Deadly Rich (70 page)

The young man stayed seated in the front pew. He looked around at the congregation. It seemed to Cardozo that there was a curl of disdain to his smile, as though he had a secret inside him that he was not allowing to slip out.

When the young man rose, Cardozo rose.

“If ever you needed proof that Dick Braidy was a somebody,” Cardozo heard Kristi Blackwell say, “look at the turnout.”

“The Nixons are here,” her companion said. “And Madonna. And
Jackie.
Is Jackie going to Jeu de Paume?”

The young man walked forward to the front pew. He crossed in front of the communion rail. He started up the middle aisle and immediately met a traffic jam of glitterati.

For the next three minutes Cardozo thought he’d lost the young man, and then Ellie’s voice hissed in his left ear, “By the baptismal font.”

“Where the hell’s the baptismal font?” Cardozo growled into his tie clip.

“Southeast corner of church.”

Cardozo peered over an ocean of bobbing coiffed heads, of couture dresses and dark suits. He saw the carved marble font, and he saw Siegel and Monteleone and the young man in the tweed jacket standing between them. They hadn’t exactly put him under restraint, but his shocked and disbelieving face said he didn’t feel exactly free to go either.

“Stay right there,” Cardozo told the mike. “Stay visible.”

He had to squeeze around a woman in slinky gray who was saying to a man in a blue blazer, “I don’t know if Jeu de Paume’s going to be worth it. Are you bothering to go?”

Three feet away Leigh Baker stood talking with her friend Tori Sandberg. They were the only women in the church who were wearing black. Cardozo reached out and touched Leigh’s shoulder. She looked over at him. He saw surprise in her face, and something else, quickly controlled and covered over.

“Ladies, I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But can you see the baptismal font? The young man in a gray tweed jacket?”

Leigh Baker turned toward the font. “The oversized gray herringbone tweed jacket with elbow patches?”

“Is that the male Hispanic you saw in the boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s?”

For an instant she seemed utterly baffled, and then she shook her head. “That’s Juanito. He was Dick’s gardener. He took care of the terrace plants. He wasn’t the man in Marsh and Bonner’s.”

“Absolutely not,” Tori Sandberg said.

“Sorry to bother you.” Cardozo spoke to the mike. “Wrong man. Let him go.”

“
ONE NEW LETTER SOURCE
in note five,” Lou Stein was saying. “
U.S. News and World Report
.”

“Which issue?”

Lou’s sigh traveled across the line. “April second, what else.”

“I wish I could figure out why he loves magazines that went on sale April second.”

“You got it wrong, Vince. They’re
dated
April second. They went on sale March twenty-sixth. April second was the day the April ninth issues came out.”

Cardozo frowned. He flipped his calendar to the week of March twenty-sixth. The only event of interest listed by the publisher was the new moon, a black circle in the blank space for Monday. He tapped his ballpoint against the calendar’s spiral binding. Something nagged at him. It was like hearing a name that almost rang a bell but not quite. “Why does March twenty-sixth seem more interesting to me than April second?”

“It’s farther from April Fool’s. And it’s something new to think about.”

“Thanks, Lou.”

The instant Cardozo laid the receiver down the phone rang. What was it about his telephone? he wondered. For years it had been content to ring with a low-key obnoxious buzz. But today there was a distinctly new ugliness in the ring—an ear-flaying overtone that he could swear he’d never detected before.

He caught the phone before it could inflict a second jangle on his nerves. “Cardozo.”

“Lieutenant, it’s Rad Rheinhardt at the
Trib.
We’ve got another letter from Society Sam. I’m sending it up by messenger.”

DRIZZLE WAS DROPPING
from a sullen, leaden sky. The wet pavement shimmered, and the drizzle turned everything to distance. Cardozo and Malloy were sitting in the Honda, illegally parked south of the West Seventy-second Street entrance to Central Park. They were watching the bench on the pedestrian path just inside the park wall.

A solitary figure sat on the bench: a woman, wearing a big-shouldered green jacket, her long blond hair done up in a fat blond bun. She was holding a pink Mylar umbrella. One silver high-heeled boot tapped restlessly against the paved path.

Rick Martinez was seven minutes late for his two o’clock date.

