VC01 - Privileged Lives (56 page)

“She did a lot of drugs.”

Dan shook his head. “I don’t see a consistent diagnosis. Gamma globulin you give for hepatitis, but what’s the blood analysis? There’s no cell count, no sedimentation rate, nothing. These records are incomplete.”

He whipped through pages and came to something that made him stop.

“Now this is downright interesting. Tegretol. That’s specific for temporal lobe infection. Which means it’s not a tumor attacking the brain, it’s an organism.” Dan frowned. “What kind of brain infection did she have?”

“I’m asking you.”

“I’d have to section the brain and put it under a microscope. They must have done that at the hospital. Go back and ask if they ran a brain section p.m.”

“This lady was a socialite, they don’t autopsy socialites.”

“This socialite they should’ve. Either the infection moved incredibly fast or the initial diagnosis was way off. They’re all over the map, treating morphine withdrawal, hepatitis, heart fibrillation, epilepsy, and meantime something very hungry is having a picnic on her brain.”

He closed the folder and pursed his lips thoughtfully, the pencil in his hand tapping the desk edge.

“Assuming these doctors aren’t jerks, something that began as a blood disorder crossed to the brain. And the blood-brain barrier is not easy to penetrate. You have to be the size of maybe two electrons to get through. But without the blood sheets, there’s no point even guessing.”

“Any chance of unnatural causes?”

“These are infections, not bullets.”

“Could someone who knew medicine have infected her?”

“Not even Josef Mengele. This kind of disaster is like a five-plane midair collision. You can’t plan it, you can’t control it. You trying to make a case?”

“Just wondering.”

“If she was sharing needles, there could have been contributing negligence. But that’s luck of the draw, not murder.”

“I don’t think she was sharing. Too classy for that.”

“Get me her blood charts. There’s definitely grounds for curiosity.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Lieutenant.”

Dr. William Tiffany rose from his desk and stretched out his arm, offering a handshake. He was the same stout, Nautilus-pumped man Cardozo remembered from Ash’s sick room, dressed in a well-cut dark suit and striped tie.

It was a roomy corner office, with a black leather couch and two comfortable matching chairs. Cardozo chose the chair nearer the window.

Dr. Tiffany closed a folder and took the other chair.

Between the doctor and the detective was a table of woven bamboo, painted a ripe peach and heaped with magazines—
Town and Country, Yachting, Vanity Fair,
the French edition of
Réalités.

Dr. Tiffany smiled, exuding the confidence of a man who dealt every day with the lives and deaths of people with very deep pockets. “You said on the phone you were a friend of Lady Ash Canfield.”

“Yes, I was.”

“That makes two of us. Terrible loss. And you’re a friend of Dina Alstetter as well?”

“She asked me to speak with you.”

“Yes? Concerning—?”

“Lady Canfield’s medical records. My coroner says they’re not complete. There are no blood analyses.”

Dr. Tiffany’s eyes were intelligent, shrewd. “Lady Canfield’s husband has the right to keep them confidential.”

“Mrs. Alstetter says Lady Canfield was going to divorce her husband. As next of kin, she’d like to know what killed her sister.”

“Congestive heart failure.”

“My coroner says something got across the blood-brain barrier. He says you’re protecting yourself. Mrs. Alstetter wants to know your side of things before she takes legal steps.”

The doctor looked toward Cardozo with that built-in coolness of his profession. “Nothing could have saved Lady Canfield. Lieutenant, have you heard the term
HIV
?”

“It causes AIDS. Is that what Lady Canfield had?”

Dr. Tiffany leaned back in his chair.

“AIDS manifested in Zaire twelve years ago,” he said. “Cuban troops brought AIDS to this hemisphere and to Central America. American mercenaries and military advisers brought AIDS from Central America to New York, where it entered the gay community and the heterosexual swinging community. Because gays are a small population, living in three or four ghettos across the country, the number of repeat exposures was enormous, and the disease followed a spectacular, fulminating course. What people are just beginning to grasp is that AIDS may have spread just as rapidly among heterosexuals. Because it’s had the entire American population to fan out through, repeat heterosexual exposures have been far lower than among gays. On the other hand, total exposures have been enormously higher, given that heterosexuals outnumber gays ten to one. We do know that one repeatedly exposed heterosexual group, non-IV-using female prostitutes, is showing double the rate of infection that male homosexuals in New York City did four years ago. If you extrapolate from that statistic, we have a holocaust down the road.”

