Deadly Rich (38 page)

“Why second-rate?”

“The Scots would never mix corn and barley malt.”

“So it was a cheap knock-off Scotch.”

“Let’s just say domestic. Who knows how the liquor cartels price these products.”

“So the party caterers were charging for Johnnie Walker and serving refunneled Laird Robbie. What did she do, dribble?”

“I said
saturated
, Vince. She must have sopped the drink up.”

Cardozo tried to visualize it: Dizey Duke is schmoozing at a jet-set memorial party; she spills a drink; she reaches into her bra and pulls out a used Kleenex with sinus blood on it and sops up.

No. Maybe at home, but not in front of these people.

“I don’t think she sopped up a drink. It got spilled on her.”

“This had to be a hell of a spill.”

“So she had a hell of a spill. It must have been just before she went over the wall, because no one at the party has mentioned seeing her with Scotch and Coke running down her front.”

“You’ll have it in writing tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Lou.”

Cardozo dialed Dizey Duke’s work number. A man answered. “Duke office, MacLean speaking.”

Cardozo could hear that he was hurting and depressed. “Mac, it’s Vince Cardozo at the Twenty-second Precinct. Do you happen to remember what kind of liquor Ms. Duke was drinking at the memorial reception?”

A silence came over the phone like an empty ripple in space. “When Ms. Duke drank, which was infrequently, she preferred dry white wine, usually in a spritzer. When she drank hard liquor, which was
very
rarely, she stuck to vodka.”

“Did she ever drink Scotch?”

“She’d sooner have drunk battery acid. She detested Scotch.”

A LITTLE AFTER THREE P.M
. Cardozo was standing in the courtyard of the old Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue, talking with a young man by the name of Jan Bachman.

Jan had tended bar at the Aldrich memorial, and the caterers had said he’d be here working a benefit dinner. He had light hair, a turned-up nose, and cloudy blue eyes. When Cardozo asked if he could by any chance recall what Dizey Duke had been drinking, he burst out laughing.

“I sure can and it’s not by chance. Vodka and soda, easy on the soda.”

“Nothing but that?”

Jan nodded. He was wearing dungarees and one small cross-shaped earring, and he was carrying his waiter’s tux in a suit bag. “Dizey never changed. I’ve been pouring booze for that lady for five years and, believe me, I knew her likes. Dizey was strictly Stoli. With a twist of lime. Not lemon, lime. She was very particular about that inch of lime peel.”

“Did she really like it, or did she just drink it to give an impression?”

Cardozo and Jan Bachman formed a little island of stillness in the river of activity flowing around them. Men were setting up dining tables around the pool and arranging pink tablecloths and rose centerpieces and chintz napkins in tulip glasses. Three moving men were trying to lift a harp onto a six-inch platform.

It seemed to Cardozo it was a different century in here than it was out in the streets.

“Dizey was Billings, Montana,” Jan said. “Her idea of a fun drink was probably barbecue sauce and tequila. But to get anywhere in New York you go with the flow, and Stoli and soda is definitely the flow. And insisting on a lime peel shows you have real taste—and know how to kick waiter ass.”

“You never knew Dizey to lapse after a few and order something else—say, diet cola and Scotch?”

“God, no.”

“Doesn’t anyone drink diet cola and Scotch?”

“Not in public, not at the affairs I bartend.”

“Do you remember serving diet cola and Scotch to
anyone
at the memorial party?”

Jan shook his head. “Frankly, no—and that sort of thing I’d recall, because columnists would pay good money to know.”

“DIZEY WAS WEARING OONA’S BROOCH
,” Leigh said.

“You mean, a brooch like Oona Aldrich’s?” Vince Cardozo said.

They were sitting in Waldo Carnegie’s library. She’d chosen the library and not the living room for this meeting, because it was a smaller space. Less could get lost in it.

“No,” she said. “Van Cleef only made three of them, and the brooch Dizey had on was exactly the same as Tori’s and mine. It had to be Oona’s.”

“Then, the day Dizey Duke died she was wearing the same brooch that Oona Aldrich wore the day
she
died?”

