Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

17

AT THE TASK FORCE meeting Malloy reported that so far no prisons in the tristate area had recognized the photo of John Doe. “Maybe we should go national.”

Cardozo tossed a chewing gum wrapper at an ashtray. There was a growing buzz of frustration in him. “So go.”

Greg Monteleone sat shuffling three squares of phone message paper. “For what it’s worth, two Laundromats say they recognize the flyer. Unfortunately, they’re eight miles away from one another, so unless John Doe schlepped his dirty linen by helicopter, one of them’s got to be mistaken.”

Cardozo told Monteleone and Malloy to each take a Laundromat and check them out.

Cardozo lowered the shade in his cubicle and set up the projector. He looked at slides, Sunday’s slides, Monday’s, the whole week’s. He tried to see each one as though for the first time.

Again and again he referred back to his one maybe, the mystery woman in slides 28 and 43: his gaze took in the flowing blond hair, the confident face and stride, the blouse, the skirt, the belt … the pink-striped package that went into the building and never came out again.

He told himself that there had to be a match, that Tommy’s team had missed it, that she was somewhere else too, in another photo neatly logged and tagged.

But she wasn’t and she wasn’t and she wasn’t.

At one thirty Monteleone was back from Queens to report that the mom and pop who ran the Laundromat had made a mistake.

Two hours later Malloy was back from Staten Island. The ferry ride had been great; the woman who ran the Laundromat was an old sweetie, but she had a habit of calling the FBI and reporting that their Ten Most Wanted had left laundry in her shop. The FBI had stopped taking her calls, so she’d turned to local law enforcement.

Monday, June 2. Cardozo was clicking through slides. He compared the faces on his wall to the faces on his desk, photographs Ellie Siegel had gotten from the insurance companies that reimbursed the Beaux Arts clinics.

There should be a computer to do this, he thought.

In three hours he found only seven matches that weren’t already in the log. He felt he was groping through a maze that led only to potholes.

He was yawning and blinking when Siegel walked in from the squad room wearing a big smile. She stared at Cardozo with his head resting on his forearm.

“I got something.” Her face lit up the room. “The owner not only claims to have seen the victim regularly, she has his laundry.”

Cardozo’s smile opened like a Japanese fan, the muscles stretching one at a time, and he realized he hadn’t smiled in nine days. “Where?”

The area on lower Eighth Avenue was in the throes of gentrification: gays and yuppies edging in, Puerto Ricans getting edged out. On a block of Medicaid dentists and trendy upscale bistros, the Paradise Laundromat shared the ground floor of a brick tenement with the Jean Cocteau Hair Salon and Greeting Card Boutique.

Cardozo and Siegel entered the narrow storefront. To reach the clanking washers and dryers they had to walk a gauntlet of neighborhood Latin kids pitting their machismo against Japanese video game machines.

Soap dust floating in the air prickled the inside of Cardozo’s nose and made him want to sneeze.

A girl waited by one of the dryers, studying her reflection in the window of spinning underwear. She was applying makeup, careful not to get powder on the headband of her Walkman earphones.

At the rear of the store an old Chinese woman in a black five-and-ten oriental robe was sitting erect and rigid on a small wooden box.

Cardozo showed her his shield.

Her tiny black eyes studied it suspiciously.

He showed her the flyer.

She nodded, her skin as dry as old parchment, her features drawn and shrunken. “Si,” she said. “Joven.” Young.

“His name, his address?”

No reaction. Cardozo tried his Spanish, a modification of the Portuguese he’d learned at home as a child. “¿Su nombre, su dirección?”

The old woman shook her head in denial. “No nombre, no dirección.”

The right corner of her mouth was drawn down: she had some kind of paralysis of a facial nerve, and that, added to her accent, made her hash of Cantonese, Spanish, and English very hard to understand.

Cardozo was able to piece together that the young man had come in regularly, every Thursday, and he must have lived nearby, because he carried such big bags of laundry.

“You have one of these sacos grandes?” Cardozo asked. “Give it to me. Dámelo por favor.”

