“Monserat had a deal with a funeral home.”
“What funeral home?”
Claude Loring named a well-known funeral home. “They’d loan him the stiffs overnight. He paid two, three hundred dollars per body. He paid more for the dead bodies than for the living. I got a hundred for every guest I delivered. And all the drugs I wanted.”
“Were people tortured at these parties?” Cardozo said.
“The dead bodies we had to be careful with, because they had to look good from the neck up, you never knew who was open casket. But the people who weren’t dead, sometimes they got roughed up. Monserat says the way you get to the soul of another person is when you produce panic in them. You have someone there at your mercy and they’re panicked, think they could die any moment and it’s completely up to you, how you flip a coin.”
“Sounds like it excited you too,” Cardozo said.
“Yeah, it excited me. Everyone was getting off on everyone else getting off. Like a circle jerk.”
A blank, almost disgusted incredulity showed in Lucinda MacGill’s face.
“Anyone ever get killed at these parties?” Cardozo asked.
Loring had to think for a moment. “Not that I recall.”
“Where did the black bondage hood come from?”
“It was Monserat’s. It was a work of art, he used to say. Anyone who wore it became a masterpiece. He said masks were the real reality. He had lots of masks—different types—Halloween masks, joke store masks. But the bondage mask was special.”
“Special how?”
“That mask was reserved for the victims. If Jodie Downs hadn’t been wearing that mask I could never have hurt him. I’m a gentle guy, I don’t hurt people. But once Jodie had the mask on, for me he wasn’t human anymore. He turned into something else. When I looked at him in that mask five percent of me said he was a man and ninety-five percent of me said he was a monster. That mask had a nightmare look. Like anyone wearing it would cut your head off if you gave them the chance. They had to be killed. It was self-defense—you or them.”
Claude Loring flexed his hands nervously. Sitting in his jeans and I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt, he looked taller than his six feet two, huge and rawboned, and those hands looked as though they could snap a human neck as easily as a celery stalk.
“Tell us who was at the party that night,” Cardozo said.
Claude Loring named names. Lucinda MacGill took notes.
“Who was wearing drag?” Cardozo asked.
“Two, three of them. That Duncan creep, Sir Dunk—he was wearing one of his wife’s red dresses—real glitzy number, shimmer and shimmy.”
“Was he wearing lipstick?”
“The works, rouge from his eyeballs down to his jowls. Believe me, some guys should not do drag. It’s beyond grotesque.”
“Was Duncan Canfield smoking?”
“Yeah, he smoked.”
“Cigarettes?”
“Cigarettes, pot, crack.”
“Did he put out a cigarette in Jodie Downs’s hand?”
“Yeah, and it was weird, Jodie hated it but liked it, Jodie held on to that cigarette, he was moaning like he was coming.”
“Was Jodie killed at the party?”
“No—he was cut, but not killed.”
“Describe how he got killed.”
“It was my job to dump the merchandise after the parties. If it was a dead body, I’d truck it back to the funeral home. If it was a kid, I’d take them back to where they were staying, pay them off. I was supposed to take the mask off Jodie and take him back home. But he was calling me a dumb fag and a lot of things—so I decided Jodie, you’re a two-time winner, and I took him to Beaux Arts Tower to have a scene alone with him. We smoked some more crack and Jodie kept saying ‘Do it, do it.’”
“What did he mean, ‘Do it’?”
“Kill him. You have to understand—I was on crack. And he was asking for it, begging for it. So I choked him.”
Claude Loring mopped his face with a red-checked handkerchief.
“After Jodie was dead I guess I panicked.”
“Because you’d killed him,” Lucinda MacGill said.
“Because I’d killed him and I was out of crack and I needed to keep going. There I was with this body in this evil mask and what the shit was I going to do? Talk about drawing a complete blank—I knew I had to get a second wind, get it together, I couldn’t just sit there with this body scaring the bejeezus out of me. And then I remembered my coke dealer was on duty at the front door.”
