He was standing between her and the front door.
She was absolutely unmoving for a moment. She gauged his strength and his madness and realized she had at best a little courage, a little cleverness to muster against him.
She whirled before he could react and she sped through the hallway into the bedroom, flinging the door shut and twisting the key in the lock. She ran to the phone.
Her lungs were pulling in ragged breaths.
There was no dial tone. She jiggled the cradle. The line was dead. She stared at the receiver disbelievingly. She realized Loring had yanked the cord from the wall.
“Jesus,” she gasped.
She ran to the bedroom window and snapped the Levolors open. The windows were dark across the airshaft. There were lights on two floors below, but rock music was screeching into the night and there was no chance anyone would hear her if she yelled for help.
A crash whirled her around. The bedroom door shot open, smashing into the wall.
Babe froze.
Loring stood panting, silhouetted in the doorframe. His right hand held a sledge hammer.
Lifted on a jolt of panic, Babe dashed into the bathroom, flinging the door shut and jamming the bolt into place. She stepped back, her eyes fixed on the door, realizing it offered at the outside no more than thirty seconds’ protection.
A crash filled the brightly tiled space around her. Jars and bottles chattered on the bathtub shelf. The panels of the door buckled and parted and the gray head of the sledgehammer jutted through, swung back, forced deeper entry.
The realization shot through Babe that her one chance was to go outside.
The window lock had been painted shut and she had to jab the paint loose with a nail file from the cabinet.
Behind her, with each deafening smash, the hammer widened the breach.
She shoved the window up and crouched on the ledge. Holding to the window with one hand, she swept through the dark with the other. Another wall of the building ran at right angles to the bathroom and her fingers contacted wood. It was a cutting board propped on its edge, holding the livingroom window open.
She reached one foot for the other ledge, found it, shifted her center of gravity out over the airshaft. She grabbed the livingroom window and pulled herself through. She could feel brick scrape through her gown.
At that instant she heard the door panel give in the bathroom.
Loring had switched off the lights in the livingroom. She fell down from the window into darkness. Her foot caught on a table leg and the table went crashing to the floor.
She raced across the livingroom and pulled at the front door. She remembered putting her purse on the chair by the door. She felt for it, found it, wrestled again with the knob.
The door flew open with the third yank.
She darted into the corridor, slammed the door. She rummaged in her purse, found the key, locked the deadbolt.
That would give her another ten seconds. If he didn’t have a key, maybe another sixty tops.
She ran down the corridor and pushed the elevator button. She could see from the floor indicator that the elevator was climbing up from the ground floor.
She heard Loring pulling at the front door of the apartment, and then she heard the hammer crashing.
She pulled at the door of the fire stairs next to the elevator. It was unlocked. She shot into the stairway. The only light bulb was on the landing below, and she slipped in the dark. Her high-heeled shoe twisted beneath her, sending a sickening wrench up through her calf.
Her balance was gone. She lunged forward, fell three concrete steps, managed to catch the steel railing.
She pulled herself upright. Burning pain was shooting through her ankle. She took off her shoes. Clutching purse and high heels, she scrambled down the stairs to the next landing.
She dashed into the corridor. The indicator showed that the elevator was still rising, just passing the second floor.
She stood jabbing a finger at the call button. She heard Loring break through the door upstairs, and then the thudding of his workboots across the floor.
She sped back to the fire stairs. She ran down another flight to four and into the corridor.
The indicator showed the elevator still climbing, passing three now. She pushed the call button.
The elevator came to a stop.
Making as little sound as possible, Babe drew the elevator door open. She reached for the grill and attempted to pull it aside. It refused to yield.
She hammered at the grill with the heel of her shoe.
Finally, taking its time, the grill opened.
She slipped into the elevator. There was no light and the walls were covered in heavy industrial bunting.
She tried to yank the grill shut. Again, it was automatically timed and there was no way she could speed it. She began jamming buttons—down and close and emergency call and floor one. The grill slowly closed and the elevator cable shuddered.
