VC01 - Privileged Lives (59 page)

“Vince,” she said, her voice tight and shaking. “I’m going to be sick. I have to get out of here.”

Cardozo dialed Melissa Hatfield’s work number.

“I see you people are putting up a condo in the meat-packing district. Charming neighborhood.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“Would you have time to run another real estate trace for me? Two lots down from your new condo there’s a warehouse. Five eighteen Gansevoort.”

“I know the building. It’s your basic abandoned firetrap.”

“You sure it’s abandoned? There are names on half the mailboxes.”

“Those are welfare drops. Standard scam with the Department of Human Resources, getting aid for nonexistent dependent children. No one lives there. We wanted to buy, so we checked. The owner’s holding out, listing bogus rent-control tenants. You can’t evict anyone under rent control. The land rights are going to skyrocket and the owner thinks he can make a killing. He’s got a surprise coming. The city’s reassessing all the property on that block. The taxes will quintuple and he’ll have to sell. Nat Chamberlain’s going to be the only bidder the city allows. So you see, it pays to contribute to the mayor’s reelection campaign.”

“The owner’s got more than welfare phantoms in there. Somebody’s been using the front apartment on the third floor. And I think they had a lease, because they made improvements. I need to know who.”

“I suppose the owner could have leased to an actor or artist—something temporary. Anything’s possible. I’ll check.”

“You ever see anything going on in that apartment?”

Cardozo pointed. The warehouse appeared dead, remote, the clouds behind it a menacing smudge.

The old man’s eyes narrowed blearily beneath a shock of white hair. A varicose, hawklike nose dominated his face. He shrugged, not bothering to lift himself from the doorstep where he had made himself a pallet of newspapers and old rags. A smell of animal blood rose from the pavement.

Cardozo opened his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill and dangled it.

The old man reached up a trembling hand and took the money. The rip in his undershirt widened and another fold of white torso blobbed out. “Used to see things. Hasn’t been anything going on up there since they moved out.”

“When did they move out?”

A soot-caked fingernail scratched white cheek-stubble. “First week in June.”

“Remember the name of the moving company?”

“Shit, I don’t remember my own name.”

“What kind of furniture?”

“Couches, tables, lamps, cameras, black leather shit.”

“What kind of black leather shit?”

“Black leather shit like they got in all those asshole clubs around here.”

“What kind of cameras?”

“Video. You could hock ’em for maybe eighty bucks.”

“Did you see the people who used the place?”

Silence.

Cardozo opened his wallet again.

A prostitute wobbled past on high heels, slowing to stare at the ten-dollar bill. The skirt was ass-hugging tangerine stretch nylon and the blond wig could have been swiped from a department store dummy.

A ship’s horn bleated on the river.

The old man took the money; the prostitute immediately picked up speed, calves rippling with muscle.

“They had parties. Fridays, Saturdays. Limousines parked up and down all along here.” The old man’s hand indicated the deserted street.

“Every weekend?”

“Just now and then.”

“What kind of people?”

“What kind of people ride limousines? Rich assholes. Scared they’re gonna get mugged or bitten by a rat.”

“How were they dressed?”

“Tuxes, dresses, costumes.”

“What kind of costumes?”

“Leather.”

“Any idea what they were doing up there?”

“I dunno.” The old man broke out laughing. His breath was an explosive mix of beer and tooth decay. “They never invited me.”

“Come on, earn that twenty. You must’ve heard something, seen something.”

“Couldn’t see nothin’. They closed the curtains. Heard music. Singin’. Once in a while screamin’.”

“Screaming?”

“Sounded like screamin’. Music was so loud couldn’t be sure.”

“What kind of screaming? Like someone was singing, or drunk, or hurting or what?”

“Screamin’ like someone was screamin’.”

Cardozo stared at the warehouse. The one streetlight still working made the block look all the more abandoned.

“Did you ever see a body carried out?” he asked.

“All they did was carry each other out of that place. Some of them arrived so stoned they had to carry each other in.”

“You never saw a
dead
body?”

“How you gonna tell the difference? They were dead on their feet. Haven’t seen ’em in a month. Since those movers.”

Cardozo patted the old man on the shoulder and crossed toward the warehouse. He had almost reached the other sidewalk when a blue Pontiac swerved around him, pulling to a stop in the middle of the block.