“Hector,” Cardozo said.
Loring nodded. “Son of a bitch didn’t want to let me have any. But I pushed his buttons and he let me have a lid. I snorted it and then it was like no problems. I saw what I had to do—cut the body up and drop the pieces in different garbage chutes. There was a saw up on seventeen, they were remodeling up there. So I started to cut him up and I got one leg off and it was really hard work, and I was beat, so I thought, okay, time off. I was planning to come back in a few hours, but I passed out.”
He began sobbing.
“I hate myself and I hate what I did. But it’s like it wasn’t me. Monserat gave me drugs and once I was high I was like a dog on a chain. Wherever Monserat wanted me to go I would go. I tried to fight, but I guess I was really weak.”
Now he was playing the cocker spaniel, all soft and appealing, with great big blue eyes, begging for understanding.
The spring in the swivel chair groaned as Cardozo leaned forward. “Okay, Claude, that will be it for now.”
Greg Monteleone took Loring back to the lockup.
Lucinda MacGill was shaking, a survivor who had barely made it across the border of the damned. She had to plant the soles of her shoes on the floor until she was steady, and then she stood.
“How are you?” Cardozo asked.
“Older,” she said. “You think you know all about the unbelievable. And then you hear a story like that and your brain wants to shut down.”
“Loring is willing to repeat all that in exchange for immunity.”
“From what? He’s already been convicted of killing Downs.”
“He can still be tried for dealing crack. For assaulting Babe Devens with intent to kill.”
Cardozo felt the cool, deliberate touch of Lucinda MacGill’s attention.
“Loring’s claim that Lewis Monserat sent him to kill Cordelia Koenig—that bothers me,” she said. “Do you believe him?”
“Damned right I do. You don’t?”
Her expression was concerned, serious. “Loring could be saving his own skin.”
“He’s got no reason to go after Cordelia or her mother. It’s got to be Monserat.”
“Why? You say Monserat wanted Babe dead and Scott Devens convicted so Cordelia would inherit and he’d marry her and get control. … I don’t know, Vince. He’s forty years older.”
“And money’s money. And Monserat loves money. And Cordelia loved Monserat. He gave her drugs. He gave her strokes when no one else was giving her anything. You heard her last night. She wanted to marry him.”
MacGill’s eyes were a cool, boiling green. “Legally, Loring is just as useless as Cordelia. What you’ve got is two attempts to murder Babe Devens and the unsupported testimony of two confessed would-be murderers. Loring claims Monserat put him up to it, and you claim Monserat put Cordelia up to it, and what Cordelia claims we’re not going to know till she gets a lawyer. But she’s a drug addict and barely legal age, and Loring is a drug addict and a convicted killer. You can’t even bring Monserat in for questioning on evidence like that. Morgenstern will crucify you.”
“What if we just take portions of Cordelia’s statement?” Cardozo said. “The sexual acts with Monserat while she was underage and the drugs he provided her?”
“Vince,” Lucinda MacGill said, “I spent last night saving you from that. It’s not going to hold up.”
“What about the kiddie porn?”
“He’s masked in all the films you s
howed me. Unless you’re holding some footage back, you haven’t got an ID.”
“Cordelia will come around,” Cardozo said. “She’ll ID him.”
“And all you’ll have then is the same, uncorroborated, totally inadmissible statement you began with.” Lucinda MacGill sighed.
“She was there, for God’s sake,” Cardozo said, belligerent now.
Lucinda MacGill’s eyes reached out patiently. “She was a child, she was drugged, it was seven years ago. She absolutely has to be corroborated.”
“The videotapes are corroboration,” Cardozo said.
“I wouldn’t be in such a rush to use those tapes. They show drug use, which impeaches Cordelia’s judgment and memory, and they show sodomy, which impeaches her character and credibility. The tapes might not even be allowed into evidence if the court rules that she can’t waive self-incrimination. And if it can be proved the tapes are seven years old, they get Monserat off, because the statute of limitations on the offenses has run.”
