Night Life

by David C. Taylor

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Priscilla, Susannah, and Jennifer, with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to my agent, Lisa Gallagher, for her diligence, her encouragement, and her smart, concise, and provocative comments on the manuscript; to Tom Doherty, Bob Gleason, Linda Quinton, Kelly Quinn, and the kind people at Forge for their enthusiasm and for deftly guiding me through uncharted waters; to Cynthia Merman for her precise, stylish copyediting.

  To my writer friends who encourage through word and example: Jeffrey Lewis, George Semler, Alex Beam, Henry Rosenbaum, Carlos Davis, Beth Gutcheon, and Tony Fingleton; and special thanks to my brother, Michael, who first led me astray down to the bright lights of Times Square, the pool halls, and the pinball parlors.

  Toda la vida es sueño,

  y los sueños, sueños son.

  —Pedro Calderón de la Barca,

  Life Is a Dream

  PROLOGUE

  New Year’s Eve 1953. A good year, 1953, all in all. That shit head Stalin is finally dead. And those Commie spies, the Rosenbergs, went to the hot squat at Sing Sing. The Korean War is over, though maybe that didn’t work out as well as it should have. But it’s over. The CIA kicked the Red son of a bitch Mosaddegh out of Iran and put the shah back on the throne where he belonged. That showed the Russkis not to screw around in the Middle East. Sure, the Dow is below three hundred at 280.9, down twelve and half points from the beginning of the year, but everyone knows that’s going to change. America, the arsenal of democracy, a beacon of freedom to the world, is the richest, most powerful country on the planet. 1954 is going to be great. Forget The Bomb. Forget the Red menace. Tonight New York is electric with the joy of all that is sure to come. It is good to be alive.

  Especially if you have a good job, money in your pocket, and a great-looking woman on your arm, and the three young men walking west on 50th Street had all of that and more. They had been at P.J. Clarke’s and had taken on just enough champagne to be sure the world was made for their pleasure. They were headed for Times Square for the New Year’s Eve lights and the crowds and the fun of it. They were doing the New Yorker’s zigzag—down a block, over a block, down a block, over a block, jaywalking, dodging cars, never stopping—and their latest zag took them along the north side of the Waldorf-Astoria. The lights of Park Avenue glittered ahead of them. The cold air reddened their cheeks and pinched their fingers, but the men walked with their coats open, because who gives a damn about the cold; they were impervious, invulnerable. A black Cadillac limousine idled at the side entrance to the Waldorf, exhaust drifting from its tailpipe, and the thought that went through the minds of the three young men when they saw it was, Someday, man, someday.

  Two men in dark overcoats and fedoras came out of the hotel. One opened the back door of the limo, and the other took up a position next to him to block the sidewalk, and the young people had to stop, which was not what they had in mind, not them, not tonight, and one of the men, recently back from a business trip to London, said, in his best Brit accent, “I say, my good man. You are stopping the Sutton Place Rangers from their appointed rounds. Kindly step aside.” He grinned and took a step forward as the others laughed at his daring. Good old Pete, always had something up his sleeve.

  Overcoat put a hand to Pete’s chest and stopped him. “Step back.” His voice was cold and he added a short, abrupt shove for emphasis, and good old Pete stumbled back and almost fell.

  “Hey, wait a minute. What the hell?”

  The man ignored him, because a uniformed doorman opened the side door to the Waldorf, and a party of five people hurried out toward the limousine. There was a woman in their midst. Her head was covered with a scarf. A red dress showed under her open mink coat. She wobbled on high heels. The men around her were laughing at something as they came out the door. The one who helped her into the car was movie star handsome, in his twenties, wearing a fawn-colored Chesterfield coat with a collar of chocolate velvet. His blond head was hatless, and the lights made his hair shine like gold. He put a hand under the woman’s elbow, and as she bent to enter the limousine, the scarf pulled back to show a glimpse of a heavy, powdered pouched face, and the hem of her dress rode high enough to reveal thick legs, and then she was gone, and the young men scrambled in after her. The man holding the door and the blocker went back toward the hotel. The limo pulled away.

