Deadly Rich (31 page)

He asked himself:
What are these
? He tried to see them as drawings. What did they represent? He tried to see them as symbols. What did they embody?

A light on the phone blinked. Cardozo snapped up the receiver before it could buzz. “Vince Cardozo, how can I help you?”

“I’m sorry to bother you …”

The voice was hesitant, almost apologetic. He recognized Leigh Baker, and he felt an involuntary little glow in the center of his rib cage.

“That’s okay. Bother me.”

“I got a threatening phone call today.”

He reached for his pen. He kept his voice easy and calm, not letting anything show. “What was the threat?”

“
Shut your evil trap
—
or you’ll go to the head of the line.
”

It was a revealing choice of words, and they set off a familiar and unpleasant resonance in his memory—part teacher talk, part abusive adult-to-child talk. The kindergarten as hell. “Did you recognize the voice?”

“No. He was disguising it. The pitch was low, soft. Almost a whisper.”

“Did he have an accent?”

“No—no accent.”

“Was there any kind of reverberation or delay? Could these have been long-distance or satellite calls?”

“They sounded local.”

“Did you hear any background sounds—television, music, other voices, traffic?”

“No.”

Cardozo ran the options through his mind. “I think we’d better install a trace.”

“All right. If you think so.”

“If we tap from inside the house and we have permission of the resident, we don’t need a court order. The only question I’m legally required to ask you is, are you a resident?”

“I don’t know how the law defines that.”

“Let’s go by how you define it.”

“It’s Waldo’s house, but he’s away and I suppose I’m a resident at the moment.”

“Fine. I’ll be over with a man after I get through here. Would six, six-thirty be okay?”

“Six or six-thirty would be fine,” she said. “I haven’t any plans.”

That seemed odd to him: a woman like Leigh Baker spending an evening in New York, not having any plans. “Can you get the servants out of the house? It’ll take a half-hour, hour.”

“I’ll make sure they’re not here.”

“And till I get there it might be a good idea to let your answering machine take your calls.”

WHEN LEIGH BAKER OPENED
the front door, she was wearing a dress of a pale peach and her hair had a tousled and magnificent look, as though half an hour ago she’d paid a hairdresser two-hundred dollars to mess it up just right.

“Miss Baker,” Cardozo said, “I’d like you to meet my friend Tommy Thomas. Tommy’s with Nynex.”

“How do you do, ma’am,” Tommy said.

Leigh Baker’s eyes went right past Cardozo and raked Tommy from his face down to his shoes and then back up.

Cardozo could understand why: Tommy’s sandy-brown hair was salon-cut and he wore a beautifully tailored lightweight dark gray suit. The small leather case in his left hand was made of pigskin, and it carried his initials in gold, just beneath the combination lock. When Leigh Baker took that lingering second look, Cardozo felt a tiny sting of regret that he hadn’t spent a thousand dollars more grooming himself.

“Which part of the house do you need to see?” Leigh Baker asked.

“Phone lines usually come into the cellar,” Tommy said.

“Then to the cellar we’ll go,” Leigh Baker said. The remark had an odd kind of prefabricated merriness that didn’t fit Cardozo’s impression of her.
Why do I suddenly hate Tommy Thomas
? he wondered.

Don’t bother answering
, he told himself.

Tommy Thomas was Cardozo’s telephone connection.

When you needed a phone tap, the official way was to go through the law-enforcement bureaucracy. The procedure took up to three weeks, and it left a paper trail four departments wide. The unofficial way was to go through the phone company, the people who had invented the phone and the phone tap and the phone trace and who still controlled the state-of-the-art technologies of all three. This took anywhere from five minutes to an hour, and in the end, three hundred fewer people knew about it.

Leigh Baker led them through the kitchen and down a flight of stairs.

Though the chandeliers were brass instead of crystal, Waldo Carnegie’s idea of a cellar could have been someone else’s idea of a ballroom. Oriental rugs dotted the polished oaken parquet, and the walls and the ten-foot ceiling were paneled in molded walnut. The pipes that criss-crossed overhead were polished brass, as though someone had decided,
Hell, if we can’t make them invisible, we might as well make them expensive.

