VC01 - Privileged Lives (38 page)

Danny’s was almost deserted this time of the day, and Cardozo was aware of a tight expectancy in his chest as he pushed through the door into the air-conditioned dimness.

The late afternoon light made the restaurant a mysterious dark blue pool. A few early drinkers had taken up places at the bar, huddled in their separate solitudes. A jukebox was crooning softly.

When his tired eyes adjusted he could see down the rows of deserted tables. There was sunlight in the window and it outlined Babe Devens sitting at a far table.

She saw him, and a nervously ingratiating smile flashed across her face.

“Good to see you up and around,” Cardozo said.

“I’m around.” She tapped her armrest. She was sitting in a wheelchair. “Not quite up yet.”

“That’ll come in no time.” He pulled out a chair and sat down facing her. “You’re looking terrific.”

“Thanks. I have a feeling if I can stay far away from hospitals, I might learn how to live again.”

The owner, a burly Irishman with enormous sideburns, came over to take their orders.

“What are you having?” she asked Cardozo.

“A draft Michelob.”

She said she’d have the same. He hadn’t figured her for the draft beer type, but when Danny brought the drafts he liked the way she drank hers and seemed to enjoy the taste.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“It’s not exactly a police matter. It’s just that you helped me, and I wanted to thank you in person, and …” She pushed her glass around on the table. “I’ve been trying to see the records of Scottie’s second trial. They’re sealed.”

Cardozo frowned.

“It isn’t usual, is it, to seal court records?”

“Not unless you’re a Kennedy and you accidentally drowned a campaign worker who absolutely was not your mistress and the judge is a friend of the family.”

“Scottie doesn’t have that kind of clout.”

How pretty she is, Cardozo thought, the soft blond hair slanting across her forehead and the large inquiring eyes fixing him with their cool wondering stare, and the bright mouth, silent and expectant now.

“Your daughter was a minor at the time,” he said. “The judge might have been protecting her from publicity.”

“That doesn’t make sense. She was a minor during the first trial, and those records aren’t sealed.”

That stopped Cardozo for a moment. He tried to match the precociously sexy model in the Babethings ads, the teasing face, the seminude glossy body peeling out of the hip-hugging jeans, with his notion of childhood. Cordelia couldn’t have been older than fourteen when those ads began. “There could have been new evidence introduced in the second trial—testimony that gave evidence of another crime, or prejudiced a case already in the courts, or libeled somebody. Hard to say. Judges have pretty broad leeway. They don’t often seal records, but when they do they’re not called to account for their decision.”

“Is there any way I could get to those records?”

“You could sue. You could petition the court.”

Frustration showed in her face. “Lieutenant Cardozo—”

“I wish you’d call me Vince.”

“If you call me Babe.”

“Okay, Babe.”

“Vince—”

That first names broke the odd little pocket of tension that had built up. She smiled, and he had a sense she would be a very easy person to be with.

“You testified at the first trial,” she said. “Did you testify at the second?”

“The honor of my presence was not requested at the second. By then the fix was in.”

“The verdict was rigged?”

“What verdict? The state bought the plea bargain.”

“How was that arranged?”

“Your husband’s attorney made the D.A. an offer and the D.A. accepted. In my opinion the state had the evidence to lock your husband up and in the second trial they threw it away.”

She was looking at him. Her eyes were not saying anything. He could sense that inside this lovely quiet woman there was a huge amount of determination.

“At the first trial Cordelia was the only eyewitness against Scottie,” she said. “He was convicted on her testimony. But at the second trial that conviction was reversed. And Cordelia’s testimony is sealed. Why? What did she say?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“She doesn’t remember.”

“Doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to?”

“A little of both, I think. It was too painful for her.”

Cardozo nodded. “I can see that. A lot of people abandoned your little girl. By the way, who took care of her?”

“My parents raised her. But legally she was the ward of a family friend—Billi von Kleist.”

Cardozo’s eyebrows went up. “Why did she have a guardian?”

