VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “Vince, no one got killed.”

  “You better believe these nuts killed someone. You don’t get that close to the borderline and not step over. Just once. Just to see what it feels like.”

  “You still can’t indict the whole class.”

  “Why not? The whole country worships them. They’re glamorous. Powerful. Rich. In. They’re the people everyone else wants to be. And look at the pattern of their existence. Going to parties, posing for photographers, hoping they’ll make the gossip columns, waiting for something different to happen. Well, nothing different’s going to happen, so they decide to make it happen.”

  “Vince, on those tapes you have two things coming together that weren’t meant to. You have an instinct—sex—and a class of substances—drugs.”

  “It’s not that simple, Monsignor.”

  “Okay, I’m Catholic, and it is that simple. Simpler. I see it five times a week on the autopsy table. Separately, drugs and sex can go either way—good or evil. But put them together, use them for kicks—and there’s no limit to the evil.”

  “Sometimes I get the feeling that you’ve got so many answers that none of this shit bothers you.”

  “Of course it bothers me. I’m human. But I’m a doctor. I’ve seen how it works. There’s nothing demonic about it, nothing that proves Karl Marx was right. It’s an impulse—a sort of ‘what if?’—you don’t even imagine it clearly—under ordinary circumstances, that impulse would slide right by, like a bubble—but you take a drug, the drug freezes that moment, that impulse, and the what-if turns into a why-not and then you’re doing it and the drug’s telling you it’s not you doing it. And believe me, even what’s on those tapes isn’t the worst. It’s the surface of the cesspool. You don’t know what else is down there.”

  “No, Dan. You don’t know. I’ve seen the rest of these tapes.”

  49

  “DRUGWISE,” THE STAR WAS saying, “these are the glory days.”

  Cardozo watched from the doorway. He admired the woman. She had been there. She had had the guts to go public and take the celebrity edge off the drug cult. At fifty-two she looked better than she had at thirty-two, and even at her most drugged out she had always been a beauty.

  “Coke is cheaper, purer, and more abundant than ever before. Doctors use it. Lawyers use it. Investment counselors use it. And God knows, senators use it. How else do you explain those votes on Salvador and Nicaragua? Coke keeps you awake, but contrary to popular belief, it does not make you smart, and it sure as hell doesn’t help you lose weight.”

  There was laughter, and the star grinned back at her audience, but her violet eyes stayed serious.

  “So what are you going to do the next time your host passes a mirror of flake at a sit-down dinner? Why not do what I do. Say ‘Fuck you.’ That’s a good clear way of sending a no signal, and it’s a sure way of not being invited back by assholes.”

  More laughter.

  Cardozo’s eye kept going back to Cordelia Koenig, tucked into the fifth row of folding chairs. She was glancing around to see who was arriving and who was leaving and who was watching whom.

  The guard noticed Cardozo. He crossed to the doorway. “Can I see your card?”

  Cardozo showed his shield.

  The guard frowned and backed off.

  The star lifted a tumbler of ice water from the card table and took a healthy swallow. Then she was into her homestretch.

  “There are people who believe that Twelfth Avenue may have problems. A Hundred Third Street may have problems, but Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street will never have problems. Well, we know the problem is everywhere. Above all, it’s right here. And we know where the answer is. Same place. God bless you all and thanks for listening to me—and keep coming back.”

  There was applause, which the star cut short.

  Hands went up.

  The star began taking comments from the floor.

  The guard was pointing to his watch.

  The star got to her feet. “Would those who care to please join me in the Lord’s Prayer.”

  Cordelia kept looking around, not joining in the prayer.

  The meeting broke up.

  Cordelia’s dress flashed like blue fire as she headed for the other exit. Cardozo quickly followed her slender back, the hollow between the shoulder blades where a cashmere tennis cardigan from C. Z. Guest’s new collection dangled like a mauve flag.

