VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  And suddenly the mystery woman wasn’t a mystery anymore.

  The butler led Cardozo into the big, pricey pad and threw open the huge cypress doors of the livingroom.

  “Your Ladyship, Mr. Vince Cardozo.”

  Countess Vicki sat curled on the enormous velvet sofa, one leg beneath her and the other swinging shoeless. The shoes lying on the Persian carpet matched her brown silk dress.

  She was talking on the telephone and trying to clasp an emerald bracelet. Sapphires and diamonds blazed at her throat and wrists and ears. Her slender, oval face turned in Cardozo’s direction, full-lipped and hinting, and she shot him a smiling, brown-eyed glance of welcome.

  Like the countess’s dress, the enormous livingroom with its three marbled pillars and two crystal chandeliers seemed to have been designed to set off the owner’s dark coloring. Bookcases were filled with gold-tooled leather bindings and glittering figurines and intricately ornamented porcelain plates. Tables wore bright shawls and were dotted with china bowls and silver-framed pictures of current celebrities, most of them autographed.

  Cardozo took a leisurely stroll to the fireplace. Engraved invitations were stuck in the mirror over the mantel. They were also, more surprisingly, stuck in the frame of a Renoir.

  “Too divine,” Vicki said. “Call you later—love you much.” She set the phone receiver back in the cradle and rose from the sofa.

  “How angelic of you to remember my phone number.” She came across the room and took Cardozo’s hand. “I honestly thought you’d forgotten me.”

  Cardozo smiled. “Never.”

  The countess bent down and pulled the phone cord out of the wall jack. “We don’t need that anymore. Would you like something to drink? I have some leftover cappuccino—or would you rather get drunk?”

  “I could live without cappuccino.”

  The countess, a dark silhouette against the glow of the pantry doorway, spent three minutes trying to press extra ice cubes into the blender. “I hope you like slush margaritas,” she called. “And if you don’t, please pretend.”

  The blender screeched and she came out of the pantry carrying two champagne glasses filled with what looked like chopped icicles. “Maid’s day off—forgive.”

  He sipped. “Tastes great.”

  She sipped. “It’s usually hard for me to meet new people. But with you it’s different, I felt that right away. I can be myself with you—and you can be yourself with me—and neither of us is going to judge the other. I think that’s the way a man and a woman should be, don’t you?”

  “It’s not a bad idea.”

  “Why don’t we find a more private locale?”

  Dark hair billowing, skirt swaying, she led him down a seemingly endless corridor, the walls tiled with Utrillos and Jasper Johnses.

  Drink in hand, she stood by the door, her bright mouth smiling now, her large eyes inviting him into the still, cool, dim interior of the bedroom.

  He accepted, moving past her.

  The walls had been done in a dizzying variety of faux marble and faux wood and trompe-l’oeil. There were cut begonias in a Chinese porcelain vase on the dresser and a telephone console with eight buttons on the bedside table. On a chest of drawers were three wigs on stands—a red, a gray, and a blond.

  Clothes had been laid out on the bed: a mauve evening gown, silk stockings, a sequined purse, a short fur jacket.

  “Are you going out?” he asked.

  “I was planning to.” She swung out one of the mirror wall panels and took a cushioned hanger from the closet. “But why go to a dull party when I can stay home and have an exciting one?”

  “I guess you’re pretty good at state-of-the-art partying.”

  “I guess that’s a compliment.” She finished her drink and slipped a CD into the player. Tinkly music filled the room. “I love the naive magic of Mozart—don’t you?”

  She switched off the lamp, leaving the room half lit by streetlights slanting through the Roman shades. She drew the thick damask curtains, and a moment later she lit a scented candle and placed it beside the phone.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” she said.

  He sat down on the bed.

  She sat beside him, solemnly reading his face. She put her arm around him and drew him against her breasts.

  He felt the involuntary response of his body, the deep-down beat of his heart speeding up.

