Thursday, June 6
LEIGH WATCHED THE CITY slide past the amber-tinted windows. She felt edgy, remote, in no mood for Europe.
Just beyond the LeFrak City turnoff of the Expressway, the limo hit a slowdown. A zebra-striped sawhorse blocked one of the lanes. A highway-patrol car was pulled to the divider and a highway cop stood by the sawhorse, signaling drivers to merge lanes.
“Trouble.” Leigh’s new private guard pushed the button that automatically rolled down the window. He leaned out and called, “Say, Officer! Officer! What’s happening?”
The cop, a heavyset man with gray hair, stared in the direction of the shout. He stood for a moment with one hand on his hip holster, eyes only half visible behind their sunglasses, and then he sauntered over. “Tow truck collided with a U-Haul.”
“How long’s the delay?”
The cop made a helpless Italian gesture with both hands. “I hope you’ve got a good book or a TV in that backseat.”
“Officer, I have Leigh Baker in this backseat with me. The actress. We’re trying to make a plane. Any chance we could use the grass divider to get past this mess?”
The cop frowned and glanced over his shoulder at the single-lane grass divider. He gave a what-the-hell shrug. “Why not.” He leaned down to the window. “Hey, Miss Baker, enjoy your trip.”
AT THE CONCORDE BOARDING GATE the new man handed Leigh her ticket and passport. “Enjoy your trip, Miss Baker.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
“I wish I could.” His smile took just a millisecond too long to develop. “Your guard is waiting for you on the plane. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”
At the end of a blue plastic accordion-walled boarding ramp, a stewardess took Leigh’s boarding pass. “How are you today, Miss Baker? You’re in row six, window seat to your right.”
Leigh peered into the cabin and counted rows. She recognized Kristi Blackwell in six, even though Kristi was wearing an enormous picture hat that hid one eye. In the seat beside her, Wystan Blackwell was gulping champagne as though a bartender had announced last call.
Leigh fixed her best fake smile in place and waved.
Kristi didn’t see her; she was busy sniffing the perfume sample that came with the airline’s overnight kit. Wystan was signaling the stewardess for another champagne.
The seat directly across the aisle from them was empty. The seat beside it was occupied by a man. He had bent sideways and was shading his eyes to peer through the window. When he took his hand down, Leigh saw that he had startling pale eyebrows. He leaned back in his seat, and she recognized Arnie Bone.
Leigh executed an about-face before he could see her.
Passengers clustered and unclustered in the aisle. She worked her way around them.
“Miss Baker, is everything all right?” the stewardess asked.
“Where’s the washroom?”
“Straight ahead.”
Leigh went straight ahead, but instead of turning right for the washroom she turned left and got off the plane.
LEIGH TOSSED HER PURSE on the bed. Before leaving, the servants had turned the air conditioner off. In the four hours since she’d been away the bedroom had become stuffy, and she crossed to the window and pressed Low/cool. A breeze built up and gradually rippled the curtain.
In the garden below children were having a birthday party with favors and paper hats and ice cream and cake. That’s how I’d like to spend my weekend, she thought. Being six years old.
She splashed water on her face and kicked off her shoes. Just as she was lying down she noticed that a phone call had come in. For an instant she had the sensation of being an inanimate object at the mercy of a malevolent box of plastic and wire.
She pressed Replay.
The message was a four-minute silence.
As she listened the silence seemed to listen back.
The machine clicked to a stop. All the emptiness of the deserted town house suddenly pressed in on her. She felt a cold buzzing like Novocain jabbed into the dead center of an ache.
I’ve made a dumb mistake, she realized.
She searched in the drawer of the bedside table for the card with Vince Cardozo’s work number.
He answered on the fourth ring. “Cardozo.”
“Hi, it’s Leigh. Leigh Baker. Sorry to bother you.”
“Go ahead. Bother me. Aren’t you in Paris?”
“No—I’m here. And I got another one of those calls.”
“Then I should come over and look at the trace.”
“I wish you would.”
“It may be late.”
“That’s okay.”
CARDOZO BROKE THE CONNECTION and phoned Esther Epstein, the elderly widow who lived next door in his apartment house. “Would you mind looking in tonight to make sure that Terri’s okay? I may be home late.”
“How late?”
He had to smile. Mrs. Epstein was coming on like the voice of his conscience.
“Because,” she said, “I have a favor to ask you. My air conditioner broke, and the man says it won’t be fixed till Monday. Would you die of a heart attack if you walked in and found an old lady sleeping on the couch?”
