VC01 - Privileged Lives (3 page)

“Mask?” That interested Cardozo. You got jaded in this job. A murdered man was ordinary, a mask wasn’t.

“Bondage mask, executioner’s mask, some black leather shit. Someone killed him and left him naked in one of the for-sale apartments. Took one of his legs.”

“Ouch.”

“You get your own task force. Borrow anyone from any precinct you want. Put together your dream team. Whatever they’ve got ongoing, they’re liberated. And they’re on overtime, starting now.”

Cardozo went into the lobby, a cool art deco arcade of white Carrara marble and patinated bronze. There were man-high corn plants, lushly potted, and deep leather sofas, unoccupied. A sign said
ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED
. A nervous-looking man in a green uniform sat by the switchboard. He looked over and said, “’Scuse me, who are you visiting?”

He had an accent that was half Puerto Rico, half New York street, and as he came forward Cardozo saw that the right side of his face was streaked with scars that had probably been fresh yesterday.

“I’m visiting the corpse.”

The doorman stopped, startled, and an Irish sergeant came around from behind the switchboard. “That’s okay, Hector. Lieutenant, this is Hector—Hector, this is Lieutenant Cardozo. You’ll be seeing a lot of him.”

“How do you do, sir.” The doorman, embarrassed, lifted his cap and revealed a wig that a dime store window dummy would have been ashamed to wear.

“Floor six, Lieutenant.” The sergeant held the elevator door.

In the vestibule on six, a sergeant from the 22d precinct stood guard outside the apartment. He was young, pale, and acting harried. He glanced at Cardozo’s shield and handed him plastic gloves.

Cardozo twisted his fingers into the gloves. They popped on with revolting kissing smacks. As he entered the apartment, another sergeant wrote Cardozo’s name, shield number, and time of arrival into the crime scene log.

The naked body, bathed in sunlight, was stretched flat on its back on the floor of the master bedroom.

The calm blue eyes, staring through a black leather mask that hugged the entire skull, were fixed on the ceiling, their gaze flat and mysterious. The mouth was locked behind a steel zipper.

Cardozo crouched for a closer look.

The mask, with its uncanny power, disturbed and fascinated him. If ever an object had suggested absolute evil to his mind, it was that crudely stitched piece of dyed hide, combining the anonymity of the executioner with the obscenity of a pig’s snout.

The body was in good shape—well-exercised, lean; it was Caucasian, the body of a man in his twenties.

With the stopping of the heart, gravity had pulled the blood to the lower half of the body, causing dark blue discolorations of the parts lying downside.

The chest was crisscrossed with scratch marks. They made a circle with a Y in it, the old sixties peace sign. None appeared to have penetrated the muscle layer.

The victim’s right leg had been removed. From the look of the shear marks on the startlingly white femoral bone, a buzz saw had done the job.

On the foot of the remaining leg a tag had been tied to the big toe. The tag was a standard department form, number 95. The first officer on the scene had filled in the time of discovery and relevant details.

Dan Hippolito, the medical examiner—a slim man in his middle fifties with receding, graying hair—opened the zipper of the mask to examine the dead man’s lips and gums.

“When do you think he died?” Cardozo asked.

“Not more than twenty-four hours ago … not less than twelve.”

“How was he killed?”

The M.E. looked closely at the throat. “Pending autopsy, I’d say fracture of the cervical vertebrae.”

In New York City, Cardozo reflected, strangling was not one of your more usual methods of dispatching your fellow man. “I have a feeling this one died high. I want to know the drugs.”

“We’ll give his blood a good spin. Should have all prescriptions for you tomorrow.”

A photographer was snapping pictures of the dead man. A detective was taking measurements with a pocket tape, calling out figures for his partner to mark on the crime scene sketch. A technician was outlining the corpse in chalk.

A team from the Forensic Unit was taking scrapings from the floor. Cardozo recognized Lou Stein from the lab, hunkered down searching for blood particles or traces of semen.

“What have you got, Lou?”

Lou glanced up. He was two weeks back from his Florida vacation, and his face was still mahogany beneath a fringe of straw-colored hair. “Ask me tomorrow.”

