He lifted the telephone. The receiver blasted him with the strains of a vocal quartet warbling “The Age of Aquarius.”
“I don’t believe it. I’m getting Muzak on the goddamned phone.”
He strode through the squad room into the hallway.
The redheaded proprietor of an East Side crack boutique sat on a bench, manacled to a plainclothesman. She was gazing into a simulated-gold pocket mirror, studded with phony emeralds. Her free hand, holding a puff studded with more phony emeralds, was busily powdering her face.
The same smarmy musical arrangement was drifting up the stairwell.
Cardozo leaned over the banister and shouted down, “Get that fuckin’ Muzak off my phone!”
The crack boutique owner’s eyes came up at Cardozo with a grin. “Way to go, man, way to go.”
It did no good. it didn’t even make him feel better. Now when he lifted his receiver the tune was “Yesterday.”
He gave up and walked downstairs.
The computer room was the only effectively air-conditioned room in the station house. The computer rated air-conditioning because, unlike a cop, it refused to work in discomfort.
“Help you, Lieutenant?” Charley Brackner asked. A brown-eyed young man, prematurely bald, Charley was the precinct’s resident computer whiz, the only person who could turn the machine on or off without blowing the air conditioning. His cheerfully condescending manner reflected the confidence of a man who had long ago realized the unique and intimidating power of the skills he possessed.
“Call up the rap sheet on Lewis Monserat.”
Cardozo spelled the name, and Charley’s fingers, moving in a blur over the IBM letter keyboard, fed the information into the computer. The screen flashed the word searching and a moment later the words no file available.
“What does that mean?” Cardozo said. “There’s no file or there’s a file but we mortal schmucks aren’t allowed to read it?”
Charley turned around in the swivel chair, patiently professorial. “It means Maisie has nothing on him.”
“Maisie?”
“The computer. Either Monserat has a damned good lawyer, or he hasn’t been caught, or he isn’t a criminal.”
“Not even a parking ticket?”
“Believe it or not, Lieutenant, eighty percent of the residents of central and south Manhattan lead law-abiding lives.”
Cardozo’s face and hands were dappled in reflections from the slides. When he recognized a figure he added to an earlier notation in the log. Fresh faces got new notations.
He flicked to a new slide and suddenly he sat forward.
It was as though the light had changed, as though the surrounding area had dimmed out and only the narrow waist held in a black band splashed with primary colors was in focus.
He toyed with the lens. The figure on the wall receded into a blur, came forward into sharpness.
His eyes took in the three-inch black leather belt, the outlandishly huge and brilliant red and green and blue costume jewels encrusting it.
The woman had a strikingly deep suntan and blond hair that splayed out into the breeze in a long wave behind her.
Cardozo felt a tightening around the chest.
He switched off the projector. For a minute the wall seemed to glow where the image had been.
He lifted the phone and dialed the number of the Pleasure Trove sex shop.
Burt, the salesman from Pleasure Trove, leaned back against the cubicle wall, a column of smoke rising from his cigarette up into the still air. The carousel made click after click as the slides flicked by.
The legs of Burt’s chair came down on the linoleum with a thunk. “Hold that picture.” His eyes were narrowed, suddenly attentive, his mouth closed so that his lips made a fine line. “That’s her.”
The young blond woman in the slide was striding toward the Beaux Arts lobby. She had brown eyes, strong nose and jaw. A puff of wind had driven her apricot ruffled blouse hard against her breasts, showing a firm, braless outline.
In her right hand she was holding a shoebox-sized package.
Cardozo rose. “Thanks, Burt. I appreciate it.”
After Burt left, Cardozo sat thinking.
There was an easy way of putting it together. Didn’t mean it was the right way, just an easy way.
Kushima had made a fifth mask, Monserat had sold it, and it had turned up as part of the personal adornment in a mutilation murder. The owner of the mask had reached the gallery, who had reached the artist, and they all were denying the mask had ever existed.
Now tie that in with the Pleasure Trove mask, bought for cash by a woman using a false name and address.
Did women ever buy leather bondage gear? Sure, statistically there had to be more than a few kinky women in the greater metropolitan area. Okay, could she have been buying it on her own for reasons that had nothing to do with the killing? Could she have been embarrassed, so she used a fake name and address?
Right away there was a contradiction: she went into Beaux Arts Tower with the mask, she came out without it.
Cardozo kept playing with combinations, and there was one he kept coming back to: the owner of the fifth mask had bought the Pleasure Trove mask as insurance, which meant he believed it was indistinguishable from the Kushimas. He’d used the unknown woman as a gofer because he could not afford visibility. In case the trail ever led to him, he’d be able to whip the mask out and say, “See, fellas? Here’s mine. Must be someone else you’re after.”
Which meant that somewhere there was a record of that mask’s movements, a trail of paper scraps that led to the killer.
Cardozo pored over the log. The girl was number 28. Name unknown. No match with patients of either clinic. Only one other picture was cross-referenced: number 43. In this one she was coming out of the building, back into the sunlight, without the package.
Those were the only two pictures of her. Both Tuesday, May 27. First day of business after the murder. Cardozo noted the times in the log. In at 11:07, out at 11:18.
He studied both slides. This time he was looking at the doorman. In the first the doorman seemed to be watching the young woman, suspiciously, difficult to say whether he recognized her or not. In the second his expression was much friendlier and he seemed to be speaking to her.
Cardozo studied the photos of the house staff, selected a slide, dropped it into the carousel. The wall lit up with a close-up of Andy Gomez.
It was almost eleven; from behind the steeple of Saint Andrew’s the moon was rising into the night sky. Andy Gomez stood inside the door of Beaux Arts Tower, talking animatedly on the house phone.
“Hi there, Andy.” Cardozo flashed his shield.
Andy’s eyes withdrew suspiciously under their brows and he hung up the phone.
Cardozo showed him a photograph. The lab had brushed out the background so as not to compromise the surveillance van. “Ever seen this woman, Andy?”
Andy frowned. “I see a lot of women.”
“Come on, Andy. You seem like a pretty alert guy to me. A woman like this came to the building, you’d remember which apartment she went to.”
“Maybe I said hello to her, she’s a pretty woman, but remember who she was visiting, hell no. I see too many faces.”
Cardozo scanned the fives on the Beaux Arts John Doe that had come in since yesterday, put them into their own stack, reflected that time was passing and memories of potential witnesses were growing staler.
Tommy Daniels knocked on the open door. Today he was wearing a heliotrope pink shirt that brought an infra-red glow to the cubicle.
“Your photographers are doing nice work,” Cardozo said. He handed Tommy the picture of the blond-haired mystery woman.
“Beautiful lady. Who is she?”
“We want to find out. Have your men in the van keep an eye out for her. If she goes into the building again, follow her and see which floor she goes to.”
16
“I JUST LOOKED AT that buffet and put on ten pounds. But I danced every ounce of it off.” Lucia Vanderwalk sat smiling at her daughter. “I haven’t heard such a dance band since Eddy Duchin played at my birthday. No rock whatsoever. And Cordelia has never looked prettier. Of course, she was wearing one of your gowns.”