‘Yes.’
‘But you’re not a chemist.’
‘No.’
‘What exactly do you do, Mr Shaw.’
‘I facilitate things.’ Shaw didn’t seem to care what Cassidy wanted. He was only going to give him what he wanted to give.
The phone rang in the next room, and Cassidy heard Orso answer it. ‘Do you work in New York, you and Mr Williger?’
Shaw hesitated and then decided the answer could do no harm. ‘Sometimes we find space in the city in a government building or lab, but mostly we work at Fort Dix, out in New Jersey.’
‘Do you live here in the hotel?’
‘Sometimes when I’m in New York.’
‘Does Mr Williger?’
‘He occasionally takes a room when we have to work late and plan to start early the next day.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Scarsdale. Westchester County. Sometimes it’s not worth getting on the train if he has to be back in the morning.’
Orso appeared in the door to Williger’s room. ‘There’s a Dr Ambrose coming up. He says that he was treating Williger.’
‘I called him,’ Shaw said.
‘You said you called the desk and the police.’
‘Yes. I did. Then I called Dr Ambrose. I thought he should know. He saw Paul yesterday.’
‘What was he treating him for?’
‘Depression.’
Cassidy waited for more, but there was no more. He followed Orso back into Williger’s room. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘No note that I could find, but most of them don’t leave one. Why the hell didn’t he open the window?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he lay there on the bed thinking about it, got up, and wham! out he went. Maybe he thought if he took the time to open it he wouldn’t go.’
They searched the room quickly. An overcoat and a tweed jacket hung in the closet. There was nothing in the bureau drawers. A change of shirt, underwear, and socks in the suitcase. A leather shaving kit was on a shelf in the bathroom. There was a toothbrush in the holder above the sink. It was wet. He brushed his teeth, no simpler part of the daily routine, and then lay down on the bed. What the hell happened between the toothbrush and the window? Cassidy wondered. What was in his head that was so horrible that he could not go on? Jesus, I never want to get to that place, he thought.
A firm rap of knuckles on the door.
Orso opened it as Cassidy came out of the bathroom.
‘I’m Ambrose,’ the man in the doorway announced. He entered the room as if he owned it. He trailed strong body odor. He was a medium-height heavyweight with a broad chest and a belly that threatened the threadbare dark blue cardigan buttoned over a red flannel shirt. He wore shapeless corduroy trousers and laced leather boots. He had a close-cropped, dark beard so thick that it hid his mouth, and his hair was thick, curly, and touched with gray. Cassidy thought he looked like one of the many poets and painters who live in the Village, but his eyes marked him as something else. They were so dark that the cornea and the iris blended to one color. They were not the eyes of a dreamer.
He looked at Orso and Cassidy, took them in, recorded them, and then brushed past them to stand looking out of the shattered window. After a while he turned around. ‘I am Dr Sebastian Ambrose. Paul Williger was my patient. Who are you?’
‘Detective Orso, Detective Cassidy. Eighteenth Precinct,’ Orso said.
‘Where’s Spencer Shaw?’
‘In the next room.’
Ambrose nodded abruptly and went through the connecting door.
‘Asshole,’ Cassidy said.
‘Yeah, I could see you liked him from the jump,’ Orso said. ‘What’s that all about?’
‘I don’t know. The moment he came in it was like fingernails on a blackboard.’
‘Hate at first sight?’
‘It saves time.’
Low voices came from the other room. Moments later Ambrose reappeared. He screwed a cigarette into a long ebony holder and lit it with a silver lighter. ‘I’m taking Mr Shaw back to my place and giving him a sedative.’ There was no room for argument.
‘What were you treating Paul Williger for?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Depression.’
‘Are you a psychiatrist?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was he suicidal?’
Ambrose drew on the cigarette and blew smoke through his nose. ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss my patient’s case with anyone. Doctor–patient confidentiality.’ His tone suggested Cassidy should fuck off. He scratched his head vigorously with his free hand, and dandruff drifted like snow. He looked across the room at the shattered window again. ‘How do you feel when you confront your failures, Detective Cassidy?’
‘They happen so seldom I’m usually relieved to discover I’m fallible. It indicates humanity.’
