VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “I was married for eight years but it wasn’t good sex. Good sex is what it’s all about.”

  Siegel’s ears were filled with the roar of the place. She excused herself, said she’d be right back. She found Richards on a bench monitoring the stream of members coming into the bar. Sound, fury, and movement poured by in a smellifluent cascade.

  He slid her a glance, motioning her to look toward the bar. A blond, heavyset man with a droopy moustache was standing six feet away.

  “The handyman,” she said. “Claude Loring.”

  And then she saw something else.

  A man was moving with a shambling gait away from the bar. He had two wings of black hair over his ears, and he had dark, haunted eyes. He was badly out of shape in his Jockey shorts.

  Siegel sat there right on the brink of recognition and then a little memory popped out. “Lewis Monserat. The art dealer that handled the masks.”

  Richards peered. “Think they’re together?”

  “They’re sure not together tonight,” Siegel said.

  “Loring knows me,” Richards said.

  “Okay, I’ll take Loring. You take the king of the New York art world.”

  Lewis Monserat prowled, and an aura of tension came off him like mist. His hands kept kneading one another. Whatever he was on, it seemed to Detective Sam Richards that it could not be one of the joy-making chemicals.

  The art dealer looked unbelievably thin, his ribs standing out and his flesh sunken in except for the potbelly.

  He found a corner that fascinated him. He hunched his shoulders and stared into the darkness as if trying to count how many shadows were writhing in it.

  Siegel had to work hard to keep Loring in sight: he was moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing into the crowd, reappearing again. He paused to observe group action, scored coke, did coke, dealt coke.

  Then he leaned silhouetted in barlight against a pillar, erect, solitary, like a pillar himself. His gaze moved smoothly from face to face, body to body, shadow to shadow. It stopped.

  Siegel followed the direction of his eyes.

  A group of dancers had taken over an area by the bondage poles. One of them was taller than the others, a lanky boy of twenty or so with fine, curly light hair. He exuded a scrubbed blond healthiness.

  His coloring reminded Siegel of Jodie Downs.

  Loring watched the boy dance and then he watched the boy go to the bar for a beer. The boy took his beer to one of the empty tables along the wall.

  Loring followed. He planted himself before the table. He gave the boy a long steady gaze that was open and hungering.

  The boy was staring at the label on his beer can. There was something about him that seemed unsoiled: his face was not yet calculating.

  Loring said something. The boy brought his gaze up. Loring grinned lazily. Color stole slowly up the boy’s face.

  Loring lit a joint. He moved forward and held it out. The boy accepted it and took a long drag.

  Loring sat down. He looked at the boy. He asked something.

  A little line of wariness ran from the boy’s eye down to the corner of his mouth.

  Something stretched between them like a wire, alive with current, taut, ready to snap.

  The boy shook his head.

  Loring nodded and got up. He walked away without looking back at the boy, boring his way through the crowd and out into the clothescheck vestibule.

  The boy was sitting there, eyes lost in the semidistance, sad, peering, as if he had no place in the whole world to go.

  Siegel could see Loring on the bench in the vestibule, wrestling his foot into a boot. A moment later Loring was pushing his way up the stairs.

  Suddenly the boy seemed to make up his mind. He was moving quickly through the crowd now to the clothescheck. Siegel saw him claiming an armload of denim.

  She realized the next few moments were going to move very quickly. She pushed her way to the clothescheck, got her clothes back, and quickly dressed.

  The boy was already halfway up the stairs, wearing some of his clothes, carrying the rest.

  Siegel climbed the dimly lit stairwell, a fog of body heat pressing against her as she came out into the mugginess of the street. A thick robe of mist trailed through the parked cars. Footsteps echoed on the cracked pavement.

  Loring was walking a jagged lane through the limousines and trucks. He passed through a cone of light from a streetlamp. Light pinged off the studs in his jacket.

  The boy appeared in the gaps between parked trucks, trying to catch up.

