VC03 - Mortal Grace (11 page)

“If you have some kind of soda or diet drink,” Cardozo said.

The light died from Hitchcock’s smile. “Nothing stronger?”

He wants company
, Cardozo realized. “Just soda, thanks.”

Hitchcock went to work with highball glasses and ice cubes. With his high cheekbones and his hair receding into a severe widow’s peak, his dark eyes seemed too large, like a panda’s. “Annabelle, you’ll have something.”

Mrs. Hitchcock answered almost absently from her chintz-covered sofa. “A weak one.” She was a short, stout woman with neatly styled gray hair. Her pearls matched the gray.

Hitchcock handed them each a tall glass with the etched shield of Yale University. He settled into the easy chair facing Cardozo. “To your health, Lieutenant. And how’s the war in our streets?”

Cardozo raised his glass. “On schedule.”

“Who’d have thought New York would turn into this?” Hitchcock shook his head. “When the hell do we finally hit bottom?”

“Now, Larry.” Annabelle Hitchcock’s tone was brightly chiding. “I doubt the lieutenant came all this way to discuss urban blight.”

Hitchcock turned as though to say,
Well then, what did you want to discuss?

“It’s about your daughter,” Cardozo said.

A silence fell on the softly lit, paneled living room. In the hallway of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Hitchcock’s East Seventy-ninth Street apartment, a grandfather clock struck seven-fifteen.

Cardozo realized he was quite possibly bearing the worst news a parent can hear. He chose neutral words, feeling his way. “I understand she broke her ankle a year and a half ago?”

Hitchcock sat swirling his drink, staring at whirlpools. “Louisa was playing in an amateur theatrical down at St. Andrew’s Church. They had her doing Rockette-like high kicks. They put her left foot in a device that was supposed to improve her balance. But instead it broke her ankle.”

“Do you want to see the X rays?” Mrs. Hitchcock said. “We’ve still got them.”

There was something in her tone that didn’t fit the situation, something almost dotty, as if she were volunteering her child’s graduation photos.

“Are you sure it’s no trouble?” Cardozo said.

“None at all.” Mrs. Hitchcock crossed to an inlaid cherry-wood secretary and opened one of the lower drawers. She brought Cardozo an enormous manila envelope stamped
LENOX HILL HOSPITAL X-RAY DEPT.

Cardozo slid one of the X rays out. He held it up to the lamp on the table beside him. An astonishingly clean fracture showed.

“Could I borrow these? I’d like to compare them with…”

He broke off. Both Hitchcocks were staring at him.

“A body has been found. A young woman with the same type of fracture.”

Mrs. Hitchcock’s hand trembled as she set her glass down. Scotch slopped over onto a New York Yacht Club coaster.

In the hallway, a door slammed. A teenage girl came bouncing into the living room.

“Hello, all.” She had a wild shock of red hair and she went straight to the bar.

“Our daughter, Louisa,” Mrs. Hitchcock explained. “Home from Bennington for a few days.”

“Who’s that talking about me behind my back?” Louisa Hitchcock turned, holding a generous tumbler of what looked like a vodka tonic.

“Lieutenant Cardozo would like to borrow your X rays,” Annabelle Hitchcock said. “Someone else has the same fracture.”

“Really?” Louisa said. “Anyone I know?”

“A dead girl,” Hitchcock said.

Cardozo reached inside his jacket and brought out the drawing of Ms. Basket Case.

Louisa Hitchcock took the drawing. She set down her drink and raised one hand and rubbed the back of her neck. It was as though she wanted to stretch her moment of being the center of attention. “You know who she reminds me of
exactly
? Betsy Frothingham. Except Betsy’s alive.”

“I’ll say,” Hitchcock said.

Louisa Hitchcock handed the drawing to her father.

Hitchcock sat frowning at it as though he were trying to work something out in his mind. “Never saw her. Annabelle?”

Mrs. Hitchcock drew in a breath, shaking her head. She handed the drawing back to Cardozo.

“Seems we’re not much help,” Hitchcock said. “Sorry.”

“I’ve had a chance to compare those fractures.” The voice on the phone was Dan Hippolito from the M.E.’s office. “There are similarities—Louisa Hitchcock had the same kind of spiral fracture as Ms. Basket Case—but it’s nothing you could base a case on.”

“Have you seen many of those spiral fractures?” Cardozo said.

“Professionally? Not too many in New York City. You usually see them in ski resorts.”

