VC01 - Privileged Lives (43 page)

He opened the manila envelope. It was a calculated risk: it meant showing her that people she’d trusted had taken her life apart.

He handed her Flora Vogelsang’s pages.

Her blue gaze went slowly across the sheets, and there was an ache for her in his chest.

She didn’t move except to turn the pages. She didn’t say anything or even show she was reacting. But he could feel her taking it in, and he could feel her world turning dark.

When she’d finished she looked more numb than anything else. The shock didn’t seem to have happened yet. She just sat swaying a little against the chair.

“Strange how it catches you unawares. A minute ago I was happily making lists of guests for my first party, and now …”

She sat looking across the room at him.

“There’s more,” he said.

She looked up, hands hanging a little way from her body, breathing shallowly, lips parted, braced for the second blow.

He gave her the other document.

After the first paragraph she stiffened. Behind her eyes came the sudden flare-up of understanding.

At that moment Cardozo felt a tightness in the back of his throat, an overpoweringly tender melancholy for her.

“We know why your parents accepted the plea bargain. They weren’t going to let this come out.”

Her face held like a struck mirror determined not to break apart.

“It takes money to keep a secret. A lot of people knew this one. Dr. Vogelsang. Ted Morgenstern. Your ex-husband. Your daughter. Maybe the D.A. Maybe even the judge.”

She mused on that. He watched her pulling in.

“You’re thinking something,” he said.

“I wonder if Mrs. Banks knew. It might explain …”

“It might explain what?”

She told him about Mrs. Banks’s restaurant, her clothes, her new face and manners and social set.

Suddenly Cardozo’s mind was making connections. He asked questions: where did Babe’s parents bank, did she know where Scott Devens and Mrs. Banks had accounts, where did Cordelia get her money and where did she keep it, how close were the Vanderwalks to Judge Davenport?

“I’ve always called him Uncle Frank. My mother was angry that he didn’t give Scottie a harsher sentence, but they were certainly close till the trial.

Cardozo’s face darkened. “They’re your parents,” he said, “but they’re sons of bitches. I think we should take them.”

“Take them?”

“Confront them. Get this cleared up for once and all.”

The taxi stopped before a five-story German schloss in the middle of a block of French châteaus. A Mercedes limousine was parked at the curb, in front of iron gates bearing the sign,
NO PARKING ACTIVE DRIVEWAY 24 HOURS A DAY
. Cardozo calculated it was the kind of house that went nowadays for six million and change.

He paid the cabby and helped Babe and her crutches onto the sidewalk.

Babe turned. “All I told Mama was that I was bringing a friend for tea. She’ll be dreadful with you. She says I only introduce her to men I’ve decided to marry. I never allow her any input, she claims.”

“I’ll handle it.”

Babe gave him a nervous smile and the smile he gave back was not nervous at all. She pressed the brass doorbell. Murky clouds scudded across the sky and thunder rumbled overhead.

After a moment a butler opened the door: there was the merest of stiff-backed bows. “Good day, Mrs. Devens.”

“How are you today, Auchincloss? Please tell my parents that Lieutenant Cardozo and I are here.”

“Certainly. Would you care to wait in the drawing room?”

The butler vanished, and a panting chow chow came running up, barking, darting its black tongue over Babe and her crutches, then sniffing at Cardozo’s trousers. The dog preferred the trousers.

“If Jill annoys you just push her away,” Babe said.

Cardozo let the dog play with his cuff. His gaze took in the marble staircase, the paintings, the narrow blue Oriental carpet that seemed designed precisely to fit the hallway and leave a six-inch border of gleaming dark parquetry.

He followed Babe into the drawing room. The walls were vivid orange—an unusual color for a room, bright and haunting. The sofas and chairs were ivory-colored satin. The teacups and service were waiting on the coffee table.

“Well, we’re the first here,” Babe said.

Cardozo could see she was fidgety. For distraction, he asked about a Japanese urn under the Steinway. Babe said the urn had belonged to the last mistress of the last king of Rumania.

Cardozo began to get a sense of the house. Everything was rich, fantastic, beautiful. The
tchotchkes
of the world’s rulers had fallen to the Vanderwalks in astonishing quantity. Not just the urn, but Queen Victoria’s fan, in a glass case above the door; Winston Churchill’s watercolor of Somerset Maugham’s villa, in a gold frame that must have cost a patrolman’s annual salary. Babe said the tea service had been designed by Paul Revere for the empress Josephine.

