Night Watch

by David C. Taylor

  ‘Detective Michael Cassidy.’

  The clerk turned and discreetly used a phone on a desk against the back wall. He spoke quietly for a few seconds, and then hung up and returned to Cassidy. ‘Mr Pickering will be with you in a few minutes. If you’d like, you can wait here in the lobby or the bar is just to your left.’

  Cassidy ordered bourbon on the rocks and took a table near the window. The waiter brought Cassidy his drink. He lit a cigarette from the second pack of the day. It tasted like burning rope. Four nuns in black habits with white headpieces sailed by looking like large dignified birds. A drunk in a plaid jacket pressed against the window and stuck out his tongue at Cassidy and then tacked away as if fighting a high wind.

  Joe Pickering slipped into the chair opposite him. ‘Good evening, Detective Cassidy.’

  ‘Mr Pickering.’ They shook hands across the table. ‘Care for a drink?’

  ‘Unfortunately I can’t while on duty. How may I help you?’

  ‘The man in the room next to Paul Williger’s said that he called the desk and the police after Williger went out the window. Later, he mentioned that he had also called the doctor who arrived, a man named Ambrose. I was wondering if he made any other calls that might have slipped his mind.’

  ‘Shall we go see?’ Pickering stood up. ‘Please bring your drink.’

  Cassidy took money from his pocket as he stood.

  ‘On the house,’ Pickering said.

  Cassidy dropped a dollar on the table for the waiter and followed Pickering out of the bar. The clerk lifted the desk gate as they approached, and they went through a door marked Authorized Personnel Only to the telephone switchboard center for the hotel. There were five night-time operators on the board. They were all middle-aged women, and they all wore earphones, and mouthpieces. They sat on swivel stools in front of the large switchboard. Three of them had knitting within easy reach, another had a paperback book with a lurid cover of a young woman in a tight sweater and a man with a gun, and the fifth had a stack of movie gossip magazines. The graveyard shift was not busy.

  ‘Good evening, ladies,’ Pickering said.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Pickering,’ they chirped and looked at Cassidy with curiosity.

  Pickering disappeared around the side of the switchboard. He came back moments later carrying a large ring binder.

  ‘September twenty-second, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. About one in the morning.’

  Pickering flipped pages and ran a finger down columns of figures. ‘Here we are. One twenty-one, a call from 605, Mr Shaw’s room to the long-distance operator. Five minutes later a call to the desk. Two minutes after that he placed a call to the police. Then five minutes later a call to a New York number. Perhaps that’s the doctor’s. Here, I’ll write it down.’ He took a fountain pen from his inside pocket and unscrewed the cap and wrote the number on a small pad he found in a drawer.

  ‘What was the long-distance call?’

  Pickering looked back at the ledger. ‘It was to a number in Washington, DC. Mr Hoffman called the same number fifteen minutes later.

  ‘Hoffman? Who’s Hoffman?’

  ‘I think he must be a colleague of Mr Shaw’s and Mr Williger’s. They often check in on the same days.’ Pickering handed Cassidy another piece of paper with the Washington number.

  ‘He never mentioned Hoffman. Are he and Shaw still in the hotel?’

  ‘Let’s go see.’

  Hoffman had checked out fifteen minutes after Williger went out the window. Spencer Shaw checked out the next day.

  NINE

  In the morning, Cassidy called the DC number Shaw had called from the Astor. Someone picked up the phone on the fifth ring. ‘Yes?’ said a man’s voice.

  ‘This is Detective Michael Cassidy, New York Police Department. Who am I speaking to?’

  There was silence on the other end. ‘I’d like to speak to Spencer Shaw or John Hoffman.’

  The phone hung up with a click.

  Tommy Foley was reading Field & Stream magazine when Cassidy stopped by his desk.

  ‘Foley, how’d you do with the Leon Dudek thing?’ He offered Foley a cigarette.

  ‘Who?’ Foley took the Lucky and lit it with a kitchen match scraped on his chair arm.

  ‘Dudek. Leon Dudek. Someone stuck a blade in his brain up in the park. I gave you his address.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That guy.’ He put the magazine face down on the desk to hold his place. The cover painting showed a twelve-point buck in a clearing and a hunter sighting a rifle down on him from a camouflaged tree stand. ‘I didn’t get nowhere with that. I went down there, in the Alphabets, Lower East Side. What a crappy neighborhood. Half the people don’t speak a word of English, the other half don’t want to talk to a cop.’

