Night Watch

by David C. Taylor

  ‘What do you think that was all about?’

  ‘I don’t know. My manly charm, maybe. I ask Winky who is she. He says she’s a professor, mathematics, physics, something like that, over at NYU down in the Square there. Last name is Parson. Amy Parson.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to call her. I could use a little more education.’ He folded the paper carefully and put it in his shirt pocket.

  ‘Is the Lieutenant in?’

  ‘Waiting on you,’ Orso said it without heat, just the tip of a needle. Orso stood up and lifted his jacket from the chair back. He was a big man, well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds. He had sloping shoulders and long arms, and a big belly, and while he might have carried a few extra pounds, he was immensely strong and quick. ‘They found a stiff up in the park this morning, up near Columbus Circle.’

  ‘Something for us?’ They crossed the squad room. The only other detective in the room was at a desk in the corner using two fingers to punish an ancient typewriter.

  ‘Nah. No signs of violence. Heart attack or something. They’ll know when they do the cut.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Don’t know. No ID. One of those night-time bottom feeders in the park must have found the body. Took his wallet, made a few bucks.’

  Cassidy rapped on the pebbled glass of Lt Tanner’s door and pushed in without waiting for an invitation.

  ‘Nice of you two to join us,’ Lt Tanner said as Cassidy and Orso entered.

  ‘Sorry, Boss.’

  Tanner waved his cigar stub to dismiss the apology. Recently Tanner had taken to waxing his bald head, and the overhead bulbs made it glow. Tanner had a heavyweight’s shoulders and chest, and the legs of a lightweight. When he was on his feet he looked like he could fall over at a touch. It was an illusion. He had been a tough street cop, and a Marine Corps Captain in the Pacific war, but he was insufficiently political to advance far in the police department, a situation that did not seem to bother him much.

  Detectives Bonner and Newly were in chairs near the desk. ‘The Pig and the Nig,’ as they were known, though never to their faces. Alfie Bonner was an old-fashioned street cop. He was built like a tank, five feet nine inches tall and two hundred twenty pounds. He looked like he’d been put together from leftovers by someone who wasn’t paying attention to the task: mismatched eyes, one blue, one hazel, looked out of a square head that held a small nose, a thick-lipped mouth, and white hair buzzed short. He knew every punk, stick-up guy, pickpocket, bunco artist, and hooker who worked Times Square and the Stem. He believed a judiciously applied nightstick taught clearer lessons than a couple of months in jail on Rikers. More than one tough guy left town nursing broken bones. He was also a full-service despiser, his disdain for all races not his own was democratic. No one could figure out how his partner, Clive Newly, escaped it. Newly was a tall, calm Negro officer, one of the few of his race who had made detective. He lived with prejudice, but hated nobody as far as Cassidy could tell, and he went about his business quietly and dispassionately.

  If Bonner heard you disrespect Newly, he’d bust your mouth.

  The four detectives nodded to each other. Orso took a seat next to Newly. Cassidy leaned against the windowsill and lit another Lucky Strike.

  ‘Okay,’ Tanner said. ‘The guy we want is due to make his rounds. If he sticks to the pattern, he’ll go up to that apartment on Forty-eighth around noon. We don’t know if he steps on the heroin up there, packages it, or what, but he’s usually there for about an hour. The apartment’s in the name of a Bridey Halloran – one arrest for soliciting, one arrest for kiting checks. No convictions. Popovic’s standing by in case you need a fifth, which you probably do, but I’m not going to tell you how to make it work.’

  ‘I thought the plan was to follow the asshole up to his wholesaler,’ Orso said. ‘We bust this guy, another asshole’s going to pop up to sell the junk.’

  ‘The plan changed. It came down from the captain.’ He got no encouragement from the men in front of him, but he went on. ‘It may come as a surprise to you, but the police department runs on money like everything else in this world. The department budget is a pie. Every precinct, every division, wants the biggest piece of the pie possible. The East Side precincts get big slices ’cause that’s where the rich people live, and the money gets what the money wants. A precinct like the Eighteenth has to show we should have more by showing we’re doing more. This guy’s been peddling horse to the neighborhood for months, but now we’re going to do something about it, because it so happens that Councilman Franzi’s son was over here a couple of nights ago to see a show, and while he’s here, he buys some smack, OD’s in the Automat men’s room, and now he’s over at Mount Sinai. We get this guy and the councilman’s going to be very grateful when the budget process begins. So get out there and bring home the asshole, ’cause that’s bringing home the bacon.’

