VC03 - Mortal Grace (34 page)

“Might I be of service to you gentlemen?” A grinning white boy had joined the group. He stood with his hand outstretched. “Hi, I’m Eff, how can I help you?”

The driver turned. “What gives you the idea we need your fucking help?”

The kid was a foot shorter than the driver, and eighty pounds lighter. His T-shirt said
My family went to Baltimore and all I got was this lousy T-shirt
and it hung loose around his ribs. He wore a small crucifix earring in his left ear, and under his New York Mets baseball cap his blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. “I represent this young lady. I handle all contractual arrangements for her services.”

The man in the toupee snapped a finger at the driver. “Take care of this creep.”

The driver took half a step backward.

The pupils of the kid’s eyes became pinpricks.

The driver threw a punch, pitching his whole body weight into it.

The kid held out a razor. He let the big man step into the straight edge, and then he twisted.

The driver sank down to the tarmac, screaming,

“I got a lot of maybe’s, a lot of ‘gee, he looks kind of familiar,’” Ellie said, “but nobody knew where he went, who he went with.”

“Nobody
admitted
they knew,” Cardozo said. “These kids are not a forthcoming population. Except, one spaced-out kid gave me a possible lead.” He laid the photo of Wanda Gilmartin on the table. “Do you think that could be a chain in her braid?”

They were sitting in a West Street bar called the Sea Shell. The place was dimly lit and Ellie had to angle the photo to the light. Through the window you could see the docks just across the traffic-choked West Side Highway.

“I thought it was just a bad print. But I suppose it could be something metallic.”

“You don’t happen to have a magnifying glass in that purse.”

“Why would I have a magnifying glass in my purse?” Suddenly Ellie was practically snarling. “Do you carry a telescope in your wallet?”

“I’m sorry I asked. Excuse me.”

The only other customer in the bar stood feeding dollar bills to the jukebox. Mamas and Papas golden oldies made an easy retro sound that went with the old movie posters on the walls.

“Come on, Ellie, what’s bothering you?”

“I found it a very sad experience.” She took the plastic straw from her ginger ale and snapped it into inch-long bits. “I saw a lot of AIDS out there. Runaways and druggies and prostitutes and petty thieves. Teenagers walking around looking like they’re in Dachau. They need help.”

“I don’t know if help would help. It seems to me, to be alive in a place like that at a time like this is to be totally screwed up.”

She gave him a wounded glance. “I was born in New York. I’ve spent my life here. I love this city. And I’ve seen it go further downhill than there’s a hill to go down. Lately I’ve been trying to persuade myself it has the potential for one last rebound.”

“You can stop brainwashing yourself. It doesn’t.”

She let out a long exhalation. “Sometimes the part of me that wants to be macho admires you for not getting upset about things. Sometimes I resent you for not getting upset at least a little.”

“What do you want, Ellie? You think if I develop an ulcer it’s going to help trace one single runaway on those docks?”

“You could at least care.”

“Of course I care. What’s got into you?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess those kids upset me.”

“Then get angry at them, not me.”

“I’m not angry. I’m depressed.” She tapped a napkin to the corner of her eye.

“You’ve been working awfully hard, Ellie.” He reached across the table and touched her hand. “Do you think maybe you should take the rest of the day off? Go home and get some rest?”

“Don’t mother me, Vince.”

“I didn’t say a thing. I’m sorry.”

The eyes that looked into his were moist and red. “Sometimes you can be so full of bullshit.”

He pulled back his hand. “We’re not communicating.”

The West Street door flew open, and through the sudden dazzling trapezoid of sunlight, a man stumbled into the bar. At first Cardozo thought the man had been scalped, and then he realized it was a case of a toupee coming semidetached.

The man dropped a quarter into the pay phone and five seconds later he was brass knuckling the phone with the receiver.

The bartender, a big, bald old guy, put down the glass he had been polishing and went over. “Hey, buddy, what’s wrong?”

The man in the toupee said he needed to get a call through to 911. It was hard to hear over “California Dreaming,” but Cardozo caught something about a driver getting slashed by one of the lowlifes out there on the dock.

“Excuse me, Ellie.” He crossed the room. He showed his shield. “Can I help?”