The slant of her eyes lent them a wary expression. “Ticket?”

“No ticket.”

One finger unbent. “One dollar más.”

She went and got a stool and pulled a green nylon bag down from a crowded shelf.

Half a laundry ticket was safety-pinned to it. The date stamped on it was May 23. The Friday before the murder. She undid the pin, her hands liver-spotted and twisted with arthritis, and dropped it into a box of similar pins.

She held out the half ticket and with a cracked Bic pen made a pantomime of signing. Cardozo signed. She made him write down his shield number.

“Eight dollars fifty cents.” Her English was a hell of a lot better when it came to money.

As Cardozo pulled into the cluster of glassy buildings, the air had a tang of oncoming rain. He took the laundry up to the fourth floor.

The man from Evidence was already there, a scholarly-looking civilian in his late twenties, tall and skinny with curly red hair. He began making an inventory of the laundry. It was a curious mix—woollen argyle socks with Brooks Brothers labels, Fruit of the Loom underpants and T-shirts, Healthknit jockstraps, five-and-dime tube socks without labels.

“A lot of socks,” the evidence man commented. “He must have worn two, three pairs a day.”

“Maybe he jogged.” Cardozo noticed that the clothes were all India-inked with the same initials—J.D.

Funny if the guy’s name really was John Doe.

Cardozo had known evidence men who would tag a pair of socks as a single item, especially if a detective was waiting, but this man went strictly by the book, tagging each sock with its own numbered tag, tearing each tag on its two perforated lines, filling out each stub in identical, careful block printing.

Lou Stein sauntered into the room. His face still bore traces of its holiday tan, but the holiday smile was gone. Care had eaten its way back.

“We’re not going to need all that,” he said. He lifted a pair of underpants, a T-shirt, and a sock out of the tagged pile and signed for them.

On the seventh floor, in the soft blue glow of lab lights, Lou Stein removed the evidence tags and dropped the clothing into a bath of distilled water. Sliding the lid into place, he pressed a button. The water began agitating violently.

After three minutes Lou drained the water from the tub and fed it into another tank. He played with a bank of switches. Something began making a Cuisinart sound.

Lou beckoned. “We can watch over here.”

Cardozo fixed his eyes on a computer terminal. Mathematical and chemical symbols exploded into green points of brilliance on the black screen.

Thirty seconds later a printed analysis spewed out of the mouth of a computer-linked desktop printer.

Lou ripped off a sheet of printout and resettled his spectacles thoughtfully. “The underclothes and socks show a heavy saturation of the same detergent that caused the rash on John Doe.”

Cardozo stopped on the fourth floor. The evidence man was examining a shirt. His teeth were pressed down into his lip.

“What do you make of this, Lieutenant?”

Cardozo took the shirt. It was white cotton, a nice weave, oxford or chambray.

“A dress shirt with a one-inch collar,” Cardozo observed.

“Most of the other stuff is initialed J.D. This one’s initialed D.B.”

Cardozo studied the inside of the collar with the India-inked letters. “And no label.”

“What is it, a Chairman Mao?”

Cardozo didn’t know. “How many of these has he got?”

“Just that one.”

Tommy Daniels arranged the sleeves outward on the table like the arms of a crucified man. “I’ll shoot you a beauty. Good enough for GQ.”

“Forget beautiful,” Cardozo said. “I need six prints.”

Cardozo called the team into his office. He passed out the photos and then rested both hands on the edge of the desk.

There was a wide waiting silence. Three tired men and one tired woman stared at the pictures.

“Whatever any of you are doing now,” Cardozo said, “drop it. Find out what the hell kind of shirt that is, who makes it, where it’s sold.”

It was dark when Monteleone returned. There was no mistaking the black beyond the window for the last traces of day.

“It’s a clerical shirt,” he said. “Priests attach their collar to that hole in the back with a collar button.”

A skin of silence dropped on the cubicle, freezing out the voices and clatter from the squad room.

“The guy’s too young,” Cardozo said. “He couldn’t have been a priest.” He realized that what he meant was, a priest couldn’t have died that kind of death—God wouldn’t have let him.

