“So what was in the relationship for Brian?”
“He hoped he’d get a little power. What he got instead was AIDS.”
Cardozo sat there watching Melissa Hatfield stare at him. He couldn’t buy that she had learned so much from her brother, or that Brian’s AIDS and his liaison with Morgenstern were the secret he’d sensed her holding back. “Melissa,” he said, “what don’t you want me to know?”
She looked surprised. “What are you talking about?”
“There’s something else. From day one I’ve felt it.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Then why don’t you tell me?”
“Vince, I like you.” It seemed to embarrass her to make the admission. “I even thought … maybe …” She looked down at the paper place mat printed with drink recipes and began running her fingernail back and forth through a banana daiquiri. “I wanted you to like me.”
“I do like you.”
“Would you like me if you knew I was sleeping with my boss? Nat Chamberlain, who’s put up half the overpriced firetrap co-ops in Manhattan and took more graft than any politician in this city?”
The picture finally came into focus. “Why would I blame you for him?”
“Last spring there was a fire in one of Nat’s flagship co-ops. A policeman died from burns he got rescuing a woman.”
“You didn’t build the building—you didn’t set the fire.”
“But somebody set it. And the insurance paid Nat another forty-four million.” Melissa was silent a moment. “I feel dirty.”
“Welcome to the real world.”
“That’s all—welcome to the real world?”
“If there’s any other answer, I don’t know it.” Cardozo sighed and signaled for the check.
46
CARDOZO PHONED THE LEWIS Monserat Gallery.
The woman with the prim voice said gallery hours were Tuesday through Saturday, 11 A.M. till 6 P.M.—except Thursday, when hours were 12 till 8 P.M. She added, “We’re closed Saturdays during the summer.”
“Nothing like a long weekend,” Cardozo said.
Cardozo examined the facade of 432 Franklin Street.
It was a typical conversion, a six-story industrial building with a column of windows marked Shaftway where the freight elevator ran. No amount of sand-blasting would ever turn the brick walls into brownstone, any more than fresh black paint would ever turn the fire escape into wrought iron art nouveau.
A sign swinging from the lowest cross-walk of the escape announced LUXURY CO-OPS AVAILABLE.
He pushed through the unlocked gray iron security door. A hand-lettered sign taped to the mailboxes inside requested, FOR YOUR OWN SECURITY PLEASE LOCK FRONT DOOR AFTER 11 P.M. THERE HAVE BEEN INCIDENTS.
Cardozo studied the building directory. Fewer than half the apartments were occupied, and there was no name in either fourth-floor slot.
The owners had installed an inner door of plate glass, the latch controlled by an intercom buzzer system. He pushed the buzzers for both sixth-floor units. An instant later two loud rasps clicked the latch open.
A glance at the first floor told him that the A apartments were at the front of the building, the B’s at the rear.
He took the stairway to the fourth floor, two quiet steps at a leap.
The lock on 4A was a Medeco—not pickproof, but certainly MasterCard-proof.
“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called irritably from upstairs.
Cardozo returned to his car, parked twenty yards down the opposite curb of Franklin Street, and took up his vigil, staring up at the dark windows on the fourth floor of 432.
He observed relatively little movement on Franklin. The street looked as if it had originally been an alley between two rows of warehouses. Judging by the garbage cans, most of the buildings had converted to residences. There were no stores, no restaurants, no reason to wander down the poorly lit pavement unless you happened to live there or needed a quiet wall to piss against or wanted a little semiprivacy to screw in.
Hudson, the cross street, was obviously the place for action. There was something aimless but urgent about the human movement, as if this was the now spot, the place to get sucked into the whirl of high-media exposure. The dress code was expensive sleaze, punk as modified by the fashion dictators. From his vantage point Cardozo couldn’t see a person over thirty on the sidewalk.
Porsches and BMW’s, Mercedeses and stretch limos crawled along, battling pedestrians for right of way. The cars changed colors like chameleons as they passed glitzy show windows and flashing neon logos.
Besides boutiques, card shops, and health food eateries, there was a disco called Space on the corner, guarded by an unsmiling seven-foot albino dressed in blue mylar. Next to it a restaurant sign flashed LA CÔTE BLEUE; through the window Cardozo could see the big circular glass bar mobbed with customers waiting to be seated.
The intersection smelled of sex and fashion and money—the things that made New York New York.
A little after eleven, a cruising police car hooked a turn down Franklin. The blue-and-white pulled alongside Cardozo.
“Hey, you.” A woman leaned out the passenger window, red hair peeking out from under a police officer’s blue cap. “No parking.”
Cardozo flashed his shield and the woman got flustered.
“Sorry.”
“’S okay.”
Fifteen minutes later a man leaned down and rapped on Cardozo’s window. He had thick black hair and a beard, an earring, piercing dark eyes.
“Hey, man. I got grass, crack, PCB, coke, ludes, THC, uppers, downers, opium, hash, morphine. Try before you buy.”
