VC03 - Mortal Grace (22 page)

Cardozo glanced at Bonnie Ruskay when she said that, and he saw Lowndes glancing at her at the same time. There was a warning in the lawyer’s eyes and she couldn’t have missed it.

“Have you ever met these runaways?” Cardozo said.

“Not all of them.”

Lowndes cleared his throat. “How does that window look?”

“No one broke through it.” Cardozo peered through a doorway. “Is this the bathroom?”

“It is.” Ellie stood by the bathroom window, staring down at the roof of the garage. “Someone could have climbed up on the roof and got in this way.”

The window was unlocked and open a crack.

“Did you find it that way?”

She nodded. “Haven’t touched a thing.”

A bath towel had been wadded into the space between the towel rack and the tile wall. Cardozo touched it.

The bath towel was dry. So was the soap. So was the bath mat.

He crossed to the sink. There was nothing in the medicine cabinet except an almost exhausted bottle of Advil and two more of the church’s For God’s Sake, Keep It Safe! packets, unopened.

A balding, limp-bristled toothbrush sat in a water glass on the sink rim next to a plastic hairbrush. A crack in the hairbrush handle had been patched with electrician’s tape.

Cardozo tore a sheet from the toilet paper roll so as not to leave prints. He held the hairbrush up to the light. There were dark brown hairs in the bristles.

“So you think he broke in through that window,” Lowndes said, “and brushed his hair before he went downstairs?”

“Your guess is a lot more colorful than mine, counselor.” Cardozo set the brush back on the sink.

As he came back into the bedroom, he took his house keys out of his pocket, tossed them into the air, caught them. Showing the world the debonair side of Vince Cardozo. He tossed them again, didn’t catch them, kicked them accidentally-on-purpose under the bed. Showing the world the klutzy side of Vince Cardozo.

He got down on his hands and knees. Dust balls had claimed the space beneath the bed as their own ecological niche. He stifled a sneeze, yanked three generous strands from the gray shag rug, and slipped them into his fist with the keys.

TWENTY-NINE

A
BUTLER OPENED THE
door.

“Could I speak to Mrs. Schuyler, please?” Ellie showed her ID.

He seemed unimpressed. “Is she expecting you?”

“I doubt it.”

“If you’d be so good as to wait here, I’ll try to locate her.”

He left Ellie standing in a small marble foyer. She could see through a long living room out French windows into a garden. The space bustled with big hair and jewels and couture. Voices chattered and a small orchestra was playing show tunes of the fifties. Uniformed servants circulated with trays of drinks and canapés. Gusts of laughter broke like whitecaps dotting the sea.

A small, very slender woman approached. She had gray-blond hair, puffed and ringleted, and too much suntan, and she was squinting. “Yes? I’m Samantha Schuyler.”

Ellie introduced herself. “I need to ask one or two questions about the 911 call you made yesterday.”

“I only have a moment.”

“This will only take a moment.”

“Would you mind the polo practice room? It’s quieter.” Mrs. Schuyler led the way up a flight of stairs into a room that housed a high wooden sawhorse with a saddle seat. There was no other place to sit.

“In your 911 call you said you heard a scream and breaking glass. Do you have anything to add to that?”

“Add to it?” Samantha Schuyler was thoughtful. “No.”

“Or to change?”

“To change?” Mrs. Schuyler seemed surprised. “No. Someone screamed as if they were in shock—or pain. Frankly, it sounded as if they were screaming for their life…although I’ve never actually heard anyone scream for their life, so I couldn’t swear.”

Ellie was taking notes—not an easy thing to do standing. “Was the person who screamed male or female?”

“It could have been a very hysterical man—or a very hysterical woman.” Mrs. Schuyler stood against the wall. Above her, somebody’s dour ancestor, mounted on horseback and captured in oil paint, glared down unblinkingly. “Screams are screams—there’s no particular gender to them. At least there wasn’t to this one.”

“You say somebody screamed, and glass broke. You’re sure of that order. First the scream and then the breaking glass. Not the other way around.”

Samantha Schuyler was silent a moment, running something carefully through her head. “I can hear it now. That person screams. Then the glass shatters. That’s the order.”

“How soon after the scream did the glass shatter?”

