VC03 - Mortal Grace (10 page)

He propped the autopsy report against the lamp in front of him. A demented fax machine in the squad room was sending out high-pitched squeaks like the signal a truck makes before it backs up over you.

He reached back and slammed the door.

When he had reread the medical examiner’s report, he consulted his watch and decided that even over at the D.A.’s office they must have started work by now. He lifted the phone and dialed.

“Harvey Thoms,” a voice growled.

“Harvey—Vince Cardozo. I just read
Newsday.
Where did they get that business that the girl in the basket was a black hooker?”

An instant’s hesitation came across the line and then Thoms said, “Someone in the press office must have gotten it from the autopsy.”

“I’m looking at the autopsy, and I don’t see it.”

“Well, mistakes happen.” There was a kind of dismissive shrug in Thoms’s voice.

“Why’s there no mention of the Styrobasket? Someone might have seen a basket that size being transported. And why not spell out the exact location of the grave? If we don’t give the public something to recognize, how’s anybody going to come forward?”

“I’ll see if we can get the commissioner to clear that information for release.”

Cardozo had an uneasy sense of a bureaucratic snafu in the making—the stuff that internal affairs investigations and mass firings were made of. “From what I’m reading in
Newsday
, this is a murder that took place on Mars. If this is how the press commissioner is handling the case, I’m not surprised the media aren’t picking it up.”

“I hear you, Vince. You have a point. I’ll get right on it.”

Cardozo slipped the tape into the VCR and fast-forwarded to the flash. He backed the tape up and froze the frame.

Sonya Barnett gazed at the pulsing image on the screen. “What’s so special? All I can see is a nerdy audience of four hundred wannabe celebrities and a tacky little stage with peppermint bunting and an overbuilt Harlequin tap-dancing with an anorectic Columbine.”

Cardozo could not see the famous Barnett neck, and that, he realized, was her intention. She had tied a silk scarf around her head babushka-style and knotted it tightly under her chin. The pale blue of the scarf met the pure white of a turtleneck sweater.

“What about the five people facing the camera?” he said.

Her face was heavily caked in makeup, and she was sitting in shadow, but he could see her glance flick up. Her blue eyes narrowed and she laughed. “The divine Ms. Barnett and her four divines—a minister, a priest, a rabbi, and a what-do-you-call-it.”

They were seated on wicker armchairs in the living room of Miss Barnett’s Tudor town house. Wooden decoy ducks and Uncle Sam mugs and show biz awards lined the shelves. They were drinking tea. Tea had been Miss Barnett’s idea, in fact she had insisted, and it was awful stuff—weak and cold.

“Father Joe is such a sixties ecumenist.” She paused to sip from her cup. “One of these days he’s going to pull a certified witch doctor out of his mitre.”

“Why are the five of you facing the TV camera?”

“Because we’re all in show biz, darling, and our careers are faltering, and if there’s the slightest chance of a photo-op, we’ll crawl out of our iron lungs and dance the Charleston.”

“But why did you all turn at that particular moment?”

“At what particular moment?”

Cardozo pressed
play
on the remote. The image broke into movement: a girl screamed, there was an instant of whiteout, and the camera panned to the bushes.

“Oh, yes.” Sonya Barnett nodded. “
That
moment—the entrance of the party pooper.”

“Was it the scream that made you turn?”

“Not bloody likely—it takes more than a scream to get the attention of old monsters like us.”

Cardozo reversed the tape and wound back to the flash. “Then what was Father Joe photographing?”

“Let me think.” Sonya Barnett took a moment to reflect. “He was photographing the TV crew.”

“What was so remarkable about the TV crew?”

“It was just such a relief to see them. We’d gotten all dolled up, but none of us knew for sure whether or not there was going to be TV coverage. And then I looked over my shoulder and lo and behold, there was a five-man crew from NBC. I said, ‘Don’t look now, fellas, but this little picnic just went prime-time.’”

She was wearing darned gray jogging pants and scuffed track shoes and she had her feet up on a needlepoint footstool. She crossed her legs the other way.

“I don’t mean to suggest that Father Joe’s
obsessed
with publicity. He’s a genuinely religious man and it’s the Church he’s publicizing, not himself. Frankly, I don’t believe in a deity—I mean,
look
at the state of this world!—but I do respect that sort of transcendental commitment in others. Which is the only reason I agreed to be a character witness for Father Joe in that messy child abuse case.”

