Never Too Rich (29 page)

“
So? I’m a desperate woman, Daddy.”
Hallelujah cocked her head and gave him her best
daddy’s-little-girl look. Even with her punk clothes and fierce
makeup, her eyes had the desired effect. She could practically see
his heart melt. “Well?” she demanded.

He sighed. “It’s a fine mess you got us into this
time, Ollie. But I’ll help, sugar, I’ll help.”

Chapter 29

Rhoda Brackman, manager of the local branch of the
National Women’s Bank of North America, was spare,
thirty-something, and had “career” written all over her.

It showed in her manner, which was brisk. Her
bearing, which was businesslike. And her clothes, which consisted
of a conservatively cut charcoal pin-striped suit, high-collared
white silk blouse, and low-heeled gray pumps.

She carried her professionalism to the extreme. Wore
a minimum of makeup. Had clear-lacquered nails and eschewed jewelry
of any sort. Her only concession to self-expression seemed to be
her brown hair. It was chin-length and straight, with razor-sharp
bangs slicing across her forehead, a cut Louise Brooks had made
famous on-screen more than half a century earlier, and a fact that
Rhoda Brackman, who had no use for frivolous entertainment, was
totally unaware of.

But unlike Louise Brooks, she never smiled.

Rhoda Brackman took herself and the bank she worked
for with the utmost seriousness. And a minimum of humanity.

“
Hi hi!” Edwina sang brightly as
she breezed to the desk on which a white-lettered black sign, much
larger than the identical one pinned to Rhoda Brackman’s chest,
proclaimed MS. BRACKMAN. Edwina slid into the client’s chair beside
it and crossed her legs. “Isn’t it a glorious day out!”

Ms. Brackman merely grunted. She wasn’t one to
suffer interruptions gladly or to engage in idle small talk. She
eyed Edwina severely, her lips turning down at the corners and
expressing yet more disapproval as her gaze appraised her visitor’s
costly clothes from collar to foot.

Edwina looked as if she’d jumped straight from the
pages of
Vogue.
Her luminous makeup glowed; her Copper Glaze
lips glistened. She was wearing a yellow dalmatian-print silk
blouse, a black wrap-around skirt over gold stretch trousers, and a
red crushed-velvet shawl with long pink and yellow fringe by Paloma
Picasso, which she had flung casually over one shoulder. Her feet
were shod in black high heels trimmed in gold leather.

Edwina was well aware that it wasn’t exactly a
banking outfit. So what? She’d worn her most conservative suits to
all the other banks where she’d applied for business loans during
the past several months, and where had that gotten her? Nowhere,
that’s where.

Because to her dismay she’d discovered that her
friendly Anchor Banker
didn’t
understand . . . found out
that the chemistry
wasn’t
right at Chemical. . . learned
that no matter what the ads promoted, she did not—repeat
not
—have a friend at Chase.

So, having struck out at all the other lending
institutions, she’d finally decided: Maybe the fashion-conscious
real me stands a better chance. With that attitude, and reasoning
that if anyone should be sympathetic to the trials and tribulations
of a woman starting her own business, surely it would be a women’s
bank.

Now, faced with the reality of Ms. Brackman’s
joyless visage, Edwina was beginning to feel more than a little
apprehensive.

“
It’ll be a few minutes,” Ms.
Brackman said with a glower. “I’ve got this paperwork to finish
first.”

Edwina forced her blazing smile to remain in place.
“Take your time,” she offered with a flourish. “I’m in absolutely
no hurry.”

They were words she regretted as the few minutes
stretched into nearly half an hour. Finally Ms. Brackman gathered
up the papers, took her time making a neat stack, and then folded
her hands. “Now, then,” she said crisply. “You wanted to see
me?”

Why the hell do you think I’m sitting here? Edwina
didn’t say it. Throttling the woman—even verbally—wouldn’t
accomplish anything.

“
I applied for a business loan,”
Edwina reminded her matter-of-factly. “Last week.” Her face was
beginning to hurt from so much high-voltage smiling. “The name’s
Edwina G. Robinson.”