Malloy stared through the spattered windshield up the avenue, at art-deco condos layered like birthday cakes. He raised a paper cup of deli coffee to his mouth. He had dark crescents under his eyes like a linebacker’s glare smudges. “Where the hell is this fucker? Can’t he even keep an appointment?”

It was ninety seconds later that Cardozo saw a young man in a red T-shirt step out of the Seventy-second Street subway exit, across the avenue. He stood a moment in the drizzle, waiting for the traffic light. He crossed the avenue and turned south. He passed within ten feet of the Honda, close enough for Cardozo to recognize the face in the Bodies-PLUS photo.

“It’s Martinez.” Malloy crunched the empty coffee cup and stuffed it halfway into the ashtray.

“With his head shaved.” Cardozo lifted the radio mike. “Attention all units, suspect Martinez wearing red T-shirt, approaching pedestrian path.”

Martinez reached the path and turned. He walked past the bench, slowed, turned around. He stared at the woman sitting there in the green jacket.

“Think the woman’s his contact?” Malloy said.

Cardozo frowned. “The man on the phone said meet
me,
not
her.
”

Martinez doubled back to the bench. He sat half a bench-length from the woman. She glanced at him and reangled her Mylar umbrella to ward off eye contact.

Cardozo spoke into the mike. “Martinez is seated on bench.”

“Either these two are playing it supercool,” Malloy said, “or they really don’t know each other.”

“I get the feeling she doesn’t intend to know him,” Cardozo said.

After a moment Martinez glanced again at the woman.

“He’s wondering if she’s the contact,” Malloy said.

Martinez looked at his watch. He leaned toward the woman and said something. The umbrella shifted and the woman gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding sneer.

“And now he knows she’s not,” Cardozo said.

“His contact’s almost fifteen minutes late.”

“Give him another five minutes.”

Three minutes passed and Martinez rose from the bench. He stood a moment in indecision, and then he began ambling down the path into the park.

Cardozo grabbed the radio mike. “Martinez is heading east on pedestrian path toward Sheep Meadow.”

Malloy slid out of the car and started after Martinez. At the sound of the car door slamming, Martinez glanced back. He saw Malloy and broke into a run.

Cardozo shoved the mike back into its dashboard bracket. His feet slammed the floor, and he was up and out of the car in one thrust.

Both Martinez and Malloy had vanished. He sprinted up the path. It branched two ways.

He checked right, checked left. His eye caught Martinez’s red T-shirt flashing through the foliage to the right.

The next sixty seconds seemed to happen on the other side of a plate-glass wall.

A rising hill brought Cardozo to an open meadow.

Martinez was forty yards ahead, running.

Parallel to the path, in the bushes, something was moving and it was Malloy, leaping out and punching the air. Compacted steel flashed in his hand.

It was as though Malloy had lost control of his body, as though it had become something that was not an overweight middle-aged cop’s body.

In a crackle of raw acceleration Martinez became a smudge of speed cutting through misty drizzle.

It amazed Cardozo that Malloy had the swiftness. He was actually closing the gap between himself and the red T-shirt.

And then Cardozo heard the gunshot and the warning: “Stop! Police!”

No, that wasn’t right. My mind reversed it
, Cardozo thought.
First the warning. Then the gunshot.

Cardozo broke into a run.

Time became a liquid rush, and Malloy and Martinez became two particles caught in the whirlpool. Martinez was darting in and around the bushes, but there was a drag on his movements. Swerving around a tree, he went into a skid and then he was down, kneecaps kissing mud.

Malloy approached, taut and ready, service revolver drawn.

“Police!” Cardozo could hear him shouting. “Police! Surrender your weapon! Give yourself up!”

Something flashed between them, and Cardozo heard the second shot.

Martinez was on the ground, writhing, kicking, and then he was still.

When Cardozo reached them, Malloy was still shouting at Martinez to drop his gun. Cardozo raised a hand, palm out, signaling Malloy to holster the gun, back off.

Martinez was lying in a fetal curl on his side. His arms were locked tight around the part of his chest that was coming to pieces. He was gasping, pulling in air through a gaping mouth. He had eyes the color of wind, and he had that look that meant nerves and brain cells were going off-line fast.

Cardozo crouched down on one knee. He spoke gently: “Martinez—can you hear me?”

Martinez’s sweat had activated his cologne. A dense sweetness like church incense rose from his body.

