VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Babe Devens sat with her arms folded on the hospital table, staring at Lucinda. “They don’t need to control anyone’s money. They have plenty of their own.”

  “Some people are greedy.”

  “Not my parents. They’re do-gooders. They think they’re protecting me.”

  “From what?”

  “All kinds of sordid realities.”

  Lucinda MacGill rose from the chair and began pacing. “You have a right to a sanity hearing—we get three examining doctors to declare you competent, your family has the right to three examining doctors to declare you incompetent, a judge hears the experts and decides. If the judge decides against you we move for a jury trial. You’ll definitely win with a jury.”

  Babe’s deep-set eyes darkened and there were furrows in her forehead. “What would all that take—months?”

  “Months, maybe years; and a few hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t want to go through all that.”

  “Good. Neither do I. I work for the city and I’m moonlighting.” Lucinda moved to the window. A swollen summer sun ached in the sky, edging skyscrapers in blinding silver. “There hasn’t been a word about you in the papers,” she said.

  Babe Devens’s brow wrinkled. “Should there be?”

  “Well, the papers printed all the testimony when your husband tried to kill you.”

  “My husband didn’t—” Babe Devens broke off. “What’s your point?”

  “Your parents are trying very hard to keep your recovery quiet. Let’s make them show cause. Give them x number of days to convince a court you shouldn’t be declared competent. That leaves them two options: go to court—which would entail headlines—or stay out of court—and lose custody and power of attorney. You decide. You know your family.”

  “They can’t abide publicity.”

  “Good. We’ll go that route.”

  17

  AT THE TASK FORCE meeting Malloy reported that so far no prisons in the tristate area had recognized the photo of John Doe. “Maybe we should go national.”

  Cardozo tossed a chewing gum wrapper at an ashtray. There was a growing buzz of frustration in him. “So go.”

  Greg Monteleone sat shuffling three squares of phone message paper. “For what it’s worth, two Laundromats say they recognize the flyer. Unfortunately, they’re eight miles away from one another, so unless John Doe schlepped his dirty linen by helicopter, one of them’s got to be mistaken.”

  Cardozo told Monteleone and Malloy to each take a Laundromat and check them out.

  Cardozo lowered the shade in his cubicle and set up the projector. He looked at slides, Sunday’s slides, Monday’s, the whole week’s. He tried to see each one as though for the first time.

  Again and again he referred back to his one maybe, the mystery woman in slides 28 and 43: his gaze took in the flowing blond hair, the confident face and stride, the blouse, the skirt, the belt … the pink-striped package that went into the building and never came out again.

  He told himself that there had to be a match, that Tommy’s team had missed it, that she was somewhere else too, in another photo neatly logged and tagged.

  But she wasn’t and she wasn’t and she wasn’t.

  At one thirty Monteleone was back from Queens to report that the mom and pop who ran the Laundromat had made a mistake.

  Two hours later Malloy was back from Staten Island. The ferry ride had been great; the woman who ran the Laundromat was an old sweetie, but she had a habit of calling the FBI and reporting that their Ten Most Wanted had left laundry in her shop. The FBI had stopped taking her calls, so she’d turned to local law enforcement.

  Monday, June 2. Cardozo was clicking through slides. He compared the faces on his wall to the faces on his desk, photographs Ellie Siegel had gotten from the insurance companies that reimbursed the Beaux Arts clinics.

  There should be a computer to do this, he thought.

  In three hours he found only seven matches that weren’t already in the log. He felt he was groping through a maze that led only to potholes.

  He was yawning and blinking when Siegel walked in from the squad room wearing a big smile. She stared at Cardozo with his head resting on his forearm.

  “I got something.” Her face lit up the room. “The owner not only claims to have seen the victim regularly, she has his laundry.”

  Cardozo’s smile opened like a Japanese fan, the muscles stretching one at a time, and he realized he hadn’t smiled in nine days. “Where?”

  The area on lower Eighth Avenue was in the throes of gentrification: gays and yuppies edging in, Puerto Ricans getting edged out. On a block of Medicaid dentists and trendy upscale bistros, the Paradise Laundromat shared the ground floor of a brick tenement with the Jean Cocteau Hair Salon and Greeting Card Boutique.

