Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

“Then he’s rich.”

“He likes to think he is.”

“Who cosigned for Monserat?”

Melissa looked at Cardozo. She was going through some kind of pain. “I’m in sort of a conflict-of-interest situation here, Vince. This isn’t easy for me. When you showed me that dead boy’s photograph it didn’t come to me at first where I knew him from, and then I remembered and I thought about picking up the phone and telling you everything. Then I thought about not telling you anything. And I guess I came down in the middle and now I’m moving off center and I’m a little scared.”

“Jodie Downs and your brother had something to do with Lewis Monserat’s cosigner?”

“In a way. Lew Monserat’s cosigner was Balthazar Properties. One of our corporations.”

“How come?”

“Because Ted Morgenstern has shares in Balthazar.”

Cardozo’s brows arched down at the name Morgenstern. “Why did Morgenstern want to help Monserat?”

“He wasn’t necessarily helping. Morgenstern uses fronts for his property. You’d have to dig to the bottom of a manure pile of shell companies to find out who really owns that loft. The one thing I’m sure of is it doesn’t belong to Lew Monserat.”

“Who do you think owns it? Educated guess.”

“Ted Morgenstern has handled a lot of society divorces and he’s covered up more than a few society murders; and when it comes to dirty mergers and forced acquisitions and real estate takeovers, he’s king of the hill. He renders a lot of special services, and any one of his rich clients might want a discreet little one-bedroom under a false name. And any one of his poor clients would be willing to provide the cover.”

“Any chance Morgenstern owns it himself?”’

Melissa nodded. “From what I know of him personally, he could have an interest in it.”

“What kind of interest?”

“My hunch is it’s a pleasure pad, trick pad, whatever you want to call it. But in the upper reaches of depravity, as opposed to the upper reaches of politics, it’s hard to know who holds the real power. It could be that Morgenstern’s the master and the place is his, or it could be that Morgenstern has a master and the place is that person’s.”

“You’re talking master-slave s.m. stuff?”

“It’s a possibility, is all I’m saying. On the other hand it could be Morgenstern just has a habit of hiding property because he’s lived that way for thirty years. Nothing he owns is in his name. The yacht, the town house, the cars, the paintings—they’re owned by his firm, not him.”

“Why’s he so anxious to avoid ownership?”

Melissa waited for the waitress to refill their cups, and then she glanced around the room. The booths next to theirs were empty.

“Three reasons,” she said. “One, Morgenstern deals real estate for the archdiocese, and they don’t need scandal. Two, he’s been under tax indictment for the last twenty-two years and the feds could seize everything he owns. Every cardinal since Spellman has tried to get the indictment lifted, but IRS isn’t Vatican City.”

“That’s two reasons. What’s the third?”

“Vince, can I trust you? This could mean my job. It could mean my kneecaps or my face or my life. They can’t know it came from me.”

“You can trust me.”

Melissa regarded him with her deep-set eyes. “Morgenstern is dying. He’ll be damned if he’s going to pay a penny in estate taxes to any government.”

“What’s he dying of?”

“He’s in the same program at Vanderbilt that my brother was.”

“He’s got AIDS?”

“Early stages. They give him three years.”

“He’s gay?” Cardozo said. “He’s an IV drug user? What?”

“All of the above. Morgenstern uses my boss as a drop for liquid amphetamine. I never heard of anyone drinking liquid amphetamine, though I suppose you could. Balthazar buys Morgenstern callboys through a charge card service. Nat keeps the records because it’s a tax deduction. As a favor to Morgenstern, Nat also provides callboys to religious figures in the community. As a result some high-rankers have AIDS. Less said about that the better.”

“How many shares does Morgenstern have in Balthazar?”

“Thirty-five percent. It’s held by Astoria Properties N.A. That’s a Dutch Antilles company. As far as the meat-packing district scheme goes, as far as any of his scams go, he’s technically clean. But Morgenstern’s real power is that he’s dying. He doesn’t have to care about anyone. He’s a terrorist wearing a vest that’s wired to explode. The only thing he cares about is, he doesn’t want it publicly known he’s gay. No, there’s a second thing he cares about. He doesn’t want to go to hell.”

