Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

43

BABE AND CARDOZO SIGNED the visitors’ register. The room was softly lit. The immediate family formed a receiving line: Dunk, doing his best to muster a sorrowful charm; Dina, with a look of mourning dignity; Ash’s parents—DeWitt Cadwalader, a tall, gray man dressed in power; Thelma Cadwalader, a slender bejeweled woman with eyes warm and large and a benevolent smile; and Dina’s son, Lawson, a grave little six-year-old.

The count and countess de Savoie arrived directly behind Babe and Cardozo. They scattered condolences to the family, and then the countess saw Cardozo.

“Well hello, Dick Tracy.”

“Hi, your highnesses.”

The countess kissed Babe. “Quite a turnout. And live piano music—quelle élégance. But ‘Hey, Look Me Over’? Whose joke is that?”

“It’s not a joke. It was Ash’s favorite song.”

“Crazy, crazy gal. You just gotta love her.”

There was a mood in the place that was strange to Cardozo. This wasn’t an Irish cop’s wake where old women wept and men wearing their one good suit grabbed one another by the shoulder. Here the clothes were expensive and elegant and the room had the buzz of gossip. There was a glitter of polished oak and crystal, of jeweled women who had trundled to the viewing in the warm dark of limousines. Servants circulated with trays of wine. It had more the air of a party than a viewing.

The viewing line advanced slowly, past slip-covered sofas and wingback chairs, handsome antique tables laden with flowers.

Gordon Dobbs sauntered over and kissed Babe’s cheek.

“Hi, sweetie. Hi, Vince. Isn’t this a blast? One of Ash’s greatest parties—she knew it would be. I got the whole death scene. She was fabulously brave, fabulously serene. And wait till you see her—she looks absolutely great. The family had Raoul Valency Concorded over from Paris to do her. What a character. What a life. Catch you later.”

When they reached the casket, Babe kissed her fingertips and touched them to Ash’s folded hands.

Staring at Ash in her blue gown and bangle bracelets, Cardozo felt he was face to face with human fragility and insignificance and the one final earthly certainty, solitude.

Babe was shaking as though a wave had hit her.

He put an arm around her. “There’s a chair over here.” He steered her through the crowd around to a wingback chair.

“I just need to rest a moment,” Babe said.

“Sure—you rest.”

Something made Cardozo look up. Dina Alstetter was standing by the fireplace, staring at him. She motioned him over.

“Thanks for coming,” she said with an offhand tone.

“I’m sorry about your sister. She was a good person.”

“Thanks.” Her eyes held his. “There are some things I need to talk to you about.”

“Feel free to phone me.”

“I mean now.”

“I’m listening.”

“Not here.” She took a glass of wine and Cardozo followed her into the hallway.

They entered another viewing room. In the corner a woman was laid out in a silk-lined mahogany casket. She had pear-shaped ruby earclips and brown hair waved to her shoulders and she was wearing an evening gown. A hand-lettered plaque announced that her name was Lavinia Mellon Fields. The visitors’ register on the bookstand was blank. A sort of stillness submerged everything.

“Should we be here?” Cardozo said. “It doesn’t seem respectful.”

Dina Alstetter replied to that notion by sitting in a chair, very much in the manner of a cat staking out its turf, and lighting a fresh cigarette. “Vinnie Fields was the banal widow of a banal San Francisco billionaire and I very much doubt she’ll have any callers.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

She breathed in, breathed out, and said, “I have evidence.” She opened her purse and drew out a mini-cassette recorder.

Cardozo had to wonder, What kind of woman would bring a tape recorder to her dead sister’s viewing? and the only answer that came to him was, This kind of woman.

Dina Alstetter pressed a button. There were two voices on the tape.

One was Dina Alstetter’s. “You know he stole your clothes.”

The other voice was a shadow of Ash Canfield’s. “Did he?”

“I’m asking you. Did he? Say yes or no. You have to say it, Ash. This isn’t a videorecorder.”

“Yes.”

“Dunk stole your clothes. Duncan Canfield stole your clothes and jewels and sold them.”

“Yes.”

