VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “How can you tell?”

  “How does a mother know her children? I made it. It is me.”

  “How many did you make?”

  “Only five. Five is my limit—above that I am a whore.”

  “Who bought the mask from you?”

  She was sitting there, sipping her miso.

  “I know nothing of who buys my works.”

  “I want the buyer.”

  “My gallery handles all sales—Lewis Monserat on Prince Street.”

  Cardozo carried the masks through narrow SoHo streets filled with rushing, lurching traffic.

  The Lewis Monserat Gallery on Prince Street was quietly impressive, with a high skylighted ceiling, a calm atmosphere, and no visitors.

  The receptionist sat at a large desk, a prim woman wearing a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She smiled at Cardozo’s approach, but when he showed his shield and asked to speak with Mr. Monserat the smile was gone.

  “I’ll see if he’s in.”

  She went into another room, closing the door behind her.

  Cardozo used the time to look at the exhibit, paintings of faceless figures who seemed to get smaller and lonelier as the canvases got larger.

  The woman reappeared and ushered him into the rear office.

  A man with a head of black hair that looked as though he’d marinated it in olive oil rose from behind a desk and held out a hand. “Lewis Monserat. How can I help you, sir?”

  He was wearing a very well-cut, expensive Italian suit. His large, expressive eyes gave Cardozo permission to drop into the studded leather chair.

  Cardozo took the Kushima mask from the brown paper bag and placed it on the desk.

  “You sold this. Who bought it?”

  Monserat reached out and lifted the mask. He turned it over, then inside out. When he finally spoke, his voice had quiet resonance. “This has a slight resemblance to the work of my client Nuku Kushima, but—”

  Cardozo cut him short. “Miss Kushima has identified the mask. Who bought it?”

  Whatever had been cordial in Monserat’s manner abruptly vanished. The silence in the room was suddenly flat and harsh.

  “It’s against gallery policy to release our client list.”

  “I’d appreciate your reversing that policy.”

  “Wait one moment, please.” Monserat rose and went out into the gallery. Cardozo could hear him making a phone call.

  On the desk, a nineteenth-century carriage clock struck four delicate chimes.

  Monserat returned. “You cannot compel me to release that information without a court order.”

  “Who says?”

  Monserat’s gaze met his levelly, coldly. “My attorney—Mr. Theodore Morgenstern—I’m sure you’ve heard of him?”

  “Would you get him on the phone, or do I need a court order for that too?”

  Smiling acidly, Monserat picked up the telephone. He dialed, handed Cardozo the receiver, and sat back.

  “Ted Morgenstern,” an officious voice said.

  “It’s Vince Cardozo.”

  He and Morgenstern had collided in courtrooms, in judges’ chambers, before grand juries: often enough to hate one another’s guts. A public yet shadowy figure for over three decades, Morgenstern had made his reputation and fortune acting as broker in business deals, criminal justice deals, political hostage deals, international arms and spy deals, real estate deals—and those were just the deals that were public knowledge.

  “We’re investigating a capital crime,” Cardozo said. “It wouldn’t take me two hours to get an order compelling disclosure of that list.”

  “Then I suggest those would be two hours most well spent, Lieutenant. It’s about time you so-called law enforcers learned to operate within the law.”

  It took less than twenty minutes for Cardozo to learn that he wasn’t going to get a court order compelling diddly-squat—not in two hours, not in twenty. His judge, Tom Levin, was not in the court, not in chambers, not reachable. Levin’s secretary, sounding harried over the phone line, said she’d do her best to page him. Her voice was not hopeful.

  As Cardozo touched the receiver down into the cradle, Carl Malloy burst into the office. He was moving like a bouncing ball, his hair lifting from his forehead and flopping down again.

  “Vince, we’ve been going crazy, where you been, we’ve been beeping you all afternoon.”

  “The hell you have, I just put fresh Duracells in that beeper this morning.” Cardozo’s glance went to the unopened package of Duracell batteries lying on top of the fives. “I’m losing my marbles.”

