VC01 - Privileged Lives
Page 38
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“THE DEFENDANT WILL RISE.”
Claude Loring rose. Babe leaned forward. She was sitting in the front row of the courtroom, next to Cardozo. Her gaze took Loring in, from the short-cropped hair to the neat regimental tie to the tailored dark suit.
Ted Morgenstern hadn’t bothered coming to the sentencing. He’d sent Ray Kane, balding and young in his Armani suit, looking restlessly at his wristwatch, as though he had a helicopter to catch three minutes ago.
Judge Francis Davenport adjusted half-moon spectacles on his nose, surveyed the almost-empty courtroom, and peered down at the defendant. “Claude Loring, you have pleaded guilty to the crime of negligent manslaughter.”
Babe’s eyes were pinned to the man at the defendants’ table.
Claude Loring’s head was bent now, his face gaunt; there was no light, no life in his eyes.
“It is the sentence of this court,” the judge said, “that you serve not more than twenty-five and not less than six years imprisonment at the New York State penitentiary at Ossining, New York.”
Loring’s head dropped.
Cardozo calculated rapidly that Loring would be out on parole in two years. He could feel hate come out on his body like sweat.
Two guards came forward and led Claude Loring away.
Ray Kane stuffed papers into a briefcase, twirled the combination lock.
Cardozo quickly shouldered his way after the prisoner. He flashed his shield at the guards. “Hey, fellas, I want to talk to Claude a minute.”
Loring turned around.
“Someone I want you to meet, Claude.”
Babe came slowly across the courtroom on her crutches. She looked searchingly at Loring. Her brow wrinkled, questioning.
Claude stood squinting at her, one finger poked through his pants pocket, scratching his balls. Something was rumbling inside him, a lot of anger coming to a boil under his skull. His voice snapped out like sandpaper. “What the fuck do you want, bitch?”
Cardozo slapped the killer hard across the jaw.
A guard stepped between them. “Easy does it, Lieutenant. He’s state property now.”
“Can I use the phone, long distance?”
“Of course,” Babe said.
They were in her livingroom. Cardozo stared a long time at the phone and he could feel her watching him, curious.
Finally he picked up the receiver and punched out a number. Three shades of white noise came over the line and then three buzzes and then the voice of Lockwood Downs from the middle of Illinois.
“Loring got six to twenty-five,” Cardozo said.
There was a silence. “What does that mean?” Downs said.
“He could be paroled after he serves a third.”
“A third of what?”
“A third of six.”
“Two years.” The voice had crumpled.
At that moment Cardozo experienced an overpowering melancholy. Lockwood and Meridee Downs would hurt. They would hurt for the rest of their lives. Every time they saw a young man in the pride of youth with all the promise of life before him, they would think, That could have been our son.
Cardozo felt pitifully small. “I’m sorry.”
He hung up.
Babe was giving him that piercingly blue look.
“Vince—why did you make that call from here?”
She was staring at him and he wasn’t sure what he was reading in that stare. Her eyes were gentle and questioning, but there was a strangeness in them too.
“I don’t understand why you wanted me to hear. And I don’t understand why you took me to that trial.”
“So you could see the defendant.”
“Why?” she said.
“Why did you think you knew him?”
“I didn’t. I thought I might like to draw him.”
“Still want to draw him?”
“Why are you testing me? You’re acting as though I’m somehow involved.”
“You are involved.” For the next twenty minutes Cardozo told Babe about the Downs killing. He could see it was shocking her and he could see too that it wasn’t connecting to anything in her head.
“This is what you said under sodium pentothal.” He put the cassette player on the coffee table between them. He pushed the start button.
When the tape was over she looked up at him, frightened, eyes begging for the sort of assurance he couldn’t give, a promise that the world wasn’t crazy, that she wasn’t.
“It’s impossible,” she said.
“Right,” Cardozo said. “It’s impossible.”
Cardozo laid two lists on the table. “She ID’ed these twelve from the photo file. She was definite. These seventeen are maybe’s—she didn’t know their names, but she dawdled, like she knew the faces. And this is her personal address book. Don’t lose it—it’s a loan.”
“So what do you want from me?” Charley Brackner asked.
