AS CARDOZO LET HIMSELF INTO his apartment, he saw Leigh Baker rising from the sofa and his heart skipped a half-dozen beats in a row.
“Terri let me in,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I need to talk to you.”
“Of course I don’t mind.” He dropped his keys into the bowl on the hall table. “Where’s Terri?”
“She said she was going to a movie. I think she really just wanted to leave us alone.”
He came into the living room. He crossed to her. “Terri likes you. So do I.”
They kissed and she drew back.
“Can I get you anything?” he offered.
“I’m okay, thanks.”
“Just give me a minute.” He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, thought seriously about shaving, decided he was crazy, and went to his bedroom to put on a clean shirt. He went into the kitchen and got the ice tray from the refrigerator and banged it against the sink.
“Hey,” he called. “Would you have any way of getting hold of Tamany Dillworth’s address?”
“Possibly. Why?”
“Her old address burned down.” He dropped three cubes into a glass and filled it with ginger ale. “And she’s picking up mail for Rick Martinez.”
“Should I know who Rick Martinez is?”
He came back into the living room. “You met him in Marsh and Bonner’s.”
She was seated on the old flowered sofa. The standing lamp threw a circle of light around her. “The man with the boom box?”
Cardozo nodded. “He was married to a woman called Isolda Martinez. She died in the Emergency Room the night those socialites went partying. Rick Martinez blamed them. And it looks like he killed them.”
Leigh Baker was silent for a moment, thinking. “I was so certain it was Jim Delancey. How could I have been so certain and so wrong?”
“It’s happened to me more than once.” Cardozo sat on the sofa close to her. “Where did you go? I missed you.”
“I’m sorry. I missed you too. But I had to be by myself. I had to make some decisions.”
He could feel her trying to hold a smile and not coming anywhere near managing.
A dry swallow rode down her throat. “They say you can’t get clean and sober without getting honest. They say you’re as sick as your secrets. If you hold back even a single lie, that lie will keep pulling you back down into drugs and liquor.”
“Who’s this they?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Experts.”
“There are too many experts in this world.”
“And too many lies in my life. I keep getting twisted around and winding up at the same wall. So maybe I should tell the truth, for a change.”
“Are you asking for my advice or my ears?”
“Your ears. Maybe your shoulder in a while.”
“My shoulder’s not planning to go anywhere.”
Her eyes were anxious, tired. “The letter that was sent to the newspaper after Dizey died—it was a lie.”
He released her hand. “Lie is a strange word.”
“It’s the right word.”
“To lie, you have to say something. That letter was gibberish. It didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, it did. It said he killed her. And he didn’t.”
He set his glass down on the side table. “How do you know?”
“I’m still doing it.” She shook her head. “I’m still lying. I don’t know how to stop. The reason I’m here isn’t to be honest or stay sober—it’s because Waldo knows and he’s about to blast it to you and the world.” She gazed over at him. “Unless he’s told you already.”
Cardozo shook his head.
She pulled in a slow breath and let it out in a sigh. “I was on the terrace when Dizey went over the wall.”
Suddenly Cardozo’s stomach felt like eight miles of dead intestine. “Did you push her?”
“Everything but. I called her a thief and I threw my drink in her face. She accused me of drinking again.”
“Were you drinking?”
“I was very drunk and paranoiacally defensive.”
“Paranoiacally defensive about what?”
“I was afraid she’d publish an item saying I’d fallen off the wagon.”
“Had she done anything like that before?”
“Every damned time.”
“Okay, so maybe you wanted to kill her. But you didn’t. Wanting isn’t criminal. What you did wasn’t planned. It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t intentional. Keeping silent wasn’t breaking the law.” Why am I talking so fast? he wondered. Who am I trying to convince? “You weren’t withholding evidence of a crime. It wasn’t as though by keeping silent you implicated an innocent person.”
“Maybe not this time.” She stared down at her hands. “But there’s something else. When I saw Dizey fall, when I saw how easily a person could go over that wall—I realized Nita could have died the same way.” She swallowed. “And Delancey could have been innocent.”
“Jim Delancey got his rights, which was more than he gave your daughter. Granted, he wasn’t judged by a wolfpack of his peers, but at least it was a jury. Besides, you saw him push her.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t see him push her.”
“But you testified under oath—”
“I lied.” She stood. She wheeled around. “I would have told the truth. I was ready to, I was going to—but they produced that diary—and people were believing it.”
“But why did you have to lie? Why you?”
“I honestly thought I was doing the right thing. That diary was such an obvious forgery—he had to be guilty. Why would an innocent man forge proof?”
“How do you know he forged it?”
“I don’t know how I knew anything. I was drunk, I was drugged, I was convinced I had to take some kind of action.” She spoke in a bitter, bottomed-out voice. “I give great performances drunk. My movies didn’t get lousy till I sobered up.”
“I don’t want to believe this.” He couldn’t think over the clatter of dominos falling in his head. He stared at her. He felt remote from her and could not overcome the feeling. Either this is the most naive person I’ve ever met, he thought, or the most cunning.
