VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  He waved to the lieutenant working the complaint desk, then followed two sergeants up the old iron-banistered staircase. The radios buckled to their hips gave off synchronized bursts of static. They were pulling a handcuffed hooker through a door. She was kicking, screeching, beginning to lose her blond wig.

  Things were quiet tonight.

  Cardozo paused at the second floor corridor and watched the sergeants push the woman into the precinct holding cage. She began shaking the bars, screaming that they’d stolen her motherfucking wig and her lawyer was going to kick their honky asses.

  The marble steps leading to the next floor were gritty with ancient filth. On a bench in the hall a detective was taking a statement from an elderly male complainant who had just been robbed at knifepoint on Lexington Avenue.

  “The city’s not safe anymore,” the man was moaning. Cardozo felt sorry for a guy that old and just beginning to learn.

  He entered the Detective Unit squad room. The large office was crammed with metal desks and files and old wood tables. The windows were covered with grills, and the grills and glass had been painted over in an industrial green that almost matched the walls.

  It was late and the room was deserted except for the detective on night duty. “What’s happening?” Cardozo asked.

  “There’s an R.I.P. up on Madison,” Tom Sweeney said. “Two Hispanics seen breaking into a chocolate shop.”

  Cardozo gave Sweeney a look. Most cops did their eight hours and got their asses home. Not Sweeney, at least not lately. He seemed to be in the squad room round the clock. Cardozo had heard rumors that his wife was in the process of leaving him for another woman. He felt sorry for the guy.

  Sweeney said a ten thirty—reported stickup—had come in fifteen minutes ago: a Caucasian with a .38 had walked into the Bojangles on Sixtieth and taken four hundred dollars, wallets, rings, and wrist watches. No casualties.

  The room smelled of coffee. Cardozo made his way to the source of the smell. “What kind of idiot would do that? Anyone sitting in Bojangles, the watch has got to be a Timex, the ring’s tin. Criminals used to have brains in this city.”

  An evil-looking Sola for charging radio batteries sat on a padlocked cabinet. The cabinet was where detectives weary of carrying three pounds of metal could stow their weapons. Two Mr. Coffees sat quietly steaming beside the Sola. The squad split the cost of cheap drip-grind and kept the coffee makers working around the clock. Cardozo poured a Styrofoam cup of brew that looked as though it had been jelling in the bottom of the pot for two days. He ripped open an envelope of Sweet ’n Low and let the powder silt down into his coffee.

  “What’s that pross in for downstairs?” he said. “They made loitering a crime again?”

  “Offering to sell coke to Lieutenant Vaughan.”

  Cardozo made a face. Another hooker trying to sell talcum powder to a plainclothesman. He couldn’t believe Vaughan would bother with the arrest, the paperwork, the aggravation. “What’s Vaughan want with bullshit like that?”

  “You know what the CP says: we gotta increase productivity.” Sweeney nodded toward the bulletin board where the two-week-old word-processed directive from the police commissioner’s office had been push-pinned. “Budget time in Nueva York. El capitano wants to goose those percentages.”

  Cardozo’s eyes went across the deserted room. The detention cage, butted into a corner, was empty for the moment, with a two-year-old copy of Penthouse magazine spread facedown on the bench.

  He crossed to his office, a cubicle with precinct green walls.

  His desk was the same gray metal as the desks outside. The phone was an early touch-tone model that Bell had discontinued in 1963; it had had a crack under the cradle since ’73 and the tape on the crack got changed whenever it dried up. The typewriter was a model-T Underwood that you couldn’t have donated to a reform school.

  He frowned. A dismal-looking pile of departmental forms had accumulated around the typewriter since Saturday. Today was supposed to be his RDO, his regular day off; he was supposed to be in Rockaway with his little girl.

  He sat in the swivel chair and saw that the top piece of paper was a hand-scrawled note: CALL CHIEF O’BRIEN AT HOME A.S.A.P., followed by the captain’s home phone and the initials of the sergeant who had taken the call.

  Cardozo dialed the Woodlawn number.