“
Me entiendes
?” Cardozo said.

For one brief instant Martinez’s eyes looked directly into Cardozo’s. His throat was going like a scared pigeon’s, pushing out air.

Cardozo leaned his ear down. He could make out whispered, disconnected syllables.

“Maria … mother …
Dios … ruega … sotros
…”

Either Martinez was trying to squeeze in a quick Hail Mary before he slipped across, or he was sinking into bilingual delirium.

Across the meadow an ambulance careened down the jogging path. Even at this distance Cardozo could hear the siren blipping get-out-of-my-way screeches.

Cop cars were cutting across the turf.

Martinez was very quiet now. His eyes had a dreamily surrendering gaze. Cardozo sensed he was in bad shape, getting rapidly worse.

Two cop cars arrived and then the ambulance. Three paramedics lifted Martinez onto a stretcher.

“Whose gun?”

A cop was standing there holding a ballpoint pen through the trigger guard of a small black revolver.

“Where’d you find that?” Cardozo said.

The cop kicked dead leaves. “Right here.”

Malloy’s face was shocked, pale. He nodded toward the ambulance. “It was his.”

RICK MARTINEZ DIED
at three-ten that afternoon in the Emergency Room of Saint Agnes Hospital.

A half hour later, when Cardozo returned to the precinct, there was hardly any activity in the detective squad room. Malloy sat at one of the old-junk typewriters, hunting for the keys to fill in a departmental report. He looked exhausted.

Captain Lawrence Zawac from Internal Affairs was standing beside him, reading over his shoulder.

“What’s happening?” Cardozo said.

“Sergeant Malloy is telling me about the shooting,” Zawac said.

Cardozo noticed that the typing on the form already ran down half the page.

“What are you telling him, Carl?”

“Just how it happened.” Malloy had the face of a man saying hello to mortality a few decades earlier than he’d ever expected.

Cardozo glanced at Zawac. “Is this official?”

Zawac had a smug, secret look. “Call it friendly.”

“Maybe you should talk to a lawyer,” Cardozo told Malloy.

“We’ve discussed that option,” Zawac said, “and Sergeant Malloy has decided to go another route.”

The scar that cut Zawac’s upper lip in two seemed far redder than Cardozo remembered. It showed clearly through his dark mustache. His eyes were gloating.

“Another route?” Cardozo said. “Well, whatever you’re doing, make it fast. We have to get down to Martinez’s apartment.”

“Vince,” Malloy said, “I have to—” He stopped and made a new start. “I’m going to turn over my gun till the hearing.”

“Okay, you’ll turn over your gun.” Cardozo was sure Zawac had fed Malloy some kind of IAD hype, and Malloy had bought into it. But he shrugged as though it didn’t matter. His object now was simply to get Malloy alone. “Where does the rule book say you need a gun to search an apartment anyway?”

Zawac shifted weight. The change of position had the effect of placing him between Cardozo and Malloy.

“Sergeant Malloy will be staying at the precinct,” Zawac said.

Cardozo sensed something dangerous now: Malloy was smiling, but the smile was crazed and wrong. Cardozo read panic in the eyes, the kind where the panicky person was literally blocking out the signals reality was sending him.

“Sorry,” Cardozo said, “Malloy doesn’t sit at the precinct on my task force’s time.”

“Sergeant Malloy is off the task force.”

“I take orders from the top—not from left field.” Cardozo held out a hand. “Show me the paper on this.”

“If you want to see paper, Lieutenant, I guarantee I can arrange for you to see paper.”

“Show me the order, or Malloy’s walking out this door with me.”

Silence, eye contact.

“Carl, come on,” Cardozo said.

Malloy just sat there. There was something missing in him. He looked hurt, beaten, not quite understanding what life was suddenly about or where the next blow was going to fall from.

Malloy said, “Vince—let it go.”

“Look, Carl, even if IAD has persuaded you to give up your rights, they haven’t persuaded me to give up mine. I’m ordering you back to work.”

“I’m resigning from the task force.”

“What the hell are you doing, Carl? If you play scapegoat now, the hyenas are going to go for you. They’re already smelling dead meat.”

“I’ve thought it over and this is the way I have to handle it, Vince. I’m sorry.”

“
SOMETHING THE MATTER
with the ice cream?” Malloy asked.