Newly said, “Gentlemen,” and tipped his hat and followed.
Cassidy watched them leave. He lit a cigarette. “Okay, what was all that about?”
“He thinks you’re a good cop.”
“Come on. He doesn’t think anyone but he and Newly is any good.”
“No. He thinks there are maybe twenty good cops on the force. You’re one of them.”
“Huh.” He was unused to praise, and did not look for it. His father showered superlatives on everyone and by doing so cheapened their value, and his mother had been brought up and trained by chilly people who assumed that everyone in their family would always do his best and therefore praise was unnecessary. Still, Bonner was a cop’s cop, and if he thought Cassidy was a good cop, well, he had to admit, it felt good.
“What do you think of his idea that the dead man was working up there?” Orso tasted the gin again and pushed it aside unfinished. “Hey, Hanno, this stuff tastes like turpentine.”
“I’ve got another bottle tastes like gasoline. You want me to bring you a shot? On the house.”
“I think Bonner gave us a hint to see if we’ll check it out,” Cassidy said. “If we do, even if nothing comes of it, we’re okay. If we don’t, he’ll think we’re just assholes like the rest of them.”
“Do you care what Bonner thinks?”
“He’s a shit, but he’s a good cop.”
“So what do we do?”
“We check it out.”
* * *
Orso went to check on the sanitation men who had worked the early shift the week the man was shot, and Cassidy went to the station house and worked the phones to the Department of Buildings until he had a list of people who had applied for construction permits in a six-block area near where the dead man was found. The first was a town house. It had started out as a single-family town house, was broken into apartments and was being made into a single-family home again. The foreman looked at the photograph and shook his head. “Nah. I mean maybe I’ve seen him around, but I don’t recognize him. You’re welcome to show it to the guys inside. Maybe one of them knows him.”
They didn’t.
The second was in an apartment building on 73rd Street. The doorman swore he had never seen the man, and that if he hadn’t seen him, the guy had never been in the building. Cassidy, unconvinced of the man’s infallibility, went up to show the photograph to the workers renovating the apartment on the eighth floor. The apartment had a wonderful view over the park, but the three men ripping apart the kitchen did not recognize the dead man. There was nobody home at the third address, a four-story limestone house with an imposing door of glass and black iron near the corner of 73rd and Fifth Avenue. The fourth address held a team of Italian artisans putting in a stained-glass window who passed the photo of the dead man around like a holy relic, discussed it at length in the music of their language, agreed that they had never seen the man, and then crossed themselves in unison. The fifth and sixth addresses produced the same lack of result.
Cassidy sat on a bench against the wall outside Central Park and lit a cigarette. The sun filtered down through the trees behind him and warmed his back. For a New Yorker like Cassidy, the steady rush of traffic on Fifth Avenue was as soothing as the flow of a river. There was something he was missing, something he should have been looking for. What was it? A man is killed and left in Central Park in the early morning. The location is specific. He was put in place so someone could see him. How did the killers know that person would see him? Because it was his habit to go past that spot in the early morning. Who did that? People on their way to work? Possibly. Does someone from one of these gold coast addresses walk through Central Park to work? Unlikely. Who, then?
A young woman in blue jeans and a windbreaker came out of the park pulled by six dogs. Some were large, some small, and some in between, and they all strained forward on their leashes while she leaned back like a water skier. Her piercing whistle brought them to heel at the curb, and when the light changed, a word of command sent them out into the street, and she let them tow her across.
Dogs. What had young Seth said? Someone was missing from the usual dog-walking rotation. A woman with a red setter. How many of the apartments he had just visited had dogs? The first one, the town house, was gutted from top to bottom. No one lived there. No dog. The eighth floor apartment with the new kitchen? There had been a water bowl in the dining room on a rubber mat. For a dog or for a cat? He didn’t know. There had been a dog in the apartment with the Italian glass men. He heard it yapping behind a door. No evidence of an animal in the last apartment. Across the street, the dog walker turned in at the limestone town house and keyed the door while her charges milled about in front of her. One of them was a red setter. Before Cassidy could dodge through traffic and cross the avenue, they had disappeared inside.
