VC01 - Privileged Lives (67 page)

As Cardozo and Cordelia entered the building there was a buzzing sound of voices. A small crowd stood in the hallway. At first they seemed to be the overflow of some party, chatting, and Cardozo half expected to see that they were holding glasses of wine.

But one of the men was holding up Babe Devens.

Her hair was tangled across her face and her evening dress was ripped. She stretched out a hand to Cardozo. The hand held a shoe, held it tightly, like a weapon. There was blood on the toe.

Cardozo opened his arms and she stepped in against him and he hugged her. Then Babe put both hands on Cordelia’s head and kissed her.

“What happened?” Cardozo said.

A professorial man in his late forties stepped forward. “I saw it.” He was gray-haired with a world-battered, intellectual sort of look, wearing an open-necked shirt and blazer. “A madman was going at her with a sledgehammer. If we hadn’t walked in when we did, he would have smashed her head open.”

“It was Loring.” Babe’s breathing steadied. “He was waiting upstairs.”

“Are you okay?” Cardozo asked.

“Okay now,” she said, but there was a look in her eyes and it was light-years away from okay.

Cardozo took Cordelia and Babe up in the elevator to the sixth floor. A hole had been hammered in the apartment door and splintered wood littered the hallway. He pushed the door open.

The structural columns in the apartment glowed in the light coming through the windows. He flicked the light switch. Half the furniture in the room had been shattered.

“My God,” Cordelia whispered, and put her hands to her face.

“He was waiting here to kill you, Cordelia,” Cardozo said. “You, not your mother. And you know who sent him.”

52

L
UCINDA MACGILL, TALL AND
slim, carried herself from the car to the doorway with a purposeful stride. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?”

“Vince told me to find you.” Monteleone leaned his thumb on the buzzer. “That’s all I know.” His pale, heavy-jawed face stared impatiently between the bars of the wrought-iron grill.

A moment later Cardozo opened the town house door. He looked agitated. “Glad you’re both here. I appreciate it.”

He took MacGill and Monteleone upstairs to a room with cherry-wood paneling. Lucinda MacGill glanced at the French impressionists on the wall.

“Your surroundings have improved, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks. Have a seat.”

MacGill sat down in a silk upholstered bentwood chair and surveyed Cardozo with a steady eye.

“Let me just give you some idea what’s coming down,” Cardozo said. “I have two very nervous ladies in the next room. Tonight an attempt was made on the life of one of them, but it was meant for the other. You know the mother, Babe Devens. She’s the one who almost got taken out. I don’t think you know the daughter, Cordelia Koenig. Cordelia has been through a lot. A
lot.
She’s at the breaking point, and she’s ready to tell us just about everything we need to make an indictment. Is your tape recorder loaded, Counselor?”

Lucinda MacGill slid her Panasonic out of her purse. “With a ninety-minute tape.”

“We’re going to need every inch of it. Let’s go.” Cardozo showed the way to the room next door.

Cordelia was sitting on the deep plush sofa, not moving, tensed, her eyes fixed on the green marble fireplace with its brass griffin and irons. Babe was sitting in the chair beside her daughter, and she shifted nervously while Cardozo made introductions.

Lucinda MacGill adjusted herself in a comfortable chair. Her eyes took in the dark oak paneling, the oyster-colored silk curtains, the Boesendorfer concert grand piano. Bowls of cut roses and gardenias lightly scented the air.

“Anytime you’re ready, Cordelia,” Cardozo said.

Lucinda MacGill started her tape recorder.

Cordelia seemed to lose herself for a moment, blinking and gazing around the room as though she had gone to sleep somewhere else and just woken up in a place she’d never seen before. When she finally spoke, her words had a once-removed, hearsay quality, as if everything she was describing had happened way offstage to someone else.

“We started making love when I was eleven. I didn’t really know about sex and I didn’t know what we were doing and I didn’t know he was filming it. He gave me drugs. He said he loved me. He said we’d get married when I was sixteen.”

Her uninflected tone told of a life of anguish and solitude, a life so screwed up that there had never been any point not screwing it up further.

“He said Mother would be drunk that night and so would Scottie. All I’d have to do would be to go into the bedroom and put the needle into her arm and empty the syringe. My mother and stepfather came home drunk and they passed out. I went into their bedroom and I put the needle into my mother’s arm.”

