Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

The civilians were nodding, promising. They always nodded, they always promised, and in Cardozo’s experience they kept the promise for no more than twenty-four hours.

He asked the would-be buyers short questions and listened to long, meandering answers: they were in the market to buy a Manhattan apartment, had chosen this day to drive in from New Rochelle. They were obviously scared and he had the impression they didn’t know anything more than they were saying. He got their names and address and had them fingerprinted and let them go.

Cardozo asked Connell if there were any electric saws in the building.

“Sixteen and seventeen are being remodeled into a duplex. There may be a saw up there.”

Cardozo sent a sergeant to search 16 and 17. “Who has the key to this apartment?”

“Till it’s sold you open it with the passkey,” Connell said.

“Who has the passkey?”

“It’s kept in the personnel office,” Connell said.

“All personnel have access?”

Connell nodded.

“Any of the residents have passkeys?”

“No, sir.”

“Anyone besides personnel have access to the personnel office and the passkey?”

“I do, Lieutenant.”

Cardozo looked at the sales agent. She impressed him with her lack of embarrassment or uncertainty.

“My name’s Melissa Hatfield. It’s my job to show the apartments. Sometimes there are prospective buyers on very short notice and I have to let myself in.”

He noted things about her skin texture, voice tone, details of clothing. She wore a white dress with large woven holes in it and it looked on her the way dresses were supposed to look on fashionable women and rarely did.

“Did you let yourself in today?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have to ask you some questions. Would you mind waiting in the lobby?” Cardozo turned to the super. “I’ll need a list of building personnel and the worksheets for the last two days.”

“I have those down in the office,” the super said.

Cardozo and Connell were passing through the Beaux Arts garage. A shadowless fluorescent glow flickered across Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, Mercedeses, and Rollses.

“Is that garage door kept locked?” Cardozo asked.

Connell nodded. “Garage users have electronic remotes to open it.”

“Do the staff have remotes?”

“We have to. For deliveries.”

Cardozo asked how the garage was guarded.

“Monitored from the lobby.” Connell pointed to a closed-circuit TV camera poised on the cinderblock wall.

They passed the laundry room. Two washers, two dryers.

“Residents use those?” Cardozo asked.

“The maids use them.”

There were two elevator entrances in the basement corridor—one marked Passenger, one marked Freight. A third door was marked Authorized Personnel Only. Cardozo opened it.

“Garbage compactor.” Connell grinned. “State of the art.”

“What happens after the garbage is compacted?”

“It goes into those state-of-the-art bags.”

Cardozo took a moment fingering one of the black plastic bags. The plastic was sturdy stuff, a good eighth of an inch thick.

“And where do the bags go?”

“The trucking company picks them up.”

Connell led Cardozo to the personnel office. Besides a desk, the windowless room held an easy chair, two metal chairs, a card table, and two filing cabinets.

“Personnel list,” Connell muttered. “Worksheet …” He opened a cabinet drawer and looked behind a pile of racing forms.

“And. the residents,” Cardozo said.

“Bingo.” Connell pulled out three lists.

Cardozo looked them over. “You’re a resident.”

Connell nodded. “The apartment comes with the job.”

“You weren’t working yesterday?”

“I get holidays and weekends off,” Connell said.

“Where were you?”

“I spent the day at home. My wife Ebbie—she’s an invalid. We don’t get out too much.”

Cardozo folded the lists and slipped them into his jacket pocket. He noticed a battered-looking thirteen-inch Sony TV on the desk. “Who watches that?”

Connell seemed embarrassed. “I do.”

“Don’t you have your own upstairs?”

“Ebbie doesn’t like sports. So if there’s an important game, I usually catch it here.”

The room had gray concrete walls and cement floor and naked pipes overhead. It didn’t look like the coziest spot for watching the Mets.

“Can I use your phone?” Cardozo asked.

“Help yourself. Do you need me?”

“Not for the moment.”

“I’ll be in the utility room. Out in the hall and hook a right.”

Alone, Cardozo took out his notebook and spent three minutes drawing up a list of his own. He wrote down eight names, crossed out three, after a little thought crossed out a fourth.

