“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Mike, you’ve got to do something. Those Irish pricks. You can’t just let them roll over you.”
“What would you do?”
“Kill one of them. Franklin, probably. He’s got no family, and it all started with him. He’s a shitball and he deserves to die.”
“No.”
“Easy to do. You go hang out someplace where a lot of people can see you, establish an alibi. Toots Shor’s or someplace they know you. I’ve got a throw-down gun I took off a punk a couple of years ago. Untraceable. Franklin goes to that whorehouse on Eleventh once a week, gets his ashes hauled, gets loaded. He comes out, pop, pop, pop, he never knows what hit him, goes to Jesus with a smile on his face.”
“No, thanks.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Orso shrugged at Cassidy’s shortsightedness. “Okay. Anything you want? Anything I can get you?”
“My father’s got a play in rehearsal at the Winter Garden. The dance captain’s name is Marco Pinetti. He was going to come up with the names of who Ingram hung with. Stop by and see what he’s got. When you’re there, speak to a dancer named Victor Amado. Marco can point him out. Tell him I’m sorry I missed the meeting. Tell him I still want to talk to him whenever, wherever.”
“We’re still working it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Cassidy woke in late afternoon from a dreamless sleep. The cadaverous gray man he had last seen in the diner near the Blue Parrot leaned against the wall by the door and smoked a cigarette. He wore the same black suit or its twin. He had taken off his black fedora, maybe in deference to the solemnity of the hospital.
“Come on in. Make yourself at home.” Cassidy pushed himself up against the pillows with a groan and drank water from the glass on the bedside table.
“How’re you doing?”
“Great. Never better”
“You look a little rough.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Frank wants to know whether this has anything to do with the thing he asked you to do.” His gesture took in the hospital room and battered Cassidy.
“No, it doesn’t. It’s something else.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard. Friends of the guy you threw out the window is what I heard.”
He switched his hat to his cigarette hand and took a piece of paper torn from a notebook out of his jacket pocket. “Frank said I should talk to the bartender at the Parrot about this Ingram guy you was asking about, so I did. Griff came up with some names, guys this Ingram guy hung out with. Griff says this Ingram was a real hustler, always had his eye out for a way to make a buck. Guys went out with him, but mostly no one went back for seconds, if you get my drift. I don’t know if it does you any good, but there it is.”
He put the piece of paper on the bedside table and stepped back. “Frank says you need anything, you call me. My number’s on the top. I’ve got one of those answering services. You tell the girl you want me to call. Leave a number.”
“What’s your name?”
The man thought for a moment and decided there was no danger in it. “Packer.”
“Packard like the car or Packer like the cannibal?”
He smiled big yellow teeth, the first sign of animation. “The cannibal.” His face closed up again. He settled his hat squarely on his head and went out.
Cassidy looked at the piece of paper he’d left. There were a dozen names on it written in pencil in block letters a child would make. Packer’s telephone number was written in ink at the top of the page in tiny, precise script.
The doctor made evening rounds. He poked and prodded and grunted his satisfaction and told Cassidy, “One more day, I think. Just to be sure.”
* * *
Dylan took him home in a taxi. The stairs tested his bruised thigh and made his cracked ribs ache, but when Dylan suggested they rest halfway up, he told her he felt fine. Pride.
“I bought a steak and some canned soup, in case you were hungry. I don’t know what you like, so I bought some different kinds.”
“Thank you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The doctor said take it easy. I guess I’ll take it easy. Read a book. Look out the window. Listen to some jazz. Do you like jazz?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.” They were aware of each other in a way that made them awkward, as if they were starting fresh.
“We’ll go listen to some.” God, she was beautiful.
She smiled. “I’d like that. Your sister came by yesterday when you were asleep. She asked that you call her when you got home.”
“Okay.” The way she moved. The way she smiled.
“I like her.”
“So do I.” Like something wild. Jesus, the next thing you know you’ll be writing poetry.
“Will you be all right?”
“I’m fine.” Tell her to stay.
“I’ve got some things to do downstairs. If you need anything, just bang on the floor.”
She crossed the room, wide shoulders, slim back, solid butt, and long, leggy stride. When she reached the door he stamped twice on the floor.
She turned and looked at him. “What took you so long?”
Tangled in each other and their clothes.
“Ow.” His bruised shoulder against the doorjamb.
“Sorry.”
“Uh.” His thigh on the bedpost.
“Oops.”
“Aaggh.” He tripped on his pants and fell on the bed with her on top.
“Sorry.”
“Take it easy. I’m a little sensitive down there.”
“Jesus, I hope so.”
When he woke in the morning, she was gone. She’d left a note in the kitchen saying she had gone to Ribera’s to do some work. At the end it said, “Tonight?” He stood by the window with a cup of coffee and thought about her, about how it felt to push his fingers through in the tight curls of her hair, of the bold way she looked at him, the way she smelled of lightly scented soap, clean hair, and something that was hers alone, some dark, spiced fume.
18
“That guy Marco. He’s a fairy, right?” Orso asked.
