VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Sam Richards, wearing a dapper green blazer, knocked on the open door. “All set, Vince.”

  Cardozo gathered his task force in the dingy but large room that served the detective squad as a spare office.

  Greg Monteleone used a box top as a tray to carry five coffees, and Ellie Siegel, almost elegant in a pale blue dress, came in with a large box of assorted doughnuts.

  Cardozo stood at the blackboard. He took a piece of chalk and wrote the words JOHN DOE HOMICIDE. Then came John Doe’s identifying numbers: UF61 #8139; UF60 #6480. UF stood for uniformed force, which meant police, plainclothes or otherwise; the 60 and 61 were the departmental forms on which all reports relating to the crime would be filed.

  Beneath he wrote the Forensic number, 3746-10, and the five property voucher numbers. Next he wrote the day of the murder, the coroner’s estimated time of death, and the place of occurrence. He sketched a diagram of apartment six, putting a stick-figure man in the bedroom where the body had been found.

  On the left of the board he listed the two small pieces of plastic, the electric saw, the cigarette butt, and the black leather mask that so far constituted the sole physical evidence in the case. He followed these by their tag numbers. On the right he wrote the word witnesses and put a question mark below it.

  He stood back and turned to face his squad.

  “What have we got? No ID on the victim. Our crime scene crew came up with eight partial prints. We’re in the process of matching these against the prints of every MOF and every civilian at the crime scene. If we fail to match them, they may or may not prove to be the prints of our killer. Negative for any fingerprints on the mask. The saw we don’t yet know about. The blood on it is human, too small an amount to be typed yet. Beyond that we have two shreds of black plastic, so far not a particle of fiber or hair. In short we have nothing. Okay—clockwise around the room.”

  Sam Richards set down his coffee. “Princess Lobkowitz, you should excuse the expression, drinks a little, so it’s not surprising she didn’t hear anything. However, she has a peeve with Hector the doorman. On the day of the killing, around two P.M., she had to let herself into the building with her own key. Hector should have been on duty, but he wasn’t.”

  “Benson mentioned the same thing,” Monteleone said.

  Cardozo went to the blackboard and made a notation: HECTOR, NOT AT DOOR 2 PM?

  “I also spoke with Ms. Debbi Hightower,” Richards continued, “no e on the Debbi. She heard nothing, saw nothing, says she was at work at the Toyota show at the World Trade Center for the last three nights, and this kept her out till noon Saturday and nine A.M. Sunday.”

  “Only one kind of Friday night show goes till noon Saturday,” Monteleone smirked.

  Cardozo ignored him. “What about the accountant?”

  “Fred Lawrence is a very angry man,” Richards said. “IRS decided to surprise-audit a client, he had to cut short his holiday weekend and come back to New York to prepare. He arrived in the building noon Saturday, says he saw nothing, heard nothing. However, I think he did hear something or see something.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “A remark about the garage. He said he was very annoyed about conditions down there, he was going to complain to the co-op board at the next meeting.”

  “What conditions?”

  “All he would say was, ‘Nothing criminal, but goddamned annoying considering the money we pay—we could at least get a little respect.’ We’ve all heard the attitude.”

  Cardozo smiled. It was the standard civilian complaint against cops.

  “After which,” Richards continued, “I spoke with one of the doormen, Jerzy Bronski, at his SRO in Chelsea. He says both Saturday and yesterday he worked the midnight shift, then drove his cab from 8 A.M. to 8 P.M.—he moonlights—then he slept.”

  “Yezhi,” Monteleone said.

  Richards looked up. “Beg your pardon?”

  “Yezhi, not Jerzy. The Poles pronounce J-E-R-Z-Y Yezhi.”

  “Sounds like Yiddish for Jesus,” Richards said.

  “Yezl,” Siegel said. “The Yiddish word for Jesus is Yezl.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Monteleone said. “I’m not discussing Yiddish, that’s not my department.”

  “My grandmother used to say Yezl,” Malloy said. “Every December she’d open her Christmas cards, and if there was a Jesus bambino she’d say, ‘Another Yezl.’”

  “You’re Jewish?” Monteleone asked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Only my grandmother,” Malloy said.

