Deadly Rich Read Online Free PDF Page B

rooms?”
    “No,” Leigh Baker said immediately.
    It took Tori Sandberg longer. She was staring out the window. “No,” she said finally.
    “Did you see anyone come out of the dressing rooms?”
    “No,” Leigh Baker said.
    Cardozo waited for Tori Sandberg to answer.
    “No,” she said.
    “Who else was in the boutique?”
    “There was Ms. Hansen.” Tori Sandberg gave the s in Ms. a careful z sound: no gliding over the distinction.
    “There was one salesperson,” Leigh Baker said. “There were two other customers—women—white women—and there was a black woman who came in a little after we did.”
    “And a Hispanic man came in with her,” Tori Sandberg said.
    “I wouldn’t say he was with her,” Leigh Baker said.
    “Why not?” Cardozo said.
    A good deal of Leigh Baker’s strength and will seemed to be concentrated on sustaining an even rate of breathing. “I couldn’t say exactly. I suppose because she left alone. And they weren’t really matched in any way. She had style and he—”
    “He was a street lout,” Tori Sandberg said. “But they were together. I’m sure of it.”
    Cardozo had a theory that evolution had provided one hour of grace between the experience of raw terror and the onset of shock. The purpose was to enable prehistoric hominids to slink back to the safety of their caves.
    For these women the hour was running out.
    “Okay,” he said, anxious to cover as much as possible before they became too tired, too confused to even want to think. “There was a black woman and a male Hispanic, and they may or may not have been together. Anyone else?”
    “No one else,” Leigh Baker said.
    “He had an enormous boom box.” Tori Sandberg’s teeth came down tightly on her lower lip, clenching back distaste. “He was playing rap music. Oona asked him to shut it off. He didn’t understand her. At least he did a good job of pretending not to. So she took one of his batteries into the dressing room with her.” Tori Sandberg had turned her head, looking directly at Cardozo with an odd intensity. “So he killed her.”
    “Excuse me.” Cardozo’s mind braked sharply. “You believe that the male Hispanic with the boom box killed Oona Aldrich over a boom-box battery ?”
    There was silence. Tori Sandberg’s lids sank with a moment’s weariness over her eyes.
    She probably accepted that anyone could be a victim. The newspapers had taught her that. And she was probably coming to accept that anyone could be a killer. The plot of any TV movie of the week demonstrated that.
    But in Cardozo’s experience it was still hard for most people to believe that there were individuals in this world who could drive a nail into a grandmother’s skull because she stayed on the phone too long, or force stones down a six-year-old’s throat for the hell of it, or slash a woman’s throat because she had challenged a guy’s macho by taking the battery from his boom box.
    “Yes,” Tori Sandberg said quietly, firmly. “She treated him like an inferior and an idiot. She was always doing that to waiters and strangers.”
    An interesting vibration was coming off her: Cardozo had a sense that she was enraged at the dead woman. Some part of her felt that Oona Aldrich had provoked her own murder.
    “She was out of control,” Tori Sandberg said. “She made a scene at Archibald’s over lunch, she made a scene outside the store, as we were going in, and she made the scene in the boutique.”
    Cardozo’s ballpoint moved quickly, trying to keep up, leaving practically illegible tracks over the notepad. “What kind of scene did she make at lunch?”
    Tori Sandberg’s eyelids flicked down, paler than the color of her face. “She was drinking a lot of champagne, and who knows what pills she was on. She started arguing with the waiter about the vegetable dip. So the poor waiter got her a fresh pot and that ended that argument, so she started another. She claimed she saw someone in the kitchen who shouldn’t