Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

He’d been a cop long enough to know that ninety-five percent of humanity lied. Even nuns gave the truth a little twist now and then. Lying didn’t make a person a killer.

Still, he felt Melissa Hatfield had tried to con him and he was curious why she’d tried. He jotted a memo in his pocket notebook: HATFIELD—ALONE SATURDAY?

4

THEY DIDN’T SEE BABE watching.

She stood outside the open door, in darkness, staring in.

They moved in slow motion through a soft sea of candlelight, holding champagne glasses. They wore tuxedos and gowns and rubber headpieces like children’s Halloween masks. Babe recognized Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Richard Nixon, the Mad Hatter.

A butler in a John Wayne mask glided through the crowd, refilling glasses from a green jeroboam with a Moët label.

Babe could see the masks bobbing up and down, chitchatting animatedly with one another.

“Bonjour,” Porky Pig said. “Ça va?”

That didn’t seem right. Porky Pig couldn’t have said bonjour.

For an instant Babe was lost, hovering between two worlds. Then her eyes blinked open. The dream figures faded and the hospital room came slowly into focus.

“Bonjour, ma petite.” That voice again, familiar now.

Babe’s gaze went to the doorway. She saw a rangy, wide-shouldered, fit-looking man in his late fifties. He came forward into the light, wearing a beautifully cut blazer and slacks and a silk tie with the insignia of the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. He bent down at her bedside to kiss her. He had gray hair and strong, handsome features, and he smelled of vetiver cologne. At that instant she recognized her old friend Baron Billi von Kleist.

“It’s been quite a while.” He spoke with the comfortable Oxford accent of a European aristocrat. “You look splendid. As usual.”

He took a chair and sat gazing at her. He had a deep tan, and she sensed something very like compassion in his eyes.

“Stop being charming,” she said, smiling as she always did when he played with her. “You look splendid. I look like an exhumed corpse.”

He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He crossed one knee over the other. The press in his gray trousers was razor sharp.

“Chacun à son goût,” he said. “Actually, I’m here on a mission, not a visit. I’ve brought you an old friend—she’s been seeing you faithfully twice a week while you were in the land of Winken and Blinken and Nod but now that you’re awake, she’s turned a little shy about picking up with you again. She asked me to bring her. Or rather, your mother told me you were back and when I said I was coming to see you, she delegated me to bring Cordelia.”

“Cordelia!” Babe cried.

“Hello, Mother.”

It was a woman’s voice, not a girl’s, and when Babe looked toward the doorway of the hospital room it was a woman, not a girl, who stood there.

Babe squinted. “Cordelia?”

Instead of an answer, her daughter shot Babe a questioning look, swaying with a moment’s unsteadiness as though she had the legs of a newborn deer. Then she gathered up her poise and glided into the room.

Babe had to catch her breath. When she’d last seen Cordelia the child had been a gangly, unhappy twelve-year-old, but the young woman who walked into the hospital room was a stunning young blonde: startlingly made up and colorfully dressed in jeans and a yellow silk blouse, with jangling chains and baubles and a wide gold cuff bracelet on her left wrist.

The young beauty bent over the bed and kissed Babe. It was not a daughter’s kiss, warm and giving, but reserved, precise—a kiss between countesses.

“Welcome back,” Cordelia said. Her eyes were the deep, almost cobalt blue that Babe remembered.

“It’s good to be back,” Babe said. “Let me look at you.”

Cordelia’s hand slipped free of her mother’s. She backed away from the bed and turned 360 degrees, like a mannequin in a fashion salon showing off a new dress.

“Don’t say it. I’ve grown. I’m two inches too tall to be a dancer and it just killed me when I had to drop out of ballet school.”

“But you’re a perfect height.”

“I owe that to your genes, mother. And to Billi’s nagging me about posture. Just like a parent.”

“Wasn’t I supposed to act like a parent?” Billi said. “After all, Cordelia’s my ward—and a very well behaved ward too.”