  Hell’s Kitchen ran from 34th Street North to 59th, and from Eighth Avenue West to the Hudson River piers. It was a traditionally Irish neighborhood of tenements restricted to a height of six stories. The neighborhood was host to dingy bars, greasy spoons, grind houses, hot-sheet hotels, and small businesses always on the verge of failure. Its residents were poor, and poverty bred crime. The cops of the 18th were urged to keep that crime west of Eighth Avenue so as not impede the flow of money into the Broadway theaters and restaurants, but it was like shoveling against the tide.

  ‘Fucking Micks,’ Bonner said, ‘they live like pigs.’ He lay between Cassidy and Orso against the sloping roof parapet of a five-story tenement on West 48th Street. Across the street and below them a man walked out of a brownstone with a bag of garbage. He stopped at the top of the stoop and heaved the bag toward a row of battered topless garbage cans that waited by the curb. The bag missed and split open on the street, spewing garbage. ‘Pigs,’ Bonner repeated in case they missed the point.

  Bonner slid back from the parapet so he could not be seen from the street when he stood up. ‘Fucking waste of time, is my thought. Who the hell cares whether these people kill themselves with heroin. Good riddance.’

  ‘You’re a true humanitarian,’ Orso said. ‘Alfie Bonner, the friend of man.’

  Bonner grinned and gave him the finger.

  A brassy bell clanged below them in the street. ‘Is that him?’ Orso asked.

  Cassidy ducked back to the parapet. Below him a battered green van pulled to the curb in front of a fire hydrant. Its bell rang again and again. Women began to come out of the nearby brownstones carrying knives wrapped in newspaper. The bell stopped. The van’s back doors crashed open. Moments later the men on the roof heard the whir of a pedal-operated grindstone, and the whisper of a steel blade across the grit.

  Twenty minutes later the women were gone and the grindstone was quiet, and the only noise was the rush of city traffic, the blare of horns, distant sirens. The doors of the van clashed shut, but the engine did not start. Cassidy looked over the parapet in time to see the back of a man disappear into the brownstone next door. ‘Jesus, he’s big.’

  ‘What do you mean, big?’ Orso asked.

  ‘I mean big. He looked huge. Have you ever seen him, Bonner?’

  ‘Nope. So he’s big, so what? You whack him a few times, he’ll get small.’

  Cassidy pulled back from the parapet and stood. ‘Newly and Popovic?’

  ‘They’re in the basement across the street. They’ll give him a minute or two and then come in, block the stairs.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  The three men stepped across the low wall that separated one brownstone roof from the other, and walked to the metal door that led to the stairs. Someone had hammered the lock out of the door long ago, and it was held almost shut by a tight loop of clothesline tied to the inside doorknob and something on the inside jamb. Bonner slid the blade of a folding knife into the gap, cut the rope, and pushed the door open. They exchanged glances. This was the last easy step. A
fter this, no matter what they had planned, nothing was sure.

  The landing inside the door was strewn with empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. The stairwell was dim and smelled of cooking, bad drains, and tobacco smoke. Somewhere below them a door slammed and steps clattered down toward the bottom floor.

  ‘Third floor, front apartment,’ Bonner said and led them down. They went quietly and paused at the fourth-floor landing to listen. A radio played behind an apartment door. The hall toilet flushed. The door opened, and a man came out buttoning his fly. He stopped when he saw them standing at the bottom of the stairs, dropped his eyes, hurried to his apartment, and disappeared inside. The lock clicked shut. The safety chain rattled into place. Three dangerous men standing together in a group. Whatever hell that was, he did not want to know.

  A nod from Bonner, and they went down.

