Deadly Rich (40 page)

The pocketbook didn’t stop Delancey. He lifted the man’s head by the ears. He spat in the man’s face. He slammed the man’s head down against the pavement.

At the exact moment that the man stopped screaming, the girl began.

And at the exact moment that the precinct answered, a squad car squealed to a stop at the curb. Two uniformed cops hopped out.

“Twenty-second Precinct,” the voice was saying in Malloy’s ear.

“Thanks anyway,” he said. “It’s under control.”

Monday, June 3

C
ARDOZO’S EYE DID A QUICK SCAN
of the court papers. “The charges are assault and battery and resisting arrest. The judge set bail of two thousand.”

Ellie Siegel, crisp and efficient-looking in her starched blouse, allowed her jaw to drop for just an instant. “Don’t they know who Jim Delancey is?”

“The judges in night court,” Greg Monteleone said, “know nothing.” He snapped a red suspender to punctuate the remark.

“I don’t get it,” Sam Richards said. “Delancey’s on parole. He can’t afford a conviction for
littering
, let alone assault. Why did he get himself into a brawl?”

Cardozo shrugged. “He claims he was defending the kid.”

“Why defend a kid he doesn’t even know?”

Greg Monteleone flashed a saucer-eyed leer. “Because my name is Jim Delancey and I have a big thing for little kids. Happy Halloween!”

“Bullshit,” Sam Richards said. “He has a thing for his girlfriend.”

“I’ll bet she paid the bail,” Greg Monteleone said. “Delancey’s no dickhead—he likes them rich.”

“Maybe deep down he’s a little bit of a good guy,” Carl Malloy said.

“Maybe deep down he’s a little bit violent,” Ellie said, “and maybe it’s not so far deep down.”

“
THIRD LETTER JUST CAME IN
.” Rad Rheinhardt’s voice had the faintest hint of a slur. “Want to hear it?”

“Not in the least.” Cardozo switched the receiver to his left hand and picked up a ballpoint. “Read it to me slowly.”

“‘
Simple Simon meet the die man, climbing up the stair. Jack be
’—he spells that with a single capital B—‘
nimble, Dick be
’
—
single capital B—‘
quick. Your idiot quest for sex.’
Am I going too fast?”

“You’re doing fine.”

“‘
To end all sex is there anything else in your perverted
—
in your perverted—
’”

“Is he repeating or are you?”

“I am.”

“Your perverted what?”

“Okay. ‘
Worldview. Mine marks little piggies fine. Kisses, Society Sam.
’ I’m sending it up by messenger—you’ll have it within the hour.”

“Thanks, Rad.”

Cardozo laid the receiver back in the cradle. It rang again immediately. “Cardozo.”

“Hi, it’s Abner Love over at the sound lab. Bet you’d forgotten me.”

“I haven’t forgotten you, Abner.”

“I’ve been tinkering with that other tape you gave me. There’s a stretch where I’ve been able to pull up some background signals. They’re faint, but the wave form resembles the signals on the boom-box tape. I wish you were here to see the oscilloscopes.”

“How close is the resemblance?”

“Except for frequency they’re a good match. Both onset with a click, both reverb at the high end of the partials, both show very little decay. If it weren’t for those partials, I’d say the sound is electronically produced.”

Cardozo’s ears pricked up at the word
sound.
Singular, not plural. “We’ve got the same sound on both tapes?”

“The sequences of pitches is a little different, but it’s obviously generated exactly the same way.”

“Any idea what generated the sound?”

“I’d say touch-tone dial tones, except there are too many of them and the partials are wrong.”

“Abner, could I have dupes of those two tapes?”

LEIGH BAKER SAT
in the straight-backed metal chair, listening. A series of bright, shrill, dial-tonelike hums floated through the cubicle. And died.

Cardozo snapped the cassette out of the tape player. “And
this
was what he found on your answering-machine tape.”

He slipped a second cassette into the machine and pressed the Start button. For just over twelve seconds the little speaker resonated with more of the same high-pitched hums.

“It’s familiar,” Leigh Baker said.

“Which one’s familiar? The boom-box tape or yours?”

“They both are. But I can’t quite place the sound.”

“While you’re thinking,” Cardozo said, “how about some really rotten coffee, courtesy of the detective squad?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“How do you take it?”