“Not tonight, thanks.”
The man gave Cardozo a look as though he had to be crazy or a cop to be parked on that street not trying to score drugs.
A little before midnight thunder belched and Cardozo’s rear view told him that the sky was turning a darker shade of night. The Empire State Building, lit art-deco blue and white for the night, was beginning to get lost in swirling clouds.
Rain spattered down, and pedestrians dodged into doorways. The line waiting to get into Space had to stand there and get soaked.
Cardozo’s eye ran along the fourth story of 432 Franklin.
The windows were dark.
They stayed dark for that night and the next.
It came with no warning. Cardozo had been watching, waiting three nights for it.
Hudson Street bustled with the Friday night crowd. The heat of the day had yielded to the heat of the night, dense upward-rippling waves tinged pink and yellow by neon and headlights. The revolving door of La Côte Bleue was emptying four customers in a spin. The line waiting to get into Space stretched halfway down Franklin Street.
The alley beside 432 was so dark that Cardozo almost didn’t spot the faint stir of movement.
Between the huge black garbage cans behind Space and the small silver ones behind La Côte Bleue three figures detached themselves from the shadows.
The three stood in the mouth of the alley, lighting a pipe of crack, passing it. When the pipe was consumed they moved unsteadily toward the door of 432.
The woman was pretty in a fading sort of way, wearing floppy safari trousers and a Hell’s Angels denim vest. She had the look of someone too much had happened to, someone who had no more reactions to offer.
The Hispanic was skinny and dark-faced, with a V of paleness at his open shirt front.
Lewis Monserat wore an Eisenhower army jacket, cap, and designer glasses. He didn’t look well. He was thin, the cords of his neck drawn taut, and he carried himself as if he had a headache, as if the very act of inserting the key in the lock required the coordinating of muscles he had barely the strength to control.
The door slammed behind them and three minutes later the lights on the fourth floor went on.
A car horn tooted, disturbingly close to Cardozo’s ear.
He stirred to consciousness in the driver�
��s seat of the Honda, hands folded across his chest. His sleep had not been deep, but he felt as if he had died in it.
The early morning light was flat and strange and it gave objects an eerie, unreal shimmer. The black Porsche sedan waiting at the door of 432 could have materialized from a dream. There didn’t seem to be anyone, not even a driver, behind the tinted windows.
The horn tooted again.
The door to 432 opened. The woman and the Hispanic were dressed as they had been the night before, but Monserat had changed into an old T-shirt and a worn pair of jeans. He wore loafers, no socks. Miami Vice style.
He held the car door for the others. He looked around him before getting in. His dark eyes, high cheekbones, and jutting chin combined into a strikingly emaciated face.
Cardozo allowed the Porsche to make the turn onto Hudson before he turned the key in his ignition.
The Saturday morning traffic was light. He kept a two-block distance across town and down Broadway.
The sun was stroking the tops of glass buildings.
The Porsche turned left on Wall Street and continued to the East River heliport. Cardozo pulled to a hydrant a half-block away and watched.
A helicopter was waiting on the tarmac. On its door was emblazoned the logo HAMPTON HELICAB.
The Porsche drew to the metal fence.
Monserat and his companions got out and walked to the copter. A mechanic closed the door after them. The rotors blurred into invisibility. The copter lifted, throwing off motes of light.
Cardozo found a phonebooth on the corner of William Street.
“Hampton Helicab, good morning.”
“This is Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo, NYPD. You have a Lewis Monserat and party flying with you this morning.”
Cardozo spelled the name, and it took the agent a moment to confirm.
“Does Mr. Monserat have a return flight with you?”
“Yes he does, sir. Monday at seven forty P.M.”
Cardozo broke the connection and dialed a second number.
“Waldo, it’s Vince Cardozo. How about a cup of coffee, my treat?”
Twenty minutes later Cardozo and Waldo Flores were sitting in Kate’s Cafeteria on West Seventeenth Street, on opposite sides of a Formica-topped table.
Waldo’s large brown eyes stared above the edge of the coffee mug. “Man, you keep asking me to break the law. I’m straight now. Not pushin’ drugs, not runnin’ girls, no B and E. Why the hell don’t you let me alone?”
Cardozo tore the edge off another packet of Sweet ’n Low and let it snow down into his coffee. “We’ve been having complaints about robberies at some East Side doctors’ offices. Papers missing. Drugs missing, too.” The drugs were a guess, but he trusted his intuition of the Waldos of this world.
Waldo’s eyes came up in a hurry. “All right, I helped myself to some Valium, it’s a crime?”
“Yeah, Waldo. It’s a crime. What are you going to tell the judge? I asked you to go in?”
First puzzlement, then terror replaced the lost reluctant look. “Man, you never let go, do you.”
“It’s a Medeco. You can open it in your sleep. There’s no one home till Monday night, only one other apartment on the floor, we jimmy the front door with a charge card.”
