VC01 - Privileged Lives (7 page)

“Oh, yeah? What show’s that?”

“Toyota Presents.”
She was searching him for a reaction.

“Oh, yeah.
Toyota Presents.”

“A lot of stars got their starts in industrials. Shirley MacLaine danced for General Motors.”

“Right. I heard that somewhere.” Sam Richards opened his notebook. “Debbi, could you tell me when you were in the building yesterday, when you came in, when you went out, what hours you were in the lobby, the elevator, anywhere else on the premises?”

She said she’d worked late, come home around noon Saturday, slept till an hour before the show, left the building around seven, returned early this morning.

“Did you see or hear anything unusual in the building?” It occurred to him that if Debbi Hightower had been as stoned yesterday as she seemed today, she wouldn’t have noticed an elephant falling out of the sky.

She hoisted one leg up and placed a foot on the edge of the beanbag. Her toenails were pink, which didn’t go with the green fingernails. “Seemed a lot less busy than usual.”

“Any odd noises or people?”

She thought a moment. “Well, it’s all relative, isn’t it? I mean, what do you consider odd?”

“Strangers in the building?” William Benson, who owned the apartment on the twenty-eighth floor, shook his head. He was a small, lean man about eighty years of age. With elegant carelessness, his right hand twirled a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals. Gold cufflinks winked at the wrists of his burgundy smoking jacket. “No, none that I noticed.”

“Any strange noises?” Detective Monteleone asked.

“I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you that. Memorial Day’s a wonderful weekend for working. I turned off my hearing aid.”

For the first time, Detective Monteleone noticed the small beige plastic button in Benson’s left ear.

Behind the eighty-year-old architect the livingroom glowed like an art gallery, with track lighting that picked out abstract expressionist and pop art paintings on the walls.

“There was one thing,” Benson said, “but you could hardly call it unusual, it happens so often. I went out for the paper, and I had to use my key to let myself back into the building. Our Saturday doorman, Hector, wasn’t at the door. I have a hunch he sits down in the personnel room watching ballgames on TV.”

“Tell me that’s not a Gestapo tactic. Tell me it’s not.” Fred Lawrence, the owner of the apartment on floor 11, was explaining to Detective Sam Richards how he happened to be in New York on a holiday weekend when his wife and son were out romping at their summer rental in Ocean Beach. “To phone on a Friday—not even the courtesy of a letter—and call a field audit Tuesday—knowing Monday’s Memorial Day. It destroys my weekend, it terrifies my client, it wastes everybody’s time. I’ve never let a client overstate deductions. I don’t work that way.”

Sam Richards nodded, shaping his lips into a conciliatory smile. “We’ve all had our troubles with the IRS.”

“It’s harassment, plain and simple.” Fred Lawrence, his stomach pushing a breathless bulge into his pink Polo sports shirt, his face beet red and gaunt, was clearly a man under strain. His fringe of black hair glistened with sweat. Behind gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes darted, never once meeting Sam Richards’s. He paced the room, fingers skittering across the edges of hi-tech leather and chrome chairs and glass-topped tables.

“And then this outrage in six—how the hell did a thing like that happen? We’re supposed to have security in this building.”

“With your help, Mr. Lawrence, we hope to find out how it happened.”

Fred Lawrence threw a startled glance at the detective. “You seem to think I have some information—well, I don’t.”

“What time did you return to the building?”

“Around noon yesterday.”

“You parked in the garage?”

“Yes, I rent a space there.”

“Did you notice anything or anyone strange in the building over the weekend?”

“As I tried to explain, Officer, I’m under a great deal of pressure, I’m extremely preoccupied, and I apologize, but the answer is no, I noticed nothing until all you police came pouring in.”

Cardozo pulled his Honda Civic into the unlit alley beside the ninety-five-year-old precinct building. There was a parking space beneath the fire escape. He made sure to lock up. Unmarked police cars had been getting ripped off lately in the precinct parking lot.

He nearly tripped in the dark over a stack of A-frame barriers. They had been piled in reserve two years ago for crowd control. Crowds had come and gone, the barriers had stayed.