Five dogs were trapped in the vestibule between the outer door, with its glass and black wrought iron, and the glass and wood inner door that led to the front hall of the house. The red setter was not among them. When they saw Cassidy climb the steps, they began to bark and circle each other. A small terrier threw itself at the glass three times. Cassidy saw the young woman come into the hall from a room near the back of the house. She opened the inside door and stepped into the vestibule and said something to the dogs that quieted them. She looked out at Cassidy through the glass and bars of the front door, and her eyes widened when she recognized the badge he held up to the glass. She pointed a finger at her chest and mouthed me? He shook his head and shouted at the glass, “I need to talk to you.” She quieted the dogs again, opened the big door, and slipped out through a narrow opening while holding the terrier back with one foot. “Angus is the curious one,” she explained. “He gets into all kinds of mischief if you let him.”
Her name was Naomi Stern. She was an athletic young woman with a mass of curly brown hair and guileless brown eyes. She was studying at Hunter College on Park Avenue, and she picked up extra money by walking dogs. She’d been doing it for three years, and she had a group of regular clients. It was clear that she thought of the dogs as her clients, not their owners.
“Do you walk them in the morning?” Cassidy asked.
“No. Usually the owners walk them before they go off to work or whatever, and I come do a late-morning or early-afternoon walk, and that holds them until the owners get home.”
“The people who live here”—he checked his list—“Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hopkins? They have the red setter.”
“Yes. Lucky. That’s his name.”
“Do you know when they get home?”
“Why? Did they do something?”
“No. They might have seen something we need help with.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed that there was no greater drama. “Well, they’re away, and they won’t be back until the end of the week, so I’m walking Lucky three times a day.”
“You have a key to the house.”
“Sure.” The perfect innocence of the innocent. “Why? Oh, I get it. I could run off with all their stuff. Is that what you think?” She was offended.
“No, no. I was just wondering how it worked. They’ve been having some renovation done, haven’t they?”
“A pipe burst upstairs, and when they started to get it fixed, they decided to knock down a wall and do some other stuff. I think it’s pretty much done now.”
“Did you ever see the men working on it?”
“I saw one of them once when I came to pick up Lucky.”
Cassidy showed her the photo. “No. The guy I saw wasn’t as big as this guy. At least I don’t think so. This guy looks big. The other guy had longer hair. This guy looks pretty strange. What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead? Wow. What happened?” She was still young enough to be surprised by death.
“Someone shot him.”
“God, how awful.”
“When did Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins leave?”
“Uh, let�
�s see. They left me a note for when I came to walk Lucky in the afternoon asking me to take him out in the mornings too. I was late because I had a Modern History jap.”
“Jap?”
“Yeah, you know, a surprise quiz. Like Pearl Harbor?”
“Ahh.”
“So it must have been last Friday.”
“And they left suddenly.”
“Yes, I guess so. I mean they hadn’t said anything to me. But they’ve done that before. He goes away on business, or something, and she decides to go at the last minute. I don’t mind, ’cause it means more money for me.” The dogs in the vestibule were howling in protest at their confinement. Naomi looked back at them in concern and raised a hand, but it did no good. “Is there anything else? The dogs…”
“No. Go ahead.”
She released the dogs, and Cassidy watched as they towed her down the block.
13
“Orso talked to the sanitation department guys, the ones who used to work the early shift up there around Seventy-second Street,” Cassidy said.
“The ones who wake me up at dawn banging the cans around?” Alice asked.
“Banging cans is part of their job. It lets the citizens know that their tax dollars are being spent on hardworking men.”
They were in a wooden booth in Chumley’s on Bedford Street in the Village. The old speakeasy had been a literary watering hole since Prohibition, and the walls displayed the book jackets of the writers who came to drown their demons or prime their muses: Eugene O’Neill after he’d made enough money to upgrade from the flop houses and gin mills of the Bowery, Dos Passos, Ring Lardner, Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, Hemingway, the self-proclaimed world heavyweight champion.