A woman in a navy blue dress came through the doorway, fixing Cardozo with pale blue eyes. “How do you do—I’m Beatrice’s mother, Lucia.”

Her face was like an artist’s painting, the white of her skin contrasting delicately with her gray hair and pale crimson lips. She wore a single strand of pearls. A tiny circle of diamonds pinned to the silk dress caught the light and threw out flashes of color.

“How do you do, ma’am,” Cardozo said. “Vince Cardozo.”

A man in a navy blue blazer sauntered into the room. Babe introduced her father.

Hadley Vanderwalk had the look of a gray-haired American aristocrat, tall and lean and sharp-featured, his skin tanned by years spent on yacht decks and golf courses. There was something pleasant and intelligent in the set of his mouth.

Lucia Vanderwalk moved to a sofa and took a seat by the tea service. It was a signal for the men to sit. Her hands moved powerfully, gracefully, over the silver, seeming to communicate with it.

“Tell me about yourself, Leftenant.” She pronounced his rank that way, British.
Lef,
not
lou.

“I was born in New York, I grew up in New York, I became a cop in New York.”

“Homicide or vice?”

“Homicide.”

“You look familiar.” She stared at him, something more than ordinary interest in her eyes. “Ceylon or China?”

He realized she was talking tea and he figured what could he lose. “China.”

She poured from the teapot on the left. “Lemon or milk?”

“Lemon, please.”

“Sugar”—she glanced at him—“or NutraSweet?”

“A little NutraSweet, thanks.”

“Yes, I use it too.”

She handed him a cup. It was almost weightless. The china was as delicate and fine as the skull of a newborn baby.

“Please help yourself to sandwiches. The dark bread’s
petit-suisse,
the light’s watercress. No one’s allergic to watercress, I hope?”

Petit-suisse,
Cardozo discovered, was cream cheese with a pleasantly tart accent.

Lucia Vanderwalk distributed tea and directed conversation.

Cardozo gradually got a feel for the Vanderwalks. They were wealthy liberals. They’d hung a sign on their lives—Do Not Disturb. They knew social inequity existed and they dealt with it by electing Lena Horne and Paul Newman to the country club.

Lucia struck him as a woman who knew exactly what she wanted—she didn’t use words like “maybe” or “perhaps.” Hadley struck him as the sort of husband who would defer to his wife’s judgment in every matter but the important one—money.

“The Metropolitan Museum is doing just as much as any settlement house for the people of this city.” Lucia Vanderwalk’s glance, level and confident, turned diagonally across the table toward Cardozo. “Perhaps you don’t agree, Leftenant?”

“You’re right,” he said pleasantly. “I don’t agree.”

Lucia Vanderwalk tilted her head questioningly. “Have you
been
to the Metropolitan?”

“I investigated a robbery there ten, twelve years ago.”

“But have you ever been there
un
professionally?”

He met the dowager’s adamantly tolerant gaze. “I don’t have much time for things that don’t connect to work. Wish I did.”

“Sounds like you fellows are on the job twenty-four hours a day,” Hadley Vanderwalk said.

Cardozo nodded. “Pretty much.”

“But you’re certainly not working now,” Lucia Vanderwalk smiled.

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

There was a drawn-out, smiling silence. Lucia Vanderwalk observed Cardozo with interest.

“Seven years ago,” he said, “I helped investigate the attempt on Mrs. Devens’s life. That’s why you recognize me.”

Lucia Vanderwalk’s lips pulled into a thin line. She turned her eyes coldly toward her daughter. “Beatrice, this is shabby and absolutely irresponsible. You could at least show a little consideration for your poor father!”

Hadley Vanderwalk did not look the least bit troubled.

“If you and your husband had refused to plea-bargain,” Cardozo said, “the D.A. would have prosecuted on the original charge. Why didn’t you refuse?”

“Are we going to go into all this
again
?” Lucia Vanderwalk sighed.

“Did you have sudden doubts about the evidence? Or about Scott Devens’s guilt?”

Lucia Vanderwalk’s eyes defied Cardozo. “Neither my husband nor I had the slightest doubt whatsoever. Nor have we now.”

“After the first trial,” Cardozo said, “you invited a writer by the name of Dina Alstetter into your daughter’s house. Mrs. Alstetter found a bottle of insulin in a stud box in the bedroom. You let her keep that bottle.”

“Yes, she wanted to write a magazine article about it.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that the bottle should be taken to the police?”

