VC01 - Privileged Lives (49 page)

“You’ve got to be joking. There’s only one woman here.”

“Who said Sunny’s a woman?”

“I assumed …” Devens frowned and didn’t say what he assumed.

“You can do better than that, Scottie. Her murder was in the papers and you’re in her date book.”

Cardozo could see Devens calculating the odds that it was a bluff, and then he could see Devens realizing that by taking the time to calculate, by not coming in fast with a denial, he’d given himself away.

“What does that convict me of?”

“You tell me.”

Devens sat immobile for a moment. Suddenly he thrust out his arm and stopped a passing waiter. “Dewar’s on the rocks. Double. Anything for you, Lieutenant?”

Cardozo shook his head.

“Don’t you drink?”

“If I drink I smoke, and if I smoke I lose all self-respect.”

“You impress me, Lieutenant. After two trials and seven years, you’re still gunning for me. Why? How could you hate a man you don’t even know?”

For all his fine clothing, Devens gave off the scent of an all-American whiner, a man who was hustling whatever and whoever he could. Cardozo wondered what Babe had seen in this loser and then he wondered why he was bothering to wonder.

“I don’t need to know you,” Cardozo said. “All I need to know is what you did to that kid.”

“Sunny was not a kid and I didn’t do anything to her.”

“But once upon a time Cordelia Koenig was and you did.”

Devens looked at him suddenly, with panic, and then he slid away into a sort of blank. “Christ. I thought we were talking about Sunny.”

“We were.”

“I only saw Sunny that once. I don’t know anything about her except that she was sweet and maybe she was a thief and now she’s dead.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“I flew back on her flight from Chicago. We got to talking.”

“Where were you two weekends ago when she was killed?”

“I was in the Hamptons.”

“All weekend—Friday to Sunday?”

“All weekend—Friday to Tuesday.”

Nice weekends in the jet set. “Can you back that up?”

“Yes I can.”

“You’re going to have to. Who were you with?”

Devens gave him the names, and Cardozo wrote them down in his notebook.

“Are you going to spread it around about Sunny and me?” Devens asked.

“Does it matter?”

“It could ruin me.”

“Nothing’s ruined you yet. Waiter, can I have the check?” “This is on me,” Devens said quickly.

“No it’s not.” Not taking his eyes from Devens, Cardozo laid twenty dollars in the saucer.

39

“S
OMETHING OR SOMEONE,” CARDOZO
said, “links you to the Beaux Arts killing. I’m betting it’s someone you know but don’t know you know—some little memory that got erased when you were in coma. We’ve compared the names in your address book with our case files. There are a few matches, but they’re people we already know—socialites on the periphery. They don’t lead us anywhere new. What we need is someone who has your memories of seven years ago—intact.”

“Well, that obviously isn’t me,” Babe said.

They were on the flagstone terrace behind the town house. Cardozo was standing there just looking at her.

“Did you ever keep a diary?”

Babe smiled. “Never.”

“Can you think of any close friends, anyone who traveled in the same circles, someone who knows as much about you as you do about yourself—and who’d be willing to help?”

Babe’s throat was suddenly scratchy as steel wool. “I would have said Scottie, but obviously not.”

“No one else?”

“Well, Ash Canfield—I don’t have a secret in the world from her. We made it a policy never to be stoned at the same party. In case one of us had to take the other home.”

“Then let’s ask Ash to look over these photos. How do we get hold of her?”

Babe had graduated to a cane, and she was able to climb the ramp to the
Minerva,
industrialist Holcombe Kaiser’s two-hundred-foot yacht, without Cardozo’s help. As they reached the deck, noise and lights hit them.

The black-tie extravaganza—one of the hardest-to-wrangle invitations of the season—was in full swing. The masts wrapped in furled sails soared three stories high.

Cardozo was aware of people looking at Babe with hungry ogling eyes, whispering speculations, and he was aware that some of the speculation was spilling over onto him.

He held out the Tiffany-engraved vellum invitation for Beatrice Devens and Escort, and a young, elegantly uniformed butler steered them toward the reception line and called out their names.

Holcombe Kaiser, their billionaire host, greeted his guests with the brisk dispatch of a ruling monarch. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Babe.”

A camera flashed as Kaiser’s lips touched Babe’s cheek.

“Too long,” she said. “This is my friend Vincent Cardozo.”

“How do you do, sir.” It was that faintly ironic use of the word, from superior to inferior. “Thanks for bringing Babe.”