He lifted the phone and dialed headquarters. “Flo, it’s Vince.” He read her the names of the four detectives. “Pull them off whatever they’re doing, get them up here.”

“You know what they’re doing, Vince, they’re having a day off.”

“So was I.”

“You’re not going to be a loved man.”

3

IN THE BEDROOM, CARDOZO stood alone in the sunlight glaring through the window. He was working now, stirred by the sense of a secret waiting to be revealed, a sense that was tantalizing and almost sexual in its excitement.

He looked about the blank surfaces of the unfurnished room, seeking some object, some detail that bore the imprint of what had happened here.

The bedroom door had two hinges. He could remember a time when doors had had three hinges, but nowadays builders got by with two. He swung the door. In the crack just below the bottom hinge something small and dark and glistening had wedged against the jamb. He crouched. Using the tip of his gloved finger he gently poked the dark thing.

An inch of black plastic fell to the floor.

He picked up the fragment, turned it over in his hand. He tested the thickness between his thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t surprised at what he felt. A piece of garbage bag, similar to the ones he’d seen in the compactor room.

He dropped the fragment into a clear plastic evidence bag.

Down the hallway, where the baseboard wasn’t quite joined to the wall, he found another piece of black plastic.

“Cleaning house?”

Cardozo glanced up. “You look lousy,” he said.

In fact Detective Sam Richards didn’t look lousy at all. Nattily dressed in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, charcoal gray summer-weight slacks, he looked like a linebacker who had traded in his shoulder pads for a TV news anchor’s chair.

But the expression on his long, unsmiling black face was grumpy, and his big roguish moustache was pulled down into a frown. There was a small pink Band-Aid on his chin.

“How’d you get the battle wound?”

“Cut myself shaving.”

“Hung over?”

“Maybe. I spent last night celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“Having today off.”

“That was premature.”

“Tell me about it, Vince. Tell me why I’m alive, tell me why I’m here.”

“How about if I just tell you about this killing.” Cardozo described what he had seen, reviewed what he had found, and walked Richards through the apartment.

“I want you to canvass,” Cardozo said. “Cover the building, cover the neighborhood, see if any of the local Peeping Toms or storekeepers noticed anything. You’ll split the job with Greg Monteleone.”

“Tell Monteleone I’ve started.”

Cardozo felt he had been poking through kitchen cabinets for an hour. His watch told him it had been twenty-five minutes.

As he swung open the door beneath the sink, the inside of his nose prickled violently. Print powder came eddying up in a cloud. He sneezed once, and again, and then again.

“Gesundheit.” A fortyish man in a badly cut suit the color of dry clay was watching from the corridor, amused. Detective Greg Monteleone’s brown eyes were gleaming in a cheerfully soulful face that gave him the appearance of a prankish poet. “Three sneezes means good luck.”

“Thanks, Greg.” Cardozo opened cabinets above the sink.

“What are you looking for?”

“If I knew, maybe I wouldn’t be looking for it.”

“Hasn’t Forensic already been through those?”

“I like to see for myself.”

“Trouble with you is, Vince, you’re a perfectionist, a type A personality.” In his off-hours Monteleone was a voracious reader of self-help books. “You have to learn to delegate.”

“I’m delegating. That’s why you’re here.”

“You looked in here?” Monteleone had a hand on the refrigerator. In all the years Cardozo had known Greg Monteleone, he had had his hand on either a refrigerator door or a girl’s leg. Monteleone pulled out the plastic vegetable and meat bins, setting them down on the linoleum and peering into the empty spaces behind them.

“Don’t eat the evidence,” Cardozo said.

“There isn’t any evidence. Not even a goddamned beer.”

Cardozo searched through the dishwasher, the drawers, the little closet for brooms and mops. His eye kept coming back to the dishwasher. It was a front-loading brown-and-cream model.

He pulled down the dishwasher door. He gave the lower basket a forward tug, and it glided easily out over the open door. He pulled on the upper basket, the shallow rack for cups and glasses. It slid almost all the way out, empty.