The small, shaded lamp on the table cast a golden light, and Alice, half in the light and half in shadow, was beautiful and mysterious. The joint was full. Laughter rose above the hum of conversation, the rattle of silver on china, and the clink of ice in glasses, the companionable New York nighttime sounds Cassidy loved.
“There was a trash barrel twenty feet from where the dead guy was sitting, but of course they didn’t notice him when they emptied it.”
“How could that be? Twenty feet.” She leaned forward to light her cigarette from the match Cassidy held.
“One thing you learn. People are blind. They walk along in their own little worlds, and they don’t see anything outside those worlds. And if they do, they don’t know what the hell they’ve seen. Four eyewitnesses will give you four different stories about what happened and four different descriptions about who did it.”
“Maybe they should put cameras up.”
“Cameras?”
“Sure. Movie cameras or TV cameras or something. On the buildings, so if someone does something you just go look at the film.”
“Jesus, what a terrible idea. Do you want them to have a record of what you do out on the street?”
“No.” Alice laughed. “God, no. So what do you do now?”
“Well, there are two other places with building permits I couldn’t get into. Maybe he was working in one of them. And then the people with the red setter will be back at the end of the week. I’d like to know what made them take off.”
“I never would have thought of that, fancy clothes and workman’s hands.”
“I didn’t think of it either.” He told her about Bonner and Newly.
“I never saw a colored cop until I came up to New York, not where I grew up.”
The waiter brought refills for their drinks, a martini straight up with a twist for Cassidy and a Sazerac for Alice. She took a sip. “Hmm, that’s good. This is what my daddy used to drink when he was feeling flush.”
“Where was that?”
She scanned his face. Was he being polite, or did he want to know? “Cut Off, Louisiana.”
“Near New Orleans?”
“No. Well, about seventy miles south, but it might as well have been the other side of the planet, New Orleans seemed so far away. Cut Off. They sure named that right. Lafourche Parrish on Bayou Lafourche. My daddy fished the bayou. My brothers worked the sulfur pit. Have you spent much time in a small southern town?”
“No.”
“One main street. Two churches. A crappy diner. A Tastee Freez where everyone hangs out after school. Two garages, a general store, a hardware store, one grade school, one high school, town hall, some houses. A whole lot of nothing. The boys are going to work for their fathers fishing, or in the hardware store or the garage, the sulfur mine. The girls’ll be their wives and have babies who grow up to do the same thing. Everybody knows you. Everybody knows your business. They think they know who you are, and that’s who you have to be.”
“Who were you?”
“Honey, I was the high school slut.” She said it with a grin, but when she took a sip of her drink, she watched defiantly over the rim of the glass for his reaction.
“Damn. I kept telling my parents they were sending me to the wrong schools.”
She laughed. “Yeah, sure. Every school had one. You must have too.”
“Uh-uh. I was locked up in all boy schools from kindergarten through high school. We had to hunt for girls outside the classroom.”
“Hunt? All you had to do is stand on the corner and wait. Some girl would come along as hot for you as you were for her. You think we didn’t want it? If there was some way girls could know they weren’t going to get knocked up you couldn’t fight them off with a stick. But I was the town pump, and they were the high school heroes who nailed me. As if I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“There were only two conversations boys had in high school—one was sports. The other was girls. What did she let you do? How far did you get with her? First base, second base, third, all the way? Did you stick her? Did you get her? Nobody did, of course, and everybody lied. And we were pretty sure if it was going to happen we would have to trick her into it. No one told us girls wanted it too. The best-kept secret.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “At sixteen I decided to stop feeling sorry for who I was and what people thought. I took off with a traveling salesman who sold women’s foundation garments. God, did he know women. I guess he would, hands in their underwear all the time. He set me up in a little apartment in Washington and helped me get a job at Berman’s Department Store. I loved that place. I’d never seen so many beautiful clothes, shoes, perfume, and women coming in all day long and trying them on. They knocked it down in 1954, city beautification, or something. I never went back to look to see what they put up that they thought was more beautiful.”
