VC01 - Privileged Lives (13 page)

“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

A
T 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.”

“Was he a junkie?”

“Nah, with junkies the circulation is so bad you see necrotic tissue in the toes, but Johnny’s got no punctures and five good toes.”

“What does the combination of drugs tell you?”

“Nothing special. You can buy it prepackaged on the streets. There’s usually some other shit in it, but that metabolizes without a trace.”

Cardozo thanked Dan, then phoned the lab. “Hey, Lou, did you check John Doe’s hair? Any chance he dyed it?”

“It’s the first thing we check with blonds. The color’s real. He did use a very expensive conditioner—high in vitamin E. But it’s over-the-counter stuff.”

Cardozo drew a line through the memo in his notebook. At 8:05 he crossed the hall for his task force meeting.

“How are we doing on garbage?” he asked.

Siegel shook her head. “No leg yet.”

“And the photo?”

“Turned out pretty well.” She had taken a photo of the dead man to the Photographic Unit, had them airbrush it and put him in high-fashion clothes from last month’s
GQ.
She passed it to Cardozo.

He eyed it critically. The photographic boys had dressed John Doe conservatively: button-down shirt, regimental tie, tweed jacket. “Take this to the modeling agencies. See if they ever worked with him.” He turned to Detective Malloy. “Carl, how about licenses?”

“Still coming up dry,” Malloy said. “Except for Bronski. He’s got violations on his cab—and complaints to the commission.”

Cardozo smiled: the city’s taxi commission was a pork barrel of bribery and embezzlement, and the commissioners—who did little besides enforcing a cabbie dress code—were presently targets of criminal indictment. “What kind of complaints?”

“Picks up passengers from any lane, busts lights, grabs other cabbies’ fares. A go-getter like that, you’d think he’d hustle rides during the off-peak hours. But noon-to-two, he must have been napping. At eleven forty-five he had a fare from Broadway and Park Place to Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. The next fare was one
P.M.
, from Ninetieth and Broadway to Fifty-ninth and Sixth: Then one forty-five, from Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth to Twelfth Street and Third Avenue.”

“Aren’t those rides spaced a little far apart?” Cardozo said.

“Very much so, compared to other drivers’ sheets. Another thing. Bronski leaves his first fare a block from the Tower. He leaves his second six blocks from the Tower. He picks up his third a block away. I suppose it’s possible, but it seems strange.”

“How was his meter for the day?” Cardozo asked.

“Low. The other drivers’ sheets averaged twenty dollars more for the same shift.”

“Better give it another look,” Cardozo said. “Greg, what about mental institutions?”

Monteleone had checked for sex offenders released or escaped within the last month. No escapes had been reported, fifteen offenders had been released.

“Follow up on them. Find out where they were Saturday. What residents did you get hold of?”

“Jessica Lambert, Esmée Burns, and Estelle Manfrey are out of town semipermanently. Lambert’s in Hollywood, shooting a miniseries about Ellie Siegel.”

Detective Siegel looked up.

“Bad joke. It’s about a woman sleuth. Burns always spends April and May in Paris, she has a perfume factory there. Manfrey is in a wheelchair in Palm Beach, zonked on painkillers.”

“Who did you talk to personally?”

He’d spoken to Joan Adler, the mousy writer of political broadsides, who had returned from weekend house parties in the Hamptons. She had not recognized the victim’s face on the flyer. He’d also shown the flyer to the Beaux Arts staff, with the same result. He had persuaded Bill Connell, the super, to let him post a flyer in the lobby.

“Today,” Cardozo said, “take the flyer to the stores and the clinics. And get the names of the employees and patients.”

“They’re not going to want to give me those.”

Cardozo ignored the objection. “Run the names through the Bureau of Records. Have the Passport Office send us photos.”

“You’re assuming every name on the list will have a passport.”

“The ones that don’t, ask the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for license photographs.”

“Vince, that could be two hundred photos.”

“So? We’re going to have a lot of faces to match.” Cardozo turned to Sam Richards. “Sam, how’d the follow-up on Debbi Hightower go?”

“I checked with the World Trade Center. She was sort of telling the truth. There was an industrial show in the ballroom of the Helmsley Hotel and it was called
Toyota Presents.”
Sam Richards passed a program to Cardozo. “But Hightower’s not listed on the program. I checked the hotel’s employee list. No Hightower there either. I asked the waiters and bartenders if they’d seen a lady of Miss Hightower’s description. They had. She came in through an agency—Amanda’s Girls—temporary staff for the show.”

“What kind of temporary staff?”

“Hostess. She served coffee and smiled.”

“Who was the audience?”

“Out-of-towners. Toyota dealers, would-be Toyota dealers, Ford dealers Toyota is trying to steal.”

“What time did this show go on?” Cardozo asked.

“Eight o’clock.”

“I don’t buy Debbi Hightower served coffee and smiled at a bunch of out-of-town car dealers from eight o’clock Friday night till noon Saturday. Amanda’s Girls—is that a legit business?”

“They’re in the Yellow Pages—office temps. They have a New York business license.”

“I’d like her to account for that time, Sam.”

“She’s a hooker,” Monteleone said. “Don’t tell me she bought that apartment on an office temp’s pay.”

“She’s late with the maintenance,” Sam Richards said.

“Lean on her,” Cardozo said. “Find out who she was with. Maybe she brought the guy to her place. Maybe he saw something she didn’t. Maybe he did something she didn’t see. Dig. How’d you do with Fred Lawrence and that problem in the garage?”

“I finally got it out of him. He rents a space in the garage, it’s supposed to be his and his alone. He got back from Fire Island on Saturday at noon, and a taxi had parked in his place.”