VC03 - Mortal Grace (56 page)

“Was he?”

“Definitely sane.”

“And telling the truth?”

“In my opinion, much of what he said…was truthful.”

Muller looked away. Cardozo could see he was ashamed of this part of it.

“It came out—during the course of my examination of Eff—that he ran a sort of…employment agency. He provided young people to…customers who enjoyed that kind of thing. It so happens I’m doing research on juvenile prostitution. For the National Institutes of Health. The project is completely legitimate.”

Muller had raised his voice and he seemed to realize it. His face flushed.

“Eff and I worked out an informal arrangement. He referred young people to me for my research—and in addition to paying his customary fee, I looked the other way when he stole azidofluoramine.”

In other words
, Cardozo translated,
you provided him with the drug and he provided it to half the runaways on the docks.
“And what kind of research did you do with these young people?”

“I interviewed them. We discussed the sorts of services they provided their clients.”

“And did you ever ask them to demonstrate these services?”

“Once or twice—they volunteered.” Muller set down his martini. “I’ve spent a lifetime researching human nature—yet there are still times I don’t understand people, times when I don’t understand the things they allow themselves to be put through.”

“Do they always have a choice?”

“Yes. Always.” Muller made a hollow of one hand and a ball of the other, and he socked the ball into the hollow. It was an angry, brutal, self-punishing movement. “And anyone who says otherwise is dipping deep into the well of psychobabble. Mind you, on the spectrum of paraphilia, what these young people allowed was barely middling-grade nastiness. Still, people progress to extremes. And often rapidly.”

It bothered Cardozo that you could know as much about other people as Vergil Muller knew and still never take any responsibility for the truth about yourself. “How did Eff know which young people to send you?”

“He mailed me photographs and I returned the ones who looked—right for my research.”

“Where did you return them?”

“To an address on Highland Road in the Bronx.”

“Do you still have any of these photos?”

At nine-thirty sharp that evening, Ellie Siegel stepped into the Twenty-third Street Roy Rogers. About half the tables were taken, and six women were sitting alone, but none of them wore a yellow silk rose above her ear.

Ellie got herself a cup of coffee and was considering the hot apple pie when her conscience told her
absolutely not.
She took her coffee to a corner table where she could watch the door.

A woman who’d been sitting across the restaurant dropped into the chair next to her. “Lieutenant Siegel?”

Ellie turned. “Mrs. Quigley?”

The woman had graying dark hair, pulled back from the forehead and anchored with a barrette. She wore nothing else in her hair.

“I know, no yellow rose. I wanted a look at you before you got a look at me.”

She was wearing a pup tent the color of autumn leaves, drawn in well above the waist with a knotted winter woolen scarf. Ellie wondered if that was a look or a necessity.

“Long day,” Mrs. Quigley said. “Had to return some items I bought at a Canal Street closeout.
That
was a fight. And then a session with my chiropractor. My knees. Can’t get down and clean a floor the way I used to.”

“What about using a mop?”

Mrs. Quigley gave her a look that said,
No. Not now. Not ever.
“Mops can’t scrub. You don’t do your own housekeeping, do you?”

“I do when I have time.”

“Most cleaning women take the easy way out. Spray polish. Spray ʼn Vac. As long as I’ve been keeping house, I never used a spray anything. Not for Father Montgomery, not for Father Monahan, not for Father Romero. I hear Father Montgomery’s new woman uses foam-rubber mops.”

Olga Quigley’s hand shot into her purse.

“It’s Father Romero I’m here about. Did you know him?”

Ellie shook her head.

“Ever see any of his shows? They were terrific.”

“Never saw one.”

“He was a good man, even if he did drink. And he never touched those children. I’m not saying he was a saint by any stretch, but he never touched a child—or a teenager. Or anyone. All he wanted to do was help people. That Department of Law and that D.A. and what they did to Father Chuck’s memory, it makes me sick.”

Mrs. Quigley brought a plastic food bag out of her purse. It was stuffed with charred paper.

“When things started going wrong for Father Chuck, he began burning papers. His files—his calendars—his letters. His life. I saved what I could.”

“What was he trying to hide?”

“I doubt he knew. But he felt he was being investigated. So he tried to hide everything.”

