Deadly Rich (36 page)

The beam of a soft spotlight fell across the terrace. A woman was moving through the potted trees and terrace furniture, and every now and then she passed through the shaft of light.

Dizey excused herself and opened the French window. She felt she was stepping into a furnace. How, she wondered, had Manhattanites ever managed to stay alive before air-conditioning?

“Hey,” she called out, “come on back inside and circulate. This is Oona’s last party!”

The silhouette held itself motionless at the terrace wall. Behind it there was only a thinning pale splash of sky over Jersey to remind you that there had ever been a day.

“I was thinking of the dead,” Leigh Baker said.

Dizey crossed the terrace toward her. “What about them?”

Leigh Baker turned and stood facing Dizey.

What is it about beautiful sexy people
? Dizey wondered.
Light seems to shine through them. Even in the dark.
In all her years of reporting on them, Dizey had never understood how they achieved that quality.

“So many have died,” Leigh said. “Parents … grandparents … friends—you finally reach that point in your life where you know more dead people than living.”

“So what?” Dizey said. “The dead may outnumber the living, but the unborn outnumber them all.”

Leigh was holding a glass and she lifted it to her lips. “Why, Dizey. What a profound and spiritual thing to say.”

“I’d have thought it’s obvious.”

Somewhere not far away a church bell was chiming the quarter hour.

Leigh lifted her eyes at Dizey. “I see your old humorous, frowning eyes looking about, and I know you’re on the trail of something. And then it occurs to me; I’m your quarry, aren’t I.”

In the mind of any top gossip columnist is stored every impression, every sensation, every emotion and intuition she has ever experienced—ready for instant cross-reference and collating. And every bone in Dizey’s body sweated with the conviction that she had seen Leigh Baker this way before, in the bad old days when Leigh had gotten plastered with daily regularity.

Dizey sat. “Your answering machine had the gall to tell me to make my message brief.”

“What were you calling me about?”

“Wanted to check a rumor. How are you feeling—
really
?”

“Me? Fine.”

“Honey, I know you’ve walked a strange and terrible road. I want to help you find your way back. You’re drinking again, aren’t you?”

Leigh rose and backed off a step. She was gaping at Dizey, and Dizey could feel her trying to hold herself together.

“Why is it,” Leigh said, “that people like you feel alive only when you destroy things?”

“Honey, is that a line from one of your old movies, or is it just alcoholic attitude?” She rose. “There’s Scotch in that glass, isn’t there?”

“No.”

“I want to help you find your way back.”

Leigh backed off two steps more, as though Dizey were a guard dog who might at any moment break free of its leash and leap at her.

“Honey, you need me.” Dizey circled nearer to that glass. “You’ve had your little turn on the stage of international attention and now—unless you get the right help—it’s over.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you’re the right help?”

Leigh’s nose tipped up a little, and it gave her a look of being vulnerable. Dizey could remember long, lonely years in Billings, Montana, that she’d spent wishing to hell God had given her a nose like that.

“I can’t stand to see you killing yourself,” Dizey said.

“That’s bull. No matter what’s going on you’re always asking yourself, How can I get a column inch out of this?”

“There are losers and there are winners—that’s life. A flip of a coin.” Dizey held out her hand. “I write about the people that the coin comes up heads for. You could be one of them again. Just give me that drink.”

“It’s not a drink.”

“Then give it to me.”

“It’s mine.”

“And it’s killing you.”

“Are you really so sure of everything you’re so sure of?” There was something sly about Leigh now. Gold flashed from the bracelet on her wrist. Her hand shot up, pointing. “Look out there.”

Dizey’s head turned just far enough to see what Leigh was pointing at. Night sky glimmered over New York.

“Somewhere in this city,” Leigh said, “a man who calls himself Society Sam is watching us—and he’s going to pick one of us, and he’s going to rip that person apart.” She turned. “And you’re no different from Society Sam.”

To Dizey Duke, what came next seemed to be happening to someone else.

One instant Leigh Baker was standing perfectly quietly, her head angled out toward the New York skyline; the next instant she turned toward Dizey.

Suddenly a terrible cry came out of Leigh Baker. “That’s Oona’s! You give that back to me, you vicious, thieving bitch! It’s hers!”