Christopher Street was crowded. Village whackos and weirdos, Orso called them, artists, poets, dancers, musicians, Bohemian New York, with a sprinkling of older people with foreign accents, string bags, and frumpy clothing who had washed up in the Village in the 1930s when they read the handwriting on the walls of Europe.
“Uh-huh. Actually, I think he’d fuck anything that would hold still for it. When did Amado quit showing up for rehearsal?” Cassidy lit a cigarette while they waited for a break in traffic.
“The day after you went in the hospital. A lot of fairies in the theater is what they tell me. I guess you must have known a few, growing up in it and all.”
“Sure.”
“They ever, you know, bother you?”
“No.”
“I don’t get these girly guys. What the hell’s with them?” He flapped a limp wrist.
“That particular girly guy Marco jumped into France on D-Day with the 101st Airborne.”
“No shit?”
“Of course he was wearing lace panties and a bra under his fatigues.”
“Get out of here.”
“He said if he was going to die, at least he’d go feeling sexy.”
The entrance to the building was just off Greenwich Street. Half the bell pushes in the entry way lacked names. 6A showed Victor Amado in ornate script cut from a business card. Cassidy rang. No answer.
“Hey,” Orso said. He pushed on the outer door and it swung open. They stepped into the vestibule of worn cracked linoleum, dim light from a single bulb, the smell of old frying oil from the coffee shop next door. A crappy lock held the inner door. “An invitation to burglary,” Orso said as he examined it.
“What are they going to steal once they get in?”
* * *
They climbed through the cooking smells trapped in the stairwell, and the air got warmer and thicker as they ascended. In full summer the apartments would swelter, and in the winter they would be cold. But the rent was cheap.
When they reached the sixth floor, Orso leaned against the wall and tried to regain his breath while Cassidy rang Amado’s bell.
“You could try eating less.”
“Screw that. I could climb fewer stairs.”
Cassidy rang again. “Not home. Maybe we should try later.”
“And do these stairs again?” Orso leaned over and banged impatiently on the door. He tried the knob and then bent forward to examine the lock. “Hey.”
Cassidy leaned to look. There were bright scratches in the brass of the two locks. “Someone forgot his keys.”
“What do you think?”
“You’re better at it than I am.”
Orso took a roll of soft leather from his inside pocket removed three lock picks, and bent to the door for a minute. “Okay.” Orso put the picks away. “Only the top was locked.” He pushed open the door. A dangling security bar banged against the door. “Holy shit.”
A wrecking crew had searched the apartment. Ripped cushions leaked stuffing. Tables lay upended. The searchers had pulled the carpet up and crumpled it on the eviscerated sofa. They had pulled every drawer out, torn every framed photograph from the wall, and smashed the frames to see if there was anything concealed behind the prints. Even some of the ceiling had been pulled down.
Their shoes crunched broken glass as they looked through the small apartment. The bedroom had been given the same fine attention as the living room. Someone had used a knife to hack open the padded headboard. Clothes littered the floor. The shoulders of some of the jackets had been cut open.
“So where’s Victor Amado?”
The tiles in the bathroom were spattered with drops of drying blood, and flies buzzed at the crusted puddle in the tub. “Wherever he is, I’m going to bet he ain’t happy,” Orso said.
They went back into the living room, and Orso continued to the kitchen. Cassidy righted a coffee table and picked up some of the photos in their broken frames and laid them out on the surface. They were all of young men posed in bright light and cut by shadows, as if they were disappearing into the dark or stepping out into the light. Some were nudes. Some wore dancers’ leotards. Art shots.
“Hey, Mike. You might want to step in here.” Orso’s voice was overly casual.
Victor Amado was in the refrigerator. He was naked. Whoever had crammed him in had broken one of his legs to make him fit. His chin was forced down on his chest and there was frost in his hair from the underside of the freezer unit.
“Check his hand.” One hand was visible and Cassidy saw what Orso meant. There was blood under two of the fingernails all the way back to the lunule. “Someone had a knife or something up under there.”
“What made you think to look?”
“I was hungry, figured I might find a snack. Is that Amado?”
“Yes.”
* * *
The morgue attendants bitched while they worked to pry the body out of the Frigidaire. Rigor mortis and cold locked him in a curled position, and he lay lumpish on the stretcher like some ancient mummy coughed up by a glacier. A protruding knee bumped the door frame as they maneuvered into the hall. “Six flights. Shit. Why don’t they ever die on the ground floor?”
“Don’t expect much on time of death,” Skinner said. “That icebox was set on high. He could’ve been in there for days. Blood in the tub is hard, a few days, anyway.”
In the dream in the hospital, when Amado had stopped him on the night street, Cassidy had known he was dead. When had he dreamt that? Tuesday.
“I think he’s been in there since Tuesday.”
“What’s that, a hunch?”
“Yes.”
Skinner studied him for a moment to see if he was joking, and then shrugged. “Okay, Tuesday. I’ll use that as a starting thought when I do the cut.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Jesus, Cassidy, you’re always in such a hurry. I’ll give you a call when I get it done.” Skinner followed his men downstairs.
* * *
Orso bought an ice cream cone from a stand on Hudson while Cassidy made a call from a booth on the corner.
The phone was answered on the fourth ring. “Yes?”
