“OH, NO!” SHOCK HUNG in the air three feet in front of Dick Braidy’s face. “That poor woman. That poor, poor woman.”
“How well did you know her?” Cardozo said.
“I didn’t know her at all well. I saw her more as a type than as an individual. To me, Nan Shane was a New York tragedy long before she was murdered.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It was the old story: She wanted a great deal, she could afford very little. This town does that to so many young men and women. And so many not-so-young.”
In the living room windows behind Dick Braidy, curtains moved softly in the air-conditioned breeze.
On the end table beside the sofa, a scented blue candle burned in a small silver dish. Incandescent particles whirled upward through the tiny halo of light.
“You’d see her at parties. Always wearing that same de la Renta cocktail number. Poor thing, she was caught between two worlds. Too useful to invite as a guest—and too useless to hire as a servant. She generally appeared as designated fortuneteller, just around the time the after-dinner liqueurs came out. She’d smile and spread her cards and predict sweet generalities—and ask for a twenty-five-dollar tip.”
“That’s how she made her living?”
“There was a rumor that she had a sideline. I hate to speak ill of the dead. But you heard it so much, you had to wonder. Why were people always whispering that Nan Shane was a dope courier?”
“Maybe because she was.”
“I have no idea. Personally, I never required her services—for anything.”
“The night of May sixth, nineteen eighty-five—the night you described in ‘Socialites in Emergency’—do you recall if Nan Shane joined your table at dinner?”
A moment went by and then Dick Braidy nodded.
“I seem to recall she did. Sorella Chappell was feeling insecure about some job or other for the British royal family, and Nan swore it would come through. Nan’s forecasts tended to be the kiss of death, so needless to say, it did not.”
“And afterward—did she go to the hospital with you?”
“Nan Shane? Leave before she’d worked every room in the apartment? No way.”
“WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT,” Dan Hippolito said, “is a physical impossibility.”
He dealt the glossies out one by one on his desktop, turned so Cardozo could see them headup. They lay there like a gruesome, oversized hand of solitaire: Oona, Avalon, and Nan.
“Missing tissue,” Dan said, “is very, very rare in stab wounds. With bullets, with bombs, with speeding cars, yes—it’s in the nature of high-velocity impacts that flesh gets severed from the victim and scatters. Even with a rotary saw you see a little scatter, a little loss. But with a knife?”
Cardozo’s eyes slowly scanned the photos, comparing. In the preautopsy shots, the victims had been stripped and washed. No dried blood obscured the killer’s artwork. Each abdomen showed deep-lipped horizontal slashes and rat-a-tat punctures. In places the killer’s blade had opened the intestine.
In the postautopsy shots, the wounds puckered like the drawn purse strings of a miser’s moneybag.
“I reviewed over two hundred lethal stabbings in the last quarter,” Dan said. “Not one single instance of tissue missing. So I had to wonder. Why this particular tissue? It didn’t seem to be especially meaningful tissue. We’re talking microscopic bits of abdominal skin and fat and muscle. Who would want them? No one. Why would he take them? No reason. So why are they missing?”
Viewed chronologically, from Oona to Nan, the photos showed a progression. Cardozo could clearly see the killer’s hand becoming surer, the horizontal slashes becoming more nearly parallel, more nearly aligned and equal. The photos could have been sketches of a corporate logo struggling to find that final, instantly recognizable image.
“I gave this a lot of thought,” Dan said. “It took me till yesterday to find the answer. In fact, you might say the answer found me.”
He took a small copper watering can from his desk and leaned in his swivel chair to tip water at a thirsty-looking philodendron.
“My wife and I were having dinner at a friend’s home, and the lady of the house is a terrific cook. Last night we had tournedos—you ever had tournedos?”
Cardozo shook his head. “Haute cuisine isn’t my thing, Dan. Offhand I couldn’t say.”
