VC01 - Privileged Lives (23 page)

Bellamy stared, not moving, not breathing.

The corpse looked curiously unborn, eyes closed in placental dreaming.

Cardozo waited in a tingling state of awareness. There was no sound but the plashing of water from an unseen hose. The smell was a blend of formaldehyde and meat that had sat too long in a marinade of sickening sweetness.

Dave Bellamy just stood there with a stunned look. Then he lifted his hands slowly and nodded his head.

As they drove uptown Bellamy sat strapped into his safety belt, but his mind was somewhere else, secret and apart.

A late afternoon shade had fallen over the city. The sky was a darkening bruise behind the turrets of lower Manhattan, just beginning to glitter with electric lights.

“It’s your first corpse, isn’t it,” Cardozo said. He felt sorry for the boy. “It’s like virginity. You never get it back.”

They parked on West Twentieth.

Cardozo followed Dave Bellamy into the seminary. Through a window he could see the interior of an office, the shape of a priest bent over a desk. There was an intermittent amateurish clatter of typewriter, the ringing of a phone, and then a voice of which he could make out nothing except the gentleness. The priest waved Dave Bellamy through and smiled as though he recognized Cardozo.

They passed into a peaceful cloister with stepping-stone paths and evening-dappled oaks. There were iron fences, dark, ivy-twined brick buildings and a chapel with a high Gothic tower. Green-washed light filtered through trees that had grown undisturbed for a hundred years.

They went up a stairwell with hollowed stone steps. The well smelled of centuries of cleanliness. They stopped at the fourth landing.

Dave Bellamy nervously got out his keys and opened the door. He turned on the light. It revealed neat, scholarly clutter: a desk, stacks of black-bound books that reminded Cardozo of the Penal Code, drafting lamps, a crucifix—Jesus in ivory, not suffering—over the bed. Khaki trousers and a sports shirt had been tossed down on the bedspread as though someone had just made a dash for the shower. There was a suitcase beside the bed.

“Those are his?” Cardozo asked.

Dave Bellamy nodded.

“And the suitcase?”

“That’s his too.”

“Do you lease this room?”

“I’m leasing it for the summer session,” Dave Bellamy said.

“May I open the suitcase?”

“Sure.”

Cardozo opened the bag. The top layer was underpants and tube socks and T-shirts with J.D.’s initials. The next layer was leather. A vest, a belt, a cap, gloves, all bearing the India-ink initials J.D. Then black rubber and steel. The kind of things sex shops sold and called novelties. A plastic Baggie with grass, Bambu rolling papers, some tabs of blotter paper, a contact lens holder with coke inside, a two-ounce brown bottle three-quarters full of liquid popper.

“How’d you meet this guy?” Cardozo asked.

“We’re from the same hometown. Mattoon, Illinois. He was studying fashion at Pratt, I was … here.”

“Did you know he was into this stuff—drugs, leather?”

“I knew he was gay,” Bellamy said. “I didn’t know the details.”

“Did you know he had one of your shirts?”

“No.”

“Did he take any of your other clothes?”

“Some clericals are missing.”

“I take it Jodie liked to dress up.”

“For laughs I’d let him put on my clericals. Just here in the room.”

“Can you give me his family’s phone?”

Back at the precinct, Cardozo ordered that flyers of the dead man be distributed to all the leather bars in Manhattan.

He stared at his telephone.

He knew he was making the first mistake—thinking, planning what to say. There was no way of planning it.

He picked up the telephone. He dialed and listened to the line buzz.

A voice in the county sheriffs office in Mattoon, Illinois, answered. A moment later the deputy sheriff picked up and listened to what Cardozo had to say. A sigh traveled across the phone line. “I’ll go over and tell Lockwood and Meridee Downs myself. They’re friends.”

“Would you give them my number?” Cardozo said. “They may have questions.”

“They’ll have questions all right.”

A call from Mattoon came seventeen minutes later. “Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Lockwood Downs. Jodie’s dad.” The voice was strangled. “My wife and I just heard that our son …” The words died.

“I’m very sorry,” Cardozo said. He felt scooped out inside, and freezing, and he knew with his whole body what the murdered boy’s father was feeling.

“My wife and I will be in New York tomorrow,” Lockwood Downs said.

