‘Okay. Fine. Wonderful.’
‘You’ll have to take Hoffman’s place. We’re going out with more blind trials. We need another man.’
‘Sure. Love to. Should be a lot of fun.’
Ambrose examined him for sarcasm, but all he got from Shaw was a bland look and a smile. ‘I did not like that detective who was in the hotel. Cassidy. An arrogant man. Are we likely to deal with him again?’
‘No. Williger was a suicide. Nothing says different. There’s no reason they won’t sign off on it. Don’t worry about him. If he becomes a problem, he’s mine, not yours, part of the clean up.’
‘Very well. Keep me informed. Please pull the door tight when you go. Sometimes it sticks.’
Shaw stood on the sidewalk outside Ambrose’s house and finished his cigarette. A ragged bum pushed a baby carriage full of scrap iron west toward the salvage yard on Washington. Shaw turned east toward Hudson. Ambrose gave him a pain, and if it weren’t for the thing he had to do about his brother, he never would have asked for assignment in New York. There was an opening in Saigon he could have. Things were happening in Saigon. He needed something, action; action was always good. Maybe the blind trials would provide a kick.
He watched a young woman in a long tight, blue skirt and a tight red sweater walk down the block toward him. How old was she, eighteen, twenty? Old enough. Guys had been screwing her in the back seats of their imaginations since she was fifteen. Someone must have told her that she looked like Marilyn Monroe, because she was sure trying, blonde hair, red lipstick, mouth a little open. She knew he was looking. She pretended not to notice. When he got close, he smiled his best smile and said, ‘Hey.’ She looked at him. ‘Hi. Do you want to fuck?’
‘What?’ Shock. Her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open. ‘What!?’
‘Do you want to fuck?’
‘What?’
‘You know, screw?’ He poked his right forefinger in demonstration through the circle made by his left thumb and forefinger. ‘Do you want to screw? I’ve got a place nearby.’
‘Go away. Go away.’ Her hands were up in defense and she was backing away.
‘Hey, hey, it’s okay. No? That’s fine. Not a problem. It’s just that I’m on a tight schedule, and I thought I’d ask and save some time.’ He smiled, waved, and walked away. In his experience, the odds of a yes were around fifty-fifty, a delightful discovery that had saved him a lot of time and restaurant bills. He could hear the clatter of her heels on the pavement as she took off in the other direction. Okay, then, a taxi to the Yale Club, a game of squash, and then drinks at the bar. He was bound to run into someone he knew, and the evening would move on from there.
EIGHT
Cassidy knocked on the pebbled glass door of Lieutenant Tanner’s office and went in. ‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Close the door,’ Tanner said. The window was wide open, and the sudden cross draft blew papers off Tanner’s desk as he grabbed for them. Cassidy closed the door. The temperature in the office matched the high forties outside. Tanner wore his overcoat. He stooped to pick up the blown papers and sat back down behind his desk. He gestured toward the open window. ‘I got tired of smelling my own smells in here. Fucking window hasn’t been open since Prohibition. Took me half an hour to chip the paint away. Damn near popped a hernia getting the thing up.’ A putty knife and an old hammer with a taped handle lay on the windowsill. ‘Dr Sebastian Ambrose? Doc of the guy who went out the window over at the Astor?’
‘Yeah.’
‘He says you were rude to him.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Yeah, well, he reached out to someone down at Centre Street, and they passed it on.’
‘What do they want me to do, send him flowers?’
‘I don’t know what they want. They got the message. They passed it to me. I passed it to you. I’d say that’s the end of it. The guy who jumped, Williger, they put him down for a suicide. Case closed. You don’t have to see Ambrose again.’
‘Who is he, Ambrose? First he sends a lawyer from a high-powered law firm in the middle of the night to make sure his friend Shaw gets back to his hotel all right, and then he dings me at Centre Street. Where does he get the juice?’
