VC01 - Privileged Lives (26 page)

His finger connected with a plastic button and there was an exploding cone of light, horrible light.

Gina lay shading her eyes in shock, blinking at him. “Don’t answer,” she moaned.

His eyes apologized. He snatched up the phone in his fist and brought it to his ear. “Monteleone.”

A voice said, “It’s Will Madsen.”

Monteleone had to think before the name clicked into place. The Episcopal priest whom he’d questioned in Beaux Arts Tower. “Yes, Father.”

“There’s been something on my conscience. I did see something the day of the murder—something I didn’t mention.” Madsen sounded nervous. He also sounded drunk. “I hate to make trouble for other people.”

“I certainly can identify with that.”

“Could we meet somewhere? Now?”

Monteleone wasn’t going to bicker about the hour. Information on murders was a seller’s market. “Where would you like to meet, Father?”

22

T
ASK FORCE MEETING, SATURDAY
, June 7, fourteen days after the murder.

Siegel was winding up her Inferno report, telling how she’d connected with one of the hard-core regulars. “He’s bisexual, and he knows everything that goes on in that place. He wants to see me again.”

“Good,” Cardozo said. “Did you make a date?”

She regarded Cardozo steadily for an instant. “We left it open. He’s not going to forget me.”

It was Malloy’s turn. He seemed shaky and nervous as he drew a deep ragged breath.

“The bartender—Stan—gave me free beers. Real chatty type. Offered me coke, I said my doctor told me to lay off. He gave me his home phone.”

“Did you give him yours?” Cardozo said.

“Told him I was married, said he couldn’t call me at work or home. That turned him on.”

Monteleone smirked. “Carl, you’re so hard to get.”

“Date him,” Cardozo said. “Get close to him.”

Malloy’s Irish eyes were thoughtful. “Okay.”

Monteleone’s turn. “Had a talk with Father Will Madsen. He seems to be a periodic lush. Turns out he’s been withholding a piece of information, but this morning around one
A.M.
he got drunk and spilled. The day of the murder, a little before noon, he saw Debbi in the lobby flirting with Hector Dominguez.”

“The guy with the dead muskrat on his head?” Sam Richards said.

“What a lousy rug,” Malloy said.

Monteleone continued. “When Madsen was passing through the lobby again, Debbi was back, totally crazed. She was trying to claw Hector to pieces. Madsen feels very guilty telling this. It’s taken him two weeks and a few fifths of Stoli to come forward.”

Cardozo pondered, trying to stick events together.

“Remember those scratches on his face?” Siegel said.

Cardozo nodded. “Hector said the cat did those. Greg, when did this happen?”

“A little after 2
P.M.
”

Silence came down, broken an instant later by the sound of Richards making a hacking attempt to recover from coffee swallowed the wrong way.

“What did Madsen mean, Debbi was flirting with Hector?” Cardozo asked.

“He said it looked like Debbi was coming on to the guy.”

“He didn’t say coming on,” Siegel said. “A priest wouldn’t use that expression.”

“He said flirting. That means coming on, right?”

Siegel made an impatient face. “Flirting is courtship, Greg. Coming on is hard cruising. One is flattering and one is demeaning.”

“Got it,” Monteleone said.
“Gracias mucho.”

“Like she was offering herself?” Cardozo said. “Like she was willing to make it with Hector?”

“Father Madsen seemed to think so.”

Cardozo was thinking of the possibilities, everything going through his mind at once. He had three facts: at noon a not very bright upscale hooker had been trying to wheedle good graces from a Neanderthal doorman, and two hours later she was physically attacking him. And sometime during those two hours a man had been murdered on the sixth floor.

“What turned Debbi around in two hours?” Cardozo said.

“I saw someone change like that once,” Siegel said. “It was a psychotic break brought on by cocaine.”

Sam Richards’s lower lip moved. He ran his tongue along it. “There’s another witness—he’d be able to shed some light.”

Cardozo looked at him. “Who’s that, Sam?”

“Jerzy Bronski’s taxi was parked in the garage. He says he was taking a pee, but it stands to reason he was boffing Debbi, right?”

Cardozo picked up the telephone. He dialed. The line buzzed eight times.

“Ms. Hightower’s residence,” a woman’s harried voice said.