“Everybody seems young when you get older,” Monteleone said. “Hell, cops look young to me. To tell the truth, Vince, even you look young to me.”

Cardozo sat there for a moment letting things sort themselves out in his mind. He tapped a blunted pencil against the blotter.

“Let’s assume he’s a priest. Priests live where they work, right? And how far would you carry laundry—five, six blocks tops, right? Let’s post the flyer in all churches within six blocks of that Laundromat.”

“Clerical shirts are just formal shirts without the collar or the fancy front.” Greg Monteleone was sharing his research with Tuesday’s task force meeting. “They come in three colors—black and white for your hoi polloi priests, and magenta for bishops. White clerical shirts always have a rabat worn over them. That’s a vest. Some Jesuits and low-church Anglicans try for the dog-collar look, and they wear the black shirt with the collar and without the vest.”

“We’re looking at a white shirt,” Cardozo said. “Is it Catholic or is it Anglican?”

“They’re both the same,” Monteleone said. “The only difference is who’s inside. They’re all sewn by Ricans and Chicanos and gook illegals in the same Yiddish sweatshops.”

Ellie Siegel, looking exasperated, scratched a match loudly and lit a cigarette.

“If you’re buying a standard clerical shirt,” Monteleone said, “you do it by mail or you go to a Roman Catholic shop and get it off the rack. If you want to go special, outfits like Brooks Brothers make white clerical shirts to order for rich Anglicans and Romans.”

“Didn’t know there were rich priests,” Siegel said.

“They’re called bishops,” Monteleone said.

“Was D.B.’s shirt custom-made?” Cardozo asked.

Monteleone nodded. “The guy at Brooks Brothers said D.B.’s was a very nice custom job. The cloth quality was extremely high, and the tapered waist isn’t standard.”

“The minister had his waist tapered?” Richards said.

“Maybe he was proud of his waist,” Malloy said.

Siegel seemed puzzled. “Throwing a tailor-made shirt into the washer with the underwear—wouldn’t you think he’d send a shirt that expensive to a dry cleaner?”

“I don’t know when you last looked at a priest or minister,” Monteleone said, “but the shirt very rarely shows. The black vest hides it.”

“Did Brooks Brothers happen to have made this shirt?” Cardozo asked.

Monteleone shook his head. “No. But a shirt like this you can have custom-made at any shop that tailors to order.”

Cardozo sighed. “Okay, guys. Hit the Yellow Pages.” He adjourned the meeting and went to his cubicle.

He reviewed the new slides from the observation van. He had asked the photo team to tag any new appearances of the girl in 43—and he noticed that there were no tags.

He switched on the projector and began going through the slides. Yesterday had been sunny. Beaux Arts Tower gave off a sense of dignity and ease, a cool monolith, its large windows tinted against the sun.

He slowed at a photo of a dark-haired man in a seersucker suit, carrying a briefcase, looking back over his shoulder directly at the camera.

Another man who had made the truck.

Cardozo stared at the photo a moment. No, it wasn’t another man. It was the same man in a different suit.

He went back through the log and found the earlier notation: #79, Monday, May 26.

He dropped 79 into the carousel and clicked the picture on.

The same man was carrying the same briefcase, looking very spiffy and businesslike. His patent leather shoes looked like dancing pumps, thin-soled enough for him to have felt every pebble on the pavement.

Seventy-nine’s eyes met Cardozo’s.

Today Cardozo tried to look at the slide in a new way. Possibly there was something about the man in the picture that was cocksure and careless. Maybe he was looking around not because he sensed danger but because he sensed attention. Maybe he wanted to see who else thought he was looking good.

Cardozo clicked back to the other photo of the same man. This time his attention went to another detail: Hector doing duty at the door, grinning.

Cardozo clicked forward.

Hector and the caller vanished into the lobby.

Next: Princess Lily Lobkowitz entering, looking angry at finding no doorman.

Next slide: 79 leaving the building.

