“Pretty dress,” he said. “Silk?” He knew it wasn’t.
She knew he knew. “Taiwanese synthetic. It’s trick printed. You’re supposed to see roses in certain lights.”
“It works. I saw them.”
“Bloomingdale’s expected them to be a big seller last year. They weren’t. I got this for eighteen dollars off a gypsy rack on Thirty-second Street.”
It was interesting what people volunteered about themselves. She was telling him she wasn’t dumb about money the way her clients were. She was telling him not to lump her with them. He sensed that was important to her.
“Where do we go from here?” she said. “Dinner and a Broadway show? Your expense account or mine?”
“Not tonight. Tonight’s business.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make my day and buy one of the apartments in Beaux Arts Tower. I could swing a discount for you. You’d add a little safety to the building.”
He noted the controlled tapping of her finger on the ashtray. She had mastered her eyes so they didn’t skitter when he fixed his gaze on her.
“Only rajahs and Philippine dictators are buying into this co-op market.” He moved the hurricane lamp to the wall. He laid a nine-by-eleven manila envelope on the table. It was marked NYPD OFFICIAL BUSINESS PENALTY FOR PRIVATE USE $50.
Her glance went down to it.
“I took another look at six this afternoon,” he said. “How often are the unsold apartments cleaned?”
“I don’t know, but I can check.”
“Did six look cleaner to you than the others—except for the obvious difference?”
“Except for the obvious difference, no. It looked about the same.”
“Is the air conditioning left on in the unsold apartments?”
“Never. That wastes electricity. I come in a half hour before the showing and turn it on.”
“Did you turn on the air conditioning in six?”
“No. I didn’t have time to get to the building early.”
“But it was on.”
“Somebody must have—left it on.”
They both understood she was talking about the killer.
“How many times did you show six this last month?”
“Only yesterday.” She added, “Manhattan real estate’s soft these days.”
“Melissa, the card you gave me says you work for Beaux Arts Properties. Who’s Balthazar Properties? They’re putting up a coop on Lex and Fifty-third and they have the same phone number.”
“That’s us too.”
“Why do you have two different names?”
“We have eleven different names and we have eleven different companies. It’s not illegal. We limit the liability. If one building springs a leak or goes bankrupt it doesn’t endanger the other properties.”
“One company for each property?”
“I’m not Nat Chamberlain’s accountant. I know of eleven companies. I know of eleven properties in this city that are secured as of closing business today. I doubt that’s the whole picture.”
“You like working for Nat Chamberlain?”
“I wouldn’t work for an employer I didn’t like—any more than you would.”
“What makes you so sure I wouldn’t?”
“You’re not the type.”
“You seem to think you know how to size people up.”
“I’m not in your league, but I’m good.”
“What can you tell from a face?”
“Whether the sale will go through.”
“Take a look at the pictures in that envelope.”
He saw her hand wanting to hesitate, and he saw her not allowing it to. She opened the envelope and drew out the two glossies. Her eyes went from one to the other and narrowed.
“I take it this is the dead man?”
“You should have my job.”
She shifted the photos around on the table. The face in the photographs had a classic male beauty, and death gave it a patrician glaze, like a Roman head in a museum case.
“He’s handsome,” she said finally. “Too bad.”
“If he’d been ugly, it wouldn’t have been too bad?”
Her gaze came up to his. “If he’d been ugly he wouldn’t be dead.”
“You know something I don’t.”
“This isn’t how ugly people die. This is how ugly people kill.”
Cardozo sat back and sipped his Scotch.
She asked, “Was he as young as he looks?”
It interested Cardozo: people kept seeing everything but death: he was young, he was good-looking, that was what they saw. “The coroner thinks he was twenty-two, twenty-three.”
Her eyes didn’t tip anything, but the silence did. A silence that long meant she was having to think. She picked up a glossy again. “Christ. Why are they all dying so young?”
“Who do you mean, they?”
“People like him, young, dying …” She was in her mind and didn’t speak for a minute.
Someone young died, he realized. Someone close to her. “Tell me something, Melissa. You looked at those pictures and whatever you saw, you couldn’t make it go away. What was it?”
She let out a breath. “It’s hard to put into words. Sometimes you see somebody but you never realize you’re seeing them because they’re always in the same context.”
“Like who?”
“Like the man at the newsstand; the doorman you pass on the way to the subway; the woman who runs a bookstore and you wave as you go by. And then one day you see that person lifted out of their context—and you don’t know who they are or why you should even think you remember them. You stare at them and they stare at you and it’s almost hostile, like hey what are you doing off your shelf? My work isn’t like yours, it doesn’t call for a trained memory. I see a face, I do business with the face, if the deal falls through I forget the face. But with this one there’s something … I feel I could have seen him. But it didn’t have anything to do with work.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. There’s no feeling of time connected to it.”
“Where?”
“In an elevator.”
“What elevator?”
“I don’t remember. All I get is elevator.”
“Beaux Arts Tower?”
“No. Definitely not. Anything to do with our buildings I remember. But if I saw this man, I was off guard, not paying attention. It’s as though we looked at each other, smiled, and agreed not to say hello. You know the way it can be with strangers in the city. What I mean is, this was friendly but the distance was very, very controlled. I wish I could be more specific, but all I get is that kind of a question mark feeling.”
“Melissa, I want you to do something for me. Keep those photographs. Keep looking at them. Keep putting that face into every elevator you walk into. In one of those elevators you’re going to remember. And as soon as you do …” He reached into his wallet, thick with a wad of VISA carbons, and fished out one of his cards. “Those are my numbers. Work phone on top, home phone on the bottom. Call me. Day or night.” He smiled. “But not too late at night.”
An eye of light gleamed in the dark. Cardozo adjusted the lens of the projector. The image cleared, showing late afternoon New York sky, pale and cloudless. Hard bright sun splashed down onto the Fifty-third Street pavement, across the deco facade of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and the marble-faced lobby of the high rise next to it.
Cardozo was going over yesterday’s hidden-camera photos of Beaux Arts Tower.
On the wall of his cubicle, men and women hurried toward destinations he could not see. Examining their images, Cardozo was fascinated: reading the truth and the falsehood in the human face—that was the most challenging puzzle of all.
He pushed a control button and the carousel turned, dropping a new slide into the projector.
It was a photo of a fortyish man with thin sandy hair and a lightweight tan suit. The man was entering Beaux Arts Tower, but he was looking behind him.
The man’s skin was tinged with shadows: the bones in his face showed bluishly and gray speckled his hair. In his hand he held a briefcase. It looked expensive, genuine pigskin.