Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

12

“I SHOULD BE ANGRY AT you,” Dr. Eric Corey said.

“Why?” Babe was sitting in a smock on a table covered with paper roller in the doctor’s examination room.

“For one thing, you woke up while I was in Bermuda. Made me cut short my vacation. For another, you’re in such damned good shape you’re almost a false alarm. There’s not much I can do for you. Nature seems to be handling the hard stuff.”

Tallish, with a deep tan that set off his aquamarine eyes, Dr. Corey had a bedside manner that matched his voice: gentle, perhaps too gentle to be completely trusted. As he examined her he was slow and careful not to hurt her.

“You’re my pet project. I’ve sunk seven years into you.” He rotated her ankle. “Feel okay? Better than yesterday?”

“Much better.”

“That?”

“Ouch.”

“Just a pin. We want to be sure your nerves are waking up. Wiggle your big toe.”

She made an effort. The big toe responded with a twitch.

“Good girl. Cross your legs.” He bonged her knee with a rubber hammer.

Her leg bounded up.

“You’ve got fine reflexes, ma’am, and they’re getting finer, and one of these days they’ll be just about normal—for a woman your age.”

“Doctor, how old am I?”

“That depends when you were born.”

“But am I older than when I went into coma? Or did my body and mind just stay in a deep freeze?”

“Interesting question. Might take a philosopher to answer it—or a lawyer. Hey, see the shape your ligaments are in? Not bad—not bad at all. We walked you a mile every day so they wouldn’t shrink.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank your gene pool. You’re a robust woman. All we need to do now is build up your strength, exercise your muscles, feed you. How’s your appetite?”

“I’m dying for some decent food.”

“Good sign. We’ll move you to solids gradually. Your stomach’s shrunk. We have to stretch it slowly. No lobster Newburg in the first month.”

Her eye went to the wheelchair. “When will I be able to walk?”

“We’ll have you on crutches in a few weeks, and in a couple of months you should be able to make it on a cane.”

“Months!”

“Maybe sooner.”

“When can I leave the hospital?”

“We’ll see.” He made a notation on a clipboard. “How are you feeling—mentally, emotionally?”

“Angry to have lost seven years. Curious to know what caused my coma.”

His eyes flicked up at her. “Hard to say seven years after the fact. Could have been a bump on the head, or drugs—”

“Insulin?”

He laid down the clipboard. “What gave you that idea?”

“A police detective.”

He looked at her. “Police aren’t M.D.’s, you know. The only people their pathologists examine are dead.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s all you’re going to get from me because it’s all I know. Now hop into that chair and let’s skedaddle you out of here.”

13

A LITTLE AFTER 2:00 P.M., a truck with the logo Andy’s Dumping, Astoria, pulled onto the Fountain Avenue landfill in Queens. Its load had been held at a depot in Manhattan over the long weekend. The truck searched, proceeded farther down the area, found a dumping place under the slow drizzle, and reared up: there was a sudden intensification of the stink in the air as the debris slid down glistening into a pile on the earth.

Ten years ago there had been nothing here but Jamaica Bay, a finger of the Atlantic. Now there was a land built of garbage, raising its rotting mountains to the sun’s heat, pressing its soft shore into the ocean. All day long an unending cortege of dump trucks, escorted by clouds of hovering gulls, had been depositing their contributions.

Since Sunday an army of men and women in police rain gear had laboriously explored this new land. For over thirty-six hours they had sunk five-foot steel probes into the muck, turned pieces of slime, climbed over ridges and valleys, peered into the rusted refrigerators and stoves that dotted the gray moonscape like wrecked space probes from another planet.

With a deafening mechanical scream the truck changed gears, swung in a wide U, and lumbered back out of the dump area.

Seagulls came screaming down.

Patrolman Luis Estevez, on loan to the 22d precinct from Special Services, was checking piles on the north strip of landfill. He walked a distance, moving his eyes in short arcs along the garbage until some object or shape caught his attention, moved closer to poke, then moved on.