“Some shiv-packing crack-head out there sushi-sliced my driver.” The man in the toupee had a blue contact lens riding way off center in his right eye. Blood trickled from his right nostril.

“How badly hurt is your driver?”

“His intestines are coming out on the pavement. What kind of animal could do that? What kind of animal does this city breed?”

Cardozo borrowed the bartender’s phone and called the precinct. He told them to send an ambulance and a squad car down right away.

When he returned to the table, Ellie had risen from her funk. “Hey,” she whispered, “that’s Tony Franklyn—the singer. My mom’s got all his records.”

“He shouldn’t be driving a limo in this neighborhood.” Cardozo pocketed Wanda Gilmartin’s photo. “Would you do me a favor, Ellie? Take care of his driver. I have to get uptown.”

FORTY-FOUR

“A
LL FOUR VICTIMS WERE
packed in reinforced hampers made by Styrobasket of Kalamazoo.” Lou Stein was reading from scraps of paper clamped to his clipboard. “The clothing of all four showed traces of the same incense residue and the same carpet lint.”

“The same?” Cardozo said. “Not similar? The same?”

Lou nodded. “The same. Wills and Lomax had wax on their skin in the nipple area.”

“Same wax?”

Lou foraged through a tray of printouts on his desk. He pulled up a coil of paper and shook his head. “Not identical. Lomax had yellow dye.” He flipped a sheet on the clipboard. “The rose in the Lomax bouquet matches the roses in the two Gilmartin bouquets—Linda Porter.”

He handed Cardozo an eight-by-ten color glossy. It seemed to show a black rope woven of calamari tentacles, sprinkled with shining glops of calf’s-foot gelatin.

“What’s this?”

“I enlarged the lower third of Wanda Gilmartin’s braid.”

Cardozo felt a stab of disappointment. In enlargement, the curious glint in Wanda’s braid looked a little more yellow than the other streaks in the photo, but it was still only a streak.

“Is this the best we can get?”

Lou gestured to Cardozo to come with him to a darkened corner of the lab where a computer monitor sat flickering. “The photo doesn’t blow up well. The emulsion gives you terrible resolution—besides which, it’s badly scratched. But this should interest you.”

Lou punched up a file. The monitor flashed the message
processing
, and then the head and shoulders from the Wanda Gilmartin Polaroid scrolled up onto the screen.

Cardozo stared at the unmoving image of the young girl with her wide, dark eyes and her long black hair gathered into two braids. There was something in the face that he recognized—a beaten, pathetic look that he had seen in the eyes of cornered animals.

Lou’s hands moved over the keyboard, calm, unhurried. Green light glinted off his bifocals.

The image on the screen flowed apart, changing to dots. The dots began melting like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle turned liquid.

“What’s happening?”

“The program just enlarged and now it’s enhancing—basically it’s executing an iterative connect-the-dots algorithm.”

“The machine’s making guesses?”

“Highly educated guesses.”

After several seconds of swirl, the colored streaks suddenly leapt into a new pattern.

Cardozo stared at the screen. There was a faint electronic pulsation to the image, as though it were made up of living microorganisms. Golden filament glinted through woven black hair—definitely metal, definitely twisted into interlocking links.

His mind was pumping, making connections. “It
is
a chain.” He turned.

Lou nodded.

“That’s it.” A wave of certainty broadsided Cardozo. “That’s the link.”

“I need to check some evidence in an old homicide.” Cardozo slid the request form under the grille and laid his ID beside it.

The clerk squinted. He glanced at Ellie Siegel. “Is the lady with you?”

“She is,” Cardozo said.

“Is she a cop too?”

“She is,” Ellie said. She flipped open her shield case.

The air-conditioning inside the property room seemed to have jammed at the coldest possible setting. There were goose bumps on her upper arms, but Ellie was smiling her lady-cops-are-cheerful-until-provoked smile.

The clerk grunted. He was dressed in jeans and flannel workshirt and regimental striped suspenders, and he twanged the right suspender. “They’ve been changing the storage system. It’ll take me a minute.”

He drifted back across the storage room, poking along shelves and into bins, peering behind shopping bags and brown paper parcels. Cardozo had the impression that, as a part of its cost-cutting, the city had decreed that any container that could possibly enclose anything would henceforth be used as an evidence bag.

