Deadly Rich (47 page)

She opened the next drawer and found a poultry knife. The drawer crashed to the floor. Cutlery clattered.

The scratching stopped. After a moment it began again.

There was a click, and the kitchen door opened.

Leigh stepped backward toward the pantry. Her slipper struck a knife and sent it spinning across the tiling. She ducked into the pantry and clicked off the light.

She heard three footsteps. They had a man’s weight. The street door made a firm, solid sound closing.

“Miss Baker?” The kitchen light went on. “Is anyone home?”

He must have known she was there. As he came around the corner he caught her knife hand in midmovement.

“You shouldn’t have gotten off the plane without telling me.” Arnie Bone lifted the poultry knife from her fist and laid it on the counter. “Do you have any idea of the trouble you’ve caused?”

The front doorbell chimed. She spun around and ran.

A man’s arm was holding something up to the window. A shield winked gold. She threw the door open.

“Sam Richards, ma’am.” His dark face was expressionless behind his gunfighter mustache. “Lieutenant Cardozo asked me to keep an eye on you.”

She stood aside and gestured him to come in.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

“No. I’m not.”

She looked behind her. Arnie Bone stood at the end of the hallway, watching her.

“This man broke into the house.”

“Officer, that’s not exactly correct.” Arnie Bone came forward.

“Could you please ask him to go?” Leigh said.

Arnie Bone handed his wallet to Sam Richards.

Sam Richards studied the color photograph on the driver’s license. He flipped a thick cellophane page and studied the color photo on the guard’s license. He handed the wallet back. He turned to Leigh. “This man is a licensed private guard.”

“I know that,” she said. “But I didn’t hire a private guard, and I don’t want this one.”

“Waldo Carnegie hired me,” Arnie Bone said. “This house is his—not hers.”

Sam Richards looked from the man to the woman and back again to the man. “Did Mr. Carnegie hire you to guard the house?”

“Mr. Carnegie hired me to guard Miss Baker.”

“I don’t wish to be guarded,” Leigh said. “Not by this man. He broke into the house. It’s the second time he’s almost frightened me to death.”

“I didn’t intend to frighten Miss Baker,” Arnie Bone said. “I apologize. Mr. Carnegie gave me the keys to the back door. I rang at the front door and no one answered. I let myself in.”

“Please ask him to go,” Leigh said.

“Mr. Bone, your services aren’t required.”

Arnie Bone’s eyes gave Leigh permission to drop dead. He walked to the front door.

“Just one thing,” Sam Richards said. “Could I see those keys?”

Arnie Bone took a key ring from his pocket. Two bright new keys jingled.

Sam Richards lifted the key ring from Arnie Bone’s hand and placed it in Leigh Baker’s hand. He opened the front door. “Thank you, Mr. Bone.”

Leigh watched Arnie Bone go. There was anger and stony nonacceptance in his face.

His fingers touched the brim of a nonexistent hat. “Good-bye for now, folks.”

Saturday, June 8

N
AN SHANE LAID THE FINAL CARD
faceup on the table. “Six of cups, reversed. You have opportunities ahead. New vistas.”

The waiter shook his head. “New vistas?
Again
? Send those cards back to the factory for a tune-up.”

Nan cupped a hand around a yawn. “I don’t think these jerks are ever going to show up.” She lifted her drink, a Tequila Sunrise in a stem glass, and drained the last diluted dregs. “Do me a favor, J.J.—see if you can get me a refill?”

The thin-hipped, redheaded waiter carried Nan’s glass across the softly lit interior of Tiffany lamps and red-checked tablecloths. There was practically nobody in the place.

The bartender—a young, overweight guy in shirtsleeves—wore a jowl-to-jowl frown as he polished the gleaming maple bar with slow swipes of a chamois. Nan could see him refuse to make her another drink. Hostility came off him in waves.

She gathered up her cards and shuffled them into a neat stack.

The waiter returned. “Sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Nan slipped the cards back into their box and dropped the box into her tote bag. She gave the waiter’s hand a pat. “But thanks for trying.”

In the corner of the bar a four-year-old with blond pigtails stood on tiptoe playing with the buttons on an old-fashioned rainbow-colored jukebox. Nan Shane snapped a finger. “Come on, Dodie. Hit the road to dreamland.”

