“We’re not indicting her for Christ’s sake! We’re going after the man who seduced her and gave her that syringe.”
“Has she told you his name?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Don’t let her tell you.”
“I want to know his name. I want to nail him. That’s why I got you here.”
“You got me here and I’m spelling it out to you. Do this the right way, Vince.”
“What the hell is this, a minuet?”
“You’re dealing with an emotionally unstable girl—I know she’s young, I assume she’s unstable. Legally, she’s doubly incompetent. If all you’ve got is her testimony, and her testimony involves one word of what I just heard, get her a lawyer right now. Otherwise the D.A. won’t touch this megillah and your criminal’s going to walk.” She continued to fix Cardozo with a burning gaze. “I’m sorry. Whoever he is, he sounds like a real louse, but even if he doesn’t live under the law, we do.”
“Lucinda,” Cardozo said wearily, “what you’re not grasping is the human cost—the contamination this guy is leaving in his path.”
“Believe me, Vince, I do get the picture.”
There was no point going straight home. Cardozo knew he was too furious to sleep. He stopped off at the precinct.
He poured himself a coffee. It must have been sitting in the pot since 3 A.M. of the day before. His first sip added to his sense that his life was not only unreal but disgusting.
He went to his cubicle. There were four new directives from the PC’s office. He sailed them over to the open file cabinet drawer. They plopped on top of last week’s.
Now he was staring at a flyer that someone had put on his desk:
MADAME ROBERTA—FORTUNES TOLD—ASTRAL READINGS
He was about to crumple it when he saw handwriting on the back: Vince C, call Faye. He went to the door.
“Who the hell is Faye?”
“She said you know her,” Sergeant Goldberg answered.
“You took this message, Goldberg? There’s no date, there’s no time, there’s no last name, there’s no number.”
“Hire a secretary,” Sergeant Goldberg grumbled.
Cardozo could think of only one Faye—Loring’s friend Faye di Stasio. He got the number from Information and dialed. On the seventh ring a clouded voice said hello.
“Faye? This is Lieutenant Vince Cardozo. You phoned me?”
“You asked me to keep an eye out for Claude. He’s set up a coke buy—tonight, two A.M., outside the Inferno.”
“Who’s he selling to?”
“Me.”
Claude Loring held his arms and rubbed them: the weather was growing too cool for a sleeveless Levi’s jacket. Faye di Stasio followed him to the van parked across Ninth Avenue from the entrance to the Inferno.
Claude reached into the glove compartment and took out the little black paper bag. Faye dug into her pocket and pulled out a roll of twenties.
There was a pinging sound like a pebble striking a hub cap. Claude spun around.
“Freeze.” A man stood there, holding out a gold shield. “Lieutenant MacFinney, narcotics.”
Claude whirled and ran. Another cop stepped out from behind a parked Chevy, gun drawn. “You heard the man, Claude.”
Claude stopped in his tracks. A cinderblock was forming in his stomach. The cop knew Claude’s name. It was a setup—had to be.
“It’s not my coke, it’s hers.” Claude pointed. “Faye di Stasio, she’s a dealer, I was holding for her.”
The cop who’d said his name was MacFinney turned around. “Faye—go and sin no more.”
Faye stumbled into the darkness.
“Open the bag,” MacFinney said.
Claude opened the bag.
The other cop came forward, dangling a pair of handcuffs. “Up against the wall, fella.”
Claude turned himself toward the wall. There were two clicks and he felt the icy burn of metal against his wrists. The cops steered him to an unmarked car. Another cop was sitting inside in plainclothes. Recognition hit Claude like a slap.
Vince Cardozo slid over to make room. “We have to discuss a few matters with you, Claude. Possession with intent to sell and a homicide you attempted two nights ago.”
“I want to see my lawyer.”
“You don’t need a lawyer. It’s not you we’re after. Tell us who sent you to kill Cordelia Koenig.”
“I was at the Inferno talking to a guy with a green mohawk.” Claude Loring had a chain smoker’s rasp to his voice. “Then Jodie Downs came up and started butting in and being real obnoxious and I thought okay, punk, you just won the lottery, you’re it. I took him up to the van to smoke some crack and after that first hit he was mine. I told him I knew where we could get some more crack, and I took him up to Monserat’s party pad. I was the scout for Lew’s parties—I dug up the entertainment.”
“What kind of entertainment?” Cardozo said.
“People. Kids, guys, girls. Dead bodies.”
Lucinda MacGill was usually a bright, self-possessed young woman, but her upturned face stared at Loring in horror. “Where’d you get the dead bodies?” she asked.
“Monserat had a deal with a funeral home.”
“What funeral home?”
Claude Loring named a well-known funeral home. “They’d loan him the stiffs overnight. He paid two, three hundred dollars per body. He paid more for the dead bodies than for the living. I got a hundred for every guest I delivered. And all the drugs I wanted.”
“Were people tortured at these parties?” Cardozo said.
“The dead bodies we had to be careful with, because they had to look good from the neck up, you never knew who was open casket. But the people who weren’t dead, sometimes they got roughed up. Monserat says the way you get to the soul of another person is when you produce panic in them. You have someone there at your mercy and they’re panicked, think they could die any moment and it’s completely up to you, how you flip a coin.”
“Sounds like it excited you too,” Cardozo said.
“Yeah, it excited me. Everyone was getting off on everyone else getting off. Like a circle jerk.”
A blank, almost disgusted incredulity showed in Lucinda MacGill’s face.
“Anyone ever get killed at these parties?” Cardozo asked.
Loring had to think for a moment. “Not that I recall.”
“Where did the black bondage hood come from?”
“It was Monserat’s. It was a work of art, he used to say. Anyone who wore it became a masterpiece. He said masks were the real reality. He had lots of masks—different types—Halloween masks, joke store masks. But the bondage mask was special.”
“Special how?”
“That mask was reserved for the victims. If Jodie Downs hadn’t been wearing that mask I could never have hurt him. I’m a gentle guy, I don’t hurt people. But once Jodie had the mask on, for me he wasn’t human anymore. He turned into something else. When I looked at him in that mask five percent of me said he was a man and ninety-five percent of me said he was a monster. That mask had a nightmare look. Like anyone wearing it would cut your head off if you gave them the chance. They had to be killed. It was self-defense—you or them.”
Claude Loring flexed his hands nervously. Sitting in his jeans and I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt, he looked taller than his six feet two, huge and rawboned, and those hands looked as though they could snap a human neck as easily as a celery stalk.
“Tell us who was at the party that night,” Cardozo said.
Claude Loring named names. Lucinda MacGill took notes.
“Who was wearing drag?” Cardozo asked.
“Two, three of them. That Duncan creep, Sir Dunk—he was wearing one of his wife’s red dresses—real glitzy number, shimmer and shimmy.”
“Was he wearing lipstick?”
“The works, rouge from his eyeballs down to his jowls. Believe me, some guys should not do drag. It’s beyond grotesque.”
“Was Duncan Canfield smoking?”
“Yeah, he smoked.”
“Cigarettes?”
“Cigarettes, pot, crack.”
“Did he put out a cigarette in Jodie Downs’s hand?”