“Do Jews believe in hell?”

“He’s Catholic. Spellman baptized him. Morgenstern hates Jews.”

“Did Spellman give him a plenary indulgence?”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t.”

“Spellman dealt everything—real estate, POW’s, indulgences.”

“How do you know all this stuff about Spellman and Morgenstern?”

“Everyone knows Spellman had a weakness for pretty little Jewish boys. Which Morgenstern was before he turned into the portrait of Dorian Gray.”

“I mean the inside stuff. How did you get it?”

“I had an inside track.” There was a pause, just a beat of silence, as if she were deciding how far she could trust him. “My brother and Morgenstern were lovers. It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

“Some gays cruise subway johns and get caught, and some gay lawyers cruise police lockups. Morgenstern got Brian off a soliciting charge. He liked Brian’s looks, he liked Brian’s style: Brian was the kind of person he could take to Gracie Mansion and the Archdiocesan Palace and the Harmonie Club without everyone snickering.”

She lit another cigarette, looked at it with hatred, and decapitated it against the edge of the ashtray.

“Brian was always looking for the big break. He said New York is a who-do-you-know town, Morgenstern knew everyone, if he slept with Morgenstern he’d know everyone. He’d even have contacts in the federal government, because Morgenstern had a town house in Washington, D.C.; it was a partying pad for him and his government connections, walking distance from the Capitol. It was stocked with booze and boys, and Morgenstern stayed there whenever he had to put in a congressional fix or bribe a government agency. Brian was impressed. Dolce vita with a power twist. The downside was, he wasn’t happy with Morgenstern. Sexually or emotionally or any way. Morgenstern’s very controlling, very closeted. He comes from that period of powerhouse antigay gays—cardinals and J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. The right-wing establishment gave those guys permission to be gay provided from nine to five they were gay-bashers, black-bashers, communist-bashers—you name it, they’d bash it. Brian was very open with me. There were no taboo subjects between us. He told me all about the sex Hoover and the cardinal and Morgenstern liked. It was very punitive, very naive and sick. They had to be drunk. They liked getting hit, taking verbal abuse. Hoover had a racial wrinkle—he liked blacks. Morgenstern adds a whole anti-Semitic wrinkle, he likes his lover to dress up in SS clothes—he thinks Nazis are sexy. There’s something wrong with Morgenstern’s skin. Even before the AIDS he had a sort of advanced psoriasis—the lesions bleed unless they’re kept oiled. Brian used to oil his back for him. Sexy, hey? So every time Brian made it with Morgenstern he had this compulsion to go trick on the outside with—how did he put it?—a mammal.”

“So what was in the relationship for Brian?”

“He hoped he’d get a little power. What he got instead was AIDS.”

Cardozo sat there watching Melissa Hatfield stare at him. He couldn’t buy that she had learned so much from her brother, or that Brian’s AIDS and his liaison with Morgenstern were the secret he’d sensed her holding back. “Melissa,” he said, “what don’t you want me to know?”

She looked surprised. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s something else. From day one I’ve felt it.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Then why don’t you tell me?”

“Vince, I like you.” It seemed to embarrass her to make the admission. “I even thought … maybe …” She looked down at the paper place mat printed with drink recipes and began running her fingernail back and forth through a banana daiquiri. “I wanted you to like me.”

“I do like you.”

“Would you like me if you knew I was sleeping with my boss? Nat Chamberlain, who’s put up half the overpriced firetrap co-ops in Manhattan and took more graft than any politician in this city?”

The picture finally came into focus. “Why would I blame you for him?”

“Last spring there was a fire in one of Nat’s flagship co-ops. A policeman died from burns he got rescuing a woman.”

“You didn’t build the building—you didn’t set the fire.”

“But somebody set it. And the insurance paid Nat another forty-four million.” Melissa was silent a moment. “I feel dirty.”