‘No idea. And I don’t give a shit. He’s in the rearview mirror. There are other things out there that need work. That big asshole you guys busted selling smack, the knife sharpener, Connor Finn, he made bail and missed his first court date. Apparently he doesn’t have faith that the system is going to come down in his favor. We’d like to get him back inside. Councilman Franzi is particularly interested in the case. His office called three times in the last twenty-four. And what about the guy who got stabbed in the head up in the park there? Leon Dudek. Where are we on that?’
‘I’ve been on night watch. I gave it to Foley.’
‘So talk to Foley. Find out where we are. Close the door when you go out.’
But Foley had already left the house. Leon Dudek would have to wait till tomorrow.
Cassidy walked toward Broadway. The sky was darkening toward evening, the time of day the French call ‘the blue hour,’ when lovers meet outside the orbits of their normal lives. Taxis dropped passengers in front of the restaurants that catered to pre-theater diners. Workers hurried home carrying bags of groceries. A group of Broadway gypsies early for the evening’s call, posed with hips cocked, hands and elbows just so, and smoked cigarettes and chattered at each other near the stage door of the Mark Hellinger Theatre. They always reminded Cassidy of birds lightly connected to the earth, about to spring into the air. The theater marquee announced the hit My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. One of the dancers did a shuffle and slide that ended with a pirouette, and the others saluted him with mocking applause. Three hookers in tight, bright dresses stilted ahead of Cassidy on stiletto heels. Just before Broadway they stopped to use the window of a restaurant as a mirror to check their makeup. A middle-aged couple at a table near the window looked at them with alarm. One of the women mimed an exaggerated kiss and made a gesture that offered a threesome, and the couple shied away as if something dangerous threatened to come through the glass into their orderly world. Laughing, the women went on.
Cassidy turned south on the Stem. The sidewalks were crowded with tourists come to the big city hoping for a thrilling brush against the sin that Broadway and Times Square promised. The Paramount Building took up the east side block between 44th Street and 43rd. The movie theater marquee advertised Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, but the five teenage girls outside the theater swooned at the poster in a glass display case near the lobby door that promised Elvis Presley would be there in November in Love Me Tender. Cassidy went through the glass doors to the office building and rode the elevator to where his brother, Brian, had an office at ABC News.
Brian’s secretary, Claire, said, ‘He’s expecting you, Mr Cassidy.’
Brian was a big, square-built man with an open, cheerful manner that invited confidences, useful gifts for a reporter. He had his feet up on his desk next to a framed photograph of his wife, Marcy, and their two daughters. His attention was focused on a video monitor showing a tape of an interview on the set of his news show, Behind the Headlines. Brian and the man he was interviewing sat in easy chairs angled toward each other and facing the camera. There was a table between them that held coffee mugs and two ashtrays. Behind them loomed a piece of electronic studio equipment Cassidy could not identify. It looked like a metal cabinet faced with dials and switches. ‘Good evening,’ Brian’s black-and-white TV presence said looking directly at the camera. ‘Welcome to Behind the Headlines. Tonight my guest is Utah Congressman Martin Williams.’ He nodded to the congressman. ‘Congressman Williams, thank you for being here tonight.’
‘It’s my pleasure, Brian.’ That stretched the truth, because Congressman Williams fidgeted in his chair and lit a cigarette even though there was one burning in the ashtray next to him. ‘I’ve never been on television
before. It’s quite an experience.’ A confession of his unease.
Brian turned back to the camera. His manner was calm, confiding, but grave, as if warning that important subjects were to be discussed on the program. Pay attention. ‘Tonight’s broadcast is part of our continuing series, How The Government in Washington Spends Our Money. I want to remind our viewers that the money the government spends comes from you and me, our neighbors and friends, mostly in the form of the taxes we pay. It is our government funded by our money, and we at Behind the Headlines believe it is important for us to look at how the process works.’
The broadcast went to a test pattern, and Brian got up and turned the TV off.
‘I thought I was going to learn something there. You should have left it on,’ Cassidy said.
‘Watch it next month, and all will be revealed. Wednesday October tenth at eight p.m.’