Babe was sitting there, erect and slender against the back of her chair, looking at her daughter with eyes that were wide and pained.

“I only gave her half the dose,” Cordelia said.

“Just a minute,” Lucinda MacGill said. “You did what?”

“I gave her half.” Cordelia blinked hard and a confused frown made tiny lines in her face. “I don’t know why. I guess I couldn’t kill her all the way.”

Lucinda MacGill rose. “Miss Koenig, don’t say another word to me or to Lieutenant Cardozo or to Detective Monteleone or to any member of the police force or district attorney’s office.”

Cardozo’s head snapped back into a disbelieving stare. “What the hell are you pulling?”

“Lieutenant,” Lucinda MacGill said, “we need to have a word.”

He followed her into the hallway.

“It’s tainted.” Lucinda MacGill spoke with flat finality, sliding the glass-paneled door shut behind them. “Nothing that girl says is admissible.”

“You got to be crazy.”

“Cordelia is confessing to the attempted murder of her mother. Her evidence is self-incriminating. She should be represented by counsel when she talks to the police.” Lucinda MacGill’s manner was precise, unexcited, unemotional. The perfect justice machine. “No counsel on earth would permit her to make those statements.”

“She chooses to waive her goddamn rights.”

Lucinda MacGill’s eyes said Vince Cardozo was an idiot. “You can read her her Miranda twelve times and she can waive her rights thirteen times, she’s still got to have a lawyer because otherwise this is not going to be allowed as evidence in
any
court of law.”

“We’re not indicting
her
for Christ’s sake! We’re going after the man who seduced her and gave her that syringe.”

“Has she told you his name?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. Don’t let her tell you.”

“I
want
to know his name. I want to nail him. That’s why I got you here.”

“You got me here and I’m spelling it out to you. Do this the right way, Vince.”

“What the hell is this, a minuet?”

“You’re dealing with an emotionally unstable girl—I know she’s young, I assume she’s unstable. Legally, she’s doubly incompetent. If all you’ve got is her testimony, and her testimony involves one word of what I just heard, get her a lawyer right now. Otherwise the D.A. won’t touch this megillah and your criminal’s going to walk.” She continued to fix Cardozo with a burning gaze. “I’m sorry. Whoever he is, he sounds like a real louse, but even if he doesn’t live under the law, we do.”

“Lucinda,” Cardozo said wearily, “what you’re not grasping is the human cost—the contamination this guy is leaving in his path.”

“Believe me, Vince, I do get the picture.”

There was no point going straight home. Cardozo knew he was too furious to sleep. He stopped off at the precinct.

He poured himself a coffee. It must have been sitting in the pot since 3
A.M.
of the day before. His first sip added to his sense that his life was not only unreal but disgusting.

He went to his cubicle. There were four new directives from the PC’s office. He sailed them over to the open file cabinet drawer. They plopped on top of last week’s.

Now he was staring at a flyer that someone had put on his desk:

MADAME ROBERTA—FORTUNES TOLD—ASTRAL READINGS

He was about to crumple it when he saw handwriting on the back:
Vince C, call Faye.
He went to the door.

“Who the hell is Faye?”

“She said you know her,” Sergeant Goldberg answered.

“You took this message, Goldberg? There’s no date, there’s no time, there’s no last name, there’s no number.”

“Hire a secretary,” Sergeant Goldberg grumbled.

Cardozo could think of only one Faye—Loring’s friend Faye di Stasio. He got the number from Information and dialed. On the seventh ring a clouded voice said hello.

“Faye? This is Lieutenant Vince Cardozo. You phoned me?”

“You asked me to keep an eye out for Claude. He’s set up a coke buy—tonight, two
A.M.
, outside the Inferno.”

“Who’s he selling to?”

“Me.”

Claude Loring held his arms and rubbed them: the weather was growing too cool for a sleeveless Levi’s jacket. Faye di Stasio followed him to the van parked across Ninth Avenue from the entrance to the Inferno.

Claude reached into the glove compartment and took out the little black paper bag. Faye dug into her pocket and pulled out a roll of twenties.

There was a pinging sound like a pebble striking a hub cap. Claude spun around.

“Freeze.” A man stood there, holding out a gold shield. “Lieutenant MacFinney, narcotics.”