Dr. Tiffany shook his head and paused and sat there just looking at Cardozo.

Cardozo sat there looking back.

“Are you Catholic or Fundamentalist or born again?” Dr. Tiffany asked.

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t want to offend you.”

“You couldn’t even begin.”

“With the virus as widespread as it is, and the Catholic hierarchy and the Falwellians dead set against educating the public, the caseload is doubling every six months. Over a tenth of the population has been exposed, and possibly a third of those exposed will die within seven years. How does that grab you, Lieutenant?”

“Doctor,” Cardozo said, “you don’t need to shout. Put me on the mailing list. I’ll contribute. Could you just tell me if you tested Ash Canfield’s blood?”

Dr. Tiffany rose and walked to his files. “Would you mind coming over here, Lieutenant?”

Dr. Tiffany pulled a gold keychain from his pocket and unlocked one of the file drawers. The drawer slid out smoothly on noiseless rollers.

“There’s a lot of agony going on out there, Lieutenant. Not just the kind you police deal with. These are the records of tens of thousands of blood tests, X rays, CAT scans, examinations by dozens of our doctors. They go back five years.”

Cardozo stared at the alphabetized folders, aware that something alien and menacing was passing under his eyes.

“The men and women in these files have suffered physical degradation you could not begin to imagine. Over half of them are dead. And the others don’t have long.”

Cardozo ran his eye from the back of the drawer forward to the C’s and then along the names.
CLEMENS, CANNING, CANFIELD
.

“In these drawers you’ll find the ex-wife of the head of the largest communications conglomerate in the country. A nun. Top fashion designers. Children. Infants. Grandfathers. Firemen. Pro football players. Some of your own coworkers. Some of mine. Famous actors. Actors who were never famous and never will be. Soldiers—men who survived Vietnam. Help yourself.”

Cardozo drew out the folder marked
CANFIELD, ASH
, and stared at the photograph of Ash Canfield at nearly full body-weight, at the sheets of computer-generated graphs and printout.

“I don’t understand these graphs,” he said.

“Lady Ash Canfield had no T-cells and her blood tested positive for HIV antibodies.”

Cardozo dropped the file back into place. An awareness was pressing at the margin of his consciousness. Something to do with the drawer, a deep drawer, the letters running back through the early H’s. He saw that the last name was Hatfield.

“What about this one?” he drew the folder out. The photo showed a wholesome-looking man in his mid-thirties,
HATFIELD, BRIAN
. “Dead or alive?”

“Brian was one of mine,” Dr. Tiffany said. “He died last summer.”

Cardozo drew out the neighboring folder,
HALLEY, JOHN
. His stomach tightened as though a fist had slammed him. The face in the photograph was Jodie Downs’s.

“Tell me about this patient,” Cardozo said. “John Halley.”

“John was one of my outpatients. He had ARC—AIDS-related complex. He dropped out of the program a little over five months ago.

“Is ARC infectious?”

“We don’t know. Some people seem to be able to transmit the virus without coming down with AIDS themselves. I’d have to answer that one with a guarded yes.”

“What’s the incubation period?”

“There’s a lot of misinformation in the press on that. We don’t know what triggers the virus once it’s in the blood. There could be cofactors we’re completely unaware of. So far as we know, the disease can manifest anytime between exposure and death. So I’d put what you call the incubation period at anywhere from an hour to forty years.”

“Then if someone was playing around with John Halley’s blood, there’s a chance that person might pick up the disease?”

“Blood is the major vector. But that depends what you mean by ‘playing around.’”

“Light cutting.”

“Cutting through the skin?” Dr. Tiffany sounded perplexed.

“Yeah. Ritual stuff. S.m.” Cardozo remembered a case from eight years back. Two fifty-year-old angel-dust freaks who’d thought they were vampires. “There may even be some—uh—drinking.”

“Drinking Halley’s
blood
?”

“Possibly.”

“Anyone behaving that way in this city today runs an excellent chance of already having the disease.” An excellent chance, Dr. Tiffany’s tone of voice seemed to say, and a richly deserved one.

