VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “Not that kind of killing,” Cordelia said. “I mean for kicks.”

  “There are kicks in war. You’d be surprised.” One by one the man snipped the corners off the four envelopes and tapped their powdered contents into the mix.

  “He’s cooking a speedball,” the technician said.

  “That’s no speedball.” Cardozo didn’t believe it. He saw it happening in front of him, and he couldn’t believe it. “He’s melting down crack. That’s a fucking speedball express. Once that hits their bloodstream they’re going to be out of control.”

  The man filled the syringe from the cup, drawing the liquid up into the transparent chamber. He laid the syringe on the table. He held out the red tubing, smiling.

  Cordelia came toward him, smiling back at him. She stretched out her arms, palms toward the ceiling.

  “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe,” the man said. “Where oh where shall the goodies go?”

  “You choose which arm,” Cordelia said. “You always bring me luck.”

  The man carefully knotted the tubing around her upper left arm. The swollen dark vein jutted in the crook.

  Cordelia turned slightly, so that the man had to reorient himself. As he touched the tip of the needle to the pulsing vein, he was facing the TV camera.

  Cardozo could feel something wordlessly taking shape. There was a tiny preparatory movement on the man’s part, and then with a quick jab he sank the needle tip into the vein and began to lower the plunger.

  White-hot realization shot through Cardozo. “He’s giving it all to her! It’ll kill her!”

  Cordelia’s free hand whipped up. Her fingers dug under the mask, clawing it up off the man’s eyes. His pivoting gaze froze. For one blinking, unbelieving moment the unmasked face of Baron Billi von Kleist stared straight into the camera.

  Of course, Cardozo realized. Not Monserat. Von Kleist. The suitor, the guardian, the best friend.

  Cordelia stretched out her hands to grab the syringe. The needle was shooting glittering droplets into space. Twenty fingers twisted around one another, tangoing across the screen, zooming in and out of focus, grappling for possession.

  The baron bent Cordelia backward over the table. The lit heater wobbled and went over. Flame jetted across the tabletop.

  The baron reached with his right hand for the mineral water.

  Cordelia, using both hands, twisted the syringe from his left hand. She took three steps away from him and stood at the edge of the screen.

  The baron doused the flame in Evian. When he turned again to face Cordelia, he raised the scissors in his right hand.

  It was a face-off, the needle with its payload versus the scissors with their cutting edges.

  Panic and determination were mingled in Cordelia’s expression. Now she was circling out of camera range, and the baron was turning, eyes tracking her.

  “No way I’m going to let this happen.” Cardozo flung open the truck door and bounded across the street.

  He dove into the building entrance and leaned on the buzzer to 4A to spook them, maybe to stop them, anyway to buy time, and he leaned on all the other buzzers to get into the building. A rattling buzz answered and released the lock and he yanked the inner door open.

  The indicator showed the elevator on the third floor.

  He took the first flight of stairs in a blind run. His legs thrust him up past two and three in a single continuous lunge.

  On four he swerved into the corridor, his shoes slapping and skidding on the tiled floor. He faced the door of 4A, tested the knob, stepped back. He drew his revolver and took dead aim at the lock and fired one shot. Wood and metal shattered. Holding the gun with both hands at eye level, he kicked the door in.

  The baron was swaying in the livingroom at the end of the corridor. In the colors of real life his bathrobe was maroon and ochre. His feet were splayed apart and he was trying to steady himself by gripping the back of a chair.

  His back arched and cords stood out at the base of his suntanned neck. His breath was a whinny, a struggle for air. Red foam was bubbling from his lips.

  The chamber of the empty syringe was jutting out of his throat, like a grotesquely oversized tiepin that had been shoved in twelve inches too high. The needle had dug in to the hilt.

  Above the pale and trembling lips the large staring eyes turned toward Cardozo. The baron’s pupils had become pinpoints of disbelieving, dwindling light. The moment became a silence. The baron’s eyes closed and his hands lost the chair. He fell in a sideways heap.