Three slides later, Hector was back at his post, and Baron Billi von Kleist was entering the building. Hector was smiling at him.

Next: a patient for one of the psychotherapists entering the building. Hector wasn’t smiling.

Cardozo clicked forward to a photo showing a shadowy figure getting out of a cab. A woman. She was wearing dark glasses, a kerchief, tight jeans.

Next slide. Hector was signaling the woman. Next: Hector and the woman retreating into the depths of the lobby, leaving the doorway unattended.

Cardozo stopped. The taxi and the woman’s dark glasses triggered an association to a killing he’d solved two years back. The Mildred Hopkinson case.

Hopkinson had been legally blind and she’d lived with her working sister in Kew Gardens. Three years ago her father had been pushed from a twelfth-story window in Manhattan and someone had left one of Mildred’s gloves on the floor. It seemed a crude and cruel sort of frame; Mildred’s vision kept her housebound, and with her father’s death her small annuity passed to an uncle.

Cardozo had ordered a stakeout on Mildred’s home and discovered she had a secret boyfriend, a cabby who picked her up every day at the side door, took her for a drive to a motel, and brought her back to that same door at three sharp.

Mildred finally admitted her boyfriend had driven her to her dad’s, the old man had picked a fight, and—not seeing the open window—she’d pushed him. Two years for involuntary manslaughter.

Cardozo clicked back through the sequence of slides. He knew exactly what he was looking for. Bingo. He stopped at the shot where the woman was getting out of the cab.

No mistaking it. She hadn’t paid for the ride. Another glad-to-please cabby.

Thanks for the tip, Mildred.

Cardozo went back to the first day’s photos, looking for any female wearing glamour shades and babushka.

June 2—four P.M.—a woman coming out of the Tower wearing dark glasses, no kerchief.

Debbi Hightower? He put the picture aside, pulled a Hightower from the stack, dropped it into the projector.

He clicked between the Hightower and the maybe Hightower and the girl in the cab. He reached out with his imagination, raking things in.

They’re dealing dope. Seventy-nine is delivering, Hector is holding, Debbi is buying—definitely using …

He clicked back to the cabby, a gray-capped man out of focus in the foreground. He played with the lens. He couldn’t get the image to sharpen.

It was frustrating. The man was right there in the photograph and Cardozo couldn’t see him. It was like a Miranda rule standing between him and a smoking gun.

He phoned Tommy Daniels.

Tommy arrived wearing canary yellow trousers and his conservative helio pink shirt. He was remarkably energetic and Cardozo envied him that.

“Do a little magic with that slide, will you, Tommy?”

Tommy Daniels popped a pink gumdrop into his mouth. It was disgusting some of the things members of the force did to avoid smoking. He played with the lens, focusing and unfocusing the image in the shaft of light.

“Stop, hold it right there, Tommy.”

The face was still blurred, but the logo on the cab door was clear enough to make out: DING-DONG TRANSPORT.

Cardozo handed Tommy the slide of the woman in dark glasses. “How clear can you make that?”

Tommy tinkered with the projector. He shook his head. “I’ll have to do this one in the lab.”

“I’d be obliged, Tommy.”

Cardozo swiveled in his chair and yelled for Malloy. “Get Bronski’s cab sheet for yesterday.” Cardozo read the hour from the log. “I want the drop-off at 12:20 P.M.”

18

“WE’VE BEEN SERVED WITH a show cause order of the most unbelievable malice,” Lucia Vanderwalk said. “It comes from some woman lawyer purporting to act on your behalf.”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Babe said, “but I obviously needed legal representation.”

“Why? You have your father and me acting on your behalf.”

For a moment Babe said nothing from where she sat in her wheelchair. “I’m grateful for the help you and Papa gave me while I was sick. But you’ve stopped being a help. I want to get out of here and you want me to stay and that’s why I hired Miss MacGill.”

“Then you admit you went behind our backs.”

“I admit I hired a lawyer. There’s no secret about it.”

“This Judge Levin who signed the order is an outrageous incompetent. He ruled against Cybilla deClairville in her suit against her dressmaker.”

