Bottles of perfumes and lotions were neatly organized and displayed on a triptych-mirrored dressing table. A carved standing lamp cast a glowing circle of light on a faceless, curly-topped wig stand. He smiled.
That
was the woman whom newsmen had loved to photograph.
A tiny ormolu clock ticked softly on a small leather-topped desk. Cut flowers drooped from a narrow porcelain vase. An engraved crystal paperweight rested on a stack of unopened mail. A folio-size silk-bound engagement book lay open to the preceding week. The pages were blank.
He turned to the present week. There was only one entry, and it was for today:
Tuesday, September 8. Lunch, 1 P.M.
—
Jack
.
He searched past and future weeks. All blank.
He glanced up at the sound of a footstep. A very young-looking woman in the uniform of a New York City cop stood in the shadow of the doorway. She had tried to butch up her appearance by cutting her hair short, using no makeup, and clenching her jaw. He recognized Sergeant Britta Bailey from his precinct.
“Lieutenant—this is Jack Briar.” Her voice trembled, and Cardozo suspected that this might be her first homicide. “Mr. Briar found the bodies.”
A tall, ponytailed man in his thirties held out a hand. The hand was shaking badly and he had swollen, shell-shocked eyes.
“I’m very sorry,” Cardozo said.
Jack Briar nodded. “Thank you.”
“We’ll need a statement. Would you wait for me in the living room?”
Cardozo waited till Briar was gone. “There’s another body?”
Officer Britta Bailey nodded. She led him down a carpeted corridor through a high-ceilinged sitting room filled with antique needlepoint furniture and beaded lamps and age-spotted mirrors. With tasseled velvet curtains shutting out the bright September day, it had the clutter of an antique shop. Cardozo had heard rumors that former Treasury Secretary John Briar and his wife had profited from the bailout of a dozen Midwestern savings and loans. The sounds of traffic surging by down on Park Avenue seemed light-years away.
They went down a long hallway, the walls covered with framed photos of John Briar grinning at long-forgotten dignitaries. A uniformed cop stood outside a door. His face looked as though he’d just been force-fed a plateful of rat gizzards. Cardozo felt a trickle of foreboding. He pushed the door open.
He wrinkled his nose. A rancid odor floated in the dank, warm air.
He reached for the wall switch and flicked.
On the oriental carpet by the bed, crumpled between the lion’s paw of a black marble table and the silk seat of a toppled lyre-back chair, John Briar lay faceup in a scattering of books and magazines, shattered lamps and feathers. A goose-down pillow had burst and he had pulled it and the bedsheets with him.
His face was the color of yellow chalk. Beneath an unbelted satin robe, his body was appallingly skinny; ribs showed like white welts. His lips and nipples had drained of pigment. Thinning jet-black hair was slicked back from a high, amazed forehead. The roots were silver. A lump of hair-weave had matted halfway up the tangled strands. Mouth and eyes gaped in a scream of silent terror.
Cardozo felt his nerves clench. He wasn’t the block of ice he used to be. Reality was landing punches that he’d have blocked five years before.
He took his notebook from his jacket pocket and began jotting.
Sergeant Britta Bailey rapped on the open door. “Lieutenant, the crime scene team is here.”
Six dark-suited men and a woman hurried into the room. They snapped open their black carrying cases and went to work, collecting stain samples, dusting for latent fingerprints, searching with infrared light for suspicious fibers and oils and dirt and stains. With their silent purposefulness they reminded Cardozo of starlings gathering in a dead apple tree. Two men from the medical examiner’s office dragged a black plastic body bag into the room, straps trailing on the rug.
Cardozo stepped out of their way and crossed to the door. “You said you have a suspect in custody?”
Sergeant Bailey nodded. “If you’re a football fan, get ready for a jolt.”
She took him down another hallway and through a dining room, where the table was laid for six with linen and silver and china and crystal. Two uniformed officers stepped aside.
“I used to worship this guy,” she said. “Seriously.”
She pushed open a swinging door. They stepped into a dining room-size kitchen.
A heavyset man sat at the butcher-block table sucking spaghetti from a five-gallon pot. His fork and spoon made hungry scraping sounds on the stainless steel. His dirty blond hair needed a cut badly. He wore a loose khaki shirt, cotton trousers, and Top-Siders. Underneath all that loose cloth a lot of muscle moved and a lot more was held in reserve.