She could hear Loring two floors above, hear the staticky clicks of his finger on the call button.
The elevator hesitated between the up and down calls—and then with a thin screaming sound it began lumbering downward at a maddeningly unhurried speed.
Babe heard footsteps crashing down the stairs, doors slamming.
The elevator crawled to three, and she glimpsed Loring’s face as he peered through the elevator door and then dove into the stairwell. His workboots thunked down the concrete steps. The elevator dropped past three.
And suddenly he was there, swinging his hammer, shattering an opening in the elevator door. The sledgehammer crashed through the breach. The gate began buckling.
The elevator continued its downward crawl past two. The hammering suddenly stopped.
As the elevator reached the first floor, Loring darted into view. The sledgehammer struck two battering blows at the door.
Babe pressed her weight on the up button, trying desperately to reverse the elevator’s direction.
She searched frenziedly through her purse for some object of defense. She had nothing.
Babe dropped her purse.
Loring yanked the door open and slammed the grill aside.
His face was inhumanly twisted.
Babe held her shoes in front of her, toes out.
He lifted the sledgehammer, and twenty pounds of raw iron arced through space.
Babe ducked.
The hammer smashed into the wall behind her, ripping down bunting, then lifted again.
With the toes of both shoes angled directly at his eyes, Babe thrust.
As Cardozo and Cordelia entered the building there was a buzzing sound of voices. A small crowd stood in the hallway. At first they seemed to be the overflow of some party, chatting, and Cardozo half expected to see that they were holding glasses of wine.
But one of the men was holding up Babe Devens.
Her hair was tangled across her face and her evening dress was ripped. She stretched out a hand to Cardozo. The hand held a shoe, held it tightly, like a weapon. There was blood on the toe.
Cardozo opened his arms and she stepped in against him and he hugged her. Then Babe put both hands on Cordelia’s head and kissed her.
“What happened?” Cardozo said.
A professorial man in his late forties stepped forward. “I saw it.” He was gray-haired with a world-battered, intellectual sort of look, wearing an open-necked shirt and blazer. “A madman was going at her with a sledgehammer. If we hadn’t walked in when we did, he would have smashed her head open.”
“It was Loring.” Babe’s breathing steadied. “He was waiting upstairs.”
“Are you okay?” Cardozo asked.
“Okay now,” she said, but there was a look in her eyes and it was light-years away from okay.
Cardozo took Cordelia and Babe up in the elevator to the sixth floor. A hole had been hammered in the apartment door and splintered wood littered the hallway. He pushed the door open.
The structural colum
ns in the apartment glowed in the light coming through the windows. He flicked the light switch. Half the furniture in the room had been shattered.
“My God,” Cordelia whispered, and put her hands to her face.
“He was waiting here to kill you, Cordelia,” Cardozo said. “You, not your mother. And you know who sent him.”
52
LUCINDA MACGILL, TALL AND slim, carried herself from the car to the doorway with a purposeful stride. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?”
“Vince told me to find you.” Monteleone leaned his thumb on the buzzer. “That’s all I know.” His pale, heavy-jawed face stared impatiently between the bars of the wrought-iron grill.
A moment later Cardozo opened the town house door. He looked agitated. “Glad you’re both here. I appreciate it.”
He took MacGill and Monteleone upstairs to a room with cherry-wood paneling. Lucinda MacGill glanced at the French impressionists on the wall.
“Your surroundings have improved, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks. Have a seat.”
MacGill sat down in a silk upholstered bentwood chair and surveyed Cardozo with a steady eye.
“Let me just give you some idea what’s coming down,” Cardozo said. “I have two very nervous ladies in the next room. Tonight an attempt was made on the life of one of them, but it was meant for the other. You know the mother, Babe Devens. She’s the one who almost got taken out. I don’t think you know the daughter, Cordelia Koenig. Cordelia has been through a lot. A lot. She’s at the breaking point, and she’s ready to tell us just about everything we need to make an indictment. Is your tape recorder loaded, Counselor?”