“Miss Hightower, please.”

“This is her service. She won’t be back till Sunday evening.”

“What time Sunday evening?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Her father.”

“Hello, Dr. Hightower. I didn’t recognize your voice. Debbi will be back after eight o’clock.”

A wave of annoyance swept Cardozo. He set his coffee down. He looked at the Beaux Arts Tower service personnel work schedule. Hector Dominguez would not be working until Monday, 4
P.M.
to midnight.

He phoned Hector’s home number and after two rings thought better of it and hung up. Save that one for face-to-face. He pulled the fives on Jerzy Bronski.

The sky had turned dusky gray. Heat waves rising from the street were tinged with the neon of shop signs.

The garage occupied a corner lot. There was a cardboard sign in the glass pane of the dispatcher’s door: do not enter.

Cardozo entered. He flashed his open wallet and asked for Jerzy Bronski.

The dispatcher, tufts of black hair poking out from his sweat-soaked T-shirt, glanced over from his desk. “Not back yet.”

Cardozo sat uninvited in the free chair.

Stuttering fluorescent light flicked the peeling wall.

At quarter after eight a tall, slender man came in with his taxi sheets.

“Visitor,” the dispatcher said.

Jerzy frowned at Cardozo, a sharp line jagging down between his eyebrows.

Cardozo rose and introduced himself. “Good meeting you, Jerzy. How about some coffee?”

“How about a drink?” Jerzy said.

Three minutes later they were settling down at a table on the glass-enclosed terrace of the Sazerac House across the way.

Jerzy tapped a Lucky loose from a crumpled pack and laid the pack on the table beside the metal ashtray. He lit the cigarette, striking a match from a book one-handed. He leaned back against his chair. “It makes me look bad, cops coming into my garage asking about me like I was a criminal.”

“Jerzy, believe me, for a guy who moonlights his ass off the way you do, you’re looking great.”

Jerzy shaped an O with his mouth and blew out a perfect smoke ring.

“We know you’ve been making it with Debbi Hightower,” Cardozo said. “And we know you were with her the day of the killing.”

The legs of Jerzy’s chair came back to the floor and denial began gathering itself in his face.

“We have a witness who can place your cab in the garage.” Cardozo went out on a limb. “And who saw you take the elevator up to Debbi’s. Hightower isn’t the point, you weren’t breaking any laws that we’re interested in enforcing. What we want from you is information.”

Jerzy’s finger drew a track in the condensation that had formed on his glass of Scotch and water.

“Why did Debbi attack the doorman?”

Jerzy was silent.

“We know you falsified your cab sheets. We know you were driving Debbi home every day after she hooked in the hotel. We know, but Ding-Dong Transport doesn’t need to know.”

Jerzy’s expression was undecided: he wanted to save his ass but he didn’t want to wind up parking it in a fry pan. “She freaked out,” he said.

“Why?”

Jerzy mopped his face with a dime store handkerchief that needed to see some action in a washing machine. “A delivery was late.”

“Jerzy, I’m not a narc, so let’s get this out of the way. It was coke, right?”

Jerzy put his drink down. He spoke quietly. “She’s one of those chicks that live on the stuff. We were having a great time, and then she flipped.” He imitated the intonation of Debbi flipping. “Gotta see my dealer, gotta see my dealer.”

“Who’s her dealer?”

Jerzy sucked in breath, hollowing his cheeks. “Do you have to drag me into this? You’ve been watching the building, you know who runs the coke in that place. He promised her the stuff: she went down and he didn’t have it. She flipped out.”

The third time Cardozo buzzed, the decibel level of punk rock dropped to something approaching bearability. The door opened a crack. A young woman’s face stared at him above the safety chain. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders, curly in a way that suggested she had just bathed.

She looked curiously at his shield and then curiously at him.

“They said the police were coming up.”

“I am the police.”

“You’re not the black dude that was here before.”

“No, I’m not.”

“He was nice.”

“So am I.”

She worked her eyelashes. “What’s this about?”

“Just a few questions.”

“The place is kind of a mess—the maid’s been sick.”

“That’s okay, we can talk here in the hallway.”

“What the hell, you’re not my mother, you’re not going to criticize. Are you?”

