VC01 - Privileged Lives (70 page)

The technician turned to acknowledge the compliment. He had plain features, a little slope to his nose. He was a quiet man, competent-looking.

Cardozo’s gaze moved slowly from one face to the other and then to the monitor with its shadowy play of shapes. “All you’ve got is a lousy TV hookup. You’ve got no control over what happens.”

“You haven’t seen this girl in action. Sit down, Vince. Watch. She’s amazing.”

Cardozo didn’t sit, but he watched.

The sound was crackling and the middle third of the picture rippled. The technician fine-tuned. The image on the monitor resolved into lights and darks, the curve of a woman’s shoulder, her arm touching the lower part of her face. Cordelia.

“She’s too close,” the technician said.

“He knows,” Monteleone said. “He’ll back her off. He wants this film to turn out as good as we do.”

He wants to kill her,
Cardozo thought.
He sent a man to kill her the other night. He hasn’t changed his mind.

“Come here,” a man’s voice said.

She moved back, and now the camera saw a man sitting on a sofa, wearing a half mask over his eyes and a striped dressing gown. His arms went around her. He folded his hands on her breast. He drew her down. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her throat, and then lightly brushed his lips against hers.

“I’ve missed you.” She unbuttoned her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

He couldn’t kill her,
the thought came back.
Not on camera.

“Why have you been staying away?” the masked man asked.

But the man’s a necro. He wants jack-off films of people dying. What could be hotter than this, a home movie of yours truly killing one of the country’s top models?

“A lot’s been happening.” Cordelia let her skirt drop, then peeled her panties off. They slid silkenly down her.

The man put his face close to Cordelia’s. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

“Do you forgive me for the other night?” the man asked. “Tina’s party went on forever. I tried to phone you but there was something wrong with your machine.”

“That’s okay, I went out.”

He sniffed at her mouth, her eyes, her hairline. He sniffed at the tops of her breasts. His hand moved along her leg.

As Cardozo watched, something crawled through him.

The man’s dressing gown fell open.

“I have a confession to make.” Cordelia began stroking his penis. “I ran out of coke Memorial Day weekend. I went to your old place to borrow some. You had a party going on. A dude was tied up.”

Memorial Day weekend,
Cardozo thought. His mind had been working on it but it wasn’t till now that it came together.

“You were torturing him,” Cordelia said. “It freaked me. Because it turned me on. I’ve never been turned on like that.”

Cordelia
had seen them torturing Downs. And Cordelia must have told her mother while Babe was still in coma. The time sequence fit.
That
was Babe’s telepathy, her dream. The puzzle dissolved into the simple image of a panicked child telling her mommy the terrible thing that had happened, pleading with mommy to make the world right again.

On the screen, the man took Cordelia’s hand away from his hard cock. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s make it better.”

He got up and disappeared from the frame. A moment later he returned and laid out his banquet on the coffee table: four glassine envelopes, horn-handled scissors, four red-capped vials, a soup spoon, a chafing dish heater, a silver caviar cup, red rubber tubing, an eyedropper, a cigarette lighter, a bottle of mineral water, a syringe.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Cordelia asked.

“Of course.”

“Tell me about it. Get me hot.”

“She’s great,” Monteleone said. “She’s handling it.”

Monteleone could have been watching a game show. He wasn’t feeling what Cardozo was feeling. Cardozo had a sense of a change in the man’s expression. Something shifted behind the eyeslits.

The man lit the heater, then with the eyedropper measured mineral water into the cup. “I fought in the Second World War. Many people were killed.” He placed the cup over the flame and slowly tapped the crystals from the four vials into the water.

“Not that kind of killing,” Cordelia said. “I mean for kicks.”

“There are kicks in war. You’d be surprised.” One by one the man snipped the corners off the four envelopes and tapped their powdered contents into the mix.

“He’s cooking a speedball,” the technician said.

“That’s no speedball.” Cardozo didn’t believe it. He saw it happening in front of him, and he couldn’t believe it. “He’s melting down crack. That’s a fucking speedball express. Once that hits their bloodstream they’re going to be out of control.”