He gave another tug and this time felt firm resistance. He reached a hand in, probed. He pulled out a handful of neatly coiled black insulated electric cord. Now he tugged the upper basket and it slid all the way out, empty. He pulled the lower basket out, lifted it off its tracks and set it on the floor.

The water sprinkler, shaped like a small perforated propeller, sat in a recess on the floor of the washer. He realized now that only two of the paddles belonged to the dishwasher. What he had taken to be the third paddle was a mini rotary saw, wedged into the hollow beneath the sprinkler.

He lifted the saw out. “What do you think of this, Greg?”

Greg Monteleone was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder. “Black and Decker. The best.” He took the saw in his gloved hands, angling the blade to the window light. “This baby cuts bone, all right.”

Cardozo scratched his ear. “The killer didn’t hide the body, but he hid the saw. What kind of thinking is that?”

“It’s crazy thinking,” a female voice said. “You have a crazy killing, so what else do you expect?”

A woman stood in the doorway. Cardozo turned and gave Detective Ellie Siegel a smile. “Glad you could make it, Ellie.”

She gave him a look from her dark eyes that was not a smile by a long shot. He recognized another cop in mourning for her lost holiday.

“Detective Ellie Siegel,” Cardozo said, “you remember Detective Greg Monteleone.”

“Not funny,” Ellie said. “Please, not today.”

Greg and Ellie were good detectives; they just weren’t the greatest friends. Greg got along with Ellie better than she got along with him—but Greg made it a point to get along with just about anyone who didn’t insult him. Ellie made no secret of the fact that she considered Greg, in his opinions and tastes, a thug.

Greg got back at Siegel by openly admiring her looks, which wasn’t hard. She had Mediterranean coloring and fine Semitic bones, and her dark eyes were just close enough together to give her gaze a strange, arresting quality. She was a woman that men watched, even when she wasn’t wearing the violet body-hugging dress she had on today.

Cardozo took Siegel down to the bedroom and showed her where the dead man had been found.

“Well, Lieutenant,” she said, “just what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Find the leg. It was put in a heavy-duty black plastic garbage bag. It could have been dumped down the chute in this building. It could have been tossed into a public garbage can or trash basket. It could already be landfill.”

“It wouldn’t be landfill, not yet. Sanitation doesn’t move that fast on a holiday weekend. And it could have been dumped in someone else’s garbage. I passed about twenty French restaurants between here and Seventh Avenue, and they weren’t all shut. Restaurants use private garbage services.”

“You can have all the uniformed bodies you need. Search the garbage cans in a ten-block radius and then search the landfills.”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “What makes you think this leg is in one piece?”

“It may not be.”

“We could be looking for hamburger?”

“We could be looking for hamburger.”

“Vince, ruining my weekend is one thing, but ruining this dress I’m not going to forgive. You could have at least warned me. I’d’ve worn jeans.”

“You don’t have to dress like you’re going to a tea party all the time.”

“It’s Memorial Day for God’s sake.”

“Who dresses for Memorial Day?”

“Jewish princesses.”

“You didn’t see any strangers going in or out of the building?” Cardozo was in the lobby, questioning the doorman. “No delivery men, no repairmen?”

“Holiday weekend, you kidding?” Hector Dominguez shook his head. Sunlight spilling through the lobby door sank into his toupee, refracting brightly when it hit the fringe of graying human hair over his ears. “Yesterday maybe three, four people went in and out of this building.”

“Who?”

“Residents.”

“Which residents?”

“The ones who aren’t away. Most got houses in the Hamptons, houses in Europe. A few don’t.”

“How do you think that guy got into six?”

“He didn’t get in on my shift.”

“Think he came in through the cellar?”

“He’d have to get through the door; that takes a remote.”

“You can buy those remotes.”

“But you gotta set the code.”

“There aren’t that many codes, are there?”

“Anyone coming in through the cellar, it would have showed on the monitor.”

Hector tapped a finger on the bank of four TV screens. Two showed the garage, and two showed the interiors of the elevators. The views of the garage were panning shots from cameras moving back and forth in automated hundred-eighty-degree arcs. The elevators were stationary shots from cameras mounted in the ceilings of the cabs.

