VC01 - Privileged Lives Page 3

  “And where do the bags go?”

  “The trucking company picks them up.”

  Connell led Cardozo to the personnel office. Besides a desk, the windowless room held an easy chair, two metal chairs, a card table, and two filing cabinets.

  “Personnel list,” Connell muttered. “Worksheet …” He opened a cabinet drawer and looked behind a pile of racing forms.

  “And. the residents,” Cardozo said.

  “Bingo.” Connell pulled out three lists.

  Cardozo looked them over. “You’re a resident.”

  Connell nodded. “The apartment comes with the job.”

  “You weren’t working yesterday?”

  “I get holidays and weekends off,” Connell said.

  “Where were you?”

  “I spent the day at home. My wife Ebbie—she’s an invalid. We don’t get out too much.”

  Cardozo folded the lists and slipped them into his jacket pocket. He noticed a battered-looking thirteen-inch Sony TV on the desk. “Who watches that?”

  Connell seemed embarrassed. “I do.”

  “Don’t you have your own upstairs?”

  “Ebbie doesn’t like sports. So if there’s an important game, I usually catch it here.”

  The room had gray concrete walls and cement floor and naked pipes overhead. It didn’t look like the coziest spot for watching the Mets.

  “Can I use your phone?” Cardozo asked.

  “Help yourself. Do you need me?”

  “Not for the moment.”

  “I’ll be in the utility room. Out in the hall and hook a right.”

  Alone, Cardozo took out his notebook and spent three minutes drawing up a list of his own. He wrote down eight names, crossed out three, after a little thought crossed out a fourth.

  He lifted the phone and dialed headquarters. “Flo, it’s Vince.” He read her the names of the four detectives. “Pull them off whatever they’re doing, get them up here.”

  “You know what they’re doing, Vince, they’re having a day off.”

  “So was I.”

  “You’re not going to be a loved man.”

  3

  IN THE BEDROOM, CARDOZO stood alone in the sunlight glaring through the window. He was working now, stirred by the sense of a secret waiting to be revealed, a sense that was tantalizing and almost sexual in its excitement.

  He looked about the blank surfaces of the unfurnished room, seeking some object, some detail that bore the imprint of what had happened here.

  The bedroom door had two hinges. He could remember a time when doors had had three hinges, but nowadays builders got by with two. He swung the door. In the crack just below the bottom hinge something small and dark and glistening had wedged against the jamb. He crouched. Using the tip of his gloved finger he gently poked the dark thing.

  An inch of black plastic fell to the floor.

  He picked up the fragment, turned it over in his hand. He tested the thickness between his thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t surprised at what he felt. A piece of garbage bag, similar to the ones he’d seen in the compactor room.

  He dropped the fragment into a clear plastic evidence bag.

  Down the hallway, where the baseboard wasn’t quite joined to the wall, he found another piece of black plastic.

  “Cleaning house?”

  Cardozo glanced up. “You look lousy,” he said.

  In fact Detective Sam Richards didn’t look lousy at all. Nattily dressed in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, charcoal gray summer-weight slacks, he looked like a linebacker who had traded in his shoulder pads for a TV news anchor’s chair.

  But the expression on his long, unsmiling black face was grumpy, and his big roguish moustache was pulled down into a frown. There was a small pink Band-Aid on his chin.

  “How’d you get the battle wound?”

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  “Hung over?”

  “Maybe. I spent last night celebrating.”

  “Celebrating what?”

  “Having today off.”

  “That was premature.”

  “Tell me about it, Vince. Tell me why I’m alive, tell me why I’m here.”

  “How about if I just tell you about this killing.” Cardozo described what he had seen, reviewed what he had found, and walked Richards through the apartment.

  “I want you to canvass,” Cardozo said. “Cover the building, cover the neighborhood, see if any of the local Peeping Toms or storekeepers noticed anything. You’ll split the job with Greg Monteleone.”

  “Tell Monteleone I’ve started.”

  Cardozo felt he had been poking through kitchen cabinets for an hour. His watch told him it had been twenty-five minutes.