  As the phone rang he glanced through the rest of the paper. Mostly it was a bunch of fives, DD5 supplementary complaint reports, the triplicates that detectives filled out summarizing progress on ongoing cases. As unsolved crimes got stale, regulations required a minimum of two reports annually. The fives mounted up—the older the report, the thicker the fistful of blue forms stapled to it.

  A voice cut into the ringing. Gruff. “O’Brien.”

  “Chief? Vince. Just got your message.”

  “Vince, the goddamnedest thing. Remember that Babe Vanderwalk business seven years ago—the husband tried to—”

  “I was on your task force. I remember.”

  “Damned if Babe Vanderwalk didn’t come out of her coma. The hospital phoned. And then a lawyer phoned. Represents the family, they don’t want any fuss, they don’t want any publicity.”

  “Mazel tov to the Vanderwalks. Can she talk?”

  “She can talk. She’s normal. Lost a little weight, joints a little stiff, but she’s all there.”

  “Does she remember anything?”

  “Go see her and find out. I’m delegating you.”

  Cardozo exhaled loudly. “Chief, you just handed me a one-legged John Doe.”

  “You know the background, Vince. Go to Doctors Hospital, get a statement, and close the case. Five minutes.”

  “I can’t control what she’s going to say. Her statement may open the case.”

  “Get a statement that closes the case. Go up there tomorrow. They wake those patients up at six, seven o’clock. You don’t have to wait for visiting hours.”

  “Chief, I honestly—”

  “Thanks, Vince, I knew I could count on you.”

  The receiver went dead in Cardozo’s hand. He looked at it a moment and then slammed it back onto the cradle.

  Though it was seven years in the past, the Vanderwalk case still stoked old resentments in him. He’d worked his butt off collecting solid evidence, he’d avoided the minefields of the Miranda and Esposito decisions, the jury had convicted, and then on appeal the D.A. had accepted a plea bargain that let the killer off.

  Except if Babe Vanderwalk was awake, the killer wasn’t a killer anymore.

  Anyway, that’s tomorrow, Cardozo reminded himself. Today’s today.

  He pushed Babe Vanderwalk Devens out of his head and began skimming fives. They were drearily familiar: ripped-up hookers, businessmen with no ID dead in trash barrels, family fights where somebody had taken out a knife or gun, stewardesses jumping out of their Third Avenue shared apartments—or had they been pushed? They were like old friends to him. He’d been staring at some of them for over ten years.

  And they all concluded with the same words: NO NEW INVESTIGATIVE LEADS SINCE LAST REPORT.

  The cases kept pouring in, dead bodies that had all been human beings, every one of them entitled to live till accident or natural death claimed them and, failing that, entitled to justice. It was his job to see they at least got justice. No homicide case was ever closed till it was cleared, but fewer than a third were cleared nowadays. That meant a backlog of over five hundred in the two two alone. A lot of killers were walking around on their own cognizance out there.

  His eye went guiltily to the filing cabinet. The bottom drawer was wedged shut against an overflow of departmental orders that he had yet to get around to reading. The precinct was drowning in paper. Paper had become the measure of all things. It got you promoted, got you demoted, decided your salary, your rank, your standing in the department’s eyes. Paper was where it was at.

  “Hey, Vince.” Tommy Daniels from the Photographic Unit came bounding through the door
and clamped a hand on Cardozo’s shoulder. “Got the pictures you wanted of the ten eighteen.” He thrust out an envelope.

  Cardozo slipped the glossies out of the manila envelope. It surprised him how young the dead man was: perhaps twenty-two years old, very blond, with medium-length, shiny hair. The eyes were long-lashed, the chin strong, almost challenging, with a cleft to it, the lips full but not quite pouting. A handsome boy. He seemed to be contentedly dreaming.

  “Beautiful, hey?” Daniels said.

  Cardozo looked at his photographic expert’s thick black hair, his chartreuse shirt that lit up three walls of the cubicle, his face shining with an eagerness to please that would have been cute in a cocker spaniel.

  “You go for guys, Daniels?”

  “The shots, Lieutenant. I’m talking about the shots.”

  “Yeah, they’re Academy Award.”

