“THE BLUE CROSS and the Medicaid card,” Lou Stein said, “are genuine. The driver’s license is a fake, but it’s an excellent fake.”
Documents and personal possessions had been spread out across Lou’s worktable. Except for the Darby knife, Cardozo had recovered them all from Rick Martinez’s apartment yesterday after the shooting. An Emergency Room nurse had found the Darby strapped to the left shin of Rick Martinez’s corpse.
“The passports are genuine,” Lou Stein said.
Cardozo opened the United States passport. “Has the printing on the bearer page been tampered with?”
“No. The bearer page is genuine. So once upon a time there was a real Richard Martinez, American citizen, born March 8, 1951, in New York. And this was his passport, issued April 18, 1986, in New York.”
“But the Richard Martinez in that photo,” Cardozo said, “looks ten, fifteen years younger than anyone born in 1951.”
“The very point I was about to make.” Lou Stein took the passport and turned to the bearer’s photo. “This page has been subjected to at least four laminations. This isn’t the original photo.”
“Is the bearer signature the original?”
The signature hasn’t been tampered with—but the signature page is younger than the passport.” Lou Stein flipped through seventeen pages of U.S. and Salvadorean immigration stamps. “My guess is, every time a new Richard Martinez was created, they took out the old signature page and stitched in a fresh one.”
Cardozo picked up the Colombian passport and opened it to the bearer page. The passport had been issued three years ago in Medellin to Manuel Gomez Ybarra. The photo of Gomez Ybarra in the Colombian passport was the same as the photo of Richard Martinez in the American—exactly the same: same young face, same young smile showing the same crooked incisor, same shirt with the same jauntily unbuttoned collar.
According to the information in the passport, Manuel had been born in Medellin in 1970. Cardozo had telephoned the Medellin police yesterday, and they had telexed the rap sheet that Cardozo now held in his left hand. Manuel had a record of juvenile theft and had spent his fourteenth year in reformatory; since then a charge of pimping had been brought and dropped. At present he was wanted for questioning in connection with three drug-related shootings and one suspected muerte de prueba.
Lou Stein squinted at the rap sheet. “What the hell’s a muerte de prueba?”
“It’s a service the freelance killers offer in Medellin. Before a client signs them on for a hit they kill any stranger the client points out.”
For an instant Lou Stein seemed to have to work to keep his mouth from falling open. “Why?”
“To prove they have the right stuff. Medellin drug barons want to be sure they hire the very best.” Cardozo flipped the passport back onto the table. His eye went now to the typewriter, a lightweight, forty-year-old Olivetti Lettera 22. The black-plastic spacer key was chipped, and the tan paint was peeling off the steel body. “And you’re sure that’s the Olivetti he used to type the envelopes?”
“Sure, we’re sure. Same way we’re sure that the Darby knife strapped to his leg was the murder weapon. The signatures match.”
A sheet of departmental letterhead had been rolled into the typewriter carriage, and Lou had typed Rad Rheinhardt’s address at the New York Trib. He pulled the sheet out and handed Cardozo a magnifying glass. “See the way the letter h loses a little of the lower left there? And the k in New York?”
Cardozo handed back the magnifying glass. “I believe you, Lou. Just tell me if you found any fingerprints, any particles?”
“None. He wore surgical gloves when he handled the machine—prepowdered. Some of the powder fell between the keys and inside the machine.”
Cardozo’s gaze traveled to the cardboard carton. Issues of Time and Newsweek and People and God only knew what other mass-circulation national weeklies had been crammed into it so tightly that the seams had begun to pull apart. “Any prints on the magazines?”
“No clear fingerprints, but we’ve got plenty of exact matches in the typefonts and in the scissoring. For instance, in the second letter, idiot quest—the whole phrase comes from this copy of Foreign Affairs.” Lou pulled a sober-looking gray magazine out of the carton. There was nothing on its cover but print.
