Deadly Rich (25 page)

“Dick Braidy—great to meet you.” Braidy held out a hand. “What’ll you have? A drink drink? Diet Pepsi? Reheated coffee?”

“Diet Pepsi will be fine, thanks.”

“Juanita!” Benedict Braidy shouted. “
Dos
diet Pepsis,
por favor, inmediata
!” Benedict Braidy plopped into an armchair. “Sit, Lieutenant, please. You can’t expect me to share poop with a guy who’s towering over me.”

Cardozo took a seat on the sofa.

“Now, tell me,” Braidy said. “What’s all this sudden revival of interest in ‘Socialites in Emergency’?”

“That night appears to be the last time that Oona Aldrich and Avalon Gardner were on speaking terms.”

“True. Up till, oh, I’d say midnight or so, when she noticed he was snapping her picture.”

“She didn’t notice till midnight?”

“Until the doctors got the bone out of her trachea, she had more important matters on her mind.”

The Mexican servant woman brought two diet Pepsis in tall green tumblers. Benedict Braidy thanked her and dismissed her.

“You’ve got to bear one thing in mind about Avalon,” Braidy said. “He was a sly guy. Wherever he went that camera went too—and after a while you got desensitized. You stopped noticing that it was always clicking. Always recording. You allowed him to photograph astonishing stuff. He could have had a great career in blackmail. That, by the way, is a joke.”

Cardozo smiled. “Does anything stand out in your memory of the hospital that night?”

Braidy shaped his lips into a thinking man’s pout. “It seemed to me it was the standard waiting-to-get-into-Emergency drama.” He tapped a finger to his skull. “Six years is a long time for this poor head to retain
anything.
As I recall, the doctors were charming. The nurses were hoots and a half. We were all having a great time till Oona realized she wasn’t going to die. Then, of course, she got grandiose over the photographs, and we wished she
would
die. That, by the way, is also a joke. Poor dear soul.”

“You fought with Avalon Gardner,” Cardozo said.

“Everyone fought with Avalon.”

“Last night.”

“Last night he was at his tactless, scene-making, scene-stealing worst.”

“Why did he leave the party early?”

“My honest opinion? He saw a chance to make the greatest exit of the evening. He grabbed it. He was on a roll. Unfortunately he didn’t know when to stop. He went into the street and he attracted one catastrophe too many.” Dick Braidy smiled sadly. “But still he went out just the way he would have wanted to—like a legend, headlines and all.”

Cardozo unfolded the Identi-Kit drawing from his jacket pocket. He handed it across the coffee table. “Do you recall having seen this man last night?”

Astonishment hung like a vapor in front of Dick Braidy’s face. “At the
party
?”

“Anywhere at all.”

Benedict Braidy stared a long moment at the Hispanic male. “Well, it’s a tad hard to say—he is a rather salt-of-the-earth New York type. I honestly can’t say I recall him.”

“Did you see him in the Emergency Room?”

Braidy looked up, surprised. “You mean six years ago?” He took a pair of reading glasses from their case and propped the tortoiseshell wings loosely on his ears. He squinted through them as though trying to bring a memory into focus. After a moment he shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall his being there. I don’t recall his
not
being there. Of course he would have looked younger.” Braidy slipped the glasses back into their case. “I take it this is the man with the noisy radio?”

Cardozo nodded. He handed Dick Braidy a photo. “Did you see this man last night?”

Dick Braidy frowned. “Jim Delancey? At the party? Absolutely not. Do you think he’s the one?”

“We don’t have enough to rule anyone in or out. We have two events linking the victims: They went from dinner to the Emergency Room six years ago—and they testified as character witnesses for Nita Kohler’s character four years ago. For the last two thousand days and nights of their lives, there was no other contact between them.”

Benedict Braidy’s smile dropped off his face. “But they were chosen randomly, weren’t they? I mean, I was at that dinner too. And I went to the Emergency Room. And I testified for Nita’s character at the trial.” Dick Braidy’s mouth hung open. “You don’t think he’s going down a list.”

Cardozo didn’t answer.

Dick Braidy grabbed a cigarette from a cedar-lined silver box. He fumblingly lit it and then he blew smoke out. “But that note he sent didn’t mention any dinner or trial.” Braidy stared mournfully at the cigarette in his hand. “I haven’t smoked in three years.”