“Welcome to the real world.”

“That’s all—welcome to the real world?”

“If there’s any other answer, I don’t know it.” Cardozo sighed and signaled for the check.

46

CARDOZO PHONED THE LEWIS Monserat Gallery.

The woman with the prim voice said gallery hours were Tuesday through Saturday, 11 A.M. till 6 P.M.—except Thursday, when hours were 12 till 8 P.M. She added, “We’re closed Saturdays during the summer.”

“Nothing like a long weekend,” Cardozo said.

Cardozo examined the facade of 432 Franklin Street.

It was a typical conversion, a six-story industrial building with a column of windows marked Shaftway where the freight elevator ran. No amount of sand-blasting would ever turn the brick walls into brownstone, any more than fresh black paint would ever turn the fire escape into wrought iron art nouveau.

A sign swinging from the lowest cross-walk of the escape announced LUXURY CO-OPS AVAILABLE.

He pushed through the unlocked gray iron security door. A hand-lettered sign taped to the mailboxes inside requested, FOR YOUR OWN SECURITY PLEASE LOCK FRONT DOOR AFTER 11 P.M. THERE HAVE BEEN INCIDENTS.

Cardozo studied the building directory. Fewer than half the apartments were occupied, and there was no name in either fourth-floor slot.

The owners had installed an inner door of plate glass, the latch controlled by an intercom buzzer system. He pushed the buzzers for both sixth-floor units. An instant later two loud rasps clicked the latch open.

A glance at the first floor told him that the A apartments were at the front of the building, the B’s at the rear.

He took the stairway to the fourth floor, two quiet steps at a leap.

The lock on 4A was a Medeco—not pickproof, but certainly MasterCard-proof.

“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called irritably from upstairs.

Cardozo returned to his car, parked twenty yards down the opposite curb of Franklin Street, and took up his vigil, staring up at the dark windows on the fourth floor of 432.

He observed relatively little movement on Franklin. The street looked as if it had originally been an alley between two rows of warehouses. Judging by the garbage cans, most of the buildings had converted to residences. There were no stores, no restaurants, no reason to wander down the poorly lit pavement unless you happened to live there or needed a quiet wall to piss against or wanted a little semiprivacy to screw in.

Hudson, the cross street, was obviously the place for action. There was something aimless but urgent about the human movement, as if this was the now spot, the place to get sucked into the whirl of high-media exposure. The dress code was expensive sleaze, punk as modified by the fashion dictators. From his vantage point Cardozo couldn’t see a person over thirty on the sidewalk.

Porsches and BMW’s, Mercedeses and stretch limos crawled along, battling pedestrians for right of way. The cars changed colors like chameleons as they passed glitzy show windows and flashing neon logos.

Besides boutiques, card shops, and health food eateries, there was a disco called Space on the corner, guarded by an unsmiling seven-foot albino dressed in blue mylar. Next to it a restaurant sign flashed LA CÔTE BLEUE; through the window Cardozo could see the big circular glass bar mobbed with customers waiting to be seated.

The intersection smelled of sex and fashion and money—the things that made New York New York.

A little after eleven, a cruising police car hooked a turn down Franklin. The blue-and-white pulled alongside Cardozo.

“Hey, you.” A woman leaned out the passenger window, red hair peeking out from under a police officer’s blue cap. “No parking.”

Cardozo flashed his shield and the woman got flustered.

“Sorry.”

“’S okay.”

Fifteen minutes later a man leaned down and rapped on Cardozo’s window. He had thick black hair and a beard, an earring, piercing dark eyes.

“Hey, man. I got grass, crack, PCB, coke, ludes, THC, uppers, downers, opium, hash, morphine. Try before you buy.”

“Not tonight, thanks.”

The man gave Cardozo a look as though he had to be crazy or a cop to be parked on that street not trying to score drugs.

A little before midnight thunder belched and Cardozo’s rear view told him that the sky was turning a darker shade of night. The Empire State Building, lit art-deco blue and white for the night, was beginning to get lost in swirling clouds.

