Tuesday, June 11
“YOU’RE GOING TO KILL me. Or spank me. Or stop sponsoring me when I tell you what I’ve done.”
“Tell me what you’ve done, so I can decide whether it’s murder or a spanking.”
They were sitting in Luddie’s living room. Happy’s exercises were finished, and the child was resting now in his bed, and they were drinking Luddie’s home-ground coffee.
“I spent the weekend with Vince Cardozo,” Leigh said.
Luddie’s face held itself—all stern bone, capped by a bristling crop of gray hair—but something impatient and disapproving skittered behind his flat blue gaze.
“You’re playing your old games,” he said. “You’re trying to neutralize this man.”
“I have to survive.”
“He’s not going to harm you.”
“I had to know that for sure.” She ignored the look of skepticism playing across Luddie’s face. “He doesn’t think I’m involved in Dizey’s death. Except as a witness.”
“You know, Leigh, I don’t think you’re involved either—except as a witness. Did it ever occur to you, you’re going to enormous lengths to cover up a fiction?”
“Possibly.”
“Are you going to see him again?” Luddie asked.
She looked around at the view through the windows, at the city caught by the oncoming storm. Dark, massed arches of cloud hung pink-bellied in the sky.
She met Luddie’s gaze with bold, unresigned eyes. “Of course I’m going to see him again.”
“What’ll you do if he falls in love with you?”
She smiled. “I’ll be nice to him.”
“And what will you do if you fall in love with him?”
“I’ll try to be nice to myself.”
Luddie’s large eyes were heavy with silent knowing. “Leigh, how long have I known you?”
“Four years, give or take three months.”
“How many times have you been in love during that time?”
“Does it matter?”
“With you, love is a very public business. You’re going to feel a great need to go public with this cop. And as I understand your relationship with Waldo, he’ll put up with a lot, but he won’t put up with sexual humiliation.”
“I’m tired of being someone else’s image. I want a little something of my own.”
“And you really think a homicide detective is going to turn out to be a little something just for Leigh?”
“Well, why not? Is it all that ridiculous?”
She looked over at Luddie, but the fight she had expected wasn’t there in his face. Anger seemed to have faded, and in its place she read a sort of stony and sad acceptance.
“Can’t you ever think of anyone’s well-being besides your own?”
“I care about Vince. I do.”
“Haven’t you ever felt disinterested concern for another human being?”
“I care about Jasmin Hakim.”
“Jasmin who?”
“Dick says she’s dating Jim Delancey.”
“I don’t think you should be putting stock in what your ex-husband says. He’s a professional gossip. Why do you bother with him?”
“Because I need information about Delancey’s girlfriend.”
“Why?”
“I have to warn her. She’s in danger.”
“Is she? And is it your responsibility?”
“I think it is. You obviously think it’s not.”
“I think you’re pushing yourself very hard, Leigh. What are you planning to do?”
“Tonight I’m going to follow Jim Delancey from work.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“The police are following me, so they’ll be following him; and if he’s meeting with her, he won’t be able to hurt her.”
“Don’t do that,” Luddie said. “Please don’t.”
“I can’t just sit and let it happen all over again.”
IN THE COFFEE SHOP across the street from Archibald’s, she waited at a table in the rear. She made no attempt to disguise who she was or what she was doing: she was Leigh Baker, and she was watching Archibald’s two doors through the window.
Outside the front entrance women wearing diamonds clutched escorts’ arms and picked their way through parked limousines. A line of taxis stretched up Lexington.
Outside the kitchen door nothing moved.
Leigh ripped open a pink envelope of Sweet’n Low. A cloud of powder misted down into her cup. She stirred, sipped the coffee, found it horrible, and told herself she wasn’t going to drink it. She picked up her doughnut and bit into the oiliest, most sugar-sodden lump of dough she had ever tasted. She told herself she wasn’t going to eat it.
Across the street the kitchen door opened, and a Korean in a chef’s hat lugged a garbage can out and set it on the sidewalk. A moment later the door opened again, and Jim Delancey stepped out wearing an apron. He lit a cigarette and looked in her direction.
Maybe he saw her, maybe he didn’t. She couldn’t tell. Nothing happened on his face.
