Текст книги "Privileged Lives"

Автор книги: Edward Stewart

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

An eye of light gleamed in the dark. Cardozo adjusted the lens of the projector. The image cleared, showing late afternoon New York sky, pale and cloudless. Hard bright sun splashed down onto the Fifty-third Street pavement, across the deco facade of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and the marble-faced lobby of the high rise next to it.

Cardozo was going over yesterday’s hidden-camera photos of Beaux Arts Tower.

On the wall of his cubicle, men and women hurried toward destinations he could not see. Examining their images, Cardozo was fascinated: reading the truth and the falsehood in the human face—that was the most challenging puzzle of all.

He pushed a control button and the carousel turned, dropping a new slide into the projector.

It was a photo of a fortyish man with thin sandy hair and a lightweight tan suit. The man was entering Beaux Arts Tower, but he was looking behind him.

The man’s skin was tinged with shadows: the bones in his face showed bluishly and gray speckled his hair. In his hand he held a briefcase. It looked expensive, genuine pigskin.

The man gave Cardozo a long steady gaze.

It was unmistakable: the gaze was coming straight at him.

Cardozo switched off the projector.

The feet of his chair let out a spine-jangling shriek as he slid back on the linoleum floor.

He stood in darkness. He swung open the door, walked into the light of the squad room, poured himself a cup of Mr. Coffee coffee. There was no Sweet ’n Low.

He went back into his cubicle. He closed the door. He switched on the desk light and looked down at the log that Tommy Daniels’s photographic team had kept.

Each person going in or out of the building was recorded in the notebook and given a number. Some of the entries had names, where names were known. The license plate of every car pulling up at the door was recorded, as was the license of every vehicle entering or leaving the garage. Each entry was accompanied by a time, and each number cross-indexed to a photograph of a person or automobile.

Cardozo reviewed the list.

The number of the man in tan was 79. No name. Cardozo wondered. Tommy Daniels had sworn that no one would make the truck, but Cardozo knew how men sitting on a plant could get bored, how they could get careless.

Cardozo snapped off his lamp, turned the projector on, looked at 79 again.

Something in 79’s eyes met Cardozo’s almost like an act of defiance. Shit, Cardozo thought. He made the truck.

It was much later.

Girders whipped past as Cardozo drove over the Brooklyn Bridge: the tires of his Honda went from asphalt to exposed steel infrastructure and the humming in his ears jumped up an octave.

He took the first exit, swinging down into Brooklyn Heights. A rough warm wind was bending the leaf-heavy trees as he parked.

The rain had made up its mind to stop. There was moonlight in the sky. The street was dark, but it was a warm darkness, not the dread-inspiring night of Manhattan. Streetlamps cast islands of illumination. Noble nineteenth-century town houses, merchants’ homes, framed the tree-lined street. The scene had the order and unreality of a stage set.

A church bell chimed the late hour. In the distance, a group of well-dressed young Jehovah’s Witnesses was returning to their dormitory.

Cardozo lifted the lock of the hip-high wrought-iron gate at number 42, noting that it was purely decorative, nothing protective about it. It swung back smoothly. Trees overhung the flagstone walk.

Judge Tom Levin, in pajamas and a bathrobe, opened the door.

“Hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” Cardozo said.

“Hell no. Come on in.”

Slippers slapping on carpet, Levin led Cardozo into the sitting room. Cardozo sat in a corduroy-covered chair.

Levin’s fifty years had given a firm set to ascetic features that in youth had probably seemed soft. “Scotch?” he offered.

“Why not.”

The judge rose, got glasses from the sideboard, tonged ice into them, added Johnnie Walker. Cardozo watched him.

The glow of a streetlight fell in leafy patterns through the tall window.

The judge brought Cardozo’s glass back to him. The judge sat and smiled and raised his glass in an unspoken toast.

“What brings you here, Vince? You sounded angry on the phone.”

“I’m on the Beaux Arts Tower killing.”

Levin arched an eyebrow. “Lucky you.”

Cardozo explained that he needed a court order to get Monserat’s list of purchasers of the Kushima bondage masks.