“He was flagrantly unfaithful to you. You knew he was unfaithful to you. He made no secret of it. He humiliated you and made you miserable.”

“Yes.”

“He introduced you to drugs and provided them.”

“Yes.”

“You wanted to divorce him and you still do.”

“Yes.”

“It’s he who wants the reconciliation, not you.”

“Yes.”

“And you haven’t slept with him since the separation.”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t, Ash. Say you haven’t if you haven’t. Or have you?”

“No.”

“Do you regard him as your husband?”

A long silence.

“No.”

“You’ve intended to divorce him since the separation and you’ve never wavered in that intention.”

A long silence.

“No.”

“Is it your intention that Duncan Canfield remain in your will?”

“No.”

“Is it your intention to modify your will and to bequeath Duncan Canfield no more than one dollar? Is that your intention, Ash?”

“Yes.”

Cardozo listened and frowned, and when the tape had whirred to a stop he looked at Dina Alstetter. “You recorded that in the hospital?”

She lit another cigarette from a burning stub. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“To prove she was going to disinherit him.”

“Was she?”

“For God’s sake, is the tape in Chinese?”

“On that tape you’re stuffing words into a dying woman’s mouth.”

“We had discussions long before Ash took ill. She knew all about Dunk and his gay party set.”

“What gay party set?”

“The count and that loathesome Lew Monserat.”

“What did she know about them?”

“That they were carrying on, doing drugs, throwing orgies. That’s why she filed for a separation. She was in full possession of her faculties when she filed. Dunk has no right to her money.”

“I don’t get it. You certainly don’t look like you need the money.”

“I don’t have to need money to want justice.”

“No, but you sure seem to need his scalp. What the hell did he do—jilt you?”

“I know you only mean to be rude—but if I didn’t need a favor from you, I’d slap you for that.”

Cardozo frowned. “You’re in love with that airhead?”

She drew in a breath and let out a sigh. “Since you insist on having the background, let’s just say Dunk and I used to be friends and one day we stopped.”

“Be a pal, use someone else to stir up trouble for him. This doesn’t involve me.”

“But it most certainly does. He killed her and my feelings about Duncan Canfield don’t even enter the picture because that is a rock-bottom fact.”

“A disease killed her.”

“He gave her the disease.”

“Now how the hell did he do that?”

“The autopsy will show how.”

“There’s not going to be an autopsy. Your sister’s embalmed. Mrs. Alstetter, you have all my sympathy, and I’ll throw in some advice. You haven’t got a case, and you sure as hell haven’t got any evidence. There’s not a doubt in my mind that the son of a bitch wanted his wife dead. But there’s no such crime as malice. At least, it’s not my department, and if there is, you’re as guilty of it as he is.”

She snapped her purse shut. “All right—if I have to prove it to you by getting her medical records, I will.”

“Examination of head reveals left eye missing. Left eye socket is site of bullet entry wound.” Dan Hippolito was dictating into a microphone suspended over the examining table. “Exit wound is in left posterior parietal area.”

Dan glanced over and saw Cardozo. With his hand gloved in skin-hugging bloodied plastic, he moved the microphone aside, then lifted his curved Plexiglas face shield.

“Hiyah, Vince, I’d shake hands but you caught me in the middle of things.”

Cardozo looked down at the body of the one-eyed young male Hispanic. “Am I interrupting?”

“The patient will keep. What’s up?”

“Got time for a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.”

They went to Dan’s office, a small stark white subterranean chamber. Dan popped his hands out of the gloves. He took off his rubber apron and surgical smock and hung them on the coat stand.

There were two chairs and a desk and a table with a hot plate and a coffee pot. Dan had arranged a small forest of plants against one wall. Another wall was lined with shelves of medical books.

Cardozo took a seat. “Dan, would you look at a medical report for me?”

“Hey, there’s sloppy work in this department, but I don’t want to snitch on a colleague, okay?”

“Not to worry, this isn’t an autopsy.”

Dan came back from the hot plate with two Styrofoam cups of coffee.

Cardozo handed him the folder.

