A dream woke him in darkness—fragments of a fight with his brother who wasn’t his brother, gunfire, trees strung with colored lights, the woodshed of the Mexican ranch of his teenage summers, but not the woodshed, a loud, droning voice full of metal. He lay in the dark reaching for the images, but they faded away.
* * *
Cassidy ate breakfast at four in the morning at the Bickford’s on Seventh Avenue. Two cabbies on break played gin at the corner table while a third slept with his head on his arms. An old woman, birdlike in her thinness, with flyaway white hair under a paste and rhinestone tiara, and bright red lipstick that only approximated her mouth, waved wildly from the bulwark of bags that surrounded her at a table near the door. Cassidy nodded to her, nearly a bow, and said, “How are you, Your Highness?” as he went past to take a stool at the counter. She nodded to him regally and made a gesture with her hand, a blessing. She told whoever would listen that she was Anastasia, the lost daughter of the last Tsar of the Russias, and no one in the Village said no.
The waitress brought him a cup of coffee. “What can I get you, Mike?”
“A short stack, sausage, orange juice.”
“You got it.”
“Kate, has the princess eaten?”
“A cup of coffee, a glass of water. She gives her welfare money to her people. No one can get her to stop.”
“Get her whatever she wants on me.”
The early edition of the Daily News groused that Fidel Castro refused to pledge that Cuba would join the U.S. in the Cold War against Russia. Cuba, he said, would remain neutral. A spokesman for the State Department said that there could be no neutrality in a matter this grave. With us or against us—there was no middle ground in American foreign policy.
Cassidy finished his last cup of coffee as one of the cabbies came off break and rode the man’s hack uptown. The cabbie was content with silence and Cassidy was grateful for that. He loved the city in the blue predawn hours when it was at its quietest. A few optimistic taxis cruised. Trucks made their early deliveries before rush hour locked down the streets. There was almost no one on the sidewalks, a few drunks tacking home from the late-night bars near Union Square, the night cleaning crews leaving the big office buildings along Park Avenue South, early shift workers headed for the breakfast restaurants. There was more traffic around Grand Central as they went up the elevated street and through the short eastern tunnel and out onto Park Avenue. The cab turned left on 72nd Street and stopped at the corner of Fifth Avenue. Cassidy passed money over the seat back and waited for his change.
“Do you like the city?”
“What?” the driver said.
“I asked if you liked the city. It’s beautiful at this time of the morning. Like some big animal just waking up and stretching. We’re lucky to live here. I love it,” he said. It was easy to confess to a stranger, a man he would never have to talk to again.
The cabbie checked him in the rearview mirror. Love? What kind of whacko did he have in the backseat? “Sure. Greatest city in the world. I’ve never been anywhere else. Why would I go? What’ve they got that we don’t got?”
A Parks Department truck was parked on the path at the southern end of the Conservatory Waters. A grand name for a shallow concrete oval bowl a couple of hundred feet in diameter. It was bounded by a low, curved parapet against which he used to lie to launch his sailboat, the concrete warm on his belly in the summer, and cool in the fall and spring. The bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen near the northwestern end had been put in after his time. Two men in khaki work clothes were planting flowers in a broad bed of newly turned earth near the low brick boathouse.
Barney Rose and Kevin Rotella were both in their late twenties. Rose was a tall, bony man with a shock of straw-colored hair, blue eyes, and a narrow face with an overbite that made him look like a hungry chipmunk. Kevin Rotella was a couple of inches shorter and a few pounds heavier. His dark hair was swept up into a pompadour and held in place by some goo that glistened in the light from the streetlamp overhead. He had sleepy brown eyes, bedroom eyes, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up on muscular arms, one of which sported a tattoo of the Marine Corps insignia and the words “Semper Fi.”
When Cassidy showed them his badge, Rotella put down a flat of plants he was carrying and lit a cigarette, and Rose got up from where he had been digging in the rich earth.
“What can we do for you, Officer?” Rotella asked. He accepted a cigarette from the pack Rose offered and bent to the lighter.
“Were you here Monday morning?”
“Monday? Sure. We’re here, right around here, every morning Monday through Friday. It’s planting season. Do you know how many plants we’ve got to get in the ground? A lot. What do they tell us, Barney? How many thousand?” Rotella was clearly the spokesman, a man who liked the sound of his voice.
“Twelve thousand.” Rose’s voice was thin and soft, as if he did not use it much.
“There you go. Twelve thousand plants. Takes a lot of time. So why do you ask? About Monday, that is?”
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary when you came on shift?”
They looked at each other. Rotella shrugged. “I don’t know. Out of the ordinary like what?”
“There was a dead man sitting on a chair near the Fifth Avenue entrance. Someone shot him and then brought him into the park.”
“You’re kidding.”
“We figure he was brought here around five in the morning, about when you guys went on shift.”
“We heard about a dead guy found in the park, but we didn’t see nothing, did we, Barney?”
“No.”
“Nobody parked near the entrance, maybe up on the sidewalk for a few minutes?”