“Who’s Monserat’s attorney?” Levin asked.

“Ted Morgenstern.”

Levin rose and stood by a window staring down into the small garden behind the house, where ferns grew under the oak trees.

“That prick,” he muttered.

Judge Levin was a Harvard grad, an ex-liberal. He kept a licensed thirty-eight revolver, and he kept writs, subpoenas, and court orders in blank at home, so he could execute them at any hour of day or night.

He crossed swiftly to his writing desk. The forms were there, in the second drawer, awaiting only the specifics, which he now bashed in on an old Olivetti portable.

Judge Levin handed Cardozo the order. “This should add a little misery to his life.”

15

“I TOLD BRONSKI WE have a witness placing his cab in the garage of Beaux Arts Tower—so who was his fare and why did he falsify his sheet and put Fifty-fourth and Sixth?” Detective Carl Malloy was wearing a Kelly green vest today. “Bronski swears the sheet is correct: he says he had to take a pee, so he went to the building to use the men’s room. He didn’t want to mention it to us because it’s against building regulations to, you know, use the place as a facility. He would never have parked his cab in the garage except it was a holiday and he expected most of the residents to be away for the weekend.” Malloy hesitated.

“I still get the feeling he’s holding back. I went back over his taxi sheets. On the day of the killing and for three days before, he had the same fare—a pick-up at Broadway just before noon and a drop-off at Fifty-fourth and Sixth at twelve-thirty. Even allowing for midday traffic, that’s a hell of a long time.”

Something clicked in Cardozo’s mind. “Where on Broadway?”

“Sometimes the sheet says two twenty-five, sometimes two fifty.”

“The Federal Building’s down there,” Ellie Siegel said.

“So’s the World Trade Center,” Cardozo said. “And Sam, you said those are the same days Debbi Hightower was in the Toyota show?”

“But the show was from eight at night till ten thirty.” Siegel frowned. “What are you saying, she slept over?”

Richards looked at the others. “Didn’t Gordon Dobbs say she’s a hooker?”

“What’s the mystery?” Greg Monteleone gave a little grin. “Debbi’s been getting free cab service after she turns her hotel tricks, and Bronski’s been ripping off Ding-Dong to get a little daytime nooky.”

“Maybe he’s her pimp,” Carl Malloy said.

“Do pimps have intercourse with their hookers?” Ellie Siegel asked.

“If they’re good girls, once a month,” Sam Richards said.

“A white pimp?” Monteleone said. “Give me a break.”

Irritation began to gather in Ellie Siegel’s eyes. “Greg, white pimps exist.”

“In this town?”

For an instant Ellie Siegel just stared at the ceiling.

“On the other hand,” Monteleone conceded, “I don’t think it proves Bronski and Debbi are chopping up naked guys.”

“You don’t know that, Monte,” Malloy said. “You don’t know these two.”

“I know they’re dingbats.”

“Dingbats don’t murder?” Siegel challenged. “Greg, how the hell did you ever make detective?”

“They promoted me before affirmative hiring let you in.”

“Carl,” Cardozo cut in, “will you keep after Bronski, see about those fares?” Heaving his body up out of his chair, he signaled Monteleone and Richards to come with him.

In the corridor a detective was interviewing a hysterical female complainant who had received a ransom note for a missing dog. In the squad room Detective O’Shea was doing day duty, and Detective Moriarty stood at a cabinet looking for a case folder.

“Hey Vince,” O’Shea called, “Lou Stein sent over a lab report. It’s on your desk.”

There was a lot else on Cardozo’s desk: a two-inch stack of new departmental orders and a blue paperbound book that looked like an addendum to the state telephone listings, in fact a revision of the penal law pursuant to last trimester’s state supreme court decisions.

Greg Monteleone picked up the penal code and shoved his mouth into a lopsided grin. “What did their honors decide about that guy getting a blow job in the van at the Holland Tunnel?” He flipped through pages. “What’s sodomy, seven seven oh nine?”

“Consensual heterosexual sodomy’s legal,” Sam Richards said.