The Korean said something. Delancey gave him a cigarette, and the two men stood on the stoop smoking, not talking. Delancey finished his cigarette and tossed the butt into the gutter. He went back inside.
Leigh looked around her. The coffee shop was almost deserted. In the booth by the front door a uniformed cop sat alone, hunched over a piece of pie. His fingers tapped the edge of his plate in time to a Tony Bennett song playing softly on the radio. A wedding band glinted.
The counterman was passing a damp cloth over the counter. The movement was aimless: it wasn’t cleaning anything, because there was nothing to clean. Maybe it was just a way of passing the dead hours of evening.
Leigh looked again at her watch. Five to nine.
The kitchen door of Archibald’s opened and Delancey stepped out. He wasn’t wearing his apron.
Leigh signaled the counterman. “Could I have my check, please?”
The counterman brought her a check for a dollar eighty. She was horrified to see that she had drunk the coffee and finished the doughnut. She opened her purse and put down three dollars.
Outside, a summer wind gusted hotly along the pavement, swirling sheets of newspaper.
Delancey turned south on Lexington. People were moving at a leisured pace from storefront to storefront, slowing to glance at the latest in designer rumple wear, at the thirty-nine flavors listed in the window of David’s Cone.
She followed Delancey at a half-block’s distance.
He turned east on Seventy-second.
Traffic thinned. Headlights reflected off the minuscule glass particles that formed part of the glistening asphalt.
She followed Delancey to the five-hundred block, where Seventy-second Street dead-ended at the East River. It was a preserve of solidly built co-ops, with the odd brownstone sprinkled in. A glass-and-marble condo towered over a vest-pocket park.
Delancey went into the condo lobby. The uniformed doorman smiled and went to a bank of buzzers and pushed the top buzzer in the last row. After a moment he turned and nodded Delancey through.
They know him here, she thought. They trust him. Something skittered in her stomach.
She waited sixty seconds, then approached the lobby.
“Help you, ma’am?” The doorman gave her that glance she always got from strangers, the one that said, Do you know who you look exactly like? But you couldn’t be …
She nodded and answered with the glance that said, Right. I just look like her.
“Verna Higgins to see Charlotte Mayes. I’m expected.”
“I’m sorry, there’s no Mayes in the building.”
“Are you sure? She used to live in Apartment—” Leigh approached the bank of buzzers and memorized the name at the top buzzer in the last row. Bailey, C. Apartment 4-A. Jasmin Hakim lived either in a sublet or under an assumed name. “She used to live up on the eighth floor. In apartment 8-A, I think. Isn’t the A line the apartments right over there?” She pointed west.
“No, ma’am, A line are the apartments with the small terrace on the river. You must have been here some time ago.”
“I guess she moved. Thanks anyway.”
Leigh crossed the street. The far side of Seventy-second gave her a better sightline on the small fourth-story terrace. The terrace was dark, but there was a light on inside the apartment.
A group of people came out of the condo lobby. They were obviously a party on their way to dinner, laughing and happily tipsy. Their voices receded.
A girl came out onto the fourth-story terrace. She wore blue jeans and a loose shirt. She went to the railing and looked out over the river. Her slim body glowed in the light from indoors.
Jim Delancey joined her. Leigh could see him going straight into his rap. His expression was warm and humorous and friendly. His gestures were graceful and flowing—courtship gestures. His hand smoothed the hair that fell over the girl’s face, hair that was dark and perfect and straight.
The girl laughed.
They kissed.
Jim Delancey lit a cigarette, and they spent five minutes passing it back and forth. The girl stood swaying on legs that seemed gradually to lose their steadiness. Jim Delancey’s hand played with a loose strand of her hair and then her face broke into a smile and she gave a shrug.
He kissed her again, a serious kiss this time. He backed her against the railing.
A tide of recollection rushed in on Leigh. She felt a pang, a sense of helplessness in the face of inevitability.
The whisper of distant traffic came softly. In the street around her there was now only stillness—parked cars, deserted doorways spilling light, a phone booth.
She walked quickly to the phone booth. She dialed 411. “Operator, do you have a number listed for C as in Carol “Bailey, Five ninety-one East Seventy-second Street?”
The operator gave her the number. She dropped a quarter into the slot and dialed. The phone rang once. Twice.