“A little fake sugar and some milk.”

“Settle for fake milk?”

“Perfect.”

“Don’t go away.”

While he was out of the cubicle she looked around the little space. It gave her the feeling that the detectives didn’t clean and—what with city budget cutbacks—no one else did either. The only tidy area she could see in all the clutter was the place on the desk where a small stainless-steel framed photograph sat.

She picked it up. It showed a young girl, six years old or so, with long, straight dark hair and beautiful deep brown eyes.

“Drink at your own risk.” Cardozo came back with two coffees. “The police accept no liability.”

Leigh was still holding the girl’s photo in her hand. “Excuse me for being snoopy.” She set it back in its place of honor. “She’s so pretty, I couldn’t help noticing.”

“My little girl,” Cardozo said.

Leigh accepted a styrofoam cup from his hand. She sipped and her mouth had a sensation of thick, bitter heat, like what she imagined summer nights in Mongolia to be. “Not so bad,” she said.

Cardozo dropped back into his seat. “The engineer thinks the sounds on those tapes both have the same source.”

“And what’s the source?”

“He doesn’t know. But if the person threatening you left the sound on your machine and the same sound showed up on the boom-box tape, there’s a good chance that your caller and the man with the boom box are the same person.”

She shook her head firmly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And I’m sorry, but that’s what the tapes say.”

“Then the tapes are wrong.”

A beat of silence passed. “It might interest you to know that the night Dizey Duke died, Jim Delancey never left his building.”

“What does that have to do with anything? Delancey didn’t—” She stopped herself. She realized what she had been about to say:
Delancey didn’t push her.

Cardozo’s eyes flicked up. “Delancey didn’t what?”

The air conditioner began whining. Cardozo rose and walked to the window and gave it a karate chop. The whine became a sort of muffled sobbing.

Leigh shifted in her chair, bracing herself, drawing up steadiness from the floor. “Delancey didn’t leave his building? How do you know?”

Cardozo came back slowly to his desk. He gave her a look that said,
I’m going to trust you.
“We had men watching both entrances. Delancey never came out.”

The cubicle suddenly seemed darker to Leigh. She couldn’t tell if she was imagining it or if the current had dipped. And she couldn’t tell if Vince Cardozo was saying the police no longer suspected Jim Delancey. She wanted to scream. Every instinct in her body said it was Jim Delancey.
He
was the one who was phoning her,
he
was the one who was killing her friends.

Cardozo’s eyes never left her. “Are you going to be home later?”

“I can be. Why?”

“I may have some news about Oona’s brooch.”

A SHADOW FELL ACROSS THE DESK
. Cardozo turned and saw Ellie Siegel resting a shoulder against the open door.

“What did the movie star want?”

He shrugged. “I asked her to listen to some tapes.”

“And she dropped everything and came running right over?”

“I didn’t time her, and I didn’t ask how much she had to drop.”

“Are you going Hollywood on us, Vince?”

“If all you came here for is to nag, good-bye. If something is on your mind, please get to the point.”

“As a matter of fact, something
is
on my mind. It’s not a big deal, but I thought you should know.” Ellie stepped into the cubicle and handed him that morning’s
New York Tribune,
folded open to page ten.

“What’s this?”

“Benedict Braidy’s society column.”

“I didn’t know he was writing one.”

“He’s replaced ‘Dizey’s Dish.’ Now it’s called ‘Dick Sez.’”

Cardozo scanned. In the space where only last week an air-brushed, blond-banged Dizey had grinned, a black-banged, air-brushed Dick Braidy now solemnly frowned.

My great and good friend, Zack Morrow, publisher and owner of this newspaper, has invited me to take over the society column. Mindful of my dear friend Dizey Duke’s high standards and achievement, I accepted on one condition: that I be allowed full freedom to follow in Dizey’s hard-hitting footsteps.

And so, dear readers and Dizey fans, with your blessing, here goes:

What followed seemed standard Dizey fare: who went where, who wore what.

Ellie picked up the tape player and spent a moment examining it. “Is the tape secret? Is that why the door was shut?”

“Do you want to hear the tapes? Is that why you’re nagging me?”

Ellie set the tape player gently down on the desk. “I didn’t mean to nag, and I hope you don’t feel as grumpy as you sound. I just wondered why you had your door shut.”