“I’m absolutely sure of it.”

“Did you ask Dizey where she’d gotten it?”

“I accused her of stealing it …” She let her voice trail off, showing him that she lacked assurance, that this was difficult for her. “Dizey denied it. I called her a liar.” Leigh glanced up slowly. “In fact, I’m ashamed to say, we had a fight.”

She was throwing Cardozo a cue: This would have been a natural point for him to mention what the police had unearthed about Dizey’s last moments, how they had reconstructed that final chronology. If anyone else had told him about a fight, now was the logical time for him to react.

But he didn’t.

“Frankly,” Leigh said, “I’m surprised nobody heard us.”

“Where did you have this fight?”

“On the terrace.” At the last moment instinct had kicked in and told Leigh not to wear black; so she faced Cardozo for the second time today with her hair freshly combed, dressed to dazzle in lilac, in carefully understated maquillage.

“Was anyone else on the terrace?”

“No—just Dizey and me.”

“Who was on the terrace first?”

“I suppose I was.”

“So you were alone before Dizey joined you?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Why were you alone on the terrace?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to be.”

“Why did Dizey join you?”

“I don’t think she knew I was there when she came out.”

“And were you there when she fell?”

He said this so simply, so directly, that she realized he was actually a very sly man.

“When I left the terrace, she was still standing there.”

“Standing there doing what?”

Leigh did not answer immediately. She lowered her eyelids just a little, as though they were an inner screen on which she had to review her memories. “Dizey had turned her back to me. She was standing there looking out over the city.”

“Facing the wall?”

“Yes, looking out over the wall.”

“Why did you leave the terrace?”

Keep it simple
, she told herself. “Because we’d fought. I wanted to get away from her.”

“How did you end your conversation with Dizey?”

“End it?” By the time she decided that the natural reaction to the question would be a rueful half smile, the rueful half smile no longer felt natural. “I don’t think I exactly ended it. I suppose I said good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”

She had two jobs to do at once: she had to monitor her own performance, and she had to interpret his. It really required two minds and all she had was one, and it was a not very together mind at this moment.

“Maybe not
literally
good-bye … Probably I said, I’m going inside; and she said, I’m staying out here; and I said, I’ll see you later.”

“And you didn’t see her later.”

“No.”

“Were you the last person to see Dizey on that terrace?”

“I have no idea.”
In the little parallel universe where I’m sitting
, she thought,
I’m completely innocent of wrong-doing. The only reason we’re even having this chat is because you requested it, and I want to help you.

It occurred to her that she needed a motivation for that.

I want to help you because I like you.

She let her eyes meet his.

See? My eyes say I like you.

But what were his eyes saying?

“When I came back into the house,” she said, “I mixed and mingled and I honestly wasn’t keeping track of who was going onto the terrace and who was coming back.”

“How did Dizey seem to you during that last meeting?”

His eyes studied her, and she could feel him wondering things. What was he picking up on? Did he realize that underneath all her glib glamour, the celebrity was a vibrating wreck?

The first step was to deflect that
last-meeting
jab.

“I didn’t know it was a last meeting, so I wasn’t paying as much attention as I might have had I known. How did she seem? She seemed very much herself—bubbly, gossipy.”

“Did it strike you as odd that she was bubbly?”

“We’d come from a memorial, and people are usually a little down after a memorial. So everybody drinks and then that kind of hysteria takes over and it seems giddy and fun, and I suppose that’s how Dizey felt.”

“Was she drinking?”

“Oh, yes—Dizey loved her drinking and drinks were on the house.”

“Tell me, was Dizey drunk?”

“In my opinion she was very drunk.”

“Do you recall what she was drinking?”

Recall, to be convincing, could not be instant. Leigh half closed her eyes as though reseeing the scene. “I think she was drinking vodka. It seems to me she only drank Stoli neat or Stoli and soda.”

“Why only Stoli?”

“Maybe the Stoli people paid her.”

“You say that as though you don’t approve.”

His eyes lingered on her face, and she could feel her face reddening. She decided the best next step would be to let a little human frailty show.