Lucinda MacGill slid her Panasonic out of her purse. “With a ninety-minute tape.”
“We’re going to need every inch of it. Let’s go.” Cardozo showed the way to the room next door.
Cordelia was sitting on the deep plush sofa, not moving, tensed, her eyes fixed on the green marble fireplace with its brass griffin and irons. Babe was sitting in the chair beside her daughter, and she shifted nervously while Cardozo made introductions.
Lucinda MacGill adjusted herself in a comfortable chair. Her eyes took in the dark oak paneling, the oyster-colored silk curtains, the Boesendorfer concert grand piano. Bowls of cut roses and gardenias lightly scented the air.
“Anytime you’re ready, Cordelia,” Cardozo said.
Lucinda MacGill started her tape recorder.
Cordelia seemed to lose herself for a moment, blinking and gazing around the room as though she had gone to sleep somewhere else and just woken up in a place she’d never seen before. When she finally spoke, her words had a once-removed, hearsay quality, as if everything she was describing had happened way offstage to someone else.
“We started making love when I was eleven. I didn’t really know about sex and I didn’t know what we were doing and I didn’t know he was filming it. He gave me drugs. He said he loved me. He said we’d get married when I was sixteen.”
Her uninflected tone told of a life of anguish and solitude, a life so screwed up that there had never been any point not screwing it up further.
“He said Mother would be drunk that night and so would Scottie. All I’d have to do would be to go into the bedroom and put the needle into her arm and empty the syringe. My mother and stepfather came home drunk and they passed out. I went into their bedroom and I put the needle into my mother’s arm.”
Babe was sitting there, erect and slender against the back of her chair, looking at her daughter with eyes that were wide and pained.
“I only gave her half the dose,” Cordelia said.
“Just a minute,” Lucinda MacGill said. “You did what?”
“I gave her half.” Cordelia blinked hard and a confused frown made tiny lines in her face. “I don’t know why. I guess I couldn’t kill her all the way.”
Lucinda MacGill rose. “Miss Koenig, don’t say another word to me or to Lieutenant Cardozo or to Detective Monteleone or to any member of the police force or district attorney’s office.”
Cardozo’s head snapped back into a disbelieving stare. “What the hell are you pulling?”
“Lieutenant,” Lucinda MacGill said, “we need to have a word.”
He followed her into the hallway.
“It’s tainted.” Lucinda MacGill spoke with flat finality, sliding the glass-paneled door shut behind them. “Nothing that girl says is admissible.”
“You got to be crazy.”
“Cordelia is confessing to the attempted murder of her mother. Her evidence is self-incriminating. She should be represented by counsel when she talks to the police.” Lucinda MacGill’s manner was precise, unexcited, unemotional. The perfect justice machine. “No counsel on earth would permit her to make those statements.”
“She chooses to waive her goddamn rights.”
Lucinda MacGill’s eyes said Vince Cardozo was an idiot. “You can read her her Miranda twelve times and she can waive her rights thirteen times, she’s still got to have a lawyer because otherwise this is not going to be allowed as evidence in any court of law.”
“We’re not indicting her for Christ’s sake! We’re going after the man who seduced her and gave her that syringe.”
“Has she told you his name?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Don’t let her tell you.”
“I want to know his name. I want to nail him. That’s why I got you here.”
“You got me here and I’m spelling it out to you. Do this the right way, Vince.”
“What the hell is this, a minuet?”
“You’re dealing with an emotionally unstable girl—I know she’s young, I assume she’s unstable. Legally, she’s doubly incompetent. If all you’ve got is her testimony, and her testimony involves one word of what I just heard, get her a lawyer right now. Otherwise the D.A. won’t touch this megillah and your criminal’s going to walk.” She continued to fix Cardozo with a burning gaze. “I’m sorry. Whoever he is, he sounds like a real louse, but even if he doesn’t live under the law, we do.”