“Yes.” Babe remembered sitting in the lawyer’s office, signing a paper making Billi Cordelia’s guardian in the event of any mishap to herself. She and Scottie had almost killed themselves driving on the wrong side of the road in Gstaad and it seemed a good idea—one of those just-in-case legalities that she had never thought would actually come to pass. “Were you a good guardian?” she asked.

“You’ll have to ask my ward,” Billi said.

“Billi was magnificent,” Cordelia said. “He kept Grandmère from nagging too hard and he took me out at least twice a month for wonderful evenings—and he hired me.”

“Hired you? What did you hire her to do, Billi?”

“Cordelia will tell you all about that. She’s an excellent employee.” Billi rose. “I’m going to leave you two alone. I’ll be back, Babe. We’ll have a chat of our own.”

He kissed her good-bye, and she had a sense he wanted to say something more. But he turned and left.

Mother and daughter sat gazing at one another. Cordelia’s eyes were smiling, but uneasiness peeped through them.

“You’re beautiful,” Babe said.

“You mean I’m glossy. I have to be. I’m a professional model.”

This is my child, Babe thought. This stranger. “Tell me everything.”

“That would take days.”

“Good. They say I’ve got weeks to kill in this place.”

Cordelia shifted in her chair. Babe noticed the faint pulse under a milk white patch on the inside of Cordelia’s arm, barely hollowed by shadow.

“You’re staring,” Cordelia said.

“I don’t mean to. It’s just that you were so little and lost and now you’re so grown-up and you don’t look lost at all.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Cordelia said.

For an instant Babe was startled: a child of twelve smoking? Babe had to remind herself that this particular child was nineteen. She watched her daughter light a Tareyton filter king. Cordelia did it very well, like an actress in an old Warner Bros, movie—the rich bad girl—tilting her head back, propelling twin dragontails of white smoke through her arched nostrils.

Cordelia studied her mother. “You’re looking well, Mother.”

Babe felt jewelless, dressless, seven years behind the times. “Bring me up to date. You were twelve when we last talked. You wore braids and you were always bumping into things.”

A frown flickered on Cordelia’s face. “And I was going to Spence, and you were making me wear those horrid braces.”

“They weren’t all that horrid, and look what lovely teeth you have as a result.”

“I hated them. But they came off when I was thirteen, so at least I didn’t look like a freak when I went to Madeira.”

“How did you like Madeira?”

“A little stuffy. I roomed with a girl from Richmond. We almost got thrown out for smoking pot.” Cordelia’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and then she dropped her gaze. “I was on probation for a term.”

Babe felt an instant’s anxiousness in the pit of her stomach. She hid it with an interested smile. “That probably helped your schoolwork.”

“Yes, I did well in music.”

“You get that from your father.”

“And I did well in French and history and art too.”

“You get the art from me.”

“I graduated with honors.”

“I wish I could have been at your graduation.”

“Be glad you weren’t. It rained. And guess what. The headmistress turned out to be a murderess. She’s serving a twenty-five-year sentence for shooting three bullets into her Jewish lover.”

Babe studied Cordelia, wondering if she was playing some kind of joke.

Cordelia smiled. The smile got as far as her eyes and then her jaw and chin tightened. Suddenly she placed her head across Babe’s lap. Babe began stroking the pale golden spill of hair.

After a moment Cordelia sat up again, choking back a sniffle. “I had my coming-out that spring at the cottage in Newport. Grandpère was my escort. He looked smashing in his old World War One ribbons.”

Babe wondered—why Grandpère, why not Scottie? “Grandpère’s decorations are World War Two, darling.”

“You know what I mean. And then Vassar accepted me. But after six months I knew it wasn’t for me. So I came back to New York, and met an agent at a party, and voilà, I’m a model. I haven’t made up my mind whether or not to work full time. Modeling’s so dull—half of it’s just standing around perfecting your bored look.”

She demonstrated her bored look, and Babe had to laugh.

