VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Nothing about selling apartments in the more than ten years Melissa Hatfield had been selling them had ever been easy. Real estate in Manhattan was a buyer’s market and this man knew it.

  “What does the maintenance run?” he asked.

  “Seventeen fifty.”

  He coughed—a hacking sound that came from his chest. “Cold in here,” he said.

  Noon sun beat against the French doors, but an icy current was flowing through the air.

  The man’s wife called him to the terrace. “We can put a garden there.”

  She was pointing. Short and dark-haired, she was wearing battered blue clogs, a pullover, and a red sweater tied around her neck by its sleeves. The I’m-rich-and-I-don’t-need-to-impress-you look.

  Melissa Hatfield wondered if this was their idea of how to spend Memorial Day weekend: Let’s go tour some upmarket co-ops and pretend we’re interested in buying. “We can arrange terms,” she said. “Ten percent down will hold it.”

  The man was staring into her eyes so determinedly she felt an impulse to laugh. He was trying to do it all at once: come on to her, turn down the apartment, maintain his image as a high roller.

  “You’re very kind,” he said.

  His wife crossed toward the hall, looking over the cherrywood cabinets in the kitchen, swinging them open, flicking them shut with careless slams. “Could we see the rest of the apartment?” she said.

  Oh well, Melissa Hatfield thought. It’s only a beautiful Sunday on Memorial Day weekend and they got me here for nothing.

  She led them down the hallway. The bedroom door was shut.

  Melissa Hatfield stopped. The door shouldn’t have been shut. She opened it. The room was in darkness, needles of sunlight jabbing in through the Levolor blinds. The blinds shouldn’t have been down.

  She stood motionless, senses suddenly alert.

  There was a faint pumping sound, like an animal catching its breath. The air smelled of something foreign, something vaguely sweet and unpleasant. Cold sweat came out on her body.

  She crossed to the window. Shadows hovered like nets. The air conditioner was on full blast. She changed the setting and turned the plastic rod controlling the blinds.

  In the brilliance of daylight Melissa Hatfield saw him.

  He was lying on the floor, naked, hooded in black leather. A Vietnam peace symbol had been gashed into his chest. One of his legs had been taken off and the fresh stump of thigh looked like a cross section of beef carcass in a butcher shop showcase.

  Melissa Hatfield’s throat froze up solid and then a cry tore itself out of her, rocketing through the silence.

  Seven miles away, a man lay on the beach.

  He was one of four thousand souls who had journeyed from city homes down to the Brooklyn shore that day, schlepping brave little pieces of portable comfort with them. He had stretched out on an orange beach blanket, and his head was resting on a rolled blue bath towel. His eyes were shut. A yellow umbrella shaded him. A Sony transistor radio was piping whispers of Little Richard into his ear. Little Richard was his twelve-year-old daughter’s choice, not his. He would have chosen Sinatra or Tony Bennett. But it was meant to be his daughter’s day, not his, one of those rare days that father and daughter actually got to share, so he’d let her choose the music.

  His wallet was stuffed inside his shoe, rolled into the blue towel under his head. There was a shield in his wallet. A gold shield, New York City detective.

  An off-duty cop was required to carry his gun with him at all times, but Vince Cardozo was in violation of regulations. He’d decided he wasn’t going to wear three pounds of nickel stuffed into his bathing trunks like an extra dick or wrap the gun in a towel and leave it on the beach when he got around to trying the water. He’d left his .38 Smith & Wesson at home.

  He’d closed his eyes, telling himself it was just for two minutes. Three minutes tops. Almost immediately he’d sunk down into peacefulness, letting go of the world. Where he was, he wasn’t hearing Little Richard. Wasn’t hearing the waves. Wasn’t smelling ocean salt or beached kelp or wind-borne suntan oil or sand that had been broiled to a sparkle.

  At that moment Lieutenant Vince Cardozo was happy. He didn’t know anything. Not who he was, not where he was. Didn’t know that the sun was glowing, didn’t know that the wind had a shine on it like twelve trumpets. Didn’t know that his daughter, Terri, who had been sitting beside him twiddling the dial of the radio, had got bored and wandered off along the beach.

