VC01 - Privileged Lives (17 page)

“Only rajahs and Philippine dictators are buying into this co-op market.” He moved the hurricane lamp to the wall. He laid a nine-by-eleven manila envelope on the table. It was marked
NYPD OFFICIAL BUSINESS PENALTY FOR PRIVATE USE $50
.

Her glance went down to it.

“I took another look at six this afternoon,” he said. “How often are the unsold apartments cleaned?”

“I don’t know, but I can check.”

“Did six look cleaner to you than the others—except for the obvious difference?”

“Except for the obvious difference, no. It looked about the same.”

“Is the air conditioning left on in the unsold apartments?”

“Never. That wastes electricity. I come in a half hour before the showing and turn it on.”

“Did you turn on the air conditioning in six?”

“No. I didn’t have time to get to the building early.”

“But it was on.”

“Somebody must have—left it on.”

They both understood she was talking about the killer.

“How many times did you show six this last month?”

“Only yesterday.” She added, “Manhattan real estate’s soft these days.”

“Melissa, the card you gave me says you work for Beaux Arts Properties. Who’s Balthazar Properties? They’re putting up a coop on Lex and Fifty-third and they have the same phone number.”

“That’s us too.”

“Why do you have two different names?”

“We have eleven different names and we have eleven different companies. It’s not illegal. We limit the liability. If one building springs a leak or goes bankrupt it doesn’t endanger the other properties.”

“One company for each property?”

“I’m not Nat Chamberlain’s accountant. I know of eleven companies. I know of eleven properties in this city that are secured as of closing business today. I doubt that’s the whole picture.”

“You like working for Nat Chamberlain?”

“I wouldn’t work for an employer I didn’t like—any more than you would.”

“What makes you so sure I wouldn’t?”

“You’re not the type.”

“You seem to think you know how to size people up.”

“I’m not in your league, but I’m good.”

“What can you tell from a face?”

“Whether the sale will go through.”

“Take a look at the pictures in that envelope.”

He saw her hand wanting to hesitate, and he saw her not allowing it to. She opened the envelope and drew out the two glossies. Her eyes went from one to the other and narrowed.

“I take it this is the dead man?”

“You should have my job.”

She shifted the photos around on the table. The face in the photographs had a classic male beauty, and death gave it a patrician glaze, like a Roman head in a museum case.

“He’s handsome,” she said finally. “Too bad.”

“If he’d been ugly, it wouldn’t have been too bad?”

Her gaze came up to his. “If he’d been ugly he wouldn’t be dead.”

“You know something I don’t.”

“This isn’t how ugly people die. This is how ugly people kill.”

Cardozo sat back and sipped his Scotch.

She asked, “Was he as young as he looks?”

It interested Cardozo: people kept seeing everything but death: he was young, he was good-looking, that was what they saw. “The coroner thinks he was twenty-two, twenty-three.”

Her eyes didn’t tip anything, but the silence did. A silence that long meant she was having to think. She picked up a glossy again. “Christ. Why are they all dying so young?”

“Who do you mean,
they?”

“People like him, young, dying …” She was in her mind and didn’t speak for a minute.

Someone young died, he realized. Someone close to her. “Tell me something, Melissa. You looked at those pictures and whatever you saw, you couldn’t make it go away. What was it?”

She let out a breath. “It’s hard to put into words. Sometimes you see somebody but you never realize you’re seeing them because they’re always in the same context.”

“Like who?”

“Like the man at the newsstand; the doorman you pass on the way to the subway; the woman who runs a bookstore and you wave as you go by. And then one day you see that person lifted out of their context—and you don’t know who they are or why you should even think you remember them. You stare at them and they stare at you and it’s almost hostile, like hey what are you doing off your shelf? My work isn’t like yours, it doesn’t call for a trained memory. I see a face, I do business with the face, if the deal falls through I forget the face. But with this one there’s something … I feel I could have seen him. But it didn’t have anything to do with work.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. There’s no feeling of time connected to it.”

“Where?”

“In an elevator.”

“What elevator?”

“I don’t remember. All I get is elevator.”

“Beaux Arts Tower?”

