A reception was being held in a room of Toulouse-Lautrec posters.
He skirted the hubbub and went searching for the fourth mask. In a gallery away from the voices and music he found a collection of heads. There were faces of stone and wood and plastic, all caught in glass boxes like vivisections in sterile chambers.
Walking among them, reading from the printed catalogue, he came upon the leather thing he was looking for: Bondage IX, leather and steel sculpture, Nuku Kushima, American, 1941—.
He stared at the face that was not a face: eyeless sockets the size and shape of stitched buttonholes, the lump of nose flattened into a piglike snout, the queasily smooth earlessness beneath the temples, the gash of sealed zipper marking the line where lips should have been.
The mask seemed to communicate a message he could only half understand. He sensed something deeper than terror: the utter willing acceptance of catastrophe.
There was a sudden hollowness in him.
In a moment suspended outside time he heard the zippered scream of a dead man six stories above this very space.
Women’s laughter broke in. The cheerful buzz of conversation flowed around him, corks were popping in another room, waiters were scurrying.
“All that redness around John Doe’s waist and upper thigh and ankle—there had to be some kind of allergen attacking the epiderm. But why those areas and no others? Because that’s where the elastic bands in socks and underpants chafe. Okay, but what kind of allergen?”
Dan Hippolito slipped a slide under the microscope, bent down, adjusted the focus.
“We peel the skin from the waist, the ankle, the upper thigh, study it under the microscope. Behold, granules the size of boulders.”
Hippolito motioned Cardozo.
Cardozo bent over the scope. He saw boulders.
“So we pulverize the skin, spin the particles, and eureka, the foreign substance has a different specific gravity from human skin and we isolate the culprit—detergent.”
Cardozo pulled his eye up from the microscope. “Detergent?”
Hippolito nodded. “Generic industrial grade nameless detergent—killer soap—cheapola of the cheapola—not sold in supermarkets, not even ghetto supermarkets, and the FDA has considered outlawing it. It’s illegal in Canada, illegal in twelve states of the union. In New York it’s iffy but there are jobbers—under investigation by the attorney general—who sell the powder in forty-pound cartons. Now this stuff is so corrosive that dry—dry—it eats through cardboard.”
“So who uses it?”
“Broadly speaking, two sorts of institutions. Prisons and bottom-of-the-line Laundromats.”
By the time Cardozo got back to HQ, Lieutenant Damato was beginning his blotter entries for the four-to-one tour. Of the task force, only Siegel and Malloy were still in the station house. Cardozo called them into his office and told them the medical examiner’s new evidence.
“The victim took his clothes to a cheap Laundromat and used their soap,” Ellie Siegel said.
“Or left the clothes for them to wash,” Malloy said.
Cardozo pushed back in his chair. “So we’re looking for a Laundromat that may or may not be self-service, but also has a dump-your-laundry-and-we’ll-handle-it service. How many Laundromats like that are there in this city?”
Malloy screwed up his face, an expert. “Three, four hundred easy.”
“Get flyers out to all Laundromats in all boroughs.”
“What about Laundromats in Jersey?” Ellie Siegel said. “Hoboken’s nearer than Staten Island.”
“Include Hudson County.”
“Prison,” Carl Malloy said. “John Doe could have been just released or he could have escaped.”
“So? Check the prisons.”
Alone, Cardozo set up the projector and began going through slides.
Behind him, a voice spoke.
“Vincent Cardozo?”
Cardozo turned in his chair. A pudgy young man in an Italian-cut summer-weight gray shantung suit stood backlit against the open door.
“Ray Kane,” the young man said, “attorney-at-law.” He held out a chubby pink hand. He had no visible neck; smooth baby-fat jowls overspilled his shirt collar. The shirt designer’s name was appliqued to the breast pocket, and Kane smelted as if he had baptized himself in cologne.
“How can I help you, Mr. Kane?”
“Today you walked into the legitimate place of business of Lewis Monserat and terrorized his assistant. You threatened to send her to the Tombs and you menaced her with an improperly executed order for seizure.”
“I thought Ted Morgenstern represented Monserat.”
Ray Kane drew himself up. “I am an associate of Mr. Morgenstern’s firm.”
Cardozo got the picture. Ever the true power broker, Ted Morgenstern had sent one of his small fry to handle the niggling paper work.
Cardozo slowly rose to his feet. From a standing position he could see pink scalp through Kane’s thinning razor-cut hair. “Mr. Kane, I’m working.”
“So am I.” Kane held out an official document bearing the seal of the court.
“What’s that?”
“An order demanding return of the list of purchasers of the Kushima mask.”
“On what grounds?”
“Improperly seized, without warrant, no evidence of a crime.” Kane smacked his lips as if he were sucking macaroons off dentures.
“A murdered man, you don’t call that a crime?”
“I warn you, Lieutenant, if you try to link Mr. Monserat’s name to any ongoing criminal investigation, we shall not hesitate to bring slander charges.”
Cardozo picked up the receiver of his phone. “Damato, send me one of the A.D.A.’s.”
Kane stared at Cardozo from contact lenses that were probably meant to change his brown eyes to blue but instead made them look like a very special effect in a sci-fi film.
In a moment there was a knock at the door. “Lieutenant Cardozo? Lucinda MacGill, assistant district attorney.” The young woman held out a hand. Her pale brown hair was cut in bangs, tumbling in back to her shoulders.
“That was fast,” Cardozo said.
“I was downstairs taking a deposition.”
It was the job of assistant D.A.’s to take statements from suspects, and Lucinda MacGill had a stenographer with her, a man in his early thirties, tall and thin with scraggly black hair and a beard to match. He looked like he’d rather be writing sonnets but needed the bread to pay his Con Ed.
“How can I help you?” Lucinda MacGill asked.
“Miss MacGill,” Cardozo said, “meet Counselor Kane.”
Her lips thinned as she said hello.
“Counselor Kane is serving me a writ, and I want to be sure it’s properly executed before I comply.”
Assistant D.A.’s were like detectives: they caught cases on a first-come, first-served basis; or, more accurately, the cases caught them. There was no picking or choosing. How you handled what you were served determined how your career went. Lucinda Mac-Gill looked like she could handle.
“May I see the writ?” Her eyes scanned quickly and she gave the document back to Kane. “It’s properly executed.”
Cardozo crumpled the Monserat list into a ball and lobbed it to the floor. “All yours, Counselor.”
Cardozo sat at his desk asking himself why his jaw was clenched so tight that electric currents were stinging through his fillings, how his heart could be in two places at once, thudding in his left temple and crashing in his gut.
Because he was furious.
Over a gofer.
A gofer for a shyster who had headed the opposition on a case that had been cleared seven years ago. A case that had officially evaporated when Babe Devens woke up.
He told himself to be reasonable, think about something else, something that didn’t make him angry, like the air conditioner in his cubicle that wasn’t even pretending to work. Or Lewis Monserat, peddling marked-up s.m. gear and hiding behind the skirts of the law.
Had anyone who wasn’t guilty of at least grand larceny ever hired Ted Morgenstern or any of his associates?
Cardozo’s mind went over that a moment, flicked back to Doria Forbes-Steinman’s accusations. They were wild, certainly exaggerated, but …