Deadly Rich (4 page)

Spilled a pint of plasma and you still don’t hurt—

Oona’s eyes had become burning slits. “This is beyond belief. Things are falling apart in this lousy city. Isn’t anyone going to take a stand against that racket?”

“Oona, sweetie,” Leigh said, “please don’t get excited.”

Oona drew in a breath, and then she was in motion. She crossed directly to the Hispanic.

“Will you kindly turn that racket off?” she said.

He turned. Sweat gleamed on the steep ridges of his cheekbones. His dark eyes returned her gaze unflinchingly. “What?”

“I said,” Oona shouted, “turn that garbage off!”

“What?”

It occurred to Leigh that the Hispanic needed a translation.

Oona walked to the boom box, snapped it open, and yanked out one of the batteries.

The music stopped.

Oona turned and picked up her dress and took the battery with her into the changing room.

The black woman burst out laughing.

“Verdict, please.” Tori was holding up a green beaded bolero.

“Twenty-four hundred.”

“You mean for the whole dress,” Leigh said.

“There isn’t a whole dress. This is it.”

“It seems a little expensive,” Leigh said.

“I suppose.” As Tori crossed back to the display rack the black woman intercepted her.

“I love that jacket on you.”

“Do you really?” Tori said.

The woman nodded. “It picks up the green of your eyes. But you know, the violet might look even better.” She walked to the rack and pulled out a violet bolero. “
Voilà.
Let’s see it on you in the daylight.” She carried the violet bolero over to the door, and Tori followed.

An alarm went off.

“Excuse me,” Ms. Hansen called, raising her voice above the jangling bell. “That merchandise is tagged. It can’t leave the boutique till we deactivate it.”

“I’m sorry.” The black woman was giggling in embarrassment.

“Will you kill that alarm!” Ms. Hansen called to Xenia Delancey.

It was a moment before silence was restored.

Leigh glanced toward the changing rooms. The curtain in the little doorway was swaying. “Did someone just come out of the changing rooms?”

“I didn’t see anyone,” Tori said.

OONA ALDRICH FELT TOO WOOZY
to take the overhead route getting out of the one skirt and into the other. So she undid her own skirt and let it puddle around her feet. She lifted one bare foot out and with the other flipped it toward the bench. And missed.

Now she opened Ms. Ingrid Hansen’s prissy little silk skirt. She held it in a hoop with both hands, lifted one leg, and tried to step into it.

Right away she saw there was going to be a balance problem. Holding the skirt open required two hands, but keeping herself upright on one foot required at least one wall and one more hand.

Oona looked around the changing room.

There’s the wall, but has anyone seen a third hand
?

She put her engineering smarts to work.

What about sitting down on the bench
…?

She sat down on the bench. Well, she’d intended to sit. It was more of a fall but no bones were broken.

And pulling the skirt up my legs
…?

She pulled the skirt up her legs. She stood, adjusted the hang of the pleats, fastened the belt. She looked at herself in the mirror, fore and aft.

Not bad.

She slid the jacket off the hanger and slipped her right arm into the sleeve.

Something rapped on the door.

“Just a minute!” Her left hand, halfway into the jacket, snagged the lining. She reached with her right hand and slid the door bolt back.

“How do I look?” She faced the mirror, tried to untangle her left arm, heard cloth rip. “Shit. Now I’ll have to buy the damned thing. Well—what do you think?”

Funny—she liked the skirt, but the jacket struck her as sort of pukey. Well, no wonder. She was wearing it halfway on and halfway off.

“Give me a hand with this jacket, will you?”

There was a movement in the mirror behind her. For half an instant her brain recorded the image of a man standing there, two eyes staring with lids pulled back like snarling lips. At the same moment she registered two words, only one of them English.

“
Saludos
, bitch.”

Before she could turn, something tugged at her hair and a sudden pressure twisted her head back. The air sparkled and silver whipped past her eyes. A hot piano-wire of pain gripped her neck and fire flicked across her throat.

She struggled to break free. The jacket held her hand like a tourniquet.

He bent her back and, with a cracking sound, she felt her spine surrender. She was on the floor, pushing up with one arm, trying to reach the bench, when a blade danced down in front of her eyes, winking right, left, up, and down.

