“What did Ingram tell him about the photos?”
“Not much, just that the photos paid their rent and the envelopes of cash. He got the idea with the last one that Ingram was double-crossing whoever set it up and was keeping the photos for himself. He said they were going to be worth a lot of money.”
“Did he say where Ingram might have hidden them?”
“No, but he did say that cop, Cassidy, searched Ingram’s locker at the theater.”
“He had a locker? Jesus, why didn’t we know that?”
“How the hell were we going to know it?”
“He didn’t have any idea who was running Ingram?”
“No. He just knew that Ingram did it for someone, but now he was going to screw him, go out on his own, make some real money.”
Fraker stabbed another oyster and put it in his mouth.
Crofoot turned away so he wouldn’t have to watch him chew. He was going to have to do something about Fraker when this was over.
24
Lieutenant Tanner came up the stairs and into the squad room. Uncharacteristically, he wore a suit and his tie was pulled up tight under his collar, and he looked more weary and harassed than a man should at ten in the morning. “Cassidy, Orso, in my office, please.”
By the time they got there he had shed his jacket and was yanking his tie down and unbuttoning his collar. He dropped into his desk chair, pulled open a drawer, and put a quart of Irish whiskey on the desk. “Too early for you guys?”
“Not too early for me,” Orso said.
“No, thanks.”
Tanner found two shot glasses in the drawer, filled them, and slid one across to where Orso could reach it. He raised his glass in toast and drank half.
“Jesus, I feel like I’ve been nibbled to death by ducks. I get a call to show up at Centre Street, so I put on my suit, tighten my tie and my asshole, and present myself to the deputy chief’s office for a reaming, not that I know what I’m getting reamed for, but what else do you go to Murtagh for? You guys know Chief Murtagh? If not, avoid the pleasure. So he’s telling me what an asshole I am. A couple of the other deputy chiefs come in to watch the master at work, pick up a couple of pointers. Murtagh’s telling me I can’t even run a squad, much less a station house, ’cause I’ve got a couple of fucking guys running around doing what they please, even when they’ve been ordered to do something else. Which is you two and the Ingram case, which you’ve been told to drop. So do you do that? No, you don’t. You find a dead guy, Amado, who’s tied to Ingram. How the hell you do that if you’ve dropped the case, I don’t know. You had a lead. Okay, I get that, but you’re supposed to pick up the phone, call Bonner and Newly. Do you? No. Why not? You can’t find a phone?”
“Boss,” Orso began.
“Uh-uh. No need to apologize. A good reaming saves me the cost of the colonoscopy my frigging doctor wants me to get. You will now do what you were always supposed to do. You will turn over all you’ve got to Detectives Bonner and Newly. You will be assigned other cases. There’s plenty of crime out there to go around.”
“Who complained to Murtagh?” Cassidy asked. “The Pig?”
“No. The Feds. What’s the difference?”
Bonner and Newly were at their desks in the squad room. Bonner smoked a cigar that smelled like burning socks and Newly took notes while Cassidy talked about the Ingram case. Orso sat with his feet up on an empty desk nearby and made no comment while Cassidy told the detectives about Ingram’s connection to Amado but not about the envelope with the coin he found in Ingram’s locker, told about Ingram’s work at the Waldorf, about his frequenting the bars on Bird Alley, but not about Costello’s interest in the photos, talked about Ingram’s false identity but not about the mailbox drop at the post office across the street from Penn Station.
“Thank you, Detective Cassidy,” Newly said when he finished. “If you think of anything else, you’ll let us know?”
“Of course.”
* * *
Gottfried Properties was in a brownstone on Bleecker Street near Perry. Cassidy and Orso climbed the stairs to the third floor.
“They’re good cops, Mike. They’re going to find this place. They’re going to know we’ve been here.”
“You want to drop it, Tony, I’ll understand. We could get fired for this, direct disobedience of an order.”
“Ah, what the hell. I don’t have to be a cop.”