  As he swung open the door beneath the sink, the inside of his nose prickled violently. Print powder came eddying up in a cloud. He sneezed once, and again, and then again.

  “Gesundheit.” A fortyish man in a badly cut suit the color of dry clay was watching from the corridor, amused. Detective Greg Monteleone’s brown eyes were gleaming in a cheerfully soulful face that gave him the appearance of a prankish poet. “Three sneezes means good luck.”

  “Thanks, Greg.” Cardozo opened cabinets above the sink.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “If I knew, maybe I wouldn’t be looking for it.”

  “Hasn’t Forensic already been through those?”

  “I like to see for myself.”

  “Trouble with you is, Vince, you’re a perfectionist, a type A personality.” In his off-hours Monteleone was a voracious reader of self-help books. “You have to learn to delegate.”

  “I’m delegating. That’s why you’re here.”

  “You looked in here?” Monteleone had a hand on the refrigerator. In all the years Cardozo had known Greg Monteleone, he had had his hand on either a refrigerator door or a girl’s leg. Monteleone pulled out the plastic vegetable and meat bins, setting them down on the linoleum and peering into the empty spaces behind them.

  “Don’t eat the evidence,” Cardozo said.

  “There isn’t any evidence. Not even a goddamned beer.”

  Cardozo searched through the dishwasher, the drawers, the little closet for brooms and mops. His eye kept coming back to the dishwasher. It was a front-loading brown-and-cream model.

  He pulled down the dishwasher door. He gave the lower basket a forward tug, and it glided easily out over the open door. He pulled on the upper basket, the shallow rack for cups and glasses. It slid almost all the way out, empty.

  He gave another tug and this time felt firm resistance. He reached a hand in, probed. He pulled out a handful of neatly coiled black insulated electric cord. Now he tugged the upper basket and it slid all the way out, empty. He pulled the lower basket out, lifted it off its tracks and set it on the floor.

  The water sprinkler, shaped like a small perforated propeller, sat in a recess on the floor of the washer. He realized now that only two of the paddles belonged to the dishwasher. What he had taken to be the third paddle was a mini rotary saw, wedged into the hollow beneath the sprinkler.

  He lifted the saw out. “What do you think of this, Greg?”

  Greg Monteleone was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder. “Black and Decker. The best.” He took the saw in his gloved hands, angling the blade to the window light. “This baby cuts bone, all right.”

  Cardozo scratched his ear. “The killer didn’t hide the body, but he hid the saw. What kind of thinking is that?”

  “It’s crazy thinking,” a female voice said. “You have a crazy killing, so what else do you expect?”

  A woman stood in the doorway. Cardozo turned and gave Detective Ellie Siegel a smile. “Glad you could make it, Ellie.”

  She gave him a look from her dark eyes that was not a smile by a long shot. He recognized another cop in mourning for her lost holiday.

  “Detective Ellie Siegel,” Cardozo said, “you remember Detective Greg Monteleone.”

&n
bsp; “Not funny,” Ellie said. “Please, not today.”

  Greg and Ellie were good detectives; they just weren’t the greatest friends. Greg got along with Ellie better than she got along with him—but Greg made it a point to get along with just about anyone who didn’t insult him. Ellie made no secret of the fact that she considered Greg, in his opinions and tastes, a thug.

  Greg got back at Siegel by openly admiring her looks, which wasn’t hard. She had Mediterranean coloring and fine Semitic bones, and her dark eyes were just close enough together to give her gaze a strange, arresting quality. She was a woman that men watched, even when she wasn’t wearing the violet body-hugging dress she had on today.

  Cardozo took Siegel down to the bedroom and showed her where the dead man had been found.

  “Well, Lieutenant,” she said, “just what do you expect me to do about it?”

  “Find the leg. It was put in a heavy-duty black plastic garbage bag. It could have been dumped down the chute in this building. It could have been tossed into a public garbage can or trash basket. It could already be landfill.”

