VC01 - Privileged Lives (12 page)

Cardozo took a moment to study the building under construction. Already looming up twenty-seven stories on Lexington Avenue, it was of a type unseen twenty years ago, a scaffoldless high rise where each floor served as a foundation for the next and the owner could build as far into the sky as his lawyer could persuade the city authorities to write the variance.

He stared at the block, adding it up like an equation. There was a balance to it. At the corners, one building coming down, one going up; in the middle, one parking lot, one tenement.

And then his eye saw something else. Up on Lexington, on the second-floor level of the uncompleted high rise, the owner had erected a large sign above the heads of the churning crowd. The lettering, in generously legible wedding-invitation script, spelled
LE XANADU, LUXURY CO-OP, SPRING OCCUPANCY, OFFERING BY PROSPECTUS ONLY, ADDRESS INQUIRIES TO BALTHAZAR PROPERTIES, 555-8875.

Cardozo frowned. He slipped his notebook out of his breast pocket. He flipped through yesterday’s notes and he found a business card with the same number, 555-8875.

An NYPD seal with the warning
NO ENTRY CRIME SCENE
had been pasted over the crack between the front door and the jamb. He sliced through it with his
VISA
charge card and then he took two keys from the evidence bag—a Medeco and a four-sided Fichet with teeth that looked as though they could cut flesh.

He unlocked the door and entered apartment 6.

Someone had left the air conditioner running. The air was comfortably cool. A gentle afternoon light slatted through the silver-gray Levolor blinds and glowed on the dark polyurethaned floors.

A coat of fingerprint powder lay on the tops of the doorknobs. It lay in the same fine black snow in the kitchen by the refrigerator and sink and cabinets.

Cardozo wriggled his fingers into a pair of skin-thin plastic gloves. They were a medical item. The department bought them by the gross.

He went into the bedroom.

The one-legged chalk man on the floor looked crazily wrong, a figure of bends and angles in a space where nothing else was bent or angled. The straight line where the leg had been cut off seemed inconsistent, as though the artist had abruptly lost interest in his job.

He walked around it to the window and riffled his finger along the edge of the blinds. They made a soft clacking sound like marsh reeds in a breeze. He turned the Lucite pole, changing the slant of the blinds, letting the outside come gradually in.

Five stories below he could see the museum garden, the twenty-foot reflecting pool, the bronzes of huge-boned naked women. There were tables with blue-and-white umbrellas. Museum members, clean and relaxed in their summer clothes, were strolling or sitting alone or in twos and threes with books, cups of coffee, decanters of wine.

What kind of a city was it nowadays, he asked himself. How did the pieces fit together? It was getting a lot crazier, a lot tougher than when he had been a rookie patrolman and the biggest danger he’d faced was stepping into a mom and pop fight on Saturday night in the South Bronx.

South Bronx—his first beat—five miles and twenty-two years away.

In those days in all of New York City there were maybe 300 murders a year. In about 60 percent of the cases perpetrators were found within 24 hours. The conviction rate was close to 80 percent and it took at most three months to bring a case to trial. Heroin had been the hobby of 20,000 losers north of 96th Street and Coke meant the stuff that wasn’t Pepsi. The NYPD had yet to come up with the 911 emergency number or mix with computers, Knapp commissions, or civilian review boards. It had taken an average of 22 minutes for a squad car to respond to a call.

Now the murder rate was shading 2,000 a year, you were lucky to identify the corpse, let alone the killer; you found perpetrators in 40 percent of the cases, the chances of getting a conviction were one in twenty, and the chances of getting that conviction reversed or sent back on appeal were 50-50. Everything was computerized—fingerprints, rap sheets, 911 calls—and the computers were down 40 percent of the time. It took a squad car an average of 70 minutes to respond to a 911 emergency. New York had become the junkie capital of the world, with one resident in ten an addict. And coke with a small
c
was so popular that even rookie cops were stealing the seizures from busts and substituting Johnson’s baby powder, a fact discovered when an overworked prosecutor looking for a second wind had snorted one tenth of a gram of evidence.

New York had turned into the city of more—more confusion, more corpses, more wealth, more poverty, more drugs than ever before or anywhere else, and still climbing.

Why do I love this town,
Cardozo wondered.