“You were at this door from eight A.M. to four P.M. yesterday?” Cardozo kept going over it, testing to see if it kept coming out the same way. “You never left your post?”

Hector shrugged. “Maybe I went downstairs to take a leak.”

“Maybe you took a leak or you took a leak?”

“I took a leak.”

“What time?”

“It’s not like it’s a big deal you’d remember the exact time.”

“You left this door unguarded?”

“I left it locked.”

“Who has a key?”

“All the residents.”

“So a resident could have come in, or anyone could have left, and you might not know?”

“That could happen. It’s not like I was expecting a murder.”

But his eyes were saying something else. They said he’d been expecting something, maybe still was expecting it.

“How’d you get those scratches on your face, Hector?”

Hector’s hand went up to his cheek and a glass ruby flashed from his finger. “Man, my damned cat scratched me.”

“When?”

“Yesterday, day before. I forget.”

“You’d better work on that memory, Hector.”

A big red-headed man sauntered into the lobby. He had florid coloring and glinting green eyes that didn’t take the least offense when Hector challenged, “Hey, you gotta be announced. Where you goin’?”

“That’s okay, Hector,” Cardozo said. “Detective Malloy’s with me.”

Hector touched a fumbling hand to the brim of his cap and Detective Carl Malloy, smiling, touched a finger to a nonexistent hatbrim.

Cardozo drew Malloy aside and filled him in on the crime. “I want you to check out all the cars and trucks parked in a five-block radius.”

Malloy was a constitutionally cheerful man, but at the mention of a five-block radius he drew a deep sigh. Five blocks meant better than three thousand vehicles. The sigh puckered Malloy’s fire-engine red vest at its straining brass buttons. A little under six feet and a little over two hundred pounds, Malloy had trouble with his weight. He binged daily on bagels and cream cheese, claiming his doctor had told him dairy products would quiet his ulcer.

“You can have all the bodies you need,” Cardozo said. “Start running the licenses through National Crime Bureau and see if anyone’s got a record.”

“You got it,” Malloy said.

Cardozo nodded and turned and crossed the lobby. Melissa Hatfield was waiting on one of the leather sofas. She saw him and quickly jabbed out her cigarette.

“Would you mind showing me the other unsold apartments?” he asked.

“Why not? That’s what I’m here for.”

They took the elevator up to 12. There was a small carved drop-leaf table in the foyer, and a bowl of dried flowers had been put on it. A soothing aromatic spiciness filled the space.

She fitted the passkey into the lock and opened the door.

“Same floor plan,” Cardozo observed.

“The buyer makes his own modifications,” she said.

Cardozo crossed through the entrance hall into the livingroom. The air was warm and still. From the window he could see a bright gray sliver of the East River a mile away, glinting between Sutton Place high rises.

He explored the kitchen, the bedrooms, the bath. Something bothered him. “This is exactly the same as six?”

A hint of mischief crept into the line of her mouth. “Not quite. This one costs thirty thousand more.”

They looked at 16 and 17 and 19. Cardozo had that same feeling—a difference. In 23 he asked, “The ceilings aren’t a little lower here?”

“No, they’re all ten foot eight. That’s one of our selling points.”

The, livingroom of 29 had a pale blue oriental carpet and deep beige sofas. She explained that this one was the show suite.

“What’s the price?”

“We’re asking a million.”

He whistled.

“It’s not so high considering the view.”

“You didn’t build the view.”

She smiled. “The buyer doesn’t know that.”

French windows led onto a terrace and Cardozo stepped out. Well-watered boxwoods masked a hip-high wrought-iron railing. Chains of creeping cars and trucks shimmered and rippled in the heat rising from the streets far below. From here you could see the Queens and Brooklyn shores and a surprising amount of green in a city that he had always thought of as asphalt, concrete, and glass.

“Something to drink?” Melissa Hatfield offered. “The company stocks everything.”

“Scotch and water and a little ice will be fine.”

When he returned to the livingroom, she was arranging bottles and glasses and napkins on the top of a carved rosewood chest that had been gutted and turned into a bar.

