VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  Dina leapt up. “Ash!”

  “Nurse!” Babe cried.

  A nurse and an intern hurried into the room. The intern removed the respirator and the nurse held a glass of water to Ash’s lips.

  Ash forced a swallow and tried to speak. Her voice was scarcely a whisper. “When this is all over, we’ll all live together, won’t we?”

  Babe’s tongue was helpless and her throat was dry.

  “Yes, darling,” Dina said, “we’ll all get a lovely house together.”

  “I want my viewing … in the best suite at Frank E. Campbell’s… Get my hair done … a little rinse over the gray. Dress me in that … pale blue gown … Babe made me. And give me … a really grand send-off … at Saint Bart’s.”

  “Yes, darling,” Dina said.

  “I’d like to be alone now. Dunk will be … on the phone, and I want … to be ready … Would you turn out the lights?”

  Dina turned out the light.

  When Babe looked back from the doorway, all that was left of her friend was the unmoving shadow of a shadow.

  43

  BABE AND CARDOZO SIGNED the visitors’ register. The room was softly lit. The immediate family formed a receiving line: Dunk, doing his best to muster a sorrowful charm; Dina, with a look of mourning dignity; Ash’s parents—DeWitt Cadwalader, a tall, gray man dressed in power; Thelma Cadwalader, a slender bejeweled woman with eyes warm and large and a benevolent smile; and Dina’s son, Lawson, a grave little six-year-old.

  The count and countess de Savoie arrived directly behind Babe and Cardozo. They scattered condolences to the family, and then the countess saw Cardozo.

  “Well hello, Dick Tracy.”

  “Hi, your highnesses.”

  The countess kissed Babe. “Quite a turnout. And live piano music—quelle élégance. But ‘Hey, Look Me Over’? Whose joke is that?”

  “It’s not a joke. It was Ash’s favorite song.”

  “Crazy, crazy gal. You just gotta love her.”

  There was a mood in the place that was strange to Cardozo. This wasn’t an Irish cop’s wake where old women wept and men wearing their one good suit grabbed one another by the shoulder. Here the clothes were expensive and elegant and the room had the buzz of gossip. There was a glitter of polished oak and crystal, of jeweled women who had trundled to the viewing in the warm dark of limousines. Servants circulated with trays of wine. It had more the air of a party than a viewing.

  The viewing line advanced slowly, past slip-covered sofas and wingback chairs, handsome antique tables laden with flowers.

  Gordon Dobbs sauntered over and kissed Babe’s cheek.

  “Hi, sweetie. Hi, Vince. Isn’t this a blast? One of Ash’s greatest parties—she knew it would be. I got the whole death scene. She was fabulously brave, fabulously serene. And wait till you see her—she looks absolutely great. The family had Raoul Valency Concorded over from Paris to do her. What a character. What a life. Catch you later.”

  When they reached the casket, Babe kissed her fingertips and touched them to Ash’s folded hands.

  Staring at Ash in her blue gown and bangle bracelets, Cardozo felt he was face to face with human fragility and insignificance and the one final earthly certainty, solitude.

  Babe was shaking as though a wave had hit her.

  He put an arm around her. “There’s a chair over here.” He steered her through the crowd around to a wingback chair.

  “I just need to rest a moment,” Babe said.

  “Sure—you rest.”

  Something made Cardozo look up. Dina Alstetter was standing by the fireplace, staring at him. She motioned him over.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said with an offhand tone.

  “I’m sorry about your sister. She was a good person.”

  “Thanks.” Her eyes held his. “There are some things I need to talk to you about.”

  “Feel free to phone me.”

  “I mean now.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Not here.” She took a glass of wine and Cardozo followed her into the hallway.

  They entered another viewing room. In the corner a woman was laid out in a silk-lined mahogany casket. She had pear-shaped ruby earclips and brown hair waved to her shoulders and she was wearing an evening gown. A hand-lettered plaque announced that her name was Lavinia Mellon Fields. The visitors’ register on the bookstand was blank. A sort of stillness submerged everything.