Without replying, Ms. Brackman reached down, slid
open the lower drawer of her desk, pulled Edwina’s thin file, and
slammed the drawer shut. She flipped through the pages, her brow
furrowing, then tossed it across her desk. “It’s been denied,” she
said curtly, turning away.

With those three words, Edwina’s last flicker of
hope died. Keeping her face impassive, she wondered: Where do I
have to go for financing? A loan shark?

Her voice level, she asked, “Could you tell me why
it’s been turned down?”

Rhoda Brackman turned back to her with a tired sigh.
Clearly she viewed this interview as a total waste of her valuable
time. “Loans are approved and denied by our loan board, just like
at any other bank. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to let me get back
to—”

“
I’m not done,” Edwina said, her
chin rising stubbornly. “I would like some specifics. I need to
know the reasons
why
I’ve been refused the loan.”

“
Ms. Robinson, in case you don’t
realize it, you’re jobless. In other words, without an
income.”

Edwina forced herself to remain civil. “The reason
I’ve applied for the loan in the first place is to
start
a
business. One that would give me an income.”

“
That’s neither here nor there.
Obviously you haven’t sufficiently proved to us that you’ll be able
to repay a loan of this magnitude. That being the case, this bank,
like any other, would require substantial equity.”

“
But what about my co-op? Surely
it’s equity! It’s worth at least a million-two!”

Ms. Brackman wasn’t impressed. If anything, her
attitude grew even colder. “Be that as it may, according to your
application, you still have seventeen years of a thirty-year
mortgage to pay off.”

Is this a no-win situation? Edwina wondered. Is my
company doomed to failure before it’s even launched? She said, “In
that case, Ms. Brackman, perhaps you could be so kind as to give me
some advice. If you were in my shoes and wished to obtain a
business loan of the amount I need, how would you go about it?”

Ms. Brackman managed a smug smile. “But I’m
not
in your shoes, am I?”

The bitch!
Edwina could only stare at her in
shock. Well, one thing was for certain: no advice or help would be
forthcoming from this bank, and especially not from Ms.
Brackman.

With that knowledge, Edwina rose stiffly from her
chair. “Thank you for your help,” she said with a cool dignity she
could only marvel at. “It was most generous of you to take the
time.” Then, turning on her heel, Edwina walked calmly out of the
National Women’s Bank of North America, daring herself to cry.

Chapter 30

Apartment 35G reeked. The stench of decay was so
strong it had drifted out through the closed door and into the
carpeted public corridor. You could smell it the moment you got off
the elevator.

“
Jesus!” Fred Koscina recoiled,
grabbing a rumpled handkerchief out of a pocket and pressing it
over his nose and mouth.

“
That’s how we learned about it,” a
young uniformed officer told him. “A neighbor kept complaining to
the super about the smell. When he didn’t do anything after a few
days, she finally called 911. The windows are open and the place is
airing out now.”

Koscina turned to Carmen Toledo. “This ain’t going
to be pleasant. Wanna stay out here, Carm?”

“
Sure, boss. But what kind of cop
would that make me?” She held a handkerchief pressed against her
mouth and nose too. “Let’s get it over with.”

They went into the apartment.

It was a large L-shaped studio on the thirty-fifth
floor of the recently built high-rise. Not long ago Koscina had
come across ads for the building in the
New York Times
Magazine.
The ads had called it “luxury you’ll die for.” Well,
they had been right, he thought. Someone had.

Inside, the narrow hall led past a closet-lined
dressing alcove and the bathroom. Stopping to peer inside, Koscina
was greeted by a wall of pink marble tiles and a narrow one-person
whirlpool tub. Panty hose hung from a towel rack where they’d been
placed to drip dry. Piles of dirty towels, washcloths, and
underwear were shoved into a corner. Open jars of dried-out
cosmetics were scattered on the marble vanity. On the toilet tank
sat what looked like a lidless industrial-size canister of cold
cream. A sea of makeup-smeared Kleenex littered the floor.

“
Someone sure lived like a pig,”
Toledo said through her handkerchief. She nodded at the vanity.
“Those jars are Princess Marcella Borghese. Know how much they
cost, boss? Maybe thirty, forty, fifty bucks. I bought my sister
some for Christmas.” She shook her head at such profligate
waste.

