“Could you tell me if Doria Forbes-Steinman was here that night?”
“She has been in my home.” Mrs. Vanderbilt’s mouth was pale: it was two pink lines lightly sketched across her strangely glowing face. “But you’ll want exact information.”
Mrs. Vanderbilt turned to her secretary, a woman of fifty-some years dressed in black.
“Endicott, will you fetch the guest list for April twelfth last?”
The room was large. The ceiling was high. The walls were shimmering with French impressionists. Endicott scurried to one of the three doors.
“Endicott.”
Endicott stopped.
Mrs. Vanderbilt fixed her gaze on Cardozo. “You’ll want the service list as well?”
“Please,” he said.
“Very well, Endicott.” Mrs. Vanderbilt gave a wave.
Endicott opened a door and a miniature dachshund burst into the room. With three high-pitched barks it jumped into the lap of New York City’s premiere hostess, tail wagging crazily.
“Have you ever seen such energy?” Mrs. Vanderbilt allowed the animal to lick the sapphire-cut diamond on her finger. “Isn’t Robespierre just ferocious? And darling? Sois sage, Robespierre! Sois sage pour maman!”
Cardozo had the impression Mrs. Vanderbilt spoke to her pet in French because she didn’t want the servants to understand. He couldn’t think what to say to her about her dog. He was suddenly haunted by a phantom that showed up now and then, the adolescent fear of using the wrong fork at a formal dinner.
Endicott returned.
Mrs. Vanderbilt deposited the dog on the floor. “Va t’amuser, Robespierre.”
There was something dubious and nasty in Endicott’s eyes as she handed Cardozo the lists.
He took a moment running his eye down the columns of famous names. “I see Scott Devens and Doria Forbes-Steinman were both here.”
Mrs. Vanderbilt’s face indicated displeasure. “Mrs. Forbes-Steinman was here. Her escort was taken ill. He sent his regrets at the last moment.”
Cardozo could see that Mrs. Vanderbilt was not in the habit of receiving or forgiving last-moment regrets.
“May I have copies of these?” Cardozo asked.
“Endicott, type copies for the leftenant.”
“Champagne, sir?”
Cardozo showed the waiter his shield. “Water for me. Send Mr. Devens whatever he’s drinking and tell him I’d like to talk when he’s finished his set.”
Cardozo looked around him. The decor was World War II movie palace Moorish. The tables were packed too close. Someone had paid off a fire inspector.
An amber spot picked out Scott Devens at the keyboard of a baby grand, dark and handsome in his tux, weaving a Bach fugue on “You Do Something to Me.”
The Winslow Hotel’s Teak Room was what publicists called an intimate space, a watering hole for people who liked to get mentioned in the gossip columns and didn’t mind dropping four hundred dollars for two bottles of champagne. Gabors hung out here, and Yugoslavian princes who didn’t speak Yugoslavian. Lighting was low, coming from candles on the tables and false windows with silhouetted minarets.
Devens kept smiling over his right shoulder at the front table. Cardozo dimly recognized some of Devens’s party: a TV stud actor, a strikingly bizarre six-foot black fashion model, an artist who silkscreened trash cans, the publisher of a porn magazine who’d survived three bombings by Moral Majority activists. He didn’t recognize the drunk woman in the gold brocade dress. She wasn’t Mrs. Forbes-Steinman and she couldn’t have had anything going for her but money. Her face turned determined and anxious every time Devens looked at another table.
There was a spattering of laid-back applause as Devens closed the lid on the keyboard. He brought his Scotch to Cardozo’s table.
“Very kind of you, Lieutenant—is it Lieutenant now?”
“I don’t forget old acquaintances, Mr. Devens.”
“Would you care to join my friends and me?”
“Let’s keep it simple and you join me.”
Devens sat.
“Mrs. Vanderbilt says you didn’t go to her dinner on April twelfth.”
Devens crossed one leg over the other. His black patent leather pumps had little bows that didn’t tie anything. He didn’t move a muscle in his face. “I was sick.”
“Mrs. Forbes-Steinman didn’t lose that charge card at Mrs. Vanderbilt’s. Sunny Mirandella stole it from the apartment.”
Devens drained his glass. “Who’s Sunny Mirandella?”
Cardozo placed three photographs on the table: Downs, Loring, and Sunny. “Why don’t you tell me.”
“You’ve got to be joking. There’s only one woman here.”
“Who said Sunny’s a woman?”
“I assumed …” Devens frowned and didn’t say what he assumed.
“You can do better than that, Scottie. Her murder was in the papers and you’re in her date book.”
Cardozo could see Devens calculating the odds that it was a bluff, and then he could see Devens realizing that by taking the time to calculate, by not coming in fast with a denial, he’d given himself away.
“What does that convict me of?”
“You tell me.”
Devens sat immobile for a moment. Suddenly he thrust out his arm and stopped a passing waiter. “Dewar’s on the rocks. Double. Anything for you, Lieutenant?”
Cardozo shook his head.
“Don’t you drink?”
“If I drink I smoke, and if I smoke I lose all self-respect.”
“You impress me, Lieutenant. After two trials and seven years, you’re still gunning for me. Why? How could you hate a man you don’t even know?”
For all his fine clothing, Devens gave off the scent of an all-American whiner, a man who was hustling whatever and whoever he could. Cardozo wondered what Babe had seen in this loser and then he wondered why he was bothering to wonder.
“I don’t need to know you,” Cardozo said. “All I need to know is what you did to that kid.”
“Sunny was not a kid and I didn’t do anything to her.”
“But once upon a time Cordelia Koenig was and you did.”
Devens looked at him suddenly, with panic, and then he slid away into a sort of blank. “Christ. I thought we were talking about Sunny.”
“We were.”
“I only saw Sunny that once. I don’t know anything about her except that she was sweet and maybe she was a thief and now she’s dead.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“I flew back on her flight from Chicago. We got to talking.”
“Where were you two weekends ago when she was killed?”
“I was in the Hamptons.”
“All weekend—Friday to Sunday?”
“All weekend—Friday to Tuesday.”
Nice weekends in the jet set. “Can you back that up?”
“Yes I can.”
“You’re going to have to. Who were you with?”
Devens gave him the names, and Cardozo wrote them down in his notebook.
“Are you going to spread it around about Sunny and me?” Devens asked.
“Does it matter?”
“It could ruin me.”
“Nothing’s ruined you yet. Waiter, can I have the check?” “This is on me,” Devens said quickly.
“No it’s not.” Not taking his eyes from Devens, Cardozo laid twenty dollars in the saucer.
39
“SOMETHING OR SOMEONE,” CARDOZO said, “links you to the Beaux Arts killing. I’m betting it’s someone you know but don’t know you know—some little memory that got erased when you were in coma. We’ve compared the names in your address book with our case files. There are a few matches, but they’re people we already know—socialites on the periphery. They don’t lead us anywhere new. What we need is someone who has your memories of seven years ago—intact.”
“Well, that obviously isn’t me,” Babe said.
They were on the flagstone terrace behind the town house. Cardozo was standing there just looking at her.
“Did you ever keep a diary?”
Babe smiled. “Never.”
“Can you think of any close friends, anyone who traveled in the same circles, someone who knows as much about you as you do about yourself—and who’d be willing to help?”