He lit one neatly rolled joint from another. He glanced at the line of customers. This was his moment, his island of power. Nothing was going to hurry him.
The people behind Cardozo were talking about how much Fifth Avenue office space was going for per square foot. They looked like stockbrokers, lawyers, small-time civil service grafters who had snorted a line, kicked the traces, and bolted off the ten-to-six Monday-to-Friday path.
Monteleone showed his membership card. “Two guests.”
The admission man’s olive, broadly ugly face took on a look of calculation. “Twenty bucks.”
Monteleone pulled twenty from his wallet and signed the register. Cardozo noticed that he signed the mayor’s name.
They moved on into a dim area where members were taking off their clothes and handing them over to the clothescheck.
“Check your clothes.” Monteleone was already out of his trousers, wearing ridiculous plaid boxer shorts. “Keep some money in your socks. Drinks are three bucks each.”
A brave smile deepened the lines of Siegel’s face. She pulled off her blouse.
Cardozo stripped down to his Jockeys.
They moved into the next room. It was cavernous. The low ceiling rested on wooden beams that came from the dirt floor at crazy angles. The acid rock thundering from a dozen speakers gave the cavernous space the feel of a coalmine that might collapse at any moment. Definitely a space for people who liked to live near the edge.
The bar was a bunch of crates arranged in a circle. Naked figures were sitting and standing and posing.
Beyond the bar was an area packed with waterbeds and hemmed in by sections of steel fence, suitable for padlocking your playmates to; there was a six-foot wading pool of the sort you see on suburban back lawns; there were deck chairs scattered around, card tables where members could take conversation and drug breaks.
“So you think this is where Jodie Downs met Mr. Right,” Monteleone said.
They stood there, three uncomfortable cops in their underwear, without guns, without shields, keeping their eyes open.
Gradually details began standing out.
A man with an IV in one arm and a glucose bag hanging from a head-high walker was talking with a woman sitting on the bar. She lazily stroked his shoulders with a whip.
“Pig city,” Siegel muttered. “Absolutely new dimensions in chazerei.”
Across the room, a woman was walking over a naked man with football cleats. A few solo acts prowled the dark corners, sniffing for action.
Cardozo felt like a fifth wheel on a spaceship. “Anyone want a drink?”
Nobody objected.
On his way to the bar he passed a man in a sling getting fist-fucked by a fat, bare-breasted woman in an executioner’s hood. At a nearby card table women naked under their black raincoats were discussing how their husbands got off on this fister, how much better she was than the fister at Plato’s.
Cardozo stood at the bar.
It took a few moments before the bartender asked what Cardozo wanted.
“Three Scotches.”
“Dream on, little boy.” The bartender ripped the flip tops off three Schlitzes and didn’t bother wiping the spatter off his nose or off the bar.
Cardozo put down twelve dollar bills.
The bartender crumpled them up in his fist like a wipe-up towel. “You’re new?”
Suddenly Cardozo was looking at the bartender, seeing him. He was a heavyset man in his late twenties or early thirties, with dark curly hair, a jaw that needed shaving, a moustache covering a full upper lip. Jodie’s Identi-Kit.
“Yeah,” Cardozo said. “I’m new.”
“Stan,” the bartender said.
Cardozo accepted a tough handshake. “Vince.” His real name was easier than trying to keep false names straight.
“You’re with them?” The bartender threw a nod toward Monteleone and Siegel.
“Yeah.”
“Enjoy yourselves.”
Cardozo took the drinks back to his coworkers. Now that his eyes and nerves were adjusted he noticed a half-dozen other men who looked like Jodie’s Identi-Kit. Clones.
“It’s not a funny thing, make believe, is it,” he said.
“It’s a Petrie dish,” Siegel said.
“I’m going to mingle,” Monteleone said, and he was gone.
“No one’s enjoying themselves,” Cardozo said. “I thought orgies were supposed to be fun.”
Siegel looked at him. “Vince, you’re so touchingly square.”
“Yeah.” He had a feeling of being outside everything, of not belonging to the same race as these people. “Why did Jodie Downs do it? Why do any of them do it?”
“The sex? It’s an excuse to do drugs.”
“Why do they do drugs?”
“So they can enjoy the sex.”
“Ellie, the exasperating thing about you is you sincerely believe you got it all figured out.”
“I haven’t got anything figured out. But I don’t freak as easy as you and I got my eyes open. You said we’re looking for a killer?”
“Inferno is the last place we know Jodie was seen alive. We want to know who he talked to, who he left with. Our witness is there. It could be our killer is there.”
Friday, June 6. Thirteen days since the murder. It was already a long hot morning in the task force room. Cardozo turned slowly in his chair and rose to his feet.
“I’m moving the photography van from Beaux Arts Tower to the Inferno. We’re going to photograph every person going in or out of that club. We’re going to compare those photos with the Beaux Arts photos. We’re looking for faces we can connect to the murder scene. We’re also going to stake out the Inferno.”
“You might as well dust for fingerprints in a toilet bowl,” Monteleone said.
Cardozo shot him a look. “That toilet bowl holds evidence. We’ll dust.”
Cardozo outlined the rotating schedule he had worked out: the members of the task force would appear singly and in groups at the Inferno, night after night, till they became familiar faces.
“Tonight Siegel will apply for membership, they’ll remember her from last night, and she’ll take Malloy as a guest.”
“Thanks,” Siegel said.
“Tomorrow night Malloy takes Richards.”
“Aren’t they going to connect us?” Malloy asked. “A bunch of squares hanging around not doing coke, not partying?”
“So? We’re voyeurs, that’s how we get our kicks.”
Cardozo passed out Xeroxes of Jodie’s Identi-Kit attacker.
“This is the type of man he was attracted to. So we look for Inferno patrons of this type. We win their confidence. We ask if any of them knew Jodie, noticed who he was with that last night.”
The detectives filed wearily out of the room, holding copies of the fantasy face.
Lucinda MacGill, assistant district attorney, was waiting for Cardozo in his cubicle.
“It’s improper and it’s dangerous.” Her tone was objective, noncommittal.
“So’s life,” Cardozo said.
“We’re not talking life. We’re talking criminal code. You don’t have probable cause to put an observation truck outside that club or to send plainclothesmen in.”
“I didn’t ask for your permission. I asked how can I do it without blowing the case.”
“Any first-year public defender will make a civil liberties issue that the NYPD hasn’t got the right to photograph consenting adults going to and from their private revels.”
Cardozo’s eyes snapped to the ceiling and scanned wearily back and forth.
“And, Lieutenant, if you’re going up against that sleazebag Ted Morgenstern on this, you can expect to get the Bill of Rights thrown at you.”
“Why do you say I’m going up against Morgenstern?”
“The State Liquor Authority records are public and they’re computerized. According to the records, Morgenstern’s firm represented the Inferno in their application for a liquor license.”
“The patrons of the Inferno are snorting coke.”
“Name ten members of the United States Senate who aren’t.”
“Right out in the open?”
“The Inferno is not out in the open. It’s a chartered fraternal organization under the laws of New York State, and like your home or mine it’s private.”