The little girl turned. She had huge eyes and pouting lips.

“No,” Nan said. “Don’t even ask. You’ve played that song enough.”

Dodie didn’t move.

“I said come here.”

Dodie began crying.

Nan Shane had to cross the bar and take Dodie by the hand and pull her to the door. The child whined and held on to chairs and table legs. Nan kicked the door open, and Dodie’s wail hit the night air like shattering glass.

“Shut up,” Nan said.

Dodie didn’t shut up.

There was really no decision to be made. Nan let Dodie have it across the face, outer edge of the backhand.

“And that,” Nan said, “is just a warning.”

Dodie was quiet now. Nan could hear the city again. Overhead, the bar’s sign gave a squeak in the steamy breeze. Nan loved that sign. The owner had promised she could have it if he ever closed the bar. It was varnished driftwood, with rustic carved letters, and the letters spelled
ACHILLES FOOT
.

“Lady,” a voice said.

Nan Shane blinked. Out of nowhere a man was coming toward her. She realized he’d been standing just beyond the circle of light that fell from the window, but standing so still that she’d mistaken him for a shadow.

“Lady, why did you hit that child?”

Why was it, Nan Shane asked herself, that everyone in New York City knew how to run a single mother’s life better than she did herself? “This is my child. Thank you for your concern, but this is mother-daughter business. Please keep out of it. Come on, Dodie. Homeward-bound.”

Dodie began crying again.

“Don’t you know children belong to God?”

He said it so quietly, with a look of such gentleness on his face, that at first Nan registered nothing but his tone. It was the tone for saying,
What a lovely child.

“I beg your pardon?” Nan said.

“You mustn’t slap that child. God hates people who beat children.”

Her head felt like a TV set that was picking up video from one channel and audio from another. What she was hearing and what she was seeing didn’t go together. He was dressed in clean jogging clothes, like a stockbroker out for a late-night run, and he had a smile you’d say yes to in a minute if you met him in a bar. But what he was saying was crazy. God and hate and beating children—what kind of a conversation was that to start with a stranger at two
A.M.
on a New York sidewalk?

Nan Shane sensed a creepie vibe coming off this guy.

“Come on, Dodie. Beddie-bye.” She reached for her daughter’s hand.

But Dodie didn’t move. She just stood there and stared at the man. Ever since Nan had split from Dodie’s father, the girl had stared at men.

“Come
on
.” Nan gave Dodie’s hand a yank. “We’re going home.
Now
.”

Dodie began screaming. Nan gripped the child’s hand hard and didn’t let go and took off at a fast walk. She’d drunk a little more than she ought to have, and Dodie decided it would be cute to act like a deadweight, and between the booze and the brat Nan had a difficult time walking straight.

The child stumbled and fell. Wouldn’t you know it, the screams got even louder. Any minute now people would be sticking their heads out the windows to see who was getting murdered.

“Will you stop play-acting?” Nan gave the girl a good hard pull to stand her up straight. “You’re embarrassing me!”

“You’re abusing that little girl,” the man said.

Nan didn’t believe it. The man was walking right alongside them, grinning, happy with himself, sure as hell happy with something. You’d have thought she’d invited him to walk her home and stop up for a drink.

“Will you do me a favor and get lost?” she said.

He was not one to take a hint.

Nan glanced up and down the street. A taxi with its off-duty light on had passed them and was waiting at a red light two blocks north. Except for parked cars and that one taxi, Third Avenue was empty.

“You don’t deserve a child,” the man said.

“What I don’t deserve at two o’clock in the morning is
you
, you goddamn creep. So fuck off before I call a cop.”

“You don’t deserve anyone.”

“You want me to scream? Because my kid gets it from me. I taught her how.” Speaking of which, Nan brought the flat of her hand down sharp on Dodie’s skull. “Shut up, the both of you!”

“You’re a monster, and I’m not going to let you abuse that little girl anymore.”

Nan stopped and whirled to face him, so angry now that she could see her own spittle fly. “You want to adopt a kid, go to Family Services. This one’s mine—so butt out, asshole!”

That did it. There was a startle reflex in his eyes. He fell back a step.

Nan Shane grabbed Dodie’s hand tight. “Come on, kid, move it. He’s a weirdo.”

Nan began running.

But suddenly it felt all wrong.

