VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  He phoned Tommy Daniels.

  Tommy arrived wearing canary yellow trousers and his conservative helio pink shirt. He was remarkably energetic and Cardozo envied him that.

  “Do a little magic with that slide, will you, Tommy?”

  Tommy Daniels popped a pink gumdrop into his mouth. It was disgusting some of the things members of the force did to avoid smoking. He played with the lens, focusing and unfocusing the image in the shaft of light.

  “Stop, hold it right there, Tommy.”

  The face was still blurred, but the logo on the cab door was clear enough to make out: DING-DONG TRANSPORT.

  Cardozo handed Tommy the slide of the woman in dark glasses. “How clear can you make that?”

  Tommy tinkered with the projector. He shook his head. “I’ll have to do this one in the lab.”

  “I’d be obliged, Tommy.”

  Cardozo swiveled in his chair and yelled for Malloy. “Get Bronski’s cab sheet for yesterday.” Cardozo read the hour from the log. “I want the drop-off at 12:20 P.M.”

  18

  “WE’VE BEEN SERVED WITH a show cause order of the most unbelievable malice,” Lucia Vanderwalk said. “It comes from some woman lawyer purporting to act on your behalf.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” Babe said, “but I obviously needed legal representation.”

  “Why? You have your father and me acting on your behalf.”

  For a moment Babe said nothing from where she sat in her wheelchair. “I’m grateful for the help you and Papa gave me while I was sick. But you’ve stopped being a help. I want to get out of here and you want me to stay and that’s why I hired Miss MacGill.”

  “Then you admit you went behind our backs.”

  “I admit I hired a lawyer. There’s no secret about it.”

  “This Judge Levin who signed the order is an outrageous incompetent. He ruled against Cybilla deClairville in her suit against her dressmaker.”

  “Judges make strange rulings. Who knows how the judge may rule when you and I go to court. Or how a jury may decide, if it comes to that.”

  A very bad silence rolled in.

  Lucia said, “You seem to relish the idea of making this squabble public.”

  “I don’t relish it, but I’m willing to take the chance. What I’m not willing to do is sit here and let another minute of my life tick away.”

  “Dr. Corey happens to be an excellent physician and it’s his opinion you’re not well enough to be let out of the hospital.”

  “And it’s my opinion I am.”

  “You’re not a specialist.”

  “I am when it comes to myself.”

  Lucia turned to her husband. “Hadley, will you reason with your daughter?”

  There was a special smile at the corner of Hadley’s lips. Babe understood it exactly. Her father’s eyes met hers, creating a conspiracy of warmth.

  “Lucia, she’s an adult. As I understand the legalities of this, she ceased to be our ward once she regained consciousness.”

  “Is that true, Bill?” Lucia said.

  Lucia and Hadley had brought Bill Frothingham, the family lawyer, with them, and Lucia gave him her lovely smile. She had a great many smiles at her disposal, not all of them lovely, but this was obviously the one she thought appropriate.

  “Not precisely.” A gray-templed man with penetrating eyes and a sharp-featured arresting face, Bill Frothingham had a gift for getting on well with people, or at least keeping them at bay with the sort of smile he was smiling now. “The test is competence, not consciousness. Once Babe can demonstrate competence she becomes her own ward.”

  “Obviously she’s competent,” Hadley said. “She went and hired a lawyer.”

  “You can hardly call it competent,” Lucia shot back. “She’s defying the best neurologist in the country.”

  “Look here.” Bill Frothingham shoved his mouth into a peace-making grin. “We all want the same thing, which is for Babe to be well. If she’ll agree to spend a reasonable amount of time under medical care—”

  “I’m taking my nurse with me,” Babe said. “I’ll be under medical care in my own home.”

  “Don’t expect a doctor like Eric Corey to make house calls,” Lucia warned.

  “He likes me,” Babe said, “I’ll invite him to dinner.”

  “Don’t you get sarcastic with me, young lady.”

  “I’m telling you exactly what I plan to do.”

  Lucia’s green eyes challenged her daughter. “And if you should need an X ray or an EKG or an EEG or a CAT scan?”

