VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “You’re staring,” Cordelia said.

  “I don’t mean to. It’s just that you were so little and lost and now you’re so grown-up and you don’t look lost at all.”

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Cordelia said.

  For an instant Babe was startled: a child of twelve smoking? Babe had to remind herself that this particular child was nineteen. She watched her daughter light a Tareyton filter king. Cordelia did it very well, like an actress in an old Warner Bros, movie—the rich bad girl—tilting her head back, propelling twin dragontails of white smoke through her arched nostrils.

  Cordelia studied her mother. “You’re looking well, Mother.”

  Babe felt jewelless, dressless, seven years behind the times. “Bring me up to date. You were twelve when we last talked. You wore braids and you were always bumping into things.”

  A frown flickered on Cordelia’s face. “And I was going to Spence, and you were making me wear those horrid braces.”

  “They weren’t all that horrid, and look what lovely teeth you have as a result.”

  “I hated them. But they came off when I was thirteen, so at least I didn’t look like a freak when I went to Madeira.”

  “How did you like Madeira?”

  “A little stuffy. I roomed with a girl from Richmond. We almost got thrown out for smoking pot.” Cordelia’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and then she dropped her gaze. “I was on probation for a term.”

  Babe felt an instant’s anxiousness in the pit of her stomach. She hid it with an interested smile. “That probably helped your schoolwork.”

  “Yes, I did well in music.”

  “You get that from your father.”

  “And I did well in French and history and art too.”

  “You get the art from me.”

  “I graduated with honors.”

  “I wish I could have been at your graduation.”

  “Be glad you weren’t. It rained. And guess what. The headmistress turned out to be a murderess. She’s serving a twenty-five-year sentence for shooting three bullets into her Jewish lover.”

  Babe studied Cordelia, wondering if she was playing some kind of joke.

  Cordelia smiled. The smile got as far as her eyes and then her jaw and chin tightened. Suddenly she placed her head across Babe’s lap. Babe began stroking the pale golden spill of hair.

  After a moment Cordelia sat up again, choking back a sniffle. “I had my coming-out that spring at the cottage in Newport. Grandpère was my escort. He looked smashing in his old World War One ribbons.”

  Babe wondered—why Grandpère, why not Scottie? “Grandpère’s decorations are World War Two, darling.”

  “You know what I mean. And then Vassar accepted me. But after six months I knew it wasn’t for me. So I came back to New York, and met an agent at a party, and voilà, I’m a model. I haven’t made up my mind whether or not to work full time. Modeling’s so dull—half of it’s just standing around perfecting your bored look.”

  She demonstrated her bored look, and Babe had to laugh.

  “Do you want to see my portfolio?” Cordelia opened a large leather carrying case. It was crammed with glossies. She slipped them out of their plastic sheaths and handed them over one by one.

  Babe studied photos of her daughter on horseback, on camelback, on elephantback, her daughter running on beaches, in Irish meadows, across Newport lawns, her daughter lounging formally, informally, in furs, in a Scaasi, in Calvin Klein jeans, her daughter smiling at dogs, at jewelry, at foreign cars, at silverware, at young men. And then there were magazines with Cordelia on the cover: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle.

  “You’re very successful,” Babe said. “But you gave up college?”

  “I earn thirty-five hundred an hour. College just didn’t do it for me.”

  Babe wondered what money was worth nowadays. She wondered what an education was worth.

  “I’m the logo of Babethings,” Cordelia said.

  Babethings—the company Babe had founded to market her designs. She wondered who was heading it now, how it was doing.

  “I’m under contract. I do print ads and TV. Anytime they need a face or a voice-over, it’s me. So in a way, I’m famous. I’ve been interviewed in People magazine and Interview and I’ve been on talk shows and I’m invited all sorts of terrific places.”

  Babe’s thoughts were racing, trying to keep up with everything her daughter was telling her. “And do you have boyfriends?”

