Night Life

by David C. Taylor

  The stickup man paused just inside the glass door and checked the street. When he came out, the gun was back in the pocket of his jacket and he carried the paper sack holding the money. He turned north. Cassidy did not know which car hid Orso until his partner stepped onto the sidewalk behind the robber. “Police, asshole. Hold it.”

  The man took off running. He tried to pull the pistol from his pocket, but it caught on the cloth, jerked from his hand, and skittered away across the pavement. Orso went after him, but his new shoes betrayed him. One foot went out from under. He slid wildly for a moment, then went down. Cassidy glanced at him as he ran by. Orso was pushing himself up from the snow. “Goddamn it! Go get him. I’ll get the gun.”

  The robber turned east on 53rd Street. A man walking his dog shouted at him as he ran past. Cassidy had his gun in his hand, but there were people on the street. He put the gun away.

  He gained when the thief skidded as he ran out into the traffic on Fifth Avenue. Horns blared at both of them. The cap flew off the man’s head as he reached the east side of the avenue. Down the block people leaving the Stork Club crowded the sidewalk. The robber dodged for the street. Cassidy caught him and slammed him against a Cadillac limousine double-parked and idling. The bag of money flew from the man’s hand. Someone on the sidewalk said, “Hey, what’s going on?” Cassidy grabbed the struggling man’s hair and jammed his face into the limousine hood to calm him. He yanked him around by the shoulder and elbowed him in the mouth, and then hit him under the rib cage. That was for the pharmacist, an old man doing a job. He gave you the money, goddamn it. You didn’t have to hit him. The thief sagged with a groan.

  Someone pulled on Cassidy’s sleeve. He brushed him away without looking. “I’m working here.” He hit the robber again. An old bull named McGinley had taken him out for a drink when he first put on the uniform and told him, “When you catch one of the fuckers in the act, beat the shit out of him. He may beat you in court. Witnesses might not show, might lie. Someone could pull strings to cut him loose. Maybe he jumps bail. But you beat the crap out of him, every time he looks in the mirror, sees that broken nose, he’s going to know.” Cassidy let go and the thief curled himself around his pain in the gutter. The hand came back to pull hard at his sleeve. He turned.

  A young man faced him, young except for his eyes, which were pale, heavy lidded, and as old as the bottom of the sea. “What do you think you’re doing?” the man demanded. Rubberneckers crowded the sidewalk behind him.

  “Back off, bud. Police business.” He was calm now. His anger was a switchblade. It flew out fast and bright and sharp, and then it folded away again, gone until the next time. How long had it been there? Since the war, certainly.

  “Back off? You don’t tell me what to do.” The man’s dead eyes were always moving, never settling on Cassidy. “That’s my car. Get that man away from my car. I have to go.” The chauffeur had gotten out of the driver’s side and now stood uncertainly in the street.

  “In a minute.”

  Orso came through the crowd. He was breathing hard, and there was a rip in the knee of his pants.

  “Tony, he dropped the loot. I don’t know where the hell it went.”

  “Right,” Orso said.

  The man was impatient. “Thompson, move the car. We have to go now.” The chauffeur looked to Cassidy nervously.

  “A couple of minutes, we’ll be out of your way.” He turned back to pat the robber down for other weapons. There was movement behind the tinted windows of the limo, and he could sense there were a number of people in the car, but the smoked glass blurred their faces.

  “No. Now.” The man grabbed his arm again.

  “Back off or I’ll run you,” Cassidy said.

  “Do you know who I am?” The young man asked.

  “No,” Cassidy said. He clicked handcuffs on the robber and spun him to the pavement.

  “Hey,” the robber complained. “I’m in the snow down here. You’re ruining my trousers.” Cassidy kicked him lightly to quiet him.

  “I’m Roy Cohn.” He waited for the impact on Cassidy.

  “Happy New Year, Mr. Cohen.”

  “Not Cohen.” Tight with anger. “Cohn. Roy Cohn.”

  “Okay. Well, give my congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Cohn, and I hope they’re as happy with the result as I am.” He smiled into the man’s anger and leaned against the fender while he lit a cigarette. He kept a foot on the stickup man’s head to hold him.