“It’s a filet of beef. The usual way to fix it is tournedos Rossini, dark sauce and marrow. Now, the marrow that my friend’s wife put in the center of each tournedos was shaped like an ace of spades. Sitting right there on the beef, this little ace of spades. How did she do that? I wondered. So I asked. So she told me. A cookie cutter.”
Dan Hippolito gave Cardozo a careful, level look.
“That’s when it hit me. It wasn’t Sam trying to take these microscopic bits of flesh, it was his weapon that couldn’t help taking them. He was using the equivalent of a cookie cutter to slash his victims.” Dan Hippolito leaned forward. “It’s called a Darby blade. Invented, strangely enough, by a man called Darby. Which is all I know about Mr. Darby. The interesting thing about the Darby is, the blade starts with a point, but as you travel down to the hilt, the cross section becomes triangular. Why triangular, you ask.”
Dan Hippolito took a piece of scratch paper.
“Here’s your traditional cut with a two-edged blade.”
He drew an up-and-down line on the paper.
“Withdraw the knife and the flesh readheres to itself, because this side of the cut”—the tip of his pen tapped both sides of the line—“comes back into contact with this side of the cut. This process is called healing. But with the Darby there can’t be any healing.”
Dan Hippolito drew a small triangle, a quarter inch on each side.
“Withdraw the knife and the flesh can’t readhere to itself, because this side of the wound”—the pen tapped the three sides of the triangle—“doesn’t touch this side or this side. As a result the wound never closes, it never heals. Now, who would want such a weapon? An army fighting a guerrilla war. Which army? The U.S. army.”
“This thing exists?”
“It used to exist. We used it in Vietnam.”
“Then there are still some of them around.”
Dan Hippolito rotated his swivel chair and reached for the coffeepot. He refilled Cardozo’s cup and then his own. “We know for a fact there’s at least one Darby still around—and Society Sam’s got it.”
Cardozo sat tapping his fingers on his knee.
“Vince, I was a medic in that war. I had to ship boys to Japan who had cut themselves with their own Darbys. There was no way you could stitch a Darby wound in the field. The only reason we can stitch these people is, they’re dead. I could not be more positive. What we are seeing here is Darby work.”
“Okay, if you’re positive, then I am. The killer used a Darby blade on the three victims. Now what about the rest of the MO? Was there semen in Nan Shane’s mouth?”
“Didn’t I say classic MO?”
“Pubic hairs in the mouth?”
“This time three. The lab’s taking a look. You should have the results tomorrow.”
CARDOZO CALLED Sam Richards into his cubicle. “Sam, you fought in Vietnam.” There was a flick of wariness in Sam Richards’s eyes, like that reflexive drawing back when a hand slaps you in the face. “I saw a little of it.”
“Did you ever run into a Darby blade?” Cardozo said.
Richards gave him a sideways look, as though he had to be crazy. “If I’d ever run into a Darby, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“Then I take it you saw what a Darby could do.”
“I saw one or two cases.”
Cardozo laid three glossies out on his desk. Oona. Avalon. Nan. Preautopsy but tidied up. “We think these might be Darbys.”
Richards blinked. “I never saw a Darby do this.”
“So what did it?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Vince. A Darby could do this, easily. But over there Darbys were used in guerrilla combat, hand-to-hand. They were for fast, serious killing, not for drawing pictures.”
“You think Society Sam is drawing pictures?”
“I don’t know what he’s doing, but I can tell you what he’s not doing. He’s not improvising. He’s not making it up as he goes along. These cuts aren’t random, they’re not accidental. The similarities are too strong—the parallel horizontal lines, the dots. They’re intentional.”
“What do they mean to you?”
“To me they mean these were three very unlucky people.” Richards’s forefinger tapped Oona’s puncture wounds. “Now, this is the kind of work the Darby was made for. Jab it in, pull it out. It really wasn’t designed for these long cuts or slicing. I’m surprised it’s Society Sam’s weapon of choice.”
“How old would he have to be to have used it in Vietnam?”