The drink and the ice cubes flew out of Leigh Baker’s glass and hit Dizey in the face like a stinging shower of iced needles. Dizey realized that Leigh’s hand was reaching toward the brooch, toward Dizey’s lovely new hummingbird brooch.

Without even thinking, Dizey hunched one shoulder up protectively and jerked backward.

Would have jerked backward.

Out of nowhere a wall took her completely by surprise, caught her just below the small of her back. Her hand clawed space and caught the back of the wrought-iron chair. The chair wasn’t heavy enough to anchor her. It toppled against the wall, adding a push to the momentum already carrying her.

This isn’t happening
, Dizey thought.

The night sky was somersaulting over her.

This can’t be happening
, the voice inside her cried.
I have a column to write
!

THE SCREAM BROUGHT A JOLT
of alertness into all Leigh’s senses. Time dilated and the action in the space before her seemed to take place in slow motion, as though it had been prerecorded long, long ago.

Dizey’s face of open-mouthed amazement hurtled away, screaming. In the garden, five stories below, a shadow kissed the ground.

The scream stopped. Time reassembled itself and found its tempo.

Leigh picked up the chair from where it had fallen on the terrace floor. A damp breeze ruffled the bushes spaced along the low wall. She looked over them.

My God
, she realized.
That’s exactly how Nita died.
Somewhere behind her, she heard glass break. Her gaze swung toward the house. Through the French window, she could see Waldo in the living room with one arm around Honey Ogilvie’s waist.

Funny
, she thought,
I didn’t realize Honey Ogilvie had known Oona.

She crossed the terrace and stepped back into the air-conditioning. Music and voices rose up around her. It was eerie, walking through rooms that once upon a time she had fallen asleep drunk in, and feeling that once upon a time was happening all over again.

She smiled and, naturally, when a waiter offered her champagne, she said, “Thank you, but I don’t drink.”

Friday, May 31

A
NNIE MACADAM WAS STILL
on the telephone when her daughter Gabrielle led Vince Cardozo into the library.

She saw that the lieutenant was wearing a rumpled seersucker suit and a striped blue tie.
Stripes and stripes
, the part of her mind that wasn’t on the phone thought. A
lawyer would never wear that.
She gestured to him to sit.

“You naughty boy,” she was saying to the phone, “of course you can trust me.” She saw that Lieutenant Cardozo was still standing. “I have a visitor. We’ll talk later.” It was a fast hang up, and then she took a seat on the sofa.

Cardozo took the matching chair that faced her.

“That was Zack Morrow on the phone,” Annie said. “A friend of Dizey’s and her boss to boot. You know what gets me? What really and truly gets me? He didn’t even mention her.”

“Maybe he didn’t know,” Gabrielle said.

Annie turned and saw that Gabrielle was still standing by the door. She clamped down on a surge of irritation. Since age six Gabrielle had always hung around doors, wanting to hear what the grown-ups were discussing. “Would you like some coffee, Lieutenant? Say yes, I need some.”

“Sure.”

“Gabrielle honey, could you bring us two cups of coffee?” Annie waited till Gabrielle was out of the room, then leaned forward and took a menthol filter-tip from the carved glass cigarette box on the coffee table. She lifted the table lighter and sat there puffing.

Dizey had given Annie the lighter. It was Steuben, a polar bear rearing up in milky glass that would have sold, list price, at a thousand-something. Annie didn’t fool herself that Dizey had paid for the lighter, or even chosen it. Still, it had passed from Dizey’s hands to hers, and Annie was thinking how strange it was that Dizey was gone, but this coolness, this hardness, remained.

“Zack Morrow knew Dizey’s dead,” Annie said. “It just wasn’t a big deal for him.”

“Sometimes people prefer to hide what they feel.”

The remark, coming from a cop, surprised her and she looked over at him. “You know, that’s very sweet of you. To be making someone else’s excuses.”

It occurred to her that his dark eyes seemed to share her sadness, and then she realized they were neutral eyes and she was reading her own feelings into his face. He had the sort of face that invited you to do that.

“How well did you know Dizey?” he said.

“How well? I’ll tell you how well. Dizey and I were on that phone to each other every day, first thing, twenty minutes a day, three-hundred-sixty-five days a year, for eighteen years. And for eighteen years Dizey came to every one of my dinner parties. If she wasn’t in town, I didn’t give them.”