  Cordelia had retreated to a corner, hands covering her face as if to choke back the whimpers coming from her.

  Cardozo crossed to her. Her fingers closed around his.

  “Did I kill him?” she whispered.

  Cardozo glanced over at the corpse. “Somebody had to.”

  “All I wanted to do was get his confession on film.”

  “Was it Von Kleist who gave you the insulin and syringe to kill your mother?”

  Cordelia nodded.

  “He gave you dope, had sex with you from the time you were twelve?”

  “Everything.”

  “And Monserat?” Cardozo asked.

  “Lew never touched me.” Cordelia staggered to the couch and dropped onto a cushion. “Lew was just one of Billi’s fronts. Billi had a hundred of them.” She was looking at her panties hopelessly; they were a riddle she couldn’t solve. The dope was in her blood, fogging her. “People thought Billi was … was attractive and … got involved and then … couldn’t get …”

  Cardozo was thinking that it had taken one scared immature drug-addicted girl to do what no policeman, no court could ever have done, to make Billi von Kleist pay in kind for the pain and murder he had strewn, to ensure that he would never twist or take another life.

  “I loved him.” She was staring at the corpse, leaning down to touch the lapel of the robe. “I still …”

  She was beginning to nod out. Silent tears were tracking down her cheeks. The tear from the right eye was already at her chin and the tear from the left was only halfway to her mouth.

  Cardozo wondered why that was, why one tear was faster than the other, what force in the universe decided things like that.

  Her head dropped. Cardozo caught her before she could hit the floor. He eased her back onto the sofa. “You’re going to be okay,” he soothed.

  She had passed out. He had no idea how the hell he was going to get her out of this. A flying carpet was all he needed.

  55

  THE PRINT MAN FINISHED dusting and the photographer finished taking pictures and the men from the M.E.’s office zipped Baron Billi into a body bag. They filed out of the loft, leaving the chalk outline of a dead man in the floor.

  Cardozo phoned Ted Morgenstern. “Get down here to Lew Monserat’s loft. Cordelia Koenig has killed Baron Billi von Kleist. You’re going to defend her.”

  Twenty minutes later Ted Morgenstern identified himself to the sergeant guarding the crime scene. He stalked into the apartment with the confidence of a predator.

  “Where’s my client?”

  “In the hospital. Have a seat.”

  There was an edge of command to Cardozo’s voice. Ted Morgenstern’s face betrayed a rush of irritation, but he sat.

  Cardozo pushed buttons on the VCR, and the TV set bathed the room in ghostly voices and images.

  Morgenstern did his best to stay frosted, and when the tape had run he put on an air of smug, lighthearted adventure. “Who made that tape? The police? It’s inadmissible.”

  “Baron Billi von Kleist made it. Kleist’s last tape.”

  Morgenstern’s face was calculating. “Can you prove that?”

  “I can prove the baron had a habit of giving sex-and-torture parties and taking candid tapes of them. There are seven years of tapes right here in the closet.”

  Something changed. Morgenstern’s eyes were on Cardozo and there was the first flicker of fear in them. A thread of excitement moved in Cardozo’s body and he
was almost ashamed of it.

  “Some of the tapes are going to interest you, Counselor. You star in them.”

  Ted Morgenstern had started to rise from the sofa but now he sank back again.

  Cardozo ran a two-minute selection from the tapes—enough to give Morgenstern a taste.

  Morgenstern was ashen and shaking. “Those tapes aren’t relevant,” he said.

  Lucinda MacGill came out of the bedroom, carrying a videocassette in each hand. “The tapes are relevant, Counselor,” she said. “Anything found on the scene of the crime is relevant and admissive. People of New York versus Cudahy, 1953. Upheld by the Supreme Court, 1958.”

  Ted Morgenstern looked as though he’d been slammed in the stomach with a baseball bat. “Are those the only copies?”

