VC01 - Privileged Lives (60 page)

“That’s two reasons. What’s the third?”

“Vince, can I trust you? This could mean my job. It could mean my kneecaps or my face or my life. They can’t know it came from me.”

“You can trust me.”

Melissa regarded him with her deep-set eyes. “Morgenstern is dying. He’ll be damned if he’s going to pay a penny in estate taxes to any government.”

“What’s he dying of?”

“He’s in the same program at Vanderbilt that my brother was.”

“He’s got AIDS?”

“Early stages. They give him three years.”

“He’s gay?” Cardozo said. “He’s an IV drug user? What?”

“All of the above. Morgenstern uses my boss as a drop for liquid amphetamine. I never heard of anyone drinking liquid amphetamine, though I suppose you could. Balthazar buys Morgenstern callboys through a charge card service. Nat keeps the records because it’s a tax deduction. As a favor to Morgenstern, Nat also provides callboys to religious figures in the community. As a result some high-rankers have AIDS. Less said about that the better.”

“How many shares does Morgenstern have in Balthazar?”

“Thirty-five percent. It’s held by Astoria Properties N.A. That’s a Dutch Antilles company. As far as the meat-packing district scheme goes, as far as any of his scams go, he’s technically clean. But Morgenstern’s real power is that he’s dying. He doesn’t have to care about anyone. He’s a terrorist wearing a vest that’s wired to explode. The only thing he cares about is, he doesn’t want it publicly known he’s gay. No, there’s a second thing he cares about. He doesn’t want to go to hell.”

“Do Jews believe in hell?”

“He’s Catholic. Spellman baptized him. Morgenstern hates Jews.”

“Did Spellman give him a plenary indulgence?”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t.”

“Spellman dealt everything—real estate, POW’s, indulgences.”

“How do you know all this stuff about Spellman and Morgenstern?”

“Everyone knows Spellman had a weakness for pretty little Jewish boys. Which Morgenstern was before he turned into the portrait of Dorian Gray.”

“I mean the inside stuff. How did you get it?”

“I had an inside track.” There was a pause, just a beat of silence, as if she were deciding how far she could trust him. “My brother and Morgenstern were lovers. It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

“Some gays cruise subway johns and get caught, and some gay lawyers cruise police lockups. Morgenstern got Brian off a soliciting charge. He liked Brian’s looks, he liked Brian’s style: Brian was the kind of person he could take to Gracie Mansion and the Archdiocesan Palace and the Harmonie Club without everyone snickering.”

She lit another cigarette, looked at it with hatred, and decapitated it against the edge of the ashtray.

“Brian was always looking for the big break. He said New York is a who-do-you-know town, Morgenstern knew everyone, if he slept with Morgenstern he’d know everyone. He’d even have contacts in the federal government, because Morgenstern had a town house in Washington, D.C.; it was a partying pad for him and his government connections, walking distance from the Capitol. It was stocked with booze and boys, and Morgenstern stayed there whenever he had to put in a congressional fix or bribe a government agency. Brian was impressed. Dolce vita with a power twist. The downside was, he wasn’t happy with Morgenstern. Sexually or emotionally or any way. Morgenstern’s very controlling, very closeted. He comes from that period of powerhouse antigay gays—cardinals and J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. The right-wing establishment gave those guys permission to be gay provided from nine to five they were gay-bashers, black-bashers, communist-bashers—you name it, they’d bash it. Brian was very open with me. There were no taboo subjects between us. He told me all about the sex Hoover and the cardinal and Morgenstern liked. It was very punitive, very naive and sick. They had to be drunk. They liked getting hit, taking verbal abuse. Hoover had a racial wrinkle—he liked blacks. Morgenstern adds a whole anti-Semitic wrinkle, he likes his lover to dress up in SS clothes—he thinks Nazis are sexy. There’s something wrong with Morgenstern’s skin. Even before the AIDS he had a sort of advanced psoriasis—the lesions bleed unless they’re kept oiled. Brian used to oil his back for him. Sexy, hey? So every time Brian made it with Morgenstern he had this compulsion to go trick on the outside with—how did he put it?—a mammal.”

“So what was in the relationship for Brian?”

