VC01 - Privileged Lives (18 page)

Greg Monteleone picked up the penal code and shoved his mouth into a lopsided grin. “What did their honors decide about that guy getting a blow job in the van at the Holland Tunnel?” He flipped through pages. “What’s sodomy, seven seven oh nine?”

“Consensual heterosexual sodomy’s legal,” Sam Richards said.

“Not in public.”

“A van on a public thoroughfare is private property with a reasonable expectation of safety from search and seizure—State of New York versus Offernaty, 1985.”

“Not if the door’s open,” Cardozo said. “State of New York versus Moony, 1986.”

“Who gets a blow job with the door open?” Richards asked.

“This guy does.” Monteleone’s large Mediterranean nose came out of the booklet. “Marvin van Peters, do you believe that for a name?”

“It’s a gag for
Screw
magazine,” Sam Richards said.

“Give me that book,” Cardozo growled.

Monteleone was hooting and jumping. “Innocent, he’s innocent! Hey, fellas, hit the tunnel!”

Cardozo grabbed the penal-code update. “If you gentleman would be kind enough to give me a little undivided attention?”

He patted the slide projector.

“Know how to work this thing? Today, instead of watching
Policewoman
reruns, you, Greg, and you, Sam, are going to look at these.” He held up a box of slides. “Each time you come to a face you recognize, you enter the name here in the logbook, okay?”

He showed them the logbook from the surveillance truck at Beaux Arts Tower. Turning to yesterday’s loose-leaf pages, he explained the logging system.

“And when you’ve finished, you’re going to take the license numbers and names from the log and run them through the National Crime Bureau.”

He tossed the penal-code update back to Monteleone.

“Enjoy.”

Cardozo took the lab report with him and hurried down the marble staircase. Nodding to the duty officer at the portals, he left the station house, turning into the alley at the side of the precinct. He walked around his Honda and crawled in behind the wheel. He slammed the door and took a moment to read the lab report.

Lou Stein had found no match between Loring’s, Stinson’s, Gomez’s, or Revuelta’s prints and any found at the murder scene.

The Lewis Monserat Gallery was deserted except for the well-groomed receptionist, who looked up at Cardozo from the Gabriel García Márquez paperback she was reading at her desk. Today he noticed that she was in her late forties.

“Mr. Monserat will not be in this morning,” she said.

“All I need is the list of buyers of the Kushima mask.”

“Only Mr. Monserat can give you that.”

“Miss,” Cardozo said, “this is a court order.” He handed her the document.

“I’m not a lawyer, I don’t understand this.”

“You read English.”

“There’s nothing I can do without Mr. Monserat’s permission.”

“You can hand that list over right now, or you can phone your lawyer and tell him to meet you in twenty minutes at the Tombs.”

She flinched and went to a mahogany filing cabinet. After a moment’s lip-biting she pulled out a sheet and handed it to him.

The list of buyers of Nuku Kushima’s artwork
Bondage IX
showed three institutions: the Franklyn Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Walter Kizer Museum in Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in New York; and one private collector, Doria Forbes-Steinman, with a Manhattan address.

“Miss Kushima told me there were five masks,” Cardozo said.

“There were four made and four sold.”

“I’d like to look in that file.”

“You have no right to—”

Cardozo moved around her and searched the
K’s.
He flipped through invoices for woodcuts, oils, conceptual pieces, and lithos. He slowed down at Leather Sculptures.

The gallery had placed Kushima
Body Halters
with three institutions;
Blade-Tipped Black Leather Boots
with two institutions and two private collections;
Executioner’s Gloves
with one institution and four private collections.
Razor-Studded Vest
had been a slow-moving item, one private collection;
AC-Powered Nipple Clamps With Leather Thong
had gone to two museums and two private collections.

Bondage IX (mask)
had four purchasers. The sheet was freshly typed.

“How many masks did you make?” Cardozo asked.

Nuku Kushima’s slender little body blocked the doorway of her loft. “Four.”

“Yesterday you told me five.”

“I could not have said five because I made only four. Four is my artistic limit.”

He stared at her inscrutable lying little face and wished to hell he’d carried a hidden tape recorder when he’d questioned her. Not that the tape would have had any legal value, but at least he’d have had something to confront her with. As matters stood, he had nothing, and she knew it.

