Deadly Rich by Edward Stewart

trial.”
    “Did you see Miss Baker here today with two companions?”
    “I noticed her.”
    “And did you show yourself?”
    “Look, I work in back, I don’t get paid to go out in the front room and dance.”
    “Did you let her see you?”
    Delancey stood there staring into the street at BMWs double-parked beside Porsches. “After I noticed she was here, I moved to the other end of the counter.”
    “Why?”
    For the briefest tick of an instant Jim Delancey’s eyebrows puckered and lifted. You’re playing with me , man , his eyes said. “So she wouldn’t see me when the kitchen door swung open again.”
    “But one of her companions did see you. And she made a scene in the restaurant.”
    Jim Delancey let his breath out in a sigh. “Look, I’m not a psychic. I don’t know what’s going through other people’s heads, and I don’t know why they decide to make scenes.
    “Were you acquainted with Oona Aldrich?”
    Delancey stared with tight lips, blank gaze. “I never met Oona Aldrich in my life.”
    “Do you recognize the name?”
    “After today I do.”
    “Are you aware that after she left the restaurant today Oona Aldrich was attacked and killed?”
    Cardozo waited for some reaction in the boy’s face. Shock. Faked shock. Something. What he saw instead was a carefully maintained neutrality, flat and cool.
    “I’m aware she was killed.” He could have been saying, I’m aware the sky is blue.
    “And how did you become aware of it?”
    “My mother phoned me.”
    “And how did your mother know?”
    “She works at the Ingrid Hansen Boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s.”
    “What’s your mother’s name?”
    “Xenia Delancey.”
    It struck Cardozo as a bizarre little coincidence. “Did you leave the premises anytime between one-thirty and two-thirty?”
    “Maybe I came out here to smoke a cigarette.”
    “Maybe you came out here to smoke a cigarette, or you came out and smoked a cigarette?”
    Jim Delancey drew in a deep breath that almost burst his blue button-down, open-necked shirt. “I came out here and had a smoke.”
    “When? For how long?”
    “I don’t keep a diary of this stuff. I took a five-minute break. Do you call that leaving the premises?”
    “I call it leaving the premises if no one saw you.”
    Delancey tossed a nod toward the kitchen door. “They saw me.”
    Cardozo questioned the Korean and the black man. They said Delancey had been in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, but they agreed he’d never been gone for longer than a cigarette break.
    The maître d’ backed up their story.
    Cardozo questioned the waiter. He said it had been a bitch of a lunch hour, much too hectic to allow him to notice who was in the kitchen when.
    “Anyone else who might be able to tell me anything?”
    “You could ask Larry—the other waiter.”
    “Where’s Larry?”
    “He went on vacation two hours ago, lucky bum—but he’ll be back working the early shift next Tuesday.”
    “Okay. Thanks for your time.” Cardozo shut his notebook and slid it back into his pocket. As he turned to go he caught Jim Delancey watching him expressionlessly from across the kitchen.
    “ I’M COUNTING ON YOU, VINCE .” Captain Tom Reilly’s gray eyes stared hopefully out of his heavy, pale face. It was late for Reilly to be at the precinct: by seven in the evening he was usually home in Queens, or out on the golf course. “There’s going to be a lot of shit from this mess in Marsh and Bonner’s. Stay on top of it.”
    “I’ll do my best, sir.”
    They sat facing each other across a glass-topped wood desk twice the size of Cardozo’s, in an air-conditioned office four times the size of his cubicle.
    “Organize yourself a four-man task force,” Reilly said. “Let me know in a day who you want.”
    “I can tell you now.”
    Reilly’s white eyebrows shot up, surprised, as if Cardozo had to be psychic to have already been thinking of a task force.
    But it was a fact of New York political life