In the mound just left by Andy’s Dumping something half glimpsed caused him to turn around and take a second look.

About five feet up the new embankment there was a black glistening lump poking through the compacted putrefaction, and he wondered.

Boots sloshing, he made his way toward it.

The mountain changed shape beneath him, sucking him down.

He was six feet away before he could see the black plastic clearly, close enough to suffocate in the stench, and he had to get even closer to see the crisscrossing steel reinforcements, the paper-sheathed wire twist that held the neck of the bag shut.

He thought a minute, then bent down, placed both rubber-gloved hands around the neck and gave a strong, slow tug. Gradually the mountain yielded up the bag. The patrolman carried it down to the older landfill, where the footing was solid. He took a knife from his hip and with hurried grimness cut into the plastic.

A mass of red pulsing with maggots slopped into the open.

Meat—nothing but meat. This in itself was unusual.

His eye caught something white. With rapid efficiency he probed his blade along the ridge of white.

His face stiffened.

He knew what he had found, and it made him cold inside.

He ran back to his blue-and-white and radioed his supervisor. Police radio traffic was insecure and newspaper scavengers routinely listened in, so he kept the message brief and general. “Hey Lou,” he told his lieutenant. “It’s Estevez. I found something that’s going to interest you.”

It was early afternoon. The rain had almost stopped and Sheridan Square was swirling with Jersey drivers and pedestrians and pigeons all hell-bent on ignoring the traffic lights.

Cardozo approached the threshold of a darkened doorway and stepped into the coolness of the Pleasure Trove adult boutique.

The air smelled of banana incense. There was no sound except the whir of an air conditioner, the whisper of a radio turned to an easy-listening station. He looked around the shop.

A mousy-looking man was browsing nervously through a rack of high-gloss pornographic magazines. Two teenaged girls suddenly broke into giggles at a display case of tickler-dildos.

A salesman sat behind the counter, staring at the Times crossword puzzle, chewing somberly on a pencil eraser.

“Excuse me.” Cardozo stood at the counter and reached into the brown paper bag that held the plastic evidence bag. He opened the plastic bag and lifted out the leather mask.

“Ugly mother,” the clerk remarked. “You want to return it?” He was a slender man in his middle forties with graying brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard and moustache.

“No, but I’d like to get some information.”

“We don’t wholesale.”

“No sweat. This is item 706 in your catalogue, right?”

“Not anymore it isn’t. Last time we advertised any of these was in the March catalogue.”

“But you sold this mask?”

“Is there some kind of problem with it?”

“I’d like to know who bought it.” Cardozo quietly laid his wallet open on the counter.

The salesman’s glance went down to the shield and came back up, altered now into another sort of glance. He picked up the mask, turning it in his hands, studying it doubtfully.

“This isn’t a Pleasure Trove product. It’s a rip-off. These masks are made by Nuku Kushima.”

“You say that name like I should know it.”

“She exhibits in SoHo galleries, which makes her masks art. Ours are home entertainment. Hers go for thirteen thousand dollars. Ours go for three hundred fifty. We sued, but she has a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts and the court decided the case fell under the Warhol principle—remember, Warhol signed two cans of Campbell’s soup and sold them as art?”

Cardozo didn’t remember: civil suits weren’t his beat. “Could you show me the difference between your masks and hers?”

“Ours are machine-stitched on commercial leather stitching machines and hers are hand-stitched by couture seamstresses—so they don’t hold up.” The salesman turned the mask inside out and pulled at a seam. “Her stitching is at quarter-inch intervals. Ours is sixteenth-inch. She uses nylon thread, we use gut. Gut can take eight times the tension. See how this has already started pulling apart? This baby has sure seen some action, hasn’t she.”

“Are these masks popular?”

“The price doesn’t make them too popular—but tourists from New Jersey are buying them since that murder.” Predictably, the body in six had leaked to the press; and just as predictably, the press had gotten most of the details wrong. “We sold a few today.”

“How many?”