“Frank Costello.”
“Wrong number.”
“Check anyway. Michael Cassidy calling.” The man at the other end put the phone down hard and went away. Cassidy watched an old woman in a torn raincoat and the wreckage of an Easter bonnet pick through the garbage cans outside a bodega across Greenwich from his phone booth. She wore galoshes and heavy white kneesocks.
“Hold on.”
“Michael, how are you?” Costello said.
“Fine. What’s the progress on getting Dad out of lockup?”
“We’re working on it. I hope to have good news soon. How are you doing on that matter we talked about?”
“I’m working on it too. There’ve been a couple of developments.”
The old woman found something good and tucked it in a yellow shopping bag and then went back to foraging.
“Good. Well, let’s hope we both have good news in the next few days. Call me whenever you want.” He hung up.
The message was clear. Until Cassidy came up with something valuable to trade, his father would stay in jail.
Leverage.
Orso was leaning against a lamppost on the corner and licking his ice cream. “What do we do now?”
“Check with the building management, find out what you can about Amado: how long he’s been there, who visits, any complaints. You know.”
“What are you going to do?” A drip of ice cream started down the cone and he caught it with his tongue.
“I’m going to New Jersey.”
“Jesus, Jersey? Well, better you than me.” He took a last bite of ice cream and threw the cone in the gutter.
* * *
Cassidy rented a Ford from the taxi garage on Hudson Street and drove it up along the West Side Highway past the steamship piers and Riverside Park, and across the George Washington Bridge that soared over the river, and north to Englewood, New Jersey. He stopped at an Esso station and asked the man at the gas pump how to get to the address that Ingram had listed on his driver’s license and on his job application at the Waldorf. It was warmer in Englewood than it had been in New York, so he took off his jacket and laid it over his gun and shoulder rig on the passenger seat. The man came back with the map and unfolded it on the hood of the car to trace the route to Linwood Street with a grease-grimed finger.
Linwood was a street of modest frame houses built before the war. There were small front lawns, and large, mature trees sprouted the lush new green of spring. The houses had short driveways that led back to one-car garages, and the cars parked in the drives were modest Fords and Chevvies. Most of them were three or four years old, but some were new. It was a solid blue-collar neighborhood, men with good jobs in the manufacturing plants, and stay-at-home moms. It was midafternoon. Cassidy drove slowly to spot the house numbers. School was out, and there were kids on bicycles on the sidewalks. On one block his approach scattered a group of boys playing baseball in the street. They coalesced behind him when he moved on.
Number 763 was a white house with green shutters and green trim. A covered porch shaded the front of the house and three red-painted cement steps led up to it. A five-year-old red Ford pickup was parked in the drive. There was another car past it covered with a tan tarp. Cassidy parked at the curb and went up the cement path that bisected the front lawn. It was cooler under the porch roof. Cassidy rang the doorbell. He heard shoes on hardwood, and then the front door opened and a man looked out at him through the screen door.
“Joseph Ingram?”
“Yup. But I’ve either got it, or I don’t want it, ’cause if I wanted it, I’d have gotten
it.” He was a dark, cheerful man of about thirty-five, five foot ten or so and a hundred seventy pounds, little of it fat. He chewed an unlit pipe.
“I’m not selling anything.”
“Well, then, what can I do for you, Mr.…?”
“Cassidy.” He showed him his badge and ID. “I’m sorry to bother you. I know this must be a hard time, but I need to talk to you about Alex Ingram.”
“My brother?” He pushed out through the screen door, and Cassidy made room for him. Ingram walked to the edge of the porch and banged the ashes out of his pipe on the railing.
“Right. Alex.”
“I know my brother’s name. I just don’t know what we’re going to talk about, or why the New York cops care.”
That seemed callous, but grief strikes people different ways. “I was the first detective on the scene. I don’t know what they told you when they called…”
“Who? Who called?”
“Usually it’s the watch lieutenant. It could have been somebody else, I guess.” Cassidy had seen a number of relatives soon after a family member was killed, and none of them had reacted with Ingram’s calm.
“Called about what?”
“Your brother’s death.”
“Why would the New York Police Department call me about my brother’s death?” He was completely bewildered.
“Because he was killed in New York.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s back up here a little. He wasn’t killed in New York.”
“He wasn’t?”
“Well, killed, I don’t know about that. I guess you could say it. He drowned.”
“Drowned?”
“Yeah. Someone left the neighbors’ gate open. He got into the backyard.” He gestured vaguely down the street. “Fell in the little swimming pool they had back then, one of those above-ground ones. You had to climb the ladder. He liked to climb. Drowned. Wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“When was back then?”
“Twenty-two years ago. He was two.”
* * *
Cassidy spent the rest of the afternoon in the Englewood City Hall with a helpful clerk named Gladys Bochner, a good-looking, flirtatious woman in her thirties whose ring finger was marked by the pale band of a recently removed wedding ring. She helped him through the mystery of the filing system, and they discovered that Alexander Ingram had indeed died by drowning in June 1932. In September 1943, the Records Bureau received a request for a copy of Alexander Ingram’s birth certificate.
Night Life Page 18