  “It wouldn’t be landfill, not yet. Sanitation doesn’t move that fast on a holiday weekend. And it could have been dumped in someone else’s garbage. I passed about twenty French restaurants between here and Seventh Avenue, and they weren’t all shut. Restaurants use private garbage services.”

  “You can have all the uniformed bodies you need. Search the garbage cans in a ten-block radius and then search the landfills.”

  She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “What makes you think this leg is in one piece?”

  “It may not be.”

  “We could be looking for hamburger?”

  “We could be looking for hamburger.”

  “Vince, ruining my weekend is one thing, but ruining this dress I’m not going to forgive. You could have at least warned me. I’d’ve worn jeans.”

  “You don’t have to dress like you’re going to a tea party all the time.”

  “It’s Memorial Day for God’s sake.”

  “Who dresses for Memorial Day?”

  “Jewish princesses.”

  “You didn’t see any strangers going in or out of the building?” Cardozo was in the lobby, questioning the doorman. “No delivery men, no repairmen?”

  “Holiday weekend, you kidding?” Hector Dominguez shook his head. Sunlight spilling through the lobby door sank into his toupee, refracting brightly when it hit the fringe of graying human hair over his ears. “Yesterday maybe three, four people went in and out of this building.”

  “Who?”

  “Residents.”

  “Which residents?”

  “The ones who aren’t away. Most got houses in the Hamptons, houses in Europe. A few don’t.”

  “How do you think that guy got into six?”

  “He didn’t get in on my shift.”

  “Think he came in through the cellar?”

  “He’d have to get through the door; that takes a remote.”

  “You can buy those remotes.”

  “But you gotta set the code.”

  “There aren’t that many codes, are there?”

  “Anyone coming in through the cellar, it would have showed on the monitor.”

  Hector tapped a finger on the bank of four TV screens. Two showed the garage, and two showed the interiors of the elevators. The views of the garage were panning shots from cameras moving back and forth in automated hundred-eighty-degree arcs. The elevators were stationary shots from cameras mounted in the ceilings of the cabs.

  “You were at this door from eight A.M. to four P.M. yesterday?” Cardozo kept going over it, testing to see if it kept coming out the same way. “You never left your post?”

  Hector shrugged. “Maybe I went downstairs to take a leak.”

  “Maybe you took a leak or you took a leak?”

  “I took a leak.”

  “What time?”

  “It’s not like it’s a big deal you’d remember the exact time.”

  “You left this door unguarded?”

  “I left it locked.”

  “Who has a key?”

  “All the residents.”

  “So a resident could have come in, or anyone could have left, and you might not know?”

  “That could happen. It’s not like I was expecting a murder.”

  But his eyes were saying something else. They said he’d been expecting something, maybe still was expecting it.

  “How’d you get those scratches on your face, Hector?”

  Hector’s hand went up to his cheek and a glass ruby flashed from his finger. “Man, my damned cat scratched me.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday, day before. I forget.”

  “You’d better work on that memory, Hector.”

  A big red-headed man sauntered into the lobby. He had florid coloring and glinting green eyes that didn’t take the least offense when Hector challenged, “Hey, you gotta be announced. Where you goin’?”

  “That’s okay, Hector,” Cardozo said. “Detective Malloy’s with me.”

  Hector touched a fumbling hand to the brim of his cap and Detective Carl Malloy, smiling, touched a finger to a nonexistent hatbrim.

  Cardozo drew Malloy aside and filled him in on the crime. “I want you to check out all the cars and trucks parked in a five-block radius.”

  Malloy was a constitutionally cheerful man, but at the mention of a five-block radius he drew a deep sigh. Five blocks meant better than three thousand vehicles. The sigh puckered Malloy’s fire-engine red vest at its straining brass buttons. A little under six feet and a little over two hundred pounds, Malloy had trouble with his weight. He binged daily on bagels and cream cheese, claiming his doctor had told him dairy products would quiet his ulcer.

  “You can have all the bodies you need,” Cardozo said. “Start running the licenses through National Crime Bureau and see if anyone’s got a record.”