“Not in public.”

“A van on a public thoroughfare is private property with a reasonable expectation of safety from search and seizure—State of New York versus Offernaty, 1985.”

“Not if the door’s open,” Cardozo said. “State of New York versus Moony, 1986.”

“Who gets a blow job with the door open?” Richards asked.

“This guy does.” Monteleone’s large Mediterranean nose came out of the booklet. “Marvin van Peters, do you believe that for a name?”

“It’s a gag for Screw magazine,” Sam Richards said.

“Give me that book,” Cardozo growled.

Monteleone was hooting and jumping. “Innocent, he’s innocent! Hey, fellas, hit the tunnel!”

Cardozo grabbed the penal-code update. “If you gentleman would be kind enough to give me a little undivided attention?”

He patted the slide projector.

“Know how to work this thing? Today, instead of watching Policewoman reruns, you, Greg, and you, Sam, are going to look at these.” He held up a box of slides. “Each time you come to a face you recognize, you enter the name here in the logbook, okay?”

He showed them the logbook from the surveillance truck at Beaux Arts Tower. Turning to yesterday’s loose-leaf pages, he explained the logging system.

“And when you’ve finished, you’re going to take the license numbers and names from the log and run them through the National Crime Bureau.”

He tossed the penal-code update back to Monteleone.

“Enjoy.”

Cardozo took the lab report with him and hurried down the marble staircase. Nodding to the duty officer at the portals, he left the station house, turning into the alley at the side of the precinct. He walked around his Honda and crawled in behind the wheel. He slammed the door and took a moment to read the lab report.

Lou Stein had found no match between Loring’s, Stinson’s, Gomez’s, or Revuelta’s prints and any found at the murder scene.

The Lewis Monserat Gallery was deserted except for the well-groomed receptionist, who looked up at Cardozo from the Gabriel García Márquez paperback she was reading at her desk. Today he noticed that she was in her late forties.

“Mr. Monserat will not be in this morning,” she said.

“All I need is the list of buyers of the Kushima mask.”

“Only Mr. Monserat can give you that.”

“Miss,” Cardozo said, “this is a court order.” He handed her the document.

“I’m not a lawyer, I don’t understand this.”

“You read English.”

“There’s nothing I can do without Mr. Monserat’s permission.”

“You can hand that list over right now, or you can phone your lawyer and tell him to meet you in twenty minutes at the Tombs.”

She flinched and went to a mahogany filing cabinet. After a moment’s lip-biting she pulled out a sheet and handed it to him.

The list of buyers of Nuku Kushima’s artwork Bondage IX showed three institutions: the Franklyn Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Walter Kizer Museum in Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in New York; and one private collector, Doria Forbes-Steinman, with a Manhattan address.

“Miss Kushima told me there were five masks,” Cardozo said.

“There were four made and four sold.”

“I’d like to look in that file.”

“You have no right to—”

Cardozo moved around her and searched the K’s. He flipped through invoices for woodcuts, oils, conceptual pieces, and lithos. He slowed down at Leather Sculptures.

The gallery had placed Kushima Body Halters with three institutions; Blade-Tipped Black Leather Boots with two institutions and two private collections; Executioner’s Gloves with one institution and four private collections. Razor-Studded Vest had been a slow-moving item, one private collection; AC-Powered Nipple Clamps With Leather Thong had gone to two museums and two private collections.

Bondage IX (mask) had four purchasers. The sheet was freshly typed.

“How many masks did you make?” Cardozo asked.

Nuku Kushima’s slender little body blocked the doorway of her loft. “Four.”

“Yesterday you told me five.”

“I could not have said five because I made only four. Four is my artistic limit.”

He stared at her inscrutable lying little face and wished to hell he’d carried a hidden tape recorder when he’d questioned her. Not that the tape would have had any legal value, but at least he’d have had something to confront her with. As matters stood, he had nothing, and she knew it.

“Would you be willing to repeat that in court, under oath?”

There was nothing in her eyes: no truth, no falsehood. Only a Zen emptiness. “Naturally.”

