VC01 - Privileged Lives (21 page)

Determination flared in Babe Devens’s eyes. “There’s nothing I’m doing here that I can’t do at home. The house has an elevator, I can take E.J. with me, the therapists can work with me there. I’ll be fine.”

It occurred to him that this woman knew herself and knew her limits and that if she said she would be fine then she would be.

“What do you want me to do?” he said.

“Put me in touch with a lawyer who’s not Wall Street and not old money and not scared of Hadley or Lucia Vanderwalk.”

Cardozo found Lucinda MacGill on the second floor taking a deposition from a woman screaming in Yiddish and Russian. A sergeant, obviously a volunteer pulled out of the muster room, was attempting to translate.

A young man handcuffed to a chair was screaming Spanish and a lieutenant was translating. Through all the screaming and translating Cardozo gathered that the young man had pushed the woman’s husband under a Queens-bound F train while attempting to grab the gold Star of David from his neck.

Lucinda MacGill saw Cardozo and came over to the coffee urn. “The kid’s high on crack,” she said. “The husband died forty minutes ago in emergency at Saint Clare’s. The woman wishes she’d never left Russia.”

“You working tomorrow?” Cardozo said.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’m sleeping.”

“If you felt like going up to Doctors Hospital tomorrow and talking to Babe Vanderwalk Devens you could earn a little extra.”

“Babe Devens? You’re kidding. I thought she was in coma.”

“She was but now she isn’t. The court made her her parents’ ward. They won’t let her out of the hospital. She wants to go.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant. That might just pay off my car loan.”

Lucinda MacGill lit one of her two daily cigarettes and smiled at Babe Devens as though they had been friends for years. “Tell me about your family. What are they after? Do they want to control your money?”

Babe Devens sat with her arms folded on the hospital table, staring at Lucinda. “They don’t need to control anyone’s money. They have plenty of their own.”

“Some people are greedy.”

“Not my parents. They’re do-gooders. They think they’re protecting me.”

“From what?”

“All kinds of sordid realities.”

Lucinda MacGill rose from the chair and began pacing. “You have a right to a sanity hearing—we get three examining doctors to declare you competent, your family has the right to three examining doctors to declare you incompetent, a judge hears the experts and decides. If the judge decides against you we move for a jury trial. You’ll definitely win with a jury.”

Babe’s deep-set eyes darkened and there were furrows in her forehead. “What would all that take—months?”

“Months, maybe years; and a few hundred thousand dollars.”

“I don’t want to go through all that.”

“Good. Neither do I. I work for the city and I’m moonlighting.” Lucinda moved to the window. A swollen summer sun ached in the sky, edging skyscrapers in blinding silver. “There hasn’t been a word about you in the papers,” she said.

Babe Devens’s brow wrinkled. “Should there be?”

“Well, the papers printed all the testimony when your husband tried to kill you.”

“My husband didn’t—” Babe Devens broke off. “What’s your point?”

“Your parents are trying very hard to keep your recovery quiet. Let’s make them show cause. Give them
x
number of days to convince a court you shouldn’t be declared competent. That leaves them two options: go to court—which would entail headlines—or stay out of court—and lose custody and power of attorney. You decide. You know your family.”

“They can’t abide publicity.”

“Good. We’ll go that route.”

17

A
T THE TASK FORCE
meeting Malloy reported that so far no prisons in the tristate area had recognized the photo of John Doe. “Maybe we should go national.”

Cardozo tossed a chewing gum wrapper at an ashtray. There was a growing buzz of frustration in him. “So go.”

Greg Monteleone sat shuffling three squares of phone message paper. “For what it’s worth, two Laundromats say they recognize the flyer. Unfortunately, they’re eight miles away from one another, so unless John Doe schlepped his dirty linen by helicopter, one of them’s got to be mistaken.”

Cardozo told Monteleone and Malloy to each take a Laundromat and check them out.

Cardozo lowered the shade in his cubicle and set up the projector. He looked at slides, Sunday’s slides, Monday’s, the whole week’s. He tried to see each one as though for the first time.

Again and again he referred back to his one maybe, the mystery woman in slides 28 and 43: his gaze took in the flowing blond hair, the confident face and stride, the blouse, the skirt, the belt … the pink-striped package that went into the building and never came out again.