“Hello, Mickey.” Cardozo had never met Mickey Williams before, but he knew the face from photos and TV ten years back, when Williams had been a star running back for the Houston Oilers. Cardozo opened his wallet and flashed his ID. “Vince Cardozo, Twenty-second Precinct. I’d like to talk to you.”
Williams’s eyes came up and swung around, death-trance brown with icy black dots. He grinned. “Have a seat.” The voice was soft. A thick hand went out and pushed back a chair.
Cardozo sat. “How long have you been in this apartment, Mickey?”
Williams shifted. “Three, four days.”
Cardozo sensed something seriously out of whack. The voice was pitched like a child’s. The words were toneless, the affect flat.
“Are you aware that there are two dead people on the premises?”
Williams nodded. “Yes, sir, I’m aware of that. Johnny and Amalia.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Good friends. He was.”
“How many hours have you known of their deaths?”
“Since they died. I killed them.”
Cardozo angled his green Honda Civic into the alley. Britta Bailey held open the passenger door.
Mickey Williams, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun, stumbled into a stack of A-frame crowd-control barriers. His face colored. “Sorry about that.” He crouched and began restacking.
Funny guy
, Cardozo thought.
Doesn’t blink an eye at murdering two defenseless old people but goes to pieces when he makes a mess in an alley.
“Don’t worry about it now.” He steered Williams up the steps of the century-old East 63rd Street precinct building. One of the green glass globes was busted and the ironwork was rusting and the painted bricks were peeling.
Sergeant Bailey followed, a hand on her holstered service revolver.
The inside of the precinct was every bit as dingy as the exterior. Cardozo waved to the lieutenant working the complaint desk. Cops prided themselves on their cool, but not even ten-year men were immune to celebrity worship, and the lieutenant did a double take at the sight of the Houston Oilers’ former star.
“Come on.” Cardozo hurried Williams up the steel-banistered staircase. “Before they start asking for your autograph.”
“You kidding?” Williams had a wistful, “if only” look. “Nobody remembers me.”
“They’re going to remember you now.”
The marble steps leading to the third floor smelled of their weekly ammonia bath, but the cracks were grit-caked and filthy. On a bench in the hall a detective was taking a statement from a bag lady with Park Avenue diction.
“What’s this city coming to?” she wailed. “Twelve-year-old children carrying automatics on the Lexington Avenue
local
!”
Cardozo nodded. “You’re absolutely right, darling.” He opened a door and gestured Williams into the detective unit squad room. Mickey Williams’s legs and butt so stretched his seersucker trousers that the pocket linings showed as white half-moons.
Cardozo pointed. “You can make yourself comfortable in that little room over there. How do you like your coffee?”
“I dunno. Sugar and cream.”
“Optimist.” Cardozo threaded his way between old metal desks. An antique coffeemaker sat gurgling on the padlocked cabinet where detectives stored their revolvers. He poured two plastic cups of tarlike liquid, then added to each a plastic spoonful of nondairy creamer and an envelope of sweetener.
It was late in the shift and the squad room was deserted except for Detective Greg Monteleone.
“What’s happening?” Cardozo asked.
Monteleone shrugged. “A ten-thirty came in five minutes ago.” Ten-thirty was cop-code for reported stickup, and they’d been on the rise throughout the Upper East Side. “A male Caucasian with a box cutter held up a Mr. Softee ice-cream truck on Madison.”
“What kind of moron is this town breeding?” Cardozo shook his head. “Criminals used to have brains.”
“Hey.” Monteleone lowered his voice. “Is that Mickey Williams in your office?”
“Yeah, but keep it under your hat.”
“What kind of trouble is he in?”
“The worst.” Cardozo crossed to his cubicle and nudged the door shut behind him.
Mickey Williams stood by the window, watching a pigeon pinwheel in the amber light of the alley. “Pigeons are funny creatures. I could watch them all day.”
“Parrots are better comedians.” Cardozo set the two cups down on the desk. He opened the middle drawer of his file cabinet, found the camcorder, and checked to make sure it was loaded and working. “You’re not camera-shy, are you, Mickey?”
“Hell no, nothing bothers me.”
“Unless you’ve got guts of steel, that coffee might.”
