VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “I want to know if I’m getting too far from reality.”

  Cardozo showed Henning the photograph of Sir Duncan that Ellie Siegel had clipped from Town and Country. “This is what this guy looks like in—let’s call it real life.” He laid down the computer-modified portrait beside it. “I’m almost a hundred and two percent convinced that this is the same guy.”

  Sergeant Henning was a powerfully built young man, serious-looking and clean shaven, with keen blue eyes and a full head of black hair curling back from a face that was prematurely lined and drawn. His eyes wrinkled and there was a flicker of something—not exactly surprise, more like distaste caught off guard and not wanting to show itself.

  “Strike you as reasonable that a man who looked like that would want to look like a woman who looked like that?”

  “Reason doesn’t come into it,” Sergeant Henning said. “I have no trouble with it.”

  “Say this guy is doing drag acts in his wife’s old clothes. The wife doesn’t know. Didn’t know. Thought her old clothes were going to charity.”

  “A lot of TV’s keep it secret for a whole marriage.”

  “TV?”

  “Transvestite.”

  “The guy may not be a transvestite exactly. The real point may be something else—a sort of s.m. that involves play-acting and gender switching.”

  “All possible. Not frequent, but possible. Usually TV’s and s.m. are two very different worlds. Psychologically and socially.”

  “But it could happen?”

  “Sure.”

  “The guy may dress up and act out these scenes in front of a video camera. Possible?”

  “Very frequent.”

  “But he doesn’t keep the camera at his home. There’s a special place where he gets together with like-minded friends. They do drugs and dress up and party and make these videotapes.”

  “It’s very common for TV’s or s.m.’s to have a special apartment for their celebrations. Trick pads. The way some married guys have apartments to meet their girlfriends.”

  “Okay. Where does he keep his clothes, the drag clothes?”

  “Most guys would keep them at home. If they’re married and the wife doesn’t know, they’d keep them someplace where she wouldn’t be apt to look—the toolchest, the workshop, maybe even a safe.”

  “But if he lives in a Manhattan apartment, how does he get across town without being noticed?”

  “Is he rich?”

  “Very.”

  “Hire a limo.”

  “Then the elevator man knows. The doorman knows.”

  “He changes into drag in the limo. The driver’s in on it. That happens a lot. There are special limo services. He could even stash the drag with the limo company.”

  “But it’s fancy drag, he wants it to look good. A real woman wouldn’t dress in a limo, make herself up in the back seat—would this guy?”

  “Either you don’t know the things some women do in limos, or you don’t know what state-of-the-art limos are like. They have Jacuzzis. Beds. Mirrors.”

  “But say these games and videotapes—say the s.m. in them is really rough. Maybe someone’s even been killed.”

  Henning’s eye flicked up and fixed on Cardozo. “We both know that happens.”

  “This guy doesn’t want anyone to know he does drag—not anyone on the outside, certainly not a limo driver. He doesn’t want anything showing that connects to that side of his life.”

  “Then if he’s smart he changes in the place where they make the films. But there are no rules. A lot of guys aren’t realistic in this one area. They don’t want to be found out, but they take asshole risks. Maybe that’s part of the unconscious thrill. You see Manhattan publishers, bankers, lawyers, guys with two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salaries, walking past the doorman in leather. Leather, for Christ’s sake. They gotta be crazy if they think they’re leading a double life, but they do it.”

  “But drag?”

  “Drag—no. They don’t go past the doorman in drag. Not the older generation. Not if it’s secret. If it weren’t for the wife, I’d say your friend takes the drag with him in a suitcase. But married, I don’t know what he tells her—he’s going to Chicago on business for six hours? Unless the wife isn’t around much, or they lead separate lives, like she has a lover or she’s always out Thursdays at the opera.”

  “What about keeping the drag in the secret apartment?”

  “Frankly, Lieutenant, I know more about leather than drag. But if we’re talking high drag, the gear is very expensive—it runs a few thousand dollars. And the people that do these things, the drugs, the games—they’re not the kind you’d trust with something you valued. So unless this secret apartment was his own place, no one else coming and going, I don’t think he’d keep the drag there. Also, how does it get cleaned and repaired, who takes care of all that? There’s a lot of logistics to drag, a lot more than to leather.”