He told himself that there had to be a match, that Tommy’s team had missed it, that she was somewhere else too, in another photo neatly logged and tagged.

But she wasn’t and she wasn’t and she wasn’t.

At one thirty Monteleone was back from Queens to report that the mom and pop who ran the Laundromat had made a mistake.

Two hours later Malloy was back from Staten Island. The ferry ride had been great; the woman who ran the Laundromat was an old sweetie, but she had a habit of calling the FBI and reporting that their Ten Most Wanted had left laundry in her shop. The FBI had stopped taking her calls, so she’d turned to local law enforcement.

Monday, June 2. Cardozo was clicking through slides. He compared the faces on his wall to the faces on his desk, photographs Ellie Siegel had gotten from the insurance companies that reimbursed the Beaux Arts clinics.

There should be a computer to do this,
he thought.

In three hours he found only seven matches that weren’t already in the log. He felt he was groping through a maze that led only to potholes.

He was yawning and blinking when Siegel walked in from the squad room wearing a big smile. She stared at Cardozo with his head resting on his forearm.

“I got something.” Her face lit up the room. “The owner not only claims to have seen the victim regularly, she has his laundry.”

Cardozo’s smile opened like a Japanese fan, the muscles stretching one at a time, and he realized he hadn’t smiled in nine days. “Where?”

The area on lower Eighth Avenue was in the throes of gentrification: gays and yuppies edging in, Puerto Ricans getting edged out. On a block of Medicaid dentists and trendy upscale bistros, the Paradise Laundromat shared the ground floor of a brick tenement with the Jean Cocteau Hair Salon and Greeting Card Boutique.

Cardozo and Siegel entered the narrow storefront. To reach the clanking washers and dryers they had to walk a gauntlet of neighborhood Latin kids pitting their machismo against Japanese video game machines.

Soap dust floating in the air prickled the inside of Cardozo’s nose and made him want to sneeze.

A girl waited by one of the dryers, studying her reflection in the window of spinning underwear. She was applying makeup, careful not to get powder on the headband of her Walkman earphones.

At the rear of the store an old Chinese woman in a black five-and-ten oriental robe was sitting erect and rigid on a small wooden box.

Cardozo showed her his shield.

Her tiny black eyes studied it suspiciously.

He showed her the flyer.

She nodded, her skin as dry as old parchment, her features drawn and shrunken.
“Si,”
she said.
“Joven.”
Young.

“His name, his address?”

No reaction. Cardozo tried his Spanish, a modification of the Portuguese he’d learned at home as a child.
“¿Su nombre, su dirección?”

The old woman shook her head in denial.
“No nombre, no dirección.”

The right corner of her mouth was drawn down: she had some kind of paralysis of a facial nerve, and that, added to her accent, made her hash of Cantonese, Spanish, and English very hard to understand.

Cardozo was able to piece together that the young man had come in regularly, every Thursday, and he must have lived nearby, because he carried such big bags of laundry.

“You have one of these
sacos grandes
?
”
Cardozo asked. “Give it to me.
Dámelo por favor.”

The slant of her eyes lent them a wary expression. “Ticket?”

“No ticket.”

One finger unbent. “One dollar
más.”

She went and got a stool and pulled a green nylon bag down from a crowded shelf.

Half a laundry ticket was safety-pinned to it. The date stamped on it was May 23. The Friday before the murder. She undid the pin, her hands liver-spotted and twisted with arthritis, and dropped it into a box of similar pins.

She held out the half ticket and with a cracked Bic pen made a pantomime of signing. Cardozo signed. She made him write down his shield number.

“Eight dollars fifty cents.” Her English was a hell of a lot better when it came to money.

As Cardozo pulled into the cluster of glassy buildings, the air had a tang of oncoming rain. He took the laundry up to the fourth floor.

The man from Evidence was already there, a scholarly-looking civilian in his late twenties, tall and skinny with curly red hair. He began making an inventory of the laundry. It was a curious mix—woollen argyle socks with Brooks Brothers labels, Fruit of the Loom underpants and T-shirts, Healthknit jockstraps, five-and-dime tube socks without labels.

