VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  There was a click and then her voice was on the line, that wonderfully warm voice, coming alive at the sound of his.

  “Nice to hear your voice, Vince.”

  “Just a quick question. Who was your husband’s doctor seven years ago?”

  He could feel her wondering why he was asking.

  “We both used the same doctor—Fred Hallowell on Park.”

  The manager pointed Cardozo into the depth of the garage.

  Cardozo’s steps echoed. It was a dimly lit space, badly ventilated, smelling of gasoline. Light reflected on the floor, pulling murky rainbows out of the oil spills.

  He watched the lower half of a man wriggling under a blue ’86 Pontiac. He nudged the man’s foot with his own.

  The rest of Waldo Flores wriggled out.

  “Pontiac’s looking good, Waldo. Maybe I’ll bring my Honda here for a tune-up.”

  Waldo looked as though he wanted to give Cardozo a mouthful of the greasy wrench he was holding. “We don’t do Hondas.”

  “That’s a shame. What I’m here about, Waldo, I have another job for you.” Cardozo handed him the piece of paper with Dr. Frederick Hallowell’s Park Avenue address and office hours. He explained that there would be a number of cards in Scott Devens’s file and all he needed was the card for September of seven years ago. “Go in over the July Fourth weekend, okay?”

  35

  AT 12:35 CARDOZO WAS sitting in Danny’s Bar and Grill working through a Reuben sandwich with a Diet Pepsi, lemon on the side. He’d already decided dessert was going to be strawberry cheesecake when Ellie Siegel came through the door.

  She sat at the table and plunked her Crazy Eddie shopping bag on the empty chair next to her. She looked at the menu. “Think I have time for crabcakes?”

  Danny, the owner and waiter, said sure, crabcakes took five minutes. Siegel ordered crabcakes and potato skins and asked Cardozo if she could have a glass of Chablis on duty.

  “Think you can handle it?” he said.

  “Make that a double,” she told Danny. She then got comfortable in her chair and said, “Okay, Vince, why have you invited me out for a fancy lunch? What’s bothering you?”

  “This.” He handed her Vogelsang’s report.

  As Siegel read, her features creased into a frown. When she had finished she leaned back in her chair. “That was then, Vince. This is now.”

  He felt a naked flash of anger. “It doesn’t stop mattering just because a D.A. bought a plea.”

  “But is it any business of yours? Vince, you got a job.”

  “Babe Devens was my case. I blew it.”

  “You didn’t blow anything. You’re only a cop. You don’t control the D.A.”

  “I’m a detective and I didn’t even sniff this.”

  “You’re homicide. This is child abuse, morals, narcotics—and it’s a hell of a long time ago.”

  “The creep that fucked her should go free just because he’s been on the loose seven years fucking other thirteen-year-olds? If that’s the law, the law’s nuts. I have a girl who’s going to be thirteen and I’d murder the guy that touched her.”

  “First of all, there’s no way you’re going to find out who molested Cordelia Koenig six years ago, and second of all the girl in this report is not your daughter.”

  “The guy in this report is the guy that tried to kill Babe Devens.”

  “Mrs. Devens didn’t die.”

  “He took seven years from her, he should be allowed to do that? Fuck the kid, take seven years from the mother?”

  “Okay, life’s not fair.”

  “You scream about porno hurts women and sexism on the job hurts women but when it comes to something in real life that hurts two real women all you can say is life’s not fair. You take my breath away, Ms. Siegel. You really do.”

  Siegel raised her eyebrows at him. Her gaze was interested and curious and cool. “Vince, there’s no homicide here, this doesn’t connect to any ongoing investigation. She’s one of two million people in this town who was battered when she was a kid and she’s been using it ever since as an excuse for getting high and getting by. Why are you fixating on her?”

  Cardozo handed Siegel the pages that Waldo Flores had brought him that morning: Dr. Frederick Hallowell’s record on Scott Devens’s September checkup seven years ago.

  She took the document with an expression of mild expectation, and she read it with a look of mild surprise. What impressed Cardozo was how very mild the surprise was.