“You have some other lists on that computer. Beaux Arts Tower and the Inferno. Can you pull the matches?”
Charley gave a happy little smart-ass grin, his way of saying the task was pathetically uncomplicated. “Sure. We create a directory called B DEVENS and when we get the names in we’ll tell Maisie to COMP.” His fingers began flying over the keyboard and the names began lighting up the screen.
An hour and a half later the names were on the computer and Charley typed in SEARCH: INFERNO.
The screen flashed back: SEARCHING.
Charley swiveled around in his chair and lit a Camel. “Maisie’s random access,” he told Cardozo. “Sometimes she’s lucky and hits it on the first go, sometimes she takes a few seconds.”
The screen flashed: ENTRY NOT FOUND.
“Okay, let’s try Beaux Arts.”
The screen flashed: ENTRY NOT FOUND.
“Not found, what does that mean?” Cardozo said.
“Not found means not there.”
“I know those files are in the computer,” Cardozo said.
“Did these three files have anything in common?”
“Try Jodie Downs or Downs murder.”
Charley typed *DOWNS*.
The screen flashed SEARCHING and a moment later
DOWNS, JODIE, MURDER
THIS DIRECTORY CONTAINS THE FOLLOWING SUBDIRECTORIES
AND/OR FILES
BEAUX ARTS TOWER
INFERNO FRATERNAL AND SOCIAL CLUB NINTH AVENUE
LOCKWOOD DOWNS
MERIDEE DOWNS
CLAUDE LORING
LEWIS MONSERAT
FAYE DI STASIO
“Can you match lists to the names in those files?”
“Sure.” Charley typed in the COMP order.
The screen flashed SEARCHING.
“Son of a bitch is going to do it,” Cardozo said.
“Tell you what else Maisie can do. Every time she matches a name, she can call up all files under that name and search them for new names.”
“What’s the point?”
“It’s a sieve. Eventually the net’s so fine you’ll catch everything—like B. Devens mail-ordered slippers from the same dealer in Cleveland as one of Monserat’s artists.”
“Do it.”
Two hours later Charley brought Cardozo ninety single-space accordion-folded leaves.
Cardozo looked at the quantity of print-out. His eyes had the pain and disbelief preceding sudden death. “Charley, you’re a good man. Too good.”
Cardozo began going over the pages.
He could feel there was some kind of connection he wasn’t tuning in on. He took the pages home that night and puzzled over them.
At 3 A.M. he put his head down on the sofa cushion.
Thirty seconds later he saw Claude Loring’s gaunt face, his contemptuous eyes, his lips hurling out words. Cardozo listened to those words.
What the fuck do you want, bitch?
He replayed them, catching the exact intonation. It came to him. That stress on the word you.
Charley B
rackner was in his cubicle, fresh from a night’s sleep, chewing on a prune Danish.
Cardozo dumped the ninety pages into Charley’s wastebasket. “Forget this shit. Loring knows her. All we need to know is how Loring connects with Babe Devens.”
Charley made an expert sort of face. “Everybody in the world networks to somebody somehow.” He typed instructions into the computer.
SEARCH LINK LORING : B DEVENS
A moment later the screen flashed back
SEARCHING.
After sixty seconds of the flashing word, a column began running down the screen.
C LORING
BEAUX ARTS TOWER
BILLI VON KLEIST
MONSERAT GALLERY
DUNCAN CANFIELD
ASH CANFIELD
B DEVENS
“Print that,” Cardozo said.
Charley gave the print command and a page clattered out of the printer.
Cardozo detached the page. “Thanks, Charley.”
“Vince.”
Charley’s tone stopped him. A new column was running down the computer screen.
C LORING
BEAUX ARTS TOWER
BILLI VON KLEIST
MONSERAT GALLERY
D FORBES-STEINMAN
SCOTT DEVENS
B DEVENS
Cardozo stared at the screen. “Does Maisie read The Enquirer?”
“Huh?”
“Could you get that machine to amplify the link between Forbes-Steinman and Devens? Does it know that they’re shacked up, or is there something more?”
Charley typed in
SEARCH LINK D FORBES-STEINMAN: SCOTT DEVENS
The screen flashed
SEARCHING
After almost a minute new material began scrolling up the screen.