The salesman went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a drawer. He thumbed through invoices. “Three.”

“Can I see those?”

Cardozo reviewed the sales slips: there were two on charge cards. One sale was for cash. Joan Smith, 3 Park Avenue, 350 plus twenty-eight eighty-eight sales tax.

He thought about that. “Joan Smith paid cash?”

The salesman made a trying-to-remember face. “First sale today. She was here at five to ten, real impatient because I didn’t open the door till ten. Some people are that way. It says ten to ten on the door, they gotta get in at five of.”

“You always take the customer’s name on a cash sale?”

“Sure, we send them our catalogue.”

Cardozo laid himself ten-to-one odds there was no Joan Smith at 3 Park Avenue; twenty-to-one if a 3 Park Avenue even existed, it was an office building. “Do you remember what she looked like?”

“Average height, nice figure. She was dressed real SoHo punk. You know, designer garbage bag. Blond hair, natural I think; she was wearing a big studded leather belt, celebrity shades.”

“What do you mean, studded belt? Like s.m.?”

“Like high-trash fashion. A lot of big fake gemstones.”

It seemed strange to Cardozo: first sale the day after a holiday weekend, anxious customer, close to four hundred dollars cash in hand. As though a leather bondage mask was one of those items you absolutely couldn’t start the day without, like cream in your coffee or gas in your tank or your first cocaine fix.

“Got a phonebook?”

“Sure.” The salesman hefted a dog-eared copy of the Manhattan White Pages over the counter.

The book listed plenty of J. Smiths and a few Joan Smiths, none at 3 Park Avenue. There was an N. Kushima on Prince Street in SoHo, and Cardozo wrote down the number. “I’d like to buy one of your masks,” he said.

“We’re sold out.” The salesman’s expression held a hint of guarded helpfulness. “But since you’re NYPD, I could let you have the store sample—I’ll mark it down to a hundred.”

“Do you take VISA?”

“Sure do.”

Cardozo held out his hand. “My name’s Cardozo. Vince Cardozo.”

“I’m Burt.”

Cardozo called N. Kushima from a booth, said he was police and needed to talk with her.

“I’ll be home another half hour,” she said.

The woman who opened the door to him was a small Japanese with a face like a walnut; she was wearing jeans and sandals and a paint-splattered hospital smock, and her hair was tied up in a checked handkerchief.

“Come in, please.” The only thing Oriental about her was the face. Her accent was pure New York, an incongruous mix of Jewish and street Hispanic. She smiled crookedly.

He stepped into a loft flooded with yellow light. The sun had come out, and the space was lush with potted plants on windowsills, on tables and stands; an eight-foot avocado tree was growing out of a ceramic urn on the floor.

The paintings on the walls were six-foot canvases with barbed wire nailed to them, Adidas jogging shoes and babies’ mittens and burlap sacks impaled on the barbs, red paint and lucite-encased viscera spewing from the sacks. The intestines looked real, as though they’d come from a butcher shop or autopsy room.

She stood there looking at him looking at the paintings.

“Yours?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Is that the way you feel, or just the way you want other people to feel?”

“Ours is a savage age. I’m sure a policeman sees sights far more dreadful than any of these. I’m having a cup of miso, would you care for some?”

“No, thanks.”

“Please.” Her gesture encompassed chairs and scattered floor pillows. She sat in a peacock chair, drew her legs up, and looked at him. “How may I help you?”

He took the two leather masks from their bags and laid them on the floor in front of her. “Do you recognize these?”

A frown of caution darkened her forehead and she sipped carefully from her cup. With her foot she pushed the Pleasure Trove mask contemptuously aside. “That one is a vulgarization.” Her foot hovered above the other. “This one is mine.”

“How can you tell?”

“How does a mother know her children? I made it. It is me.”

“How many did you make?”

“Only five. Five is my limit—above that I am a whore.”

“Who bought the mask from you?”

She was sitting there, sipping her miso.

“I know nothing of who buys my works.”

“I want the buyer.”