“Do you want to see my portfolio?” Cordelia opened a large leather carrying case. It was crammed with glossies. She slipped them out of their plastic sheaths and handed them over one by one.

Babe studied photos of her daughter on horseback, on camelback, on elephantback, her daughter running on beaches, in Irish meadows, across Newport lawns, her daughter lounging formally, informally, in furs, in a Scaasi, in Calvin Klein jeans, her daughter smiling at dogs, at jewelry, at foreign cars, at silverware, at young men. And then there were magazines with Cordelia on the cover: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle.

“You’re very successful,” Babe said. “But you gave up college?”

“I earn thirty-five hundred an hour. College just didn’t do it for me.”

Babe wondered what money was worth nowadays. She wondered what an education was worth.

“I’m the logo of Babethings,” Cordelia said.

Babethings—the company Babe had founded to market her designs. She wondered who was heading it now, how it was doing.

“I’m under contract. I do print ads and TV. Anytime they need a face or a voice-over, it’s me. So in a way, I’m famous. I’ve been interviewed in People magazine and Interview and I’ve been on talk shows and I’m invited all sorts of terrific places.”

Babe’s thoughts were racing, trying to keep up with everything her daughter was telling her. “And do you have boyfriends?”

Cordelia’s eyes flicked away. “At the moment there’s Rickie—you’ll meet him. I’m fond of Rickie, he’s a smashing tennis player and he dances terrifically. He wants to marry me but I honestly don’t know. His father is Sir Rickie Hawkes, Barclays Bank.”

“Oh, yes,” Babe said, recognizing the bank, not Sir Rickie. Doubtless the British had created quite a few new sirs since she’d gone under.

Cordelia spoke of her other interests—discos and parties and cars and Thoroughbreds and interesting people doing interesting things that got mentioned in the papers.

“And do you ever see your father?” Babe said.

“Ernst is wonderful. Every time he plays in New York I go backstage. We’re very close. Vanity Fair did a father-daughter article on us. He played a smashing Rachmaninoff Third with the Cleveland at Carnegie last month. I saved you the reviews.”

“Do you two ever have time to talk? Does he take an interest in you?”

“We talk all the time. Ernst phones no matter where he is—Budapest, Berlin, Capetown—just last week it was Tokyo. Of course he gets the time zones mixed up, so we’re usually talking at four in the morning—but I do adore him.”

It sounded to Babe like the same old Ernst, going as strong at seventy as at fifty-five, whisking in on a jet plane, sweeping Cordelia off to the Palm Court for champagne and cakes, pressing two tickets into her hand, tossing her to the press in the greenroom after the concert.

“And do you ever see Scottie?” Babe asked.

Cordelia froze over. It seemed precocious to Babe, a girl that young able to freeze over that hard, that fast.

“Why would I see Scottie?”

A silence fell on the room.

“Because he’s your stepfather.”

“But he’s not—not since he divorced you.”

Babe felt a jolt of pain jump through her nerves. She pushed herself up in the bed: she was shaking. She had to make herself believe that this was real: the words she had just heard, the girl watching her, the shock reeling through her.

Cordelia’s eyes were fixed on her mother now, wide and observing. “Grandmère said she was going to tell you everything. I can see I’ve put my foot in it.”

Only the thought that she must be strong in front of her daughter kept Babe from breaking into little fragments. “Of course Grandmère told me. Are you and Scottie still friends?”

Amazement and pain mingled in Cordelia’s expression. “How could we be, Mother? After what he did to you?”

Babe’s instincts were telling her to keep going, fake it. “Don’t blame him, darling,” she said quietly, telling herself she’d suspected, that she’d been prepared for bad news. “You can’t expect a man to stay married seven years to a woman who might never wake up.”

Cordelia’s hands tightened into fists. “Why are you so kind to him? You must love him incredibly. Still.”

5

“DID YOU NOTICE ANY strangers in the building over the weekend?” Detective Sam Richards asked.