“No. Definitely not. Anything to do with our buildings I remember. But if I saw this man, I was off guard, not paying attention. It’s as though we looked at each other, smiled, and agreed not to say hello. You know the way it can be with strangers in the city. What I mean is, this was friendly but the distance was very, very controlled. I wish I could be more specific, but all I get is that kind of a question mark feeling.”

“Melissa, I want you to do something for me. Keep those photographs. Keep looking at them. Keep putting that face into every elevator you walk into. In one of those elevators you’re going to remember. And as soon as you do …” He reached into his wallet, thick with a wad of
VISA
carbons, and fished out one of his cards. “Those are my numbers. Work phone on top, home phone on the bottom. Call me. Day or night.” He smiled. “But not too late at night.”

An eye of light gleamed in the dark. Cardozo adjusted the lens of the projector. The image cleared, showing late afternoon New York sky, pale and cloudless. Hard bright sun splashed down onto the Fifty-third Street pavement, across the deco facade of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and the marble-faced lobby of the high rise next to it.

Cardozo was going over yesterday’s hidden-camera photos of Beaux Arts Tower.

On the wall of his cubicle, men and women hurried toward destinations he could not see. Examining their images, Cardozo was fascinated: reading the truth and the falsehood in the human face—that was the most challenging puzzle of all.

He pushed a control button and the carousel turned, dropping a new slide into the projector.

It was a photo of a fortyish man with thin sandy hair and a lightweight tan suit. The man was entering Beaux Arts Tower, but he was looking behind him.

The man’s skin was tinged with shadows: the bones in his face showed bluishly and gray speckled his hair. In his hand he held a briefcase. It looked expensive, genuine pigskin.

The man gave Cardozo a long steady gaze.

It was unmistakable: the gaze was coming straight at him.

Cardozo switched off the projector.

The feet of his chair let out a spine-jangling shriek as he slid back on the linoleum floor.

He stood in darkness. He swung open the door, walked into the light of the squad room, poured himself a cup of Mr. Coffee coffee. There was no Sweet ’n Low.

He went back into his cubicle. He closed the door. He switched on the desk light and looked down at the log that Tommy Daniels’s photographic team had kept.

Each person going in or out of the building was recorded in the notebook and given a number. Some of the entries had names, where names were known. The license plate of every car pulling up at the door was recorded, as was the license of every vehicle entering or leaving the garage. Each entry was accompanied by a time, and each number cross-indexed to a photograph of a person or automobile.

Cardozo reviewed the list.

The number of the man in tan was 79. No name. Cardozo wondered. Tommy Daniels had sworn that no one would make the truck, but Cardozo knew how men sitting on a plant could get bored, how they could get careless.

Cardozo snapped off his lamp, turned the projector on, looked at 79 again.

Something in 79’s eyes met Cardozo’s almost like an act of defiance.
Shit,
Cardozo thought.
He made the truck.

It was much later.

Girders whipped past as Cardozo drove over the Brooklyn Bridge: the tires of his Honda went from asphalt to exposed steel infrastructure and the humming in his ears jumped up an octave.

He took the first exit, swinging down into Brooklyn Heights. A rough warm wind was bending the leaf-heavy trees as he parked.

The rain had made up its mind to stop. There was moonlight in the sky. The street was dark, but it was a warm darkness, not the dread-inspiring night of Manhattan. Streetlamps cast islands of illumination. Noble nineteenth-century town houses, merchants’ homes, framed the tree-lined street. The scene had the order and unreality of a stage set.

A church bell chimed the late hour. In the distance, a group of well-dressed young Jehovah’s Witnesses was returning to their dormitory.

Cardozo lifted the lock of the hip-high wrought-iron gate at number 42, noting that it was purely decorative, nothing protective about it. It swung back smoothly. Trees overhung the flagstone walk.

Judge Tom Levin, in pajamas and a bathrobe, opened the door.

“Hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” Cardozo said.

“Hell no. Come on in.”

Slippers slapping on carpet, Levin led Cardozo into the sitting room. Cardozo sat in a corduroy-covered chair.

Levin’s fifty years had given a firm set to ascetic features that in youth had probably seemed soft. “Scotch?” he offered.

“Why not.”

The judge rose, got glasses from the sideboard, tonged ice into them, added Johnnie Walker. Cardozo watched him.