“Scottie and I were almost killed in a car crash—our fault, we were driving drunk. Billi was a good friend, and we thought in case anything ever really happened to us, there should be someone to look after Cordelia. Billi adored her, and she adored him, and so I appointed Billi. I never thought it would actually come to pass. But then I went into coma, and Scottie was charged, so Billi became Cordelia’s legal guardian.”

“But Von Kleist let your parents take care of her?”

“He’s not a family man. All he really wanted to be was a friend to her. The sort my parents could never be.”

“You don’t think too highly of your parents.”

“I think they’re confused people. They mix up the nineteenth century with the twentieth. I think they put Cordelia up to testifying against Scottie. They’ve always disliked him. I think Cordelia lied in the first trial and told the truth in the second.”

“What truth?”

“I think she cleared Scottie.”

Cardozo shook his head. “No way.”

“Scottie was framed,” Babe said.

“You really want to believe that.”

“It’s not just because I want to believe it.” She opened her purse and placed a small blue bottle on the table. “Somebody put this in a box beside my bed after the first trial. Insulin. A friend of mine by the name of Dina Alstetter found it. She mentioned it in a magazine article. The article was quoted in a book that smeared Scottie. The author of that book is a man named Gordon Dobbs.”

“Gordon Dobbs,” Cardozo said thoughtfully. He turned the bottle in his hand, studying the faded label and the still-legible lot number. “Well well.”

“He told me my parents paid him to write the book.”

“Not surprising. They were out to get Devens. They paid a retired police detective too.” Cardozo kept turning the bottle, studying it. “Where did you get this insulin?”

“My mother let Dina keep it and Dina gave it to me.”

“Peculiar,” Cardozo said. “Why didn’t your mother give it to the police?”

“I don’t think this bottle existed when the police were investigating. I think this bottle came later—when Scottie appealed.”

Cardozo studied the lot number on the label and then he held the bottle upside down, testing the seal.

“The manufacturer gave me the name of the pharmacy that bought it,” Babe said. “The pharmacist won’t say who he sold it to. He says records are confidential.”

“Pharmacy records aren’t confidential,” Cardozo said. “Not from the police.”

“If someone did plant this bottle—”

“All it would prove is that someone planted this bottle after you went into coma.”

“But doesn’t it prove he’s innocent? If Scottie were guilty, why would anyone
have
to plant proof?”

“There could be reasons. It’d be a sure way to create doubt about his guilt.”

She shook her head. “There’s no doubt about that. I had lunch with Scottie. I asked outright if he’d tried to kill me. He said he had.”

“So he finally got honest. I guess that settles it.”

“Not the way you think. I was married to Scott Devens for five years. I know when he’s telling the truth and I know when he’s lying. When he said he’d tried to kill me, I saw something in his eyes, I saw it written on his face. Maybe that sounds strange to you, but I’m an artist. I have a trained eye, I see things that most people miss.”

“What was this something you saw in Scott Devens’s face that the rest of us missed?”

“I saw a Scottie I’d never seen before—a man who can’t stand up for anything—not for his own feelings or convictions and worst of all not even for himself or for the truth. He doesn’t respect himself anymore. He’s sold out. He’s not the Scottie I married.”

“So he’s lying?”

She nodded.

“Isn’t that a very peculiar lie to tell?”

“He knows how to make me hate him.”

“And do you? Hate him?”

“I hate him for thinking so little of me he could imagine I’d believe him. And I hate him for thinking so little of himself that he’d allow his good name to be taken from him.”

“Why would he do it?”

“I guess he’s always wanted an easy, glamorous life. Now he has one. Maybe he was paid.”

“Who paid him?”

“I don’t know. Who profits besides Scottie if Scottie lies? The only person I can think of is the person who—” Her words broke off.

“The person who tried to kill you?”

She sighed. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

“I think you have some interesting ideas.” Cardozo held the clear colorless liquid in the bottle up to the light. “What did you say the name of that pharmacy was?”

“You sold this,” Cardozo said. “Who bought it?” The druggist took the insulin bottle. His frowning eyes traveled from the label to Cardozo’s shield. He went wordlessly behind a glass wall and Cardozo watched him push buttons on a desktop computer.

