VC03 - Mortal Grace (5 page)

“Can you recall when that picture was taken?”

“More or less.”

“Did one of you take a flash picture?”

“I did. Wouldn’t have missed that photo-op for the world.”

“What were you photographing?”

“I took a whole roll of my performers—if you’ll excuse the possessive. They were doing a knockout tap-dance number. St. Andrew’s puts on musicals using young volunteers for talent. You may have heard of our productions.”

Father Montgomery waved a beefy hand toward the wall. Elegantly framed posters announced twelve years of annual musicals, written and directed by Father Montgomery. Alongside them hung framed reviews and interviews. The largest and most ornate frame enclosed a citation from Operation Second Chance, honoring Father Joseph Montgomery for
exceptional and meritorious service to the youth of our city.

“I’m very proud of my talent pool.” Father Montgomery opened a desk drawer. He brought out a Brooks Brothers shoe box and set it on the desk. “They’re a wonderful mix—Social Register, ghetto, black, white, oriental.”

There was something about his expression—particularly when he boasted—that seemed almost juvenile. And then Cardozo realized it was something about Father Montgomery’s
lack
of expression: he’d had a lift, and his face was absolutely dead around the eyes.

“We even have one ex-hooker; she’s so street, so funny, so divine.”

“What about the photo you took of the bush?”

“The bush?”

“When Ms. Lowndes screamed, didn’t you turn and photograph the bush where the body was found?”

Father Montgomery blinked and missed a beat. “I’m a garden fiend—I was probably just photographing the flower beds.”

“Could I have the film you shot that day?”

“If you honestly think my amateur photography will help you find that poor child’s killer.”

“You may have caught something that the TV camera didn’t.”

Father Montgomery lifted the telephone receiver. “Bonnie—be an angel. Do you think we can locate that film I shot at the Vanderbilt Garden opening?”

When he replaced the receiver, Cardozo was staring at him.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

Father Joe smiled defensively. “Should I?”

“We once had a conversation about a relative of mine—a teenager by the name of Sally Manfredo.”

“Really? I hope your relative is doing well.”

“So do I.”

At five-thirty that afternoon, Cardozo got back to the precinct and found himself stuck behind a minor traffic jam: two sergeants were pulling a teenage male Hispanic up the narrow iron-banistered staircase. The kid’s scrawny wrists were jerking in handcuffs behind his back. He was kicking, shouting that the cops had confiscated his inventory.

“Take you to the Supreme Court, man, the Supreme Court!”

They dragged him to the second-floor holding cage and threw him in with a half dozen docile-looking deadbeats.

The words
confiscate
and
inventory
echoed strangely in Cardozo’s ear as he climbed to the third floor. He went to the lieutenant’s desk in the squad room and looked over the sixty sheet—the complaints from the preceding tour.

“What’s going on downstairs?” he said. “They arresting vagrants for panhandling or what?”

Ellie Siegel looked up from her desk. Her eyes had a don’t-give-me-any-more-nuisance-today look. “Crackdown on sidewalk peddlers selling magazines without a license.”

“Last I heard, girlie and porno magazines were free speech.”

“New orders from the Puzzle Palace.” Headquarters at One Police Plaza churned out so many exasperating and nonsensical orders that cops called the place the Puzzle Palace. “More than eighty percent picture content, and it isn’t printed matter.”

“That’s crazy. The courts’ll knock it right down.”

“In a year.” Ellie came with him into his cubicle. “There’s a copy on your desk.”

The latest directive from the police commissioner—printed, like all of them, on blue paper—sat on the desk top, anchored by a small plastic bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a plastic-wrapped wedge of prune-colored something. Cardozo picked up the shrink-wrapped something. “What’s this?”

“Rice cake.” Ellie shut the door. “It’s delicious and it’s good for you.”

Cardozo peeled off the plastic. His nose told him the wedge was sweet. His teeth bit down on corrugated air. He skimmed the directive as he chewed.

It was exactly as Ellie had said, and it had all the thumbprints of city hall. Polls showed that fear of crime was up—and for a very good reason: crime was up. But the mayor—always running for re-election in this city—was putting out stats that crime was down. His figures were cooked: plea-bargained violent crimes were reclassified as lesser felonies. The nonviolent-crime count was padded with quality-of-life offenses like littering and loud radios, so the percentage of violent crimes appeared to decline.