“I am not going to submit to cross-examination in my own livingroom.”

“Your daughter’s house was searched and there’s no mention of that stud box or that bottle in any of the reports.”

“What finds its way into police reports is hardly my responsibility.”

“The insulin in that bottle was prescribed for Faith Banks.”

Lucia Vanderwalk’s face arranged itself into a careful blank. “Evidently my daughter’s housekeeper was a diabetic. Is that a crime?”

“Isn’t it a little odd that the evidence at the trial was insulin that Mrs. Banks found in Scott Devens’s closet?”

“I fail to see the oddity.”

“Mrs. Banks never told the police she was a diabetic. And the insulin that she claimed she found was never traced.”

Lucia Vanderwalk tapped her fingers together. “Mrs. Banks’s health and medications are all very mysterious I’m sure, but what has my daughter’s former servant to do with me or my husband?”

“Quite a lot, ma’am. You two paid Faith Stoddard Banks two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The money was transferred to her bank account the day after Judge Davenport closed the second trial to the public. On the same day you paid a half million into Scott Devens’s account. You’ve been paying him a quarter million and Mrs. Banks fifty thousand every year since.”

Lucia Vanderwalk exhaled loudly. “Hadley,” she commanded, “will you kindly say something?”

“I’m amazed at Lieutenant Cardozo’s research,” Hadley Vanderwalk said imperturbably.

“Tell him it’s not true!” his wife cried.

“It’s not true.” Hadley Vanderwalk paused to light his pipe. “The money went to Ted Morgenstern.”

A disbelieving expression flared on Lucia Vanderwalk’s face. “Hadley, how can you be so stupid?”

“Morgenstern took his percentage—a large one,” Hadley Vanderwalk said. “He passed the rest on to Mrs. Banks and to Scottie. Morgenstern’s a clever man. He organized a syndicate to back Mrs. Banks’s restaurant. He organized another to back Scottie’s career. Both have been profitable, I understand. Morgenstern gave us a chance to invest. We foolishly turned him down. Principle, you know.”

Cardozo took out his notebook and made a show of consulting his notes. “At the second trial Ted Morgenstern introduced a psychiatric and physical examination of Cordelia made by Dr. Flora Vogelsang.”

“That record is sealed!” Lucia Vanderwalk cried.

Cardozo gave her a long, slow look.

Mrs. Vanderwalk took a cigarette from a crystal box. “Dr. Vogelsang, for your information, is a vicious old Freudian and she should be burnt at the stake. She called Cordelia mad. Can you imagine, from inkblots and projective I-don’t-know-what’s she had the gall to accuse our granddaughter of inventing stories. I’m ashamed for Beatrice to have to hear this, but Dr. Vogelsang claimed Cordelia hated her mother and was in love with her stepfather. It was the most revolting oedipal offal, the lot of it.”

“Ted Morgenstern introduced another medical report into evidence,” Cardozo said. “Dr. Frederick Hallowell’s. That report showed that Scott Devens was infected with the same disease as Cordelia—gonorrhea.”

“Must we?” Lucia Vanderwalk snapped. Her finger tapped a furious bolero against her pearls.

“Yes, Mama,” Babe Devens said. “We must.”

“What were we to do?” Lucia Vanderwalk pleaded. “Let the papers get hold of it? Tell the world that Scott Devens had intercourse with his stepdaughter, a twelve-year-old? We had to protect the child.”

“Babe, you have to understand,” Hadley Vanderwalk said. “We thought you were lost and gone. We had to choose. Justice for our dead daughter—or a chance for our granddaughter. We chose Cordelia. Maybe it was wrong, but given the circumstances, that was the best decision we could make at the time.”

“The second trial would have destroyed her,” Lucia Vanderwalk said.

“Cordelia had no comprehension of what Scott had done to her,” Hadley Vanderwalk said.

“She was only a child.” Lucia Vanderwalk stubbed out her cigarette. The ashtray was Steuben. The table was Chippendale. The cigarette was Tareyton filter. “Scott seduced her with drugs. Terrible things—marijuana, cocaine …”

“Injections of morphine,” Hadley Vanderwalk said. “At twelve she was an addict.”

“You have no idea,” Lucia Vanderwalk said, “how hard that child has had to work to put her life back together, to put all this horror behind her, how hard she’s worked to get off drugs. It took courage and persistence. You’re not going to undo the healing of seven years, surely you’re not!” Babe absorbed the plea quietly.