“What happened to the salesman?”
She shrugged. “He dumped me. I met people and had other jobs. I was a secretary up on Capitol Hill for a while, but I sure wasn’t hired for my typing. I met Georgie at a party and went to Cuba and met you, and here we are having dinner.”
Dinner arrived with a bottle of wine.
“Fair’s fair. I get to hear about you now. Growing up in New York, and all.” She leaned forward in anticipation.
“Nothing to tell. I grew up on Sixty-sixth Street. My father’s a producer of Broadway plays. I’ve got a brother and a sister and a bunch of nieces and nephews. I went to school on Seventy-fourth Street, joined the army, came back, joined the cops.”
“Wow, you’re some wonderful storyteller. I was on the edge of my seat. Some men can’t wait to tell you about themselves. You can’t shut them up. Some you have to dig it out with a pick. Now I know which one you are.”
* * *
Jimmy Greef came into Chumley’s through the unmarked door in the little courtyard off Barrow Street. He went to the end of the bar and dropped the leather satchel on the floor and kicked it in under the bar gate. Jamie, the Irish bartender with hair like white cotton, gave him a knowing nod, picked up the satchel, and carried it to the back room. The second bartender, Willie, a slender black-haired man with a mustache clipped so close it looked like a black smear, mopped the clean bar in front of him and said, “How y
ou doing, Jimmy? Get you something while you wait.”
“Yeah. Get me one of them, it’s like a martini, but made with rye? With the cherry.”
“A Manhattan?”
“Yeah, that’s it. A Manhattan.”
“Up, or on the rocks?”
“Yeah, up. And give me two of them cherries.”
“You got it.” Willie moved away to make the drink, and Jimmy Greef lit a Chesterfield, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke at the back bar. He could feel some of the tension leave him. Not that he was nervous carrying the bag. Nah, not nervous, but he recognized the responsibility. If they trusted him to carry the bag, it meant he was moving up the ladder. Only six months since he made his bones and here he was doing a thing of trust. Twenty-four years old and on the way up. He took off his fedora and dropped it on the bar and ran a palm over his hair to make sure it stayed slicked back on his skull. His sideburns were long like Elvis’s, who he thought he looked like, except maybe his lips were thinner. Not that he admitted it, but a girl he met out at Coney said he did. He wore a dark blue suit from Barney’s Bargain Basement with wide chalk stripes, a little too long in the sleeves and the pants, a little too flashy, a look-at-me suit cut a little full in the chest to hide the pistol in its holster under his left arm. Nah, the nerves didn’t come from carrying the bag. No one in his right mind was going to try to take it off. No one who knew what was what, anyway. That would mean war. A couple of independents made the move a few years ago, but the word was they ended up in a swamp in Jersey. Still, he always felt good when he came into one of the joints and took a little breather while they got the payment, and he felt better when he dropped the bag at the end of the night at Carmine’s. I mean, say what you want, you’re carrying fifteen, twenty grand, someone might just try to get lucky. Then how do you explain that to Carmine? You don’t. Someone takes the bag, no matter who, you’re dead. Don’t think about that, man. Don’t.
“There you go, Jimmy.” Willie slid the Manhattan to him and turned away to serve another customer. Greef ate the first cherry. It tasted like it looked, dark red and sweet. Petey Lick could tie the stem in a knot with his tongue, but Greef couldn’t figure out how to do it no matter how many times he tried. He took a sip of the drink, lit another cigarette, and turned and leaned his back against the bar and looked out into the restaurant. He liked Chumley’s. A lot of good-looking broads came here to eat, usually with guys, but sometimes there were strays at the bar. College girls came to look at the pictures of the writers on the walls, maybe. He got lucky a couple of times. Chat them up. Buy them a drink or two, let the jacket slip open so they saw the gun. The gun got them hot every time. That one in the red dress over near the wall. Was she eating alone? No, there he was just coming to sit down, back from the men’s room or something. Jesus, those were some tits on that blonde in the booth with the black-haired guy.
Night Work Page 18