  “Should we be here?” Cardozo said. “It doesn’t seem respectful.”

  Dina Alstetter replied to that notion by sitting in a chair, very much in the manner of a cat staking out its turf, and lighting a fresh cigarette. “Vinnie Fields was the banal widow of a banal San Francisco billionaire and I very much doubt she’ll have any callers.”

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  She breathed in, breathed out, and said, “I have evidence.” She opened her purse and drew out a mini-cassette recorder.

  Cardozo had to wonder, What kind of woman would bring a tape recorder to her dead sister’s viewing? and the only answer that came to him was, This kind of woman.

  Dina Alstetter pressed a button. There were two voices on the tape.

  One was Dina Alstetter’s. “You know he stole your clothes.”

  The other voice was a shadow of Ash Canfield’s. “Did he?”

  “I’m asking you. Did he? Say yes or no. You have to say it, Ash. This isn’t a videorecorder.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dunk stole your clothes. Duncan Canfield stole your clothes and jewels and sold them.”

  “Yes.”

  “He was flagrantly unfaithful to you. You knew he was unfaithful to you. He made no secret of it. He humiliated you and made you miserable.”

  “Yes.”

  “He introduced you to drugs and provided them.”

  “Yes.”

  “You wanted to divorce him and you still do.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s he who wants the reconciliation, not you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you haven’t slept with him since the separation.”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t, Ash. Say you haven’t if you haven’t. Or have you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you regard him as your husband?”

  A long silence.

  “No.”

  “You’ve intended to divorce him since the separation and you’ve never wavered in that intention.”

  A long silence.

  “No.”

  “Is it your intention that Duncan Canfield remain in your will?”

  “No.”

  “Is it your intention to modify your will and to bequeath Duncan Canfield no more than one dollar? Is that your intention, Ash?”

  “Yes.”

  Cardozo listened and frowned, and when the tape had whirred to a stop he looked at Dina Alstetter. “You recorded that in the hospital?”

  She lit another cigarette from a burning stub. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To prove she was going to disinherit him.”

  “Was she?”

  “For God’s sake, is the tape in Chinese?”

  “On that tape you’re stuffing words into a dying woman’s mouth.”

  “We had discussions long before Ash took ill. She knew all about Dunk and his gay party set.”

  “What gay party set?”

  “The count and that loathesome Lew Monserat.”

  “What did she know about them?”

  “That they were carrying on, doing drugs, throwing orgies. That’s why she filed for a separation. She was in full possession of her faculties when she filed. Dunk has no right to her money.”

  “I don’t get it. You certainly don’t look like you need the money.”

  “I don’t have to need money to want justice.”

  “No, but you sure seem to need his scalp. What the hell did he do—jilt you?”

  “I know you only mean to be rude—b
ut if I didn’t need a favor from you, I’d slap you for that.”

  Cardozo frowned. “You’re in love with that airhead?”

  She drew in a breath and let out a sigh. “Since you insist on having the background, let’s just say Dunk and I used to be friends and one day we stopped.”

  “Be a pal, use someone else to stir up trouble for him. This doesn’t involve me.”

  “But it most certainly does. He killed her and my feelings about Duncan Canfield don’t even enter the picture because that is a rock-bottom fact.”

  “A disease killed her.”

  “He gave her the disease.”

  “Now how the hell did he do that?”

  “The autopsy will show how.”

  “There’s not going to be an autopsy. Your sister’s embalmed. Mrs. Alstetter, you have all my sympathy, and I’ll throw in some advice. You haven’t got a case, and you sure as hell haven’t got any evidence. There’s not a doubt in my mind that the son of a bitch wanted his wife dead. But there’s no such crime as malice. At least, it’s not my department, and if there is, you’re as guilty of it as he is.”

  She snapped her purse shut. “All right—if I have to prove it to you by getting her medical records, I will.”