“Esther, you’re a lady, but you’re not an old lady, and if I found you on my couch … you kidding? I’d die of joy. Sleep over, please.”
CARDOZO UNLOCKED THE DOOR and stepped into Waldo Carnegie’s wine cellar.
The shaded overhead light threw a pale, even glow over the walls of wine bottles. Through a mesh grille in the ceiling he could hear the faint gray pulsation of the temperature-stabilizing system.
He lifted the Harlequin drawing off its hook and swung the little door open. A digital four pulsed in the display window of Tommy Thomas’s sound-activated cassette recorder.
It seemed odd to him that there had been only four calls. He thought of Leigh Baker as a popular person, one who’d have celebrities on her private line all hours of the day and night.
He pushed the Rewind button and then Play. There was a moment’s transistorized silence, then three buzzes, a click.
In the trace window area code 212 flashed.
An answering machine came on, speaking with Leigh Baker’s voice. “Hello, you have reached …” She gave just the number, no name, no promise to call back, no assurance of anything.
A 929 appeared next to the area code. Cardozo recognized a lower Manhattan exchange.
Beep. Obviously a hang up. Too fast for the tracing mechanism to capture the rest of the caller’s number. The trace window went blank.
Another span of silence. Another three buzzes. A click. In the window, area code 212 flashed a second time.
The answering machine cut in. Beside the area code flashed 555.
There was a beep and then a man’s voice, with a kind of upper-class East Coast arrogance encoded in its nasality. “Leigh, are you there? It’s Waldo. Are you there, honey?”
The trace window said Waldo was calling from 555-1923.
I don’t need to listen to this, Cardozo thought. Before he could press the Fast Forward button, her voice came on the line.
“Hi, darling. Where are you?”
He realized he’d been hearing that voice since he’d been a boy. It was as familiar to him as his own mother’s or his daughter’s or his dead wife’s. Maybe, in a way, more familiar. It pervaded entire areas of his memory, and so unobtrusively that he hadn’t been aware, till this moment, how much it was part of his recall. A hundred masks in his mind spoke with it: the rich girl, the spoiled college-sorority girl, the small-town sweetheart, the hooker, the wartime nurse, the nun …
“I’m still at work,” Waldo’s voice said. “Look, I’d like to get in a little squash at the Racquet Club. Do you mind if I’m late?”
“Not at all—I haven’t got anything planned.”
Funny, Cardozo thought. I’d have thought that’s when she’d mind most. He fast-forwarded.
The next call was Tori Sandberg phoning from a midtown exchange. Lunch plans.
He fast-forwarded to the final call.
Three buzzes, a click. The call was coming from area code 212.
The answering machine picked up.
Now the exchange appeared: 617.
The answering machine beeped.
Then came the silence. It had a hollow, pulsating quality, like the sound you get when you hold a seashell up to your ear. Now and then electronic blips sounded faintly, as though the phone company’s sensors had detected an empty circuit and were trying to reroute traffic through it.
The silence was coming from 617-4336.
Cardozo copied the number on his notepad.
“WHEN DO YOUR SERVANTS get back?” Cardozo said.
They were in the living room. Leigh Baker was sitting at one end of a sofa, and Cardozo sat in the chair facing her. She pulled a needlepoint cushion in front of her and wrapped her arms around it, like a little girl rocking a doll. “I expected to be in Europe. I gave them till Sunday night.”
He fixed her with a disbelieving stare. “You’re going to spend three days and nights alone?”
“I’m not alone. You’re here.”
“I’m here now, but—”
“But what?”
He shrugged. “Now’s now.”
“Luckily.” She tossed the pillow onto the sofa beside her. “How are you coming with your killer?” she asked.
He shrugged. “All you can do is do everything you can do.”
A soft flow of lacquered light spilled across Oriental rugs and carved mahogany tables. Ornately framed French Impressionists glowed from pale walls, and alabaster busts of fellows who could have been Roman emperors stood guard at either end of the mantel of the hooded marble fireplace.
“It was luck that broke Son of Sam,” he said. “A parking ticket. They had a three-hundred-man task force, but without that parking ticket three hundred pairs of hands would have been as useful as three hundred pairs of tweezers.”
Her head with its beautifully messy hair rested back on satin cushions. “But Son of Sam was crazy. Isn’t it always harder when you’re looking for a madman?”
“Society Sam’s probably crazy too. At least that’s what the psychological profile says.”
“Do you believe it?”
He rippled the water in his glass studiously. “Not as much as the psychologists do, but some of it rings true. For example, I buy very much that it’s a class thing.”
