Deadly Rich (46 page)

The light and shadow moving across the screen threw an easy shimmer out into the room, and Cardozo felt his body floating away from him. She slid over on the sofa, closing the space between them, and her bare arm lay so near to his skin where he had rolled up his shirtsleeve that he could feel warmth coming off her.

When her head dropped toward his shoulder, it was the most automatic, natural thing in the world to let his arm go around her. The part of his brain that cared about survival was telling him,
Get up, get out of here
, and the rest of him had no desire to go anywhere.

It was the rest of him that won.

He pulled her deeper into the warm place she had made on his shoulder. He turned her head and began to kiss her, easily at first, nibbling her lips softly, then biting gently, then moving deeper.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.

AFTERWARD, CARDOZO SAT UP
and dropped his feet over the edge of the bed. He was having trouble recognizing himself.

“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t believe I did that.”

She raised her eyes toward him. He sensed a kind of gentle acceptance in them.

“We
both
did it,” she said, “and it was damned nice.”

“I guess I’m not used to damned nice.”

“You should get used to it. You deserve a little.”

“How do you know what I deserve?”

“Everybody deserves a little.”

He stood and began gathering up his underwear.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll take my things and sleep down the hall.”

“Oh, come on, we’ve done the deed. At least you could stay and cuddle. Cuddling’s the nicest part.”

He looked at her and something in the way she was looking back at him made him realize that she and Waldo had not been lovers in a long time. “Why, you’re just a big, sentimental broad.”

“You better believe it.”

A CLICKING SOUND
reached down into Cardozo’s dream. For a transitional moment he was still floating through a turquoise Caribbean sea. And then he was not.

He opened one eye. A soft flutter of shadows filled the unfamiliar bedroom.

He raised his head. The window curtains were stirring in the air-conditioning. Just beyond the rise-and-fall of Leigh Baker’s sleeping body, the fluorescent hands on the bedside clock pointed to three-twenty. Beneath them the answering machine was flashing a green light.

The machine beeped. “Miss Baker.” It was a man’s voice. “This is your security service.”

“Oh, shut up,” she moaned.

“You seem to have been separated from your guard. Could you give us a call as soon as you get this message? We’re at area code 212 …”

Her hand went to the machine and killed the sound.

“What did you do?” Cardozo said. “Run away from your guard?”

“It’s a long story. I can’t stand him.” Her arm came back to bed and went around him. “Let’s go back to sleep.”

Friday, June 7

Z
ACK CAME BACK TO REALITY
with a sense of exhilaration and release.

The curtains were drawn and the bedroom was half light, half dark. The bathroom door was open a generous crack and the light had been left on, and it threw a soft spill into the space beyond the canopied bed.

Beside him Gloria Spahn was lying on her side, breathing deeply and peacefully.

He allowed his body time to take back its boundaries, then gently pulled away. He rose by swinging his legs out off the bed and putting both feet on the floor. He felt weightless. Colors seemed sharper and sounds brighter. He sensed that the world wanted to sparkle and sing if only he’d let it.

Making love is great
, he thought.
I’ve been making love since I was fourteen and it’s still great. There’s something about making love that catches me up no matter what kind of mood I’m in
—
it gets me out of myself, out of whatever paper bag I’ve sealed myself into.

“Boo!” she cried.

He jumped.

She bounded up and into the bathroom and began running the bath water and filling the tub with scents and soaps and oils and salts.

“You know what the greatest feeling in the world is?” She was kneeling on the rim of the sunken tub, her hand testing the temperature of the water beneath the foam. “A hot tub after hot sex. Nothing beats it.” She motioned him. “Come on—I’ll scrub your back.”

In the tub he said, “We could be great together.”

Gloria Spahn kissed her fingers and pressed them over Zack’s lips. “Don’t spoil it.”

He felt sudden uncertainty, and its presence was like a cold shadow. He could read no hint of her thoughts in the blank, self-satisfied beauty of her face.

The drug high was still carrying him, and his sense of her was sketchy, unfinished, as though nothing he could imagine would ever quite enclose her or confine her.