Ellie opened the doggie bag and sifted through the blackened scraps.

“That one you’ve got there,” Mrs. Quigley said, “that was the very first thing he ever burned.”

Ellie looked down at a fragment of a card bearing the letters ALLY MANFRE. The address and phone were still legible.

SEVENTY-ONE

A
FTER DINNER, TERRI GLANCED
across the space between their two easy chairs. “What’s the matter, Dad?”

“Did I say anything was the matter?”

“You don’t need to say it in words.”

“I’m sorry if my body language is that transparent.”

“It’s your breathing. You hold it too long and then you grunt.”

“I’m trying to figure something out. I think it’s code. Wizzen Rizzem.”

“Wizzen Rizzem?” When she stood it seemed to him she was already on the tall side of average for her age. She lifted the notepad from his lap. “W - Z - N - R - Z - M. Where does it come from?”

“Somebody’s date book. They had a few lunches and dinners with this guy.”

She squinted, pursed her lips, gave the skin of her face an isometric workout. She ripped a blank piece of paper from the pad and folded the sheet lengthwise down the middle.

“What’s this going to be, a paper glider?”

“This is going to blow your socks off.” Her ballpoint moved rapidly, writing the alphabet in a column down the left-hand side of the fold. Then the pen came up the right-hand side of the fold. This time
A
to
Z
ran bottom to top. She began drawing horizontal arrows. The letter
W
on the left connected to
D
on the right.
Z
connected to
A.
“It’s a reverse alphabet code.”

Cardozo felt mild amazement. Amazed, first, that he had not remembered the code from his own childhood, when comic books had used it to encrypt messages from Superman and Captain Marvel. Amazed, secondly, that people were still entrusting their secrets to it.

Terri drew an arrow from
N
to
M
. When she drew the next arrow,
R
to
I
, he saw it.

“Damian—only misspelled.”

Terri drew the last connection,
M
to
N.
“Anyone you know?”

“Not personally—but I’m becoming familiar with his work.”

Cardozo crossed to Greg Monteleone’s desk. “May I?” He opened the follow-log on Bonnie Ruskay. He ran his finger down yesterday’s entries. “Who was following Ruskay yesterday evening—you or Henahan?”

Greg twanged one of his fire-engine-red suspenders. “Me—and unless my eyes deceived me, you. Henahan took over at eight.”

Cardozo’s finger stopped at 5:10
P.M
., when Ruskay’s taxi had left her at 474 Broadway. According to the log, she’d spent close to seven hours in the apartment of a W. Erbro on the eighth floor.

“Who’s this W. Erbro person?”

Greg shrugged. His lack of concern was not just breezy, it was monumental. “I looked him up in the phone listings. There’s no such residence or business.”

Cardozo frowned. His finger moved down. A little after midnight, Reverend Bonnie Ruskay had taken a taxi back to her apartment. “What kind of building is it?”

“A run-down old loft-building in Soho.”

“That much I could see for myself. Who lives there, what happens there?”

“Artists and small manufacturing.” Greg smirked. There seemed to be some kind of private little joke going on in the back of his mind. “The directory says eight is Erbro, but it doesn’t say what kind of business he’s in.”

“Something strike you as amusing?”

Greg shrugged disdainfully.

Annoyance was like a wad of doughnut burning in Cardozo’s throat. “Find out who Erbro is.”

Greg snapped the other suspender. “I’m trying.”

Cardozo went to his cubicle. He opened his briefcase and took out the photos Dr. Vergil Muller had surrendered. He spent a moment pondering each face in turn.

There were eight photos. He spread them on the desk top side by side, like playing cards. Five teenage girls, three teenage boys. Their names—or names that might have been theirs—had been block-printed in the lower margins.

Their charms had not been great enough to attract Dr. Muller. Which meant, possibly, that they had not yet been bound by belts or cut with knives or burned with hot candle wax. Possibly they were even still alive.

Now Cardozo arranged Father Joe’s runaway photos in a line above Muller’s.

The printing on the two series of photos was the same.

He could see only one difference: the names on Father Joe’s were followed by a number. There was no number on any of Muller’s.

He held a magnifying glass over the photo of a gap-toothed boy with the name Barry Bone. He examined the wall behind Mr. Bone.