  She hurried down a flight of stairs, heels castanetting in the stone well. The side door of Saint Andrew’s Protestant Episcopal Church slammed.

  When Cardozo came out onto Fifty-third Street, the night was a dark bruise behind the skyline of Manhattan. She was sitting on the fender of a chauffeured BMW, chatting and laughing with friends.

  Her head moved with easy humor, and her blond bangs swayed.

  Cardozo interrupted. “Miss Koenig?”

  Her gaze came up at him, pale blue and drop-deadish, as if he were no more to her than an autograph hunter.

  “Can we talk privately?” He showed her his shield, making it clear this was official.

  The others saw it too—the dark-haired girl with her Locust Valley lockjaw voice, the young man carrying an initialed pigskin briefcase and a squash racquet.

  Silence fell like the slam of a coffin lid.

  “What’s this about?” Cordelia’s voice was suddenly high-pitched and fluty.

  He motioned her to step aside with him.

  She slid silkily off the fender and, hesitating, followed him down the sidewalk, past double-parked limos to his double-parked Honda.

  Across the sidewalk the glass silhouette of Beaux Arts Tower gleamed as if it had been dipped in black ink.

  Cardozo opened the passenger door for her.

  “Please get in. I need you to identify someone.”

  She looked at him with terrified child’s eyes. “Has something happened? Oh my God, who is it?”

  Cordelia’s gaze wandered, straightforwardly appraising every tchotchke in the apartment. It was the gaze of a curious child still seeing the world for the first time.

  Watching her—her every movement studied, every glance precise, the upward tilt of her head like a pharaoh’s—Cardozo saw his home through her eyes—the down-scale, budget look of the fold-out sofa from Castro, the tables from the Sloan’s closeout, the lace curtains from the latino bodegas on Fourteenth Street.

  She had a special unguarded glance of disbelief for the painting of the Valley of Lourdes hanging over the TV.

  Matisse, he had to admit, it was not.

  “You live near Space,” was her only remark.

  Now she moved through the room like an actress on a film set knowing where the light was, catching it exactly with her smile. She dropped easily into the overstuffed chair, as if it belonged to her.

  “The way you were talking, I thought you were taking me to the morgue to see my mother’s body.”

  “No, I want you to identify a man.”

  “Bring him out,” she said cheerfully. She was like a chameleon—by turns defensive, childlike, and now ever so slightly flirtatious. She was a mirror giving him back what she thought he wanted.

  “He’s on tape,” Cardozo said. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Have you got honey?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll have any kind of caffeine-free diet soda.”

  All the refrigerator had was nondiet 7-Up. Cardozo doubted her tastebuds would know the difference.

  They didn’t.

  She sipped and smiled as he lowered blinds, turned down lights, and pressed the start button on the VCR remote.

  Images came onto the screen, hazed as though with the passage of time. The walls of a room painted stark white. The black rectangles of closed shutters. The gracious curves of a Queen Anne chair. A table. A second chair.

  A slim figure moved awkwardly into the frame. At first indistinct in the uncertain light, it suddenly resolved into a young girl.

  She
looked bizarre and beautiful and vulnerable in an ultrasophisticated silk gown. There was something touching and wild, endearing and silly about the way she wobbled on high heels—as though she had raided mommy’s closet. Except the dress fitted. Fitted those fledgling twelve-year-old breasts perfectly.

  She wore makeup—lashes and lipstick, additions to the perfection of youth that seemed garish because they were unnecessary, a mockery of nature. She wore diamond earrings and triple strands of pearls, probably courtesy of her mother, who probably didn’t know she’d extended the courtesy.

  The girl took off one earring. Licked it lingeringly. Placed it in an ashtray.

  On the table beside the ashtray, neatly set out as though for a formal dinner, were a syringe, a small silver chafing dish, an eyedropper, a bowl of clear liquid, and several glassine envelopes of powder.

  She took off the other earring and repeated the ritual.