Rain spattered down, and pedestrians dodged into doorways. The line waiting to get into Space had to stand there and get soaked.

Cardozo’s eye ran along the fourth story of 432 Franklin.

The windows were dark.

They stayed dark for that night and the next.

It came with no warning. Cardozo had been watching, waiting three nights for it.

Hudson Street bustled with the Friday night crowd. The heat of the day had yielded to the heat of the night, dense upward-rippling waves tinged pink and yellow by neon and headlights. The revolving door of La Côte Bleue was emptying four customers in a spin. The line waiting to get into Space stretched halfway down Franklin Street.

The alley beside 432 was so dark that Cardozo almost didn’t spot the faint stir of movement.

Between the huge black garbage cans behind Space and the small silver ones behind La Côte Bleue three figures detached themselves from the shadows.

The three stood in the mouth of the alley, lighting a pipe of crack, passing it. When the pipe was consumed they moved unsteadily toward the door of 432.

The woman was pretty in a fading sort of way, wearing floppy safari trousers and a Hell’s Angels denim vest. She had the look of someone too much had happened to, someone who had no more reactions to offer.

The Hispanic was skinny and dark-faced, with a V of paleness at his open shirt front.

Lewis Monserat wore an Eisenhower army jacket, cap, and designer glasses. He didn’t look well. He was thin, the cords of his neck drawn taut, and he carried himself as if he had a headache, as if the very act of inserting the key in the lock required the coordinating of muscles he had barely the strength to control.

The door slammed behind them and three minutes later the lights on the fourth floor went on.

A car horn tooted, disturbingly close to Cardozo’s ear.

He stirred to consciousness in the driver’s seat of the Honda, hands folded across his chest. His sleep had not been deep, but he felt as if he had died in it.

The early morning light was flat and strange and it gave objects an eerie, unreal shimmer. The black Porsche sedan waiting at the door of 432 could have materialized from a dream. There didn’t seem to be anyone, not even a driver, behind the tinted windows.

The horn tooted again.

The door to 432 opened. The woman and the Hispanic were dressed as they had been the night before, but Monserat had changed into an old T-shirt and a worn pair of jeans. He wore loafers, no socks. Miami Vice style.

He held the car door for the others. He looked around him before getting in. His dark eyes, high cheekbones, and jutting chin combined into a strikingly emaciated face.

Cardozo allowed the Porsche to make the turn onto Hudson before he turned the key in his ignition.

The Saturday morning traffic was light. He kept a two-block distance across town and down Broadway.

The sun was stroking the tops of glass buildings.

The Porsche turned left on Wall Street and continued to the East River heliport. Cardozo pulled to a hydrant a half-block away and watched.

A helicopter was waiting on the tarmac. On its door was emblazoned the logo HAMPTON HELICAB.

The Porsche drew to the metal fence.

Monserat and his companions got out and walked to the copter. A mechanic closed the door after them. The rotors blurred into invisibility. The copter lifted, throwing off motes of light.

Cardozo found a phonebooth on the corner of William Street.

“Hampton Helicab, good morning.”

“This is Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo, NYPD. You have a Lewis Monserat and party flying with you this morning.”

Cardozo spelled the name, and it took the agent a moment to confirm.

“Does Mr. Monserat have a return flight with you?”

“Yes he does, sir. Monday at seven forty P.M.”

Cardozo broke the connection and dialed a second number.

“Waldo, it’s Vince Cardozo. How about a cup of coffee, my treat?”

Twenty minutes later Cardozo and Waldo Flores were sitting in Kate’s Cafeteria on West Seventeenth Street, on opposite sides of a Formica-topped table.

Waldo’s large brown eyes stared above the edge of the coffee mug. “Man, you keep asking me to break the law. I’m straight now. Not pushin’ drugs, not runnin’ girls, no B and E. Why the hell don’t you let me alone?”