Cardozo nudged an ashtray toward him. “This one doesn’t count.”

Braidy stubbed out the cigarette and drained his diet Pepsi and set the glass down with a thunk on the male Hispanic’s face.

“When I spoke to Leigh Baker this morning,” Cardozo said, “she didn’t know Avalon was dead. No one had told her. Didn’t anyone think of picking up the phone and letting her know?”

“As a matter of fact,” Dick Braidy said, “I tried. And I’m sure a lot of her friends tried. But she’d turned off her answering machine, and she’d told the servants she didn’t want to be disturbed. She does that sometimes. She isolates. I think last night was very hard on her.”

“I’m surprised her friend Waldo Carnegie couldn’t reach her.”

“Waldo’s an odd person, and even though they live in the same house they have an unconventional relationship.”

Cardozo took a business card from his wallet and added his home number. He laid it on the edge of the coffee table. “If you think of anything else linking Avalon Gardner and Oona Aldrich, would you let me know?”

Dick Braidy picked up the card and looked at it. “You’d better believe I’m going to be racking my brain. But I warn you: I get my best inspirations at two in the morning.”

Cardozo rose from his chair. “Jot them down and hold off till dawn?”

“I’ll try. No promises.”

“T
HEY WERE HERE THE
night of May sixth, nineteen eighty-five,” Cardozo said, “between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty.” He was explaining to the young, dark-haired woman stationed at the computer desk. “I need to know what happened in Emergency—what they saw, who they saw, who saw them.”

“In
Emergency
?” The young woman shook her head. A strand of brown hair fell across her eyes, and she pushed it away. “Unless they’re patients they don’t get through that door. Whatever happened, happened in here in the Admitting Room.”

Across the room a queue of Hispanics and blacks and Third Worlders wound past the window where the triage nurse checked who had insurance and who did not. Babes in arms were wailing. Exhausted mothers barked commands to be silent.

A babble of languages—most of them hysterical—filled the heavily disinfected air. Cardozo was able to recognize Spanish, Portuguese, and the weirdly clipped cadences of Haitian French. His ear could detect too the singsong of Korean and Vietnamese, plus a half-dozen dialects that he doubted Berlitz had ever gotten around to listing in the curriculum.

“Okay,” he said, “how do I find out who was in this room?”

“Let’s make sure six years ago is still on database.” The young woman touched her computer keyboard like a pianist rippling out an arpeggio. A list of files began scrolling up the screen. “We’re in luck. Let’s check May sixth Emergency admissions.” She stopped the list and touched the screen with an electronic pencil. “Sixteen between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty.”

Two chairs away a Haitian woman in a green hospital smock sat shivering, teeth chattering on a thermometer. Cardozo had seen a nurse order her out; the woman had waved the thermometer, pointing to a fever of one hundred four. The nurse had sent for Security, and Security had yet to appear.

Cardozo leaned forward in his seat to get a better look at the terminal. “Can you tell me anything about these people or their complaints?”

“If you want the admitting complaint, we’re going to have to hand-comb.” The young woman pushed a command key. Green-gold print began moving up the screen, like credits rolling in a movie. “Fever. Bleeding from the mouth. Laceration eye.”

“How do you lacerate an eye?”

She pressed a key and stopped the print crawl. “Jennifer Molina did it by sticking a pencil in it.” She pressed the key again and the crawl continued. “Fractured ankle. Obstructed trachea.”

“Who was the obstructed trachea?”

“Oona Aldrich. She was sent home, so she couldn’t have been dying. Not that night anyway. The next is a laceration scalp.”

“What would that be, a mugging?”

“Bumped head, low-hanging beam.”

“Any chance the low-hanging beam was in someone’s hand?”

“Doesn’t say. Usually it would say
street attack
or
assault
if the damage wasn’t accidental. Fractured femoral bone.”

“Fractured how?”

“Fall downstairs. And then we have a gunshot wound.”

“Who got shot?” Cardozo said.

“Lopinto, Germano.”

“How?”

“That would be in your files and not mine.”

“Life-threatening?”

“Lobe of ear. Maybe it was intended to be life-threatening and missed. Then we have fever. Diarrhea. Fever.”

“Those are three separate admissions?”

The young woman nodded. “Must’ve been a bug going around. Laceration torso. Looks like a stabbing. Twelve stitches. But he was sent home. Our next case is puncture wound, hand.” She frowned. “Our next admission is
no complaint.
”

“That’s an admission?”