Cardozo frowned. He had a sense that the magazine didn’t go with the others. “Can I look at that?” He opened the copy, flipped through it. Nothing was missing until page fifty-seven, where Lou had stuck a bookmark. A hole had been cut through the heavy paper, leaving a blank in the thicket of words:
the longstanding perception that 19th-century style imperialism is an
to which the vaster majority cannot acquiesce
“Who said idiot quest?” Cardozo asked.
“Henry Kissinger.”
“What was he talking about?”
“Hegemony.”
“Hard to imagine Rick Martinez or Manuel Gomez Ybarra bothering with articles about hegemony.”
“What can I tell you? People are funny. Our Creator made us that way.”
“I’ll tell you what’s even funnier. I was in Rick Martinez’s apartment twenty-two hours before we got him, and this typewriter and these magazines weren’t there. I was back in that apartment less than two hours after he died, and this typewriter and those magazines were sitting on the floor in the bedroom.”
Lou’s eyes were a pale clear blue like water under ice. “Maybe he took them out of the closet in between your visits. Did you search the closet the first time you went in?”
“Lou, we staked the apartment out. After I went in, Rick Martinez never came home.”
“Well, you got a mystery.”
Lou Stein’s finger went to the side of his nose and pushed his glasses higher. Possibly his glasses needed the push. But to Cardozo it seemed out of character—a guilty movement, a stalling movement, as though Lou was unhappy with what he was about to have to say.
“Here’s another mystery.” Lou tapped the magnifying glass against the glass of hairs that Cardozo had found on the bathroom sink. “These are pubic hairs. They matched the hairs we found in the victims’ mouths. But they aren’t Martinez’s.”
“Hold on.” A black hole had suddenly opened in Cardozo’s universe. “What the hell are you telling me?”
“The semen in every instance was his. The pubic hair in every instance was not.”
“Whose was it?”
“Donor X’s.”
“Help me, Lou. I’m having trouble putting this together.”
“It’s my fault, Vince. I was sloppy. From the very first victim on, I should have checked that the pubic hair and the semen came from the same donor. Frankly it never occurred to me they wouldn’t.”
“Different donors. How would that work?”
“It would be very hard for a donor to ejaculate semen in another person’s mouth without leaving some pubic hair. The fact that the perpetrator did not deposit pubic hair in his earlier victims indicates he didn’t deposit semen there either.”
“But we have his semen in all the victims and we know it’s his.”
“I’m using the word deposit in a technical sense. The semen and the pubic hairs both got into the mouth the same way—he put them there.”
“How?”
“Oral syringe and tweezers.”
Cardozo reached for an explanation. “Why?”
“Why is your province.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
FROM TWO BLOCKS AWAY, Cardozo heard the honking chorus of automobile horns and the voice shouting in Spanish and English: “Qué queremos? Guerra! What do we want? War!”
As he turned onto Sixty-sixth he saw that the street had been blocked off by an Eyewitness News TV truck. Picketers waved signs lettered as neatly as cigarette advertisements:
NYPD IS RACIST!
NYPD MURDERERS!
MALLOY ES VERDUGO!
MALLOY IS AN EXECUTIONER!
ANGLO COPS KILL HISPANICS!
Cardozo caught the drift.
In front of the precinct hundreds of protesters had formed a roiling, jitterbugging mass, overturning police barricades, going at the windshields of parked cars with baseball bats and bottles and bricks.
Up on the roof of the TV truck three cameramen were trying to catch it all with their minicams.
One of the picketers, seeing his TV opportunity, grabbed a trash can, shouldered it, made a run toward the window of the I Scream for Ice Cream Ice Cream Shop.
The trash can went sailing through the plate glass.
A single-voiced roar of approval went up, and a wave of protesters became a wave of looters.
Cardozo stood there behind the TV truck, in the space where nothing was happening, because no camera was watching.
When the cameramen climbed back down into the truck, he sensed a slacking-off of crowd spirit. He lowered his head, shielded his eyes with his forearm, and ran forward. A bottle whizzed past his ear to crash against the precinct door.
A sergeant let him inside.