  “There are dupes,” Cardozo said.

  Morgenstern was sitting there, dead. “The police have them?”

  “The cops don’t know the dupes exist. They don’t even know the originals exist.”

  “Who has the dupes?”

  “I do. In a bank vault.”

  Ted Morgenstern closed his eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking about Cordelia’s defense,” Cardozo said. “You know how I think you should handle it? Offscreen. Like in the Downs case and the Devens case. You flashed Jodie Downs’s medical file at his parents. They didn’t want it made public and they accepted a plea bargain and Loring got off. Seven years ago, Cordelia Koenig caught the clap from Baron Billi. You had Devens catch himself a dose. You flashed the medical records at the Vanderwalks, they saw a connection between her gonorrhea and his. They weren’t going to let that get into the newspapers, so they let Devens walk. Are you following me, Counselor?”

  “Not exactly.” The resolve had drained out of Morgenstern’s voice.

  “People take your suggestions. With your clout you can get the D.A. to accept a plea of justifiable manslaughter.”

  “Excuse me,” Lucinda MacGill interrupted. “Why not head this off at the coroner’s office and go for accidental death?”

  Her balls took Cardozo’s breath away.

  “With accidental,” she said, “there’ll be a hearing, no charges, no trial, and the existence of the tapes won’t even need to be known.”

  Ted Morgenstern sat there cracking his knuckles. “It’ll mean calling in a few favors. But accidental is definitely the way to go.”

  “Okay,” Cardozo said. “In exchange for accidental in the Von Kleist killing, you get Baron Billi’s tapes.” He felt a strange elation. He had never thought he would be holding the power to influence events, to make the world jump like a trained dog as the Ted Morgensterns and the Vanderwalks and the D.A.’s of New York routinely did. But for the first time in his life he held that power, and it was more potent than a loaded magnum and more addictive than a jeroboam of crack.

  Morgenstern rose and walked to the window and stared at police and reporters swarming down in the street. “And what do you want for the duplicate tapes?”

  “That’s simple. Baron Billi’s groupies get visas to Paraguay and they have till Saturday to use them.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Here’s another laugh. Sir Dunk turns his wife’s estate over to the AIDS foundation.”

  Cardozo phoned Jodie Downs’s parents from the precinct. Lockwood Downs answered.

  “Jodie’s death wasn’t simple murder,” Cardozo said. “Claude Loring was working for other people. We just caught them.”

  It took Lockwood Downs a moment to speak. “I wasn’t expecting this. Meridee and I had just about given up hope that anyone would ever pay.”

  “These people are going to pay.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I just don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Thank you for keeping on it, Lieutenant. We both thank you.”

  Sixty seconds later Cardozo told Babe everything, not attempting to sweeten any of it. The telephone receiver pressed the silence of her shock into his ear.

  “Where have they taken Cordelia?”

  Cardozo gave Babe the address of the hospital. “Look,” he said, “I know it sounds like the end of the world, but worlds are ending every day and it’s not always such a bad thing. Other kids have gotten off drugs. Cordelia can do it. Just remember I’ll be there beside you.”

  “Will you, Vince? Be beside me?”

  Vince Cardozo, he asked himself, what the hell are you doing?

  He realized he was in love with her, dreaming of some kind of happily ever after that just didn’t exist. He and Babe Devens were from two different planets on opposite sides of the sun.

  He thought about that and decided, just for today, to forget happily ever after.

  “Yeah. I’ll be right beside you,” he said. “Meet you at the hospital. Fifteen minutes.”

  He hesitated, then decided he had time to make one last call. It was Terri’s lunch break. She’d be home. He dialed and his daughter answered on the fourth ring.

  “Remember that day we got called away from the beach? I’m going to make it up to you.”

  “Daddy, you don’t have to make anything up to me.”

  “I want to. How about this weekend? Would you like to go swimming?”

  “It’s too cold.”

  “It’s not too cold in the Virgin Islands. I have three days off. What do you say? No way the precinct can beep me in Saint Thomas.”

