VC01 - Privileged Lives (24 page)

“Diet Pepsi.”

The bartender gave Cardozo the can of soda.

The shadows in the bar were deep—almost night. Tatters of street light played through the synthetic buckskin that had been rigged across the windows.

“You’re Hal?” Cardozo asked.

“That’s right.”

“You know this guy?” Cardozo laid a flyer on the bar.

The bartender put on granny glasses and they gave him a look totally at odds with the piratical black beard. A tiny loop of steel glimmered in his right ear. He studied the flyer a moment, then folded his glasses back into his vest pocket. “Yeah. I know him.”

“Tell me about him.” Cardozo showed the bartender his shield.

“Jodie and I dated.”

“And?”

“Are you a narc?”

“Homicide.”

Shock hit the bartender’s face. He leaned down against the bar. “He’s dead? How?”

“We want to find out.”

The bartender began to wipe a glass. From the pool table, clear and clean as the tap of a woodpecker, came the contact of a cue on an ivory ball, then the rumble of dead weight dropping down a felt-lined pocket.

“He never mentioned any threats?” Cardozo asked.

“He didn’t get threats. He got propositions.”

“Who’d want to kill him?”

“I don’t know. Me, sometimes.”

“Where were you the twenty-fourth?”

“Week ago Saturday? Same place I am now. Right here.”

“Where was he?”

“The Inferno.”

“What’s the Inferno?”

“Sex club on Ninth. He practically lived there. It’s where we met.”

Wind-whipped rain spattered down, making soapsuds in the gutter outside the precinct house as Cardozo hurried from the alley into the lobby. His cubicle was hot and still. He stood with his finger on the light switch, trying to guess from the mound on his desk how much departmental garbage had come in. He pressed the button. The light flung his shadow across the wall and filing cabinet.

The Jodie Downs file was on his desk, along with a note from Detective Barry MacPherson of the nineteenth please to take care of the hospital report.

There were four pages of
NYPD
letterhead covered with amateurish, misaligned, misspelled typing—clearly a departmental job—and there was a sheaf of public health reports, slightly better typed, with photographs attached.

The police report was grim, sad reading.

Jodie Downs had reviewed mug shots and sat at twenty-one lineups and had not been able to recognize his attacker. The assailant had never been found. The Identi-Kit picture, based on Jodie’s description, showed a stocky, well-built man in his late twenties, with strong jaw, dark curly hair, a high smooth forehead, a moustache covering a sensual full upper lip. Possibly Hispanic or Italian. There was nothing real about the perpetrator: he was a dream, a stud who swaggered through a million male fashion drawings and probably ten million gay jack-off magazines.

Police and Lenox Hill Hospital psychiatrists profiled Downs as a bewildered and guilt-ridden young man, unable to reconcile the contradictions in his own personality, compulsively drawn to the temporary self-obliteration of drugs and sexual acting out.

Cardozo looked at the photographs and felt sick. They’d been taken, he supposed, for insurance purposes—in case Jodie Downs had sued for loss of his testicle.

Cardozo went to the door and hollered for Monteleone.

A moment later the light from the squad room outlined Greg’s solid frame.

“Greg, you used to work Vice Squad. What do you know about a place called the Inferno?”

“You got six hours, Vince. It doesn’t open till midnight. Doesn’t get swinging till two.”

“What goes on there?”

“What doesn’t go on. It’s a sex club. Sex and drugs.”

“Gay?”

“Vince—it’s got everything. Maybe no animals, maybe no liquor license, but believe me there are categories of behavior there that even the Supreme Court couldn’t put a name to.”

“What kind of dress?”

“Dress? You kidding? Leather bra or booties is optional—but your basic party wear at Inferno is skin.”

“You don’t have to look any special way to get in?”

“You could look like Godzilla and get in. In fact that’s the kind of membership they want.”

“Were you a member?”

“Sure. The whole vice squad of New York’s a member.”

“Are you still a member?”

“I haven’t received an expulsion notice.”

“Good. You’re taking two guests tonight.”

“Vince. I’m a married man.”

“You don’t have to break your marriage vows.”

“That place is what Cardinal O’Connor calls an occasion of sin.”

