“What problem? He started poor, he got rich, but he never forgot the old folkways.”
“I thought of that, but I really have trouble seeing this guy as rich.”
“From one pubic hair he’s not rich?”
Lou held up two fingers. “Two pubic hairs.”
“So how does he get the coke?”
“Could be he’s tied into the business.”
Cardozo ran the idea through his mind, poking for holes. “I have trouble with that. A wacko wouldn’t be working for the coke cartel.”
“I have to agree he’s not a good employment risk. In terms of brain function there’s no question this man is diminished. Where magnesium should show in the spectrograph there’s a gap, so he’s washing the magnesium out of his system before it can be deposited in the hair cells.”
“What does that mean in English?”
“He has a habitually high alcohol or caffeine intake, or both.”
“Like ninety percent of the inhabitants of New York.”
“Worse than ninety percent. You only see gaps like this in the spectrographs of Skid Row bums and members of Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“No one in AA would be doing coke,” Cardozo said.
“Again, that’s a behavioral question. More your line than mine.”
“What about the stuff in the wastebasket?”
“Unfortunately the candle is such a common item that it tells us very little. It’s a Saffire-brand commercial
Shabbes
candle, available in any supermarket in New York.”
“Any prints?”
“Too smudged to recover.”
“How long did it burn?”
“We burned an identical candle under lab conditions, and what we came up with is nineteen, twenty seconds.”
Cardozo ran the scenario through his mental movieola: The killer went into the changing room, killed Oona, lit a candle, let it burn for twenty seconds, tossed it into the wastebasket. Why?
“The pins and pink tissue paper were the wrapping on a blouse that a customer had discarded in the morning, and the stereo ad was clipped from yesterday’s morning edition of the
New York Trib
.”
“The stereo ad?” Cardozo said. “You mean Dizey Duke’s society column.”
Lou shrugged. “The column was on the back.” He clearly couldn’t conceive of anyone wanting to read, let alone clip out, any of Dizey Duke’s five-times-a-week scribblings. “No prints.”
“What about the boom box?” Cardozo said. “Any luck?”
“The boom box looks like a bridge fell on it. Hard to be sure, but it appears to be a Sony XX.”
“Come on, Lou. I found the damned thing. There’s no
appearing
about it. The trademark says Sony, loud and clear.”
Lou glanced across the cubicle with just a flash of impatience. “Sorry, I wasn’t being clear. It’s a Sony that appears to be an XX. The model went on sale in the metropolitan area nine months ago. Two hundred and some outlets carry it.”
Cardozo sighed and looked down at the scratch pad he’d been doodling on. He’d drawn five horizontal, more or less parallel lines. The bottom line lay slightly to the left of the others. “Any prints?” His hand added a sprinkle of dots in the upper left-hand corner of the design.
“There are partials all over it,” Lou said. “Once we eliminate the prints of the security guards, who knows, maybe our man left a few. But what we did find is a tape. What’s interesting is, he recorded it himself. Did a piss-poor job too. He took some rap music off the air or from another tape. Our sound man thinks he recorded over something else.”
“Can our sound man tell us what kind of something else was recorded on this tape?”
“Maybe you should talk to him yourself. He explains it a hell of a lot better than I can.”
“
WHAT WE’VE GOT ON THE TAPE
,” Abner Love said, “are rap recordings taken from another tape—so there’s hiss and accumulated signal distortion.” Abner was a middle-aged skinhead with hair that would have been light brown if he’d let it grow out, but with a considerable tonsure, which maybe was why he didn’t.
“Can you identify the original tapes?” Cardozo said.
“Now, you’re not going to believe this—but my little kid is a fan of rap music, and he has the original tape.”
They were sitting in Abner’s work space on East Thirty-second Street, a loft with walls banked from floor to ceiling with high-tech sound equipment. Abner handed Cardozo a commercial tape cassette.
The front cover showed five white men who looked like younger Abners hunkered down around a floor mike on a bare stage. The album was called
Hallelujah Dirt.
The artists called themselves the Celestial Honkies and Roscoe.
Cardozo shook his head. “My kid’s fifteen, she doesn’t bring much of this stuff into the house anymore.” He didn’t bother saying, I’d murder her if she did.