  “You don’t know any guys who have this kind of profile?”

  “Making snuff films in drag?”

  “You might have heard something.”

  “Sure, you hear things, but take it with a grain of salt.”

  Henning started to speak, hesitated, worked his lip.

  “Okay, I’ve heard of somebody, he does drag, and he’s in a situation where it would wreck his life, his friendships, his career, everything, if it ever came out.”

  Cardozo flashed that Henning was talking about a cop. Not himself, but another cop. A member of the Gay Caucus.

  “It’s a compulsion, a need. And he needs a place where he can act out and it can’t be at home, because at home he drinks Bud with the boys, watches ballgames. A coworker could open a closet and see Scarlett O’Hara’s ballgown and blow the whole thing. So what’s he going to do? We know what rents are, who can afford one apartment, let alone a secret pad? So he shares with some other TV’s, who are not exactly reliable people. I don’t mean in general, but these particular TV’s are dips. So he keeps a locker in the pad. It’s a secure locker, you could put jewels in it. Dynamite couldn’t get into it.”

  Cardozo flashed that Henning was talking about his lover. “Kind of like keeping your own bottle of liquor at an after-hours club?”

  Henning nodded. “Right.”

  48

  “I NEED TO GET INTO Lewis Monserat’s Franklin Street loft,” Cardozo said.

  “But he lives on Madison,” Babe said.

  “His playpen is on Franklin.”

  A hesitation came over the phone line. “Has he done anything wrong?”

  “I’ll know after I search. Can you keep him busy two hours?”

  “He’s showing a new artist at his gallery this Wednesday evening, he’ll have to be there at least three hours.”

  “Are you going?”

  “I can.”

  “Is Duncan Canfield going?”

  “Do you want him to go?”

  “Him and Count Leopold and Countess Vicki.”

  “The count and countess never miss an opening of Lew’s. And I can ask Dunk to take me.”

  “Be your most—what’s the word they use in gossip columns?—captivating. Make sure they all stay.”

  At 8 P.M. three men in the brown uniforms of the United Parcel Service approached the doorway of number 432 Franklin Street. Two were empty-handed and the third carried a large carton marked SONY TRINITRON.

  The tallest of the delivery men glanced both ways along the street. The thin crowds of early evening had begun milling up the block on Hudson Street, but except for the three UPS men, Franklin was deserted.

  The shortest of the delivery men removed a plastic card from his wallet and worked it into the crack between the inner door and the metal jamb. A moment later the door swung free.

  Babe’s eye played across the crowd.

  The Monserat Gallery was full of guests, and more were arriving by the minute. Handsome women in smart gowns, men in tuxes who were obviously going on to other events mingled with you
ng and not-so-young people in jeans and T-shirts and flouncy gypsy skirts with peasant tops.

  For those who couldn’t brave the crush to the elaborate buffet tables, waiters circulated with drinks and food. Deftly placed speakers pumped discreet post-punk energized trance music into the party.

  “Lew!” Babe waved.

  Lew Monserat had a little slow smile for her as they drew toward one another, and he kissed her on each cheek.

  He was elegantly dressed in a blue blazer, vellum-colored shirt, ecru flannels, but his face was gaunt, his eyes exhausted, and he moved with a sort of stoop.

  “It’s been so long,” Babe said.

  “We haven’t talked in eight years—can you believe it?”

  “Well, I know how to fix that.” Babe took his arm. “Tell me about your new artist and introduce me to everyone.”

  Waldo Flores’s assbones ached from sitting on the hard wooden chair, and he had a crimp in his neck from leaning forward to listen for a click that never came.

  But this time there was a click. It was so faint he couldn’t tell at first whether he had heard it or just wished it.

  He slid a steel piece between the rods and pressured it slowly clockwise.

  The lock made a friendly sound as the bolt slid back.

  An hour of pain dropped off his shoulders and he swung the door open.