MIRANDELLA, SUNNY, HOMICIDE
EVIDENCE AT CRIME SCENE
SUBJECT’S PURSE
CONTENTS
HELENA RUBINSTEIN BLUSH PINK LIPSTICK
TAMPAX TAMPONS THREE
KEYS FIVE
FOUREX CONDOMS EIGHT
ESTEE LAUDER COLOGNE
EIGHTY-SEVEN DOLLARS THIRTY-TWO CENTS
CHARGE CARDS
MASTERCARD 5500-7843-2316 SANDRA MIRANDELLA
VISA CARD 5647-5418-8953 JOY FEINSTEIN
BLOOMINGDALES CHARGE 6532-098
D FORBES-STEINMAN/SCOTT DEVENS
“Stop there,” Cardozo said.
Sunny Mirandella was the name of a TWA stewardess who had lived in Dr. Flora Vogelsang’s neighborhood. She’d been found with a slashed throat, and she was Monteleone’s case. So far there’d been no collar, and after three weeks with no productive leads, Sunny had been moved to a back burner.
Cardozo called Greg Monteleone into the computer room and nodded toward the flashing cursor on the screen. “What does that mean?”
“Sunny used stolen charge cards.”
“Why are there two names on the Bloomingdale’s card?”
“It’s a joint charge shared by Steinman and Devens. There are two cards, one name on each. Sunny was using Steinman’s card.”
“And the two names were still on the account? How recently were those cards issued?”
Monteleone shrugged. “They’re good through this year.”
“Did you follow up on Steinman’s card?”
“Course I followed up on it. Steinman lost it at a party.”
“Pull the sheet on it.”
Monteleone got the sheet. “A dinner at Tina Vanderbilt’s last April twelfth. Sixty guests. Doria Forbes-Steinman went to the powder room and she left her purse on the bed. That’s when she thinks the card was stolen.”
“She thinks. She thinks.” Cardozo thought. “Tina Vanderbilt? Charity bashes, fund-raisers, opera galas?”
“Yeah. She has a triplex on Park.”
“So that would have been a formal dinner. The women wear gowns and the purses are little things, gold pony hide from Saks, you can fit the house keys and two hits of coke in. Why would Forbes-Steinman take her Bloomie’s charge card to a sit-down dinner? That’s a waste of purse space.”
“I never claimed to understand women.”
“Get me a photo of Sunny Mirandella. A nice normal presentable photo.”
“We don’t have any nice normal presentable photos of Sunny Mirandella. They all look like s.m. centerfold.”
“Then get me her driver’s license.”
Doria Forbes-Steinman looked carefully at each photo: Jodie Downs, Sunny Mirandella, Claude Loring.
She was sitting on the plush gray sofa in front of the three-panel comic-strip blowup of a cathedral. Cardozo could see beyond her into the hallway, where the Nuku Kushima black leather mask was still on display on its pedestal.
“Just a minute,” she said. “This man is familiar.”
Cardozo came back across the sunny room and looked down over her shoulder. She was holding the photo of Claude Loring.
“Where was it? … Down in SoHo last winter… He’s that friend of Lew Monserat’s. I saw them at the opening of the Schnabel exhibit at the Mary Boon Gallery.” She looked up at Cardozo. “But my Bloomingdale’s card wasn’t stolen at Mary’s. I bought a juicer with it the day after that opening.”
“You say this man is Monserat’s friend. Do you mean they were together often?”
“No, I mean they seemed to be lovers that night. Lew loves kinky trash. Always has.”
Cardozo’s mind went over the links. Loring and Monserat both played at the Inferno; Ted Morgenstern represented them both; and in Doria Forbes-Steinman’s opinion they’d had an affair. An affair didn’t seem likely: the clothescheck at the Inferno had said that Loring liked kids. But still, there was some kind of relationship between the two, some bond that made them a team. “Would you happen to have the date of that Schnabel opening?”
“It’s in my calendar.” Doria Forbes-Steinman got up from the sofa. “Just a moment.”
She left the room and returned.
“Here we are, Lieutenant. I wrote it all down for you.” She handed him the date, time and place, on a piece of stationery from the desk of Doria Forbes-Steinman.
