VC01 - Privileged Lives (22 page)

Ellie Siegel, looking exasperated, scratched a match loudly and lit a cigarette.

“If you’re buying a standard clerical shirt,” Monteleone said, “you do it by mail or you go to a Roman Catholic shop and get it off the rack. If you want to go special, outfits like Brooks Brothers make white clerical shirts to order for rich Anglicans and Romans.”

“Didn’t know there were rich priests,” Siegel said.

“They’re called bishops,” Monteleone said.

“Was D.B.’s shirt custom-made?” Cardozo asked.

Monteleone nodded. “The guy at Brooks Brothers said D.B.’s was a very nice custom job. The cloth quality was extremely high, and the tapered waist isn’t standard.”

“The minister had his waist tapered?” Richards said.

“Maybe he was proud of his waist,” Malloy said.

Siegel seemed puzzled. “Throwing a tailor-made shirt into the washer with the underwear—wouldn’t you think he’d send a shirt that expensive to a dry cleaner?”

“I don’t know when you last looked at a priest or minister,” Monteleone said, “but the shirt very rarely shows. The black vest hides it.”

“Did Brooks Brothers happen to have made this shirt?” Cardozo asked.

Monteleone shook his head. “No. But a shirt like this you can have custom-made at any shop that tailors to order.”

Cardozo sighed. “Okay, guys. Hit the Yellow Pages.” He adjourned the meeting and went to his cubicle.

He reviewed the new slides from the observation van. He had asked the photo team to tag any new appearances of the girl in 43—and he noticed that there were no tags.

He switched on the projector and began going through the slides. Yesterday had been sunny. Beaux Arts Tower gave off a sense of dignity and ease, a cool monolith, its large windows tinted against the sun.

He slowed at a photo of a dark-haired man in a seersucker suit, carrying a briefcase, looking back over his shoulder directly at the camera.

Another man who had made the truck.

Cardozo stared at the photo a moment. No, it wasn’t another man. It was the same man in a different suit.

He went back through the log and found the earlier notation: #79, Monday, May 26.

He dropped 79 into the carousel and clicked the picture on.

The same man was carrying the same briefcase, looking very spiffy and businesslike. His patent leather shoes looked like dancing pumps, thin-soled enough for him to have felt every pebble on the pavement.

Seventy-nine’s eyes met Cardozo’s.

Today Cardozo tried to look at the slide in a new way. Possibly there was something about the man in the picture that was cocksure and careless. Maybe he was looking around not because he sensed danger but because he sensed attention. Maybe he wanted to see who else thought he was looking good.

Cardozo clicked back to the other photo of the same man. This time his attention went to another detail: Hector doing duty at the door, grinning.

Cardozo clicked forward.

Hector and the caller vanished into the lobby.

Next: Princess Lily Lobkowitz entering, looking angry at finding no doorman.

Next slide: 79 leaving the building.

Three slides later, Hector was back at his post, and Baron Billi von Kleist was entering the building. Hector was smiling at him.

Next: a patient for one of the psychotherapists entering the building. Hector wasn’t smiling.

Cardozo clicked forward to a photo showing a shadowy figure getting out of a cab. A woman. She was wearing dark glasses, a kerchief, tight jeans.

Next slide. Hector was signaling the woman. Next: Hector and the woman retreating into the depths of the lobby, leaving the doorway unattended.

Cardozo stopped. The taxi and the woman’s dark glasses triggered an association to a killing he’d solved two years back. The Mildred Hopkinson case.

Hopkinson had been legally blind and she’d lived with her working sister in Kew Gardens. Three years ago her father had been pushed from a twelfth-story window in Manhattan and someone had left one of Mildred’s gloves on the floor. It seemed a crude and cruel sort of frame; Mildred’s vision kept her housebound, and with her father’s death her small annuity passed to an uncle.

Cardozo had ordered a stakeout on Mildred’s home and discovered she had a secret boyfriend, a cabby who picked her up every day at the side door, took her for a drive to a motel, and brought her back to that same door at three sharp.

Mildred finally admitted her boyfriend had driven her to her dad’s, the old man had picked a fight, and—not seeing the open window—she’d pushed him. Two years for involuntary manslaughter.

Cardozo clicked back through the sequence of slides. He knew exactly what he was looking for. Bingo. He stopped at the shot where the woman was getting out of the cab.