“Vince,” she said quietly, “I made a choice, it was the wrong choice. I’ve been living with the consequences, and it hasn’t been the most entertaining company.”
He felt strong in the wrong way and weak in the wrong way. “Unfortunately someone else had to live with the consequences too.”
Her gaze fastened on him, grim and pleading. “I didn’t realize it was a cop’s job to judge people. I thought that was why we have juries.”
He stood. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or why. “This cop judges people. That’s how he stays alive.”
“You mean you’re disappointed that I don’t fit into your glamorous little picture of me.”
“It wasn’t even your life at stake.” His voice felt tight in his throat.
“But I had to make Nita’s life mean something.”
“Even God couldn’t have done that. Her life was over. The returns were in.”
“You’re sober and you think like a sober person, and I’m an alcoholic and I was thinking like one.”
“Three cheers for AA, three cheers for the disease model of alcoholism. But I don’t buy the disease model of irresponsibility. It’s a cop-out.” He moved toward the window. Once he got there he just stared out over the roofs. “You didn’t even lie to me straight out, like an honest liar. You let me lie to myself.”
“I did what I thought I had to.”
“Everything you said, everything you didn’t say, everything you let me believe—it was all because you were scared of me. Am I right?”
“Yes.” She said it in a voice that was barely audible.
“You could have told me straight out about Dizey. It was a natural New York death. Drunks fall off terraces all the time in this city.”
“I was afraid.”
Sunset lit the water towers and church spires like a pinball machine. This was one of the last areas in Manhattan where the steeples were still higher than the apartment buildings.
“You couldn’t even take the chance of trusting me?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
Cardozo shook his head. “You can go to bed with someone and not be sure if you trust them? What were you doing, faking? Giving another great performance?”
“I’m trying to be honest. Help me.”
He just stood there, hurting, waiting for something inside his head to happen and point him to the next moment. He heard her say his name.
“Vince. For the part that was fake—I’m sorry. But it wasn’t all fake.”
He turned around and she was standing there.
“I’m sorry too,” he said. “The idea that you could want me was just so … it made me feel so terrific. Like a kid. Like the first time I went to the movies. All your men felt that way, didn’t they? Proves I’m a star-struck nitwit like the whole rest of the world.”
She looked at him. He had the feeling she was searching for something in his eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore.
“I won’t stay,” she said.
He watched her go. A moment later he heard the front door shut.
“LEIGH BAKER SAYS she made a mistake,” Cardozo said. “She didn’t see you push Nita.”
Jim Delancey, neat and trim in his baggy linen trousers and red Reeboks, didn’t answer.
“That gives you grounds for a retrial,” Cardozo said. “Without her testimony the state has no case.”
They were standing just outside the kitchen door of Archibald’s. East Seventy-fourth Street was dark.
“I’m not going to discuss it,” Jim Delancey said.
“If you didn’t kill Nita Kohler, what the hell can’t you discuss?”
Jim Delancey drew in a breath and his I-love-Archibald’s T-shirt swelled beneath his I-love-Archibald’s apron. “There’s a trial record. Read it. I’ve said everything I have to say.”
“Jim, look at me. I’m not wearing a wire.” Cardozo opened his jacket, pulled up his shirt, showed that the only thing attached to his skin was skin. “There’s no court stenographer here. You’re not going on the record.”
Delancey stood there tight-lipped, leaning against the hood of a burgundy-colored Rolls.
“Weren’t you high the night Nita died?” Cardozo said.
“I’m not going to discuss it.”
“Wasn’t Nita high?”
“I’m not going to discuss it.”
“Why didn’t you plead drug intoxication as a defense?”
Down the block, lobbies spilled light under numbered awnings. A breeze rocked the saplings that had been newly planted along the pavement. Reflections of streetlights glinted off the hoods of slow-passing taxis and limos.
“Where did Nita’s diary come from?” Cardozo said.
Delancey’s fingertips chattered on his knee.
“Who forged it?”
Delancey’s heavy shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
“Who paid for your defense?”
Delancey exhaled, setting his fingers into a steeple. A twilight flow of resignation rippled out from him, and Cardozo was baffled by it.
“Why didn’t you tell us where you were when Oona Aldrich was killed?”
A muscle jumped just above Delancey’s jaw. “I did tell you.”
“Why didn’t you tell us the truth? You had a witness on your side. Why didn’t you use him?”
The screen door slammed open, and a Korean in a New York Mets cap leaned out to dump a thirty-gallon trash bag of kitchen scraps into a garbage can.
“Are you charging me?” Jim Delancey said.
Cardozo waited for the Korean to go back inside. “There doesn’t seem to be much left to charge you with.”
“Then I don’t have to answer.”
RICK SAUNTERED WEST on Forty-eighth.
At first he didn’t pay any particular attention to the ’87 green Celica parked outside Ming Lee’s all-night Chinese restaurant. But as he walked past, a taxi happened to be turning and its headlights swept the Celica. Rick glanced sideways and he saw a man sitting in the front seat. A heavy-set man gnawing on a hero sandwich.
