Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

11

AT 7:59 A.M., CARDOZO entered the precinct house. Pandemonium was back to normal after the long holiday weekend. The lobby swarmed with cops, their waists thick with the dangling paraphernalia of the Job: beltloads of .38-caliber rounds, service revolvers, leather-wound billy clubs, staticking radios, and handcuffs that rang discordantly with each step. Greetings and backslaps were being exchanged like calls on the floor of a stock exchange. Cardozo traded a few, joining the flow up the stairs.

In his cubicle the three button on the phone was lit. It was Dan Hippolito, reporting on John Doe’s blood. “He had enough alcohol in him to pickle an elephant. Enough coke to orbit a hippo. Plus considerable quantities of heroin and meth.”

“Was he a junkie?”

“Nah, with junkies the circulation is so bad you see necrotic tissue in the toes, but Johnny’s got no punctures and five good toes.”

“What does the combination of drugs tell you?”

“Nothing special. You can buy it prepackaged on the streets. There’s usually some other shit in it, but that metabolizes without a trace.”

Cardozo thanked Dan, then phoned the lab. “Hey, Lou, did you check John Doe’s hair? Any chance he dyed it?”

“It’s the first thing we check with blonds. The color’s real. He did use a very expensive conditioner—high in vitamin E. But it’s over-the-counter stuff.”

Cardozo drew a line through the memo in his notebook. At 8:05 he crossed the hall for his task force meeting.

“How are we doing on garbage?” he asked.

Siegel shook her head. “No leg yet.”

“And the photo?”

“Turned out pretty well.” She had taken a photo of the dead man to the Photographic Unit, had them airbrush it and put him in high-fashion clothes from last month’s GQ. She passed it to Cardozo.

He eyed it critically. The photographic boys had dressed John Doe conservatively: button-down shirt, regimental tie, tweed jacket. “Take this to the modeling agencies. See if they ever worked with him.” He turned to Detective Malloy. “Carl, how about licenses?”

“Still coming up dry,” Malloy said. “Except for Bronski. He’s got violations on his cab—and complaints to the commission.”

Cardozo smiled: the city’s taxi commission was a pork barrel of bribery and embezzlement, and the commissioners—who did little besides enforcing a cabbie dress code—were presently targets of criminal indictment. “What kind of complaints?”

“Picks up passengers from any lane, busts lights, grabs other cabbies’ fares. A go-getter like that, you’d think he’d hustle rides during the off-peak hours. But noon-to-two, he must have been napping. At eleven forty-five he had a fare from Broadway and Park Place to Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. The next fare was one P.M., from Ninetieth and Broadway to Fifty-ninth and Sixth: Then one forty-five, from Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth to Twelfth Street and Third Avenue.”

“Aren’t those rides spaced a little far apart?” Cardozo said.

“Very much so, compared to other drivers’ sheets. Another thing. Bronski leaves his first fare a block from the Tower. He leaves his second six blocks from the Tower. He picks up his third a block away. I suppose it’s possible, but it seems strange.”

“How was his meter for the day?” Cardozo asked.

“Low. The other drivers’ sheets averaged twenty dollars more for the same shift.”

“Better give it another look,” Cardozo said. “Greg, what about mental institutions?”

Monteleone had checked for sex offenders released or escaped within the last month. No escapes had been reported, fifteen offenders had been released.

“Follow up on them. Find out where they were Saturday. What residents did you get hold of?”

“Jessica Lambert, Esmée Burns, and Estelle Manfrey are out of town semipermanently. Lambert’s in Hollywood, shooting a miniseries about Ellie Siegel.”

Detective Siegel looked up.

“Bad joke. It’s about a woman sleuth. Burns always spends April and May in Paris, she has a perfume factory there. Manfrey is in a wheelchair in Palm Beach, zonked on painkillers.”

“Who did you talk to personally?”

He’d spoken to Joan Adler, the mousy writer of political broadsides, who had returned from weekend house parties in the Hamptons. She had not recognized the victim’s face on the flyer. He’d also shown the flyer to the Beaux Arts staff, with the same result. He had persuaded Bill Connell, the super, to let him post a flyer in the lobby.

“Today,” Cardozo said, “take the flyer to the stores and the clinics. And get the names of the employees and patients.”

“They’re not going to want to give me those.”

Cardozo ignored the objection. “Run the names through the Bureau of Records. Have the Passport Office send us photos.”