No mistaking it. She hadn’t paid for the ride. Another glad-to-please cabby.

Thanks for the tip, Mildred.

Cardozo went back to the first day’s photos, looking for any female wearing glamour shades and babushka.

June 2—four
P.M.
—a woman coming out of the Tower wearing dark glasses, no kerchief.

Debbi Hightower? He put the picture aside, pulled a Hightower from the stack, dropped it into the projector.

He clicked between the Hightower and the maybe Hightower and the girl in the cab. He reached out with his imagination, raking things in.

They’re dealing dope. Seventy-nine is delivering, Hector is holding, Debbi is buying—definitely using …

He clicked back to the cabby, a gray-capped man out of focus in the foreground. He played with the lens. He couldn’t get the image to sharpen.

It was frustrating. The man was right there in the photograph and Cardozo couldn’t see him. It was like a Miranda rule standing between him and a smoking gun.

He phoned Tommy Daniels.

Tommy arrived wearing canary yellow trousers and his conservative helio pink shirt. He was remarkably energetic and Cardozo envied him that.

“Do a little magic with that slide, will you, Tommy?”

Tommy Daniels popped a pink gumdrop into his mouth. It was disgusting some of the things members of the force did to avoid smoking. He played with the lens, focusing and unfocusing the image in the shaft of light.

“Stop, hold it right there, Tommy.”

The face was still blurred, but the logo on the cab door was clear enough to make out:
DING-DONG TRANSPORT
.

Cardozo handed Tommy the slide of the woman in dark glasses. “How clear can you make that?”

Tommy tinkered with the projector. He shook his head. “I’ll have to do this one in the lab.”

“I’d be obliged, Tommy.”

Cardozo swiveled in his chair and yelled for Malloy. “Get Bronski’s cab sheet for yesterday.” Cardozo read the hour from the log. “I want the drop-off at 12:20
P.M.
”

18

“W
E’VE BEEN SERVED WITH
a show cause order of the most unbelievable malice,” Lucia Vanderwalk said. “It comes from some woman lawyer purporting to act on your behalf.”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Babe said, “but I obviously needed legal representation.”

“Why? You have your father and me acting on your behalf.”

For a moment Babe said nothing from where she sat in her wheelchair. “I’m grateful for the help you and Papa gave me while I was sick. But you’ve stopped being a help. I want to get out of here and you want me to stay and that’s why I hired Miss MacGill.”

“Then you admit you went behind our backs.”

“I admit I hired a lawyer. There’s no secret about it.”

“This Judge Levin who signed the order is an outrageous incompetent. He ruled against Cybilla deClairville in her suit against her dressmaker.”

“Judges make strange rulings. Who knows how the judge may rule when you and I go to court. Or how a jury may decide, if it comes to that.”

A very bad silence rolled in.

Lucia said, “You seem to relish the idea of making this squabble public.”

“I don’t relish it, but I’m willing to take the chance. What I’m not willing to do is sit here and let another minute of my life tick away.”

“Dr. Corey happens to be an excellent physician and it’s his opinion you’re not well enough to be let out of the hospital.”

“And it’s my opinion I am.”

“You’re not a specialist.”

“I am when it comes to myself.”

Lucia turned to her husband. “Hadley, will you reason with your daughter?”

There was a special smile at the corner of Hadley’s lips. Babe understood it exactly. Her father’s eyes met hers, creating a conspiracy of warmth.

“Lucia, she’s an adult. As I understand the legalities of this, she ceased to be our ward once she regained consciousness.”

“Is that true, Bill?” Lucia said.

Lucia and Hadley had brought Bill Frothingham, the family lawyer, with them, and Lucia gave him her lovely smile. She had a great many smiles at her disposal, not all of them lovely, but this was obviously the one she thought appropriate.

“Not precisely.” A gray-templed man with penetrating eyes and a sharp-featured arresting face, Bill Frothingham had a gift for getting on well with people, or at least keeping them at bay with the sort of smile he was smiling now. “The test is competence, not consciousness. Once Babe can demonstrate competence she becomes her own ward.”

“Obviously she’s competent,” Hadley said. “She went and hired a lawyer.”

“You can hardly call it competent,” Lucia shot back. “She’s defying the best neurologist in the country.”