“You don’t have to,” Cardozo said, trying to make it easier for them.

“Lieutenant, we have to.”

Cardozo peered over the railing toward the Eastern information counter. He saw the man and woman standing at the baggage carousel. They were dressed in unobtrusive mourning, and somehow that seemed sad and sweetly square and very old-fashioned. She was small and pretty and straight, her body held erect in a soft white dress. The man was thin, nearly six feet tall. His clothes spoke of another time, the early Kennedy years: pepper-and-salt suit and a gray tie and a lightweight charcoal raincoat over his arm.

Cardozo came down the stairs. He held out his hand and introduced himself.

“Meridee and I want to thank you for phoning,” Downs said. His voice was tight and controlled and the sun had layered brown into his deep-lined face.

“Do you have luggage?” Cardozo asked.

Mrs. Downs shook her head. She had soft reddish hair and moist green eyes and there was a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Just these,” she said.

They were each carrying a flat little fit-under-the-seat bag.

“We’d better go see Jodie,” Downs said.

“That’s not necessary,” Cardozo said. “Jodie’s friend Dave Bellamy identified him.”

“You don’t understand,” Mrs. Downs said. Her small forehead was smooth, her mouth and chin firmly set “We came east to say good-bye to our boy.”

The attendant raised the sheet. The parents gazed down at the shut eyes.

Cardozo could feel the wave of shock hit them. Every atom of color was driven from their faces.

They always caught you unprepared, those moments when you knew that life was not forever, that death was just around the bend. The Bible told you and life told you, but still you never felt it in your gut except when it was someone special that death claimed. Cardozo had had one of those moments. Lockwood and Meridee Downs were having one now.

A thousand years crept by.

Mrs. Downs bent to kiss the dead lips.

Downs’s face lifted up and he looked at his wife so tenderly, so softly, that the look was a caress in itself. Cardozo could remember that look, the look of caring, of belonging to someone.

She threw her arms around her husband and just cried.

Cardozo drove the Downses to the Helmsley Midtown, where the airline had reserved them a two-hundred-dollar-a-day room for the night. Downs took off his jacket and ordered drinks from room service and asked Cardozo to join them.

They sat down in big comfortable upholstered chairs and chatted—that aimless surrealistic chatter that people always make in the face of death. For the Downses, it was the beginning of a release. For Cardozo, it was his job.

Cardozo had the impression the Downses had been a hopeful upward-bound kind of family. He handled real estate and contracting, she had a nurse’s certificate. They lived in the west end of town, the good end. They spoke with open pride about their white-shingled house on Lincoln Street. It had two baths and a full cellar, and it was theirs, mortgage paid in full.

Downs said, “I don’t believe in debt. I guess that’s un-American of me.”

“Jodie grew up in that house,” Mrs. Downs said quietly. She shook her head. “It seems unbelievable. There was a time only a little while ago when Jodie was still here, in this world, and now he’s not.”

“His whole life, wiped out,” Downs said. “You look back, you see a street paved with might-have-been’s and if-only’s. The phone rings, and you expect it’ll be him saying,
Hey, Dad, send a hundred bucks.”

“He was always short of money,” Mrs. Downs said.

Cardozo began to learn a little about their son. He didn’t push into it—just let it come.

“He played French horn in the marching band,” Mrs. Downs said. “He was too slender to make the high school football team.”

“But he worked out with weights,” Downs said, “until he made the basketball team.”

“He was popular with girls too,” Mrs. Downs said, wistfully. “The gay thing—that came later.”

Cardozo ran his mind over Jodie’s life. “How did Jodie lose his testicle?”

Downs was silent. Cardozo sensed in him a puritanism that had lost confidence in itself. It was his wife who finally broke the silence.

“Jodie came to New York three years ago to be an actor. He met a man in a bar. He took the man home. The man drugged him and slashed him.”

“Did the police ever find this man?” Cardozo asked.

Mrs. Downs pushed the hem of her dress down past her knee. She shook her head.

“After that Jodie enrolled in fashion school,” Downs said.

Cardozo understood the dark in which the Downses were adrift. He rotated his glass, making the ice in his Scotch shudder, knowing he was about to hurt them more.

“Something else happened to Jodie,” he said. “You didn’t see it. But you should know.” He could hear someone’s wristwatch ticking. “His right leg was amputated.”

