Thursday, June 20
“AS WE ALL KNOW, my brother was not always pious.” Bridget Braidy was leaning just a little too close into the mike. “But he was devout in the way that counted: in his actions.”
She was standing at the lectern of Saint Anne’s Roman Catholic church, dressed in the same navy-blue suit Cardozo had seen her in at the last Police Academy graduation. She wore three strands of pearls, and her white Peter Pan collar had half snagged in the uppermost.
“And one story,” she said, “comes particularly to mind, illustrating that side of him. Now, some of you may know that Dick’s death is not the first time our family has been devastated by murder. Four years ago my beloved niece Nita Kohler was murdered.”
A woman in the pew ahead of Cardozo whispered loudly to the woman next to her, “Nita Kohler was her niece?”
“Her niece by marriage, you might say,” Cardozo heard the second woman say, and he realized she was Kristi Blackwell wearing a red Orphan Annie wig, and then he realized that the wig was her real hair.
The first woman took out her compact, studied her reflection, and touched up her powder. “Are you going to the Jeu de Paume tomorrow?”
“How could I miss Zack’s wedding party?”
“I can’t believe he’s marrying that fat nobody.”
“She must know how to do something Tori Sandberg doesn’t.”
“Or something Tori Sandberg won’t do.”
“Let me tell you what my big brother did,” Bridget Braidy was saying. “Benedict O’Houlihan Braidy was a grand guy—anyone who reads the columns knows that. But he wasn’t just grand. He was warm too, and human, and he could scale himself down. When my niece was murdered, he phoned me and he said, ‘Sis, I know how you’re feeling, because I’m feeling exactly the same. So let’s do something about it. I’ll be by in ten minutes to pick you up …’”
Cardozo was waiting for a murderer—a young male Hispanic murderer of athletic build with short-cropped dark hair. He and the murderer had no formal date to meet, but an astonishing number of killers showed up for their victims’ funerals—so why not the man who had murdered Benedict Braidy?
His nose took in that smell peculiar to houses of worship—the mixture of incense and altar flowers, but with a moneyed accent here, the spice of women wearing expensive perfumes. His eye circled the nave with its high-arched shadows, and the stained-glass windows with their rich hue of Tiffany lamps, and the spectacular carved ivory altarpiece.
He saw no agony of Christ pictured here, only a serene crucifixion and can-do-looking saints with golden spears. The memorial plaques on the wall amounted to a century’s worth of New York movers and shakers. The communion rail shone like a piece of yacht’s brass, and he could imagine the city’s country-club set tinkling delicately against each other as they knelt for noonday wafers.
Dick Braidy’s funeral had drawn a respectable turnout, filling the front twenty pews. Most of the women wore diamonds. Many were bare-shouldered. Most had their hair done in airy, expensive-looking arrangements. Their men wore tailored dark suits. There was a lot of looking around in the pews to see who else was there; kisses were blown, hand signals exchanged, fingers waved.
A sound behind him drew Cardoso’s eyes toward the nave.
A young man with dark, cropped hair, heavy-set and tanned, had darted into the church. The right age. The right build. Eyes sunken in, lazy-lidded, dark-looking. Possibly Hispanic.
He was dressed carefully, but the clothes were not expensive: a gray tweed jacket that was the wrong weight for today’s heat wave, and so large on him that it had to be second-hand; gray cotton trousers that looked pressed for the occasion; no boom box.
He hung back a moment at the rear of the nave. Hesitation flickered over him. He came noiselessly down the side aisle. He passed within a foot of where Cardozo was sitting. He was wearing white Adidas jogging shoes. His affable, slightly sad smile sloped down at the corners.
Cardozo smelled something streetwise, almost a put-on.
The young man genuflected, crossed himself with simple Catholic gravity, and stepped into an empty pew.
Cardozo leaned down toward the little Japanese mike fastened like a tie clip to his necktie. “Can you hear me, Ellie?”