  Lieutenant Cardozo’s breathing became softer and softer. There was almost no movement in his chest. The coiled strength relaxed. The breeze stirred his hair, medium brown, beginning to gray at the temples.

  White clouds sailed across the blue sky. Long swells tilted the sea up and down, sending out pinpoints of light. Out by the horizon the wind-driven whitecaps were edged in glinting gold. With a squawking cry gulls swooped in a great flock down toward the great bursts of leaves of the beachfront trees.

  Something buzzed. It was a patterned buzz, a nagging seed of nightmare, two shorts and a long, pitched like a dentist’s drill.

  Vince Cardozo’s hand awakened, located the page boy on the blanket beside him, swatted it dead.

  He opened his eyes, pushed himself up on one elbow, forcing back his shoulders, opening wide. A stocky man, he prided himself on being well-built for someone of forty-odd summers. If his forehead was a bit high and smooth, he had thoughtfully balanced it with a devil-may-care moustache, giving himself, he hoped, a face sleek enough to detract from the blocky torso.

  He squinted and saw Terri coming over the sand. She had dark hair and brown eyes like his and a turned-up nose, not like his. He waved at her. With the hand not holding a Diet Pepsi, she waved back.

  God, he thought, she’s so damned beautiful in that yellow swimsuit. Only twelve, tall for her age, of course; she carried herself with a grace that was impossible not to watch.

  She settled down onto the blanket, looking at him with a serene humorous interest.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  “Not so far away as you.” She had faintly freckled skin and there was a challenging tilt to her chin. In back of her the sky looked like no sky he had ever seen.

  The pager buzzed again.

  Behind her eyes was a sudden flare-up of disappointment.

  “Dad,” she said. “Answer it.” Like her mother. Same tone, same look of good-humored annoyance.

  She poked through her little plastic change purse and a minute later he felt the soft pressure of her fingers pushing a quarter into his hand. She looked up at him for a moment out of those bottomless brown eyes.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  She kissed him.

  At the refreshment stand he dropped the quarter in the phone and dialed Manhattan. He recognized the voice that answered. “Flo, it’s Vince.”

  “Hiya, Vince, we got something for you.”

  Cardozo had no trouble finding the address. Beaux Arts Tower stood on a street of boutiques and French bakeries and antique dealers and $200-an-hour psychoanalysts, a narrow skyscraper thrusting sharply above the neighboring landmarked six-story brownstones.

  The building had a glassy, upscale look. He remembered the ads: Beaux Arts Tower. The luxury of the 21st century now. Built in the air space over a midtown museum, it was prime Manhattan real estate, occupied by many of the city’s movers and shakers.

  A large pale blue Plymouth was double-parked in front of the building. Light vibrated on the car. As Cardozo approached, the passenger door swung open and Mel O’Brien, chief of detectives, stepped out.

  In his gray gabardine suit, conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes, the chief looked like a fund-raiser for a prep school.

  “Very handsome,” Cardozo said.

  “What’s that?” The chief’s face was set in hard, impatient lines.

  “You, Chief. Handsome.”

  Chief O’Brien was a man of fine bearing, age fifty-sev
en, tall, blue-eyed, with silver hair and a pink face. An angry pink face. “What kept you?”

  “Traffic.”

  “I’ll be right back,” O’Brien told his chauffeur, a detective sitting at the wheel. If you were the chief of detectives, even your driver had a gold shield.

  Cardozo and Mel O’Brien approached the building.

  The chief moved with a swing to his shoulders. “Hope I didn’t pull you away from anything important.”

  Cardozo answered, “You did.”

  The chief was solemnly reading his face. “What are you working on?”

  “The usual. A couple dozen homicides.”

  “Farm them out. There’s something upstairs I need you to take over right away. Murdered man in a mask.”

  “Mask?” That interested Cardozo. You got jaded in this job. A murdered man was ordinary, a mask wasn’t.