In the small galley kitchen the counters were piled
high with dirty dishes and mold-furred pots.

“
Jeez, boss! How can anybody make a
mess like that when they have a dishwasher?”

They came to the main room. Already, clusters of
homicide detectives were starting to scour for clues. A police
photographer’s flashbulb kept popping. The medical examiner had yet
to arrive.

The panoramic sliding glass doors leading out onto a
little balcony were open to air out the stench of decay. Piles of
dirty clothes lay everywhere—heaped on the pinkish-mauve
wall-to-wall, tossed on chairs, thrown into corners. Plastic bags
of laundered clothes, straight from the dry cleaner’s, lay torn
open, as though ransacked, on the glass-and-chrome dining table.
Toledo caught sight of a Bergdorf’s label and exchanged glances
with Koscina, but she didn’t have to say anything. Her eyes said
enough. She was getting a feel for the occupant. Soon they would
both know all the intimate details of the deceased. It never failed
to unnerve them. It took death to make strangers come to life.

Koscina steeled himself. It was time to examine the
body.

He gestured to Toledo, and together they moved into
the alcove end of the L-shaped room, where the blood-encrusted body
of a female nude lay sprawled sideways across an unfolded
white-and-rust patterned sofa-bed.

The first thing that struck Koscina was the
unnatural position of the body. The victim’s legs were stretched
out straight, looking practically glued together, and her arms were
squeezed flat against her sides—almost like a human torpedo. With
an added shock, he realized that the sofa
wasn’t
rust and
white, as he’d first thought. It was snow white. The rust patterns
were bloodstains.

Dried blood. Christ. It was everywhere.

Beside him, he could hear Carmen Toledo gagging
behind her handkerchief, but she fought valiantly to keep her lunch
down. He had to hand it to her. Even he, old hand that he was when
it came to viewing corpses, felt like throwing up.

Swallowing the rising bile in his throat, he forced
himself to study the victim closely.

The woman had been dead for days, perhaps a week or
longer— her face was purple and almost unrecognizably bloated from
the buildup of internal gases. A multitude of deep, brutal gashes
punctured her swollen chest and abdomen.

There wasn’t a hair left on her head, only a
sickening mass of dried raw meat.

She had been completely scalped.

Koscina’s stomach did another flip-flop, but his
mind was screeching.

It was then that he became aware of the flies,
attracted by the sweet scent of blood, buzzing around and alighting
on the carrion. When he waved his arms wildly to scare them off, he
noticed something even worse. Maggots were crawling in the woman’s
eyes and wounds.
Fuckin’ maggots!

Now he had to turn away and shut his eyes against
the horror. Stench or no stench, he had to breathe deeply. It
didn’t surprise him to find that he was shaking. The only worse
things he’d had come face-to-face with in a career of ugly sights
were the floaters—those bloated, fish-eaten bodies that surfaced
from time to time in the East and Hudson rivers. And this woman
looked like one of those. Only the fish bites were missing.

His deep breathing had the desired effect; he could
feel himself beginning to relax a little. Now he was ready to
proceed. He watched the police photographer moving to the back of
the sofa-bed to take shots at a different angle.

None of them was prepared for what happened next.
When the flashbulb went off again, a big yowling dark shadow
suddenly launched up from behind the sofa-bed and leapt out at
Koscina and Toledo.

They jumped back and cried out.

The shadow made a neat four-paw landing on the
fold-out mattress, just inches from the corpse, curled tail raised
tentatively. It looked up and meowed plaintively.

“
It’s only a cat.” Carmen Toledo
reached out to pet it. She laughed nervously and shook her head.
“For Christ’s sake, for a moment there I almost thought I saw a
ghost.”

“
So did I,” Koscina muttered.
“Jesus, I nearly jumped outta my skin!”

The big orange tabby sat down beside the corpse and
nonchalantly began to lick its paws with great delicacy.

Koscina rubbed his eyes wearily. He knew that his
thankless job was really starting to get to him by the way he’d
reacted—he’d been as spooked as a six-year-old!

“
Who’s in charge here?” he asked
the photographer.