VC01 - Privileged Lives (61 page)

Cardozo spelled the name, and it took the agent a moment to confirm.

“Does Mr. Monserat have a return flight with you?”

“Yes he does, sir. Monday at seven forty
P.M.
”

Cardozo broke the connection and dialed a second number.

“Waldo, it’s Vince Cardozo. How about a cup of coffee, my treat?”

Twenty minutes later Cardozo and Waldo Flores were sitting in Kate’s Cafeteria on West Seventeenth Street, on opposite sides of a Formica-topped table.

Waldo’s large brown eyes stared above the edge of the coffee mug. “Man, you keep asking me to break the law. I’m straight now. Not pushin’ drugs, not runnin’ girls, no B and E. Why the hell don’t you let me alone?”

Cardozo tore the edge off another packet of Sweet ’n Low and let it snow down into his coffee. “We’ve been having complaints about robberies at some East Side doctors’ offices. Papers missing. Drugs missing, too.” The drugs were a guess, but he trusted his intuition of the Waldos of this world.

Waldo’s eyes came up in a hurry. “All right, I helped myself to some Valium, it’s a crime?”

“Yeah, Waldo. It’s a crime. What are you going to tell the judge? I asked you to go in?”

First puzzlement, then terror replaced the lost reluctant look. “Man, you never let go, do you.”

“It’s a Medeco. You can open it in your sleep. There’s no one home till Monday night, only one other apartment on the floor, we jimmy the front door with a charge card.”

Waldo bent toward the lock, his face furiously concentrated, everything focused on the signals reaching his fingers through the little steel rod.

A door banged four flights down. Steps were audible, then the sound of the elevator wheezing to life.

“Motherfuck,” Waldo grumbled. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” He inserted a second rod, then a third.

The elevator passed and stopped one floor above.

Waldo froze.

Steps echoed. A door slammed.

Waldo straightened up, the tension dropping off his shoulders. He twisted the handle and gave the door to 4A a triumphant push.

Cardozo entered the apartment. Waldo followed.

They walked along a hallway, the only sound the crackling of Styrofoam packing pellets snapping like peanut brittle beneath their feet.

Cardozo opened doors.

Waldo stood watching him.

Lewis Monserat’s home away from home had everything: a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, a blood-stained towel thrown behind the toilet, an answering machine blinking in the bedroom, a VCR and an eighty-inch projection TV in the livingroom.

Cardozo had started across the colorful rya rug that stretched before the TV screen when he saw a silver tray holding plastic-sealed syringes on the secretaire that stood beneath a gold-framed mirror. Other evidence of fun and frolic was lying about: an empty two-litre bottle of Gilbey’s gin, pipes, mirrors, silver straws, single-edged safety razors.

It looked as though last night had been a quiet evening at home with booze and coke and crack, video and the Smithsonian collection of dildos and handcuffs.

“The maid’s gonna have a lot of cleanin’ up to do,” Waldo observed.

Cardozo moved the TV screen. Four black two-by-fours had been screwed into the wall, forming an H with two cross beams. He could see scrapes on the wood, and rust stains.

Waldo prowled the room, picking up mirrors and sniffing white dust from them, scooping up red-capped plastic vials that had fallen behind sofa cushions.

Cardozo figured out how to work the VCR and ejected the video tape. The cassette label was hand-lettered: games. He pocketed it.

“A lot of grass in the freezer,” Waldo called from the kitchen.

“Don’t take so much it’s obvious,” Cardozo said. “We may want to come back.”

“Shit, I ain’t comin’ back here.”

Waldo went quickly through the bedroom into the bathroom, sniffing bottles in the medicine cabinet.

Cardozo found that the bedroom closet had a Fichet lock.

“Waldo, come here.”

Waldo sauntered out of the bathroom, heaping fistfuls of Quaaludes and Valiums into his pockets.

“Open this.”

Waldo studied the lock, frowned, opened his toolkit, selected an eight-inch rod.

“Stand back, amigo.”

Waldo probed, listened, inserted a second rod.

Cardozo glanced at the magazines on the bedside table.
Hustler. Honcho. A Child’s Garden of Sex.
Last May’s
Reader’s Digest,
with a marker inserted at “The Seven Telltale Signs of Loneliness: Are you Suffering From the Disease That Cripples More Than Three Million Americans Annually?”