  Cardozo and Siegel entered the narrow storefront. To reach the clanking washers and dryers they had to walk a gauntlet of neighborhood Latin kids pitting their machismo against Japanese video game machines.

  Soap dust floating in the air prickled the inside of Cardozo’s nose and made him want to sneeze.

  A girl waited by one of the dryers, studying her reflection in the window of spinning underwear. She was applying makeup, careful not to get powder on the headband of her Walkman earphones.

  At the rear of the store an old Chinese woman in a black five-and-ten oriental robe was sitting erect and rigid on a small wooden box.

  Cardozo showed her his shield.

  Her tiny black eyes studied it suspiciously.

  He showed her the flyer.

  She nodded, her skin as dry as old parchment, her features drawn and shrunken. “Si,” she said. “Joven.” Young.

  “His name, his address?”

  No reaction. Cardozo tried his Spanish, a modification of the Portuguese he’d learned at home as a child. “¿Su nombre, su dirección?”

  The old woman shook her head in denial. “No nombre, no dirección.”

  The right corner of her mouth was drawn down: she had some kind of paralysis of a facial nerve, and that, added to her accent, made her hash of Cantonese, Spanish, and English very hard to understand.

  Cardozo was able to piece together that the young man had come in regularly, every Thursday, and he must have lived nearby, because he carried such big bags of laundry.

  “You have one of these sacos grandes?” Cardozo asked. “Give it to me. Dámelo por favor.”

  The slant of her eyes lent them a wary expression. “Ticket?”

  “No ticket.”

  One finger unbent. “One dollar más.”

  She went and got a stool and pulled a green nylon bag down from a crowded shelf.

  Half a laundry ticket was safety-pinned to it. The date stamped on it was May 23. The Friday before the murder. She undid the pin, her hands liver-spotted and twisted with arthritis, and dropped it into a box of similar pins.

  She held out the half ticket and with a cracked Bic pen made a pantomime of signing. Cardozo signed. She made him write down his shield number.

  “Eight dollars fifty cents.” Her English was a hell of a lot better when it came to money.

  As Cardozo pulled into the cluster of glassy buildings, the air had a tang of oncoming rain. He took the laundry up to the fourth floor.

  The man from Evidence was already there, a scholarly-looking civilian in his late twenties, tall and skinny with curly red hair. He began making an inventory of the laundry. It was a curious mix—woollen argyle socks with Brooks Brothers labels, Fruit of the Loom underpants and T-shirts, Healthknit jockstraps, five-and-dime tube socks without labels.

  “A lot of socks,” the evidence man commented. “He must have worn two, three pairs a day.”

  “Maybe he jogged.” Cardozo noticed that the clothes were all India-inked with the same initials—J.D.

  Funny if the guy’s name really was John Doe.

  Cardozo had known evidence men who would tag a pair of socks as a single item, especially if a detective
was waiting, but this man went strictly by the book, tagging each sock with its own numbered tag, tearing each tag on its two perforated lines, filling out each stub in identical, careful block printing.

  Lou Stein sauntered into the room. His face still bore traces of its holiday tan, but the holiday smile was gone. Care had eaten its way back.

  “We’re not going to need all that,” he said. He lifted a pair of underpants, a T-shirt, and a sock out of the tagged pile and signed for them.

  On the seventh floor, in the soft blue glow of lab lights, Lou Stein removed the evidence tags and dropped the clothing into a bath of distilled water. Sliding the lid into place, he pressed a button. The water began agitating violently.

  After three minutes Lou drained the water from the tub and fed it into another tank. He played with a bank of switches. Something began making a Cuisinart sound.

  Lou beckoned. “We can watch over here.”

  Cardozo fixed his eyes on a computer terminal. Mathematical and chemical symbols exploded into green points of brilliance on the black screen.

  Thirty seconds later a printed analysis spewed out of the mouth of a computer-linked desktop printer.