“My gallery handles all sales—Lewis Monserat on Prince Street.”

Cardozo carried the masks through narrow SoHo streets filled with rushing, lurching traffic.

The Lewis Monserat Gallery on Prince Street was quietly impressive, with a high skylighted ceiling, a calm atmosphere, and no visitors.

The receptionist sat at a large desk, a prim woman wearing a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She smiled at Cardozo’s approach, but when he showed his shield and asked to speak with Mr. Monserat the smile was gone.

“I’ll see if he’s in.”

She went into another room, closing the door behind her.

Cardozo used the time to look at the exhibit, paintings of faceless figures who seemed to get smaller and lonelier as the canvases got larger.

The woman reappeared and ushered him into the rear office.

A man with a head of black hair that looked as though he’d marinated it in olive oil rose from behind a desk and held out a hand. “Lewis Monserat. How can I help you, sir?”

He was wearing a very well-cut, expensive Italian suit. His large, expressive eyes gave Cardozo permission to drop into the studded leather chair.

Cardozo took the Kushima mask from the brown paper bag and placed it on the desk.

“You sold this. Who bought it?”

Monserat reached out and lifted the mask. He turned it over, then inside out. When he finally spoke, his voice had quiet resonance. “This has a slight resemblance to the work of my client Nuku Kushima, but—”

Cardozo cut him short. “Miss Kushima has identified the mask. Who bought it?”

Whatever had been cordial in Monserat’s manner abruptly vanished. The silence in the room was suddenly flat and harsh.

“It’s against gallery policy to release our client list.”

“I’d appreciate your reversing that policy.”

“Wait one moment, please.” Monserat rose and went out into the gallery. Cardozo could hear him making a phone call.

On the desk, a nineteenth-century carriage clock struck four delicate chimes.

Monserat returned. “You cannot compel me to release that information without a court order.”

“Who says?”

Monserat’s gaze met his levelly, coldly. “My attorney—Mr. Theodore Morgenstern—I’m sure you’ve heard of him?”

“Would you get him on the phone, or do I need a court order for that too?”

Smiling acidly, Monserat picked up the telephone. He dialed, handed Cardozo the receiver, and sat back.

“Ted Morgenstern,” an officious voice said.

“It’s Vince Cardozo.”

He and Morgenstern had collided in courtrooms, in judges’ chambers, before grand juries: often enough to hate one another’s guts. A public yet shadowy figure for over three decades, Morgenstern had made his reputation and fortune acting as broker in business deals, criminal justice deals, political hostage deals, international arms and spy deals, real estate deals—and those were just the deals that were public knowledge.

“We’re investigating a capital crime,” Cardozo said. “It wouldn’t take me two hours to get an order compelling disclosure of that list.”

“Then I suggest those would be two hours most well spent, Lieutenant. It’s about time you so-called law enforcers learned to operate within the law.”

It took less than twenty minutes for Cardozo to learn that he wasn’t going to get a court order compelling diddly-squat—not in two hours, not in twenty. His judge, Tom Levin, was not in the court, not in chambers, not reachable. Levin’s secretary, sounding harried over the phone line, said she’d do her best to page him. Her voice was not hopeful.

As Cardozo touched the receiver down into the cradle, Carl Malloy burst into the office. He was moving like a bouncing ball, his hair lifting from his forehead and flopping down again.

“Vince, we’ve been going crazy, where you been, we’ve been beeping you all afternoon.”

“The hell you have, I just put fresh Duracells in that beeper this morning.” Cardozo’s glance went to the unopened package of Duracell batteries lying on top of the fives. “I’m losing my marbles.”

Malloy’s eyes met Cardozo’s, keen and wild. “Vince, we found the leg.”

There was an instant of absolute silence and Cardozo’s stomach had the crazily exhilarated sensation of free fall.

“Where?”

“It was out in a landfill in Queens, the truck picked it up Sunday from Beaux Arts Tower. We traced the truck, we traced the garbage, we traced everything, it all dovetails.”

