Deadly Rich (65 page)

From his chair Cardozo could see the blinking amber cursor dart beneath the glass screen, leaving a four-line spill of words and numbers too fleeting and too faraway to read.

Wilkes touched the Enter button. The screen emptied. There was a silent space in time, and then the microcircuitry kicked in with a soft clatter as the printer activated. He leaned sideways to detach a sheet of printout from the printer. He handed it to Cardozo. “Read all about it.”

Cardozo scanned La Rue Newton’s curriculum vitae: a list of eight murder victims, the address of the federal facility for the criminally insane to which he’d been remanded, and vital stats that ended with the date of his death three years ago. “Seems weird. Newton was carving flags on people’s stomachs forty years ago, and Society Sam is doing the same thing now.”

“There are copycat killings all the time.”

“But usually the cat who gets copied is in the headlines.”

“La Rue Newton got headlines. In his day.”

“According to witnesses’ descriptions, Society Sam wasn’t born till fifteen, twenty years after Newton was put away. Why would Society Sam copy a cat that no one remembers?”

“Vince, at the moment I can’t answer that. Serial killers have been known to base their careers on
famous
serial killers of the past—look at all the Jack-the-Ripper ripoffs—but why Sam likes La Rue is something you may have to ask him personally when you get around to meeting him.”

“I’d also like to ask him why he likes society columns. He left one at the scene of every kill but Dizey’s.”

“Other killers have left newspaper clippings at the scene.”

“It’s always the column printed in the
Trib
the morning before the kill. At Oona’s the column mentioned the boutique. At Avalon’s the column mentioned the dinner party. But at Gloria’s the column described a dinner she hadn’t even gone to. There was no connection.”

“It could be the message he’s sending is the date, not the content.”

“But two days earlier Dick ran a blind item about Gloria. Sam passed it up. I can’t figure it out. He’s telling us these columns are important, and at the same time he’s telling us he doesn’t bother reading them.”

Wilkes was thoughtful for a moment. “I’m going to dig a little deeper into the literature this weekend. I’ll check killers who left society columns at the scene. And that ‘
sex to end all sex
’ line in the third letter …”

Cardozo’s glance flicked up. “What about it?”

Wilkes shrugged. “It reminds me of something. I’ve seen it somewhere else.”

“We’ve all seen it somewhere else.”

“You recognize it?”

Cardozo nodded. “But I’m not going to spoil it for you.”

He could see the remark bothered Wilkes.

“Vince, this isn’t a game. If you know something—tell me.”

“The same five words showed up in Nita Kohler’s diary. In fact the same nine words.
‘Sex to end all sex, is there anything else
?’

Wilkes shook his head. “No, I’m not familiar with that diary. I’ve seen the words somewhere else.”

Cardozo sighed. “Marty, is it possible we’ve gone off on a tangent? Is it possible Martinez is doing all this to get even?”

“It’s not just possible, it’s certain. Serial killing is
about
getting even.”

“I mean, striking back at specific people that he has a specific grudge against? Could he be doing that and dressing it up as serial killing?”

Wilkes nodded. “There are examples of that in the literature. At least four of them. I’ll dig them up for you.”

THE DOOR MARKED LEGAL RECORDS
was ajar. Cardozo gave two staccato raps on the glass and walked in.

A young woman seated at a computer terminal glanced up at him. He held out his shield.

She pushed back her chair and rose. “Shamma Dailey. Records.” She was tall, slim, with blue-gray eyes, crisply waving brown hair. “How can I help you?”

Behind Ms. Dailey, half-lowered shades jittered in the current of the air conditioners.

Cardozo’s eye traveled from the two desks, each with its own computer terminal, to the wall that was gunmetal gray filing cabinets from floor to ten-foot ceiling.

“You had a problem in your Emergency Room, the night of May sixth, nineteen-eighty-five. There was a lawsuit.”

“It would be right here. Off-database.” She moved to the files at the extreme right of the wall. She spent a moment peering at dates on the drawers, then pulled out the next-to-bottom drawer. “Who sued?”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

“Oh, boy.” She did some thinking. “In that case, here’s what has to be done. These files are arranged by year, alphabetized under the plaintiff’s name. Assuming your suit was filed within a year of the alleged damage, it’ll be in this drawer. Someone has to go through this whole drawer from here back. It can’t be me because I have work to do, and it shouldn’t be you because you’re not on the staff … but seeing as you’re a cop and this is need-to-know—right?”

