Deadly Rich
A Vince Cardozo Mystery
Edward Stewart
for Jackie Farber,
Stowe Hausner, and Steven Hollar—
who made the difference
S
OMETHING WAS WRONG. LEIGH
Baker kept hearing voices. The goose-down pillows in their Porthault cases that had begun the evening under her head were now lying on top of her, like a barricade, and she had to push them aside to see.
The Levolors were angled against whatever light the sky had to offer, but her time sense told her it was night. She stared a long moment at the light that beaded the perfume bottles and silver-backed brushes on the dressing table. Her eye followed the light to its source, the TV screen.
She recognized the man who did the weather wrap-up on Fox Five. The remote was lying on the little painted papier-mâché table beside her bed, on top of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair.
She reached for it. Her fingertips touched the highball glass. An unthinking reflex brought the glass to her lips.
Slivered ghosts of ice cubes slid beneath her nose. The liquid had a brownish color and it smelled like Johnnie Walker and diet Pepsi. It flowed over her tongue without any flavor. To avoid spilling she drained the glass before setting it back down.
She patted her pillows into a fresh headrest behind her. She picked up the remote and pressed the Off button. The image on the TV screen collapsed into a white lozenge that sputtered and decayed into darkness.
She laid her head back and closed her eyes.
Even with the TV off she still heard those voices and she could not drop off to the state where she wanted to be, that oceanic feeling of floating nothingness.
At the sound of a latch clicking she opened her eyes again.
Light floated in from the living room, and a teenage girl stood silhouetted and slim in the doorframe. Taking fast, shallow breaths, Leigh’s daughter came into the bedroom with gingerly steps, as though she were walking on someone else’s legs.
Leigh pushed herself to sitting. “What is it? Nita, what’s wrong?”
The girl’s face was a blank surface. She worked her throat, worked her jaw, trying to force words out. Nothing in her expression changed, but suddenly her eyes looked as if they were full of icicles and a terrible little cry came out of her. “What does it mean?”
“What does what mean, darling?”
Like a comet flicking its tail, Nita turned and tore out of the bedroom and across the darkened living room, through the French window and out onto the terrace.
Leigh touched one foot down onto the floor and then the other. She tested her standing muscles. They seemed to work, though she listed a little to the left and she knew right away that she needed another drink.
Now she tested her walking muscles. They were slow to answer her head’s commands, but they took her to the bedroom door.
And then Nita’s voice: “No!”
It seemed to Leigh that something flew across the terrace, low and fluttering. She blinked and it took her mind a moment to process the image. A white dress. White arms. White legs. Nita.
For a moment light and shadow alternated like flashes of a strobe. And then silence pooled. Too much silence. It was as though a magician had waved a wand and made the white rabbit disappear. There was no white dress. No white arms. No white legs. No Nita.
“Nita,” Leigh whispered. “Where are you?”
A knot twisted inside her stomach. She closed her eyes, fighting back nausea.
I will not vomit
, she told herself.
When the spasm passed, she opened her eyes. Through the open French window moonlight spilled down onto the terrace in a wash of white stillness. Relief took her. There was no one there.
I was imagining it.
She moved into the living room.
I need a drink.
She turned on a light. The room was done in soft grays and deep greens—peaceful colors. Three dozen red roses with a note from her director had been placed in a tall crystal vase near the bar. She had the impression that the scene was being projected onto a 360-degree wraparound screen.
At that moment a wave of Nita’s perfume floated past her.
She didn’t move. She stayed exactly where she was, sniffing, listening.
“Nita?”
The silence and that faint trail of sweetness drew her toward the open French window. Her body had to fight a path through a wall of medication. Everything seemed twisted around, wrong. She stepped onto the terrace.
It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the moonlight.
Potted plants and dainty tables and chairs came into focus. She caught the trail of perfume again, and it drew her across the terrace to the low wall.
She stood there, looking out. She saw things with eerie, drugged precision. The town-house facades across the garden all glowed with the dead light of the moon.
A breeze ruffled the little boxwood bushes that the gardener had spaced along the low section of the wall. She saw that several of the branches had been freshly snapped off.
She moved a toppled chair aside. She stood a long moment staring over the waist-high wall. She slowly swung her gaze down to the garden five stories below. It was like staring down into a pool from a high diving board. The trees and the parallel dark rows of green hedge all seemed to be rippling on dark water.