“We come in from the west side. The garage where we pick up the truck’s over there. No reason to go over to Fifth unless we’re putting in new plantings, and that won’t happen till next week.”
“Okay. If you think of anything, give me a call.” He gave each of them his card and walked over to Fifth Avenue and sat on a bench just outside the park entrance. The sun now slanted light from the East River down 72nd Street. People came out of the buildings into the morning, men in suits on their way to work, women herding children off to school, teenagers still half asleep, dog walkers. Delivery vans arrived carrying food from Gristedes, dry cleaning, plumbing supplies, orders from Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. People got off the buses at the stops on either side of the avenue. How many people had he seen in the last two hours? Hundreds. The avenue jammed with traffic as the sun rose higher and promised a warm day.
At seven thirty Seth Rutherfurd and his dog came out of 19 East. They paused for a moment on the corner, ignored the red light, and jaywalked through a break in traffic, a New York kid.
“Did you find the killer yet?” The dog sat and followed the conversation.
“No.”
“Do you know who the dead man is?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Mr. Mac remembers you at school. He says you used to get into a lot of trouble.”
“I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I was a wiseass.”
“Huh, yeah.” The boy grinned in recognition.
“It didn’t do me a lot of good.”
“No.” Recognition again. The dog found little of interest in the talk. It stood and tugged at the leash. “I’ve got to go.”
“Okay.” Cassidy watched the boy enter the park. He got up from the bench and walked to the corner where he could see into the park. From where he stood a bush, bright with new green growth, hid where the chair and the dead man had been. Whoever the man had been left for had to go into the park to see him. Then what? You see a dead man you know. What do you do? You don’t call the cops. Why not? Because you’re scared. You recognize that he was left for you to see by someone who knew you would go by that spot that day. How did he know? Maybe you went by it every day. Maybe you didn’t go anymore. Maybe find
ing the dead man meant you couldn’t go back there again.
“Seth.” The boy turned to his call and waited for him while the big poodle lifted his leg on a tree. “Do a lot of the people who walk dogs walk them in the park?”
“Some do.”
“Do you walk Tinker every day?”
“Yes. Unless I’m sick or something.”
“Do you see the same people every day?”
“Mostly, I guess.”
“In the last few days has anyone been missing, anyone who usually walks when you do, but you haven’t seen?”
The boy thought about it. “I don’t know. I mean, we don’t always come out at exactly the same time, and I guess I haven’t been paying attention. You know, I don’t know who they are, a lot of them. They just say hello sometimes if our dogs stop to sniff. I know the dogs better.”
“Close your eyes. Think about it for a minute. You come out of your building with Tinker, here. You walk to Fifth and wait to cross to the park. You go. You get to the park and go in. Who do you see? What dogs don’t you see?”
The boy closed his eyes and concentrated. The big poodle looked up at him curiously and then yawned showing big, white teeth.
Seth opened his eyes. “The red setter. I haven’t seen the red setter for a while.”
“Who walks it?”
“A lady.”
“Where do you see her? Where does she come from?”
“Up there.” He gestured north. “I don’t know where, but I see her sometimes coming down Fifth and then going into the park here.”
“Where’s the next entrance to the park to the north?”
“Up past Seventy-sixth Street.”
“So this is the closer entrance, which means she probably lives between here and Seventy-fourth. When was the last time you saw her and the setter?”
“I don’t know. A few days ago, maybe a week.”
“Since you found the dead guy?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“What does she look like?”
“I don’t know. A lady. Brown hair. Old.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know. Like my mother.”
“How old is your mother?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Thanks, Seth.”
“It’d be cool if I helped you find the killer.”
“Yes, it would.”
10
Ex-Sergeant Paco Lopato finished his rum and signaled the bartender for another. The man took an unlabeled bottle from the shelf behind the bar and walked down to refill Lopato’s glass.
“Gracias.”
“Nada.” He took a dollar from the change in front of Lopato and walked back to where he had been arguing with two other patrons about the baseball careers of two Havana boys, Julio Bécquer, the Washington Senators first baseman, and Minnie Miñoso, the longtime White Sox utility man now playing left field for the Cleveland Indians.
Lopato picked up the glass between forefinger and thumb, a delicate grip for a big man, and drank half the rum in one. It was the kind he liked, harsh and burning and tasting of the cane. When he turned to look at the clock on the wall the gun in his jacket pocket clunked against the front of the bar.
Five more minutes.
He was not drinking for courage. What he had to do was a simple matter, something he had done before. It needed coolness and confidence, and he had both without liquor. He liked this bar. He liked the rum they served. He had time to kill. What else should he do, read a book? He smiled at the thought and took a leather case from his pocket, selected a thin cigarillo, the same kind of small cigars Colonel Fuentes smoked. The cigars were his only expensive luxury. He had stolen one from the Colonel’s desk soon after he went to work for him, had liked it, and had started buying them from the tobacconist in Old Havana where the Colonel bought his. When Fuentes had first noticed he smoked them, he raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Well, let him think what he wanted. Lopato smoked them because he liked them, not because he was trying to mimic his betters.
