VC01 - Privileged Lives (62 page)

Babe was silent.

“I walk through these rooms—they feel so lonely, so empty.”

“What are you doing with yourself? Aren’t you getting out at all?”

“I was out with Vicki the other night—she took me to some of the discos—it’s not a lot, but it’s a toe in the water. I really don’t feel up to dinners, meeting people, making chitchat. There’s always that obligatory I’m-so-sorry and I’m so tired of it. And every damned little thing reminds me of her. I order Château-Margaux and I remember when she and I last drank it. I play a record and it’s her favorite. I try to read and the words on the page start a chain of associations and I wind up thinking of her. Look what I found, going through her things.”

Dunk pulled a pack of glossy photographs out of a manila envelope and handed them to Babe.

She looked at them—candids of Ash, appearing rather tipsy in some airport or other. One showed Ash dancing on a VIP lounge couch, a gaggle of nuns staring in open shock.

“Our trip to Bavaria, remember?” Dunk said. “When we all went to Caroline’s schloss and at Shannon they announced ‘Boarding all passengers on Aeroflot to Moscow and all passengers on Mr. Getty’s jet to Bad Nemetz.’ It’s one of those silly moments you never forget.”

“I remember.” Babe remembered being embarrassed, but it was obviously one of Dunk’s golden moments and she wasn’t going to say anything to tarnish it.

“Speaking of mementos …” Babe opened her own envelope and handed Dunk her sketch of the red gown. “Do you remember the dress I designed for Ash?”

He shook his head. “I got rid of all her clothes. The day after she died I phoned the Junior League thrift shop and told them to send a truck.”

Cardozo held the door for Babe.

The air inside the Junior League thrift shop smelled of floor wax, camphor, and the perfumes of forty different millionaires’ wives. The women floating up and down the aisles did not seem to be shopping so much as strolling, enjoying a break in lives that were all intermission to begin with, pausing to examine a froth of petticoat or an onyx bookend. They had a bored air, but there was a seriousness in their boredom, as though they were pursuing highly competitive careers.

“How do you tell who’s selling and who’s buying?” Cardozo whispered.

“The saleswomen are wearing originals,” Babe said.

Cardozo glanced along the racks of dresses and evening gowns, seemingly crushed together helter-skelter, all exuding an aroma of last decade’s chic; shelves of figurines and glasses and vases; stacks of books coming apart at the bindings.

“Garth, look!” a woman cried. “Depression glass candlesticks!”

Babe examined the sleeve of an oxydized mink that had gone the color of an old toupee.

A young woman approached. She wore slacks and a silk blouse with a patterned scarf, her reddish-brown hair pinned behind one ear with an emerald clip. “May I help you?”

“Who takes deliveries?” Babe asked.

“Cybilla handles those. I’ll see if she’s free.”

Everyone in the store looked free to Cardozo.

By the window, he observed two women discussing a flared rust-and-black patterned dress.

The younger woman was thin and blond, bright-eyed, agitated, a princess with a small p, doing coke or possibly prescription speed, worried about her age, her body, her left contact lens.

Her opponent was a tall, slender woman with steel-gray hair softly waved over an intelligent face.

They were disagreeing. It was clearly a collision of life-styles.

Cardozo understood what the young blond woman did not: the Junior League boutique was not Crazy Eddie’s; you didn’t
hondle
with the help, who in any case were not help but Park Avenue volunteers.

The woman in slacks spoke to the gray-haired lady, who came smiling across the shop.

“Great to see you, Babe. You’re looking just terrific.”

“So are you, Cybilla.”

“We’re going crazy. Three cartons of
tip-top
junk just came in from Truman Capote’s old garage and we’re understaffed.”

“Cybilla,” Babe said, “this is Vincent Cardozo. Vince, Cybilla deClairville—a good friend of my mother’s and mine.”

Cybilla raised her left eyebrow. She held out a perfectly and unobtrusively manicured hand. One gold band and nothing else. “You look familiar to me, Mr. Cardozo. Have we met?”

“Your home was robbed eleven years ago,” he said. “They almost killed the butler. How’s he doing?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“The Bonnard is all stitched up?”

“As good as new, Mr. Cardozo.”

