Night Watch

by David C. Taylor

  ‘Paul? Another?’

  ‘Nobody drinks without me.’ Paul Williger was a few years older than the other men, and he was the only one at the table who wore a wedding ring. His brown hair was thinly strewn on his skull. His face and midsection were beginning to show the softness of a man who spent too much time sitting down. His eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses were pale blue and anxious. He pushed his glass forward. ‘Old Overholt, two cubes.’

  ‘I don’t know how the hell you can drink that stuff,’ Shaw said as he pushed out of the booth. He picked up the three glasses and carried them to the bar. The bartender found three clean glasses, made the drinks, and slid them back across the bar to Shaw.

  ‘Scotch, scotch, rye. I put a swizzle stick in the rye so you’d know which was which. You got ’em, or you want me to carry ’em over?’

  ‘I’ve got them,’ Shaw said. He pushed a five dollar bill across the bar and said, ‘Keep the change.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The bartender turned away and did not see Shaw take a small glass tube from his pocket. Shaw checked to see that no one was watching and then allowed a drop of colorless fluid to fall into the glass of rye. He stirred it with the swizzle stick and carried the drinks back to the table.

  ‘Hold on,’ Paul Williger said. He put a hand to a lamp post on the corner of Broadway and Forty-sixth to steady himself. ‘Whoa. Maybe that last one wasn’t such a good idea.’

  Hoffman and Shaw exchanged a look.

  ‘Are you all right, Paul?’ Shaw asked.

  ‘I don’t know. One too many.’ Then, ‘Jesus … The lights.’

  Times Square was ablaze in neon signs for Pepsi Cola, Bond Two Trouser Suits, Canadian Club, Fly TWA, Admiral Television, the endless pour of neon nuts from the giant Planter’s Peanuts bag at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. As Williger watched, the lights melted and ran. The hole that blew the smoke rings for the Camel cigarettes man roared, and the smoke was as hard as concrete. The cars on the street were bright-eyed monsters with chrome teeth, and he could hear the raw squawks of laughter from people a block away. He put his hands to his ears to block the noise, but it came through his flesh like water through paper. The plate glass of an appliance store flexed and bulged. ‘Paul,’ Shaw said again. ‘Are you all right?’ His voice sounded like metal.

  ‘Not me,’ Williger said. ‘Not me. You weren’t supposed to do it to me.’ The sound of his own voice oozed in his head. ‘We agreed. Not after the last time. Not me.’

  ‘Easy, Paul. It’s okay. We’re going to get you back to the hotel. It’s okay.’ Hoffman gave Shaw a worried look and put his arm around Williger’s waist. ‘Come on, Paul. We’re going back to the hotel.’ But Williger clung to the lamppost, the only anchor in his world. ‘Paul, it’s okay. You’re going to be fine. Let’s go to the hotel.’

  ‘Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. It wasn’t supposed to be me. Not again. Not me. They promised.’ Williger began to weep, and his tears were hot beads on his cheeks.

  People on the sidewalk looked at them curiously and kept moving. Someone’s night had gone sideways, but it was not their business. Shaw pried at Williger’s fingers to loosen his grip on the lamppost. His voice was harsh with impatience. ‘We’re all on the list, Paul. That’s what we agreed to. I got through it. You can get through it. Come on. Get a grip. Tomorrow you’ll be back on top.’

  Shaw’s anger pierced Williger’s brain like hot pins. He put his hands up again to block the noise. Hoffman took advantage of the moment to turn him away from the lamppost. Shaw took his other arm, and they moved him along the sidewalk. He closed his eyes against the melting lights, but they came through his eyelids and through his skull, and swarmed his brain.

  ‘Step down,’ Hoffman said.

  Williger opened his eyes and saw that they were at the curb to cross the street. The car monsters, eyes glaring, chrome teeth bared, crouched in a row at the intersection. Williger pulled back, but Hoffman and Shaw urged him across and he did not have the strength to resist.

