“Don’t look at me,” Monteleone said. “I’m not discussing Yiddish, that’s not my department.”
“My grandmother used to say Yezl,” Malloy said. “Every December she’d open her Christmas cards, and if there was a Jesus bambino she’d say, ‘Another Yezl.’”
“You’re Jewish?” Monteleone asked. “I didn’t know that.”
“Only my grandmother,” Malloy said.
“Enough Jews for Jesus,” Cardozo said. “Can we please get on with this?”
“I haven’t been able to get to Claude Loring, the handyman,” Richards said. “I went to the address the super gave me, 32 Broome Street. I spoke to Loring’s roommate, who now claims to be his ex-roommate, a gentleman by the name of Perfecto Rodriguez.”
“That’s a name?” Greg Monteleone asked. “They call their kids Perfecto?”
“Who are you calling ‘they’?” Ellie Siegel inquired.
“You know who I mean.”
Siegel was glaring. “Say it, Greg.”
“Latinos.”
“Greg,” Siegel remarked, “anyone ever told you you’re a racist?”
“I can’t believe a parent would call a kid Perfecto, I think it’s a horrible name for anyone. That makes me a racist?”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cardozo cut in, “stow it.”
Richards went on. “Perfecto says Loring hasn’t been living at that address since the first of the month. Loring left no forwarding address, Loring owes for Con Ed and telephone, Loring also left a lot of classical records and dirty laundry, will we please tell Perfecto if we locate Loring.”
“Perfecto doesn’t know where Loring works?” Monteleone asked. “That seems funny—we know where Loring works.”
“Why are you on Perfecto’s case?” Siegel asked.
“Believe me, I don’t give a damn about the guy, but he seems a little dense.”
Cardozo consulted his notes. “The Beaux Arts worksheets show Loring was on the job every day last week, eight A.M. to four P.M.”
“I checked back with the super,” Richards said. “The only address he has for Loring is Perfecto’s pad on Broome Street.”
“Where do they mail the paychecks?” Cardozo asked.
“They don’t. The super hands them out at the building twice a month. Loring’s not due at work today, but he’s due tomorrow, so I figure I can catch him then.”
“Unless he’s left town,” Monteleone put in.
“There’s one other thing,” Richards said.
“Go on,” Cardozo said.
“I had the feeling the building personnel were holding back. I don’t mean their stories didn’t check out, but there was something they weren’t saying. Revuelta’s wife was right there beside him; every now and then she’d shoot him a warning in Spanish.”
“What was the warning?”
“I didn’t catch the exact words, but she was giving him that ‘Keep your mouth shut’ look. It’s universal body language. Joshua Stinson’s wife gave me the same feeling.”
Cardozo looked over at Monteleone. “Greg?”
Monteleone nodded. “I got the same feeling exactly when I questioned Andy Gomez and Fred Johnson. Mrs. Gomez and Mrs. Johnson don’t want their men losing their jobs at Beaux Arts Tower. You could read it on their faces. Same thing when I spoke with Herb Dunlop and Luis Morro. Dunlop has a really nice little place in Kew Gardens, a back yard, roses. All four of them can account for their movements. If you believe the witnesses, there’s no way we can place them at the scene.”
“What witnesses?” Cardozo said.
“Family.”
Cardozo made a mental note. “What about building residents?”
“Benson didn’t hear anything,” Monteleone said, “but he’s an architect and he says he turns his hearing aid off when he wants to concentrate. Father Madsen didn’t hear anything either.”
Very dimly, Cardozo was beginning to see connections. Conditions in the garage, whatever the hell that meant. A doorman not at his post when he should have been. Building employees’ wives nervous about cops. “Sam, go back, talk to Lawrence. Find out about these conditions in the garage. Which brings us to the leg.” Cardozo turned to face Ellie Siegel. “Ellie?”
“Negative on all trash cans accessible from the street, public and private, within a five-block radius. I couldn’t check Beaux Arts’s garbage: it went out Sunday morning.”
Cardozo frowned. “Sunday on a long holiday weekend?”
“It struck me as unusual, too, Vince, but when you look at the overtime that garbage companies get for hauling on Memorial Day weekend—twice their regular fee—it makes sense. Especially since the agent of the building owns the garbage company.”
“I thought garbage was mob-controlled,” Sam Richards said.
Siegel glanced at him. “You think real estate in this town isn’t?”
Cardozo nudged her back to the subject. “What about commercial garbage?”
“The neighborhood has a high concentration of luxury restaurants—mostly French, some Italian. Within the five-block radius, only eight put their garbage directly out on the street. The others use locked bins. Of the eight, six hadn’t yet had their garbage picked up. All the bags contained bone, and all the bone has gone to the lab for analysis. Incidentally, this was a really disgusting job.”
“Sorry. What about the other two restaurants?”
“Unfortunately, neither uses the same pickup company as Beaux Arts. We’re dealing with three companies and three landfills. There were no municipal pickups over the weekend, but do you want to consider the possibility that the killer took the leg himself to a municipal landfill? That would bring us up to six landfills.”
“Let’s start with the three.”
“We’ve started.”
“Carl, how are we coming on the licenses?” Cardozo asked. “What’ve you turned up?”
“What we’ve turned up so far,” Carl Malloy said, “is no hot cars, no cars registered to criminals.”
“What you’ve turned up so far in other words,” Monteleone said, “is you’ve turned up nothing.”
Malloy looked at him. “Thanks, Greg. Thanks for telling me.”
“Some reason for thinking the person who did this drove?” Siegel said.
“Come on, he drives,” Monteleone said. “Everybody drives.”
Monteleone was being deliberately provocative. He had a way with “everybody” statements that drove Siegel wild.
“My brother doesn’t drive,” Siegel said.
“And not every driver has a record,” Richards said. “Look at me—I’m clean.”
“He drives,” Monteleone said, eyes on Siegel.
“The killer may be a woman,” Siegel said.
“How about that,” Monteleone said. “Where were you the night of the killing, Ellie? Double-parking?”
Ellie Siegel took a long sip of coffee. “It would be a real long shot if the killer’s out on parole for sawing somebody else up.”
“Long shots happen,” Cardozo said.
“If that long shot happened,” Monteleone said, “there’s going to be one very ticked-off parole officer.”
Cardozo’s eyes played across the faces of his detectives. Malloy and Monteleone were reminders of the days when the force had been male only, overwhelmingly white, and for the most part Irish and Italian. Siegel and Richards were reminders of the demographic changes that had shaken the force in recent years. Though City Hall had brought unbelievable pressure to recruit women and minorities into the upper ranks, there was nothing political about their winning the gold shield of the detective and the right to work in civilian clothes. Each of the four detectives had had a distinguished record in uniform, and each—for all their differences of character and outlook—had the strong legs, hard knuckles, and patience that it took to make a good detective.
Cardozo assigned tasks.
Richards would keep knocking on doors and asking questions. He would show flyers of the victim’s face to all the staff and residents of Beaux Arts Tower; he would post a flyer in the lobby. Malloy would check out the vehicles of the Beaux Arts staff and residents.
Monteleone would put in a call to the local mental institutions to see if any sex offenders had been released or had escaped within the last month.