VC01 - Privileged Lives (58 page)

“You’re not going to harass my client!” Morgenstern was backed against an étagère loaded with Kiwanis citations and autographed celebrity photos. His cobra-lidded eyes were blinking rapidly and an artery was pulsing in his temple. “We happen to live under a system called the law, Mr. Nazi, and you just get the hell out of this office and don’t come back without a warrant!”

“And let me tell
you
something, Clarence Darrow. You may be a whiz when it comes to engineering compassionate commutations for cold-blooded killers, but
this
commutation just boomeranged, because yesterday in Central Park some freak ripped the panties off of Harold Benziger’s stepdaughter and murdered her.”

“There’s no fucking connection!”

“What do you bet the
Daily News
can find a connection—like poetic justice? And shit will the press love the archdiocese tie-in. I’d like to see how fast His Eminence gives you the gate.”

“I don’t rat on my clients, and if any lies about any commutation appear in any newspaper, I’ll have you off the force! I will personally have your ass!”

“You’ll personally have my ass in your face, snake gills.” Cardozo turned to the little lady on the sofa. “Nice to see you again, Ms. Vlaminck.”

“Have we met?” she said pleasantly.

“We were at the same table at Holcombe Kaiser’s party for Tina Vanderbilt,”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, indeed. Nice to see you.”

“We fought like we’ve never fought before. I told him, don’t do crack, it makes you crazy. He threatened me with the bread knife.”

Faye di Stasio sat there a long time, her breasts rising and falling with the rhythm of her memories.

“I had to get him out. I couldn’t let him stay, crazy like that.”

Tears flooded her eyes. There was a defensive tone in her voice, but she didn’t look defensive. She looked crushed, as if all defenses had failed her long ago.

“I changed the locks. I can’t even begin to tell you the stuff he did.”

She began to tell him.

Cardozo listened patiently. She had something he needed and he was willing to flatter her with attention, even kindness if necessary, to get it.

“The cat—he killed the cat.” She looked at him blankly. “Who’d do a thing like that? Killing a cat?”

They sat there in silence. She lowered her eyes. She seemed shrunken. She was breathing hard, cigarette idling in one hand.

“Faye—where’s Claude now?”

“Gone.”

“Where?”

“I’m too tired, too confused to even want to think where.”

“He got a compassionate commutation to take care of his mother. Think he could be with her?”

She floated him a look. “His mother’s been dead three years.”

Cardozo breathed deeply, feeling frustration like a weight across his back. “Will you let me know if he shows up?”

“He won’t show up.” Her lower lip was trembling. “Not if he wants to stay living.”

Cardozo touched her cheek. “Don’t kill him. Phone me and let me do it for you, okay?”

Eight hours later, thinking Claude Loring might have returned to play in his old pigpen, Cardozo personally dredged the Inferno. Mission unsuccessful. It was four in the morning when he decided to call yesterday a day. He pulled himself groggily up the stairs and out into the street.

After the Inferno, New York smelled clean. Mist was closing in, washing the colors out of the buildings opposite.

Cardozo walked slowly south, stepping over fetid pockets of gutter water. The echo of his footsteps followed him. He passed a few moving figures on the sidewalk, a few zonked-out forms in doorways.

At the corner of Little West Twelfth and Gansevoort streets a truck blared its horn, blasting Cardozo out of his thoughts.

He stepped back and watched the driver negotiate the turn. There was a grinning steer painted on the side of the truck, and below it the message Sam’s Beef—Nobody Beats Our Meat.

Cardozo crossed the street. His feet were aware of edges and uneven surfaces, and he looked down and saw that the pavement had changed from asphalt to cobblestones.

His eyes came up and he was struck by something, a sign attached to the warehouse on the corner ahead of him. He paused to read the weathered black lettering.

To the right of the sign a doorway was tilting ten degrees off the vertical, leaning toward the Hudson River.

Cardozo stepped back and took a long, careful look. The building was six-storied, wood-framed, in poor repair. There were places where the shingle siding had begun to drop off.

Every bone in his body vibrated with the conviction that he knew this building.

“Where are these meat trucks, Babe?”

“In the street”

“What street?”

“Outside the building.”

Cardozo was sitting in his livingroom, sipping a Bud, his hand dipping into a bag of Nacho-flavored Doritos.

On the table Babe Vanderwalk Devens’s voice spooled out of the cassette player, dreaming, disembodied.

“The building is on the corner. The cobbled street meets the asphalt. The building is falling apart. The sign is in English and Spanish. Body parts of cows. The doorway is on the left. That’s where I go in.”

45

M
ATHILDE LHEUREUX HAPPENED TO
be nearest when the phone rang. “Babe,” she said, one hand over the mouthpiece, “for you—a Mr. Cardozo.”

Babe took the receiver and lifted the cord over the head of one of the seamstresses. “Vince? It doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s me. What are you doing?”

“Eighty-two things at once.”

Babe felt Mathilde Lheureux’s old humorous frowning gaze fix on her. Mathilde’s gray hair had turned totally white and she wore it pinned back from her forehead, but she still had the shrewd, naughty eyes of a playful monkey. Babe found something infinitely reassuring in that familiar smile and in that dear old face, only slightly aged from the face she remembered.

“Can you fit in an eighty-third?” Cardozo said.

Babe sighed. “Vince, it’s crazy here.”

Which was putting it mildly. She had been able to rent a little space for her own atelier in the penthouse of the Babethings building. Lawyers were working on the papers—for the moment she had a verbal agreement with Billi—and she and Mathilde had started on her summer and fall lines. Naturally, they hadn’t been able to put together their old group—but they’d found one of their old seamstresses, and one of the beaders, and two of the tailors.

“I guess I didn’t put that right,” Cardozo said. “I need your help. Can you meet me?”