  The Hotel Astor lobby was quiet. The two uniformed clerks behind the reception desk watched Hoffman and Shaw maneuver Williger to the elevators. The older clerk raised an eyebrow to the younger, and they went back to their paperwork. Another overserved guest being helped to bed by friends.

  Paul Williger’s room was on the sixth floor overlooking Broadway. Shaw’s was through a connecting door, and Hoffman’s was down the hall. They shucked Williger out of his overcoat and sat him in an easy chair. He sat tipped forward at the waist with his hands on his knees and his eyes closed.

  Shaw drew up a straight chair from the desk and sat with his knees almost touching Williger’s. He took a pen and a notebook from his jacket and opened it to a blank page. They were supposed to take notes, though he did not have much hope for something useful tonight. Williger was too far gone. ‘Paul, how do you feel now?’

  No answer.

  He flipped the pages of his notebook until he found a list of questions. ‘Paul, is your name Paul Andrew Williger?’

  No answer.

  ‘Do you work for the US Government?’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you have a son named Matthew and a daughter named Helen?’

  Williger knew Shaw was talking to him, but he could not understand what he was saying over the interior noise in his body. His blood sang through his veins and arteries, liquids gurgled in his guts, and his breath rasped in and out, in and out. The noise was horrifying. It sounded like his body was eating itself.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Shaw asked.

  Silence.

  Shaw glanced at Hoffman and shrugged. ‘Get me a cold towel, will you?’

  Hoffman brought a wet towel from the bathroom, and Shaw pressed it to Williger’s forehead and cheeks, but it brought no change in Williger’s blank expression.

  ‘What do you think?’ Hoffman asked.

  ‘I’ve seen some weird reactions, but nothing like this. He’s not answering questions. I mean, what the hell good is it if he won’t answer questions? The whole point is answering questions.’ Shaw sighed in frustration. ‘Paul, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me.’

  No response.

  ‘It should have been me,’ Hoffman said. ‘I told you I was ready.’

  ‘I know, and I appreciate your volunteering, but that’s not the point. They want sequential and cumulative data. Williger took it a week ago. They wanted to know his reaction to a second protocol.’

  ‘Well, they aren’t going to love the result. I should call it in, find out what they want us to do.’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead. We can wait it out, transport him, call Dr Ambrose, whatever they want.’ Hoffman nodded and went through the connecting door.

  Shaw stood up and put his hand on Williger’s arm. The muscle was rigid, tensed to the limit. ‘Paul, take it easy. It’s okay. Everything’s all right. Relax. You’re with friends. It’s going to be fine. Sit tight.’

  No response.

  SIX

  Cassidy hated the night watch. The worst in people seeped out during the night. They did things they would not do in daylight, as if darkness could hide their actions: children were thrown against the wall for not finishing dinner, women were beaten for changing the channel, rapists and muggers, stick-up artists, the perverted, and the weird, they all slid out of the shadows looking for prey. Cassidy remembered the Life magazine photographs of zebras and antelope gathered around a waterhole at night. The flash revealed the glowing eyes of predators waiting in the bushes – New York City after midnight.

  Night watch played hell with his system. Nearly two weeks on, and Cassidy still was not used to it. Sleep, difficult to find in normal times, was thrown out of whack. He was hungry at odd times, fought sleep on the job with too much coffee that turned his stomach sour, went home in morning light, fell exhausted into bed as Rhonda rose for her day, and waited for sleep that would not come. After the second irritable early morning exchange, Rhonda told him she would s
ee him again when his schedule changed back to day. One night to go, then the weekend, and back to day shift just as he was getting used to night.

  A uniformed sergeant named Flannigan came up from the desk downstairs. ‘Hey, Cassidy, a guy went out the window over at the Astor. Splat. The beat cop called it in.’