Babe showed Cybilla her sketch of the red dress. “Do you have this dress?”

Cybilla studied the sketch. “I’m afraid we don’t. It’s a bit out of our league.”

“But it came in with Ash Canfield’s things.”

Noncomprehension lines knotted Cybilla’s brow.

“I designed it for her,” Babe said. “I’d like it for sentimental reasons. I’ll buy it, of course.”

“We don’t have any of Ash’s things,” Cybilla said.

“But Dunk gave you everything.”

“No he didn’t. Dunk hasn’t said
boo
to me in three years.”

Countess Vicki de Savoie-Sancerre joined the conversation, tall and leggy in an orange jumpsuit. “Hello, Babe, you’re looking glorious, as always.”

“I didn’t know you worked here,” Babe said.

“Every Thursday this month, taking over for Betsy.”

Cybilla handed Countess Vicki the sketch. “Have we had a dress like this?”

Countess Vicki stared at the sketch. “Oh, Dunk Canfield brought it in and it was purchased the same day.”

“Do you happen to have the receipt?” Cardozo asked.

Countess Vicki smiled and held out her wrists. “Lieutenant, handcuff me. I didn’t make out a receipt. I just put the money in the register.”

For an instant Duncan Canfield’s face glowed from the entire screen, patterned pinpoints of vibrating light and dark.

Charley Brackner pushed a button that split the screen.

From the bottom half Canfield’s image sent out sharp glints like sparks from a flint. In the upper half appeared the message:

WELCOME TO IDENTI-KIT COPYRIGHT 1985

HERE IS YOUR MENU OF CHOICES:

[1] MALE

[2] FEMALE

“Female,” Cardozo said.

Charley Brackner’s brown eyes glanced up at him. “Female?”

“Read my lips. Female.”

Charley pushed another button. A new message appeared:

HERE IS YOUR MENU OF CHOICES.

FACE SHAPE

HAIR

EYEBROWS

EYES

NOSE

CHEEKS

LIPS

JAW

CHIN

“How would he disguise himself,” Cardozo said, “if he wanted to be a woman for the night. For Halloween. For a joke.”

“Okay. A wig, eyeshadow, lashes …”

The cursor began snatching options from the top half of the screen and moving them down onto the face. Feature by feature a drifting current of superimpositions redrew reality.

“How good is our man at this stuff?” Charley said.

Cardozo studied what was coming up on the screen. “Better than you are.”

“Sorry about that. Lipstick?”

“Definitely lipstick. I could even give you the shade.”

“Color we don’t have.”

Fleetingly the smile left Canfield’s face, then returned with Cupid’s bow lips.

“Less like a hooker,” Cardozo said.

New lips, more lady-like, fell into place. Gradually a change passed over the face. The likeness to Canfield began to die and the likeness to someone else, to
something
else, began to spread. There was a precise moment when the balance tipped, when the human being faded away, when all gentleness in the face had gone, and suddenly the image seethed with almost theatrical violence and anger.

“Try adding more hair, earrings—you know, women’s things.”

The hair dropped from her ears—for she was now definitely some kind of she—to her neck to her shoulders.

Cardozo stood there, staring. There was still a faint stain of doubt, a sensation that something was missing.

“Give her a dress.”

Suddenly she was wearing a severe dark dress.

“Make it lighter, flouncier.”

“Vince, we only have a limited line of dresses in this program. Saks Fifth Avenue we are not.”

“I can draw you the type I want.” Cardozo drew it on a piece of scratch paper.

“Vince, never go into fashion.”

The dress toppled into place.

Charley Brackner pressed a button and now the face occupied the entire screen, casting a hard glow, like sunlight on snow.

“That’s good,” Cardozo said. “Can you print that face?”

Charley pushed a button.

Seven minutes later Cardozo was sitting in his cubicle staring at Dunk Canfield transformed.

He angled the picture under his desk lamp. Specks of dust floated in the grayish flicker. Light vibrated on the face. The face was trapped in fluorescence. The eyes stared back at him, cheerless and vacant.

Unless Canfield had an identical twin of the opposite sex, there could be very little doubt: Sir Dunk was the same person as the ugly woman in the videotape wearing Ash Canfield’s dress.