  Cardozo found the light switch and flicked it. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  It startled Waldo to see Richard Nixon wearing a Frederick’s of Hollywood black lace panty-bra with the crotch cut out. The mask was that realistic.

  Mickey and Minnie Mouse and the other cartoon character masks looked real in their own way, but it was a different way, not shocking, just ugly with the black lingerie and black leather dangling on hangers beneath them.

  But Nixon and John Wayne, those were shocks.

  Cardozo bent down at the bottom shelf in the closet, pulled out a videocassette, and studied it. The neatly hand-lettered label read FUN ‘N’ GAMES HALLOWEEN 7.

  He carefully peeled off the label and stuck it onto the spine of one of his own blank cassettes. He put the labeled blank on the shelf in place of Monserat’s cassette.

  He wrote FUN ‘N’ GAMES HALLOWEEN 7 on a fresh label and attached it to Monserat’s cassette. He dropped the cassette into the Sony Trinitron carton.

  Tony Bandolero stepped around Cardozo and took a gown down from the clothesbar. There was the powdery crackle of a plastic bag opening.

  The gown was deep red, with sequins. Because flashes would be visible through the blinds, Tony was using room light. He scanned the gown with his digital light meter and adjusted his camera aperture.

  There was a click as the shutter opened and shut and then a faint whir as the film advanced.

  Cardozo’s felt-tip pen carefully wrote FUN ‘N’ GAMES HALLOWEEN 8.

  Cardozo stared through the filtered darkness, registering the slow, silent passage of the camera’s gaze across a white wall.

  Weird figures took shape on the TV screen, ghostly inhabitants of a world of electronic phantoms and dreams, moving and swaying in the flickering light, acting out their secret rituals.

  A sensation of unformed dread grew in his belly.

  And then, in front of his eyes, it was real.

  His gaze slashed for one disbelieving instant at the image on the screen. The blood drained sickeningly from his head.

  He reached a shaking hand for the phone and dialed.

  “Hippolito.”

  “Dan, it’s Vince. I need your opinion on something. It’s urgent.”

  Cardozo’s livingroom was dim with the rapid shifting of lights and darks. Dan Hippolito, mild and grave, watched the TV screen with a look of disdain.

  “Morgenstern’s gay?” he said in a tone of amazement.

  “A guy sucking a guy’s cock, I’d call that gay,” Cardozo said.

  “Why the hell did he let it be filmed?”

  “He didn’t know. There are two types of movies in this collection: one where the camera’s moving around in the party and everyone knows they’re stars or hired help. Then there’s another type, like this, where the camera doesn’t move. Which means it’s hidden, operated remote or automatic. The people wearing masks know what’s happening. The object is to get the goods on the people who don’t know.”

  “Jesus, he gives deep throat. Vince, if you don’t mind, I find Ted Morgenstern kind of revolting under the best of circumstances. Chowing down on a nine-foot Watusi in a Wehrmacht uniform I think he’s to puke.”

  Cardozo pressed the fast-forward. The actors plunged into a comic, sped-up dance.

  Naked on a stepladder, the dark-haired girl free-based while a chivalrous gentleman in a Popeye mask held the flame of an acetylene torch beneath her bulbed glass pipe. A ponytailed young man wearing see-through black lace panties flung himself into doggie position on the floor, sniffing through a silver straw at a hand mirror zebra’d with lines of white powder.

  A man wearing a Richard Nixon mask snapped flash pictures of an industrious young woman who was blowing a man in a Lone Ranger mask and simultaneously fondling the genitals of two other men in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck masks. Seated on two Queen Anne chairs sipping drinks, two extraordinarily ugly drags ignored the couplings and thrashings. One of them was moustached and the other was not. They both wore elaborate gowns.

  “Charlie Chaplin goes porno.” Dan Hippolito lit a cigarette. “So help me, Vince, you better not have dragged me down here to watch home movie orgies. I have real trouble empathizing with driven behavior.”

  “You may have more than a little trouble empathizing with what comes next.”

  What came next was a startlingly beautiful Latin woman with the face of a Madonna, lying naked and absolutely still on a thick quilt that had been spread on the floor between the two Queen Anne chairs.

