Deadly Rich (51 page)

Smoke crack with Jim, she said. This will do it.

I bought enough crack from her to last the week.

January 11, Thursday

In counseling today I suggested to Jim that we smoke a peace pipe. He was reluctant when I told him it was crack, but curiosity got the better of him and he tried it. Two tokes and we were off to the races.

He is the greatest lover I have ever had, bar none, nothing short of sensational. It was yummy sex to end all sex—

It was there that Leigh Baker had placed the bookmark. Cardozo closed the diary.

On the other side of the library Leigh Baker sat with a magazine on her lap. She was turning pages, not reading. She looked over at Cardozo. A little line of wariness ran from her eye down to the corner of her mouth. “Do you recognize the phrase?”

“Sure. The same five words in exactly the same order.”

“Nita was intelligent. She was educated. She was sane … And she was a woman. No woman would write those five words, not in a diary, not in a letter, not in a soft-core novel. It’s a man’s wish-fulfillment of how a horny woman thinks.”

She took her glass in both hands. It was a brandy snifter of diet Pepsi. She sat staring into it.

“The diary’s a forgery,” she said.

There was extraordinary calm in the way she made that statement. He wondered at the ferocity of that calm.

“As I recollect,” he said, “it must have been an awfully good forgery. Didn’t experts say the handwriting was your daughter’s? Wasn’t there information only your daughter could have known?”

Leigh tapped a finger on the edge of the snifter. “It was well researched. It was skillful. But it was a fake.”

“All right, say it was a fake. Still,
sex to end all sex
—those are five very ordinary words. A very common figure of speech. I think it’s a coincidence. And I think you’re hanging way too much hope on way too little fact.”

She blinked hard, as though her eyes were stinging. “You’re determined not to believe me, aren’t you?”

Ten seconds passed.

She dried her eyes on the back of her hand.

“Come on.” Cardozo crossed to the sofa and sat beside her. “Don’t cry. Come on. Please.”

“What makes you think I’m crying?”

“Your face is wet. Come here.”

She buried her face in his chest.

“You could be wrong, you know.” His arms went around her and hugged her softly. “All of us are wrong some of the time. Delancey has an alibi for Oona’s killing. We don’t have witnesses to link him to any of the others.”

She held on to him, and he could feel her body breathing. “Are you going to stop watching him?”

“We may have to cut back a little.”

She pulled away. Her eyes met his without blinking. “Don’t.”

He stared at her. “You couldn’t save Nita from Delancey then, so you’re going to move heaven and earth to save her from him now. Why?”

“I owe it to her.”

“Who says?”

She looked at him, trying to make a smile for him. She brought her leg out from under her and touched her bare foot to the carpeted floor. She stood. “Is anyone around here getting hungry? Let’s see what else the chef left on ice.”

Sunday, June 9

C
ARDOZO WAS CURIOUS ABOUT
this man that Leigh Baker said she depended on.

“You’re in Nan Shane’s address book,” he said.

“I’m not surprised,” Luddie Ostergate said. “She used to be in mine. How’s she doing?”

“She’s dead.”

“Nan? Nan
Shane
?” Luddie Ostergate held himself absolutely still in the chair. “How did it happen?”

Cardozo told him how Nan Shane had died.

They were sitting in Ostergate’s living room, a minimally furnished loft space with two walls of windows and a knockout view of the Chrysler Building.

Ostergate listened, his face unmoving, but when Cardozo described the knife cuts, he flinched.

“Jesus. She may have done some dumb things in her life, but she didn’t deserve to go like that.”

“How well did you two know each other?”

“Not well. She came into AA about three years ago. She was a cross-addicted alcoholic and cokehead, and she picked me to be her sponsor.”

“How did she happen to pick you?” Cardozo asked.

“Strictly potluck. She drew my name out of a box.”

Ostergate had insisted on Cardozo’s having a cup of coffee. Now that he had the cup in his hand Cardozo was glad he’d insisted. It turned out to be a thick brew, edged in the charcoal overroastedness that Cardozo associated with waking up in the morning.