  Cassidy woke Orso from his nap on a cot in the locker room, and a squad car dropped them on Broadway in front of the hotel where two other squad cars were already nosed to the curb. They pushed their way through the rubberneckers who discussed the event in whispers as if the dead man might be offended by noise. Patrolmen had blocked off a patch of sidewalk north of the lobby doors where the body lay. Cassidy crouched beside the corpse. He guessed that the man was in his late thirties. He lay on his back. He wore a dark suit and white shirt, and his tie was pulled down a couple of inches. His head was flattened at the back where it had struck the sidewalk, and his eyes bulged from the impact. His mouth was open. His legs were bent and broken. Blood leaked from under his head and pooled on the concrete where the neon lights of Times Square turned it black. There were pieces of glass and window frame around the body, and the shade from the man’s room, pulled to the end of its roller, lay six feet away.

  Cassidy stood as Orso approached. ‘The night manager heard him hit. He’s over there with Scalabrine,’ Orso said. A small man in a dark uniform with a few discreet touches of gold braid stood near the entrance with a big uniformed cop whose white hair showed from under his hat.

  ‘How’re you doing, Tony, Detective Cassidy?’ Scalabrine and Orso knew each other from the old neighborhood, but he was leery of Cassidy who had a reputation in the house of being unpredictable, a guy who didn’t run the normal tracks. Cassidy had done him a favor a couple of years before and had never asked for payback, and that was a little weird according to the customs of the tribe. Cassidy had also thrown a Vice cop named Franklin out a third-story window for beating up a whore, and then about a year later threw him out another window. That was big weird. Best to walk wide around him, Scalabrine thought. ‘Detectives, this is Joe Pickering. He’s the night manager. He heard the guy hit.’

  Pickering was a thin, neat man whose blonde hair was parted in the middle. He had alert eyes, and an air of self-control. He was a man who was used to solving other people’s problems. He waited calmly for the questions he knew would come.

  ‘Tell me what happened from your point of view,’ Cassidy said.

  ‘At two o’clock I like to make a round of the lobby to be sure that everything is in its place, no cigarettes burning in the ashtrays, stationery put away at the desks if someone has been writing there, check to see that the doors to the restaurant are locked, that kind of thing. I was near the front door when I heard the impact.’

  ‘You knew what it was?’

  ‘I’ve worked in hotels for thirty-two years. It is an unfortunate reality that people occasionally use our facilities to end their lives. I suspect they do it to avoid – what shall I say? – to avoid the untidy aspects of doing it in their own homes. I have, over the years in different establishments, been on duty when six men and one woman jumped to their deaths. I did not hear them all, but I heard three. I knew immediately what this was.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I ran outside. He was lying as you see him now. He was alive, I think, but only for a moment. I heard him breathe, and then,’ he shrugged, ‘he stopped. One breath, maybe two.’

  ‘Did he try to say anything?’

  ‘No. I called John Jacobi, the night doorman, to stand with him and keep people away while I went to find Officer Scalabrine, who I had seen pass the hotel. Then I came back to wait for you.’

  ‘Where is Mr Jacobi?’

  ‘I’m afraid he was rather undone by this. I sent him to the staff dining room to wait in case you wanted to speak to him.’

  ‘Thank you. Do you recognize him? I assume he was a guest of the hotel.’

  ‘Mr Williger. Paul Williger, room 603.’

  ‘You knew him. What can you tell me about him?’

  ‘I never saw him before half an hour ago, but as you can see, he took the window shade and glass with him when he jumped. He must have come from a high floor. I simply looked up until I found the broken window with no shade and then checked the register.’

  ‘Mr Pickering, can you let us into Mr Williger’s room?’ Cassidy asked.

  ‘Of course. I’ll get the passkey from my office.’

  They rode up to the sixth floor in the peculiar silence elevators provoke.

  Pickering opened the door to room 603 and stood back to let Cassidy and Orso pass. ‘If you don’t need me, Officers, I’ll go back to the desk.’

  Cold night air and street noise came in through the broken window. The sheer curtains fluttered in the draft. Cassidy took in the small suitcase on a stand near the closet, the impression on the bed where someone had lain without removing the spread, the glass of water on a table next to an easy chair, and the desk chair drawn up in front of the larger chair. He noticed a towel on the floor by the chairs and when he touched it, he discovered it was wet.