“Class?” she said.
Without gawking too openly, Cardozo glanced around him, at Chinese vases of fresh-cut chrysanthemums, crystal bookends enclosing single silk-bound volumes, gold table clocks and porcelain figurines and marble goose eggs upended on intricate ebony stands. They were objects that spoke of wealth in the most straightforward voice imaginable. There was nothing coded about them.
“Look at the locations Society Sam chooses,” he said. “Marsh and Bonner’s, Park Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street, an Upper East Side town house—he’s hitting in the Golden Ghetto. It’s an envy thing, a rage thing. And the victims: they’re wearing jewelry, fine clothes—emblems of money. And they’re fashionable … they have long hair … they’re tall—”
“Avalon wasn’t tall.”
“For a woman he was tall.”
“The killer mistook Avalon for a woman?”
“We’re guessing.”
“So if I pin my hair up and wear a cotton coat and low heels and slouch and stay away from expensive shops and this area—”
“Then you’ll be a lot safer. Unless … you see, here’s where my expert and I disagree.”
“Your expert?”
“You really want to hear me grouse about work?” he said.
“Absolutely.”
“I have a friend who’s a clinical psychologist. He thinks the victims are chosen at random—the killer’s psycho-biological clock alarm goes off, the killer goes into his gotta-kill cycle, prowls till he sees a candidate. He stalks that candidate and when the opportunity presents itself, he hits. The only connection between the killer and the victim is that the victim is the first candidate to cross the killer’s path after the cycle starts. In a technical sense the killer and victim are strangers.”
“Why only in a technical sense? It seems to me they are strangers.”
“My friend calls it ‘an unsymmetrical relationship.’ The victim doesn’t know who the killer is—but the killer knows who the victim is.”
He was aware of a change in her, in the quality of her attention.
“You don’t mean the killer personally knows who he’s killing,” she said.
“He doesn’t know in your sense and mine. He knows in the sense that, from his point of view, the victim is wearing a flag or a label. The killer can read that flag. The killer knows the most likely place to find a victim with that label, the most likely time to find one. But when the victim looks at the killer, there’s no flag, no label—no warning—until that last instant when the knife comes out.”
“Do you agree with any of this?”
“Not completely. I don’t think the killings are random.”
She shifted slightly. “That’s interesting. Why not?”
“Look at the original Son of Sam killings. None of those victims knew one another. There wasn’t a single link. They didn’t eat at the same restaurants, they didn’t share employers, they didn’t ride the same busses or live on the same streets. That’s random. But Society Sam’s victims know each other.”
She gave a half nod of assent. “Are the police sure the victims were all killed by one person?”
“It’s the simplest theory.”
“But is the simplest always right? What if those Society Sam letters are fakes?”
“We’re sure the first two are the same killer.”
“But you’re not sure who killed Dizey?”
“Completely different MO. No cuts.”
“If it isn’t the same killer, is there anyone you suspect?”
“A lot of people had access to Dizey that night. A lot of them had been stung at one time or another by that column of hers.”
“You think it was someone she’d blasted in the column?”
“It’s the sort of possibility we have to consider. But don’t forget the ones who never got mentioned—because they might have had a grudge against her too.”
“In other words, you’re considering practically everyone at that memorial.”
“We have to.”
“Tell me, just for example, would you consider me?”
Cardozo found himself enjoying this woman. She had something unpredictable about her. He liked not knowing exactly how she would react, because he didn’t know exactly how he’d respond, and that made him interesting to himself again. “Would I consider you as Society Sam? No, you’re a woman.”
“What about just killing Dizey?”
“I’d consider it.”
“How could you prove it?”
“You have to understand—most homicide investigations are closed one way: a witness talks.”
“What if there’s no witness?”
“There’s always one witness, and that’s the one that usually talks.”
Her hands rested on her lap, locked. “The killer confesses?”
“Or gives himself away.”
“How?”
“Surprisingly dumb ways. A lot of killers can’t resist cozying up to the cops.”
“Why’s that?”
“I have a theory it’s fear. Some part of them is afraid that punishment is inevitable. They want to speed things up a little, end the waiting. A lot of killers actually try to help the cops. For example, if you were the killer, you’d be making a big mistake now—asking me about the investigation.”
“Then let’s change the subject before I get myself sentenced to life. Are you hungry?”
“Cops are always hungry.”
“Let’s eat in. Do you mind?”
“Who, me?”
