VC03 - Mortal Grace (18 page)

“Forget him. He’s a hustler.” Ellie cleared the screen. “He has it in for Father Joe almost as badly as you do.”

Cardozo followed Ellie back upstairs. “Okay, maybe I’m prejudiced against Montgomery. But it’s not clouding my judgment. There’s something wrong with the guy.”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t give me that ‘maybe,’ like I’m an idiot.”

“Yesterday you thought there was something wrong with Father Romero.”

“There’s something wrong with both of them.”

As they came back into the squad room, Greg Monteleone was bent down closing the padlock on the steel cabinet where detectives stored their weapons.

“Thought you were using the computer,” Ellie said.

“Just getting rid of my gun. Hot weather like this, it adds to the drain carrying the extra pounds all day.”

“Greg, your day is barely two hours old. And you’re carrying five extra pounds from yesterday’s lunch.”

Greg blew her a kiss. “And I love you, too, princess.” He returned to his desk and handed Cardozo a special delivery letter. “Came in while you were downstairs.”

“Thanks.” Cardozo glanced at the sender’s address, and he was aware of Ellie glancing too: the state prison at Dannemora.

She walked with him to his cubicle. “Who’s your pen pal?”

Cardozo ripped open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of prison letterhead. “His name is Martin Barth.”

“Inmate?”

Cardozo skimmed the page of neat handwriting. “Says he’s serving a life sentence.”

“Know him?”

“Never heard of him.”

Cardozo moved to the window. Noonday shadows were creeping up the brick wall across the alley. “He writes, quote,
I was deeply moved by the artist’s reconstruction of the face of misery that was published last week on page one of the
New York Post.
I was acquainted with this unfortunate child and must talk with you immediately. I know how she died.”

“I’m glad to see you.” On the other side of the Plexiglas partition, Martin Barth fidgeted in a dark metal chair. “You have no idea how glad. Thank you for coming all this way.”

“I wanted to come,” Cardozo said.

To the right and left of them, the visitors’ room stretched like a hundred-yard lunch counter. The space was dim and dirty, with a smell of ammonia layered over deeper strata of sweat and tobacco. Whatever that thirty-four thousand per prisoner per year in the state budget was going to, it wasn’t sweeping and scrubbing or electric lighting around here.

“You must think it’s strange I’ve asked to meet you.”

There were dark circles under Barth’s pale eyes, lines grooving the corners of his mouth. He stared out of horn-rimmed glasses that kept slipping down the bridge of his nose. Every time they slipped he made an irritated face and pushed them back up. He struck Cardozo as a mousy, obsessive, nearsighted man who probably had not yet accepted the reality of his situation.

“No, not especially strange,” Cardozo said. “I get a few calls from prison.”

“It’s not as horrible a place as they say.” Even though they were communicating through telephones, Barth leaned closer to the partition, confidingly. “It’s here that I found my Higher Power. Do you know about the Higher Power?”

“It’s like God, isn’t it?”

“Very much like God. My Higher Power wants me to make a clean breast of all my wrongs.”

Barth took a pack of Marlboro Lights from the pocket of his blue prison shirt. Sweat had plastered the cheap material to his narrow chest. He tapped a cigarette loose and lit it. He smoked like someone who was trying to learn how, who hoped it would make him look tougher.

Cardozo flashed that Martin Barth had waited till his forties to enter adolescence.

“Let me begin with some background. Before imprisonment, I was an agricultural futures analyst. I was employed by Salomon Brothers on Wall Street. I also did a little stock brokerage on my own, in violation of company rules.”

A wry smile hinted that he and Cardozo were coconspirators, that they knew things about human frailty that no one else did. Cardozo smiled back, joining the conspiracy.

“I’m married to a lovely wife and I’m the father of two lovely children. I’m presently serving a life sentence for murdering one of my private clients.”

Barth paused to exhale a shapeless cloud of smoke that slowly drifted up toward the ceiling vent.

“The dead girl whose picture the papers printed—I never learned her name. She was a runaway. I picked her up when I was jogging on the West Side docks about fifteen months ago. I took her back to a meat-packing plant in the vicinity. My firm traded in the stock of the company that owned the property, and I had keys. It was always empty during the day.”

He ground out his cigarette.