She nodded. “Says so here.”

“Why would someone be admitted for no complaint?”

“Beats me.” She studied the screen a moment and then she said, “Poison.”

“
No complaint
was poison?”

“No, poison is the next admission.”

“What was no complaint’s name?”

“Isolda Martinez. The account was never paid.”

“How much did she owe?”

“Eighty dollars.”

“What would have cost eighty dollars?”

“It’s a flat rate, heart surgery or a Band-Aid on a cut. If you do it through Emergency, it costs you eighty bucks.”

“There’s no way you can find out what she was admitted for?”

“If it’s not here, it’s not here.”

“How could it not be there?”

“Error. Somebody forgot to enter it. Somebody also entered her out of sequence. She was admitted five minutes ahead of Jennifer Molina, eye laceration.”

“How’d she get out of sequence?”

“I don’t know. It happens, I guess.”

“Was she admitted to the hospital from Emergency?”

“No way. She failed the wallet biopsy with a resounding thunk—no insurance, no health plan, no social-security number.”

“If they can’t pay, they don’t get past Emergency?”

“Not here. They go to the Bronx or Harlem. It’s a tough world, Lieutenant. There’s a lot of competition for medical resources.”

BACK AT THE PRECINCT
Cardozo took a cup of coffee into his cubicle and got busy on the phone. He gave Directory Assistance the names of the sixteen patients. Directory Assistance gave him 117 numbers in five boroughs.

He began by trying the nineteen I. Martinezes.

In an hour, he was able to reach half the numbers. Of the seven I. Martinezes he managed to speak to, none were Isoldas. None of the others that he reached had ever in their lives set foot in Lexington’s Emergency Room.

The other half didn’t answer. Cardozo put them on a keep-trying list.

“
THE METHOD
,” Dan Hippolito said, “is the same as before: Approach from the rear. Left-handed armlock around the victim’s neck. Right-handed slash across the victim’s throat, from left to right. A second stroke laterally across the throat in the reverse direction.”

Cardozo handed back the photo of Avalon Gardner’s head, throat, and shoulders.

“It’s a military kill,” Dan Hippolito said. “They teach it in the marines. At least in my day they did. Blood loss—even loss from a major artery like the carotid—is a slow death, whereas asphyxiation is fast. With this kill arterial blood runs back into the windpipe. You die both deaths at once—technically asphyxiation is the killer, but blood loss pulls the die-time down.”

They were sitting in Dan Hippolito’s office. The air-conditioning vent high up on the wall was making a low, constant hum.

“So the killer could be an ex-marine,” Cardozo said.

“I’m not saying American marines have a monopoly on this method. And nothing about the rest is military.” Dan Hippolito laid down another glossy on the desktop. “The abdominal cuts are roughly horizontal.” The capped tip of Dan Hippolito’s ballpoint followed the line of the cuts. They had a black, velvety thickness, as if they were ribbons laid on top of the dead man. “You have three on the left side. You have two on the right.”

Cardozo saw that the bottom-most cut and the top-most had been made out of line with the other three, distinctly to the right of them. He asked himself,
Why
?

“Five cuts in all,” Dan Hippolito said, “spaced roughly an inch apart. And then over the liver you have a sprinkling of puncture wounds.”

The ballpoint made a nervous little pecking like the needle of a sewing machine.

“The liver again.” Cardozo saw tiny creases where the dead flesh had pulled together along the sutures. “I see we’ve still got that pucker.”

Dan Hippolito nodded. “Missing tissue. Not much, but definitely missing.”

“Same weapon?”

“Very likely.”

Cardozo lifted his coffee cup and took another swallow. His throat was dry. He needed the swallow. He didn’t need the coffee. His head was throbbing from caffeine. He felt a dull fire in the arches of his feet from all the walking he’d done that day. His eyes came up from the glossy. “Oral sex again?”

Dan Hippolito nodded. “Two pubic hairs in the victim’s mouth. The lab’s examining them. We should have results tomorrow.”

“Two again. Why two?”

“Why not? Two’s a nice even number.”

Cardozo couldn’t think of any why not, but he couldn’t think of any why either. It just struck him as odd. “Semen?”

Dan Hippolito shook his head. “This time there was no semen in the mouth.”