  “Looks like Scott Devens gave his stepdaughter the clap when she was thirteen,” she said.

  “Looks it.” A terrible sense of loss possessed him.

  Siegel stared at him, her face registering concern. “Vince, are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t know what was happening within him. He didn’t want to think about it. “Yeah. I’m fine. Am I acting weird or something?”

  “Or something.”

  “I don’t know why this hits me the way it does. I feel I’ve been sandbagged. How many corpses have I seen, how many raped kids, why does my mind say no to this?”

  Her eyes hooked his. “Vince, we both know that where Cordelia is headed will be a hell of a lot worse than where she is now. The road she’s taking, there’s only one direction—down. I think you should talk to her mother.”

  He thought about telling Babe. The whole thing was taking on a numbing sadness.

  Siegel touched his hand. She had a firm, clear gaze, no agitation, no uncertainty. “It’s not as though you had to tell her her kid’s dead—yet.”

  She was on crutches and she seemed happy to see him. “Iced tea on the terrace?”

  “No—no iced tea. Let’s talk inside.”

  She looked at him with an expression of curiosity, then led him into the large den beyond the dining room.

  “You’re doing well on those crutches,” he said.

  “I add a half hour a day. It takes a human being two years to learn to walk—I’m hoping to do it in two months.”

  He admired her: she accepted that the game was tough, but she had a quiet determination to keep playing.

  “Drink?” she offered.

  “You sit, I’ll fix them,” he said. “What’ll you have?”

  “Scotch and a little water. There’s ice in the bucket.”

  It was a handsome bucket, silver, engraved with the emblem of the New York Racquet and Tennis Club and beneath that the words Scott Devens, Squash Championship, 1978.

  He fixed two stiff Scotches and handed her one. She was sitting in an armchair, crutches resting against her and forming a little barricade.

  Outside the windows, sun splashed the private park.

  “How much pain can you take?” he asked.

  “How much are you offering?”

  “The psychiatrist’s report on your daughter.”

  Her whole expression changed. She was looking him straight in the eye, the way people do when they’re scared of showing they’re scared.

  He opened the manila envelope. It was a calculated risk: it meant showing her that people she’d trusted had taken her life apart.

  He handed her Flora Vogelsang’s pages.

  Her blue gaze went slowly across the sheets, and there was an ache for her in his chest.

  She didn’t move except to turn the pages. She didn’t say anything or even show she was reacting. But he could feel her taking it in, and he could feel her world turning dark.

  When she’d finished she looked more numb than anything else. The shock didn’t seem to have happened yet. She just sat swaying a little against the chair.

  “Strange how it catches you unawares. A minute ago I was happily making lists of guests for my first party, and now …”

  She sat looking across the room at him.

  “There’s more,” he said.

  She looked up, hands hanging a little way from her body, breathing shallowly, lips parted, braced for the second blow.

  He gave her the other documen
t.

  After the first paragraph she stiffened. Behind her eyes came the sudden flare-up of understanding.

  At that moment Cardozo felt a tightness in the back of his throat, an overpoweringly tender melancholy for her.

  “We know why your parents accepted the plea bargain. They weren’t going to let this come out.”

  Her face held like a struck mirror determined not to break apart.

  “It takes money to keep a secret. A lot of people knew this one. Dr. Vogelsang. Ted Morgenstern. Your ex-husband. Your daughter. Maybe the D.A. Maybe even the judge.”

  She mused on that. He watched her pulling in.

  “You’re thinking something,” he said.

  “I wonder if Mrs. Banks knew. It might explain …”

  “It might explain what?”

  She told him about Mrs. Banks’s restaurant, her clothes, her new face and manners and social set.

  Suddenly Cardozo’s mind was making connections. He asked questions: where did Babe’s parents bank, did she know where Scott Devens and Mrs. Banks had accounts, where did Cordelia get her money and where did she keep it, how close were the Vanderwalks to Judge Davenport?

  “I’ve always called him Uncle Frank. My mother was angry that he didn’t give Scottie a harsher sentence, but they were certainly close till the trial.

