VC03 - Mortal Grace (25 page)

“The lab reports have started coming in. Prints on the iron match prints taken from Father Joe at the hospital.”

“We expected that. Any prints beside his?”

“No one’s.”

“We didn’t expect that.”

“Seven full prints and three partials inside the rectory guest room window. No fingerprints outside the window.”

“Doesn’t prove a hell of a lot. The window could have been left open a crack. Someone could have climbed up on the roof and reached under and pushed it up—their prints would have wound up inside.”

“Assuming they weren’t wearing gloves.”

“No one said anything about any gloves on the dead man.”

“Not yet they haven’t.” Ellie stood with her hands in her skirt pockets, not moving, her arms tanned and bare to the shoulders of her blouse. “There was no window glass in the vacuum cleaner bag—which indicates none landed inside the study.”

Cardozo nodded. “Which confirms the window wasn’t broken from outside.”

She handed Cardozo the report. “The glass that you found in the courtyard comes from the window.”

“Which confirms the window was broken from inside.” He sat thumbing the pages, jagged where bits of perforated printer-guide still clung to them. “Paint this break-in fake—and paint this death suspicious.”

Ellie was staring. He could feel her radar running full tilt.

“Lou says he found incense residue and acrylic rug fiber on the dead man’s clothes. The incense matches residue on the clothes in the Ms. Basket Case basket. How come you asked him to check that far back?”

“Just covering all the bases.”

“And then a few.” She smiled. It was a tolerant smile. It seemed to say,
I know you. I know your thoughts. I accept you as you are.
“The fiber matches fibers on the Ms. Basket Case clothes. It also matches the strands that you pulled from the rug in the rectory. How come you didn’t tell me you’d done that, Vince?”

“Because you’d have told me it wasn’t legal.”

“Which it wasn’t. But never mind, because Lou says it’s no use to us. Ditto for the incense. They’re both as common as hydrogen atoms.”

Greg Monteleone knocked on the open door. Today he was wearing a peanut-butter-brown shirt with a strawberry-red button-down collar, and he looked as though a jokester had set the controls wrong on a color TV. “Letter for you, Vince. Looks like you’ve been invited to something ritzy.”

He handed Cardozo a heavy cream vellum envelope. Cardozo’s name and work address were neatly penned in ballpoint block letters across the front. A return address had been engraved on the back: 34½ East 69th Street. There was no sender’s name.

Cardozo opened it. Holding the page by a corner, he drew out a sheet of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church letterhead.

He read it over quickly. An electric current rippled the hairs on his neck. The two lines of block letters had been printed by the same hand and pen as the address.

The murdered runaways are in the shoe box in the rector’s desk.

There was no signature.

His eyes glided up to meet Ellie’s. He handed her the note.

She read with a sort of understated frown, not giving it much voltage. She was silent for a moment. She walked to the window. Morning light slanted through.

She looked back at him. He could feel the weight of her skepticism.

“When was it postmarked?” she said.

He turned the envelope over. “Yesterday.”

“That was the day after the 911 call. Do you recognize the handwriting?”

“Not offhand. I doubt the writer wanted me to.” Cardozo opened the lower left-hand drawer of his desk. “It could be a malicious joke, but just to make life tough, let’s assume it’s not.” He brought out Father Joe’s shoe box of talent and dropped it to his desk top. A leaden thump resonated.

“Vince, your desk is a mess.” Ellie pulled the straight-backed chair over. She sat down, legs primly crossed, and went to work moving piles of paper, stacking them into higher piles, clearing space.

“You want some coffee?” he said.

She nodded. “I’ll need it.”

Two minutes later, Cardozo brought two styrofoam cups from the squad room and handed one to Ellie. He nudged the door shut with his heel.

“Those are yours.” She had arranged the talent photos in two piles. “M through Z.”

Cardozo dropped into his swivel chair. M was Marie MacDonald, a freckled kid in time-warp pigtails who looked like an MGM child starlet. Her bio, phone number, and address were paper-clipped to the photo on a neatly word-processed page.

N was Tommy Nutter.

He had reached Q, Lily Anne Quinn, when he heard Ellie make a surprised sound. He couldn’t tell if it was the photo in her right hand or the coffee in her left that had startled her.

His first taste told him it was the coffee. “Sorry. Glen said it was fresh.”