Her voice came out of the tiny transistor plugged into his left ear. “I’m hearing you.”
She was seated across the church, eight aisles back, and he could see her pale key-lime suit motionless through all the shifting, glittering socialites and celebrities.
“You see the guy alone in the front pew, my section?”
“I see him.”
“… I panicked,” Commissioner Braidy’s amplified voice was saying, p’s exploding in the vaulted space like cherry bombs. “Because when my brother said, Let’s do something, he usually meant dancing the hustle with Jackie O or hunting down New York’s best pizza with Greta Garbo. I said, ‘Dick, I’m not dressed, I’m not in any condition to do anything.’ And my big brother said, ‘That’s when you’ve got to be good to yourself. You’ll hear me honk three times—just come as you are.’”
“He’s got to come down my aisle,” Cardozo said, “or the center, or yours.”
“Okay,” Ellie’s voice answered in his ear. “I’ll cover this aisle.”
“Greg,” Cardozo said, “do you see him?”
“I see him,” Monteleone’s voice said.
“Cover the center aisle, okay?”
“The horn honked three times,” Commissioner Braidy was saying. “I threw on a windbreaker and went downstairs—and there was the biggest, whitest, stretchiest limo you ever did see, with a uniformed chauffeur, and inside was my big brother, in blue jeans and a parka, with his arms spread and tears running down his big Irish mug—and I just fell into those arms, and we had the cry of our lives. And then Dick said to the driver, ‘Driver, take us to the nearest David’s Cookies.’”
Bridget Braidy looked out over the congregation.
“Now that is style. That is class. And I’ll tell you one thing: When my big brother and I left that David’s cookie shop three hours later, there was not a single macadamia chocolate chip remaining on the premises.”
Commissioner Braidy paused. She mugged cookie munching. There was laughter. A few hands applauded. The sound of the traffic on Park Avenue seemed remote, not just in space but in time, like remembered thunder.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Bridget Braidy said. “This city has seen too much crime. This city has seen too many of its decent citizens terrorized and murdered. As God and this gathering are my witnesses, I make this vow to my murdered brother: Your death and Nita Kohler’s, and the deaths of the thousands of New Yorkers sacrificed this and every year to the tide of random violence—your deaths shall not have been in vain. If I have to turn in my commissioner’s badge and run for mayor myself, I will fight, to the last fiber and breath of my body, the evil that has stolen you from us. So help me God.”
She blew a kiss over the heads of the congregation.
“Good-bye, Dick. Earth was better for your being here, and heaven’s better now that you’re there where you belong. We love you. We miss you. God bless you—put in a good word for us with You Know Who. And how about saving us just a drop of—what do you call that stuff they drink up there?—Roederer Cristal!”
Twenty minutes later the priest blessed the departed and blessed the congregation. The pallbearers wheeled the coffin back down the aisle. Two doors slammed like cannon shots and the organ broke into a roof-ripping postlude—Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On.”
The congregation rose and spilled into the aisles. Expensive pumps clicked on marble floors like tap-dancing castanets. Voices broke into an almost deafening chatter. The center aisle jammed with little kiss-kiss groups.
The young man stayed seated in the front pew. He looked around at the congregation. It seemed to Cardozo that there was a curl of disdain to his smile, as though he had a secret inside him that he was not allowing to slip out.
When the young man rose, Cardozo rose.
“If ever you needed proof that Dick Braidy was a somebody,” Cardozo heard Kristi Blackwell say, “look at the turnout.”
“The Nixons are here,” her companion said. “And Madonna. And Jackie. Is Jackie going to Jeu de Paume?”
The young man walked forward to the front pew. He crossed in front of the communion rail. He started up the middle aisle and immediately met a traffic jam of glitterati.
For the next three minutes Cardozo thought he’d lost the young man, and then Ellie’s voice hissed in his left ear, “By the baptismal font.”
“Where the hell’s the baptismal font?” Cardozo growled into his tie clip.
“Southeast corner of church.”