  “I can always be readmitted.”

  “Lucia,” Hadley said pleasantly, “I think we should admit when we’re beaten.”

  19

  AT THE WEDNESDAY MORNING task force meeting Carl Malloy produced Bronski’s cab sheets for June 2. The sheets said he’d been at West End Avenue and 93rd Street at 12:20 when the photo van placed his look-alike at Beaux Arts Tower.

  “I don’t believe the sheets,” Cardozo said.

  He passed around Tommy Daniels’s blowup of the girl in the babushka.

  “A two-week vacation in Oahu if anyone can identify her.”

  “Debbi Hightower,” Sam Richards said.

  “You’re crazy,” Malloy said.

  “How can you tell from this?” Siegel said. “It’s a blob.”

  “Debbi’s a blob,” Greg Monteleone said.

  “But she’s not this blob,” Malloy said.

  “You’re a real help,” Cardozo said. “All of you. Get out of here.”

  He went back to the slide projector and began the laborious task of going through all the photos since day one, isolating all nonresident females wearing babushkas and designer shades.

  By late afternoon he’d turned up eight possibilities and was wondering about a ninth when there was a knock on the doorframe.

  He turned.

  A boy stood at the door, very lost, very out of place. His look was open and vulnerable. His hair was reddish and hung in bangs on his forehead. He wore faded jeans, Adidas jogging shoes, and a T-shirt with a few well-laundered holes. It was the yuppie version of the street look.

  Cardozo could see his caller was not a junkie, not a pimp, not a pross, not a booster.

  “Lieutenant Cardozo?”

  “Help you?”

  “My name’s Dave Bellamy.” The boy’s voice was taut, unsteady. “The man downstairs told me to talk to you.”

  The boy’s feet kept checking an impulse to step backward. Cardozo could see he was scared shitless.

  “It’s about a guy I know. Jodie Downs.”

  In Cardozo’s mind the initials J.D. set off a little inner jingle. He began listening with his skin. He lifted a pile of rubble from a chair. “Have a seat.”

  The boy sat obediently.

  “If you’d like some coffee—” Cardozo offered.

  “No, thanks, I’ve had a lot more than my quota today.” The way the boy said it was embarrassed, apologetic, like a drunk saying I’ve had too many, I’ve had to have too many to psych myself up for this.

  “I saw the poster at church last night.” The boy’s glance fought desperately for some sort of courage, skittering off surfaces, ricocheting away from Cardozo’s. “The poster said anyone recognizing this man. I recognized him. Jodie Downs. He was watering my plants for me while I was away.”

  Cardozo got out a pad, began taking notes. “Can I have your name and address, Dave?”

  Dave Bellamy spelled his name and gave an address at One Chelsea Place—“That’s the Episcopal seminary on Ninth Avenue. I’m a second-year student. I got back late from Chicago last night, I’ve been home visiting my folks for a week, and I went to a late mass at the Roman Catholic church on Twenty-fourth. They have a beautiful late mass. I saw the poster.”

  His hand going to his hair, pulling at a strand of reddish blond.

  “The plants in my room were dead. Some clothes of Jodie’s were on the bed, and some of mine were missing.”

&nb
sp; “When did you last see Jodie?”

  Dave Bellamy had to think a moment. “The night I flew home. Friday May sixteenth. He came to my room to get the keys.”

  “You got a minute, Dave? I’d like you to come with me downtown and look at something.”

  The attendant walked to number 1473. He turned a key and applied just enough pull to bring the slab sliding out. Ball bearings screeched.

  Bellamy glanced at Cardozo.

  Cardozo gave him a nod.

  Bellamy walked across to the slab. His step was cautious, as though the floor might burst beneath his feet.

  The attendant lifted the sheet. The light drew the drained, waxen face of the dead man out of the shadows.

  Bellamy stared, not moving, not breathing.

  The corpse looked curiously unborn, eyes closed in placental dreaming.

  Cardozo waited in a tingling state of awareness. There was no sound but the plashing of water from an unseen hose. The smell was a blend of formaldehyde and meat that had sat too long in a marinade of sickening sweetness.