“What else would you do?”
“Fall back on my natural talents. Become a gigolo. You know, take rich women out to dinner and the theater, charm them with my savoir faire, take them home and screw their ears off, pick up the money off the dresser, and steal away into the night.”
“Tough on the back after a while.”
“You learn to pace yourself.”
The Gottfried office was in a shotgun apartment, one room leading directly into another from front to back, and each room was crammed with piles of paper as if nothing that entered was ever removed. A middle-aged woman in a man’s yellow cardigan sat at a scarred wooden desk in the front room and scratched a pencil through her tangle of brown hair while she talked on the phone. “It’s a eighty a month, first and last and a security deposit. Yeah, right, refrigerator and stove. Okay, then. Bring me the signed lease and a check and I’ll give you the keys. Bye.” A burning cigarette bobbed in the corner of her mouth when she talked. She looked at Cassidy and Orso without surprise or interest. “Help you?”
He showed her his badge. “Bill Gottfried?”
“All the way back.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder and then picked up the phone, checked a list on a pad in front of her, and dialed.
Gottfried was at his desk, barricaded behind a drift of paper. The window behind him was opaque with years of grime. He was a big soft-looking man. He had a round, wide, big-mouthed face like a frog, black curly hair, and bright dark eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a sweatshirt and blue jeans. He waved a hand in greeting and went on with his phone call.
“I don’t give a shit what kind of problems you’ve got with what kind of suppliers. I’ve got six units standing empty costing me money while you screw around with plumbing you promised to have finished a month ago. You don’t get this done by the end of the week, I’m calling in another guy I know to do it, and I’m not paying you a dime. The end of the week.”
He slammed the phone down and stood up, smiling. “Contractors. You gotta be firm with them or they’ll dick you.” He offered his hand across the wall of paper. “Bill Gottfried. What do you need?”
“Victor Amado.”
“Yeah, I figured that. You know I’m going to have to throw away that icebox. Brand-new a year ago. What about him?”
“Anything you can tell us. How long was he in the apartment? Did he ever have visitors, roommates? Any problems with the rent?”
“He’s been in there since about September. The rent? No. The rent comes like clockwork the first of the month. Probably ’cause he doesn’t pay it himself. It comes from a law office up in midtown.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Nah, well, I don’t know. I don’t ask too many questions when the rent comes regular, but you get some where the tenant isn’t paying, someone else is. Young women, actresses, and like that who’ve got some sugar daddy looking after them. Sons of rich guys down here trying to be artists. Like that.”
“I need the address of the law office that paid Amado’s rent.”
“Sure. Hey, Betty.” Gottfried’s shout blew garlic across the desk. “Give these guys the address of that lawyer who paid Amado’s rent.”
* * *
The law offices of Fitcher, Freed, and Alamek were on the sixth floor of a ten-story building on Sixth Avenue just south of 38th Street. The elevator operator was a stooped and dusty man in a worn gray uniform two sizes too big. His thin gray hair was yellowed with age. He missed the landing four times, slamming the operator’s handle back and forth, before he gave up, opened the gat
e, and growled “Watch your step” without much concern.
The pebbled-glass doors along the hall of cracked linoleum offered a chiropractor, two “painless” dentists, an advertising company, two mail-order firms, Sadie’s Hats, Frank’s Novelty Items, a glove maker, Goldfine’s Foundation Garments for Women, a bail bondsman, and finally Fitcher, Freed, and Alamek.
A sturdy, middle-aged woman with hair dyed so black it absorbed light looked at Cassidy and Orso over horn-rimmed glasses shaped like cat’s eyes from behind a wooden desk in the reception area. Her expression was wary, as if she had learned to expect little good to come through the door. Three men and a woman waited on hard wooden chairs along one wall.
Orso showed the woman his badge. “We want to talk to whoever sends rent down to Gottfried Properties for a Victor Amado.”