“My age. Or older. And appearances to the contrary, I’m no kid.”
Cardozo frowned. “Was the Darby standard issue over there?”
“The elite units had them. The marines, the Green Berets.”
“How many of them are still in circulation?”
“I haven’t seen any since the war. They don’t turn up on the street. But they must exist somewhere. They have a rarity value, like gold dollars.”
“Let’s find out who’s making them, who’s dealing them, who’s buying them.”
“I can check into it. I’ll have to go through the Pentagon. It could take a while.”
“Okay, take a while—but find out by tomorrow.”
Sam Richards gave him a friendly finger.
THERE WAS A KNOCK and the cubicle door opened. Noise floated in from the squad room, followed by Ellie Siegel. She looked cool and unharried in a dress that had the color of the glow on a twilight beach.
Slanting back in his swivel chair, legs stretched out, and one foot crossed cowboy-fashion over the other, Cardozo set his lips in a thin line of annoyance.
Ellie picked up a photo, frowned at it, tossed it back onto the desk. “So … Sam did Shane too. Don’t tell me it’s a surprise.”
“Nothing’s a surprise.”
“So what’s bothering you?”
“I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out, when you’re talking to the wall, do you call it Mr. or Mrs. Wall?”
“Don’t talk to a wall you haven’t been introduced to. Talk to me instead.”
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“Neither would the wall. Come on.”
Cardozo sighed and sat there, two fingers tapping paradiddles on the edge of the desk. “How long have we been watching Delancey?”
“Over four weeks now.”
“How many man-hours, how many dollars have we spent?”
“I don’t know. Enough to retire on.”
“And every time Sam hits, something screws up the tail. Four weeks of watching the guy and it’s useless—we still don’t know where the hell he is when the killing goes down.”
“So? Accidents happen. Nobody’s perfect. The best-laid plans. We’ll clean up our act.”
“Excuse me. I wasn’t quite accurate. Wednesday, May eighth, Jim Delancey disappears from work for over an hour. During that hour Oona Aldrich is killed. Where’s Delancey? Today a witness turns up, says he saw Delancey at Achilles Foot up on Third Avenue.”
“During that same hour?”
“During that very same hour.”
“So Delancey has an alibi.”
“He didn’t use the alibi. He did just the opposite—he hid it from us.” Cardozo got up and paced to the window. He punched a button on the air conditioner. The compressor labored to life, pulling down the wattage in the desk lamp, kicking out a cycle of gasps and clanks. “I thought I had a handle on this case—but it’s falling apart.”
“Vince, you’re a big baby.” Ellie neatened a stack of papers on the desk. “Nothing’s falling apart except your housekeeping.”
“Nan Shane didn’t testify for Nita Kohler. She didn’t eat at table eight at Annie MacAdam’s. She didn’t go to the Emergency Room. She wasn’t even part of a social group. She was a hanger-on. Why’s she dead?”
“She’s dead because Society Sam drew crisscrosses all over her with a pointed instrument.”
“There was no reason for him to pick her.”
“Vince. If there was a reason for the others, there was a reason for Nan. Count on it.” Ellie adjusted the hang of her dress. “I’ve been wondering about Nan myself. Matter of fact, I checked to see if she had an arrest sheet.”
“And?”
Ellie beckoned. “This way, please.”
Cardozo followed her into the squad room.
At the moment the squad’s one computer was unattended. Ellie seated herself at the terminal and booted the computer. Something inside it made a sound like teeth coming down on a spoonful of chipped ice. Her fingers clicked rapidly over the keyboard, typing the word finest.
“Where did you learn to work one of these things?”
“Four nights at the New School. Essential Computer Literacy. The department paid. You could have learned too, Vince.” A message appeared on the screen: WELCOME TO FINEST.
“Do these machines always say welcome?”
“If they’ve got any manners.” Now the computer offered a menu of choices. Ellie selected criminal records.
The computer asked for her ID. She typed in Reilly.
“You’re not Reilly,” Cardozo said.