Cardozo tore the edge off another packet of Sweet ’n Low and let it snow down into his coffee. “We’ve been having complaints about robberies at some East Side doctors’ offices. Papers missing. Drugs missing, too.” The drugs were a guess, but he trusted his intuition of the Waldos of this world.

Waldo’s eyes came up in a hurry. “All right, I helped myself to some Valium, it’s a crime?”

“Yeah, Waldo. It’s a crime. What are you going to tell the judge? I asked you to go in?”

First puzzlement, then terror replaced the lost reluctant look. “Man, you never let go, do you.”

“It’s a Medeco. You can open it in your sleep. There’s no one home till Monday night, only one other apartment on the floor, we jimmy the front door with a charge card.”

Waldo bent toward the lock, his face furiously concentrated, everything focused on the signals reaching his fingers through the little steel rod.

A door banged four flights down. Steps were audible, then the sound of the elevator wheezing to life.

“Motherfuck,” Waldo grumbled. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” He inserted a second rod, then a third.

The elevator passed and stopped one floor above.

Waldo froze.

Steps echoed. A door slammed.

Waldo straightened up, the tension dropping off his shoulders. He twisted the handle and gave the door to 4A a triumphant push.

Cardozo entered the apartment. Waldo followed.

They walked along a hallway, the only sound the crackling of Styrofoam packing pellets snapping like peanut brittle beneath their feet.

Cardozo opened doors.

Waldo stood watching him.

Lewis Monserat’s home away from home had everything: a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, a blood-stained towel thrown behind the toilet, an answering machine blinking in the bedroom, a VCR and an eighty-inch projection TV in the livingroom.

Cardozo had started across the colorful rya rug that stretched before the TV screen when he saw a silver tray holding plastic-sealed syringes on the secretaire that stood beneath a gold-framed mirror. Other evidence of fun and frolic was lying about: an empty two-litre bottle of Gilbey’s gin, pipes, mirrors, silver straws, single-edged safety razors.

It looked as though last night had been a quiet evening at home with booze and coke and crack, video and the Smithsonian collection of dildos and handcuffs.

“The maid’s gonna have a lot of cleanin’ up to do,” Waldo observed.

Cardozo moved the TV screen. Four black two-by-fours had been screwed into the wall, forming an H with two cross beams. He could see scrapes on the wood, and rust stains.

Waldo prowled the room, picking up mirrors and sniffing white dust from them, scooping up red-capped plastic vials that had fallen behind sofa cushions.

Cardozo figured out how to work the VCR and ejected the video tape. The cassette label was hand-lettered: games. He pocketed it.

“A lot of grass in the freezer,” Waldo called from the kitchen.

“Don’t take so much it’s obvious,” Cardozo said. “We may want to come back.”

“Shit, I ain’t comin’ back here.”

Waldo went quickly through the bedroom into the bathroom, sniffing bottles in the medicine cabinet.

Cardozo found that the bedroom closet had a Fichet lock.

“Waldo, come here.”

Waldo sauntered out of the bathroom, heaping fistfuls of Quaaludes and Valiums into his pockets.

“Open this.”

Waldo studied the lock, frowned, opened his toolkit, selected an eight-inch rod.

“Stand back, amigo.”

Waldo probed, listened, inserted a second rod.

Cardozo glanced at the magazines on the bedside table. Hustler. Honcho. A Child’s Garden of Sex. Last May’s Reader’s Digest, with a marker inserted at “The Seven Telltale Signs of Loneliness: Are you Suffering From the Disease That Cripples More Than Three Million Americans Annually?”

Suddenly a board creaked in the hallway. The apartment door opened, slamming against the wall.

Waldo spun around, eyes huge.

“Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo?” A man’s voice. “Yoo-hoo, God damn it.”

“Il n’y a personne.” A woman.

Count Leopold de Savoie-Sancerre, bloated in flowered surfer’s jams and a yellow silk shirt, passed the bedroom doorway, followed by Countess Vicki in a fiery pink skirt.

Cardozo motioned Waldo to pack up his gear.

Count Leopold’s voice came from the livingroom. “Mais c’est un bordel!”