A black-and-white cat mewed from the gutter.

The blond wig turned. The prostitute stepped with exaggerated elegance off the sidewalk, clacked across the cobblestones, and bent down to confer with the driver.

After a moment the driver threw open the passenger door and the prostitute hopped in.

Tony Bandolero, from Forensic, was waiting in the shadow by the warehouse door. He was frowning, running a hand through his curly brown hair. “Why are all transvestite hookers black?”

“Are they?”

“That one is.”

Cardozo watched the Pontiac pull across Washington Street. “Why are the customers all white, why do they all have New Jersey license plates?”

“Do they?”

“That one does.”

Cardozo pushed open the door and flicked on the flashlight. They went inside and up the stairs.

“What do those hookers charge?” Tony Bandolero asked.

“I hear fifty bucks.”

“Fifty bucks for a blow job? No wonder the country’s going to hell.”

A rat froze for an instant in the light, then scurried.

Tony Bandolero held the flashlight and Cardozo opened the door with his MasterCard.

In the dimness of the apartment the shadow of the window ribbing made a slanting pattern on the floor. Cardozo crossed through the puddles of light. He gazed out through the panes. The moon was glowing on the roofs of the city.

“These scratches look like someone was moving something heavy.” Tony was squatting close to the floor. The flashlight lay on its side, lighting up a triangle of polyurethaned planking. “Refrigerator, maybe.”

“I want to know what those stains are,” Cardozo said.

“Let’s find out.” Tony opened his toolkit and selected a scalpel. Working the blade around the stained wood, he loosened a fragment, lifted it, and deposited it in a plastic evidence bag.

He played the flashlight along the floor, found other stains, took scrapings.

In the doorless doorway between the rooms he crouched to gaze at the doorjamb. The flashlight beam was showing him a rust-colored stain at knee level, a tangle of whorls and spirals.

“Hold the light for me, would you?”

Cardozo squatted beside him and took the flashlight.

Tony chiseled a cut around the stain, loosened the wood beneath it, lifted the stain with tweezers, and placed it between two sheets of glassine.

Cardozo played the light along the jamb. There was a similar stain on the neighboring surface, at the same level.

“What I think we got,” Tony said, “is fingerprints. Funny place for prints, down there.”

“Unless the body was slung over someone’s shoulder.”

Tony nodded. “Coming through the doorway he tried to grab.”

“He would have been alive, then,” Cardozo said. “Conscious.”

“Have to be. Grabbing like that isn’t reflex. Wherever he was being carried, he wasn’t in any rush to get there.”

“The scrapings are human blood,” Lou Stein said. “Type O.”

“Jodie Downs’s type,” Cardozo said.

“Bear in mind it’s a very common type. Eighty percent of the human race—”

“I know, I know.”

“The marks on the doorjamb are a thumb and partial index.”

Cardozo’s hand tightened on the receiver. “Whose?”

“They match Jodie Downs’s prints.”

“So he was there in that apartment. He was cut and carried out alive.”

“Looks it.”

“Thanks, Lou.” Cardozo hung up the receiver. He didn’t know how many minutes he sat absolutely still in his chair, running people and events in his mind, freezing images, going back, comparing, fast-forwarding, trying an image here, trying it there, finding the place where it fitted.

The pattern expanded before his eyes, opening to include all those pieces that had never fitted in before, all the brightly colored expensive people who had been hovering over the mud and blood from the beginning but who had never quite belonged to the same ugly, brutal universe.

The images linked and locked:

The apartment in the meat-packing warehouse-sex club area where glittering people had come in limousines. Babe Devens’s memory of cartoon characters torturing Jodie Downs. Loring carrying Downs out of the apartment into Faye di Stasio’s van, leaving bloodstains; parking the van in the garage at Beaux Arts Tower; taking Downs up the service elevator to apartment six. Snuffing him there.

“You were right.” There were dark circles under Melissa Hatfield’s clear gray eyes, as though she’d been putting in too much overtime. “The apartment on Gansevoort Street was rented. A man called Lewis Monserat had a three-year lease on it.”

“The art dealer?” Cardozo said.

