“I’ll be right back,” he said.
She kissed him.
At the refreshment stand he dropped the quarter in the phone and dialed Manhattan. He recognized the voice that answered. “Flo, it’s Vince.”
“Hiya, Vince, we got something for you.”
Cardozo had no trouble finding the address. Beaux Arts Tower stood on a street of boutiques and French bakeries and antique dealers and $200-an-hour psychoanalysts, a narrow skyscraper thrusting sharply above the neighboring landmarked six-story brownstones.
The building had a glassy, upscale look. He remembered the ads: Beaux Arts Tower. The luxury of the 21st century now. Built in the air space over a midtown museum, it was prime Manhattan real estate, occupied by many of the city’s movers and shakers.
A large pale blue Plymouth was double-parked in front of the building. Light vibrated on the car. As Cardozo approached, the passenger door swung open and Mel O’Brien, chief of detectives, stepped out.
In his gray gabardine suit, conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes, the chief looked like a fund-raiser for a prep school.
“Very handsome,” Cardozo said.
“What’s that?” The chief’s face was set in hard, impatient lines.
“You, Chief. Handsome.”
Chief O’Brien was a man of fine bearing, age fifty-seven, tall, blue-eyed, with silver hair and a pink face. An angry pink face. “What kept you?”
“Traffic.”
“I’ll be right back,” O’Brien told his chauffeur, a detective sitting at the wheel. If you were the chief of detectives, even your driver had a gold shield.
Cardozo and Mel O’Brien approached the building.
The chief moved with a swing to his shoulders. “Hope I didn’t pull you away from anything important.”
Cardozo answered, “You did.”
The chief was solemnly reading his face. “What are you working on?”
“The usual. A couple dozen homicides.”
“Farm them out. There’s something upstairs I need you to take over right away. Murdered man in a mask.”
“Mask?” That interested Cardozo. You got jaded in this job. A murdered man was ordinary, a mask wasn’t.
“Bondage mask, executioner’s mask, some black leather shit. Someone killed him and left him naked in one of the for-sale apartments. Took one of his legs.”
“Ouch.”
“You get your own task force. Borrow anyone from any precinct you want. Put together your dream team. Whatever they’ve got ongoing, they’re liberated. And they’re on overtime, starting now.”
Cardozo went into the lobby, a cool art deco arcade of white Carrara marble and patinated bronze. There were man-high corn plants, lushly potted, and deep leather sofas, unoccupied. A sign said ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED. A nervous-looking man in a green uniform sat by the switchboard. He looked over and said, “’Scuse me, who are you visiting?”
He had an accent that was half Puerto Rico, half New York street, and as he came forward Cardozo saw that the right side of his face was streaked with scars that had probably been fresh yesterday.
“I’m visiting the corpse.”
The doorman stopped, startled, and an Irish sergeant came around from behind the switchboard. “That’s okay, Hector. Lieutenant, this is Hector—Hector, this is Lieutenant Cardozo. You’ll be seeing a lot of him.”
“How do you do, sir.” The doorman, embarrassed, lifted his cap and revealed a wig that a dime store window dummy would have been ashamed to wear.
“Floor six, Lieutenant.” The sergeant held the elevator door.
In the vestibule on six, a sergeant from the 22d precinct stood guard outside the apartment. He was young, pale, and acting harried. He glanced at Cardozo’s shield and handed him plastic gloves.
Cardozo twisted his fingers into the gloves. They popped on with revolting kissing smacks. As he entered the apartment, another sergeant wrote Cardozo’s name, shield number, and time of arrival into the crime scene log.
The naked body, bathed in sunlight, was stretched flat on its back on the floor of the master bedroom.
The calm blue eyes, staring through a black leather mask that hugged the entire skull, were fixed on the ceiling, their gaze flat and mysterious. The mouth was locked behind a steel zipper.
Cardozo crouched for a closer look.
The mask, with its uncanny power, disturbed and fascinated him. If ever an object had suggested absolute evil to his mind, it was that crudely stitched piece of dyed hide, combining the anonymity of the executioner with the obscenity of a pig’s snout.
The body was in good shape—well-exercised, lean; it was Caucasian, the body of a man in his twenties.
With the stopping of the heart, gravity had pulled the blood to the lower half of the body, causing dark blue discolorations of the parts lying downside.
The chest was crisscrossed with scratch marks. They made a circle with a Y in it, the old sixties peace sign. None appeared to have penetrated the muscle layer.
The victim’s right leg had been removed. From the look of the shear marks on the startlingly white femoral bone, a buzz saw had done the job.
On the foot of the remaining leg a tag had been tied to the big toe. The tag was a standard department form, number 95. The first officer on the scene had filled in the time of discovery and relevant details.
Dan Hippolito, the medical examiner—a slim man in his middle fifties with receding, graying hair—opened the zipper of the mask to examine the dead man’s lips and gums.
“When do you think he died?” Cardozo asked.
“Not more than twenty-four hours ago … not less than twelve.”
“How was he killed?”
The M.E. looked closely at the throat. “Pending autopsy, I’d say fracture of the cervical vertebrae.”
In New York City, Cardozo reflected, strangling was not one of your more usual methods of dispatching your fellow man. “I have a feeling this one died high. I want to know the drugs.”
“We’ll give his blood a good spin. Should have all prescriptions for you tomorrow.”
A photographer was snapping pictures of the dead man. A detective was taking measurements with a pocket tape, calling out figures for his partner to mark on the crime scene sketch. A technician was outlining the corpse in chalk.
A team from the Forensic Unit was taking scrapings from the floor. Cardozo recognized Lou Stein from the lab, hunkered down searching for blood particles or traces of semen.
“What have you got, Lou?”
Lou glanced up. He was two weeks back from his Florida vacation, and his face was still mahogany beneath a fringe of straw-colored hair. “Ask me tomorrow.”
Down the hallway fingerprint men armed with flitguns and makeup brushes pumped dark powder on windowsills and doorknobs, dusting for latent prints. A sergeant stood writing in a notebook.
“You were the first on the scene, Sergeant?” Cardozo asked.
The sergeant nodded. He looked all of twenty years old: freckles, blond hair, a cowlick.
“Who called you here?”
The sergeant tilted his head toward an overweight man in slacks and a peach Lacoste shirt standing near the doorway. “The super.”
“The super found the body?”
“No. She did.” Now the sergeant was nodding toward a good-looking, light-brown-haired woman who was taking a light from the super’s Zippo. “The sales agent. She was showing the apartment to those two.” He indicated a woman with a red sweater tied around her shoulders and a man in a striped polo shirt.
“Anyone else seen the body that I don’t know about?”
“No one’s left the apartment since I got here.”
Cardozo crossed to the civilians and introduced himself. The super gave his name as Bill Connell, and Cardozo asked if he had mentioned to anyone what he’d seen in the apartment.
The super shook his head. “Not a soul. I made the phone call and came right back.”
“I’m going to ask you people not to talk about anything you’ve seen here. Not that a man is dead, or naked, or wearing a mask, or missing a leg. We want to keep those details secret because aside from the people in this apartment, only the killer knows about them. The success of the investigation is going to depend on your cooperation.”