VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  A jolt went through Babe. “How did you know that?”

  Behind Cordelia’s bright shining eyes something fierce and excited was growing. “And then Richard Nixon cuts a Y inside the circle?”

  “That’s right.” Babe couldn’t exhale. A kind of dreaming unreality invaded her.

  “And you tell yourself it’s not really happening,” Cordelia said, “but then the Y starts bleeding and you know it’s real, and the young man screams through the mask and the scream is real too.”

  A damp static crawled slowly across Babe’s skin. “And then Minnie Mouse …”

  “Minnie Mouse puts her cigarette out,” Cordelia said. “She puts it out in the young man’s …”

  “Hand.” Babe said.

  Silence sank down onto the room.

  “I don’t believe it.” Cordelia’s eyes took hold of her mother. “I saw them doing those things. I was there. I was standing at the door to his loft. I watched. And when I couldn’t stand watching any more of it I turned and ran and when I stopped running I was in your hospital room. You were the only person I could tell it to.”

  A wave of icy heat washed up Babe’s spine. “You—told me?”

  Cordelia nodded. “While you were in coma—I told you everything. I pretended you could hear me.” Pressing her lip between her teeth, Cordelia walked to the fireplace and stood gazing at the unlit logs. “I pretended you wanted to hear me—lying in your bed, so peaceful, always waiting for me, never running off anywhere. You were my best friend. And I was yours.” Cordelia’s voice developed an almost childish, singsong lilt. “I’d ask, Mother should I do this, should I do that. There’d be a catch in your breathing, because you heard me, and I’d count your breaths till the next catch. An even number meant yes and an odd number meant no. That was our code. And before I went home, I’d bend over you and kiss you and I’d say Mother I love you, I’m sorry I’ve hurt you—and if you ever get well I’ll never hurt you again.”

  Cordelia stared a moment at her mother. She turned away again.

  “And you’d say I love you too, Cordelia. At least that was what I liked to pretend.”

  Her words came out in gulps and she began to lose control of her breathing.

  “That day—after what I saw in the loft—I begged you: Mother—come back.”

  Her voice took on the tone of a child begging.

  “I need you. I don’t have anyone now.”

  Cordelia started to cry, little sobs that she fought back and then couldn’t fight back any longer.

  “And you opened your eyes. For just that one second you were looking at me.”

  Cordelia clutched a fist to her mouth.

  “I called the nurse. I said, ‘Mother heard me.’ The nurse said, ‘No, she can’t hear anything.’ She said opening your eyes didn’t mean you were seeing.”

  “But I woke up,” Babe said.

  Cordelia nodded. “That night.”

  At last Babe found the first foothold of understanding. The thing that had haunted her was not a dream, not a psychic flash; it was Cordelia standing by the hospital bed and pouring out all the pain of her terror and loneliness and need as she would have to a tombstone. And because Babe had been alive, not dead, some faculty standing sentinel over her sleeping mind had heard her daughter’s call. And, like a hysterical ninety-pound mother lifting a two-ton VW off her crushed infant, she had answered the call—rising back to wakefulness, remembering the words that had summoned her, but taking them for the voice of her own mind, not knowing till now how it was or what it really was that she remembered.

  “Cordelia,” she said, “if you hadn’t come to me that day …”

  Cordelia’s teeth closed on a knuckle. She blinked and stared from behind a fist at her mother.

  “If you hadn’t stood by my bed,” Babe said, “if you hadn’t called me—I’d still be in coma. It was you that brought me back.”

  The sad, hopeful, questioning smile on Cordelia’s face seemed to float across the room and reach out to her.

  “Thank you,” Babe said. “Thank you for needing me. Thank you for saving me.”

  Babe laid her hand against the girl’s cheek.

  “Cordelia—you said I was your best friend when I was asleep. And you said you were my best friend. Now that I’m awake—could you trust me to keep on being your friend? Do you think we could try?”

  Cordelia stood stiff and silent and awkward. Then she swallowed and sniffled and nodded, and very slowly, her arms closed around her mother.