“Look,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Let’s keep the keys,” he said. “Let’s let this be our place.”

“Let me think about it,” she said.

FOR THE SAKE OF APPEARANCE
Zack left the apartment first. Coming down alone in the mirrored self-service elevator, he checked his reflection, patting a dark lock of still-damp hair into place.

The elevator deposited him smoothly on the ground floor. The doorman held the front door. “Beautiful day, sir,” he said.

“You’re telling me.” Whistling, Zack stepped onto the sidewalk.

AT TEN MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT
Detective John Ferrara sat behind the wheel of his Toyota. He had parked on East Fifty-second Street, but he was keeping his eye on the entrance to the residential high-rise at Twenty-three Beekman Place.

He was indulging in his worst nocturnal habit, a thick bologna sandwich on white bread, with lettuce, tomato, and double mayo. He had spread waxed paper on his lap. This was a necessary precaution when eating one of these deli monsters. The juice from the tomato had thinned the extra mayo into a liquid that began dripping as soon as he pressed the sandwich thin enough to wedge the corner of it into his mouth.

At three minutes before midnight an unforeseen problem began to develop, and it was twofold: The waxed paper started sliding off Detective Ferrara’s lap, and the tomato slice began to slip sideways, off the bologna. Detective Ferrara’s hands could feel the sandwich beginning to destabilize, like a drunk tight-wire walker a half second before the plunge.

Thirty seconds later a man stepped out of the service entrance of Twenty-three Beekman. He was short, he was whistling, and where he wasn’t bald he was dark-haired. Detective Ferrara recognized the afternoon doorman.

The doorman’s shift was over, and he had changed from uniform to street clothes—a Hawaiian shirt and dark slacks. He stood a moment on the sidewalk. He looked up at the full moon hanging over Beekman Place. He jingled the change in his pockets and sauntered west on Fifty-first.

Meanwhile the edge of the tomato slice was peeking out from between the bread, and Detective Ferrara could feel it getting ready to make the jump. A glance downward told him that the waxed paper was seriously overleveraged, with no more than an inch to go before it fluttered down to the gas pedal.

A bicyclist rode east on Fifty-second, passing Detective Ferrara’s car. The cyclist turned onto Beekman Place, cycled past Twenty-nine, and stopped at Twenty-three. Detective Ferrara recognized the Korean delivery boy from the deli where he’d bought his sandwich.

Without quite stepping off his cycle, the boy touched one foot down to the pavement and handed the doorman a large paper bag. The doorman counted out a handful of singles. The boy waved and turned his bike around and came back past Detective Ferrara.

By now Detective Ferrara had a dilemma. It required two hands to hold a bologna with double mayo, though in an emergency, such as the one developing, one hand could do the job for a second or so. The choice was this: Would it be better to use the free hand and the one second to catch the waxed paper or the tomato?

If he caught the waxed paper, he would save his trousers but guarantee himself a sandwich fallen apart in his lap.

If he tried to catch the tomato, he might lose everything and wind up with mayo on his trousers. On the other hand, he might hit the jackpot, come out with trousers clean and sandwich intact.

What it came down to was, was he a gambler or not?

He never got to answer the question.

A white flare exploded on his left side, practically blinding him. A woman’s voice screamed: “Leave us alone!”

Detective Ferrara’s head jerked around toward the screams, and the white-out in his field of vision traveled with him. All he could see was the silhouette of a human being, a black lump like a monster animated cartoon, jumping and waving what looked like a rock.

“What did he ever do to you?” the voice screamed.

The rock flashed again, and Detective Ferrara realized she had a camera, and she was photographing the stakeout.

“Leave us alone! Damn you!”

Something thumped, and a vibration traveled through the car. She was kicking the door. Another flash went off, and now neither of Detective Ferrara’s eyes could see. “Lady, just calm it, will you?”

“We’ve never hurt you!” the voice screamed.

Gradually he began seeing her. She wore steel-rimmed glasses, like the meanest grade-school teacher you ever saw, and she had white hair that was thrashing behind her like a two-foot tail on a berserk pony. Every line in her face, and there were many, had bunched into a single snarl. She had eyes of distilled red hatred. “We’ve never hurt anyone! Can’t you just let us live our lives?”

