“This one’s a Minox, made by the Krauts.” He put his finger on an aluminum rectangle about three inches long and an inch wide. A metal cord attached at the butt end, and along the cord at intervals were beads of brass. Lodin picked it up. “You hold one of the beads on the paper you’re copying and pull the cord tight and you know exactly how many centimeters the lens is from the text. Perfect focus every time.” He put the Minox down and picked up a matchbox. “British. The lens isn’t much, but if you’re given a quick search, all you’re carrying is a matchbox.” He picked up a cigarette lighter and showed how the bottom slid aside to expose the lens. “Russian. The Russians liked to copy American stuff, but they always screwed it up a little. Here, look at this.” He held the lighter out for Cassidy and pointed at the manufacture’s logo, RONSON. It was spelled RONSUN.
Where had Cassidy seen one like it before?
“Hey, Cassidy.” Marnie Lodin leaned against the doorjamb and rubbed her eyes. She wore the twin to her husband’s robe. She had a tough street urchin’s face, and her black curls sprung from her head as if electrified. “Six o’clock on a Saturday morning. Jesus.”
“Sorry, Marnie.”
“Yeah, yeah. You want to stay for breakfast? I promised Howie buttermilk pancakes.”
“Thanks. I’ve got to go.”
“Maple syrup. Bacon.”
“Another time. Thanks.”
“Just so long as it’s not six o’clock on the weekend. What’ve you guys been doing, developing?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see them?”
“No.”
“Did you pay the man?”
“Marnie, come on.” Lodin shook his head in embarrassment. “Cassidy’s a friend.”
“Not the point. He came to you ’cause you’re a pro. Pros get paid. Right, Mike?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, then.”
Cassidy put a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. “Sorry about waking you up, Marnie.”
“Hey, what the hell. Who cares?” She kissed him on the cheek and patted his butt as he left with the prints and negatives in an envelope.
* * *
Weak bulbs in overhead fixtures dimly lighted the precinct evidence room. The room smelled of dust, disinfectant, and decay. Long wire racks that reached nearly to the ceiling held brown cardboard boxes labeled with case names, numbers, and dates. Some of them went back thirty years, memorials to cases never brought to trial, to justice avoided, to fugitives in the wind.
“Jorgenson said you were down here,” Orso said. “What’s up? You were lucky you caught me. I was headed for Coney when you called. I figured to eat a couple of red hots, drink a few beers in the sun, and then introduce myself to a bathing beauty and let nature take its course.”
“At least I saved her from that.”
Cassidy pulled the Alex Ingram case box off a shelf and spread its contents on the wooden table under a dangling bare bulb. He pulled Ingram’s clothes from their heavy paper envelopes. The trousers and underwear were stiff with blood dried the color of rust. He pinched the seams and felt the shoulder padding of the jacket.
“What are we looking for?” Orso asked.
“I don’t know. Anything. When we looked before, it was just a murder. It’s something else now.”
“Are you going to tell me about it, or do I have to guess?”
“He had a cigarette lighter. See if you can find it.” Cassidy found Ingram’s wallet and checked the compartments to see if he might have hidden more film there. There was nothing. The hundred and seventy-five dollars had disappeared into some cop’s pocket.
“Here it is.” Orso held up the gold lighter.
“Take a close look at it. Tell me what you find.”
Cassidy replaced the contents of the box while Orso turned the lighter over under the light. “It’s a lighter. A Ronson. Gold. Nice lighter. What am I looking for?”
“How’d they spell Ronson?”
Orso looked. “Hey, what the hell? ‘S-U-N.’”
Cassidy took the lighter and slid the base aside to reveal the lens. “It’s a camera, a Russian-made spy camera.”
“What are you saying? Ingram was a Russian spy? Come on.” He saw Cassidy’s face. “Okay. Why not? But isn’t that out of our league?”
“Nothing’s out of our league. We’re New York’s Finest.”
