“Yes, you can. You walk over there, and say, Slava, we’re getting a divorce. I’m staying here.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” Like a schoolyard argument with no winners.
“I can’t.”
“Well, then, I guess that’s it.”
She looked into his face, hoping he would soften, and read that it was not going to happen. “All right.” She looked once more, and then turned and walked away.
In the dream he had walked after her but could not close the gap, but he did not try to follow her now. In the dream he had called out to her, but he did not call out to her now. In the dream she had turned and waved to him before she got in the car.
Dylan stopped by the car and said something across the hood to Slava. He snapped his cigarette away and got in behind the wheel.
Dylan looked back at him, and, as in the dream, raised a hand. Then she got in the car and drove away.
* * *
Ribera drove Cassidy to the airport, a slow journey through the crowds in the street. More than once they were turned aside by Barbudos holding the main avenues for trucks filled with rebels and their supporters.
“There are almost no planes coming or going. They are using the Cuban airline to bring the freed prisoners from the Isle of Pines, but I managed to find you something.”
“Thank you.”
“I told you, chaos.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“What will you do now?”
“Go home and lick my wounds.”
“My advice, my friend, is to find someone else to lick your wounds and anything else you might want licked. Get right back up on the horse.”
“Thanks, Carlos. I’ll take it under consideration.”
“This is advice from a man whose heart has been broken many times. Like everything else, it heals stronger at the broken place. Believe me. I know what I’m talking about. Find some healthy, uncomplicated girl and take her to bed.”
Ribera hugged him on the curb outside the main terminal. “I’ll see you soon.”
“How’s that?”
“How can it not be? You and I were meant to be friends.” He hugged Cassidy hard, got back in the car, and drove away.
The terminal was crowded with people hoping for a flight off the island. Many of them were Americans, tourists trapped by the revolution. They took up the chairs and benches. Some of them sat on their luggage or on the floor against the wall. They looked tired, forlorn, and a little scared. The party was over.
Most of the Cuban supporters of Batista, the ones who feared they were in danger, had gotten out by boat or had gone into hiding until they saw which way the wind blew.
Cassidy found the desk Ribera had described, in an out-of-the-way corner of the terminal. It was decorated with a small palm tree. A black-haired young woman in a lime green uniform stood behind it.
“Yes, Mr. Cassidy. I have you on my list. We have already boarded. You are one of the last. If you would like to go through that gate, you will see the plane directly in front.”
“Thank you.” He took the boarding pass and picked up his bag.
“Room for one more?” He turned to the cheerful, familiar voice.
“Hello, Alice.”
“Kidder. A friendly face. My lucky day.” Her dress had been painted on, and she wore impossibly high heels that allowed her to look him in the eye. She carried a big handbag heavy enough to drag her shoulder down, and a porter waited behind her with a large suitcase.
“Leaving the party?”
“Taking it with me.” She turned to the woman behind the desk and rested her handbag on it. “Alice Brooks. I think you have me on the list.” She winked at Cassidy.
Alice hooked her arm in Cassidy’s, and they went out the gate. The afternoon sun was low, and the day had cooled. A DC-6 waited on the tarmac. Bright green letters on the fuselage spelled TROPICANA SPECIAL.
“See? Stick with me. Where I go, the party goes.” She bumped him with a hip, and then let go of his arm and went up the ramp first so that he could have the pleasure of following.
PART TWO
NEW YORK DREAMS
6
The dead man sat on a wooden kitchen chair just inside the 72nd Street entrance to Central Park. It was seven o’clock in the morning on a March day, spring a distant hope. Gray clouds scudded low over a waking New York. The pavement was wet from an early-morning rain. A raw day to fit Cassidy’s mood as he walked into the park from Fifth Avenue and found his partner, Tony Orso, talking with two uniformed patrolmen. Orso looked crisp and fresh after his daily shave and hot towel in the barbershop at the Park Sheraton. He wore a light wool suit in a tight dark gray herringbone pattern, highly polished black shoes, a Burberry raincoat belted but not buttoned, and a pale gray fedora. He examined Cassidy as he approached, taking in the unshaven face, the pallor, the dark circles under the eyes, the torn pocket on his suit jacket, the lipstick smear on the collar of his creased white shirt.