Suddenly a board creaked in the hallway. The apartment door opened, slamming against the wall.

Waldo spun around, eyes huge.

“Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo?” A man’s voice. “Yoo-hoo, God damn it.”

“Il n’y a personne.”
A woman.

Count Leopold de Savoie-Sancerre, bloated in flowered surfer’s jams and a yellow silk shirt, passed the bedroom doorway, followed by Countess Vicki in a fiery pink skirt.

Cardozo motioned Waldo to pack up his gear.

Count Leopold’s voice came from the livingroom.
“Mais c’est un bordel!”

“T’affolles pas,”
Countess Vicki said.
“Il y a eu une fete, c’est tout.”

Cardozo eased the front door open. He and Waldo slipped into the corridor.

First came the sound: a woman’s voice singing “I Could Have Danced All Night,” high and piping and almost laughably pure.
My Fair Lady,
the original cast recording, badly scratched. Julie Andrews.

An image began to appear on the television screen, lights and darks, the curve of a woman’s shoulder, gloved fingers stroking the lower part of her face.

The camera pulled back jerkily.

The woman wore a glittering evening gown. She was strangely, disturbingly ugly.

The room behind her had stark white walls. There were two Queen Anne chairs. She sat.

Vague silhouettes passed through the background. A man in evening clothes stepped into focus. He bowed gallantly.

He took the woman’s hand and she rose. They began moving together. The movements never quite became a dance, but still there was a sort of pattern to it, as though the actors had rehearsed certain postures and facial attitudes.

Cardozo’s eyebrows were creased in the effort of understanding.

The picture changed to a different woman, standing naked against the same blank walls.

Cardozo tried to guess her age and figured she was shading sixteen.

A man in evening clothes entered the frame. He kissed the girl’s eyes, her cheeks, her ears, then lightly brushed his lips against hers. They spoke, but the words were garbled—only a tone came through, joking and teasing and laughing.

Three other men in evening clothes entered the frame.

The girl began deep-throating one of the men.

Something in the image put Cardozo on guard. The three men not involved in the sex act were aware of something, seeing something the girl could not.

Suddenly the men pushed the girl to the floor. Her reaction was unstaged: surprise and pain.

Two of the men held her down. Without warning, something slopped down on the girl. It took Cardozo a moment to recognize what he was seeing: animal intestines from a slaughterhouse.

There was mindless terror in the girl’s kicking and thrashing.

Cardozo knew what she was thinking—she believed these lunatics were going to kill her. That was what they wanted her to believe, that was what they wanted to get on film.

At the same time there was a bell going off in his head: the animal intestines triggered an association that wasn’t quite making it to the surface.

And then it came to him.

The butcher shop viscera that Nuku Kushima had encased in lucite and made part of her art.

Connections began spinning off one another in Cardozo’s mind.

Intestines in Kushima’s art and intestines in Lew Monserat’s home video, and Monserat was Kushima’s dealer.

Claude Loring killed Jodie Downs. Doria Forbes-Steinman recognized Loring as a friend of Monserat’s.

No big deal—a lot of New Yorkers were friends.

Monserat and Loring both frequented the Inferno.

Still no big deal—more than a few New Yorkers were into kink and anonymous sex.

Count Leopold and Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre had a key to Monserat’s new party pad. The countess had put on a blond wig and walked into Pleasure Trove, paid cash for a bondage mask, and carried it into Beaux Arts Tower.

Was that a big deal?

Putting on a disguise, giving a false name, paying cash—yes, that was a big deal. Buying the mask the first business day after the killing meant it was a replacement for the fifth Kushima mask, the mask found on the victim.

Monserat had said the fifth mask didn’t exist, but this contradicted the artist’s first statement. As dealer for Kushima’s work Monserat could easily have owned or borrowed the fifth mask and destroyed the records.

Since Monserat didn’t live in Beaux Arts Tower, that raised a question: who had Vicki given the mask to? Obviously it could have been anyone, even the doorman. All the well-heeled people in that building probably dealt with Monserat—and transporting a mask was not an offense like transporting drugs or a minor across state lines for immoral purposes.

And then there was Babe.