He followed her into the kitchen. She opened an armoire-sized refrigerator and stood rattling the ice cubes in her empty glass. The freezer compartment exhaled white mist around her face.
“How would you feel about tomato and fennel soup, rack of lamb, vanilla ice cream with lingonberries that were fresh once upon a time?”
“What-berries?”
“They grow in Sweden. They’re supposed to be a delicacy.”
“How are you going to make all that?”
“Waldo’s chef froze some leftovers. I’ll just heat them up.” She pulled three quart-sized plastic bags from the freezer and thunked them down on the counter. They looked like petrified swamp. She slit knife holes in the bags and arranged them on plates and slid them into the microwave. She set dials with a matter-of-factness that made him think she’d mastered basic microwave cookery.
She went and pulled another bag from the freezer. This one looked like a red woolen cap that had frozen in a snow drift. She set it in a mixing bowl.
She arranged two place settings on a butcher-block table in a corner of the kitchen. Two dozen gleaming copper pans hung from a rack directly overhead.
“Could I ask a rude question?” Cardozo pointed a thumb upward. “Does anyone ever cook in those things?”
She smiled. “I don’t pry into the servants’ lives, and they don’t tattle on me to the magazines.”
She went down to the cellar and returned with a bottle of wine. A heavy coat of whitish dust lay on the neck of the bottle, and he could see a 1969 on the label.
“Mouton-Rothschild.” She spoke the French syllables as though they were the name of a never-to-be-forgotten lover. “It was the only wine that ever did all those things to my mouth that connoisseurs say a great wine should.”
The name rang a distant, five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle bell in his mind. He remembered reading about it in The New York Times.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m not that much of a wine drinker.”
“You are tonight.” She got the cork out with three twists of something that looked like obstetrics forceps for midgets. “To hell with letting it breathe. It can breathe in the glass.” She poured two glasses.
“Are you drinking?” he said.
“One glass looks lonely. I like two on the table, don’t you? When you finish yours, we’ll switch.”
When the bell on the microwave went off, she got up and took out their thawed dinners and brought the soup bowls and plates back to the table.
During dinner she turned giddy, talkative, as though she were the one who was drinking the wine. She told him about having a French mademoiselle and an English nanny when she was a child and going to the Brearley school over on East End Avenue when she was twelve, and sitting next to Rockefellers and Vanderbilts in class.
“That’s where I met Oona and Tori. We were instant chums for life. When we were seventeen we all made our debut together at the Infirmary Ball at the Plaza. Lester Lanin conducted the orchestra, and do you know who I danced my first dance with? Truman Capote.”
“Why not your father?”
“Dad had died.”
“What about your mother?”
“Mom didn’t.”
The silence told him that Leigh Baker’s mother was not her favorite person.
“By the time Tori and Oona and I were twenty-one, we were all engaged. And by twenty-two Oona and I were married.”
“How many times have you been married?”
“Four. But Charley was the one I loved. Charley Kohler.”
“The producer? Tell me about him.”
She drew in a breath and sat with her hands flat on the table, thinking. “I’ve always thought happiness is not even knowing you’re happy till you look back and you say, Wow, that was it. After he died I looked back at those years and I realized that was it.”
“What did you like most about him?”
There was something in her eyes that was deeper than loss. They were deep-set eyes and of such a dark green that they appeared almost brown around the pupils. “I loved his laughter. I loved the way he laughed. I loved the times he chose to laugh. I loved the reasons he laughed.”
“No one since?”
“Not like him. It would be what researchers call a statistical fluke.”
“Flukes happen.”
“All the time. But I’ve had mine. Mustn’t be greedy.”
He was feeling a glow throughout his body, a flush over every inch of his skin, and he felt free to ask her questions he might not have if he hadn’t had that second glass of Mouton-Rothschild.
“What about Dick Braidy? I have trouble seeing you married to him.”
“He was Charley’s personal assistant and after Charley died he was there when I needed him, and most of the time he was sweet. It counts for something, when a person’s sweet to you.”
“Doesn’t sound like many people have been sweet to you.”
“Maybe I have exaggerated expectations.”
“What about you and Waldo?”
Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth and went back to her plate. “It’s not the same at all. We’re not married.”
“I know, but …” He shrugged. “You live here.”
“He’s lonely.” She said it as though it was the reason they were together.
“And are you lonely?”
“I thought I was.”
“Why don’t you marry him?”
“We’re not in love. He wants a friend, he wants a hostess, he wants some glitz—I’m it.”
“And what do you want?”
“I’m not sure.”
He sat there in the stillness of that moment. What am I doing? he wondered. Hoping for a twenty-ton truck to run my life over?