  Orso stepped around Cohn. He held the paper bag of loot. “The doorman had it. He was keeping it dry for us under his coat. A concerned citizen.”

  “What’s your name?” Cohn’s face was stiff with rage, and for a moment those dead eyes held on Cassidy.

  “Cassidy. Detective Michael Cassidy.” He jerked the stickup man to his feet and pushed him toward the sidewalk, and Cohn had to step aside.

  “You’re going to hear from me,” Cohn said.

  “Always a pleasure to hear from a citizen, Mr. Cohen.”

  Cohn started to say something, then wrenched open the door to the limousine and scrambled in. Before he slammed the door, Cassidy saw that the car held four or five men surrounding a heavy-set woman in a red dress.

  Cassidy walked the stickup man to Fifth Avenue and sat him on the curb at the corner. The man spat blood into the snow between his feet.

  Orso unlocked a call box and ordered a squad car to come pick up the prisoner. He offered Cassidy a cigarette, took one for himself, and lit them both with his Zippo. “Hey, you really didn’t know who he was?”

  “Cohn? Yeah, sure. He’s Senator Joe McCarthy’s rottweiler, his lawyer on the what? The Senate Subcommittee for Investigations, something like that. They’re going to save us from the Communist menace. Going to root out the Commies in all walks of life. Last I heard they were saying maybe Eisenhower’s a Commie. Cohn’s the one who’s always whispering in McCarthy’s ear or drilling into some poor witness. ‘Detective Orso, are you trying to tell this committee that you had no knowledge that the Italian Ravioli League was a Communist front? You’re an idiot if you think we don’t know of your Commie affiliations. How dare you come before this committee and lie about your attempts to overthrow the U.S. government!’ He’s that guy.”

  “Not someone to screw with, I hear.”

  “Fuck him. What’s he going to do to me?” The limousine pulled up to wait for the light. Cohn, a ghost behind the smoky side window, looked at Cassidy. The light changed, and the car turned north on Fifth.

  The stickup man threw up in the gutter. Orso nudged him with his shoe. “I don’t think this guy’s looking at a happy new year,” Orso said.

  2

  March. Cold rain and dark days. Winter still pressed at the city’s back. Spring was a distant hope.

  Cassidy listened.

  “It was blood, you could tell, you know what I mean? Knew it right away, blood. Come right through the kitchen wall up at the top there, up in the corner over the stove. She’s yelling, ‘It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.’ I’m telling her, shut up. It ain’t no miracle. It’s blood from upstairs. Don’t never marry someone with religion. She’ll drive you nuts.” Donovan wore an Eisenhower jacket with no shirt underneath and army-issue trousers. His bare feet were stuck into untied shoes. He was unshaven, and his belly tested the jacket’s buttons.

  “It could’ve been. It could’ve been a miracle, blood through a wall. Like them tears at Lourdes the little girls saw. The Virgin, and that … the stigmatism. It could’ve been.” His wife’s hair was dyed an unlikely orange, and her hands clutched each other and were never still.

  “She wants to call the priest, Father Dunbar over there to St. Mary’s. Call him, I says, but it’s blood from upstairs, like when the commode overflowed. I’m going up.”

  “He ain’t afraid of nothing. He was in the war, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, all them. Killed a lot of Japs. Ain’t afraid of nothing.” She rubbed her hands down the front of the apron that covered a yellow-and-green-patter
ned housedress. Fuzzy pink slippers shaped like bunnies muffled her feet.

  “Was the door open?” From where they stood on the landing, Cassidy could see through to the bathroom and the dead man.

  “Nah. It was locked.” Donovan dug a ring of keys from his pocket. “I’ve got the key, see. I’m the super. I hear the radio playing. I knock. No answer. I figure they can’t hear me over the radio, so I knock again, loud. No answer. I’m banging pretty good but nobody’s coming, so finally I think, what the hell. I open the door, and I seen him dead over there.”

  “You could tell he was dead?” Cassidy asked.

  “I walked over and took a look. I’ve seen dead men before. He was dead.”