Ambrose looked at him hard, and his brow furrowed for a moment. ‘That kind of remark usually indicates great insecurity.’
‘I appreciate your professional opinion. Send your bill to the precinct.’
It bounced off. ‘Let’s go, Spencer,’ Ambrose called toward the open door. Spencer Shaw appeared from the other room wearing an overcoat.
‘We need Mr Shaw to come to the stationhouse with us,’ Cassidy said.
‘Mr Shaw has undergone a serious trauma. He needs a sedative and rest.’
‘I’ll have a Department doctor examine him when we get to the house. A man jumped, fell, or was pushed from a window in this room, and we need Mr Shaw to come make a report while the events are still fresh in his mind.’
‘Pushed?’ Ambrose said, and raised a skeptical eyebrow.
‘At this point we rule nothing out.’
‘Are you suggesting that Mr Shaw pushed him out the window?’
‘No. For all I know the chambermaid did it, because she found him lying on the bed with his shoes on, but we still need Mr Shaw to come make his report. It won’t take long, and we’ll make sure Mr Shaw is comfortable and cared for.’
‘Over my protest as his doctor.’ Ambrose did not like being checked, and his voice was thick with anger.
‘Noted. If you’d like to come with him, you may.’
Shaw watched their hostility with amusement.
‘Spencer, you go with them. Don’t worry about a thing,’ Ambrose said, and patted Shaw on the shoulder, ‘I’ll take care of this.’
It almost sounded like a threat.
There was no doctor at the stationhouse to examine Shaw, but he showed no signs of suffering or unease. Cassidy gave Shaw a cup of over-stewed coffee from the pot on the hotplate in the squad room and showed him to an unoccupied desk where he could write his report. Most people were nervous when they talked to the cops at a crime scene. Shaw and Ambrose both displayed unusual arrogance. What made them feel so safe?
The usual night-time noises rose from downstairs at the booking desk: a couple of drunks shouted at each other until someone told them to shut the fuck up; someone howled as if possessed by demons; a crash as something hard was thrown or kicked. This was where people washed up when their night took a wrong turn near Times Square. Anger and anguish were the common harmonies.
Cassidy smoked and thought about Paul Williger lying in his room at the Astor and then getting up and throwing himself through the window. How fast would he have to be going to blast through the window and frame? Williger, from the looks of him, weighed about a hundred seventy-five pounds, a lot of weight to throw against glass and wood. Was it enough? What were the physics? What was he thinking when he went out? Jesus, how does a man do that?
‘Cassidy,’ a uniformed patrolman called from the top of the stairs. ‘There’s a guy to see you. Says he’s a lawyer for the guy you brought in.’
‘Thanks, Gerry. Let him up.’
A young man came up and stopped on the landing and looked around. He was in his twenties. He wore a well-cut charcoal gray overcoat. The pressed trousers of a pin-striped suit showed bel
ow its hem, and his shoes were polished black wingtips. A crisp white shirt and a dark striped tie showed in the vee of the overcoat. He carried a black leather briefcase. His dark blond hair was still wet from the shower. He was the poster boy for an Ivy League law school.
Cassidy raised his hand, and the young man nodded and crossed to his desk. Cassidy stood to shake hands.
‘Peter Gilbert. I’m an attorney with Sullivan and Cromwell.’
‘Detective Michael Cassidy. I guess you’re the lucky one they call in the middle of the night.’
Gilbert smiled. ‘They sure don’t call the senior partners. Is there something I have to sign to allow Mr Shaw to leave here?’
‘No. He can go as soon as he finishes his report. If we need follow-up questions, we’ll get in touch with him. Do you know Mr Shaw?’
‘No, I don’t. They asked me to come down and see that he was being properly treated, so here I am.’
‘Standard service for all the firm’s clients?’
‘Oh, no. At least I’ve never heard that.’
‘So he’s an important client.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I’m just doing what I was asked to do.’ He looked around the squad room with lively curiosity. A scream from downstairs jerked his head around.
‘Are you a criminal attorney, Mr Gilbert?’