She screamed and it was like a cartoon because she didn’t hear the scream, she saw it—a red scream, liquid and hot and flying in twenty directions at once. The bubbling scream flowed back into her throat, choking off her air.

And the blade’s bloody kiss went on. And on.

“
THIS IS INSANE
,” Leigh said. “It can’t take her twenty minutes to change into a simple dress.”

“Take it easy,” Tori said. “Oona’s insecure, she’s a perfectionist.”

“Not on my time she isn’t.”

Leigh crossed the boutique to the little doorway that led to the changing rooms. She stepped past the curtain, and her glance took in a corridor with an emergency exit at the end and three doors on each side. On the right two stood half ajar.

She moved past them and stopped at the third door.

“Oona? Are you in there?” She rapped on the door. No answer. She leaned her ear against it and felt a sort of coiled stillness radiating through the wood panel.

Oh my God,
she thought,
if Oona has passed out in the dressing room
…

Leigh tried the doorknob. It turned. She gave a push inward. The room was empty.

She went to the door directly opposite. She knocked. “Oona?”

No answer. She tried the handle. The door swung inward. The room was empty.

She went to the next door and rapped sharply. “Oona—are you in there?”

She felt the first stirrings of concern. The doorknob turned and she pushed the door open. A flash of green whooshed up in front of her face.

She recoiled.

A dress left hanging on a hook was trembling in the air current from the open door. She saw it was green linen—not the dress Oona had been trying on.

A green linen belt had been thrown across the seat of a chair, and a woman was leaning toward it.

“Excuse me,” Leigh said, and when the woman refused to acknowledge her, she realized she had apologized to her own reflection.

She went to the last door.

The sounds of voices and bells floated in from the main floor—luxuriously muted as if they’d had to pass through layers of lamb’s wool and silk.

“Oona!” With one rap she gripped the handle and pushed.

She stood staring at a trash basket with a botany print wrapped around it, filled with sheets of pink tissue paper. Resting in a nested indentation on the tissue were three pins with fat heads.

Damn Oona
, she thought.
This can’t be
—
there’s no way out of here except the fire exit or through the boutique
—

She stepped back into the corridor. Her eye went again to the first changing room with its half-open door. She realized now that she hadn’t actually looked in that room or in the one next to it—she had assumed that with their doors ajar they had to be empty.

She went to the nearest half-open door. “Oona?”

“
GET AN AMBULANCE
.”

Ms. Hansen’s eyes swung up and around as though she’d been slapped. “I beg your pardon?”

Leigh seized the telephone from the counter and thrust the receiver at Ms. Hansen. She felt her voice grow teeth. “Get an ambulance this minute, or I will sue the ass off this store.”

“T
HEN YOU BOTH WERE WITH
Oona Aldrich when she was killed?” Lieutenant Detective Vincent Cardozo was saying.

He was sitting in a borrowed doctor’s office on the second story of Lexington Hospital, questioning two very pale, very shocked-looking women who had just lived through one of the worst experiences that New York City could offer.

Leigh Baker answered “Yes” at the exact moment that Tori Sandberg said “No.”

Nervous glances flicked between the women. It seemed to Cardozo that the glances appointed Tori Sandberg spokesperson.

“All three of us went together to the boutique.” Tori Sandberg held herself upright, spine straight, her back not touching the chair. “Oona took a dress into the changing room, and we were waiting for her to come out. It got to be an awfully long wait, and Leigh went to see what had happened.”

Cardozo glanced toward Leigh Baker. “Then it was you who found Mrs. Aldrich after the attack.”

Leigh Baker nodded.

It occurred to Cardozo that he was questioning one woman who had been a world-famous movie star, who perhaps still was, and another who as a magazine editor enjoyed national recognition and, within the bounds of New York, fame. Yet these were no enameled faces of celebrity. Fear had broken through.

“Was Mrs. Aldrich dead or alive?” Cardozo said.

