The area on lower Eighth Avenue was in the throes of gentrification: gays and yuppies edging in, Puerto Ricans getting edged out. On a block of Medicaid dentists and trendy upscale bistros, the Paradise Laundromat shared the ground floor of a brick tenement with the Jean Cocteau Hair Salon and Greeting Card Boutique.
Cardozo and Siegel entered the narrow storefront. To reach the clanking washers and dryers they had to walk a gauntlet of neighborhood Latin kids pitting their machismo against Japanese video game machines.
Soap dust floating in the air prickled the inside of Cardozo’s nose and made him want to sneeze.
A girl waited by one of the dryers, studying her reflection in the window of spinning underwear. She was applying makeup, careful not to get powder on the headband of her Walkman earphones.
At the rear of the store an old Chinese woman in a black five-and-ten oriental robe was sitting erect and rigid on a small wooden box.
Cardozo showed her his shield.
Her tiny black eyes studied it suspiciously.
He showed her the flyer.
She nodded, her skin as dry as old parchment, her features drawn and shrunken. “Si,” she said. “Joven.” Young.
“His name, his address?”
No reaction. Cardozo tried his Spanish, a modification of the Portuguese he’d learned at home as a child. “¿Su nombre, su dirección?”
The old woman shook her head in denial. “No nombre, no dirección.”
The right corner of her mouth was drawn down: she had some kind of paralysis of a facial nerve, and that, added to her accent, made her hash of Cantonese, Spanish, and English very hard to understand.
Cardozo was able to piece together that the young man had come in regularly, every Thursday, and he must have lived nearby, because he carried such big bags of laundry.
“You have one of these sacos grandes?” Cardozo asked. “Give it to me. Dámelo por favor.”
The slant of her eyes lent them a wary expression. “Ticket?”
“No ticket.”
One finger unbent. “One dollar más.”
She went and got a stool and pulled a green nylon bag down from a crowded shelf.
Half a laundry ticket was safety-pinned to it. The date stamped on it was May 23. The Friday before the murder. She undid the pin, her hands liver-spotted and twisted with arthritis, and dropped it into a box of similar pins.
She held out the half ticket and with a cracked Bic pen made a pantomime of signing. Cardozo signed. She made him write down his shield number.
“Eight dollars fifty cents.” Her English was a hell of a lot better when it came to money.
As Cardozo pulled into the cluster of glassy buildings, the air had a tang of oncoming rain. He took the laundry up to the fourth floor.
The man from Evidence was already there, a scholarly-looking civilian in his late twenties, tall and skinny with curly red hair. He began making an inventory of the laundry. It was a curious mix—woollen argyle socks with Brooks Brothers labels, Fruit of the Loom underpants and T-shirts, Healthknit jockstraps, five-and-dime tube socks without labels.
“A lot of socks,” the evidence man commented. “He must have worn two, three pairs a day.”
“Maybe he jogged.” Cardozo noticed that the clothes were all India-inked with the same initials—J.D.
Funny if the guy’s name really was John Doe.
Cardozo had known evidence men who would tag a pair of socks as a single item, especially if a detective was waiting, but this man went strictly by the book, tagging each sock with its own numbered tag, tearing each tag on its two perforated lines, filling out each stub in identical, careful block printing.
Lou Stein sauntered into the room. His face still bore traces of its holiday tan, but the holiday smile was gone. Care had eaten its way back.
“We’re not going to need all that,” he said. He lifted a pair of underpants, a T-shirt, and a sock out of the tagged pile and signed for them.
On the seventh floor, in the soft blue glow of lab lights, Lou Stein removed the evidence tags and dropped the clothing into a bath of distilled water. Sliding the lid into place, he pressed a button. The water began agitating violently.
After three minutes Lou drained the water from the tub and fed it into another tank. He played with a bank of switches. Something began making a Cuisinart sound.
Lou beckoned. “We can watch over here.”
Cardozo fixed his eyes on a computer terminal. Mathematical and chemical symbols exploded into green points of brilliance on the black screen.
Thirty seconds later a printed analysis spewed out of the mouth of a computer-linked desktop printer.
Lou ripped off a sheet of printout and resettled his spectacles thoughtfully. “The underclothes and socks show a heavy saturation of the same detergent that caused the rash on John Doe.”
Cardozo stopped on the fourth floor. The evidence man was examining a shirt. His teeth were pressed down into his lip.
“What do you make of this, Lieutenant?”
Cardozo took the shirt. It was white cotton, a nice weave, oxford or chambray.
“A dress shirt with a one-inch collar,” Cardozo observed.
“Most of the other stuff is initialed J.D. This one’s initialed D.B.”
Cardozo studied the inside of the collar with the India-inked letters. “And no label.”
“What is it, a Chairman Mao?”
Cardozo didn’t know. “How many of these has he got?”
“Just that one.”
Tommy Daniels arranged the sleeves outward on the table like the arms of a crucified man. “I’ll shoot you a beauty. Good enough for GQ.”
“Forget beautiful,” Cardozo said. “I need six prints.”
Cardozo called the team into his office. He passed out the photos and then rested both hands on the edge of the desk.
There was a wide waiting silence. Three tired men and one tired woman stared at the pictures.
“Whatever any of you are doing now,” Cardozo said, “drop it. Find out what the hell kind of shirt that is, who makes it, where it’s sold.”
It was dark when Monteleone returned. There was no mistaking the black beyond the window for the last traces of day.
“It’s a clerical shirt,” he said. “Priests attach their collar to that hole in the back with a collar button.”
A skin of silence dropped on the cubicle, freezing out the voices and clatter from the squad room.
“The guy’s too young,” Cardozo said. “He couldn’t have been a priest.” He realized that what he meant was, a priest couldn’t have died that kind of death—God wouldn’t have let him.
“Everybody seems young when you get older,” Monteleone said. “Hell, cops look young to me. To tell the truth, Vince, even you look young to me.”
Cardozo sat there for a moment letting things sort themselves out in his mind. He tapped a blunted pencil against the blotter.
“Let’s assume he’s a priest. Priests live where they work, right? And how far would you carry laundry—five, six blocks tops, right? Let’s post the flyer in all churches within six blocks of that Laundromat.”
“Clerical shirts are just formal shirts without the collar or the fancy front.” Greg Monteleone was sharing his research with Tuesday’s task force meeting. “They come in three colors—black and white for your hoi polloi priests, and magenta for bishops. White clerical shirts always have a rabat worn over them. That’s a vest. Some Jesuits and low-church Anglicans try for the dog-collar look, and they wear the black shirt with the collar and without the vest.”
“We’re looking at a white shirt,” Cardozo said. “Is it Catholic or is it Anglican?”
“They’re both the same,” Monteleone said. “The only difference is who’s inside. They’re all sewn by Ricans and Chicanos and gook illegals in the same Yiddish sweatshops.”
Ellie Siegel, looking exasperated, scratched a match loudly and lit a cigarette.
“If you’re buying a standard clerical shirt,” Monteleone said, “you do it by mail or you go to a Roman Catholic shop and get it off the rack. If you want to go special, outfits like Brooks Brothers make white clerical shirts to order for rich Anglicans and Romans.”