The vestibule was mobbed with cops in riot gear.
“What’s happening?” Cardozo said. “Why’s everyone in here and not out on the street?”
“Mayor’s orders.” The sergeant shrugged. “He doesn’t want anything ugly while the TV truck’s here.”
Cardozo grimaced. “And I suppose what’s out there now is pretty?”
THE BLACK-AND-WHITE GLOSSIES showed Rick Martinez’s apartment as it had been two hours after Martinez had been shot. The police photographer had used a flash and fast film, and the pictures had the stark, high-contrast look of photos in a true-crime paperback.
Cardozo reviewed them one by one. The poster of Rambo taped to the refrigerator. The filthy plates in the sink and the Shabbes candles on the drainboard. The bookcase with the little stuffed bear sitting on the tape deck. The bulletin board displaying the press record of Society Sam’s achievements.
And then the joker: the Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter on the bedroom floor next to the answering machine and the carton of magazines.
Ellie Siegel stepped into the cubicle.
“There’s no table in Martinez’s apartment,” Cardozo said.
“So?” She handed him the stakeout log.
“Where did Rick type?”
“On his knees.”
“Come on.”
“Come on yourself. It’s possible.”
“Then where did he cut and paste the letters?”
“On the floor.”
“That floor’s filthy. That whole place is filthy. The letters were clean. They were put together somewhere else. The typewriter and magazines were brought to the apartment later.”
“When?”
“Let’s see when.” Cardozo opened the log to Wednesday, June nineteenth. “Malloy staked it out till four P.M. and I was there at four, and there was no typewriter or magazines. So they had to have come in later.”
He turned the page. Ellie took a step forward to read over his shoulder.
The log showed that Detective Goldberg had run the stakeout from four P.M. to midnight. He reported plenty of human traffic in and out of the building. A lot of paper bags had gone in, a lot had come out.
But no typewriter had gone in. No cartons had gone in.
Cardozo turned to the next sheet.
Detective Ferrara had handled the stakeout from midnight to eight A.M. Thursday. Same story. No typewriter, no cartons.
Carl Malloy had taken over at eight A.M. and worked till noon. No typewriter, no cartons.
Goldberg had been scheduled to run the stakeout from noon to eight P.M. He’d ended early, when the crime scene crew arrived at four.
“Three thirty-five.” Ellie’s finger pointed to the entry in the log. “Black female took packages into building. Two separate trips. Woman wore kerchief on hair but resembled Identi-Kit of T. Dillworth.”
Cardozo took the log to Sergeant Goldberg’s desk. “Sergeant—how come you didn’t mention you’d seen Dillworth going into the Martinez building?”
Goldberg shot him an impatient glance. “I mentioned it—right there in the log, where I was supposed to.”
“How come you didn’t mention it to me?”
“Because, in the first place, I forgot and because, in the second place, I assumed you’d read the log, because you’re the lieutenant on the case and that’s what the log’s for, right?”
“Why didn’t you follow her?”
“Those weren’t my orders.”
Goldberg had a point.
“It was my goof,” Cardozo said.
He went to get himself a coffee. In the little service room off the squad room, the detectives had crowded around the TV. He could see the image on the screen: a dozen hands, in close-up, shredding an American flag.
The detectives booed.
“Hey, Greg.” Cardozo jabbed Monteleone gently. “What’s going on? Where’s that happening?”
“Right out in front of the precinct. Live.”
“I didn’t see any flag-trashing out there.”
“You’re seeing it now.”
On the screen the camera pulled back to a longer view. A man with a shaved head was dousing the torn flag with a jet of clear liquid from a gallon can. When he tossed a match, the flag seemed to explode. So did a half-dozen hands. Rioters ran from the flames, streaming into a blur on the sidewalk.
A cheer went up from the detectives. Hearing his own men applaud like that, Cardozo had a nightmare vision that the whole city was coming unglued.
