VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Monteleone’s turn. “Had a talk with Father Will Madsen. He seems to be a periodic lush. Turns out he’s been withholding a piece of information, but this morning around one A.M. he got drunk and spilled. The day of the murder, a little before noon, he saw Debbi in the lobby flirting with Hector Dominguez.”

  “The guy with the dead muskrat on his head?” Sam Richards said.

  “What a lousy rug,” Malloy said.

  Monteleone continued. “When Madsen was passing through the lobby again, Debbi was back, totally crazed. She was trying to claw Hector to pieces. Madsen feels very guilty telling this. It’s taken him two weeks and a few fifths of Stoli to come forward.”

  Cardozo pondered, trying to stick events together.

  “Remember those scratches on his face?” Siegel said.

  Cardozo nodded. “Hector said the cat did those. Greg, when did this happen?”

  “A little after 2 P.M.”

  Silence came down, broken an instant later by the sound of Richards making a hacking attempt to recover from coffee swallowed the wrong way.

  “What did Madsen mean, Debbi was flirting with Hector?” Cardozo asked.

  “He said it looked like Debbi was coming on to the guy.”

  “He didn’t say coming on,” Siegel said. “A priest wouldn’t use that expression.”

  “He said flirting. That means coming on, right?”

  Siegel made an impatient face. “Flirting is courtship, Greg. Coming on is hard cruising. One is flattering and one is demeaning.”

  “Got it,” Monteleone said. “Gracias mucho.”

  “Like she was offering herself?” Cardozo said. “Like she was willing to make it with Hector?”

  “Father Madsen seemed to think so.”

  Cardozo was thinking of the possibilities, everything going through his mind at once. He had three facts: at noon a not very bright upscale hooker had been trying to wheedle good graces from a Neanderthal doorman, and two hours later she was physically attacking him. And sometime during those two hours a man had been murdered on the sixth floor.

  “What turned Debbi around in two hours?” Cardozo said.

  “I saw someone change like that once,” Siegel said. “It was a psychotic break brought on by cocaine.”

  Sam Richards’s lower lip moved. He ran his tongue along it. “There’s another witness—he’d be able to shed some light.”

  Cardozo looked at him. “Who’s that, Sam?”

  “Jerzy Bronski’s taxi was parked in the garage. He says he was taking a pee, but it stands to reason he was boffing Debbi, right?”

  Cardozo picked up the telephone. He dialed. The line buzzed eight times.

  “Ms. Hightower’s residence,” a woman’s harried voice said.

  “Miss Hightower, please.”

  “This is her service. She won’t be back till Sunday evening.”

  “What time Sunday evening?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Her father.”

  “Hello, Dr. Hightower. I didn’t recognize your voice. Debbi will be back after eight o’clock.”

  A wave of annoyance swept Cardozo. He set his coffee down. He looked at the Beaux Arts Tower service personnel work schedule. Hector Dominguez would not be working until Monday, 4 P.M. to midnight.

  He phoned Hector’s home number and after two rings thought better of it and hung up. Save that one for face-to-face. He pulled the fives on Jerzy Bronski.

  The sky had turned dusky gray. Heat waves rising from the street were tinged with the neon of shop signs.

  The garage occupied a corner lot. There was a cardboard sign in the glass pane of the dispatcher’s door: do not enter.

  Cardozo entered. He flashed his open wallet and asked for Jerzy Bronski.

  The dispatcher, tufts of black hair poking out from his sweat-soaked T-shirt, glanced over from his desk. “Not back yet.”

  Cardozo sat uninvited in the free chair.

  Stuttering fluorescent light flicked the peeling wall.

  At quarter after eight a tall, slender man came in with his taxi sheets.

  “Visitor,” the dispatcher said.

  Jerzy frowned at Cardozo, a sharp line jagging down between his eyebrows.

  Cardozo rose and introduced himself. “Good meeting you, Jerzy. How about some coffee?”

  “How about a drink?” Jerzy said.

  Three minutes later they were settling down at a table on the glass-enclosed terrace of the Sazerac House across the way.