The man filled the syringe from the cup, drawing the liquid up into the transparent chamber. He laid the syringe on the table. He held out the red tubing, smiling.

Cordelia came toward him, smiling back at him. She stretched out her arms, palms toward the ceiling.

“Eenie, meenie, minie, moe,” the man said. “Where oh where shall the goodies go?”

“You choose which arm,” Cordelia said. “You always bring me luck.”

The man carefully knotted the tubing around her upper left arm. The swollen dark vein jutted in the crook.

Cordelia turned slightly, so that the man had to reorient himself. As he touched the tip of the needle to the pulsing vein, he was facing the TV camera.

Cardozo could feel something wordlessly taking shape. There was a tiny preparatory movement on the man’s part, and then with a quick jab he sank the needle tip into the vein and began to lower the plunger.

White-hot realization shot through Cardozo. “He’s giving it all to her! It’ll kill her!”

Cordelia’s free hand whipped up. Her fingers dug under the mask, clawing it up off the man’s eyes. His pivoting gaze froze. For one blinking, unbelieving moment the unmasked face of Baron Billi von Kleist stared straight into the camera.

Of course,
Cardozo realized.
Not Monserat. Von Kleist. The suitor, the guardian, the best friend.

Cordelia stretched out her hands to grab the syringe. The needle was shooting glittering droplets into space. Twenty fingers twisted around one another, tangoing across the screen, zooming in and out of focus, grappling for possession.

The baron bent Cordelia backward over the table. The lit heater wobbled and went over. Flame jetted across the tabletop.

The baron reached with his right hand for the mineral water.

Cordelia, using both hands, twisted the syringe from his left hand. She took three steps away from him and stood at the edge of the screen.

The baron doused the flame in Evian. When he turned again to face Cordelia, he raised the scissors in his right hand.

It was a face-off, the needle with its payload versus the scissors with their cutting edges.

Panic and determination were mingled in Cordelia’s expression. Now she was circling out of camera range, and the baron was turning, eyes tracking her.

“No way I’m going to let this happen.” Cardozo flung open the truck door and bounded across the street.

He dove into the building entrance and leaned on the buzzer to 4A to spook them, maybe to stop them, anyway to buy time, and he leaned on all the other buzzers to get into the building. A rattling buzz answered and released the lock and he yanked the inner door open.

The indicator showed the elevator on the third floor.

He took the first flight of stairs in a blind run. His legs thrust him up past two and three in a single continuous lunge.

On four he swerved into the corridor, his shoes slapping and skidding on the tiled floor. He faced the door of 4A, tested the knob, stepped back. He drew his revolver and took dead aim at the lock and fired one shot. Wood and metal shattered. Holding the gun with both hands at eye level, he kicked the door in.

The baron was swaying in the livingroom at the end of the corridor. In the colors of real life his bathrobe was maroon and ochre. His feet were splayed apart and he was trying to steady himself by gripping the back of a chair.

His back arched and cords stood out at the base of his suntanned neck. His breath was a whinny, a struggle for air. Red foam was bubbling from his lips.

The chamber of the empty syringe was jutting out of his throat, like a grotesquely oversized tiepin that had been shoved in twelve inches too high. The needle had dug in to the hilt.

Above the pale and trembling lips the large staring eyes turned toward Cardozo. The baron’s pupils had become pinpoints of disbelieving, dwindling light. The moment became a silence. The baron’s eyes closed and his hands lost the chair. He fell in a sideways heap.

Cordelia had retreated to a corner, hands covering her face as if to choke back the whimpers coming from her.

Cardozo crossed to her. Her fingers closed around his.

“Did I kill him?” she whispered.

Cardozo glanced over at the corpse. “Somebody had to.”

“All I wanted to do was get his confession on film.”

“Was it Von Kleist who gave you the insulin and syringe to kill your mother?”

Cordelia nodded.

“He gave you dope, had sex with you from the time you were twelve?”

“Everything.”

“And Monserat?” Cardozo asked.