Mrs. Downs’s lower lip trembled. She blinked hard. Downs stared at Cardozo in silence.

“It was done after death,” Cardozo said, as though this was some sort of pitiful comfort.

Downs sat stone still, a sad broken mountain of a man, not a tremor in his face, not a movement except the narrow glazing over of his eyes.

“Was there anything on that leg—any distinguishing mark, a tattoo?”

“Nothing I know of,” Downs said.

Mrs. Downs lifted her drink from the end table. She sipped slowly until it was drained halfway down to the ice cubes. “They tied Jodie up and terrorized him and he was completely at their mercy and they didn’t care. And then they got their thrills. No one should have to die that way—for nothing, for no reason except some drugged-out lunatic wants to know what it’s like to be God.”

She moved to the window. She stood with her back to the men.

“Who killed our son?” she asked in a voice so calm and matter-of-fact that Cardozo was chilled.

“I intend to find that out,” he said.

She turned. She looked at him. “Do you promise?”

“Now Meridee,” Downs cut in, “all the lieutenant can do is his best—”

She pushed off her husband’s hand. “Lieutenant, do you have a child?”

“I do,” he said. “A girl.”

“An only child?”

“That’s right.”

She took Cardozo’s hands in hers. “Then you’ll find Jodie’s killer? You’ll see—he gets what he deserves?”

Cardozo knew exactly what she was going through. His eyes promised. “I’ll find him. He’ll get what he deserves.”

Cardozo returned to the precinct and felt an unaccountable craving for sweets. He ordered in blueberry pie and milk.

He sat reviewing the task force’s fives and then he phoned the one nine and asked for Detective Barry MacPherson. The mumble that came over the line was either a bad connection or a mouthful of cheese blintz.

“Barry, you had an attempted homicide over there, first week in June, three years back.”

“We had nine attempts and six successes, I remember the week well. So does my wife. June third’s our wedding anniversary. That was the year we didn’t get to go to Colorado. This year we didn’t get to go to the Bahamas.”

“Keep plugging. Maybe next year you won’t get to go to Paris.” A delivery boy brought the pie, sticky and sugary, a purple disaster. Cardozo made a face. “The victim’s name was Jodie Downs, twenty years old, ex-aspiring actor, fashion design student, gay. He picked up a slasher in a bar, lost one of his balls.”

“Ouch.”

“You weren’t by any chance on the case, were you, Barry?”

“It’s hard enough remembering the ones who die. The survivors I have a very short retention for.”

“He’s dead now.”

“Can’t say I recall him.”

“Jodie Downs.”

“A lot of stiffs under the bridge in three years.”

“Could you messenger me whatever paper you’ve got?”

“You got it.”

Ellie Siegel came into the cubicle. She stood there a moment just staring at Cardozo. “Ever heard of the Rawhide bar?”

“Tell me what I’m missing out on.”

“Eighth Avenue and West Twentieth.” She sailed an interoffice memo down onto the desk. “The bartender recognized the flyer. His name is Hal. He’s tending bar till eight. So you got time to enjoy your pie.”

Cardozo shoved the paper plate at her. “You enjoy it.”

She looked at the purple stain sinking through the crust into the cardboard. “Vince, you know your problem? No self-respect, putting junk like that into your gut. Some night I’m going to cook you a decent meal. You’re too young to be going to pot.”

“I’m not going to pot.”

“Mr. America you’re not.”

“Who’s talking, Miss Universe? I get my share of propositions.”

“You’d get better propositions if you ate right. Knock off ten pounds and maybe you’d even get a shiksa to marry you.”

“You’re a pushy Jewish broad, you know that?”

“I’m as Irish as you.”

“I’m not one percent Irish.”

“So we match.”

“You think you’re going to get me with insults, you really think insults are going to give me a hard-on?”

“Who needs you, Vince? You’re a macho bitch.”

Cardozo pushed through the door. He took a deep breath, tasting the air, disliking the smell of spilled beer that seemed to have gone a stage beyond rot.

The bartender hefted himself up into a standing position. A black-moustached giant, steel studs sprayed across his leather like diamonds, he came down the bar, passing a damp cloth along the wood. The rag stopped two swipes away from Cardozo. “What’ll it be?”