Night Life

by David C. Taylor

  At Penn Station, she waited till the last moment and then got off as the doors closed, but Cassidy was ready for that and he stepped off behind two women carrying shopping bags from Barneys. He let Dylan take a lead and followed her through the vaulted waiting room of the train station and out onto Seventh Avenue.

  She must have been sure she had shaken any possible tail, because she walked east along 34th Street without looking back. Cassidy crossed to the north side of the street and tracked her. She wore charcoal gray trousers of some thin material and a blue cotton shirt open at the throat that set off her red hair, and she walked with a free swinging stride, and men stopped on the sidewalk and turned to watch her go. One man spoke to her, and she laughed and threw a reply over her shoulder and kept going.

  Dylan went north on Lexington Avenue. Between 38th and 39th, she stopped and looked around. Then she quickly entered a shop in the middle of the block.

  It was the camera store run by the man named Apfel where Cassidy had taken the envelope he had found in Alex Ingram’s dressing room locker. Apfel, the voice on the phone he had called from the lawyer Freed’s office.

  A moment after Dylan entered, Apfel appeared behind the glass door. He locked it, flipped around an OPEN sign so it read CLOSED, and pulled a shade down over the glass.

  Cassidy found a greasy spoon halfway up the block and took a booth at the window that gave him a clear view of the front door of the camera shop across the street. He ordered coffee and settled in for the wait. Two men were sitting at the counter ripping each other the way men do who have been friends for a long time. They were in their twenties. One was rail thin, black haired, with a narrow, bony nose and a pointed chin, and the other was heavy, red faced, thick handed, and as bald as an egg. From their madras jackets, khaki trousers, and polished loafers, they were young executives on a break from one of the nearby book publishers or ad agencies.

  Cassidy tuned out their genial insults and thought about Apfel in his camera shop. The photographs. How had Ingram been so careless that he’d ruined them?

  He took the prints Howie Lodin had made from his inside pocket, put the clear photo back, spread the blurred prints in front of him, and examined them in the sunlight that fell through the window. What was this? A table? And this glow? A lighted lamp? This could be a window with city lights behind it, but where was it taken? This was a man, or maybe a woman. And this—another man? woman?—also unidentifiable. There was something in one of the photos that pricked his memory. A silvery rounded mass that reflected light. He had seen something like that recently. What the hell was it? And where had he seen it?

  A bell behind him tinkled as someone opened the door to the diner, and a warm breeze blew in for a moment before the door closed. The man who had entered walked past him on the way to the counter.

  “Orso.”

  Orso turned. “Hey, what the hell?” Orso slid into the booth.

  “Ribera?” He gestured to the camera store across the street.

  “Jesus, he took us through it. We lost Thomaselli in the subway, but Hanratty and I stuck with him to Third and Thirty-eighth. Halfway up the block he ducks down an alley. We can’t follow him there, ’cause the alley dead ends, so I cruise by and see him duck into a door. I figure it’s the back door of one of the shops over here on Lex, so I run around to see if he comes out, which I don’t think he did.”

  “He’s in the camera shop.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s where Dylan went.”

  “Dylan?”

  “I followed her up here. She’s meeting Ribera and a guy named Apfel who runs the shop.”

  “Okay. Tell me about it.”

  “Apfel supplied the camera in the cigarette lighter. Apfel developed the photographs. When I went in there with the envelope I found in Ingram’s locker, he was very interested in any negatives that might have been in it. Ingram stole them to go into business for himself.”

  “Do you think Apfel’s the guy who tortured Ingram?”

  “I do.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A Russian agent.”

  “And Dylan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to burn her down.”

  The thin man at the counter said, “I’ve got to get back to the office. Coca-Cola is counting on me. I’ll see you, Chrome Dome.” He slapped his friend on the back and stood up.

  “Hold on.” Cassidy got up and went to the man paying at the register. “What did you just call your friend?”

  “What?”

  “What’d you call him?” Cassidy’s intensity made the other man step back.

  “I don’t know. What do you want? I called him, what, Chrome Dome. What the hell?” The man held his hands up defensively.

  “Chrome Dome. Right. Thanks.”

  “Jesus, man, what’s wrong with you?” He backed to the door, keeping his eye on Cassidy, and then went out fast.

  The woman behind the register, the counterman, and Chrome Dome watched Cassidy warily. New York. People go off the rails all the time. Be prepared to jump.

  Orso drank his coffee, unperturbed. “What was all that about?”

  “I’m going up to the Waldorf.”

  “Sure. Go ahead, don’t tell me why. I don’t have to know. What do you want me to do?”

  “Wait here. Take whoever comes out the front first. Hanratty can pick up whoever comes out the back.”

  “Okay. You all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Cassidy lied, his rage at Dylan humming just below the surface.

  He found a phone booth on the corner of 40th, closed the door against the traffic noise, and dropped a nickel in the slot.

  The phone was answered on the third ring. “Yes?”