Dan turned pages. “What are you looking for?”

“A general impression. Is it kosher?”

“You know, my practice for the last twenty years has been dead people.”

“This woman is dead.”

Dan Hippolito sipped coffee and kept turning pages. “That begins to be evident. Catastrophic weight loss—fulminating fever—uremia …” He looked up, open curiosity sparking his dark eyes. “Friend of yours?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“Okay, let’s start at the beginning.” His eyes scanned. “Valium, Dilantin, phenobarbital … Was this female an alcoholic?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re medicating for alcohol-induced epilepsy.” He read on. “Stereomycin is an antifungoid, Dilantin is an antiseizure, Dramamine is an antinausea … Okay, a rabbi I am not, but this is about as kosher as a pig’s foot. What were they doing, experimenting? You wouldn’t prescribe this combination to a chimpanzee.”

“Why not?”

“The drugs counteract one another.” Dan flipped through more pages. “Procaine to desensitize the trachea.”

“Why are they doing that?”

“It’s generally done prior to a bronchoscopy.”

“What’s that?”

“Go down the throat and cut a little tissue from the lungs to biopsy for cancer. Except they’re doing a dye test on the brain artery.” Dan swiveled in his chair. “These records would make sense if she had lung cancers entering the bloodstream and metastasizing to the brain. That I could buy, but—” He stopped at the next page. “Methadone? Are these pages for one patient? Because methadone has one use and one use only, purely political, to shift addicts from free-market heroin to government-owned heroin. Was she a junkie?”

“She did a lot of drugs.”

Dan shook his head. “I don’t see a consistent diagnosis. Gamma globulin you give for hepatitis, but what’s the blood analysis? There’s no cell count, no sedimentation rate, nothing. These records are incomplete.”

He whipped through pages and came to something that made him stop.

“Now this is downright interesting. Tegretol. That’s specific for temporal lobe infection. Which means it’s not a tumor attacking the brain, it’s an organism.” Dan frowned. “What kind of brain infection did she have?”

“I’m asking you.”

“I’d have to section the brain and put it under a microscope. They must have done that at the hospital. Go back and ask if they ran a brain section p.m.”

“This lady was a socialite, they don’t autopsy socialites.”

“This socialite they should’ve. Either the infection moved incredibly fast or the initial diagnosis was way off. They’re all over the map, treating morphine withdrawal, hepatitis, heart fibrillation, epilepsy, and meantime something very hungry is having a picnic on her brain.”

He closed the folder and pursed his lips thoughtfully, the pencil in his hand tapping the desk edge.

“Assuming these doctors aren’t jerks, something that began as a blood disorder crossed to the brain. And the blood-brain barrier is not easy to penetrate. You have to be the size of maybe two electrons to get through. But without the blood sheets, there’s no point even guessing.”

“Any chance of unnatural causes?”

“These are infections, not bullets.”

“Could someone who knew medicine have infected her?”

“Not even Josef Mengele. This kind of disaster is like a five-plane midair collision. You can’t plan it, you can’t control it. You trying to make a case?”

“Just wondering.”

“If she was sharing needles, there could have been contributing negligence. But that’s luck of the draw, not murder.”

“I don’t think she was sharing. Too classy for that.”

“Get me her blood charts. There’s definitely grounds for curiosity.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Lieutenant.”

Dr. William Tiffany rose from his desk and stretched out his arm, offering a handshake. He was the same stout, Nautilus-pumped man Cardozo remembered from Ash’s sick room, dressed in a well-cut dark suit and striped tie.

It was a roomy corner office, with a black leather couch and two comfortable matching chairs. Cardozo chose the chair nearer the window.

Dr. Tiffany closed a folder and took the other chair.

Between the doctor and the detective was a table of woven bamboo, painted a ripe peach and heaped with magazines—Town and Country, Yachting, Vanity Fair, the French edition of Réalités.

Dr. Tiffany smiled, exuding the confidence of a man who dealt every day with the lives and deaths of people with very deep pockets. “You said on the phone you were a friend of Lady Ash Canfield.”

“Yes, I was.”