Samantha Schuyler walked to the window. As she moved, she flashed. She was wearing diamonds every place that a diamond could be attached to a body or dress. She stood gazing down at the party in her garden. “I wasn’t standing here with a stopwatch.”

“You were standing there?”

“Right here.”

Ellie looked out. Across the garden, you could see the Gothic leaded windows of the rectory. One of the panes on the ground story was broken. “Could you estimate the time between the scream and the breaking glass?”

“It could have been two or three minutes. If it had been just the scream, I wouldn’t have thought anything. After all, screams are par for the course over there. It could have been just the usual church wildness. But when glass broke, I knew something was going on. I’ve never heard them destroy property before.”

“You used the words,
the usual church wildness.
What do you mean by that?”

“You know churches nowadays.”

“I’m sorry to say I don’t.”

“It’s only gossip. If you haven’t heard it, I really don’t know if I should repeat it….”

“Mrs. Schuyler, a young man has died.”

Samantha Schuyler’s eyes swung around immediately, “Another one?” She caught herself. “I mean…who?”

“We don’t know yet. But I hope you’ll tell me anything you know that might shed light on it.”

“I’m hardly a judge of what sheds light on what.”

“You say you’ve often heard screams coming from the church.”

“From the rectory. They don’t scream in the church…yet.”

“Do you have any idea who’s screaming or why?”

“I certainly do. They give youth dances and wild parties. They’re always keeping the neighbors awake. I’ve even heard rumors—” She broke off. “But you don’t want rumors.”

“What are the rumors?”

“Drug use and sex. That sounds like an exaggeration, I realize. But you have to know the background. The city wanted to put a methadone clinic in the neighborhood—naturally, we in the neighborhood objected.”

“Naturally.”

Samantha Schuyler glanced at Ellie. Her eyes said she detected irony and didn’t like it. “The upshot was, St. Andrew’s volunteered to lend space for a methadone clinic once a week. So now there are strange young men and women—and some not so young men and women—going in and out of that church all hours of the day and night. Rough-looking types—crazy, stoned, noisy. One step up from street people and criminals. You can imagine what that’s done to the quality of life around here.”

“Yes, I can.” Ellie tried to sound sympathetic.

“
Then
the city wanted to put in a soup kitchen. Same story. We objected, St. Andrew’s got around us and opened its own soup kitchen. Exactly the same people show up: Tuesdays, it’s free methadone; Fridays, it’s free lunch. And
now
the city wants to set up a homeless dorm. We’re fighting it, but if we succeed in blocking it, no one doubts for a minute that St. Andrew’s will open its garage to the homeless. Maybe it’s a good thing this has happened. Maybe this man’s death will focus attention on what St. Andrew’s is doing.”

“And just what is St. Andrew’s doing?”

“Destabilizing the community. There’s a lot more going on over there than soul-saving or counseling or consciousness-raising. It was inevitable that something ghastly was going to happen. And it’s high time the police looked into it.”

Cardozo placed the two case folders side by side on his desk top. The girl who had been discovered fourteen months ago in the Vanderbilt Garden; the housebreaker who had been discovered less than one day ago in the rectory of St. Andrew’s Church.

It didn’t seem likely there could be a connection. But still, the same church was involved in both cases, and it wouldn’t hurt to check for similarities and rule out the possibility.

He opened the first folder.
CASE UP61 #11214 OF THE 22ND PRECINCT…JANE DOE, CAUCASIAN, HOMICIDE BY MEANS UNKNOWN…

The skull-face of Ms. Basket Case gawked at him from the top page, eyeless yet staring. Two blue forms had been stapled to the folder. These were DD5 supplementary complaint reports, the progress update required at least twice yearly on all ongoing cases. Technically, any unsolved case was ongoing whether the detective had time to continue the investigation or not.

Since no court had passed on Martin Barth’s confession, Ms. Basket Case was in a legal sense unsolved and therefore still open. Which was not at all the same as active.

Cardozo’s updates—both identically worded—tersely summarized the situation:
There has been no progress on this case since last report.
These were the bottom carbons of triplicate sets, and his handwriting had come through faintly and unevenly.

After a moment, he opened the second folder.

CASE UP61 #12703 OF THE 22ND PRECINCT…JOHN DOE, CAUCASIAN, HOMICIDE BY MEANS TO BE DETERMINED. A Polaroid flash shot showed the face of the housebreaker—sallow, shut-eyed, dead.