“He hoped he’d get a little power. What he got instead was AIDS.”

Cardozo sat there watching Melissa Hatfield stare at him. He couldn’t buy that she had learned so much from her brother, or that Brian’s AIDS and his liaison with Morgenstern were the secret he’d sensed her holding back. “Melissa,” he said, “what don’t you want me to know?”

She looked surprised. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s something else. From day one I’ve felt it.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Then why don’t you tell me?”

“Vince, I like you.” It seemed to embarrass her to make the admission. “I even thought … maybe …” She looked down at the paper place mat printed with drink recipes and began running her fingernail back and forth through a banana daiquiri. “I wanted you to like me.”

“I do like you.”

“Would you like me if you knew I was sleeping with my boss? Nat Chamberlain, who’s put up half the overpriced firetrap co-ops in Manhattan and took more graft than any politician in this city?”

The picture finally came into focus. “Why would I blame you for him?”

“Last spring there was a fire in one of Nat’s flagship co-ops. A policeman died from burns he got rescuing a woman.”

“You didn’t build the building—you didn’t set the fire.”

“But somebody set it. And the insurance paid Nat another forty-four million.” Melissa was silent a moment. “I feel dirty.”

“Welcome to the real world.”

“That’s all—welcome to the real world?”

“If there’s any other answer, I don’t know it.” Cardozo sighed and signaled for the check.

46

C
ARDOZO PHONED THE LEWIS
Monserat Gallery.

The woman with the prim voice said gallery hours were Tuesday through Saturday, 11
A.M.
till 6
P.M.
—except Thursday, when hours were 12 till 8
P.M.
She added, “We’re closed Saturdays during the summer.”

“Nothing like a long weekend,” Cardozo said.

Cardozo examined the facade of 432 Franklin Street.

It was a typical conversion, a six-story industrial building with a column of windows marked Shaftway where the freight elevator ran. No amount of sand-blasting would ever turn the brick walls into brownstone, any more than fresh black paint would ever turn the fire escape into wrought iron art nouveau.

A sign swinging from the lowest cross-walk of the escape announced
LUXURY CO-OPS AVAILABLE
.

He pushed through the unlocked gray iron security door. A hand-lettered sign taped to the mailboxes inside requested,
FOR YOUR OWN SECURITY PLEASE LOCK FRONT DOOR AFTER 11 P.M. THERE HAVE BEEN INCIDENTS
.

Cardozo studied the building directory. Fewer than half the apartments were occupied, and there was no name in either fourth-floor slot.

The owners had installed an inner door of plate glass, the latch controlled by an intercom buzzer system. He pushed the buzzers for both sixth-floor units. An instant later two loud rasps clicked the latch open.

A glance at the first floor told him that the A apartments were at the front of the building, the B’s at the rear.

He took the stairway to the fourth floor, two quiet steps at a leap.

The lock on 4A was a Medeco—not pickproof, but certainly MasterCard-proof.

“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called irritably from upstairs.

Cardozo returned to his car, parked twenty yards down the opposite curb of Franklin Street, and took up his vigil, staring up at the dark windows on the fourth floor of 432.

He observed relatively little movement on Franklin. The street looked as if it had originally been an alley between two rows of warehouses. Judging by the garbage cans, most of the buildings had converted to residences. There were no stores, no restaurants, no reason to wander down the poorly lit pavement unless you happened to live there or needed a quiet wall to piss against or wanted a little semiprivacy to screw in.

Hudson, the cross street, was obviously the place for action. There was something aimless but urgent about the human movement, as if this was the now spot, the place to get sucked into the whirl of high-media exposure. The dress code was expensive sleaze, punk as modified by the fashion dictators. From his vantage point Cardozo couldn’t see a person over thirty on the sidewalk.

Porsches and BMW’s, Mercedeses and stretch limos crawled along, battling pedestrians for right of way. The cars changed colors like chameleons as they passed glitzy show windows and flashing neon logos.

Besides boutiques, card shops, and health food eateries, there was a disco called Space on the corner, guarded by an unsmiling seven-foot albino dressed in blue mylar. Next to it a restaurant sign flashed
LA CÔTE BLEUE
; through the window Cardozo could see the big circular glass bar mobbed with customers waiting to be seated.