“That makes two of us. Terrible loss. And you’re a friend of Dina Alstetter as well?”

“She asked me to speak with you.”

“Yes? Concerning—?”

“Lady Canfield’s medical records. My coroner says they’re not complete. There are no blood analyses.”

Dr. Tiffany’s eyes were intelligent, shrewd. “Lady Canfield’s husband has the right to keep them confidential.”

“Mrs. Alstetter says Lady Canfield was going to divorce her husband. As next of kin, she’d like to know what killed her sister.”

“Congestive heart failure.”

“My coroner says something got across the blood-brain barrier. He says you’re protecting yourself. Mrs. Alstetter wants to know your side of things before she takes legal steps.”

The doctor looked toward Cardozo with that built-in coolness of his profession. “Nothing could have saved Lady Canfield. Lieutenant, have you heard the term HIV?”

“It causes AIDS. Is that what Lady Canfield had?”

Dr. Tiffany leaned back in his chair.

“AIDS manifested in Zaire twelve years ago,” he said. “Cuban troops brought AIDS to this hemisphere and to Central America. American mercenaries and military advisers brought AIDS from Central America to New York, where it entered the gay community and the heterosexual swinging community. Because gays are a small population, living in three or four ghettos across the country, the number of repeat exposures was enormous, and the disease followed a spectacular, fulminating course. What people are just beginning to grasp is that AIDS may have spread just as rapidly among heterosexuals. Because it’s had the entire American population to fan out through, repeat heterosexual exposures have been far lower than among gays. On the other hand, total exposures have been enormously higher, given that heterosexuals outnumber gays ten to one. We do know that one repeatedly exposed heterosexual group, non-IV-using female prostitutes, is showing double the rate of infection that male homosexuals in New York City did four years ago. If you extrapolate from that statistic, we have a holocaust down the road.”

Dr. Tiffany shook his head and paused and sat there just looking at Cardozo.

Cardozo sat there looking back.

“Are you Catholic or Fundamentalist or born again?” Dr. Tiffany asked.

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t want to offend you.”

“You couldn’t even begin.”

“With the virus as widespread as it is, and the Catholic hierarchy and the Falwellians dead set against educating the public, the caseload is doubling every six months. Over a tenth of the population has been exposed, and possibly a third of those exposed will die within seven years. How does that grab you, Lieutenant?”

“Doctor,” Cardozo said, “you don’t need to shout. Put me on the mailing list. I’ll contribute. Could you just tell me if you tested Ash Canfield’s blood?”

Dr. Tiffany rose and walked to his files. “Would you mind coming over here, Lieutenant?”

Dr. Tiffany pulled a gold keychain from his pocket and unlocked one of the file drawers. The drawer slid out smoothly on noiseless rollers.

“There’s a lot of agony going on out there, Lieutenant. Not just the kind you police deal with. These are the records of tens of thousands of blood tests, X rays, CAT scans, examinations by dozens of our doctors. They go back five years.”

Cardozo stared at the alphabetized folders, aware that something alien and menacing was passing under his eyes.

“The men and women in these files have suffered physical degradation you could not begin to imagine. Over half of them are dead. And the others don’t have long.”

Cardozo ran his eye from the back of the drawer forward to the C’s and then along the names. CLEMENS, CANNING, CANFIELD.

“In these drawers you’ll find the ex-wife of the head of the largest communications conglomerate in the country. A nun. Top fashion designers. Children. Infants. Grandfathers. Firemen. Pro football players. Some of your own coworkers. Some of mine. Famous actors. Actors who were never famous and never will be. Soldiers—men who survived Vietnam. Help yourself.”

Cardozo drew out the folder marked CANFIELD, ASH, and stared at the photograph of Ash Canfield at nearly full body-weight, at the sheets of computer-generated graphs and printout.

“I don’t understand these graphs,” he said.

“Lady Ash Canfield had no T-cells and her blood tested positive for HIV antibodies.”

Cardozo dropped the file back into place. An awareness was pressing at the margin of his consciousness. Something to do with the drawer, a deep drawer, the letters running back through the early H’s. He saw that the last name was Hatfield.