Cardozo’s eye compared the numbers on the two cases.

He frowned, thinking for a moment that a computer must have goofed. The cumulative total of cases reported to the precinct couldn’t have jumped fifteen hundred in a year and two months. Even counting all the lost credit cards and runaway dogs, all the stolen bikes and incidents of gender harassment, there was no way it could have climbed that fast.

He turned over a commissioner’s directive and did a rough calculation on the back. Figure a 12 percent growth in real crime—a conservative estimate. Figure a 50 percent growth in nonsense crime, the borderline stuff that the mayor had mandated tracking and if necessary inflating, so that growth in paper crime would dwarf growth in real crime.

Cardozo realized the total was just about right. And—unless you happened to be the mayor or the mayor’s minion—it was also meaningless.

“How was I supposed to know he had a pacemaker?” a voice from the squad room wailed. “He was a bum, he was stealing my garbage!”

A town house dweller on East Eighty-second Street had found a street person going through her trash bin. Having paid six hundred dollars in fines for unbagged trash, she’d lost her temper and kicked the man. He had dropped dead on the sidewalk. Detective Henahan was taking the woman’s statement.

“How could he afford a pacemaker? I work for a living, and I can’t afford a pacemaker!”

Cardozo got up and closed the door of his cubicle. He took his phone to the window and called Dan Hippolito at the medical examiner’s office. “Dan, do you remember that autopsy you did last year, the Jane Doe we found in a Styrofoam basket?”

“I remember. Vanderbilt Garden. There wasn’t a hell of a lot to work with.”

“Could you do me a favor? You’ll be getting an unidentified male housebreaker from St. Andrew’s rectory.”

“He’s already here. Came in a half hour ago.”

“Check for similarities between him and Jane Doe. Anything at all—no matter how small, or how dumb.”

“I’ll look.” Dan’s tone was doubtful.

“I appreciate it.”

Cardozo replaced the receiver and dropped into his chair. He pulled the St. Andrew’s newsletter from the housebreaker file. A zappy headline proclaimed,

CONDOMS THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR SATURDAY NIGHT.

Cardozo sighed and skimmed the article.

Beginning the first of next month, SAYOP—the St. Andrew’s Youth Outreach Program—will be distributing condoms free of charge to any teenager who requests them. Condom recipients will be invited, but not required, to view the twelve-minute award-winning documentary film, “Sexuality and Responsibility in Today’s Changing World: A Young Person’s Perspective.”

The phone jangled with completely unnecessary malice. His first impulse was to swat it. “Cardozo.”

“Oh, yes, Lieutenant.” The voice of a woman. Cultivated but with a broad edge of phoniness. A woman he knew he didn’t know. “This is Mrs. Douglas Moseley’s secretary. Would you be able to stop by the house at six-thirty tonight for a drink? We’re at Sixty-ninth and Park.”

Cardozo looked at the work piled up on his desk. Besides the housebreaker at Father Joe’s, he had a stack of still-open homicides. You couldn’t say
no
to a Douglas Moseley, but you could sure as hell be ornery about saying yes.

“How about seven?” he said.

“We’ll make it seven.” He could tell from the tone that she was miffed. “Mr. Moseley will be looking forward to seeing you again.”

A butler admitted Cardozo to the Moseleys’ Park Avenue penthouse duplex co-op. The voices and laughter and piano music in the living room sounded like a party, but the ashen-faced butler looked like a funeral. He led Cardozo to the library.

A woman was sitting at an antique mahogany desk signing checks. She turned. “Lieutenant Cardozo—I’m Paula Moseley, Douglas’s wife.” She raised the desk lid and locked it. She had narrow, almost squinting green eyes and her auburn hair had been expensively teased into a wild mane. She rose and gave him her hand. “Dougie is on the phone—could I offer you a drink?”

“I’ll take a diet Pepsi if you have one.”

She gave him a curious look. “Do you not drink alcohol at all or are you just not drinking tonight?”

“I’m just not drinking right now.”

“Forgive me for asking. I deal with substance abuse in my work—mostly young people.”

“What kind of work is that?”

She went to a small sideboard where a bar had been set up against the wall of watered silk. Her hands made practiced, economical moves with glasses and bottles and an engraved silver ice bucket. “I’m in clinical psychology.”