A body lay directly below, splayed out across the flagstone path. White dress. White arms. White legs.
Leigh doubled forward. Disbelief physically took her. A sickening whoosh of bile and booze and half-digested diet Pepsi flooded her mouth. She could feel vomit rushing up and out of her.
Some instinctive residual sense of decorum told her to get to the john. She turned and shoved a garden chair out of the way and ran stumbling and puking back toward the living room.
A young man stood half crouched against the wall. She collided with him and stared with a hand over her mouth.
He sprang up to his full height, well over six feet, and there was something about his panicky eyes that made her think she might have to fight him.
“I didn’t mean to,” he whimpered.
“No, I know you didn’t.” Leigh kept her voice soft, nonconfrontational. She edged past him toward the open French window.
He made no move to stop her.
She darted into the living room and in the same movement swung the French window shut behind her. Her heart was banging in her chest. She fumbled her hand around the key and twisted it, and then she ran to the phone and snatched up the receiver and punched 911.
SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE TRIAL
the woman who was prosecuting the case phoned Leigh and said the defense had unearthed new evidence. “Could you be in my office tomorrow morning at ten?”
Leigh wore her black-on-black Chanel. In the limo, riding to the meeting, she took twenty milligrams of prescribed Valium and twenty of unprescribed Dexedrine that her husband had left on his side of the bathroom cabinet.
At ten after ten, on the fourth floor of the State Supreme Court Building, the prosecutor introduced her to a small, stocky gray-haired woman wearing a plain black cotton dress. “Miss Baker, I’d like you to meet Xenia Delancey—the mother of the accused.”
Leigh did not take the hand that Xenia Delancey offered.
“Miss Baker,” Xenia Delancey said, “I’m a mother too.”
“We have nothing to say to each other,” Leigh said.
“On the contrary.” The defense attorney placed a small leather-bound book on the conference table. He invited Leigh to read it.
The book, Leigh discovered, was a diary. She opened it. Most of the pages were blank. Where there was writing she recognized it as Nita’s. The forty or so hand-written pages covered the last forty days of her daughter’s life. Days of drugs and sex and recklessness.
“This is a forgery,” Leigh said. “Nita never did these things.”
“Miss Baker, I understand that you loved your daughter.” The prosecutor spoke with an unashamed Queens Irish accent. Words sounded tough in her mouth. “I understand that the diary comes as a shock to you. But I’ve prosecuted six date-kill cases, and I can tell you from trial experience, young girls
are
sexual beings and they often
do
confide their sexual activities to a secret diary.”
“Maybe, but this diary is a fake.”
“The jury will have to decide that,” the defense lawyer said.
“They’re putting this forgery into
evidence
?” Leigh said. “They’re allowed to do that?”
“Yes, they’re allowed to do that.” The prosecutor drew in a long breath and let it out in a deeply troubled sigh. “But Mrs. Delancey has an offer to make.”
“You tell the state to accept a lesser plea,” Xenia Delancey said. “I’ll tell my boy’s lawyer not to use this diary.”
“What kind of lesser plea?” Leigh said.
“Negligent manslaughter,” the defense attorney said.
“At best,” the prosecutor said, “the state can make a case for involuntary manslaughter.”
“It was murder.” Leigh heard herself speak before she’d even realized what she was going to say. It was a flat statement of fact, with no emotion in it whatsoever. “I saw him push her.”
The prosecutor whirled. Her glasses flew off her nose, and her blond hair spun out like a tossed skirt. After a moment she picked her glasses up from the floor and put them back on.
The muscles in the defense attorney’s jaw worked slowly. “Miss Baker didn’t depose that she saw her daughter killed.”
“I’m deposing it now,” Leigh said.
“In other words,” the defense attorney said, “you’ve been suppressing evidence for the better part of a year?”
“I was willing to forgive the man my daughter loved—because I believed he hadn’t intended to kill her.” Leigh could feel the defense attorney’s gaze on her, dubious, puzzled, probing for truth and for falsity. “But that diary, that
forgery
, is an act of pure malicious calculation. I have no intention of forgiving now.”
“She’s lying,” Xenia Delancey said.
“Mr. Lawrence,” the prosecutor said, “would you and Mrs. Delancey be good enough to wait in the hallway for a moment?”