“Sure it was, last week.” She set down the cup. “This one’s out of alphabetical order. And she doesn’t have a bio.”

Ellie showed him the photo: a female teenager, pigtails again, but nothing MGM about her: the two-piece bathing suit pose had a sleazy, provocative look, and the tongue-tip was flicked out over the lower lip in a let-me-entertain-you come-on. The name
WANDA GILMARTIN
and the number
2
had been block-printed in ballpoint in the lower border.

“Gilmartin.” Cardozo was thoughtful. “Rings no bells.” After an instant he picked up the next photo in his stack. “What do you know. Richie Vegas is out of order too.”

He laid the photo next to Wanda’s. Richie stood shirtless, tattooed, street-tough and scrawny, scowling. Again, there was no bio; the name was block-printed in the lower border, this time with the number
1.

“Wally Wills—no bio.” Ellie laid the photo on the desk top. The number
3
had been printed beside the name. Another shirtless teenager, standing in a wooden doorway, the sun in his eyes.

The clunking of the air conditioner suddenly seemed louder.

“Tod Lomax, number four.” Cardozo placed the photo beside Wills’s. Lomax’s face had a drugged look. The doorway he was standing in looked the same as Wills’s doorway.

“Would you call these pictures audition photos? More like rejects from a rent-a-chicken catalogue.” Cardozo tapped a ballpoint pen against the edge of the desk. “We’d better run these names and photos through the National Register of Runaways.”

Ellie didn’t answer. Her mouth had narrowed into a troubled, tight line.

She handed Cardozo a photo of a young man with jet-black hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. He was sitting in an armchair, indoors. The photo had been taken with a flash that made little red pinpricks in the center of his eyes. He was wearing a dark blue shirt under a blue suit jacket, no necktie.

The name
PABLO CESPEDES
had been carefully block-printed beneath the photo; next to the name was the number
5
.

Cardozo studied the wide, grinning face. His mouth was suddenly dry.

It was the face of the dead boy from the rectory.

“Let’s see if this is his real name and if he has a record.”

A minute and a half later Cardozo and Ellie were staring at the computer screen in the squad room. In theory, all police records—from 911 calls to fingerprints to rap sheets—were computerized for instant accessibility. In fact, the computers ate so many files and were down so much of the time—over a hundred days a year, in some precincts—that you never knew what you were going to get when you called up information.

Today the computer was cooperating, and fifteen seconds after Ellie tapped in the command, a face stared back from the screen.

“That’s him,” Cardozo said.

It was the same Pablo Cespedes as in the photograph, only the grin was more demented, the eyes more seriously goofy, as if he’d prepared for his mug shot by smoking a joint of Maui Wowie. There was no housebreaking on the sheet; only a single charge of theft. Pablo Cespedes was currently on probation and residing in a foster home.

Cardozo copied down the home phone on a sheet of scratch paper. He went back to his desk and dialed the number.

On the fourth ring a woman answered sweetly. “Hello?”

THIRTY-THREE

D
AN HIPPOLITO DREW BACK
the black nylon sheet. The dead boy’s foster parents stared down into the body tray.

Freida Adler was a little woman with a lot of makeup. She grabbed her husband’s arm. Jupiter Adler was a big man, built like a butcher.

“It’s Pablo.” Freida’s whisper left mist like skywriting on the chilled subbasement air. “Oh, my God.”

Jupiter squeezed her hand.

Cardozo felt a cold hollow in his stomach. “I’m sorry.”

“Please.” Freida sank down onto the slatted wood bench. “I need some water.”

“Can she have some water?” Jupiter said.

Dan Hippolito brought a Dixie cup from the cooler in the hallway. Jupiter held the cup. Freida sipped.

“Are you feeling a little better?” Cardozo said.

Freida found a brave little smile. Her right eyetooth had a gray dead color. “Partially.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“How long did Pablo live with you?” Cardozo asked in the car.

“It would have been six months tomorrow,” Jupiter said.

Freida spoke up from the backseat. “Pablo was very easy to get along with. Some aren’t.”

“Have you taken in other homeless kids?”

“We have room for four,” Jupiter said. “Lately, with city cutbacks, we’ve had three.”

“You do it full-time?”

“Now I do. I’m on workmen’s compensation. Doesn’t go far.”