“T’affolles pas,” Countess Vicki said. “Il y a eu une fete, c’est tout.”

Cardozo eased the front door open. He and Waldo slipped into the corridor.

First came the sound: a woman’s voice singing “I Could Have Danced All Night,” high and piping and almost laughably pure. My Fair Lady, the original cast recording, badly scratched. Julie Andrews.

An image began to appear on the television screen, lights and darks, the curve of a woman’s shoulder, gloved fingers stroking the lower part of her face.

The camera pulled back jerkily.

The woman wore a glittering evening gown. She was strangely, disturbingly ugly.

The room behind her had stark white walls. There were two Queen Anne chairs. She sat.

Vague silhouettes passed through the background. A man in evening clothes stepped into focus. He bowed gallantly.

He took the woman’s hand and she rose. They began moving together. The movements never quite became a dance, but still there was a sort of pattern to it, as though the actors had rehearsed certain postures and facial attitudes.

Cardozo’s eyebrows were creased in the effort of understanding.

The picture changed to a different woman, standing naked against the same blank walls.

Cardozo tried to guess her age and figured she was shading sixteen.

A man in evening clothes entered the frame. He kissed the girl’s eyes, her cheeks, her ears, then lightly brushed his lips against hers. They spoke, but the words were garbled—only a tone came through, joking and teasing and laughing.

Three other men in evening clothes entered the frame.

The girl began deep-throating one of the men.

Something in the image put Cardozo on guard. The three men not involved in the sex act were aware of something, seeing something the girl could not.

Suddenly the men pushed the girl to the floor. Her reaction was unstaged: surprise and pain.

Two of the men held her down. Without warning, something slopped down on the girl. It took Cardozo a moment to recognize what he was seeing: animal intestines from a slaughterhouse.

There was mindless terror in the girl’s kicking and thrashing.

Cardozo knew what she was thinking—she believed these lunatics were going to kill her. That was what they wanted her to believe, that was what they wanted to get on film.

At the same time there was a bell going off in his head: the animal intestines triggered an association that wasn’t quite making it to the surface.

And then it came to him.

The butcher shop viscera that Nuku Kushima had encased in lucite and made part of her art.

Connections began spinning off one another in Cardozo’s mind.

Intestines in Kushima’s art and intestines in Lew Monserat’s home video, and Monserat was Kushima’s dealer.

Claude Loring killed Jodie Downs. Doria Forbes-Steinman recognized Loring as a friend of Monserat’s.

No big deal—a lot of New Yorkers were friends.

Monserat and Loring both frequented the Inferno.

Still no big deal—more than a few New Yorkers were into kink and anonymous sex.

Count Leopold and Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre had a key to Monserat’s new party pad. The countess had put on a blond wig and walked into Pleasure Trove, paid cash for a bondage mask, and carried it into Beaux Arts Tower.

Was that a big deal?

Putting on a disguise, giving a false name, paying cash—yes, that was a big deal. Buying the mask the first business day after the killing meant it was a replacement for the fifth Kushima mask, the mask found on the victim.

Monserat had said the fifth mask didn’t exist, but this contradicted the artist’s first statement. As dealer for Kushima’s work Monserat could easily have owned or borrowed the fifth mask and destroyed the records.

Since Monserat didn’t live in Beaux Arts Tower, that raised a question: who had Vicki given the mask to? Obviously it could have been anyone, even the doorman. All the well-heeled people in that building probably dealt with Monserat—and transporting a mask was not an offense like transporting drugs or a minor across state lines for immoral purposes.

And then there was Babe.

Babe Devens recognized Monserat’s former party pad—abandoned four days after the Downs killing—as the scene of a masked party where a young man had been tortured in exactly the same way as Jodie Downs. Babe had been dreaming, but that was another story—or question. The tape in Monserat’s VCR showed disjointed snippets of other sadistic parties, some masked, some not. So dreaming or not, Babe had been right on the money.

A lot of pieces, a lot of holes.

What to do?

Consult the dreamer.