Cardozo crouched on the floor, and when he realized that the crouch would kill his thighs during the hour or more this search could very likely require, he sat cross-legged and let his lower back do the suffering.

He worked his way through the files slowly. He carefully examined the covering page of each lawsuit, not wanting to miss a single May sixth that might be hiding in the boldfaced legalese. At the end of an hour and a half he found a suit brought by Richard Martinez for recovery in the wrongful death of Isolda Martinez.

Cardozo took the file to Ms. Dailey. “Sorry to bother you again, but could you tell me what the hell this last paragraph means in English?”

Ms. Dailey’s gaze moved quietly over the page. “Isolda Martinez died in Emergency the night of May sixth, nineteen eighty-five. She had no proof of insurance, and the hospital refused to treat her.”

“That much I got.”

“Isolda was covered on Richard Martinez’s insurance, and he claimed the hospital should have known. He also accused the hospital of letting
Fanfare Magazine
create a noxious condition in Emergency that contributed to Isolda’s death.”

“I got that too.”

“The jury awarded two million dollars to Martinez. The judge set the award aside.”

“Why?”

“Okay. Here’s the hard part. A cash award would have initiated the hospital’s collateral suit against the insurer. And that would have raised the employer’s premiums.”

“But why does that mean Martinez can’t collect his damages?”

She floated him a disheartened look. “Because the employer was a federal agency. The federal government can be sued only if it consents. The government refused to pay increased premiums, and it refused to be sued for them. Therefore the premiums couldn’t be raised. Therefore the hospital couldn’t collect from the insurer. Therefore Martinez couldn’t collect from the hospital. All the contract-law dominos fell backward and Martinez got crushed.”

Cardozo felt a pang for Martinez, a sense of raw helplessness in the face of the majestic riffing and doo-wopping of the law. “Tell me if I’m understanding this. The insurer didn’t tell the hospital this woman was insured, so the hospital didn’t treat her, so she died—and everyone admits to this—and her husband still couldn’t collect a dollar?”

Ms. Dailey’s smile flattened and she continued with a different tone, hesitant, maybe just a little bit apologetic. “It was unfair. But it
was
legal. The crux of the matter is the insurance contract. I’d talk with the insurer.”

“And who’s the insurer?”

“Blue Cross Blue Shield—they’re down on Forty-first Street. I’m sure they’d be more than prepared to give you an expert run-around.”

CARDOZO STEPPED OFF THE ELEVATOR
on the fourteenth floor of the Blue Cross building into a warren of corridors bounded by flat-white, head-high partitions. He explored and finally found the opening marked 1412. He rapped on the wall. “Is Monte Horlick around?”

A young man with red suspenders sat at a modular desk, staring at figures scrolling up the screen of a computer terminal. A two-foot-high paper dandelion stood in a Perrier bottle on the desk beside the terminal. The face drawn in the center of the dandelion was smiling with berserk good cheer.

The young man turned in his chair. “Horlick is right here. What’s up?”

Cardozo showed his shield. “They told me downstairs you could run down the records on a policy.”

“Shoot me the stats.” Horlick pressed buttons on his keyboard and cleared the computer screen. “Policy number?”

Cardozo read the number from his notebook.

Horlick entered the digits and letters. Lines of type began scrolling up the screen. Horlick gazed at the screen through half-parted lids. “What we have here is a gentleman by the name of Richard no middle name no initial Martinez. It’s a terrific policy: wraparound benefits plus psychiatric plus dentistry. Mr. Martinez’s most recent reimbursement was for dental work performed April eighteenth.”

For Cardozo it happened in a split millisecond—the realization that something had dropped into his lap. “April eighteenth
this
year? Do you mean this policy is current?”

“Current and kicking.”

“Where did you mail that reimbursement?”

CARDOZO FINALLY FOUND A PAY PHONE
in the street that worked. He called Carl Malloy at the precinct.