Cardozo made a detour to the Mr. Coffees and poured himself a cup that his stomach didn’t need but that his nerves craved.

Ellie Siegel sat at a battered desk trying to negotiate over the phone with a computer in Washington, D.C. She raised her eyes to Cardozo’s and they were curiously and wonderfully green.

“Hey, Vince,” the desk lieutenant called. “Two slashings last night. One in the one eight, the other in the two one.”

Cardozo treated himself to two envelopes of Sweet ’n Low. “What’s it got to do with us?”

“Looks like a serial killer. O’Malley thinks the perp might have chopped a hooker in the two two.”

“Not in the last six months—but tell O’Malley he’s welcome to look through our files.”

Cardozo shut the door of his cubicle and began dialing the phone numbers on the Monserat sales sheet.

The curator of the Franklyn Collection in D.C. told him the Kushima mask was on exhibit in the basement, in the New Trends show. An assistant curator at the Walter Kizer Museum in L.A. said the mask was presently on view with recent acquisitions.

The New York Museum of Contemporary Arts had a recorded message announcing the screening times of D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm, part of a retrospective honoring Lillian Gish.

Cardozo took his coffee into the squad room and sat on the edge of Siegel’s desk. The computer at the other end of the phone line had put her on hold, and she gave him a weary smile.

“Ellie, you used to teach art.”

“That’s why I’m a cop.”

“How can a bondage mask be art?”

“Because critics and dealers say it is.”

“Then why isn’t a toothbrush art?”

Her eyes sparkled with mischief and intelligence. “Vince, you’re a beautiful Philistine. A toothbrush is art, has been since the MOMA exhibit in seventy-six.”

“An artist can do anything and call it art?”

“Some artists would call the murder in Beaux Arts Tower conceptual art.”

Cardozo was thoughtful. “You think an artist did it?”

“He or she would have to be a very dedicated artist, a rebel against the commercial establishment.”

“Why do you say that?”

“No signature. No commission for the dealer. Dealers get up to sixty percent.”

Cardozo took a long swallow of coffee. “Doria Forbes-Steinman seems to have gone into art collecting in a big way.”

“Sure, she’s what art critics call a major force.”

“I haven’t kept up with her since the Scottie Devens trial. Have you?”

Detective Siegel flicked hair out of her face, casually. “A little. I’m the same as any other supermarket shopper stuck in the checkout line. I grab a National Enquirer from the rack.”

“I don’t read the Enquirer, so fill me in.”

Siegel lowered her long, dark, curling lashes. “She and her husband aired their differences in civil court, so Doria’s past is now part of the public record. Turns out she’s a charming colleen, Vince, a breath of Killarney from deepest Transylvania. Her full name is Doria Bravnik Forbes-Steinman. Bravnik is Yugoslavian, like her. Forbes is the name of the British foreign service schnook she claims was her first husband.”

“He wasn’t her husband?”

“A gal like Doria stirs up vicious rumors. The issue’s moot, because once her British passport got her to New York, she divorced Forbes and married Steinman.”

“What does the Enquirer say about Steinman?”

Ellie looked embarrassed, as though it was an admission of depravity that she knew so much rumor. There was something about Siegel that seemed unsoiled: her face was sophisticated, cynical even, without being malicious. It was that quality that had drawn Cardozo to her.

“If some of those Wall Streeters are overnight millionaires,” she said, “Steinman’s a five-minute billionaire. But it isn’t enough nowadays just to have money. You have to do something to get written up in Manhattan, inc., so Doria and Steinman collected modern art. They played artists like stocks and they bet lucky. By the time of the Devens trial they’d built up what the press calls an important collection. Doria left Steinman six years ago and took half the collection. She hasn’t divorced Steinman, because divorce would disinherit her two Forbes children, who Steinman agreed to support when love was in bloom. The kids are stowed in a Scottish boarding school at his expense. Steinman sued Doria for her half of the collection and the lawsuit had the art world lined up in warring camps.”