“Care for a nibbly?” she offered. “We have fish balls, chicken livers with bacon, cheese puffs. It only takes a minute to warm them in the microwave.”

“No, thanks. I’m trying not to eat between meals.” He sipped. She’d left the water out of his Scotch.

She caught his hesitation. “Sorry. I forgot you’re not a potential buyer.”

He let his gaze walk across the walls. There were three paintings and they reminded his untutored eye of French impressionists.

“Are the oils genuine?” he asked.

“The Vlamincks are real. The lawyer at the Metropolitan says the Renoir’s a forgery. He wants to buy it himself.”

“Are they safe here?”

“They’re insured. If anyone steals them, Beaux Arts Properties will be richer than ever.”

Cardozo pulled Bill Connell’s list from his pocket. “Tell me about your tenants.”

“We don’t have too many tenants. Technically we’re a co-op, and the law limits our income rental. There’s Armani, the clothing shop on the first floor. They have five employees. They were closed for the holiday. Rizzoli, the book shop on the second floor. Four employees. Closed for the holiday. On the third floor there’s Saveurs de Paris, a French pastry shop. The New York Times food critic likes them and they get three dollars an éclair. The concierge has an apartment on the same floor.”

“What’s a concierge?”

“Bill Connell, the super. He and his wife have a dinky two-roomer.”

“I didn’t know there was anything dinky in this building.”

Her eyes lifted a moment toward his. “A little more than you might think.”

Cardozo’s eye went down the list. “Fourth floor. Doctors Morton Fine, D.D.S., P.C., Hildegarde Berencz, D.D.S., P.C., Seymour Black, D.D.S., P.C. Who are they?”

“Dentists.”

“Closed for the holiday?”

“They close for every holiday you’ve ever heard of, including Ramadan.”

“Fifth floor. Dr. Arnold Gross, M.D., P.C., Dr. Robin Lazaro, M.D., P.C, Paola Brandt, P.S.W., P.C, Renata Mills, P.S.W., P.C.”

“Therapists. P.S.W. means psychiatric social worker. They don’t have an M.D., they can’t dispense drugs.”

“Floor seven. Princess Lily Lobkowitz.”

“Her ex-husband’s Polish. It’s one of those unverifiable titles. She can get a little crazy when she drinks, but I don’t see her killing naked young men in black hoods.”

“Duke and Duchess de Chesney. You’ve got a lot of titles in this building.”

“I think the title’s real. They’re English and they’re hardly ever here. Which makes them ideal in a cooperative situation. They let management vote their proxies.”

“Debbi Hightower, nine?”

“She’s a girl who thinks she’s going to make it in show business.”

“You don’t?”

“Fortune telling’s not my field. I only sell real estate.”

“Father Will Madsen—tenth floor.”

“He’s the rector of that Episcopal church on the corner. Very quiet man, never disturbs a soul.”

“Eleventh floor. Fred Lawrence.”

“Accountant. He falsifies returns for some of the biggest guns in show biz and government.”

“Why do you say falsifies?”

Her face colored. “Sorry. I’m really on today, aren’t I. I don’t know anything about Fred Lawrence. He strikes me as sneaky and he’s an accountant, that’s all. His wife wears loud, cheap clothes. Thinks she’s sexy and she’s not. Their child’s a spoiled brat.”

The twelfth floor was marked unsold. “I see there’s no thirteen.”

“We don’t want bad luck in this building, Lieutenant.”

“Fourteen—Billi von Kleist.”

“He’s president of Babethings—the clothing company Babe Vanderwalk founded. He’s jet-setty. Maybe some of his friends are a little druggy.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Oh, most people are doing coke nowadays, aren’t they?”

Cardozo looked at her. “I’m not.”

“Neither am I. But you know what I mean.”

A silence passed.

“Fifteen—Notre Dame. I take it that’s not the football team,” Cardozo said.

“The rock singer. You haven’t heard of him?”

Cardozo scowled. “My daughter’s heard of him.”

“He’s on tour. He’s never here.”

Sixteen and seventeen were marked unsold. “What about eighteen, Estelle Manfrey?”

