Deadly Rich (10 page)

She rose from her chair. “You know, Dick, when you treat me like an idiot, it’s like a telegram saying that part of me just died.”

He leapt to his feet. He stood staring at her and he had an honestly bewildered look on his face. “Sweetie, I was just thinking out loud how to help you.”

“I’ve told you how you could help. Good-bye, Dick.”

He walked with her into the hallway. They reached the front door.

“That better not have been an angry good-bye.”

“It wasn’t.” She sighed. “Even when I hate you, I can’t stay angry. You’re the only man in my life who makes me laugh.”

“And that had better be a compliment. Kiss kiss?”

She angled her cheek, and he gave her a peck and a quick little two-finger wave. He stood in the open doorway till the elevator came and she stepped in.

What a great gal
, he was thinking,
in her way.

He closed the door and hurried to the kitchen. On the shelf above the telephone, two sixty-four-dollar bottles of olive oil were positioned with their labels and price stickers facing out.

He lifted the receiver and pushed the memory button where he had programmed Dizey Duke’s unlisted number. “Dizey, toots,
c’est moi.
I’ve just had the most amazing talk with Leigh.”

“Lucky you.”

“She told me something you really ought to know about. I think our poor Betty Ford grad has flipped out. Either that or gone back to the sauce. Got a minute?”

T
HE THUMB PULLED BACK HER EYELIDS
one at a time. It was not a gentle thumb. “Notice we have marked hemorrhaging in the eyes,” Dan Hippolito said.

The woman’s face was turned toward the ceiling, and for an instant, with her eyelids open, she was looking directly at Cardozo. The eye whites were densely speckled with tiny red veins, like shrimp that needed cleaning.

Maybe Cardozo just imagined it, but he started to see things in that dead gaze—pain and fear and the certainty of death in all its undiluted brute force. He was reminded of a steer in a slaughterhouse at the instant the vacuum gun was held to its brains.

Suddenly the smell in the room came at him in a wave—formaldehyde and decayed human tissue—a stench at once acrid and sickeningly sweet.

“Strangled?” Cardozo said.

Dan Hippolito held up a finger—playing the moment like a schoolteacher. Dan Hippolito was a tough, wiry, narrow-faced man with dark, receding hair, one of the most experienced M.D.s of the city’s medical examiner’s office. “The pressure applied to her throat was enough to cause the
onset
of strangulation. But strangling didn’t kill her. What killed her was this.”

Dan Hippolito’s moving finger indicated the ear-to-ear gash across the throat.

“Most probable scenario, the killer approached from the victim’s rear, got a left-handed armlock around her neck. With knife clasped in his right hand, he drew the blade across her throat, from left to right—severing the windpipe and the carotid. Because of the way the head was held, sufficient blood flowed back into the throat to drown her.

“The killer then delivered a second stroke laterally across the victim’s throat, right to left, intersecting the first stroke.”

Dan Hippolito pointed out the second stroke—a clear gash x-ing across the first so that the woman appeared to be wearing a necklace of two ribbons of dull black velvet.

“These two strokes killed her. The rest is window dressing.”

Dan Hippolito lifted back the sheet, and Cardozo’s not-quite-believing gaze took in what Dan Hippolito called window dressing. “Now, notice the knife marks on the abdomen are roughly horizontal, four on the left side and only one, the bottom-most, on the right—five cuts in all, spaced roughly an inch apart. These are shallow cuts, but one of them—the third cut down—perforates the abdominal wall.”

To Cardozo the parallel pattern of cuts seemed intentional, not random. He tried to fathom the purpose behind the pattern. After a moment his eye went to the right breastbone, to a three-inch-square area sprinkled with puncture wounds. In execution these were totally different from the horizontal cuts, as though here a crazed staple gun had attacked her.

Cardozo nodded toward the area. “What was he trying to reach?”

“The liver is all you’d find down there. But they don’t penetrate. They’re jabs—very fast, shallow.”

“But it’s as though he had a purpose.”

“Absolutely. He’s not just doodling. The parallel cuts are approximately even in spacing. They took time. Possibly he was marking the body.”

“Why?”

“I’ve seen something similar in drug-cartel hits. The killer trademarks the body to prove he was the one who took her out. Or he marks her as a warning to anyone else who’s thinking of crossing the cartel.”