“Jesus Christ,” Cardozo muttered.
“The long and the short of it is, the sex and drug charges are going to backfire. So forget them.”
“So how do we get to Monserat?” Cardozo said.
“I’m fresh out of bright ideas,” Lucinda MacGill said.
Out in the squad room, the television had been moved onto the Mr. Coffee table. It was the bottom of the eighth. The count was three and two. The Mets had men on second and first. The St. Louis Cardinals were ahead by one run. A shout went up from the detectives as Gary Carter struck a two-base hit.
Cardozo felt a sharp dagger of pain behind his eyes.
“Vince, stop making faces as though I’m the one who makes up these laws.”
“You’re the one who keeps springing them on me.”
“That’s my job.”
“Monserat tried to kill Cordelia. He’s going to try again.”
“Then give her a guard. Vince, you can’t bring him in on Loring’s evidence. Be realistic. Loring is a felon, a convict. He’d do anything for his next hit of coke. He’s tainting some very important people. You hear a lot of those names in real estate and arbitrage and junk bonds and corporate takeovers and restructurings and political fund-raising.”
“You’re saying because these people are tied in with money, with real estate, with politicians, because they have dinner with the Rockefellers and get photographed with Brooke Astor, they can’t be touched? The city’s bombing out socially and economically, but so long as there’s gold to be made playing three-card monte with the ruins, it’s okay to chop up anybody you want and jack off over the videotape?”
“You’re saying that, not me. What’s this thing you’ve got? Poor people commit murder too. It’s not just the rich.”
“Poor people don’t have Ted Morgenstern. They get caught.”
“Loring had Ted Morgenstern. He got off with two months.”
“I don’t care about Loring. He’s a windup doll. I care about that fuck of an art dealer.”
“Ease off, Vince.”
He thumped a hand against the desk. A drawer splintered. “I don’t believe what this city’s become. This used to be my home. Now you need ten million for openers in this city.”
“What the hell has that got to do with anything? You’re off on a tangent, Vince.”
They were screaming at one another now.
“You bet I’m on a tangent.” Cardozo snatched up the phone and punched out a number. Over the noise of the ball game a phone rang in the squad room. “Greg—I want you and Siegel and Malloy to tail Monserat. Round the clock. I want a tap on his phone. I want to know where he goes, who he talks to, and I don’t want him near Cordelia Koenig.”
When he hung up, MacGill’s eyes were waiting for his, narrowed and concerned. “You can’t do that.”
“Screw can’t,” he said.
53
“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D spend a night in this house again.”
Cordelia’s voice came wonderingly across the room.
Babe looked up and smiled. “It’s like the old days to have you back—even if it’s only till the carpenters put up your walls again.”
The two of them had been sitting there for over an hour. At first they had talked, and then, yielding to a sort of insinuating gravity, they had let the faint fingers of drizzle against the windows lull them into increasingly longer silences.
“Strange,” Cordelia said. “This place still feels like home to me.”
“I’m glad.”
“It makes me remember.” Today Cordelia had tied her hair back with a wide blue band that matched her eyes. In the soft cone of dimmed light her hair was the color of fresh cornbread. “It makes me think how life could have been—and how lousy it turned out instead.”
The sudden vehemence in the girl’s voice caught Babe unprepared. “Nothing’s turned out lousy,” Babe said.
“I have.”
“That’s not true.”
“How can you stand having me here?” Cordelia cried. “How can you sleep in that bed knowing I’m only a room away? How can you stand me at all?”
Babe crinkled her eyes in puzzlement. “You’re my daughter. I love you.”
“That’s not possible.” With a crackling of slick paper Cordelia threw her magazine to the floor and sprang to her feet. “You can’t love me after what I did.”
“You didn’t—” Babe drew back, taking a moment to choose her words, to find the tone for them. “You needed someone to show you the way. I should have been there for you and I wasn’t.”
“A lot of mothers aren’t there for their children.” Cordelia hugged her arms around herself. “But their children don’t give them lethal injections.”