Cardozo caught her peeking over the rim of her cup at him, gauging the effect she’d made.

“What child abuse case was that?”

She made a face. “I’d say this tea has lost its pop, wouldn’t you? Shall we tell Ingrid to freshen it?”

“Mine’s fine, thanks.”

She picked up a small copper bell and gave it a violent shake. “Ingrid! Come fix this tea, what did you do to it, it’s pew-ee!” She set the bell down and eyed Cardozo thoughtfully. “A female child in Father Joe’s care broke an ankle. You never heard about it?”

“Never.”

“Her name was Louisa Hitchcock. It was her own fault. As my old Swedish mom used to say, if you can’t stand up, for God’s sake sit down. Naturally, this world being what it is today, the parents sued. The father’s been involved in some shady Treasury bond bids on Wall Street. The mother organizes parties for charity and pockets a percentage. What pigs.”

“When did this happen?”

“A year, a year and a half ago. I knew I’d get terrible press if I stepped into that courtroom.” Sonya Barnett sighed. “You’d think I was advocating child abuse. But I couldn’t let Father Joe go to jail, could I?”

THIRTEEN

E
VERY TIME BONNIE RAISED
her eyes she saw Nell sitting there in the leather easy chair. But this wasn’t Nell, this was Phil, a frightened thirteen-year-old African-American male trying desperately to stay off crack.

“You can’t go home,” Bonnie said. “Not if your mother’s still using.”

Silence closed in. The little Tiffany clock on the desk seemed to tick like a bomb. Phil’s luminous, lost gaze was like a suction tube draining Bonnie’s most cherished assumptions out of her.

“She’s not using a whole lot,” Phil said softly.

Bonnie knew that was bull. Phil’s mother could smoke the yield of a Bolivian coca field in two hours. And using wasn’t the worst of her behavior—she was a borderline schizophrenic and in her deluded rages she was beating the boy. New lacerations were visible on his neck and arms and the left eye was swollen shut like a split plum. But Bonnie had never managed to get Phil to discuss his mother’s abuse. That was a barrier for the psychiatrist to scale.

“You can’t be around anyone who’s using,” Bonnie said. “No matter how little they’re using. No matter how much you love them.”

“But if I…” Phil’s mouth twisted. He seemed to be trying to frame a question that was both painful and embarrassing. “If I don’t go home, where can I stay?”

“Would you like to stay here?”

He looked away, shyly. “I don’t want to be trouble.”

“Father Joe has a guest room. Maybe you could stay there till we arrange something. Okay?”

Phil’s right eyelid drooped. After a gawky moment he nodded.

“Wait here,” Bonnie said. “I’ll ask Father Joe right now.”

She went and knocked on Father Joe’s door. He was at his desk frowning at a copy of the latest diocesan newsletter.

“Can Phil have the guest room for a night?”

“Sure.” Father Joe didn’t look up. “He can have it for a week.”

Bonnie stepped into the office and closed the door behind her. “Where’s that boy Tod who was here the other day?”

“He did his work and left.” Father Joe laid down the newsletter. “Why?”

“He asked me to help a friend of his.”

Father Joe smiled. “Tod has a lot of needy friends.”

“This one’s pregnant.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“She doesn’t know what to do with the baby.”

“And neither would Tod. How pregnant is she?”

“She couldn’t be too far along. She looks like a rail.”

“Of course, it doesn’t show till the twenty-second week or so—and by then it’s too late.” Father Joe moved a paperweight on his desk. It thunked faintly on the rosewood. “At least it’s too late under New York law.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that.”

“But I’ll bet the girl was.”

“St. Hubert’s in Maine says they’ll save a bed for her.”

“That’s a better solution.” Father Joe nodded thoughtfully. “Assuming the girl’s willing.”

“If I can just talk to her again, I know I can persuade her. Don’t you have any way of locating Tod?”

Father Joe walked to the window. “Tod Lomax is urban tumbleweed. Goes where chance takes him. Lately he’s been with those runaways squatting on the West Side docks.”

“I’ve heard about those docks. The kids are prostituting themselves and doing drugs and eating out of garbage cans.”