  The third floor. Bare wood, worn and buckled, and dingy gray walls. Three doors peeling paint on either side of the hall. The apartment they wanted was at the front of the building on the right side. Downstairs the front door opened and closed. Cassidy looked down the stairwell. Clive Newly looked up at him and waved.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Bonner said with a tight grin, the action already jacking him up. He slipped his .38 from his holster and held it down by his leg. Orso pulled his gun and winked at Cassidy. Cassidy left his under his arm.

  They moved down the hall walking as quietly as possible. Bonner stopped short of the door. Cassidy went past him to the other side. Orso took a position facing the door. There were two locks, both of them new and shiny. Cassidy raised his hand to knock. A piece of furniture screeched across a floor and crashed against a wall inside the apartment. It was followed by an explosive grunt of effort and then another. A woman screamed.

  Orso took two fast steps forward and stamped his foot into the door next to the latch. Wood ripped. Orso hit it again, and the door blew open, and Cassidy and Bonner went through fast with Orso close behind. The living room was sparsely furnished with a ratty old sofa covered by a blanket, a couple of mismatched wooden chairs, a card table holding a brass balance scale. Bonner through the kitchen door first with Cassidy on his heels as the woman shrieked again.

  ‘Police! Police!’ they shouted as they went in.

  Cassidy got a quick look from a weird angle past Bonner’s bulk. A peroxide-blonde woman was on her back on the kitchen table, which was slammed up against the wall. Her dress was bunched around her waist, and her knees were up and splayed, and it was clear from the expression on her face that she had not been shrieking in pain. The knife sharpener’s trousers and underwear were puddled around his ankles. He was between her legs and when he jerked around toward them as they charged the room, his dick stuck up in front of him. He was a huge man, bigger than Orso, legs like tree trunks, and a vast chest and shoulders that strained his shirt. He lunged toward a table under the window where a leather roll lay open displaying an array of knives. The pants around his ankles tripped him, and his lunge turned into a hop as he tried to stay upright. Bonner drove into him, and they both crashed down in a tangle and began to thrash on the floor, each struggling for advantage. The knives slid around the floor under them. The woman was now screaming in earnest. Orso yelled at her to shut up and tried to kick the knife sharpener in the head. He missed, and his plant foot landed on one of the blades. He skated for a moment, his arms windmilling for balance, and then lost it crashed down. His gun went off when he hit the floor and blew plaster out of the ceiling.

  The woman stopped screaming, and when Cassidy turned to find out why, she was coming at him with a cast-iron skillet raised to take off his head. He half blocked the blow with his arm and the skillet came down on the meat of his shoulder, and his arm went numb. She kicked him, but she was barefoot, and it hurt her more than him. She raised the skillet again. ‘Cut it out,’ he said, but her eyes were crazed. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth, and she was wild to crush his skull.

  Behind him Bonner was yelling, ‘Watch the knife! Watch the knife!’

  Cassidy circled away from the woman. ‘Put it down. Put it down.’ But she was going to put it down on his head if she could. When she swung, he blocked her arm with his left and punched her in the gut with his right. She dropped the skillet, wrapped her arms over her stomach, took a couple of steps backward, and then sat down on the floor. She bent over and gasped for breath that would not come.

  Cassidy turned to help Bonner and Orso. The knife sharpener stood up. Bonner rode him like a cat on a dog’s back. He had lost his gun, and he hammered the man’s face and neck with his fist. It didn’t bother the man much. The knife sharpener reared backward and slammed Bonner into the wall but could not shake him off. Bonner crooked his arm around the man’s thick neck in a chokehold. The big man had a knife in his right hand, and he stabbed back over his shoulder, but Bonner saw it coming and ducked his head to the other side. Orso stepped up and hit the man on the head with the butt of his .38. Blood spurted from his scalp, and the man slashed at Orso, who stumbled back. Cassidy kicked the man in the back of his knee, and the leg buckled and he went down with Bonner still riding him. Orso drew a spring-loaded sap from his back pocket and hit the man twice. He sighed and went slack. Bonner dug his pistol out from under the radiator where it had skittered. He got to his feet and looked down at the half-naked unconscious man. ‘Son of a bitch was strong.’ He kicked him once in the side.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ the woman said in a strangled voice. ‘Leave him alone, you bastard.’

  ‘Hey, Bonner,’ Orso said, giddy with adrenaline. ‘Did you get a load of the dick on the bastard. I don’t think he was trying to stab you. I think he was trying to fuck you.’