  There was no sound in the room but the buzzing of the VCR.

  Cardozo watched Cordelia sitting there, alert in the flickering cone of light. He could smell her tingling state of puzzlement.

  It was like meeting an old friend at an unexpected time and place, out of context—not at first recognizing them—taking a moment to remember that there’s a thing called time, that it changes us, that the stranger we’re looking at now could be the friend of years ago.

  A spasm twitched the muscles of Cordelia’s face, and at that instant Cardozo saw her recognize the little girl.

  It was herself, seven years ago.

  From the whiteness of her face he understood that she had had no idea any of this had been videotaped.

  She felt his attention, glanced over, looked quickly away from him.

  A man stepped gracefully into the picture on the TV screen. He wore evening clothes and a half mask, a domino, over his eyes. He could have been the Lone Ranger in a tux.

  He began fondling the girl. He kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, her throat, each ear, and then brushed his lips against hers. Once, lightly. A second time, lingeringly.

  Now, working with the unhurried care of a maître d’ personally preparing crepes suzette for a favorite marchioness, the Lone Ranger readied the dope. He lit the flame in the chafing dish, melted the white powders down into a liquid, drew them up into the syringe.

  Without prompting, the girl held out her arm.

  He tied a length of rubber tubing around her forearm. A vein rose, delicately pulsing in the shaded crook.

  He pressed the tip of the needle into the vein, slowly depressed the plunger, emptied the chamber into her bloodstream.

  All the while she gazed at him with blank-faced adoration.

  Over the next sixty seconds the dope took hold. A beat slipped into the girl’s movements as she shed her awkwardness and shyness.

  Her head tipped back invitingly. The man kissed her throat, his tongue passing over the milk-white patch faintly hollowed by a shadow. At the same time he undid the zipper down the back of the gown.

  The silken fabric fell to the girl’s waist. She wriggled, and the dress slid past her slender hips and lay in a shimmering puddle on the floor. She stepped out of it. She was wearing no undergarments.

  There was only the faintest darkening of pubic hair at her crotch.

  She reached up and unhooked the pearl necklace. Letting it slide slowly through her hands, she dropped it on the table.

  The tip of her tongue appeared in the corner of her mouth.

  She knelt.

  First she took the man’s right hand. She kissed his fingers, one at a time. Then the left hand. Same m.o.

  Then she opened his fly, drew out his circumcised penis, manipulated him to erection. She began blowing him. It was a slick, experienced blowjob, like the work of a hooker who’d been at it for half her lifetime. Only there was real enthusiasm to it. The kid got a kick out of dick.

  The man stepped back, erection wagging. He undressed, folding his clothes and laying them neatly on the Queen Anne chair, putting his shirt studs and cufflinks into the ashtray on the table.

  His attention came back to the girl.

  She tilted her face toward him. He drew her head up. She went on tiptoes, closing her eyes.

  He swiftly covered her neck, her shoulders, in kisses. His lips moved more slowly over her mouth, her cheeks, her closed eyes. His hands softly stroked her throat, then went to her breasts, to the perfect pubescent nipples, teasing them to erectness.

  His face dove and smothered the breast, his mask a slash of black like a knife wound across her flesh.

  He lowered her into the chair, spread her thighs, and began intercourse.

  The camera never blinked.

  Cardozo froze the image with a little snap. He waited, letting the silence widen.

  Cordelia was in some sort of twilight, looking at the screen in a musing way. Her face had become an unmoving mask, all expression paralyzed: the only thing that showed was the emptiness in her eyes.

  “Well?” he said, staring at her, not letting her look away.

  She raised her eyebrows at his tone. “Well what?”

  “Who’s the man?”

  She shifted and her dress made a silky sound. She lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke. She sat gazing at him, not answering, an impudently poised nineteen-year-old. Her eyes seemed to say, I make three hundred thousand a year on my own and I’ll inherit thirty million and I’m a New York Vanderwalk. Who the hell are you?