Two uniformed patrolmen entered the room talking about a Yankees–Red Sox spring-training game in Florida. One of them said, “How’re you doing, Detectives?” as they went past Orso and Cassidy and looked for something on a shelf near the end of the aisle.
“Let’s go,” Cassidy said.
They walked to a hole-in-the-wall on 48th Street and ate thick Cuban sandwiches stuffed with roast pig, ham, melted cheese, pickles, and mustard, and drank bottles of dark Cuban beer.
Cassidy told Orso about finding the microfilm. He did not tell Orso Howie’s name, and Orso did not ask. He told him that the first negatives were blurs and that he had been sure the last one would be worthless too. Orso stopped eating to listen.
“You want me to go on?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Mike.”
“The last one came out okay.”
“Are you going to show it to me?”
“As soon as we’ve finished lunch.”
“We’re finished.” Orso threw money on the table.
They went into the men’s room and locked the door.
Orso held the print up and turned it to the light. “Well, I’ll be … Four guys dead because of this.”
“No. Four guys dead because of what people think is on the film. What have we got? One image. No idea of where it was taken, no corroboration of who else was there. But they don’t know that. They think that everything is clear, who, where, when, and what happened.”
“So what do you want to do, turn this stuff in?”
“To who?”
“We could give them to the lieutenant, let him take the heat.”
“If we turn them in to the department, Costello, the Feds, the CIA all know about it in five minutes. Any leverage I’ve got to help my father is gone. I have to find out where this was taken, when it happened, and who was there. If you want out, stay out, I understand. No one will know you saw this.” He put the print back in the envelope.
“Forget about it. If I was the guy sent to clean this up, I’d do me just to be sure. Partners and all, who knows what you might have shown me or told me? I’m in. What else do I have to do with my time?”
33
The late Eddie Freed sent rent checks for Perry Werth’s apartment on West 84th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. It was a postwar of no distinction built of pale yellow brick already going gray under New York grime. The window frames were aluminum, the miracle metal that showed up everywhere from airplanes to toothbrush holders. The acid in the air had pitted them with dark specks. Unlocked glass doors led to an outer lobby with a panel of buzzers on one wall. Another set of locked glass doors led to a small charmless inner lobby with a bronzed mirror, a leather bench with aluminum legs, and two elevators with a sand-filled column ashtray between them.
There were six apartments to a floor. Perry Werth lived in 8D. Orso jabbed the buzzer. He was about to ring again when the intercom hummed for a moment and then a metallic voice asked, “Yes? Who is it?”
“Police. Detectives Orso and Cassidy, Mr. Werth. We need to talk to you,” Orso said into the intercom.
There was silence for a moment. “What about?”
Orso rolled his eyes at Cassidy. “Mr. Werth, we can do this over the intercom for all the neighborhood to hear. Or we can do it down at the station. Or we can do it in your apartment, comfortable and private. Your choice.”
A longer silence, and then, “All right. Come on up. I’m in eight D.” The door buzzed, the latch clicked, and Cassidy pushed the door open.
Orso and Cassidy crossed the lobby and got in the elevator. A man came in through the lobby door jus
t before it closed and hurried toward the elevator. “Hold the door, will you?” He was in his early thirties, a trim, compact man with dark hair cut short in the military manner. He wore black trousers, a gray shirt, and a black windbreaker. Cassidy noticed that he wore thin leather gloves though it was not cold out. Orso pushed 8. “Floor?”
“Seven,” Fraker said.