  “He was in the war. He’s seen a lot of dead men in the war.” She touched her husband on the shoulder, and he turned and gave her a wink.

  “Did you touch anything?”

  “No.”

  “Besides the doorknob,” Cassidy said mildly.

  “Yeah, right. The doorknob. I didn’t want to go in, but I thought I ought to see, see if he needs help or something, but he’s dead, so I go out and find the beat cop having a pop up to the Chinaman’s and bring him back.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Mr. Donovan.”

  “Yeah. You’re welcome. Don’t mention it.”

  “I’ll come talk to you in a while, if you’ll just wait in your apartment.”

  “Sure.” They took one last look, and then Donovan put a solicitous hand under his wife’s elbow and eased her down the stairs.

  Cassidy nodded to the uniformed cop waiting by the window and then went to the open bathroom doorway and looked at the dead man. He was tied to a wooden armchair with brown electrical cord. His shirt had been cut or ripped off him and lay in rags near the chair. A towel was loosely knotted around his throat. There was blood on the towel and blood on his mouth. A gag. He had been tortured. There were dark wounds on his chest and neck where something had torn out chunks of flesh. One nipple was gone. Cassidy saw the bloodstained pliers in the sink. There was a military-style hairbrush next to the pliers in the sink and another one on the floor. Blood from the wounds had soaked the man’s suit pants and then pooled under the chair. It ran thick and bright down the black-and-white tiles to the corner behind the toilet where the tiles were broken. The room smelled like a slaughterhouse.

  A year of combat, eight years on the Force, and the viciousness men offered each other still surprised him. When was he going to learn? Or maybe that was something you should never learn.

  The man’s blond head was tilted back and to the side, and even dead he was movie star handsome except for the agony, softened by death but still etched on his face. His eyes were lightless, as dull as stones. Whoever had killed him had robbed him of everything he was and everything he might have been. What had he done to attract such savagery? Maybe it wasn’t something he had done but something he knew.

  Cassidy turned back into the living room. The furniture crowded it as if bought with a grander space in mind. There was a white carpet, a black sofa with matching armchair and hassock, and an ebony-and-glass coffee table within reach of the sofa. A brushed-aluminum lamp like something off an airplane swooped over the sofa on a long flexible stalk. There were framed prints on the wall that Cassidy recognized as Degas’s dancers. A black-and-red Chinese lacquered cabinet held liquor bottles and a siphon. A fawn Chesterfield coat with a chocolate brown velvet collar had been hung on a coatrack near the door. A suit coat that matched the bloodstained trousers in the bathroom was draped on the back of a chair.

  Six glasses, one plate, one fork, one knife, one spoon, one cup, and one saucer were in the drying rack in the narrow galley kitchen. Cassidy recognized it from his own kitchen as a bachelor’s array. When he was home, the dead man drank more than he ate, and he mostly ate alone. A brown paper bag on the counter next to the small refrigerator showed dark where something inside was thawing. Cassidy looked in and found two baking potatoes, a box of frozen peas, and a package wrapped in white paper with sirloin scrawled on it with a butcher’s pencil. When Cassidy poked it with his finger, he found it cold. He could feel the uniformed cop’s eyes on him, but he ignored him and went into the bedroom.

  The window was wide open. Rain puddled on the floor. Cassidy crossed and looked out. The fire escape led up to the roof and down to the alley next to the building. There was a broken flowerpot on the landing outside the window where someone might have kicked it scrambling out. Cassidy turned back into the room.

  A fake fur throw covered the double bed. There was another white carpet on the floor. A dark green leather armchair with a side table and reading lamp next to it took up one corner. A low, wide ebony bureau, topped by a large mirror, was against the wall opposite the window. Cassidy raised his eyes and caught his reflection in the glass. Unruly black hair, dark eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, angular face with winter-pale skin stretched over bones that threatened to break through. Who the hell are you, and why do you keep looking at me that way?