  Malloy’s eyes met Cardozo’s, keen and wild. “Vince, we found the leg.”

  There was an instant of absolute silence and Cardozo’s stomach had the crazily exhilarated sensation of free fall.

  “Where?”

  “It was out in a landfill in Queens, the truck picked it up Sunday from Beaux Arts Tower. We traced the truck, we traced the garbage, we traced everything, it all dovetails.”

  “What shape’s the leg in?”

  “Call Dan Hippolito, he’s looking at it right now.”

  Just as Cardozo reached for the phone a button began blinking and a voice from the squad room shouted, “Vince, phone call for you, on three!”

  “Who is it?”

  “Some guy.”

  “Jesus, can’t anyone around here take messages?”

  There was a crackle and Dan Hippolito’s voice came on the line. “Vince, I’ve looked at this new bone material. It’s human, a right male thigh. How are you, by the way?”

  “I’m fine. What have we got?”

  “We can type the blood from the marrow, it’s O, same as John Doe. There’s some skin tissue, pretty ragged, an educated guess is that it’s Caucasian or very light black or Hispanic.”

  “In other words the whole human race.”

  “It’s not Oriental. There’s a mark at the fracture, characteristic of a rotary blade, and there’s an approximate match with John Doe, but it’s approximate, because bone tissue was compressed in the compactor.”

  “Is there anything you can see that the killer wanted to hide: a birthmark, a tattoo, a deformity?”

  “Vince, there’s no way you’re going to get a birthmark or tattoo off of this. It’s hash. This new tissue isn’t going to tell us why the killer wanted the leg off. So far as deformity is concerned, the femur is reasonably intact, God only knows how, and there are no breaks, no bends, no bone pathology. There’s a fungus in the fat cells of the marrow, but hell, this meat’s been rotting for three days and it’s been buried under every parasite in the city of New York. So take it from there, Vince, that’s the best I can do.”

  Cardozo felt a wave of disappointment rising in his gut. “Thanks, Dan.”

  “Give my love to your daughter.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  14

  CARDOZO PHONED MELISSA HATFIELD and asked her to have a drink with him after work.

  “I can meet you at six fifteen at Morgan’s,” she said. “Fifty-third and Sixth. Know the place?”

  Cardozo knew it. Ten years ago Morgan’s had been Reilly’s, the watering hole for his precinct. Reilly’s was the corner lot that had not sold out to Rockefeller Center. For four decades, dwarfed by gleaming million-dollar art deco skyscrapers, the two-bit, two-story grungy bar with blinking Schlitz signs and Miss Rhinegold posters in the window had been a zit on the face of Prometheus. Cardozo had loved Reilly’s: not just because the owner had stood up to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., but because the drinks weren’t watered, because you could get corned beef and cabbage from eight in the morning till four the next morning, and most of all because of the customers: maintenance men, Rockettes on break from the Music Hall, secretaries and off-duty police and firemen, people who did a dollar’s work for a dollar’s pay and didn’t expect to get famous or bribed or laid for it.

  Those days had ended when Reilly died and Reilly’s became Morgan’s. The zit became a beauty mark. White woo
d siding went up over the crumbling brick, green New England shutters got nailed to the siding, red ruffled checkered cafe curtains appeared on bronze rails. Cardozo had gone back once and once had been enough.

  Tonight he arrived five minutes early. He wanted to see Hatfield come in, wanted to watch her for that one moment before she knew he was looking.

  Morgan’s was doing the kind of business Reilly had only dreamed of: SRO. Cardozo had to push through the shoulder-to-shoulder Happy Hour crowd.

  The bartenders worked in front of five-foot pyramids of the booze of eighty nations. They had pirate moustaches and Jack LaLanne bodies, and their red-checked open-necked shirts matched the cafe curtains. They came on to the female customers, bending close to catch the order, and gold chains twinkled in hairy cleavages. With the male customers they were macho and curt.

  “What’s yours?” a six-foot linebacker radiating cologne snarled.

  “Scotch and water,” Cardozo said.