  “Enough Jews for Jesus,” Cardozo said. “Can we please get on with this?”

  “I haven’t been able to get to Claude Loring, the handyman,” Richards said. “I went to the address the super gave me, 32 Broome Street. I spoke to Loring’s roommate, who now claims to be his ex-roommate, a gentleman by the name of Perfecto Rodriguez.”

  “That’s a name?” Greg Monteleone asked. “They call their kids Perfecto?”

  “Who are you calling ‘they’?” Ellie Siegel inquired.

  “You know who I mean.”

  Siegel was glaring. “Say it, Greg.”

  “Latinos.”

  “Greg,” Siegel remarked, “anyone ever told you you’re a racist?”

  “I can’t believe a parent would call a kid Perfecto, I think it’s a horrible name for anyone. That makes me a racist?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Cardozo cut in, “stow it.”

  Richards went on. “Perfecto says Loring hasn’t been living at that address since the first of the month. Loring left no forwarding address, Loring owes for Con Ed and telephone, Loring also left a lot of classical records and dirty laundry, will we please tell Perfecto if we locate Loring.”

  “Perfecto doesn’t know where Loring works?” Monteleone asked. “That seems funny—we know where Loring works.”

  “Why are you on Perfecto’s case?” Siegel asked.

  “Believe me, I don’t give a damn about the guy, but he seems a little dense.”

  Cardozo consulted his notes. “The Beaux Arts worksheets show Loring was on the job every day last week, eight A.M. to four P.M.”

  “I checked back with the super,” Richards said. “The only address he has for Loring is Perfecto’s pad on Broome Street.”

  “Where do they mail the paychecks?” Cardozo asked.

  “They don’t. The super hands them out at the building twice a month. Loring’s not due at work today, but he’s due tomorrow, so I figure I can catch him then.”

  “Unless he’s left town,” Monteleone put in.

  “There’s one other thing,” Richards said.

  “Go on,” Cardozo said.

  “I had the feeling the building personnel were holding back. I don’t mean their stories didn’t check out, but there was something they weren’t saying. Revuelta’s wife was right there beside him; every now and then she’d shoot him a warning in Spanish.”

  “What was the warning?”

  “I didn’t catch the exact words, but she was giving him that ‘Keep your mouth shut’ look. It’s universal body language. Joshua Stinson’s wife gave me the same feeling.”

  Cardozo looked over at Monteleone. “Greg?”

  Monteleone nodded. “I got the same feeling exactly when I questioned Andy Gomez and Fred Johnson. Mrs. Gomez and Mrs. Johnson don’t want their men losing their jobs at Beaux Arts Tower. You could read it on their faces. Same thing when I spoke with Herb Dunlop and Luis Morro. Dunlop has a really nice little place in Kew Gardens, a back yard, roses. All four of them can account for their movements. If you believe the witnesses, there’s no way we can place them at the scene.”

  “What witnesses?” Cardozo said.

  “Family.”

  Cardozo made a mental note. “What about building residents?”

  “Benson didn’t hear anything,” Monteleone said, “but he’s an architect and he says he turns his hearing aid off when he wants to concentrate. Father Madsen didn’t he
ar anything either.”

  Very dimly, Cardozo was beginning to see connections. Conditions in the garage, whatever the hell that meant. A doorman not at his post when he should have been. Building employees’ wives nervous about cops. “Sam, go back, talk to Lawrence. Find out about these conditions in the garage. Which brings us to the leg.” Cardozo turned to face Ellie Siegel. “Ellie?”

  “Negative on all trash cans accessible from the street, public and private, within a five-block radius. I couldn’t check Beaux Arts’s garbage: it went out Sunday morning.”

  Cardozo frowned. “Sunday on a long holiday weekend?”

  “It struck me as unusual, too, Vince, but when you look at the overtime that garbage companies get for hauling on Memorial Day weekend—twice their regular fee—it makes sense. Especially since the agent of the building owns the garbage company.”

  “I thought garbage was mob-controlled,” Sam Richards said.

  Siegel glanced at him. “You think real estate in this town isn’t?”