“I’ve been in the program over five years,” Ostergate said. “That qualifies me as an old-timer. We old guys put our names in the sponsor box and theoretically every newcomer picks a sponsor, and that’s how we keep an eye on the beginners. Sometimes the relationship takes and lasts twenty years. Sometimes it doesn’t and it lasts twenty minutes.”

“You were crossed out of Nan Shane’s address book.”

“I’m not surprised. Nan didn’t stay in the program long.”

“How long?” Cardozo asked.

“Three, four months. When we lost touch, I assumed she was out coking and boozing.”

“You didn’t go after her?”

“It’s not that kind of a program, and I’m not that kind of a guy.” Ostergate’s voice seemed to give in to a bone-deep tiredness. “I nagged her about her coke habit. She lied about it, and by lying she made it clear she wasn’t ready for AA.”

“Tell me about her coke habit.”

“Her per-diem habit would have cost …” Ostergate’s fingers seemed to be tapping out abacus movements on his knee. “Three hundred dollars. But Nan got it wholesale. She had connections in the industry.”

“What can you tell me about her connections?”

“I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to know. Far as I was concerned that was between her, God, and the cops. I told her she had to get out of the coke business—told her she’d never beat her addiction if she was peddling it to other people.”

Ostergate was silent for one shadowed moment, and the air seemed to vibrate with his dislike of what this woman had come to represent in his life.

“But she had a whole head trip about her East Side apartment and her life-style, and being a single mother and owing the kid a decent life. To Nan, decency was a private kindergarten and designer playclothes. She had a lot of expenses and she had no skills and she didn’t want to learn any. So she stayed in the dope-peddling business. She tried to kick coke, but naturally, dealing it all the time, she couldn’t.”

For a moment Ostergate’s gaze touched Cardozo, as though they both knew all eighty-nine flavors of human weakness.

“She must have had a hundred coke slips in a hundred days. After the hundred first, I told her to change professions or get her ass out of my life. This was maybe a year ago. I never saw her again—never heard her name again—till you phoned.”

“Did you ever meet her kid?”

“Never.”

“Ever see her apartment?”

“She’d visit me here or meet me in a coffee house, but as you can see, I’m a pretty casual dresser—I don’t think she wanted to take the chance that anyone who counted might see a slob like me going into her apartment.”

Luddie Ostergate’s dress didn’t look all that casual to Cardozo: a sport shirt that had been machine washed often enough to have softened to pale designer blue, gray cotton trousers that were supposed to have the wrinkled look and did, athletic socks, unadorned brown loafers that matched the brown leather belt. Cardozo would have called the look careful casual. It would have set you back a lot at Barney’s, not so much at the Gap.

“Was Nan actually in with any society types?”

Ostergate smiled. “She wanted to think she was. She applied herself to it. She was a real networker. As in
tireless.
Nan was the kind of woman who went to funerals of prominent people she’d never even met, and shook every hand in the church. And I think she actually got a few invitations out of it. I remember once she was scheduled to speak at a meeting, and she canceled at the last moment because some social star had invited her to coffee.”

“Coffee?” Cardozo said.

“That’s right. Not dinner. Coffee
after
dinner. A lot of times. Coffee after dinner.”

“Think she was dealing coke at these dinners?”

Ostergate sat a moment in cool, smiling cynicism. “In all the months I knew her, Nan was never
not
dealing coke. Meetings she had the decency not to deal at. But there was always some deal going down in Beekman Place or Sutton Place or some club where your ancestors had to have sailed a deck on the
Mayflower
.”

“I don’t suppose you take notes when someone you’re sponsoring talks to you.”

“No, nothing like that. Usually it’s just shit they need to ventilate—the sooner it’s out and forgotten, the better.”

Ostergate seemed to live simply: no art treasures hung on his walls, his furnishings made no designer statement. The most expensive object in the room was probably the computer set up on a worktable: it looked to Cardozo like a twin of the computer in Dr. Wilkes’s office.

“Have you sponsored many people?” Cardozo said.

“In all, I’d say ten. I’m not trying to set a record. I sponsor as many as I’m comfortable with, two or three at a time. At the moment I sponsor only two.”

“We have a friend in common.”

“Who’s that?”

“Leigh Baker.”

Luddie Ostergate blinked as if for an instant something had almost thrown him off balance. “Sorry, I live in so many different worlds, I sometimes get thrown for a loop when a name crosses over.”