“Carl, I need you to stake out a mailing address. Box 108-E, Four twelve West Fortieth Street. It’s an outfit called Mailsafe. The box is rented in the name of Richard Martinez.”

“Jesus Christ, is that Rick Martinez?”

“It’s him.”

“TELL ME ABOUT DICK BRAIDY
,” Cardozo said.

“Dick?” Kristi Blackwell gazed thoughtfully across her desk with its computer terminal and its vase of bloodred roses. “He was always charming, often honest, and he was very, very driven.”

“Driven by what?”

Kristi Blackwell was wearing a high-fashion dark business suit, but she radiated an easy, at-home sort of power.

“Dick was leading a life where everyone he ever heard of was a millionaire—except him. In his heart he was a runty little Irish kid from north Boston, and he never got over it.” She turned up her eyes and smiled. “Shall I tell you his most painful memory?”

Cardozo could feel her bursting to tell him. “Please.”

“He rarely discussed this, though I pleaded with him to put it in an article—his most painful memory was having been invited, as a teenager, to a debutante cotillion at the Brookline Country Club. They were serving beef Wellington at the sit-down dinner but it was Friday night, and of course in those days Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. So the old Irish biddy who was waiting on Dick’s table brought him a plate of scrambled eggs and she whispered in his ear, in brogue if you please, ‘I know you’re a nice Irish boy, so I made these for you myself.’”

Kristi Blackwell delivered the line in a little brogue of her own. Her eyes were on Cardozo and there was a how’m-I-doin’ look in them.

This was an odd way, Cardozo couldn’t help but think, to be talking about a friend who was both dear and dead.

“Well,” Kristi Blackwell said, “one of the Cabot girls was sitting at poor Dick’s table and she just took one look at those
sad
eggs and she burst out laughing.”

“Laughing because he was Catholic?”

“Laughing because he was
ignorant
Catholic. What poor Dick didn’t realize was that Cardinal Cushing had given social Catholics permission to cool that no-meat rule. Dick told me he never forgot that girl’s laughter—and he never knew how the serving woman had spotted him.”

“How had she spotted him?”

“The place card—Braidy.”

“He never figured that out?”

“Dick was a puzzling man. For all his shrewdness he had more blind sides than an accordion.”

“Such as?”

“He yearned to be a major player, but he never truly understood what the game was about. He had no sense of what was stylish or awful. For example—the major boo-boo of his career: when he got his first big check from the magazine, he realized he’d never be taken seriously if he didn’t move out of that seedy little hotel where he’d been living. So he went out and bought a rundown co-op in a dingy little building that didn’t allow Jews. He honestly thought it was more chic if
somebody
wasn’t allowed in. Of course, in New York, that kind of anti-Semitism is provincial.”

Cardozo got the impression from the way she said it that perhaps there were other kinds of anti-Semitism that weren’t provincial.

“Dick never truly understood the basics. To an extent he could fake it. He watched other people and imitated their behavior, but he overdid it. He filibustered every dinner party he could get into. He thought that made him a good seat. In the last decade of the twentieth century he was still sending to Turnbull and Asser in London for his shirts. He thought
that
was chic. He sincerely believed that gossip was the prime energizer of the universe. So he told that
stupid
story about Barbara Walter’s bidet much too often and he infuriated Louis Auchincloss with that canard about Lily and the sugar bowl. In fact, that ridiculous sugar bowl got him blackballed from the Union Club
and
the Century.”

“I don’t know either of those stories.”

“And you don’t want to. The point is, Dick did himself huge damage with that hara-kiri mouth of his. If Louis doesn’t like you, Brooke is not going to have you in the house—and that’s exactly what happened. And then on top of having no judgment about gossip, he told all sorts of needless lies—no one ever knew why.”

“Could you give me an example?”

“Silly things. Who-cares kinds of things. He said Harrison Ford had painted his house before he became a star.”

“Not true?”

“Not true. Harrison Ford painted his
sister’s
house. Dick tried to imply that he and Leigh had never divorced, and when that didn’t fly he tried to imply they had secretly remarried.”

“Why did he want to imply that?”

“He was star struck. And he didn’t want to be called gay.”

“Was he?”

“Gay? How could anyone tell? He was so scared after Leigh divorced him that he never had sex with anyone.”