Cardozo shot Monteleone a look. “His Eminence is a member too?”

Monteleone leveled a smoke-colored gaze at him. “I want overtime and a half. Hardship pay.”

“Screw you. And find Ellie. Tell her she’s invited. One
A.M.
sharp.”

20

“W
E’RE PUBLIC NOW.” THERE
was pride in Billi’s voice
.
“Our stock is traded on the New York Exchange. And doing very handsomely.”

“How much of ourselves do we own?” Babe asked.

“We control, naturally. We’ve kept the lion’s share. Twelve percent.”

“That’s a lion’s share?”

“Nowadays. And I’ll tell you something else. We hold a hell of a lot of IBM, and the crash didn’t touch it.”

“But we’re designers,” Babe said. “Not a brokerage house.”

“Indeed we are designers. Designers plus.” He plunged into a whirlwind description of the plusses: the new products and services, the plans to expand and diversify, something about Canadian lumber.

Babe rested her forehead against the palm of her hand. Her eyes were so heavy that they were weighing down her entire head. “Billi, I’m sorry, it’s too much coming at me at once.”

Billi was silent a moment. Long black lashes half-veiled his gaze.

She saw she’d wounded him. “Don’t misunderstand. I love what you’ve done—no, that sounds phony and frivolous. I can’t even follow what you’ve done, but I trust you. I always have.”

She’d almost married Billi. He’d proposed marriage after her divorce from Ernst Koenig, before her romance with Scottie. She’d never said yes, never said no—except by marrying Scottie, which was as decisive a no as a woman could give—yet he’d remained her friend and business associate.

“I just feel helpless, Billi. So completely cut off and out of things.”

“But you’re not.” He rose and turned off the air conditioner and opened the window, letting in a rush of city air that seemed noisy and vital compared to the lifeless cool purity of the stillness in that room.

She could smell the world out there, the streets alive and bustling and active, the people living and real and seven years older than she remembered. She yearned to catch up, to be part of it again.

“You’re going to get yourself out of here,” he said. “And you’re not going to yield an inch to those parents of yours. It’s not that they’re against you. They’re just frightened for you.”

“Why?”

“Because a lot’s changed in seven years. A lot of people are thrown by the new society, the new behavior, the new money.”

“There’s never anything new about money.”

“Nowadays there’s a great deal.” A shadow crossed Billi’s face, and there was a curl of disdain to his tone. “The new
nouveaux
aren’t the type you remember. They entertain on Park Avenue and they invite gossip columnists and press agents. They deal on Wall Street and bank in Geneva, shoot in South Africa, shop in Hong Kong, eat in Paris. And flaunt it everywhere. Ostentation is the rage—and it’s the biggest reversal to rock society since drugs. Some people can’t cope—they’re clinging to the old ways for dear life. Lucia and Hadley pretend we’re still living in the time of
The Forsyte Saga
and
Gaslight.
And they’re not the only people fooling themselves.”

Billi stood a long moment beside the window, his eyes squinting against the rays of the sun. His arms were locked around his chest. There was something held back in his voice and it didn’t go with his words.

“Take our friend Ash Canfield,” he said. “She looks quite the lady with her Chanel suits and her little hats and she has that eager, childlike quality. She thinks life should be a coming-out party—but she’s flustered and bored when the band’s not playing, so she turns to drink and drugs. She’s living a nightmare—destroying her body, her mind.”

Babe was silent, thinking of the Ash she had known years ago and the Ash she had seen last week.

Billi turned. He looked at her. “But you’re not frightened, Babe, and you’re not helpless. You never have been. You’re going to be fine. Cordelia’s got the same stuff as you. She’s going to be fine too.”

“Cordelia’s changed.”

“She’s grown up.”

“I know. I’ll have to get to know her all over again.”

“You’re going to enjoy that.”

“I hope so.”

“Dis donc,
do I detect just a little note of self-pity?”

Babe’s hands played with a loose strand of her hair, and then she attempted a little smile and couldn’t manage it and she settled for a little shrug. “You detect a symphony of self-pity. Billi—what happened to my life?”