“Why ski resorts?”

“The foot’s restrained in the ski, and when the skier falls the ankle twists in a characteristic way.”

“You think Basket Case was a skier?”

“I’ll leave the educated guesses up to you.”

A notion had been nagging at Cardozo, and now seemed to be the time to bring it up. “While we’re on the subject of educated guesses…I’ve been wondering about that matzo residue in her mouth….”

“What about it?”

“Any chance it might be communion wafer?”

Dan’s voice hesitated. “You mean logically or chemically?”

“Either. Both.”

“Logically, it’s a stretch. Communion is usually wafer plus wine, and you take the wine after the wafer—chances are it would wash the wafer down and you wouldn’t have so large a quantity of residue in your mouth. In fact, you might not have any.”

Cardozo kept flipping the scenario through his mind. “And chemically?”

“There you’re on more solid ground. In terms of the chemical breakdown, I don’t see why the residue couldn’t be communion wafer. But I wouldn’t go out on a limb and say it was.” The tone implied,
and I wouldn’t recommend you go out on that limb either.

“Thanks, Dan. That’s what I wanted to know.” Cardozo hung up the phone and pondered.

“Six detectives.” Ellie Siegel was standing in the doorway of the cubicle. “For two days, six detectives have been scouring the runaway zones of the city with Nico’s portrait.” She was wearing a cotton blouse the color of pink dogwood blossoms. “So far nobody recognizes the girl. I guess memories tend to be short in runaway circles.”

“Like the lives,” Cardozo said.

“O’Reilly wants to cut us back to four detectives.”

“Four’s not enough.”

“Talk to O’Reilly.”

Cardozo turned a full circle in his swivel chair. “You talk to him.”

“I have.”

“Just once couldn’t you have good news for me?”

“I was reading over yesterday’s interviews with the doormen.” She flexed an eyebrow. “You might want to look at this one.”

She handed him the folder. He looked.

Juan Rodriguez, a midnight-to-eight doorman at 1012 Fifth Avenue, reported that twice in the last year, toward dawn, he had seen a man walking in the bushes at the edge of the garden. On both occasions the man had been carrying a cone-shaped newspaper-wrapped package.

As Cardozo read, a ripple of static electricity passed through the hairs on the back of his neck. His eyes flicked up. “Where’s this doorman now?”

“Working the day shift. He’s waiting for you.”

On marble tables in the lobby of 1012 Fifth Avenue, candle-shaped lights glowed in designer hurricane glass.

“Can you describe him?” Cardozo was saying. “Age, height, build?”

“Medium.” Beneath his green with gold brocade doorman’s jacket, Juan Rodriguez shrugged heavy shoulders. “Everything was medium.”

“Color hair?”

“Couldn’t tell. The sun wasn’t up. It was still dark.”

“Any distinguishing marks?”

“Give me a break.” Juan Rodriguez grinned. “He was on the other side of Fifth Avenue.”

“But you saw what he had in his hand.”

“That much I could see. Something wrapped in paper.”

A woman stepped out of one of the elevators and stopped at the mirrored wall to check her lipstick. Cardozo had the impression of a blond, bored madonna wearing too much jewelry to be traveling the streets of New York without an armed guard.

“Juan,” she said, “Tiffany’s is sending a man to pick up a return. The maid has it.”

Rodriguez held the door. “I’ll see to it, Mrs. Oliphant.”

Cardozo waited for the door to swing shut on Mrs. Oliphant and her shark-gray limousine. “You told the detective the man in the garden was carrying something wrapped in newspaper.”

Rodriguez nodded. “It could have been newspaper.”

“How could you tell?”

“It had a look. Pictures. Headlines. But at a distance I’m not going to swear.”

“Could you see what was inside the paper?”

“Could have been a bottle.”

“Did you actually see a bottle?”

A hesitant tilt came into Rodriguez’s blue-shadowed jaw. “Just the shape. Like a cone. Like a…
bottle
.”

“Bottles aren’t often cone-shaped.”

“I’m not saying it couldn’t have been something else.”

“Did you see how this man was dressed? Jacket, overcoat?”

There was a flow of silence that Rodriguez finally broke with a tight shake of the head. “No overcoat. The first time I saw him was in spring and the second time was autumn.”

“Shirtsleeves?”

“A shirt sounds right.”

“And did you notice anything at all about this shirt?”

