“Is this yours?” Cardozo asked.
Lockwood Downs nodded. He seemed sandbagged. “Ours for two days. The district attorney’s letting us use it.”
A current of coolness reached out from the open limousine door. Cardozo was aware of the heat of the sunlight on his shoulders, aware too of Meridee Downs standing there looking like a dying leaf. “I wish I could have done more,” he said.
“You did enough.” Downs’s voice broke. “You were there.”
A truck backfired, and pigeons wheeled up into the soft blue sky of a summer’s day.
“Can we give you a lift anywhere?” Meridee Downs asked.
“Sure, if you’re heading uptown.”
There was a bar in the back seat, and a color TV, and a tape deck, and a videocassette player. A heavy smell of perfume hovered pleasantly over the smell of leather upholstery. They sat quietly as the limo dodged expertly through Chinatown and took the FDR Drive north along the river.
Lockwood Downs drew his breath in. “I want to kill them for what they’re doing.”
The sun, subdued to dusky copper, slanted in through the raised windows. The U.N. and new riverside luxury co-ops whizzed past. Meridee Downs’s eyes fixed on Cardozo. “Lieutenant, do you recommend the plea bargain?”
Cardozo knew what the D.A. wanted him to say and he knew what he felt like saying. “Doesn’t quite balance out. Jodie lost his life. You lost a son. The killer loses a few months.”
Her face was puzzled. “The district attorney told us fifteen years.”
“Fifteen’s the maximum. No one but Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan serves the maximum. Loring’s going to the mat voluntarily. The minimum is the most he’ll get. Eight years. Then you have to subtract time off for good behavior. Also, you have to consider early parole. So if you want to know what I think, I think the plea bargain’s a mistake. I think the state can get a conviction without it.”
“The district attorney said if we accept it there won’t be a trial.”
“There’ll be a hearing. Loring will plead guilty, waive trial; the judge will sentence him.”
“If we go to trial we may not win,” Lockwood Downs said.
The material of Meridee Downs’s dress made a rustle in the quietness. “And Morgenstern will make everyone think Jodie did it to himself, he deserved it. Lieutenant,” she said, “Jodie tried to turn himself around. He tried hard. He may have done bad things, but nothing like what was done to him. He never murdered anyone.”
“The plea bargain’s up to you,” Cardozo said. “Whichever way you decide, the D.A. will back you.”
“Where we live,” Lockwood Downs said thoughtfully, “they haven’t even heard of alternative life-styles. ‘Gay’ means happy or it means AIDS. It’s forty minutes from Chicago and eighty light-years from New York. We have to go on living in that town.”
“But it’s murder,” Meridee Downs said, “not shoplifting. Loring has to pay.”
“But we have to go on living,” Lockwood Downs repeated.
The limousine stopped in front of the Waldorf. Swedish and Israeli flags were flying. A doorman sprinted out and held the door.
The hotel lobby glittered with lights and polished oak, brass and crystal and gold and velvet and green Italian marble.
“We’ve come up in the world,” Lockwood Downs said bitterly.
Cardozo went with the Downses while they picked up their room key and then he watched them cross through the ultra-well-dressed throng to the elevator.
Meridee Downs turned and gave a quick, sad little wave.
He waved back, with a sense of standing outside a disaster helplessly looking in, of watching a man and a woman mutilated by events.
He went to the checkout desk. A young woman looked up at him.
“Suite twelve twelve,” he said, unobtrusively showing his shield. “Who’s paying?”
The young woman cast him a look, then checked through a bin of room registration forms. She drew out a card. “Prepaid by American Express card.”
“Mr. Downs’s card or someone else’s?”
“Pyramid Enterprises.”
Back in his cubicle, Cardozo phoned American Express. He jotted Pyramid’s phone and address on a scratch pad and stared at them until the association he wanted clicked in his mind.
He went through his Rolodex. His finger stopped at Melissa Hatfield’s card, Beaux Arts Properties, Inc. The telephone number and address were the same as Pyramid’s.
He lifted the phone and dialed.
Her honeyed, moneyed voice came on the line. “Beaux Arts.”
“Melissa, it’s Vince Cardozo.”
“Nice to hear a sane voice. You are sane, aren’t you?”
“Always.”
“It’s a madhouse here today. Never work in real estate.”
“It’s a promise. Could you do me a favor?”
“If it’s legal.”
“Absolutely. Can you tell me what Pyramid Enterprises is?”
“That’s easy. Pyramid is our Delaware corporation.”
He read her the American Express number. “Who uses that credit card?”
“Nat Chamberlain. It’s for entertaining company clients.”
At 10:45 the next morning, Meridee and Lockwood Downs stepped into District Attorney Alfred Spaulding’s office. Hopelessness lay on them like a palpable shroud.
The district attorney offered coffee. He offered to send his secretary for Danish, for orange juice. They said they’d had breakfast at the Waldorf, thanks.
“There’s no sense dragging this out.” Lockwood Downs was holding his wife’s hand. They were sitting side by side at the conference table, in a cone of summer morning light streaming through the ten-foot casement. Their faces were drained. “We’ll go along with the plea bargain.”
“This office will abide by your decision,” the district attorney said quietly.
“If I may so,” Ray Kane said, “I think you show commendable wisdom.” Kane had come alone; apparently Morgenstern had been sure of the Downses accepting the plea bargain and hadn’t considered it important enough to show up for.
“We’d like to thank you for all your help,” Lockwood Downs said, “and we’d like to thank Lieutenant Cardozo for his.”
Lockwood Downs’s eyes met Cardozo’s, and at that moment the squirrel that was leaping around inside Cardozo’s ribs turned into a rat.
“We know you have a lot of murders in New York.” Something had happened to Meridee Downs’s voice. It was like stone, as if there were no more tears in it. “We appreciate the trouble you’ve gone to on our behalf.”
And that was it. Short, rehearsed speeches. They made their exit quickly. Cardozo was rising from his chair with them, and the next moment he was looking at an empty doorway.
He turned to the D.A. “How do you happen to know Nat Chamberlain?”
Something hovered over the D.A.’s face. “Nat who?”
“He’s paying for the Downses’ suite at the Waldorf. He’s paying for their limousine. He’s probably paying for their plane tickets. He owns Beaux Arts Tower.”
A furrow appeared between the D.A.’s eyes. He turned to Ray Kane. “Ted told me your office was paying for all that.”
“The office is paying.” Ray Kane smiled, snapping the gold locks on a pancake-thin pigskin briefcase he had never bothered to open. “Nat owes Ted some favors, Ted called them in. Not to worry, gentlemen.” He glanced at his watch. “I’d love to take you two to coffee, but I have a meeting with the mayor’s commissioner for cultural affairs. Good seeing you both.”
After Kane had left, Cardozo stood staring at the D.A.
“Why did you let Morgenstern get involved?”
“Where was I going to put them, Holiday Inn? Morgenstern has a budget for that kind of thing; this office doesn’t.”
“It’s not right, Al. A lot of things in this case aren’t right.” Cardozo could feel a vein in his forehead beginning to pump up. “The plea bargain’s a fucking farce. How can you buy diminished responsibility?”
“Vince, what are we going through this for? The parents are gone, you’re not winning anyone’s vote, certainly not mine. I accept diminished responsibility because Loring is a cokehead, he admits he was high.”