  Cardozo’s face darkened. “They’re your parents,” he said, “but they’re sons of bitches. I think we should take them.”

  “Take them?”

  “Confront them. Get this cleared up for once and all.”

  The taxi stopped before a five-story German schloss in the middle of a block of French châteaus. A Mercedes limousine was parked at the curb, in front of iron gates bearing the sign, NO PARKING ACTIVE DRIVEWAY 24 HOURS A DAY. Cardozo calculated it was the kind of house that went nowadays for six million and change.

  He paid the cabby and helped Babe and her crutches onto the sidewalk.

  Babe turned. “All I told Mama was that I was bringing a friend for tea. She’ll be dreadful with you. She says I only introduce her to men I’ve decided to marry. I never allow her any input, she claims.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  Babe gave him a nervous smile and the smile he gave back was not nervous at all. She pressed the brass doorbell. Murky clouds scudded across the sky and thunder rumbled overhead.

  After a moment a butler opened the door: there was the merest of stiff-backed bows. “Good day, Mrs. Devens.”

  “How are you today, Auchincloss? Please tell my parents that Lieutenant Cardozo and I are here.”

  “Certainly. Would you care to wait in the drawing room?”

  The butler vanished, and a panting chow chow came running up, barking, darting its black tongue over Babe and her crutches, then sniffing at Cardozo’s trousers. The dog preferred the trousers.

  “If Jill annoys you just push her away,” Babe said.

  Cardozo let the dog play with his cuff. His gaze took in the marble staircase, the paintings, the narrow blue Oriental carpet that seemed designed precisely to fit the hallway and leave a six-inch border of gleaming dark parquetry.

  He followed Babe into the drawing room. The walls were vivid orange—an unusual color for a room, bright and haunting. The sofas and chairs were ivory-colored satin. The teacups and service were waiting on the coffee table.

  “Well, we’re the first here,” Babe said.

  Cardozo could see she was fidgety. For distraction, he asked about a Japanese urn under the Steinway. Babe said the urn had belonged to the last mistress of the last king of Rumania.

  Cardozo began to get a sense of the house. Everything was rich, fantastic, beautiful. The tchotchkes of the world’s rulers had fallen to the Vanderwalks in astonishing quantity. Not just the urn, but Queen Victoria’s fan, in a glass case above the door; Winston Churchill’s watercolor of Somerset Maugham’s villa, in a gold frame that must have cost a patrolman’s annual salary. Babe said the tea service had been designed by Paul Revere for the empress Josephine.

  A woman in a navy blue dress came through the doorway, fixing Cardozo with pale blue eyes. “How do you do—I’m Beatrice’s mother, Lucia.”

  Her face was like an artist’s painting, the white of her skin contrasting delicately with her gray hair and pale crimson lips. She wore a single strand of pearls. A tiny circle of diamonds pinned to the silk dress caught the light and threw out flashes of color.

  “How do you do, ma’am,” Cardozo said. “Vince Cardozo.”

  A man in a navy blue blazer sauntered into the room. Babe introduced her father.

  Hadley Vanderwalk had the look of a gray-haired American aristocrat, tall and lean and sharp-featured, his skin tanned by years spent on yacht decks and golf courses. There was something pleasant and intelligent in the set of his mouth.

  Lucia Vanderwalk moved to a sofa and took a seat by the tea service. It was a signal for the men to sit. Her hands moved powerfully, gracefully, over the silver, seeming to communicate with it.

  “Tell me about yourself, Leftenant.” She pronounced his rank that way, British. Lef, not lou.

  “I was born in New York, I grew up in New York, I became a cop in New York.”

  “Homicide or vice?”

  “Homicide.”

  “You look familiar.” She stared at him, something more than ordinary interest in her eyes. “Ceylon or China?”

  He realized she was talking tea and he figured what could he lose. “China.”

  She poured from the teapot on the left. “Lemon or milk?”

  “Lemon, please.”

  “Sugar”—she glanced at him—“or NutraSweet?”

  “A little NutraSweet, thanks.”

  “Yes, I use it too.”