  Jerzy tapped a Lucky loose from a crumpled pack and laid the pack on the table beside the metal ashtray. He lit the cigarette, striking a match from a book one-handed. He leaned back against his chair. “It makes me look bad, cops coming into my garage asking about me like I was a criminal.”

  “Jerzy, believe me, for a guy who moonlights his ass off the way you do, you’re looking great.”

  Jerzy shaped an O with his mouth and blew out a perfect smoke ring.

  “We know you’ve been making it with Debbi Hightower,” Cardozo said. “And we know you were with her the day of the killing.”

  The legs of Jerzy’s chair came back to the floor and denial began gathering itself in his face.

  “We have a witness who can place your cab in the garage.” Cardozo went out on a limb. “And who saw you take the elevator up to Debbi’s. Hightower isn’t the point, you weren’t breaking any laws that we’re interested in enforcing. What we want from you is information.”

  Jerzy’s finger drew a track in the condensation that had formed on his glass of Scotch and water.

  “Why did Debbi attack the doorman?”

  Jerzy was silent.

  “We know you falsified your cab sheets. We know you were driving Debbi home every day after she hooked in the hotel. We know, but Ding-Dong Transport doesn’t need to know.”

  Jerzy’s expression was undecided: he wanted to save his ass but he didn’t want to wind up parking it in a fry pan. “She freaked out,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Jerzy mopped his face with a dime store handkerchief that needed to see some action in a washing machine. “A delivery was late.”

  “Jerzy, I’m not a narc, so let’s get this out of the way. It was coke, right?”

  Jerzy put his drink down. He spoke quietly. “She’s one of those chicks that live on the stuff. We were having a great time, and then she flipped.” He imitated the intonation of Debbi flipping. “Gotta see my dealer, gotta see my dealer.”

  “Who’s her dealer?”

  Jerzy sucked in breath, hollowing his cheeks. “Do you have to drag me into this? You’ve been watching the building, you know who runs the coke in that place. He promised her the stuff: she went down and he didn’t have it. She flipped out.”

  The third time Cardozo buzzed, the decibel level of punk rock dropped to something approaching bearability. The door opened a crack. A young woman’s face stared at him above the safety chain. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders, curly in a way that suggested she had just bathed.

  She looked curiously at his shield and then curiously at him.

  “They said the police were coming up.”

  “I am the police.”

  “You’re not the black dude that was here before.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “He was nice.”

  “So am I.”

  She worked her eyelashes. “What’s this about?”

  “Just a few questions.”

  “The place is kind of a mess—the maid’s been sick.”

  “That’s okay, we can talk here in the hallway.”

  “What the hell, you’re not my mother, you’re not going to criticize. Are you?”

  “Promise.”

  She stepped back from the door, her loosely tied bathrobe a swirl of Day-Glo ruffles.

  The furniture in the livingroom was minimal: beanbag chairs, bookcases, lonely objects in a dim cavern. Magazines and show business newspapers littered the floor.

  She
sank onto a beanbag chair and he sat on the other.

  Her eyes fixed on him in uneasy expectancy.

  “You had a fight with the doorman a week ago Saturday,” he said.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Come on, Debbi. We know why you’re wearing a false nail and we know how Hector got his face scratched. We have a witness.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “I have rights.”

  “You don’t have those rights till I arrest you, Debbi. I’m asking you some questions hoping maybe I won’t have to do that. Just tell me what you and Hector were fighting about.”

  Her eyes became pools of evasion. “Hector’s an s.o.b., that’s what we were fighting about.”

  “Debbi, we know about Hector’s sideline.”

  She got up from the beanbag. “No way I’m going to get into this conversation.”

  “We know he’s dealing coke to you.”

  The face was defiant now, eyes blazing. They were blue-gray eyes, a wild blazing blue-gray. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

  A beige decorator phone lay on the floor at the end of a tangled plastic line. She didn’t make a move toward it.

