Cordelia stared a moment at her mother. She turned away again.
“And you’d say I love you too, Cordelia. At least that was what I liked to pretend.”
Her words came out in gulps and she began to lose control of her breathing.
“That day—after what I saw in the loft—I begged you: Mother—come back.”
Her voice took on the tone of a child begging.
“I need you. I don’t have anyone now.”
Cordelia started to cry, little sobs that she fought back and then couldn’t fight back any longer.
“And you opened your eyes. For just that one second you were looking at me.”
Cordelia clutched a fist to her mouth.
“I called the nurse. I said, ‘Mother heard me.’ The nurse said, ‘No, she can’t hear anything.’ She said opening your eyes didn’t mean you were seeing.”
“But I woke up,” Babe said.
Cordelia nodded. “That night.”
At last Babe found the first foothold of understanding. The thing that had haunted her was not a dream, not a psychic flash; it was Cordelia standing by the hospital bed and pouring out all the pain of her terror and loneliness and need as she would have to a tombstone. And because Babe had been alive, not dead, some faculty standing sentinel over her sleeping mind had heard her daughter’s call. And, like a hysterical ninety-pound mother lifting a two-ton VW off her crushed infant, she had answered the call—rising back to wakefulness, remembering the words that had summoned her, but taking them for the voice of her own mind, not knowing till now how it was or what it really was that she remembered.
“Cordelia,” she said, “if you hadn’t come to me that day …”
Cordelia’s teeth closed on a knuckle. She blinked and stared from behind a fist at her mother.
“If you hadn’t stood by my bed,” Babe said, “if you hadn’t called me—I’d still be in coma. It was you that brought me back.”
The sad, hopeful, questioning smile on Cordelia’s face seemed to float across the room and reach out to her.
“Thank you,” Babe said. “Thank you for needing me. Thank you for saving me.”
Babe laid her hand against the girl’s cheek.
“Cordelia—you said I was your best friend when I was asleep. And you said you were my best friend. Now that I’m awake—could you trust me to keep on being your friend? Do you think we could try?”
Cordelia stood stiff and silent and awkward. Then she swallowed and sniffled and nodded, and very slowly, her arms closed around her mother.
“I’m moving home,” Cordelia announced.
Cardozo lifted a stack of reports off one of the chairs, clearing a place for her to sit. “The plasterers fixed your apartment that fast? Give me their number.”
“No. I’m moving home to my mother’s house.”
“Oh. That’s terrific.”
“I think so. So does she.” Cordelia was silent a moment. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“How many guesses do I get?”
“I’m not going to shield him anymore.”
Cardozo gave her a long glance. He found a pad and picked up his ballpoint and squiggled it on a piece of paper to make sure the ink was flowing.
“Do you have a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Until you have a lawyer, don’t tell me anything that’s going to incriminate you, and don’t tell me the names of any people who’ve committed crimes. For the time being I’m not supposed to learn this kind of information from you. My expert tells me that’s the law.”
“Funny law.” Cordelia sat gazing at him.
“Doesn’t leave much to talk about, does it. Okay. Excuse my directness, but if there’s a polite way to phrase this question I sure don’t know it.”
“You don’t have to start being polite with me.”
“Did you sleep with Scottie Devens when you were thirteen?”
“I never slept with my stepfather.”
“So there’s no way you could have caught gonorrhea from him?”
“Not unless it spreads telepathically.”
“Did you know you had gonorrhea when you were thirteen?”
“I knew I had something. I didn’t know then what it was. I know now.”
“Do you know how you got it?”
“Yes. So do you.”
“How many men did you have sex with before you were infected?”
“You’re giving me too much credit. There was only him.”
Cardozo’s mind played with the new piece of information.
What it came down to was that Ted Morgenstern had done his usual snoop job on the chief witness against his client. For a few hundred bucks slipped to a pediatrician’s nurse, he’d turned up paydirt: the kid was being treated for gonorrhea. He raised a tzimmes in court about her sanity, had her sent to a psychiatrist, who by law also had to be an M.D., and got the gonorrhea introduced into evidence as part of the psychiatric report. At the same time he sent Scottie out to incriminate himself by catching an independent dose.
All the Vanderwalks had to buy was that Cordelia and Scottie had been walking around infected with the same dose.
Cardozo reflected that a dose of the clap was a pretty cheap price to pay for a plea bargain. Especially a plea bargain that cut a thirty-year sentence to three months. Throw in a lifetime annuity of a quarter million, and it was a deal no defendant—not even an innocent one—could afford to refuse.
And that’s what people pay lawyers for.
Cordelia was smiling, showing unusually white teeth. “Lieutenant—do you hate him?”
For a moment Cardozo wasn’t there. “Hate who?”
“The man I’m not supposed to name.”
“Hate takes time. I’m a busy guy.”
“I hate him.” Her index finger went skimming in a back-and-forth motion along the edge of the desk. “I know how we can trap him.”
Cordelia gave him a look, and Cardozo waited for whatever it was that was going to spring out of that head.
“I can get his confession on videotape,” she said. “He has the equipment.”
“Somehow I don’t think he’s going to sit still while you set up the lights for the quiz.”
Cordelia’s finger slowed. “He likes to tape sex. We’ll have sex with the sound recorder on. I’ll get him to talk. We’ll both be high. It’ll be easy. He’s a real jabbermouth when we have sex.”
Cardozo leapt up and his feet went down on the floor with a thump. “Jesus Christ. No way. Don’t even say it.”
When Greg Monteleone got home and gave his wife Gina a kiss, she didn’t give him one back.
“Tell me, Detective,” she said, “what would you say to a beautiful strung-out young girl in your livingroom?”
Cordelia Koenig was sitting idly on the sofa, turning the pages of Time magazine much too quickly even to be speed-reading them. Monteleone felt his heart squeeze into the space meant for his Adam’s apple. He prepared a smile and came into the room.
The girl was on her feet nimbly and quickly. “Hi—remember me? We met the other night?”
“Course I remember you, Miss Koenig.”
“I hope you don’t mind my asking the precinct where you lived.” She stood there, with her tumbling taffy-blond hair and her perfectly upturned nose and her brightly lipsticked mouth, smiling a smile that he sensed was a lie. “I knew the minute you walked into Mother’s livingroom that you were a man I could talk to.”
Her eyelids with their long black lashes came down, pale and uncontrollably fluttering against the darker skin of her face. Monteleone knew immediately she was on speed.