  “Examination of head reveals left eye missing. Left eye socket is site of bullet entry wound.” Dan Hippolito was dictating into a microphone suspended over the examining table. “Exit wound is in left posterior parietal area.”

  Dan glanced over and saw Cardozo. With his hand gloved in skin-hugging bloodied plastic, he moved the microphone aside, then lifted his curved Plexiglas face shield.

  “Hiyah, Vince, I’d shake hands but you caught me in the middle of things.”

  Cardozo looked down at the body of the one-eyed young male Hispanic. “Am I interrupting?”

  “The patient will keep. What’s up?”

  “Got time for a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  They went to Dan’s office, a small stark white subterranean chamber. Dan popped his hands out of the gloves. He took off his rubber apron and surgical smock and hung them on the coat stand.

  There were two chairs and a desk and a table with a hot plate and a coffee pot. Dan had arranged a small forest of plants against one wall. Another wall was lined with shelves of medical books.

  Cardozo took a seat. “Dan, would you look at a medical report for me?”

  “Hey, there’s sloppy work in this department, but I don’t want to snitch on a colleague, okay?”

  “Not to worry, this isn’t an autopsy.”

  Dan came back from the hot plate with two Styrofoam cups of coffee.

  Cardozo handed him the folder.

  Dan turned pages. “What are you looking for?”

  “A general impression. Is it kosher?”

  “You know, my practice for the last twenty years has been dead people.”

  “This woman is dead.”

  Dan Hippolito sipped coffee and kept turning pages. “That begins to be evident. Catastrophic weight loss—fulminating fever—uremia …” He looked up, open curiosity sparking his dark eyes. “Friend of yours?”

  “Friend of a friend.”

  “Okay, let’s start at the beginning.” His eyes scanned. “Valium, Dilantin, phenobarbital … Was this female an alcoholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re medicating for alcohol-induced epilepsy.” He read on. “Stereomycin is an antifungoid, Dilantin is an antiseizure, Dramamine is an antinausea … Okay, a rabbi I am not, but this is about as kosher as a pig’s foot. What were they doing, experimenting? You wouldn’t prescribe this combination to a chimpanzee.”

  “Why not?”

  “The drugs counteract one another.” Dan flipped through more pages. “Procaine to desensitize the trachea.”

  “Why are they doing that?”

  “It’s generally done prior to a bronchoscopy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Go down the throat and cut a little tissue from the lungs to biopsy for cancer. Except they’re doing a dye test on the brain artery.” Dan swiveled in his chair. “These records would make sense if she had lung cancers entering the bloodstream and metastasizing to the brain. That I could buy, but—” He stopped at the next page. “Methadone? Are these pages for one patient? Because methadone has one use and one use only, purely political, to shift addicts from free-market heroin to government-owned heroin. Was she a junkie?”

  “She did a lot of drugs.”

  Dan shook his head. “I don’t see a consistent diagnosis. Gamma globulin you give for hepatitis, but what’s the blood analysis? There’s no cell count, no sedimentation rate, nothing. These records are incomplete.”

  He whipped through pages and came to something that made him stop.

  “Now this is downright interesting. Tegretol. That’s specific for temporal lobe infection. Which means it’s not a tumor attacking the brain, it’s an organism.” Dan frowned. “What kind of brain infection did she have?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “I’d have to section the brain and put it under a microscope. They must have done that at the hospital. Go back and ask if they ran a brain section p.m.”

  “This lady was a socialite, they don’t autopsy socialites.”

  “This socialite they should’ve. Either the infection moved incredibly fast or the initial diagnosis was way off. They’re all over the map, treating morphine withdrawal, hepatitis, heart fibrillation, epilepsy, and meantime something very hungry is having a picnic on her brain.”

  He closed the folder and pursed his lips thoughtfully, the pencil in his hand tapping the desk edge.