‘No. I’m a tax lawyer.’ He turned and put out his hand as Spencer Shaw approached. ‘Mr Shaw, I’m Peter Gilbert with Sullivan and Cromwell. They asked me to come down and make sure you got home safely. I’ve got a taxi waiting.’
Spencer Shaw shook his hand. He put the yellow pad with his report on Cassidy’s desk. ‘That’s it.’
‘Okay,’ Cassidy said. ‘If we need more, we’ll be in touch.’
‘Always a pleasure to see New York’s finest at work,’ Shaw said, and headed for the stairs. Cassidy watched him go and wondered why Shaw acted as if the whole evening amused him, as if he had some secret that let him stand above it all.
Orso put a steaming mug on Cassidy’s desk. ‘Fresh pot.’
‘Thanks. That might keep me awake till I get home.’
‘Nice-looking suit on that kid. The overcoat’s cashmere and wool. It goes one fifty at Brooks Brothers.’
‘A lawyer sent to carry Shaw back to his hotel.’
‘We were going to let him go anyway.’
‘Maybe they just wanted to make sure.’
‘Ambrose?’
‘My guess.’
‘Overkill.’
‘Just what I was thinking. I was also thinking that Shaw didn’t see it as something out of the ordinary that a tax lawyer for a big-time firm gets rousted out of bed to collect him.’
‘The guy’s pretty fucking calm. You don’t meet many like that. I got the feeling he was laughing at us. What do you think?’
‘He acts like he’s got a lot of clout. I wonder where it comes from.’ He noticed that Orso was freshly showered and shaved and had put on a clean shirt. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I thought I’d start the day with a physics lesson.’
‘The professor at NYU?’
‘Yeah.’ He looked worried. ‘Man, I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know what?’
Orso looked sheepish. ‘Do you remember a couple of years ago you were going out with that broad turned out to be a Russian spy? Dylan was her name.’
‘No.’
‘Okay. Okay. Remember I told you don’t give her the keys to your apartment? You know what I said will happen?’
‘“Soon we’d be standing up in front of some monsignor doing the till-death-do-us-part thing,” I think is what you said. It didn’t quite work out that way. We did the death thing before the monsignor thing.’
Dylan McCue, Russian spy, lover, who betrayed him, and who then saved his life, and was now dead somewhere in Russia, dead but not gone.
Orso was unembarrassed. ‘Yeah, well, still. Good advice.’
‘Did you give the professor the keys to your apartment?’
‘No. She gave me the keys to hers.’ Orso shrugged at life’s strange turns and went down the stairs with an eager step.
Cassidy had not thought of Dylan for a long time. He had dreamed of her over and over in the months after she left New York on the Russian freighter from which he had rescued his father. It was a dream of finding her again, repeated like a loop of film in his head, but after a while he decided the dream was wishful thinking, not predictive. Soon after that, the dream stopped.
Early morning left the Times Square area nearly deserted. Daylight scattered its vampires. An occasional taxi cruised. A man hosed down the sidewalk in front of an all-night deli. A man and a woman in green aprons unloaded crates of vegetables in front of the grocery on Eighth Avenue. The neon and electric signs had been turned off. The theater marquees, now unlit, showed pale ghosts of their night-time announcements. A few cleaning crews from the theaters made their way toward the subway talking in Spanish. A newspaper delivery truck crawled Eighth while two helpers in the back threw out bundles of papers to land with thumps on the sidewalk in front of newsstands and stores. A woman in silk pajamas and slippers under a fur coat, her hair in curlers, smoked a cigarette distractedly while she waited for her dachshund to sniff out the proper place to piss. A street sweeper rumbled by, its circular brushes swishing, and left a trail of water glistening on the street. By nine the subways would be pouring out office workers hurrying to their jobs with nervy energy and the streets would be dense with traffic, but now the sky was bright, and the morning crisp, the day as yet unbruised.
God, he was tired. Home and bed and then the weekend off. But at least the night watch was over.