“Strangers?” the woman said. “There are always strangers in the building. Those shops bring in nothing but, and that psychiatric clinic on the fifth floor produces some very strange encounters.”

Sam Richards had been on the job long enough to know the world and its bullshit. Yet the word princess still commanded his respect. It conjured up pictures from a book of King Arthur and his knights that he had pored over as a boy. True, Lily Lobkowitz was no lady fair. She might once have been. There were vestiges—a bright blue sparkle to the eyes that nervously watched him, an attempted confidence to the tilt of her very rounded chin. But her face was lined and tired, and powder had spilled onto her dark blouse. He had a feeling she’d put on her makeup after he had rung the doorbell.

She sat very still on the chintz sofa, not regally straight but cautiously so, as though if she leaned in any direction at all she’d keep going, right onto the floor. She smelled of vodka.

“Did you see strangers over the weekend?” he asked.

“No, not over the weekend—not that I can recollect.” Her teeth touched her lower lip. “Of course, I’ve been indoors all the time, trying to shake this summer cold.”

The princess’s livingroom was spacious, comfortably furnished; the plush love seat and chairs matched the sofa. A portrait of a woman with a jeweled crown hung over the fireplace. Beyond the grand piano striped awnings shaded the terrace from the bright afternoon sun.

“Did you go out at all on Saturday, ma’am?”

He had a hunch she didn’t like taking deliveries from the liquor store; she didn’t want the building staff to count. So she went out herself. She probably had two or three stores in the neighborhood and was careful to rotate her visits. It seemed sad, a princess spending a holiday weekend alone with her Stolichnaya.

“Did you see anything or anyone unusual?”

That same faraway look, annoyance seeping in now. “You could hardly call it unusual—Hector does it all the time.”

“Does what, ma’am?”

“He leaves the door unguarded.”

Sam Richards took out his notebook and turned past the page where he’d jotted the milk and eggs his wife wanted him to pick up from Shop-Rite. Write it down, his instructor at Police Academy had said. No matter how dumb, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time, it could turn out to be evidence. “What time on Saturday?”

The princess was silent a moment. “The second time I went out for my cold pills. I’d say it was two o’clock or so.”

Detective Sam Richards stepped out of the elevator.

The thunk-thunk-thunk of a fender bass came at him through the door. He pushed the buzzer politely, and when the music showed no signs of abating he pushed it impolitely, leaning his full 220 pounds onto his thumb.

A woman’s voice screamed, “Who is it?” and he shouted, “Police!”

The music cut off. There was a scurrying silence.

The foyer boasted no lacquered table or little Oriental rug, none of the wealthy little amenities Richards had noticed on the other floors of the building. The door opened three inches. A young woman stared out. Her watery green eyes said she was nearsighted.

Sam Richards held his shield up above the safety chain. “Detective Richards, twenty-second precinct.”

“Far fuckin’ out.”

“Are you Deborah Hightower, the owner of this apartment?”

“Debbi.” She had the husky voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker. “No e on the Debbi.”

“Could I come in for a moment?”

“If it’s about my maintenance payment, talk to my lawyer.”

“It’s not about the maintenance.”

She undid the chain and stepped back from the door, letting him pass. She wore black nylon jogging shorts and a Coke is it! T-shirt, and her feet were bare.

The hallway opened into a livingroom furnished with two black beanbag chairs and two Techtronic stereo speakers. The amplifier and turntable sat on the shelf of a varnish-it-yourself bookcase that she hadn’t varnished. No window curtains softened the view of the high rise across the street. Black scuffmarks on the parquet floor told of heavy furniture that had been dragged in and dragged out again. The air smelled of freshly sprayed lemon deodorizer. The lemon didn’t quite mask the scent of marijuana.

Ms. Hightower offered coffee. “Instant. Sorry about that.”

“Fine by me.”

Sam Richards dropped onto a beanbag and stared at marks on the walls where six pictures had hung. The floor needed dusting.

