VC01 - Privileged Lives (25 page)

Gradually details began standing out.

A man with an IV in one arm and a glucose bag hanging from a head-high walker was talking with a woman sitting on the bar. She lazily stroked his shoulders with a whip.

“Pig city,” Siegel muttered. “Absolutely new dimensions in chazerei.”

Across the room, a woman was walking over a naked man with football cleats. A few solo acts prowled the dark corners, sniffing for action.

Cardozo felt like a fifth wheel on a spaceship. “Anyone want a drink?”

Nobody objected.

On his way to the bar he passed a man in a sling getting fist-fucked by a fat, bare-breasted woman in an executioner’s hood. At a nearby card table women naked under their black raincoats were discussing how their husbands got off on this fister, how much better she was than the fister at Plato’s.

Cardozo stood at the bar.

It took a few moments before the bartender asked what Cardozo wanted.

“Three Scotches.”

“Dream on, little boy.” The bartender ripped the flip tops off three Schlitzes and didn’t bother wiping the spatter off his nose or off the bar.

Cardozo put down twelve dollar bills.

The bartender crumpled them up in his fist like a wipe-up towel. “You’re new?”

Suddenly Cardozo was looking at the bartender, seeing him. He was a heavyset man in his late twenties or early thirties, with dark curly hair, a jaw that needed shaving, a moustache covering a full upper lip. Jodie’s Identi-Kit.

“Yeah,” Cardozo said. “I’m new.”

“Stan,” the bartender said.

Cardozo accepted a tough handshake. “Vince.” His real name was easier than trying to keep false names straight.

“You’re with them?” The bartender threw a nod toward Monteleone and Siegel.

“Yeah.”

“Enjoy yourselves.”

Cardozo took the drinks back to his coworkers. Now that his eyes and nerves were adjusted he noticed a half-dozen other men who looked like Jodie’s Identi-Kit. Clones.

“It’s not a funny thing, make believe, is it,” he said.

“It’s a Petrie dish,” Siegel said.

“I’m going to mingle,” Monteleone said, and he was gone.

“No one’s enjoying themselves,” Cardozo said. “I thought orgies were supposed to be fun.”

Siegel looked at him. “Vince, you’re so touchingly square.”

“Yeah.” He had a feeling of being outside everything, of not belonging to the same race as these people. “Why did Jodie Downs do it? Why do any of them do it?”

“The sex? It’s an excuse to do drugs.”

“Why do they do drugs?”

“So they can enjoy the sex.”

“Ellie, the exasperating thing about you is you sincerely believe you got it all figured out.”

“I haven’t got anything figured out. But I don’t freak as easy as you and I got my eyes open. You said we’re looking for a killer?”

“Inferno is the last place we know Jodie was seen alive. We want to know who he talked to, who he left with. Our witness is there. It could be our killer is there.”

Friday, June 6. Thirteen days since the murder. It was already a long hot morning in the task force room. Cardozo turned slowly in his chair and rose to his feet.

“I’m moving the photography van from Beaux Arts Tower to the Inferno. We’re going to photograph every person going in or out of that club. We’re going to compare those photos with the Beaux Arts photos. We’re looking for faces we can connect to the murder scene. We’re also going to stake out the Inferno.”

“You might as well dust for fingerprints in a toilet bowl,” Monteleone said.

Cardozo shot him a look. “That toilet bowl holds evidence. We’ll dust.”

Cardozo outlined the rotating schedule he had worked out: the members of the task force would appear singly and in groups at the Inferno, night after night, till they became familiar faces.

“Tonight Siegel will apply for membership, they’ll remember her from last night, and she’ll take Malloy as a guest.”

“Thanks,” Siegel said.

“Tomorrow night Malloy takes Richards.”

“Aren’t they going to connect us?” Malloy asked. “A bunch of squares hanging around not doing coke, not partying?”

“So? We’re voyeurs, that’s how we get our kicks.”

Cardozo passed out Xeroxes of Jodie’s Identi-Kit attacker.

“This is the type of man he was attracted to. So we look for Inferno patrons of this type. We win their confidence. We ask if any of them knew Jodie, noticed who he was with that last night.”

The detectives filed wearily out of the room, holding copies of the fantasy face.

