Deadly Rich (80 page)

She had been cold and alone, justifying herself to strangers, going through other people’s rituals, for all the sixteen years of her life.

“The blood of Christ.” The priest tipped the chalice toward her lips.

She felt as though she were falling into the wine. She realized she still had a buzz on from all the drugs—especially that pink pill. She could no longer follow what was happening.

Hands helped her up onto her crutches. Helped her along an endless aisle. The cast on her left ankle weighed like a concrete block. Hands helped her through a door and up into a van.

A voice was asking her questions, oily with caring. “Tell me, my child, how long have you been a runaway?”

Wanda didn’t know what answer was desired.
Always give the customer what he wants.
“A long time.”

Now they were driving. On the other side of the windshield bloated flakes of snow drifted weightlessly in and out of the headlight beams. Her fingers played with the gold chain she had braided into her hair.

“Tell me, my child, how long have you been prostituting yourself?”

“A long time. Since I was eleven.”

The van passed through iron-barred gates and into a garage. Hands helped her out of the front seat and up a narrow flight of stairs. Her crutches thumped on each creaking wooden step. She reached the top and had to rest a moment to catch her breath.

A parchment-shaded lamp clicked on. She saw a small apartment with Gothic-lettered mottoes hanging up on the walls:

Bring me young sinners.

Suffer the little children to come unto me.

My kingdom is not of this world.

The kingdom of God is within you.

You must become again as a child.

He who dies with forgiveness of sins…wins!

The air carried a suffocating reek of incense.

“I need the bathroom.”

“Right in there.”

Wanda propped her crutches against the cold white tile wall. She knelt at the toilet and tried to throw up. Her throat could produce nothing but empty retchings.

She hobbled back into the other room. Darkness was coming at her in waves. She had to force her eyes to stay open.

The priest stood lighting incense in a small copper bowl. “Tell me, my child, how long have you been taking drugs?”

“I don’t know—a long time. I’m sorry, Father, I’m fogging out. Could we finish this talk later? I really need to sleep.”

“There’s just a little bit more of the ceremony.”

Something in his face was wrong. Something in the moment was bent. It was as though time had taken a right-angled turn.

“I thought the ceremony was over,” Wanda said.

“Almost. This is the last part. You’ll feel better if you atone.”

“I thought I did atone.”
Christ, I’ve been atoning for one person’s sins or another’s since I was born.

“No, my child, you confessed. Now you atone.” Father lifted off his pectoral cross. He kissed it and laid it with a soft thunk on the table beside a highball glass that was still half full. Ice cubes rattled as he raised the glass. He took two long swallows. The rum sent a chilled, 150-proof sting down his throat. He stood a moment, savoring the sensation of icy heat. Then he removed his embroidered stole and draped it neatly over the back of the chair.

The zipper of the black cassock required care: it had been sticking the last several times he’d worn it. With patient, coaxing tugs he finally freed himself. He arranged the cassock on a hanger and the stole over the cassock, adjusting them so there would be no wrinkles. He hung the vestments in the closet.

Now he took the transparent waterproof smock from its peg. He slipped into it.

He returned to the table and swallowed the rum remaining in the glass. He poured a fresh drink from the bottle. The young girl, leaning back in the peach-colored leather chair, watched him with a drowning gaze. She did not make the obvious comment about his drinking.

The second glass went stinging down the hatch. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

The smock squeaked as he bent to lift her. She moved easily into his arms. He centered her weight on his shoulder and made sure she wasn’t going to slide. Walking sideways, he carried her carefully down the narrow stairway.

She gave a little bounce at every step. Faint puffs of air parted her lips, and with each puff the smock sent out a mousy little squeak.

He crossed the cellar and laid her in the galvanized laundry tub. He moved the braids away from her pale, high-domed forehead. Her dark eyes showed surprise, flecked with something else.

He closed each eye, kissed each eyelid, kissed her lips. She did not flinch from the rum. The inside of her mouth had the salty taste of a spent firecracker. He gazed at her, stretching the small, personal moment.

“God loves you, Wanda,” he whispered. “So do I.”