  He sensed it was a performance, far from the truth of what she was feeling.

  “Are you threatening me?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Good.” She gathered up her cigarettes and silk purse. He could feel her fighting her fear with a show of bravado. “I’m going to go now,” she said.

  “No you’re not. There’s something else you’re going to see.”

  He changed videocassettes.

  The images shimmered, the only source of light in the darkened room.

  Her hand hovered like a hummingbird just above the arm of the chair, and then she sank back, holding on to the arm very hard.

  The tapes were a voyage to a very strange part of a country called Hell.

  Cordelia watched in utter stillness, a belt of moisture forming across her forehead. Without warning she jumped and grabbed the remote control from him and jammed off the picture.

  “Who is he?” Cardozo shouted.

  Her breath was coming in little shakes. The channel on the screen began changing erratically.

  “Those are human beings!” Cardozo screamed. “Ripped and gone, like pages of last year’s calendar, crumpled and tossed into the incinerator! And you think the man you’re shielding is human? You think he’s even a man? Let me tell you something, he’s not human, he’s not a man, he’s prehistoric slime!”

  He twisted the remote control from her hand and flicked the cassette back on. He felt totally out of control, and what was more dangerous, he was enjoying the feeling.

  “Some species survive because they taste horrible, because they’re poisonous … because they have no predators.” Cardozo thrust his thumb at the man frozen on the TV screen, gray skin pulled taut over his cheekbones, eyes behind the mask halfway to sockets. “He’s one of them! Tell me that shithead’s name! It’s Monserat, isn’t it! Your downstairs neighbor!”

  Cardozo stood there, rage building up to critical mass, and she still didn’t answer, and pumps began thudding in his skull.

  “He gave you the insulin to inject your mother—didn’t he! He taught you how to use a syringe—didn’t he! And did you know he’s a sadist and a necrophile, did he invite you to any of his parties where torture was the entertainment or a dead body was the guest of honor?” He stopped the picture. “You’re lucky you’re fucking alive, you know that?”

  She spoke in a half whisper. “You’re getting me very confused.”

  His eyes hooked hers and the resolve seemed to drain out of her.

  “I was only a kid,” s
he whispered.

  “You’re not a kid now.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with—those other things.”

  “Then stop shielding him.”

  He stared at her until she looked down.

  “Why are you doing this to me? It wasn’t my fault! I never had a chance!”

  “You have a chance now.”

  Cordelia turned away and put a fist to her mouth. He could feel her breaking, and he had a sense of encroaching light as though he were on the very edge of hearing her say the man’s name.

  But her flow of emotion broke off, suddenly suspended.

  He felt a third presence, a shape at the end of the dark entrance corridor. He followed the direction of Cordelia’s gaze.

  His daughter Terri had come into the room.

  He felt a fist go into his heart. He didn’t know how long she had stood there, how much she had seen or heard.

  It may have been nothing more than the shock of the moment that made Terri look at him like that, a kid—sweet and thin, like a forlorn remnant of a doll—watching him with large sad injured eyes. He had a dizzying sense of levitation.

  “Terri,” he said, wanting to explain, wanting to apologize.

  Cordelia brushed violently past him. There was a slam, and she was out the door, her heels clattering crazily down the stairs, and then came the deeper, more distant thud of the street door.

  “Terri,” he said.

  The silence was spreading out too far, too fast.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  There was something about her that seemed unsoiled. Cardozo realized that he knew nothing about this girl, this young woman, this daughter. He had no idea where she drew her strength from.

  She came into the livingroom and flicked on a light, gazing at him. “Daddy, come here, you need someone to hug you.”

  50

  “WE’VE GOT TO TALK.” Cordelia’s voice came out of her throat clogged, muffled. The hand holding the receiver was so shaky she had to steady it with the other hand, and her bracelets were rattling.