“You must have been very fond of her.”

Annie shrugged. “We had our ups and downs—what friendship doesn’t? There are years when you love each other, years when you hate each other. There are even days when you swear to yourself you’d love to see her dead.” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “And then one day it happens. You have your blackest wish. She’s dead. And that day isn’t at all what you imagined it would be. There’s no triumph, no winning. Only loss.”

She glanced over at him. His eyes, deeply set in shadowed pockets, seemed to grieve with her. She couldn’t escape the feeling that he was using those eyes to lure her into confiding. So what. She had to tell someone.

“Because you’d always imagined that somehow she’d be there to see you win. Everything in your life, you imagined that somehow she’d be there witnessing it—loving you for it or wishing you dead because of it—but she’d be there.” Annie got up from the sofa. She gestured him to stay seated. “Don’t get up—I just need to move around.”

She walked to the window. Beyond the terrace splotchy sunlight was dribbling through a shadowy sky. The gray jagged horizon of the co-ops lining Madison and Fifth seemed inert and cut off, like a mountain range on a planet uninhabited by human beings.

“When you’re young, you honestly believe you’re going to go through your whole life making close friends—and it never works out that way. One by one they go and when they’re gone, there’s no one to take their place.” She realized she was moaning for herself, and she felt embarrassed. She turned and saw that Lieutenant Cardozo was standing again. “But you’re a cop. You’ve been through worse.”

“There’s no worse. I’m sorry you lost a friend.”

Annie shrugged. “I lost a friend. I lost an enemy. I lost a part of my life. Oh, well. Look at the bright side. It saves me the trouble of killing her. Because, believe me, sometimes I wanted to. Like a million other people who knew her.”

Annie returned to the sofa. She sat. She couldn’t keep herself from shaking, and then to her surprise, she couldn’t keep herself from crying.

Cardozo held out a handkerchief. “I need your honest opinion—as Dizey’s friend.”

Annie accepted the hankie. She daubed at her nose. She picked at a sleeve, adjusted her hem, neatened herself in preparation for honesty.

“Did Dizey have a drinking problem?”

“Drinking problem?” Annie smiled almost fondly. “Dizey had a drinking
fact.
The lady was a practicing, ambulatory alcoholic.”

“Did she have depressions?”

“How would anyone have known? Depression didn’t have a chance with all the speed her doctor prescribed.”

“Is there any possibility that Dizey took her own life?”

“Dizey? Suicide?” Annie’s hand slapped her bosom so hard she practically knocked herself off the sofa. “
No way.
Not while there was gossip left to gossip, or a scoop left to scoop.”

Gabrielle returned with a coffee tray that should have jingled but that made a sound in her hands more like clanking.
What the hell has she got on that tray
? Annie wondered.

Annie moved the polar-bear lighter to one side, and Gabrielle set the tray on the coffee table.

“Want me to pour?” Gabrielle said.

Annie saw that Gabrielle had brought three cups. “That’s okay, hon. I’ll handle it. Lieutenant Cardozo and I would appreciate being alone—you don’t mind.”

“Oh,” Gabrielle said. “Okay.” She closed the door behind her.

“How do you like yours?” Annie asked.

“Milk and a little fake sugar. If you have any.”

“We have fake everything in this house.” Annie poured and stirred.

“Could I trouble you for another look at your guest list?” Cardozo said. “May sixth, the Princess Margaret dinner? I’d like to see the seating plan for the tables.”

Annie went to the bookcase. She searched a moment through her loose-leaf binders. She brought the binder back to the coffee table. She opened it to May sixth. “Here we are. The page is practically dog-eared.” Her forefinger ran halfway down the right-hand page of the binder and stopped. “This is weird.”

In the silence that seemed suddenly to settle on the room, Annie could distinctly hear the ticking of the clock on the mantel.

“What’s weird?” Cardozo said.

“Dizey sat at the same table as Oona and Avalon.”

Cardozo came and sat beside her on the sofa. “Who else sat at that table?”

Annie sat trying to blink back moisture that was suddenly pooling in her eyes. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m going to miss that vicious bitch.” She pushed the binder toward Cardozo. “Lieutenant, can you read it? Something’s wrong with my eyes, I can’t see.”