“What about this one?” he drew the folder out. The photo showed a wholesome-looking man in his mid-thirties, HATFIELD, BRIAN. “Dead or alive?”

“Brian was one of mine,” Dr. Tiffany said. “He died last summer.”

Cardozo drew out the neighboring folder, HALLEY, JOHN. His stomach tightened as though a fist had slammed him. The face in the photograph was Jodie Downs’s.

“Tell me about this patient,” Cardozo said. “John Halley.”

“John was one of my outpatients. He had ARC—AIDS-related complex. He dropped out of the program a little over five months ago.

“Is ARC infectious?”

“We don’t know. Some people seem to be able to transmit the virus without coming down with AIDS themselves. I’d have to answer that one with a guarded yes.”

“What’s the incubation period?”

“There’s a lot of misinformation in the press on that. We don’t know what triggers the virus once it’s in the blood. There could be cofactors we’re completely unaware of. So far as we know, the disease can manifest anytime between exposure and death. So I’d put what you call the incubation period at anywhere from an hour to forty years.”

“Then if someone was playing around with John Halley’s blood, there’s a chance that person might pick up the disease?”

“Blood is the major vector. But that depends what you mean by ‘playing around.’”

“Light cutting.”

“Cutting through the skin?” Dr. Tiffany sounded perplexed.

“Yeah. Ritual stuff. S.m.” Cardozo remembered a case from eight years back. Two fifty-year-old angel-dust freaks who’d thought they were vampires. “There may even be some—uh—drinking.”

“Drinking Halley’s blood?”

“Possibly.”

“Anyone behaving that way in this city today runs an excellent chance of already having the disease.” An excellent chance, Dr. Tiffany’s tone of voice seemed to say, and a richly deserved one.

That evening at home Cardozo opened the Manhattan telephone directory. He turned to the H’s, counting Hatfields. There were eleven.

He sat a moment, feeling a thickening layer of certainty. It couldn’t be chance, he told himself. Chance never took such perfect aim.

44

CARDOZO SEARCHED THROUGH HIS Rolodex till he found Beaux Arts Properties, Ltd. He propped the card against the phone as a reminder to call Melissa Hatfield when her office opened—ten A.M.

He settled down to read yesterday’s fives on a corporate takeover lawyer whose body had been found a week ago in the park at Sutton Place. Monteleone’s spelling, as usual, was atrocious.

At 8:37 Cardozo’s phone rang.

“We have to have a talk, Vince.” It was Mel O’Brien, the chief of detectives. Usually phone talks with O’Brien began with his hatchet man, Detective Inigo, and then thirty to ninety seconds on hold before you got through to Himself. It was a rare thing for the CD to place his own call, and it was a dangerous thing when his voice was as easy and congenial as it was now. “Nine o’clock, my office, okay?”

Which gave Cardozo exactly twenty-two minutes to bust his ass getting through morning rush-hour traffic down to One Police Plaza.

Mel O’Brien stood at the window, gazing out at the fall sky and the glow it cast on the high rises beginning to encircle Chinatown. “What are you up to, Vince? Spending all your time in the field? Out-Sherlocking your own men?”

“No, sir. Unless it’s a task force, I don’t go into the field.”

“How many hours have you logged in the precinct this last month?”

“It’s in the log.”

“I wouldn’t mind knowing what cases you’re on.”

“You do know, Chief.”

The CD turned and looked at Cardozo. “You were tying up the computer a few weeks back—running a lot of lists through—what was that all about?”

Cardozo had a sense that his head was about to be held under a bucket of bureaucratic horsepiss. “It related to an ongoing homicide.”

“What homicide?”

“Sunny Mirandella, a stewardess. She was murdered in her apartment up on Madison.”

Which wasn’t exactly a lie, but it was pretty thin ice.

“You had Babe Devens into the precinct for a slide show.” O’Brien’s gaze moved over Cardozo with the coolness of a stethoscope. He was making it very obvious that he’d been checking back over Cardozo’s movements, that he had the power to do it and that he had a damned good reason to do it.

