Deadly Rich (41 page)

The ambulance executed a sharp left.

The door of the syringe depository swung open with a bright, startling clang. Ambrose reached a fist over and bopped the door shut. He sat there dragging on his cigarette. “I’m listening.”

“I could book you on suspicion,” Cardozo said. “You couldn’t work for the city, Ambrose. They’d have to suspend you. Without pay. Think about it.”

“Suspicion of what?”

“Suspicion of smoking on the job.”

Ambrose’s eyes flicked around guardedly.

Cardozo smiled. “Only joking. But that is oxygen in that cylinder, isn’t it?”

Ambrose stretched out a foot. The tip of his blue sneaker touched the cylinder. “That’s why the big letters spell
oxygen.
”

“You guys sure like to live on the edge,” Cardozo said.

Ambrose didn’t answer. His jacket was hanging by Cardozo’s left ear, and Cardozo reached a hand up into the pocket and pulled out a lady’s wallet.

“Tell me, Ambrose. Do you really think blue alligator is helping the ecology?”

Ambrose stared with one instant’s open astonishment. “You have no right to touch that.”

“Just checking that you have a valid social-security number.”

“My social-security card’s not in there.”

Ambrose reached for the wallet, but Cardozo leaned away. He leafed through the credit cards.

“Neither is your American Express, your Visa, your AT&T, or your Ritz limo charge—unless your name is. Mitzi Lloyd Eberstadt. You don’t look like a Mitzi to me, Ambrose. But that woman you guys just dropped off, now
she
looked like a Mitzi.” Cardozo riffled through the bill compartment. He whistled. “Two hundred thirty, cash.”

“The wallet fell out when we were moving her.”

“So you’re just holding on to it till you can return it to her?” Cardozo tossed the wallet to him.

Ambrose had fast reflexes. He caught it one-handed.

“Now, Ambrose, enlighten me about something. You were driving Oona Aldrich to the hospital when she lost a little platinum hummingbird brooch with ruby eyes. Three weeks later you were driving Dizey Duke to the hospital when
she
lost a little platinum hummingbird brooch.”

“I wasn’t driving. I never drive. I’m a trained paramedic. I stay with the patient.”

“Then you were back here with these women when they lost their brooches. Maybe you saw what happened to those hummingbirds?”

Cardozo figured that, financially speaking, Ambrose had to be in a negative-asset position. He probably owed three thousand dollars to every bank that had ever been dumb enough to issue him a credit card, plus interest, plus collection charges, plus past judgments due. If he got suspended from his ambulance job, the most he could look forward to in unemployment benefits would be $175 a week. After rent that would amount to barely ten dollars a day to sustain his drinking, his drugging, and lesser needs—such as eating.

“Okay, okay. I did fence two small items. They were both cheap little hummingbird brooches. It was the only time I ever did anything like that in my life.” Ambrose spoke quietly, with no physical show of emotion except for the way his sneaker ground out his cigarette on the ambulance floor. “But I didn’t steal them. I saw them lying on the floor, and I have financial expenses. My mom is in Intensive Care, she’s not covered by insurance—”

“Who’d you fence them to, Ambrose?”

In a toss-up between Ambrose’s neck and anybody else’s, Cardozo had a fair hunch whose neck Ambrose would choose.

“This fellow I know,” Ambrose said. “He’s a society decorator.”

CARDOZO PHONED LEIGH BAKER
. “Let’s meet,” he said, “and talk about Oona Aldrich’s brooch.”

“
HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW
Fennimore Gurdon?” Cardozo said.

“Fenny?” Leigh Baker stretched the nickname out like a piece of taffy. “I don’t really know him, but I adore him.”

They were sitting in a place on Madison that called itself the Fifth Avenue Tea Room. It had been Leigh Baker’s suggestion.

A civilized white noise filled the room like a thin vapor—dozens of voices all modulated to the same register, silverware clacking against china, the sweetly chaotic gamelan music of leisured life. Most of the other customers were women—and they looked to Cardozo like the immaculately-maned sort who got together monthly and discussed Proust. Their clothes contrasted brightly with the honeydew-melon color of the walls and columns. Matching wooden shutters ran from floor to ceiling, shuttering windows that weren’t there.

“Tell me about him,” Cardozo said.

Leigh Baker took a moment collecting her thoughts. She was wearing a green blouse that brought out the color of her eyes. Little truant blips of light flashed from tiny, almost invisible diamonds in her ears. “He has terrific staying power. He’s been popular with the last three generations of tastemakers. He has a home on the Vanderbilt property in Rhinebeck. If you like his style, the home’s beautiful. If you don’t, it’s an overdecorated Victorian department store. He’s considerate and charming and he’s a great escort.”

A waitress placed an iced cappuccino in front of Leigh Baker and a coffee in front of Cardozo. On the small table between them she set a plate of tiny, crustless sandwiches that looked as though they had been made by elves for elves.

“Your turn,” Leigh Baker said. “Tell me what
you
know about Fenny.”

“Oona Aldrich’s brooch was fenced to him—twice.”

Leigh Baker caught her breath and a hand went halfway to her mouth. “But how
could
he?” A shadow pulsed rapidly just beneath the white hollow of her throat. “
Why
would he?”

“The theory around the Fraud Bureau is, he has an expensive crack habit. He owes major back taxes to the city. So he’s had to take up a few sidelines.”

“Besides fencing?”

“Besides fencing. He helps people move into society. For twenty thousand a month he promises to get you into four major dinners. That’s above what he charges for decorating your home.”

She lifted her glass of cappuccino and sipped. “How do you know about this?”

“Some of his dissatisfied customers complained to the Better Business Bureau. There’s also a possibility that he sells housebreakers the plans of the apartments he decorates. The attorney general is looking into it.”

“I
never
heard that.”

The remark sounded unguarded and sincere, and Cardozo took it to mean that she’d heard all the rest.

“Some of my co-workers believe he sold the Vanderbilts’ security plans for the country estate—but Mrs. V. protected him from the heat.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Word is, he deals dope to a few close friends who don’t want to have to take deliveries personally.”

“That poor old dowager is on dope?” Leigh Baker played with her cappuccino glass, turning it slowly on its paper doily.

“Here’s my suggestion,” Cardozo said. “I phoned and his shop will be open tomorrow between two and six. You go there and tell him you want a brooch like the one Dizey bought from him. If he produces the brooch, which he will unless he’s already sold it, we have him.”

She was silent. It was as though she were staring into motionless water.

“I’ll be at Fenny’s tomorrow,” she said. “Two o’clock.”

“Good. Then so will I.”

THAT EVENING LEIGH LOOKED UP
from her copy of French
Vogue
and saw that Waldo had laid his copy of
Forbes
down on the sofa beside him. He was staring into his highball. He seemed preoccupied, and she asked him if anything was bothering him.

“Just thinking,” he said.

She’d heard on television that the Dow Jones had closed down almost two hundred points, and she wondered if that had anything to do with his mood. She crossed the room and sat beside him. She took his glass and set it on the table and took his hands in hers.

“Don’t worry about business,” she said. “What goes up comes down, what goes down comes back up.”

“I’m not worried about business. To tell the truth, I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t worry about me either. I go up, I come down. I go down, I come back up.”

“I promised I wouldn’t leave you alone, and now I have to.”

Her hands withdrew. “When?”

“I’ve got to go to Tokyo this Thursday. One of our companies is in trouble. I won’t be able to get back till Sunday.”

“And you can’t take me with you?”

He shook his head. “But I’ve arranged for you to be taken care of.”

She got to her feet. “Not that guard again—I won’t have Mr. Arnold Bone following me around.”

“Nothing like that. You’re going to Paris for four days with Kristi and Wystan Blackwell.”

She had a feeling Waldo had bribed the Blackwells to look after her, and a trip to Paris had been Kristi’s price. “That’s awfully sweet of you.” And then she sighed. “I just wish you could come with me instead of them.”

“So do I. Maybe next time.”

Tuesday, June 4

“T
HE ZIP CODE,” ELLIE
Siegel said, “is one-one-eight-oh-three—Stauber Drive, Hicksville.” Today she was wearing a dark blue dress with a low neck—not very low, just low enough for the heat. “Why anyone would drive thirty miles out on Long Island just to mail this note, don’t ask me.”

“He had an errand,” Malloy said.

Sam Richards shook his head. “No one who can possibly help it has an errand in Hicksville.”

