“I am when it comes to myself.”
Lucia turned to her husband. “Hadley, will you reason with your daughter?”
There was a special smile at the corner of Hadley’s lips. Babe understood it exactly. Her father’s eyes met hers, creating a conspiracy of warmth.
“Lucia, she’s an adult. As I understand the legalities of this, she ceased to be our ward once she regained consciousness.”
“Is that true, Bill?” Lucia said.
Lucia and Hadley had brought Bill Frothingham, the family lawyer, with them, and Lucia gave him her lovely smile. She had a great many smiles at her disposal, not all of them lovely, but this was obviously the one she thought appropriate.
“Not precisely.” A gray-templed man with penetrating eyes and a sharp-featured arresting face, Bill Frothingham had a gift for getting on well with people, or at least keeping them at bay with the sort of smile he was smiling now. “The test is competence, not consciousness. Once Babe can demonstrate competence she becomes her own ward.”
“Obviously she’s competent,” Hadley said. “She went and hired a lawyer.”
“You can hardly call it competent,” Lucia shot back. “She’s defying the best neurologist in the country.”
“Look here.” Bill Frothingham shoved his mouth into a peace-making grin. “We all want the same thing, which is for Babe to be well. If she’ll agree to spend a reasonable amount of time under medical care—”
“I’m taking my nurse with me,” Babe said. “I’ll be under medical care in my own home.”
“Don’t expect a doctor like Eric Corey to make house calls,” Lucia warned.
“He likes me,” Babe said, “I’ll invite him to dinner.”
“Don’t you get sarcastic with me, young lady.”
“I’m telling you exactly what I plan to do.”
Lucia’s green eyes challenged her daughter. “And if you should need an X ray or an EKG or an EEG or a CAT scan?”
“I can always be readmitted.”
“Lucia,” Hadley said pleasantly, “I think we should admit when we’re beaten.”
19
AT THE WEDNESDAY MORNING task force meeting Carl Malloy produced Bronski’s cab sheets for June 2. The sheets said he’d been at West End Avenue and 93rd Street at 12:20 when the photo van placed his look-alike at Beaux Arts Tower.
“I don’t believe the sheets,” Cardozo said.
He passed around Tommy Daniels’s blowup of the girl in the babushka.
“A two-week vacation in Oahu if anyone can identify her.”
“Debbi Hightower,” Sam Richards said.
“You’re crazy,” Malloy said.
“How can you tell from this?” Siegel said. “It’s a blob.”
“Debbi’s a blob,” Greg Monteleone said.
“But she’s not this blob,” Malloy said.
“You’re a real help,” Cardozo said. “All of you. Get out of here.”
He went back to the slide projector and began the laborious task of going through all the photos since day one, isolating all nonresident females wearing babushkas and designer shades.
By late afternoon he’d turned up eight possibilities and was wondering about a ninth when there was a knock on the doorframe.
He turned.
A boy stood at the door, very lost, very out of place. His look was open and vulnerable. His hair was reddish and hung in bangs on his forehead. He wore faded jeans, Adidas jogging shoes, and a T-shirt with a few well-laundered holes. It was the yuppie version of the street look.
Cardozo could see his caller was not a junkie, not a pimp, not a pross, not a booster.
“Lieutenant Cardozo?”
“Help you?”
“My name’s Dave Bellamy.” The boy’s voice was taut, unsteady. “The man downstairs told me to talk to you.”
The boy’s feet kept checking an impulse to step backward. Cardozo could see he was scared shitless.
“It’s about a guy I know. Jodie Downs.”
In Cardozo’s mind the initials J.D. set off a little inner jingle. He began listening with his skin. He lifted a pile of rubble from a chair. “Have a seat.”
The boy sat obediently.
“If you’d like some coffee—” Cardozo offered.
“No, thanks, I’ve had a lot more than my quota today.” The way the boy said it was embarrassed, apologetic, like a drunk saying I’ve had too many, I’ve had to have too many to psych myself up for this.
“I saw the poster at church last night.” The boy’s glance fought desperately for some sort of courage, skittering off surfaces, ricocheting away from Cardozo’s. “The poster said anyone recognizing this man. I recognized him. Jodie Downs. He was watering my plants for me while I was away.”
Cardozo got out a pad, began taking notes. “Can I have your name and address, Dave?”
Dave Bellamy spelled his name and gave an address at One Chelsea Place—“That’s the Episcopal seminary on Ninth Avenue. I’m a second-year student. I got back late from Chicago last night, I’ve been home visiting my folks for a week, and I went to a late mass at the Roman Catholic church on Twenty-fourth. They have a beautiful late mass. I saw the poster.”
His hand going to his hair, pulling at a strand of reddish blond.
“The plants in my room were dead. Some clothes of Jodie’s were on the bed, and some of mine were missing.”
“When did you last see Jodie?”
Dave Bellamy had to think a moment. “The night I flew home. Friday May sixteenth. He came to my room to get the keys.”
“You got a minute, Dave? I’d like you to come with me downtown and look at something.”
The attendant walked to number 1473. He turned a key and applied just enough pull to bring the slab sliding out. Ball bearings screeched.
Bellamy glanced at Cardozo.
Cardozo gave him a nod.
Bellamy walked across to the slab. His step was cautious, as though the floor might burst beneath his feet.
The attendant lifted the sheet. The light drew the drained, waxen face of the dead man out of the shadows.
Bellamy stared, not moving, not breathing.
The corpse looked curiously unborn, eyes closed in placental dreaming.
Cardozo waited in a tingling state of awareness. There was no sound but the plashing of water from an unseen hose. The smell was a blend of formaldehyde and meat that had sat too long in a marinade of sickening sweetness.
Dave Bellamy just stood there with a stunned look. Then he lifted his hands slowly and nodded his head.
As they drove uptown Bellamy sat strapped into his safety belt, but his mind was somewhere else, secret and apart.
A late afternoon shade had fallen over the city. The sky was a darkening bruise behind the turrets of lower Manhattan, just beginning to glitter with electric lights.
“It’s your first corpse, isn’t it,” Cardozo said. He felt sorry for the boy. “It’s like virginity. You never get it back.”
They parked on West Twentieth.
Cardozo followed Dave Bellamy into the seminary. Through a window he could see the interior of an office, the shape of a priest bent over a desk. There was an intermittent amateurish clatter of typewriter, the ringing of a phone, and then a voice of which he could make out nothing except the gentleness. The priest waved Dave Bellamy through and smiled as though he recognized Cardozo.
They passed into a peaceful cloister with stepping-stone paths and evening-dappled oaks. There were iron fences, dark, ivy-twined brick buildings and a chapel with a high Gothic tower. Green-washed light filtered through trees that had grown undisturbed for a hundred years.
They went up a stairwell with hollowed stone steps. The well smelled of centuries of cleanliness. They stopped at the fourth landing.
Dave Bellamy nervously got out his keys and opened the door. He turned on the light. It revealed neat, scholarly clutter: a desk, stacks of black-bound books that reminded Cardozo of the Penal Code, drafting lamps, a crucifix—Jesus in ivory, not suffering—over the bed. Khaki trousers and a sports shirt had been tossed down on the bedspread as though someone had just made a dash for the shower. There was a suitcase beside the bed.
“Those are his?” Cardozo asked.