Deadly Rich (62 page)

“You must have interviewed him when you hired him.”

“It was basically a handshake interview for a menial position.”

“What exactly was Rick’s job?”

Bruce shrugged. “Keeping the gym clean, seeing that the soap and towels were stocked.”

“How long has he worked here?”

“Since April thirtieth.”

“What’s his home address?”

“Haven’t got it.”

“Where did you send his paychecks?”

“I paid him in cash.”

“Do you have a home phone for him?”

“Rick doesn’t have a phone. It’s the standard undocumented-alien hard-luck story. He just arrived here from Salvador.”

“How’d you and Rick happen to find each other?”

“I advertised in a body-building magazine.” Bruce pulled a magazine out of a rack.

The magazine was called
Bodybuilding for You.
On the cover it showed an overmuscled, overtanned man and woman posing in workout unitards. Inside were ads for vitamin supplements and workout machines, articles touting the supplements and machines, and personal ads broken down by city.

“Can you describe Rick for me?”

“Settle for a photograph?”

Bruce handed Cardozo a folded, four-page newsletter—
Bodies-PLUS Gazette.
Page one featured a group photo captioned “Your Staff.”

Bruce’s forefinger pointed to a smiling, dark-haired, dark-eyed young man holding a stack of clean towels.

“That answers one question,” Cardozo said. “Why nobody recognized him from the Identi-Kit. I wouldn’t have recognized him either.”

“That thing out on the bulletin board?” Bruce said. “That’s meant to be Rick?”

“That was the intention.” Cardozo sighed. “Did anyone here know Rick personally?”

Bruce scratched the scalp just above his right ear. “Rick didn’t talk too much to the staff or the clients. The guy he seemed friendliest with was Dick Braidy. That’s not going to help you much.”

“No one else?”

“I did see one of the clients talking to him once. A young girl. Francoise Ford.”

“
I CAN’T BELIEVE
we’re talking about the same Rick.” Francoise Ford couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. She had short blond hair and flawless skin and pale blue eyes that, at the moment, expressed shock and disbelief. “He seemed so gentle. Almost vulnerable.”

“How well did you know him?”

They were sitting in a small study in the Ford apartment. Young Miss Ford reached a hand out and gave the globe of the world an absentminded spin.

“We got used to seeing each other around the gym, and we’d say hi. Then one night the owner was picking on him, and I felt sorry for him. I invited him to dinner. We talked.”

“Did he tell you anything about himself?”

“He said he was from El Salvador. He said his parents had been killed by government soldiers. He said he was here illegally.”

“Did he tell you where he lived?”

She shook her head. “We didn’t exchange addresses or phone numbers. He did say if I wanted to see his hometown, all I had to do was go to Avenue D. I don’t know if he meant he lived there.”

“You only saw him outside the gym that one time?”

“That’s the only time.” She was thoughtful. “He came here once though. My stepmother was giving a party. He brought me some flowers. I didn’t even get to see him. But I still have the note.”

She left the room and returned with a small florist’s card. The message had been written in large ballpoint letters:
Love, Bob De Niro.

“Why
Love, Bob De Niro
?”

“It was a joke on my stepmother.”

“I’d like to keep this.”

For just an instant she seemed sad. “Okay. You can keep it.”

“What night was the party?”

“Last Thursday.”

“T
HE ARTICLE’S CALLED ‘SOCIALITES
in Emergency,’” Cardozo said. “We’re looking for any drafts he may have hiding in there.”

Neat and darkly pretty and silent, Laurie Bonasera was seated in front of Benedict Braidy’s computer, punching commands into the keyboard. She had spent a quarter hour at the same C prompt on the terminal, digging for some combination of keys that would snap the data free of the hard disk and bring it up on the screen.

“I’m not getting any files named
socialite
or
social
anything,” she said. “You don’t happen to know if Braidy had some system for naming his files?”

“All I know is, he handled that computer the way a Jersey driver handles a car in Manhattan. He told me he was always losing files.”