That evening at home Cardozo opened the Manhattan telephone directory. He turned to the
H
’s, counting Hatfields. There were eleven.

He sat a moment, feeling a thickening layer of certainty. It couldn’t be chance, he told himself. Chance never took such perfect aim.

44

C
ARDOZO SEARCHED THROUGH HIS
Rolodex till he found
Beaux Arts Properties, Ltd.
He propped the card against the phone as a reminder to call Melissa Hatfield when her office opened—ten
A.M.

He settled down to read yesterday’s fives on a corporate takeover lawyer whose body had been found a week ago in the park at Sutton Place. Monteleone’s spelling, as usual, was atrocious.

At 8:37 Cardozo’s phone rang.

“We have to have a talk, Vince.” It was Mel O’Brien, the chief of detectives. Usually phone talks with O’Brien began with his hatchet man, Detective Inigo, and then thirty to ninety seconds on hold before you got through to Himself. It was a rare thing for the CD to place his own call, and it was a dangerous thing when his voice was as easy and congenial as it was now. “Nine o’clock, my office, okay?”

Which gave Cardozo exactly twenty-two minutes to bust his ass getting through morning rush-hour traffic down to One Police Plaza.

Mel O’Brien stood at the window, gazing out at the fall sky and the glow it cast on the high rises beginning to encircle Chinatown. “What are you up to, Vince? Spending all your time in the field? Out-Sherlocking your own men?”

“No, sir. Unless it’s a task force, I don’t go into the field.”

“How many hours have you logged in the precinct this last month?”

“It’s in the log.”

“I wouldn’t mind knowing what cases you’re on.”

“You do know, Chief.”

The CD turned and looked at Cardozo. “You were tying up the computer a few weeks back—running a lot of lists through—what was that all about?”

Cardozo had a sense that his head was about to be held under a bucket of bureaucratic horsepiss. “It related to an ongoing homicide.”

“What homicide?”

“Sunny Mirandella, a stewardess. She was murdered in her apartment up on Madison.”

Which wasn’t exactly a lie, but it was pretty thin ice.

“You had Babe Devens into the precinct for a slide show.” O’Brien’s gaze moved over Cardozo with the coolness of a stethoscope. He was making it very obvious that he’d been checking back over Cardozo’s movements, that he had the power to do it and that he had a damned good reason to do it.

“I was showing Mrs. Devens slides from the Downs case.”

“You thought Mrs. Devens was involved?”

“I hoped she could give me some help.”

The CD sat down in his big upholstered swivel chair, shaking his head from side to side. “Jesus Christ, Vince, Devens and Downs are closed. You closed them. We’ve got five new homicides a day in this city and we’re not even making arrests in three a week.”

“Chief—you don’t have to worry about me.”

“Because that wasn’t the only time you were seen with Mrs. Devens.” O’Brien was studying Cardozo, watching to see what his reaction would give away. “You two were at a viewing at the Campbell Funeral Home.”

At that point the whole picture changed.

Cardozo had known he was taking risks: even though he hadn’t let his ongoing caseload slide, if he reopened closed cases without a good cause and a fast result, and the wrong people found out, the price could be his shield and his pension. He could find his ass busted back to patrolman. But now he saw that if he
did
show cause and produce results, the price could be all that and a little bit more too.

“Ash Canfield was a friend,” he said. “She died, she had a viewing. I went.”

The complaint had to have come from Countess Vicki. Again. Which showed Cardozo how the chain of communication ran—from the countess to someone who was probably Ted Morgenstern, to the D.A. to the CD.

“And Babe Devens?” O’Brien asked.

“Mrs. Devens is a friend too. If there’s something wrong with our going to a funeral home I wish you’d tell me.”

“Did you go on job time?”

“It was a viewing, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like I was going to a party.”

“It wasn’t like you were going to a homicide, either.”

O’Brien gave him a long, dark look. It galled Cardozo to be reminded that this man had an absolute right to tell him what to do; it galled him to accept that sometimes in this job nothing was wanted or tolerated but obedience.

“What was the case you were discussing with Dan Hippolito last Tuesday?” O’Brien asked. “Was that job-related too?”