“What shape’s the leg in?”

“Call Dan Hippolito, he’s looking at it right now.”

Just as Cardozo reached for the phone a button began blinking and a voice from the squad room shouted, “Vince, phone call for you, on three!”

“Who is it?”

“Some guy.”

“Jesus, can’t anyone around here take messages?”

There was a crackle and Dan Hippolito’s voice came on the line. “Vince, I’ve looked at this new bone material. It’s human, a right male thigh. How are you, by the way?”

“I’m fine. What have we got?”

“We can type the blood from the marrow, it’s O, same as John Doe. There’s some skin tissue, pretty ragged, an educated guess is that it’s Caucasian or very light black or Hispanic.”

“In other words the whole human race.”

“It’s not Oriental. There’s a mark at the fracture, characteristic of a rotary blade, and there’s an approximate match with John Doe, but it’s approximate, because bone tissue was compressed in the compactor.”

“Is there anything you can see that the killer wanted to hide: a birthmark, a tattoo, a deformity?”

“Vince, there’s no way you’re going to get a birthmark or tattoo off of this. It’s hash. This new tissue isn’t going to tell us why the killer wanted the leg off. So far as deformity is concerned, the femur is reasonably intact, God only knows how, and there are no breaks, no bends, no bone pathology. There’s a fungus in the fat cells of the marrow, but hell, this meat’s been rotting for three days and it’s been buried under every parasite in the city of New York. So take it from there, Vince, that’s the best I can do.”

Cardozo felt a wave of disappointment rising in his gut. “Thanks, Dan.”

“Give my love to your daughter.”

“I’ll do that.”

14

CARDOZO PHONED MELISSA HATFIELD and asked her to have a drink with him after work.

“I can meet you at six fifteen at Morgan’s,” she said. “Fifty-third and Sixth. Know the place?”

Cardozo knew it. Ten years ago Morgan’s had been Reilly’s, the watering hole for his precinct. Reilly’s was the corner lot that had not sold out to Rockefeller Center. For four decades, dwarfed by gleaming million-dollar art deco skyscrapers, the two-bit, two-story grungy bar with blinking Schlitz signs and Miss Rhinegold posters in the window had been a zit on the face of Prometheus. Cardozo had loved Reilly’s: not just because the owner had stood up to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., but because the drinks weren’t watered, because you could get corned beef and cabbage from eight in the morning till four the next morning, and most of all because of the customers: maintenance men, Rockettes on break from the Music Hall, secretaries and off-duty police and firemen, people who did a dollar’s work for a dollar’s pay and didn’t expect to get famous or bribed or laid for it.

Those days had ended when Reilly died and Reilly’s became Morgan’s. The zit became a beauty mark. White wood siding went up over the crumbling brick, green New England shutters got nailed to the siding, red ruffled checkered cafe curtains appeared on bronze rails. Cardozo had gone back once and once had been enough.

Tonight he arrived five minutes early. He wanted to see Hatfield come in, wanted to watch her for that one moment before she knew he was looking.

Morgan’s was doing the kind of business Reilly had only dreamed of: SRO. Cardozo had to push through the shoulder-to-shoulder Happy Hour crowd.

The bartenders worked in front of five-foot pyramids of the booze of eighty nations. They had pirate moustaches and Jack LaLanne bodies, and their red-checked open-necked shirts matched the cafe curtains. They came on to the female customers, bending close to catch the order, and gold chains twinkled in hairy cleavages. With the male customers they were macho and curt.

“What’s yours?” a six-foot linebacker radiating cologne snarled.

“Scotch and water,” Cardozo said.

He left a dollar tip—he knew what this city did to a guy’s budget and he believed even shitheads deserved a decent wage. There was no thank you.

Attitude, Cardozo thought—New York’s gift to the world. Everyone was handing it to everyone. Park Avenue socialites stepping into limos, Puerto Rican checkout girls in the supermarket—their eye met yours with that same unlovely, unmistakable message: drop dead. It was turning into a worm-eat-worm town.