Laurie shook her head. “He was obviously doing a lot wrong. Either he didn’t know how or he didn’t want to bother to create directories. All his files are in the root directory.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me—I’m not computer-literate.”

“It’s as though he were putting all the numbers in his phone book under the letter A. He’s got a thousand files in the root directory on an eighty-meg hard disk, and that’s way beyond what the disk-operating system can cope with. Added to which …”

Laurie’s shoulders moved forward beneath her blue cotton print blouse. She squinted a moment at the information on the screen.

“Let’s run check-disk and just see.”

Her hands moved like a pianist’s, fingers tapping a command into the keyboard. “I have a hunch he forgot to save files.”

“What does that mean?”

“After he wrote something he left it on the screen and turned the power off. Anything on the screen when you close down is lost. What he should have done was press the Save key.”

“So how did he save things?”

“He didn’t always save them on the disk. He printed them out. He was way underutilizing his system.”

Judging by the sounds the computer had started making, something was snapping and bursting inside. Then there was silence, and a series of amber characters floated up from the bottom of the screen.

“He’s got over three hundred lost files,” Laurie said. “Plus a quarter of his disk space is broken chains.”

“What’s a broken chain?”

“The program writes on the nearest available space, which may be anywhere on the disk. Files wind up hopping all over the place. The program can’t track them. What started happening was, each new file went into the space of the last file he lost, but if the new file was shorter than the lost file, a little of the old file was left on the disk. So there’s a little bit of everything he ever wrote still on the disk.”

“Then maybe we can find some of ‘Socialites in Emergency.’”

“I asked the computer very politely if it had any kind of socialites in its directory. It doesn’t.”

The computer made a sound like seeds jumping inside a maraca.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Laurie said. “This is strange. He’s got one subdirectory.”

“Why’s that strange?”

“If he could make one, he could have made a dozen and saved his files—and his sanity.”

A river of amber print flowed across the screen.

Laurie pushed two keys and the river widened into a screen-filling ocean.

She did not speak. She sat frowning at the screen. A strand of wavy dark hair fell over her forehead, and she let it lie there. She kept pushing the key with the downward-pointing arrow, and each time the glowing amber print edged upward a line at a time.

“He couldn’t have made this directory himself. It’s got to be a default command.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s something the computer’s programmed to do unless you specifically tell it not to. This directory is too neat to be his. Whoever installed the computer put this command in. What I think it is—and this would make sense with the kind of computer operator he was—it’s a backup command. It automatically saves the files before he can lose them. But it saves them under a different name, because you can’t have two files with the same name.”

“What name does it use?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out …”

The fingers began moving again, at first doubtfully and then picking up confidence till they were jumping over the keys.

And then three columns of print froze on the screen.

“Joseph, Mary, and Mickey Mouse.”

“What’s the trouble?”

There was a strained look on her face. “The name of the backup is the date and hour and minute the file was created.”

“The file we’re looking for would have been written six years ago, shortly after May sixth.”

She sent information with rapid, clicking fingers into the keyboard. A moment later a new directory of files came up on the screen.

“Hey! It’s going to work!” She pushed a button and the printer clattered to life.

Cardozo strolled into the living room. He felt he was standing on the carefully constructed stage set of someone else’s life.

Silver-framed photographs artfully scattered on tabletops pictured Benedict Braidy and various members in good standing of the international jet set. The lowest shelf of the bookcase held a set of untitled leather-bound albums.

Cardozo crouched down and opened one. He turned through page after page of photos of society and entertainment and finance celebrities. Celebrities walking, dancing, eating. Celebrities swimming, goofing for the camera, kissing. Twelve volumes of celebrities of the last thirty years.

There was a nagging wrongness about the photos. The makeup was too heavy, the expressions exaggerated, every mood was stretched to a grimace and held for the camera. He didn’t see in these people’s faces what he saw in the faces of his co-workers or most of the people in the streets of New York—the simple daily pleasure in living.