Babe Devens recognized Monserat’s former party pad—abandoned four days after the Downs killing—as the scene of a masked party where a young man had been tortured in exactly the same way as Jodie Downs. Babe had been dreaming, but that was another story—or question. The tape in Monserat’s VCR showed disjointed snippets of other sadistic parties, some masked, some not. So dreaming or not, Babe had been right on the money.

A lot of pieces, a lot of holes.

What to do?

Consult the dreamer.

47

I
T WAS QUIET EXCEPT
for the hissing on the soundtrack, and in a way that hissing made the room even more silent. Babe’s wide green-blue eyes followed the movement on the screen.

A man in evening clothes crossed the screen. Behind him four black beams attached to the wall formed the letter H, with two crosspieces, almost as tall as he was.

“That’s Lew Monserat,” Babe said.

Another man in evening clothes entered the frame.

Babe leaned forward. “That’s Binny Harbison.” She sounded astonished. “This must be an old tape.”

“Who’s Binny Harbison?”

“A designer. I heard he died three years ago.”

Now the woman in the gown appeared. She put a cigarette to her mouth. Both Binny Harbison and Lew Monserat offered lights. The woman took a light from Binny. She crossed to one of the Queen Anne chairs and sat.

Babe’s face was suddenly an oval of concentration. Her gaze played over the hard jaw, the high forehead, the widely spaced dark eyes, the aquiline nose. “There’s something …”

The woman leaned back against the chair, watching the column of smoke from her cigarette drift up into the unstirring air.

“There’s something wrong with her hair,” Babe said. “It’s fake. She’s wearing a wig. Could you stop the film?”

Babe peered at the TV screen.

“The picture’s so bad. Even the nose could be false. But still there’s something …”

Babe got up and went to the door. “Mathilde, could you come here a moment?”

A white-haired Frenchwoman with a swatch of blue cloth in one hand and a pair of pinking shears in the other stepped into the room. Babe introduced Mathilde Lheureux, her assistant, and Cardozo said how do you do.

“Do you recognize that dress?” Babe asked.

Mathilde approached the TV screen. “You designed that dress. It is red, with hand-stitched sequins.”

“Of course.” Babe took Cardozo through a workroom where eight women were working sewing machines and into an office. She shut the door. “Excuse the confusion,” she said, “we’ve hardly moved in.”

She went to the deep bookcase that held art folders. Tall, moving lightly, she was showing more and more of the grace that had been locked up in her for seven years. She studied labels, found the folder she wanted. She unlaced the strings and laid it open on the drafting table. She turned sheets of paper with a little snap.

“This one,” she said.

Cardozo looked down at a delicate sketch of a faceless woman in a gown that was warm, ripe red, the color of a perfect strawberry.

“I designed it for Ash Canfield,” Babe said. “She wore it to my party the night I went into coma.”

Babe felt silence, motionlessness in the house. Every piece of furniture seemed to say
Ash is gone.
She looked about the room, seeing the moody Corot woodscape over the fireplace, all the small doodads and objects that had been Ash’s enthusiasms and now, without her, seemed pitiful and meaningless, like abandoned pups.

“First stop, a drink, yes?” Dunk said.

“Isn’t it a little early for that?”

“You know what the Countess Rothschild used to say—‘Oh, well, what the hell’”

He mixed martinis, strained them carefully into two glasses, and garnished them with garlic olives. He came across the livingroom and handed Babe one. They settled onto facing couches.

She studied his face, the squarely set eyes, the bobsled nose and dimpled chin, the long curling lashes, all the physical details that had been Ash’s obsession. And Dina Alstetter’s. And, once upon a time, hers too. It seemed peculiar: Ash gone, the obsession surviving.

“It’s sweet of you to come by,” he said. “You look more and more terrific every day.”

There were dark lines under Dunk Canfield’s eyes, accentuated by his deep tan, and they seemed to speak of weeks of sleeplessness. A yachting cap sat rakishly atilt his hair, bleached from the Corfu sun.

“How are you, Dunk?”

“It’s been one of those days. It’s been one of those lives.” His posture sagged and his head hung forward. “I loved her. I was a rotten bastard to her, but I loved her. We weren’t always the best lovers or the best friends—as you well know—but damn it, we knew how to have fun. She was my best playmate ever. And we were just getting back together. And this time it would have worked. I know it would have.”