Cardozo began going over the pages.
He could feel there was some kind of connection he wasn’t tuning in on. He took the pages home that night and puzzled over them.
At 3 A.M. he put his head down on the sofa cushion.
Thirty seconds later he saw Claude Loring’s gaunt face, his contemptuous eyes, his lips hurling out words. Cardozo listened to those words.
What the fuck do you want, bitch?
He replayed them, catching the exact intonation. It came to him. That stress on the word you.
Charley Brackner was in his cubicle, fresh from a night’s sleep, chewing on a prune Danish.
Cardozo dumped the ninety pages into Charley’s wastebasket. “Forget this shit. Loring knows her. All we need to know is how Loring connects with Babe Devens.”
Charley made an expert sort of face. “Everybody in the world networks to somebody somehow.” He typed instructions into the computer.
SEARCH LINK LORING : B DEVENS
A moment later the screen flashed back
SEARCHING
.
After sixty seconds of the flashing word, a column began running down the screen.
C LORING
BEAUX ARTS TOWER
BILLI VON KLEIST
MONSERAT GALLERY
DUNCAN CANFIELD
ASH CANFIELD
B DEVENS
“Print that,” Cardozo said.
Charley gave the print command and a page clattered out of the printer.
Cardozo detached the page. “Thanks, Charley.”
“Vince.”
Charley’s tone stopped him. A new column was running down the computer screen.
C LORING
BEAUX ARTS TOWER
BILLI VON KLEIST
MONSERAT GALLERY
D FORBES-STEINMAN
SCOTT DEVENS
B DEVENS
Cardozo stared at the screen. “Does Maisie read The Enquirer?”
“Huh?”
“Could you get that machine to amplify the link between Forbes-Steinman and Devens? Does it know that they’re shacked up, or is there something more?”
Charley typed in
SEARCH LINK D FORBES-STEINMAN: SCOTT DEVENS
The screen flashed
SEARCHING
After almost a minute new material began scrolling up the screen.
MIRANDELLA, SUNNY, HOMICIDE
EVIDENCE AT CRIME SCENE
SUBJECT’S PURSE
CONTENTS
HELENA RUBINSTEIN BLUSH PINK LIPSTICK
TAMPAX TAMPONS THREE
KEYS FIVE
FOUREX CONDOMS EIGHT
ESTEE LAUDER COLOGNE
EIGHTY-SEVEN DOLLARS THIRTY-TWO CENTS
CHARGE CARDS
MASTERCARD 5500-7843-2316 SANDRA MIRANDELLA
VISA CARD 5647-5418-8953 JOY FEINSTEIN
BLOOMINGDALES CHARGE 6532-098
D FORBES-STEINMAN/SCOTT DEVENS
“Stop there,” Cardozo said.
Sunny Mirandella was the name of a TWA stewardess who had lived in Dr. Flora Vogelsang’s neighborhood. She’d been found with a slashed throat, and she was Monteleone’s case. So far there’d been no collar, and after three weeks with no productive leads, Sunny had been moved to a back burner.
Cardozo called Greg Monteleone into the computer room and nodded toward the flashing cursor on the screen. “What does that mean?”
“Sunny used stolen charge cards.”
“Why are there two names on the Bloomingdale’s card?”
“It’s a joint charge shared by Steinman and Devens. There are two cards, one name on each. Sunny was using Steinman’s card.”
“And the two names were still on the account? How recently were those cards issued?”
Monteleone shrugged. “They’re good through this year.”
“Did you follow up on Steinman’s card?”
“Course I followed up on it. Steinman lost it at a party.”
“Pull the sheet on it.”
Monteleone got the sheet. “A dinner at Tina Vanderbilt’s last April twelfth. Sixty guests. Doria Forbes-Steinman went to the powder room and she left her purse on the bed. That’s when she thinks the card was stolen.”
“She thinks. She thinks.” Cardozo thought. “Tina Vanderbilt? Charity bashes, fund-raisers, opera galas?”
“Yeah. She has a triplex on Park.”
“So that would have been a formal dinner. The women wear gowns and the purses are little things, gold pony hide from Saks, you can fit the house keys and two hits of coke in. Why would Forbes-Steinman take her Bloomie’s charge card to a sit-down dinner? That’s a waste of purse space.”
“I never claimed to understand women.”
“Get me a photo of Sunny Mirandella. A nice normal presentable photo.”
“We don’t have any nice normal presentable photos of Sunny Mirandella. They all look like s.m. centerfold.”
“Then get me her driver’s license.”
Doria Forbes-Steinman looked carefully at each photo: Jodie Downs, Sunny Mirandella, Claude Loring.
She was sitting on the plush gray sofa in front of the three-panel comic-strip blowup of a cathedral. Cardozo could see beyond her into the hallway, where the Nuku Kushima black leather mask was still on display on its pedestal.
“Just a minute,” she said. “This man is familiar.”
Cardozo came back across the sunny room and looked down over her shoulder. She was holding the photo of Claude Loring.
“Where was it? … Down in SoHo last winter… He’s that friend of Lew Monserat’s. I saw them at the opening of the Schnabel exhibit at the Mary Boon Gallery.” She looked up at Cardozo. “But my Bloomingdale’s card wasn’t stolen at Mary’s. I bought a juicer with it the day after that opening.”
“You say this man is Monserat’s friend. Do you mean they were together often?”
“No, I mean they seemed to be lovers that night. Lew loves kinky trash. Always has.”
Cardozo’s mind went over the links. Loring and Monserat both played at the Inferno; Ted Morgenstern represented them both; and in Doria Forbes-Steinman’s opinion they’d had an affair. An affair didn’t seem likely: the clothescheck at the Inferno had said that Loring liked kids. But still, there was some kind of relationship between the two, some bond that made them a team. “Would you happen to have the date of that Schnabel opening?”
“It’s in my calendar.” Doria Forbes-Steinman got up from the sofa. “Just a moment.”
She left the room and returned.
“Here we are, Lieutenant. I wrote it all down for you.” She handed him the date, time and place, on a piece of stationery from the desk of Doria Forbes-Steinman.
“Mrs. Forbes-Steinman,” he said, “there are two names on that Bloomingdale’s charge account—yours and Scott Devens’s.”
She blinked and flinched back as if something menacing had flown near her eyes. “Is that a question?”
“May I talk with Mr. Devens?”
She folded her hands together and then unfolded them.
“Scottie’s not here at the moment. The easiest way to find him would be to go to the Teak Room at the Winslow around eleven tonight. He’s playing piano there.”
Mrs. Vanderbilt sat in a silk brocade chair, facing an antique writing desk. She did not rise, and she did not invite Cardozo to sit.
“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time for you,” he said.
“Of course not.” Mrs. Vanderbilt’s tone made it clear it was such an obviously bad time that to mention it merely compounded the annoyance. “How may I help you, Leftenant?”
“You gave a dinner here—”
“I give many dinners here,” she cut in. She looked at least ninety. Her eyes were blue and sharp and lively. Her hair was white, and it had the striking elegance of a founding father’s peruke.
“You gave a dinner last April twelfth.”
“That’s true.” She was dressed in pale pink. She gave the impression of being short, no more than five feet tall, and fashion-model thin, weighing at most ninety-five pounds. “Was a crime committed at my dinner?”
He smiled. “I doubt a crime has been committed at any of your dinners, ma’am.”
She didn’t smile. “That relieves me.”