“I was showing Mrs. Devens slides from the Downs case.”

“You thought Mrs. Devens was involved?”

“I hoped she could give me some help.”

The CD sat down in his big upholstered swivel chair, shaking his head from side to side. “Jesus Christ, Vince, Devens and Downs are closed. You closed them. We’ve got five new homicides a day in this city and we’re not even making arrests in three a week.”

“Chief—you don’t have to worry about me.”

“Because that wasn’t the only time you were seen with Mrs. Devens.” O’Brien was studying Cardozo, watching to see what his reaction would give away. “You two were at a viewing at the Campbell Funeral Home.”

At that point the whole picture changed.

Cardozo had known he was taking risks: even though he hadn’t let his ongoing caseload slide, if he reopened closed cases without a good cause and a fast result, and the wrong people found out, the price could be his shield and his pension. He could find his ass busted back to patrolman. But now he saw that if he did show cause and produce results, the price could be all that and a little bit more too.

“Ash Canfield was a friend,” he said. “She died, she had a viewing. I went.”

The complaint had to have come from Countess Vicki. Again. Which showed Cardozo how the chain of communication ran—from the countess to someone who was probably Ted Morgenstern, to the D.A. to the CD.

“And Babe Devens?” O’Brien asked.

“Mrs. Devens is a friend too. If there’s something wrong with our going to a funeral home I wish you’d tell me.”

“Did you go on job time?”

“It was a viewing, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like I was going to a party.”

“It wasn’t like you were going to a homicide, either.”

O’Brien gave him a long, dark look. It galled Cardozo to be reminded that this man had an absolute right to tell him what to do; it galled him to accept that sometimes in this job nothing was wanted or tolerated but obedience.

“What was the case you were discussing with Dan Hippolito last Tuesday?” O’Brien asked. “Was that job-related too?”

The CD was a master in the use of words. That little syllable too said it all.

“I was in the neighborhood—I stopped by. Dan and I go back a long way.”

“You got a lot of friends.”

“I’m lucky.”

“What about that kid murdered outside the Metropolitan Museum this morning?”

The call had come in on 911 at 8:10. Cardozo had assigned the case. “O’Rourke is on it,” he said.

“Why don’t you get on it too.”

Cardozo drove back to the precinct, sorting it out. Calling the CD on him meant someone was scared, using up big favors, taking big risks—and that meant that very soon someone would be wanting Vince Cardozo silenced.

In his cubicle, Cardozo phoned Judge Tom Levin. He got the judge’s secretary.

“Amy, can you tell the judge I’ve got to see him tonight. Nine o’clock, his place, unless he leaves word otherwise.”

“I’ll tell him, Vince.”

Cardozo jiggled the cradle, got a dial tone, and punched out the number on the Rolodex card that he had left leaning against the phone.

“Beaux-Arts-Balthazar.” It was Melissa Hatfield’s voice, with the husky, offhand tone that he remembered.

“Melissa, it’s Vince Cardozo. How you been?”

“Oh, life’s been stumbling along as best it can.”

“What I’m calling about, could I come up and see you after work? Your place? Six, six-thirty?”

Cardozo would have been on time for Melissa, but at 12:30 Larry O’Rourke burst into his office.

“Vince—we got an ID.”

O’Rourke had Irish red-blond hair and intense green eyes. He was short and slender, but his body was all muscle and tendon and he worked out at a gym to keep it that way. He’d just made detective and if he seemed a little excited it was because the dead girl found outside the Metropolitan Museum that morning was his first homicide.

“Her name’s Janet Samuels. The stepdaughter of Harold Benziger.” O’Rourke was standing there as though the name should mean something.

“Sorry,” Cardozo said. “Bell’s aren’t ringing.”

“Real estate. He spearheaded the I Love New York campaign. Gives the mayor a lot of financial support. I mean a lot.”

Cardozo had often thought that the money spent putting celebrities on TV singing that jingle could have renovated a few thousand units of decayed housing. “Oh yeah, that Benziger.”