“Hey,” Orso said. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks for the kind words.”
“You just starting your day, or ending your night?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to sort that out.”
“Uh-huh. Was it a hit-and-run, or did you actually get her name?”
“Of course I got her name. What kind of asshole do you think I am? It was Corrine, or Mary, or maybe Joan. One of those, I’m pretty sure. What’ve we got here?”
“Young man over there found him when he came out to walk the dog.” Orso gestured to the boy waiting nearby with a big, leashed, dark gray poodle. Striped blue-and-yellow pajama bottoms showed under the hem of his expensive wool overcoat. He wore a blue cap with a white “B” on it and unbuckled galoshes. Cassidy guessed he was about twelve years old. He looked at the cops, looked at the dead man, and then scratched the dog behind one ear. When he stopped, the dog butted him for more.
Cassidy lit a cigarette as he walked over. The dog looked at him with interest, sniffed his shoes, and then sat back and waited. “Hi, I’m Detective Cassidy. What’s your name?”
The dog turned to watch the boy as if curious about his response. Maybe he was. Poodles were supposed to be smart dogs, and he looked smarter than half the dopes on the force. “Seth Rutherfurd.”
Cassidy gestured at the cap with the letter “B.” “Do you go to Buckley, Seth?”
“Yes.” The boy seemed unsurprised at the question. Who knows where adults get their information?
“Is Mr. Mac still coaching?”
That brightened the boy. “Yeah. Did you go there?”
“I did. Tell Mr. Mac that Mike Cassidy said hello.”
“Okay.”
“Can you tell me what you saw out here?”
“I live in Nineteen East.” He gestured toward a building on the north side of 72nd Street. “I have to walk Tinker before I go to school. I always come into the park here. The man was sitting there on the chair. I thought he was waiting for someone, but that seemed kind of weird, sitting on a chair in the park. And when I got close, I thought, whoa, he’s got a hole in his head. I ran back to the Nineteen East and had the doorman call the police and then I came back here to wait, ’cause I thought you’d want to talk to me.”
“What about your parents? Do they know where you are?”
“I asked the doorman not to call them. They’d make me go upstairs, and I wouldn’t see what was happening. I wanted to see.”
“Okay.” Cassidy understood that. It was what he would have done when he was twelve. He had always wanted to see. “Do you know him? Have you seen him before?
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Never seen him around the neighborhood?”
“Well, I thought he looked kind of a little familiar, but then I don’t think so.”
“Maybe in one of the stores? Coming out of one of the buildings you pass on the way to school?”
The boy shook his head.
“Did you see
anyone else in the park or on the street?”
“There were some people waiting for the bus at the stop on Seventy-Second. I didn’t see anyone when I came into the park. I mean anyone but him. Mostly people come out to walk their dogs when I’m going back in.”
“Let me get your phone number in case I have to talk to you again.”
“I already gave it to Mr. Orso.”
“Okay, then. Thanks for your help.”
“May I stay and watch?”
“Not much is going to happen here. They’re going to come take the man away, and that will pretty much be it. Besides, you don’t want to be late for school, do you?”
“No,” he said with perfect insincerity. “I’d hate to be late for school. Come on, Tinker.” The boy trudged away, condemned to another day in the classroom. The dog walked beside him, the unnecessary leash dangling between them.
Cassidy squatted in front of the man in the chair to study him. He looked to be in his late twenties. He had the thick body of a former college linebacker now carrying extra pounds. Even in the dull slack of death his face was handsome, though the dark blood–rimmed bullet hole in the middle of his forehead did not add to that. His black hair was curly and tight to his skull like wool. He wore a tweed jacket, a blue button-down shirt, pressed gray flannel trousers, dark wool socks, and polished wing-tip shoes, one of the uniforms of the Upper East Side. His hands rested on his thighs. They were stubby, powerful, and the nails were cut short. Cassidy picked one up and turned it over. It was heavily callused, the hands of a working man, at odds with the clothes.