“Very rich, very old, very frail—never here either. She lives in Palm Beach.”

Nineteen was another unsold. “Twenty—Tillie Turnbull?”

“You and I know her as Jessica Lambert.”

Cardozo’s pencil stopped tapping. “The movie star?”

Melissa nodded. “She’s a very nervous woman—always skittering around in dark glasses and babushkas. She puts her kerchief on before she puts on her makeup, so usually there’s a ring of Max Factor around the kerchief. I don’t really think men in black masks are her type.”

“Twenty-one—Gordon Dobbs?”

“He writes books about society with a capital S. Who’s sleeping with who, who got blackballed from what. He’s very fastidious, very organized, has a reputation for malice that he doesn’t quite live up to.” She glanced up. “Are you asking if I think these people could be killers?”

“Just asking what you know about them. Twenty-two. Phil Bailey.”

“President of NBS-TV and a lot else too. I drew up all the papers but I called him Philip. Phil equals Philip, right? Wrong. I had to redraw everything. His legal name’s Phil. He had it changed. I checked the court records. It’s that understated power trip that the really big people are on. They don’t care if you know their name or their face or their income. In fact they’d rather you didn’t. They don’t want to be on the cover of Time and they don’t go around blocking traffic with limousines. They’re not out to impress anyone.”

“But he managed to impress you.”

She made a circling motion with her glass. “He and his wife are decent people. He’s a powerful man. He’s a polite man. A very attractive man. Men like that don’t need to do the sort of thing we saw in six.”

“Maybe his wife does.”

“Why? She has Phil.”

Her thought processes intrigued him. “You see it as a sex crime.”

“Don’t you?”

“Maybe.” His eyes went back to the list. Twenty-three was marked unsold. “Twenty-four—Hank Doyle. The pro football player?”

“The same.”

Cardozo was surprised. “He doesn’t seem the type.”

“Which way do you mean, Lieutenant? He’s not the type who’d want Beaux Arts, or Beaux Arts wouldn’t want his type?”

“Both.”

“We gave him thirty percent off. We needed a black in the building.”

“Why?”

“We had to be integrated to get federal funds.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean a city tax abatement?”

“No, Lieutenant. Beaux Arts Properties is smarter than that. In addition to the city tax abatement, we got federal funds for integrated, middle-income housing.”

“This is middle-income?”

“According to some people.”

Cardozo shook his head. “Twenty-five. Joan Adler.”

“She writes about politics. She’s a crusader in print, but in person she’s a mouse. Always cringing in the corner of the elevator She has a tremor in her arm. I think she may have m.s.”

“I see twenty-six and twenty-seven have been made into a duplex for Johnny Stefano. Is that the composer?”

Melissa nodded. “He had a string of hit shows up through the mid-seventies. He’ was late with his last two maintenance payments. He may be having some kind of money trouble. I get the impression he’s sexually kinky. He wears leather in the elevator. Of course a lot of people do nowadays. It may not mean much.”

“Twenty-eight—William Benson.”

Melissa Hatfield lit up. “He’s an adorable old man. Completely unassuming. You’d never know he’s built half the buildings that make New York New York. Including this building and the museum below it. Of course he’s old now and has to walk with a cane, but he puts in a twelve-hour day.”

Cardozo found it intriguing: Melissa Hatfield had a sharp word for practically everybody in the building—yet the president of the TV network and the old architect seemed to have won her heart. He wondered how.

He checked off floor 29, the apartment they were sitting in. Which brought them to floors 30 and 31.

“Esmée Burns,” Cardozo said. “I see that’s another duplex.”

“Burns makes cosmetics,” Melissa Hatfield said. “Very successfully.”

Cardozo had a memory of dozens of small pink bottles on the bathroom shelf. “My wife used to use her stuff.”

“Why’d she stop?”

“She died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. I got used to it a long time ago.”

“You’re still wearing your wedding ring.”

“In my work you wear a wedding ring whether you’re married or not. It keeps things simple.”

“Not a bad idea. Maybe I should try it.”