“Oona was still alive,” Leigh Baker said. “Barely.” The sofa had two seats, but she had positioned herself at the end farthest from Cardozo, sitting forward, taking up barely half a cushion. Her wavy chestnut hair had been cut long, and a lock had fallen across her face. She pushed it aside. Her deep green eyes gazed at him. “I saw a pulse in her neck.”

Cardozo, writing in his notebook, made a note of the pulse in the neck. “I’d like you both to think back carefully. At any time before or during the period that Mrs. Aldrich was changing her dress, did either of you see anyone else go into those changing rooms?”

“No,” Leigh Baker said immediately.

It took Tori Sandberg longer. She was staring out the window. “No,” she said finally.

“Did you see anyone come out of the dressing rooms?”

“No,” Leigh Baker said.

Cardozo waited for Tori Sandberg to answer.

“No,” she said.

“Who else was in the boutique?”

“There was Ms. Hansen.” Tori Sandberg gave the s in
Ms.
a careful
z
sound: no gliding over the distinction.

“There was one salesperson,” Leigh Baker said. “There were two other customers—women—white women—and there was a black woman who came in a little after we did.”

“And a Hispanic man came in with her,” Tori Sandberg said.

“I wouldn’t say he was with her,” Leigh Baker said.

“Why not?” Cardozo said.

A good deal of Leigh Baker’s strength and will seemed to be concentrated on sustaining an even rate of breathing. “I couldn’t say exactly. I suppose because she left alone. And they weren’t really matched in any way. She had style and he—”

“He was a street lout,” Tori Sandberg said. “But they were together. I’m sure of it.”

Cardozo had a theory that evolution had provided one hour of grace between the experience of raw terror and the onset of shock. The purpose was to enable prehistoric hominids to slink back to the safety of their caves.

For these women the hour was running out.

“Okay,” he said, anxious to cover as much as possible before they became too tired, too confused to even want to think. “There was a black woman and a male Hispanic, and they may or may not have been together. Anyone else?”

“No one else,” Leigh Baker said.

“He had an enormous boom box.” Tori Sandberg’s teeth came down tightly on her lower lip, clenching back distaste. “He was playing rap music. Oona asked him to shut it off. He didn’t understand her. At least he did a good job of pretending not to. So she took one of his batteries into the dressing room with her.” Tori Sandberg had turned her head, looking directly at Cardozo with an odd intensity. “So he killed her.”

“Excuse me.” Cardozo’s mind braked sharply. “You believe that the male Hispanic with the boom box killed Oona Aldrich
over a boom-box battery
?”

There was silence. Tori Sandberg’s lids sank with a moment’s weariness over her eyes.

She probably accepted that anyone could be a victim. The newspapers had taught her that. And she was probably coming to accept that anyone could be a killer. The plot of any TV movie of the week demonstrated that.

But in Cardozo’s experience it was still hard for most people to believe that there were individuals in this world who could drive a nail into a grandmother’s skull because she stayed on the phone too long, or force stones down a six-year-old’s throat for the hell of it, or slash a woman’s throat because she had challenged a guy’s macho by taking the battery from his boom box.

“Yes,” Tori Sandberg said quietly, firmly. “She treated him like an inferior and an idiot. She was always doing that to waiters and strangers.”

An interesting vibration was coming off her: Cardozo had a sense that she was enraged at the dead woman. Some part of her felt that Oona Aldrich had provoked her own murder.

“She was out of control,” Tori Sandberg said. “She made a scene at Archibald’s over lunch, she made a scene outside the store, as we were going in, and she made the scene in the boutique.”

Cardozo’s ballpoint moved quickly, trying to keep up, leaving practically illegible tracks over the notepad. “What kind of scene did she make at lunch?”

Tori Sandberg’s eyelids flicked down, paler than the color of her face. “She was drinking a lot of champagne, and who knows what pills she was on. She started arguing with the waiter about the vegetable dip. So the poor waiter got her a fresh pot and that ended that argument, so she started another. She claimed she saw someone in the kitchen who shouldn’t have been there.”

“And who was that?”

A moment went by. Cardozo was suddenly aware of a silence threaded through with shadow.

“A murderer,” Leigh Baker said.

“She was screaming it,” Tori Sandberg said. “
What is that murderer doing in your kitchen
?
How dare you hire a murderer
!”