  ‘Mike,’ Orso was looking through the open connecting door to the next room. When Cassidy stepped over, Orso pushed the door wide. A man sat on an easy chair near the window. He looked at the two cops standing in the door but did not get up. For a moment he looked startled though he must have heard them come into the room next door. He pushed his blond hair back from his forehead with his left hand and stubbed out a burning cigarette in the ashtray with his right. A copy of Time magazine lay open on his lap. The place adjoining Williger’s room was a small suite. It consisted of a bedroom, a living room with two easy chairs, a sofa, coffee table, and writing desk.

  Cassidy stepped into the room. ‘Sir, my name is Michael Cassidy. I’m a detective with the Eighteenth Precinct. This is Detective Orso. Please identify yourself.’ Both men held their badge folders where the man could see them.

  ‘Spencer Shaw.’ Shaw leaned forward to read the IDs. He looked up from Cassidy’s to study Cassidy’s face with interest.

  ‘I’d like to see some identification,’ Cassidy said.

  Shaw stood up, and took a wallet from his hip pocket. He extracted a driver’s license and handed it to Cassidy. Shaw’s address was in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. Cassidy handed it back. ‘Mr Shaw, did you know the man who occupied the adjoining room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cassidy waited. Some people gushed when speaking to a cop. Others, reticent in the face of authority, waited for the questions. ‘What was your connection to him?’

  ‘We worked together.’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Paul was a chemist.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘No, I’m not a chemist.’ Orso prowled the room, and every once in a while Shaw’s eyes would search him out and then come back to Cassidy. He did not seem concerned, just observant.

  ‘Did you and Mr Williger spend the evening together?’

  ‘Yes.’ Shaw twisted the gold signet ring on his little finger.

  ‘Please tell me what you did.’

  ‘We worked until about eight o’clock. We had dinner. We walked for a while. We stopped in a bar and had a nightcap. We came back to the hotel sometime after midnight.’ An evening stripped to its basic components.

  ‘Just the two of you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you have dinner?’

  ‘The German place on Fifty-sixth off Seventh.’

  ‘The Hofbrau?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘And the nightcap? Where was that?’

  ‘One of those Irish places off Seventh in the Forties. We were walking back here.’

  ‘The Shamrock?’

  ‘I don’t know what the name was. We stopped so I could light a cigarette. We realized that we were standing in front of a bar. Paul said, “Let’s go have a nightcap,” so we went in.’

  ‘Did Mr W
illiger have a lot to drink during the evening?’

  ‘No. A couple of drinks before dinner. A beer with. A couple of drinks when we stopped on the way to the hotel. Normal.’

  ‘Not drunk enough to fall out the window?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What happened after you came back here?’

  ‘Paul wasn’t feeling well. He had a headache. He said he thought he’d turn in. I came in here to read. I must have dozed off. I guess what woke me was the crash when he went out the window. I ran into his room, and …’ He hesitated as if reliving the moment. ‘And he was gone. I came back in here and called the desk to tell them what had happened, and I called the police.’

  Orso went back into the dead man’s room.

  ‘How well did you know Mr Williger?’

  ‘We’ve worked together for more than a year. I’ve met his family. We’re colleagues more than friends, but we have spent quite a lot of time together because of the work.’

  ‘Had he been depressed, any problems at home you know about, any financial problems?’

  Shaw took a pack of Pall Malls from the coffee table and offered one to Cassidy. Cassidy took it and lit their cigarettes with his Zippo. Shaw blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Paul had been having some problems, emotional problems.’ His voice was low as if he was reluctant to discuss the dead man’s personal life with a stranger.

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  ‘Depression. Over the past few months he was often late with work, and he confessed to me that sometimes he couldn’t make himself move, couldn’t get started. People at work were beginning to worry about it. He’s a good scientist, but he’s been having trouble keeping his nose to the grindstone.’

  ‘Who did he work for?’

  ‘The Department of the Army.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Research on biochemical compounds.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more. I’m not allowed to discuss the work with people who are not cleared.’

  ‘Secret work?’