  “It’s a beautiful thing, don’t you think, our being so intimate—complete strangers?” She unbuttoned his shirt. Her tongue touched him softly. “Why do you have the gun? What kind of crime are you in?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  She smiled, accepting the answer without believing it. “And I’m the Ayatollah.”

  “Don’t joke—he’s a holy man.”

  “Are you a Moslem cop?”

  “The force recruits minorities.”

  She bent down and laid her head lightly on his lap. She had a troubled moment with his zipper.

  He was only halfway hard.

  She pulled up and kissed him on the mouth, giving him a tiny grin, and then she went to the mirrored closet and got a little Tiffany salt cellar of cocaine. She took a tiny spoonful of coke up her nostril and then offered him one.

  “Pass,” he said.

  She stared with hungry dark eyes at him and then she dove.

  He could feel an acute attack of integrity coming on. “Look, this is a little sleazoid for me.” He freed himself and stood.

  She pushed her hair out of her face. Her eyes were bright with sudden noncomprehension. “Then why did you come here?”

  “I told you. I’m a cop.”

  He showed her his shield. The silence hung there, blazing.

  “I resent this invasion. I’ve never broken the law.”

  “Cocaine’s not breaking the law?”

  She was sitting with sudden, furious erectness. “Half a gram. Personal use.”

  “Aiding and abetting isn’t breaking the law?”

  “Aiding whom? Abetting what?”

  He reached into his jacket and brought out the photograph of Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre in her blond wig striding into Beaux Arts Tower with the little package. “You bought a leather mask from the Pleasure Trove in Greenwich Village the Tuesday after Memorial Day. Who did you take it to?”

  A twisted look came into her mouth and a network of fine lines suddenly crisscrossed her face. “You’ve got fucking nerve spying on me!”

  “You and your friends have been running between raindrops a long, long while. But this time you’re all going to get soaking wet.”

  “Fucker!” she screamed. “Motherfucking copfucking sucker!”

  She dove for the door and wrenched it open.

  Count Leopold de Savoie-Sancerre, his flushed face looking very much surprised, was crouching at keyhole level on the other side.

  Cardozo and Sam Richards were discussing a fifty-nine-year-old Hispanic by the name of Avery Rodriguez who had taken two .38 slugs in the head that morning in the men’s room at Bloomingdale’s. They were reviewing Avery’s rapsheet, a thesaurus of petty felonies, when Sergeant Goldberg shouted from the squad room that Cardozo had a call on three.

  Cardozo pushed the blinking button and lifted the receiver. “Cardozo.”

  A woman’s voice said, “Would you hold for District Attorney Spalding, please.”

  A moment later Al Spalding’s voice came on the line. “Vince, the Downs case is closed. Why are you hassling people?”

  Cardozo signaled Richards to hold on a moment. “Who says I’m hassling them?”

  “Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a friend of hers.”

  “Let’s say I’m an acquaintance of an acquaintance. This isn’t an official call, Vince, but if you don’t lay off, the next call’s going to be official and it won’t come from me.”

  “I don’t have any idea what Countess Vicki de S. and S. is talking about.”

&nbs
p; “Vince, don’t play dumb with me, please. I’d appreciate it if we could clear up this matter with this phone call.”

  “Just tell me who said Downs case? Who used those two words, Downs case?”

  “She said you did.”

  Cardozo knew he hadn’t mentioned the Downs case to Countess Vicki. She’d made the connection herself. Big slip. “Okay, Al. It’s cleared up.” He hung up the phone. “Be right with you, Sam.”

  Cardozo opened his desk drawer and found Melissa Hatfield’s business card. On one side there was printed black lettering; on the other, the countess’s unlisted phone—seven smudged red digits punctuated by a dash.

  Something not very pleasant had happened to Lou Stein’s face. Cardozo’s glance slid incredulously along the bruise running from the right eye down to the mouth, the barely healed multiple abrasions on the cheekbone. “Kissing a meat grinder?” he asked.

  “Disagreement with a stranger on Fifty-eighth Street,” Lou muttered through swollen lips. “He thought he had a right to my wallet, I disagreed.”

  “Who won?”

