VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Loring’s friend and alibi lived in a Civil War loft building with World War I paint peeling off the limestone-arched doorway. Cardozo found the button with part of a business card wedged into the name slot: FAYE DI STASIO ASSOCIATES. He pushed, and after a second push a buzzer screeched back and the glass door released with a click.

  They began the climb up the rickety steps. The air in the stairwell pressed like a blanket soaked in hot water. A dark-haired young woman waited on the fourth-floor landing. It seemed to Cardozo there was something hurt and bitter in the way she was standing there, defending her door.

  “Faye di Stasio?” he asked.

  She smoked her cigarette and she just stared and let ashes drift down toward the floor. “Who’s looking for her?”

  “Police.” Cardozo showed his shield, introduced Richards.

  “The place is a mess.” She let them pass.

  A television was going. The room was steeped in the aroma of negligence, and the air smelled like an old sofa.

  “You had a guest over the weekend?” Cardozo put the question in a carefully natural voice, as though it would be the most normal thing in the world for this woman to tell Vince Cardozo all about the men who shared her sleeping space.

  Her gaze came up level to his. “Who’s in trouble—him or me?”

  “Not you. Maybe not him either.”

  “I’m having some coffee—could I offer you some?”

  Cardozo glanced at Richards. Richards nodded.

  “Won’t you have a seat?” Her words were strangely ladylike coming from a woman with dirty bare feet.

  Cardozo couldn’t believe the poverty of the space: stained, crumbling walls, laths poking through plaster like exposed bone; window curtains decaying in the city’s acid air; chairs with fractured legs bound in mover’s tape.

  The two policemen picked chairs that looked safe.

  Cardozo let his eyes prowl the apartment. A sewing machine had been set up in the kitchen; cloth toys spilled out of three-foot cartons stacked beside the bathroom; cat food in a bowl by the door was growing a two-day-old skin. An air-conditioning unit pumped noisily in a rear window. Beyond the burglar gates tips of scraggly sumac rose in the soot-blackened courtyard.

  She brought three mugs of coffee.

  “A man called Claude Loring stayed with me.”

  “What times was he here this weekend?” Cardozo asked.

  She lit a fresh cigarette and held it to one side, her elbow on the table and her wrist angled back. “Late Friday night till this morning.”

  “What do you mean, late Friday night?”

  “Well, maybe it was Saturday morning. The sun wasn’t up.”

  “He was here straight through?”

  “Right up there.” She pointed to a loft bed that had been amateurishly built over the kitchen.

  “You were home all weekend?”

  A silence went on too long. She nodded again.

  “Never went out?”

  “I was working. Maybe I went for coffee, cigarettes.”

  “So how do you know he was here all the time?”

  “The longest I was out was ten, fifteen minutes. He’s like a bear—sleeps two, three days in a row.”

  “You’ve known him how long?”

  “Oh, we go back a few years.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I run my own business—creative toys for pets.”

  He picked up a stuffed mouse sitting on a table: the eyes opened like a doll’s and a squeal came out of it.

  “You made this?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Pretty,” he said. He didn’t quite mean it.

  Her face lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. “I’m really a cloth-sculptor. The business is temporary, till I get my exhibit.”

  The phone rang and an answering machine cut in. “Hello. You have reached the office of Faye di Stasio Associates.” The voice was hers. “Please leave your name and phone number and a member of our staff will contact you.”

  There was a beep and then a man’s voice, gruff. “Hey, Faye—it’s me. Pick up.”

  She threw back her coffee and crossed the room and snatched up the receiver. “I’m sorry,” she said after listening a moment, “we had some trouble. It won’t happen again.”

  “What sort of trouble?” Cardozo asked as she came back to her chair.

  “The van broke down. Nothing could go out Saturday. Today everything’s ready and our dealers are claiming they lost the holiday trade, they want to cut back on their orders. What a business.”

  “Claude must be a help to you.”

  “Yeah. Claude’s great.”

  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 he
ld 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.”