Above the green globes glowing on either side of the station house door the precinct flag fluttered limply from its pole, a rumpled seal of the City of New York and the number 22. The two two was one of the six precincts that used to make up the Seventh Division. Changing city administrations had moved the numbers around, but the sooty bricks and rusting iron and peeling paint were still there on Sixty-third Street, distinctly out of place in the heart of Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District.

The inside of the 22d Precinct station house was as shabby as the outside, perhaps a little more so since it never got rained on except for parts of the fifth floor, where the roof leaked. For three decades City Hall had been promising to rebuild.

The Muzak was playing “One for My Baby.” Cardozo disliked Muzak, and he especially disliked that tune. He didn’t see why a police force that was cutting patrols to meet its budget needed canned music.

He waved to the lieutenant working the complaint desk, then followed two sergeants up the old iron-banistered staircase. The radios buckled to their hips gave off synchronized bursts of static. They were pulling a handcuffed hooker through a door. She was kicking, screeching, beginning to lose her blond wig.

Things were quiet tonight.

Cardozo paused at the second floor corridor and watched the sergeants push the woman into the precinct holding cage. She began shaking the bars, screaming that they’d stolen her motherfucking wig and her lawyer was going to kick their honky asses.

The marble steps leading to the next floor were gritty with ancient filth. On a bench in the hall a detective was taking a statement from an elderly male complainant who had just been robbed at knifepoint on Lexington Avenue.

“The city’s not safe anymore,” the man was moaning. Cardozo felt sorry for a guy that old and just beginning to learn.

He entered the Detective Unit squad room. The large office was crammed with metal desks and files and old wood tables. The windows were covered with grills, and the grills and glass had been painted over in an industrial green that almost matched the walls.

It was late and the room was deserted except for the detective on night duty. “What’s happening?” Cardozo asked.

“There’s an R.I.P. up on Madison,” Tom Sweeney said. “Two Hispanics seen breaking into a chocolate shop.”

Cardozo gave Sweeney a look. Most cops did their eight hours and got their asses home. Not Sweeney, at least not lately. He seemed to be in the squad room round the clock. Cardozo had heard rumors that his wife was in the process of leaving him for another woman. He felt sorry for the guy.

Sweeney said a ten thirty—reported stickup—had come in fifteen minutes ago: a Caucasian with a .38 had walked into the Bojangles on Sixtieth and taken four hundred dollars, wallets, rings, and wrist watches. No casualties.

The room smelled of coffee. Cardozo made his way to the source of the smell. “What kind of idiot would do that? Anyone sitting in Bojangles, the watch has got to be a Timex, the ring’s tin. Criminals used to have brains in this city.”

An evil-looking Sola for charging radio batteries sat on a padlocked cabinet. The cabinet was where detectives weary of carrying three pounds of metal could stow their weapons. Two Mr. Coffees sat quietly steaming beside the Sola. The squad split the cost of cheap drip-grind and kept the coffee makers working around the clock. Cardozo poured a Styrofoam cup of brew that looked as though it had been jelling in the bottom of the pot for two days. He ripped open an envelope of Sweet ’n Low and let the powder silt down into his coffee.

“What’s that pross in for downstairs?” he said. “They made loitering a crime again?”

“Offering to sell coke to Lieutenant Vaughan.”

Cardozo made a face. Another hooker trying to sell talcum powder to a plainclothesman. He couldn’t believe Vaughan would bother with the arrest, the paperwork, the aggravation. “What’s Vaughan want with bullshit like that?”

“You know what the CP says: we gotta increase productivity.” Sweeney nodded toward the bulletin board where the two-week-old word-processed directive from the police commissioner’s office had been push-pinned. “Budget time in Nueva York.
El capitano
wants to goose those percentages.”

Cardozo’s eyes went across the deserted room. The detention cage, butted into a corner, was empty for the moment, with a two-year-old copy of
Penthouse
magazine spread facedown on the bench.

He crossed to his office, a cubicle with precinct green walls.

His desk was the same gray metal as the desks outside. The phone was an early touch-tone model that Bell had discontinued in 1963; it had had a crack under the cradle since ’73 and the tape on the crack got changed whenever it dried up. The typewriter was a model-T Underwood that you couldn’t have donated to a reform school.

He frowned. A dismal-looking pile of departmental forms had accumulated around the typewriter since Saturday. Today was supposed to be his RDO, his regular day off; he was supposed to be in Rockaway with his little girl.