“For my money they’re no big deal, but
Hallelujah Dirt
went platinum six days after release.”
Abner slid another cassette across the worktable. This one was commercial home-recording tape, Sony X-90, with no writing on either label on either side.
“Now, the boom-box tape,” Abner said, “was recorded on a poor machine with imperfect sound-head contact. So areas on the tape retain magnetic residue from an earlier recording made on a different machine.” Abner looked across the table at Cardozo. “Are you with me so far?”
“I think so.”
Abner smiled. “When we play the boom-box tape, we’re hearing a composite signal. But since we have the original of the rap tape, we can subtract that signal from the composite signal—and theoretically that leaves us the pure residue of the previous signal.”
“The way you say
theoretically
doesn’t sound too hopeful.”
“Why don’t I play you a little of what we’ve reconstructed so far?” Abner walked to the wall and flicked a switch, and three oscilloscopes lit up with amber grids laid over black backgrounds. A kind of spacious silence poured from the speakers mounted around the room.
In a moment dots like comets trailing three-inch tails made flat-line graphs across the grids. He flicked two more switches, and bright lariats of light danced across the screens.
The sound that poured from the speakers struck Cardozo as garbage made audible—screams, uh-huh’s, baby-baby-baby’s, clicks, bangs, drum machines, voices high, voices low, voices screeching like people getting born, people getting laid, people getting killed, people jiving, jibbering, singing English, Spanish, Korean, fading in and out—till finally a chant rose above the river of sonic chaos:
Nickel-dimin’ two-bit pipsqueak squirt, Bleedin’ Thursday blood on your Tuesday shirt—Spilled a pint of plasma and you still don’t hurt, ’Cause your head’s in the heart of the hallelujah dirt.
Abner strolled from wall to wall, manipulating dials and switches, and by a series of almost imperceptible shifts the sound tamped down into a structureless aural foam, and then—in some unexpected corner of that immensity of white noise, hints of another sound began to cluster.
Cardozo focused his ear on that little smidgin of sound.
Abner’s finger nudged one last switch.
Now Cardozo heard it: a bright, high beep lasting maybe half a second.
Abner stopped the tape. “Recognize it?”
Was this a quiz show? Name that tune in one note? “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”? The “Hallelujah Chorus”?
Cardozo shook his head. “Sorry.”
Abner smiled like the kind of guy who enjoyed having the answer that no one else did. “It’s the signal an answering machine makes when a call comes in. It’s a high frequency, and on a cheap machine it scars the magnetic coating. You can’t record over a scar, which is why we can recover the signal. So at least we know what we’re looking for.”
Maybe Abner knew, but Cardozo didn’t. “And what’s that?”
“The in-coming messages buried under ‘Hallelujah Dirt.’”
“Think you can actually pull up the messages?”
“It’ll take time, but something’s got to be there. At least a fragment. Possibly a range of fragments. Once we have those we put the computer to work and enhance. Same principle as your outer-space photos enhancement, except that program translates sound to light and ours translates sound to better sound. Theoretically.”
Friday, May 10
“V
ERY ROUGHLY,” ELLIE SIEGEL
said, “from what I could worm out of the lawyers, if the stock market and real estate don’t crash too badly in the near future, Oona Aldrich’s estate is worth around seven million.”
Greg Monteleone whistled.
“Who inherits?” Cardozo said.
He had gathered his task force in the spare room that the detective squad used as an extra office and storage space. The chairs they were sitting in were parochial-school surplus, wood-slatted collapsibles that had tortured generations of students; but Ellie held herself easily erect in her pale pink blouse, as though she were comfortable with her body, comfortable with the chair, comfortable even with the humidity. Though an air conditioner was clattering in the window, the air had a disturbingly unreal density.
“Oona’s only immediate relative,” Ellie said, “is her son by the first marriage. He gets half. A quarter goes to the Metropolitan Opera. There are cash bequests to servants, friends, local charities.”
“What’s the largest cash bequest?”
“The butler, the cook, and the maid get two hundred fifty thousand each. There are bequests of twenty thousand each to three friends.”
“Doesn’t sound as though Oona had many good friends,” Sam Richards said.