Cardozo felt a hot ball of anger in his gut. The murder rate in this city had soared to an even dozen a day. Armed and violent assaults averaged a daily hundred. Cops nailed perpetrators in fewer than a third of the cases. The D.A. opted to prosecute fewer than a third of that third, and juries returned convictions in fewer than sixteen percent of all criminal trials. Half of those convictions got reversed on appeal.

Thirty-six hundred people were getting murdered a year, the list of the terrorized was going up by a half million annually, and the mayor and his commissioner had decided that the best defense against the human tigers ripping the city apart was a wall of paper.

Cardozo crumpled the directive and sailed it into the wastebasket where it belonged.

“You had a message from Dan Hippolito,” Ellie said.

He was still tasting sulfur and he realized it was Ellie’s rice cake. His tongue told him,
No way.
“This thing is awful.”

“You’re running around twelve, fourteen hours a day without a regular meal. You can’t live on coffee. You have to put something in your system besides junk.”

He knew better than to argue with Ellie. The only way out was to change the subject. “What did Dan want?”

“He says he has good news that he hopes you’ll have the good sense not to take as bad news.”

Cardozo rewrapped the wedge and tossed it into the wastebasket on top of the commissioner’s latest. “I’ll stick to junk.”

“He says there’s no way Ms. Basket Case could be Sally.”

When Cardozo looked around, Ellie was staring at him. Her eyes had a slight almond shape and it gave her gaze an oddly personal quality that made you look twice.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t look at me that way.”

“Which way?”

“Like you’re sizing up a suspect.”

“Sorry,” she said. “It fascinates me how your jaw tenses when you feel threatened.”

“My jaw tenses when I’m trying to swallow the commissioner’s prose and a rice cake ambushes my mouth.”

“Vince—who’s Sally?”

Cardozo uncapped the orange juice, swished his mouth clean of rice treat, and swallowed. “Sally Manfredo. You never met her.”

“Your sister’s girl?”

He nodded. “She vanished six years ago. Before I knew you.”

That look in Ellie’s eye sharpened. “And you’re still worried about her.”

“When something like Ms. Basket Case happens—sure, I’m worried.”

Ellie nodded. “I understand.” She turned to go. “Oh, there was one other message. Sam Portola.”

He tipped his head back and drained the plastic bottle. “Do I know him?”

“A doorman up on Fifth Avenue. He thinks he may have seen something in the garden.”

1010 Fifth Avenue, an elegant granite-faced prewar building, stood directly opposite the Vanderbilt Garden. It must have been one of those co-ops where the maintenance had gone so high that the tenants required something tangibly ritzy for their money—which in this case meant a doorman dressed in a full three-piece uniform no matter how hot the day.

And today was hot.

The name tag on the gray-and-gold livery jacket said
SAM PORTOLA
. He held the door at Cardozo’s approach, smiling with cheerfully counterfeit affability.

“Sam, can I have a word with you?” Cardozo flashed his shield.

Portola’s face fell. “Sure, but I’m on duty.”

“You phoned the Twenty-second Precinct—you wanted to report something you saw in Vanderbilt Garden?”

“Right. A detective was asking me the other day, and I didn’t remember. But today is Ginny’s birthday—my other kid. And that made me remember. I saw a van in the garden, parked near a light.”

Cardozo took out his notebook. “This was inside the garden?”

Portola nodded. “This was inside the garden—back by the shrubs where they found that…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

A man and woman glided through the lobby in conspicuously tailored clothes. Portola jumped to hold the door for them.

“Do you remember the approximate date when you saw this van?” Cardozo asked.

“It was a year and three months ago. March seventh.”

Cardozo had learned to distrust exactness in memory. “How do you happen to recall?”

“There was kind of a smiling sun painted on the side. The smiling sun reminded me to buy happy-face balloons from the balloon factory on West Twenty-first Street. For my other kid. Sammy. March seventh is his birthday. If it hadn’t been for that van, I would have forgotten.”

“Did you see who was driving this van?”

Portola shook his head.

“See anyone hanging around?”