The intersection smelled of sex and fashion and money—the things that made New York New York.

A little after eleven, a cruising police car hooked a turn down Franklin. The blue-and-white pulled alongside Cardozo.

“Hey, you.” A woman leaned out the passenger window, red hair peeking out from under a police officer’s blue cap. “No parking.”

Cardozo flashed his shield and the woman got flustered.

“Sorry.”

“’S okay.”

Fifteen minutes later a man leaned down and rapped on Cardozo’s window. He had thick black hair and a beard, an earring, piercing dark eyes.

“Hey, man. I got grass, crack, PCB, coke, ludes, THC, uppers, downers, opium, hash, morphine. Try before you buy.”

“Not tonight, thanks.”

The man gave Cardozo a look as though he had to be crazy or a cop to be parked on that street not trying to score drugs.

A little before midnight thunder belched and Cardozo’s rear view told him that the sky was turning a darker shade of night. The Empire State Building, lit art-deco blue and white for the night, was beginning to get lost in swirling clouds.

Rain spattered down, and pedestrians dodged into doorways. The line waiting to get into Space had to stand there and get soaked.

Cardozo’s eye ran along the fourth story of 432 Franklin.

The windows were dark.

They stayed dark for that night and the next.

It came with no warning. Cardozo had been watching, waiting three nights for it.

Hudson Street bustled with the Friday night crowd. The heat of the day had yielded to the heat of the night, dense upward-rippling waves tinged pink and yellow by neon and headlights. The revolving door of La Côte Bleue was emptying four customers in a spin. The line waiting to get into Space stretched halfway down Franklin Street.

The alley beside 432 was so dark that Cardozo almost didn’t spot the faint stir of movement.

Between the huge black garbage cans behind Space and the small silver ones behind La Côte Bleue three figures detached themselves from the shadows.

The three stood in the mouth of the alley, lighting a pipe of crack, passing it. When the pipe was consumed they moved unsteadily toward the door of 432.

The woman was pretty in a fading sort of way, wearing floppy safari trousers and a Hell’s Angels denim vest. She had the look of someone too much had happened to, someone who had no more reactions to offer.

The Hispanic was skinny and dark-faced, with a V of paleness at his open shirt front.

Lewis Monserat wore an Eisenhower army jacket, cap, and designer glasses. He didn’t look well. He was thin, the cords of his neck drawn taut, and he carried himself as if he had a headache, as if the very act of inserting the key in the lock required the coordinating of muscles he had barely the strength to control.

The door slammed behind them and three minutes later the lights on the fourth floor went on.

A car horn tooted, disturbingly close to Cardozo’s ear.

He stirred to consciousness in the driver’s seat of the Honda, hands folded across his chest. His sleep had not been deep, but he felt as if he had died in it.

The early morning light was flat and strange and it gave objects an eerie, unreal shimmer. The black Porsche sedan waiting at the door of 432 could have materialized from a dream. There didn’t seem to be anyone, not even a driver, behind the tinted windows.

The horn tooted again.

The door to 432 opened. The woman and the Hispanic were dressed as they had been the night before, but Monserat had changed into an old T-shirt and a worn pair of jeans. He wore loafers, no socks.
Miami Vice
style.

He held the car door for the others. He looked around him before getting in. His dark eyes, high cheekbones, and jutting chin combined into a strikingly emaciated face.

Cardozo allowed the Porsche to make the turn onto Hudson before he turned the key in his ignition.

The Saturday morning traffic was light. He kept a two-block distance across town and down Broadway.

The sun was stroking the tops of glass buildings.

The Porsche turned left on Wall Street and continued to the East River heliport. Cardozo pulled to a hydrant a half-block away and watched.

A helicopter was waiting on the tarmac. On its door was emblazoned the logo
HAMPTON HELICAB
.

The Porsche drew to the metal fence.

Monserat and his companions got out and walked to the copter. A mechanic closed the door after them. The rotors blurred into invisibility. The copter lifted, throwing off motes of light.

Cardozo found a phonebooth on the corner of William Street.

“Hampton Helicab, good morning.”

“This is Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo, NYPD. You have a Lewis Monserat and party flying with you this morning.”