I wouldn’t mind eating a hero right now, Rick thought. Genoa salami and provolone and red peppers—
The thought stopped right there, bumped by a second thought: You couldn’t buy a hero at Ming Lee’s. You couldn’t buy a hero within five blocks of Ming Lee’s. So how come that guy’s eating a sandwich that he had to have brought from at least five blocks away?
Rick slowed at the window of a darkened bodega. He pretended to be studying the cerveza posters, but he placed himself so he could see the reflection of the Celica. A U-Haul van made a turn and the headlights caught the windshield of the Celica.
The guy in the car held his head angled sideways. Except for the chewing the head didn’t move. Who the hell, Rick asked himself, eats with his head turned sideways?
It came to Rick that the hungry man in the Celica was just possibly a stakeout, and just possibly he was watching the doorway of 457 West Forty-ninth Street.
Rick was careful to keep walking naturally, like your typical no-harm-intended nighttime stroller. He strolled right past his doorway, didn’t even slow, didn’t even glance at it. See, man? No way I live in that building. He turned north on Tenth Avenue, and when he was sure the cop in the Celica couldn’t see him, he broke into a run.
THE GIRL STOOD bathed in the jittering light of the pizza-parlor window.
Rick drifted to the next storefront, an all-night head shop. He stopped, looked across at the girl, gauging her openness. He judged her to be fourteen, trying hard to look nineteen. She had pale, small features and she’d rewritten them in heavy makeup and framed them in ringlets of reddish-blond hair.
She was wearing jeans and a blue-and-gold toreador jacket over bare tits, with the sequined collar turned up. She had obviously been dressed by her pimp.
Rick felt a complex flutter in his stomach. She was attractive to him in a way he couldn’t quite explain to himself. He smiled his broadest smile, inviting hers.
Her glance floated slowly across the sidewalk. The pavement was full of people, every one of them alone. She let her gaze slide over Rick.
He saw that her blue eyes were scared, blinking behind spiders’ legs of fake lashes.
Baby, you think you’re scared now, just wait till you see what Rick’s got for you.
He took three steps toward her and simply stood there, presenting himself, solid, unmoving, a fact of the universe. “Hi,” he said. “I’m a statistic.”
“I can see that.” She had a midwestern accent.
“I wanna fuck you,” he blurted.
“No problem. I live over there.” She nodded at a blinking hotel sign across the street.
He followed her through stalled, honking traffic.
The hotel lobby smelled of ammonia and hot spices. A hand-lettered sign said ABSOLUTELY NO VISITORS. A fat Chinese man at the desk gave her half a glance and handed her a key.
The girl stepped into the elevator and Rick stepped in behind her. She pushed the button for five. Rattling rhythmically, the elevator clunked upward.
Rick brought his face close to the girl’s. He could smell the sweet residue of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum on her breath. He looked into her eyes and she looked straight back into his, not smiling. Slowly he reached over and wrapped a hand around her shoulder. He slid his other hand up between the legs of her jeans.
The elevator stopped. She pulled away. He followed her down a corridor with most of its forty-watt light bulbs blown out.
She put a key into a lock but did not turn it. “What’s in the pouch?”
“Crack, ice, and money.”
She swung the door open. It was a small, bare room, and Rick could see her housekeeping was even worse than his. A bath towel had been stuck across the window with screwdrivers. An ancient Tina Turner poster had been taped to the wall.
Rick laughed. “What the well-dressed wall is wearing, hey?”
The girl sat on the unmade bed, one leg tucked under her. She looked at him. “I wish I was as weird as you. That crack must be pretty good.”
Rick gave the door a push shut. The latch clicked and they were alone. “Know what I want to do?”
“No, surprise me.”
“I want to get high with you and spend the night.” He took out his crack pipe, dropped a rock into the bowl, lit it with his Bic. He took a deep drag and passed the pipe to the girl.
She took a hit and handed the pipe back. “My man doesn’t like me to have sleepovers.”
“So, how many customers do you usually have between now and noon?”
“On a slow night, enough to make three hundred.”
“Bullshit.” He took out his wallet and handed her seven fifties.
She fanned the money out, waving it slowly back and forth in front of her. “I didn’t say yes.”
His lips shaped a coaxing smile. He tapped a finger against his jogging pouch. “Come on. It’s two in the morning and I’m beat and I’m horny and there’s nowhere else I can go.”
“Boo-hoo. What are you, a poor little orphan?”
“Yeah, that’s what I am tonight. An orphan.”
She reached for a jam jar sitting on the windowsill. She unscrewed the top and dropped the money in. “I’m strictly safe sex. My man’s the only man I go down on without protection.” She took a rubber from the jar. “Sit down.”
He sat down on the bed beside her. She unzipped his fly and began slipping the rubber around his cock.
He touched the side of her throat. “You’re so soft.”
She smiled. “You’re not.”