Tommy Thomas crossed the cellar and opened a small brass cabinet door, exposing a pocket of agitated dials and wheels and blinking lights. “This looks like some kind of temperature-stabilizing mechanism. What’s he got down here, a wine cellar?”

“Yes, he has, and they say it’s a very good one.”

“Could I have a look?”

Leigh Baker unlocked a door behind the stairway.

Wine, Cardozo discovered the minute he stepped into the little windowless room, lived at a temperature ten degrees lower than people.

Leigh Baker flicked on the light.

Except where the pen-and-ink portrait of a standing Harlequin hung, the walls were
x
’ed with tiger-maple latticing, and the lattices were filled with bottles lying on their side, cork end out. At a quick estimate Cardozo calculated more than three thousand bottles.

Tommy lifted the Harlequin off its hook and leaned it against a low wall of white burgundies. The picture had masked a foot-square door set flush with the paneling. He jiggled it open. A nest of color-coded wires streamed through a series of tiny black boxes, looping over and under and around one another like nerve fibers in a brain.

“Bingo.” Tommy snapped open the catch of his pigskin case and took out a flat, three-by-three-inch black metal box and went to work.

Leigh Baker stood quietly watching. Her face was strained and a little anxious. Cardozo could tell that the situation was giving her trouble. Till now the calls had been in the same class as nightmares: she could always tell herself she was imagining them. With this little box that option was dead. The beast was going to leave footprints.

It took Tommy Thomas just under seven minutes to wire in the microminiaturized memory box and ring-activated cassette-recorder. “That will record the number calling in and the conversation. You’ll have everything but the caller’s age, weight, and social-security number.”

Leigh Baker avoided looking at the tracing box. She looked at Tommy. “Could I offer you a drink, or iced tea, or whatever?

Tommy pulled back his jacket sleeve to look at his watch. “Sorry. I’d enjoy it, but I’ve got one more job to get to.”

At that instant Cardozo loved Tommy Thomas.

“
HOW ABOUT YOU, LIEUTENANT
?” Leigh Baker said. “Something to drink?”

They were standing in the front hallway, just the two of them now.

“Maybe a little water,” Cardozo said.

“Nothing stronger?”

“Not while I’m on duty, thanks.”

“It’s almost seven. Can’t you go off duty?”

“If I’m off duty, I don’t have a hell of a lot of business being here.”

Something uncertain appeared in her eyes, as though she didn’t quite know which door to go through next. It was a moment before confusion reshaped itself into a smile. “In that case, you’re on duty and there’s water galore.” She took him to the kitchen and searched through three huge, over-stocked refrigerators. “Damn. We had some Evian and some Vittel—but I can’t find them.”

Cardozo went to the sink and turned the tap. “This will do me fine. I’m a native.”

“You need a glass.” She opened a cabinet and handed him a brandy snifter. “Sorry. I haven’t learned my way around Waldo’s cups and saucers.”

Cardozo let the water run till it was cold, and then he filled the snifter.

“You need some ice,” she said.

“I’m okay.”

“Let me do
something
hospitable.” She took the snifter to the refrigerator and dropped three cubes of ice into it. “Do you suppose we’d be a little more comfortable in the living room?”

The living room was a high-windowed space large enough to hold a concert-grand piano and three separate groupings of tapestried sofas and chairs. Leigh Baker selected the grouping nearest the fireplace. She took one end of the sofa and Cardozo took the chair facing her.

He sat a moment, rippling the water in his glass. “Isn’t your number unlisted?”

She nodded. “Yes, I have my very own secret unlisted line. Waldo insisted.”

“And the calls have been coming in on that line?”

She nodded.

Cardozo looked around him. French windows sealed in the air-conditioned cool with its faint scent of potpourri that pervaded the house. It was hard to believe that, on the far side of the soundproofed outer walls, traffic was shaking the city and homeless men and women were staking out doorways for their night’s sleep.

It was even harder to believe the statistics saying that somewhere in the city at this very moment seven people were getting ready to kill seven other people, five of whom would be complete strangers to their assailants.

“Who knows the number?” he said.