“A lot of socks,” the evidence man commented. “He must have worn two, three pairs a day.”

“Maybe he jogged.” Cardozo noticed that the clothes were all India-inked with the same initials—J.D.

Funny if the guy’s name really
was
John Doe.

Cardozo had known evidence men who would tag a pair of socks as a single item, especially if a detective was waiting, but this man went strictly by the book, tagging each sock with its own numbered tag, tearing each tag on its two perforated lines, filling out each stub in identical, careful block printing.

Lou Stein sauntered into the room. His face still bore traces of its holiday tan, but the holiday smile was gone. Care had eaten its way back.

“We’re not going to need all that,” he said. He lifted a pair of underpants, a T-shirt, and a sock out of the tagged pile and signed for them.

On the seventh floor, in the soft blue glow of lab lights, Lou Stein removed the evidence tags and dropped the clothing into a bath of distilled water. Sliding the lid into place, he pressed a button. The water began agitating violently.

After three minutes Lou drained the water from the tub and fed it into another tank. He played with a bank of switches. Something began making a Cuisinart sound.

Lou beckoned. “We can watch over here.”

Cardozo fixed his eyes on a computer terminal. Mathematical and chemical symbols exploded into green points of brilliance on the black screen.

Thirty seconds later a printed analysis spewed out of the mouth of a computer-linked desktop printer.

Lou ripped off a sheet of printout and resettled his spectacles thoughtfully. “The underclothes and socks show a heavy saturation of the same detergent that caused the rash on John Doe.”

Cardozo stopped on the fourth floor. The evidence man was examining a shirt. His teeth were pressed down into his lip.

“What do you make of this, Lieutenant?”

Cardozo took the shirt. It was white cotton, a nice weave, oxford or chambray.

“A dress shirt with a one-inch collar,” Cardozo observed.

“Most of the other stuff is initialed J.D. This one’s initialed D.B.”

Cardozo studied the inside of the collar with the India-inked letters. “And no label.”

“What is it, a Chairman Mao?”

Cardozo didn’t know. “How many of these has he got?”

“Just that one.”

Tommy Daniels arranged the sleeves outward on the table like the arms of a crucified man. “I’ll shoot you a beauty. Good enough for
GQ.”

“Forget beautiful,” Cardozo said. “I need six prints.”

Cardozo called the team into his office. He passed out the photos and then rested both hands on the edge of the desk.

There was a wide waiting silence. Three tired men and one tired woman stared at the pictures.

“Whatever any of you are doing now,” Cardozo said, “drop it. Find out what the hell kind of shirt that is, who makes it, where it’s sold.”

It was dark when Monteleone returned. There was no mistaking the black beyond the window for the last traces of day.

“It’s a clerical shirt,” he said. “Priests attach their collar to that hole in the back with a collar button.”

A skin of silence dropped on the cubicle, freezing out the voices and clatter from the squad room.

“The guy’s too young,” Cardozo said. “He couldn’t have been a priest.” He realized that what he meant was, a priest couldn’t have died that kind of death—God wouldn’t have let him.

“Everybody seems young when you get older,” Monteleone said. “Hell, cops look young to me. To tell the truth, Vince, even
you
look young to me.”

Cardozo sat there for a moment letting things sort themselves out in his mind. He tapped a blunted pencil against the blotter.

“Let’s assume he’s a priest. Priests live where they work, right? And how far would you carry laundry—five, six blocks tops, right? Let’s post the flyer in all churches within six blocks of that Laundromat.”

“Clerical shirts are just formal shirts without the collar or the fancy front.” Greg Monteleone was sharing his research with Tuesday’s task force meeting. “They come in three colors—black and white for your hoi polloi priests, and magenta for bishops. White clerical shirts always have a rabat worn over them. That’s a vest. Some Jesuits and low-church Anglicans try for the dog-collar look, and they wear the black shirt with the collar and without the vest.”

“We’re looking at a white shirt,” Cardozo said. “Is it Catholic or is it Anglican?”

“They’re both the same,” Monteleone said. “The only difference is who’s inside. They’re all sewn by Ricans and Chicanos and gook illegals in the same Yiddish sweatshops.”