“Would you be willing to repeat that in court, under oath?”

There was nothing in her eyes: no truth, no falsehood. Only a Zen emptiness. “Naturally.”

Cardozo made a detour to the Mr. Coffees and poured himself a cup that his stomach didn’t need but that his nerves craved.

Ellie Siegel sat at a battered desk trying to negotiate over the phone with a computer in Washington, D.C. She raised her eyes to Cardozo’s and they were curiously and wonderfully green.

“Hey, Vince,” the desk lieutenant called. “Two slashings last night. One in the one eight, the other in the two one.”

Cardozo treated himself to two envelopes of Sweet ’n Low. “What’s it got to do with us?”

“Looks like a serial killer. O’Malley thinks the perp might have chopped a hooker in the two two.”

“Not in the last six months—but tell O’Malley he’s welcome to look through our files.”

Cardozo shut the door of his cubicle and began dialing the phone numbers on the Monserat sales sheet.

The curator of the Franklyn Collection in D.C. told him the Kushima mask was on exhibit in the basement, in the New Trends show. An assistant curator at the Walter Kizer Museum in L.A. said the mask was presently on view with recent acquisitions.

The New York Museum of Contemporary Arts had a recorded message announcing the screening times of D. W. Griffith’s
Orphans of the Storm,
part of a retrospective honoring Lillian Gish.

Cardozo took his coffee into the squad room and sat on the edge of Siegel’s desk. The computer at the other end of the phone line had put her on hold, and she gave him a weary smile.

“Ellie, you used to teach art.”

“That’s why I’m a cop.”

“How can a bondage mask be art?”

“Because critics and dealers say it is.”

“Then why isn’t a toothbrush art?”

Her eyes sparkled with mischief and intelligence. “Vince, you’re a beautiful Philistine. A toothbrush is art, has been since the
MOMA
exhibit in seventy-six.”

“An artist can do anything and call it art?”

“Some artists would call the murder in Beaux Arts Tower conceptual art.”

Cardozo was thoughtful. “You think an artist did it?”

“He or she would have to be a very dedicated artist, a rebel against the commercial establishment.”

“Why do you say that?”

“No signature. No commission for the dealer. Dealers get up to sixty percent.”

Cardozo took a long swallow of coffee. “Doria Forbes-Steinman seems to have gone into art collecting in a big way.”

“Sure, she’s what art critics call a major force.”

“I haven’t kept up with her since the Scottie Devens trial. Have you?”

Detective Siegel flicked hair out of her face, casually. “A little. I’m the same as any other supermarket shopper stuck in the checkout line. I grab a
National Enquirer
from the rack.”

“I don’t read the
Enquirer,
so fill me in.”

Siegel lowered her long, dark, curling lashes. “She and her husband aired their differences in civil court, so Doria’s past is now part of the public record. Turns out she’s a charming colleen, Vince, a breath of Killarney from deepest Transylvania. Her full name is Doria Bravnik Forbes-Steinman. Bravnik is Yugoslavian, like her. Forbes is the name of the British foreign service schnook she claims was her first husband.”

“He wasn’t her husband?”

“A gal like Doria stirs up vicious rumors. The issue’s moot, because once her British passport got her to New York, she
divorced
Forbes and married Steinman.”

“What does the
Enquirer
say about Steinman?”

Ellie looked embarrassed, as though it was an admission of depravity that she knew so much rumor. There was something about Siegel that seemed unsoiled: her face was sophisticated, cynical even, without being malicious. It was that quality that had drawn Cardozo to her.

“If some of those Wall Streeters are overnight millionaires,” she said, “Steinman’s a five-minute billionaire. But it isn’t enough nowadays just to have money. You have to do something to get written up in
Manhattan, inc.,
so Doria and Steinman collected modern art. They played artists like stocks and they bet lucky. By the time of the Devens trial they’d built up what the press calls an important collection. Doria left Steinman six years ago and took half the collection. She hasn’t divorced Steinman, because divorce would disinherit her two Forbes children, who Steinman agreed to support when love was in bloom. The kids are stowed in a Scottish boarding school at his expense. Steinman sued Doria for her half of the collection and the lawsuit had the art world lined up in warring camps.”