And he didn’t see Benedict Braidy. Except in one photo—taken in the apartment, where Judy Garland was offering a poorly rolled joint to Ava Gardner, and there, half of him dimly visible in the mirror, Benedict Braidy was holding a camera.

And it dawned on Cardozo. Braidy wasn’t in the pictures, because he’d taken them all. Here was a man who had never been present for his own life, who had always stood behind a lens, clicking away like a tourist, never quite believing any of it was real, needing photographic proof that he had been part of it, that he had lived Technicolor friendships with the celebrities of his time.

Cardozo came to the photographs of Leigh Baker.

There she was, carefully centered on the page, standing with melancholy elegance in hunting clothes outside a French chateau. There she was, dashing in a low-cut, jeweled evening dress across a mobbed sidewalk into the Academy Awards, a valiant smile making tiny lines in her face. There she was, curtseying to the Queen of England and looking as if she wished she had something to grip for support; and there in the front of the crowd, holding a miniature camera, was Dick Braidy.

Cardozo looked for some sign that Braidy had loved Baker or that she had loved him, that their marriage had been anything more than the fleeting intersection of two publicity campaigns. He didn’t see it.

The thirteenth and last album held an almost helter-skelter collection of faded, crumbling snapshots and clippings. Many had come loose from their white corner moorings.

Cardozo considered a barefoot six-year-old girl with pigtails and smudged cheeks, fists clenching the skirt of her checkered dress. She stood beside a ramshackle porch, staring with torn-boyish defiance into the camera.

Good God
, Cardozo realized. It was a childhood snapshot of Assistant Deputy Commissioner Bridget Braidy.

And here was a boy of eight or so, in patched knickers, hugging a Labrador. Cardozo recognized Dick Braidy—superstar gossip-to-be.

A snapshot of Bridget’s first communion. She was standing outside the church, wearing a clean white dress, and her face was scrubbed.

Dick’s first communion—same church. A white jacket, dark trousers, dark necktie, shined shoes.

On and on the collection went: prayer cards, Mass cards, funeral announcements, obituaries of Braidys clipped from small-town newspapers, the yellowed title page of a Baltimore Catechism, ripped from its binding, that bore the successive inscriptions John Patrick Braidy, Phillip Michael Braidy, Benedict O’Houlihan Braidy.

Page after page of the same four grim faces—mother and father and the two kids—gathered around picnic tables, dining tables, Christmas trees, Model-T’s, wood shacks in the country, brick-and-concrete shacks in the city.

As Cardozo turned the pages he felt Braidy’s wistfulness and a yearning almost too deep to give voice to: It was as though the people in these photos spoke to him in tones low, flat, and weary:
Get rich
!
Get famous
!
Above all, get out
!

In the next room the printer finally stopped clattering.

Laurie stood in the doorway, holding a twenty-eight-page accordion-fold list of dates and times. “The nearest he’s got to May sixth six years ago is May seventh, ten-forty
A.M.
”

“Let’s give it a try,” Cardozo said.

Laurie sat down at the terminal, cleared the screen, and punched in an instruction. The message
One Moment Please
flashed, and ten seconds later a page of amber print scrolled up the screen.

“He’s got a title on this,” she said, leaning forward in the seat. “‘Society Goes to Emergency.’”

“That’s it.”

“Want to print it?”

“Please.”

Four minutes later Cardozo sat on Dick Braidy’s bird-chintz sofa, comparing the printout of “Socialites” with the version published in
Fanfare Magazine.
With a red Magic Marker he drew wavy lines alongside passages that had been cut from the magazine version. He found four.

At the nurse’s window—which is made, ominously, of steel-mesh-reinforced safety glass—Dizey exchanges a few to-the-point words with the triage nurse, whose grim face would have been at home on Madame Defarge in A
Tale of Two Cities.

“My name is Dizey Duke. My friends and I are with Oona Aldrich, who is an annual benefactor of this hospital. Mrs. Aldrich is choking and requires immediate attention.”

Madame Defarge snaps to. She makes one phone call, and seconds later the duty doctor opens a door and invites our party into Emergency.

Three pages later: