He carefully peeled off the label and stuck it onto the spine of one of his own blank cassettes. He put the labeled blank on the shelf in place of Monserat’s cassette.
He wrote FUN ‘N’ GAMES HALLOWEEN 7 on a fresh label and attached it to Monserat’s cassette. He dropped the cassette into the Sony Trinitron carton.
Tony Bandolero stepped around Cardozo and took a gown down from the clothesbar. There was the powdery crackle of a plastic bag opening.
The gown was deep red, with sequins. Because flashes would be visible through the blinds, Tony was using room light. He scanned the gown with his digital light meter and adjusted his camera aperture.
There was a click as the shutter opened and shut and then a faint whir as the film advanced.
Cardozo’s felt-tip pen carefully wrote FUN ‘N’ GAMES HALLOWEEN 8.
Cardozo stared through the filtered darkness, registering the slow, silent passage of the camera’s gaze across a white wall.
Weird figures took shape on the TV screen, ghostly inhabitants of a world of electronic phantoms and dreams, moving and swaying in the flickering light, acting out their secret rituals.
A sensation of unformed dread grew in his belly.
And then, in front of his eyes, it was real.
His gaze slashed for one disbelieving instant at the image on the screen. The blood drained sickeningly from his head.
He reached a shaking hand for the phone and dialed.
“Hippolito.”
“Dan, it’s Vince. I need your opinion on something. It’s urgent.”
Cardozo’s livingroom was dim with the rapid shifting of lights and darks. Dan Hippolito, mild and grave, watched the TV screen with a look of disdain.
“Morgenstern’s gay?” he said in a tone of amazement.
“A guy sucking a guy’s cock, I’d call that gay,” Cardozo said.
“Why the hell did he let it be filmed?”
“He didn’t know. There are two types of movies in this collection: one where the camera’s moving around in the party and everyone knows they’re stars or hired help. Then there’s another type, like this, where the camera doesn’t move. Which means it’s hidden, operated remote or automatic. The people wearing masks know what’s happening. The object is to get the goods on the people who don’t know.”
“Jesus, he gives deep throat. Vince, if you don’t mind, I find Ted Morgenstern kind of revolting under the best of circumstances. Chowing down on a nine-foot Watusi in a Wehrmacht uniform I think he’s to puke.”
Cardozo pressed the fast-forward. The actors plunged into a comic, sped-up dance.
Naked on a stepladder, the dark-haired girl free-based while a chivalrous gentleman in a Popeye mask held the flame of an acetylene torch beneath her bulbed glass pipe. A ponytailed young man wearing see-through black lace panties flung himself into doggie position on the floor, sniffing through a silver straw at a hand mirror zebra’d with lines of white powder.
A man wearing a Richard Nixon mask snapped flash pictures of an industrious young woman who was blowing a man in a Lone Ranger mask and simultaneously fondling the genitals of two other men in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck masks. Seated on two Queen Anne chairs sipping drinks, two extraordinarily ugly drags ignored the couplings and thrashings. One of them was moustached and the other was not. They both wore elaborate gowns.
“Charlie Chaplin goes porno.” Dan Hippolito lit a cigarette. “So help me, Vince, you better not have dragged me down here to watch home movie orgies. I have real trouble empathizing with driven behavior.”
“You may have more than a little trouble empathizing with what comes next.”
What came next was a startlingly beautiful Latin woman with the face of a Madonna, lying naked and absolutely still on a thick quilt that had been spread on the floor between the two Queen Anne chairs.
Something had happened to Dan Hippolito’s expression. “Stop the frame.” His voice had the even, dead strain of on-guardedness.
He moved forward, sitting in the hard glow of the frozen TV picture. He seemed to be searching the actors’ faces for some explanation. But the Madonna’s face was absolutely serene and her abusers’ faces had only a drugged, wow-I’m-not-here look.
“Take it backward.”
Cardozo ran the tape backward.
“Forward again. Real time. I’ll tell you when to stop-frame. There.”
For an unending moment stillness submerged everything.
Finally a sigh came out of Dan. “She’s a young female Hispanic, I’d say twenty to twenty-two years old, good physical condition, five foot one inch tall, scale weight probably one hundred ten pounds.”
“And?” Cardozo prodded.
Dan walked over and gently put an arm around Cardozo’s shoulders. It was a spontaneous, unthinking gesture, compassionate, as though he were preparing his friend for some very bad news.
“Don’t get hispanical.”
“What do you mean, hispanical?”
“I mean the way you are now—hispanical. Just relax.”
Dan began talking about lividity and rigor. The words came at Cardozo like a slow bucket of swamp water.
“Dan, just tell me yes or no—is she dead?”
“She’s dead.”
“From start to finish, she’s dead?”
“Do you mean are they killing her on camera? No. She’s been dead two, three days before this even began. And I don’t think she was murdered.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Suspicious death there would have been an autopsy. Nothing has cut this girl, except the drainage catheters in the forearms. And that’s professional. Which means there was a death certificate. She’s embalmed. You don’t have amateur embalmers. Certainly not loons like these. The girl’s from a funeral home.”
“They took a body from a funeral home?”
“It’s called necrophilia. It happens.”
“I hate these guys.”
“It’s not a homicide, Vince. There’s no trauma to the body. It was a quick easy death. Most likely an OD. To tell you more than that, I can’t. Not the way she looks. Not what you’re showing me. All I can give you is an educated guess.”
“Give me your educated guess on this.” Cardozo sprang the videocassette out of the VCR and inserted another. “It’s going to be a little more than you want to see.”
“Every day I see more than I want to.”
The image this time was a thin young man stumbling across the screen in faded blue jeans and white sneakers, goofily grinning, blissed out.
The young man stripped clumsily to the buff and lay belly down on a banquet table.
Porky Pig and the Lone Ranger, nattily dressed in white tie and tails, moved into the frame. They lashed the young man’s hands to the legs of the table.
The kid was grinning. Fun and games.
Porky and the Ranger passed lengths of bicycle chain around the young man’s ankles, made the chains fast to the other two table legs. Now came a ceremonial padlocking of the chains.
The kid turned and smiled at the camera.
The Lone Ranger stepped off camera and returned holding a jumbo-sized jar of Vaseline and a six-inch clear plastic tube of one-inch diameter. He presented both to the camera’s inspection.
The Lone Ranger stepped off camera again. He returned holding in one hand a wooden tongue depressor. He showed it to the camera.
Now he showed the other hand. His palm held a small clump of wet fur. The fur was alive, skittering, the size of a new-born rat. It had long hind legs and a long skinny tail and tiny bright black eyes and two white needles of incisors in the upper jaw of its chattering miniature mouth.
The boy looked around. His expression changed to puzzlement.
What happened next was difficult to believe.
“How much of this is there?” Dan said.
“The tape runs a few hours.”
“Jesus, I don’t want to see this.”
Cardozo killed the film. A commercial for AT&T long-distance dialing came up on Channel 7 and he killed the TV. “These are intelligent, wealthy people,” Cardozo said. “The wealthiest people on earth, and look at the things they do to other people. I can’t get that out of my head. People with everything, nothing good left to want, so they have to want bad things. And their attitude. It’s like they’re saying, what’s so special about a human life? Why should we respect it? Let’s wipe it out. Want to see it again? Run the tape back. See it sped up or in slo-mo? Just push the button.”