“Judges make strange rulings. Who knows how the judge may rule when you and I go to court. Or how a jury may decide, if it comes to that.”

A very bad silence rolled in.

Lucia said, “You seem to relish the idea of making this squabble public.”

“I don’t relish it, but I’m willing to take the chance. What I’m not willing to do is sit here and let another minute of my life tick away.”

“Dr. Corey happens to be an excellent physician and it’s his opinion you’re not well enough to be let out of the hospital.”

“And it’s my opinion I am.”

“You’re not a specialist.”

“I am when it comes to myself.”

Lucia turned to her husband. “Hadley, will you reason with your daughter?”

There was a special smile at the corner of Hadley’s lips. Babe understood it exactly. Her father’s eyes met hers, creating a conspiracy of warmth.

“Lucia, she’s an adult. As I understand the legalities of this, she ceased to be our ward once she regained consciousness.”

“Is that true, Bill?” Lucia said.

Lucia and Hadley had brought Bill Frothingham, the family lawyer, with them, and Lucia gave him her lovely smile. She had a great many smiles at her disposal, not all of them lovely, but this was obviously the one she thought appropriate.

“Not precisely.” A gray-templed man with penetrating eyes and a sharp-featured arresting face, Bill Frothingham had a gift for getting on well with people, or at least keeping them at bay with the sort of smile he was smiling now. “The test is competence, not consciousness. Once Babe can demonstrate competence she becomes her own ward.”

“Obviously she’s competent,” Hadley said. “She went and hired a lawyer.”

“You can hardly call it competent,” Lucia shot back. “She’s defying the best neurologist in the country.”

“Look here.” Bill Frothingham shoved his mouth into a peace-making grin. “We all want the same thing, which is for Babe to be well. If she’ll agree to spend a reasonable amount of time under medical care—”

“I’m taking my nurse with me,” Babe said. “I’ll be under medical care in my own home.”

“Don’t expect a doctor like Eric Corey to make house calls,” Lucia warned.

“He likes me,” Babe said, “I’ll invite him to dinner.”

“Don’t you get sarcastic with me, young lady.”

“I’m telling you exactly what I plan to do.”

Lucia’s green eyes challenged her daughter. “And if you should need an X ray or an EKG or an EEG or a CAT scan?”

“I can always be readmitted.”

“Lucia,” Hadley said pleasantly, “I think we should admit when we’re beaten.”

19

AT THE WEDNESDAY MORNING task force meeting Carl Malloy produced Bronski’s cab sheets for June 2. The sheets said he’d been at West End Avenue and 93rd Street at 12:20 when the photo van placed his look-alike at Beaux Arts Tower.

“I don’t believe the sheets,” Cardozo said.

He passed around Tommy Daniels’s blowup of the girl in the babushka.

“A two-week vacation in Oahu if anyone can identify her.”

“Debbi Hightower,” Sam Richards said.

“You’re crazy,” Malloy said.

“How can you tell from this?” Siegel said. “It’s a blob.”

“Debbi’s a blob,” Greg Monteleone said.

“But she’s not this blob,” Malloy said.

“You’re a real help,” Cardozo said. “All of you. Get out of here.”

He went back to the slide projector and began the laborious task of going through all the photos since day one, isolating all nonresident females wearing babushkas and designer shades.

By late afternoon he’d turned up eight possibilities and was wondering about a ninth when there was a knock on the doorframe.

He turned.

A boy stood at the door, very lost, very out of place. His look was open and vulnerable. His hair was reddish and hung in bangs on his forehead. He wore faded jeans, Adidas jogging shoes, and a T-shirt with a few well-laundered holes. It was the yuppie version of the street look.

Cardozo could see his caller was not a junkie, not a pimp, not a pross, not a booster.

“Lieutenant Cardozo?”

“Help you?”

“My name’s Dave Bellamy.” The boy’s voice was taut, unsteady. “The man downstairs told me to talk to you.”

The boy’s feet kept checking an impulse to step backward. Cardozo could see he was scared shitless.