  “Debbi, we’re not interested in the coke. We’re interested in what happened in this building a week ago Saturday when a man in six was murdered.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Does the name Jodie Downs mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Inferno?”

  “What inferno?”

  She said it without a capital I. That satisfied him.

  “Why did you attack Hector?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Debbi, I don’t care about that coke, but some friends of mine would care a whole lot.”

  Behind the bright glitter of her mascaraed eyes, he caught a sudden note of pleading.

  “In my business, I have to stay alert. So sometimes I do a little coke.” She grinned nervously. “Sorry ’bout that.”

  His mouth smiled back at her. “A lot of people do coke. Hell, cops have been caught doing it.”

  “Tell me. It’s strictly personal use. I don’t deal.”

  “We understand that, Debbi. We’re not accusing you of dealing.”

  “I was expecting a gram of coke. I prepaid. With Hector you prepay. He said he’d have it at one thirty. All right, I was a little late picking it up—but that’s no reason for him to sell it to someone else.”

  “Who’d he sell it to?”

  “He said it was a real good customer who needed it real bad, needed it more than I did.”

  “Do you have any idea who?”

  “Look, I make it my business not to know other people’s business, you know what I mean?”

  “Someone else in the building?”

  “I absolutely don’t know that.”

  Broome Street was dark as Cardozo stepped out of the car. A summer wind gusted along the pavement, swirling sheets of newspaper. Tiredness was all through him as he let himself into the apartment.

  “You look beat.” Terri walked toward him, and the soft cone of the hallway light sculpted her out of the darkness. She had a springy step and her body radiated a comfort with itself.

  His arms went around her, folding her to him.

  “You had a call. A woman.” She handed him the piece of paper with the number.

  He sensed her attention and looked at her sideways. Her oddly adult, humorous eyes met his and the flicker of a smile passed between them.

  He went into the hallway and dialed. His reflection in the mirror told him he needed a shave and he’d been sweating into his shirt a few hours too long.

  On the second ring Melissa Hatfield answered.

  “Am I calling at a bad time?” he said.

  “No, I’m watching TV.” Behind her cheerful voice something solemn was waiting to come out. “I checked into that address. Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue is leased to a company called Pegasus International, and Pegasus is renting the adjoining cellar space to the Inferno Fraternal Society.”

  Holding the phone receiver in one hand, Cardozo stretched to pick up a pencil. He found a blank space on a junk mailing from the Museum of Modern Art. “Who’s Pegasus?”

  “I think they’re a paper company. They’re leasing on a month-to-month basis, which is unusual for a building, to say the least.”

  “Who are they leasing from?”

  There was an odd pausing before she spoke again. “They’re leasing from us. Balthazar. We picked up the building about four months ago. They were already in occupancy. We’ve picked up a few odd lots in the meat-packing district. My boss, Nat Chamberlain’s, trying to put the lots together. So he leases month to month. When he gets enough property he’ll rip down and put up a condo.”

  “Doesn’t Chamberlain care who he rents to?”

  “The theory is in case there’s a stink he can claim he didn’t know who Pegasus was renting to. It’s like Mayor Koch or President Reagan not knowing their handpicked deputies are breaking all the laws. I could check the Pegasus incorporation papers, but it’ll be the usual New York labyrinth.”

  “Don’t bother with that. You’ve told me enough. Thanks.”

  “Vince, I enjoyed last night.”

  “So did I.”

  At one o’clock the following morning, Detectives Carl Malloy and Sam Richards entered the underground premises of the Inferno Recreational Club, signing in as Mr. Warren and his guest, Mr. White.

  23

  ON SUNDAY, THE EIGHTH of June, a little after 8:00 P.M., Babe Devens’s nurse wheeled her out of the side entrance of Doctors Hospital to a gray stretch limousine double-parked on 89th Street. The chauffeur came around to help the nurse lift Babe into the back seat. Lucia Vanderwalk watched, and something locked in the stern planes of her face.

  The back of the car smelled of fresh roses. Babe and her father sat facing traffic, and Lucia and the nurse took seats facing Babe.