Lucinda MacGill, assistant district attorney, was waiting for Cardozo in his cubicle.

“It’s improper and it’s dangerous.” Her tone was objective, noncommittal.

“So’s life,” Cardozo said.

“We’re not talking life. We’re talking criminal code. You don’t have probable cause to put an observation truck outside that club or to send plainclothesmen in.”

“I didn’t ask for your permission. I asked how can I do it without blowing the case.”

“Any first-year public defender will make a civil liberties issue that the NYPD hasn’t got the right to photograph consenting adults going to and from their private revels.”

Cardozo’s eyes snapped to the ceiling and scanned wearily back and forth.

“And, Lieutenant, if you’re going up against that sleazebag Ted Morgenstern on this, you can expect to get the Bill of Rights thrown at you.”

“Why do you say I’m going up against Morgenstern?”

“The State Liquor Authority records are public and they’re computerized. According to the records, Morgenstern’s firm represented the Inferno in their application for a liquor license.”

“The patrons of the Inferno are snorting coke.”

“Name ten members of the United States Senate who aren’t.”

“Right out in the open?”

“The Inferno is not out in the open. It’s a chartered fraternal organization under the laws of New York State, and like your home or mine it’s private.”

“Private for ten bucks.”

“A trespass case could be made if any MOF goes in there with a false ID.”

“All the members are using false ID’s.”

“They’re not all trying to make a bust.”

“It’s an orgy pit.”

“So are a lot of Park Avenue bedrooms.”

“I’ve spent my life working in the sewer. Till the Inferno I thought I’d seen all sizes and shapes of shit. I’d like to know how much Morgenstern paid who to get that liquor license.”

She studied him, looking to see if she’d made any dent at all in his cop’s head. Not a hopeful look. “I’m talking to a brick wall.”

“The brick wall has ears.”

She lifted her half-tinted fashion glasses, revealing the flash of two intelligent watchful eyes. “Your photography van is illegal. If you find evidence, destroy the photograph and find the evidence another way. Anything you or your plainclothesmen discover inside the club is entrapment. It can’t be used. Any recordings you make are for your reference only and they’ve got to be destroyed. Ditto for any notes or memos. The key word, Lieutenant, is destroy. I’m telling you now, because after you send that van in, I’d be an accessory to obstruction. As for any memos, recordings, or photographs already in your possession, you’re on your own there. You have to read any suspect or potential witness his rights. And remember, the potential witness enjoys the same expectation of noninvasion as the suspect.”

“You’re asking the impossible.”

“I’m not asking, Lieutenant. You can’t take a step without probable cause, and Miranda is a minefield. I’ve seen valid cases destroyed because cops used their common sense instead of listening to their lawyers. Play it my way, or your killer walks, and you’re the man who walked him.”

Cardozo watched her leave the cubicle: a nice, easy walk.
She’s going to go places,
he thought.
Definitely.

On a long, lined yellow legal pad in a tight tiny scrawl Cardozo recorded every question he could think of. He was curious about the wide-open sex scene at the Inferno—especially in the light of AIDS. Who owned the club, why hadn’t it been shut down?

He took Melissa Hatfield’s business card from his wallet and punched her work number into his phone. He asked if she’d care to join him that evening for another drink.

“What’s the occasion?”

“You thought you maybe knew the victim or had seen him.”

A silence.

“I’d like to show you some new photographs. They might jog your memory.”

When Melissa finally spoke her voice was unexpectedly bright. “Could I possibly persuade you to come up to dinner at my place tonight?”

Melissa Hatfield’s address was a high rise on East Sixty-sixth, with a uniformed doorman and a sign saying all visitors must be announced. Cardozo waited while the doorman announced him, eyeing him as though he were a mugger.

He rode to the twenty-ninth floor, rang her buzzer once, and waited.

When she opened the door, there was something different about her hair; it seemed to float around her face. “Come in,” she smiled.

Her apartment bore the small graces of civilization: it was clean, cozy, softly lighted, with a pale Oriental rug and a spinet piano and bookcases and framed posters that looked like French and German art shows.

Not a million dollars, but in a way better: intelligence, taste, knowledge of what made her comfortable and what didn’t.