  Daniels folded his arms proudly across his chest. “The usual procedure with morgue lights is to use a fast shutter time, but that gives you the morgue look. I experimented, used a slow shutter, three tenths of a second, then gave the film seven minutes in a hydroxide solution. That gives the skin a glow.”

  “You call this skin glowing?”

  “It’s not your standard morgue shot is what I mean.”

  “Daniels, are you on speed or are you doing a four-to-one today or what?”

  “O.T. Time and a half and a half on a holiday.”

  Leave it to a go-getter like Daniels to figure the overtime angles. “Today’s not a holiday,” Cardozo said. “Tomorrow is.”

  “The weekend’s a holiday.”

  Cardozo shook his head, looking at a full body shot.

  “The perp has got to be one weird piece of work,” Tommy Daniels said. “Real EDP.” EDP was the police psychiatrists’ abbreviation for Emotionally Disturbed Person. “He’ll walk, right?”

  “Daniels, are you a coroner, are you a shrink? I got enough resentment today without your expert opinion.”

  “Today? You got resentment today? Tell me a day you don’t have resentment.”

  “Very comic. Today was supposed to be my day off. I can forgive a lot, but not dragging me into this shit on my day off, and I promise you, the animal that did this is not going to walk.”

  “Okay, okay, I just meant the courts—you know.”

  “Screw the courts. We’re all emotionally damaged persons—you, me—that doesn’t give us special privileges to saw people up.” Cardozo tapped a photograph. “Let’s crop this one a little higher so he looks like he could be wearing an open-necked shirt. Put the face on a flyer: anyone having any information please contact et cetera et cetera. Run off a few thousand. We’ll paste them up around town.”

  Daniels took back the photo. “Ten four.”

  Cardozo glanced at him. Cops on TV used police radio abbreviations, why shouldn’t real cops. Life imitating art. Daniels in his liqueur-green shirt imitating Hill Street Blues reruns.

  An association clicked in Cardozo’s head. “Say … what happened to that photography van we used on the Mendoza stakeout?”

  Special Services had gutted an old Consolidated Edison repair truck. From the outside it looked like the standard Con Ed nuisance, a small white-and-blue van that took a week and a half futzing around a manhole. Inside it had cameras and radios and phone-monitoring equipment.

  “The one seven borrowed it.”

  “Borrow it back. I want a team at Beaux Arts Tower—your boys—round-the-clock photographic surveillance. Pictures of anybody entering or leaving the premises, any vehicles pulling up to the door or taking that alley down to the garage. A logbook with dates and hours, licenses, taxi medallion numbers.”

  “Sounds like we got a budget on this one.”

  “Yeah, we got a budget.”

  Cardozo sat down, alone in his cubicle. He sipped a little of his coffee. He cleared a space on his desktop. He moved Tommy Daniels’s glossies around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He couldn’t make sense of the missing leg.

  Cardozo had seen corpses where the head was gone, where the tits were gone, where the dick or balls were gone. Those were the classic chop-offs.

  But the leg. Why the leg?

  He took a sip of coffee. He was thinking that he was getting up in his forties. Most of the cops he worked with were younger, still good at running and good at climbing fences, good at looking at stuff like these pictures and not barfing. The pressure was getting to him, One P.P. screaming for results, The New York Times on his ass the one time in a blue moon one of his men shot in self-defense. Fear was getting to him, too, fear of looking like a dope or a coward, fear of opening his mouth and getting in shit with the brass.

  He pushed up from the desk and walked to the window.

  He gazed into the black night of the shaftway. His fingers drummed on the top of the file cabinet. Had there been something about the leg the killer wanted to hide: a birthmark, a tattoo, a deformity?

  Cardozo selected a photograph of the dead man’s face and took it out to the desk lieutenant. “Send this over to Missing Persons—John Doe. Have them show it around, check if he turned up missing.”

  It was a long shot: the victim might not have been reported missing, he might not have been missing long enough to be reported, he might be missing from Wichita. But you had to cover the bases.

  Cardozo went back to his office, lifted the phone, and dialed a number. He waited, jaw clenched, through eight rings. Finally a voice said, “Stein, Forensic.”