  “You got it,” Malloy said.

  Cardozo nodded and turned and crossed the lobby. Melissa Hatfield was waiting on one of the leather sofas. She saw him and quickly jabbed out her cigarette.

  “Would you mind showing me the other unsold apartments?” he asked.

  “Why not? That’s what I’m here for.”

  They took the elevator up to 12. There was a small carved drop-leaf table in the foyer, and a bowl of dried flowers had been put on it. A soothing aromatic spiciness filled the space.

  She fitted the passkey into the lock and opened the door.

  “Same floor plan,” Cardozo observed.

  “The buyer makes his own modifications,” she said.

  Cardozo crossed through the entrance hall into the livingroom. The air was warm and still. From the window he could see a bright gray sliver of the East River a mile away, glinting between Sutton Place high rises.

  He explored the kitchen, the bedrooms, the bath. Something bothered him. “This is exactly the same as six?”

  A hint of mischief crept into the line of her mouth. “Not quite. This one costs thirty thousand more.”

  They looked at 16 and 17 and 19. Cardozo had that same feeling—a difference. In 23 he asked, “The ceilings aren’t a little lower here?”

  “No, they’re all ten foot eight. That’s one of our selling points.”

  The, livingroom of 29 had a pale blue oriental carpet and deep beige sofas. She explained that this one was the show suite.

  “What’s the price?”

  “We’re asking a million.”

  He whistled.

  “It’s not so high considering the view.”

  “You didn’t build the view.”

  She smiled. “The buyer doesn’t know that.”

  French windows led onto a terrace and Cardozo stepped out. Well-watered boxwoods masked a hip-high wrought-iron railing. Chains of creeping cars and trucks shimmered and rippled in the heat rising from the streets far below. From here you could see the Queens and Brooklyn shores and a surpris
ing amount of green in a city that he had always thought of as asphalt, concrete, and glass.

  “Something to drink?” Melissa Hatfield offered. “The company stocks everything.”

  “Scotch and water and a little ice will be fine.”

  When he returned to the livingroom, she was arranging bottles and glasses and napkins on the top of a carved rosewood chest that had been gutted and turned into a bar.

  “Care for a nibbly?” she offered. “We have fish balls, chicken livers with bacon, cheese puffs. It only takes a minute to warm them in the microwave.”

  “No, thanks. I’m trying not to eat between meals.” He sipped. She’d left the water out of his Scotch.

  She caught his hesitation. “Sorry. I forgot you’re not a potential buyer.”

  He let his gaze walk across the walls. There were three paintings and they reminded his untutored eye of French impressionists.

  “Are the oils genuine?” he asked.

  “The Vlamincks are real. The lawyer at the Metropolitan says the Renoir’s a forgery. He wants to buy it himself.”

  “Are they safe here?”

  “They’re insured. If anyone steals them, Beaux Arts Properties will be richer than ever.”

  Cardozo pulled Bill Connell’s list from his pocket. “Tell me about your tenants.”

  “We don’t have too many tenants. Technically we’re a co-op, and the law limits our income rental. There’s Armani, the clothing shop on the first floor. They have five employees. They were closed for the holiday. Rizzoli, the book shop on the second floor. Four employees. Closed for the holiday. On the third floor there’s Saveurs de Paris, a French pastry shop. The New York Times food critic likes them and they get three dollars an éclair. The concierge has an apartment on the same floor.”

  “What’s a concierge?”

  “Bill Connell, the super. He and his wife have a dinky two-roomer.”

  “I didn’t know there was anything dinky in this building.”

  Her eyes lifted a moment toward his. “A little more than you might think.”

  Cardozo’s eye went down the list. “Fourth floor. Doctors Morton Fine, D.D.S., P.C., Hildegarde Berencz, D.D.S., P.C., Seymour Black, D.D.S., P.C. Who are they?”

  “Dentists.”

  “Closed for the holiday?”

  “They close for every holiday you’ve ever heard of, including Ramadan.”