‘It’s on a Wednesday? Are you sure?’
Brian laughed. ‘Let me check with Claire.’
‘I might be busy on the tenth upholding the law.’
‘I’ll give you the short version, without commercials, over a drink.’ He crossed to the bar table in the corner near the window. ‘A martini?’
‘Perfect,’ Cassidy said. ‘The congressman looked a little nervous. Did he think you were going to take him over the jumps?’
‘Everybody’s nervous the first time on TV. You have to keep telling them, pretend it’s a conversation. Look at me when you answer. Don’t look at the camera. The camera will find you. Some get it. Some don’t. The good ones understand what TV is going to do for them.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’ll take them into every home that has a television.’
‘Politicians in the living room. That’s going to fuck up a lot of good cocktail hours.’ He accepted the martini from Brian and took a sip. ‘So what’s with the congressman?’
‘He refused to vote for an appropriation bill, because one of the companies that would profit from it sent his re-election campaign a contribution.’
‘How much?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘I want to know how much someone thinks a congressman goes for.’
‘A thousand bucks.’
‘Huh, not much more than a New York Councilman might get. You’d think a congressman would cost at least twice as much. Of course there are more of them than there are councilmen. That probably dilutes the demand.’
Brian toasted him with bourbon and laughed. ‘Ah, the tough, cynical cop, but I know you, Michael. Outrage, not cynicism. Outrage drives you. And by the way, Congress has called for a select committee to look into Williams’s allegation. The appropriation bill is on hold.’
‘My faith in the system is restored. What was the company?’
‘A medical supply company that contracts with the military. It’s in my notes. Do you want me to look?’
‘It wouldn’t mean anything to me.’
‘You said on the phone that you wanted to ask me about something.’
‘What can you tell me about a law firm called Sullivan and Cromwell?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I ran into one of their lawyers a couple of nights ago.’
‘Who was that?’ Brian took his empty glass and carried it to the bar.
‘Peter Gilbert.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘But you know some of the others there?’
‘I do. I went to school with some of them,’ Brian said. ‘How did you meet Gilbert?’
‘He came to the stationhouse the other night to get a release for someone we had down there. We hadn’t arrested the guy. We just asked him to come down to make a report. But it made somebody nervous, and they got Gilbert out of bed and sent him down.’
‘Who was the guy you brought in?’
‘His name was Shaw, Spencer Shaw. He worked with a chemist for the Department of the Army who went out a window at the Hotel Astor the other night.’
‘Was it suicide, or do you think he was pushed?’ Brian asked.
‘It bothers me that he didn’t open the window. But I don’t know what goes through a man’s mind at that moment. Maybe he was impatient to get it over with.’
‘What did Shaw say?’
‘He was in the other room. He said he didn’t see anything. He heard the crash when Williger went through the window.’
‘Why did someone send a lawyer to make sure a witness who saw nothing got home all right?’
‘I don’t know.’
Brian brought him a fresh drink and sat with his feet up on his desk. ‘What do you know about Sullivan and Cromwell?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It might be the most powerful law firm in the country. We were going to do a piece on them about a year ago. A kind of who-pulls-the-strings-behind-the-throne thing. They suggested that it wouldn’t be a good idea, and someone on the top floor decided there wasn’t really a story there after all. They’ve been international power brokers since the end of the last century. They know everybody in finance, politics, the press, and everybody owes them something. They’ve been sitting pretty on the intersection of Washington politics and global business for seventy years. John Foster Dulles is a partner, and so is his brother, Allen.’
‘The Secretary of State and the director of the CIA? Now I know who to call when I need a lawyer.’
Cassidy lit a cigarette. ‘So why are these hotshots interested in an Army chemist?’
‘I don’t know. But there’ll be some mix of money and politics. I’m going back down to Washington. Do you want me to ask around? Maybe I could turn up something on the chemist. What’s his name?’
‘Paul Williger.’
‘And the other guy again, the one the lawyer came to spring?’