Maybe because someone has to.

His eye traveled to the ivied marble wall and wrought-iron fences that the museum had erected to separate its garden from the rest of the city.

And then his gaze came back inside.

He had no clear idea what he was looking for. He browsed, open to any suggestion the rooms might throw to him. He went through empty closets. He pulled open the mirrored door of the bathroom medicine cabinet. Black powder floated down and dappled the white of the sink.

He peered into the tub and then his eye went up to the shower curtain rod. Something caught his attention. He took off his shoes, stepped up onto the edge of the tub and squinted at the bright stainless steel.

Tiny scratches ran lengthwise across the distorted reflection of his nose.

He checked the rod three feet further on and found the same scratches.

A shoplifter on heroin was screaming abuse from the lockup cage. Cardozo’s ears winced as he climbed the stairs. He stopped at Detective Monteleone’s desk.

“Greg, the super says there were shower curtains in all the unsold apartments—clear plastic with a white border. The shower curtain in six is gone. What do you think?”

Monteleone looked up from his pre-World War II Underwood. He had rolled a virgin five into the carriage. “I think exactly what you think I think. The killer wrapped the leg in it.”

“There was no spill. How did he tie it?”

Monteleone shrugged. “Rope.”

“There weren’t any fibers in the bedroom.”

“Wire.”

“There weren’t any scratches on the polyurethane. And if he used the curtain, why’d we find the garbage bag fragments?”

“He spread the curtain to do the messy work, then used the bags to clean up, then got rid of the leg and the curtain.” Monteleone held out a bitten buttered bagel.

“Thanks, I ate.” The furrows on Cardozo’s brow deepened. “I found scratches on the shower curtain rod. There used to be rings. They’re gone too. Metal, not plastic. Who uses metal rings nowadays?”

“My grandmother-in-law. No one else.”

“You ever tried to unhook those things? Why would he bother?”

“I don’t think he would, Vince. Anyone using a shower curtain to dispose of a human leg would pull the curtain off the rings. But if the rings are gone, it’s something else. Maybe the building agents were showing one of the other apartments, a shower curtain got torn, so they replaced it from six.”

“The shower in the other bathroom would already have curtain rings. They’d just take the curtain.”

Monteleone scratched his moustache. “What does the super say?”

“He says the last time he checked there was a curtain in six, but he doesn’t remember when the last time he checked was.”

“I don’t think it connects to the killing.”

“Somebody still took it.”

“Petty larceny.”

10

B
ARON BILLI VON KLEIST
had taken up his favorite position: observer. Leaning against the mantelpiece, he shrugged one broad shoulder, adjusting the hang of his dinner jacket. His gaze continued to sweep the party.

Ash Canfield’s livingroom was thronged with the people who controlled the look, as opposed to the power, of New York. Waiters circulated unobtrusively with trays of champagne. The mayor was seated at the Boesendorfer, rippling out Cole Porter for one of Alan Jay Lerner’s widows.

“Hey, circulate. You’re one of my stars.” Ash Canfield was wearing her blond-rinsed hair upswept and wide on her head; long black lashes half-veiled her gaze. “Just introduce yourself to anyone you don’t know.”

“My dear Ash,” Baron Billi smiled, “not only do I know ninety-nine percent of the people here, I know half the clothing—intimately.” He had counted over a dozen of his designs being worn tonight. The gowns sent a massively mixed message—
See my body, want my body
—and
Drop dead, you could never afford me.
Tough swank—the look that Billi had pioneered after assuming control of Babethings—had not only reversed the company’s sweetness-and-light image, it had tripled earnings.

“Do you know Irina, princess of Serbia?” Ash said.

“Oh,
please,
is that a threat?”

Billi saw Lewis Monserat, dealer, talking with Dina Alstetter, the sister of the hostess. They were standing in one of the open terrace doorways, their diet-slim bodies glowing in the light of a Lalique lamp.

Billi made his way across the room.

“Well, handsome Billi,” Dina said. She touched a hand to her crisply waved auburn hair.

“Lovely, lovely Dina. So tan and lean. The evening shows promise—at last.” Billi took Dina Alstetter’s hand and ceremoniously lifted the long, manicured fingers to his lips. “And when may we look forward to your debriefing on Barbados?”