  “What an ugly broad,” good old Pete said with perfect timing so the man who had pushed him had to have heard it as he went back into the hotel. Pete’s friends all laughed, and the small, dark cloud of the encounter was blown away by the laughter, and they went on toward Times Square and the New Year, and all it would bring.

  1

  Orso stamped his feet in the snow and watched the all-night drugstore up the block on Sixth Avenue. “He ain’t coming. I told you. Only a mongoloid hits five in a row. He wised up.” Orso was well over six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds and had the round, well-fleshed face of a sensualist.

  “Give it a chance. He always hits around midnight. It’s quarter to.” Cassidy was an impatient man who was trying to teach himself how to wait. He was shorter than his partner, broad shouldered and strong, but whip thin as if the motor running inside consumed everything as it entered.

  “New Year’s Eve. We should be in a warm bar someplace, not freezing our asses off waiting for some stickup guy who ain’t going to show,” Orso said. “Guy’s got half a brain he’s over at Dempsey’s getting plastered waiting till next year to go back to work.”

  “If he had half a brain he wouldn’t be robbing all-night drugstores one after the other right up Sixth Avenue.”

  Orso lit a cigarette and cupped it in his hand so the glow was hidden from the street. “Did you hear about Gavrilich?”

  “Hear what?” Cassidy leaned against the brick wall of the alley and watched the snow filter down past the streetlights. He wore a sheepskin jacket and boots against the weather, and the gun in his pocket was cold through his thin leather glove.

  “Canned. Cleaned out his desk this morning. Eighteen years on the job, no severance, no pension. Turn in your badge, your gun, and sayonara. The shooflies got him. Loyalty clause, or whatever the hell they’re calling it. Turns out he joined some group a few years ago, now it’s on the attorney general’s list, a Commie-front organization. Only reason he joined was there were a lot of women in it, he figured he’d get laid.”

  “Well, he’s fucked now.”

  “Politics. Stay away from that crap. If I can’t eat it, drink it, wear it, or fuck it, I’m not interested.” A core philosophy Cassidy had heard from Orso before. He wished his own view of life were as straight a line. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Try to keep
it simple, control the chaos, keep the lines straight. Did it ever work?

  The traffic was light on the avenue, and the car tires hissed in the wet. Somewhere a group of drunks sang “Should old acquaintance be forgot…” loud and off-key. Cassidy looked east along the block to the neon sign for the Cortland Hotel, its colors muted by the falling snow.

  Orso followed his look. “You threw him out the window.” Orso flicked a hand at the hotel.

  “Yeah.” He flinched from the memory and felt his heart race the way it had that morning when he woke from the dream, months ago, but still vivid.

  * * *

  In the dream, a woman screamed. In the dream, Cassidy and a man he knew—who was he? who was he?—walked together toward an open window, face-to-face, chest-to-chest, as if in a dance, and then the man disappeared with a cry. Cassidy awoke that morning with his heart pounding, and the unease from the dream stayed with him through the day.

  It had been Indian summer then, the briefest of seasons, one he loved, the last soft days of the year, elegiac in their echo of the summer past and yet promising that spring would come after the dark cold days of winter. Kids played stickball and ringolevio in the streets until called inside for dinner. People sat on their stoops and fire escapes—the men in T-shirts, the women in cotton dresses—and listened to radios propped on windowsills, Guy Lombardo’s band, or Count Basie over at Birdland, or to The Lone Ranger, Broadway Is My Beat, or Inner Sanctum. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”

  That afternoon Cassidy was on the corner of Sixth Avenue, not far from where he stood now, tearing the cellophane off a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes and thinking how lucky he was to have been born in this city, that when it worked, it worked better than anyplace.