Across the squad room a telephone jangled. Detective DeVegh, receiver balanced between shoulder and ear, called out, “We got a squeal. Who’s up this morning? You catching, Ellie?”

“Ellie’s on a case,” Cardozo said, curtly, and DeVegh gave him an excuse-me-for-breathing look, and Cardozo asked Siegel, “Tell me about the Steinman lawsuit.”

“Vince, you really have time for this b.s.?”

“I want to know everything about these people, including what underarm deodorant they use.”

“Lewis Monserat, the art dealer, testified for Steinman. Doria threw the slop bucket at Monserat, accused him of being a little bit more than an art dealer.”

“How much more?”

“Doria said Monserat was a certified necrophile, a pederast, a porno film maker, a child prostitution ringleader, a Nazi collaborator who turned his own mother in to the Gestapo. Monserat’s lawyer pointed out that Spain was one of the few European countries not occupied by Nazis, and she waffled and said maybe Monserat just murdered his mother.”

“She said this in court?”

“Affirmative. Doria had her day, irrelevant and inadmissible though her testimony may have been. The one legally damaging shot she did get off was to claim Monserat used her to bid up his own clients’ paintings at auctions.”

“Did Monserat sue?”

“He threw the slop bucket back. Said Doria’s maiden name was Schinsky, she was a Belgrade hooker, she was already married to a certain Mr. Bravnik when she married Forbes bigamously and got her exit visa out of the Eastern bloc. If Monserat was telling the truth, the marriage to Steinman was bigamous too.”

“Did Doria sue?”

“No one sued, they all gave interviews and went on talk shows. Doria got more exposure than Monserat, because by then her name had surfaced as the other woman in the Scottie Devens trial. The smart money was betting Doria was the reason Scottie tried to put his wife under.”

“I was betting that too,” Cardozo said quietly.

Siegel flicked a dark-eyed glance at him. “So? It looked like a pretty sure thing to me too. You’re looking unhappy.”

“Just thinking. Is Doria still living with Scottie?”

“Last I read in the supermarket, they were an ongoing item.” Siegel’s smile was a miracle—world-aware and world-mocking but self-aware and self-mocking too. “It’s the real world out there, Vince—it’s a different mind-set: glamour and art and high fashion and beautiful people doing their beautiful thing—not us poor schleppers in the twenty-second precinct.”

“Who got the Steinmans’s art collection?”

“Doria got to keep her half. Including that mask.”

A butler led Cardozo into the livingroom of the Fifth Avenue duplex. The room was large and plush and sunny, with yellow chrysanthemums on the Steinway. The breeze of an air conditioner stirred the folds of dove gray window curtains. Track lights lit three oil paintings of the same cathedral, each panel done in dots of a different primary color, like a monster comic strip.

A woman came into the room.

Cardozo looked at Mrs. Forbes-Steinman, and he saw a statue, its broadly beautiful face smiling at him. She extended her hand: her slightly plump arm was covered with bracelets of light blue sapphires.

“I have great respect for the police.” Her voice was low and cultivated and bore a residual middle-European trace.

He would have loved to have answered,
And I have great respect for women who give good head.

“How may I help you?” she said.

“You own a Nuku Kushima mask?”

“Bondage Nine.”

“Do you have it here?”

“Naturally. Would you like to see it?”

“Very much.”

He followed her into a hallway. Through an arch he could see the butler and a girl in a maid’s uniform silently setting a dinner table for twelve.

The mask had been fitted over a wig stand and was sitting on a teakwood pedestal. He noticed a faint pattern of minuscule lacerations around the eyes.

“How did it get scratched?” he asked.

She sighed. “Would you believe the Nicaraguan girl used lemon Pledge and a Brillo pad on it?”

She was standing close beside him and he turned his head and studied her. Everything about her struck him as exact, smooth, artificial, extremely tense. Even her skin, which was a pampered pale olive shade.

“Could I ask you a question?” he said.

She regarded him pleasantly.

“You’re an educated woman,” he said. “You have taste. Why do you own this? It’s ugly, and what it stands for is ugly.”