Cardozo frowned at the list of occupants. “There’s a lot of empty space in the building.”

“We’re one seventh vacant, Lieutenant. With the new tax laws, Manhattan real estate’s soft.”

Cardozo folded the list and slipped it back into his jacket pocket. “What did you do Saturday?” he asked.

“Me? Nothing special. Why? Am I a suspect?”

“You have access to the key.”

She rose from the sofa. She had a good figure. He could see she worked at keeping in shape. “I lead a quiet life, Lieutenant. Saturday is one of my truly dull days. I slept late. I fed Zero.”

“Who’s Zero?”

“Zero’s my cat. How’s that for an alibi? He’s a domestic short hair, marmalade, neutered, three legs—he had cancer last year. He’s twelve years old.”

“I was asking about you, not Zero. Your cat’s in the clear.”

“Sorry. I’m a cat person. Do you have a cat, Lieutenant?”

“Street Abyssinian.”

“I never heard of that breed.”

“It’s more an accident than a breed. My daughter adopted him from the animal shelter.”

“I hope he’s had his shots.”

“He has, thanks for asking. Tell me, did you happen to go out at all yesterday?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help loving cats. I guess I go on about them. Yes, I went for a walk in Central Park.”

“What did you do for lunch?”

“I skipped lunch. Had an early dinner.”

“Where?”

“Where I have all my dinners—in my kitchen. Then I saw a movie.”

“What movie?”

“Dark Victory—Bette Davis.”

“Where’s that playing?”

“I rented it from the video shop. When I got home there was a message on my answering machine. My boss wanted me to show six to some buyers today.”

“You were in and out all afternoon?”

“New York’s a great city for wandering when the weather’s nice.”

“Where did you wander?”

She walked to the window. She tossed a nod. “Way over there by the river. I love the boats, and the boys diving into the East River, and I love the seagulls, even though they’re scavengers, and those islands, even though they have prisons on them.”

“Are you on call every weekend for your boss?”

“I get a commission above my salary, Lieutenant. I don’t feel my employer imposes on me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She came back to the sofa with a swaying walk, hands held behind her, out of sight.

“It wasn’t exactly what I was asking. By the way, what did I say just now that upset you?”

Her gaze came round to his. “It wasn’t anything you said. I know this sounds naive, but I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

“That’s not naive, that’s lucky.”

“I think it’s beginning to hit me. Do you ever get used to it?”

“No, I’m not used to it.” He finished his drink.

She took the glasses back to the kitchen.

“Which leg?” he asked.

She turned and gave him a blank look.

“Which leg did Zero lose?”

“The rear right.”

“Same as the man downstairs.”

“I was trying not to think that.”

“It’s okay to think things.”

She rinsed the glasses and put them into the dishwasher. “We gave him chemotherapy, we gave him radiation. Nothing could save the leg.” She closed the dishwasher. “Silly to think of a cat when a man’s dead.”

“Zero’s okay now?”

“He’s fine. Hops around, doesn’t even know the leg’s gone.”

“That’s great. A survivor. We should all be survivors.”

They stood saying good-bye in the lobby, and Cardozo asked for her phone numbers at work and at home.

Melissa Hatfield took out her business card, added her home address and phone, handed it to him.

He watched her leave the building. The young woman who had come close to tears over her three-legged cat strode like a lioness past the afternoon doorman, recognizing him with the barest of nods, hair streaming behind her in a long chestnut mane. Her hand went up, swift and sure of its power. Magically, a taxi materialized at the curb to whisk her away.

In his work Cardozo had seen hundreds of New York women neurotically attached to their pets—fat women, middle-aged women, rich women who turned to their Pekinese or Persian for the warmth and meaning that no lover or job would ever give their lives.

But Melissa Hatfield didn’t fit the profile. She was intelligent, attractive; she didn’t need to spend an entire Saturday alone. What’s more, Cardozo didn’t believe she had. She didn’t give off the scent of the manless New York woman; nor did she give off that sadder scent of the friendless New Yorker. He didn’t think she was gay and he didn’t believe her story about wandering around all day and renting an old Bette Davis movie for her evening entertainment.