Waldo bent toward the lock, his face furiously concentrated, everything focused on the signals reaching his fingers through the little steel rod.
A door banged four flights down. Steps were audible, then the sound of the elevator wheezing to life.
“Motherfuck,” Waldo grumbled. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” He inserted a second rod, then a third.
The elevator passed and stopped one floor above.
Waldo froze.
Steps echoed. A door slammed.
Waldo straightened up, the tension dropping off his shoulders. He twisted the handle and gave the door to 4A a triumphant push.
Cardozo entered the apartment. Waldo followed.
They walked along a hallway, the only sound the crackling of Styrofoam packing pellets snapping like peanut brittle beneath their feet.
Cardozo opened doors.
Waldo stood watching him.
Lewis Monserat’s home away from home had everything: a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, a blood-stained towel thrown behind the toilet, an answering machine blinking in the bedroom, a VCR and an eighty-inch projection TV in the livingroom.
Cardozo had started across the colorful rya rug that stretched before the TV screen when he saw a silver tray holding plastic-sealed syringes on the secretaire that stood beneath a gold-framed mirror. Other evidence of fun and frolic was lying about: an empty two-litre bottle of Gilbey’s gin, pipes, mirrors, silver straws, single-edged safety razors.
It looked as though last night had been a quiet evening at home with booze and coke and crack, video and the Smithsonian collection of dildos and handcuffs.
“The maid’s gonna have a lot of cleanin’ up to do,” Waldo observed.
Cardozo moved the TV screen. Four black two-by-fours had been screwed into the wall, forming an H with two cross beams. He could see scrapes on the wood, and rust stains.
Waldo prowled the room, picking up mirrors and sniffing white dust from them, scooping up red-capped plastic vials that had fallen behind sofa cushions.
Cardozo figured out how to work the VCR and ejected the video tape. The cassette label was hand-lettered: games. He pocketed it.
“A lot of grass in the freezer,” Waldo called from the kitchen.
“Don’t take so much it’s obvious,” Cardozo said. “We may want to come back.”
“Shit, I ain’t comin’ back here.”
Waldo went quickly through the bedroom into the bathroom, sniffing bottles in the medicine cabinet.
Cardozo found that the bedroom closet had a Fichet lock.
“Waldo, come here.”
Waldo sauntered out of the bathroom, heaping fistfuls of Quaaludes and Valiums into his pockets.
“Open this.”
Waldo studied the lock, frowned, opened his toolkit, selected an eight-inch rod.
“Stand back, amigo.”
Waldo probed, listened, inserted a second rod.
Cardozo glanced at the magazines on the bedside table. Hustler. Honcho. A Child’s Garden of Sex. Last May’s Reader’s Digest, with a marker inserted at “The Seven Telltale Signs of Loneliness: Are you Suffering From the Disease That Cripples More Than Three Million Americans Annually?”
Suddenly a board creaked in the hallway. The apartment door opened, slamming against the wall.
Waldo spun around, eyes huge.
“Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo?” A man’s voice. “Yoo-hoo, God damn it.”
“Il n’y a personne.” A woman.
Count Leopold de Savoie-Sancerre, bloated in flowered surfer’s jams and a yellow silk shirt, passed the bedroom doorway, followed by Countess Vicki in a fiery pink skirt.
Cardozo motioned Waldo to pack up his gear.
Count Leopold’s voice came from the livingroom. “Mais c’est un bordel!”
“T’affolles pas,” Countess Vicki said. “Il y a eu une fete, c’est tout.”
Cardozo eased the front door open. He and Waldo slipped into the corridor.
First came the sound: a woman’s voice singing “I Could Have Danced All Night,” high and piping and almost laughably pure. My Fair Lady, the original cast recording, badly scratched. Julie Andrews.
An image began to appear on the television screen, lights and darks, the curve of a woman’s shoulder, gloved fingers stroking the lower part of her face.
The camera pulled back jerkily.
The woman wore a glittering evening gown. She was strangely, disturbingly ugly.
The room behind her had stark white walls. There were two Queen Anne chairs. She sat.
Vague silhouettes passed through the background. A man in evening clothes stepped into focus. He bowed gallantly.
He took the woman’s hand and she rose. They began moving together. The moveme
nts never quite became a dance, but still there was a sort of pattern to it, as though the actors had rehearsed certain postures and facial attitudes.
Cardozo’s eyebrows were creased in the effort of understanding.
The picture changed to a different woman, standing naked against the same blank walls.
Cardozo tried to guess her age and figured she was shading sixteen.
A man in evening clothes entered the frame. He kissed the girl’s eyes, her cheeks, her ears, then lightly brushed his lips against hers. They spoke, but the words were garbled—only a tone came through, joking and teasing and laughing.
Three other men in evening clothes entered the frame.
The girl began deep-throating one of the men.
Something in the image put Cardozo on guard. The three men not involved in the sex act were aware of something, seeing something the girl could not.
VC01 - Privileged Lives Page 48
