“But you can’t write the party up—you’re the guest of honor!”

“My dear girl, a professional gossip has an obligation to his readers. He is on twenty-four-hour call.”

Ash took his arm. “You’re not going to say anything about Dunk—please, Dobbsie.”

“I’ll have to at least mention he was indisposed. Otherwise it’ll look as though Suzi and Liz scooped me.” Gordon Dobbs’s dark eyes twinkled beneath curly hair beginning to gray. “And we don’t want people saying you made me guest of honor just to shut me up, do we?”

“Can’t you write about something else? Dunk isn’t the only important person who’s not here.” Ash hesitated. “If I give you a very, very hot story, will you leave Dunk out of your column?”

“Depends how hot.”

“Babe Devens has come out of her coma.”

Gordon Dobbs’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you pulling my leg?”

“It’s the absolute eye-witness truth.”

“So spill, spill.”

Ash drew Gordon Dobbs to a corner of the terrace and filled him in on the details. “But don’t you dare quote me.”

“Let me have it exclusive. For a week.” Gordon Dobbs recapped his pen. “And show me where people are getting that terrific-looking pink grapefruit sorbet from.”

At the buffet table, Hadley Vanderwalk was helping Lucia empty the contents of two sorbet cups into one.

“Tante Lucia,” Ash smiled. “Uncle Hadley. I’m so glad you could make it.”

“Splendid party,” Hadley said. “One of your delightfully rash impulses.”

“Tante Lucia, you remember Gordon Dobbs.”

Lucia had dressed in black, with a brocade jacket. She had put a pink ribbon in her hair. It was as though she still saw herself as a bright, irrepressible little girl. She had charmed her father when she was six, why not the world now? “Yes,” Lucia said, “of course I remember Mr. Dobbs.”

Gordon Dobbs lifted an asparagus-and-Saint-André canapé to his lips and nodded mysteriously.

“Isn’t the news glorious?” Ash said.

Lucia Vanderwalk knit her flawlessly pruned eyebrows together. “News?”

“I visited,” Ash said. “Didn’t Uncle Hadley …”

“Mr. Dobbs,” Lucia said, “would you excuse us?” Her narrow gaze went from Ash to Hadley and back to Ash. “Where can we talk privately?”

In the library, morocco-bound sets of Eugene Sue and Macaulay sat on shelves with beveled brass edging.

“You gave your word.” Lucia’s lips were set in a thin line of fury.

“My word?” Hadley seemed honestly baffled.

“That you wouldn’t tell anyone about Beatrice. And of all people, you had to go and tell her.”

Ash’s lips trembled. One hand played with the clasp of a cabochon emerald earring. “I’m sorry, Tante Lucia. I only wanted to cheer Babe up.”

Lucia stood there, rigid and unyielding, staring at Ash in absolute motionlessness. “You’ve never been trustworthy. Not as a child, not now. If there is any publicity, if anyone or anything disturbs my daughter’s recovery, I shall hold you personally responsible.”

Ash looked at Lucia, her thick-lashed blue eyes fixed and blank and uncomprehending. And then something dropped like a curtain. “Would you excuse me? My guests.”

Turning, Ash bumped into a chair. As she crossed the hall to the livingroom, she looked a little out of control, not quite managing things with her usual grace.

“A little hard on the poor gal, don’t you think?” Hadley said. “You can’t really expect to keep Babe’s recovery under wraps.”

“We’ve got to keep it under wraps, as you choose to put it, till we’re sure Beatrice can cope.”

“Of course she’ll cope. She’s as strong as a Thoroughbred and she’ll be getting the best physical therapy money can buy.”

“And can Cordelia cope? This is going to throw the poor child completely back into her mother’s shadow.”

“Do you really see your daughter and granddaughter as rival flowers struggling for the same patch of sunlight?”

“How can you ask that? In seven years have you understood one single word the psychiatrist has said to us?”

Hadley Vanderwalk took an imperturbable swallow from his glass of champagne. “You’re too many jumps ahead for me, Lucia old girl.”

There was a change in Lucia. She suddenly smiled.

“Cordelia,” Lucia said. “There you are. We’ve been searching all over.”

Hadley turned. It was difficult to say how long Cordelia had been standing in the doorway. She had her hair swept up this evening. She was wearing a bodiced blouse of Edwardian lace fastened at the collar by a cameo brooch set with a small emerald, and she looked chic and striking and strangely unconcerned.

“And you’re wearing your great-grandmother’s brooch,” Lucia said. “I love seeing it on you.”

“Anyone care to dance?” Cordelia asked.

“It would be a great relief,” Hadley said.

On the dance floor, Hadley inhaled his granddaughter’s perfume—Joy, the most expensive in the world. The jewels that flashed from the girl’s wrists were diamonds.

“Were you and Grandmère arguing about me?” Cordelia asked.

“Grandmère thinks you’re going to have some kind of crisis now that your mother’s back.”

“And what do you think, Grandpère?”

“I think you’re old enough to behave like the young lady you give every sign of being.”

“Thank you, Grandpère.”

The band was playing a very slow “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and Cordelia danced like a little girl, her cheek angled down toward her shoulder, looking up at her grandfather.

A hand tapped Hadley on the shoulder. Hadley turned his head. The hand belonged to Count Leopold de Savoie-Sancerre, a bald, paunchy gentleman in his middle seventies with a chestful of World War II Danish military decorations.

“Doublecut, if you please,” Count Leopold said. His partner was Lucia Vanderwalk, and she was frowning at her husband.

As Hadley handed Cordelia over to the count, he whispered to his granddaughter, “Pray for me.” He took his wife’s hand. “I seem to be running into you all over the place, my dear.”

The band broke into a manically up-tempo “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” Count Leopold methodically boogied Cordelia toward the edge of the dance floor. “The countess has some very fine snort. What do you say?”

Cordelia smiled. “You’re on.”

Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre, forty years her husband’s junior, was bent over a Chippendale side table in the spare guest room. Long dark hair half hid her face, and her wide-apart green eyes didn’t bother looking up as Count Leopold and Cordelia came in.

“Company,” Count Leopold sang out.

“Close the door.” With a gold safety razor Countess Victoria was carefully pulverizing the cocaine spill on a Cartier purse mirror. An enormous ruby-and-diamond ring blinked on the joint of her finger. “Anyone know why Dunk isn’t at the party?”

“Dunk and Ash are breaking up again,” Cordelia said.

“Is it true Dina Alstetter had an affair with Dunk and he ditched her for Ash?”

“Years ago,” Cordelia said.

“No wonder Dina’s acting so smug.” Countess Victoria arranged the coke into lines. “Youth before beauty.”

Cordelia took a hundred-dollar bill from her purse and rolled it into a tight little cylinder. She bent over the mirror.

“Be careful,” Countess Victoria warned. “I got this stuff through a Nicaraguan freedom fighter. It’s eighty percent pure.”

11

AT 7:59 A.M., CARDOZO entered the precinct house. Pandemonium was back to normal after the long holiday weekend. The lobby swarmed with cops, their waists thick with the dangling paraphernalia of the Job: beltloads of .38-caliber rounds, service revolvers, leather-wound billy clubs, staticking radios, and handcuffs that rang discordantly with each step. Greetings and backslaps were being exchanged like calls on the floor of a stock exchange. Cardozo traded a few, joining the flow up the stairs.

In his cubicle the three button on the phone was lit. It was Dan Hippolito, reporting on John Doe’s blood. “He had enough alcohol in him to pickle an elephant. Enough coke to orbit a hippo. Plus considerable quantities of heroin and meth.”