“Then if someone was playing around with John Halley’s blood, there’s a chance that person might pick up the disease?”
“Blood is the major vector. But that depends what you mean by ‘playing around.’”
“Light cutting.”
“Cutting through the skin?” Dr. Tiffany sounded perplexed.
“Yeah. Ritual stuff. S.m.” Cardozo remembered a case from eight years back. Two fifty-year-old angel-dust freaks who’d thought they were vampires. “There may even be some—uh—drinking.”
“Drinking Halley’s blood?”
“Possibly.”
“Anyone behaving that way in this city today runs an excellent chance of already having the disease.” An excellent chance, Dr. Tiffany’s tone of voice seemed to say, and a richly deserved one.
That evening at home Cardozo opened the Manhattan telephone directory. He turned to the H’s, counting Hatfields. There were eleven.
He sat a moment, feeling a thickening layer of certainty. It couldn’t be chance, he told himself. Chance never took such perfect aim.
44
CARDOZO SEARCHED THROUGH HIS Rolodex till he found Beaux Arts Properties, Ltd. He propped the card against the phone as a reminder to call Melissa Hatfield when her office opened—ten A.M.
He settled down to read yesterday’s fives on a corporate takeover lawyer whose body had been found a week ago in the park at Sutton Place. Monteleone’s spelling, as usual, was atrocious.
At 8:37 Cardozo’s phone rang.
“We have to have a talk, Vince.” It was Mel O’Brien, the chief of detectives. Usually phone talks with O’Brien began with his hatchet man, Detective Inigo, and then thirty to ninety seconds on hold before you got through to Himself. It was a rare thing for the CD to place his own call, and it was a dangerous thing when his voice was as easy and congenial as it was now. “Nine o’clock, my office, okay?”
Which gave Cardozo exactly twenty-two minutes to bust his ass getting through morning rush-hour traffic down to One Police Plaza.
Mel O’Brien stood at the window, gazing out at the fall sky and the glow it cast on the high rises beginning to encircle Chinatown. “What are you up to, Vince? Spending all your time in the field? Out-Sherlocking your own men?”
“No, sir. Unless it’s a task force, I don’t go into the field.”
“How many hours have you logged in the precinct this last month?”
“It’s in the log.”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing what cases you’re on.”
“You do know, Chief.”
The CD turned and looked at Cardozo. “You were tying up the computer a few weeks back—running a lot of lists through—what was that all about?”
Cardozo had a sense that his head was about to be held under a bucket of bureaucratic horsepiss. “It related to an ongoing homicide.”
“What homicide?”
“Sunny Mirandella, a stewardess. She was murdered in her apartment up on Madison.”
Which wasn’t exactly a lie, but it was pretty thin ice.
“You had Babe Devens into the precinct for a slide show.” O’Brien’s gaze moved over Cardozo with the coolness of a stethoscope. He was making it very obvious that he’d been checking back over Cardozo’s movements, that he had the power to do it and that he had a damned good reason to do it.
“I was showing Mrs. Devens slides from the Downs case.”
“You thought Mrs. Devens was involved?”
“I hoped she could give me some help.”
The CD sat down in his big upholstered swivel chair, shaking his head from side to side. “Jesus Christ, Vince, Devens and Downs are closed. You closed them. We’ve got five new homicides a day in this city and we’re not even making arrests in three a week.”
“Chief—you don’t have to worry about me.”
“Because that wasn’t the only time you were seen with Mrs. Devens.” O’Brien was studying Cardozo, watching to see what his reaction would give away. “You two were at a viewing at the Campbell Funeral Home.”
At that point the whole picture changed.
Cardozo had known he was taking risks: even though he hadn’t let his ongoing caseload slide, if he reopened closed cases without a good cause and a fast result, and the wrong people found out, the price could be his shield and his pension. He could find his ass busted back to patrolman. But now he saw that if he did show cause and produce results, the price could be all that and a little bit more too.
“Ash Canfield was a friend,” he said. “She died, she had a viewing. I went.”
The complaint had to have come from Countess Vicki. Again. Which showed Cardozo how the chain of communication ran—from the countess to someone who was probably Ted Morgenstern, to the D.A. to the CD.
“And Babe Devens?” O’Brien asked.
“Mrs. Devens is a friend too. If there’s something wrong with our going to a funeral home I wish you’d tell me.”
“Did you go on job time?”
“It was a viewing, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like I was going to a party.”
“It wasn’t like you were going to a homicide, either.”
O’Brien gave him a long, dark look. It galled Cardozo to be reminded that this man had an absolute right to tell him what to do; it galled him to accept that sometimes in this job nothing was wanted or tolerated but obedience.
“What was the case you were discussing with Dan Hippolito last Tuesday?” O’Brien asked. “Was that job-related too?”
The CD was a master in the use of words. That little syllable too said it all.
“I was in the neighborhood—I stopped by. Dan and I go back a long way.”
“You got a lot of friends.”
“I’m lucky.”
“What about that kid murdered outside the Metropolitan Museum this morning?”
The call had come in on 911 at 8:10. Cardozo had assigned the case. “O’Rourke is on it,” he said.
“Why don’t you get on it too.”
Cardozo drove back to the precinct, sorting it out. Calling the CD on him meant someone was scared, using up big favors, taking big risks—and that meant that very soon someone would be wanting Vince Cardozo silenced.
In his cubicle, Cardozo phoned Judge Tom Levin. He got the judge’s secretary.
“Amy, can you tell the judge I’ve got to see him tonight. Nine o’clock, his place, unless he leaves word otherwise.”
“I’ll tell him, Vince.”
Cardozo jiggled the cradle, got a dial tone, and punched out the number on the Rolodex card that he had left leaning against the phone.
“Beaux-Arts-Balthazar.” It was Melissa Hatfield’s voice, with the husky, offhand tone that he remembered.
“Melissa, it’s Vince Cardozo. How you been?”
“Oh, life’s been stumbling along as best it can.”
“What I’m calling about, could I come up and see you after work? Your place? Six, six-thirty?”
Cardozo would have been on time for Melissa, but at 12:30 Larry O’Rourke burst into his office.
“Vince—we got an ID.”
O’Rourke had Irish red-blond hair and intense green eyes. He was short and slender, but his body was all muscle and tendon and he worked out at a gym to keep it that way. He’d just made detective and if he seemed a little excited it was because the dead girl found outside the Metropolitan Museum that morning was his first homicide.
“Her name’s Janet Samuels. The stepdaughter of Harold Benziger.” O’Rourke was standing there as though the name should mean something.
“Sorry,” Cardozo said. “Bell’s aren’t ringing.”
“Real estate. He spearheaded the I Love New York campaign. Gives the mayor a lot of financial support. I mean a lot.”
Cardozo had often thought that the money spent putting celebrities on TV singing that jingle could have renovated a few thousand units of decayed housing. “Oh yeah, that Benziger.”
Two hours later the CD telephoned Cardozo again. “I want you personally to tell the Benzigers that their daughter’s been murdered.”