Friday, June 21
THERE WAS A KNOCK and Cardozo looked up.
“Zip code eleven-four-two-one is Ninety-seventh Street, Jamaica, Queens.” One tanned arm outstretched, Ellie Siegel was leaning against the doorframe.
He lobbed a smile up at her. “Tell me more.”
She came in and sat down in the empty chair. “The worst neighborhood Sam ever picked to mail a letter from. If you’re not packing heat, you’re underdressed.”
“Then you were dressed right.”
“Barely. All I had was a dinky service revolver. The natives are carrying Uzis.”
She laid the Xerox of Society Sam’s sixth note down on the desk. Jumbled typefaces formed seven more or less horizontal, more or less parallel lines across the page.
CAN THE CUT JUDGE THE CUTTER
PAPER THE SCISSORS
I WILL NOT JOIN YOUR MAKE BELIEVE
WEEP NO TEARS FOR CUT UP CUT OUTS
WHEN WILL DOLLS LEARN
PAPER YOU WERE TO PAPER YOU RETURN
KISSES, SOCIETY SAM
“When did he mail it?” Cardozo said.
“With a P.M. 18 June postmark the latest it could have been mailed was noon Tuesday—but the postmaster says pickups have been running late. Gangs have been shooting the trucks with rock salt.”
“Rock salt?”
Ellie nodded. “He says it could have been mailed before the weekend.”
Cardozo handed her a Xerox of the note Society Sam had sent after Dizey’s death. “Does it seem to you Dizey’s note got reversed with Dick Braidy’s?”
“Because Dizey’s says Dick be quick and Braidy’s talks about paper and paper dolls?” Ellie’s expression said she wasn’t buying it. “Braidy was a journalist too, paper could refer to him.”
“But Dizey’s name wasn’t Dick.” Cardozo held a pencil chop-stick-fashion between two fingers and rat-a-tatted on the edge of the desk. “Sam’s pattern was to leave a society column published the morning before a killing. There was no clipping when Dizey went off the roof.”
“No candle either,” Ellie reminded him.
He nodded. “But this was the column Dizey published that morning.” He handed her a newspaper clipping. The photograph showed an ex-cleaning woman and now-socialite by the name of Olga Ford. Her hair had been clipped like a hedge imitating an animal. A silver net kept it from running away. Her Slovenian eyes seemed to gloat, I am the ladder to greatness.
Ellie read aloud, her voice carefully suspending all judgment. “Tonight Mrs. Gavin Hay (Olga to you, kid) Ford, the newest power widow around town, is hostessing an event at her East 78th Street duplex. Friends of Oona Aldrich, whose memorial is being held tonight, are understandably in no mood to go. Mrs. F. has warned those who accepted the ill-timed invite to be prepared for a mystery guest. The event is sure to shake up society’s notion of acceptable chic, because megabucks like Olga’s spell megaswank, and Olga is not about to let anyone forget it.”
“According to his engagement calendar,” Cardozo said, “Dick Braidy went to that dinner. According to last Friday’s New York Post, the First Lady was also there.”
“Got it,” Ellie said. “The mystery guest. How much do you suppose Olga had to contribute to the President’s reelection committee?”
“Only her accountant and the IRS have the answer to that.” Cardozo took a half rotation in his swivel chair. “According to Mrs. Ford’s stepdaughter, Rick Martinez, a.k.a. Society Sam, delivered a bunch of flowers to that party with this note.” Cardozo laid the little note on the desk.
Ellie scowled. “Love, Bob De Niro?”
“The girl says it was meant to be a goof on the stepmother. But I wonder if it wasn’t Rick’s way of getting into the party. Because here’s what I’m thinking: Rick, alias Sam, was aiming for Braidy the night Dizey died. But Braidy was at a dinner party where the surprise guest turned out to be the First Lady; Surprise guest meant surprise security. Sam’s bouquet got through the security, but Sam couldn’t. He missed his hit.”
“If Sam was at Olga’s, who killed Dizey?”
“No one. Dizey was on the still-to-be-hit list, but she died ahead of time—and accidentally.”
“Then why did Sam mail the wrong note?”
Cardozo sat listening to the faint chug-a-lug of the air conditioner. “You know something, Ellie? I haven’t got the answer to that one.”
“THE BLUE CROSS and the Medicaid card,” Lou Stein said, “are genuine. The driver’s license is a fake, but it’s an excellent fake.”
Documents and personal possessions had been spread out across Lou’s worktable. Except for the Darby knife, Cardozo had recovered them all from Rick Martinez’s apartment yesterday after the shooting. An Emergency Room nurse had found the Darby strapped to the left shin of Rick Martinez’s corpse.
“The passports are genuine,” Lou Stein said.
Cardozo opened the United States passport. “Has the printing on the bearer page been tampered with?”
“No. The bearer page is genuine. So once upon a time there was a real Richard Martinez, American citizen, born March 8, 1951, in New York. And this was his passport, issued April 18, 1986, in New York.”
“But the Richard Martinez in that photo,” Cardozo said, “looks ten, fifteen years younger than anyone born in 1951.”
“The very point I was about to make.” Lou Stein took the passport and turned to the bearer’s photo. “This page has been subjected to at least four laminations. This isn’t the original photo.”
“Is the bearer signature the original?”