Claude whirled and ran. Another cop stepped out from behind a parked Chevy, gun drawn. “You heard the man, Claude.”

Claude stopped in his tracks. A cinderblock was forming in his stomach. The cop knew Claude’s name. It was a setup—had to be.

“It’s not my coke, it’s hers.” Claude pointed. “Faye di Stasio, she’s a dealer, I was holding for her.”

The cop who’d said his name was MacFinney turned around. “Faye—go and sin no more.”

Faye stumbled into the darkness.

“Open the bag,” MacFinney said.

Claude opened the bag.

The other cop came forward, dangling a pair of handcuffs. “Up against the wall, fella.”

Claude turned himself toward the wall. There were two clicks and he felt the icy burn of metal against his wrists. The cops steered him to an unmarked car. Another cop was sitting inside in plainclothes. Recognition hit Claude like a slap.

Vince Cardozo slid over to make room. “We have to discuss a few matters with you, Claude. Possession with intent to sell and a homicide you attempted two nights ago.”

“I want to see my lawyer.”

“You don’t need a lawyer. It’s not you we’re after. Tell us who sent you to kill Cordelia Koenig.”

“I was at the Inferno talking to a guy with a green mohawk.” Claude Loring had a chain smoker’s rasp to his voice. “Then Jodie Downs came up and started butting in and being real obnoxious and I thought okay, punk, you just won the lottery, you’re it. I took him up to the van to smoke some crack and after that first hit he was mine. I told him I knew where we could get some more crack, and I took him up to Monserat’s party pad. I was the scout for Lew’s parties—I dug up the entertainment.”

“What kind of entertainment?” Cardozo said.

“People. Kids, guys, girls. Dead bodies.”

Lucinda MacGill was usually a bright, self-possessed young woman, but her upturned face stared at Loring in horror. “Where’d you get the dead bodies?” she asked.

“Monserat had a deal with a funeral home.”

“What funeral home?”

Claude Loring named a well-known funeral home. “They’d loan him the stiffs overnight. He paid two, three hundred dollars per body. He paid more for the dead bodies than for the living. I got a hundred for every guest I delivered. And all the drugs I wanted.”

“Were people tortured at these parties?” Cardozo said.

“The dead bodies we had to be careful with, because they had to look good from the neck up, you never knew who was open casket. But the people who weren’t dead, sometimes they got roughed up. Monserat says the way you get to the soul of another person is when you produce panic in them. You have someone there at your mercy and they’re panicked, think they could die any moment and it’s completely up to you, how you flip a coin.”

“Sounds like it excited you too,” Cardozo said.

“Yeah, it excited me. Everyone was getting off on everyone else getting off. Like a circle jerk.”

A blank, almost disgusted incredulity showed in Lucinda MacGill’s face.

“Anyone ever get killed at these parties?” Cardozo asked.

Loring had to think for a moment. “Not that I recall.”

“Where did the black bondage hood come from?”

“It was Monserat’s. It was a work of art, he used to say. Anyone who wore it became a masterpiece. He said masks were the real reality. He had lots of masks—different types—Halloween masks, joke store masks. But the bondage mask was special.”

“Special how?”

“That mask was reserved for the victims. If Jodie Downs hadn’t been wearing that mask I could never have hurt him. I’m a gentle guy, I don’t hurt people. But once Jodie had the mask on, for me he wasn’t human anymore. He turned into something else. When I looked at him in that mask five percent of me said he was a man and ninety-five percent of me said he was a monster. That mask had a nightmare look. Like anyone wearing it would cut your head off if you gave them the chance. They had to be killed. It was self-defense—you or them.”

Claude Loring flexed his hands nervously. Sitting in his jeans and
I LOVE NEW YORK
T-shirt, he looked taller than his six feet two, huge and rawboned, and those hands looked as though they could snap a human neck as easily as a celery stalk.

“Tell us who was at the party that night,” Cardozo said.

Claude Loring named names. Lucinda MacGill took notes.

“Who was wearing drag?” Cardozo asked.

“Two, three of them. That Duncan creep, Sir Dunk—he was wearing one of his wife’s red dresses—real glitzy number, shimmer and shimmy.”

“Was he wearing lipstick?”

“The works, rouge from his eyeballs down to his jowls. Believe me, some guys should not do drag. It’s beyond grotesque.”