  “Bondage mask, executioner’s mask, some black leather shit. Someone killed him and left him naked in one of the for-sale apartments. Took one of his legs.”

  “Ouch.”

  “You get your own task force. Borrow anyone from any precinct you want. Put together your dream team. Whatever they’ve got ongoing, they’re liberated. And they’re on overtime, starting now.”

  Cardozo went into the lobby, a cool art deco arcade of white Carrara marble and patinated bronze. There were man-high corn plants, lushly potted, and deep leather sofas, unoccupied. A sign said ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED. A nervous-looking man in a green uniform sat by the switchboard. He looked over and said, “’Scuse me, who are you visiting?”

  He had an accent that was half Puerto Rico, half New York street, and as he came forward Cardozo saw that the right side of his face was streaked with scars that had probably been fresh yesterday.

  “I’m visiting the corpse.”

  The doorman stopped, startled, and an Irish sergeant came around from behind the switchboard. “That’s okay, Hector. Lieutenant, this is Hector—Hector, this is Lieutenant Cardozo. You’ll be seeing a lot of him.”

  “How do you do, sir.” The doorman, embarrassed, lifted his cap and revealed a wig that a dime store window dummy would have been ashamed to wear.

  “Floor six, Lieutenant.” The sergeant held the elevator door.

  In the vestibule on six, a sergeant from the 22d precinct stood guard outside the apartment. He was young, pale, and acting harried. He glanced at Cardozo’s shield and handed him plastic gloves.

  Cardozo twisted his fingers into the gloves. They popped on with revolting kissing smacks. As he entered the apartment, another sergeant wrote Cardozo’s name, shield number, and time of arrival into the crime scene log.

  The naked body, bathed in sunlight, was stretched flat on its back on the floor of the master bedroom.

  The calm blue eyes, staring through a black leather mask that hugged the entire skull, were fixed on the ceiling, their gaze flat and mysterious. The mouth was locked behind a steel zipper.

  Cardozo crouched for a closer look.

  The mask, with its uncanny power, disturbed and fascinated him. If ever an object had suggested absolute evil to his mind, it was that crudely stitched piece of dyed hide, combining the anonymity of the executioner with the obscenity of a pig’s snout.

  The body was in good shape—well-exercised, lean; it was Caucasian, the body of a man in his twenties.

  With the stopping of the heart, gravity had pulled the blood to the lower half of the body, causing dark blue discolorations of the parts lying downside.

  The chest was crisscrossed with scratch marks. They made a circle with a Y in it, the old sixties peace sign. None appeared to have penetrated the muscle layer.

  The victim’s right leg had been removed. From the look of the shear marks on the startlingly white femoral bone, a buzz saw had done the job.

  On the foot of the remaining leg a tag had been tied to the big toe. The tag was a standard department form, number 95. The first officer on the scene had filled in the time of discovery and relevant details.

  Dan Hippolito, the medical examiner—a slim man in his middle fifties with receding, graying hair—opened the zipper of the mask to examine the dead man’s lips and gums.

  “When do you think he died?” Cardozo asked.

  “Not more than twenty-four hours ago … not less than twelve.”

  “How was he killed?”

  The M.E. looked closely at the throat. “Pending autopsy, I’d say fracture of the cervical vertebrae.”

  In New York City, Cardozo reflected, strangling was not one of your more usual methods of dispatching your fellow man. “I have a feeling this one died high. I want to know the drugs.”

  “We’ll give his blood a good spin. Should have all prescriptions for you tomorrow.”

  A photographer was snapping pictures of the dead man. A detective was taking measurements with a pocket tape, calling out figures for his partner to mark on the crime scene sketch. A technician was outlining the corpse in chalk.

  A team from the Forensic Unit was taking scrapings from the floor. Cardozo recognized Lou Stein from the lab, hunkered down searching for blood particles or traces of semen.

  “What have you got, Lou?”

  Lou glanced up. He was two weeks back from his Florida vacation, and his face was still mahogany beneath a fringe of straw-colored hair. “Ask me tomorrow.”