Two hours later the CD telephoned Cardozo again. “I want you personally to tell the Benzigers that their daughter’s been murdered.”

“It’s O’Rourke’s case, Chief.”

“I’m not sending a rookie in there. That would be complete disrespect of the Benzigers’ stature in this community.”

“O’Rourke isn’t a rookie.”

“Christ’s sake, he just got his gold. Harold Benziger is a force in this town. He gets a lieutenant to bring him the bad news. His secretary says she can’t reach him, but he’ll be at his home at seven tonight.”

It was eight thirty by the time Cardozo pushed Melissa Hatfield’s doorbell.

“You’ve changed the color scheme,” he said.

“I’m trying to.”

Melissa Hatfield invited him in and offered him a drink.

“Melissa, would you mind sitting down?”

“Sure.” She didn’t sit. “What is it?”

“Who was Brian Hatfield?”

After what seemed a long time, though it might have been only ten seconds, she said, “Brian was my brother.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He died.”

Cardozo looked in her eyes. “Dr. William Tiffany was treating him in the Vanderbilt Pavilion, am I right?”

Melissa’s teeth came down over her lower lip.

“You thought you recognized Jodie Downs’s photograph. You said he reminded you of someone you’d seen in an elevator. Someone you’d seen regularly but couldn’t place. Later you backed away from that. Said you’d made a mistake. I think you did place his face. I think Jodie Downs was an outpatient in the same program as your brother. I think you saw Jodie in that elevator regularly when you went to visit Brian.”

She reacted as if she were living in slow motion. She moved to one of the windows, stood with her hands resting on the air-conditioning unit.

“I was ashamed,” she said.

“Ashamed that your brother had AIDS?”

Melissa dropped her head. “There are people who get ashamed. They can’t help it. And then they have to be ashamed of being ashamed. Hasn’t that ever happened to you?”

For a long moment the room was hushed.

“Jodie Downs was ashamed,” she said softly. “You know what he told me his name was? John Halley. That’s how he happened to be in Brian’s group. F to L. Imagine being ashamed that you’re dying, having to pretend you’re someone else, that the person with your name would never have a disease like that.”

“Was Brian ashamed?”

“Brian wasn’t ashamed, not of AIDS, not of anything. He was Gay Lib militant and triumphant. Right to the end. I tried to be like him. Every evening I’d go and sit by the bed and pretend it was all right, that dying was just part of life and if he wanted to accept it that was just great. We read Kübler-Ross together, and when his eyesight went I read it to him and he held my hand. Oh, Brian was a real champ at acceptance. But I couldn’t accept it. I still can’t.”

She looked up at him. “I could use a drink. What about you?”

A sense of her isolation engulfed him.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I have a date with a judge and I’m late.”

“What do you expect me to do about it?” Webbing out from Jerry Brandon’s red-rimmed eyes were the fine lines of overwork.

“Tell them,” Cardozo said.

“AIDS is already endemic in the prison system.”

“Tell them anyway.”

Brandon moved the long extendable arm of the lamp out of the way and sat at his desk. He lifted the phone and dialed. In a minute he was talking chummily to a prison doctor and all of him was in motion—his bony head, his big shoulders, his square jaw.

“You’ve got an inmate up there by the name of Claude Loring, L-O-R-I-N-G as in George. He ought to be tested for AIDS.”

It must have been a long reply, because Brandon listened for over three minutes. “You’re sure? When?” His eyes flicked up at Cardozo’s and he picked up a ballpoint and began scribbling quickly. “Thanks.”

Brandon hung up the phone and stared at Cardozo. “Vince, this is going to surprise you.”

“I’m never surprised.”

“Claude Loring’s not in prison.”

Cardozo sat forward. “What the hell happened to him?”

“It seems to be a very long story. I couldn’t get all of it. The governor commuted Loring’s sentence a week ago.”

Cardozo’s stomach was getting tight. “On what grounds?”

“Compassionate medical.”

“For AIDS?”

Brandon shook his head. “Loring’s mother is sick. He’s her sole support.”

Cardozo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When he moved his head the room seemed to tip. “How could the governor fall for that bullshit?”