“She says you help her get through what she’s going through.”

“And she’s going through a lot. To tell the truth, I’m surprised I’m any help to anyone at the moment. Work’s keeping me busy. Too busy.”

“Could I ask what kind of work you do?”

“I run a chain of thrift shops.” There was a touch of self-disparagement in Luddie Ostergate’s shrug. “They’re staffed with men and women from AA. By the way, if the NYPD is ever looking for first-rate part-time help, you can’t do better than hire someone from AA.”

“I’ll remember that.” Cardozo set down his cup. He rose and strolled to the bookcase, making no secret of his curiosity. On the top two shelves Ostergate had arranged history books and biographies alphabetically by author. A third shelf held foreign-language manuals and a fourth, books on economics and foreign policy.

Cardozo examined the computer. It was an NEC Powermate 2—exactly the same as Wilkes’s. “You use this in your work?”

“I’d be dead without it.”

Cardozo leaned down to read the print on the screen:
Condor 90397 ROM BIOS PLUS Version 5. 10 Copyright
©
1989-1991.
“What’s ‘Condor’?”

“My computer program gives you the option to name it.” Luddie Ostergate rose from his chair and came across the room. “I named it Condor.” He pushed a control button on the keyboard. His knuckles were reddened, swollen, his nails unevenly trimmed. The screen went blank. “Ever seen one?”

“A condor? No.”

“Fantastic birds.”

“You must have spent time in South America.”

“A little.”

A coaxial line had been attached to the computer housing. Cardozo’s eye followed it to the phone jack on the baseboard. “What kind of program do you use?”

“Standard small corporate bookkeeping—tracks inventory and expenses and payroll. Do you use a computer?”

Cardozo shook his head. “Me? No way. But I have a friend who talks to Washington on one of these. From his desk in Manhattan he can read files in a subbasement in Virginia.”

“These machines are the greatest communicators on earth today.”

“Where’s your mainframe?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“That phone line—isn’t it your link to the mainframe?”

Luddie Ostergate’s face seemed to hesitate before breaking into a grin. “No, that’s the stores’ link to me. I’m the mainframe.” He placed a hand on the computer casing. “This little eighty-meg baby is the brains of the whole operation.”

DICK BRAIDY TURNED A PAGE
.

He had wrapped himself in a rumpled bathrobe and a day’s worth of whiskers stubbled his cheeks gray. His eyes were bloodshot and the skin beneath them looked puffy and tender.

He sat there in the armchair, staring at the diary. He hardly breathed, hardly moved. Finally he floated a glance toward Leigh.

“Everyone else says I’m exaggerating,” she said. “Am I?”

“No.” The word was hardly more than a breath.

“So it’s more than a five-word coincidence?”

“Much more.” He handed back the diary. “You didn’t turn the page. Nine words are the same. In his note Society Sam said ‘
Sex to end all sex, is there anything else in your perverted worldview
?’”

She turned the page. She saw that he was right. The line began
sex to end all sex
at the bottom of the right-hand page, and it continued on the next page:
is there anything else
?

“I wish I’d seen that.” She slapped the covers shut. “The police would have
had
to believe me. Well, they’ll believe me now.”

“Don’t tell them yet.” Dick looked up at her almost beseechingly, the way a little boy might. “If you let me keep the diary, I can prove that Nita didn’t write any of it.”

“How can you prove that?”

“Trust me?”

She laid the diary down on the coffee table. She laid it down gently, because the table was a three-thousand-dollar antique, King George papier-mâché. It had been featured in the “Living” section of the
Times,
and she knew her ex-husband was very proud of it. “Keep it for as long as you need.”

“Only a day or two.”

Dick Braidy’s apartment was quiet. Rain nattered softly against the window panes. Beyond the glass the evening sky was a dull, sharkskin gray.

“I guess you could use a drink,” Dick said. “Meaning, I could.”

He walked into the kitchen and came back with two tumblers of ice cubes and a can of diet Pepsi. He prised off the flip top and half filled a tumbler and handed it to her.

He went to the secretary and poured himself a straight Chivas. “Have you heard that Jim Delancey has a girlfriend now?”