“Lew never touched me.” Cordelia staggered to the couch and dropped onto a cushion. “Lew was just one of Billi’s fronts. Billi had a hundred of them.” She was looking at her panties hopelessly; they were a riddle she couldn’t solve. The dope was in her blood, fogging her. “People thought Billi was … was attractive and … got involved and then … couldn’t get …”

Cardozo was thinking that it had taken one scared immature drug-addicted girl to do what no policeman, no court could ever have done, to make Billi von Kleist pay in kind for the pain and murder he had strewn, to ensure that he would never twist or take another life.

“I loved him.” She was staring at the corpse, leaning down to touch the lapel of the robe. “I still …”

She was beginning to nod out. Silent tears were tracking down her cheeks. The tear from the right eye was already at her chin and the tear from the left was only halfway to her mouth.

Cardozo wondered why that was, why one tear was faster than the other, what force in the universe decided things like that.

Her head dropped. Cardozo caught her before she could hit the floor. He eased her back onto the sofa. “You’re going to be okay,” he soothed.

She had passed out. He had no idea how the hell he was going to get her out of this. A flying carpet was all he needed.

55

T
HE PRINT MAN FINISHED
dusting and the photographer finished taking pictures and the men from the M.E.’s office zipped Baron Billi into a body bag. They filed out of the loft, leaving the chalk outline of a dead man in the floor.

Cardozo phoned Ted Morgenstern. “Get down here to Lew Monserat’s loft. Cordelia Koenig has killed Baron Billi von Kleist. You’re going to defend her.”

Twenty minutes later Ted Morgenstern identified himself to the sergeant guarding the crime scene. He stalked into the apartment with the confidence of a predator.

“Where’s my client?”

“In the hospital. Have a seat.”

There was an edge of command to Cardozo’s voice. Ted Morgenstern’s face betrayed a rush of irritation, but he sat.

Cardozo pushed buttons on the VCR, and the TV set bathed the room in ghostly voices and images.

Morgenstern did his best to stay frosted, and when the tape had run he put on an air of smug, lighthearted adventure. “Who made that tape? The police? It’s inadmissible.”

“Baron Billi von Kleist made it. Kleist’s last tape.”

Morgenstern’s face was calculating. “Can you prove that?”

“I can prove the baron had a habit of giving sex-and-torture parties and taking candid tapes of them. There are seven years of tapes right here in the closet.”

Something changed. Morgenstern’s eyes were on Cardozo and there was the first flicker of fear in them. A thread of excitement moved in Cardozo’s body and he was almost ashamed of it.

“Some of the tapes are going to interest you, Counselor. You star in them.”

Ted Morgenstern had started to rise from the sofa but now he sank back again.

Cardozo ran a two-minute selection from the tapes—enough to give Morgenstern a taste.

Morgenstern was ashen and shaking. “Those tapes aren’t relevant,” he said.

Lucinda MacGill came out of the bedroom, carrying a videocassette in each hand. “The tapes
are
relevant, Counselor,” she said. “Anything found on the scene of the crime is relevant and admissive. People of New York versus Cudahy, 1953. Upheld by the Supreme Court, 1958.”

Ted Morgenstern looked as though he’d been slammed in the stomach with a baseball bat. “Are those the only copies?”

“There are dupes,” Cardozo said.

Morgenstern was sitting there, dead. “The police have them?”

“The cops don’t know the dupes exist. They don’t even know the originals exist.”

“Who has the dupes?”

“I do. In a bank vault.”

Ted Morgenstern closed his eyes.

“I’ve been thinking about Cordelia’s defense,” Cardozo said. “You know how I think you should handle it? Offscreen. Like in the Downs case and the Devens case. You flashed Jodie Downs’s medical file at his parents. They didn’t want it made public and they accepted a plea bargain and Loring got off. Seven years ago, Cordelia Koenig caught the clap from Baron Billi. You had Devens catch himself a dose. You flashed the medical records at the Vanderwalks, they saw a connection between her gonorrhea and his. They weren’t going to let that get into the newspapers, so they let Devens walk. Are you following me, Counselor?”

“Not exactly.” The resolve had drained out of Morgenstern’s voice.

“People take your suggestions. With your clout you can get the D.A. to accept a plea of justifiable manslaughter.”

“Excuse me,” Lucinda MacGill interrupted. “Why not head this off at the coroner’s office and go for accidental death?”