“I have a suspicion Mama arranged it so it only takes incoming calls. Her incoming calls. I can’t call out.”
“You’re not turning paranoid, are you?”
“She doesn’t want me phoning Scottie. He hasn’t been to see me, you know.”
“Hasn’t he.” Ash looked at her oddly, and Babe could feel something close itself off in her friend.
“My parents won’t talk about him. Cordelia says he’s divorced me.”
“Cordelia told you that?”
There was a beat’s silence.
“A police detective told me Scottie tried to kill me.”
Ash squared her shoulders and looked at Babe. “Then you know.”
“Ash, I don’t know anything. When I went to bed I had a husband and a daughter and a career. I wake up and seven years are missing. I’m groping around a room blindfolded and someone’s moved all the furniture.”
“Poor sweetie. It must be god-awful.” Ash took Babe’s hand.
“Has he remarried?”
“Do the doctors really want you discussing this?” Ash said.
“What do doctors have to do with it? It’s my life.”
A sad smile appeared on Ash’s face. “He hasn’t remarried.”
Babe studied Ash, with her skittering glazed eyes and nervous hands.
“But he has someone,” Babe said.
“Doria Forbes-Steinman.”
“That redhead with all that pop art?”
“Her hair’s ash blond now and she sold off a lot of the pop art. She’s gone into magic realism.”
Babe fought to keep pain from edging into her voice. “Do they live together?”
“They have a huge co-op—a lot of English country antiques mixed in with deco and modern. You can see the Empire State Building from the bathtub.”
“You’ve taken a bath there?”
“Of course not. It was written up in Architectural Digest.”
“Does he love her?”
“Who knows if he loves anyone.”
Babe was silent a moment, remembering. “I know he loved me.”
9
TRAFFIC WAS SNAGGED BEHIND a Con Ed repair truck when Cardozo finished his lunch and came out of the deli. He crossed the street against the light, threading his way through honking cabs and delivery vans. On the opposite sidewalk he turned.
His eye lingered a moment on the delicatessen. It occupied the ground floor of a pre-World War I red brick six-story walkup tenement. The building was the lone survivor in a block that manifested all three stages of New York real estate frenzy: demolition, parking lot, and construction.
Cardozo took a moment to study the building under construction. Already looming up twenty-seven stories on Lexington Avenue, it was of a type unseen twenty years ago, a scaffoldless high rise where each floor served as a foundation for the next and the owner could build as far into the sky as his lawyer could persuade the city authorities to write the variance.
He stared at the block, adding it up like an equation. There was a balance to it. At the corners, one building coming down, one going up; in the middle, one parking lot, one tenement.
And then his eye saw something else. Up on Lexington, on the second-floor level of the uncompleted high rise, the owner had erected a large sign above the heads of the churning crowd. The lettering, in generously legible wedding-invitation script, spelled LE XANADU, LUXURY CO-OP, SPRING OCCUPANCY, OFFERING BY PROSPECTUS ONLY, ADDRESS INQUIRIES TO BALTHAZAR PROPERTIES, 555-8875.
Cardozo frowned. He slipped his notebook out of his breast pocket. He flipped through yesterday’s notes and he found a business card with the same number, 555-8875.
An NYPD seal with the warning NO ENTRY CRIME SCENE had been pasted over the crack between the front door and the jamb. He sliced through it with his VISA charge card and then he took two keys from the evidence bag—a Medeco and a four-sided Fichet with teeth that looked as though they could cut flesh.
He unlocked the door and entered apartment 6.
Someone had left the air conditioner running. The air was comfortably cool. A gentle afternoon light slatted through the silver-gray Levolor blinds and glowed on the dark polyurethaned floors.
A coat of fingerprint powder lay on the tops of the doorknobs. It lay in the same fine black snow in the kitchen by the refrigerator and sink and cabinets.
Cardozo wriggled his fingers into a pair of skin-thin plastic gloves. They were a medical item. The department bought them by the gross.
He went into the bedroom.
The one-legged chalk man on the floor looked crazily wrong, a figure of bends and angles in a space where nothing else was bent or angled. The straight line where the leg had been cut off seemed inconsistent, as though the artist had abruptly lost interest in his job.
He walked around it to the window and riffled his finger along the edge of the blinds. They made a soft clacking sound like marsh reeds in a breeze. He turned the Lucite pole, changing the slant of the blinds, letting the outside come gradually in.
Five stories below he could see the museum garden, the twenty-foot reflecting pool, the bronzes of huge-boned naked women. There were tables with blue-and-white umbrellas. Museum members, clean and relaxed in their summer clothes, were strolling or sitting alone or in twos and threes with books, cups of coffee, decanters of wine.
What kind of a city was it nowadays, he asked himself. How did the pieces fit together? It was getting a lot crazier, a lot tougher than when he had been a rookie patrolman and the biggest danger he’d faced was stepping into a mom and pop fight on Saturday night in the South Bronx.
South Bronx—his first beat—five miles and twenty-two years away.
In those days in all of New York City there were maybe 300 murders a year. In about 60 percent of the cases perpetrators were found within 24 hours. The conviction rate was close to 80 percent and it took at most three months to bring a case to trial. Heroin had been the hobby of 20,000 losers north of 96th Street and Coke meant the stuff that wasn’t Pepsi. The NYPD had yet to come up with the 911 emergency number or mix with computers, Knapp commissions, or civilian review boards. It had taken an average of 22 minutes for a squad car to respond to a call.
Now the murder rate was shading 2,000 a year, you were lucky to identify the corpse, let alone the killer; you found perpetrators in 40 percent of the cases, the chances of getting a conviction were one in twenty, and the chances of getting that conviction reversed or sent back on appeal were 50-50. Everything was computerized—fingerprints, rap sheets, 911 calls—and the computers were down 40 percent of the time. It took a squad car an average of 70 minutes to respond to a 911 emergency. New York had become the junkie capital of the world, with one resident in ten an addict. And coke with a small c was so popular that even rookie cops were stealing the seizures from busts and substituting Johnson’s baby powder, a fact discovered when an overworked prosecutor looking for a second wind had snorted one tenth of a gram of evidence.
New York had turned into the city of more—more confusion, more corpses, more wealth, more poverty, more drugs than ever before or anywhere else, and still climbing.
Why do I love this town, Cardozo wondered.
Maybe because someone has to.
His eye traveled to the ivied marble wall and wrought-iron fences that the museum had erected to separate its garden from the rest of the city.
And then his gaze came back inside.
He had no clear idea what he was looking for. He browsed, open to any suggestion the rooms might throw to him. He went through empty closets. He pulled open the mirrored door of the bathroom medicine cabinet. Black powder floated down and dappled the white of the sink.
He peered into the tub and then his eye went up to the shower curtain rod. Something caught his attention. He took off his shoes, stepped up onto the edge of the tub and squinted at the bright stainless steel.
Tiny scratches ran lengthwise across the distorted reflection of his nose.
He checked the rod three feet further on and found the same scratches.
A shoplifter on heroin was screaming abuse from the lockup cage. Cardozo’s ears winced as he climbed the stairs. He stopped at Detective Monteleone’s desk.