His eye went guiltily to the filing cabinet. The bottom drawer was wedged shut against an overflow of departmental orders that he had yet to get around to reading. The precinct was drowning in paper. Paper had become the measure of all things. It got you promoted, got you demoted, decided your salary, your rank, your standing in the department’s eyes. Paper was where it was at.
“Hey, Vince.” Tommy Daniels from the Photographic Unit came bounding through the door and clamped a hand on Cardozo’s shoulder. “Got the pictures you wanted of the ten eighteen.” He thrust out an envelope.
Cardozo slipped the glossies out of the manila envelope. It surprised him how young the dead man was: perhaps twenty-two years old, very blond, with medium-length, shiny hair. The eyes were long-lashed, the chin strong, almost challenging, with a cleft to it, the lips full but not quite pouting. A handsome boy. He seemed to be contentedly dreaming.
“Beautiful, hey?” Daniels said.
Cardozo looked at his photographic expert’s thick black hair, his chartreuse shirt that lit up three walls of the cubicle, his face shining with an eagerness to please that would have been cute in a cocker spaniel.
“You go for guys, Daniels?”
“The shots, Lieutenant. I’m talking about the shots.”
“Yeah, they’re Academy Award.”
Daniels folded his arms proudly across his chest. “The usual procedure with morgue lights is to use a fast shutter time, but that gives you the morgue look. I experimented, used a slow shutter, three tenths of a second, then gave the film seven minutes in a hydroxide solution. That gives the skin a glow.”
“You call this skin glowing?”
“It’s not your standard morgue shot is what I mean.”
“Daniels, are you on speed or are you doing a four-to-one today or what?”
“O.T. Time and a half and a half on a holiday.”
Leave it to a go-getter like Daniels to figure the overtime angles. “Today’s not a holiday,” Cardozo said. “Tomorrow is.”
“The weekend’s a holiday.”
Cardozo shook his head, looking at a full body shot.
“The perp has got to be one weird piece of work,” Tommy Daniels said. “Real EDP.” EDP was the police psychiatrists’ abbreviation for Emotionally Disturbed Person. “He’ll walk, right?”
“Daniels, are you a coroner, are you a shrink? I got enough resentment today without your expert opinion.”
“Today? You got resentment today? Tell me a day you don’t have resentment.”
“Very comic. Today was supposed to be my day off. I can forgive a lot, but not dragging me into this shit on my day off, and I promise you, the animal that did this is not going to walk.”
“Okay, okay, I just meant the courts—you know.”
“Screw the courts. We’re all emotionally damaged persons—you, me—that doesn’t give us special privileges to saw people up.” Cardozo tapped a photograph. “Let’s crop this one a little higher so he looks like he could be wearing an open-necked shirt. Put the face on a flyer: anyone having any information please contact et cetera et cetera. Run off a few thousand. We’ll paste them up around town.”
Daniels took back the photo. “Ten four.”
Cardozo glanced at him. Cops on TV used police radio abbreviations, why shouldn’t real cops. Life imitating art. Daniels in his liqueur-green shirt imitating Hill Street Blues reruns.
An association clicked in Cardozo’s head. “Say … what happened to that photography van we used on the Mendoza stakeout?”
Special Services had gutted an old Consolidated Edison repair truck. From the outside it looked like the standard Con Ed nuisance, a small white-and-blue van that took a week and a half futzing around a manhole. Inside it had cameras and radios and phone-monitoring equipment.
“The one seven borrowed it.”
“Borrow it back. I want a team at Beaux Arts Tower—your boys—round-the-clock photographic surveillance. Pictures of anybody entering or leaving the premises, any vehicles pulling up to the door or taking that alley down to the garage. A logbook with dates and hours, licenses, taxi medallion numbers.”
“Sounds like we got a budget on this one.”
“Yeah, we got a budget.”
Cardozo sat down, alone in his cubicle. He sipped a little of his coffee. He cleared a space on his desktop. He moved Tommy Daniels’s glossies around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He couldn’t make sense of the missing leg.
Cardozo had seen corpses where the head was gone, where the tits were gone, where the dick or balls were gone. Those were the classic chop-offs.
But the leg. Why the leg?
He took a sip of coffee. He was thinking that he was getting up in his forties. Most of the cops he worked with were younger, still good at running and good at climbing fences, good at looking at stuff like these pictures and not barfing. The pressure was getting to him, One P.P. screaming for results, The New York Times on his ass the one time in a blue moon one of his men shot in self-defense. Fear was getting to him, too, fear of looking like a dope or a coward, fear of opening his mouth and getting in shit with the brass.
He pushed up from the desk and walked to the window.
He gazed into the black night of the shaftway. His fingers drummed on the top of the file cabinet. Had there been something about the leg the killer wanted to hide: a birthmark, a tattoo, a deformity?
Cardozo selected a photograph of the dead man’s face and took it out to the desk lieutenant. “Send this over to Missing Persons—John Doe. Have them show it around, check if he turned up missing.”
It was a long shot: the victim might not have been reported missing, he might not have been missing long enough to be reported, he might be missing from Wichita. But you had to cover the bases.
Cardozo went back to his office, lifted the phone, and dialed a number. He waited, jaw clenched, through eight rings. Finally a voice said, “Stein, Forensic.”
“Lou, it’s Vince. Got anything yet on the Beaux Arts killing?”
“Didn’t Tony tell you?”
“Would I be calling if Tony was here?”
“He’s gotta be there, he left an hour ago.”
Cardozo came back into the squad room. “Was Tony Bandolero here asking for me?”
Sweeney angled his chin toward a half-open door across the room. “In there.”
There was an unused space off the squad room. One of the detectives had found a Sony Trinitron in the garbage on the street and brought it in, and detectives on a break sat around watching TV. People in two two threw out good garbage.
Cardozo crossed the room. He could hear gunshots and screeching tires. Cop show. He wondered how detectives, grown men, could watch that stuff.
He peered into the flickering darkness. “Tony, you there?”
One of three forms heaved itself up from a chair. “Shiut. Policewoman was about to nail the arsonist.”
Tony Bandolero came into the light, a heavyset man in his late twenties with limp black hair and a low, wrinkled forehead.
“How can you watch that stuff?” Cardozo asked.
“You want me to be improving myself, Vince, reading some great books? Divina Commedia, that’s how I should be spending my coffee break? Fangul.”
Cardozo closed the cubicle door. “What have you got?”
“Eight partial prints.”
Cardozo took the sheet and frowned. “You can get a positive ID from this?”
“If you can come up with a suspect, why not?”
“Crap. We’re going to get a match, and it’ll be one of the building workers, someone who had nothing to do with it.”
“You don’t know that, Vince.”
“I know it. What else?”
“We removed human blood from the rotary saw.”
“Is it his?”
“It may not be enough to type, Vince. We’re going to try. But all we can definitely say at this point in time is the victim is type O and the blood on the saw is human.”
“That’s all?”
“Not quite. The leather mask is standard s.m. gear—what they call a bondage mask down at the Pink Pussy Cat.”
“Any prints on it?”
“Leather is very tough to print.”