  He left a dollar tip—he knew what this city did to a guy’s budget and he believed even shitheads deserved a decent wage. There was no thank you.

  Attitude, Cardozo thought—New York’s gift to the world. Everyone was handing it to everyone. Park Avenue socialites stepping into limos, Puerto Rican checkout girls in the supermarket—their eye met yours with that same unlovely, unmistakable message: drop dead. It was turning into a worm-eat-worm town.

  Cardozo took his drink and looked for a place to sit. There were electric hurricane lamps on every checkered tablecloth. Faces bent into the circles of light—faces struggling to look sophisticated, faces struggling to look beautiful and successful, faces running on cocaine and faces beginning to blear out on Stolichnaya. Faces trying to connect with faces.

  He found an empty table; it looked like the last one in the place. On the wall where Reilly had hung the first dollar bill the bar had ever earned and the bounced checks of famous clients there was a nautical compass and a brass barometer. A clock ding-donged the time in ship’s bells. Cardozo wanted to cry.

  A short, slight girl with long dark hair and an order pad tried to interest him in the day’s special fish. He told her he was waiting for a friend, and even though he wasn’t ready he sensed the girl worked on a percentage and he ordered another drink.

  Melissa Hatfield stepped through the twin brass doors. She was carrying a very full ebony crocodile attaché case and she was wearing a gray dress belted tight enough to give it a little flare at the hips. She went straight for the bar. Men moved aside and hopeful eyes traveled with her and she knew it. She passed directly under the glare of a hurricane lamp and there was a moment when the gray of her dress became red roses, orange roses, green leaves, thorns. She looked good under the light and she knew that too. She smiled at the barman.

  The body-built pirate ignored the bald gent who had been waiting five minutes for a Rob Roy. He poured Melissa Hatfield a white wine on ice, topping it with a showy, dead accurate shot from the soda gun. He handed her the drink, smiling.

  Melissa Hatfield paid and turned. Her glance swept the pandemonium. Cardozo rose and signaled with a raised hand. She saw him, smiled, came across the room. Men stepped aside for her.

  She dropped the briefcase beside the table. “Three closings in TriBeCa,” she said. “More paperwork than the nuclear test-ban treaty.”

  Cardozo couldn’t tell whether she expected sympathy or congratulations. Maybe both. He rose.

  “You don’t have to be gallant, Lieutenant.”

  “Vince,” he said. “Call me Vince.”

  She sat down.

  He watched her sip her drink with a sort of elegant disdain and he let his intuition roam. Melissa Hatfield had an aunt in the Social Register and she’d parlayed the connection into a career of putting people down in small ways, selling luxury real estate to hungry overnight millionaires.

  “Pretty dress,” he said. “Silk?” He knew it wasn’t.

  She knew he knew. “Taiwanese synthetic. It’s trick printed. You’re supposed to see roses in certain lights.”

  “It works. I saw them.”

  “Bloomingdale’s expected them to be a big seller last year. They weren’t. I got this for eighteen dollars off a gypsy rack on Thirty-second Street.”

  It was interesting what people volunteered about themselves. She was telling him she wasn’t dumb about money the way her clients were. She was telling him not to lump her with them. He sensed that was important to her.

  “Where do we go from here?” she said. “Dinner and a Broadway show? Your expense account or mine?”

  “Not tonight. Tonight’s business.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make my day and buy one of the apartments in Beaux Arts Tower. I could swing a discount for you. You’d add a little safety to the building.”

  He noted the controlled tapping of her finger on the ashtray. She had mastered her eyes so they didn’t skitter when he fixed his gaze on her.

  “Only rajahs and Philippine dictators are buying into this co-op market.” He moved the hurricane lamp to the wall. He laid a nine-by-eleven manila envelope on the table. It was marked NYPD OFFICIAL BUSINESS PENALTY FOR PRIVATE USE $50.

  Her glance went down to it.

  “I took another look at six this afternoon,” he said. “How often are the unsold apartments cleaned?”

  “I don’t know, but I can check.”

  “Did six look cleaner to you than the others—except for the obvious difference?”