“I once saw a pornographic film called
Lola and All the Trimmings.
I’m ashamed to say it made a lasting impression on me. It concerned a man who picked up a young girl and made her his prisoner. Ever since seeing it, I’d had a fantasy of picking up a runaway and taking her to the deserted plant, and doing whatever I wanted to her.”

He broke off to light another cigarette.

“My fantasy came true. The girl was wild. She even had gold rings through her nipples. She was experienced in ways I’d only dreamed of—and completely willing. Her only qualm was the smell of the beef carcasses—even refrigerated they stank. So I lit incense.”

“Where’d you get the incense?”

“I always kept some handy in my jogging pack—to set the mood in case I ever got lucky. She let me tie her hands and feet with leather belts. She was powerless. It was pure insanity. I kicked her, beat her, dripped candle wax on her.” For that one smiling moment, Barth seemed lost in remembering. “I always had a fantasy about candle wax.”

“Where did you get the candle?”

“My jogging knapsack.”

Barth lit a third cigarette and now he had two going in the ashtray.

“The long and short was, I got carried away and accidentally killed her.”

“How’d you do that?”

“I was fondling her neck—and it just happened. I suppose I choked off her air. When I realized what I’d done, I cut the body up.”

“How?”

“With a meat saw. I loaded the body parts into a hamper.”

“Where’d you get the hamper?”

“The company used reinforced Styrofoam hampers to ship meat to restaurants. I must have ripped her when I was making love—I found one of the nipple rings on the floor after I packed her. I kept it as a souvenir. That night I abandoned the hamper in the Vanderbilt Garden.”

It seemed to Cardozo that Barth wore his guilt like a halo. His recital was frank and unflinching, and those were not always admirable qualities. There were times when people should flinch, and when they didn’t, you knew the world was in trouble.

“How did you know how to carve up the body?”

“Years of experience with Christmas roasts.”

“How did you get the body to the park?”

“I rented a van.”

“Who from?”

“An outfit that specializes in fraudulently licensed vans and trucks—so you can park anywhere and not worry about getting ticketed. I said I needed the van for a moving job.”

“Could you describe this van?”

“It was a blue Toyota. There was a smiling sun painted on the door.”

“What was the name of the van-rental company?”

“I don’t recall.”

“What happened to the ring you found on the floor? Where is it now?”

“It’s in my jogging knapsack in the closet at home. My wife will give it to you.”

TWENTY-FOUR

H
ARVEY THOMS LOOKED AT
his watch. “You’re sure this woman’s home.”

“My client’s wife is getting herself ready.” Pierre Strauss gave the buzzer another push.

“You mean she’s putting on lipstick?” Thoms said.

“Possibly.”

Cardozo did not relish standing in a small entrance hall with these two men. Strauss was a good quarter-century older and fifty pounds lighter than Thoms, but something murderous was edging into his body language and Cardozo had a feeling that in another two minutes they would be swinging at one another.

“Have you noticed,” Thoms said, “a woman gets into a car and it takes her longer to drive away than a man. A woman has to put on lipstick. You can’t drive safely without lipstick.” Thoms laughed. “I may be prejudiced, but it happens to be a fact.”

“For God’s sake,” Strauss said, “she’s a human being.”

“God bless the family of man.”

“I don’t often ask favors of the district attorney’s office, but could you muster some kind of small-scale decency for the next half hour?”

The door opened and a pale, thin woman stood looking at them with tired eyes. Her gray dress had been bought when she weighed ten pounds more. “Hello, Pierre.”

She had a quietly cultivated voice. Cardozo noticed that she was not wearing lipstick.

Strauss kissed her lightly on the cheek. He had an almost believable caring manner. It played all right in Eloise Barth’s peppermint-striped vestibule, but Cardozo had seen it play a lot better on talk shows, where Strauss presented himself as the last performing civil libertarian in captivity. Even his wild, wispy, wise-old-man white hair played well on talk shows if they gave him a stylist.

“Eloise, this is Harvey Thoms from the D.A.’s office, and Lieutenant Vince Cardozo from the Twenty-second Precinct.”

She acknowledged them uneasily. “Won’t you come in.”

“Now, as I explained on the phone, Lieutenant Cardozo is going to show you a warrant authorizing him to remove Martin’s knapsack and any contents that may be in it.”