“You’re assuming every name on the list will have a passport.”

“The ones that don’t, ask the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for license photographs.”

“Vince, that could be two hundred photos.”

“So? We’re going to have a lot of faces to match.” Cardozo turned to Sam Richards. “Sam, how’d the follow-up on Debbi Hightower go?”

“I checked with the World Trade Center. She was sort of telling the truth. There was an industrial show in the ballroom of the Helmsley Hotel and it was called Toyota Presents.” Sam Richards passed a program to Cardozo. “But Hightower’s not listed on the program. I checked the hotel’s employee list. No Hightower there either. I asked the waiters and bartenders if they’d seen a lady of Miss Hightower’s description. They had. She came in through an agency—Amanda’s Girls—temporary staff for the show.”

“What kind of temporary staff?”

“Hostess. She served coffee and smiled.”

“Who was the audience?”

“Out-of-towners. Toyota dealers, would-be Toyota dealers, Ford dealers Toyota is trying to steal.”

“What time did this show go on?” Cardozo asked.

“Eight o’clock.”

“I don’t buy Debbi Hightower served coffee and smiled at a bunch of out-of-town car dealers from eight o’clock Friday night till noon Saturday. Amanda’s Girls—is that a legit business?”

“They’re in the Yellow Pages—office temps. They have a New York business license.”

“I’d like her to account for that time, Sam.”

“She’s a hooker,” Monteleone said. “Don’t tell me she bought that apartment on an office temp’s pay.”

“She’s late with the maintenance,” Sam Richards said.

“Lean on her,” Cardozo said. “Find out who she was with. Maybe she brought the guy to her place. Maybe he saw something she didn’t. Maybe he did something she didn’t see. Dig. How’d you do with Fred Lawrence and that problem in the garage?”

“I finally got it out of him. He rents a space in the garage, it’s supposed to be his and his alone. He got back from Fire Island on Saturday at noon, and a taxi had parked in his place.”

“A taxi?” Cardozo frowned. “Why didn’t he want to tell you?”

“Because he’s ashamed. He says he’s type A, driven, heart-attack material, can’t take frustration. He went crazy and phoned the cab company. Said he was Jewish Defense League and he was going to blow them up.”

“What was the name of this cab company?”

“Ting-a-ling Taxi, something cutesy like that. He’d just as soon not remember.”

Cardozo was thoughtful. “Bronski’s company is Ding-Dong Transport. That’s awfully close to Ting-a-ling Taxi. Bronski could have had his cab parked in the Beaux Arts garage from noon to two. That would explain the low meter and why all the rides are near Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth. Carl, check that out.”

Malloy nodded.

“Any luck finding the handyman?” Cardozo asked.

“I’ve got a phone call in to the super,” Richards said. “He’ll let me know when Loring shows.”

“Maybe the handyman went to Rio,” Monteleone said. “Do we have extradition with Rio?”

“If we need it,” Cardozo said, “we’ll get it. Sam, how’d you do with the other residents?”

Richards had been able to question Billi von Kleist, the fashion designer; Phil Bailey, the TV network president, and his wife Jennifer; Johnny Stefano, the Broadway composer. None of them could shed any light on events in the building Saturday, and none of them recognized the face on the flyer.

Cardozo sighed. “That still leaves three residents unaccounted for.”

Sam Richards smiled. “Doyle’s in the Betty Ford clinic, coming off cocaine. It’s his third try. The smart money says he’s not going to make it. Notre Dame is at the Aga Khan’s resort in Sardinia, shacked up with Senator Behrend of Nebraska’s wife. The duke and duchess are in Issy-les-Moulineaux with Countess Rothschild, who is terminally ill with bone marrow cancer.”

“How’d you get all that?” Cardozo asked.

“I found a very good source. Maybe you’d like to meet him.”

“Frankly, they’re the reason we have cockroaches in the building.” Gordon Dobbs was discussing Saveurs de Paris, the bakery on the fourth floor of Beaux Arts Tower. “Their croissants aren’t even fresh. Don’t worry, I never buy from them.” He chuckled, “They didn’t make any of these.”

Cardozo’s glance went down to the colorful assortment of tiny glazed cakes laid out on the silver platter. He bit into another one, the third he’d taken, despite his worries about softening up his gut. They were superb pastries, the sort of pastries that must exist in children’s dreams. Through a mouthful of hazelnut, he asked about the super.