  A wooden tray on the bureau top held a collection of matchbooks. Cassidy flicked through them: the Copa, “21,” El Morocco, the Stork Club, Jimmy Ryan’s, and some of the other clubs on Swing Street. A photograph in a silver frame showed the dead man on a beach, arms lifted toward the bright sky, muscles taut and defined, hair blowing, smiling, a good-looking young man in a bathing suit caught in a moment of joy. The closet held four suits, five sports coats, slacks on spring-loaded hangers that held them by their cuffs, a rack of ties, four snap-brim fedoras on the shelf above, gray, dark gray, black, and brown, one straw hat in hopes of summer, and a half dozen pairs of shoes on the floor. He looked at the labels in the suits—Paul Stuart. The man was a dandy, liked clothes, and could afford them. So why was he living in a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up?

  He turned back into the living room to the uniformed cop shifting nervously near the window. He was a big man made bigger by his blue wool overcoat with the brass buttons. His hat was on the radiator near the window and his white hair was matted down. “Scalabrine, right?”

  “Yeah. Right. Hey, look, Detective, I wasn’t drinking. Donovan’s busting my balls ’cause I’ve been after him about leaving his garbage cans on the curb. Lazy bastard. They’re out there three, four days. I just stopped into the Chinaman’s to buy a pack of smokes.”

  “Did you call the meat wagon?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cassidy looked around the room. The top was up on the big Motorola radio-phonograph near the bar and the green light on the dial glowed. “Was the radio on when you came in?”

  “Yeah. Loud. I turned it down.”

  Cassidy turned the volume up and Benny Goodman’s clarinet swung “Puttin’ on the Ritz” out into the room. “Louder than that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cassidy turned the radio off. He looked out the window and saw the van from Bellevue pull up and park next to a fire hydrant. “The wagon’s here. When they come up, I want you to go canvass the rest of the apartments, see who’s here. See if anyone noticed anything, screaming, somebody coming or going.”

  “Sure, I can do that.” Scalabrine had been on the force long enough to know how to handle detectives, but not this Cassidy guy. He wasn’t a big man, maybe five ten or eleven, a hundred sixty-five pounds. He wore expensive clothes, not the cheap suits most bulls waded around in. He looked like a fucking wolf. The guys in the house said he wasn’t like the rest of them. Different, they said, maybe ’cause he was a rich man’s son. Smart, unpredictable. Some said he didn’t seem to give a shit, and others said he cared too much, that he couldn’t step back. Some said he was this, some said that, but they all ended up with “different,” whatever the hell that meant. It meant he threw Franklin out a window. Threw another cop out a fucking window. What was that about? Well, tonight it was about keeping your mouth shut and your eyes open, Scal, yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir, and hope he forgets you exist. Fucking Donovan, he didn’t have to mention the Chinaman’s.


  “I’ll be back,” Cassidy said and went downstairs to the Donovan apartment. It smelled of boiled cabbage, furniture polish, and baking bread.

  “Nah. Didn’t hear a thing,” Donovan said. “We had the radio going, me and Mae, listening to Joe McCarthy take some of them Reds over the jumps.” The room was furnished with worn and shabby pieces. Pictures of saints cut from magazines hung on the walls in five-and-dime frames. A red blanket covered the sagging sofa where Donovan sat. His bare feet were up on a low coffee table already burdened by a large prewar radio in a heavy wood case.

  “Did you hear anything when you went up and knocked on the door?”

  “The radio, like I said.”

  “Nothing else? Nobody moving around?”

  “Nope.”

  “How long were you out there before you opened the door?”

  “I don’t know. A minute or two. I wanted to give him time, in case he didn’t hear me at first. Then I figured, blood, hell he might be hurt. That’s when I opened up.” He took his feet off the table. “You want a beer or something?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’m going to get me one.” He heaved up and Cassidy followed him into the narrow kitchen where Mae Donovan pulled a crusty loaf from the oven and put it on a rack to cool and then slipped a baking sheet with a round dough in its place and closed the oven door. She brushed sweat-damp hair back from her forehead, leaving a smear of flour and smiled at Cassidy. “There’s the blood.” She pointed to a corner of the ceiling. The stain was already darkening to brown against the yellowing plaster. “I don’t know how we get the stain out. How do we get the stain out, Ralphie?”