Cardozo peered over an ocean of bobbing coiffed heads, of couture dresses and dark suits. He saw the carved marble font, and he saw Siegel and Monteleone and the young man in the tweed jacket standing between them. They hadn’t exactly put him under restraint, but his shocked and disbelieving face said he didn’t feel exactly free to go either.
“Stay right there,” Cardozo told the mike. “Stay visible.”
He had to squeeze around a woman in slinky gray who was saying to a man in a blue blazer, “I don’t know if Jeu de Paume’s going to be worth it. Are you bothering to go?”
Three feet away Leigh Baker stood talking with her friend Tori Sandberg. They were the only women in the church who were wearing black. Cardozo reached out and touched Leigh’s shoulder. She looked over at him. He saw surprise in her face, and something else, quickly controlled and covered over.
“Ladies, I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But can you see the baptismal font? The young man in a gray tweed jacket?”
Leigh Baker turned toward the font. “The oversized gray herringbone tweed jacket with elbow patches?”
“Is that the male Hispanic you saw in the boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s?”
For an instant she seemed utterly baffled, and then she shook her head. “That’s Juanito. He was Dick’s gardener. He took care of the terrace plants. He wasn’t the man in Marsh and Bonner’s.”
“Absolutely not,” Tori Sandberg said.
“Sorry to bother you.” Cardozo spoke to the mike. “Wrong man. Let him go.”
“ONE NEW LETTER SOURCE in note five,” Lou Stein was saying. “U.S. News and World Report.”
“Which issue?”
Lou’s sigh traveled across the line. “April second, what else.”
“I wish I could figure out why he loves magazines that went on sale April second.”
“You got it wrong, Vince. They’re dated April second. They went on sale March twenty-sixth. April second was the day the April ninth issues came out.”
Cardozo frowned. He flipped his calendar to the week of March twenty-sixth. The only event of interest listed by the publisher was the new moon, a black circle in the blank space for Monday. He tapped his ballpoint against the calendar’s spiral binding. Something nagged at him. It was like hearing a name that almost rang a bell but not quite. “Why does March twenty-sixth seem more interesting to me than April second?”
“It’s farther from April Fool’s. And it’s something new to think about.”
“Thanks, Lou.”
The instant Cardozo laid the receiver down the phone rang. What was it about his telephone? he wondered. For years it had been content to ring with a low-key obnoxious buzz. But today there was a distinctly new ugliness in the ring—an ear-flaying overtone that he could swear he’d never detected before.
He caught the phone before it could inflict a second jangle on his nerves. “Cardozo.”
“Lieutenant, it’s Rad Rheinhardt at the Trib. We’ve got another letter from Society Sam. I’m sending it up by messenger.”
DRIZZLE WAS DROPPING from a sullen, leaden sky. The wet pavement shimmered, and the drizzle turned everything to distance. Cardozo and Malloy were sitting in the Honda, illegally parked south of the West Seventy-second Street entrance to Central Park. They were watching the bench on the pedestrian path just inside the park wall.
A solitary figure sat on the bench: a woman, wearing a big-shouldered green jacket, her long blond hair done up in a fat blond bun. She was holding a pink Mylar umbrella. One silver high-heeled boot tapped restlessly against the paved path.
Rick Martinez was seven minutes late for his two o’clock date.
Malloy stared through the spattered windshield up the avenue, at art-deco condos layered like birthday cakes. He raised a paper cup of deli coffee to his mouth. He had dark crescents under his eyes like a linebacker’s glare smudges. “Where the hell is this fucker? Can’t he even keep an appointment?”
It was ninety seconds later that Cardozo saw a young man in a red T-shirt step out of the Seventy-second Street subway exit, across the avenue. He stood a moment in the drizzle, waiting for the traffic light. He crossed the avenue and turned south. He passed within ten feet of the Honda, close enough for Cardozo to recognize the face in the Bodies-PLUS photo.