“But she had great servants.” With a satisfied grin Greg Monteleone pushed his hands through his curly dark hair and sat back and eyed the others. He was wearing designer chinos, Top-Siders, and an eye-curdling deep heliotrope shirt.
“What about property?” Cardozo said.
“No property bequests,” Ellie said.
In the crammed, narrow room sounds seemed to hammer at the light. From the street came a gray, constant roar of cars, trucks, buses, and above them the looping wail of a siren. The precinct added its own little orchestra: through the pea-soup green walls you could hear phones jangling for attention, voices shouting, doors closing, footsteps clacking up and down the stairs, the high-pitched sigh of waterpipes.
“Where’s the son?” Cardozo said.
“He’s in England,” Ellie said. “He’s studying Classics at Oxford. I phoned him at six
A.M.
this morning. He and his mother were estranged. He says he’s renouncing any inheritance and don’t expect him at the funeral.”
“Nut case,” Monteleone said. “Who’s going to pay the college bills?”
Ellie gave him a long, unloving glance. “The boy happens to have a father.”
“So do I,” said Greg, “and he never gave me a cent.”
“But Greg,” Ellie said, “you’ve always been special.”
“Ellie, you’d better check that the son was in England Wednesday,” Cardozo said. “Check the servants’ whereabouts Wednesday. And check the previous wills—see if anyone was dropped.”
“She had two ex-husbands,” Ellie said, “but they’re richer than she was.”
“Check the exes’ whereabouts Wednesday. Did you find her address book?”
“It wasn’t hiding—she’d left it right by the bedroom phone. I think it was her favorite bedtime reading. The bottleneck is, Aldrich never threw out a return address. She entered her Con Ed account manager into her personal phone book. Half the names aren’t even alphabetical.”
“Sorry to hear it. Question her friends in the New York area. And her doctor. If she had a shrink, question the shrink. If she had a personal trainer, an astrologist—anyone providing any kind of personalized service—talk to them too.”
Ellie was taking it all down in her notebook. She wrote in a shorthand of her own invention that she’d once tried to explain to Cardozo, but he’d never understood how she could tell one of those squiggles from another.
“Do I get permission to sleep anytime this week?”
“I’ve asked Reilly to give us more detectives. Discuss it with them.”
Ellie winked. “You’re funny today, Vince.”
Cardozo sat frowning at the blackboard that had been set up on an easel at the front of the room. The words
Oona Aldrich Homicide
had been blockprinted across the top, followed by the identifying numbers that would be used on all departmental forms referring to the case.
Beneath this Cardozo had written the forensic number assigned to the case, and below, on the left, he had listed the physical evidence so far discovered: a partial candle, a newspaper clipping, a shattered boom box, particles of dirt, a Sony answering-machine tape, seven Duracell batteries, an eighth battery listed separately because it had been found separately, the victim’s clothing, and the personal effects she had carried in her purse. Beside each item he had written the property number of the voucher attached.
On the right of the board he had written the word
witnesses
, followed by the names Baker, Sandberg, Hansen, Delancey, Danks, and a question mark. There was still plenty of space in the witness column.
In the center of the board he had drawn a rough layout of the changing room and a stick figure representing the position of Aldrich’s body.
Only two things on the entire board suggested there had been a rational motive for the crime: the missing brooch and, assuming they were a cartel trademark, the knife cuts on the body. Photos of Leigh Baker’s brooch had gone out to all precincts and all jewelers in the city. On the chance that the killer might not be too bright, photos had gone to pawnshops as well. So far no one in Narcotics had recognized the cuts.
“Let me just throw out an idea,” Cardozo said. “Dan Hippolito thinks the markings on Oona’s stomach could mean it was a drug hit.”
“Did she do coke?” Sam Richards said.
Ellie nodded. “Her butler says she dabbled.”
“No way Oona was a drug hit,” Greg Monteleone said. “The drug cartel doesn’t go after its customers. It disciplines the middle men and the street retailers.”
Cardozo glanced questioningly toward Ellie. “Any chance Oona was dealing?”
“Come on,” Greg Monteleone groaned. “The woman was a wacko. She wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in the cartel.”
Ellie sighed. “I haven’t seen any evidence she was anything more than an occasional user.”