“Don’t tell the computer.”
A river of amber print flowed across the screen. Ellie pushed two keys, and the river widened into a screen-filling ocean.
Cardozo hunched down and squinted.
“Can you read it?” Ellie said. “Arrest March twenty-seven. Possession one-half-ounce cocaine. Attempted sale to undercover agent. Arresting officer: Det Robert Q. O’Rourke, Narcotics South. Arraigned March twenty-seven. Bail five thousand. Hearing set June twenty-five.”
Cardozo did not speak. He just stared at the screen.
“Is one of you Vincent Cardozo?” A young man in need of a shave stood in the corridor. His T-shirt bore the sweat-soaked logo All Day-All Night Messengers.
“That’s right,” Cardozo said, “and no prize for guessing which one.”
The messenger handed him a package the size of a VCR cassette. Cardozo glanced at the return address and saw that the sender’s name was Baker.
“You guys really live up to the all-day-all-night name. This was supposed to be here yesterday.”
The messenger shrugged. He held out a clipboard and a pen. “Sign at the X, please.”
Cardozo signed and gave the kid a dollar tip.
Ellie Siegel lifted the package. “Wrong weight for a letter bomb. May I?”
Cardozo was frowning at the screen. “Go ahead.”
She opened the bubble-wrapped envelope and pulled out a leather-bound book. She studied the cover. “This is downright interesting. The twelve-karat gold lettering says diary, but it doesn’t say whose. I won’t open it. It may be personal.”
“It’s Nita Kohler’s.”
Ellie handed it to him. “The infamous sex diary?”
He nodded. “That’s the one.”
January 1, Monday
New Year’s resolution: must brighten up my image. Must get away from black. Must dress in upbeat colors—purples, mustards, pumpkin-oranges.
January 2, Tuesday
Counseled D.V. She is a crack-addicted, child-abusing mother of three and comes for counseling only because the court ordered it. In three months I have still not gotten through to her. I am pretty sure she is still using. I may have to confront her.
Dinner at Domi’s. It was another world from that of Renaissance House.
Christina Onassis was there, designer Perry Ellis, Nobel prizewinning writer Samuel Beckett. Greta Garbo dropped by for dessert—her dress was by Adrian. How does she eat all those sweets and stay so thin?
Why is Nita Kohler writing this? Cardozo asked himself.
The tone was wrong. There was a name-dropping gushing, as though the reader was meant to feel informed and at the same time goaded into envy.
But Nita hadn’t intended any reader to see these pages. So who was she trying to impress? Her diary? Herself?
I was seated next to Dooney Heinz, who is the dunderhead of the Western world but, they say, great sex. So I decided to give it a try. Maybe it was one of his off nights, or bad coke, but I’d rate him, on a scale of ten, a three.
January 3, Wednesday
Hung over from Domi’s and romping too hard with Dooney. Up at ten for policy meeting of the emergency drug-intervention unit at Renaissance. Quel drag to be talking drugs when all I craved was to pop another codeine or Darvon.
January 5, Friday
Didn’t know how to get through to D.V. I confronted her on her using. She at first denied but finally admitted. Something weird happened.
D.V. told me I was too white, too Anglo, and too scared to smoke crack, and so long as I did not understand the crack experience from the inside, I would remain a typical white applause-and-publicity junkie, slumming on the problems of the poor.
So I did it with D.V.—smoked my first crack. The rush was immediate, intense. I think D.V. now trusts me and this can only push our therapeutic relationship forward.
Then on to dinner at Roxanne Ricci’s.
Philanthropist Lily Firestone, playwright Tom Waring, who is doing the script of You-and-Me Productions’ film “Ain’t No Time,” Sammy Davis, Jr., who is costarring, Lady Keith—why do they call her Slim? She is as pudgy as Elaine of Elaine’s.
Cardozo felt a sort of disappointment. You read a person’s diary, you expect it to be like a lamp lighting a door to an unexplored part of them. But this was an all-too-familiar story.