“It’s Martinez.” Malloy crunched the empty coffee cup and stuffed it halfway into the ashtray.
“With his head shaved.” Cardozo lifted the radio mike. “Attention all units, suspect Martinez wearing red T-shirt, approaching pedestrian path.”
Martinez reached the path and turned. He walked past the bench, slowed, turned around. He stared at the woman sitting there in the green jacket.
“Think the woman’s his contact?” Malloy said.
Cardozo frowned. “The man on the phone said meet me, not her.”
Martinez doubled back to the bench. He sat half a bench-length from the woman. She glanced at him and reangled her Mylar umbrella to ward off eye contact.
Cardozo spoke into the mike. “Martinez is seated on bench.”
“Either these two are playing it supercool,” Malloy said, “or they really don’t know each other.”
“I get the feeling she doesn’t intend to know him,” Cardozo said.
After a moment Martinez glanced again at the woman.
“He’s wondering if she’s the contact,” Malloy said.
Martinez looked at his watch. He leaned toward the woman and said something. The umbrella shifted and the woman gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding sneer.
“And now he knows she’s not,” Cardozo said.
“His contact’s almost fifteen minutes late.”
“Give him another five minutes.”
Three minutes passed and Martinez rose from the bench. He stood a moment in indecision, and then he began ambling down the path into the park.
Cardozo grabbed the radio mike. “Martinez is heading east on pedestrian path toward Sheep Meadow.”
Malloy slid out of the car and started after Martinez. At the sound of the car door slamming, Martinez glanced back. He saw Malloy and broke into a run.
Cardozo shoved the mike back into its dashboard bracket. His feet slammed the floor, and he was up and out of the car in one thrust.
Both Martinez and Malloy had vanished. He sprinted up the path. It branched two ways.
He checked right, checked left. His eye caught Martinez’s red T-shirt flashing through the foliage to the right.
The next sixty seconds seemed to happen on the other side of a plate-glass wall.
A rising hill brought Cardozo to an open meadow.
Martinez was forty yards ahead, running.
Parallel to the path, in the bushes, something was moving and it was Malloy, leaping out and punching the air. Compacted steel flashed in his hand.
It was as though Malloy had lost control of his body, as though it had become something that was not an overweight middle-aged cop’s body.
In a crackle of raw acceleration Martinez became a smudge of speed cutting through misty drizzle.
It amazed Cardozo that Malloy had the swiftness. He was actually closing the gap between himself and the red T-shirt.
And then Cardozo heard the gunshot and the warning: “Stop! Police!”
No, that wasn’t right. My mind reversed it, Cardozo thought. First the warning. Then the gunshot.
Cardozo broke into a run.
Time became a liquid rush, and Malloy and Martinez became two particles caught in the whirlpool. Martinez was darting in and around the bushes, but there was a drag on his movements. Swerving around a tree, he went into a skid and then he was down, kneecaps kissing mud.
Malloy approached, taut and ready, service revolver drawn.
“Police!” Cardozo could hear him shouting. “Police! Surrender your weapon! Give yourself up!”
Something flashed between them, and Cardozo heard the second shot.
Martinez was on the ground, writhing, kicking, and then he was still.
When Cardozo reached them, Malloy was still shouting at Martinez to drop his gun. Cardozo raised a hand, palm out, signaling Malloy to holster the gun, back off.
Martinez was lying in a fetal curl on his side. His arms were locked tight around the part of his chest that was coming to pieces. He was gasping, pulling in air through a gaping mouth. He had eyes the color of wind, and he had that look that meant nerves and brain cells were going off-line fast.
Cardozo crouched down on one knee. He spoke gently: “Martinez—can you hear me?”
Martinez’s sweat had activated his cologne. A dense sweetness like church incense rose from his body.
“Me entiendes?” Cardozo said.
For one brief instant Martinez’s eyes looked directly into Cardozo’s. His throat was going like a scared pigeon’s, pushing out air.