  Down the hallway fingerprint men armed with flitguns and makeup brushes pumped dark powder on windowsills and doorknobs, dusting for latent prints. A sergeant stood writing in a notebook.

  “You were the first on the scene, Sergeant?” Cardozo asked.

  The sergeant nodded. He looked all of twenty years old: freckles, blond hair, a cowlick.

  “Who called you here?”

  The sergeant tilted his head toward an overweight man in slacks and a peach Lacoste shirt standing near the doorway. “The super.”

  “The super found the body?”

  “No. She did.” Now the sergeant was nodding toward a good-looking, light-brown-haired woman who was taking a light from the super’s Zippo. “The sales agent. She was showing the apartment to those two.” He indicated a woman with a red sweater tied around her shoulders and a man in a striped polo shirt.

  “Anyone else seen the body that I don’t know about?”

  “No one’s left the apartment since I got here.”

  Cardozo crossed to the civilians and introduced himself. The super gave his name as Bill Connell, and Cardozo asked if he had mentioned to anyone what he’d seen in the apartment.

  The super shook his head. “Not a soul. I made the phone call and came right back.”

  “I’m going to ask you people not to talk about anything you’ve seen here. Not that a man is dead, or naked, or wearing a mask, or missing a leg. We want to keep those details secret because aside from the people in this apartment, only the killer knows about them. The success of the investigation is going to depend on your cooperation.”

  The civilians were nodding, promising. They always nodded, they always promised, and in Cardozo’s experience they kept the promise for no more than twenty-four hours.

  He asked the would-be buyers short questions and listened to long, meandering answers: they were in the market to buy a Manhattan apartment, had chosen this day to drive in from New Rochelle. They were obviously scared and he had the impression they didn’t know anything more than they were saying. He got their names and address and had them fingerprinted and let them go.

  Cardozo asked Connell if there were any electric saws in the building.

  “Sixteen and seventeen are being remodeled into a duplex. There may be a saw up there.”

  Cardozo sent a sergeant to search 16 and 17. “Who has the key to this apartment?”

  “Till it’s sold you open it with the passkey,” Connell said.

  “Who has the passkey?”

  “It’s kept in the personnel office,” Connell said.

  “All personnel have access?”

 
Connell nodded.

  “Any of the residents have passkeys?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Anyone besides personnel have access to the personnel office and the passkey?”

  “I do, Lieutenant.”

  Cardozo looked at the sales agent. She impressed him with her lack of embarrassment or uncertainty.

  “My name’s Melissa Hatfield. It’s my job to show the apartments. Sometimes there are prospective buyers on very short notice and I have to let myself in.”

  He noted things about her skin texture, voice tone, details of clothing. She wore a white dress with large woven holes in it and it looked on her the way dresses were supposed to look on fashionable women and rarely did.

  “Did you let yourself in today?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have to ask you some questions. Would you mind waiting in the lobby?” Cardozo turned to the super. “I’ll need a list of building personnel and the worksheets for the last two days.”

  “I have those down in the office,” the super said.

  Cardozo and Connell were passing through the Beaux Arts garage. A shadowless fluorescent glow flickered across Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, Mercedeses, and Rollses.

  “Is that garage door kept locked?” Cardozo asked.

  Connell nodded. “Garage users have electronic remotes to open it.”

  “Do the staff have remotes?”

  “We have to. For deliveries.”

  Cardozo asked how the garage was guarded.

  “Monitored from the lobby.” Connell pointed to a closed-circuit TV camera poised on the cinderblock wall.

  They passed the laundry room. Two washers, two dryers.

  “Residents use those?” Cardozo asked.

  “The maids use them.”

  There were two elevator entrances in the basement corridor—one marked Passenger, one marked Freight. A third door was marked Authorized Personnel Only. Cardozo opened it.

  “Garbage compactor.” Connell grinned. “State of the art.”

  “What happens after the garbage is compacted?”

  “It goes into those state-of-the-art bags.”

  Cardozo took a moment fingering one of the black plastic bags. The plastic was sturdy stuff, a good eighth of an inch thick.