  Lou Stein, who came to work each day to do his little bit in the age-old combat between dark and light, sat there for a second just looking balding, stocky, discouraged. “I kept the wallet. Did I win? Is losing a tooth winning? I had fifty bucks in the wallet. I had five hundred invested in that root canal.”

  “So you’ll get a false tooth. You’re insured.”

  Lou’s left hand waved Cardozo to a chair. The air conditioning inside Forensic wasn’t working. It was one of those hot New York fall days when the atmosphere has stagnant weight.

  “Did you file a complaint?” Cardozo asked.

  Lou fixed him with an incredulous gaze. “You kidding? I got enough aggravation. So tell me what sorrow you’re bringing to brighten my day?”

  Cardozo plopped the sandwich-sized evidence bag down in the middle of the papers on Lou’s desk. “Is there enough lipstick on that cigarette butt to do a chemical analysis?”

  Lou Stein picked up the evidence bag tagged with the number of the Jodie Downs homicide. He frowned at the inch and a half of crushed cigarette inside the plastic. “Maybe.”

  Cardozo held up the evidence bag that he had tagged VINCE C. SPECIAL. “Tell me if the lipstick on that cigarette and the lipstick on this business card are the same.”

  Lou Stein phoned Cardozo four days later. “Both lipstick samples contain glycerine, beeswax, yeast protein, red dye six, orange dye two, purple dye two, rose oil, and trace amounts of hydrocortisone acetate—which in simple English is cortisone.”

  “Cortisone—is that usual in a lipstick?”

  “No. And it ought to be illegal. In the old days, you’d have needed a prescription. But now cortisone’s sold over the counter in mild concentrations—point four, five percent. It’s an anti-inflammatory agent. Masks minor irritations such as you’d get from applying this mishmash to a chapped lip.”

  “You’re telling me it’s not your usual mass-produced commercial cosmetic.”

  “No way. The cortisone requires FDA registration. This so-called blend, or formula, is concocted exclusively by a coven of warlocks calling themselves Countess Lura Esterhasz Products, and it’s available only at the Esterhasz Eternelle Boutique on Fifth Avenue, do you need me to spell that.”

  “I can manage. Thanks, Lou.”

  “Oh, Vince, you’ll get a kick out of this. The sample on the cigarette butt has one trace ingredient I couldn’t find on the calling card. Guess. You’ll never guess. I’ll tell you. Honey.”

  “Honey?”

  “Yep. I have a hunch that’s the evening flavor.”

  Cardozo strode down Fifth Avenue, dodging chestnut vendors and messengers on skates with Walkmans and junior execs in jogging shoes.

  It was the kind of day he loved. The air was extraordinarily clear. The show windows of Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany and Harry Winston glinted in the sunlight and the sky was the deeply saturated blue of autumn. The lengthening shadows of late afternoon reverberated like echoes and fitful gusts of wind blew along Fifty-seventh Street.

  In front of the Esterhasz Eternelle Boutique women were climbing out of limousines. It was a gentle perpetual twilight inside the boutique, the air cool and blue, sweet with soft light and music and elusive perfumes and the aroma of money.

  The salon had been decorated in muted tones of blue and beige and rust, with clean, shining surfaces. Each square glass counter had two or three salesgirls waiting on one or two customers. The salesgirls were as well dressed as the clientele, and twenty to thirty years younger.

  But the customers had the slightly unreal beauty that only wealth could bestow. They seemed golden, like a memory of the past, their jewels sparkling with points of light. They moved like ripples in water. The murmur of upper class, ever so slightly back-in-the-throat voices, perfected during Newport summers and private-school winters, sounded like a record slowed down to a seductively wrong speed.

  Tea and sherry and Madeira and British water biscuits were being served at small tables in an alcove. Cardozo felt he’d walked by mistake into the ladies’ room. He approached the lipstick counter and coughed discreetly.

  The salesgirl’s hair was long, straight, and pale—the color of champagne. “May I help you, sir?”

  “I need some information. Are your products ready-made?”