“Bill Connell’s divine—you need a drip fixed, he has the handyman here in three seconds. His wife’s an invalid, you know, and that’s why he plays around.”

There it was again: the superficially pleasant remark, the sting in its tail. Cardozo asked what Dobbs knew about the dental clinic on four.

“Let’s call a spade a spade. They’re a welfare mill. Some very peculiar people walk in and out of that office. It’s common knowledge that the good doctors are, shall we say, liberal with their prescriptions for painkillers.”

Cardozo sensed Dobbs had no evidence, no information, not even a reasonable suspicion: he was doing this because he wanted two cops in his livingroom, because he wanted to turn that evening at dinner to the jeweled blonde beside him and say, “Guess who came to tea at my place today … the fuzz.”

Cardozo asked about the psychotherapists on five.

The boom of Gordon Dobbs’s laughter filled the room. He rocked back and forth in his chair. “Poor souls—they’re having a very hard time of it. Competition’s tough. New York is licensing far too many psychiatric social workers. I mean, make up your mind! Are they doctors or mother’s helpers? I spoke to one of them in the elevator, mentioned Jung and drew a complete blank. Obviously they do a lot of work for the state. Someone’s paying for that space, and believe me, it’s not those shabby clients of theirs.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be acquainted with any of them?”

“The patients? God, no.” Dobbs’s smile was ingratiating and seemed to say, We understand one another, it’s just you and I against the riffraff in the world.

Cardozo mentioned Lily Lobkowitz.

“Princess Lil? Her ex-husband’s Polish, she’s a Copa girl from Enjay.”

“Enjay?”

“Joisey. Her sister is Senator Galucci’s wife. The princess has a slight drinking problem. One glass of sherry and she’s off to the races. My heart goes out to the poor thing. She’s never invited anywhere anymore. Her brother-in-law gave her the apartment—the poop is, she had to go to a priest and swear by the Virgin Mary to stop shoplifting from Bendel’s.”

Dobbs did not look at all the way Cardozo would have imagined a professional society gossip. With his dark eyes and lithe build, his curly hair beginning to gray, he looked the sort of a man who made his living as a mercenary on battlefields, not in drawing rooms. What he sounded like was something else.

“The Duke and Duchess de Chesney?” Cardozo asked.

“They’re British, of course; the best sort of British. Never pull rank. Marvelous conversationalists—always in demand. They’re in Paris because Countess Rothschild is dying and wanted to have someone entertaining around while she’s fading. Now, to me that says a great deal.”

“Debbi Hightower?” Cardozo said.

“She claims to be an actress-hyphen-model, but I doubt she could act her way out of a birthday cake at a stag party. Poor child; some people should not do cocaine. Off the record, I’ve heard that she’s a call girl.”

“Do you know any of her johns?”

“Well, I’ve seen some very sheepish-looking gents stopping on her floor.”

“Recognize any of them?”

A suggestion of color crept up Gordon Dobbs’s cheeks. He lifted a porcelain teacup and sipped. “I wouldn’t feel right naming—No, you have to ask her. I’m sorry I brought it up; it’s not my business.”

Cardozo moved right along. “Will Madsen?”

“The rector of the church on the corner? He’s done wonders bringing in people for lunchtime services, and their concerts are a joy. He’s an absolute gentleman, never talks religion. I respect that in a man of the cloth, don’t you?”

This man’s asking me what I respect? Cardozo thought. “Fred Lawrence?”

“Does income tax returns for some very glam people. I must say he’s worked magic for me—IRS hasn’t audited me in seven years, and that’s a world’s record.”

Dobbs’s livingroom had a cool, cavelike comfort. One wall was shelved, with discreet track lights pinpointing terra-cotta idols and figurines, beaten gold masks, carved bronze and ivory, painted fragments of pottery. Dobbs was obviously a collector. The fireplace was carved marble, and curtains of silk and peach velvet made the windows here seem taller than in six.

“Baron Billi von Kleist?” Cardozo asked.

He wondered if there wasn’t an instant’s hesitation before the reply came.

“Billi’s a marketing genius, and quite close to the White House. The first lady—I kid you not—the president’s wife was at his apartment for dinner two months ago. And of course the designs he markets are truly imaginative—though I must say this latest line of his takes a little getting used to.”