There was a cracking sound. She’d broken his window.

“Lady, shut the fuck up.” As Detective Ferrara opened the car door and put a foot out on the pavement, the waxed paper, and with it his entire sandwich, slid to the street.

FROM THE BEDSIDE TABLE
Cardozo’s beeper was issuing a direct, unapologetic summons. He opened one eye. His fist swung down.

The beeping didn’t stop. He realized he’d missed. He turned on the bedside light. This time his fist connected with the target.

“Turn it off,” Leigh Baker moaned.

He turned the light off. Four seconds later he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, talking to the precinct.

“I’ll patch you through,” the operator said.

John Ferrara came on the line. Bursts of static alternated with bursts of apology. “She was photographing the stakeouts with a flash camera—blinding us.”

Cardozo felt himself drop through slow layers of understanding. “Did her son get past?”

“She distracted me a good ten, fifteen seconds. I didn’t see him, but there’s a possibility.”

It seemed to Cardozo that the words hung like a bad smell in the air. “Okay,” he said. “Where’s Xenia Delancey now?”

“Back inside. She says she’s calling the police.”

“Keep watching. If she comes out again, be charming.” Cardozo set the receiver back in the cradle. His hands pushed him up from the bed, and the next thing he realized he was up on his feet, trying very hard to get his right foot into his right trouser leg in the dark.

The light went on again and Leigh Baker sat up from her pillow. “Vince? Why are you dressing?”

“I have to go to the precinct.”

“What’s happened?” She combed her hair with her hand away from her face, blinking in the soft cone of dimmed light.

How does any human being look that beautiful
, Cardozo wondered,
when she’s just opened her eyes
? “According to the formula, this is Society Sam’s night.”

“He’s killed someone else?”

“Not yet, not that we know of. But Xenia Delancey spotted one of the cops on the stakeout. She went at him with a flashbulb. It may have been a diversion. Delancey could have slipped past him.”

“Poor Vince. Just when you thought you’d get a little rest.”

Cardozo tucked his shirt into his trousers. He hated putting on a shirt he’d worn the day before. “You know, we canceled your guard, till you’re due back from Paris.”

“And I never went. Is that a problem?”

“Do you mind if I make another call?” He dialed Sam Richards’s number. “Sam, I know it’s a rotten time to call, but I need you.”

“What’s happening?” Sam Richards’s voice said.

“Could you keep an eye on a friend of mine?”

“
Now
?” A little curl of disbelief to the tone.

“It’s an emergency.”

LEIGH LOST TRACK OF TIME
. She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there on the edge of the bed.

Downstairs the front doorbell chimed.

She crossed to the front of the house. She moved aside a curtain and peered down into the darkened street.

She didn’t see a police car.

The doorbell chimed again.

She took the elevator down. She spoke to the front door. “Vince, is that you?”

No one answered.

She drew the belt of her robe more tightly around her. She put her face to the window and looked out. There was no one on the front stoop, no one on the sidewalk. A lone cab passed in the street with its off-duty light on.

In a moment she heard a buzz in another part of the house.

The kitchen door, she realized.

She crossed the darkened dining room. She didn’t turn on the lights. Lights would have been visible from the street.

She pushed through the swinging door to the pantry. There was no window, and it was pitch-black here. She turned on the light.

The sudden brightness stung her eyes. She stood blinking.

The buzz came again—nearer and sharp this time, impatient, like a message in Morse code.

The door between the kitchen and the pantry was open. She approached the darkness beyond it. She stood a moment at the threshold. She listened and watched.

Copper pots made silhouettes overhead like giant dangling leaves. At the far end of the room streetlight fell in a pale yellow slant through panes of frosted glass.

Outside, something passed through the slant. Now it blacked out the glass panel in the door. Something scratched at the doorway.

She felt along the counter. Her hand found a drawer. She pulled it open and felt inside. Her fingers fumbled through eggbeaters and whisks.