  “Except for the obvious difference, no. It looked about the same.”

  “Is the air conditioning left on in the unsold apartments?”

  “Never. That wastes electricity. I come in a half hour before the showing and turn it on.”

  “Did you turn on the air conditioning in six?”

  “No. I didn’t have time to get to the building early.”

  “But it was on.”

  “Somebody must have—left it on.”

  They both understood she was talking about the killer.

  “How many times did you show six this last month?”

  “Only yesterday.” She added, “Manhattan real estate’s soft these days.”

  “Melissa, the card you gave me says you work for Beaux Arts Properties. Who’s Balthazar Properties? They’re putting up a coop on Lex and Fifty-third and they have the same phone number.”

  “That’s us too.”

  “Why do you have two different names?”

  “We have eleven different names and we have eleven different companies. It’s not illegal. We limit the liability. If one building springs a leak or goes bankrupt it doesn’t endanger the other properties.”

  “One company for each property?”

  “I’m not Nat Chamberlain’s accountant. I know of eleven companies. I know of eleven properties in this city that are secured as of closing business today. I doubt that’s the whole picture.”

  “You like working for Nat Chamberlain?”

  “I wouldn’t work for an employer I didn’t like—any more than you would.”

  “What makes you so sure I wouldn’t?”

  “You’re not the type.”

  “You seem to think you know how to size people up.”

  “I’m not in your league, but I’m good.”

  “What can you tell from a face?”

  “Whether the sale will go through.”

  “Take a look at the pictures in that envelope.”

  He saw her hand wanting to hesitate, and he saw her not allowing it to. She opened the envelope and drew out the two glossies. Her eyes went from one to the other and narrowed.

  “I take it this is the dead man?”

  “You should have my job.”

  She shifted the photos around on the table. The face in the photographs had a classic male beauty, and death gave it a patrician glaze, like a Roman head in a museum case.

  “He’s handsome,” she said finally. “Too bad.”

  “If he’d been
ugly, it wouldn’t have been too bad?”

  Her gaze came up to his. “If he’d been ugly he wouldn’t be dead.”

  “You know something I don’t.”

  “This isn’t how ugly people die. This is how ugly people kill.”

  Cardozo sat back and sipped his Scotch.

  She asked, “Was he as young as he looks?”

  It interested Cardozo: people kept seeing everything but death: he was young, he was good-looking, that was what they saw. “The coroner thinks he was twenty-two, twenty-three.”

  Her eyes didn’t tip anything, but the silence did. A silence that long meant she was having to think. She picked up a glossy again. “Christ. Why are they all dying so young?”

  “Who do you mean, they?”

  “People like him, young, dying …” She was in her mind and didn’t speak for a minute.

  Someone young died, he realized. Someone close to her. “Tell me something, Melissa. You looked at those pictures and whatever you saw, you couldn’t make it go away. What was it?”

  She let out a breath. “It’s hard to put into words. Sometimes you see somebody but you never realize you’re seeing them because they’re always in the same context.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like the man at the newsstand; the doorman you pass on the way to the subway; the woman who runs a bookstore and you wave as you go by. And then one day you see that person lifted out of their context—and you don’t know who they are or why you should even think you remember them. You stare at them and they stare at you and it’s almost hostile, like hey what are you doing off your shelf? My work isn’t like yours, it doesn’t call for a trained memory. I see a face, I do business with the face, if the deal falls through I forget the face. But with this one there’s something … I feel I could have seen him. But it didn’t have anything to do with work.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no feeling of time connected to it.”

  “Where?”

  “In an elevator.”

  “What elevator?”

  “I don’t remember. All I get is elevator.”

  “Beaux Arts Tower?”

  “No. Definitely not. Anything to do with our buildings I remember. But if I saw this man, I was off guard, not paying attention. It’s as though we looked at each other, smiled, and agreed not to say hello. You know the way it can be with strangers in the city. What I mean is, this was friendly but the distance was very, very controlled. I wish I could be more specific, but all I get is that kind of a question mark feeling.”