“Have you ever seen these markings on a drug-hit victim?”

“Not these exact markings. But each killer and cartel have their own trademark. It could be a newcomer.”

“And what do the marks mean if it’s not a drug hit?”

Dan Hippolito shook his head. “Couldn’t tell you. Mind reading is your department.”

Mentally Cardozo tried to resurrect the woman on the table. Alive, she would have had bright blue eyes, the desperately cheerful look of the overage all-American debutante. She would have been perky and she would have wanted to be liked.

He noticed something wrong about the cuts. All over the body the postautopsy sutures had pulled the flesh into tiny pleats. His eye went back to the throat cuts, and he noticed the same curious effect. In twenty years of seeing dead people in all possible degrees of being hacked apart and stitched back together, he had never seen a corpse with so much pursing of skin along the cuts.

“What’s all the puckering where she’s cut?”

There was a wedge of silence, and Dan Hippolito’s deep brown eyes seemed to withdraw their gaze just a little from the world. “There’s just a little more body tissue missing than the cuts can account for. Did you find any tissue at the scene?”

“There wasn’t any tissue at the scene. Just blood. Plenty of that.”

Dan Hippolito shrugged, and the shrug was tinged with acceptance of all things ugly and remarkable in the medical examiner’s universe.

Cardozo stared at the dead woman with the missing tissue. A murmur cut into his wondering, a hissing echo that he recognized: the sound of a catheter pump draining the blood from the cadaver two tables down. He took out his notebook and began making a little sketch of the cuts on Oona Aldrich.

“I can give you photos,” Dan Hippolito said. “Come on.”

In the corridor they passed morgue personnel and medical examiners and med-school students wearing white cotton jackets of varying degrees of uncleanliness.

Dan Hippolito unlocked the door to his office and, motioning Cardozo inside, flipped on a ceiling fan that brought in a buzz of air from an overhead vent. “Coffee?” he offered.

“Why not.”

Dan Hippolito snapped off his skintight plastic autopsy gloves. On his way to the small coffee maker that was quietly burping in the corner, he dropped the gloves into the wastebasket.

Cardozo looked around the little room. There was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers on the wall and the furniture was a mix of 1950s Scandinavian modern—showing its age—but even here the sharp odor of formaldehyde reminded you that you weren’t in a living room in Queens.

“Hey, Dan, you need some fresh sunflowers. That picture looks like it’s been standing in acid rain.”

“In forensic medicine they don’t give you a decorating budget”

“So why don’t you change jobs?”

“In this field at least I’ll never kill a patient.”

The office was evidence of Dan Hippolito’s commitment to a cheerful outlook. Against the far wall he had hung a closed curtain, as though even here, two levels below Second Avenue, there was a window and a sun so bright, it had to be kept out. In front of the curtain he had arranged a small forest of potted palms and corn plants. Gro-light played over the leaves as they stirred in the faintly rancid gusts of central air-conditioning.

Dan Hippolito came back with a tray on which he’d placed two plastic cups of black coffee, two pink packets of Sweet’n Low, a jar of generic powdered something that was meant to substitute for cream, and a tongue depressor to serve as a stir stick.

The two men settled themselves on opposite sides of the desk. Dan Hippolito slid three glossy photos across the desktop. Right, left, and center views of Oona Aldrich’s abdominal cuts.

“Do I get to pick my favorite?” Cardozo asked.

“Take them all. I got plenty more.” Dan Hippolito took a long swallow of coffee, then moved a blank sheet of paper to the center of the desk and began drawing lines. “To cut flesh out—as opposed to simply making a cut in flesh—you need a minimum of three cuts intersecting to form a triangle.”

He had drawn a triangle, each of whose sides extended in both directions beyond the vertices. His pen began cross-hatching the area inside the triangle.

“With those three cuts, all the tissue inside the triangle is severed from the neighboring tissue—and can be extracted. But what we have in the case of Oona Aldrich is tissue that has been removed, with no indication that special cuts were made to remove it.”

“So it was an accident? A by-product?”

“With what I’ve got now I can’t figure how he did it.” Dan Hippolito took another swallow of coffee. “It’s not quite so hard to figure out how two pubic hairs got into the victim’s mouth.”

The words fell heavily into the silence.