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you too, and that’s not an answer. Do we have a date?”

  She was silent only a moment. “You twisted my arm. It’s a date.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Vince Cardozo Mysteries

  for Jackie Farber,

  Stowe Hausner, and Steven Hollar—

  who made the difference

  ONE

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. LEIGH Baker kept hearing voices. The goose-down pillows in their Porthault cases that had begun the evening under her head were now lying on top of her, like a barricade, and she had to push them aside to see.

  The Levolors were angled against whatever light the sky had to offer, but her time sense told her it was night. She stared a long moment at the light that beaded the perfume bottles and silver-backed brushes on the dressing table. Her eye followed the light to its source, the TV screen.

  She recognized the man who did the weather wrap-up on Fox Five. The remote was lying on the little painted papier-mâché table beside her bed, on top of Vogue and Vanity Fair. She reached for it. Her fingertips touched the highball glass. An unthinking reflex brought the glass to her lips.

  Slivered ghosts of ice cubes slid beneath her nose. The liquid had a brownish color and it smelled like Johnnie Walker and diet Pepsi. It flowed over her tongue without any flavor. To avoid spilling she drained the glass before setting it back down.

  She patted her pillows into a fresh headrest behind her. She picked up the remote and pressed the Off button. The image on the TV screen collapsed into a white lozenge that sputtered and decayed into darkness.

  She laid her head back and closed her eyes.

  Even with the TV off she still heard those voices and she could not drop off to the state where she wanted to be, that oceanic feeling of floating nothingness.

  At the sound of a latch clicking she opened her eyes again.

  Light floated in from the living room, and a teenage girl stood silhouetted and slim in the doorframe. Taking fast, shallow breaths, Leigh’s daughter came into the bedroom with gingerly steps, as though she were walking on someone else’s legs.

  Leigh pushed herself to sitting. “What is it? Nita, what’s wrong?”

  The girl’s face was a blank surface. She worked her throat, worked her jaw, trying to force words out. Nothing in her expression changed, but suddenly her eyes looked as if they were full of icicles and a terrible little cry came out of her. “What does it mean?”

  “What does wh
at mean, darling?”

  Like a comet flicking its tail, Nita turned and tore out of the bedroom and across the darkened living room, through the French window and out onto the terrace.

  Leigh touched one foot down onto the floor and then the other. She tested her standing muscles. They seemed to work, though she listed a little to the left and she knew right away that she needed another drink.

  Now she tested her walking muscles. They were slow to answer her head’s commands, but they took her to the bedroom door.

  And then Nita’s voice: “No!”

  It seemed to Leigh that something flew across the terrace, low and fluttering. She blinked and it took her mind a moment to process the image. A white dress. White arms. White legs. Nita.

  For a moment light and shadow alternated like flashes of a strobe. And then silence pooled. Too much silence. It was as though a magician had waved a wand and made the white rabbit disappear. There was no white dress. No white arms. No white legs. No Nita.

  “Nita,” Leigh whispered. “Where are you?”

  A knot twisted inside her stomach. She closed her eyes, fighting back nausea. I will not vomit, she told herself.

  When the spasm passed, she opened her eyes. Through the open French window moonlight spilled down onto the terrace in a wash of white stillness. Relief took her. There was no one there.

  I was imagining it.

  She moved into the living room.

  I need a drink.

  She turned on a light. The room was done in soft grays and deep greens—peaceful colors. Three dozen red roses with a note from her director had been placed in a tall crystal vase near the bar. She had the impression that the scene was being projected onto a 360-degree wraparound screen.

  At that moment a wave of Nita’s perfume floated past her.

  She didn’t move. She stayed exactly where she was, sniffing, listening.

  “Nita?”

  The silence and that faint trail of sweetness drew her toward the open French window. Her body had to fight a path through a wall of medication. Everything seemed twisted around, wrong. She stepped onto the terrace.