SEVEN
Spencer Shaw sat on a wooden bench and watched Sebastian Ambrose milk his goat. The doctor’s brownstone was in the Village on Leroy Street and had a south-facing yard that Ambrose had turned into a miniature farm. There was a stand of corn along the east wall, and the four tomato plants staked up nearby were heavy with ripe fruit. A patch of salad greens grew in dark earth near a small tin goat shed. The goat was no more than twenty inches high at the shoulders. Her white coat was slightly soiled by the New York air. She stood placidly while Ambrose stripped her milk out into a galvanized bucket with practiced hands. ‘She’s a Nigerian Dwarf,’ Ambrose explained. ‘Six percent butter fat in the milk which makes for good cheese, but I don’t do that. I just drink the milk.’ His head was tucked down near the goat, so his voice was muffled. ‘A glass every morning, a glass every evening, the healthiest thing you can have.’ He stood up and kicked the low wooden milking stool aside, and picked up the bucket. ‘Do you want a tomato? Last of the season. We’ll have frost soon, and then they’re done.’
‘No thanks,’ Spencer Shaw said.
‘These are the real things, not like that crap you buy in the supermarket. They gas them to turn them red.’ He pulled a tomato from one of the plants, rubbed it against his shirt to clean it, and took a bite. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ Shaw said. What made Ambrose think his shirt was cleaner than the tomato? He watched Ambrose shamble toward him. The big man wore lace-up leather boots, brown corduroy trousers worn shiny at the knees and seat, a plaid flannel shirt with a frayed collar, and a ratty blue cardigan. Bits of tomato gleamed in Ambrose’s thick beard, and his hair looked like it had been groomed with an eggbeater. He stood at the bottom of the steps to the porch while he ate the tomato like an apple. He looked back over his yard with satisfaction.
‘It’s not easy to make a garden in New York soil. You have no idea of the poisons that accumulate here over the years. Do you know what phytoremediation is, Shaw?’
‘No. Not a clue.’ But he knew he was about to find out. Ambrose liked a captive audience for his lectures.
‘It refers to the natural ability of certain plants to make contaminants in soils harmless. Certain plants are hyperaccumulators. They gather and degrade the toxins. I used mustard, hemp, pigweed, and stinkweed.’
The stinkweed degraded you too, pal. Shaw smiled at the thought.
‘Is something funny?’
‘Stinkweed’s a funny word.’
Ambrose weighed him for a moment with his weird eyes, dismissed the levity, and went on. ‘It took me four years, but now I have a rich, organic, non-toxic soil without the use of chemical fertilizers. A triumph of nature over man’s pernicious misuse of the earth.’ He took a last bite of the tomato, threw the remains to the goat, and walked up past Shaw and went into the kitchen. Moments later he reappeared carrying a glass of milk. He sat on the bench next to Shaw and took a long pull at the glass and then wiped his beard with his sleeve. He searched his pockets until he found his cigarette holder and chewed it while he opened a fresh pack of Raleighs and carefully stowed the coupon in his sweater pocket before lighting up. Shaw waited. Ambrose had called him, and he would explain why when he was ready.
‘Hoffman?’
‘Hoffman has accepted an assignment overseas. He left for Iran yesterday morning,’ Shaw said. Would it be insulting to get up and lean against the porch railing? Ambrose smelled of sweat, goat, and fried food.
‘Good. Too many voices can confuse the narrative.’
‘Why should there be a narrative? I made my report. We’ve heard nothing since. A man suffering from depression threw himself out a window. It happens.’
‘There will be an autopsy.’
‘Are you worried about that?’ Shaw lit a cigarette and flicked the burned match into the garden.
‘Not really.’ Ambrose got up and retrieved the match and put it in his pocket. ‘It’s not something that a pathologist in a place like the police morgue is likely to identify.’
‘But he might.’ Stick a needle in that balloon of self-satisfaction.
‘Unlikely.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Are you questioning me on a scientific matter?’ Ambrose turned to look at Shaw in surprise.
‘You have your job, and I understand that you’re the best.’ Mollify the arrogant prick. ‘My job is to clean up if there’s any spillage. I’m good at that, but I work better if I know how big the mess is.’
Ambrose regarded him with his unsettling black eyes. Then he tilted his glass and splashed milk on the porch. ‘It’s that big. No more.’
Night Watch Page 6