He slipped a tape of Maurice Duruflé’s ineffably beautiful
Requiem
into his Walkman. He put on his earphones.

The “Kyrie” surged into his head. He started the electric saw, braced himself against the vibration, and began his work.

Kyrie Eleison.

Christe Eleison.

Two hours later he had finished one bottle of rum and begun another. Wanda lay neatly arranged in a basket—large pieces on the bottom, smaller pieces on top. He took a deep, slow breath and pushed the basket up a steel ramp into the rear of the van.

He drove slowly into the glassy New York night. The sky overhead had the color of an old bruise. He sat slightly hunched at the steering wheel, squinting, keeping the city streets in focus. Singing along with the “Agnes Dei,” he swung into Central Park.

The looping half-lit roadways were deserted at this hour. He ignored the
PARK PERSONNEL ONLY
sign and eased off the main road, driving around a sawhorse onto an unlit service road. Fifty yards up he pulled into the shrubbery.

Twigs snapped and bare-limbed bushes trembled. He cut the motor.

It was a peak moment and he sat there, losing himself. The “Sanctus” surged through his earphones. A powdering of snow drifted down through the air. The silent city was asleep.

He took the flask from his breast pocket and sat sipping rum.

Work to be done
, he reminded himself.

He screwed the top back on the flask and reached behind the seat for the pickax.

O
N A SMALL OUTDOOR
stage, a group of young clowns and ballerinas were dancing for the crowd. Their movements took on a sassy snap as the Dixieland band kicked into the final bars of “New York, New York.”

Arms linked. Feet fell into smartly synchronized step. Legs high-kicked à la Radio City Rockettes.

A-one. A-two.

Top hats and canes arced into the air.

A-one-two-three-four.

Sock-it-home kick-spin-kick jump-split-leap-spin hold-it-absolutely-still take-a-deep-sharp-bow. Two thunks on a cow bell.

A current of excitement fused the crowd into a clapping, screaming applause machine. The air jingled with we-love-you vibes.

Twenty bows later, the dancers exited the proscenium.

Behind the canvas drop, Johanna Lowndes pulled off her Columbine cap. She stood near the corner of the wooden stage, catching her breath. She leaned her head on the shoulder of her Pierrot. He wordlessly slipped an arm around her.

She listened to the cheering, whistling ovation that wanted to go on and on. “You hear that sound, and you realize there’s nothing else in life that matters.”

Well,
almost
nothing else. She could feel a familiar craving in her nerves, a need for that certain boost that only a toke on the wow-pipe could give her. “How long do we have till the next set?”

Pierrot consulted his watch. “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Be right back.” Johanna kissed him and hopped down from the stage. It had been set up ten feet from the woods of Central Park. Peering into the trees, she could see all the way through to Fifth Avenue, past silhouettes of fellow dancers relieving themselves in the bushes.

Not there
, she decided:
privacy is required.
She had only half a nickel rock left in her sock, and she was in no mood to share.
After all, a dancer needs all the energy she can muster.

She made her way through the crowd. The Vanderbilt Garden had been closed for three years due to a city budget shortfall—but now, thanks to a grant from the Port Authority Foundation, it was being reopened with a gala ceremony. Everyone was here: socialites, celebrities, Rockettes, Guardian Angels, hand-picked street kids from Harlem and the South Bronx, print people, radio people, TV people, clergy, laity, the whole world. And more were pouring through the wrought-iron gates that once had guarded the Vanderbilt mansion.

Music boomed: marching bands; rock bands with vocalists yowling into hand-held mikes. What roaring! What thumping!

Johanna’s heart soared.

Minicams scanned, still cameras flashed, faces and hairdos and flowers bloomed. There was Bianca Jagger!

Johanna smiled.

And there was Tina Vanderbilt, the unofficial doyenne of New York society!

Johanna waved.

And
there
was Sheena Flynn, the blond news anchor, shouting orders at her TV crew.

Johanna blew airkisses. “Hello!” she sang out. “Hello!”

At the south edge of the garden, she peeled off from the crowd, lifted aside a lilac branch, and sneaked behind the rhododendron bushes. Bracing herself against an elm, she bent down and retrieved her smoking paraphernalia from her leotard.