“Lucinda,” Cardozo said wearily, “what you’re not grasping is the human cost—the contamination this guy is leaving in his path.”
“Believe me, Vince, I do get the picture.”
There was no point going straight home. Cardozo knew he was too furious to sleep. He stopped off at the precinct.
He poured himself a coffee. It must have been sitting in the pot since 3 A.M. of the day before. His first sip added to his sense that his life was not only unreal but disgusting.
He went to his cubicle. There were four new directives from the PC’s office. He sailed them over to the open file cabinet drawer. They plopped on top of last week’s.
Now he was staring at a flyer that someone had put on his desk:
MADAME ROBERTA—FORTUNES TOLD—ASTRAL READINGS
He was about to crumple it when he saw handwriting on the back: Vince C, call Faye. He went to the door.
“Who the hell is Faye?”
“She said you know her,” Sergeant Goldberg answered.
“You took this message, Goldberg? There’s no date, there’s no time, there’s no last name, there’s no number.”
“Hire a secretary,” Sergeant Goldberg grumbled.
Cardozo could think of only one Faye—Loring’s friend Faye di Stasio. He got the number from Information and dialed. On the seventh ring a clouded voice said hello.
“Faye? This is Lieutenant Vince Cardozo. You phoned me?”
“You asked me to keep an eye out for Claude. He’s set up a coke buy—tonight, two A.M., outside the Inferno.”
“Who’s he selling to?”
“Me.”
Claude Loring held his arms and rubbed them: the weather was growing too cool for a sleeveless Levi’s jacket. Faye di Stasio followed him to the van parked across Ninth Avenue from the entrance to the Inferno.
Claude reached into the glove compartment and took out the little black paper bag.
Faye dug into her pocket and pulled out a roll of twenties.
There was a pinging sound like a pebble striking a hub cap. Claude spun around.
“Freeze.” A man stood there, holding out a gold shield. “Lieutenant MacFinney, narcotics.”
Claude whirled and ran. Another cop stepped out from behind a parked Chevy, gun drawn. “You heard the man, Claude.”
Claude stopped in his tracks. A cinderblock was forming in his stomach. The cop knew Claude’s name. It was a setup—had to be.
“It’s not my coke, it’s hers.” Claude pointed. “Faye di Stasio, she’s a dealer, I was holding for her.”
The cop who’d said his name was MacFinney turned around. “Faye—go and sin no more.”
Faye stumbled into the darkness.
“Open the bag,” MacFinney said.
Claude opened the bag.
The other cop came forward, dangling a pair of handcuffs. “Up against the wall, fella.”
Claude turned himself toward the wall. There were two clicks and he felt the icy burn of metal against his wrists. The cops steered him to an unmarked car. Another cop was sitting inside in plainclothes. Recognition hit Claude like a slap.
Vince Cardozo slid over to make room. “We have to discuss a few matters with you, Claude. Possession with intent to sell and a homicide you attempted two nights ago.”
“I want to see my lawyer.”
“You don’t need a lawyer. It’s not you we’re after. Tell us who sent you to kill Cordelia Koenig.”
“I was at the Inferno talking to a guy with a green mohawk.” Claude Loring had a chain smoker’s rasp to his voice. “Then Jodie Downs came up and started butting in and being real obnoxious and I thought okay, punk, you just won the lottery, you’re it. I took him up to the van to smoke some crack and after that first hit he was mine. I told him I knew where we could get some more crack, and I took him up to Monserat’s party pad. I was the scout for Lew’s parties—I dug up the entertainment.”
“What kind of entertainment?” Cardozo said.
“People. Kids, guys, girls. Dead bodies.”
Lucinda MacGill was usually a bright, self-possessed young woman, but her upturned face stared at Loring in horror. “Where’d you get the dead bodies?” she asked.
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