  “Let me talk to Frank.”

  “Nobody here by that name.”

  “Tell him Mike Cassidy’s calling.” He heard the receiver clunk on a tabletop. Footsteps retreated. Moments later someone picked up a different receiver.

  “Michael, how are you?”

  “Great. Perfect.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Do you guys do the linen service for the Waldorf?”

  “We’re involved, so to speak.”

  “I want to ask some questions people won’t want to answer. I’m going to talk to a guy named Sorino who runs the service staff.”

  “Is this about the thing we talked about?” Costello was always circumspect. He was sure the FBI and the police tapped his phones.

  “Yes.”

  “Sorino, huh? I’ll call someone. Give me half an hour.”

  * * *

  Cassidy entered the Waldorf through the revolving door on Lexington Avenue. He found the unmarked door and went down the iron staircases to the subbasement. A waiter pushed a service cart along the corridor. On it was a vase with a single rose, place settings for two, and a chromed warming dome over whatever had been ordered for lunch just like the one he had seen when he first came to the Waldorf tracking Ingram.

  The blurred shiny mass in one of the photos. “Chrome Dome,” from the ad man. The Waldorf.

  Cassidy went into Sorino’s office without knocking. Sorino was behind his desk running sums on an adding machine. He did not look up when Cassidy entered.

  Costello’s man, Packer, leaned against a wall near the door in his black suit and black hat. He nodded at Cassidy and drew so hard on his cigarette that the burning paper crackled.

  “The boss thought I should come, make sure you got what you wanted.”

  To make sure Costello got what he wanted.

  “Mr. Sorino, I’d like to see the books on the Towers for December–January.”

  Sorino typed numbers into the adding machine, pulled the lever, looked at the results with satisfaction and then at Cassidy with distaste. He opened a drawer, retrieved a ledger, and slid it across the desk without a word. Then he went back to his numbers to distance himself from the
proceedings.

  The book was leather-bound and stamped in gold with the Waldorf logo. Cassidy opened it flat and leafed back to New Year’s Eve.

  Sorino had told him that Ingram did not show up for work on New Year’s Eve, but the room service waiter had seen Ingram in the Towers elevator with three or four other men dressed for a party. Where had they been going?

  He could feel Packer watching him as he ran his finger down the page. The answer jumped out at him halfway down. The notations in the book were for services ordered for the apartments in the Waldorf Towers on New Year’s Eve. There was an order for a suite on the thirty-seventh floor: twelve bottles of Louis Roederer champagne, two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label scotch, two bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, two bottles of Beefeater gin, two bottles of Hennessy VSOP cognac, ice and mixers, six platters of assorted hors d’oeuvres including a pound of Beluga caviar. It was specified that the caviar was to be Iranian, not Russian. The order was to be delivered by six o’clock. No service staff was to enter the suite after six o’clock unless called for. That demand was underlined.

  “Tell me about Suite thirty-seven oh three.”

  Sorino put down his pen with a weary sigh. “That suite is on a four-year lease to Mr. Junius Schine.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Mr. Schine is a gentleman from California. He is in the hotel business, which is why, I suspect, he appreciates the service and the privacy he receives at the Waldorf.”

  “Is he any relation to the David Schine who works for Senator McCarthy’s committee?”

  “I believe he is David Schine’s father.”

  Stanley Fisher’s last words hadn’t been “sweet shine.” He had been trying to tell Cassidy where he and Ingram and the others were on New Year’s Eve: Schine’s suite. “Schine … suite … Schine.” The last gasps of a dying man. And the word that had sounded like “ear” or “mere”? A fragment of New Year’s Eve.

  Cassidy closed the ledger and pushed it back across the desk. Sorino stopped his calculations and slipped the book into the bottom drawer.

  “I need the passkey for the Tower suites,” Cassidy said.

  Sorino shook his head. “No, no, no. I agreed to this, but, no, not that. That is completely unacceptable. We have very important guests in the Towers. I cannot have you wandering about, poking your nose in wherever you want.”

  Packer pushed away from the wall. “Hey, come on, pal, you don’t want to be like that.” He said it mildly, but Sorino looked at him and read something in his face. He took a ring of keys from another drawer. There were three keys on the ring, each marked with a piece of colored tape.

  Sorino handed them to Cassidy. “The yellow one. This is highly irregular. I don’t like it at all. If we had not been threatened with a disruption of crucial services that would paralyze the hotel, I would not have agreed to any of this.”

  “Noted.”

  “I will hold you responsible.”

  “Good idea.” Cassidy turned to Packer. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  “In a pig’s eye. Frank says stick with you.”

  Cassidy shrugged and led the way out of the office. A waiter pushed a service cart of dirty dishes down the corridor toward them.

  “What’s up?” Packer walked at Cassidy’s shoulder. “What did you find in the book?”

  The waiter banged the double doors of the kitchen open with the end of the cart and disappeared.