  “I’m moving home,” Cordelia announced.

  Cardozo lifted a stack of reports off one of the chairs, clearing a place for her to sit. “The plasterers fixed your apartment that fast? Give me their number.”

  “No. I’m moving home to my mother’s house.”

  “Oh. That’s terrific.”

  “I think so. So does she.” Cordelia was silent a moment. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “How many guesses do I get?”

  “I’m not going to shield him anymore.”

  Cardozo gave her a long glance. He found a pad and picked up his ballpoint and squiggled it on a piece of paper to make sure the ink was flowing.

  “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Until you have a lawyer, don’t tell me anything that’s going to incriminate you, and don’t tell me the names of any people who’ve committed crimes. For the time being I’m not supposed to learn this kind of information from you. My expert tells me that’s the law.”

  “Funny law.” Cordelia sat gazing at him.

  “Doesn’t leave much to talk about, does it. Okay. Excuse my directness, but if there’s a polite way to phrase this question I sure don’t know it.”

  “You don’t have to start being polite with me.”

  “Did you sleep with Scottie Devens when you were thirteen?”

  “I never slept with my stepfather.”

  “So there’s no way you could have caught gonorrhea from him?”

  “Not unless it spreads telepathically.”

  “Did you know you had gonorrhea when you were thirteen?”

  “I knew I had something. I didn’t know then what it was. I know now.”

  “Do you know how you got it?”

  “Yes. So do you.”

  “How many men did you have sex with before you were infected?”

  “You’re giving me too much credit. There was only him.”

  Cardozo’s mind played with the new piece of information.

  What it came down to was that Ted Morgenstern had done his usual snoop job on the chief witness against his client. For a few hundred bucks slipped to a pediatrician’s nurse, he’d turned up paydirt: the kid was being treated for gonorrhea. He raised a tzimmes in court about her sanity, had her sent to a psychiatrist, who by law also had to be an M.D., and got the gonorrhea introduced into evidence as part of the psychiatric report. At the same time he sent Scottie out to incriminate himself by catching an independent dose.

  All the Vanderwalks had to buy was that Cordelia and Scottie had been walking around infected with the same dose.

  Cardozo reflected that a dose of the clap was a pretty cheap price to pay for a plea bargain. Especially a plea bargain that cut a thirty-year sentence to three months. Throw in a lifetime annuity of a quarter million, and it was a deal no defendant—not even an innocent one—could afford to refuse.

  And that’s what people pay lawyers for.

  Cordelia was smiling, showing unusually white teeth. “Lieutenant—do you hate him?”

  For a moment Cardozo wasn’t there. “Hate who?”

  “The man I’m not supposed to name.”

  “Hate takes time. I’m a busy guy.”

  “I hate him.” Her index finger went skimming in a back-and-forth motion along the edge of the desk. “I know how we can trap him.”

  Cordelia gave him a look, and Cardozo waited for whatever it was that was going to spring out of that head.

&
nbsp; “I can get his confession on videotape,” she said. “He has the equipment.”

  “Somehow I don’t think he’s going to sit still while you set up the lights for the quiz.”

  Cordelia’s finger slowed. “He likes to tape sex. We’ll have sex with the sound recorder on. I’ll get him to talk. We’ll both be high. It’ll be easy. He’s a real jabbermouth when we have sex.”

  Cardozo leapt up and his feet went down on the floor with a thump. “Jesus Christ. No way. Don’t even say it.”

  When Greg Monteleone got home and gave his wife Gina a kiss, she didn’t give him one back.

  “Tell me, Detective,” she said, “what would you say to a beautiful strung-out young girl in your livingroom?”

  Cordelia Koenig was sitting idly on the sofa, turning the pages of Time magazine much too quickly even to be speed-reading them. Monteleone felt his heart squeeze into the space meant for his Adam’s apple. He prepared a smile and came into the room.

  The girl was on her feet nimbly and quickly. “Hi—remember me? We met the other night?”