‘Spencer Shaw. If you’ve got time, that would be great. Don’t go out of your way. It probably doesn’t mean anything.’
Brian walked Cassidy down the corridor to the elevator. ‘Have you seen Dad lately?’
‘No,’ Cassidy said. ‘Not for a couple of weeks.’ His relationship with his father was volatile. The affection was always there, but they banged against each other like flint and steel.
‘He’d love it if you stopped by the theater and watched a run-through. He mentioned it the other day.’
‘I’ll try.’ It was Tom Cassidy’s forlorn hope that Cassidy would give up the idiocy of being a cop and come join him in the theater business.
‘Okay. Be good.’ Brian’s forlorn hope. He squeezed Michael’s shoulder affectionately and watched him into the elevator.
Cassidy ate a late dinner at the bar at Sardi’s and talked with Vince Sardi about the Broadway season. My Fair Lady was the big hit, but Sardi had high hopes for Bells Are Ringing and Auntie Mame. By the time he finished, the Broadway theaters had let out. The sidewalks were crowded. Broadway grifters and minor con artists were abroad and looking for suckers. Some of them stood in doorways and whispered offerings tinged with sin and darkness. Others glad-handed and buttonholed on the sidewalk with broad smiles designed to camouflage their greed. Some of them were vicious enough to steal a blind man’s cup, but for the most part they were as harmless as lice.
Near 50th Street Cassidy spotted Benny the Dip and his sister, a cheerful, pneumatic bottle-blond named Candy, working a pair of out-of-town businessmen who had spent the evening pouring booze on their thirsts. Candy, the cannon, walked two identical little white poodles on long leashes. The dogs were well trained and managed to entangle themselves with the men. Candy apologetically tried to untangle the dogs. As the men displayed their drunken gallantry to the woman, Benny came to help and dipped both their wallets. The four people disengaged with assurances of no harm done, and the two businessmen moved off. Benny stiffened when Cassidy caught his eye. Cassidy shook his head and put out a hand. Benny shrugged and gave up both wallets.
‘Jesus Christ, Cassidy.’
‘Sorry, Benny. Wrong time, wrong place
. How are you doing, Candy?’
‘I was doing fine until a minute ago. What the hell, Cassidy, don’t you ever sleep?’ She said it without rancor.
‘Take the rest of the night off, will you? Say hello to your mother for me when you see her.’
‘We’ve got mouths to feed, Cassidy,’ Candy complained.
‘If I come back down the Stem later, I don’t want to see you.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Benny said. He handed over the wallets. Candy gave Cassidy a sour look and followed her brother down the street with the dogs. They were the best pickpocket team in town. He could have arrested them, but Benny had a bail bondsman on call, and they’d be on the street again before Cassidy finished writing the report.
Cassidy found the businessmen standing at the foot of a stairway that led to a second-floor striptease joint discussing going up and taking a look at some poontang.
‘Gentlemen, you’ve got to be more careful. You dropped your wallets back there down the block.’
They looked at him in surprise and tapped the pockets where their wallets should have been. Their eyes went wide. Cassidy handed over the billfolds. One of the men surreptitiously checked to see if his money was still there.
‘Have fun,’ Cassidy said and headed downtown.
Waiting for the light at 45th Street he looked across Broadway to the Hotel Astor. Light spilled to the sidewalk from the lobby. A uniformed doorman stood to one side of the entrance and smoked a cigarette behind a cupped hand. There were lights in rooms on some of the upper floors, but none behind the new window in room 603 where Paul Williger had flown from life.
Cassidy crossed the street and headed toward the hotel entrance. The doorman ground his cigarette out under his shoe and hurried to open the door with a cheery, ‘Good evening, sir. A beautiful night.’
The night clerk watched him with a professional smile as he crossed the lobby to the desk. ‘Good evening, sir.’
‘Evening. Is Joe Pickering on duty?’
‘Yes, sir. He is. May I say who is asking for him?’
Night Watch Page 7