VC01 - Privileged Lives (19 page)

She laughed, showing white even teeth in the subtly reddened line of her mouth. “I suppose by the same token you could say Picasso’s
Guernica
is ugly.”

“This isn’t Picasso’s
Guernica.
This is the facial equivalent of a thumbscrew.”

“Beautiful art is often ugly. I know that sounds like a cheap paradox, but it’s my belief that the point of art isn’t to please, it’s to … arrest.” Her perfume filled the stillness. “I admire a work of art the way I admire a person. It has to take me without my permission, command my attention. The Kushima commands my attention.”

“You bought this through Lewis Monserat?”

Her large, thoughtful eyes came to rest on him. “My husband and I bought it through Lewis Monserat. The court awarded it to me as part of our settlement.”

He took note of the word
settlement
and realized that Doria Forbes-Steinman had her own way of tilting the truth. “Have you bought other pieces from Mr. Monserat?”

“I’ve bought from a great many leading dealers—Leo Castelli, Andre Emmerich, Ileana Sonnabend, Andrew Crispo when he was still in business. In fact, I came within a hairbreadth of owning the Brancusi head that Andy Crispo sold the Guggenheim; the deal was set, but Andy was in trouble with the IRS, and the Guggenheim offered a half-million more. I said, ‘Andy, I can’t hold you to our bargain, I release you, you need the money.’ There’s a lot of heartbreak in this business.”

“But did you buy other pieces from Mr. Monserat?”

“I’m so tired of being linked to that monster.” Doria Forbes-Steinman sighed. “Yes, I bought other pieces from Lewis Monserat—unfortunately.”

“Why unfortunately?”

“He has fine pieces. But he’s not the sort of man I like to deal with.”

“Why not?”

“In Europe, where I come from, he has a reputation. He’s a criminal. More than that. He’s evil.”

“Is that your way of saying you dislike him?”

“I dislike his deeds. Being a pageboy at Goebbels’s wedding—don’t you think that disgusting?”

“It’s not a crime.”

“Renting bodies from funeral homes—that may not be a crime either,” she said, “but it’s vile. Child pornography may not be a crime in our enlightened era, but that’s disgusting too. Or don’t you have children?”

“I have a child.”

She looked at him, half smiling. “Then we’re in agreement.”

The sky was high and cloudless and the sun was hot on Cardozo’s back. Limousines blocked Fifty-third Street and he had to make his way with a stream of well-dressed men and women into the Museum of Contemporary Arts.

A reception was being held in a room of Toulouse-Lautrec posters.

He skirted the hubbub and went searching for the fourth mask. In a gallery away from the voices and music he found a collection of heads. There were faces of stone and wood and plastic, all caught in glass boxes like vivisections in sterile chambers.

Walking among them, reading from the printed catalogue, he came upon the leather thing he was looking for:
Bondage IX,
leather and steel sculpture, Nuku Kushima, American, 1941—.

He stared at the face that was not a face: eyeless sockets the size and shape of stitched buttonholes, the lump of nose flattened into a piglike snout, the queasily smooth earlessness beneath the temples, the gash of sealed zipper marking the line where lips should have been.

The mask seemed to communicate a message he could only half understand. He sensed something deeper than terror: the utter willing acceptance of catastrophe.

There was a sudden hollowness in him.

In a moment suspended outside time he heard the zippered scream of a dead man six stories above this very space.

Women’s laughter broke in. The cheerful buzz of conversation flowed around him, corks were popping in another room, waiters were scurrying.

“All that redness around John Doe’s waist and upper thigh and ankle—there had to be some kind of allergen attacking the epiderm. But why those areas and no others? Because that’s where the elastic bands in socks and underpants chafe. Okay, but what kind of allergen?”

Dan Hippolito slipped a slide under the microscope, bent down, adjusted the focus.

“We peel the skin from the waist, the ankle, the upper thigh, study it under the microscope. Behold, granules the size of boulders.”

Hippolito motioned Cardozo.

Cardozo bent over the scope. He saw boulders.

“So we pulverize the skin, spin the particles, and eureka, the foreign substance has a different specific gravity from human skin and we isolate the culprit—detergent.”

Cardozo pulled his eye up from the microscope. “Detergent?”