“Mrs. Forbes-Steinman,” he said, “there are two names on that Bloomingdale’s charge account—yours and Scott Devens’s.”
She blinked and flinched back as if something menacing had flown near her eyes. “Is that a question?”
“May I talk with Mr. Devens?”
She folded her hands together and then unfolded them.
“Scottie’s not here at the moment. The easiest way to find him would be to go to the Teak Room at the Winslow around eleven tonight. He’s playing piano there.”
Mrs. Vanderbilt sat in a silk brocade chair, facing an antique writing desk. She did not rise, and she did not invite Cardozo to sit.
“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time for you,” he said.
“Of course not.” Mrs. Vanderbilt’s tone made it clear it was such an obviously bad time that to mention it merely compounded the annoyance. “How may I help you, Leftenant?”
“You gave a dinner here—”
“I give many dinners here,” she cut in. She looked at least ninety. Her eyes were blue and sharp and lively. Her hair was white, and it had the striking elegance of a founding father’s peruke.
“You gave a dinner last April twelfth.”
“That’s true.” She was dressed in pale pink. She gave the impression of being short, no more than five feet tall, and fashion-model thin, weighing at most ninety-five pounds. “Was a crime committed at my dinner?”
He smiled. “I doubt a crime has been committed at any of your dinners, ma’am.”
She didn’t smile. “That relieves me.”
“Could you tell me if Doria Forbes-Steinman was here that night?”
“She has been in my home.” Mrs. Vanderbilt’s mouth was pale: it was two pink lines lightly sketched across her strangely glowing face. “But you’ll want exact information.”
Mrs.
Vanderbilt turned to her secretary, a woman of fifty-some years dressed in black.
“Endicott, will you fetch the guest list for April twelfth last?”
The room was large. The ceiling was high. The walls were shimmering with French impressionists. Endicott scurried to one of the three doors.
“Endicott.”
Endicott stopped.
Mrs. Vanderbilt fixed her gaze on Cardozo. “You’ll want the service list as well?”
“Please,” he said.
“Very well, Endicott.” Mrs. Vanderbilt gave a wave.
Endicott opened a door and a miniature dachshund burst into the room. With three high-pitched barks it jumped into the lap of New York City’s premiere hostess, tail wagging crazily.
“Have you ever seen such energy?” Mrs. Vanderbilt allowed the animal to lick the sapphire-cut diamond on her finger. “Isn’t Robespierre just ferocious? And darling? Sois sage, Robespierre! Sois sage pour maman!”
Cardozo had the impression Mrs. Vanderbilt spoke to her pet in French because she didn’t want the servants to understand. He couldn’t think what to say to her about her dog. He was suddenly haunted by a phantom that showed up now and then, the adolescent fear of using the wrong fork at a formal dinner.
Endicott returned.
Mrs. Vanderbilt deposited the dog on the floor. “Va t’amuser, Robespierre.”
There was something dubious and nasty in Endicott’s eyes as she handed Cardozo the lists.
He took a moment running his eye down the columns of famous names. “I see Scott Devens and Doria Forbes-Steinman were both here.”
Mrs. Vanderbilt’s face indicated displeasure. “Mrs. Forbes-Steinman was here. Her escort was taken ill. He sent his regrets at the last moment.”
Cardozo could see that Mrs. Vanderbilt was not in the habit of receiving or forgiving last-moment regrets.
“May I have copies of these?” Cardozo asked.
“Endicott, type copies for the leftenant.”
“Champagne, sir?”
Cardozo showed the waiter his shield. “Water for me. Send Mr. Devens whatever he’s drinking and tell him I’d like to talk when he’s finished his set.”
Cardozo looked around him. The decor was World War II movie palace Moorish. The tables were packed too close. Someone had paid off a fire inspector.
An amber spot picked out Scott Devens at the keyboard of a baby grand, dark and handsome in his tux, weaving a Bach fugue on “You Do Something to Me.”
The Winslow Hotel’s Teak Room was what publicists called an intimate space, a watering hole for people who liked to get mentioned in the gossip columns and didn’t mind dropping four hundred dollars for two bottles of champagne. Gabors hung out here, and Yugoslavian princes who didn’t speak Yugoslavian. Lighting was low, coming from candles on the tables and false windows with silhouetted minarets.