He sat in the swivel chair and saw that the top piece of paper was a hand-scrawled note:
CALL CHIEF O’BRIEN AT HOME A.S.A.P.
, followed by the captain’s home phone and the initials of the sergeant who had taken the call.

Cardozo dialed the Woodlawn number.

As the phone rang he glanced through the rest of the paper. Mostly it was a bunch of fives, DD5 supplementary complaint reports, the triplicates that detectives filled out summarizing progress on ongoing cases. As unsolved crimes got stale, regulations required a minimum of two reports annually. The fives mounted up—the older the report, the thicker the fistful of blue forms stapled to it.

A voice cut into the ringing. Gruff. “O’Brien.”

“Chief? Vince. Just got your message.”

“Vince, the goddamnedest thing. Remember that Babe Vanderwalk business seven years ago—the husband tried to—”

“I was on your task force. I remember.”

“Damned if Babe Vanderwalk didn’t come out of her coma. The hospital phoned. And then a lawyer phoned. Represents the family, they don’t want any fuss, they don’t want any publicity.”

“Mazel tov
to the Vanderwalks. Can she talk?”

“She can talk. She’s normal. Lost a little weight, joints a little stiff, but she’s all there.”

“Does she remember anything?”

“Go see her and find out. I’m delegating you.”

Cardozo exhaled loudly. “Chief, you just handed me a one-legged John Doe.”

“You know the background, Vince. Go to Doctors Hospital, get a statement, and close the case. Five minutes.”

“I can’t control what she’s going to say. Her statement may open the case.”

“Get a statement that closes the case. Go up there tomorrow. They wake those patients up at six, seven o’clock. You don’t have to wait for visiting hours.”

“Chief, I honestly—”

“Thanks, Vince, I knew I could count on you.”

The receiver went dead in Cardozo’s hand. He looked at it a moment and then slammed it back onto the cradle.

Though it was seven years in the past, the Vanderwalk case still stoked old resentments in him. He’d worked his butt off collecting solid evidence, he’d avoided the minefields of the Miranda and Esposito decisions, the jury had convicted, and then on appeal the D.A. had accepted a plea bargain that let the killer off.

Except if Babe Vanderwalk was awake, the killer wasn’t a killer anymore.

Anyway, that’s tomorrow,
Cardozo reminded himself.
Today’s today.

He pushed Babe Vanderwalk Devens out of his head and began skimming fives. They were drearily familiar: ripped-up hookers, businessmen with no ID dead in trash barrels, family fights where somebody had taken out a knife or gun, stewardesses jumping out of their Third Avenue shared apartments—or had they been pushed? They were like old friends to him. He’d been staring at some of them for over ten years.

And they all concluded with the same words:
NO NEW INVESTIGATIVE LEADS SINCE LAST REPORT
.

The cases kept pouring in, dead bodies that had all been human beings, every one of them entitled to live till accident or natural death claimed them and, failing that, entitled to justice. It was his job to see they at least got justice. No homicide case was ever closed till it was cleared, but fewer than a third were cleared nowadays. That meant a backlog of over five hundred in the two two alone. A lot of killers were walking around on their own cognizance out there.

His eye went guiltily to the filing cabinet. The bottom drawer was wedged shut against an overflow of departmental orders that he had yet to get around to reading. The precinct was drowning in paper. Paper had become the measure of all things. It got you promoted, got you demoted, decided your salary, your rank, your standing in the department’s eyes. Paper was where it was at.

“Hey, Vince.” Tommy Daniels from the Photographic Unit came bounding through the door and clamped a hand on Cardozo’s shoulder. “Got the pictures you wanted of the ten eighteen.” He thrust out an envelope.

Cardozo slipped the glossies out of the manila envelope. It surprised him how young the dead man was: perhaps twenty-two years old, very blond, with medium-length, shiny hair. The eyes were long-lashed, the chin strong, almost challenging, with a cleft to it, the lips full but not quite pouting. A handsome boy. He seemed to be contentedly dreaming.

“Beautiful, hey?” Daniels said.

Cardozo looked at his photographic expert’s thick black hair, his chartreuse shirt that lit up three walls of the cubicle, his face shining with an eagerness to please that would have been cute in a cocker spaniel.