  Loring stopped at a parked van, a run-down Ford with a blue-jay logo on the side. He unlocked the cab door and hoisted himself up and in. He did not shut the door.

  The boy was running now.

  Siegel crossed the avenue, keeping the two in her sightline.

  The boy reached the door of the truck. He looked up.

  Loring made a bored face, slouching down deeper into the driver’s seat. He swung his boots up onto the dashboard.

  The boy was standing there, looking at Loring, his eyes expectant and young. Loring turned and looked at him. He reached a hand down and helped the boy swing up into the truck.

  Siegel came closer to the truck, close enough to see the license number on the Tennessee plate. She wrote it in her notebook. She circled around to the front of the truck, weaving like a junkie.

  The jagged line of warehouse roofs bit up into the smoky sky.

  She crouched against a wall as though she were a bag woman resting. An ambulance screamed through the night.

  Loring took out another joint. His mouth smiled and his moustache smiled too. A cigarette lighter flicked. For an instant the cab filled with light, drawing out of the dark two faces huddled near the flame.

  The faces stayed close. The joint went back and forth.

  Loring put both hands on the boy’s head, turning it, and kissed him.

  Then he bent forward to twist a key in the ignition. The engine made a sound like eight dozen winos hawking phlegm.

  The van pulled away from the curb. Siegel shot up off the sidewalk into the street. She raised a hand and jumped into the headlight beams of a cruising yellow Checker cab, ready to flag it down by body block if necessary.

  The cab jerked to a halt. Siegel jumped in, flipping her wallet open to the shield. “Follow that truck.”

  The Iranian-looking driver nodded.

  The van trundled east through the potholes of Fourteenth Street and then north through the potholes of Sixth Avenue. It parked at a hydrant on the corner of Thirty-third.

  “Let me off around the corner.” Siegel tipped the driver an extra five.

  As she came around onto Sixth Avenue she saw movement in the van. The boy was bending his nose down to Loring’s hand, taking a hit of coke.

  The truck door opened and Loring and the boy stepped down.

  Siegel hung back in a store entrance.

  Loring led the boy across the sidewalk to the arched doorway of a six-story loft building. A moment later they were inside and the door clicked shut behind them.

  “The kid came down alone two hours later,” Siegel said. “I called it a night and went home. Sorry, Vince. I felt as wrecked as he looked.”

  “You did a good job,” Cardozo said. There was a detail in her report that nagged at him. The van.

  “Loring’s our boy,” Monteleone said.

  Cardozo made a skeptical face. “If it was Loring, then how do you explain Monserat?”

  “What’s to explain?” Monteleone said.

  “He sold the mask and lied about it.”

  “A lot of people lie.”

  “Monserat is in very bad physical shape,” Richards said. “Whoever did that to Jodie Downs, they could haul weight.”

  “Loring is built,” Malloy said.

  “Also,” Richards went on, “it may not mean anything—but Monserat is a very inhibited guy. He watches, he jacks off, that’s it.”

  “Just comes and
goes,” Monteleone said.

  The linoleum let out a screech as Siegel shoved her chair back. “Greg, anyone ever tell you you’re disgusting?”

  “My wife Gina, every night. And she loves it.”

  “Ellie,” Cardozo said, “could you come with me a moment?”

  Siegel went with him into his cubicle. He switched on the slide projector and went quickly through the preceding night’s photos. Taxis and limousines and meat trucks flicked across the wall, and scurrying between them, like roaches fleeing the light, were men and women with maniacal dead eyes, phantoms plunging through a shadowy doorway into the age-old search for kicks and oblivion.

  He stopped at the first photo of Claude Loring: it showed a beefy blond man in jeans and a two-day beard, licking a candy bar. There was a space at the curb, a view of trucks clogging the avenue. A van was parked across the avenue. On the side of it was a huge logo of a blue jay.

  “That’s Loring’s van?”

  Siegel nodded. “That’s it.”

  Cardozo stared a moment at the blue jay, and then he called Richards.