“Look here.” Bill Frothingham shoved his mouth into a peace-making grin. “We all want the same thing, which is for Babe to be well. If she’ll agree to spend a reasonable amount of time under medical care—”

“I’m taking my nurse with me,” Babe said. “I’ll be under medical care in my own home.”

“Don’t expect a doctor like Eric Corey to make house calls,” Lucia warned.

“He likes me,” Babe said, “I’ll invite him to dinner.”

“Don’t you get sarcastic with me, young lady.”

“I’m telling you exactly what I plan to do.”

Lucia’s green eyes challenged her daughter. “And if you should need an X ray or an
EKG
or an
EEG
or a
CAT
scan?”

“I can always be readmitted.”

“Lucia,” Hadley said pleasantly, “I think we should admit when we’re beaten.”

19

A
T THE WEDNESDAY MORNING
task force meeting Carl Malloy produced Bronski’s cab sheets for June 2. The sheets said he’d been at West End Avenue and 93rd Street at 12:20 when the photo van placed his look-alike at Beaux Arts Tower.

“I don’t believe the sheets,” Cardozo said.

He passed around Tommy Daniels’s blowup of the girl in the babushka.

“A two-week vacation in Oahu if anyone can identify her.”

“Debbi Hightower,” Sam Richards said.

“You’re crazy,” Malloy said.

“How can you tell from this?” Siegel said. “It’s a blob.”

“Debbi’s a blob,” Greg Monteleone said.

“But she’s not this blob,” Malloy said.

“You’re a real help,” Cardozo said. “All of you. Get out of here.”

He went back to the slide projector and began the laborious task of going through all the photos since day one, isolating all nonresident females wearing babushkas and designer shades.

By late afternoon he’d turned up eight possibilities and was wondering about a ninth when there was a knock on the doorframe.

He turned.

A boy stood at the door, very lost, very out of place. His look was open and vulnerable. His hair was reddish and hung in bangs on his forehead. He wore faded jeans, Adidas jogging shoes, and a T-shirt with a few well-laundered holes. It was the yuppie version of the street look.

Cardozo could see his caller was not a junkie, not a pimp, not a pross, not a booster.

“Lieutenant Cardozo?”

“Help you?”

“My name’s Dave Bellamy.” The boy’s voice was taut, unsteady. “The man downstairs told me to talk to you.”

The boy’s feet kept checking an impulse to step backward. Cardozo could see he was scared shitless.

“It’s about a guy I know. Jodie Downs.”

In Cardozo’s mind the initials J.D. set off a little inner jingle. He began listening with his skin. He lifted a pile of rubble from a chair. “Have a seat.”

The boy sat obediently.

“If you’d like some coffee—” Cardozo offered.

“No, thanks, I’ve had a lot more than my quota today.” The way the boy said it was embarrassed, apologetic, like a drunk saying
I’ve had too many, I’ve had to have too many to psych myself up for this.

“I saw the poster at church last night.” The boy’s glance fought desperately for some sort of courage, skittering off surfaces, ricocheting away from Cardozo’s. “The poster said anyone recognizing this man. I recognized him. Jodie Downs. He was watering my plants for me while I was away.”

Cardozo got out a pad, began taking notes. “Can I have your name and address, Dave?”

Dave Bellamy spelled his name and gave an address at One Chelsea Place—“That’s the Episcopal seminary on Ninth Avenue. I’m a second-year student. I got back late from Chicago last night, I’ve been home visiting my folks for a week, and I went to a late mass at the Roman Catholic church on Twenty-fourth. They have a beautiful late mass. I saw the poster.”

His hand going to his hair, pulling at a strand of reddish blond.

“The plants in my room were dead. Some clothes of Jodie’s were on the bed, and some of mine were missing.”

“When did you last see Jodie?”

Dave Bellamy had to think a moment. “The night I flew home. Friday May sixteenth. He came to my room to get the keys.”

“You got a minute, Dave? I’d like you to come with me downtown and look at something.”

The attendant walked to number 1473. He turned a key and applied just enough pull to bring the slab sliding out. Ball bearings screeched.

Bellamy glanced at Cardozo.

Cardozo gave him a nod.

Bellamy walked across to the slab. His step was cautious, as though the floor might burst beneath his feet.

The attendant lifted the sheet. The light drew the drained, waxen face of the dead man out of the shadows.