Just before he stepped into the elevator, he had recognized the cop he had pinned with his flashlight in Ingram’s apartment. His heart jumped, but it was too late to stop, and then he realized that the cop had never seen his face during the fight in the dark, and when the lights came on, Fraker had been headed toward the door. The big cop pushed 7 and the door closed. Fraker stepped to the back wall. His right hand found the knife in his pocket. His heart slowed. They don’t have a fucking clue. I could kill them both before they knew what hit them. Christ, it would be easy. A backhand slash across the big man’s throat. A half turn to punch the knife into the other one’s neck. What was his name? Cassidy, Crofoot said. Punch it into Cassidy’s neck, or, if he had started to react to the big one’s cut throat, into his chest, the bigger target. In and out. In and out. In and out. Hit him hard and fast before he could react. He’d be dead standing there. Then turn back to the big one to see if he needed more. The thought of their surprise, of how easy it would be, made him smile. But the elevator would be like a slaughterhouse. There’d be blood all over, all over him. And then he’d have to go deal with Werth, and that would take time, time enough for someone to find the bodies. And no one had told him to kill the cop, so, too bad. It would have been interesting. But he had a problem now. He was there to talk to Werth, and they were headed for Werth’s apartment, no other reason for these two cops to be going to the eighth floor in this building. Rethink.
Cassidy saw the man smile and wondered what private pleasure he had thought of.
“Spring’s finally here, it looks like,” the man said. “It’s great to be alive.” He smiled again.
“Yes, it is,” Cassidy said.
The doors opened on 7 and the man stepped out. “See you,” he said with an inflection that made it sound to Cassidy more like a statement than the usual casual good-bye.
The doors closed, and the elevator lurched up.
Fraker ran for the stairwell and took the stairs two at a time to the eighth floor. He cracked the door there and watched Cassidy and his partner get off the elevator and walk down the hall to 8D. The big one rang the bell. He could not see who opened the door a moment later, but he heard a man’s voice say, “Come in, please.”
Fraker stepped out into the corridor. The apartment next to 8D, 8E, was opposite the door to the stairwell. He crossed quickly and rang the doorbell. A moment later he heard footsteps approaching. A woman’s voice asked, “Who is it?”
“Superintendent, ma’am. We’re trying to check the source of a leak. It’ll only take a minute.”
“Oh, dear. Yes, of course. Hold on, please.”
He heard her unlock two locks. She opened the door. She was a pleasant-looking gray-haired woman in a housedress and slippers. She held a feather duster in one hand.
“Please come in. A leak? Oh, dear. Please excuse the mess.” Her gesture took in the neat living room.
“This’ll only take a minute,” Fraker said. He kicked the door shut and shot his hands out and grabbed her by the throat and squeezed. She dropped the feather duster and pulled at his wrists with her two hands. He felt the cartilage in her throat compress and then crush. Her feet kicked feebly and one of her slippers flew off. He held her off with rigid arms and watched carefully to see if he could tell the moment when life left and death came. He had watched Victor Amado in the same way but had been unable to catch the moment, and he had wondered if the pain of the torture had masked it. Her face reddened, her eyes bulged, and her mouth hung open. Her grip on his wrists slackened and then fell away. Her knees buckled, and he held her up by his hands on her throat until she stopped moving. He lowered her body to the carpet. He had seen nothing, no moment of change in her, just alive and then dead. He pushed aside his disappointment and moved quickly across to the wall her apartment shared with Perry Werth’s.
The building had been cheaply made during the postwar construction boom, and the contractor had cut corners wherever he could. The walls were thin and poorly insulated, and when Fraker pressed his ear to the wall he could hear the rumble of voices next door. He caught words and phrases, but much of what was said was lost. He hurried to the kitchen and came back with a glass of thin and delicate crystal. He pressed the open end to the wall and his ear to the base of the glass. Yes, that was better.
* * *
Perry Werth was a tall, dark-haired, good-looking man in his late twenties, a few years older than Ingram and Amado. He wore charcoal gray light flannel trousers and a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt open at the collar with the sleeves rolled. He led Cassidy and Orso down the short hall and into the small living room, offered them the chairs at either end of the coffee table, and sat down on the sofa. He took a cigarette from a pack of Kools on the coffee table and lit it. From where he sat, Cassidy could see a suitcase on the bed in the room next door.
Werth noticed his look. “I just got back this morning. I’ve been on the road for a week. My wife’s at work, but I can make some coffee if you like.”