On the TV screen, behind the mob, you could see the precinct steps and the grilles on the precinct windows. Cops were looking out from behind the grilles. A solitary man stood on the edge of the crowd, motionless in a world of movement. His half-zipped Mets warmup jacket outlined a gut pushing out over an unbuckled belt.
Cardozo didn’t know why he was noticing that motionless figure in the background, except that he had a feeling the guy didn’t belong in this scene: the guy was trouble—he was going to toss a grenade or drop his pants and exhibit himself right there on live TV. He had that kind of face—crazed, spaced-out.
“Christ,” Cardozo said.
It was Carl Malloy’s face and it needed a shave.
BY THE TIME CARDOZO REACHED the vestibule two sergeants had pulled Malloy inside. He was rocking on his heels, stinking of vodka.
Cardozo steered him upstairs and into the squad room.
As they passed Laurie Bonasera’s desk Malloy stopped. “Aren’t you even going to say hi?” His speech was all drunken stresses and slurred plosives.
Laurie Bonasera turned in her chair, startled. “Good morning, Officer Malloy.”
Malloy stared across the squad room, frowning. “Where is everyone?”
Cardozo steered him toward his desk. “Watching you on TV.”
Malloy pulled the chair out and slumped down into it.
“Could I give you some advice, Carl? Pull yourself together and then go home.”
“Fuck you, Vince. I work here.”
“Not today you don’t. Take a sick day.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Stay home and read the New York Tribune in my sunny bay window?”
Malloy tried to get up, lost his balance, fell back into the chair. “I feel a little twisted, Vince.”
“Right now you’re looking at the absolute worst life has to offer. This is it. It’s not going to get any worse. And you’re doing fine, you’re getting through it.”
Malloy laid his head down on the desktop.
“Carl, this is just a suggestion, but maybe you’d be more comfortable resting in the men’s room.”
Malloy raised his head, interested in the idea. A smile shone thinly over his uncertainty. He tried to stand up again and this time he managed.
Cardozo watched him walk an almost straight line to the door.
A blare of newszak spilled in from the TV room. Cardozo headed toward his cubicle. Behind him he heard Laurie Bo
nasera’s voice, in a high, almost startled key. “Officer Malloy, I’m working.”
Cardozo turned.
Malloy was standing accusingly beside Laurie’s desk. “Don’t ‘Officer Malloy’ me.”
Laurie rose, protecting her space with one outstretched arm.
Cardozo approached. “Carl, what’s going on?”
Malloy glared over at him. “What am I, tried and convicted already? Don’t I have rights? I can’t even talk to somebody?”
“You’re off duty, Laurie’s on duty.”
“This is a private conversation,” Malloy said.
“Private conversations can be held after work hours.” Cardozo put a guiding hand on Malloy’s elbow. “Carl, come here.”
Back in his cubicle Cardozo shut the door.
“What the hell is going on between you and her?”
Malloy’s face clenched and Cardozo could feel him seething with rage and hurt.
“Carl, you’re in deep shit enough. Don’t complicate it. If Laurie Bonasera doesn’t want to see you, don’t try to see her. And don’t drink in public. Not like this. You’re out of control.”
“I have rights, Vince.”
“Yes, you have rights and if you have any sense, you want to keep those rights. Right now you have IAD gunning for your shield and your pension and you have two hundred people out there in that street gunning for your life. Why the hell do you have to make it easy for them?”
“Vince … I can’t help it. I love her.”
How does this happen? Cardozo wondered. How do cops get this twisted around, why do they divorce their own common sense? “Fine. Why don’t you just love yourself a little. Because not everyone on the other side of that door is your pal. Chances are, somebody out there is IAD. And they’re hearing you.”
“Why won’t she talk to me? Why can’t she just talk to me?”
“Maybe because she’s a married woman. Maybe because you’re a married man. Maybe because you’re going on paid suspension and you’re coming up on a hearing. Maybe because she’s a friend and she doesn’t want to complicate things for you. Maybe she cares what happens to you. The same as Ellie and Greg and Sam and I do.”
Malloy started sobbing.
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