She got up from the table. She went to the counter where she’d left the ice cream to thaw.
Cardozo watched the way she walked. It was fluid, easy, with no wasted movement.
She squeezed the ice-cream bag and made a pouting face. “It’s going to be another hour before it’s soft.”
It occurred to Cardozo that she could have thawed it in two minutes in the microwave. Obviously she was in no hurry. That suited him.
“Let’s watch a movie,” he said. “Let’s watch one of yours.”
“You’re either a sadist or a masochist. Which one?”
“How about the last one you made for TV? I missed that one.”
“I hate my TV movies.” Her eyes came around to his, thoughtfully. “Which of my movies did your wife like best?”
“The one she loved was where you were the plain Jane married to the actor with the drinking problem.”
“Cassandra—that was fifteen years ago.”
“So we’ve all added a little mileage.”
“Did you like it too?”
“Well, at the time …”
“You didn’t.”
“I thought it was good, but …” He sighed. “I’ve worked with people like the husband you had in that movie. I still do. For me it was like two hours overtime.”
“Without pay?”
He smiled.
“I was a mess in that movie. Glasses and floppy sweaters.”
“My wife loved it that you weren’t glamorous. She thought you were that woman.”
“A lot of people did. Funny, I was a roaring drunk. And my costar, who was playing a drunk, wasn’t. In fact, he was the one who persuaded me to go to AA. The first time.”
“Could we see it?” Cardozo said. “I think I’ll like it better this time.”
They went to the library on the second floor. He sat on the sofa. She loaded the tape into the VCR. She turned off all the lights except for one dim little lamp above the TV, and she came to the sofa and kicked off her shoes and sat beside him.
“Lights, camera, oops!” She aimed the remote and pushed a button, and there was a fanfare and the studio logo came up on the TV screen.
Now and then during the movie he had the feeling she was watching him, and he turned several times to check, but she was sitting forward with her chin resting on one fist, watching the screen. And then she seemed to know he was going to turn, and her eyes met his with a look that hovered between amused and uneasy, as though she hoped they were sharing something, but she wasn’t a hundred percent sure.
The light and shadow moving across the screen threw an easy shimmer out into the room, and Cardozo felt his body floating away from him. She slid over on the sofa, closing the space between them, and her bare arm lay so near to his skin where he had rolled up his shirtsleeve that he could feel warmth coming off her.
When her head dropped toward his shoulder, it was the most automatic, natural thing in the world to let his arm go around her. The part of his brain that cared about survival was telling him, Get up, get out of here, and the rest of him had no desire to go anywhere.
It was the rest of him that won.
He pulled her deeper into the warm place she had made on his shoulder. He turned her head and began to kiss her, easily at first, nibbling her lips softly, then biting gently, then moving deeper.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.
AFTERWARD, CARDOZO SAT UP and dropped his feet over the edge of the bed. He was having trouble recognizing himself.
“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t believe I did that.”
She raised her eyes toward him. He sensed a kind of gentle acceptance in them.
“We both did it,” she said, “and it was damned nice.”
“I guess I’m not used to damned nice.”
“You should get used to it. You deserve a little.”
“How do you know what I deserve?”
“Everybody deserves a little.”
He stood and began gathering up his underwear.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ll take my things and sleep down the hall.”
“Oh, come on, we’ve done the deed. At least you could stay and cuddle. Cuddling’s the nicest part.”
He looked at her and something in the way she was looking back at him made him realize that she and Waldo had not been lovers in a long time. “Why, you’re just a big, sentimental broad.”
“You better believe it.”
A CLICKING SOUND reached down into Cardozo’s dream. For a transitional moment he was still floating through a turquoise Caribbean sea. And then he was not.
He opened one eye. A soft flutter of shadows filled the unfamiliar bedroom.
He raised his head. The window curtains were stirring in the air-conditioning. Just beyond the rise-and-fall of Leigh Baker’s sleeping body, the fluorescent hands on the bedside clock pointed to three-twenty. Beneath them the answering machine was flashing a green light.
The machine beeped. “Miss Baker.” It was a man’s voice. “This is your security service.”
“Oh, shut up,” she moaned.
“You seem to have been separated from your guard. Could you give us a call as soon as you get this message? We’re at area code 212 …”
Her hand went to the machine and killed the sound.
“What did you do?” Cardozo said. “Run away from your guard?”
“It’s a long story. I can’t stand him.” Her arm came back to bed and went around him. “Let’s go back to sleep.”