Across the squad room a telephone jangled. Detective DeVegh, receiver balanced between shoulder and ear, called out, “We got a squeal. Who’s up this morning? You catching, Ellie?”

“Ellie’s on a case,” Cardozo said, curtly, and DeVegh gave him an excuse-me-for-breathing look, and Cardozo asked Siegel, “Tell me about the Steinman lawsuit.”

“Vince, you really have time for this b.s.?”

“I want to know everything about these people, including what underarm deodorant they use.”

“Lewis Monserat, the art dealer, testified for Steinman. Doria threw the slop bucket at Monserat, accused him of being a little bit more than an art dealer.”

“How much more?”

“Doria said Monserat was a certified necrophile, a pederast, a porno film maker, a child prostitution ringleader, a Nazi collaborator who turned his own mother in to the Gestapo. Monserat’s lawyer pointed out that Spain was one of the few European countries not occupied by Nazis, and she waffled and said maybe Monserat just murdered his mother.”

“She said this in court?”

“Affirmative. Doria had her day, irrelevant and inadmissible though her testimony may have been. The one legally damaging shot she did get off was to claim Monserat used her to bid up his own clients’ paintings at auctions.”

“Did Monserat sue?”

“He threw the slop bucket back. Said Doria’s maiden name was Schinsky, she was a Belgrade hooker, she was already married to a certain Mr. Bravnik when she married Forbes bigamously and got her exit visa out of the Eastern bloc. If Monserat was telling the truth, the marriage to Steinman was bigamous too.”

“Did Doria sue?”

“No one sued, they all gave interviews and went on talk shows. Doria got more exposure than Monserat, because by then her name had surfaced as the other woman in the Scottie Devens trial. The smart money was betting Doria was the reason Scottie tried to put his wife under.”

“I was betting that too,” Cardozo said quietly.

Siegel flicked a dark-eyed glance at him. “So? It looked like a pretty sure thing to me too. You’re looking unhappy.”

“Just thinking. Is Doria still living with Scottie?”

“Last I read in the supermarket, they were an ongoing item.” Siegel’s smile was a miracle—world-aware and world-mocking but self-aware and self-mocking too. “It’s the real world out there, Vince—it’s a different mind-set: glamour and art and high fashion and beautiful people doing their beautiful thing—not us poor schleppers in the twenty-second precinct.”

“Who got the Steinmans’s art collection?”

“Doria got to keep her half. Including that mask.”

A butler led Cardozo into the livingroom of the Fifth Avenue duplex. The room was large and plush and sunny, with yellow chrysanthemums on the Steinway. The breeze of an air conditioner stirred the folds of dove gray window curtains. Track lights lit three oil paintings of the same cathedral, each panel done in dots of a different primary color, like a monster comic strip.

A woman came into the room.

Cardozo looked at Mrs. Forbes-Steinman, and he saw a statue, its broadly beautiful face smiling at him. She extended her hand: her slightly plump arm was covered with bracelets of light blue sapphires.

“I have great respect for the police.” Her voice was low and cultivated and bore a residual middle-European trace.

He would have loved to have answered, And I have great respect for women who give good head.

“How may I help you?” she said.

“You own a Nuku Kushima mask?”

“Bondage Nine.”

“Do you have it here?”

“Naturally. Would you like to see it?”

“Very much.”

He followed her into a hallway. Through an arch he could see the butler and a girl in a maid’s uniform silently setting a dinner table for twelve.

The mask had been fitted over a wig stand and was sitting on a teakwood pedestal. He noticed a faint pattern of minuscule lacerations around the eyes.

“How did it get scratched?” he asked.

She sighed. “Would you believe the Nicaraguan girl used lemon Pledge and a Brillo pad on it?”

She was standing close beside him and he turned his head and studied her. Everything about her struck him as exact, smooth, artificial, extremely tense. Even her skin, which was a pampered pale olive shade.

“Could I ask you a question?” he said.

She regarded him pleasantly.

“You’re an educated woman,” he said. “You have taste. Why do you own this? It’s ugly, and what it stands for is ugly.”