A machine made muffled tap-dancing noises. The druggist returned and, still saying nothing, handed Cardozo a three-inch printout. Cardozo’s eyes skimmed the dot-matrix letters that spelled Provence Pharmacy and the lot number of the insulin, followed by the name of the prescribing doctor and the prescription number.

The name Faith S. Banks leapt off the paper, jabbing him between the eyes like a fork prong.

He stood frozen, recognizing that something was very much off. His mind backed up six and a half years. Banks had been Babe Vanderwalk’s maid. Her evidence had been central to the case against Scottie Devens. She’d found the brown bag in Devens’s closet and given it to the Vanderwalks’ private investigator. It had held the syringe, insulin, and liquid Valium.

“Have you filled any other prescriptions for this woman?” Cardozo asked.

“We’ve been selling her insulin for twelve years,” the druggist said. “She’s a diabetic.”

Back at the precinct, Cardozo pulled the records on the Devens case.

The bottles of insulin found in the brown bag had had their labels, including the lot numbers, removed. The contents had had to be analyzed before they could be positively identified as insulin. There had been no fingerprints on the bottles.

There was no mention in any of the fives of Faith Banks’s being diabetic.

Because nobody asked, Cardozo thought. Nobody thought of asking if anyone in the house had a legitimate supply of insulin.

But we must have asked,
he thought.
You don’t not ask a thing like that.

Cardozo puzzled, drinking coffee after coffee, till he was getting a high-pitched note inside his ears like a cricket playing a violin.

We must have asked and Banks must have lied.

He felt his way further.

The insulin bottles in the brown bag had been stripped of identifying marks. But the Alstetter bottle had been traceable straight to Banks. How come?

What came to him was that the first bottles had been part of a careful frame aimed at convincing the police; the fourth insulin bottle had been a careless embellishment, executed long after the Vanderwalks’ professional investigator had gone home, aimed at convincing an amateur magazine sleuth named Dina Alstetter.

Cardozo lifted the phone and dialed Judge Tom Levin’s number.

Cardozo followed Judge Levin into the sitting room of his Brooklyn Heights town house. There was a fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker black label on the sideboard, glasses and ice waiting.

The judge handed him a glass.

The transcript was sitting on the table, a brown binder with the label already beginning to peel off.
People of the State of New York
v.
William Scott Devens.

Cardozo took a seat in the corduroy easy chair, his eyes bent to the transcript. He sipped Scotch and made notes on a small lined pad.

After page 73, when the defense was moving to introduce a medical report into evidence, there was a blank page.

Cardozo turned to the next page. It, too, was blank. He riffled quickly through the remainder of the transcript. All blank.

“Tom,” he said, “would you take a look at this?”

Tom Levin took the transcript and stood turning pages. “This is downright interesting,” he muttered.

“Why would anyone steal pages from a sealed record?”

“Because sealing a record is bullshit. Every day of the week people like me get into sealed records, and whoever wanted this record sealed was making sure people like you didn’t read it.”

Cardozo read the newspaper articles on Babe Devens.

According to the
Post,
she had returned to her life of luxury among the rich and famous of New York. The
News
said her five-bedroom town house on Sutton Place was assessed at 4.2 million dollars. Her neighbors included two U.N. ambassadors, the world’s leading operatic tenor, a movie star, and a cousin of the queen of England.
People
magazine said that before her coma she and her husband had thrown parties for some of the biggest names in society and show business. Any day now she would return to her rightful place as queen of the glitterati.

The guests in the photographs of Scottie and Babe Devens’s last party looked to Cardozo like a bunch of rouged-up clowns, living in a world that rained diamonds and tinsel and cocaine.

He couldn’t picture her in that society. Didn’t want to.

He pushed the buzzer of number 18 Sutton Place, a gray slate town house with French château turrets. A stiff-necked butler let him in.

“Would you care to wait in the sitting room, sir?”

“That’s all right, Wheelock. Here I am.”

Cardozo turned. Babe Devens was wheeling herself out of the elevator, hair honey blond and eyes sky blue, and his heart gave a little jump of pleasure. Her blue silk afternoon dress shimmered faintly. Smiling, she stretched out her hand. “You’re very kind to come.”