  “Course I remember you, Miss Koenig.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking the precinct where you lived.” She stood there, with her tumbling taffy-blond hair and her perfectly upturned nose and her brightly lipsticked mouth, smiling a smile that he sensed was a lie. “I knew the minute you walked into Mother’s livingroom that you were a man I could talk to.”

  Her eyelids with their long black lashes came down, pale and uncontrollably fluttering against the darker skin of her face. Monteleone knew immediately she was on speed.

  “Sure, you can talk to me. Have a seat.”

  “There’s a criminal I know. You know him too. He’s hurt a lot of people.”

  Her large blue eyes stared at Monteleone. There was a kind of nonnegotiable determination in them, and he realized the kid wasn’t just on speed, she was on major speed.

  “Let’s get him,” she whispered huskily.

  54

  “SOMEBODY BROKE INTO MY apartment and attacked Mother,” Cordelia said. “But it was me they were after.”

  “Who do you think it was?” the voice on the phone asked.

  “My dealer. He had to have sent one of his goons. I’m a little behind on my coke payments.”

  “Naughty, naughty.”

  “It’s not my fault. The U.S. Trust won’t let me sell my Connecticut Light and Power and my IBM doesn’t pay dividends till next month.”

  “But you can’t let a debt to your dealer ride. Not if he’s sending his collectors.”

  A slight pause. “I thought maybe if you could lend me three thousand till Monday …”

  He sighed. “You only phone me when you need rescuing.”

  “It’s the last time I’ll ever ask.”

  “Well … Maybe just this one last time …”

  “Cash?”

  “Why don’t you come to my new place on Franklin Street?” He gave her the address. “Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. We can enjoy ourselves.”

  It was ten after ten and Cardozo’s head ached and for two hours he’d been wanting to go back to bed. He’d had no sleep at all the night before and he’d come in this morning to find Monteleone’s latest fives even worse spelled than Greg’s usual atrocities.

  A call came in on three. “Cordelia’s been gone since last night.” Babe had the voice of a mother doing a very poor job of not sounding frantic.

  “She hasn’t phoned?”

  “Not a word.”

  “She say where she was going?”

  “I think she was lying.”

  “What was the lie?”

  “A flutist called Wilson, Ransom Wilson she said, a concert at Alice Tully Hall. I found a pad of paper by her phone—the writing went through to the next sheet. I think she was copying down some times.”

  “What are the times?”

  “If I can read her writing—six to six thirty, it says, fifteen-dash-thirty-four-dash-twelve.”

  “Twelve?”

  “Excuse me, twelfth.”

  “Anything else? Does it say E or F?”

  “No.”

  “There’s no subway stop? Does it say Woodside?”

  “No, just fifteen thirty-four twelfth.”

  “Okay.”

  “Vince—there’s a bottle in her bathroom.”

  “What’s the label?”

  “No label. Little black pills.”

  “Like BB gun pellets, about an eighth of an inch across, a tiny line down the middle?”

  “What are they?”

  “Look, if they’re in the bottle they’re not in her. Stay by the phone. I’ll take care of it.”

  Cardozo hung up and shouted for Greg Monteleone.

  “Called in sick,” Sergeant Goldberg shouted back.

  “What’s Monteleone’s house number—fifteen thirty-four sound right?”

  “Fifteen thirty-four on unforgettable Twelfth Street, the Avenue Foch of Woodside.”

  “What the fuck’s an Avenue Foch?” someone shouted.

  Cardozo picked up the phone and dialed Monteleone’s home number. He asked Gina to put her husband on.

  She sounded surprised. “Monte’s on assignment.” Cardozo sensed a cold current around him as he sank back in his swivel chair. “What assignment is that, Gina?”

  “That kiddie porn thing you put him on. Cordelia Koenig.” Cardozo slammed a fist into the desk and his knuckles instantly regretted the gesture. “Right. That kiddie porn thing.” He hung up and sat looking at his hand. “Son of a fuckin’ bitch!” he shouted.

  Eight minutes later Cardozo was running along Franklin Street.