“That would be Mr. Freed.” She pushed a button on her intercom box and leaned toward it to speak. “Mr. Freed, there are two detectives to see you about the Gottfried Properties check.”
There was silence. She keyed the intercom again. “Mr. Freed?”
After a moment, the box squawked back, “Send them in.”
Two of the waiting men got up with their faces averted and went for the door. One of them said, “Tell him I’ll be back.” The other said nothing, and they hurried out.
The secretary indicated the right-hand office door behind her, and Orso and Cassidy went in.
“Eddie Freed, gentlemen. What can I do you for?” Freed leaned across the desk and offered them a glad hand and a smile wide enough to show the gold fillings in his molars. His thick dark hair was combed straight back and held down with something that made it look waxed. He had a long, narrow face dominated by a bony nose. He wore a black suit that had once been good but was beginning to shine at the elbows and lapels from too many dry cleanings, a light blue shirt with heavy gold cuff links, and a dark-green-and-black-striped tie held by a gold tiepin. When he sat down, the smile diminished but did not go away, and he twisted a gold ring on his left pinkie, an unconscious gesture of nervousness. He had the air of a man who had begun to slide and did not know how to stop it.
Orso and Cassidy took the chairs in front of the desk. “Tell us about Victor Amado,” Cassidy said.
“Sure. What about him? What did he do? How can I help?” Freed broadened his smile to show he was eager to cooperate.
“Somebody killed him in his apartment over on Christopher Street.”
“No. What happened, like a fight or something?”
“He was stabbed.”
“Uh-huh.” A man no longer surprised by the world’s cruelties.
“The property manager says that the rent check comes from this office.”
“That’s right.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, those are my instructions from my principal. I send the check at the end of every month so it arrives on the first of the next month. Ninety-seven dollars.”
“Who’s your principal?”
Freed licked his lips and raised his hands palms up to show he was hiding nothing. “I don’t actually know. An envelope arrives. It’s got the money in it. Ten bucks for me, eighty-seven for Gottfried. I write the check and send it on.”
“Is there a return address on the envelope?”
“No.”
“How’d he set it up?” Orso asked.
“I got a call. He told me what he wanted done, asked if I would do it.”
“How do you get in touch with him if you have to?”
“I don’t get in touch with him. I’ve got no way to do it. No return address. No phone number.”
“You didn’t think that was a little peculiar?”
“Sure. Of course I did, but I mean, what the hell? Ten bucks a month for writing a check. Nothing illegal. Who’s going to turn that down? Right?”
“What was his voice like on the phone?”
“His voice? I don’t know. A man’s voice. Nothing to it. Like anybody else’s.”
“High? Low? New York? Alabama?”
“I don’t know. It was awhile ago. I get a lot of calls.” He was lying about something.
“Did you ever hear his voice again?”
“I told you. He only called once.” Definitely lying.
“Mr. Freed,” Cassidy said, “did you pay the rent for Alexander Ingram every month on the same basis?”
Orso looked at him in surprise. So did Freed.
“Before you decide to lie about that, let me tell you something. Someone murdered Victor Amado. The same guy probably murdered Alex Ingram. Whoever did it tortured them first. Now, did you pay his rent?”
“Alex Ingram? Over on West Fifty-third? Yes.” He folded his hands on his desk and looked at Cassidy with as much eagerness as he could muster.
“The same deal? An envelope with money and then you wrote a check?”
“Yes.”
“How many others were there?”
“Others?” He was a man who either had never learned to lie well or had lost the ability.
“Freed, how many more?”
He calculated for a moment and then gave up the idea of resistance. “Two more.”
“And all the checks come from the same guy?”
Freed thought for a moment before answering reluctantly, “Yeah. Same guy.”
“And you don’t have any idea who he is.”
“No.”
“Who are the other two?”