Cardozo took his drink and looked for a place to sit. There were electric hurricane lamps on every checkered tablecloth. Faces bent into the circles of light—faces struggling to look sophisticated, faces struggling to look beautiful and successful, faces running on cocaine and faces beginning to blear out on Stolichnaya. Faces trying to connect with faces.

He found an empty table; it looked like the last one in the place. On the wall where Reilly had hung the first dollar bill the bar had ever earned and the bounced checks of famous clients there was a nautical compass and a brass barometer. A clock ding-donged the time in ship’s bells. Cardozo wanted to cry.

A short, slight girl with long dark hair and an order pad tried to interest him in the day’s special fish. He told her he was waiting for a friend, and even though he wasn’t ready he sensed the girl worked on a percentage and he ordered another drink.

Melissa Hatfield stepped through the twin brass doors. She was carrying a very full ebony crocodile attaché case and she was wearing a gray dress belted tight enough to give it a little flare at the hips. She went straight for the bar. Men moved aside and hopeful eyes traveled with her and she knew it. She passed directly under the glare of a hurricane lamp and there was a moment when the gray of her dress became red roses, orange roses, green leaves, thorns. She looked good under the light and she knew that too. She smiled at the barman.

The body-built pirate ignored the bald gent who had been waiting five minutes for a Rob Roy. He poured Melissa Hatfield a white wine on ice, topping it with a showy, dead accurate shot from the soda gun. He handed her the drink, smiling.

Melissa Hatfield paid and turned. Her glance swept the pandemonium. Cardozo rose and signaled with a raised hand. She saw him, smiled, came across the room. Men stepped aside for her.

She dropped the briefcase beside the table. “Three closings in TriBeCa,” she said. “More paperwork than the nuclear test-ban treaty.”

Cardozo couldn’t tell whether she expected sympathy or congratulations. Maybe both. He rose.

“You don’t have to be gallant, Lieutenant.”

“Vince,” he said. “Call me Vince.”

She sat down.

He watched her sip her drink with a sort of elegant disdain and he let his intuition roam. Melissa Hatfield had an aunt in the Social Register and she’d parlayed the connection into a career of putting people down in small ways, selling luxury real estate to hungry overnight millionaires.

“Pretty dress,” he said. “Silk?” He knew it wasn’t.

She knew he knew. “Taiwanese synthetic. It’s trick printed. You’re supposed to see roses in certain lights.”

“It works. I saw them.”

“Bloomingdale’s expected them to be a big seller last year. They weren’t. I got this for eighteen dollars off a gypsy rack on Thirty-second Street.”

It was interesting what people volunteered about themselves. She was telling him she wasn’t dumb about money the way her clients were. She was telling him not to lump her with them. He sensed that was important to her.

“Where do we go from here?” she said. “Dinner and a Broadway show? Your expense account or mine?”

“Not tonight. Tonight’s business.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make my day and buy one of the apartments in Beaux Arts Tower. I could swing a discount for you. You’d add a little safety to the building.”

He noted the controlled tapping of her finger on the ashtray. She had mastered her eyes so they didn’t skitter when he fixed his gaze on her.

“Only rajahs and Philippine dictators are buying into this co-op market.” He moved the hurricane lamp to the wall. He laid a nine-by-eleven manila envelope on the table. It was marked NYPD OFFICIAL BUSINESS PENALTY FOR PRIVATE USE $50.

Her glance went down to it.

“I took another look at six this afternoon,” he said. “How often are the unsold apartments cleaned?”

“I don’t know, but I can check.”

“Did six look cleaner to you than the others—except for the obvious difference?”

“Except for the obvious difference, no. It looked about the same.”

“Is the air conditioning left on in the unsold apartments?”

“Never. That wastes electricity. I come in a half hour before the showing and turn it on.”

“Did you turn on the air conditioning in six?”

“No. I didn’t have time to get to the building early.”

“But it was on.”

“Somebody must have—left it on.”