  “Lou, it’s Vince. Got anything yet on the Beaux Arts killing?”

  “Didn’t Tony tell you?”

  “Would I be calling if Tony was here?”

  “He’s gotta be there, he left an hour ago.”

  Cardozo came back into the squad room. “Was Tony Bandolero here asking for me?”

  Sweeney angled his chin toward a half-open door across the room. “In there.”

  There was an unused space off the squad room. One of the detectives had found a Sony Trinitron in the garbage on the street and brought it in, and detectives on a break sat around watching TV. People in two two threw out good garbage.

  Cardozo crossed the room. He could hear gunshots and screeching tires. Cop show. He wondered how detectives, grown men, could watch that stuff.

  He peered into the flickering darkness. “Tony, you there?”

  One of three forms heaved itself up from a chair. “Shiut. Policewoman was about to nail the arsonist.”

  Tony Bandolero came into the light, a heavyset man in his late twenties with limp black hair and a low, wrinkled forehead.

  “How can you watch that stuff?” Cardozo asked.

  “You want me to be improving myself, Vince, reading some great books? Divina Commedia, that’s how I should be spending my coffee break? Fangul.”

  Cardozo closed the cubicle door. “What have you got?”

  “Eight partial prints.”

  Cardozo took the sheet and frowned. “You can get a positive ID from this?”

  “If you can come up with a suspect, why not?”

  “Crap. We’re going to get a match, and it’ll be one of the building workers, someone who had nothing to do with it.”

  “You don’t know that, Vince.”

  “I know it. What else?”

  “We removed human blood from the rotary saw.”

  “Is it his?”

  “It may not be enough to type, Vince. We’re going to try. But all we can definitely say at this point in time is the victim is type O and the blood on the saw is human.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Not quite. The leather mask is standard s.m. gear—what they call a bondage mask down at the Pink Pussy Cat.”

  “Any prints on it?”

  “Leather is very tough to print.”

  “So where are we?”

  “You’re going to like this, Vince.”

  Tony Bandolero handed him a magazine. Cardozo leafed through.

  “What the hell’s this, gay por
n?”

  “It’s a leather goods catalogue, Vince, from a Greenwich Village sex shop called the Pleasure Trove. It is the place for leather and bondage goods.”

  “This is part of the NYPD reference library?”

  “Will you hear me out, Vince? The mask is handmade, and it’s in the catalogue, item number 706.”

  6

  THE M.E.’S OFFICE WAS located at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue in one of a complex of cinderblock buildings near Bellevue. A dark-haired girl was in charge of the lower-level reception desk, talking to a cop who wanted a receipt for a drop-off.

  Cardozo gave her his name and asked to see the medical examiner.

  The girl smiled at him prettily and consulted a clipboard hanging at the side of her desk. “He’s expecting you. Do you know the way?”

  Cardozo nodded. He couldn’t help thinking she was awfully young to be working in a morgue.

  He took the stairway to the subbasement with its depressingly familiar banks of overhead fluorescent lights and walls of latched stainless-steel body lockers. Drains dotted the cement floor at six-foot intervals.

  This level was full of scurrying figures in white lab coats. Many of them, Cardozo knew, were medical students on the prowl for pregnant Jane Does. The city let them take the dead fetuses.

  As he pushed through a door with heavy green rubber lips his nose was assaulted by a sudden stench of formaldehyde and human decay.

  He saw at a glance that four of the tables in the cutting room were occupied. Three of the bodies, two white males and a black female, had had their rib cages split open, exposing the lungs and viscera. The fourth was covered. Beside each table stood a scale for weighing organs.

  “Hey, Vince.” Dan Hippolito crossed the room. He was wearing a surgical smock and a rubber apron. He had pushed a curved Plexiglas face shield up over his receding hairline. “We just finished draining him and he’s ready. Right over here.”

  Hippolito led Cardozo to the necropsy table where John Doe lay beneath a white sheet, his one leg jutting out with the foot at a slant. Hippolito gave the sheet a nudge and let it spill to the floor.