  Cordelia’s eyes flicked away. “At the moment there’s Rickie—you’ll meet him. I’m fond of Rickie, he’s a smashing tennis player and he dances terrifically. He wants to marry me but I honestly don’t know. His father is Sir Rickie Hawkes, Barclays Bank.”

  “Oh, yes,” Babe said, recognizing the bank, not Sir Rickie. Doubtless the British had created quite a few new sirs since she’d gone under.

  Cordelia spoke of her other interests—discos and parties and cars and Thoroughbreds and interesting people doing interesting things that got mentioned in the papers.

  “And do you ever see your father?” Babe said.

  “Ernst is wonderful. Every time he plays in New York I go backstage. We’re very close. Vanity Fair did a father-daughter article on us. He played a smashing Rachmaninoff Third with the Cleveland at Carnegie last month. I saved you the reviews.”

  “Do you two ever have time to talk? Does he take an interest in you?”

  “We talk all the time. Ernst phones no matter where he is—Budapest, Berlin, Capetown—just last week it was Tokyo. Of course he gets the time zones mixed up, so we’re usually talking at four in the morning—but I do adore him.”

  It sounded to Babe like the same old Ernst, going as strong at seventy as at fifty-five, whisking in on a jet plane, sweeping Cordelia off to the Palm Court for champagne and cakes, pressing two tickets into her hand, tossing her to the press in the greenroom after the concert.

  “And do you ever see Scottie?” Babe asked.

  Cordelia froze over. It seemed precocious to Babe, a girl that young able to freeze over that hard, that fast.

  “Why would I see Scottie?”

  A silence fell on the room.

  “Because he’s your stepfather.”

  “But he’s not—not since he divorced you.”

  Babe felt a jolt of pain jump through her nerves. She pushed herself up in the bed: she was shaking. She had to make herself believe that this was real: the words she had just heard, the girl watching her, the shock reeling through her.

  Cordelia’s eyes were fixed on her mother now, wide and observing. “Grandmère said she was going to tell you everything. I can see I’ve put my foot in it.”

  Only the thought that she must be strong in front of her daughter kept Babe from breaking into little fragments. “Of course Grandmère told me. Are you and Scottie still friends?”

  Amazement and pain mingled in Cordelia’s expression. “How could we be, Mother? After what he did to you?”

  Babe’s instincts were telling her to keep going, fake it. “Don’t blame him, darling,” she said quietly, telling herself she’d suspected, that she’d been prepared for bad news. “You can’t expect a man to stay married seven years to a woman who might never wake up.”

  Cordelia’s hands tightened into fists. “Why are you so kind to him? You must love him incredibly. Still.”

  5

  “DID YOU NOTICE ANY strangers in the building over the weekend?” Detective Sam Richards asked.

  “Strangers?” the woman said. “There are always strangers in the building. Those shops bring in nothing but, and that psychiatric clinic on the fifth floor produces some very strange encounters.”

  Sam Richards had been on the job long enough to know the world and its bullshit. Yet the word princess still commanded his respect. It conjured up pictures from a book of King Arthur and his knights that he had pored over as a boy. True, Lily Lobkowitz was no lady fair. She might once have been. There were vestiges—a bright b
lue sparkle to the eyes that nervously watched him, an attempted confidence to the tilt of her very rounded chin. But her face was lined and tired, and powder had spilled onto her dark blouse. He had a feeling she’d put on her makeup after he had rung the doorbell.

  She sat very still on the chintz sofa, not regally straight but cautiously so, as though if she leaned in any direction at all she’d keep going, right onto the floor. She smelled of vodka.

  “Did you see strangers over the weekend?” he asked.

  “No, not over the weekend—not that I can recollect.” Her teeth touched her lower lip. “Of course, I’ve been indoors all the time, trying to shake this summer cold.”

  The princess’s livingroom was spacious, comfortably furnished; the plush love seat and chairs matched the sofa. A portrait of a woman with a jeweled crown hung over the fireplace. Beyond the grand piano striped awnings shaded the terrace from the bright afternoon sun.

  “Did you go out at all on Saturday, ma’am?”