  Bonner whirled on him, mad-eyed, and took a threatening step forward. Orso braced.

  Footsteps pounded down the hall, and Newly and Popovic charged through the door with guns drawn. ‘Everything okay?’ Newly asked. ‘We heard a shot.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bonner said. ‘Orso killed the ceiling.’ And the two of them howled with laughter.

  Evening light filtered through the grime-smeared windows of the squad room. The afternoon was lost to writing arrest reports: a pound of heroin found in the apartment; ten pounds of powdered milk, a favored cutting agent; the brass scale in the living room; a box of glassine envelopes for street doses; a twelve-gauge shotgun sawed off at the barrel and stock; and a diaper box filled with fives, tens, and twenties adding up to $7,805.00, which had been counted twice, sealed, and carried to the evidence room, where, with luck, it would remain untouched until the trial.

  Cassidy finished typing his report and sealed it in a brown envelope and put it in Tanner’s inbox. Orso was still working on his shots-fired report. Bonner and Newly had taken the knife sharpener, whose name was Connor Finn, and his lady friend, Bridey Halloran, downtown for the arraignment that would begin their grind through the system.

  The phone on Cassidy’s desk rang. He picked it up on the third ring. ‘Eighteenth Precinct. Cassidy speaking.’

  ‘Al Skinner, here, Mike.’ Skinner was a medical examiner in the Bellevue morgue. ‘That stiff they picked up in the park this morning? Thought it might be natural causes? It wasn’t. I found blood on his collar, so I took a closer look. Someone stuck something in there at the base of the skull, an ice pick maybe.’

  ‘When are you doing the cut?’

  ‘Tomorrow some time.’

  ‘Thanks, Al.’ He hung up. Orso looked over from his desk. ‘The guy they found in the park, it’s a homicide.’

  FOUR

  Cassidy ate a hamburger at the bar at the White Horse and then walked home. The phone rang as he came through the apartment door. He caught it on the third ring. ‘Hello.’ No answer. He shifted the receiver from ear to ear while he pulled off his coat and threw it on a chair. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Interesting time in the subway station this morning.’ The voice was slightly muffled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It looked like it was all over t
here for a moment. Headlines: Police Detective Michael Cassidy killed by subway train.’

  ‘Who is this? Orso? Stop fucking around.’ He could hear traffic sounds in the background.

  ‘Were you scared? Inches away from death. You must have been scared. Did it feel inevitable? The push toward the edge of the platform. Nothing you could do. Death coming up the track. It’s almost like a metaphor of our lives. Death starts out distant, out of sight, out of hearing. Then you hear it, a whisper on the rails. It gets closer and closer. You hear it. You see it. And then it’s there. Poetry.’

  Not Orso. Orso didn’t deal in metaphors. And this was someone who had been there. Someone who made it happen? Not the fat man. The fat man had been scared. Someone behind him had been pushing.

  ‘Do I know you? What’s the beef?’

  ‘Everything will become clear before it’s over. Don’t worry.’

  Where was he now? Somewhere close. The phone had rung as he came into the apartment. Was that chance, or had the man seen him enter the building? ‘Why don’t you come over to my apartment? We can talk about this. I’ll give you a drink.’

  ‘Not tonight. We’ll meet before this is over. And I’ll be there to watch you die. I’m looking forward to that.’

  ‘What did I do to you?’ Traffic noise again at the other end of the line.

  ‘All will be explained in good time.’

  A car horn honked twice, both on the phone and out the window at the same time – the telephone booth on Greenwich two blocks away. ‘Hey, let me get a cigarette from the bedroom. Don’t go away. We have things to talk about. I won’t be long.’

  He let the receiver dangle and bolted for the door. He took the stairs two at a time, and went out into the street with his gun in his hand. It took thirty seconds to run the two blocks to Greenwich. The phone booth’s door was open. The light was off. Cassidy touched the receiver. It was still warm. There was nobody on the street. He stepped into the booth and closed the door. The light came on. He took the receiver off the hook with his thumb and forefinger and angled it toward the light. There were no prints on the black plastic. The receiver had been wiped clean.