  “That van with the blue jay, Sam—where have we seen it?”

  Richards’s gaze came up at the image on the cubicle wall. A frown darkened his forehead. “The day we talked to Loring’s alibi—the girl space cadet over in the flower district—that van was parked outside her place, at the hydrant.”

  “Right,” Cardozo said. “Tennessee license. Didn’t she get a phone call—her machine answered and she picked up?”

  Richards had to think a moment. “Like she knew what the message was going to be and she didn’t want us to hear.”

  “What was it she said about deliveries?”

  “Someone was on her ass because she missed her weekend deliveries. She said her van was being repaired.”

  At first Cardozo was aware only of a sheet of silence. Then, faintly, through gray cinderblock walls, came the slamming and buzzing, the humming and thumping of an inhabited building.

  He was standing in the garage of Beaux Arts Tower, the belly, listening to the digestion that kept the animal going.

  His glance moved from shadows into the acid greenish pools of fluorescent light, sweeping Rollses, BMW’s, a floor full of TV commercials sprung to three-dimensional life.

  There were names stenciled in white on the wall by each parking space. In the space marked LAWRENCE, a handsome red Porsche sat.

  Cardozo mentally erased the Porsche and put a yellow cab there, a cab with the words DING-DONG TRANSPORT on its side.

  After a moment he walked past the garage door to the service elevator. He gazed up at the closed-circuit TV camera making scans of the garage. Mounted on the wall ten feet above the concrete floor, it panned slowly his way.

  He stood in the empty loading bay till the camera lens had him head-on. He realized that if a truck were parked in that place the camera wouldn’t pick up either side panel. Which was why a doorman watching the closed-circuit TV wouldn’t have seen a truck with a blue jay painted on the side.

  Cardozo had a sense of pressure behind his eyes and at the same time he felt light-headed, almost dizzy. He was finally beginning to see both sides of the coin.

  He phoned Jerzy Bronski’s garage and had them radio Jerzy. Twenty minutes later Jerzy was sitting on a bench on the esplanade in Carl Schurz Park, his face dark and still, drawn down on one side as though by the weight of the cigarette he was smoking.

  “Thanks for waiting,” Cardozo said.

  “I almost didn’t.”

  Cardozo sat on the bench. His eye went to a tugboat sliding past on the shining gray water of the East River. “Pretty place. You come here a lot?”

  Jerzy’s thin lips were set in a taut line. “I don’t come anywhere a lot. I hold down two jobs and today I’m pulling two shifts at the wheel of that wreck they call a Chrysler. Already I lost twenty dollars sitting here on my tush.”

  “Look at it this way, Jerzy. Now you have friends at the precinct. It could come in handy.”

  “Maybe it’ll pay my rent?”

  “It might even pay your dealer.”

  Jerzy gave him a look. “You said I was home free on that.”

  “You are. But I need a little help.”

  “I already helped. And guess what, Debbi knows it was me that talked to you.”

  “She didn’t learn it from me.”

  “Give me a break. Debbi’s no Einstein, but she’s no dumbo either.”

  Cardozo let that one sail right by. “Saturday, May twenty-fourth, the day the man was murdered in six and Debbi didn’t get her coke. Why did you park in Fred Lawrence’s space?”

  “All right, maybe I parked in someone’s place. It’s a crime?”

  “Why didn’t you use the truck bay?”

  “Must have been someone already parked in the bay.”

  “You remember who?”

  Jerzy had to think a moment. “A van.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “A van’s a van.”

  “Some are big. Some aren’t. Some are red, some are green. Some are blue.”

  Something made Jerzy’s eyelids twitch and he raised them. “It had a bird on it, a blue bird. I remember that bird.”

  “Was it a blue jay?”

  “It was a bird that was blue, you tell me if that’s a blue jay.”

  Cardozo showed Jerzy the print. “Is that the van?”

  Tommy Daniels had done a good job enlarging the van, cropping the foreground.

