VC01 - Privileged Lives (47 page)

Authors: Edward Stewart

Tags: #police, #legal thriller, #USA

BOOK: VC01 - Privileged Lives

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Ellie Siegel was staring thoughtfully into her can of cherry Coke. “Somebody told her,” she said.

“Who could have told her? Who knew about the cigarette butt in Downs’s left hand? Who knew about the peace sign carved on his chest? We kept that stuff out of the papers.”

“Vince, is there any possibility maybe you mentioned some stuff to her?”

“Why the hell would I mention it to her?”

“Because you’re sorry for her. Maybe you wanted to make her feel important. A lot of cops tell their girlfriends things they shouldn’t, little inside shit about ongoing investigations—”

“She is not a girlfriend. Jesus Christ, enough with the matchmaking.”

“Would you give me back my head, please? I’m just trying to understand how there could be such a mix on that tape. She has insider details and then all that
mishegoss
about John Wayne and Mickey Mouse. And Nixon. What’s with the thirty-seventh president? Added to which, there’s nothing about apartment six, nothing about Claude Loring. Devens just has isolated bits and she’s filled in the rest with comic book stuff.”

“It bothers me. I heard her saying those things and it locked right in to a feeling I’ve had all along about this Downs killing.”

“The case is solved, Vince.”

“Where did the mask come from? Where did that cigarette butt come from? Who was the woman that bought the mask from Pleasure Trove and took it to Beaux Arts Tower?”

“Wait a minute. Loring confessed. The evidence backs up his confession. The witnesses back up his confession. You’re not going to tell me that crazy tape raises any questions about his guilt. Neither does the mask or the cigarette or the woman no one could identify. They don’t make Loring innocent. No way. The woman may not even connect. The mask is a mass-produced item. The cigarette—no one’s ever been convicted on a cigarette unless the charge was littering or polluting the atmosphere at the Four Seasons. The questions in this case have been answered. That’s why those files in your lap are marked Case Closed.”

Cardozo sat there with his Diet Pepsi on ice, sealed in a state of wondering. “Too many coincidences. Morgenstern defended the Devens murder attempt and the Downs killing. We put Babe Devens under and out comes the Downs killing.”

“Vince, you’re over the line. You’ve got a mishmash, not coincidence. Mickey Mouse is not an accessory in the Downs killing. Richard Nixon has an alibi. You’re not going to get any judge to subpoena Alice in Wonderland.”

Cardozo was silent, frowning.

“But assume she was there,” Siegel said. “Where does it get you? Downs is being tortured and murdered, and in walks Babe Devens, up two flights of dark stairs. Forget she can’t even walk
now.
Forget apartment six is on the sixth floor. Forget she had nurses watching her around the clock, forget the coma. Forget she sees the murder and doesn’t see the murderer, forget what she
does
see is half of Disneyland. She’s there while the handyman is taking Jodie Downs apart. Just ask yourself: what is Babe Vanderwalk doing in that place at that time? Who or whose purpose does it serve? Her own? The handyman’s? The victim’s? Where was she before and where did she go afterward? How come no one saw her?”

“So why did she tell that story?”

“Because you and Dr. Kildare had her flying on Medicaid angel dust.”

“How did she get the details?”

“You mean how did she get the wrong details? She made them up. How did she get the right details? Maybe she made them up too and got lucky. Or maybe there
is
something to ESP, maybe she knew because
you
knew, because you’ve been fixated on this case for so long that anyone who can read lips would know what you’re thinking.”

Cardozo put down his glass and rested his head on the back of the seat. Through lowered lids he stared at the dead TV screen.

“G’night, Vince.” Siegel came across the livingroom and patted him on the cheek. “The chicken was delicious.”

“The neighbor cooked it.”

“It was still delicious.”

He sprang to his feet and came with her into the hallway. Thoughtfully, she considered the man holding the door for her.

“Vince, I don’t mean to spoil the ending for you, but Loring did it.”

He nodded, eyes blank with fatigue. The latch clicked shut.