Portola held his head at a thoughtful tilt and his finger stroked the web of broken blood vessels on his nose. He was silent a long moment before he finally nodded. “Well, there was a guy in the bushes, but I thought he was taking a leak, so I didn’t look too hard.”

“How long was he taking a leak?”

“I didn’t notice him there for long.”

“Can you describe him?”

“ʼFraid not.”

“How long was the van there?”

“Oh, it was there for an hour, an hour and a half, at least.”

“Do you remember anything else about its appearance?”

“It was blue. Looked like a Toyota. It had teardrop-shaped windows in the rear. And there were some words painted under the smiling sun. But there were branches in the way—I couldn’t read them all.”

“Could you read any?”

“God.”

“God?”

“All I could read was the first word—
God
.”

SIX

A
VOICE ON THE SPEAKER
softly prodded. “Eminence. You said three-fifteen.”

On the sofa, Barry Ignatius Cardinal Fitzwilliam stirred.
So soon?
he thought. “Is he here?”

“Yes, Eminence.”

“All right. Send him in.”

Cardinal Fitzwilliam got up, went into the washroom, and splashed his face. His nap had not rested him. It never did. He massaged cold water into the mottled, fallen skin around his eyes. The face in the mirror reminded him of an elderly dog—good-natured, deserving of love, but beginning to fail, no longer deserving of complete trust.

He came back into his office. The high ceilings gave a sense of emptiness and space. A little too much space. Despite the uncluttered, gleaming surfaces, he kept losing things. He frowned, looking for his biretta.

“Hello, Barry. How are you?” Manhattan District Attorney William Kodahl held out a hand. It was a steady hand: the district attorney was twenty-one years the cardinal’s junior. His hair was gray, but it was an effective, carefully styled gray: it brought out something electric and determined in the blue of his eyes.

The cardinal’s fingertips grazed the D.A.’s hand. One didn’t offer one’s hand to a cardinal, but you couldn’t expect a busy, free-thinking Jew to know that. And did it matter, really?

“I’m looking for my biretta….” It occurred to the cardinal that the D.A. might not know the word. “That cap of mine.”

“On the sofa.”

“Oh, yes. You have good eyes. Thank you.” The cardinal bent down, placed the biretta on his head, and—feeling a little more like a cardinal now—turned. “What have you got for me?”

The D.A. handed the cardinal a State of New York Department of Law interoffice manila envelope.

The cardinal looked for his spectacles. He was surprised, pleasantly, to find them hanging by a cord around his neck. He adjusted them to his nose, crossed to his desk, and spread out the contents of the envelope across the blotter.

The cardinal’s desk lamps—a pair of blackamoor women dressed like dancing footmen—had belonged to his mother. They were old-fashioned and politically very incorrect, but quite endearing once you got used to them. He had been used to them a very long time. He turned one of them on and moved a glossy magazine into the lamplight.

The cover showed a skimpily clad entertainer dressed as Carmen Miranda with a platter of tropical fruit on her head. He or she—it was impossible to tell which—was standing on tiptoe to kiss a cardinal in full ecclesiastical regalia. The cardinal, he realized, was himself.

The photo had to be some kind of computer-generated trick. He had never even met a Carmen Miranda impersonator.

His eye went to the name of the publication:
OutMag: A Monthly Journal of Gay and Lesbian Interest.
A bold red headline teased:
THE HUSHED-UP SCANDAL OF KIDDOPHILES IN THE CATHOLIC CLERGY—WHO’S FOOLING WITH WHOM?

The cardinal was aware of a slow burning sensation in his head. “Are these people still publishing? Who’s funding them?”

“The editor won a lawsuit. She’s invested her settlement in the magazine.”

“What kind of lawsuit?”

“She accused a man of rape.”

Why would a man rape a lesbian? That struck the cardinal as odd, like so much else in the world nowadays. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in the diocese taking legal action against the magazine?”

“Don’t fight freedom of the press. Looks medieval.”

“You mean, it looks Catholic.”

“I mean, why give
OutMag
the publicity?”

Beneath the magazine the cardinal found a sheaf of police photos and documents. “And these?”

“Those are the bad news. Raw data. Don’t discuss them with anyone.”