“No, thanks,” Cassidy said.
There was a silver-framed photograph on an end table that showed Perry Werth and a young woman standing on a dock somewhere with their arms around each other’s waists. A small boy stood against their legs and smiled up at the camera.
“What is this about?”
“Alex Ingram, Victor Amado, Stanley Fisher.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know those names. Who are they?”
“You mean who were they, because now they’re dead.”
“Dead? I don’t understand.” His face paled and he took a short, abrupt pull on the cigarette.
“Two of them were tortured. Fisher was shot.”
“What? Wait, Officer, why are you telling me this? I don’t know these men. What has this got to do with me? Good God, tortured, shot?”
Cassidy looked at Orso. Orso shrugged. “We’ve seen the photographs,” Cassidy bluffed. “We know you were there with them. We want to know who set it up, who knew about it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What photographs? Taken where? Of what?” Werth stubbed the cigarette out half smoked and lit another.
“They’re all dead, Mr. Werth. We think Ingram was killed by someone who tortured him to get the pictures. Amado too. But Stanley Fisher was shot. Whoever did that didn’t give a damn about the pictures. He just wanted Fisher dead. So someone’s cleaning up, and now you’re the only loose end. He’s going to come looking for you. We can protect you, but you have to help us out.”
“I’m sorry. You’re telling me horrible things about these men, but I don’t know them. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know why you’re talking to me.”
“We know you were there.”
“No. It’s somebody else. It’s someone who looks like me.”
“Hey, how come your rent’s paid by a two-bit lawyer downtown named Freed?” Orso asked.
“My rent?” Werth showed his surprise but recovered quickly. “That’s a private arrangement that has nothing to do with you or what you’re talking about, and I am disappointed that Mr. Freed betrayed an attorney-client privilege.”
“Yeah? Imagine Freed’s disappointment when someone shot him in the face.”
“Freed’s dead?” That shook him. “I don’t know what to say. This is a nightmare.”
“Fuck him, Mike. He doesn’t want our help. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold on, Tony. Come on, Mr. Werth, be smart about this. We don’t care who you are or what you’ve done. We don’t give a damn about your private life. We just need to get these people off the street. You can help us.”
Werth shook hi
s head. “Sorry.” His face was set.
* * *
Fraker heard the door to the apartment next door close as the two cops left. He heard the elevator arrive and go back down. He waited to make sure they were not coming back, then he stepped over the woman’s body and left the apartment and went down the stairs to the lobby. He looked through the glass doors to make sure the cops were gone, and then went out toward Amsterdam Avenue to find a phone. He’d better talk to Crofoot and find out if he should still go talk to Perry.
* * *
“What do you think?” Orso asked. They were walking south in the sun along the wall next to Central Park across the street from the Museum of Natural History. Two yellow school buses were in front of the museum and harried teachers were trying to bring order to a seething mass of schoolboys giddy with sunshine and freedom from their desks.
“I’d like to get a dump on his phone. I bet he called someone the minute we left, and I’d love to know who it was.”
“Not a chance. We’re off the case. No one’s going to pull phone records for us.”
“He’s lying,” Cassidy said. “He’s scared and he’s still lying. He’s married. He’s got a kid. He’s got a good job. That all goes away if they find out he’s turning queer tricks.”
“Yeah, but his friends are getting killed.”
“Maybe that doesn’t scare him as much.”
* * *
Fraker found an unbroken phone in a booth on the corner of Amsterdam and 83rd. He called Crofoot, but there was no answer. He went across the street and ate a hamburger with a cherry Coke and went back to the phone booth and tried again. Crofoot answered on the second ring.
“Yes.”
“I was on my way to see Werth. I didn’t get there. Two cops were going up to see him. Cassidy and his partner, a big wop.”
“Tell me something I want to hear.”
“I got into the apartment next door. The place is built like crap. I listened through the wall. I didn’t get it all. Sometimes they were too quiet, but I’ll tell you one thing: Cassidy has the photographs.”
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