There was a play of small muscles of Billi’s forehead; in his eyes was a mingled expression of deep grief and indignation. Babe had always felt that his sarcasm was a cover, that he was a gentler, kinder man than he gave himself credit for or wanted others to see.

“It didn’t just happen to you, Babe. It happened to all of us. What it is, or was, is a matter of opinion. You’re going to have to find out for yourself. And it’s going to hurt. No one can make it any easier for you.”

“Least of all Billi von Kleist, who’s going to be the perfect tight-lipped gent and not tell me a word.”

“Scottie was my friend too.”

“Was?”

Billi crossed back to the bed and took her hand. A wave of his vetiver cologne went past her, and she drew the first easy breath she’d taken in three days. No matter how many worlds came crashing down like dropped trays, she could always count on Billi von Kleist and his cool common sense.

“Let it go, Babe. Start letting go of it right here and now. It’s over, gone. Get on with the present. Get back to work.”

His eyes were probing into hers: they were a fiery blue that seemed to scan her and read her like sonar.

“No matter what else happens,” he said, “no matter what else you discover has happened, hold on to work. Work is the last, the most important, the only frontier. Everything else comes and goes—but work stays. The one friend, the one parent, the one child, the one lover. It’s the only thread we’ve got to guide us through this labyrinth we call a life.”

21

T
HEY WERE STANDING IN
the meat-packing area of Manhattan, a neighborhood of industrial buildings and warehouses just south of 14th street. The air had the smell of badly refrigerated death.

Derelict-looking buildings lined the block. A phonebooth was the major source of light.

It was a sweltering night, sidewalks still steaming from the rain. The worst of the storm had blown over, but a trickle still fell, glittering through the headlights of passing cars, triple-parked meat vans and idling limousines.

A steady stream of figures scurried under umbrellas from taxis and limos to a darkened building at the end of the block.

“What’ll the jet set think of next,” Siegel said.

The entrance to the Inferno was through a wooden shed that had been built out over the sidewalk. Monteleone led Cardozo and Siegel past a mean-looking bouncer and down a flight of cement steps that curved not into the cellar of the building but in the opposite direction, into a catacomb under the avenue itself. The steps were narrow, but not as narrow as what came next, a dank space lit by flashlights barbed-wired to the cement walls. Members were backed up in a line, waiting to show their ID’s to the director of admissions. He sat behind a four-foot raw wood carton that bore the stencils
COFFEE, CAFE, PRODUITO DO BRASIL
, and he wore a leather patch over one eye.

He lit one neatly rolled joint from another. He glanced at the line of customers. This was his moment, his island of power. Nothing was going to hurry him.

The people behind Cardozo were talking about how much Fifth Avenue office space was going for per square foot. They looked like stockbrokers, lawyers, small-time civil service grafters who had snorted a line, kicked the traces, and bolted off the ten-to-six Monday-to-Friday path.

Monteleone showed his membership card. “Two guests.”

The admission man’s olive, broadly ugly face took on a look of calculation. “Twenty bucks.”

Monteleone pulled twenty from his wallet and signed the register. Cardozo noticed that he signed the mayor’s name.

They moved on into a dim area where members were taking off their clothes and handing them over to the clothescheck.

“Check your clothes.” Monteleone was already out of his trousers, wearing ridiculous plaid boxer shorts. “Keep some money in your socks. Drinks are three bucks each.”

A brave smile deepened the lines of Siegel’s face. She pulled off her blouse.

Cardozo stripped down to his Jockeys.

They moved into the next room. It was cavernous. The low ceiling rested on wooden beams that came from the dirt floor at crazy angles. The acid rock thundering from a dozen speakers gave the cavernous space the feel of a coalmine that might collapse at any moment. Definitely a space for people who liked to live near the edge.

The bar was a bunch of crates arranged in a circle. Naked figures were sitting and standing and posing.

Beyond the bar was an area packed with waterbeds and hemmed in by sections of steel fence, suitable for padlocking your playmates to; there was a six-foot wading pool of the sort you see on suburban back lawns; there were deck chairs scattered around, card tables where members could take conversation and drug breaks.

“So you think this is where Jodie Downs met Mr. Right,” Monteleone said.

They stood there, three uncomfortable cops in their underwear, without guns, without shields, keeping their eyes open.