For two more hours he sat staring at photos and fives, his mind toying with connections, trying to tease the new piece into place.

“Hey, Dad—aren’t you sleeping anymore?”

His daughter was standing in the doorway, in rumpled night-clothes, and he felt a rush of absurdity and guilt.

He closed the file. He walked slowly, feeling an ache in his back, and he wondered if he was turning into one of those middle-aged deskmen with back problems.

Terri followed him down the hall to the kitchen. He put a pan of milk on the burner. Hot milk, his instant sleeping pill. She got a cup out of the cabinet for him.

Cardozo stood watching his daughter. That movement of the arm she had from her mother, and the way she took charge of the stove with her head a little on one side was her mother’s too.

“How you feeling, Dad?”

So was the question, and the dark-eyed look, with their implied gentle nagging.

“I’m okay.”

She mixed Sweet ’n Low and cinnamon in the cup and handed him the milk. She suspected something. He knew she sensed he wasn’t right.

“Get some sleep,” she said.

But that night he didn’t sleep.

A gob of milky light smeared on the wall. Cardozo adjusted the lens. The image leapt into focus, a tall beautiful woman with black curly hair that came to her shoulders.

Babe sat with her crutches leaning on the wall behind her, hands pushed down in the pockets of her skirt. After a long moment of deliberation she said, “There’s a seven-year gap in my memory and even if I knew these people, they’ve changed and I might not recognize them.”

“Or on the other hand you might.”

Cardozo clicked to the next. A slim blond girl with deep-set eyes. Mystery woman taking mask into BAT.

Babe pulled back, shook her head no.

The next. A middle-aged man with hollow eyes and wisps of black hair over his ears.

“That’s Lew Monserat, the art dealer. He’s lost weight. Is he well?”

“You mean mentally? I wouldn’t swear to it.”

Cardozo made check marks in the log, one for recognition and another for a certain hesitation that might have masked recognition.

Claude Loring flashed onto the wall, sweaty in his sawed-off Levi’s jacket, striding into the entrance of the Inferno.

It began with something vague. Babe just stared, still and silent.

The photo exuded a terrific sense of cocaine tension, cocaine power, cocaine violence, all held under tight Valium control.

Cardozo could feel she was beginning to make a connection. Her face tightened and paled. She was on the brink of something.

“His eyes look so cold. He makes me feel afraid.”

“Do you know him?”

“Should I?”

“There are no shoulds about it. Maybe you’ve seen him somewhere, maybe you haven’t.”

“Seven years ago he would have been a child.”

“But you feel something.”

“Yes, I feel something, but … Vince, I’m sorry, I just can’t tell. Maybe it’s just that he looks so intense.”

“What does that remind you of, someone looks so intense?”

“It makes me think … I’d like to draw him.”

“T
HE DEFENDANT WILL RISE
.”

Claude Loring rose. Babe leaned forward. She was sitting in the front row of the courtroom, next to Cardozo. Her gaze took Loring in, from the short-cropped hair to the neat regimental tie to the tailored dark suit.

Ted Morgenstern hadn’t bothered coming to the sentencing. He’d sent Ray Kane, balding and young in his Armani suit, looking restlessly at his wristwatch, as though he had a helicopter to catch three minutes ago.

Judge Francis Davenport adjusted half-moon spectacles on his nose, surveyed the almost-empty courtroom, and peered down at the defendant. “Claude Loring, you have pleaded guilty to the crime of negligent manslaughter.”

Babe’s eyes were pinned to the man at the defendants’ table.

Claude Loring’s head was bent now, his face gaunt; there was no light, no life in his eyes.

“It is the sentence of this court,” the judge said, “that you serve not more than twenty-five and not less than six years imprisonment at the New York State penitentiary at Ossining, New York.”

Loring’s head dropped.

Cardozo calculated rapidly that Loring would be out on parole in two years. He could feel hate come out on his body like sweat.

Two guards came forward and led Claude Loring away.

Ray Kane stuffed papers into a briefcase, twirled the combination lock.