Her feet were running in a dream, getting nowhere. Something was holding her from behind. A mirror flashed in front of her eyes, left to right. A burn went across her throat. The mirror flashed again, going the other way, and then she felt a hot stinging dampness burst under her chin.

Pink was spraying in front of her, and Dodie was looking up at her, wide-eyed. The child’s face was nothing but a baby-toothed shrieking hole, and blood was flying, like the time Nan’s Aunt Mattie put a finger in the blender to unstick the Bloody Mary mix.

Then gravity kicked in, and Nan hit the sidewalk in a tangle of arms and shawl and necklace and legs and skirt.

And then the pain in her stomach began.

A
T THREE-EIGHTEEN THAT MORNING
the phone in Cardozo’s office finally rang.

“Vince Cardozo.”

“Looks like we got another,” the night operator said. “Officer reports a dead woman on Third and Seventy-seventh, southwest corner.”

SHE STARED AT CARDOZO
with wide-open, startled eyes. Her legs were drawn up to the side and halfway under her. Her head lay back, touching the pavement. The position drew her neck out taut and separated the lips of the two dark slashes that x’ed her throat.

Cardozo stood a long, considering moment, returning her stare.

“Any ID?” he asked the sergeant who had been the first officer on the scene.

“Full purse,” the sergeant said. “Driver’s license, charge cards, housekeys, seventy-three cents.”

“Seventy-three cents? That’s all?”

The sergeant nodded.

“What’s her name?” Cardozo asked.

“Nan Shane. She lived on Seventy-seventh.”

“So he hit her three blocks from home.” Cardozo crouched down beside Nan Shane.

Beneath the heavy makeup, her face was bloated and pale. The skin around her startlingly blue eyes was puffed up and purplish as if she’d had some kind of allergy. Her long blond hair had roots going gray at the temples.

The only distinguishing marks on Nan Shane had been put there by her killer.

Cardozo rose, stepping out of her gaze, and moved to the curb. He glanced at the trash basket, full to overflowing with newspapers, food wrappers, soda cans. The cans were a good sign. They meant that the five-cent-deposit scavengers had not yet been through the basket.

A crime-scene technician was fencing off the murder perimeter with strips of orange tape. “Cardozo called to him. “Bag the contents of this trash can, will you?”

Cardozo stepped into the street. He stood with his back to the corpse. Overhead, the sky was beginning to lighten, but down here the last of night was clinging to the streets. His gaze panned from left to right, trying to see what she had seen, what she hadn’t seen, and noticing the windows from which someone else might have seen her.

“Any witnesses?” Cardozo asked the sergeant.

The sergeant shook his head.

“Who called the cops?”

“Jonathan Feuerstein.” The sergeant nodded. Ten feet away, under a boutique-and-card-shop awning, a gangly skinhead in a sleeveless denim jacket stood nervously smoking a cigarette. A little girl in toddler’s jeans and a striped blue shirt stood clutching the skinhead’s leg, She wore her blond hair in braids, and she couldn’t have been more than four years old.

Cardozo went over and introduced himself. “Hi, Jonathan. Can I call you Jonathan?”

“Why not? That’s my name.”

“Hi, sweetie.” Cardozo bent down to tickle the little girl under her chin. She rewarded him with a silent, freckled frown. Cardozo asked Jonathan how he’d happened to find the dead woman.

“I came around the corner, she was lying there.” Jonathan spoke with the almost toneless rasp of a two-pack-a-day man. He had wary eyes the color of soapstone, and a small vampire’s-bite tattoo on his throat, and tension lines played permanent tic-tac-toe across his forehead. “I went over, I spoke to her, she didn’t answer, I gave her shoulder a push—”

“A push with your foot?”

Jonathan looked shocked. “I bent down. I pushed with my hand. You don’t push a lady with your foot.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“I” lifted her hand to feel for a pulse, and there wasn’t any.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No. Do I have to be a doctor to lift a woman’s hand who’s bleeding in the street and needs help?”

Christ,
Cardozo thought,
why am I trying to argue with this guy? Because I was beeped out of a bed I was sharing with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known
? “Absolutely not.”

“I saw she was dead, and I went to that pay phone.” Jonathan nodded toward the pay phone halfway up the block. “I called nine-one-one and they told me to wait and in a couple of hours you guys finally got here.”