“Notre Dame?”

“I don’t have to tell you, Lieutenant, that any young man in a torn Saint Laurent with punk green hair singing songs like “We Are Going to Kill You’ is utterly harmless. That whole punk drag thing is strictly for Middle America. He’s Scientology, never goes near drugs or alcohol. He’s always on tour—you never see him in the building. At the moment he’s having an affair with the wife of Senator Behrend of Nebraska. They’re at the Aga Khan’s resort in Sardinia.”

There were taps. Detective Sam Richards’s feet clicked on marble as he moved from the foyer with its black-and-white checkerboard floor back into the light pooling by the terrace. He stood holding a teacup, staring out at the view.

“Phil Bailey?” Cardozo asked.

“Phil’s president of NBS-TV—utterly unpretentious—more a businessman than an artistic type, but just as much at ease talking to David Bowie as to King Juan Carlos. His wife’s a charmer. She could have been a concert harpist, but she gave it up to marry him. She’s Israeli, but very polished. I love Israelis like that. And I hear the son’s a gifted architect.”

Cardozo caught just an edge, like a blade winking under a sleeve: Dobbs didn’t like Jews, made exceptions, had no idea that Cardozo was a Portuguese Jewish name: probably feeling damned liberal about it, Dobbs was giving him the condescension he reserved for Catholics.

“Hank Doyle?”

Dobbs lifted his hands. A gold wedding band flashed. No other finger jewelry. “What a horrific tragedy. Hank’s wife and I used to have long talks in the elevator. She told him he had to choose, it was snort or Charlayne, and he chose snort. Now he’s at the Betty Ford Clinic—but seriously, do you know anyone who’s recovered from coke? It’s just too cheap and too available. And now all this crack nonsense. Dreadful.”

A bell rang. Cardozo’s eyes went toward the foyer.

The front door opened and a thickset six-foot-tall blond man in overalls walked in, pocketing a key. He had a slight limp, the sort that shrapnel-wounded veterans had brought back from Vietnam. His nose had a bump as though it had once been broken.

Dobbs turned. “In the master bathroom, Claude, the porcelain faucet.”

The man vanished down the hallway.

“Who was that?” Cardozo asked.

“Claude? He’s the handyman. I have a leak.”

Cardozo’s and Richards’s glances met.

Sam Richards rapped on the open bathroom door. The handyman glanced up from his work, his forehead wrinkling when he saw the open wallet and shield.

“Detective Sam Richards, twenty-second precinct. Where were you Saturday, Claude?”

Loring crouched there, frowning, then pulled himself very slowly to his feet. He laid a wrench across the sink.

There was a silence while the two men stared into each other’s eyes, appraising each other.

Richards was looking at a broad-faced man in his early thirties, thick-bodied, with blond hair, sideburns, a moustache—a man who moved with all the ease of a stone wall learning how to walk.

Loring ran a soiled finger beneath his blond moustache. “Saturday I was crashing at a friend’s.”

“All day?”

Loring’s chest pushed against his T-shirt, showing ridges of gymnasium muscle. He nodded.

“Where were you Sunday? And yesterday?”

“Same place.”

“Can anyone vouch for that?”

Loring opened his mouth … and then clamped it shut. His eyes were red-rimmed, as though they hadn’t seen sleep in a long time.

“Claude, you’d better tell us—for your own sake.”

“What’s my sake got to do with it?”

“There was a killing here Saturday.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“You have a key to the apartment where the body was found.”

“Me and a few other people.”

“We’re talking to them.”

Loring shook a Camel from the crunched pack in his hip pocket.

“Who was this friend whose place you were at, Claude?”

“You going to pester her? Look, I just had a fight with my roommate, the turd threw me out. It’s hard enough finding a place to sleep in this crappy town without you guys barreling in and scaring the shit out of her. What’s she going to think, you bust down her door asking if I killed some poor bastard?”

Richards folded his arms across his vest, and the sleeve of his brown suit rode up, exposing a new Seiko on his wrist. “We’re just asking her were you there, Claude.”

Loring picked up his wrench and stood slapping it into his palm. “Does she need to know about the killing?”

“Damn,” Richards said, slamming down the brakes, “look at that.” A dark green van, sporting a huge logo of a blue jay, had parked by a fire hydrant. Richards regarded fire hydrants as a police parking preserve.