Mickey sipped. “I’ve been served worse in the White House.”
Cardozo angled the desk lamp. “Why don’t you sit right there in that chair.” He placed the camcorder on the desk and sighted Williams through the viewfinder. “Is it Mickey or Michael?”
“It’s always been Mickey.”
Cardozo pressed
record
and enunciated into the microphone. “Mickey Williams, interviewed by Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo, four forty-five
P.M.
, September eighth.” He clicked on the power in his desktop computer, a Model-T Macintosh that you couldn’t have sold for scrap. “Mickey, before we review the events that happened this weekend, do you want to have a lawyer present?”
“Is that required?”
“No, but you’re entitled to one.”
Mickey shrugged. “Why bother?”
Cardozo had an itching sense that this was all falling into his lap a little too easily: the killer waits at the crime scene to give himself up; comes voluntarily to the precinct; gives up the right to a lawyer as though he were saying “no thanks” to a second helping of french fries.
“Would you do me a favor? Speak slowly and clearly.”
Mickey obliged. It was almost a verbatim repeat of the statement he’d given at the crime scene, only this time every monotone syllable was on tape. He described murdering two defenseless senior citizens with all the emotion of a weatherman reading the forecast off a TelePrompTer.
When he’d finished, he shifted back in his seat, sighing as though it had been a long, tiring day. The chair beneath him creaked ominously but held. “How’d I do?”
“Just fine.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Cardozo shouted.
Detective Ellie Siegel, dark-haired and brown-eyed, stepped into the cubicle. A cool, fresh breeze seemed to pass through the room.
“Would either of you guys like some apricot juice?” She held a thermos and two paper cups. Over the past several years she had insinuated herself into the position of chief nudge in Cardozo’s life. Since he was a widower, she made it a point to worry about his nutrition, and she was always offering to share homemade yogurts and juices. Cardozo found her mothering sort of sweet—so long as there were no witnesses.
“It’ll zing your blood sugar,” she said.
“Sure.” Mickey Williams stretched out a hand.
“I’ll pass,” Cardozo said. “Ellie, Mickey Williams. Mickey, Detective Siegel.”
Mickey Williams raised his eyes shyly. Liquid, dark brown eyes floated in a suddenly sheepish face.
Ellie leaned over the computer keyboard, cleared Cardozo’s file, and entered the code for the FBI’s national crime stats. She angled the monitor away from Mickey, but he was sipping juice and watching his pigeon and he didn’t seem to notice.
The computer bubbled and hiccuped, and in a moment the twenty-year criminal record of Williams, Michael Armitage, Jr., glowed from the screen.
Cardozo scanned eight charges of sexual misconduct, mostly with young girls; two confinements to prison, and one to a mental hospital. The rape and attempted mutilation of a twelve-year-old Korean orphan had resulted in a judge’s paroling Mickey to a “fellowship community” directed by a man named Corey Lyle. There were several drunk-driving charges.
Cardozo frowned. “Mickey, would you excuse us just a moment?”
“Sure thing.”
Cardozo cleared the screen and motioned Ellie into the squad room. He closed the door. “Corey Lyle—that’s the cult leader who supposedly ordered the White Plains bombing because Internal Revenue was harassing him?”
She nodded. “And the government’s been trying to indict him for seven years.”
He took a small morocco-leather address book from an evidence bag in his jacket. “I found this in Amalia Briar’s bedroom.” He turned to the page where the name
Corey L.
and a phone number had been block-printed and underlined.
“Be careful, Vince. This case could turn out to be a carton of firecrackers.”
Cardozo’s phone rang. “Cardozo.”
“Vince? Dan.”
He recognized the easygoing baritone of Manhattan’s deputy assistant chief medical examiner.
“I’ve completed the preliminary examination on the Briars. Something surprising turned up and I’d rather not discuss it over the phone.”
“John and Amalia Briar both suffocated.” Standing at the sink in his office two stories below East 30th Street, Dan Hippolito quartered four apples with a pair of autopsy scissors and fed them down the screaming chute of a Juicematic machine. “Luckily for us, their two pillows had begun to leak goose down.” He tipped the juice into two coffee mugs. His jogging shoes padded across the concrete floor and he set a mug on the table beside Cardozo’s elbow.
Cardozo scowled. “What’s this?”