Cardozo heaved himself up from the desk. He went into the squad room and studied the bulletin board. “Who took down the flyer for the Gay Cops’ Dance?”

Monteleone whooped. “You going, Vince? Take me along?”

“The CP ruled that that flyer stays up.”

The CP had issued an edict affirming the right of any and all organizations on the force to post notice of peaceful assemblies.

“Look under the Uniformed Sons of Erin novena. Under, Vince. Underneath.”

Cardozo undid the bottom thumbtacks on the novena announcement and found the gay cops’ flyer.

Technically, hiding the gay cops’ flyer under the Uniformed Sons of Erin’s was not a violation. Nevertheless, after he had made a note of the name and precinct of the organizer, Cardozo tacked the flyer over the latest communiqué from the CD’s office.

Sergeant John Henning, president of the Gay Policemen’s Caucus and organizer of the Gay Cops’ Dance, shook a Marlboro loose from the packet. He looked across the coffee shop booth at Cardozo. “Do you mind?”

“You’re going to die that way.”

Sergeant Henning lit his cigarette and signaled the waitress for another round of coffees. “You always draw morals?”

“Never. Am I going to insult you if I ask you about drag queens?”

For just a flash, Sergeant Henning’s eyes narrowed. Then they crinkled into a blandly diplomatic smile. “The only insult is asking if it’s an insult. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know if I’m getting too far from reality.”

Cardozo showed Henning the photograph of Sir Duncan that Ellie Siegel had clipped from
Town and Country.
“This is what this guy looks like in—let’s call it real life.” He laid down the computer-modified portrait beside it. “I’m almost a hundred and two percent convinced that this is the same guy.”

Sergeant Henning was a powerfully built young man, serious-looking and clean shaven, with keen blue eyes and a full head of black hair curling back from a face that was prematurely lined and drawn. His eyes wrinkled and there was a flicker of something—not exactly surprise, more like distaste caught off guard and not wanting to show itself.

“Strike you as reasonable that a man who looked like that would want to look like a woman who looked like that?”

“Reason doesn’t come into it,” Sergeant Henning said. “I have no trouble with it.”

“Say this guy is doing drag acts in his wife’s old clothes. The wife doesn’t know. Didn’t know. Thought her old clothes were going to charity.”

“A lot of TV’s keep it secret for a whole marriage.”

“TV?”

“Transvestite.”

“The guy may not be a transvestite exactly. The real point may be something else—a sort of s.m. that involves play-acting and gender switching.”

“All possible. Not frequent, but possible. Usually TV’s and s.m. are two very different worlds. Psychologically and socially.”

“But it could happen?”

“Sure.”

“The guy may dress up and act out these scenes in front of a video camera. Possible?”

“Very frequent.”

“But he doesn’t keep the camera at his home. There’s a special place where he gets together with like-minded friends. They do drugs and dress up and party and make these videotapes.”

“It’s very common for TV’s or s.m.’s to have a special apartment for their celebrations. Trick pads. The way some married guys have apartments to meet their girlfriends.”

“Okay. Where does he keep his clothes, the drag clothes?”

“Most guys would keep them at home. If they’re married and the wife doesn’t know, they’d keep them someplace where she wouldn’t be apt to look—the toolchest, the workshop, maybe even a safe.”

“But if he lives in a Manhattan apartment, how does he get across town without being noticed?”

“Is he rich?”

“Very.”

“Hire a limo.”

“Then the elevator man knows. The doorman knows.”

“He changes into drag in the limo. The driver’s in on it. That happens a lot. There are special limo services. He could even stash the drag with the limo company.”

“But it’s fancy drag, he wants it to look good. A real woman wouldn’t dress in a limo, make herself up in the back seat—would this guy?”

“Either you don’t know the things some women do in limos, or you don’t know what state-of-the-art limos are like. They have Jacuzzis. Beds. Mirrors.”

“But say these games and videotapes—say the s.m. in them is really rough. Maybe someone’s even been killed.”

Henning’s eye flicked up and fixed on Cardozo. “We both know that happens.”

“This guy doesn’t want anyone to know he does drag—not anyone on the outside, certainly not a limo driver. He doesn’t want anything showing that connects to that side of his life.”