“Tennessee license,” Cardozo said. “Wouldn’t you know.”

Richards found a hydrant on the corner of Sixth and Thirty-third and parked with three expert twists of the wheel. They threaded their way through sidewalk jungles of potted palms and corn plants; the jungle was for sale at ridiculous prices—two hundred dollars a tree and up—and the green foliage was thick enough to give sanctuary to an entire Vietcong brigade. The pavement was steaming in the freak summer warmth. This was the wholesale flower district, and the real estate industry, ready to boom the walkups in the area, had christened these blocks FloHo.

Loring’s friend and alibi lived in a Civil War loft building with World War I paint peeling off the limestone-arched doorway. Cardozo found the button with part of a business card wedged into the name slot: FAYE DI STASIO ASSOCIATES. He pushed, and after a second push a buzzer screeched back and the glass door released with a click.

They began the climb up the rickety steps. The air in the stairwell pressed like a blanket soaked in hot water. A dark-haired young woman waited on the fourth-floor landing. It seemed to Cardozo there was something hurt and bitter in the way she was standing there, defending her door.

“Faye di Stasio?” he asked.

She smoked her cigarette and she just stared and let ashes drift down toward the floor. “Who’s looking for her?”

“Police.” Cardozo showed his shield, introduced Richards.

“The place is a mess.” She let them pass.

A television was going. The room was steeped in the aroma of negligence, and the air smelled like an old sofa.

“You had a guest over the weekend?” Cardozo put the question in a carefully natural voice, as though it would be the most normal thing in the world for this woman to tell Vince Cardozo all about the men who shared her sleeping space.

Her gaze came up level to his. “Who’s in trouble—him or me?”

“Not you. Maybe not him either.”

“I’m having some coffee—could I offer you some?”

Cardozo glanced at Richards. Richards nodded.

“Won’t you have a seat?” Her words were strangely ladylike coming from a woman with dirty bare feet.

Cardozo couldn’t believe the poverty of the space: stained, crumbling walls, laths poking through plaster like exposed bone; window curtains decaying in the city’s acid air; chairs with fractured legs bound in mover’s tape.

The two policemen picked chairs that looked safe.

Cardozo let his eyes prowl the apartment. A sewing machine had been set up in the kitchen; cloth toys spilled out of three-foot cartons stacked beside the bathroom; cat food in a bowl by the door was growing a two-day-old skin. An air-conditioning unit pumped noisily in a rear window. Beyond the burglar gates tips of scraggly sumac rose in the soot-blackened courtyard.

She brought three mugs of coffee.

“A man called Claude Loring stayed with me.”

“What times was he here this weekend?” Cardozo asked.

She lit a fresh cigarette and held it to one side, her elbow on the table and her wrist angled back. “Late Friday night till this morning.”

“What do you mean, late Friday night?”

“Well, maybe it was Saturday morning. The sun wasn’t up.”

“He was here straight through?”

“Right up there.” She pointed to a loft bed that had been amateurishly built over the kitchen.

“You were home all weekend?”

A silence went on too long. She nodded again.

“Never went out?”

“I was working. Maybe I went for coffee, cigarettes.”

“So how do you know he was here all the time?”

“The longest I was out was ten, fifteen minutes. He’s like a bear—sleeps two, three days in a row.”

“You’ve known him how long?”

“Oh, we go back a few years.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I run my own business—creative toys for pets.”

He picked up a stuffed mouse sitting on a table: the eyes opened like a doll’s and a squeal came out of it.

“You made this?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Pretty,” he said. He didn’t quite mean it.

Her face lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. “I’m really a cloth-sculptor. The business is temporary, till I get my exhibit.”

The phone rang and an answering machine cut in. “Hello. You have reached the office of Faye di Stasio Associates.” The voice was hers. “Please leave your name and phone number and a member of our staff will contact you.”

There was a beep and then a man’s voice, gruff. “Hey, Faye—it’s me. Pick up.”

She threw back her coffee and crossed the room and snatched up the receiver. “I’m sorry,” she said after listening a moment, “we had some trouble. It won’t happen again.”

“What sort of trouble?” Cardozo asked as she came back to her chair.

“The van broke down. Nothing could go out Saturday. Today everything’s ready and our dealers are claiming they lost the holiday trade, they want to cut back on their orders. What a business.”

“Claude must be a help to you.”

“Yeah. Claude’s great.”