“Vince, no one got killed.”
“You better believe these nuts killed someone. You don’t get that close to the borderline and not step over. Just once. Just to see what it feels like.”
“You still can’t indict the whole class.”
“Why not? The whole country worships them. They’re glamorous. Powerful. Rich. In. They’re the people everyone else wants to be. And look at the pattern of their existence. Going to parties, posing for photographers, hoping they’ll make the gossip columns, waiting for something different to happen. Well, nothing different’s going to happen, so they decide to make it happen.”
“Vince, on those tapes you have two things coming together that weren’t meant to. You have an instinct—sex—and a class of substances—drugs.”
“It’s not that simple, Monsignor.”
“Okay, I’m Catholic, and it is that simple. Simpler. I see it five times a week on the autopsy table. Separately, drugs and sex can go either way—good or evil. But put them together, use them for kicks—and there’s no limit to the evil.”
“Sometimes I get the feeling that you’ve got so many answers that none of this shit bothers you.”
“Of course it bothers me. I’m human. But I’m a doctor. I’ve seen how it works. There’s nothing demonic about it, nothing that proves Karl Marx was right. It’s an impulse—a sort of ‘what if?’—you don’t even imagine it clearly—under ordinary circumstances, that impulse would slide right by, like a bubble—but you take a drug, the drug freezes that moment, that impulse, and the what-if turns into a why-not and then you’re doing it and the drug’s telling you it’s not you doing it. And believe me, even what’s on those tapes isn’t the worst. It’s the surface of the cesspool. You don’t know what else is down there.”
“No, Dan. You don’t know. I’ve seen the rest of these tapes.”
49
“DRUGWISE,” THE STAR WAS saying, “these are the glory days.”
Cardozo watched from the doorway. He admired the woman. She had been there. She had had the guts to go public and take the celebrity edge off the drug cult. At fifty-two she looked better than she had at thirty-two, and even at her most drugged out she had always been a beauty.
“Coke is cheaper, purer, and more abundant than ever before. Doctors use it. Lawyers use it. Investment counselors use it. And God knows, senators use it. How else do you explain those votes on Salvador and Nicaragua? Coke keeps you awake, but contrary to popular belief, it does not make you smart, and it sure as hell doesn’t help you lose weight.”
There was laughter, and the star grinned back at her audience, but her violet eyes stayed serious.
“So what are you going to do the next time your host passes a mirror of flake at a sit-down dinner? Why not do what I do. Say ‘Fuck you.’ That’s a good clear way of sending a no signal, and it’s a sure way of not being invited back by assholes.”
More laughter.
Cardozo’s eye kept going back to Cordelia Koenig, tucked into the fifth row of folding chairs. She was glancing around to see who was arriving and who was leaving and who was watching whom.
The guard noticed Cardozo. He crossed to the doorway. “Can I see your card?”
Cardozo showed his shield.
The guard frowned and backed off.
The star lifted a tumbler of ice water from the card table and took a healthy swallow. Then she was into her homestretch.
“There are people who believe that Twelfth Avenue may have problems. A Hundred Third Street may have problems, but Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street will never have problems. Well, we know the problem is everywhere. Above all, it’s right here. And we know where the answer is. Same place. God bless you all and thanks for listening to me—and keep coming back.”
There was applause, which the star cut short.
Hands went up.
The star began taking comments from the floor.
The guard was pointing to his watch.
The star got to her feet. “Would those who care to please join me in the Lord’s Prayer.”
Cordelia kept looking around, not joining in the prayer.
The meeting broke up.
Cordelia’s dress flashed like blue fire as she headed for the other exit. Cardozo quickly followed her slender back, the hollow between the shoulder blades where a cashmere tennis cardigan from C. Z. Guest’s new collection dangled like a mauve flag.
She hurried down a flight of stairs, heels castanetting in the stone well. The side door of Saint Andrew’s Protestant Episcopal Church slammed.
When Cardozo came out onto Fifty-third Street, the night was a dark bruise behind the skyline of Manhattan. She was sitting on the fender of a chauffeured BMW, chatting and laughing with friends.
Her head moved with easy humor, and her blond bangs swayed.
Cardozo interrupted. “Miss Koenig?”
Her gaze came up at him, pale blue and drop-deadish, as if he were no more to her than an autograph hunter.
“Can we talk privately?” He showed her his shield, making it clear this was official.
The others saw it too—the dark-haired girl with her Locust Valley lockjaw voice, the young man carrying an initialed pigskin briefcase and a squash racquet.
Silence fell like the slam of a coffin lid.
“What’s this about?” Cordelia’s voice was suddenly high-pitched and fluty.
He motioned her to step aside with him.
She slid silkily off the fender and, hesitating, followed him down the sidewalk, past double-parked limos to his double-parked Honda.
Across the sidewalk the glass silhouette of Beaux Arts Tower gleamed as if it had been dipped in black ink.
Cardozo opened the passenger door for her.
“Please get in. I need you to identify someone.”
She looked at him with terrified child’s eyes. “Has something happened? Oh my God, who is it?”
Cordelia’s gaze wandered, straightforwardly appraising every tchotchke in the apartment. It was the gaze of a curious child still seeing the world for the first time.
Watching her—her every movement studied, every glance precise, the upward tilt of her head like a pharaoh’s—Cardozo saw his home through her eyes—the down-scale, budget look of the fold-out sofa from Castro, the tables from the Sloan’s closeout, the lace curtains from the latino bodegas on Fourteenth Street.
She had a special unguarded glance of disbelief for the painting of the Valley of Lourdes hanging over the TV.
Matisse, he had to admit, it was not.
“You live near Space,” was her only remark.
Now she moved through the room like an actress on a film set knowing where the light was, catching it exactly with her smile. She dropped easily into the overstuffed chair, as if it belonged to her.
“The way you were talking, I thought you were taking me to the morgue to see my mother’s body.”
“No, I want you to identify a man.”
“Bring him out,” she said cheerfully. She was like a chameleon—by turns defensive, childlike, and now ever so slightly flirtatious. She was a mirror giving him back what she thought he wanted.
“He’s on tape,” Cardozo said. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Have you got honey?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll have any kind of caffeine-free diet soda.”
All the refrigerator had was nondiet 7-Up. Cardozo doubted her tastebuds would know the difference.
They didn’t.
She sipped and smiled as he lowered blinds, turned down lights, and pressed the start button on the VCR remote.
Images came onto the screen, hazed as though with the passage of time. The walls of a room painted stark white. The black rectangles of closed shutters. The gracious curves of a Queen Anne chair. A table. A second chair.
A slim figure moved awkwardly into the frame. At first indistinct in the uncertain light, it suddenly resolved into a young girl.
She looked bizarre and beautiful and vulnerable in an ultrasophisticated silk gown. There was something touching and wild, endearing and silly about the way she wobbled on high heels—as though she had raided mommy’s closet. Except the dress fitted. Fitted those fledgling twelve-year-old breasts perfectly.