On the terrace the girl pulled away from Delancey. She stood with her back to him. She turned and said something.
Delancey crossed to her, almost knocking over a porch chair. He was not managing things with any sort of grace, and there was something in his manner that seemed to enjoy not managing, almost a defiant child’s strut.
He followed her inside.
On the fifth ring the girl answered. “Hello?”
Leigh swallowed. “Jasmin Hakim?”
There was a millisecond’s wariness. “Yes?”
“The man you’re with is a murderer.”
“Who is this?”
“This is—someone who’s seen what James Delancey is capable of.”
“If this is a joke, it’s one of the sickest I’ve ever heard.” The girl spoke perfect British English. Even her indignation was British.
“This is not a joke. For your own safety, please don’t go back onto the terrace with him.”
There was a silence, as though a message had to blip back from a satellite, and then the in-taken breath of recognition. “I know who you are. You have gall. You have nerve, phoning me.”
“Get Jim Delancey out of your apartment, or get yourself out. Don’t let him trap you alone.”
“You’re a meddling, psychotic, injustice collector!”
“For God’s sake, just get out of there!”
Something struck the phone booth. It had the weight of a hurled motorcycle, bursting up and out in one explosive, metal-crumpling movement.
Leigh whirled halfway around.
Someone grabbed her from behind. A hand clamped over her mouth. A forearm locked over her throat.
“Don’t scream,” a man’s voice warned.
The smell of sweat on a leather watchband flooded her nostrils. She couldn’t pull air into her lungs. She looked down and saw metal glint in his hand.
“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
Her knees snapped. Gripping tightly, pulling her out onto the pavement, her attacker slowly bent her backward.
AT TEN TWENTY-TWO, on Seventy-second Street near the East River, Patrolman Dan Rivera of the Twenty-second Precinct noticed a phone booth with a smashed glass panel that had not been smashed twenty minutes earlier.
He slowed his blue-and-white cruiser.
A phone receiver twirled at the end of a cord. The pavement around the booth was covered with shards of broken glass, as though a mad philanthropist had scattered a bucket of oversized diamonds.
Patrolman Rivera pulled up to the curb, idled the motor, and stepped out of his cruiser.
He crouched down by the pavement. He played the beam of his flashlight over the glass, looking for blood.
Two feet away, in the gutter, he found a woman’s shoe.
“HELLO. WALDO CARNEGIE SPEAKING.” Waldo Carnegie apparently was one of those men who were so rich that they could afford to answer their own phone.
“Mr. Carnegie, I’m sorry to disturb you.” Cardozo’s heart was thumping double-time in his chest, and his palms were sweating so hard that he had to grip the phone with both hands. I’ll kill Society Sam, he was thinking. I will personally hunt that bastard down and execute him on the spot if he touched her. “This is Lieutenant Vince Cardozo at the Twenty-second Precinct. I don’t want to alarm you, but there may have been … an unfortunate incident. Would you happen to know what kind of shoes Miss Baker was wearing tonight?”
“Shoes?”
“By any chance, were they pale gray alligator pumps?” Let them be green, he was thinking. Please, God, let them be moccasins. Running shoes. Anything but gray alligator pumps.
“Hold on. Leigh darling, were you wearing pale gray alligator pumps tonight?” In the distance a woman’s voice said something. Carnegie came back on the line. “Yes, she was, but she lost one of them.”
It was as though a hand squeezing Cardozo’s heart had suddenly let go and he could draw breath again. But instead of relief, he felt rage sweeping in like a black tide. “You mean she’s there?”
“Yes. She’s right here.”
TWELVE MINUTES LATER, in the third-floor drawing room of the Carnegie town house, Cardozo listened to Leigh Baker describe the attack.
“I must have passed out for a minute.” She spoke quietly, in a voice bled of all expression. Sitting there on the sofa, she seemed small and touching and scared, undeserving of his or anyone’s anger.
“And he let you go,” Cardozo said. It was part statement, part wondering.
“When I came to, he wasn’t there.”
“How did you get home?”
“I only had one shoe, so I took the first cab I could find.”
