It was 7:30 in the morning, and Babe Devens was in her hospital room, watching the morning news on TV, when Cardozo came in.
“Lieutenant Cardozo.” She looked pleased to see him.
The room was bright with morning sun. He felt an odd and sudden shyness.
“Sorry I took so long,” he said. “I didn’t get your message till last night.”
“You’re very good to come.”
He closed the door. They looked at one another in silence. He was very aware of her intelligent face, her green eyes, her honey blond hair.
“You remembered something?” he said.
“No. Please don’t be angry at me. I need your help.”
That interested him. Babe Vanderwalk Devens needed the help of a $47,000-a-year homicide detective.
“My family want me to stay in the hospital. I want to go home.”
“You don’t need me.” He smiled. “You’re over twenty-one. There’s the door.”
“It’s not that easy. The court put me in their custody. They have my power of attorney. Legally I’m a child.”
“Haven’t you contacted your lawyer?”
The silk of Babe Devens’s robe made a slight rustle in the quiet room. “First of all, I can’t. That phone only takes incoming calls. I had to ask E.J. to call you from the nurse’s station. Second of all, he’s my family’s lawyer. He’s working for them, not me. My parents want me in protective custody and they won’t let me see anybody but their handpicked visitors. Look.” She handed him a leather-bound datebook. “Mother has my life mapped out for the next month.”
Cardozo leafed through the pages, admiring the neatly looping handwriting. “Maybe your folks are right. Maybe you should stay in the hospital till you’re strong.”
Determination flared in Babe Devens’s eyes. “There’s nothing I’m doing here that I can’t do at home. The house has an elevator, I can take E.J. with me, the therapists can work with me there. I’ll be fine.”
It occurred to him that this woman knew herself and knew her limits and that if she said she would be fine then she would be.
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
“Put me in touch with a lawyer who’s not Wall Street and not old money and not scared of Hadley or Lucia Vanderwalk.”
Cardozo found Lucinda MacGill on the second floor taking a deposition from a woman screaming in Yiddish and Russian. A sergeant, obviously a volunteer pulled out of the muster room, was attempting to translate.
A young man handcuffed to a chair was screaming Spanish and a lieutenant was translating. Through all the screaming and translating Cardozo gathered that the young man had pushed the woman’s husband under a Queens-bound F train while attempting to grab the gold Star of David from his neck.
Lucinda MacGill saw Cardozo and came over to the coffee urn. “The kid’s high on crack,” she said. “The husband died forty minutes ago in emergency at Saint Clare’s. The woman wishes she’d never left Russia.”
“You working tomorrow?” Cardozo said.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’m sleeping.”
“If you felt like going up to Doctors Hospital tomorrow and talking to Babe Vanderwalk Devens you could earn a little extra.”
“Babe Devens? You’re kidding. I thought she was in coma.”
“She was but now she isn’t. The court made her her parents’ ward. They won’t let her out of the hospital. She wants to go.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. That might just pay off my car loan.”
Lucinda MacGill lit one of her two daily cigarettes and smiled at Babe Devens as though they had been friends for years. “Tell me about your family. What are they after? Do they want to control your money?”
Babe Devens sat with her arms folded on the hospital table, staring at Lucinda. “They don’t need to control anyone’s money. They have plenty of their own.”
“Some people are greedy.”
“Not my parents. They’re do-gooders. They think they’re protecting me.”
“From what?”
“All kinds of sordid realities.”
Lucinda MacGill rose from the chair and began pacing. “You have a right to a sanity hearing—we get three examining doctors to declare you competent, your family has the right to three examining doctors to declare you incompetent, a judge hears the experts and decides. If the judge decides against you we move for a jury trial. You’ll definitely win with a jury.”
Babe’s deep-set eyes darkened and there were furrows in her forehead. “What would all that take—months?”
“Months, maybe years; and a few hundred thousand dollars.”
“I don’t want to go through all that.”
“Good. Neither do I. I work for the city and I’m moonlighting.” Lucinda moved to the window. A swollen summer sun ached in the sky, edging skyscrapers in blinding silver. “There hasn’t been a word about you in the papers,” she said.
Babe Devens’s brow wrinkled. “Should there be?”
“Well, the papers printed all the testimony when your husband tried to kill you.”
“My husband didn’t—” Babe Devens broke off. “What’s your point?”
“Your parents are trying very hard to keep your recovery quiet. Let’s make them show cause. Give them x number of days to convince a court you shouldn’t be declared competent. That leaves them two options: go to court—which would entail headlines—or stay out of court—and lose custody and power of attorney. You decide. You know your family.”
“They can’t abide publicity.”
“Good. We’ll go that route.”
17
AT THE TASK FORCE meeting Malloy reported that so far no prisons in the tristate area had recognized the photo of John Doe. “Maybe we should go national.”
Cardozo tossed a chewing gum wrapper at an ashtray. There was a growing buzz of frustration in him. “So go.”
Greg Monteleone sat shuffling three squares of phone message paper. “For what it’s worth, two Laundromats say they recognize the flyer. Unfortunately, they’re eight miles away from one another, so unless John Doe schlepped his dirty linen by helicopter, one of them’s got to be mistaken.”
Cardozo told Monteleone and Malloy to each take a Laundromat and check them out.
Cardozo lowered the shade in his cubicle and set up the projector. He looked at slides, Sunday’s slides, Monday’s, the whole week’s. He tried to see each one as though for the first time.
Again and again he referred back to his one maybe, the mystery woman in slides 28 and 43: his gaze took in the flowing blond hair, the confident face and stride, the blouse, the skirt, the belt … the pink-striped package that went into the building and never came out again.
He told himself that there had to be a match, that Tommy’s team had missed it, that she was somewhere else too, in another photo neatly logged and tagged.
But she wasn’t and she wasn’t and she wasn’t.
At one thirty Monteleone was back from Queens to report that the mom and pop who ran the Laundromat had made a mistake.
Two hours later Malloy was back from Staten Island. The ferry ride had been great; the woman who ran the Laundromat was an old sweetie, but she had a habit of calling the FBI and reporting that their Ten Most Wanted had left laundry in her shop. The FBI had stopped taking her calls, so she’d turned to local law enforcement.
Monday, June 2. Cardozo was clicking through slides. He compared the faces on his wall to the faces on his desk, photographs Ellie Siegel had gotten from the insurance companies that reimbursed the Beaux Arts clinics.
There should be a computer to do this, he thought.
In three hours he found only seven matches that weren’t already in the log. He felt he was groping through a maze that led only to potholes.
He was yawning and blinking when Siegel walked in from the squad room wearing a big smile. She stared at Cardozo with his head resting on his forearm.
“I got something.” Her face lit up the room. “The owner not only claims to have seen the victim regularly, she has his laundry.”
Cardozo’s smile opened like a Japanese fan, the muscles stretching one at a time, and he realized he hadn’t smiled in nine days. “Where?”