At first his eyes had trouble focusing in the hard fluorescent light, and he saw nothing. Then he moved the glass a little further away, and a blemish appeared in the upper right-hand corner.

He moved the glass further and the blemish resolved itself into a lightning-shaped zigzag.

The seven other photos each had the same zigzag in the same place.

At that moment, sitting still was not one of Cardozo’s talents. He lifted the phone and dialed Deborah Fairchild at the D.A.’s office.

“Fairchild.” She sounded harried.

“Cardozo. Do I get a hello?”

She sighed. “Hello, Cardozo.”

“Hello yourself. Have you got a minute?”

“No.”

“Our friend Vergil Muller has been operating in a kind of ethical gray zone. While he was evaluating Eff Huffington for the D.A., he struck a private deal with him.”

“Do I really want to hear what this deal was?”

“I doubt it. Muller hired Eff to provide him with teenage runaways for s/m games. He paid Eff in cash and an FDA protocol drug.”

“I knew this was going to be awful.”

“It gets worse. Eff sent Muller photos of the chicken-of-the-week candidates. The camera that took Muller’s photos is the same camera that took the photos of the dead runaways in Father Joe Montgomery’s files. I have a hunch the D.A. is grooming Father Joe to star as the communion killer, and his case—if I’m not mistaken—rests on those photos.”

“No, you’re not mistaken. I wish you were.” She was silent for a moment, putting it together. “I haven’t been completely forthcoming with you.”

“I didn’t think you had been.”

“I’ve been holding back one task force voucher—Fabrikant Gems on West Forty-seventh Street invoiced them twelve hundred dollars.”

Cardozo scowled. “What did a D.A.’s task force need to buy from a gem store?”

“According to the invoice, a small gold-plated ring. I don’t want to think what this one could mean.”

“I’ll meet you at Fabrikant in fifteen minutes.”

Cardozo entered an arcade on West Forty-seventh, in the heart of Manhattan’s block-long diamond district.

The space swarmed with sightseers, shoppers, the Hasidim who did most of the city’s diamond dealing, delivery boys from nearby delicatessens. People were window-shopping, bargain-hunting, touting wares, arguing prices, disputing appraisals, and doing it all in shouts. The granite walls tunneled a deafening babble of English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish.

If Deborah Fairchild hadn’t waved to Cardozo from one of the shop fronts, he would never have spotted the tiny booth that was Fabrikant Gems, Inc.

“Vince, this is Aryeh Fabrikant.”

A heavyset blond man in shirtsleeves, with traditional curls and a generic black yarmulke, sat behind a small jewelry-strewn worktable, talking into a phone in rapid Hebrew. He nodded to Cardozo, acknowledging the introduction. His body language was cool, minimal. Deborah had obviously outlined the situation and he knew he wasn’t making a sale. What he didn’t know was if he was facing any kind of accusation.

When he finally hung up the phone, Deborah laid an invoice on the worktable. “We need to know the details of this transaction.”

Aryeh Fabrikant glowered at the invoice and took it to a steel filing cabinet against the wall. He pulled open a drawer and began thumbing through carbons of old receipts. He looked through three drawers and brought a flimsy sheet of yellow paper back to the table. He adjusted the arm of the jeweler’s light and studied the faint tracks of handwriting.

“That was a rush order. They wanted me to duplicate a small gold-plated ring.”

“What kind of small gold ring?” Cardozo said.

“
Gold-plated
ring,” Aryeh Fabrikant said. “It was a trinket, a piece of junk—not even in good shape.”

“Then why did it cost twelve hundred to copy it?” Deborah said.

The smile in Aryeh Fabrikant’s eyes said there was no explaining human caprice, at least not in the jewelry business. “It had to be an exact copy, and it had to be done in twenty-four hours.”

“Why twenty-four hours?”

“They wouldn’t let me keep the original any longer than that. Why, they didn’t say—I didn’t ask. Frankly, I didn’t want the job—I named a ridiculous price to discourage them. But they paid.”

“Let me see the date on that order.”

Aryeh Fabrikant handed Cardozo the yellow sheet. The date of the order was four and a half weeks after the discovery of Wanda Gilmartin’s body.