She came back from the kitchen with two white plastic mugs and handed him one. He noticed that the long green fingernail on her third finger was a falsie, beginning to hang loose. She seated herself in the beanbag facing his and blew on her coffee.

“Do you know a man was murdered in the building?” he said. “We found him two hours ago in six. No ID.”

“That’s wild.”

“Were you home this weekend?”

“Home?” She looked confused. “You mean here? This isn’t home, honey, this is a crash pad. I have a share in a summer place out in the Hamptons.” She sipped quietly. “But sad to say, I’ve been here for the last three days. I’m in a show down at the World Trade Center.”

“Oh, yeah? What show’s that?”

“Toyota Presents.” She was searching him for a reaction.

“Oh, yeah. Toyota Presents.”

“A lot of stars got their starts in industrials. Shirley MacLaine danced for General Motors.”

“Right. I heard that somewhere.” Sam Richards opened his notebook. “Debbi, could you tell me when you were in the building yesterday, when you came in, when you went out, what hours you were in the lobby, the elevator, anywhere else on the premises?”

She said she’d worked late, come home around noon Saturday, slept till an hour before the show, left the building around seven, returned early this morning.

“Did you see or hear anything unusual in the building?” It occurred to him that if Debbi Hightower had been as stoned yesterday as she seemed today, she wouldn’t have noticed an elephant falling out of the sky.

She hoisted one leg up and placed a foot on the edge of the beanbag. Her toenails were pink, which didn’t go with the green fingernails. “Seemed a lot less busy than usual.”

“Any odd noises or people?”

She thought a moment. “Well, it’s all relative, isn’t it? I mean, what do you consider odd?”

“Strangers in the building?” William Benson, who owned the apartment on the twenty-eighth floor, shook his head. He was a small, lean man about eighty years of age. With elegant carelessness, his right hand twirled a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals. Gold cufflinks winked at the wrists of his burgundy smoking jacket. “No, none that I noticed.”

“Any strange noises?” Detective Monteleone asked.

“I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you that. Memorial Day’s a wonderful weekend for working. I turned off my hearing aid.”

For the first time, Detective Monteleone noticed the small beige plastic button in Benson’s left ear.

Behind the eighty-year-old architect the livingroom glowed like an art gallery, with track lighting that picked out abstract expressionist and pop art paintings on the walls.

“There was one thing,” Benson said, “but you could hardly call it unusual, it happens so often. I went out for the paper, and I had to use my key to let myself back into the building. Our Saturday doorman, Hector, wasn’t at the door. I have a hunch he sits down in the personnel room watching ballgames on TV.”

“Tell me that’s not a Gestapo tactic. Tell me it’s not.” Fred Lawrence, the owner of the apartment on floor 11, was explaining to Detective Sam Richards how he happened to be in New York on a holiday weekend when his wife and son were out romping at their summer rental in Ocean Beach. “To phone on a Friday—not even the courtesy of a letter—and call a field audit Tuesday—knowing Monday’s Memorial Day. It destroys my weekend, it terrifies my client, it wastes everybody’s time. I’ve never let a client overstate deductions. I don’t work that way.”

Sam Richards nodded, shaping his lips into a conciliatory smile. “We’ve all had our troubles with the IRS.”

“It’s harassment, plain and simple.” Fred Lawrence, his stomach pushing a breathless bulge into his pink Polo sports shirt, his face beet red and gaunt, was clearly a man under strain. His fringe of black hair glistened with sweat. Behind gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes darted, never once meeting Sam Richards’s. He paced the room, fingers skittering across the edges of hi-tech leather and chrome chairs and glass-topped tables.

“And then this outrage in six—how the hell did a thing like that happen? We’re supposed to have security in this building.”

“With your help, Mr. Lawrence, we hope to find out how it happened.”

Fred Lawrence threw a startled glance at the detective. “You seem to think I have some information—well, I don’t.”

“What time did you return to the building?”

“Around noon yesterday.”