Cardozo quickly shouldered his way after the prisoner. He flashed his shield at the guards. “Hey, fellas, I want to talk to Claude a minute.”

Loring turned around.

“Someone I want you to meet, Claude.”

Babe came slowly across the courtroom on her crutches. She looked searchingly at Loring. Her brow wrinkled, questioning.

Claude stood squinting at her, one finger poked through his pants pocket, scratching his balls. Something was rumbling inside him, a lot of anger coming to a boil under his skull. His voice snapped out like sandpaper. “What the fuck do you want, bitch?”

Cardozo slapped the killer hard across the jaw.

A guard stepped between them. “Easy does it, Lieutenant. He’s state property now.”

“Can I use the phone, long distance?”

“Of course,” Babe said.

They were in her livingroom. Cardozo stared a long time at the phone and he could feel her watching him, curious.

Finally he picked up the receiver and punched out a number. Three shades of white noise came over the line and then three buzzes and then the voice of Lockwood Downs from the middle of Illinois.

“Loring got six to twenty-five,” Cardozo said.

There was a silence. “What does that mean?” Downs said.

“He could be paroled after he serves a third.”

“A third of what?”

“A third of six.”

“Two years.” The voice had crumpled.

At that moment Cardozo experienced an overpowering melancholy. Lockwood and Meridee Downs would hurt. They would hurt for the rest of their lives. Every time they saw a young man in the pride of youth with all the promise of life before him, they would think,
That could have been our son.

Cardozo felt pitifully small. “I’m sorry.”

He hung up.

Babe was giving him that piercingly blue look.

“Vince—why did you make that call from here?”

She was staring at him and he wasn’t sure what he was reading in that stare. Her eyes were gentle and questioning, but there was a strangeness in them too.

“I don’t understand why you wanted me to hear. And I don’t understand why you took me to that trial.”

“So you could see the defendant.”

“Why?” she said.

“Why did you think you knew him?”

“I didn’t. I thought I might like to draw him.”

“Still want to draw him?”

“Why are you testing me? You’re acting as though I’m somehow involved.”

“You
are
involved.” For the next twenty minutes Cardozo told Babe about the Downs killing. He could see it was shocking her and he could see too that it wasn’t connecting to anything in her head.

“This is what you said under sodium pentothal.” He put the cassette player on the coffee table between them. He pushed the start button.

When the tape was over she looked up at him, frightened, eyes begging for the sort of assurance he couldn’t give, a promise that the world wasn’t crazy, that she wasn’t.

“It’s impossible,” she said.

“Right,” Cardozo said. “It’s impossible.”

Cardozo laid two lists on the table. “She ID’ed these twelve from the photo file. She was definite. These seventeen are maybe’s—she didn’t know their names, but she dawdled, like she knew the faces. And this is her personal address book. Don’t lose it—it’s a loan.”

“So what do you want from me?” Charley Brackner asked.

“You have some other lists on that computer. Beaux Arts Tower and the Inferno. Can you pull the matches?”

Charley gave a happy little smart-ass grin, his way of saying the task was pathetically uncomplicated. “Sure. We create a directory called
B DEVENS
and when we get the names in we’ll tell Maisie to
COMP
.” His fingers began flying over the keyboard and the names began lighting up the screen.

An hour and a half later the names were on the computer and Charley typed in
SEARCH: INFERNO
.

The screen flashed back:
SEARCHING
.

Charley swiveled around in his chair and lit a Camel. “Maisie’s random access,” he told Cardozo. “Sometimes she’s lucky and hits it on the first go, sometimes she takes a few seconds.”

The screen flashed:
ENTRY NOT FOUND
.

“Okay, let’s try Beaux Arts.”

The screen flashed:
ENTRY NOT FOUND
.

“Not found, what does that mean?” Cardozo said.

“Not found means not there.”

“I know those files are in the computer,” Cardozo said.

“Did these three files have anything in common?”

“Try Jodie Downs or Downs murder.”

Charley typed
*DOWNS*
.

The screen flashed
SEARCHING
and a moment later