“Promise.”

She stepped back from the door, her loosely tied bathrobe a swirl of Day-Glo ruffles.

The furniture in the livingroom was minimal: beanbag chairs, bookcases, lonely objects in a dim cavern. Magazines and show business newspapers littered the floor.

She sank onto a beanbag chair and he sat on the other.

Her eyes fixed on him in uneasy expectancy.

“You had a fight with the doorman a week ago Saturday,” he said.

“That’s not true.”

“Come on, Debbi. We know why you’re wearing a false nail and we know how Hector got his face scratched. We have a witness.”

“Who?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“I have rights.”

“You don’t have those rights till I arrest you, Debbi. I’m asking you some questions hoping maybe I won’t have to do that. Just tell me what you and Hector were fighting about.”

Her eyes became pools of evasion. “Hector’s an s.o.b., that’s what we were fighting about.”

“Debbi, we know about Hector’s sideline.”

She got up from the beanbag. “No way I’m going to get into this conversation.”

“We know he’s dealing coke to you.”

The face was defiant now, eyes blazing. They were blue-gray eyes, a wild blazing blue-gray. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

A beige decorator phone lay on the floor at the end of a tangled plastic line. She didn’t make a move toward it.

“Debbi, we’re not interested in the coke. We’re interested in what happened in this building a week ago Saturday when a man in six was murdered.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Does the name Jodie Downs mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Inferno?”

“What inferno?”

She said it without a capital I. That satisfied him.

“Why did you attack Hector?”

She didn’t answer.

“Debbi, I don’t care about that coke, but some friends of mine would care a whole lot.”

Behind the bright glitter of her mascaraed eyes, he caught a sudden note of pleading.

“In my business, I have to stay alert. So sometimes I do a little coke.” She grinned nervously. “Sorry ’bout that.”

His mouth smiled back at her. “A lot of people do coke. Hell, cops have been caught doing it.”

“Tell me. It’s strictly personal use. I don’t deal.”

“We understand that, Debbi. We’re not accusing you of dealing.”

“I was expecting a gram of coke. I prepaid. With Hector you prepay. He said he’d have it at one thirty. All right, I was a little late picking it up—but that’s no reason for him to sell it to someone else.”

“Who’d he sell it to?”

“He said it was a real good customer who needed it real bad, needed it more than I did.”

“Do you have any idea who?”

“Look, I make it my business not to know other people’s business, you know what I mean?”

“Someone else in the building?”

“I absolutely don’t know that.”

Broome Street was dark as Cardozo stepped out of the car. A summer wind gusted along the pavement, swirling sheets of newspaper. Tiredness was all through him as he let himself into the apartment.

“You look beat.” Terri walked toward him, and the soft cone of the hallway light sculpted her out of the darkness. She had a springy step and her body radiated a comfort with itself.

His arms went around her, folding her to him.

“You had a call. A woman.” She handed him the piece of paper with the number.

He sensed her attention and looked at her sideways. Her oddly adult, humorous eyes met his and the flicker of a smile passed between them.

He went into the hallway and dialed. His reflection in the mirror told him he needed a shave and he’d been sweating into his shirt a few hours too long.

On the second ring Melissa Hatfield answered.

“Am I calling at a bad time?” he said.

“No, I’m watching TV.” Behind her cheerful voice something solemn was waiting to come out. “I checked into that address. Thirty-four and a half Ninth Avenue is leased to a company called Pegasus International, and Pegasus is renting the adjoining cellar space to the Inferno Fraternal Society.”

Holding the phone receiver in one hand, Cardozo stretched to pick up a pencil. He found a blank space on a junk mailing from the Museum of Modern Art. “Who’s Pegasus?”

“I think they’re a paper company. They’re leasing on a month-to-month basis, which is unusual for a building, to say the least.”

“Who are they leasing from?”

There was an odd pausing before she spoke again. “They’re leasing from us. Balthazar. We picked up the building about four months ago. They were already in occupancy. We’ve picked up a few odd lots in the meat-packing district. My boss, Nat Chamberlain’s, trying to put the lots together. So he leases month to month. When he gets enough property he’ll rip down and put up a condo.”

“Doesn’t Chamberlain care who he rents to?”