“The attacker left you your money?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you phone the police?” She bit her lip: “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
On his sofa across the room Waldo Carnegie laid down the new issue of Forbes and looked up. “No. I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Leigh Baker and Waldo Carnegie glanced at each other across the ten-foot gap between sofas. There was gratitude in Leigh Baker’s eyes and for one irrational moment Cardozo was jealous.
Be grateful to me, he wanted to shout, not to him. I’m the one who worries about you. I’m the one who almost had the heart attack. He’s the one who sits around in patent leather slippers and a smoking jacket, feeling smug and hiring guards to do his worrying.
“The important thing,” Waldo Carnegie said, “is that Leigh is safe and sound.”
Cardozo found himself gazing at her. He could feel her avoiding his eyes. She looked disheveled, maybe a little mauled, but nothing you’d go to the Emergency Room about. There were no visible bruises or cuts, and that struck Cardozo as curious.
He ran it through his mind. The attacker had her, and he let her go. Why would he have done that? Had she fought him off? Had someone else come along and surprised him?
“Did you get a look at him?” Cardozo said.
She shook her head. “It was too sudden.”
“Did you hear his voice?”
She took a swallow of her diet Pepsi and put her snifter down on the coffee table. She was thoughtful. “He told me not to scream.”
“Did he have a Hispanic accent?”
“Not remotely.”
“Did you notice anything distinctive about the voice?”
“Yes—I’ve heard it before.”
“Do you remember where?”
“A week ago. In the elevator at Jefferson Storage.”
“Lieutenant,” Waldo Carnegie said, “it’s obvious that this man has been stalking Leigh.”
“We’ve been keeping a guard on Miss Baker,” Cardozo said, “and we haven’t seen him.”
“You weren’t guarding her tonight,” Waldo Carnegie said.
“The cop had car trouble,” Cardozo said. In fact, there was a possibility that the car had been sabotaged. While Leigh Baker had been nursing a coffee in the shop across the street from Archibald’s, her guard had gone for a cup of coffee himself and had left the car unguarded. But Cardozo wasn’t going to mention that. “He lost her.”
“The police are underpaid and overworked,” Waldo Carnegie said. “Maybe we should consider hiring a private guard again.”
“That’s your right,” Cardozo said. “It might not be a bad idea, especially if Miss Baker intends to keep striking out on her own.”
“I beg your pardon?” Waldo Carnegie said.
“Miss Baker was following Jim Delancey tonight—weren’t you, Miss Baker?”
Waldo Carnegie rose from his sofa. He crossed to the sofa where Leigh Baker was sitting and took her hand. “Is that true, dear?”
Leigh Baker looked down at her lap. “I wanted to warn his girlfriend.”
“We are aware of Jim Delancey’s movements,” Cardozo said.
“Not aware enough,” Leigh Baker said.
“Darling,” Waldo Carnegie said, “I understand your concern, and I’m sure Lieutenant Cardozo does too, but you mustn’t complicate the work of the police. You don’t want to become a contributory factor to the problem, do you?”
“I don’t want Jim Delancey to kill again.”
Waldo Carnegie bent and kissed the top of her head. When he turned to Cardozo, the smile on his face was that of a proud possessor. “What are we going to do with our little girl, Lieutenant—hold her in protective custody?”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” Cardozo rose. “Good night.”
Leigh Baker’s eyes met his. He saw panic in them that she didn’t even know was there. It would hit her in an hour, he reflected. She’d sleep with the light on tonight. He wanted to reach out and hold her and protect her. He tried to tell her all that with his eyes.
“I’m glad you’re safe, Miss Baker.”
“DID DELANCEY COME OUT of the building anytime tonight?” Cardozo was sitting at his desk. The switchboard had patched his phone through to the radio car.
“I haven’t seen him so far.” Carl Malloy had to shout over radio interference. His voice could have been coming by satellite from a Middle East war zone. “Not since he went into the girl’s apartment at nine-thirty.”
“Is there a service entrance?”
“Yes, there’s a service entrance.”
“Can you see it?”
“From where I’m parked now? No.”
“Can you see the phone booth?”
“From where I’m parked now there’s a truck in the way.”
“So he could have come out the service entrance?”
“It’s possible, but to get from the service entrance to that phone booth, he’d have had to cross Seventy-second, and I would have seen him.”