Step one:
Center the precious rock in the pipe bowl.
Step two:
Hold the flame of the Bic against it till the crystal pulses.
Step three:
Place pipe in mouth, pull the hot gases into your lungs, and count to ten.

She sat on the ground and shut her eyes halfway. Filtered through the trees and through her eyelids, the garden became a blue and pink and bright yellow shimmer. The leafy shadows seemed to wear a smile. The roar of the celebration seemed a light-year away.

A squirrel sped past, ripping the mood like a gunshot.

Johanna dropped her pipe.

She gave a dismayed yelp. Her eyes scanned tangled vines and underbrush, searching. She got on her hands and knees and pawed through dead leaves.

Her hand struck something solid, smooth, man-made. She pushed back the leaves and uncovered the lid of some kind of hamper.

She frowned. She felt a prickling of curiosity.

She lifted the lid.

“Who found it?” Lieutenant Vince Cardozo, NYPD, asked.

“I found it.” A young woman stepped forward from the group of witnesses. She was dressed in blue-and-white striped tights and matching ballet skirt. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose bore circular splotches of clown’s blue. The makeup had run.

Cardozo could see that the shock had poleaxed her and she was still reeling, unable to control her crying or her shaking or her breathing or anything else that was happening to her body.

“And your name is?”

“Johanna Lowndes.” Her voice quavered like a child trying very hard not to bawl.

“How did you happen to be in those woods?”

“I was one of the dancers. Columbine.” She nodded toward the small wooden stage that had been set up twenty feet away, but her eyes stayed on him. “I needed to…you know…”

“I’m not sure I do know.”

Shock had brought her down to her naked reflexes, and he realized that those pale staring eyes were paying him a compliment. Flirting. Playing the save-me card. No longer a permissible card for a politically aware woman, but still permissible for a teenage girl.

Cardozo knew he was no pinup—he was well into his forties, and though he was tall and had kept himself in shape, he’d always tended to stockiness. But his hair and mustache had started showing flecks of gray and he’d noticed that younger women had started looking at him just the way this girl was looking now.

“I needed to take a pee,” she said.

He could see the poor kid was embarrassed. Mentioning peepee was a kiddie taboo, and right now she didn’t know what age she was.

“And there’s no bathroom, so I went into the bushes.”

Cardozo’s eye measured the distance from the stage to the bushes where the body had been found. She would have had to force her way to the far side of the garden through a crowd of three hundred to reach those lilacs. On the other hand, bushes grew equally dense directly behind the stage and afforded at least as much privacy.

“Did you choose those bushes for any particular reason?”

Confusion flickered in her face. “I’m sorry?”

“Is there any reason you didn’t use the bushes in back of the stage?”

She stared at him openmouthed, not answering.

“Perhaps I can help,” a voice behind Cardozo said.

He turned. A brown-haired man in a neat gray business suit stood smiling at him. The smile was not social, but political: I-want-your-vote-but-I-don’t-have-time-for-your-shit. “I’m David Lowndes—Johanna’s father. I’m the attorney for the sponsors of today’s event.”

“And?”

“I find it horrific that this sort of thing should happen in a civilized community.”

Like the daughter’s voice, the father’s conveyed a sense of privilege even when it was complaining. Unlike his daughter, the man had a good working mastery of the nuances of intimidation.

Cardozo flicked the message out through his eyes:
Buddy, you’re wasting your nuances on this cop.

The smile evaporated from Lowndes’s smooth, evenly tanned face. “If you wish to interrogate my daughter, I’ll be glad to act as counsel for her.”

“I’m not booking your daughter.”

“I’m grateful.”

If that’s a thank you, you’re welcome.
But it wasn’t. Sarcasm had a thousand accents in New York, and Cardozo recognized 999 of them.

He retraced the journey Ms. Lowndes claimed to have taken. He wedged his way as gently as possible through the swarm of guests. Some of them posed. Some chatted. Most waited sullenly in line to give their names and addresses to the police.

He moved aside lilac branches and stepped into the deep shade of the woods. The air hung humid and motionless. The trees seemed to push the sound of traffic far into the distance.