“Barbados was glorious. Karim’s yacht is unbelievable. You’ve
got
to patch up with him. Three stewards, and my own maid.”

“New York must be quite a comedown.”

“In more ways than one.” Dina was wearing gray silk and she kept touching the rose quartz and gold dividers of her pearl necklace. “I see my baby sister has assembled her usual collection of trend-setters and fashion terrorists—all busily dripping pearls, ashes, and borrowed
bons mots.”

“Watch out for your own glass house.” Lewis Monserat flicked flame from a gold lighter and held it to Dina’s cigarette. He’d combed his gleaming black hair straight back, rather than over his forehead, and somehow the effect was to make his eye sockets look far more hollow than usual.

“Tell me,” Billi said, “is that woman in the very bad fake Fortuny Princess Irina of Serbia? Don’t turn too obviously—just behind you to the left.”

Dina turned and her blue-gray eyes made no pretense of not staring.

Lewis Monserat looked and said the woman was one of the new curators of the fashion collection of the Metropolitan Museum, just hired away from Dallas—“Doesn’t that make you want to salaam?”—and then he began pointing out the other stars in Ash’s new crop of instant celebrities.

“You can always count on Ash’s network,” Dina sighed. “Whether you need a broker or an abortionist, a friendly judge or a caterer, Ash always knows someone who knows someone. Only do you notice there’s someone very important missing?”

Billi looked around the room. “Who?”

“The host.” Dina ran her hand through her hair with a look of iced merriment. “Will you two excuse me? I’m ravenous.”

Dina pried her way through conversational groupings. Guests were throwing their heads back with the open-mouthed hilarity of television youth. From outside came the sound of dance music.

Taking one of Ash’s Lowestoft plates in hand, Dina surveyed the buffet table.

There were candle-warmed tureens of eggs scrambled to a froth and slivered with white truffle; chargers heaped with chilled Mediterranean
langoustes; mousse de crevettes;
assorted
crudité’s
with a Pernod dip; ice swans of gray Iranian caviar that could only have been procured from the commissary at the U.N.; cold
filet de veau
in port jelly sliced paper-thin, with miraculously smooth béarnaise to dollop over it; boiled quails’ eggs sumptuously marinated in Polish buffalo grass vodka; wine aspics; and at the dessert end of the table towers of freshly imported exotic fruit, creamy ices, and tangy sherbets in frosted crystal cups.

Rising from bunches of grapes, gazing down on the cold stuffed lobster like an embalmed maître d’, was a 17th-century French marble bust of Socrates.

Ash Canfield reached into the picture, switching a cluster of white grapes with a cluster of red. She stood back, judging the effect.

“Hi, Sis,” Dina said. “Quite the royal spread.”

Ash smiled a little uneasily. “Help yourself.”

“The mousse looks yummy. When’s the host arriving?”

Ash blinked and stood frozen in a sudden cave of silence.

Dina gave her sister’s hand a mischievous little pat. “Chin up. The show must go on.”

“Excuse me,” Ash said. “The bandleader’s played that tune three times.” She quickly joined the tide flowing through the open French windows out onto the terrace.

A dance floor of polished oak had been laid down. Men in black tie and women in new summer gowns whirled to the music of a nine-piece orchestra. Beyond them the city pushed up a steel and glass skyline that burned with the hard glow of diamonds on a bed of black velvet.

Ash found Gordon Dobbs by the bandstand, whispering with a sax player, jotting something in his notebook.

“Ash my dear, only you could have gotten this crowd together.” As Gordon Dobbs slid his notebook back into his dinner jacket, diamond shirt studs sparkled in his boiled shirt. “I know for a fact that Jackie deFonseca sent last-minute regrets to the vicomtesse de Chambord so she could come here. Tomorrow morning all New York will be talking of nothing but.”

Gordon Dobbs wrote a column for
New York
magazine. Ash viewed him as a sort of protector in a fierce and flammable world. He did not pretend to be other than what he was, and he had a reliable talent for cutting enemies down to gossip-size nuggets.

“Why the notebook?” Ash asked. “Surely you’re not working.”

“Bet your sweet ass I am. Working the joint, seeing who’s with whom and who’s not, who’s saying what and who isn’t.”

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