Cardozo knew Kaiser only from news stories, knew he had spent a lifetime piling up dollars and publicity into the Holcombe Kaiser legend, carving himself a conspicuous place in a conspicuous society. Gray-haired, gray-bearded, radiating self-satisfaction, he looked Cardozo impersonally in the eye. “Please meet my good friend Edmilia Tirotos.”

Kaiser had been a widower for over half his life, and Edmilia Tirotos, the four-foot-nine wife of the deposed Indonesian dictator, stood beside him, performing the duties of hostess. Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, her face-lifts giving her a weirdly young smile that she seemed powerless to alter, she wore a diamond tiara that must have accounted for over half the foreign debt of her former fatherland.

“Where the hell are we going to find Ash Canfield?” Cardozo whispered. “This place is worse than a lockup cage.”

“Let’s try the bar,” Babe said.

It was not an easy task. There were open bars fore and aft, and a dozen strikingly handsome waiters circulated with trays of champagne.

At eight thirty the
Minerva
cast off, its motors churning the Hudson to vanilla mousse. The sun was setting, turning the Manhattan skyline amber.

Babe and Cardozo pried their way through the usual crowd going through the intricate steps of the celebrity gavotte, with amplified dance music played under a striped canopy by Scott Devens and his twelve-piece orchestra.

Inside the ship’s saloon the crystal prisms of a ballroom chandelier scattered tinkling rainbows across oyster damask and walnut paneling, dappling the pink marble fireplace with a Rubens painting above it

Babe found Ash Canfield on a silk sofa, a fair-haired woman in a scoop-bodiced silver gown, eyes sparkling with bold gaiety.

“So
this
is the famous Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo.” Ash spoke in a whispery, out-of-breath, society-girl voice.

“I didn’t know I was famous,” he said, “but thank you, Mrs.—what do I call you—Lady Ash or Lady Canfield?”

“It’s not a proper title, I’m only Lady Canfield, but why don’t we drop the Lady and you can call me Ash. And yes, you’re very famous among the inner circle of Babe’s friends.”

“Ash,” Babe suggested, “come see the view.”

“I’ve seen that filthy harbor. You forget, Babe, I was born in Doctors Hospital, right on the shores of Manhattan, just like you and every other little girl who ever went to Spence. Rather like Moses in the bulrushes, don’t you think, Lieutenant? Or do I call you Vincent?”

“Call me Vince.”

Ash linked arms with them both. “Now that we’re all cozy, let’s look for a bar. I’m famished for an olive.”

They worked their way out of the saloon. Ash threw out greetings, chatty and frivolous, hyper-radiating giddy good humor.

Cardozo pried them a path down the corridor, through a tumult of celebrity hugs and giggles and pushing.

Babe stopped suddenly in the middle of the corridor. Her eyes had locked on a woman in a strapless gray silk gown and Cardozo wondered what her mind was telling her that he wasn’t tuning in on.

There was a tangible arrogance to the straight set of the woman’s mouth and thin Roman nose and cool wide-spaced green eyes. It took Cardozo an instant to recognize Doria Forbes-Steinman, and it took him an instant longer to realize that Babe was staring not at the woman but at the dress she was wearing.

“Hello, Doria,” Babe said.

Doria Forbes-Steinman turned, standing there behind a wisp of smoke, finishing her cigarette. Her eyes went from Babe to Cardozo to Ash. “Why, Babe, what a surprise. No one told me you were invited.”

“Obviously not,” Babe said. “That’s my gown you’re wearing.”

Doria Forbes-Steinman smiled. “Hello, Ash. Hello, Lieutenant,” she said.

“If you’ve let the others out at the hips and shoulders as badly as this one,” Babe said, “I don’t know whether to sue you for theft or for butchery.”

“I know exactly what to sue you for, darling—libel.”

“Please do. And say hello to Scottie for me.”

Giving Babe the finger, Doria Forbes-Steinman eased herself into a wave of celebrities that was sweeping down the corridor.

“If you want to sue,” Cardozo said, “sue your parents, not her. It was their job to say no.”

“How did she do it?” Babe said.

“Ted Morgenstern.”

“It’s beyond belief.
Beneath
belief.”