  He heard a woman scream and turned toward the sound. He waited but did not hear it again. It could have been anything, a mouse across a kitchen floor, a cockroach in a drink, a cold hand up a skirt. He lit a cigarette and started east along the block. Ahead of him May Stiles burst out of the lobby door of the Cortland Hotel. She spotted Cassidy and came at him in a stumbling run on high heels and grabbed him by the arm. “Cassidy, there’s a guy upstairs beating the hell out of one of my girls. Do something.”

  Another scream.

  “Will you do something, for christ’s sake? He’s hurting her bad.”

  “Do you have a key to her room?”

  “A key? Yeah. A key. Sure.” She scrabbled around in her big purse and fumbled him a hotel room key.

  “Wait in the lobby.”

  Cassidy listened outside the room on the third floor and heard a grunt of effort and the smack of a fist on flesh, and “Bitch,” muffled by the door. He slipped the key into the lock and turned it slowly while he eased the knob. The latch freed with a click and the door opened. The room smelled of gin, cigar smoke, and burning meat. The bed was torn apart, blanket and sheets dragging. A naked woman huddled on the floor near a knocked-over chair. Her legs were bent awkwardly, and one arm was raised to ward off the man who stooped over her. He was naked, bowlegged, and big gutted with a mange of hair across his shoulders. He held an iron in one hand. The cord ran to a socket under the open window.

  “You work for me. You don’t work for that bitch. You work for me, got it? What? You didn’t think I’d find you? The fuck I wouldn’t.” He pressed the iron down on her thigh and her scream almost covered the sizzle of the burn.

  “Hey,” Cassidy said.

  The man turned. His chest was matted with hair, and his belly hung down like a sack. He looked at Cassidy without surprise. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Get your clothes on, Franklin. Get out of here.”

  “Hey, fuck you, Cassidy. I’m on the job.” The woman sobbed until she ran out of breath. She crawled to the overturned chair maybe with the thought of getting under it to hide.

  Cassidy could smell her burned flesh. “You’re on the job?” He could feel the rage rising. “You’re on the job? What the hell do you mean? This is the job?”

  “Get the fuck out of here.” Franklin put the iron down on the table, and smoke curled up around it. He took a step toward a chair against the wall where his clothes were draped; a holstered gun was threaded on his pants belt. “I’m going to teach you a hard lesson, you uptown punk.”

  Cassidy moved to block him.

  Franklin threw a punch. Cassidy slipped it and slammed Franklin’s arm as it went by. The momentum turned him, and Cassidy hit him twice in the kidneys and his breath whistled out. Cassidy punched him in the neck and he sagged. Franklin put his hand on the table to hold himself up. “You fuck. I’m going to kill you, you fuck.”

  “Not today.” Cassidy grabbed two handfuls of the man’s gut, squeezed hard, and lifted. Franklin came up on his toes whinnying in pain and hammering at Cassidy’s head and shoulders. He tiptoed backward as Cassidy lifted and pushed, and they went toward the open window as if in a dance. The backs of Franklin’s legs hit the windowsill. Then Cassidy threw him out, and he went with a cry.

  When he dreamed of the man falling, he did not know it was going to be a cop.

  He had had dreams like that since childhood, dreams in which he was both asleep and awake. They let him rise toward waking but held him below the surface, trapped in the dream and aware of it. Days, weeks, or months later he would be somewhere in the city, and he would recognize that this was what he had dreamed, this street, that person; the snatch of conversation as two people left a room; that opening door with that woman behind it; that man with the two black dogs, who smiled at him like a shark. The dreams were random. Sometimes they came true, sometimes they did not but just disappeared to wherever dreams go. He tried to find markers in them that would allow him to separate them from normal dreams, but he could not. He had assumed that everyone had dreams like that, until he talked to Brian about them, and his older brother looked at him and said, “Are you nuts?” and told him about déjà vu. But these dreams weren’t that. They were something else.