  Lou ripped off a sheet of printout and resettled his spectacles thoughtfully. “The underclothes and socks show a heavy saturation of the same detergent that caused the rash on John Doe.”

  Cardozo stopped on the fourth floor. The evidence man was examining a shirt. His teeth were pressed down into his lip.

  “What do you make of this, Lieutenant?”

  Cardozo took the shirt. It was white cotton, a nice weave, oxford or chambray.

  “A dress shirt with a one-inch collar,” Cardozo observed.

  “Most of the other stuff is initialed J.D. This one’s initialed D.B.”

  Cardozo studied the inside of the collar with the India-inked letters. “And no label.”

  “What is it, a Chairman Mao?”

  Cardozo didn’t know. “How many of these has he got?”

  “Just that one.”

  Tommy Daniels arranged the sleeves outward on the table like the arms of a crucified man. “I’ll shoot you a beauty. Good enough for GQ.”

  “Forget beautiful,” Cardozo said. “I need six prints.”

  Cardozo called the team into his office. He passed out the photos and then rested both hands on the edge of the desk.

  There was a wide waiting silence. Three tired men and one tired woman stared at the pictures.

  “Whatever any of you are doing now,” Cardozo said, “drop it. Find out what the hell kind of shirt that is, who makes it, where it’s sold.”

  It was dark when Monteleone returned. There was no mistaking the black beyond the window for the last traces of day.

  “It’s a clerical shirt,” he said. “Priests attach their collar to that hole in the back with a collar button.”

  A skin of silence dropped on the cubicle, freezing out the voices and clatter from the squad room.

  “The guy’s too young,” Cardozo said. “He couldn’t have been a priest.” He realized that what he meant was, a priest couldn’t have died that kind of death—God wouldn’t have let him.

  “Everybody seems young when you get older,” Monteleone said. “Hell, cops look young to me. To tell the truth, Vince, even you look young to me.”

  Cardozo sat there for a moment letting things sort themselves out in his mind. He tapped a blunted pencil against the blotter.

  “Let’s assume he’s a priest. Priests live where they work, right? And how far would you carry laundry—five, six blocks tops, right? Let’s post the flyer in all churches within six blocks of that Laundromat.”

  “Clerical shirts are just formal shirts without the collar or the fancy front.” Greg Monteleone was sharing his research with Tuesday’s task force meeting. “They come in three colors—black and white for your hoi polloi priests, and magenta for bishops. White clerical shirts always have a rabat worn over them. That’s a vest. Some Jesuits and low-church Anglicans try for the dog-collar look, and they wear the black shirt with the collar and without the vest.”

  “We’re looking at a white shirt,” Cardozo said. “Is it Catholic or is it Anglican?”

  “They’re both the same,” Monteleone said. “The only difference is who’s inside. They’re all sewn by Ricans and Chicanos and gook illegals in the same Yiddish sweatshops.”

  Ellie Siegel, looking exasperated, scratched a match loudly and lit a cigarette.

  “If you’re buying a standard clerical shirt,” Monteleone said, “you do it by mail or you go to a Roman Catholic shop and get it off the rack. If you want to go special, outfits like Brooks Brothers make white clerical shirts to order for rich Anglicans and Romans.”

  “Didn’t know there were rich priests,” Siegel said.

  “They’re called bishops,” Monteleone said.

  “Was D.B.’s shirt custom-made?” Cardozo asked.

  Monteleone nodded. “The guy at Brooks Brothers said D.B.’s was a very nice custom job. The cloth quality was extremely high, and the tapered waist isn’t standard.”

  “The minister had his waist tapered?” Richards said.

  “Maybe he was proud of his waist,” Malloy said.

  Siegel seemed puzzled. “Throwing a tailor-made shirt into the washer with the underwear—wouldn’t you think he’d send a shirt that expensive to a dry cleaner?”

  “I don’t know when you last looked at a priest or minister,” Monteleone said, “but the shirt very rarely shows. The black vest hides it.”

  “Did Brooks Brothers happen to have made this shirt?” Cardozo asked.

  Monteleone shook his head. “No. But a shirt like this you can have custom-made at any shop that tailors to order.”