  She approached him, a cool, self-possessed young woman. “Absolutely not, sir. All our products are custom-made, and each is unique for the customer. You see, skins are like fingerprints. No two are exactly the same.”

  “What about lips?”

  She looked at him with a slightly amused expression. “No two pairs of lips are the same. Are you interested for yourself or for someone else?”

  He felt his cheeks flush under the steadiness of her gaze. “For someone else.”

  “It’s more usual for the lady to inquire herself.”

  “I have her formula.” Cardozo produced the piece of paper. “All I need to know is her name.”

  An expression of doubt clouded the salesgirl’s face. “I’m sorry. We can’t give out that information.”

  He showed her his shield. He felt he had brought a machine gun to trap a butterfly. “I’d appreciate it if you could make an exception.”

  A frown darkened her forehead. “Just one moment, please.” She took the formula and went through a doorway and returned three minutes later. “You’ll have to talk with Countess Esterhasz—could you come this way, please?”

  Cardozo followed the salesgirl into an office. There were two small Hockneys on the wall, and a tray of liqueurs on a red lacquer table.

  “Would you care for a drink?” the girl offered.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Countess Esterhasz will be with you directly.”

  Seven minutes later Countess Esterhasz entered through another door. Tall, sturdily built, she appeared to be a little past forty but was probably well past sixty and a testament to her own beauty products.

  She smiled in greeting. She had clear pale skin and black hair falling straight to her shoulders. She was wearing a lavender silk dress and a strand of pearls, and the hand with the three-strand matching pearl bracelet was holding the piece of paper that Cardozo had given the salesgirl.

  “How may I help the police?” she said in a pleasantly accented voice.

  “Do you recognize that formula?” Cardozo asked.

  She shot him a half-lidded glance. “Our clients rely on our discretion. Sometimes, following certain types of surgical reconstruction, the skin develops sensitivities. A hypoallergenic cosmetic may be called for. A woman—and sometimes a man—prefers to deal with such problems privately—in confidence.” She sat in a gilded beechwood armchair. Her eyes were a keen, intelligent green. “What do you do for your skin?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She studied him, prolonging the slightly uncomfortable silence. “You should use a collagen moisturizer with calf placenta. It would
help those lines around your eyes.”

  “I don’t mind the lines.”

  She smiled, and charm lay on her like a veil. “You will in ten years.”

  “If you’ll tell me who you made that lipstick for, I won’t need to take any more of your time.”

  “How convenient to be a man. You keep your looks without devoting your life to it. As for the lipstick, we never reveal clients’ records.” Her mouth came together with firmness.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “I hold a doctorate of biological science from Budapest University.”

  She pointed to an impressively framed document on the wall. It was a fine example of Hungarian language calligraphy and it had been hung just beneath a very old autographed photo of a plump, young Marlene Dietrich and a very new one of Ronald Reagan, Jr., whose eyelashes seemed to be grinning.

  “Since you’re not an M.D.,” Cardozo said, “your records aren’t privileged.”

  He could feel the mounting wave of her annoyance.

  “My associate, Dr. Franzblau, is a dispensing chemist.”

  “There’s no such thing as chemist-client confidentiality in New York City,” Cardozo said.

  She mused on that and nodded. “Why do you need this information?”

  “I’m investigating a homicide.”

  Her face stiffened. “You realize you’ve given me two different formulas.”

  “I realize one has honey in it. I suppose that’s for kissing.”

  She was not amused. “What we call type-C labial tissue requires glucose—which you may choose to call honey. What we call type H-three does not require glucose.”

  “I take it the formula without glucose is lipstick for Countess Victoria de Savoie-Sancerre.”

  Countess Esterhasz smiled. “You have a very good accent, Lieutenant. And that is correct. It is her exclusive formula, devised by our chemists and dermatologists to meet her unique needs.”

  “Then the other is hers too?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Cardozo’s eyebrows went up and Countess Lura Esterhasz had his attention.

  “The formula containing glucose would react most harmfully with Countess Victoria’s sensitive alkaline tissue. That lipstick was perfected for another client—Lady Ash Canfield.”