  He had a hunch she didn’t like taking deliveries from the liquor store; she didn’t want the building staff to count. So she went out herself. She probably had two or three stores in the neighborhood and was careful to rotate her visits. It seemed sad, a princess spending a holiday weekend alone with her Stolichnaya.

  “Did you see anything or anyone unusual?”

  That same faraway look, annoyance seeping in now. “You could hardly call it unusual—Hector does it all the time.”

  “Does what, ma’am?”

  “He leaves the door unguarded.”

  Sam Richards took out his notebook and turned past the page where he’d jotted the milk and eggs his wife wanted him to pick up from Shop-Rite. Write it down, his instructor at Police Academy had said. No matter how dumb, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time, it could turn out to be evidence. “What time on Saturday?”

  The princess was silent a moment. “The second time I went out for my cold pills. I’d say it was two o’clock or so.”

  Detective Sam Richards stepped out of the elevator.

  The thunk-thunk-thunk of a fender bass came at him through the door. He pushed the buzzer politely, and when the music showed no signs of abating he pushed it impolitely, leaning his full 220 pounds onto his thumb.

  A woman’s voice screamed, “Who is it?” and he shouted, “Police!”

  The music cut off. There was a scurrying silence.

  The foyer boasted no lacquered table or little Oriental rug, none of the wealthy little amenities Richards had noticed on the other floors of the building. The door opened three inches. A young woman stared out. Her watery green eyes said she was nearsighted.

  Sam Richards held his shield up above the safety chain. “Detective Richards, twenty-second precinct.”

  “Far fuckin’ out.”

  “Are you Deborah Hightower, the owner of this apartment?”

  “Debbi.” She had the husky voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker. “No e on the Debbi.”

  “Could I come in for a moment?”

  “If it’s about my maintenance payment, talk to my lawyer.”

  “It’s not about the maintenance.”

  She undid the chain and stepped back from the door, letting him pass. She wore black nylon jogging shorts and a Coke is it! T-shirt, and her feet were bare.

  The hallway opened into a livingroom furnished with two black beanbag chairs and two Techtronic stereo speakers. The amplifier and turntable sat on the shelf of a varnish-it-yourself bookcase that she hadn’t varnished. No window curtains softened the view of the high rise across the street. Black scuffmarks on the parquet floor told of heavy furniture that had been dragged in and dragged out again. The air smelled of freshly sprayed lemon deodorizer. The lemon didn’t quite mask the scent of marijuana.

  Ms. Hightower offered coffee. “Instant. Sorry about that.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Sam Richards dropped onto a beanbag and stared at marks on the walls where six pictures had hung. The floor needed dusting.

  She came back from the kitchen with two white plastic mugs and handed him one. He noticed that the long green fingernail on her third finger was a falsie, beginning to hang loose. She seated herself in the beanbag facing his and blew on her coffee.

  “Do you know a man was murdered in the building?” he said. “We found him two hours ago in six. No ID.”

  “That’s wild.”

  “Were you home this weekend?”

  “Home?” She looked confused. “You mean here? This isn’t home, honey, this is a crash pad. I have a share in a summer place out in the Hamptons.” She sipped quietly. “But sad to say, I’ve been here for the last three days. I’m in a show down at the World Trade Center.”

  “Oh, yeah? What show’s that?”

  “Toyota Presents.” She was searching him for a reaction.

  “Oh, yeah. Toyota Presents.”

  “A lot of stars got their starts in industrials. Shirley MacLaine danced for General Motors.”

  “Right. I heard that somewhere.” Sam Richards opened his notebook. “Debbi, could you tell me when you were in the building yesterday, when you came in, when you went out, what hours you were in the lobby, the elevator, anywhere else on the premises?”

  She said she’d worked late, come home around noon Saturday, slept till an hour before the show, left the building around seven, returned early this morning.

  “Did you see or hear anything unusual in the building?” It occurred to him that if Debbi Hightower had been as stoned yesterday as she seemed today, she wouldn’t have noticed an elephant falling out of the sky.