Damn,
Babe thought. “When?”

“Soon as possible.”

They crossed Gansevoort Street through the bright sunlight—Babe in her pale blue Chanel, and Cardozo with his .38 in the armpit of his seersucker jacket, holding a tape recorder.

The wind had swept away the fog, and the sky had the blinding colorless brightness of a scoured frying pan.

Babe’s eyes scanned the derelict buildings. A perplexed expression hovered on her face.

Cardozo pushed the button on the cassette player. Babe’s voice came sleepwalking out.
“The building is on the corner. The cobbled street meets the asphalt.”

He took note of her reactions. Her hand tightening into a fist. Her mouth pulling shut. Her eyes narrowing, as though fending off images.

Next to the warehouse was a construction site: three stories of girders, and from the look of it many more to come. The steel was already rusted, as if it had been recycled from another structure.

One of the two signs was crudely painted on plywood:

DEMOLITION BY ZAMPIZI BROS.

347 FLOWER STREET, BROOKLYN N.Y.

The other was professionally lettered in flowing script:

THIS SITE WILL BE THE LOCATION OF
THE LUXOR

A THIRTY-TWO-STORY LUXURY CO-OP

BROUGHT TO YOU BY BALTHAZAR PROPERTIES

READY FOR SPRING OCCUPANCY

OFFERING BY PROSPECTUS ONLY

Workers moved slowly about on foot and machine. The zonked winos of the neighborhood had gathered on the opposite sidewalk, in front of the Espanita meat-packing plant, to watch and cheer.

The air smelled of rancid oil and decomposing animal parts with a faint understench of diluted sewage.

He paced himself to her, slow and easy.

In front of the warehouse, dappled in the sunlight, a pile of broken plaster waited in a dumpster. A man wearing a filthy I Love New York T-shirt and barber-pole-striped skivvies was picking bare-handed through the rubble.

Cardozo pushed the cassette button again.

“The sign is in English and Spanish. Body parts of cows.”

Babe stopped to stare at the sign.

“Familiar?”

She shook her head. She shuddered. “How can they eat eyes?”

“The doorway is on the left. That’s where I go in.”

Beside the shadowy doorway a trickle of water seeped from a split in the brick wall, zigzagging across the sidewalk.

The entrance area was dim and windowless, smelling of darkness and mildew. There was a bank of eight tarnished buzzers, four of them labeled. Cardozo copied down the names.

“Up the stairs in the dark. One flight.”

He led the way, climbing slowly up the peeling stairs. Babe guided herself up behind him, hand sliding lightly along the banister.

The stairway had cracked plaster walls, a ceiling fuzzy with spiderwebs. Heat beat stiflingly against the boarded windows. The narrow steps hadn’t been swept in years, but then the people likely to use a stairway in a building like this were apt to have other things on their minds than hygiene.

At the first landing Cardozo glanced down the crumbling hallway. Electric wires dangled from the ceiling. A junkie was sprawled in a doorway, snoring.

“Another flight.”

They went up a second flight of decaying stairs.

“
I can hear voices.”

“Whose voices?”

“Mickey Mouse. Richard Nixon.”

Three steps led from the next landing to the corridor.

The hallway was two doors deep, with windows on one side. Hexagonal wire ribbing reinforced the panes.

“
I open the door.”

“Which door, Babe?”

She stared at the first door. Her head came around. “That one.”

Cardozo crouched at the second door.

Babe hung back.

He inserted his MasterCard in the crack between the door and the jamb.

The door panels were the color of tapioca pudding that had been left out of the refrigerator for thirty years. Paint was peeling off the woodwork.

His hands moved carefully, silently, jiggling the latch open. The door swung smoothly inward.

She came down the corridor hesitantly.

She waited at the doorsill, staring. The room had been freshly painted a bright, flat white. It was stripped of all furnishing.

She went in first and he closed the door behind them. He slid the bolt.

She stood at the window and looked at the view across the low roofs of the surrounding warehouses to the higher roofs of Greenwich Village’s rowhouses. In the distance loomed the peaked high rises going up along the river and the glass towers of the financial district.

Cardozo began at the top. His eyes roamed the ceiling, noted it was freshly plastered, then slid over walls, freshly plastered and painted. The floor was oak boarding, polyurethaned to a mirror gloss. He noted long, parallel rows of new scratches, as though the wood had been freshly clawed by a dragon.

It was the sort of place that made nighttime sounds during the day: waterpipes talking to themselves, floorboards squeaking, things pinging in the walls.

His eye was troubled by dead spots on the floor where the light didn’t reflect. He crouched and made out a spattering of rust-colored deposits, barely visible.

“They don’t hear me. John Wayne is passing champagne. The man is naked.” “What man, Babe?” “The young man. I don’t know him. He has blond hair. He’s lying in the corner.”

“Which corner, Babe?”

Babe walked slowly into the other room. Also empty. Also white. There were two paper cups by the radiator, lying on their side.

Cardozo picked one up and saw the dry ring of coffee in the bottom. A bit further along a bottle top glinted. He stooped. Heineken beer.

“Winnie the Pooh and the Mad Hatter pick him up and tie him to the H.”

Now she snapped around and stared at the north wall. Something about it absorbed her. She was holding herself slightly forward of the perpendicular, trembling, on the brink of something.

His eye scanned, picking out details where there had only been featureless white. Ripples in the plaster. Lumps in the paint. A small elephant-shaped stain, a little below shoulder level, the color of rust. Next to it two holes, each a quarter inch in diameter. Someone had bored through the plaster into the wood beam beneath.

Below the two holes, at knee level, another pair of holes, identical to the first. Four feet to the right, two more pairs of holes, similarly spaced.

There was another rust-colored stain at ankle level, this one shaped like a tiny map of South America.