“You parked in the garage?”

“Yes, I rent a space there.”

“Did you notice anything or anyone strange in the building over the weekend?”

“As I tried to explain, Officer, I’m under a great deal of pressure, I’m extremely preoccupied, and I apologize, but the answer is no, I noticed nothing until all you police came pouring in.”

Cardozo pulled his Honda Civic into the unlit alley beside the ninety-five-year-old precinct building. There was a parking space beneath the fire escape. He made sure to lock up. Unmarked police cars had been getting ripped off lately in the precinct parking lot.

He nearly tripped in the dark over a stack of A-frame barriers. They had been piled in reserve two years ago for crowd control. Crowds had come and gone, the barriers had stayed.

Above the green globes glowing on either side of the station house door the precinct flag fluttered limply from its pole, a rumpled seal of the City of New York and the number 22. The two two was one of the six precincts that used to make up the Seventh Division. Changing city administrations had moved the numbers around, but the sooty bricks and rusting iron and peeling paint were still there on Sixty-third Street, distinctly out of place in the heart of Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District.

The inside of the 22d Precinct station house was as shabby as the outside, perhaps a little more so since it never got rained on except for parts of the fifth floor, where the roof leaked. For three decades City Hall had been promising to rebuild.

The Muzak was playing “One for My Baby.” Cardozo disliked Muzak, and he especially disliked that tune. He didn’t see why a police force that was cutting patrols to meet its budget needed canned music.

He waved to the lieutenant working the complaint desk, then followed two sergeants up the old iron-banistered staircase. The radios buckled to their hips gave off synchronized bursts of static. They were pulling a handcuffed hooker through a door. She was kicking, screeching, beginning to lose her blond wig.

Things were quiet tonight.

Cardozo paused at the second floor corridor and watched the sergeants push the woman into the precinct holding cage. She began shaking the bars, screaming that they’d stolen her motherfucking wig and her lawyer was going to kick their honky asses.

The marble steps leading to the next floor were gritty with ancient filth. On a bench in the hall a detective was taking a statement from an elderly male complainant who had just been robbed at knifepoint on Lexington Avenue.

“The city’s not safe anymore,” the man was moaning. Cardozo felt sorry for a guy that old and just beginning to learn.

He entered the Detective Unit squad room. The large office was crammed with metal desks and files and old wood tables. The windows were covered with grills, and the grills and glass had been painted over in an industrial green that almost matched the walls.

It was late and the room was deserted except for the detective on night duty. “What’s happening?” Cardozo asked.

“There’s an R.I.P. up on Madison,” Tom Sweeney said. “Two Hispanics seen breaking into a chocolate shop.”

Cardozo gave Sweeney a look. Most cops did their eight hours and got their asses home. Not Sweeney, at least not lately. He seemed to be in the squad room round the clock. Cardozo had heard rumors that his wife was in the process of leaving him for another woman. He felt sorry for the guy.

Sweeney said a ten thirty—reported stickup—had come in fifteen minutes ago: a Caucasian with a .38 had walked into the Bojangles on Sixtieth and taken four hundred dollars, wallets, rings, and wrist watches. No casualties.

The room smelled of coffee. Cardozo made his way to the source of the smell. “What kind of idiot would do that? Anyone sitting in Bojangles, the watch has got to be a Timex, the ring’s tin. Criminals used to have brains in this city.”

An evil-looking Sola for charging radio batteries sat on a padlocked cabinet. The cabinet was where detectives weary of carrying three pounds of metal could stow their weapons. Two Mr. Coffees sat quietly steaming beside the Sola. The squad split the cost of cheap drip-grind and kept the coffee makers working around the clock. Cardozo poured a Styrofoam cup of brew that looked as though it had been jelling in the bottom of the pot for two days. He ripped open an envelope of Sweet ’n Low and let the powder silt down into his coffee.

“What’s that pross in for downstairs?” he said. “They made loitering a crime again?”

“Offering to sell coke to Lieutenant Vaughan.”