“What’s the thing with the tie, do you think?” Orso asked. The man’s tie had been pulled up under his chin and then tied off over his shoulder to the back of the chair.
“Maybe to keep his head up,” Cassidy said as he stood.
“Why?”
“Maybe so someone would see him, recognize him.”
“A warning?”
“I don’t know. Something. Somebody left him here for some reason.” What people did to each other no longer surprised him. He had been a cop for a dozen years. He had seen the oven-roasted babies, the mangled women, the shotgun-blasted men, the battered children, bones broken from being thrown against the wall, because he wouldn’t shut up. I told him, shut up, but he kept crying. He kept crying and crying. It was really getting on my nerves, the raped, the starved, the robbed, the conned, the beaten. That’s what a cop dealt with daily, the worst that people did to each other. You had to lean into it or get out. If you stayed in, it wore you down, turned you hard and cynical. He fought against that shell closing over him, fought against losing the outrage.
Orso felt the dead man’s jacket. “Dry. When did it stop raining?” he asked the patrolmen. Both of them shrugged. The skinny one said, “We didn’t come on till six. It wasn’t raining then.”
“Around four thirty,” Cassidy said. He read Orso’s look. “I was out walking.”
“Sure. Why not? A nice walk in the rain at four thirty in the morning.” Orso shook his head. “So we know he got here after four thirty. Not much, but something.”
“Do you think he committed suicide?” the other patrolmen asked. He was a beefy redhead, and he chewed gum openmouthed with an easy bovine rhythm.
“Yeah, I think he did,” Cassidy said. “He put a bullet in his head. Then he dumped the gun someplace, walked over here carrying the chair, and sat down to catch his breath.”
“Hey, I was just asking.” Wounded.
“Easy, Mike.” Orso put a hand on his arm.
“Right. Sorry.” His anger was hair-trigger these days and had been since Cuba. He bent over the dead man and gently patted his jacket pockets looking for a wallet. There was nothing in the jacket. He checked the man’s trouser pockets, but they were empty. “No ID, but somebody’s going to miss him sometime. We’re going to hear about it.”
“How do you figure?”
“He’s wearing a wedding ring.” A simple gold band on his left hand. It had been put on a younger man’s hand years before and would now be hard to get off.
The van from the Bellevue morgue pulled up over the curb and parked near the dead man. A squad car pulled in behind it, and four patrolmen got out. They gathered with the other two uniforms and talked in low voices while they waited for the detectives.
Al Skinner got out of the morgue van, stopped for a moment to look at the body, and then came to join Cassidy and Orso. He was a wiry, spidery man with bright eyes and black hair that was beginning to fleck with gray. He looked at the dead man for a moment and then shrugged. “Well, at least he’s fresh. I’ve got a couple they just pulled out of the river been in the water at least a month. They’ve got more gas than Con Ed.”
“No ID on the guy,” Cassidy said. “Get us a picture we can show around. Try not to emphasize the bullet hole.”
“Hey, Cassidy, I’m an artist. You don’t have to tell me that stuff.” Skinner went to get equipment out of the van while Cassidy and Orso talked to the six patrolmen.
“Canvass the area. Talk to doormen. Who walks dogs around this time, who goes to work early, find out who the bus drivers are on this route from four thirty in the morning on. We’ll want to talk to them. People walk their dogs a couple or three blocks, so let’s check buildings three blocks up, three down, and over as far as Park Avenue. If we get nothing, we’ll check another block. You guys know the drill.”
The patrolmen split up and went off. Cassidy and Orso watched Skinner take pictures of the dead man from all angles. Two techs brought the stretcher and they slung the body onto it without ceremony, strapped it down, and carried it to the van while Skinner snapped more shots of the chair the man had been sitting on.