  She handed him a cup. It was almost weightless. The china was as delicate and fine as the skull of a newborn baby.

  “Please help yourself to sandwiches. The dark bread’s petit-suisse, the light’s watercress. No one’s allergic to watercress, I hope?”

  Petit-suisse, Cardozo discovered, was cream cheese with a pleasantly tart accent.

  Lucia Vanderwalk distributed tea and directed conversation.

  Cardozo gradually got a feel for the Vanderwalks. They were wealthy liberals. They’d hung a sign on their lives—Do Not Disturb. They knew social inequity existed and they dealt with it by electing Lena Horne and Paul Newman to the country club.

  Lucia struck him as a woman who knew exactly what she wanted—she didn’t use words like “maybe” or “perhaps.” Hadley struck him as the sort of husband who would defer to his wife’s judgment in every matter but the important one—money.

  “The Metropolitan Museum is doing just as much as any settlement house for the people of this city.” Lucia Vanderwalk’s glance, level and confident, turned diagonally across the table toward Cardozo. “Perhaps you don’t agree, Leftenant?”

  “You’re right,” he said pleasantly. “I don’t agree.”

  Lucia Vanderwalk tilted her head questioningly. “Have you been to the Metropolitan?”

  “I investigated a robbery there ten, twelve years ago.”

  “But have you ever been there unprofessionally?”

  He met the dowager’s adamantly tolerant gaze. “I don’t have much time for things that don’t connect to work. Wish I did.”

  “Sounds like you fellows are on the job twenty-four hours a day,” Hadley Vanderwalk said.

  Cardozo nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “But you’re certainly not working now,” Lucia Vanderwalk smiled.

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  There was a drawn-out, smiling silence. Lucia Vanderwalk observed Cardozo with interest.

  “Seven years ago,” he said, “I helped investigate the attempt on Mrs. Devens’s life. That’s why you recognize me.”

  Lucia Vanderwalk’s lips pulled into a thin line. She turned her eyes coldly toward her daughter. “Beatrice, this is shabby and absolutely irresponsible. You could at least show a lit
tle consideration for your poor father!”

  Hadley Vanderwalk did not look the least bit troubled.

  “If you and your husband had refused to plea-bargain,” Cardozo said, “the D.A. would have prosecuted on the original charge. Why didn’t you refuse?”

  “Are we going to go into all this again?” Lucia Vanderwalk sighed.

  “Did you have sudden doubts about the evidence? Or about Scott Devens’s guilt?”

  Lucia Vanderwalk’s eyes defied Cardozo. “Neither my husband nor I had the slightest doubt whatsoever. Nor have we now.”

  “After the first trial,” Cardozo said, “you invited a writer by the name of Dina Alstetter into your daughter’s house. Mrs. Alstetter found a bottle of insulin in a stud box in the bedroom. You let her keep that bottle.”

  “Yes, she wanted to write a magazine article about it.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you that the bottle should be taken to the police?”

  “I am not going to submit to cross-examination in my own livingroom.”

  “Your daughter’s house was searched and there’s no mention of that stud box or that bottle in any of the reports.”

  “What finds its way into police reports is hardly my responsibility.”

  “The insulin in that bottle was prescribed for Faith Banks.”

  Lucia Vanderwalk’s face arranged itself into a careful blank. “Evidently my daughter’s housekeeper was a diabetic. Is that a crime?”

  “Isn’t it a little odd that the evidence at the trial was insulin that Mrs. Banks found in Scott Devens’s closet?”

  “I fail to see the oddity.”

  “Mrs. Banks never told the police she was a diabetic. And the insulin that she claimed she found was never traced.”

  Lucia Vanderwalk tapped her fingers together. “Mrs. Banks’s health and medications are all very mysterious I’m sure, but what has my daughter’s former servant to do with me or my husband?”

  “Quite a lot, ma’am. You two paid Faith Stoddard Banks two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The money was transferred to her bank account the day after Judge Davenport closed the second trial to the public. On the same day you paid a half million into Scott Devens’s account. You’ve been paying him a quarter million and Mrs. Banks fifty thousand every year since.”