“I was playing a tape for Leigh Baker, and I had the door shut because it’s a zoo around here and you can’t hear yourself fart.”

“Do you
want
to hear yourself fart? Does
she
want to hear you fart?”

“The tapes happen not to be very loud. Go on. Shut the door and listen to them. Be my guest.”

Ellie frowned primly. She opened a drawer of his filing cabinet and neatened the bits of paper hanging out. “I’m sure it’s none of my business. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

“Please, Ellie, intrude.” He kicked the door shut.

“If you insist.” Ellie sat and listened while Cardozo played her the two tapes. Beneath her shut eyelids her eyes moved as though she were watching butterflies in a dream.

“Very pretty,” she said, when the tape finished. “Like a lonely robot humming to cheer itself up.”

“Recognize it?” Cardozo said.

She shook her head. “It’s familiar, but I can’t place it. It’ll come to me.”

CARDOZO HELD UP HIS SHIELD
. “Do you have an ambulance attendant here by the name of delMajor?”

“Ambrose delMajor?” In her jeans and Batman T-shirt, the dispatcher was a thick-bodied woman with a ruddy complexion and curly blond hair clipped short. “Ambrose is bringing in a coronary from Beekman Place. He should be here any minute now.”

The ambulance-dispatching station of Lexington Hospital had the frightening look of a firebombed subway token booth. Reinforced movers’ tape webbed out from bullet holes in the plate-glass window, and plastic garbage bagging had been taped up to cover a missing panel.

The phone rang. The dispatcher answered, listened, and then pleasantly said, “Fuck you too, ma’am,” and hung up.

She smiled at Cardozo.

“There’s Ambrose,” she said.

A graffiti-smeared ambulance pulled out of the avenue’s gridlocked traffic, wheels slipping on leaked oil, and skidded onto the indoor ramp. The rear doors burst open.

An attendant leapt down onto the ramp. Another began shoving a stretcher out.

The woman strapped to it looked dead.

“Which one’s Ambrose?” Cardozo asked.

The dispatcher pointed to the second attendant.

When Cardozo stepped out of the air-conditioned booth, the heat pressed down like the lid on a simmering pan. The ramp was noisy in an insanely bad-tempered way.

“Ambrose delMajor?” Cardozo called out.

The attendant spun around and froze.

Behind him, two young-looking M.D.s were wheeling the stretcher into the Emergency Room.

Cardozo strode forward, shield extended in his left hand. “Lieutenant Vince Cardozo, Twenty-second Precinct. Could I have a word with you?”

Ambrose had a flat blue stare, expressionless as the lens of a minicam. He stood a little under six feet. He was wearing sneakers and blue jeans, and beneath his white hospital jacket one corner of the collar of his blue cotton workshirt was sticking up like a broken thumb.

“What’s this about?” Ambrose spoke with a slight southern accent and a pronounced case of the sniffles.

“May eighth you were on the ambulance crew that brought Oona Aldrich to this hospital—the lady who was attacked in Marsh and Bonner’s.”

“Look, I bring thirty people a day to this hospital.”

“And four days ago you brought Dizey Duke. That was the lady who went off the town-house terrace over on Sixty-seventh.”

Cardozo sensed hesitation in Ambrose, a missed beat.

“I have no way of recalling.”

“You don’t need to recall anything, Ambrose, because I just got through checking the records. You were on both those crews. In fact, you were the
only
person who was on both those crews.”

“Ambrose!” the dispatcher yelled.

Ambrose went over to the booth.

Cardozo could see him through the window, arguing with the dispatcher. He stalked back, sullen-faced. “Can’t talk with you now. I got another call.”

“I’ll ride with you.” Cardozo hopped up into the ambulance and offered Ambrose a hand up. A moment later the second attendant began to climb in.

“Why don’t you ask your friend to ride in front?” Cardozo said.

“Fritz,” Ambrose said, “ride in front.”

Ambrose pulled the doors shut.

Cardozo settled himself in one of the technicians’ seats.

From up front there came two shocks of the cab doors slamming. The motor ground to life. On the other side of the roof the siren cut on in midscreech.

Ambrose slipped out of his white jacket and hung it over a wall hook. He took the other seat and stuck a cigarette in his mouth and spent the next thirty seconds coaxing flame out of a green plastic Bic.