She laughed, showing white even teeth in the subtly reddened line of her mouth. “I suppose by the same token you could say Picasso’s Guernica is ugly.”

“This isn’t Picasso’s Guernica. This is the facial equivalent of a thumbscrew.”

“Beautiful art is often ugly. I know that sounds like a cheap paradox, but it’s my belief that the point of art isn’t to please, it’s to … arrest.” Her perfume filled the stillness. “I admire a work of art the way I admire a person. It has to take me without my permission, command my attention. The Kushima commands my attention.”

“You bought this through Lewis Monserat?”

Her large, thoughtful eyes came to rest on him. “My husband and I bought it through Lewis Monserat. The court awarded it to me as part of our settlement.”

He took note of the word settlement and realized that Doria Forbes-Steinman had her own way of tilting the truth. “Have you bought other pieces from Mr. Monserat?”

“I’ve bought from a great many leading dealers—Leo Castelli, Andre Emmerich, Ileana Sonnabend, Andrew Crispo when he was still in business. In fact, I came within a hairbreadth of owning the Brancusi head that Andy Crispo sold the Guggenheim; the deal was set, but Andy was in trouble with the IRS, and the Guggenheim offered a half-million more. I said, ‘Andy, I can’t hold you to our bargain, I release you, you need the money.’ There’s a lot of heartbreak in this business.”

“But did you buy other pieces from Mr. Monserat?”

“I’m so tired of being linked to that monster.” Doria Forbes-Steinman sighed. “Yes, I bought other pieces from Lewis Monserat—unfortunately.”

“Why unfortunately?”

“He has fine pieces. But he’s not the sort of man I like to deal with.”

“Why not?”

“In Europe, where I come from, he has a reputation. He’s a criminal. More than that. He’s evil.”

“Is that your way of saying you dislike him?”

“I dislike his deeds. Being a pageboy at Goebbels’s wedding—don’t you think that disgusting?”

“It’s not a crime.”

“Renting bodies from funeral homes—that may not be a crime either,” she said, “but it’s vile. Child pornography may not be a crime in our enlightened era, but that’s disgusting too. Or don’t you have children?”

“I have a child.”

She looked at him, half smiling. “Then we’re in agreement.”

The sky was high and cloudless and the sun was hot on Cardozo’s back. Limousines blocked Fifty-third Street and he had to make his way with a stream of well-dressed men and women into the Museum of Contemporary Arts.

A reception was being held in a room of Toulouse-Lautrec posters.

He skirted the hubbub and went searching for the fourth mask. In a gallery away from the voices and music he found a collection of heads. There were faces of stone and wood and plastic, all caught in glass boxes like vivisections in sterile chambers.

Walking among them, reading from the printed catalogue, he came upon the leather thing he was looking for: Bondage IX, leather and steel sculpture, Nuku Kushima, American, 1941—.

He stared at the face that was not a face: eyeless sockets the size and shape of stitched buttonholes, the lump of nose flattened into a piglike snout, the queasily smooth earlessness beneath the temples, the gash of sealed zipper marking the line where lips should have been.

The mask seemed to communicate a message he could only half understand. He sensed something deeper than terror: the utter willing acceptance of catastrophe.

There was a sudden hollowness in him.

In a moment suspended outside time he heard the zippered scream of a dead man six stories above this very space.

Women’s laughter broke in. The cheerful buzz of conversation flowed around him, corks were popping in another room, waiters were scurrying.

“All that redness around John Doe’s waist and upper thigh and ankle—there had to be some kind of allergen attacking the epiderm. But why those areas and no others? Because that’s where the elastic bands in socks and underpants chafe. Okay, but what kind of allergen?”

Dan Hippolito slipped a slide under the microscope, bent down, adjusted the focus.

“We peel the skin from the waist, the ankle, the upper thigh, study it under the microscope. Behold, granules the size of boulders.”

Hippolito motioned Cardozo.

Cardozo bent over the scope. He saw boulders.

“So we pulverize the skin, spin the particles, and eureka, the foreign substance has a different specific gravity from human skin and we isolate the culprit—detergent.”