Down the hallway fingerprint men armed with flitguns and makeup brushes pumped dark powder on windowsills and doorknobs, dusting for latent prints. A sergeant stood writing in a notebook.

“You were the first on the scene, Sergeant?” Cardozo asked.

The sergeant nodded. He looked all of twenty years old: freckles, blond hair, a cowlick.

“Who called you here?”

The sergeant tilted his head toward an overweight man in slacks and a peach Lacoste shirt standing near the doorway. “The super.”

“The super found the body?”

“No. She did.” Now the sergeant was nodding toward a good-looking, light-brown-haired woman who was taking a light from the super’s Zippo. “The sales agent. She was showing the apartment to those two.” He indicated a woman with a red sweater tied around her shoulders and a man in a striped polo shirt.

“Anyone else seen the body that I don’t know about?”

“No one’s left the apartment since I got here.”

Cardozo crossed to the civilians and introduced himself. The super gave his name as Bill Connell, and Cardozo asked if he had mentioned to anyone what he’d seen in the apartment.

The super shook his head. “Not a soul. I made the phone call and came right back.”

“I’m going to ask you people not to talk about anything you’ve seen here. Not that a man is dead, or naked, or wearing a mask, or missing a leg. We want to keep those details secret because aside from the people in this apartment, only the killer knows about them. The success of the investigation is going to depend on your cooperation.”

The civilians were nodding, promising. They always nodded, they always promised, and in Cardozo’s experience they kept the promise for no more than twenty-four hours.

He asked the would-be buyers short questions and listened to long, meandering answers: they were in the market to buy a Manhattan apartment, had chosen this day to drive in from New Rochelle. They were obviously scared and he had the impression they didn’t know anything more than they were saying. He got their names and address and had them fingerprinted and let them go.

Cardozo asked Connell if there were any electric saws in the building.

“Sixteen and seventeen are being remodeled into a duplex. There may be a saw up there.”

Cardozo sent a sergeant to search 16 and 17. “Who has the key to this apartment?”

“Till it’s sold you open it with the passkey,” Connell said.

“Who has the passkey?”

“It’s kept in the personnel office,” Connell said.

“All personnel have access?”

Connell nodded.

“Any of the residents have passkeys?”

“No, sir.”

“Anyone besides personnel have access to the personnel office and the passkey?”

“I do, Lieutenant.”

Cardozo looked at the sales agent. She impressed him with her lack of embarrassment or uncertainty.

“My name’s Melissa Hatfield. It’s my job to show the apartments. Sometimes there are prospective buyers on very short notice and I have to let myself in.”

He noted things about her skin texture, voice tone, details of clothing. She wore a white dress with large woven holes in it and it looked on her the way dresses were supposed to look on fashionable women and rarely did.

“Did you let yourself in today?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have to ask you some questions. Would you mind waiting in the lobby?” Cardozo turned to the super. “I’ll need a list of building personnel and the worksheets for the last two days.”

“I have those down in the office,” the super said.

Cardozo and Connell were passing through the Beaux Arts garage. A shadowless fluorescent glow flickered across Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, Mercedeses, and Rollses.

“Is that garage door kept locked?” Cardozo asked.

Connell nodded. “Garage users have electronic remotes to open it.”

“Do the staff have remotes?”

“We have to. For deliveries.”

Cardozo asked how the garage was guarded.

“Monitored from the lobby.” Connell pointed to a closed-circuit TV camera poised on the cinderblock wall.

They passed the laundry room. Two washers, two dryers.

“Residents use those?” Cardozo asked.

“The maids use them.”

There were two elevator entrances in the basement corridor—one marked Passenger, one marked Freight. A third door was marked Authorized Personnel Only. Cardozo opened it.

“Garbage compactor.” Connell grinned. “State of the art.”

“What happens after the garbage is compacted?”

“It goes into those state-of-the-art bags.”

Cardozo took a moment fingering one of the black plastic bags. The plastic was sturdy stuff, a good eighth of an inch thick.

“And where do the bags go?”

“The trucking company picks them up.”

Connell led Cardozo to the personnel office. Besides a desk, the windowless room held an easy chair, two metal chairs, a card table, and two filing cabinets.