They were sitting in the rear booth at Danny’s Bar and Grill on East Sixty-seventh, nursing two coffees. It was cool and dry here. The weather on the other side of the plate glass window was drizzle shot through with sunset.

Melissa nodded. “He had three two-year leases before the last lease. He broke it May thirty-first. It had a year and a half to run. Actually, he vacated four days earlier, May twenty-seventh.”

The first business day, Cardozo reflected, after the body had been found in Beaux Arts Tower. “The apartment couldn’t have been his residence.”

“No. But the lease was residential. So it was some sort of pied-à-terre.”

“Unusual neighborhood.”

“He must like having a pied-à-terre. He put a binder on a loft in a co-op five days later.” She was watching Cardozo with an odd intensity. She had a habit of smiling with her mouth and retracting the smile with her eyes. “Four thirty-two Franklin Street. Apartment four-A. Down in TriBeCa.”

He nodded, thinking. “Makes sense. Same sort of neighborhood—warehouses and small businesses.”

“It was for three minutes. Then the artists fleeing SoHo rents moved in, and then real estate moved in, and now it’s
the
section of town for young established types—college professors, financial consultants, lawyers. People who think it’s square to live uptown.”

“How much did Monserat pay for the new place?”

“Too much and a half. The bank put up seventy-five percent, and he still can’t afford it. He needed a cosigner.”

“How come he couldn’t swing it on his own? I thought his gallery was one of the biggest in town.”

“So what? Who’s going to pay two hundred thousand for an eight-by-eight of a pickle? You can hit on the New York State Foundation for the Arts once, twice, then your market’s dried up. Monserat’s gallery is a penny-ante laundering operation for dope money.”

“Then he’s rich.”

“He likes to think he is.”

“Who cosigned for Monserat?”

Melissa looked at Cardozo. She was going through some kind of pain. “I’m in sort of a conflict-of-interest situation here, Vince. This isn’t easy for me. When you showed me that dead boy’s photograph it didn’t come to me at first where I knew him from, and then I remembered and I thought about picking up the phone and telling you everything. Then I thought about not telling you anything. And I guess I came down in the middle and now I’m moving off center and I’m a little scared.”

“Jodie Downs and your brother had something to do with Lewis Monserat’s cosigner?”

“In a way. Lew Monserat’s cosigner was Balthazar Properties. One of our corporations.”

“How come?”

“Because Ted Morgenstern has shares in Balthazar.”

Cardozo’s brows arched down at the name Morgenstern. “Why did Morgenstern want to help Monserat?”

“He wasn’t necessarily helping. Morgenstern uses fronts for his property. You’d have to dig to the bottom of a manure pile of shell companies to find out who really owns that loft. The one thing I’m sure of is it doesn’t belong to Lew Monserat.”

“Who do you think owns it? Educated guess.”

“Ted Morgenstern has handled a lot of society divorces and he’s covered up more than a few society murders; and when it comes to dirty mergers and forced acquisitions and real estate takeovers, he’s king of the hill. He renders a lot of special services, and any one of his rich clients might want a discreet little one-bedroom under a false name. And any one of his poor clients would be willing to provide the cover.”

“Any chance Morgenstern owns it himself?”’

Melissa nodded. “From what I know of him personally, he could have an interest in it.”

“What kind of interest?”

“My hunch is it’s a pleasure pad, trick pad, whatever you want to call it. But in the upper reaches of depravity, as opposed to the upper reaches of politics, it’s hard to know who holds the real power. It could be that Morgenstern’s the master and the place is his, or it could be that Morgenstern has a master and the place is that person’s.”

“You’re talking master-slave s.m. stuff?”

“It’s a possibility, is all I’m saying. On the other hand it could be Morgenstern just has a habit of hiding property because he’s lived that way for thirty years. Nothing he owns is in his name. The yacht, the town house, the cars, the paintings—they’re owned by his firm, not him.”

“Why’s he so anxious to avoid ownership?”

Melissa waited for the waitress to refill their cups, and then she glanced around the room. The booths next to theirs were empty.

“Three reasons,” she said. “One, Morgenstern deals real estate for the archdiocese, and they don’t need scandal. Two, he’s been under tax indictment for the last twenty-two years and the feds could seize everything he owns. Every cardinal since Spellman has tried to get the indictment lifted, but IRS isn’t Vatican City.”