“We’re investigating a capital crime,” Cardozo said. “It wouldn’t take me two hours to get an order compelling disclosure of that list.”
“Then I suggest those would be two hours most well spent, Lieutenant. It’s about time you so-called law enforcers learned to operate within the law.”
It took less than twenty minutes for Cardozo to learn that he wasn’t going to get a court order compelling diddly-squat—not in two hours, not in twenty. His judge, Tom Levin, was not in the court, not in chambers, not reachable. Levin’s secretary, sounding harried over the phone line, said she’d do her best to page him. Her voice was not hopeful.
As Cardozo touched the receiver down into the cradle, Carl Malloy burst into the office. He was moving like a bouncing ball, his hair lifting from his forehead and flopping down again.
“Vince, we’ve been going crazy, where you been, we’ve been beeping you all afternoon.”
“The hell you have, I just put fresh Duracells in that beeper this morning.” Cardozo’s glance went to the unopened package of Duracell batteries lying on top of the fives. “I’m losing my marbles.”
Malloy’s eyes met Cardozo’s, keen and wild. “Vince, we found the leg.”
There was an instant of absolute silence and Cardozo’s stomach had the crazily exhilarated sensation of free fall.
“Where?”
“It was out in a landfill in Queens, the truck picked it up Sunday from Beaux Arts Tower. We traced the truck, we traced the garbage, we traced everything, it all dovetails.”
“What shape’s the leg in?”
“Call Dan Hippolito, he’s looking at it right now.”
Just as Cardozo reached for the phone a button began blinking and a voice from the squad room shouted, “Vince, phone call for you, on three!”
“Who is it?”
“Some guy.”
“Jesus, can’t anyone around here take messages?”
There was a crackle and Dan Hippolito’s voice came on the line. “Vince, I’ve looked at this new bone material. It’s human, a right male thigh. How are you, by the way?”
“I’m fine. What have we got?”
“We can type the blood from the marrow, it’s O, same as John Doe. There’s some skin tissue, pretty ragged, an educated guess is that it’s Caucasian or very light black or Hispanic.”
“In other words the whole human race.”
“It’s not Oriental. There’s a mark at the fracture, characteristic of a rotary blade, and there’s an approximate match with John Doe, but it’s approximate, because bone tissue was compressed in the compactor.”
“Is there anything you can see that the killer wanted to hide: a birthmark, a tattoo, a deformity?”
“Vince, there’s no way you’re going to get a birthmark or tattoo off of this. It’s hash. This new tissue isn’t going to tell us why the killer wanted the leg off. So far as deformity is concerned, the femur is reasonably intact, God only knows how, and there are no breaks, no bends, no bone pathology. There’s a fungus in the fat cells of the marrow, but hell, this meat’s been rotting for three days and it’s been buried under every parasite in the city of New York. So take it from there, Vince, that’s the best I can do.”
Cardozo felt a wave of disappointment rising in his gut. “Thanks, Dan.”
“Give my love to your daughter.”
“I’ll do that.”
14
CARDOZO PHONED MELISSA HATFIELD and asked her to have a drink with him after work.
“I can meet you at six fifteen at Morgan’s,” she said. “Fifty-third and Sixth. Know the place?”
Cardozo knew it. Ten years ago Morgan’s had been Reilly’s, the watering hole for his precinct. Reilly’s was the corner lot that had not sold out to Rockefeller Center. For four decades, dwarfed by gleaming million-dollar art deco skyscrapers, the two-bit, two-story grungy bar with blinking Schlitz signs and Miss Rhinegold posters in the window had been a zit on the face of Prometheus. Cardozo had loved Reilly’s: not just because the owner had stood up to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., but because the drinks weren’t watered, because you could get corned beef and cabbage from eight in the morning till four the next morning, and most of all because of the customers: maintenance men, Rockettes on break from the Music Hall, secretaries and off-duty police and firemen, people who did a dollar’s work for a dollar’s pay and didn’t expect to get famous or bribed or laid for it.
Those days had ended when Reilly died and Reilly’s became Morgan’s. The zit became a beauty mark. White wood siding went up over the crumbling brick, green New England shutters got nailed to the siding, red ruffled checkered cafe curtains appeared on bronze rails. Cardozo had gone back once and once had been enough.
Tonight he arrived five minutes early. He wanted to see Hatfield come in, wanted to watch her for that one moment before she knew he was looking.
Morgan’s was doing the kind of business Reilly had only dreamed of: SRO. Cardozo had to push through the shoulder-to-shoulder Happy Hour crowd.
The bartenders worked in front of five-foot pyramids of the booze of eighty nations. They had pirate moustaches and Jack LaLanne bodies, and their red-checked open-necked shirts matched the cafe curtains. They came on to the female customers, bending close to catch the order, and gold chains twinkled in hairy cleavages. With the male customers they were macho and curt.
“What’s yours?” a six-foot linebacker radiating cologne snarled.
“Scotch and water,” Cardozo said.
He left a dollar tip—he knew what this city did to a guy’s budget and he believed even shitheads deserved a decent wage. There was no thank you.
Attitude, Cardozo thought—New York’s gift to the world. Everyone was handing it to everyone. Park Avenue socialites stepping into limos, Puerto Rican checkout girls in the supermarket—their eye met yours with that same unlovely, unmistakable message: drop dead. It was turning into a worm-eat-worm town.
Cardozo took his drink and looked for a place to sit. There were electric hurricane lamps on every checkered tablecloth. Faces bent into the circles of light—faces struggling to look sophisticated, faces struggling to look beautiful and successful, faces running on cocaine and faces beginning to blear out on Stolichnaya. Faces trying to connect with faces.
He found an empty table; it looked like the last one in the place. On the wall where Reilly had hung the first dollar bill the bar had ever earned and the bounced checks of famous clients there was a nautical compass and a brass barometer. A clock ding-donged the time in ship’s bells. Cardozo wanted to cry.
A short, slight girl with long dark hair and an order pad tried to interest him in the day’s special fish. He told her he was waiting for a friend, and even though he wasn’t ready he sensed the girl worked on a percentage and he ordered another drink.
Melissa Hatfield stepped through the twin brass doors. She was carrying a very full ebony crocodile attaché case and she was wearing a gray dress belted tight enough to give it a little flare at the hips. She went straight for the bar. Men moved aside and hopeful eyes traveled with her and she knew it. She passed directly under the glare of a hurricane lamp and there was a moment when the gray of her dress became red roses, orange roses, green leaves, thorns. She looked good under the light and she knew that too. She smiled at the barman.
The body-built pirate ignored the bald gent who had been waiting five minutes for a Rob Roy. He poured Melissa Hatfield a white wine on ice, topping it with a showy, dead accurate shot from the soda gun. He handed her the drink, smiling.
Melissa Hatfield paid and turned. Her glance swept the pandemonium. Cardozo rose and signaled with a raised hand. She saw him, smiled, came across the room. Men stepped aside for her.
She dropped the briefcase beside the table. “Three closings in TriBeCa,” she said. “More paperwork than the nuclear test-ban treaty.”
Cardozo couldn’t tell whether she expected sympathy or congratulations. Maybe both. He rose.
“You don’t have to be gallant, Lieutenant.”
“Vince,” he said. “Call me Vince.”
She sat down.
He watched her sip her drink with a sort of elegant disdain and he let his intuition roam. Melissa Hatfield had an aunt in the Social Register and she’d parlayed the connection into a career of putting people down in small ways, selling luxury real estate to hungry overnight millionaires.