Freed stretched his neck. “Okay, hold on here now a second. Now we’re getting into attorney-client privilege, that kind of territory. You came in. You know the names of two of the men. Nothing I can do about it. You didn’t get them from me. I can talk about them, but I just don’t feel comfortable telling you the other two. I don’t know if the client wants anyone to know.”
“How about cop-attorney privilege?” Orso asked.
“What? Cop-attorney? What’s that? I don’t think I’ve ever heard…”
“It works like this. I’ve got the privilege of smacking you around until you give up the first name. Then I’ve got the privilege of smacking you around some more till you give up the second name.” Orso moved toward the desk.
Freed shoved his chair back and lurched to his feet, one hand out as if that would slow Orso. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You can’t do that.”
“Sure I can.” Orso slipped a sap from his pocket and slapped it into his hand so it made a meaty whack.
Freed stumbled over the tin trash basket by his desk. It boomed against the wall under the grimed window, and he saved himself from falling by grabbing the edge of the file cabinet. Orso kept coming. The grin on his face made him look deranged.
“Tony, hold on a second.”
Orso stopped.
Freed had wedged himself into the corner between the filing cabinet and the window.
“Mr. Freed, you send checks to four guys. Two of them are dead. If another one dies, we’re going to be right back here talking to you about accessory before and after. Can you carry that kind of weight?”
“Accessory? Hey, I’m a lawyer. I know what constitutes accessory. You’d never get the indictment.”
“That’s all right. We’ll take you downtown and book you. Sometimes it takes a couple of days for an arraignment or bail hearing. People get lost in the system. I’ve known guys to spend a week while the paperwork catches up to them. We’ll inform the Bar that you’ve been arrested. We might even have to padlock the office while we get a search warrant for relevant files.”
Freed found courage from some memory of who he used to be. He straightened his suit while he looked from Orso to Cassidy with contempt. “You bastards. You pull this crap on me, because I’m a little guy. You wouldn’t go into any of those white-shoe law firms up on Fifth Avenue and pull this, would you? I used to be in one of those firms. Cops would come hat in hand, yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir. We’d make you sit out in the waiting room for half an hour minimum, and you never said a thing. So fuck y
ou guys.”
“Okay.” Cassidy went to the desk and picked up the phone.
“What are you doing?” Freed asked.
“Calling the wagon to take you in.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Freed lost what courage he had found.
“I can’t wait. Okay, we were assholes. But two men are dead, and two more might die soon. I need those names.”
Freed put his hand on Cassidy’s to stop him from dialing. “Cut it out. Cut it out. I’ll give you the names. I’ll give you the addresses. But that’s it. I don’t know who sends the money. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know anything else.”
Freed wrote the information on a pad from his desk. Cassidy put it in his pocket. He gave Freed one of his business cards. “The guy who sent the checks might call you now that two of these guys are dead. If he does, if you think of anything else, you call me.”
In the hall, Orso said, “How did you know Freed paid Ingram’s rent?”
“I didn’t. But Gottfried said that Amado’s rent came like clockwork the first of the month. Donovan said the same thing about Ingram’s. He didn’t say Ingram paid, he said it came. I threw it out there and we got lucky.” Maybe it was a triumph, but he remembered the sudden sheen of fear sweat on Freed’s face. “Do you ever feel like an asshole leaning on a guy like that, a guy just trying to make a living?”
“Nope.”
“He’s right, you know. We never would have worked it that way in one of the big uptown firms.”
“Hey, this is how the world works. Who are we to say different? Keep it simple for me, will you, Mike. Just keep it simple. We’re the good guys looking for the bad guys. So what do you want to do?”
Cassidy looked at the names Freed had given him. “You take Stanley Fisher. I’ll check out Perry Werth.”
25
“General Caldwell?”
“Yes?” The general turned from the army green Cadillac limousine parked in front of the apartment building on 64th Street and watched Cassidy approach. Upright, trim, square jawed, silver hair at the temples, bars of decorations on his crisply ironed uniform, military and squared away from top to bottom.
Night Life Page 21