A great lump of tabby cat was moving on the sofa.

“That’s Zero,” she said.

Even with one leg missing, the animal was huge and very much a presence. “Hi, Zero.” Cardozo patted it on the scruff of the neck.

“Please,” Melissa said. “Sit.”

He sat down in a leather chair that was a little cracked and cat-clawed. A knitted gray shawl had been thrown over the area where the damage was concentrated. Given the perfection of the rest of the room the chair was almost out of place, like an old relative at a birthday party of children. It had the look of a favorite chair.

“Drink?” she offered.

“Scotch and water.”

“I remember.” She vanished a moment and came back with two glasses and handed him one.

She sat.

He sipped. The drink was incredibly strong. “Still trying to sell me an apartment?”

“I figured you could use it.”

“An apartment?”

“A drink.”

“It shows?”

“You look lousy. Great but lousy. The way a cop’s supposed to look.”

He sensed that she might be coming on to him in her sweet ladylike style and he didn’t want to encourage it. “Can we get the cop stuff out of the way?” he said.

“Fine by me.”

He showed her a photograph of Jodie Downs in his all-American jeans and high school sweatshirt.

She looked at it very sadly, a long time. She took a cigarette out of the crystal box on the polished maple tabletop and lit it.

“Bad habit,” he said.

She exhaled twin jets of smoke. “Tell me,” she said. “About him.”

“His name was Jodie Downs. He was a student at Pratt. Ring any bells?”

Her eyes turned murky gray and she kept smoking. “None.”

“He also had a fondness for very kinky, very sleazy sex clubs. Maybe that rings a bell?”

“Look, I work in a crooked business with opportunistic people, but I don’t go to sex clubs. It’s not my scene.”

“Okay, so we know that wherever you remember his face from, it wasn’t a sex club. And we know his name. Let’s put it together.”

“I was wrong,” she said. “The man I thought he looked like is alive—he sells me my
New York Times
every morning at the newsstand on Sixty-sixth Street.”

The last time Cardozo had questioned Melissa Hatfield she’d told him she led a lonely life and the claim hadn’t fitted with his impression of her. Again he felt a dissonance between what she was saying and what his instincts were telling him. He believed her that she didn’t go to sex clubs, but he didn’t believe she’d never seen Downs’s face. She was holding something back.

Cardozo was aware of the purring of the cat at his feet.

Melissa handed back the photograph.

“What do you feel when you see a dead man like that?” she asked.

“I feel I have a job.” He sloshed his drink, helping the ice melt.

“I felt anger, hate, and doom,” she volunteered.

“Why doom?”

“If it can happen to him it can happen to anyone.”

“It’s not going to happen to you.”

“Oh, no? There’s a lot of death around.”

“That’s a cheerful thought.”

“I’m a cheerful girl.”

“Okay, cop stuff concluded.” He knew he wasn’t going to trap her. The only other way to go was to talk trivialities, get her to lower her guard and maybe let something slip.

He said it was a hot day, and she said it was turning into a hot night.

Through the window behind her the summer light was fading and the sky above the horizon of penthouses was going from violet to blue. She said even with air conditioning there was sometimes no way to get cool except to go out to a movie, and they began chatting about their favorite films, and it was as though they were taking a stroll nowhere special, just heading the same way together.

After the third round of drinks she asked if he was hungry.

“Thought you’d never ask. I’ll eat a zoo.”

“Not on the menu. Will cold pesto salad do?”

The salad was delicious. It brought back the intense and uncomplicated pleasure of eating. Cardozo lifted his glass of chilled white wine. “To the cook.”

She raised her glass.

“Melissa,” he said, “is it easy for you to check a deed?”

“What kind of deed?”

“Who owns the building at Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue?”

“What’s at Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue?”

“A sex club called the Inferno. If I check, it looks like the police setting up a bust. If you check—”

“It looks like Nat Chamberlain setting up a new luxury co-op. Sure, I can find out.”

The strident jangle inched into Detective Greg Monteleone’s awareness. He rolled onto his side to squint at the digital readout on the Japanese clock-radio.

It was two minutes after one
A.M.

His wife was stirring beside him in the bed. As he searched for the switch on the lamp her sleeping hand went out, trying to stop him.