  Cassidy slammed his right elbow into Packer’s stomach. The man grunted in pain and surprise and folded. One hand came up to hold his stomach, and the other scratched at his coat to get at the gun under his arm. Cassidy punched him hard in the side of his neck. He bounced against the wall and sagged. Cassidy hit him on the point of the jaw and Packer sprawled face-first on the floor. Cassidy grabbed a handful of the unconscious man’s jacket collar and dragged him down the corridor to a service closet. He pulled him in and left him propped against the back wall, legs splayed, among the mops and buckets.

  * * *

  Cassidy unlocked the door to the Schine suite with the passkey and went in. A short, mirrored hall led to a large living room furnished with big overstuffed chairs and sofas and good replicas of antique tables. Gold-framed landscapes of California hung on the walls. There was a photograph of Roy Cohn, David Schine, and Senator McCarthy on a table behind one of the sofas where you would be sure to see it when you entered the room. There were dark blue curtains at the north-facing windows. They had made dark blurs in the background of Ingram’s photograph. He studied the room, memorizing the paintings and where they hung, the shapes of the sofas and chairs and the color of their upholstery, the placement of the tables and what ornaments and ashtrays they held. If what he had in mind was going to work, he needed to remember the room.

  The living room gave on to a dining room, which led to a small kitchen, and a pantry stocked with nuts, bottled olives, boxes of crackers, and other cocktail snacks. The refrigerator held mixers, a pitcher of orange juice, half a lemon, a piece of something that might once have been pâté but was now curled leather, and a bottle of champagne.

  There were two bedrooms off the living room. Neither had been recently used.

  The closet in the bigger one held two suits, three sports coats, a number of trousers, an overcoat, and an army uniform with a name tag reading SCHINE pinned above the breast pocket.

  Cassidy prowled the living room, opening and closing the drawers in the tables. He found nothing of interest besides ten identical pamphlets in a drawer in a tallboy near the dining room. They were bound in dark maroon cloth and were titled “Definition of Communism.” The author was G. David Schine. Cassidy lit a cigarette and sat in an overstuffed chair and threw one leg over its arm while he read. The pamphlet was only six pages long. The writing was stiff and clumsy, and the thoughts were muddy. Schine had confused Marx with Lenin. He had confused Trotsky with Stalin. The Republic was in good hands.

  He took the prints from his pocket and studied them as he walked around the room. That dark blur with the brightness next to it was this chair and this lamp. The tall shape next to it in black-and-white was a man in a dinner jacket and white shirt. Another stood near the rectangle of a window. That table and that lamp. The bright silver of the warming dome covering a service cart. The figure in red, blurred in this picture, between the blurs of two men in dinner jackets. Ghosts and shapes, nothing that would stand up in court, but he knew the photographs had been taken in this room on New Year’s Eve.

  He left the suite and rode down in the elevator with just the elevator man. The doors opened at the Tower lobby. Roy Cohn waited to get on. He was with a good-looking young man with a soft face and curly hair. They were leaning toward each other talking with their heads close together. The young man turned to whisper something in Cohn’s ear that made Cohn laugh. When he looked up, he saw Cassidy, and his face froze.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “General MacArthur asked me to stop by to tell him where he went wrong in Korea.”

  Blood rose in Cohn’s face. “You don’t learn, do you? I explained how things work, but you didn’t listen. Do you think your father’s the only person I can reach? Well, now, now you’ll see.”

  Cassidy grabbed Cohn by his jacket and jerked him into the elevator.

  The elevator man said, “Hey,” in alarm.

  Cassidy showed him his badge and said, “Get out.” He swung Cohn around and shoved him to the back of the car and closed the door on the startled faces of the elevator man and Cohn’s friend. He pushed the lever and rode the elevator up half a floor and then stopped it.

  Cohn watched him warily from the corner of the car. His shoulders were hunched in defense, and he had his hands up. “You’re in trouble.”

  “Careful, little man. I’ve got a bad temper and a thirty-eight pistol.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Absolutely. If you come anywhere near me or mine again, I will hunt you down and shoot you. Is that
clear?”

  Cohn stared at Cassidy and said nothing.

  Cassidy took a step toward him. “Is that clear?”

  Cohn’s mouth worked for a moment and then he nodded.

  Cassidy ran the elevator down to the lobby and opened the door. Cohn darted past him and out through the revolving door to 49th Street. His friend threw Cassidy a puzzled glance and went after him.

  Cassidy stepped out of the car and smiled at the elevator man. “It runs nice. Good on the straightaways and the curves.” He went out onto 49th Street feeling better about his day.

  35

  Dylan was sitting in a chair near the window when he came into the apartment. There was a book open in her lap, but the apartment was dark now, so she must have been there for a long time.

  “How was your day?” he asked as he went to the kitchen to make a drink. Stay casual. Feel it out. The ground underfoot is treacherous.

  “Fine. How was yours?”

  “Great.” He held up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, but she shook her head.