Cardozo leaned his ear down. He could make out whispered, disconnected syllables.
“Maria … mother … Dios … ruega … sotros …”
Either Martinez was trying to squeeze in a quick Hail Mary before he slipped across, or he was sinking into bilingual delirium.
Across the meadow an ambulance careened down the jogging path. Even at this distance Cardozo could hear the siren blipping get-out-of-my-way screeches.
Cop cars were cutting across the turf.
Martinez was very quiet now. His eyes had a dreamily surrendering gaze. Cardozo sensed he was in bad shape, getting rapidly worse.
Two cop cars arrived and then the ambulance. Three paramedics lifted Martinez onto a stretcher.
“Whose gun?”
A cop was standing there holding a ballpoint pen through the trigger guard of a small black revolver.
“Where’d you find that?” Cardozo said.
The cop kicked dead leaves. “Right here.”
Malloy’s face was shocked, pale. He nodded toward the ambulance. “It was his.”
RICK MARTINEZ DIED at three-ten that afternoon in the Emergency Room of Saint Agnes Hospital.
A half hour later, when Cardozo returned to the precinct, there was hardly any activity in the detective squad room. Malloy sat at one of the old-junk typewriters, hunting for the keys to fill in a departmental report. He looked exhausted.
Captain Lawrence Zawac from Internal Affairs was standing beside him, reading over his shoulder.
“What’s happening?” Cardozo said.
“Sergeant Malloy is telling me about the shooting,” Zawac said.
Cardozo noticed that the typing on the form already ran down half the page.
“What are you telling him, Carl?”
“Just how it happened.” Malloy had the face of a man saying hello to mortality a few decades earlier than he’d ever expected.
Cardozo glanced at Zawac. “Is this official?”
Zawac had a smug, secret look. “Call it friendly.”
“Maybe you should talk to a lawyer,” Cardozo told Malloy.
“We’ve discussed that option,” Zawac said, “and Sergeant Malloy has decided to go another route.”
The scar that cut Zawac’s upper lip in two seemed far redder than Cardozo remembered. It showed clearly through his dark mustache. His eyes were gloating.
“Another route?” Cardozo said. “Well, whatever you’re doing, make it fast. We have to get down to Martinez’s apartment.”
“Vince,” Malloy said, “I have to—” He stopped and made a new start. “I’m going to turn over my gun till the hearing.”
“Okay, you’ll turn over your gun.” Cardozo was sure Zawac had fed Malloy some kind of IAD hype, and Malloy had bought into it. But he shrugged as though it didn’t matter. His object now was simply to get Malloy alone. “Where does the rule book say you need a gun to search an apartment anyway?”
Zawac shifted weight. The change of position had the effect of placing him between Cardozo and Malloy.
“Sergeant Malloy will be staying at the precinct,” Zawac said.
Cardozo sensed something dangerous now: Malloy was smiling, but the smile was crazed and wrong. Cardozo read panic in the eyes, the kind where the panicky person was literally blocking out the signals reality was sending him.
“Sorry,” Cardozo said, “Malloy doesn’t sit at the precinct on my task force’s time.”
“Sergeant Malloy is off the task force.”
“I take orders from the top—not from left field.” Cardozo held out a hand. “Show me the paper on this.”
“If you want to see paper, Lieutenant, I guarantee I can arrange for you to see paper.”
“Show me the order, or Malloy’s walking out this door with me.”
Silence, eye contact.
“Carl, come on,” Cardozo said.
Malloy just sat there. There was something missing in him. He looked hurt, beaten, not quite understanding what life was suddenly about or where the next blow was going to fall from.
Malloy said, “Vince—let it go.”
“Look, Carl, even if IAD has persuaded you to give up your rights, they haven’t persuaded me to give up mine. I’m ordering you back to work.”
“I’m resigning from the task force.”
“What the hell are you doing, Carl? If you play scapegoat now, the hyenas are going to go for you. They’re already smelling dead meat.”