Hippolito nodded. “Generic industrial grade nameless detergent—killer soap—cheapola of the cheapola—not sold in supermarkets, not even ghetto supermarkets, and the FDA has considered outlawing it. It’s illegal in Canada, illegal in twelve states of the union. In New York it’s iffy but there are jobbers—under investigation by the attorney general—who sell the powder in forty-pound cartons. Now this stuff is so corrosive that dry—
dry
—it eats through cardboard.”

“So who uses it?”

“Broadly speaking, two sorts of institutions. Prisons and bottom-of-the-line Laundromats.”

By the time Cardozo got back to HQ, Lieutenant Damato was beginning his blotter entries for the four-to-one tour. Of the task force, only Siegel and Malloy were still in the station house. Cardozo called them into his office and told them the medical examiner’s new evidence.

“The victim took his clothes to a cheap Laundromat and used their soap,” Ellie Siegel said.

“Or left the clothes for them to wash,” Malloy said.

Cardozo pushed back in his chair. “So we’re looking for a Laundromat that may or may not be self-service, but also has a dump-your-laundry-and-we’ll-handle-it service. How many Laundromats like that are there in this city?”

Malloy screwed up his face, an expert. “Three, four hundred easy.”

“Get flyers out to all Laundromats in all boroughs.”

“What about Laundromats in Jersey?” Ellie Siegel said. “Hoboken’s nearer than Staten Island.”

“Include Hudson County.”

“Prison,” Carl Malloy said. “John Doe could have been just released or he could have escaped.”

“So? Check the prisons.”

Alone, Cardozo set up the projector and began going through slides.

Behind him, a voice spoke.

“Vincent Cardozo?”

Cardozo turned in his chair. A pudgy young man in an Italian-cut summer-weight gray shantung suit stood backlit against the open door.

“Ray Kane,” the young man said, “attorney-at-law.” He held out a chubby pink hand. He had no visible neck; smooth baby-fat jowls overspilled his shirt collar. The shirt designer’s name was appliqued to the breast pocket, and Kane smelted as if he had baptized himself in cologne.

“How can I help you, Mr. Kane?”

“Today you walked into the legitimate place of business of Lewis Monserat and terrorized his assistant. You threatened to send her to the Tombs and you menaced her with an improperly executed order for seizure.”

“I thought Ted Morgenstern represented Monserat.”

Ray Kane drew himself up. “I am an
associate
of Mr. Morgenstern’s firm.”

Cardozo got the picture. Ever the true power broker, Ted Morgenstern had sent one of his small fry to handle the niggling paper work.

Cardozo slowly rose to his feet. From a standing position he could see pink scalp through Kane’s thinning razor-cut hair. “Mr. Kane, I’m working.”

“So am I.” Kane held out an official document bearing the seal of the court.

“What’s that?”

“An order demanding return of the list of purchasers of the Kushima mask.”

“On what grounds?”

“Improperly seized, without warrant, no evidence of a crime.” Kane smacked his lips as if he were sucking macaroons off dentures.

“A murdered man, you don’t call that a crime?”

“I warn you, Lieutenant, if you try to link Mr. Monserat’s name to any ongoing criminal investigation, we shall not hesitate to bring slander charges.”

Cardozo picked up the receiver of his phone. “Damato, send me one of the A.D.A.’s.”

Kane stared at Cardozo from contact lenses that were probably meant to change his brown eyes to blue but instead made them look like a very special effect in a sci-fi film.

In a moment there was a knock at the door. “Lieutenant Cardozo? Lucinda MacGill, assistant district attorney.” The young woman held out a hand. Her pale brown hair was cut in bangs, tumbling in back to her shoulders.

“That was fast,” Cardozo said.

“I was downstairs taking a deposition.”

It was the job of assistant D.A.’s to take statements from suspects, and Lucinda MacGill had a stenographer with her, a man in his early thirties, tall and thin with scraggly black hair and a beard to match. He looked like he’d rather be writing sonnets but needed the bread to pay his Con Ed.

“How can I help you?” Lucinda MacGill asked.

“Miss MacGill,” Cardozo said, “meet Counselor Kane.”

Her lips thinned as she said hello.

“Counselor Kane is serving me a writ, and I want to be sure it’s properly executed before I comply.”