“A lot of people.” She thought for a moment. “I’ve given it to my friends … my family … my agent … my lawyer … the people I worked with on my last movie—and there’s always my sponsor.”

Cardozo looked across at her. The soft, cone-shaped glow of the table lamp silhouetted her, touching the edge of her hair with highlights the color of fresh honey.

“What’s a sponsor, some product you advertise?”

For a moment she didn’t answer. He was aware of a change in her, a softening in the angle of the shield she turned to him.

“It’s an AA term,” she said finally. “A sponsor is someone who advises a newcomer.”

“So you’re an AA newcomer and you have a sponsor.”

“No, I’m not a newcomer anymore, but yes, I still have a sponsor. A beautiful man. His name is Luddie Ostergate and he’s gotten me through a lot. He’s even getting me through this.”

Cardozo let the implications of that word
beautiful
ripple through him.
This woman comes on savvy and semitough but what she really is, is lonely and a little shy and very sick of men wanting to paw her.

“But I know it’s not Luddie phoning me,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Because Luddie never phones anyone. He hasn’t called me twice in the last month. I phone him when I need him.” Her teeth sank down onto her lower lip. “Actually, I hardly ever phone him.”

“Why not? Don’t you need him anymore?”

“More than ever. But I go over to his place twice a week. We have a standing appointment.”

He finished his water and set the snifter down on the table. “That was great water. Thanks.” He stood and patted his legs to help the wrinkles drop off his pants.

“Do you really have to go?”

“Wish I didn’t, but I really do.”

She appraised him. There was something sad in her eyes now. The realization that she wanted the visit to last longer made him feel light, as though his feet were nowhere near the floor.

She yielded with a smile and walked with him back toward the hallway. They reached the front door. He could feel her delaying.

“This is for you.” She opened a drawer in the hallway table and handed him a tape cassette in an unmarked plastic box.

He turned it over in his hand. “Thanks. Whose greatest hits is this?”

“The time before last—when he called—I accidentally left the machine running.”

“Okay.” Cardozo pocketed the tape. “I’ll have the sound lab look at it.” He opened the front door and then stopped. “Could I ask you a stupid question?”

“Please do.”

He took out his notepad and ballpoint. “Would you give me your autograph?”

She smiled. “Of course.”

“And could you make it
to Terri
—two
r
’s and an
i
?”

She wrote in looping, graceful letters. “And … an …
i
. Is Terri your wife?”

“My daughter. But my wife used to be a great fan of yours.”

Leigh Baker handed the pad and pen back. “Why did your wife stop?”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a while ago. Anyway …” Cardozo slid the pad back into his pocket. “You don’t want to stand here with the door open. We’re air-conditioning the street.” Cardozo’s fingers picked that moment to lose their grip. The pen dropped to the step and he bent down to retrieve it. As he straightened up again his eye caught a movement in the hallway. A man stood waiting there—a neat, frowning heavyweight in a gray summer suit.

“I’m sorry,” Cardozo said. “You should have told me you had company.”

“That’s not company.” Leigh Baker obviously knew who he was talking about without even turning. “He’s guarding me till Waldo gets back.”

The man was staring at Cardozo. Against the florid red of his complexion, his pale eyebrows stood out like scar tissue.

“I hope Waldo gets back soon,” Cardozo said.

“So do I.”

Saturday, May 25

T
HE MINUTE FRANCOISE FORD
turned off the shower she heard voices over the partition.

“You don’t put weight-lifting gloves in the washing machine!” a man shouted.

She had a hunch that was Bruce, the owner of Bodies-PLUS.

“It’s not the end of the goddamned world!” The second voice shouted with a slightly Central American accent. That had to be Rick, the towel boy.

“It’s the end of an eight-hundred-dollar dryer if Velcro gets jammed in the heating element—and
that
will be the end of your job.”

Francoise dried herself, gave her short, blond hair a quick once-over with the hairdryer provided by Bodies-PLUS, slipped back into her street clothes. She zipped her workout clothes into her gym bag and stepped out of the changing room.

The men were still shouting, only now the washing machine was making a grating noise like a rusty saw. She couldn’t make out the words, only the tones. The tones told her the fight was getting meaner.