The civilians were nodding, promising. They always nodded, they always promised, and in Cardozo’s experience they kept the promise for no more than twenty-four hours.

He asked the would-be buyers short questions and listened to long, meandering answers: they were in the market to buy a Manhattan apartment, had chosen this day to drive in from New Rochelle. They were obviously scared and he had the impression they didn’t know anything more than they were saying. He got their names and address and had them fingerprinted and let them go.

Cardozo asked Connell if there were any electric saws in the building.

“Sixteen and seventeen are being remodeled into a duplex. There may be a saw up there.”

Cardozo sent a sergeant to search 16 and 17. “Who has the key to this apartment?”

“Till it’s sold you open it with the passkey,” Connell said.

“Who has the passkey?”

“It’s kept in the personnel office,” Connell said.

“All personnel have access?”

Connell nodded.

“Any of the residents have passkeys?”

“No, sir.”

“Anyone besides personnel have access to the personnel office and the passkey?”

“I do, Lieutenant.”

Cardozo looked at the sales agent. She impressed him with her lack of embarrassment or uncertainty.

“My name’s Melissa Hatfield. It’s my job to show the apartments. Sometimes there are prospective buyers on very short notice and I have to let myself in.”

He noted things about her skin texture, voice tone, details of clothing. She wore a white dress with large woven holes in it and it looked on her the way dresses were supposed to look on fashionable women and rarely did.

“Did you let yourself in today?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have to ask you some questions. Would you mind waiting in the lobby?” Cardozo turned to the super. “I’ll need a list of building personnel and the worksheets for the last two days.”

“I have those down in the office,” the super said.

Cardozo and Connell were passing through the Beaux Arts garage. A shadowless fluorescent glow flickered across Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, Mercedeses, and Rollses.

“Is that garage door kept locked?” Cardozo asked.

Connell nodded. “Garage users have electronic remotes to open it.”

“Do the staff have remotes?”

“We have to. For deliveries.”

Cardozo asked how the garage was guarded.

“Monitored from the lobby.” Connell pointed to a closed-circuit TV camera poised on the cinderblock wall.

They passed the laundry room. Two washers, two dryers.

“Residents use those?” Cardozo asked.

“The maids use them.”

There were two elevator entrances in the basement corridor—one marked Passenger, one marked Freight. A third door was marked Authorized Personnel Only. Cardozo opened it.

“Garbage compactor.” Connell grinned. “State of the art.”

“What happens after the garbage is compacted?”

“It goes into those state-of-the-art bags.”

Cardozo took a moment fingering one of the black plastic bags. The plastic was sturdy stuff, a good eighth of an inch thick.

“And where do the bags go?”

“The trucking company picks them up.”

Connell led Cardozo to the personnel office. Besides a desk, the windowless room held an easy chair, two metal chairs, a card table, and two filing cabinets.

“Personnel list,” Connell muttered. “Worksheet …” He opened a cabinet drawer and looked behind a pile of racing forms.

“And. the residents,” Cardozo said.

“Bingo.” Connell pulled out three lists.

Cardozo looked them over. “You’re a resident.”

Connell nodded. “The apartment comes with the job.”

“You weren’t working yesterday?”

“I get holidays and weekends off,” Connell said.

“Where were you?”

“I spent the day at home. My wife Ebbie—she’s an invalid. We don’t get out too much.”

Cardozo folded the lists and slipped them into his jacket pocket. He noticed a battered-looking thirteen-inch Sony TV on the desk. “Who watches that?”

Connell seemed embarrassed. “I do.”

“Don’t you have your own upstairs?”

“Ebbie doesn’t like sports. So if there’s an important game, I usually catch it here.”

The room had gray concrete walls and cement floor and naked pipes overhead. It didn’t look like the coziest spot for watching the Mets.

“Can I use your phone?” Cardozo asked.

“Help yourself. Do you need me?”

“Not for the moment.”

“I’ll be in the utility room. Out in the hall and hook a right.”

Alone, Cardozo took out his notebook and spent three minutes drawing up a list of his own. He wrote down eight names, crossed out three, after a little thought crossed out a fourth.

He lifted the phone and dialed headquarters. “Flo, it’s Vince.” He read her the names of the four detectives. “Pull them off whatever they’re doing, get them up here.”

“You know what they’re doing, Vince, they’re having a day off.”

“So was I.”

“You’re not going to be a loved man.”

3

IN THE BEDROOM, CARDOZO stood alone in the sunlight glaring through the window. He was working now, stirred by the sense of a secret waiting to be revealed, a sense that was tantalizing and almost sexual in its excitement.

He looked about the blank surfaces of the unfurnished room, seeking some object, some detail that bore the imprint of what had happened here.

The bedroom door had two hinges. He could remember a time when doors had had three hinges, but nowadays builders got by with two. He swung the door. In the crack just below the bottom hinge something small and dark and glistening had wedged against the jamb. He crouched. Using the tip of his gloved finger he gently poked the dark thing.

An inch of black plastic fell to the floor.

He picked up the fragment, turned it over in his hand. He tested the thickness between his thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t surprised at what he felt. A piece of garbage bag, similar to the ones he’d seen in the compactor room.

He dropped the fragment into a clear plastic evidence bag.

Down the hallway, where the baseboard wasn’t quite joined to the wall, he found another piece of black plastic.

“Cleaning house?”

Cardozo glanced up. “You look lousy,” he said.

In fact Detective Sam Richards didn’t look lousy at all. Nattily dressed in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, charcoal gray summer-weight slacks, he looked like a linebacker who had traded in his shoulder pads for a TV news anchor’s chair.

But the expression on his long, unsmiling black face was grumpy, and his big roguish moustache was pulled down into a frown. There was a small pink Band-Aid on his chin.

“How’d you get the battle wound?”

“Cut myself shaving.”

“Hung over?”

“Maybe. I spent last night celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“Having today off.”

“That was premature.”

“Tell me about it, Vince. Tell me why I’m alive, tell me why I’m here.”

“How about if I just tell you about this killing.” Cardozo described what he had seen, reviewed what he had found, and walked Richards through the apartment.

“I want you to canvass,” Cardozo said. “Cover the building, cover the neighborhood, see if any of the local Peeping Toms or storekeepers noticed anything. You’ll split the job with Greg Monteleone.”

“Tell Monteleone I’ve started.”

Cardozo felt he had been poking through kitchen cabinets for an hour. His watch told him it had been twenty-five minutes.

As he swung open the door beneath the sink, the inside of his nose prickled violently. Print powder came eddying up in a cloud. He sneezed once, and again, and then again.

“Gesundheit.” A fortyish man in a badly cut suit the color of dry clay was watching from the corridor, amused. Detective Greg Monteleone’s brown eyes were gleaming in a cheerfully soulful face that gave him the appearance of a prankish poet. “Three sneezes means good luck.”