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hoods.”
    “Duke and Duchess de Chesney. You’ve got a lot of titles in this building.”
    “I think the title’s real. They’re English and they’re hardly ever here. Which makes them ideal in a cooperative situation. They let management vote their proxies.”
    “Debbi Hightower, nine?”
    “She’s a girl who thinks she’s going to make it in show business.”
    “You don’t?”
    “Fortune telling’s not my field. I only sell real estate.”
    “Father Will Madsen—tenth floor.”
    “He’s the rector of that Episcopal church on the corner. Very quiet man, never disturbs a soul.”
    “Eleventh floor. Fred Lawrence.”
    “Accountant. He falsifies returns for some of the biggest guns in show biz and government.”
    “Why do you say falsifies?”
    Her face colored. “Sorry. I’m really on today, aren’t I. I don’t know anything about Fred Lawrence. He strikes me as sneaky and he’s an accountant, that’s all. His wife wears loud, cheap clothes. Thinks she’s sexy and she’s not. Their child’s a spoiled brat.”
    The twelfth floor was marked unsold. “I see there’s no thirteen.”
    “We don’t want bad luck in this building, Lieutenant.”
    “Fourteen—Billi von Kleist.”
    “He’s president of Babethings—the clothing company Babe Vanderwalk founded. He’s jet-setty. Maybe some of his friends are a little druggy.”
    “What kind of drugs?”
    “Oh, most people are doing coke nowadays, aren’t they?”
    Cardozo looked at her. “I’m not.”
    “Neither am I. But you know what I mean.”
    A silence passed.
    “Fifteen—Notre Dame. I take it that’s not the football team,” Cardozo said.
    “The rock singer. You haven’t heard of him?”
    Cardozo scowled. “My daughter’s heard of him.”
    “He’s on tour. He’s never here.”
    Sixteen and seventeen were marked unsold. “What about eighteen, Estelle Manfrey?”
    “Very rich, very old, very frail—never here either. She lives in Palm Beach.”
    Nineteen was another unsold. “Twenty—Tillie Turnbull?”
    “You and I know her as Jessica Lambert.”
    Cardozo’s pencil stopped tapping. “The movie star?”
    Melissa nodded. “She’s a very nervous woman—always skittering around in dark glasses and babushkas. She puts her kerchief on before she puts on her makeup, so usually there’s a ring of Max Factor around the kerchief. I don’t really think men in black masks are her type.”
    “Twenty-one—Gordon Dobbs?”
    “He writes books about society with a capital S. Who’s sleeping with who, who got blackballed from what. He’s very fastidious, very organized, has a reputation for malice that he doesn’t quite live up to.” She glanced up. “Are you asking if I think these people could be killers?”
    “Just asking what you know about them. Twenty-two. Phil Bailey.”
    “President of NBS-TV and a lot else too. I drew up all the papers but I called him Philip. Phil equals Philip, right? Wrong. I had to redraw everything. His legal name’s Phil. He had it changed. I checked the court records. It’s that understated power trip that the really big people are on. They don’t care if you know their name or their face or their income. In fact they’d rather you didn’t. They don’t want to be on the cover of Time and they don’t go around blocking traffic with limousines. They’re not out to impress anyone.”
    “But he managed to impress you.”
    She made a circling motion with her glass. “He and his wife are decent people. He’s a powerful man. He’s a polite man. A very attractive man. Men like that don’t need to do the sort of thing we saw in six.”
    “Maybe his wife does.”
    “Why? She has Phil.”
    Her thought processes intrigued him. “You see it as a sex crime.”
    “Don’t you?”
    “Maybe.” His eyes went back to the list. Twenty-three was marked unsold. “Twenty-four—Hank Doyle. The pro football player?”
    “The same.”
    Cardozo was surprised. “He doesn’t seem the