“It’s about a guy I know. Jodie Downs.”

In Cardozo’s mind the initials J.D. set off a little inner jingle. He began listening with his skin. He lifted a pile of rubble from a chair. “Have a seat.”

The boy sat obediently.

“If you’d like some coffee—” Cardozo offered.

“No, thanks, I’ve had a lot more than my quota today.” The way the boy said it was embarrassed, apologetic, like a drunk saying I’ve had too many, I’ve had to have too many to psych myself up for this.

“I saw the poster at church last night.” The boy’s glance fought desperately for some sort of courage, skittering off surfaces, ricocheting away from Cardozo’s. “The poster said anyone recognizing this man. I recognized him. Jodie Downs. He was watering my plants for me while I was away.”

Cardozo got out a pad, began taking notes. “Can I have your name and address, Dave?”

Dave Bellamy spelled his name and gave an address at One Chelsea Place—“That’s the Episcopal seminary on Ninth Avenue. I’m a second-year student. I got back late from Chicago last night, I’ve been home visiting my folks for a week, and I went to a late mass at the Roman Catholic church on Twenty-fourth. They have a beautiful late mass. I saw the poster.”

His hand going to his hair, pulling at a strand of reddish blond.

“The plants in my room were dead. Some clothes of Jodie’s were on the bed, and some of mine were missing.”

“When did you last see Jodie?”

Dave Bellamy had to think a moment. “The night I flew home. Friday May sixteenth. He came to my room to get the keys.”

“You got a minute, Dave? I’d like you to come with me downtown and look at something.”

The attendant walked to number 1473. He turned a key and applied just enough pull to bring the slab sliding out. Ball bearings screeched.

Bellamy glanced at Cardozo.

Cardozo gave him a nod.

Bellamy walked across to the slab. His step was cautious, as though the floor might burst beneath his feet.

The attendant lifted the sheet. The light drew the drained, waxen face of the dead man out of the shadows.

Bellamy stared, not moving, not breathing.

The corpse looked curiously unborn, eyes closed in placental dreaming.

Cardozo waited in a tingling state of awareness. There was no sound but the plashing of water from an unseen hose. The smell was a blend of formaldehyde and meat that had sat too long in a marinade of sickening sweetness.

Dave Bellamy just stood there with a stunned look. Then he lifted his hands slowly and nodded his head.

As they drove uptown Bellamy sat strapped into his safety belt, but his mind was somewhere else, secret and apart.

A late afternoon shade had fallen over the city. The sky was a darkening bruise behind the turrets of lower Manhattan, just beginning to glitter with electric lights.

“It’s your first corpse, isn’t it,” Cardozo said. He felt sorry for the boy. “It’s like virginity. You never get it back.”

They parked on West Twentieth.

Cardozo followed Dave Bellamy into the seminary. Through a window he could see the interior of an office, the shape of a priest bent over a desk. There was an intermittent amateurish clatter of typewriter, the ringing of a phone, and then a voice of which he could make out nothing except the gentleness. The priest waved Dave Bellamy through and smiled as though he recognized Cardozo.

They passed into a peaceful cloister with stepping-stone paths and evening-dappled oaks. There were iron fences, dark, ivy-twined brick buildings and a chapel with a high Gothic tower. Green-washed light filtered through trees that had grown undisturbed for a hundred years.

They went up a stairwell with hollowed stone steps. The well smelled of centuries of cleanliness. They stopped at the fourth landing.

Dave Bellamy nervously got out his keys and opened the door. He turned on the light. It revealed neat, scholarly clutter: a desk, stacks of black-bound books that reminded Cardozo of the Penal Code, drafting lamps, a crucifix—Jesus in ivory, not suffering—over the bed. Khaki trousers and a sports shirt had been tossed down on the bedspread as though someone had just made a dash for the shower. There was a suitcase beside the bed.

“Those are his?” Cardozo asked.

Dave Bellamy nodded.

“And the suitcase?”

“That’s his too.”

“Do you lease this room?”