The signature hasn’t been tampered with—but the signature page is younger than the passport.” Lou Stein flipped through seventeen pages of U.S. and Salvadorean immigration stamps. “My guess is, every time a new Richard Martinez was created, they took out the old signature page and stitched in a fresh one.”
Cardozo picked up the Colombian passport and opened it to the bearer page. The passport had been issued three years ago in Medellin to Manuel Gomez Ybarra. The photo of Gomez Ybarra in the Colombian passport was the same as the photo of Richard Martinez in the American—exactly the same: same young face, same young smile showing the same crooked incisor, same shirt with the same jauntily unbuttoned collar.
According to the information in the passport, Manuel had been born in Medellin in 1970. Cardozo had telephoned the Medellin police yesterday, and they had telexed the rap sheet that Cardozo now held in his left hand. Manuel had a record of juvenile theft and had spent his fourteenth year in reformatory; since then a charge of pimping had been brought and dropped. At present he was wanted for questioning in connection with three drug-related shootings and one suspected muerte de prueba.
Lou Stein squinted at the rap sheet. “What the hell’s a muerte de prueba?”
“It’s a service the freelance killers offer in Medellin. Before a client signs them on for a hit they kill any stranger the client points out.”
For an instant Lou Stein seemed to have to work to keep his mouth from falling open. “Why?”
“To prove they have the right stuff. Medellin drug barons want to be sure they hire the very best.” Cardozo flipped the passport back onto the table. His eye went now to the typewriter, a lightweight, forty-year-old Olivetti Lettera 22. The black-plastic spacer key was chipped, and the tan paint was peeling off the steel body. “And you’re sure that’s the Olivetti he used to type the envelopes?”
“Sure, we’re sure. Same way we’re sure that the Darby knife strapped to his leg was the murder weapon. The signatures match.”
A sheet of departmental letterhead had been rolled into the typewriter carriage, and Lou had typed Rad Rheinhardt’s address at the New York Trib. He pulled the sheet out and handed Cardozo a magnifying glass. “See the way the letter h loses a little of the lower left there? And the k in New York?”
Cardozo handed back the magnifying glass. “I believe you, Lou. Just tell me if you found any fingerprints, any particles?”
“None. He wore surgical gloves when he handled the machine—prepowdered. Some of the powder fell between the keys and inside the machine.”
Cardozo’s gaze traveled to the cardboard carton. Issues of Time and Newsweek and People and God only knew what other mass-circulation national weeklies had been crammed into it so tightly that the seams had begun to pull apart. “Any prints on the magazines?”
“No clear fingerprints, but we’ve got plenty of exact matches in the typefonts and in the scissoring. For instance, in the second letter, idiot quest—the whole phrase comes from this copy of Foreign Affairs.” Lou pulled a sober-looking gray magazine out of the carton. There was nothing on its cover but print.
Cardozo frowned. He had a sense that the magazine didn’t go with the others. “Can I look at that?” He opened the copy, flipped through it. Nothing was missing until page fifty-seven, where Lou had stuck a bookmark. A hole had been cut through the heavy paper, leaving a blank in the thicket of words:
the longstanding perception that 19th-century style imperialism is an
to which the vaster majority cannot acquiesce
“Who said idiot quest?” Cardozo asked.
“Henry Kissinger.”
“What was he talking about?”
“Hegemony.”
“Hard to imagine Rick Martinez or Manuel Gomez Ybarra bothering with articles about hegemony.”
“What can I tell you? People are funny. Our Creator made us that way.”
“I’ll tell you what’s even funnier. I was in Rick Martinez’s apartment twenty-two hours before we got him, and this typewriter and these magazines weren’t there. I was back in that apartment less than two hours after he died, and this typewriter and those magazines were sitting on the floor in the bedroom.”
Lou’s eyes were a pale clear blue like water under ice. “Maybe he took them out of the closet in between your visits. Did you search the closet the first time you went in?”
“Lou, we staked the apartment out. After I went in, Rick Martinez never came home.”
“Well, you got a mystery.”
Lou Stein’s finger went to the side of his nose and pushed his glasses higher. Possibly his glasses needed the push. But to Cardozo it seemed out of character—a guilty movement, a stalling movement, as though Lou was unhappy with what he was about to have to say.
“Here’s another mystery.” Lou tapped the magnifying glass against the glass of hairs that Cardozo had found on the bathroom sink. “These are pubic hairs. They matched the hairs we found in the victims’ mouths. But they aren’t Martinez’s.”
“Hold on.” A black hole had suddenly opened in Cardozo’s universe. “What the hell are you telling me?”
“The semen in every instance was his. The pubic hair in every instance was not.”
“Whose was it?”
“Donor X’s.”
“Help me, Lou. I’m having trouble putting this together.”
“It’s my fault, Vince. I was sloppy. From the very first victim on, I should have checked that the pubic hair and the semen came from the same donor. Frankly it never occurred to me they wouldn’t.”
“Different donors. How would that work?”
“It would be very hard for a donor to ejaculate semen in another person’s mouth without leaving some pubic hair. The fact that the perpetrator did not deposit pubic hair in his earlier victims indicates he didn’t deposit semen there either.”
“But we have his semen in all the victims and we know it’s his.”
“I’m using the word deposit in a technical sense. The semen and the pubic hairs both got into the mouth the same way—he put them there.”
“How?”
“Oral syringe and tweezers.”
Cardozo reached for an explanation. “Why?”
“Why is your province.”