Greg Monteleone yawned loudly. “He’s doing it to confuse us. But we’re not confused, guys, are we?”

Ellie snapped open her purse and took out her notepad. “The postmark is
A.M.
, June first—last Saturday. Ordinarily there are two Saturday pickups from Stauber. But the regular driver was sick, and the replacement didn’t make the first pickup till three
P.M.
Which means the letter must have been mailed Friday before three.”

Siegel rose from her chair and crossed to the window and stood staring out. The view was of one of those midtown alleys where sunlight didn’t fall: developers had been allowed to blot out the sky, and the only thing remotely bright on the brick wall across the way was the pigeon droppings.

“I don’t often agree with Greg, but I’m coming around to his point of view. Sam’s not just trying to confuse us, he’s trying to wear
me
out. There’s no other reason for these letters to be mailed from such crazy places.”

“You’re working too hard,” Cardozo said.

“Tell me.”

“Have to stop taking things so personally.” Cardozo gave his swivel chair a push and made a quarter revolution. “Sam, how’s the progress at Family Court?”

“I’m developing great respect for New York’s Hispanic Catholic community.” Today Sam was wearing a brass-buttoned navy-blue blazer, a regimental silk tie, and perfectly pressed gray trousers. “What impresses me is the number of boys who
haven’t
been molested by older male relatives. So far we’ve found twenty-two hundred of them. The bad news is, we haven’t found a single one who fits Wilkes’s profile.”

“Wilkes is a shrink,” Greg Monteleone said. “Shrinks are hired guns, they’ll say whatever you pay them to.”

“I’m not saying his theory is wrong,” Sam Richards said. “But I kept thinking about Jim Delancey telling the judge he was defending that boy against an abusive father.”

Greg Monteleone snapped a blue suspender. “Delancey’s saving his ass.”

“I believe he’s sincere,” Sam Richards said.

“Why?”

“He risked his parole.”

“No way.” Monteleone shook his head. “The people who had the clout to get him out have the clout to keep him out.”

“I feel he was taking a chance, and I feel he took it because he identified with that kid. I asked myself, What if we’re looking in the wrong population? What if the kid we want is
Jim Delancey
? What if Delancey was abused and sodomized by an older male relative, what if that relative was his father, what if the case landed in Family Court?”

“A lot of what-ifs,” Cardozo said.

“And here’s the biggest what-if of all. What if it happened within the last eight years, and Family Court has it in the computerized records?”

“And?” Cardozo said.

“The mother’s name is Xenia? The father’s name is James Delancey the Second?”

“Sounds right to me.”

“Eight years ago, the Child Welfare Department brought a complaint against Delancey senior.”

“What was the charge?” Cardozo said.

Sam Richards turned two empty hands palm up. “The record is sealed. I’d need a court order to get into it.”

“I’ll get you one.” Cardozo picked up his pen. “What’s the number of that case?”

CARDOZO SHUT THE CUBICLE DOOR
and lifted the phone and dialed. A woman’s voice answered brightly. “Judge’s chambers.”

“Hi, Lil, it’s Vince. Is himself in?”

The voice collapsed. “He hasn’t been well. His prostate. Last week he had to go into University Hospital for a sonogram. The tumors were soft—nonmalignant.”

“So he’s in the clear?”

“I wish. Remember Bessie—his collie?”

“Sure, I remember Bessie. She liked to drink his martinis.”

“She died.”

Not of cirrhosis, I hope.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So this weekend he went upstate to see the breeder. While he was parked—in Brewster, New York, this happened—his car got broken into.”

“This story has a happy ending?”

“They got his reading glasses.”

“The story has an ending?”

“He just came in. Act like I didn’t tell you anything. Hold on a second.”

Lil put him on hold, and he stared down at his desktop at the latest memo from the Puzzle Palace: a directive on blue paper ordering the precincts to crack down on parking violators. Attached to it was a yellow memo stating that the Twenty-second Precinct was expected to produce one point two million in tow charges by the end of the fiscal year.

Has law enforcement come to this
? Cardozo wondered.
A last-ditch expedient to balance the city books
?

New York was crumbling, services were crippled, races were polarized, homeless flooded the streets, crack killed—and New York’s finest were hunting down traffic violators.