  Dave Bellamy just stood there with a stunned look. Then he lifted his hands slowly and nodded his head.

  As they drove uptown Bellamy sat strapped into his safety belt, but his mind was somewhere else, secret and apart.

  A late afternoon shade had fallen over the city. The sky was a darkening bruise behind the turrets of lower Manhattan, just beginning to glitter with electric lights.

  “It’s your first corpse, isn’t it,” Cardozo said. He felt sorry for the boy. “It’s like virginity. You never get it back.”

  They parked on West Twentieth.

  Cardozo followed Dave Bellamy into the seminary. Through a window he could see the interior of an office, the shape of a priest bent over a desk. There was an intermittent amateurish clatter of typewriter, the ringing of a phone, and then a voice of which he could make out nothing except the gentleness. The priest waved Dave Bellamy through and smiled as though he recognized Cardozo.

  They passed into a peaceful cloister with stepping-stone paths and evening-dappled oaks. There were iron fences, dark, ivy-twined brick buildings and a chapel with a high Gothic tower. Green-washed light filtered through trees that had grown undisturbed for a hundred years.

  They went up a stairwell with hollowed stone steps. The well smelled of centuries of cleanliness. They stopped at the fourth landing.

  Dave Bellamy nervously got out his keys and opened the door. He turned on the light. It revealed neat, scholarly clutter: a desk, stacks of black-bound books that reminded Cardozo of the Penal Code, drafting lamps, a crucifix—Jesus in ivory, not suffering—over the bed. Khaki trousers and a sports shirt had been tossed down on the bedspread as though someone had just made a dash for the shower. There was a suitcase beside the bed.

  “Those are his?” Cardozo asked.

  Dave Bellamy nodded.

  “And the suitcase?”

  “That’s his too.”

  “Do you lease this room?”

  “I’m leasing it for the summer session,” Dave Bellamy said.

  “May I open the suitcase?”

  “Sure.”

  Cardozo opened the bag. The top layer was underpants and tube socks and T-shirts with J.D.’s initials. The next layer was leather. A vest, a belt, a cap, gloves, all bearing the India-ink initials J.D. Then black rubber and steel. The kind of things sex shops sold and called novelties. A plastic Baggie with grass, Bambu rolling papers, some tabs of blotter paper, a contact lens holder with coke inside, a two-ounce brown bottle three-quarters full of liquid popper.

  “How’d you meet this guy?” Cardozo asked.

  “We’re from the same hometown. Mattoon, Illinois. He was studying fashion at Pratt, I was … here.”

  “Did you know he was into this stuff—drugs, leather?”

  “I knew he was gay,” Bellamy said. “I didn’t know the details.”

  “Did you know he had one of your shirts?”

  “No.”

  “Did he take any of your other clothes?”

  “Some clericals are missing.”

  “I take it Jodie liked to dress up.”

  “For laughs I’d let him put on my clericals. Just here in the room.”

  “Can you give me his family’s phone?”

  Back at the precinct, Cardozo ordered that flyers of the dead man be distributed to all the leather bars in Manhattan.

  He stared at his telephone.

  He knew he was making the first mistake—thinking, planning what to say. There was no way of planning it.

  He picked up the telephone. He dialed and listened to the line buzz.

  A voice in the county sheriffs office in Mattoon, Illinois, answered. A moment later the deputy sheriff picked up and listened to what Cardozo had to say. A sigh traveled across the phone line. “I’ll go over and tell Lockwood and Meridee Downs myself. They’re friends.”

  “Would you give them my number?” Cardozo said. “They may have questions.”

  “They’ll have questions all right.”

  A call from Mattoon came seventeen minutes later. “Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Lockwood Downs. Jodie’s dad.” The voice was strangled. “My wife and I just heard that our son …” The words died.

  “I’m very sorry,” Cardozo said. He felt scooped out inside, and freezing, and he knew with his whole body what the murdered boy’s father was feeling.

  “My wife and I will be in New York tomorrow,” Lockwood Downs said.

  “You don’t have to,” Cardozo said, trying to make it easier for them.