  Across from 432, he saw the Con Ed truck. He beat his fists on the rear door and when Monteleone opened it an inch he yanked it wide and stormed in. He had come to kick ass.

  “Congratulations, Greg, you just fucking blew it.”

  “She volunteered, for Christ’s sake.”

  “We can’t use it.”

  “We can’t use this tape, but there are two tapes—he’s making his own up there and we’re tapping into the signal. Pete here is an electronic genius, it was a piece of cake.”

  The technician turned to acknowledge the compliment. He had plain features, a little slope to his nose. He was a quiet man, competent-looking.

  Cardozo’s gaze moved slowly from one face to the other and then to the monitor with its shadowy play of shapes. “All you’ve got is a lousy TV hookup. You’ve got no control over what happens.”

  “You haven’t seen this girl in action. Sit down, Vince. Watch. She’s amazing.”

  Cardozo didn’t sit, but he watched.

  The sound was crackling and the middle third of the picture rippled. The technician fine-tuned. The image on the monitor resolved into lights and darks, the curve of a woman’s shoulder, her arm touching the lower part of her face. Cordelia.

  “She’s too close,” the technician said.

  “He knows,” Monteleone said. “He’ll back her off. He wants this film to turn out as good as we do.”

  He wants to kill her, Cardozo thought. He sent a man to kill her the other night. He hasn’t changed his mind.

  “Come here,” a man’s voice said.

  She moved back, and now the camera saw a man sitting on a sofa, wearing a half mask over his eyes and a striped dressing gown. His arms went around her. He folded his hands on her breast. He drew her down. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her throat, and then lightly brushed his lips against hers.

  “I’ve missed you.” She unbuttoned her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  He couldn’t kill her, the thought came back. Not on camera.

  “Why have you been staying away?” the masked man asked.

  But the man’s a necro. He wants jack-off films of people dying. What could be hotter than this, a home movie of yours truly killing one of the country’s top models?

  “A lot’s been happening.” Cordelia let her skirt drop, then peeled her panties o
ff. They slid silkenly down her.

  The man put his face close to Cordelia’s. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too.”

  “Do you forgive me for the other night?” the man asked. “Tina’s party went on forever. I tried to phone you but there was something wrong with your machine.”

  “That’s okay, I went out.”

  He sniffed at her mouth, her eyes, her hairline. He sniffed at the tops of her breasts. His hand moved along her leg.

  As Cardozo watched, something crawled through him.

  The man’s dressing gown fell open.

  “I have a confession to make.” Cordelia began stroking his penis. “I ran out of coke Memorial Day weekend. I went to your old place to borrow some. You had a party going on. A dude was tied up.”

  Memorial Day weekend, Cardozo thought. His mind had been working on it but it wasn’t till now that it came together.

  “You were torturing him,” Cordelia said. “It freaked me. Because it turned me on. I’ve never been turned on like that.”

  Cordelia had seen them torturing Downs. And Cordelia must have told her mother while Babe was still in coma. The time sequence fit. That was Babe’s telepathy, her dream. The puzzle dissolved into the simple image of a panicked child telling her mommy the terrible thing that had happened, pleading with mommy to make the world right again.

  On the screen, the man took Cordelia’s hand away from his hard cock. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s make it better.”

  He got up and disappeared from the frame. A moment later he returned and laid out his banquet on the coffee table: four glassine envelopes, horn-handled scissors, four red-capped vials, a soup spoon, a chafing dish heater, a silver caviar cup, red rubber tubing, an eyedropper, a cigarette lighter, a bottle of mineral water, a syringe.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” Cordelia asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me about it. Get me hot.”

  “She’s great,” Monteleone said. “She’s handling it.”

  Monteleone could have been watching a game show. He wasn’t feeling what Cardozo was feeling. Cardozo had a sense of a change in the man’s expression. Something shifted behind the eyeslits.

  The man lit the heater, then with the eyedropper measured mineral water into the cup. “I fought in the Second World War. Many people were killed.” He placed the cup over the flame and slowly tapped the crystals from the four vials into the water.