“I’m leasing it for the summer session,” Dave Bellamy said.

“May I open the suitcase?”

“Sure.”

Cardozo opened the bag. The top layer was underpants and tube socks and T-shirts with J.D.’s initials. The next layer was leather. A vest, a belt, a cap, gloves, all bearing the India-ink initials J.D. Then black rubber and steel. The kind of things sex shops sold and called novelties. A plastic Baggie with grass, Bambu rolling papers, some tabs of blotter paper, a contact lens holder with coke inside, a two-ounce brown bottle three-quarters full of liquid popper.

“How’d you meet this guy?” Cardozo asked.

“We’re from the same hometown. Mattoon, Illinois. He was studying fashion at Pratt, I was … here.”

“Did you know he was into this stuff—drugs, leather?”

“I knew he was gay,” Bellamy said. “I didn’t know the details.”

“Did you know he had one of your shirts?”

“No.”

“Did he take any of your other clothes?”

“Some clericals are missing.”

“I take it Jodie liked to dress up.”

“For laughs I’d let him put on my clericals. Just here in the room.”

“Can you give me his family’s phone?”

Back at the precinct, Cardozo ordered that flyers of the dead man be distributed to all the leather bars in Manhattan.

He stared at his telephone.

He knew he was making the first mistake—thinking, planning what to say. There was no way of planning it.

He picked up the telephone. He dialed and listened to the line buzz.

A voice in the county sheriffs office in Mattoon, Illinois, answered. A moment later the deputy sheriff picked up and listened to what Cardozo had to say. A sigh traveled across the phone line. “I’ll go over and tell Lockwood and Meridee Downs myself. They’re friends.”

“Would you give them my number?” Cardozo said. “They may have questions.”

“They’ll have questions all right.”

A call from Mattoon came seventeen minutes later. “Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Lockwood Downs. Jodie’s dad.” The voice was strangled. “My wife and I just heard that our son …” The words died.

“I’m very sorry,” Cardozo said. He felt scooped out inside, and freezing, and he knew with his whole body what the murdered boy’s father was feeling.

“My wife and I will be in New York tomorrow,” Lockwood Downs said.

“You don’t have to,” Cardozo said, trying to make it easier for them.

“Lieutenant, we have to.”

Cardozo peered over the railing toward the Eastern information counter. He saw the man and woman standing at the baggage carousel. They were dressed in unobtrusive mourning, and somehow that seemed sad and sweetly square and very old-fashioned. She was small and pretty and straight, her body held erect in a soft white dress. The man was thin, nearly six feet tall. His clothes spoke of another time, the early Kennedy years: pepper-and-salt suit and a gray tie and a lightweight charcoal raincoat over his arm.

Cardozo came down the stairs. He held out his hand and introduced himself.

“Meridee and I want to thank you for phoning,” Downs said. His voice was tight and controlled and the sun had layered brown into his deep-lined face.

“Do you have luggage?” Cardozo asked.

Mrs. Downs shook her head. She had soft reddish hair and moist green eyes and there was a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Just these,” she said.

They were each carrying a flat little fit-under-the-seat bag.

“We’d better go see Jodie,” Downs said.

“That’s not necessary,” Cardozo said. “Jodie’s friend Dave Bellamy identified him.”

“You don’t understand,” Mrs. Downs said. Her small forehead was smooth, her mouth and chin firmly set “We came east to say good-bye to our boy.”

The attendant raised the sheet. The parents gazed down at the shut eyes.

Cardozo could feel the wave of shock hit them. Every atom of color was driven from their faces.

They always caught you unprepared, those moments when you knew that life was not forever, that death was just around the bend. The Bible told you and life told you, but still you never felt it in your gut except when it was someone special that death claimed. Cardozo had had one of those moments. Lockwood and Meridee Downs were having one now.

A thousand years crept by.

Mrs. Downs bent to kiss the dead lips.

Downs’s face lifted up and he looked at his wife so tenderly, so softly, that the look was a caress in itself. Cardozo could remember that look, the look of caring, of belonging to someone.