The clerk returned with a bulging elastic-bound legal-size manila file. He blew dust off it, coughed, and slid it under the grille.

Cardozo signed and took the file to the steel-topped counter on the opposite side of the room. He snapped on a pair of disposable surgical gloves and opened the file. His nostrils took in the faint petroleum residue of the chemicals that had been used to soak trace material out of the evidence.

He carefully spread the contents of the package on the counter: One pair rotted blue jeans with pathetically child-size hips. One rotted camouflage T-shirt. One thick white candle, partially burned. Two small matching rings, the gold plate practically gone from one of them. One three-inch length of cheap gold chain.

He separated the chain from the other objects. Beside it he laid the laser printout of Lou Stein’s computer-enhanced photo.

He adjusted the arm of the examining lamp and awaited Ellie’s judgment.

She was silent. It was as though she were staring into motionless water. Her eyes flicked from the chain to the image of a chain. Back and forth. Finally they flicked to Cardozo. “They match. Wanda Gilmartin is Ms. Basket Case.”

“I’m faxing you the drawing we published of Ms. Basket Case,” Cardozo told Harvey Thoms. “And the photo of Wanda Gilmartin.”

“Don’t bother with the drawing.” Thoms’s voice on the line was clipped, unmistakably rushed. “I’ve got it.”

“You’ll see there’s no resemblance between them. Yet Barth identified the girl from the drawing.”

“You’re telling me he was lying. You’re telling me again.”

“Only this time there’s proof. He couldn’t have recognized her from that drawing. Nobody could have.”

“And the nipple ring?”

“If he didn’t know her, he didn’t kill her. If he didn’t kill her, someone had to have given him the ring. Someone who was involved. Deeply involved.”

“Okay, Vince. I know who you’re talking about. I’ll take this up with the D.A.” Thoms’s voice had a “goodbye right now” finality.

“Wait a minute. The D.A. had better look into the cover-up. It took some well-placed hands working overtime.”

“The department appreciates your help, Vince. I’ll see it’s remembered.”

The line went dead in Cardozo’s hand. Rap music thumped somewhere, punctuated by the crackle of a dot-matrix printer in the squad room. Cardozo sat frowning.

He smelled Ellie’s perfume—the faint but pungent sweetness of rose attar—before he heard her behind him.

“Look what the morning mail brought. My turn to get an anonymous note.”

He turned in his swivel chair. Today Ellie was wearing a sleeveless teal dress that brought out the color of her eyes. She handed him a plain business envelope addressed to her in block printing. A sheet of folded Xerox paper was paper-clipped to it.

“I notice you don’t get engraved stationery.”

“Either my nameless friends aren’t as fancy as yours, or they don’t think I’m as fancy as you.”

There was no return address. Cardozo studied the postmark. “Mailed yesterday from this zip code.”

“The bad news always gets delivered faster.”

“How bad?” He unclipped the paper.

“If your name’s Vanderbrook, very bad.”

He spread the sheet open. It was a copy of a cutting from the obit page of an eighteen-month-old
New York Times.

Wheelwright Vanderbrook III, age 22, was found dead December 24 in a guest room at the Knickerbocker Club, apparently a suicide. Mr. Vanderbrook was the son of Baxter Vanderbrook, president of Consolidated Industrial Brands and chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and of the former Irene Morgan. He was a senior at Harvard University, where he was a member of the Porcellian Club. Known to his friends as Wright, he was also active in the musical association of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, New York.

The words
musical association of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
had been highlighted in yellow marker.

“Killed himself just in time for Christmas,” Cardozo observed. “Thoughtful of him.”

“Wasn’t it.”

“This was sent to you directly. Who knows you’re on the case?”

Ellie’s silence could have been meant as a reply. Or maybe it was just meant as silence. She sighed. “Reverend Bonnie Ruskay.”

“Besides her?”

“Samantha Schuyler. Maybe a few others. I’ll check my notes.”

“Who did the autopsy?”

“Dan Hippolito.”

“I’ll have a talk with him.”

“It started simple,” Dan said. “Wright Vanderbrook was a clear case of suicide. Drug overdose, self-administered.”

They were standing in Dan Hippolito’s windowless, pale-green office two levels below First Avenue. Fluorescent light flickered down on potted corn plants and forty-year-old Danish modern furniture.