  Cardozo nudged her back to the subject. “What about commercial garbage?”

  “The neighborhood has a high concentration of luxury restaurants—mostly French, some Italian. Within the five-block radius, only eight put their garbage directly out on the street. The others use locked bins. Of the eight, six hadn’t yet had their garbage picked up. All the bags contained bone, and all the bone has gone to the lab for analysis. Incidentally, this was a really disgusting job.”

  “Sorry. What about the other two restaurants?”

  “Unfortunately, neither uses the same pickup company as Beaux Arts. We’re dealing with three companies and three landfills. There were no municipal pickups over the weekend, but do you want to consider the possibility that the killer took the leg himself to a municipal landfill? That would bring us up to six landfills.”

  “Let’s start with the three.”

  “We’ve started.”

  “Carl, how are we coming on the licenses?” Cardozo asked. “What’ve you turned up?”

  “What we’ve turned up so far,” Carl Malloy said, “is no hot cars, no cars registered to criminals.”

  “What you’ve turned up so far in other words,” Monteleone said, “is you’ve turned up nothing.”

  Malloy looked at him. “Thanks, Greg. Thanks for telling me.”

  “Some reason for thinking the person who did this drove?” Siegel said.

  “Come on, he drives,” Monteleone said. “Everybody drives.”

  Monteleone was being deliberately provocative. He had a way with “everybody” statements that drove Siegel wild.

  “My brother doesn’t drive,” Siegel said.

  “And not every driver has a record,” Richards said. “Look at me—I’m clean.”

  “He drives,” Monteleone said, eyes on Siegel.

  “The killer may be a woman,” Siegel said.

  “How about that,” Monteleone said. “Where were you the night of the killing, Ellie? Double-parking?”

  Ellie Siegel took a long sip of coffee. “It would be a real long shot if the killer’s out on parole for sawing somebody else up.”

  “Long shots happen,” Cardozo said.

  “If that long shot happened,” Monteleone said, “there’s going to be one very ticked-off parole officer.”

  Cardozo’s eyes played across the faces of his detectives. Malloy and Monteleone were reminders of the days when the force had been male only, overwhelmingly white, and for the most part Irish and Italian. Siegel and Richards were reminders of the demographic changes that had shaken the force in recent years. Though City Hall had brought unbelievable pressure to recruit women and minorities into the upper ranks, there was nothing political about their winning the gold shield of the detective and the right to work in civilian clothes. Each of the four detectives had had a distinguished record in uniform, and each—for all their differences of character and outlook—had the strong legs, hard knuckles, and patience that it took to make a good detective.

  Cardozo assigned tasks.

  Richards would keep knocking on doors and asking questions. He would show flyers of the victim’s face to all the staff and residents of Beaux Arts Tower; he would post a flyer in the lobby. Malloy would check out the vehicles of the Beaux Arts staff and residents.

  Monteleone would put in a call to the local mental institutions to see if any sex offenders had been released or had escaped within the last month.

  In addition to overseeing garbage, Siegel would put her art background to work. “Take a photo of the dead man to the Photographic Unit, have them airbrush it, put him in high-fashion casual clothes.”

  Cardozo explained that the squad would stay on overtime, moving forward as quickly as possible.

  “And I want a five on everyone you talk to.”

  A collective groan went up.

  Cardozo was back in his office when Lou Stein phoned from Forensic. “We’ve been through the garbage you sent us, Vince. None of the bone is human.”

  “Crap. Have you matched the eight partials?”

  “Three of them. One is the victim’s thumb and two belong to—the name seems to be Hatfield. None of the prints from the building staff match, but we still need prints from Loring, Gomez, Revueltas, and Stinson.”

  “What about the saw?”

  “Wiped clean. Not a print on it. But we did find a male body hair embedded in the oil on the rotor. Caucasian. Not pubic. Probably forearm. Wild. Not from the victim. Who handled the saw?”

  Cardozo thought back. “I did. Monteleone did. We were wearing gloves.”

  “I’ll still need a hair from each of you. Soon as you can, Vince.”

  8

  STARTLED, BABE LIFTED HER head from the pillow. Light rippled across the walls as curtains shifted in the breeze from the air conditioner.