  She hoisted one leg up and placed a foot on the edge of the beanbag. Her toenails were pink, which didn’t go with the green fingernails. “Seemed a lot less busy than usual.”

  “Any odd noises or people?”

  She thought a moment. “Well, it’s all relative, isn’t it? I mean, what do you consider odd?”

  “Strangers in the building?” William Benson, who owned the apartment on the twenty-eighth floor, shook his head. He was a small, lean man about eighty years of age. With elegant carelessness, his right hand twirled a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals. Gold cufflinks winked at the wrists of his burgundy smoking jacket. “No, none that I noticed.”

  “Any strange noises?” Detective Monteleone asked.

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you that. Memorial Day’s a wonderful weekend for working. I turned off my hearing aid.”

  For the first time, Detective Monteleone noticed the small beige plastic button in Benson’s left ear.

  Behind the eighty-year-old architect the livingroom glowed like an art gallery, with track lighting that picked out abstract expressionist and pop art paintings on the walls.

  “There was one thing,” Benson said, “but you could hardly call it unusual, it happens so often. I went out for the paper, and I had to use my key to let myself back into the building. Our Saturday doorman, Hector, wasn’t at the door. I have a hunch he sits down in the personnel room watching ballgames on TV.”

  “Tell me that’s not a Gestapo tactic. Tell me it’s not.” Fred Lawrence, the owner of the apartment on floor 11, was explaining to Detective Sam Richards how he happened to be in New York on a holiday weekend when his wife and son were out romping at their summer rental in Ocean Beach. “To phone on a Friday—not even the courtesy of a letter—and call a field audit Tuesday—knowing Monday’s Memorial Day. It destroys my weekend, it terrifies my client, it wastes everybody’s time. I’ve never let a client overstate deductions. I don’t work that way.”

  Sam Richards nodded, shaping his lips into a conciliatory smile. “We’ve all had our troubles with the IRS.”

  “It’s harassment, plain and simple.” Fred Lawrence, his stomach pushing a breathless bulge into his pink Polo sports shirt, his face beet red and gaunt, was clearly a man under strain. His fringe of black hair glistened with sweat. Behind gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes darted, never once meeting Sam Richards�
��s. He paced the room, fingers skittering across the edges of hi-tech leather and chrome chairs and glass-topped tables.

  “And then this outrage in six—how the hell did a thing like that happen? We’re supposed to have security in this building.”

  “With your help, Mr. Lawrence, we hope to find out how it happened.”

  Fred Lawrence threw a startled glance at the detective. “You seem to think I have some information—well, I don’t.”

  “What time did you return to the building?”

  “Around noon yesterday.”

  “You parked in the garage?”

  “Yes, I rent a space there.”

  “Did you notice anything or anyone strange in the building over the weekend?”

  “As I tried to explain, Officer, I’m under a great deal of pressure, I’m extremely preoccupied, and I apologize, but the answer is no, I noticed nothing until all you police came pouring in.”

  Cardozo pulled his Honda Civic into the unlit alley beside the ninety-five-year-old precinct building. There was a parking space beneath the fire escape. He made sure to lock up. Unmarked police cars had been getting ripped off lately in the precinct parking lot.

  He nearly tripped in the dark over a stack of A-frame barriers. They had been piled in reserve two years ago for crowd control. Crowds had come and gone, the barriers had stayed.

  Above the green globes glowing on either side of the station house door the precinct flag fluttered limply from its pole, a rumpled seal of the City of New York and the number 22. The two two was one of the six precincts that used to make up the Seventh Division. Changing city administrations had moved the numbers around, but the sooty bricks and rusting iron and peeling paint were still there on Sixty-third Street, distinctly out of place in the heart of Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District.

  The inside of the 22d Precinct station house was as shabby as the outside, perhaps a little more so since it never got rained on except for parts of the fifth floor, where the roof leaked. For three decades City Hall had been promising to rebuild.

  The Muzak was playing “One for My Baby.” Cardozo disliked Muzak, and he especially disliked that tune. He didn’t see why a police force that was cutting patrols to meet its budget needed canned music.