  Jerzy’s lips shaped a thoughtful pout. “It’s the same bird. Maybe it’s the same van. How do you tell one beatup ’78 Ford from another?”

  “Did you notice anything about the license plates? Like were they out of state?”

  Jerzy gave him a look. “Give me a break. Do I look like a traffic cop?”

  “You said Claude Loring was crashing here the whole weekend and you missed your deliveries because your van broke down.”

  “That’s right.” Faye di Stasio was wearing an old T-shirt and a faded pair of jeans and Cardozo had a feeling she had thrown the clothes on two minutes ago when his buzz at the downstairs door had woken her.

  Cardozo handed her the photograph. “Is this your van?”

  She looked at the photograph, then stared with confused eyes back at him. “It could be.”

  “That blue jay is your company logo, isn’t it?”

  Her eyes were dark and nervous. She nodded.

  “So what would it be doing on someone else’s van? Aren’t logos registered, like trademarks?”

  “That’s right, but—”

  “So it’s your van.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You recognize the street in that photo?”

  “No.”

  “Did someone else park your van there?”

  “I guess.”

  “Who do you loan your van to?”

  “Claude.”

  “What does Claude borrow the van for?”

  “To get around.”

  “Was he the one who wrecked it?”

  “No one wrecked it.”

  “But you missed your deliveries Memorial Day weekend.”

  “The van broke down but it works now.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “It wouldn’t start. The brakes were slipping. You know, the usual van shit.”

  “Who repaired the van?”

  “Some shop repaired it.”

  “What shop?”

  “I don’t know. Some shop Claude took it to.”

  “When did he do that?”

  “The week before Memorial Day.”

  “And when did he bring the van back?”

  “The week after.”

  “Can you show me the bill?”

  “I don’t know where the bill is.”

  “You do a lot of coke, don’t you.”

  She blinked her eyes, held herself still. “Did I miss some kind of connecting link?”

  “I said you do a lot of coke.
Claude does a lot of coke too.”

  She leaned forward. Her smile took a long time to stretch out to him. “You’re kidding,” she said, and then, studying him, “Okay, you’re not.”

  The silence was heavy. Light spilled across the floor: a cat strolled into it. She gave the animal a look as gray as driftwood. She went into a small room beyond the kitchen. She came back with a cigarette.

  “You ever met Claude’s dealer?” Cardozo asked.

  She found an ashtray. “Claude has a private life, I don’t butt in.”

  “He never told you about the doorman at Beaux Arts Tower—the guy that wears the rug?”

  “I’m not feeling well and this conversation isn’t helping.”

  “The doorman with the really bad rug sells Claude his coke. You never been to Beaux Arts Tower?”

  “Why would I have been to Beaux Arts Tower?”

  “I think you’ve been there.” Cardozo crossed to the bathroom door and nudged it open. The odor of three-day-old cat litter drifted out. He flicked on the light and pointed to the tub. “I think you stole that shower curtain from them.”

  “I don’t know where that shower curtain came from.”

  “It came from Beaux Arts Tower.”

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “Then how come it’s here and not in apartment six where it belongs?”

  “Claude gave it to me.”

  “You’re saying Claude stole it.”

  “I didn’t say that. I mean I don’t know where it came from. So don’t try to tie me in with someone else’s petty larceny.”

  “Screw petty larceny. I’m talking homicide.”

  “I’m really not following this.”

  “You helped Claude. You loaned him your van and you let him crash here. And he gave you coke and that shower curtain and a little wine and booze and frozen dinners from the show suite, right?”

  She just stood there looking at him. “That’s not murder.”

  “No, it’s not. But killing a guy is.”

  Suddenly her fingers weren’t behaving. She dropped the cigarette. She bent and picked it up, leaving a fresh burn among a million old marks on the floor. She sank into a chair.

  “You’re an accomplice,” Cardozo said.

  “Knowing someone is not being an accomplice.” She looked distant, isolated, sitting there, her skin pale, her face locked in gold-framed glasses with a faint raspberry tint to the lenses.