  Cardozo sighed. “Okay, guys. Hit the Yellow Pages.” He adjourned the meeting and went to his cubicle.

  He reviewed the new slides from the observation van. He had asked the photo team to tag any new appearances of the girl in 43—and he noticed that there were no tags.

  He switched on the projector and began going through the slides. Yesterday had been sunny. Beaux Arts Tower gave off a sense of dignity and ease, a cool monolith, its large windows tinted against the sun.

  He slowed at a photo of a dark-haired man in a seersucker suit, carrying a briefcase, looking back over his shoulder directly at the camera.

  Another man who had made the truck.

  Cardozo stared at the photo a moment. No, it wasn’t another man. It was the same man in a different suit.

  He went back through the log and found the earlier notation: #79, Monday, May 26.

  He dropped 79 into the carousel and clicked the picture on.

  The same man was carrying the same briefcase, looking very spiffy and businesslike. His patent leather shoes looked like dancing pumps, thin-soled enough for him to have felt every pebble on the pavement.

  Seventy-nine’s eyes met Cardozo’s.

  Today Cardozo tried to look at the slide in a new way. Possibly there was something about the man in the picture that was cocksure and careless. Maybe he was looking around not because he sensed danger but because he sensed attention. Maybe he wanted to see who else thought he was looking good.

  Cardozo clicked back to the other photo of the same man. This time his attention went to another detail: Hector doing duty at the door, grinning.

  Cardozo clicked forward.

  Hector and the caller vanished into the lobby.

  Next: Princess Lily Lobkowitz entering, looking angry at finding no doorman.

  Next slide: 79 leaving the building.

  Three slides later, Hector was back at his post, and Baron Billi von Kleist was entering the building. Hector was smiling at him.

  Next: a patient for one of the psychotherapists entering the building. Hector wasn’t smiling.

  Cardozo clicked forward to a photo showing a shadowy figure getting out of a cab. A woman. She was wearing dark glasses, a kerchief, tight jeans.

  Next sl
ide. Hector was signaling the woman. Next: Hector and the woman retreating into the depths of the lobby, leaving the doorway unattended.

  Cardozo stopped. The taxi and the woman’s dark glasses triggered an association to a killing he’d solved two years back. The Mildred Hopkinson case.

  Hopkinson had been legally blind and she’d lived with her working sister in Kew Gardens. Three years ago her father had been pushed from a twelfth-story window in Manhattan and someone had left one of Mildred’s gloves on the floor. It seemed a crude and cruel sort of frame; Mildred’s vision kept her housebound, and with her father’s death her small annuity passed to an uncle.

  Cardozo had ordered a stakeout on Mildred’s home and discovered she had a secret boyfriend, a cabby who picked her up every day at the side door, took her for a drive to a motel, and brought her back to that same door at three sharp.

  Mildred finally admitted her boyfriend had driven her to her dad’s, the old man had picked a fight, and—not seeing the open window—she’d pushed him. Two years for involuntary manslaughter.

  Cardozo clicked back through the sequence of slides. He knew exactly what he was looking for. Bingo. He stopped at the shot where the woman was getting out of the cab.

  No mistaking it. She hadn’t paid for the ride. Another glad-to-please cabby.

  Thanks for the tip, Mildred.

  Cardozo went back to the first day’s photos, looking for any female wearing glamour shades and babushka.

  June 2—four P.M.—a woman coming out of the Tower wearing dark glasses, no kerchief.

  Debbi Hightower? He put the picture aside, pulled a Hightower from the stack, dropped it into the projector.

  He clicked between the Hightower and the maybe Hightower and the girl in the cab. He reached out with his imagination, raking things in.

  They’re dealing dope. Seventy-nine is delivering, Hector is holding, Debbi is buying—definitely using …

  He clicked back to the cabby, a gray-capped man out of focus in the foreground. He played with the lens. He couldn’t get the image to sharpen.

  It was frustrating. The man was right there in the photograph and Cardozo couldn’t see him. It was like a Miranda rule standing between him and a smoking gun.