Sometimes, closing your eyes is another way of seeing. Rodriguez closed his eyes. “Come to think of it, there was one thing.” He hesitated. “It looked like it could have had a kind of”—his thumb went up and made a pantomime of slicing his throat—“a priest’s collar.”

For an instant Cardozo could not feel his own heart beating. “A priest’s collar.”

“I’m not sure. This was a lot of months ago.”

“Could it have been one of these men?” Cardozo handed Rodriguez the blown-up photos of Father Montgomery and Father Romero.

The doorman’s dark eyes flicked from one to the other. “I couldn’t say. Except I think I saw the same guy the day the garden opened.”

“Which guy? The man with the newspaper or one of the men in those photos? Or were they the same?”

“I’m not sure.” There was almost a persecuted note in Rodriguez’s voice now. “I think he was with the first group that went in.”

“So the man with the newspaper could have been one of these priests and he was at the opening ceremony.”

“He could have been.”

“Which one of these priests?”

“I’m not sure.” Rodriguez’s hands gestured helplessly. “There were a lot of celebrities. He was a nobody. Everyone was wearing raincoats. And he was wearing a cap.”

“What kind of a cap?”

“Funny kind of cap.”

“Funny how?”

“Floppy. Like a collapsed chef’s hat.”

“White? Cotton?”

“No. Brown tweed. Snap-brim. With too much overhang.”

“A golf cap.”

“Right. Like you see in old black-and-white movies.”

FIFTEEN

T
HE DAY WAS SUNNY
and the air was bright. Cardozo crossed Fifth Avenue. The little stage in the Vanderbilt Garden had been taken away. The crime-scene team had completed their work, and the grounds were open to the public again.

He watched mothers pushing baby carriages, children playing, lovers holding hands. He watched solitary souls strolling or reading a paper or just sitting on a bench. The garden was like a beautiful daydream, a spot of perfection in a fallen city.

He walked to the lilac bushes on the south boundary and stepped through them into the woods. The three-foot hole where the body had been found had been repacked with earth, but it was not hard to spot.

He stood beside the dogwood tree. His gaze circled the grave, searching east-to-west, north-to-south, gradually spiraling out. There was fresh trash: a tossed-away diet Pepsi can that had not been there three days ago, a dried orange rind crawling with ants, a sheet of yesterday’s
Times.

As his eyes scanned, his thoughts took on a melancholy rhythm of their own.

He had known from the start that he was going to have a personal problem with the case. That he would be tempted to think with his memory, to see with his memory. Because, for all he knew, the runaway teenage girl in his own past had ended up just like the girl in the basket.

Sally Manfredo—if she was still alive—was the daughter of his widowed sister. Dark hair, dark serious eyes. He hadn’t seen her since the night his sister had asked him to have a talk with the girl. He’d taken her out for a dinner of steak and silence.

“Sally, how are you getting along at home?”

“Okay.”

He didn’t believe her. All evening long he’d sensed some unmentioned disquiet eating at her. “School?”

“Okay.”

“Anything you’d like to talk about?” He reached across the tablecloth and touched her hand. “It doesn’t have to get back to your mother.”

“Uncle Vince, you’re a cop.”

“I’m not a cop now. I’m your uncle. Are you in any kind of trouble?”

He could see she was nervous, preoccupied. Her sixteen-year-old lips tightened.

“What’s bothering you? Friends? Boys?”

She just sat there, silent. He noticed she was wearing makeup. Lipstick and a little eyeshadow. Otherwise her face was all her own, with that troubling perfection of youth.

“Is it drugs?”

“I’m not breaking any laws.” She smiled. That was the first smile of the evening. “Wish I were.”

“You know your mother’s very worried.”

“Of course I know. She’s always worried. I wish she’d get off my case.” Sally sat there poking a spoon at a frozen yogurt parfait.

Cardozo had the same feeling he sometimes got questioning a suspect—she wanted to come clean about something, and if he just showed a little patience, she’d work up the courage to say it.

Minutes ticked by. The waiter refilled their coffee cups.

“You know what Mom does?”

Here it comes.
“What does your mother do?”

“She searches my room.”

In a way, Cardozo was surprised; in a way, he wasn’t. “Know something? She used to search my room when we were kids. Our parents wouldn’t let me read comic books till my grades were at least B-plus. So I hid my Batman comics. Your mom would search my room, find the comics, and turn them over to Mom and Dad.” He sighed. “Who destroyed them.”