So it was a living for him, Cardozo realized. “What kind of work did you used to do?”

“Same as Freida. Case manager for the department of human resources.”

“You come that close to the human misery in this city,” Freida said, “you have to care.”

The Adlers lived in a shabby eighteen-story high rise on Riverside Drive. A banner above the entrance announced luxury co-ops for sale. It looked as though it had been gathering soot for the last ten years.

A security officer watched the Adlers let themselves and Cardozo into the lobby. They rode up to the seventh floor in a small automated elevator that was smeared with graffiti.

The Adlers’ apartment was dark and rambling and it smelled of cooking and Lysol.

A crime-scene crew arrived, and a print man and a photographer began going through Pablo’s room. It was a small space behind the kitchen and Cardozo had a feeling it had been a maid’s room long ago when the neighborhood had been upscale.

Posters of Julio Iglesias and Humphrey Bogart and Andres Segovia had been taped to the wall. Cardozo tried to see the link. All three were performers, but Iglesias and Bogart were sex symbols. Segovia with his white hair and fishbowl cataract-correction glasses and his hand-powered classical acoustic guitar seemed an odd man out.

“Why Segovia?” Cardozo said.

“Pablo loved music,” Freida said. “He played the guitar and he composed songs.”

“The only trouble was, he played his guitar too late at night.” Jupiter tossed a nod toward the window. “The neighbors complained.”

Cardozo walked to the window. It looked out on an air shaft. Even in the middle of the day, the shaft was completely dark, as though the machinery that generated sunlight couldn’t reach this far.

“When did you last see Pablo?”

“Two nights ago,” Freida said. “He took his guitar with him. He said he was spending the night at his friend Andy’s.”

“How can I get hold of Andy?”

“Pablo didn’t tell us much about Andy.”

“Do you have his phone number, or his last name?”

Freida shook her head. “Pablo didn’t want us calling his friends. He didn’t want them knowing he was on probation.”

“How many friends did he have?”

“Well, he had Andy.” She glanced toward her husband.

“I can’t think of anyone else,” Jupiter said.

Cardozo noticed a gold-trimmed cloth on the dresser top. It reminded him of something a priest might wear. “Did Pablo ever play in the musical shows at St. Andrew’s Church?”

Freida and Jupiter exchanged quizzical looks.

“Not that he ever told me,” Freida said.

“Did he ever mention a Reverend Bonnie Ruskay or a Father Joe Montgomery?”

“Pablo wasn’t going that amateur route,” Jupiter said.

Cardozo examined the borders of the cloth for markings. “What route was he going?”

“He was looking for professional backing to put on a cabaret show.”

“What kind of cabaret show?”

“One man—his own material—songs and stand-up comedy.”

Freida noticed Cardozo fingering the cloth. “Pablo loved fancy things.”

“Any idea where he got this?”

“A flea market somewhere.”

Cardozo told the print man to bag the cloth.

“You should watch this.” Jupiter handed Cardozo a videocassette from the bookshelf. “It’s Pablo’s audition tape. There’s great stuff on it.”

Sonya Barnett was sitting beside Father Montgomery’s hospital bed, balancing a teacup on her lap. She looked up when Cardozo rapped on the open door.

“Mind if I join you?”

Father Montgomery turned. “Who is it?”

“Mr. Cardozo.” Sonya Barnett’s ringless, freckled hand shot out in greeting. “You and Father Montgomery are becoming serious chums.”

Father Montgomery smiled from his nest of pillows. “I’m flattered that a busy lieutenant detective finds time to visit a boring old wreck like me. Could I offer you tea? Sonya brought some marvelous Darjeeling.”

“None for me, thanks,” Cardozo said.

“Or if you’d like something stronger,” Sonya Barnett said, “one of Joe’s parishioners sneaked in a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream in that flower arrangement.”

An enormous crystal vase of red roses sat on the chest of drawers.

“No sherry, thanks.”

Father Montgomery laughed. “Well, if you haven’t come for my hospitality, you must have come for my conversation. Sonya, you’re going to have to help me scintillate.”

“I’ll bet Mr. Cardozo has come for information,” Sonya Barnett said.

“From me?” Father Montgomery mugged astonishment.

Cardozo pulled up a third chair. “Does the name Wanda Gilmartin mean anything to you?”