  Something had happened to Dan Hippolito’s expression. “Stop the frame.” His voice had the even, dead strain of on-guardedness.

  He moved forward, sitting in the hard glow of the frozen TV picture. He seemed to be searching the actors’ faces for some explanation. But the Madonna’s face was absolutely serene and her abusers’ faces had only a drugged, wow-I’m-not-here look.

  “Take it backward.”

  Cardozo ran the tape backward.

  “Forward again. Real time. I’ll tell you when to stop-frame. There.”

  For an unending moment stillness submerged everything.

  Finally a sigh came out of Dan. “She’s a young female Hispanic, I’d say twenty to twenty-two years old, good physical condition, five foot one inch tall, scale weight probably one hundred ten pounds.”

  “And?” Cardozo prodded.

  Dan walked over and gently put an arm around Cardozo’s shoulders. It was a spontaneous, unthinking gesture, compassionate, as though he were preparing his friend for some very bad news.

  “Don’t get hispanical.”

  “What do you mean, hispanical?”

  “I mean the way you are now—hispanical. Just relax.”

  Dan began talking about lividity and rigor. The words came at Cardozo like a slow bucket of swamp water.

  “Dan, just tell me yes or no—is she dead?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “From start to finish, she’s dead?”

  “Do you mean are they killing her on camera? No. She’s been dead two, three days before this even began. And I don’t think she was murdered.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Suspicious death there would have been an autopsy. Nothing has cut this girl, except the drainage catheters in the forearms. And that’s professional. Which means there was a death certificate. She’s embalmed. You don’t have amateur embalmers. Certainly not loons like these. The girl’s from a funeral home.”

  “They took a body from a funeral home?”

  “It’s called necrophilia. It happens.”

  “I hate these guys.”

  “It’s not a
homicide, Vince. There’s no trauma to the body. It was a quick easy death. Most likely an OD. To tell you more than that, I can’t. Not the way she looks. Not what you’re showing me. All I can give you is an educated guess.”

  “Give me your educated guess on this.” Cardozo sprang the videocassette out of the VCR and inserted another. “It’s going to be a little more than you want to see.”

  “Every day I see more than I want to.”

  The image this time was a thin young man stumbling across the screen in faded blue jeans and white sneakers, goofily grinning, blissed out.

  The young man stripped clumsily to the buff and lay belly down on a banquet table.

  Porky Pig and the Lone Ranger, nattily dressed in white tie and tails, moved into the frame. They lashed the young man’s hands to the legs of the table.

  The kid was grinning. Fun and games.

  Porky and the Ranger passed lengths of bicycle chain around the young man’s ankles, made the chains fast to the other two table legs. Now came a ceremonial padlocking of the chains.

  The kid turned and smiled at the camera.

  The Lone Ranger stepped off camera and returned holding a jumbo-sized jar of Vaseline and a six-inch clear plastic tube of one-inch diameter. He presented both to the camera’s inspection.

  The Lone Ranger stepped off camera again. He returned holding in one hand a wooden tongue depressor. He showed it to the camera.

  Now he showed the other hand. His palm held a small clump of wet fur. The fur was alive, skittering, the size of a new-born rat. It had long hind legs and a long skinny tail and tiny bright black eyes and two white needles of incisors in the upper jaw of its chattering miniature mouth.

  The boy looked around. His expression changed to puzzlement.

  What happened next was difficult to believe.

  “How much of this is there?” Dan said.

  “The tape runs a few hours.”

  “Jesus, I don’t want to see this.”

  Cardozo killed the film. A commercial for AT&T long-distance dialing came up on Channel 7 and he killed the TV. “These are intelligent, wealthy people,” Cardozo said. “The wealthiest people on earth, and look at the things they do to other people. I can’t get that out of my head. People with everything, nothing good left to want, so they have to want bad things. And their attitude. It’s like they’re saying, what’s so special about a human life? Why should we respect it? Let’s wipe it out. Want to see it again? Run the tape back. See it sped up or in slo-mo? Just push the button.”