“I’m jealous of people who can drink without messing up their lives the way I did.”

He had soft eyes, sad eyes, and she felt him tuning in on her in ways that had nothing to do with words.

“How long did you say you and Dizey were together on the terrace?”

She knew she hadn’t said. “It could have been sixty seconds, it could have been five minutes. I’m rotten at estimating time. I was more or less sleepwalking through the memorial and the reception. And my mind was on other things.”

“Could I ask what other things?”

“That house … used to be my house. My daughter … was pushed from that terrace.”

She couldn’t escape a nagging sense that she was saying too much, trapping herself, that he was encouraging her to get lost in her own explanations.

“I was drunk the night my daughter died. I was drunk and drugged. I was drunk and drugged a great deal in those days. And I’ve often thought that if I’d been sober, at least sober at that instant, she might still be alive.”

“You didn’t push her,” he said quietly.

Leigh looked at him. She had a sense that he had decided to take her side. “Sometimes I feel I did.”

“No one’s going to punish you for feelings,” he said. “Sometimes feelings aren’t even facts.”

“You’re worse than my sponsor,” she said.

“What’s so bad about your sponsor?”

“I can’t lie to him.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s a little something extra to remember—like brushing your teeth and putting on clean underwear and keeping your nails clean.”

“And you can’t lie to me?”

“I don’t think it would do me any good.”

He was watching her with an agreeably skeptical half smile. “By the way, were you drinking during your talk with Dizey?”

She noted that the fight had become a talk, and the question of her drinking was slipped in almost as a footnote.

“I may have had a drink in my hand.”

“Do you remember what you were drinking?” The question gave the drink rock-solid reality.

“Is this a memory quiz?”

“Yes.”

That threw her. Of all possible replies, she had never expected
yes.
“
Well
, I actually don’t remember what I was drinking.” She was careful to fall in with his assumption naturally, innocently. She said
What I was drinking
, not
whether.
“So it must have been my usual.”

“And what’s your usual?”

“I drink diet Pepsi and—”

And she caught herself.

“And what?”

“And I don’t drink alcohol.”

AFTER CARDOZO LEFT
Leigh stood in the living room, letting her mind curl around a thought.
I didn’t play that scene at all well.

She found herself in front of the liquor cabinet. The edge of a Chardin landscape and the blooms on a pear tree in the garden were bright splashes of color in the mirror.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see her reflection mixing a drink.

She recognized it was an old solution: When you don’t know what to think or believe or feel, don’t think, don’t believe, don’t feel.

So what.

She dropped an ice cube into the glass, stared at the bubbles rising to the top of the Johnnie Walker and diet Pepsi.

She raised the glass.

Suddenly her hand felt very weary.

She tried to remember how many times she’d told herself
just this one drink
, and wound up plastered. Because she’d been drunk she’d let one person die and she’d probably killed another.

She had a dispiriting sense that she’d worn out all her roles—the seductress, the innocent, the playgirl, the celebrity, the mistress, the drunk. She just couldn’t play them anymore.

She set the glass back down on the bar.

IN THE PROPERTY ROOM
Cardozo opened the plastic bag marked
Dizey M. Duke
and held it upside down. A splash of black cloth spilled to the steel-topped table, muffling the clatter of the pumps and the purse that followed.

Carefully, methodically, his eyes scanned, taking in dark mesh stockings with a silhouette motif of various bugs that had gotten caught in the mesh, a black cotton pants suit, a black silk blouse that looked pretty low cut on the table and must have looked even lower cut on a full-bodied woman, a silk scarf with an official-looking portrait of Lenin silk-screened onto it.

It all struck him as the kind of outfit that would have gone well with too much lipstick.

From the solvent odor still clinging to the clothes, it was clear that the lab had had to drench them. The rumpled cotton panties bore the heaviest smell of benzene. Cardozo took that as a sign that Dizey’s sphincter, not surprisingly, had loosened during the fall.

He opened the purse, inverted it, and shook. Cosmetics, hankies, a plastic cigarette case, a plastic cigarette lighter, a small stapler, a pair of cheap-chic mirrored sunglasses tumbled out.