“We also found semen in the victim’s mouth. Right now the lab is examining the hairs and the semen. We should have results for you tomorrow.”

Cardozo didn’t move or say anything or even show he was reacting, but his mind just closed in on the implications. He began to see the killing as the ultimate kick-ass in a city where everybody was infringing on everybody else, and it got harder and harder to commit a cruelty that stood out.

“Well, Dan, which was it—did the killer force this woman to give him a blow job before he killed her? Or did he kill her and then have sex with her corpse?”

“I haven’t got an answer to that.”

Cardozo was swept by a marrow-deep surge of hatred for the person who had killed Oona Aldrich and for all his behavioral brothers—the people who did these things, who were out there right now doing more of them.

“
FROM THE BLOOD CELLS
in the sperm we know he’s type O.” Lou Stein was standing by the window in Cardozo’s cubicle, reading from his scrawled notes, because Cardozo hadn’t wanted to wait for the lab report till Lou’s typewriter got fixed. “And he has a very high, abnormally high, sperm count. That’s about all that the fluids can tell us. However—” Lou flipped a page of his pocket-sized notebook and frowned a moment, deciphering his own hasty hieroglyphics. “The pubic hairs tell us he’s technically Caucasian.”

“Only technically?” Cardozo said.

“Caucasian isn’t a strict category. One man’s Caucasian is apt to be another man’s something else.”

Lou Stein had won a Purple Heart in Korea, and he still carried himself like a soldier. In the department he’d gained himself a reputation as a hard, reliable worker. He rarely talked tough or acted it, but he’d never yielded so much as a blade of grass in a turf war. Lab work was a sacred trust to him, and he’d never fudged a report, not even to save a colleague’s pension. Going by the rules, doing the job, was Lou’s ethic, and Cardozo could see that, in a small way, it pained him to be reading from notes instead of a completed lab form.

“This fellow is very dark-haired,” Lou said. “And if you go by statistical stereotype, probably olive-skinned.”

Jim Delancey is dark-haired
, Cardozo thought.
On the other hand, he’s fair-skinned
…

“You would also expect brown eyes. Of course, there can be exceptions.”

Delancey has blue eyes. But he could be an exception.

“Now, here’s something,” Lou said, “that could give us a socio-economic fix on the perpetrator. There are trace amounts of kerosene on his pubic hair.”

“I take it kerosene is some kind of kinky lubricant?”

“I doubt it very much. If you used kerosene as a lubricant, you’d feel you were washing your balls in acid. Why do you think it’s such a popular torture in Central America?”

The air conditioner picked that moment to give a rattle like wheels not quite making their tracks, followed by a snap of metal hitting something it wasn’t supposed to hit. Cardozo reached across the cubicle and flicked it off.

“The only reason you’d want kerosene anywhere near your pubes,” Lou said, “is to kill parasites, and the only parasites that inhabit the pubes in these latitudes are crab lice. Kerosene’s the traditional folk-wisdom remedy.”

“What kind of folk are we talking?”

“Poor folk—very poor folk—poor whites, poor blacks, poor Hispanics. Rich people don’t get crab lice—except in the armed services and prison. If and when your average middle-class Joe gets crabs, he’s apt to use prescription kerosene and he probably doesn’t know it’s kerosene.”

“Was our man using prescription kerosene?”

“Definitely not. This stuff was straight from the hardware store.”

“Did it work?”

“On the hairs I saw there weren’t even nits, which indicates he’s pretty clean. When I lasered the hair I
did
find two green lines in the spectrograph.”

“Meaning?”

A mischievous spark came into Lou’s blue eyes. “Possibly the donor has been burning his food in copper-bottomed pots for—oh, the last two hundred years.”

“Isn’t the sperm count a little high for a two-hundred-year-old man?”

“Or he’s doing cocaine.”

Cardozo nodded. This would put the perpetrator solidly in the mainstream of Americans who had decided to run their lives on a daily diet of chemical enhancement. “Like eighty percent of the criminals in this town.”

“Heavier. Coke like this, to show up in the spectrograph like this, our man has got major access to the stuff. We’re talking five-, six-hundred-dollars-a-day street price.” Lou’s lids lowered a moment over his eyes. “On the other hand, the kerosene says he’s not tot rich. But that’s your problem, not mine.”