Cardozo found an empty stateroom and herded Babe and Ash inside and closed the door behind them. It was a comfortable rosewood-paneled room, hung with soft blue paintings all bearing the powerfully legible signature of Picasso, as recognizable as the trademark on a Coke bottle. There was a single Monet, which Cardozo had the feeling was Holcombe Kaiser’s way of remembering where he had hidden the safe.

“She has my husband,” Babe said, “and she has my gowns.”

“Let it go,” Cardozo said softly. His hand reached and squeezed Babe’s.

She squeezed back, gratefully, and then she opened the writing board of an antique carved French walnut secretary. She spread the three-by-five-inch photo reductions on the seamlessly inlaid surface of marble and boxwood.

Ash stood there, a wondering stare fixed on her face. “What’s this, lotto? Am I supposed to pick a winner?”

“In a way,” Babe said. “Would you look at these photographs and tell us if you know any of the people?”

For a second Ash seemed to have to process the request, and then she settled herself, a wobbly wisp of Chanel-scented elegance, onto the corner of the blue chintz sofa. She sneaked her glasses out of her purse. Guiltily. The lenses had thick middles to correct the far-sightedness that came with middle age, and Cardozo could see from the way she put them on that she hated wearing them.

She picked up the photos. She stared silently at each one, eyes mechanical, remote, as if she were arranging cards by suit in a hand of bridge. She separated one photo from the others. Her glance turned diagonally across the writing board toward Babe.

“This one.”

“Family snapshots?” The door had opened soundlessly. A man stood in the doorway, then sauntered into the room. Snow-blond brows and lashes made his blue eyes deep and startling. He moved quickly next to Ash and put his arm around her shoulders. “May I peek?” He had the look of an overripe Nordic god, slightly inflated, the blond curls singed in gray. His plaid cummerbund did not manage to disguise the comfortably thickening waist of the tennis player at forty.

He spread the photos out side by side. “Let’s see, our summer vacation in Europe—no, our summer vacation in Billi von Kleist’s lobby. What dreary photos—who’s collecting snapshots of big Mack trucks?”

“Dunk,” Ash said, pushing his fingers away from the photos and tamping them into a neat stack, “this is Vince Cardozo, Babe’s friend.”

“How do.” Dunk Canfield sized up Cardozo in an unimpressed glance.

Cardozo had read up on Sir Dunk: he had grown up in the world of the British formerly wealthy; family connections had gotten him admission to Harrow and a scholarship to Oxford and he looked like a lump of laid-back complacency who had never doubted his right to a life of serious unearned luxury.

Babe smoothly lifted the photos from Ash’s hand and tucked them into her purse.

Sir Dunk stared at Babe with an almost childish annoyance. “Not going to let me look?”

“You wouldn’t be interested,” she said. “And what’s all that noise upstairs?”

“The guest of honor’s arriving,” Dunk said. “Care to greet her?” He offered Ash his arm.

On the surface at least Dunk and Ash Canfield were a matched pair: good dressers, terrific smilers, bronzed and well-born and handsome. Babe and Cardozo followed them up to the deck.

Motor roaring, blades throwing out a blast of whiplashing wind, a silver Martin-Marietta custom helicopter was touching down on the landing pad at the stern of the
Minerva.
Crewmen had herded guests back beyond a perimeter of red velvet ropes.

The copter door swung up and out stepped Baron Billi von Kleist—relaxed, grinning, instant master of the space around him. A blitz of flashbulbs caught him in his tails and Legion d’honneur.

With knightly consideration the handsome European aristocrat turned and held up a kid-gloved hand. It was grasped from inside the copter by the black-gloved hand of the guest of honor.

Tina Vanderbilt stood scowling in an elegant Fortuny scarlet silk evening gown that she could have worn a half-century ago.

Edmilia Tirotos and Holcombe Kaiser stepped forward. There was a
ménage à trois
of kisses. Tina Vanderbilt’s dress turned out to have a large, detachable necklacelike collar of fabric roses sprinkled with silver paillettes. Edmilia deftly detached it and handed it to a waiter.

Holcombe Kaiser sprang open a Cartier’s box.

Edmilia lifted out a rope of diamonds and gold and placed it around Tina’s neck.

Flashbulbs went off like fireworks.

Society applauded.

With surprising nimbleness, Tina Vanderbilt curtsied to the crowd.

A whisper whipped around the deck—“three thousand carats!”

Scott Devens and the portable members of his orchestra formed a semicircle around the guest of honor. Scott gave the downbeat: saxes and violins and accordion broke into “Happy Birthday to You.”