  They took the FDR Drive south. Seven years had made their difference, but Babe was relieved to see that the city was still there. The same East River was awash with reddish light. The same jagged skyscrapers loomed dark purple against the fiery sky, pillars holding up the sunset.

  The limousine swung off the drive, smoothly catching green lights all the way to Fifty-seventh Street, where children were playing in the little riverside park. Babe smiled at the peaceful scene with its golden long-ago glow.

  One block north a dense group of people stood clustered on the sidewalk, shouting and pushing and spilling over into the street. Advance copies of New York magazine, available that day, had carried a column by Gordon Dobbs reporting Babe Devens’s recovery. A white-panel truck was double-parked just ahead of Babe’s town house. The blue lettering on its side said WCBS-TV NEWS.

  “Revolting,” Lucia muttered. “Hadley, you were going to see that this didn’t happen.”

  “It’s a free country, my dear.”

  Honking a path clear with his horn, the driver brought the limousine to the curb. The crowd surged toward the car.

  The chauffeur came sprinting around to open the door. Lucia stepped out, slicing space with her handbag, holding reporters at bay.

  The chauffeur quickly set up the wheelchair and then E.J. helped him load Babe into the chair. E.J. steered the chair across the pavement and Hadley, walking with a slight limp, went ahead and pushed the buzzer of number 18.

  The crowd pressed in. A bearded man in fatigue trousers came dashing forward, balancing a minicam on his shoulder. Babe looked up into wild, snapping light. Mikes thrust themselves into her face.

  “Looking great, Babe!”

  “Did Scottie do it, Babe?”

  The door of number 18 was opened by a stranger who regarded Babe with a look of extraordinary gravity.

  The wrought-iron grill clanged shut and then the front door closed. Street noises were blotted out, and Babe found herself once more in the
house she had left only a week ago, a week that other people called seven years.

  “Beatrice,” Lucia said, “this is Wheelock, your new butler.”

  The man’s face was gray, composed like a stone, and he seemed tall and cadaverous in his servant’s cutaway.

  “How do you do,” Babe said.

  “How do you do, ma’am. Welcome home, ma’am.”

  “Where’s Methuselah?” Babe hadn’t thought of Methuselah, the highland terrier, till this moment. Suddenly she missed his running leap, his paws mauling her dress, his damp breath and warm animal smell in her face.

  “Methuselah had to be put to sleep,” Lucia said.

  There was a stab in Babe’s heart. She wheeled herself into the hallway. Her eyes took in the familiar framed pictures on the wall, the Sheraton table, the umbrella stand. They all told the bygone story of yesterday.

  “I want to see the house,” Babe said.

  “Of course,” Lucia said. “E.J. will help you.”

  “Thanks, I can manage this chair myself.”

  Babe rode up alone in the elevator, the same mahogany-paneled elevator she remembered, yet in some elusive way different. It took her a moment to see that the floor buttons had been replaced, black numbers on white and not the white on black she recalled.

  She stopped on each floor and wheeled her chair along the corridors.

  Every room, every passageway, was quiet and mysterious and changed: spotless new coverings on the chairs in Cordelia’s room, not quite the same blue as before; a firescreen in the guest room, copper where it had been brass—one by one the little shocks built up, signs that the house had been shut for years and hurriedly reopened.

  A lump of mourning lodged in her throat as she wheeled to the open doorway of the master bedroom.

  She hesitated at the threshold of the well-furnished, handsome room, pulling in sensation through every pore. A scent of dried-rose potpourri drifted to her. Her eyes traveled across the canopied double bed, the bentwood chairs and loveseat with their shapes that were like chamber music made visible, the shelf of Limoges figurines.

  She saw herself in the mirror wall, an unfamiliar woman in an unfamiliar wheelchair, saw her own dismay at these reminders of the life she had built young and lost young.

  She wheeled forward to the chest of drawers. Her mind was in motion, counting and registering and remembering. Her eyes looked down at the silver-backed hairbrush and mirror and comb, then played across the space where Scottie’s things should have been.