Assistant D.A.’s were like detectives: they caught cases on a first-come, first-served basis; or, more accurately, the cases caught them. There was no picking or choosing. How you handled what you were served determined how your career went. Lucinda Mac-Gill looked like she could handle.

“May I see the writ?” Her eyes scanned quickly and she gave the document back to Kane. “It’s properly executed.”

Cardozo crumpled the Monserat list into a ball and lobbed it to the floor. “All yours, Counselor.”

Cardozo sat at his desk asking himself why his jaw was clenched so tight that electric currents were stinging through his fillings, how his heart could be in two places at once, thudding in his left temple and crashing in his gut.

Because he was furious.

Over a gofer.

A gofer for a shyster who had headed the opposition on a case that had been cleared seven years ago. A case that had officially evaporated when Babe Devens woke up.

He told himself to be reasonable, think about something else, something that didn’t make him angry, like the air conditioner in his cubicle that wasn’t even pretending to work. Or Lewis Monserat, peddling marked-up s.m. gear and hiding behind the skirts of the law.

Had anyone who wasn’t guilty of at least grand larceny ever hired Ted Morgenstern or any of his associates?

Cardozo’s mind went over that a moment, flicked back to Doria Forbes-Steinman’s accusations. They were wild, certainly exaggerated, but …

He lifted the telephone. The receiver blasted him with the strains of a vocal quartet warbling “The Age of Aquarius.”

“I don’t believe it. I’m getting Muzak on the goddamned phone.”

He strode through the squad room into the hallway.

The redheaded proprietor of an East Side crack boutique sat on a bench, manacled to a plainclothesman. She was gazing into a simulated-gold pocket mirror, studded with phony emeralds. Her free hand, holding a puff studded with more phony emeralds, was busily powdering her face.

The same smarmy musical arrangement was drifting up the stairwell.

Cardozo leaned over the banister and shouted down, “Get that fuckin’ Muzak off my phone!”

The crack boutique owner’s eyes came up at Cardozo with a grin. “Way to go, man, way to go.”

It did no good. it didn’t even make him feel better. Now when he lifted his receiver the tune was “Yesterday.”

He gave up and walked downstairs.

The computer room was the only effectively air-conditioned room in the station house. The computer rated air-conditioning because, unlike a cop, it refused to work in discomfort.

“Help you, Lieutenant?” Charley Brackner asked. A brown-eyed young man, prematurely bald, Charley was the precinct’s resident computer whiz, the only person who could turn the machine on or off without blowing the air conditioning. His cheerfully condescending manner reflected the confidence of a man who had long ago realized the unique and intimidating power of the skills he possessed.

“Call up the rap sheet on Lewis Monserat.”

Cardozo spelled the name, and Charley’s fingers, moving in a blur over the IBM letter keyboard, fed the information into the computer. The screen flashed the word searching and a moment later the words no file available.

“What does that mean?” Cardozo said. “There’s no file or there’s a file but we mortal schmucks aren’t allowed to read it?”

Charley turned around in the swivel chair, patiently professorial. “It means Maisie has nothing on him.”

“Maisie?”

“The computer. Either Monserat has a damned good lawyer, or he hasn’t been caught, or he isn’t a criminal.”

“Not even a parking ticket?”

“Believe it or not, Lieutenant, eighty percent of the residents of central and south Manhattan lead law-abiding lives.”

Cardozo’s face and hands were dappled in reflections from the slides. When he recognized a figure he added to an earlier notation in the log. Fresh faces got new notations.

He flicked to a new slide and suddenly he sat forward.

It was as though the light had changed, as though the surrounding area had dimmed out and only the narrow waist held in a black band splashed with primary colors was in focus.

He toyed with the lens. The figure on the wall receded into a blur, came forward into sharpness.

His eyes took in the three-inch black leather belt, the outlandishly huge and brilliant red and green and blue costume jewels encrusting it.

The woman had a strikingly deep suntan and blond hair that splayed out into the breeze in a long wave behind her.

Cardozo felt a tightening around the chest.

He switched off the projector. For a minute the wall seemed to glow where the image had been.

He lifted the phone and dialed the number of the Pleasure Trove sex shop.

Burt, the salesman from Pleasure Trove, leaned back against the cubicle wall, a column of smoke rising from his cigarette up into the still air. The carousel made click after click as the slides flicked by.