Hudson, the cross street, was obviously the place for action. There was something aimless but urgent about the human movement, as if this was the now spot, the place to get sucked into the whirl of high-media exposure. The dress code was expensive sleaze, punk as modified by the fashion dictators. From his vantage point Cardozo couldn’t see a person over thirty on the sidewalk.
Porsches and BMW’s, Mercedeses and stretch limos crawled along, battling pedestrians for right of way. The cars changed colors like chameleons as they passed glitzy show windows and flashing neon logos.
Besides boutiques, card shops, and health food eateries, there was a disco called Space on the corner, guarded by an unsmiling seven-foot albino dressed in blue mylar. Next to it a restaurant sign flashed LA CÔTE BLEUE; through the window Cardozo could see the big circular glass bar mobbed with customers waiting to be seated.
The intersection smelled of sex and fashion and money—the things that made New York New York.
A little after eleven, a cruising police car hooked a turn down Franklin. The blue-and-white pulled alongside Cardozo.
“Hey, you.” A woman leaned out the passenger window, red hair peeking out from under a police officer’s blue cap. “No parking.”
Cardozo flashed his shield and the woman got flustered.
“Sorry.”
“’S okay.”
Fifteen minutes later a man leaned down and rapped on Cardozo’s window. He had thick black hair and a beard, an earring, piercing dark eyes.
“Hey, man. I got grass, crack, PCB, coke, ludes, THC, uppers, downers, opium, hash, morphine. Try before you buy.”
“Not tonight, thanks.”
The man gave Cardozo a look as though he had to be crazy or a cop to be parked on that street not trying to score drugs.
A little before midnight thunder belched and Cardozo’s rear view told him that the sky was turning a darker shade of night. The Empire State Building, lit art-deco blue and white for the night, was beginning to get lost in swirling clouds.
Rain spattered down, and pedestrians dodged into doorways. The line waiting to get into Space had to stand there and get soaked.
Cardozo’s eye ran along the fourth story of 432 Franklin.
The windows were dark.
They stayed dark for that night and the next.
It came with no warning. Cardozo had been watching, waiting three nights for it.
Hudson Street bustled with the Friday night crowd. The heat of the day had yielded to the heat of the night, dense upward-rippling waves tinged pink and yellow by neon and headlights. The revolving door of La Côte Bleue was emptying four customers in a spin. The line waiting to get into Space stretched halfway down Franklin Street.
The alley beside 432 was so dark that Cardozo almost didn’t spot the faint stir of movement.
Between the huge black garbage cans behind Space and the small silver ones behind La Côte Bleue three figures detached themselves from the shadows.
The three stood in the mouth of the alley, lighting a pipe of crack, passing it. When the pipe was consumed they moved unsteadily toward the door of 432.
The woman was pretty in a fading sort of way, wearing floppy safari trousers and a Hell’s Angels denim vest. She had the look of someone too much had happened to, someone who had no more reactions to offer.
The Hispanic was skinny and dark-faced, with a V of paleness at his open shirt front.
Lewis Monserat wore an Eisenhower army jacket, cap, and designer glasses. He didn’t look well. He was thin, the cords of his neck drawn taut, and he carried himself as if he had a headache, as if the very act of inserting the key in the lock required the coordinating of muscles he had barely the strength to control.
The door slammed behind them and three minutes later the lights on the fourth floor went on.
A car horn tooted, disturbingly close to Cardozo’s ear.
He stirred to consciousness in the driver’s seat of the Honda, hands folded across his chest. His sleep had not been deep, but he felt as if he had died in it.
The early morning light was flat and strange and it gave objects an eerie, unreal shimmer. The black Porsche sedan waiting at the door of 432 could have materialized from a dream. There didn’t seem to be anyone, not even a driver, behind the tinted windows.
The horn tooted again.
The door to 432 opened. The woman and the Hispanic were dressed as they had been the night before, but Monserat had changed into an old T-shirt and a worn pair of jeans. He wore loafers, no socks. Miami Vice style.
He held the car door for the others. He looked around him before getting in. His dark eyes, high cheekbones, and jutting chin combined into a strikingly emaciated face.
Cardozo allowed the Porsche to make the turn onto Hudson before he turned the key in his ignition.
The Saturday morning traffic was light. He kept a two-block distance across town and down Broadway.
The sun was stroking the tops of glass buildings.
The Porsche turned left on Wall Street and continued to the East River heliport. Cardozo pulled to a hydrant a half-block away and watched.
A helicopter was waiting on the tarmac. On its door was emblazoned the logo HAMPTON HELICAB.
The Porsche drew to the metal fence.
Monserat and his companions got out and walked to the copter. A mechanic closed the door after them. The rotors blurred into invisibility. The copter lifted, throwing off motes of light.
Cardozo found a phonebooth on the corner of William Street.
“Hampton Helicab, good morning.”
“This is Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo, NYPD. You have a Lewis Monserat and party flying with you this morning.”
Cardozo spelled the name, and it took the agent a moment to confirm.
“Does Mr. Monserat have a return flight with you?”
“Yes he does, sir. Monday at seven forty P.M.”
Cardozo broke the connection and dialed a second number.
“Waldo, it’s Vince Cardozo. How about a cup of coffee, my treat?”
Twenty minutes later Cardozo and Waldo Flores were sitting in Kate’s Cafeteria on West Seventeenth Street, on opposite sides of a Formica-topped table.
Waldo’s large brown eyes stared above the edge of the coffee mug. “Man, you keep asking me to break the law. I’m straight now. Not pushin’ drugs, not runnin’ girls, no B and E. Why the hell don’t you let me alone?”
Cardozo tore the edge off another packet of Sweet ’n Low and let it snow down into his coffee. “We’ve been having complaints about robberies at some East Side doctors’ offices. Papers missing. Drugs missing, too.” The drugs were a guess, but he trusted his intuition of the Waldos of this world.
Waldo’s eyes came up in a hurry. “All right, I helped myself to some Valium, it’s a crime?”
“Yeah, Waldo. It’s a crime. What are you going to tell the judge? I asked you to go in?”
First puzzlement, then terror replaced the lost reluctant look. “Man, you never let go, do you.”
“It’s a Medeco. You can open it in your sleep. There’s no one home till Monday night, only one other apartment on the floor, we jimmy the front door with a charge card.”
Waldo bent toward the lock, his face furiously concentrated, everything focused on the signals reaching his fingers through the little steel rod.
A door banged four flights down. Steps were audible, then the sound of the elevator wheezing to life.
“Motherfuck,” Waldo grumbled. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” He inserted a second rod, then a third.
The elevator passed and stopped one floor above.
Waldo froze.
Steps echoed. A door slammed.
Waldo straightened up, the tension dropping off his shoulders. He twisted the handle and gave the door to 4A a triumphant push.
Cardozo entered the apartment. Waldo followed.
They walked along a hallway, the only sound the crackling of Styrofoam packing pellets snapping like peanut brittle beneath their feet.
Cardozo opened doors.
Waldo stood watching him.