  “Did we wake our little girl?” Lucia Vanderwalk was standing there in a pinstripe white cotton suit and polka-dot navy blouse.

  “That’s all right, Mama.”

  The gold bracelet on Lucia Vanderwalk’s wrist jangled softly as Hadley Vanderwalk helped her into a chair.

  “Babe, you’re looking dandy,” Hadley said; “Just dandy.”

  Hadley was wearing a dark three-piece suit, and as he took the chair beside Lucia’s she reached over to level the tilt of his bow tie.

  Babe pressed the button that buzzed her bed up into a sitting position.

  “Are you feeling strong enough to go over your appointments?” Lucia asked.

  “I didn’t realize I had appointments,” Babe said.

  “Hadley.” Lucia held out a hand.

  Hadley Vanderwalk handed his wife her oversized handbag. She reached into it and set a desk-sized ledger on her knees. The cover was gleaming morocco, with the name Beatrice in gold-leaf letters on the front. “A wonderful bookbinder on West Twenty-seventh did this on two hours’ notice, over the holiday—can you imagine? Such craftsmanship.”

  She flipped almost halfway through the book, to the pages marked May. Babe saw that it was an appointment calendar, and many of the blanks were already filled in, in Lucia’s looping Miss Porter’s penmanship.

  “You’ll be seeing Dr. Eric Corey, your neurologist, twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays at eleven. You’ll see your bone specialist daily at nine in the morning, except weekends of course.”

  Babe was silent, knowing better than to voice outright opposition to her mother’s organizing.

  “You’ll see your physiotherapists daily at three, weekends included. Dr. Corey says it’s important to keep moving, not to lose a single day. And you’ll see your psychotherapist two times a week.”

  “Psychotherapist?” Babe said.

  Hadley lifted his gaze and stared silently at Lucia.

  “Ruth Freeman,” Lucia said. “She’s terribly popular. Your father and I met her at a dinner at Cybilla deClairville’s—can you believe the luck?—and of course we spent the entire evening talking about you.”

  The word psychother
apist brought back an image to Babe’s mind, a flickering glimpse of a white room and strange masked figures moving in evening clothes. “I was dreaming when you came in,” she said suddenly.

  “How nice.”

  “Richard Nixon and Winnie the Pooh and Porky Pig were giving some sort of horrible party. I’ve had that dream before.”

  Lucia drew a long breath, studying her daughter carefully. “It’s not unusual to have the same dream over again. I often dream of Southampton as it was during the summer of 1948: Your father gave me the most splendid birthday present—a fancy dress ball. We had Eddy Duchin and his orchestra.”

  “Wonderful man, Duchin,” Hadley said. “Played golf every bit as well as he did the piano.”

  “Remember how he played ‘Just One of Those Things,’ Hadley? Your favorite song.”

  “It’s your favorite, Mama—not Papa’s.”

  “Your father adores ‘Just One of Those Things’—don’t you, Hadley?”

  Hadley smiled pleasantly. “Passionately.”

  “You know you only adore it to please her, Papa.”

  “You’re in a mood, dear heart,” Lucia said. “Was your dream so terribly upsetting?”

  “I can’t remember it now.”

  “Why don’t you discuss it with Dr. Freeman?” Lucia said. “She knows everything about the mind. She wrote the book on recovering from schizophrenia. She’ll see you here at the hospital, of course. No one expects you to be up and running about town just yet.”

  “I’m not schizophrenic. There’s nothing wrong with my mind. It’s my brain that was in coma.”

  “Of course. You’re absolutely right.” Lucia looked into Babe’s eyes and smiled her most conciliatory smile, inviting Babe’s.

  Babe did not smile back. “I want Scottie to visit.”

  Lucia’s face became expressionless. Babe could feel her mother mustering the case for refusal.

  “That’s rather awkward,” Lucia said.

  “I believe I have a say in my own life.”

  “Beatrice, could you at least please trust your father and me? We’ve stood by you seven years when half the specialists in the country told us it was hopeless. Strange as it may seem to you, we’re standing by you now.”