“Why?”
Jerzy mopped his face with a dime store handkerchief that needed to see some action in a washing machine. “A delivery was late.”
“Jerzy, I’m not a narc, so let’s get this out of the way. It was coke, right?”
Jerzy put his drink down. He spoke quietly. “She’s one of those chicks that live on the stuff. We were having a great time, and then she flipped.” He imitated the intonation of Debbi flipping. “Gotta see my dealer, gotta see my dealer.”
“Who’s her dealer?”
Jerzy sucked in breath, hollowing his cheeks. “Do you have to drag me into this? You’ve been watching the building, you know who runs the coke in that place. He promised her the stuff: she went down and he didn’t have it. She flipped out.”
The third time Cardozo buzzed, the decibel level of punk rock dropped to something approaching bearability. The door opened a crack. A young woman’s face stared at him above the safety chain. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders, curly in a way that suggested she had just bathed.
She looked curiously at his shield and then curiously at him.
“They said the police were coming up.”
“I am the police.”
“You’re not the black dude that was here before.”
“No, I’m not.”
“He was nice.”
“So am I.”
She worked her eyelashes. “What’s this about?”
“Just a few questions.”
“The place is kind of a mess—the maid’s been sick.”
“That’s okay, we can talk here in the hallway.”
“What the hell, you’re not my mother, you’re not going to criticize. Are you?”
“Promise.”
She stepped back from the door, her loosely tied bathrobe a swirl of Day-Glo ruffles.
The furniture in the livingroom was minimaclass="underline" beanbag chairs, bookcases, lonely objects in a dim cavern. Magazines and show business newspapers littered the floor.
She sank onto a beanbag chair and he sat on the other.
Her eyes fixed on him in uneasy expectancy.
“You had a fight with the doorman a week ago Saturday,” he said.
“That’s not true.”
“Come on, Debbi. We know why you’re wearing a false nail and we know how Hector got his face scratched. We have a witness.”
“Who?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“I have rights.”
“You don’t have those rights till I arrest you, Debbi. I’m asking you some questions hoping maybe I won’t have to do that. Just tell me what you and Hector were fighting about.”
Her eyes became pools of evasion. “Hector’s an s.o.b., that’s what we were fighting about.”
“Debbi, we know about Hector’s sideline.”
She got up from the beanbag. “No way I’m going to get into this conversation.”
“We know he’s dealing coke to you.”
The face was defiant now, eyes blazing. They were blue-gray eyes, a wild blazing blue-gray. “I’m calling my lawyer.”
A beige decorator phone lay on the floor at the end of a tangled plastic line. She didn’t make a move toward it.
“Debbi, we’re not interested in the coke. We’re interested in what happened in this building a week ago Saturday when a man in six was murdered.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Does the name Jodie Downs mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Inferno?”
“What inferno?”
She said it without a capital I. That satisfied him.
“Why did you attack Hector?”
She didn’t answer.
“Debbi, I don’t care about that coke, but some friends of mine would care a whole lot.”
Behind the bright glitter of her mascaraed eyes, he caught a sudden note of pleading.
“In my business, I have to stay alert. So sometimes I do a little coke.” She grinned nervously. “Sorry ’bout that.”
His mouth smiled back at her. “A lot of people do coke. Hell, cops have been caught doing it.”
“Tell me. It’s strictly personal use. I don’t deal.”
“We understand that, Debbi. We’re not accusing you of dealing.”
“I was expecting a gram of coke. I prepaid. With Hector you prepay. He said he’d have it at one thirty. All right, I was a little late picking it up—but that’s no reason for him to sell it to someone else.”
“Who’d he sell it to?”
“He said it was a real good customer who needed it real bad, needed it more than I did.”
“Do you have any idea who?”
“Look, I make it my business not to know other people’s business, you know what I mean?”
“Someone else in the building?”
“I absolutely don’t know that.”
Broome Street was dark as Cardozo stepped out of the car. A summer wind gusted along the pavement, swirling sheets of newspaper. Tiredness was all through him as he let himself into the apartment.
“You look beat.” Terri walked toward him, and the soft cone of the hallway light sculpted her out of the darkness. She had a springy step and her body radiated a comfort with itself.
His arms went around her, folding her to him.
“You had a call. A woman.” She handed him the piece of paper with the number.
He sensed her attention and looked at her sideways. Her oddly adult, humorous eyes met his and the flicker of a smile passed between them.
He went into the hallway and dialed. His reflection in the mirror told him he needed a shave and he’d been sweating into his shirt a few hours too long.
On the second ring Melissa Hatfield answered.
“Am I calling at a bad time?” he said.
“No, I’m watching TV.” Behind her cheerful voice something solemn was waiting to come out. “I checked into that address. Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue is leased to a company called Pegasus International, and Pegasus is renting the adjoining cellar space to the Inferno Fraternal Society.”
Holding the phone receiver in one hand, Cardozo stretched to pick up a pencil. He found a blank space on a junk mailing from the Museum of Modern Art. “Who’s Pegasus?”
“I think they’re a paper company. They’re leasing on a month-to-month basis, which is unusual for a building, to say the least.”
“Who are they leasing from?”
There was an odd pausing before she spoke again. “They’re leasing from us. Balthazar. We picked up the building about four months ago. They were already in occupancy. We’ve picked up a few odd lots in the meat-packing district. My boss, Nat Chamberlain’s, trying to put the lots together. So he leases month to month. When he gets enough property he’ll rip down and put up a condo.”
“Doesn’t Chamberlain care who he rents to?”
“The theory is in case there’s a stink he can claim he didn’t know who Pegasus was renting to. It’s like Mayor Koch or President Reagan not knowing their handpicked deputies are breaking all the laws. I could check the Pegasus incorporation papers, but it’ll be the usual New York labyrinth.”
“Don’t bother with that. You’ve told me enough. Thanks.”
“Vince, I enjoyed last night.”
“So did I.”
At one o’clock the following morning, Detectives Carl Malloy and Sam Richards entered the underground premises of the Inferno Recreational Club, signing in as Mr. Warren and his guest, Mr. White.
23
ON SUNDAY, THE EIGHTH of June, a little after 8:00 P.M., Babe Devens’s nurse wheeled her out of the side entrance of Doctors Hospital to a gray stretch limousine double-parked on 89th Street. The chauffeur came around to help the nurse lift Babe into the back seat. Lucia Vanderwalk watched, and something locked in the stern planes of her face.
The back of the car smelled of fresh roses. Babe and her father sat facing traffic, and Lucia and the nurse took seats facing Babe.
They took the FDR Drive south. Seven years had made their difference, but Babe was relieved to see that the city was still there. The same East River was awash with reddish light. The same jagged skyscrapers loomed dark purple against the fiery sky, pillars holding up the sunset.