The glow of a streetlight fell in leafy patterns through the tall window.

The judge brought Cardozo’s glass back to him. The judge sat and smiled and raised his glass in an unspoken toast.

“What brings you here, Vince? You sounded angry on the phone.”

“I’m on the Beaux Arts Tower killing.”

Levin arched an eyebrow. “Lucky you.”

Cardozo explained that he needed a court order to get Monserat’s list of purchasers of the Kushima bondage masks.

“Who’s Monserat’s attorney?” Levin asked.

“Ted Morgenstern.”

Levin rose and stood by a window staring down into the small garden behind the house, where ferns grew under the oak trees.

“That prick,” he muttered.

Judge Levin was a Harvard grad, an ex-liberal. He kept a licensed thirty-eight revolver, and he kept writs, subpoenas, and court orders in blank at home, so he could execute them at any hour of day or night.

He crossed swiftly to his writing desk. The forms were there, in the second drawer, awaiting only the specifics, which he now bashed in on an old Olivetti portable.

Judge Levin handed Cardozo the order. “This should add a little misery to his life.”

15

“I
TOLD BRONSKI WE
have a witness placing his cab in the garage of Beaux Arts Tower—so who was his fare and why did he falsify his sheet and put Fifty-fourth and Sixth?” Detective Carl Malloy was wearing a Kelly green vest today. “Bronski swears the sheet is correct: he says he had to take a pee, so he went to the building to use the men’s room. He didn’t want to mention it to us because it’s against building regulations to, you know, use the place as a facility. He would never have parked his cab in the garage except it was a holiday and he expected most of the residents to be away for the weekend.” Malloy hesitated.

“I still get the feeling he’s holding back. I went back over his taxi sheets. On the day of the killing and for three days before, he had the same fare—a pick-up at Broadway just before noon and a drop-off at Fifty-fourth and Sixth at twelve-thirty. Even allowing for midday traffic, that’s a hell of a long time.”

Something clicked in Cardozo’s mind. “Where on Broadway?”

“Sometimes the sheet says two twenty-five, sometimes two fifty.”

“The Federal Building’s down there,” Ellie Siegel said.

“So’s the World Trade Center,” Cardozo said. “And Sam, you said those are the same days Debbi Hightower was in the Toyota show?”

“But the show was from eight at night till ten thirty.” Siegel frowned. “What are you saying, she slept over?”

Richards looked at the others. “Didn’t Gordon Dobbs say she’s a hooker?”

“What’s the mystery?” Greg Monteleone gave a little grin. “Debbi’s been getting free cab service after she turns her hotel tricks, and Bronski’s been ripping off Ding-Dong to get a little daytime nooky.”

“Maybe he’s her pimp,” Carl Malloy said.

“Do pimps have intercourse with their hookers?” Ellie Siegel asked.

“If they’re good girls, once a month,” Sam Richards said.

“A white pimp?” Monteleone said. “Give me a break.”

Irritation began to gather in Ellie Siegel’s eyes. “Greg, white pimps exist.”

“In this town?”

For an instant Ellie Siegel just stared at the ceiling.

“On the other hand,” Monteleone conceded, “I don’t think it proves Bronski and Debbi are chopping up naked guys.”

“You don’t know that, Monte,” Malloy said. “You don’t know these two.”

“I know they’re dingbats.”

“Dingbats don’t murder?” Siegel challenged. “Greg, how the hell did you ever make detective?”

“They promoted me before affirmative hiring let you in.”

“Carl,” Cardozo cut in, “will you keep after Bronski, see about those fares?” Heaving his body up out of his chair, he signaled Monteleone and Richards to come with him.

In the corridor a detective was interviewing a hysterical female complainant who had received a ransom note for a missing dog. In the squad room Detective O’Shea was doing day duty, and Detective Moriarty stood at a cabinet looking for a case folder.

“Hey Vince,” O’Shea called, “Lou Stein sent over a lab report. It’s on your desk.”

There was a lot else on Cardozo’s desk: a two-inch stack of new departmental orders and a blue paperbound book that looked like an addendum to the state telephone listings, in fact a revision of the penal law pursuant to last trimester’s state supreme court decisions.