“Americans in every city are eating out of garbage cans.” Father Joe sighed. “You have to know your limits, Bonnie. You’re a terrific worker, but you can’t maintain an unblinking vigil over all the runaways in this town. No one can.”

“I’m not talking about all of them. I’m talking about one frightened, pregnant girl.”

Father Joe’s eyes were sad. “Then you’re talking about all of them.”

The traffic light was green.

Bonnie shifted her purse strap from over her shoulder to around her neck. Her right elbow clamped the purse tightly to her body. Hurrying to catch the light before it changed, she dodged through six lanes of bumper-to-bumper congestion on the West Side Highway.

It was seven-thirty in the evening and somewhere in America a bird must have been singing, but not here on the Twelfth Street pier. The humidity was acrid with chemical discharge and illegal sewage floating downstream on the Hudson. Honking trucks and automobiles added their exhaust fumes to the mix.

A Latino kid was standing in the dying sun behind a rip in the chain-link fence that some city agency had erected, ineffectually, to guard the warehouse. He seemed to Bonnie to be no older than fourteen. Built like a sparrow, shirtless, he watched traffic ooze past as though it was the most thought-provoking spectacle since educational TV. An easy, drugged goofiness played across his features.

Bonnie approached, her best smile in place. “Excuse me. I wonder if you could help me?”

The kid adjusted his flat brown gaze. His left ear was pierced and he had a small ring in it that looked like something from a hardware store keychain.

“Do you know a girl called Nell? She told me she lives around here.”

The boy’s silence struck Bonnie like a fist. Coldly uncaring eyes examined her. There was a message in those eyes, but she couldn’t read it.

“Nell has pale blond hair. She’s about fifteen, sixteen—very thin.”

The kid’s eyebrows curved high as though it were he, not Bonnie, asking the question. She recognized guile and she realized he wasn’t going to answer without an inducement. She opened her purse, angling it like a book she didn’t want anyone else to read over her shoulder. With a shock, she saw she’d given her last five to the cab driver and had nothing smaller than a twenty.

“Or maybe you know a young man called Lomax?” She held out the twenty. “Tod Lomax?”

The kid took the money without looking at it. He spat and a dust blister rose up on the asphalt.
“No hablo inglés.”

Bonnie changed linguistic gear.
“Yo hablo español un poquito. Dónde están—”

He tossed a sharp nod over his shoulder, toward the warehouse. “Try in there.”

Bonnie’s gaze went to the three-story barnlike structure. The wood siding had rotted and weathered to the dead colors of driftwood. Behind it the sun was setting on the New Jersey skyline, bloated and red like an abscessed eye.

She crossed the tarmac, steps slowing.

A door had been boarded up and the boards had been ripped down and thrown on the pavement, six-inch nails jutting. A freshly painted red-on-white
NO ENTRY
sign dangled like a shop’s advertisement. She took a deep breath and stepped beneath the sign. She stood blinking till her eyes adjusted. Right away, her skin told her that she had entered a different universe. A smell hit her with gradual but sickening force, like a simmering mix of garlic and dog excrement.

The last sunlight of the day fell through torn planking and shattered windows, dappling the stagnant, dusty gray air. Half-dressed children had staked out grave-sized plots across the entire warehouse floor. The sound of voices and rap tapes and barking dogs rose and fell in waves.

She felt she needed a mask, not just for the smell, but to fend off the eyes—dozens of eyes, hundreds of eyes like tiny electric insects glowing in a swamp.

She spoke to the nearest child. “Excuse me. Do you know a girl called Nell, a thin blond girl?” She tried to smile, but when she saw that one leg was a kneeless stump she had no smile in her. “Or a boy called Tod Lomax?”

He shook his head. It could have meant
I don’t know.
It could have meant
leave me alone.

She picked her way through bedrolls and furniture rescued from the street, through swollen, ripped-open garbage bags that served as territory markers. It was like losing her way on a checkerboard that never repeated.

“Do you know a girl called Nell? A boy called Tod?”

Poster-size portraits of Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Jesus, Ice-T, Elvis, watched her from crumbling walls, unseparated by time or logic or ideology.

“Excuse me. Do you know Nell? Or Tod?”

FOURTEEN

“W
OULD YOU CARE FOR
something to drink?” Lawrence Hitchcock’s hands were poised over the Johnnie Walker bottle.