Cardozo made a face. Another hooker trying to sell talcum powder to a plainclothesman. He couldn’t believe Vaughan would bother with the arrest, the paperwork, the aggravation. “What’s Vaughan want with bullshit like that?”

“You know what the CP says: we gotta increase productivity.” Sweeney nodded toward the bulletin board where the two-week-old word-processed directive from the police commissioner’s office had been push-pinned. “Budget time in Nueva York. El capitano wants to goose those percentages.”

Cardozo’s eyes went across the deserted room. The detention cage, butted into a corner, was empty for the moment, with a two-year-old copy of Penthouse magazine spread facedown on the bench.

He crossed to his office, a cubicle with precinct green walls.

His desk was the same gray metal as the desks outside. The phone was an early touch-tone model that Bell had discontinued in 1963; it had had a crack under the cradle since ’73 and the tape on the crack got changed whenever it dried up. The typewriter was a model-T Underwood that you couldn’t have donated to a reform school.

He frowned. A dismal-looking pile of departmental forms had accumulated around the typewriter since Saturday. Today was supposed to be his RDO, his regular day off; he was supposed to be in Rockaway with his little girl.

He sat in the swivel chair and saw that the top piece of paper was a hand-scrawled note: CALL CHIEF O’BRIEN AT HOME A.S.A.P., followed by the captain’s home phone and the initials of the sergeant who had taken the call.

Cardozo dialed the Woodlawn number.

As the phone rang he glanced through the rest of the paper. Mostly it was a bunch of fives, DD5 supplementary complaint reports, the triplicates that detectives filled out summarizing progress on ongoing cases. As unsolved crimes got stale, regulations required a minimum of two reports annually. The fives mounted up—the older the report, the thicker the fistful of blue forms stapled to it.

A voice cut into the ringing. Gruff. “O’Brien.”

“Chief? Vince. Just got your message.”

“Vince, the goddamnedest thing. Remember that Babe Vanderwalk business seven years ago—the husband tried to—”

“I was on your task force. I remember.”

“Damned if Babe Vanderwalk didn’t come out of her coma. The hospital phoned. And then a lawyer phoned. Represents the family, they don’t want any fuss, they don’t want any publicity.”

“Mazel tov to the Vanderwalks. Can she talk?”

“She can talk. She’s normal. Lost a little weight, joints a little stiff, but she’s all there.”

“Does she remember anything?”

“Go see her and find out. I’m delegating you.”

Cardozo exhaled loudly. “Chief, you just handed me a one-legged John Doe.”

“You know the background, Vince. Go to Doctors Hospital, get a statement, and close the case. Five minutes.”

“I can’t control what she’s going to say. Her statement may open the case.”

“Get a statement that closes the case. Go up there tomorrow. They wake those patients up at six, seven o’clock. You don’t have to wait for visiting hours.”

“Chief, I honestly—”

“Thanks, Vince, I knew I could count on you.”

The receiver went dead in Cardozo’s hand. He looked at it a moment and then slammed it back onto the cradle.

Though it was seven years in the past, the Vanderwalk case still stoked old resentments in him. He’d worked his butt off collecting solid evidence, he’d avoided the minefields of the Miranda and Esposito decisions, the jury had convicted, and then on appeal the D.A. had accepted a plea bargain that let the killer off.

Except if Babe Vanderwalk was awake, the killer wasn’t a killer anymore.

Anyway, that’s tomorrow, Cardozo reminded himself. Today’s today.

He pushed Babe Vanderwalk Devens out of his head and began skimming fives. They were drearily familiar: ripped-up hookers, businessmen with no ID dead in trash barrels, family fights where somebody had taken out a knife or gun, stewardesses jumping out of their Third Avenue shared apartments—or had they been pushed? They were like old friends to him. He’d been staring at some of them for over ten years.

And they all concluded with the same words: NO NEW INVESTIGATIVE LEADS SINCE LAST REPORT.