“We’ll get the chair to the lab,” Skinner said. “Maybe the geniuses there can find something. There’s some dirt on the legs, looks like, and there are some cracks in the seat, and stuff in the cracks. Who knows?”
The van left. And now there was nothing to show that a dead man had been sitting there for hours waiting for someone to find him.
“How about a cup of coffee?” Orso said.
“That’d be good.”
“There’s a place over on Lex makes coffee that tastes like the real thing, and if you ask nice, the guy’ll put a shot of something in it, give it a little punch. Good muffins too. His old lady bakes them.”
“Let’s go.”
They walked out of the park and east on 72nd Street. This was the gold coast of New York, the neighborhoods where the rich lived in limestone and granite towers with brassbound doors that led to marble-floored lobbies and wood-paneled elevators run by deferent uniformed elevator men who whisked the inhabitants up to the big, airy apartments that looked out over the city high above the smells and the noise and the scuffle of the streets. Splendid isolation.
“It’d be real nice to be really rich, wouldn’t it?” Orso said.
“Most people think so.”
“How is it that some guys get the money, and some guys don’t? One of the mysteries of life. I know which group I’m in.”
The coffee shop was on Lexington and 73rd. The counterman nodded to Orso and followed them to a back booth with two mugs and a pot of coffee. He slipped a pint of rye from under his apron and poured a jolt in each mug. Cassidy gestured for him to add a second one to his.
When the counterman went away to get their muffins, Orso said, “You might want to slow down. Don’t look at me like that. I’m your partner. I get to say things. You’ve been on a tear three months now, since you got back. You just might want to take your foot off the gas.”
“Sure. Right.”
“Okay. I’m just saying. You ain’t the first guy to be cut loose by a broad.”
“Tony. Drop it.”
“Right. Okay. Let’s talk about this guy and his little wooden chair and the funny hole in his head. Why’s he there, sitting on the chair at Seventy-second Street? And how the hell did he get there? A dead guy and a kitchen chair, you’d thi
nk someone might notice someone making the delivery.”
“Maybe someone did. Chances are the canvass will turn up something. A lot of eyes in that neighborhood.”
“Not so many at night. You ever notice how much of the shit we deal with happens at night? I bet it’s seventy percent. They do the work at night, we find out about it during the day.” He took a sip of his coffee. “What do you figure? Two guys to get him there?”
“Had to be. He was a big man. Even if they brought him and the chair in a car, they had to get them onto the sidewalk where they left him. Got to be two guys for that.”
“A warning you said, but who’s getting warned about what? In other circumstances I might say some goombah wants to let some other goombah know, but I can’t think of any hoods who live up there on Fifth.”
“A business deal gone bad. Maybe someone took someone for a bundle and he didn’t like it.” Cassidy sipped the loaded coffee and liked the bite and the warmth that spread through his chest.
“Rich people don’t do that. They hire lawyers to fight their fights.”
“Rich people do what everybody else does. They cheat. They steal. They kill. When I was in eighth grade the mother of one of the kids in my class shot the kid’s father with the pearl-handled pistol he gave her. She said she thought he was a burglar when she found him in the hall outside their bedroom at three in the morning. They’d had some break-ins in the neighborhood, in the brownstones up the block.”
“What floor were they on?” Orso dunked a piece of muffin in his coffee.
“Twentieth.”
“Uh-huh. That was a very ambitious burglar. I don’t suppose he asked the elevator man for a ride. Walked up twenty flights. Was going to walk down twenty carrying the loot. Probably doing it for his health. Doctor’s orders—get some exercise. Did she go for the high jump, the wife?”
“No. Not even prosecuted. The father owns half of downtown. Family goes back to the Dutch. The old man sat on the Mayor’s Commission for This and That, the Policy Board for Such and Such. You know the drill. He didn’t want the family name dragged through the dirt of a trial, so it all went away.” The people in the towers overlooking Central Park held the same boiling passions as people in the tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, but when the lid blew off, there was often someone there to mop up the spill.
Night Work Page 11