Babe drew in a long inhalation and slowly let it out. “You did what you were told to do. You trusted someone, and he didn’t deserve your trust. You were a child. You were used.”
Cordelia turned, her eyes sharp and challenging. “You really believe that.”
“Yes I believe it, and I hate Lew Monserat for what he did to you. I’ll never forgive myself for abandoning you to people like him.”
Cordelia shrugged. “Don’t blame Lew. He hasn’t hurt me.”
Babe was astonished. “He sent that man to kill you.”
Cordelia flicked her a glance. “It’s not the way you think. It’s not Lew’s fault.”
Babe felt a darkness in her stomach. “Aren’t you even angry?” She rose from her chair. “Or frightened?”
“I suppose I’m frightened.” Cordelia’s voice was curiously flattened. “But why should I be angry at Lew? He can’t help anything.” She moved toward the piano. In deliberate slow motion she played with the chrysanthemums in the vase. “He’s no worse than me.”
Amazement gathered in the wrinkles of Babe’s forehead. “You can’t seriously put yourself on the same level as him.”
“I know my level. A man seduced me and gave me drugs and I loved it and I loved him. Now he wants to kill me and I don’t feel any differently about him. I’d let him kill me.”
Babe’s heart hit her a blow under her throat. “You don’t mean one word of that.”
“I still love him,” Cordelia said quietly, “and I don’t want to hurt him. That makes me as bad as him, doesn’t it?”
A sense of the utter hopelessness of the child invaded every pore of Babe’s body. He can’t have that much power over her, she told herself. How could anyone have that much power over another human being?
“When you fell in love,” Babe said, “if it was love—you were alone and helpless—and a child. You turned to someone you thought would protect you.”
“And what a good child I was. He handed me a syringe and told me to kill my own mother. And I did it. What a good, obedient child.”
“But you didn’t do it.” Babe’s voice was pleading. “That’s the difference between you and him. You couldn’t kill.”
Cordelia thought for a moment. “But I could do other things just as ba
d.” Then she added, “And don’t think I haven’t.”
“It wasn’t you doing those things. It was drugs doing them.”
“Drugs don’t create evil—they only fertilize it.” Cordelia raised the lid from the piano keyboard and rolled her knuckles across a cluster of black keys. A bright, childlike sound pinged through the livingroom. “I have evil inside me.”
“That’s untrue,” Babe said.
Cordelia shook her head. “It’s there. When I close my eyes it shows me pictures. Evil pictures. Sometimes it’s like a television set jammed to one channel. There’s no way I can turn it off.”
“Just because you imagine something evil doesn’t mean that you’ve done it or that you’re going to.”
Cordelia struck another clump of black notes on the piano. “Do you see things like that inside your head?”
“Everyone does.”
Interest hung behind Cordelia’s neutral expression. “Everyone?”
“Sure. Sometimes I see crazy mixtures of kindergarten and Marquis de Sade.”
The reaction on Cordelia’s face was held back. “Tell me about them.”
There was just an image in Babe’s mind, so small and shadowy that she had to work to keep hold of it. “Ever since my coma I’ve kept seeing a sort of cocktail party in a candlelit room. The guests are wearing evening clothes and joke store masks—Porky Pig and Minnie Mouse and Alice in Wonderland and Richard Nixon.”
Cordelia’s eyes snapped around.
Babe made a little laugh. “That shows you how whacked-out my mental processes are.”
“I don’t see what’s so evil about joke store masks,” Cordelia said.
“It turns evil,” Babe said.
She moved to the window and Cordelia’s gaze moved with her.
“There’s a young man in the room,” Babe said. “He’s naked—unconscious. I think he’s drugged. These people in the masks bind him to a sort of rack. They put a black leather hood over his face. And then Richard Nixon—”
The way Cordelia was standing there, folded in a curtain of shock, made Babe stop.
“Takes a knife from the table,” Cordelia said, “and cuts a circle in his chest.”
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