Eloise Barth appeared to be listening, but barely. It was as if she would go crazy if she had to think anymore about cops and lawyers and warrants.

“Mr. Thoms is here to see that you comply with the warrant and I’m here to see that Lieutenant Cardozo does not exceed its mandate. Lieutenant, would you show Mrs. Barth the warrant?”

“I don’t want to see it. The knapsack should be right here in the closet.” She opened the hall closet. She pulled a chair over and stood on it and searched the shelf. She moved quickly, but her movements suggested exhaustion, as though this was something she wanted to get through fast so that she could lie down and die.

Pierre Strauss held the chair steady. “How are the children?”

“Doing their best.”

Cardozo was able to see into the living room. It was a bright, clean space with a carved marble fireplace and a baby grand piano and comfortably child-proof furnishings. Almost too perfect. It looked like a gigantic doll’s house.

“The knapsack’s not here.” There was a kind of blankness in her voice. “It must be in the bedroom closet.”

Pierre Strauss helped her step down from the chair. She led the way down another corridor.

They passed the doorway of a darkened room. Two little boys were sitting on the floor in front of the television, flipping through channels. There was a flash of opera from Lincoln Center. A flash of yuppie lovers from the movie of the week. A flash of Barbara Walters interviewing a new Latin American dictator.

Cardozo realized the boys were watching the doorway, not the TV, sneaking a look at Mommy’s visitors.

“How old are they?” Cardozo said.

“Timmy’s four.” Eloise Barth answered as if it were bad luck to talk to a cop about anyone she loved. “Allen’s six.”

She opened the bedroom door and turned on the light. Cardozo had the impression that the room had been stripped of luxuries—that the cotton spread on the enormous canopied bed had once been silk, that the tortoise-shell grooming implements on the dressing table had once been silver.

She opened the closet door. The inside was a jumble, as if she had packed all time-tumbled shards of her marriage into that space.

Pierre Strauss brought a chair and helped her step up.

After several minutes’ silent searching, she handed down a blue nylon High Sierra backpack.

The zipper had not been closed. As Pierre Strauss passed the knapsack to Cardozo, a candle fell to the floor, and then a package of Bombay Girl incense, and a gold ring too small for even a child’s pinkie.

“I have one question.” Cardozo stood at the window, watching sheets of summer rain whip over First Avenue. “In your opinion, is Martin Barth the kind of man who would commit this kind of murder?”

Dr. Vergil Muller—the psychiatrist who had examined Martin Barth for the State of New York—drew in a deep breath and pushed himself up from the sofa. At six-foot-three he weighed a good three hundred pounds, and he left a permanent-looking dent in the leather cushion.

“A man abducts a runaway female, possibly underage.” There was a suggestion of the southern Midwest in Dr. Muller’s way of speaking—a kind of articulated drawl. “He has sex with her; he murders her; he dismembers her and abandons her body in a hamper in a public park.”

Muller stepped around an exercise bicycle, went to his desk, rummaged through a clutter of papers, and slipped on a pair of low-grade magnifying glasses. He peered at a stack of books beneath the telephone, then crossed to the bookcase and searched two shelves. He pulled out a cobalt-blue-covered paperback the size of a telephone directory.

“You’re asking me if Martin Barth is capable of committing statutory rape, homicide, and littering, in one repugnant deed?” Muller’s gray gaze fixed Cardozo from above his glasses. “He sure is. He’s a demented fuck. But you knew that. There’s surprisingly little to be said about compulsive sociopaths, subcategory criminal, subcategory homicidal, though I could take five-hours saying it. Let’s see if the fortune-teller’s manual can shed anything succinct in the way of light.”

Dr. Muller returned to his dent in the sofa. He opened the book and ran his thumb down an index. “Tell me, Lieutenant, are you competent in psychobabble or do I have to translate?”

“I can follow the gist.”

“Okay, I’m going to condense. The type of sociopath who left that girl’s body parts in that basket would be male, in his late teens to early forties, from a broken home or dysfunctional family, one or both parents addicted to alcohol or drugs and/or abusive. He would have a history of poor relations with the opposite sex and with male authority figures. He would be unable to postpone gratification. He would see others as nonpersons; they would matter only insofar as they could gratify his ego needs. He would be deeply conflicted about sex and possibly about gender.”