They both understood she was talking about the killer.

“How many times did you show six this last month?”

“Only yesterday.” She added, “Manhattan real estate’s soft these days.”

“Melissa, the card you gave me says you work for Beaux Arts Properties. Who’s Balthazar Properties? They’re putting up a coop on Lex and Fifty-third and they have the same phone number.”

“That’s us too.”

“Why do you have two different names?”

“We have eleven different names and we have eleven different companies. It’s not illegal. We limit the liability. If one building springs a leak or goes bankrupt it doesn’t endanger the other properties.”

“One company for each property?”

“I’m not Nat Chamberlain’s accountant. I know of eleven companies. I know of eleven properties in this city that are secured as of closing business today. I doubt that’s the whole picture.”

“You like working for Nat Chamberlain?”

“I wouldn’t work for an employer I didn’t like—any more than you would.”

“What makes you so sure I wouldn’t?”

“You’re not the type.”

“You seem to think you know how to size people up.”

“I’m not in your league, but I’m good.”

“What can you tell from a face?”

“Whether the sale will go through.”

“Take a look at the pictures in that envelope.”

He saw her hand wanting to hesitate, and he saw her not allowing it to. She opened the envelope and drew out the two glossies. Her eyes went from one to the other and narrowed.

“I take it this is the dead man?”

“You should have my job.”

She shifted the photos around on the table. The face in the photographs had a classic male beauty, and death gave it a patrician glaze, like a Roman head in a museum case.

“He’s handsome,” she said finally. “Too bad.”

“If he’d been ugly, it wouldn’t have been too bad?”

Her gaze came up to his. “If he’d been ugly he wouldn’t be dead.”

“You know something I don’t.”

“This isn’t how ugly people die. This is how ugly people kill.”

Cardozo sat back and sipped his Scotch.

She asked, “Was he as young as he looks?”

It interested Cardozo: people kept seeing everything but death: he was young, he was good-looking, that was what they saw. “The coroner thinks he was twenty-two, twenty-three.”

Her eyes didn’t tip anything, but the silence did. A silence that long meant she was having to think. She picked up a glossy again. “Christ. Why are they all dying so young?”

“Who do you mean, they?”

“People like him, young, dying …” She was in her mind and didn’t speak for a minute.

Someone young died, he realized. Someone close to her. “Tell me something, Melissa. You looked at those pictures and whatever you saw, you couldn’t make it go away. What was it?”

She let out a breath. “It’s hard to put into words. Sometimes you see somebody but you never realize you’re seeing them because they’re always in the same context.”

“Like who?”

“Like the man at the newsstand; the doorman you pass on the way to the subway; the woman who runs a bookstore and you wave as you go by. And then one day you see that person lifted out of their context—and you don’t know who they are or why you should even think you remember them. You stare at them and they stare at you and it’s almost hostile, like hey what are you doing off your shelf? My work isn’t like yours, it doesn’t call for a trained memory. I see a face, I do business with the face, if the deal falls through I forget the face. But with this one there’s something … I feel I could have seen him. But it didn’t have anything to do with work.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. There’s no feeling of time connected to it.”

“Where?”

“In an elevator.”

“What elevator?”

“I don’t remember. All I get is elevator.”

“Beaux Arts Tower?”

“No. Definitely not. Anything to do with our buildings I remember. But if I saw this man, I was off guard, not paying attention. It’s as though we looked at each other, smiled, and agreed not to say hello. You know the way it can be with strangers in the city. What I mean is, this was friendly but the distance was very, very controlled. I wish I could be more specific, but all I get is that kind of a question mark feeling.”

“Melissa, I want you to do something for me. Keep those photographs. Keep looking at them. Keep putting that face into every elevator you walk into. In one of those elevators you’re going to remember. And as soon as you do …” He reached into his wallet, thick with a wad of VISA carbons, and fished out one of his cards. “Those are my numbers. Work phone on top, home phone on the bottom. Call me. Day or night.” He smiled. “But not too late at night.”