  “Lieutenant, we have to.”

  Cardozo peered over the railing toward the Eastern information counter. He saw the man and woman standing at the baggage carousel. They were dressed in unobtrusive mourning, and somehow that seemed sad and sweetly square and very old-fashioned. She was small and pretty and straight, her body held erect in a soft white dress. The man was thin, nearly six feet tall. His clothes spoke of another time, the early Kennedy years: pepper-and-salt suit and a gray tie and a lightweight charcoal raincoat over his arm.

  Cardozo came down the stairs. He held out his hand and introduced himself.

  “Meridee and I want to thank you for phoning,” Downs said. His voice was tight and controlled and the sun had layered brown into his deep-lined face.

  “Do you have luggage?” Cardozo asked.

  Mrs. Downs shook her head. She had soft reddish hair and moist green eyes and there was a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Just these,” she said.

  They were each carrying a flat little fit-under-the-seat bag.

  “We’d better go see Jodie,” Downs said.

  “That’s not necessary,” Cardozo said. “Jodie’s friend Dave Bellamy identified him.”

  “You don’t understand,” Mrs. Downs said. Her small forehead was smooth, her mouth and chin firmly set “We came east to say good-bye to our boy.”

  The attendant raised the sheet. The parents gazed down at the shut eyes.

  Cardozo could feel the wave of shock hit them. Every atom of color was driven from their faces.

  They always caught you unprepared, those moments when you knew that life was not forever, that death was just around the bend. The Bible told you and life told you, but still you never felt it in your gut except when it was someone special that death claimed. Cardozo had had one of those moments. Lockwood and Meridee Downs were having one now.

  A thousand years crept by.

  Mrs. Downs bent to kiss the dead lips.

  Downs’s face lifted up and he looked at his wife so tenderly, so softly, that the look was a caress in itself. Cardozo could remember that look, the look of caring, of belonging to someone.

  She threw her arms around her husband and just cried.

  Cardozo drove the Downses to the Helmsley Midtown, where the airline had reserved them a two-hundred-dollar-a-day room for the night. Downs took off
his jacket and ordered drinks from room service and asked Cardozo to join them.

  They sat down in big comfortable upholstered chairs and chatted—that aimless surrealistic chatter that people always make in the face of death. For the Downses, it was the beginning of a release. For Cardozo, it was his job.

  Cardozo had the impression the Downses had been a hopeful upward-bound kind of family. He handled real estate and contracting, she had a nurse’s certificate. They lived in the west end of town, the good end. They spoke with open pride about their white-shingled house on Lincoln Street. It had two baths and a full cellar, and it was theirs, mortgage paid in full.

  Downs said, “I don’t believe in debt. I guess that’s un-American of me.”

  “Jodie grew up in that house,” Mrs. Downs said quietly. She shook her head. “It seems unbelievable. There was a time only a little while ago when Jodie was still here, in this world, and now he’s not.”

  “His whole life, wiped out,” Downs said. “You look back, you see a street paved with might-have-been’s and if-only’s. The phone rings, and you expect it’ll be him saying, Hey, Dad, send a hundred bucks.”

  “He was always short of money,” Mrs. Downs said.

  Cardozo began to learn a little about their son. He didn’t push into it—just let it come.

  “He played French horn in the marching band,” Mrs. Downs said. “He was too slender to make the high school football team.”

  “But he worked out with weights,” Downs said, “until he made the basketball team.”

  “He was popular with girls too,” Mrs. Downs said, wistfully. “The gay thing—that came later.”

  Cardozo ran his mind over Jodie’s life. “How did Jodie lose his testicle?”

  Downs was silent. Cardozo sensed in him a puritanism that had lost confidence in itself. It was his wife who finally broke the silence.

  “Jodie came to New York three years ago to be an actor. He met a man in a bar. He took the man home. The man drugged him and slashed him.”

  “Did the police ever find this man?” Cardozo asked.

  Mrs. Downs pushed the hem of her dress down past her knee. She shook her head.

  “After that Jodie enrolled in fashion school,” Downs said.