Cardozo pulled his eye up from the microscope. “Detergent?”

Hippolito nodded. “Generic industrial grade nameless detergent—killer soap—cheapola of the cheapola—not sold in supermarkets, not even ghetto supermarkets, and the FDA has considered outlawing it. It’s illegal in Canada, illegal in twelve states of the union. In New York it’s iffy but there are jobbers—under investigation by the attorney general—who sell the powder in forty-pound cartons. Now this stuff is so corrosive that dry—dry—it eats through cardboard.”

“So who uses it?”

“Broadly speaking, two sorts of institutions. Prisons and bottom-of-the-line Laundromats.”

By the time Cardozo got back to HQ, Lieutenant Damato was beginning his blotter entries for the four-to-one tour. Of the task force, only Siegel and Malloy were still in the station house. Cardozo called them into his office and told them the medical examiner’s new evidence.

“The victim took his clothes to a cheap Laundromat and used their soap,” Ellie Siegel said.

“Or left the clothes for them to wash,” Malloy said.

Cardozo pushed back in his chair. “So we’re looking for a Laundromat that may or may not be self-service, but also has a dump-your-laundry-and-we’ll-handle-it service. How many Laundromats like that are there in this city?”

Malloy screwed up his face, an expert. “Three, four hundred easy.”

“Get flyers out to all Laundromats in all boroughs.”

“What about Laundromats in Jersey?” Ellie Siegel said. “Hoboken’s nearer than Staten Island.”

“Include Hudson County.”

“Prison,” Carl Malloy said. “John Doe could have been just released or he could have escaped.”

“So? Check the prisons.”

Alone, Cardozo set up the projector and began going through slides.

Behind him, a voice spoke.

“Vincent Cardozo?”

Cardozo turned in his chair. A pudgy young man in an Italian-cut summer-weight gray shantung suit stood backlit against the open door.

“Ray Kane,” the young man said, “attorney-at-law.” He held out a chubby pink hand. He had no visible neck; smooth baby-fat jowls overspilled his shirt collar. The shirt designer’s name was appliqued to the breast pocket, and Kane smelted as if he had baptized himself in cologne.

“How can I help you, Mr. Kane?”

“Today you walked into the legitimate place of business of Lewis Monserat and terrorized his assistant. You threatened to send her to the Tombs and you menaced her with an improperly executed order for seizure.”

“I thought Ted Morgenstern represented Monserat.”

Ray Kane drew himself up. “I am an associate of Mr. Morgenstern’s firm.”

Cardozo got the picture. Ever the true power broker, Ted Morgenstern had sent one of his small fry to handle the niggling paper work.

Cardozo slowly rose to his feet. From a standing position he could see pink scalp through Kane’s thinning razor-cut hair. “Mr. Kane, I’m working.”

“So am I.” Kane held out an official document bearing the seal of the court.

“What’s that?”

“An order demanding return of the list of purchasers of the Kushima mask.”

“On what grounds?”

“Improperly seized, without warrant, no evidence of a crime.” Kane smacked his lips as if he were sucking macaroons off dentures.

“A murdered man, you don’t call that a crime?”

“I warn you, Lieutenant, if you try to link Mr. Monserat’s name to any ongoing criminal investigation, we shall not hesitate to bring slander charges.”

Cardozo picked up the receiver of his phone. “Damato, send me one of the A.D.A.’s.”

Kane stared at Cardozo from contact lenses that were probably meant to change his brown eyes to blue but instead made them look like a very special effect in a sci-fi film.

In a moment there was a knock at the door. “Lieutenant Cardozo? Lucinda MacGill, assistant district attorney.” The young woman held out a hand. Her pale brown hair was cut in bangs, tumbling in back to her shoulders.

“That was fast,” Cardozo said.

“I was downstairs taking a deposition.”

It was the job of assistant D.A.’s to take statements from suspects, and Lucinda MacGill had a stenographer with her, a man in his early thirties, tall and thin with scraggly black hair and a beard to match. He looked like he’d rather be writing sonnets but needed the bread to pay his Con Ed.