Okay, he told himself. So no one on crack is original.
I went home with Tom Waring—he is great sex. Very old-fashioned in his choice of accoutrements—Thai sticks, Quaaludes—he must have a medicine chest left over from the sixties! I think to give great head you’ve got to have a great head. Tom has and does.
January 7, Sunday
Service at St. John the Divine. My coreader was a guy called Jim Delancey, and he is astonishing. I could hardly read the gospel—everything was shaking; my voice, my knees, my hands.
Afterward at the movie brunch we talked. And talked. I have never felt so attracted to another human being in my life. Jim is new in Renaissance House, and I am going to arrange to be his counselor.
January 8, Monday
I coached Jim in how best to appeal to Marci so as to be transferred to my caseload. It worked! Now we will be seeing each other for at least one hour a day, five days a week—more if I can manage it.
January 9, Tuesday
I suggested to Jim that for him to truly trust me as his caseworker we must make love.
Jim said he would have to think about this.
January 10, Wednesday
Jim said he does not think we should make love.
In session with D.V. I broke down. D.V. was extremely sisterly and solicitous and listened. Funny how our situation reversed. She was counseling me.
Smoke crack with Jim, she said. This will do it.
I bought enough crack from her to last the week.
January 11, Thursday
In counseling today I suggested to Jim that we smoke a peace pipe. He was reluctant when I told him it was crack, but curiosity got the better of him and he tried it. Two tokes and we were off to the races.
He is the greatest lover I have ever had, bar none, nothing short of sensational. It was yummy sex to end all sex—
It was there that Leigh Baker had placed the bookmark. Cardozo closed the diary.
On the other side of the library Leigh Baker sat with a magazine on her lap. She was turning pages, not reading. She looked over at Cardozo. A little line of wariness ran from her eye down to the corner of her mouth. “Do you recognize the phrase?”
“Sure. The same five words in exactly the same order.”
“Nita was intelligent. She was educated. She was sane … And she was a woman. No woman would write those five words, not in a diary, not in a letter, not in a soft-core novel. It’s a man’s wish-fulfillment of how a horny woman thinks.”
She took her glass in both hands. It was a brandy snifter of diet Pepsi. She sat staring into it.
“The diary’s a forgery,” she said.
There was extraordinary calm in the way she made that statement. He wondered at the ferocity of that calm.
“As I recollect,” he said, “it must have been an awfully good forgery. Didn’t experts say the handwriting was your daughter’s? Wasn’t there information only your daughter could have known?”
Leigh tapped a finger on the edge of the snifter. “It was well researched. It was skillful. But it was a fake.”
“All right, say it was a fake. Still, sex to end all sex—those are five very ordinary words. A very common figure of speech. I think it’s a coincidence. And I think you’re hanging way too much hope on way too little fact.”
She blinked hard, as though her eyes were stinging. “You’re determined not to believe me, aren’t you?”
Ten seconds passed.
She dried her eyes on the back of her hand.
“Come on.” Cardozo crossed to the sofa and sat beside her. “Don’t cry. Come on. Please.”
“What makes you think I’m crying?”
“Your face is wet. Come here.”
She buried her face in his chest.
“You could be wrong, you know.” His arms went around her and hugged her softly. “All of us are wrong some of the time. Delancey has an alibi for Oona’s killing. We don’t have witnesses to link him to any of the others.”
She held on to him, and he could feel her body breathing. “Are you going to stop watching him?”
“We may have to cut back a little.”
She pulled away. Her eyes met his without blinking. “Don’t.”
He stared at her. “You couldn’t save Nita from Delancey then, so you’re going to move heaven and earth to save her from him now. Why?”
“I owe it to her.”
“Who says?”
She looked at him, trying to make a smile for him. She brought her leg out from under her and touched her bare foot to the carpeted floor. She stood. “Is anyone around here getting hungry? Let’s see what else the chef left on ice.”