Lopato finished the drink and went out into the night at Columbus Avenue and 91st Street. A Checker cab was parked in front with the Off Duty sign lit. Lopato got in the back and said, “Vamos.” The driver put aside his copy of El Diario, started the engine, and pulled out into traffic.
The cab came down off the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn and parked on a side street near Grand. Down the block a blue neon sign announced Centro Cubano. The driver turned and put an arm across the back of his seat. He spoke in Spanish. “The bar is on the left as you come in. Then the dining room, then the kitchen. They sit at a table at the back on the left. Always the same table. All the way back and on the left. A table for four. There is a photograph of El Morro on the wall above the table so you know it is the right one.”
“Yes.”
“There will be four of them. They are there every Thursday night. If they are all there, do it, or if there are three. If there are only two, do not. The others will hide and it will take us a long time to find them.”
“All right.”
“Go out through the kitchen. No one there will interfere. I will not be here. Go out the back door. Walk to Grand Street. Turn right. You will see the subway entrance. It is the best way to go.”
“All right.”
“Do not worry. No one will try to stop you. They will be scared. They will think only of saving themselves.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Have you done such a thing before?”
“Me? No. Why would you think that? Which end do I point at them? Which end has the bullets?”
“You choose to make a joke.” The driver was offended. “This is not a joke. This is a serious business. War is a serious business.”
“It is for those on the bad end of the gun.”
“All right then. Go. It’s time.”
Lopato took his time getting out to show the driver he was not in charge. The driver took off before the door closed completely. Lopato watched the cab turn left at the corner and disappear. He straightened his jacket and started toward the restaurant in the middle of the block under the blue neon sign.
Lopato stopped just inside the door. The bar was on his left, as the cabdriver had said. The people lining the bar spoke in Spanish with the rhythms and accents of Cuba. The drinkers were mostly men, though there were a few women too. Some turned to look at him and then turned back to their drinks. They didn’t know him, and they didn’t care, just another Cubano looking for a drink or a meal. He stopped at the entry to the dining room. It was a large room full of people, most of them talking in loud voices, the shouts and laughter familiar to anyone who had spent time in Havana restaurants. People out for a good time. People who liked to live, who liked good food and good drink, who liked the tension a new woman brought to their lives. The smell of the food started the juices in his mouth. He had not found a good Cuban restaurant in the Upper West Side neighborhood where he was living. This clearly was a good one. Well, he would not be back to find out how good, not after tonight’s work.
The table at the back on the left was in shadow, but Lopato could see that all four chairs were occupied. He put his hand in his jacket pocket and touched the butt of the gun, a Colt .45 automatic issued to him by SIM, part of the generous supply of weapons sent to Batista’s government by the U.S. Army. He walked toward the back, pausing to let waiters with trays get by. The people at the back table leaned toward one another in heated conversation, unaware of his approach. There were three empty wine bottles on the table, and one of the men poured the glasses full from a recently opened one. Lopato glanced at the wall and found the photo of El Morro. No mistake, then. These were the ones. A thin, narrow-headed man with a pencil-line mustache and oiled hair, a white-haired man whose heavy paunch rested on his splayed thighs, a blond with a long face like a horse, and a woman mulatta, her thick gray hair pulled back from her strong face. They hadn’t said there would be a woman. Well, there was. So
be it. What did it matter? He did not know why this was necessary. It was enough that Colonel Fuentes needed it done.
They looked up without alarm when Lopato neared. Perhaps they were expecting the waiter. He took the Colt from his pocket and shot the man with the mustache in the temple. The shot was shockingly loud in the room, and for a moment afterward there was silence. The man slammed sideways and fell from his chair. Lopato shot the horse-faced man directly across the table twice in the chest, and he was thrown back against the wall. That’s when the screaming began. The heavy man began to rise, his eyes wide, his head swiveling for an escape. Lopato shot him in the face, and the heavy bullet threw him into a man trying to flee the neighboring table. The woman sat still, her hands on the table in front of her, her eyes closed so as not to see what was coming. Lopato shot her twice.
He turned, gun ready, but no one came to interfere. The archway from the dining room to the bar was jammed with people fighting to get out. Lopato pushed aside a fallen chair and went through the swinging door into the kitchen. The whole business had not taken more than ten seconds. The kitchen staff stood wide-eyed watching him as he came through the door. A cook in a stained white apron held a big chef’s knife. When he saw the gun, he dropped the knife, and it clattered to the floor. Lopato walked through the narrow room past the stove with its steaming pots and sizzling grill. The juices started in his mouth again at the fragrances of the cooking food. The back door was propped open with a milk crate to let in fresh air. He pushed through and went out into the alley and down the street to the avenue. He turned right, as instructed, and walked to the subway station at the end of the block. He would ask Colonel Fuentes. Perhaps he knew of a good restaurant on the West Side.
Night Work Page 15