The truck door opened and Loring and the boy stepped down.
Siegel hung back in a store entrance.
Loring led the boy across the sidewalk to the arched doorway of a six-story loft building. A moment later they were inside and the door clicked shut behind them.
“The kid came down alone two hours later,” Siegel said. “I called it a night and went home. Sorry, Vince. I felt as wrecked as he looked.”
“You did a good job,” Cardozo said. There was a detail in her report that nagged at him. The van.
“Loring’s our boy,” Monteleone said.
Cardozo made a skeptical face. “If it was Loring, then how do you explain Monserat?”
“What’s to explain?” Monteleone said.
“He sold the mask and lied about it.”
“A lot of people lie.”
“Monserat is in very bad physical shape,” Richards said. “Whoever did that to Jodie Downs, they could haul weight.”
“Loring is built,” Malloy said.
“Also,” Richards went on, “it may not mean anything—but Monserat is a very inhibited guy. He watches, he jacks off, that’s it.”
“Just comes and goes,” Monteleone said.
The linoleum let out a screech as Siegel shoved her chair back. “Greg, anyone ever tell you you’re disgusting?”
“My wife Gina, every night. And she loves it.”
“Ellie,” Cardozo said, “could you come with me a moment?”
Siegel went with him into his cubicle. He switched on the slide projector and went quickly through the preceding night’s photos. Taxis and limousines and meat trucks flicked across the wall, and scurrying between them, like roaches fleeing the light, were men and women with maniacal dead eyes, phantoms plunging through a shadowy doorway into the age-old search for kicks and oblivion.
He stopped at the first photo of Claude Loring: it showed a beefy blond man in jeans and a two-day beard, licking a candy bar. There was a space at the curb, a view of trucks clogging the avenue. A van was parked across the avenue. On the side of it was a huge logo of a blue jay.
“That’s Loring’s van?”
Siegel nodded. “That’s it.”
Cardozo stared a moment at the blue jay, and then he called Richards.
“That van with the blue jay, Sam—where have we seen it?”
Richards’s gaze came up at the image on the cubicle wall. A frown darkened his forehead. “The day we talked to Loring’s alibi—the girl space cadet over in the flower district—that van was parked outside her place, at the hydrant.”
“Right,” Cardozo said. “Tennessee license. Didn’t she get a phone call—her machine answered and she picked up?”
Richards had to think a moment. “Like she knew what the message was going to be and she didn’t want us to hear.”
“What was it she said about deliveries?”
“Someone was on her ass because she missed her weekend deliveries. She said her van was being repaired.”
At first Cardozo was aware only of a sheet of silence. Then, faintly, through gray cinderblock walls, came the slamming and buzzing, the humming and thumping of an inhabited building.
He was standing in the garage of Beaux Arts Tower, the belly, listening to the digestion that kept the animal going.
His glance moved from shadows into the acid greenish pools of fluorescent light, sweeping Rollses, BMW’s, a floor full of TV commercials sprung to three-dimensional life.
There were names stenciled in white on the wall by each parking space. In the space marked LAWRENCE, a handsome red Porsche sat.
Cardozo mentally erased the Porsche and put a yellow cab there, a cab with the words DING-DONG TRANSPORT on its side.
After a moment he walked past the garage door to the service elevator. He gazed up at the closed-circuit TV camera making scans of the garage. Mounted on the wall ten feet above the concrete floor, it panned slowly his way.
He stood in the empty loading bay till the camera lens had him head-on. He realized that if a truck were parked in that place the camera wouldn’t pick up either side panel. Which was why a doorman watching the closed-circuit TV wouldn’t have seen a truck with a blue jay painted on the side.
Cardozo had a sense of pressure behind his eyes and at the same time he felt light-headed, almost dizzy. He was finally beginning to see both sides of the coin.
He phoned Jerzy Bronski’s garage and had them radio Jerzy. Twenty minutes later Jerzy was sitting on a bench on the esplanade in Carl Schurz Park, his face dark and still, drawn down on one side as though by the weight of the cigarette he was smoking.
“Thanks for waiting,” Cardozo said.
“I almost didn’t.”
Cardozo sat on the bench. His eye went to a tugboat sliding past on the shining gray water of the East River. “Pretty place. You come here a lot?”
Jerzy’s thin lips were set in a taut line. “I don’t come anywhere a lot. I hold down two jobs and today I’m pulling two shifts at the wheel of that wreck they call a Chrysler. Already I lost twenty dollars sitting here on my tush.”
“Look at it this way, Jerzy. Now you have friends at the precinct. It could come in handy.”
“Maybe it’ll pay my rent?”
“It might even pay your dealer.”
Jerzy gave him a look. “You said I was home free on that.”
“You are. But I need a little help.”
“I already helped. And guess what, Debbi knows it was me that talked to you.”
“She didn’t learn it from me.”
“Give me a break. Debbi’s no Einstein, but she’s no dumbo either.”
Cardozo let that one sail right by. “Saturday, May twenty-fourth, the day the man was murdered in six and Debbi didn’t get her coke. Why did you park in Fred Lawrence’s space?”
“All right, maybe I parked in someone’s place. It’s a crime?”
“Why didn’t you use the truck bay?”
“Must have been someone already parked in the bay.”
“You remember who?”
Jerzy had to think a moment. “A van.”
“Can you describe it?”
“A van’s a van.”
“Some are big. Some aren’t. Some are red, some are green. Some are blue.”
Something made Jerzy’s eyelids twitch and he raised them. “It had a bird on it, a blue bird. I remember that bird.”
“Was it a blue jay?”
“It was a bird that was blue, you tell me if that’s a blue jay.”
Cardozo showed Jerzy the print. “Is that the van?”
Tommy Daniels had done a good job enlarging the van, cropping the foreground.
Jerzy’s lips shaped a thoughtful pout. “It’s the same bird. Maybe it’s the same van. How do you tell one beatup ’78 Ford from another?”
“Did you notice anything about the license plates? Like were they out of state?”
Jerzy gave him a look. “Give me a break. Do I look like a traffic cop?”
“You said Claude Loring was crashing here the whole weekend and you missed your deliveries because your van broke down.”
“That’s right.” Faye di Stasio was wearing an old T-shirt and a faded pair of jeans and Cardozo had a feeling she had thrown the clothes on two minutes ago when his buzz at the downstairs door had woken her.
Cardozo handed her the photograph. “Is this your van?”
She looked at the photograph, then stared with confused eyes back at him. “It could be.”
“That blue jay is your company logo, isn’t it?”
Her eyes were dark and nervous. She nodded.
“So what would it be doing on someone else’s van? Aren’t logos registered, like trademarks?”
“That’s right, but—”
“So it’s your van.”
“I suppose.”
“You recognize the street in that photo?”
“No.”
“Did someone else park your van there?”
“I guess.”
“Who do you loan your van to?”
“Claude.”
“What does Claude borrow the van for?”
“To get around.”
“Was he the one who wrecked it?”
“No one wrecked it.”
“But you missed your deliveries Memorial Day weekend.”
“The van broke down but it works now.”