“Personnel list,” Connell muttered. “Worksheet …” He opened a cabinet drawer and looked behind a pile of racing forms.

“And. the residents,” Cardozo said.

“Bingo.” Connell pulled out three lists.

Cardozo looked them over. “You’re a resident.”

Connell nodded. “The apartment comes with the job.”

“You weren’t working yesterday?”

“I get holidays and weekends off,” Connell said.

“Where were you?”

“I spent the day at home. My wife Ebbie—she’s an invalid. We don’t get out too much.”

Cardozo folded the lists and slipped them into his jacket pocket. He noticed a battered-looking thirteen-inch Sony TV on the desk. “Who watches that?”

Connell seemed embarrassed. “I do.”

“Don’t you have your own upstairs?”

“Ebbie doesn’t like sports. So if there’s an important game, I usually catch it here.”

The room had gray concrete walls and cement floor and naked pipes overhead. It didn’t look like the coziest spot for watching the Mets.

“Can I use your phone?” Cardozo asked.

“Help yourself. Do you need me?”

“Not for the moment.”

“I’ll be in the utility room. Out in the hall and hook a right.”

Alone, Cardozo took out his notebook and spent three minutes drawing up a list of his own. He wrote down eight names, crossed out three, after a little thought crossed out a fourth.

He lifted the phone and dialed headquarters. “Flo, it’s Vince.” He read her the names of the four detectives. “Pull them off whatever they’re doing, get them up here.”

“You know what they’re doing, Vince, they’re having a day off.”

“So was I.”

“You’re not going to be a loved man.”

3

I
N THE BEDROOM, CARDOZO
stood alone in the sunlight glaring through the window. He was working now, stirred by the sense of a secret waiting to be revealed, a sense that was tantalizing and almost sexual in its excitement.

He looked about the blank surfaces of the unfurnished room, seeking some object, some detail that bore the imprint of what had happened here.

The bedroom door had two hinges. He could remember a time when doors had had three hinges, but nowadays builders got by with two. He swung the door. In the crack just below the bottom hinge something small and dark and glistening had wedged against the jamb. He crouched. Using the tip of his gloved finger he gently poked the dark thing.

An inch of black plastic fell to the floor.

He picked up the fragment, turned it over in his hand. He tested the thickness between his thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t surprised at what he felt. A piece of garbage bag, similar to the ones he’d seen in the compactor room.

He dropped the fragment into a clear plastic evidence bag.

Down the hallway, where the baseboard wasn’t quite joined to the wall, he found another piece of black plastic.

“Cleaning house?”

Cardozo glanced up. “You look lousy,” he said.

In fact Detective Sam Richards didn’t look lousy at all. Nattily dressed in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, charcoal gray summer-weight slacks, he looked like a linebacker who had traded in his shoulder pads for a TV news anchor’s chair.

But the expression on his long, unsmiling black face was grumpy, and his big roguish moustache was pulled down into a frown. There was a small pink Band-Aid on his chin.

“How’d you get the battle wound?”

“Cut myself shaving.”

“Hung over?”

“Maybe. I spent last night celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“Having today off.”

“That was premature.”

“Tell me about it, Vince. Tell me why I’m alive, tell me why I’m here.”

“How about if I just tell you about this killing.” Cardozo described what he had seen, reviewed what he had found, and walked Richards through the apartment.

“I want you to canvass,” Cardozo said. “Cover the building, cover the neighborhood, see if any of the local Peeping Toms or storekeepers noticed anything. You’ll split the job with Greg Monteleone.”

“Tell Monteleone I’ve started.”

Cardozo felt he had been poking through kitchen cabinets for an hour. His watch told him it had been twenty-five minutes.

As he swung open the door beneath the sink, the inside of his nose prickled violently. Print powder came eddying up in a cloud. He sneezed once, and again, and then again.

“Gesundheit.” A fortyish man in a badly cut suit the color of dry clay was watching from the corridor, amused. Detective Greg Monteleone’s brown eyes were gleaming in a cheerfully soulful face that gave him the appearance of a prankish poet. “Three sneezes means good luck.”