“I’ve thought it over and this is the way I have to handle it, Vince. I’m sorry.”
“SOMETHING THE MATTER with the ice cream?” Malloy asked.
Laurie Bonasera shook her head.
They were at a table by the back wall of the ice-cream shop. She was eating peach, and just for a change, he was trying boysenberry. He could feel that something was off between them.
“What’s the matter, then?” he said.
She shrugged. “I guess I just don’t feel comfortable being watched.”
“Who’s watching you?”
She was wearing a yellow-and-white-striped cotton dress, and her hair was curling around her face. “It’s you they’ve got their eye on.”
“Who’s they?”
“Everyone.”
“Well, everyone’s not here. You’re oversensitive.”
“I have to trust my instincts. They’re all I’ve got.”
“Did your instincts tell you not to talk to me? Because you haven’t spoken to me in two days. You haven’t even looked at me.”
“I’m looking at you now.”
“Like you wish I wasn’t here.”
“Like I wish I wasn’t here.”
He lost a heartbeat. “What are you telling me? You don’t want to be with me?”
She picked at her peach ice cream as though she’d lost an earring in it. “How do you expect me to feel? Carl, you killed a man.”
A moment slipped mutely by. He felt slack and empty. “I killed a killer in the line of duty, and unless you’re working for Internal Affairs, don’t you think that subject can maybe wait?”
“It happens to be on my mind.”
“He killed six people, and now he’s not going to kill another six. It’s done and I did it and I’m not sorry. What’s the matter, you want me to be sorry?”
She was watching him with firm-jawed thoughtfulness. “No, that’s not what I want.”
“Because I’m a decent guy. I am.”
“I know you’re a decent guy.”
Carl Malloy had always had the belief that someday he would meet someone who would make his life okay. When he met his wife, he’d thought it was going to happen, but his life had never become okay with Delia. Since then he’d believed that one day he’d meet someone else who’d make his life okay.
He stared at Laurie Bonasera and he had a flash, a running sensation his last chance was slipping away from him. “Then when can I see you again?”
It was as though breathing was an effort for her. “We have to be careful till you’re cleared.”
He felt his dreams getting snipped smaller and smaller. “Cleared—what am I, some kind of criminal?”
“You’re married,” she said. “I’m married.”
“We’re working for the New York Police Department, not the archdiocese.”
“They’re still going to look into every detail of your life. We don’t need to make the situation worse.”
He could feel a darkness settling over him like a layer of ash from a nuclear accident. “Fuck situations. I’m not a marriage license, I’m not a gold shield—I’m a person and I need to know that I exist, that I still matter to someone.”
She took a long, careful look at him. “You are a master manipulator.”
“Where did that come from? What do I say to that, thank you?”
“The less said the better. This conversation is running downhill.” She got up from the table. “Let’s get out of here.”
He reached out and took her wrist. She looked down at his hand and he let go.
“I’m sorry.” He felt horribly apart from her. “I love you.” He waited for something magical. He waited for her to say she loved him too.
After a moment she sighed. “I know.”
He followed her to the front of the shop. He didn’t know how long he could go on feeling this sense of waste about what was happening in his life.
The old Korean woman who owned the business was standing guard behind the cash register. She recognized Malloy, and when he put down a five-dollar bill, she smiled, shook her head emphatically, and pushed the money back to him.
Malloy thanked her and tucked the five back into his wallet.
Laurie’s jaw dropped. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s just ice cream,” Malloy said.
“Just ice cream is what practically got you busted from the force. You can’t afford to cut corners anymore.”
Everything that had built up inside him chose that moment to explode. “Get off my ass!” he cried.
He could see she had to clamp down to keep from shouting right back at him.
“I don’t believe this,” she said. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe me.”
She slapped down five singles for the ice cream.
She turned to face him, and he could feel her hating him.
“My fucking treat, okay, Malloy? Okay, just this once? The bimbo pays?”
She pushed through the door and turned north on Lexington, and she was gone.