  He did not know they were prophetic until he dreamed of his mother’s death.

  * * *

  “A cop,” Orso said. He flicked his cigarette away to hiss in the snow.

  “A pimp.”

  “Yeah. Okay. But Franklin’s also a cop.”

  “Exactly my point.” Cassidy’s breath escaped like smoke. “You want to be a pimp, be a pimp. You want to be a cop, be a cop. Pick a side and stick with it.”

  “You can’t throw a cop out a window. They’re going to stack your ass in a corner and take turns pissing on it.”

  “They’re not going to do anything. They didn’t even call a disciplinary board. Why? Because what the hell are they going to find out? That a Vice Squad lieutenant was running whores and got thrown out a window when another cop caught him torturing one of those whores? They don’t want to touch it. So they transfer me out of Vice and pretend it never happened.”

  “They don’t get you for that, they’ll get you for something else. That’s how it works.”

  “Never happen. You know why? Because my heart is pure.”

  “Your heart may be pure, but your mind is fucked-up is what it is.”

  “Hey,” Cassidy said, and jerked his chin up the block. A man in a bomber jacket and cloth cap walked past the window of the drugstore and slowed to look in. “Casing it.”

  “Or checking to see if they’ve got his brand of hemorrhoid cream.”

  “See if he goes by again.”

  The man walked past the drugstore and then stopped in the unlighted doorway of a closed shop and surveyed the street. A man and a woman walked past him arm in arm, and after they were gone, he stepped out of the doorway and strolled to the drugstore and stopped to look in the window as if searching for a product.

  “Waiting for the customers to get out of there,” Cassidy said.

  First an elderly man left. He wore a long, dark coat and fur hat with earmuffs and carried a small white paper bag, and then three young men and thre
e young women followed. Their voices, full of cheer, carried to the two cops in the alley. “Ugly broad,” one of the women said, and they all laughed. One of the men scooped snow from a parked car and threw it at the others, and the six of them went down the block, laughing and calling, in a running snowball fight.

  The man in the bomber jacket looked around casually to make sure no one was approaching, pulled his hat low over his eyes, put his right hand in the pocket of his jacket, and went in.

  “Here we go,” Orso said. They crossed the sidewalk and went along outside the line of parked cars and ducked down behind a Hudson Hornet opposite the drugstore.

  “Damn,” Orso said. “Fucking snow. Thirty bucks’ worth of brand-new Florsheims ruined. The radio said no snow tonight, and I bought it.”

  Cassidy watched the man in the bomber jacket. He had stopped to leaf through a magazine from the wire rack just inside the door, but now he moved back to where the white-haired pharmacist stood behind the counter in a white coat. The pharmacist looked up and resettled his glasses with the tip of one finger. The man pointed to something in the case, and when the pharmacist bent to look at it, the man pulled his pistol and touched it to the pharmacist’s head. The pharmacist’s hands shot into the air and his shoulders hunched. The man shouted something that did not escape the glass of the window, and the pharmacist put his hands down. The robber looked over his shoulder to see if anyone had seen the dumb show and then turned back and jabbed his gun at the pharmacist and moved him over behind the big cash register.

  “I think I’m going to shoot the son of a bitch when he comes out just for the shoes,” Orso said. “You back me up?”

  “Absolutely. Shoot him. Self-defense.”

  “I’ll go north. We’ll box him.” Orso moved along the line of cars until he was past the drugstore, and Cassidy went south and squatted behind a DeSoto coupe. The pharmacist put the money from the register in a white paper bag, and when he was done, the robber hit him on the head with the gun barrel. He did not go down, but even at that distance Cassidy could see the blood begin to stain his white hair. The old man put one hand to the wound and held the other up to plead. The robber hit him twice like driving a nail, and the pharmacist folded out of sight behind the counter. Shit, he didn’t have to do that, Cassidy thought. He had the money. He didn’t have to hit the old guy. Why’d he do that?