  “Assuming these doctors aren’t jerks, something that began as a blood disorder crossed to the brain. And the blood-brain barrier is not easy to penetrate. You have to be the size of maybe two electrons to get through. But without the blood sheets, there’s no point even guessing.”

  “Any chance of unnatural causes?”

  “These are infections, not bullets.”

  “Could someone who knew medicine have infected her?”

  “Not even Josef Mengele. This kind of disaster is like a five-plane midair collision. You can’t plan it, you can’t control it. You trying to make a case?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “If she was sharing needles, there could have been contributing negligence. But that’s luck of the draw, not murder.”

  “I don’t think she was sharing. Too classy for that.”

  “Get me her blood charts. There’s definitely grounds for curiosity.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Lieutenant.”

  Dr. William Tiffany rose from his desk and stretched out his arm, offering a handshake. He was the same stout, Nautilus-pumped man Cardozo remembered from Ash’s sick room, dressed in a well-cut dark suit and striped tie.

  It was a roomy corner office, with a black leather couch and two comfortable matching chairs. Cardozo chose the chair nearer the window.

  Dr. Tiffany closed a folder and took the other chair.

  Between the doctor and the detective was a table of woven bamboo, painted a ripe peach and heaped with magazines—Town and Country, Yachting, Vanity Fair, the French edition of Réalités.

  Dr. Tiffany smiled, exuding the confidence of a man who dealt every day with the lives and deaths of people with very deep pockets. “You said on the phone you were a friend of Lady Ash Canfield.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “That makes two of us. Terrible loss. And you’re a friend of Dina Alstetter as well?”

  “She asked me to speak with you.”

  “Yes? Concerning—?”

  “Lady Canfield’s medical records. My coroner says they’re not complete. There are no blood analyses.”

  Dr. Tiffany’s eyes were intelligent, shrewd. “Lady Canfield’s husband has the right to keep them confidential.”

  “Mrs. Alstetter says Lady Canfield was going to divorce her husband. As next of kin, s
he’d like to know what killed her sister.”

  “Congestive heart failure.”

  “My coroner says something got across the blood-brain barrier. He says you’re protecting yourself. Mrs. Alstetter wants to know your side of things before she takes legal steps.”

  The doctor looked toward Cardozo with that built-in coolness of his profession. “Nothing could have saved Lady Canfield. Lieutenant, have you heard the term HIV?”

  “It causes AIDS. Is that what Lady Canfield had?”

  Dr. Tiffany leaned back in his chair.

  “AIDS manifested in Zaire twelve years ago,” he said. “Cuban troops brought AIDS to this hemisphere and to Central America. American mercenaries and military advisers brought AIDS from Central America to New York, where it entered the gay community and the heterosexual swinging community. Because gays are a small population, living in three or four ghettos across the country, the number of repeat exposures was enormous, and the disease followed a spectacular, fulminating course. What people are just beginning to grasp is that AIDS may have spread just as rapidly among heterosexuals. Because it’s had the entire American population to fan out through, repeat heterosexual exposures have been far lower than among gays. On the other hand, total exposures have been enormously higher, given that heterosexuals outnumber gays ten to one. We do know that one repeatedly exposed heterosexual group, non-IV-using female prostitutes, is showing double the rate of infection that male homosexuals in New York City did four years ago. If you extrapolate from that statistic, we have a holocaust down the road.”

  Dr. Tiffany shook his head and paused and sat there just looking at Cardozo.

  Cardozo sat there looking back.

  “Are you Catholic or Fundamentalist or born again?” Dr. Tiffany asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t want to offend you.”

  “You couldn’t even begin.”

  “With the virus as widespread as it is, and the Catholic hierarchy and the Falwellians dead set against educating the public, the caseload is doubling every six months. Over a tenth of the population has been exposed, and possibly a third of those exposed will die within seven years. How does that grab you, Lieutenant?”

  “Doctor,” Cardozo said, “you don’t need to shout. Put me on the mailing list. I’ll contribute. Could you just tell me if you tested Ash Canfield’s blood?”