  ‘Did you go to the address?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. I say, “Leon Dudek,” and they nod. I say, “Where does he live?” and they all shake their heads. “Who knows him?”, some turn around and walk away. Some give me the stink eye. They talk to each other in some language, sounds kind of like the German. I didn’t learn much German over there during the war, enough to trade a candy bar or a pack of cigarettes for a piece of ass, but what they were talking wasn’t the same.’

  ‘Yeah, great. Good work.’

  ‘Yeah. I figure, what the hell. They don’t want me to help, I ain’t going to break my balls.’

  Rhonda answered her phone on the third ring. ‘New York Post, Rhonda Raskin.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hey, stranger. Where have you been?’

  ‘Pining for you.’

  ‘Liar. I am always a phone call away,’ she said eagerly. ‘Do you find me too eager, Michael?’

  ‘No, I don’t. How was your mother?’

  ‘Irascible. And once again the subject came up of why I haven’t married a nice Jewish doctor or lawyer. “Settle down,” she says. “Stop running around.” I tell her I have a job that I like. “Job, shmob,” she says, I swear to god.’ Some of the laughter left her voice. ‘She has a real talent for making me feel like I can never measure up.’

  ‘And yet you go back almost every week.’

  ‘Hey, she’s my mother.’

  ‘What are you doing right now? Are you busy?’

  ‘I’ve got all the information you’ll ever need on the debutante season, and I can hardly wait to plunge into writing the story. Column inches of deathless prose on organdy and hairstyles. Can my Pulitzer be far behind?’

  ‘How’s your Yiddish?’

  ‘Praktakli gants.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Practically perfect.’

  ‘That’ll have to do. Can you get away?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’ve got to go down to the Alphabets and talk to people about a man who was murdered in Central Park. Apparently they mostly speak Yiddish.’

  ‘Do I get the story?’ Her focus was tight now.

  ‘The murder’s already been reported. Leon Dudek was the vic. He was found near Columbus Circle stabbed at the base of the skull. It got an inch in a couple of the papers.’

  ‘Okay, but from now on, is it my story?’

  ‘Off the record for now, but it’s your story when it’s time to report it.’

  ‘Who decides on when it’s time?’

  ‘I do.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘It’s either that or I find someone else to translate.’

  ‘Okay, right.’

  ‘You can’t jump the gun on this, Rhonda. You’ll have the story as soon as possible. Stories in the paper have a way of screwing up an investigation.’

  ‘All right. All right.’

  ‘There’s a coffee shop on the corner of St Marks Place and Third. Meet me there in half an hour.’

  ‘That’s me you see coming up the block.’

  A phone rang in an apartment on the Upper East Side. Spencer Shaw rolled off the woman who said, ‘Hey, what the hell?’ in surprise and annoyance as he
got out of bed, and padded naked toward the study. What was her name? Mary? Margie? Jesus, wouldn’t it be easier if they were all named Bunny? He answered the phone on the sixth ring. Maybe that’s what he’d do, start calling all of them Bunny. Keep it simple.

  ‘Shaw here.’

  The voice on the other end said, ‘A Detective Michael Cassidy called the 8858 number here.’

  ‘Uh-huh. How’d he get it?’ The cool breeze through the open window dried the sweat on his skin. He watched his dick go soft.

  ‘That’s one of the things you should find out. He asked to speak to you or Hoffman.’

  ‘Where’d he get Hoffman’s name?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘The hotel, probably. They keep records of calls. Is this about Williger?’

  ‘Presumably. Brian Cassidy, the TV reporter brother, was down here a couple of days ago asking questions about Gallien Medical. He also called someone at the Department of the Army and wanted to know if they had a Spencer Shaw or a Paul Williger on their books. We would prefer that he not pursue his line of questioning. It’s ruffling feathers.’

  ‘So he and his cop brother are working this together from opposite sides of the street. Why are they so interested? How’d they get a hold of Gallien Medical?’

  ‘We don’t know. There are a lot of things in play here, and we do not need a reporter and a cop poking around this operation. We want the reporter discouraged. The cop’s been told the Williger case is closed.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘This is not a story we want to see on Behind the Headlines. Clear?’

  ‘Clear.’

  There was a click as the phone at the other end returned to its cradle. He checked the clock on the desk. Almost noon. Still, plenty of time for a quickie with …?

  He turned for the bedroom calling, ‘Bunny, honey, here I come, ready or not.’

  Rhonda impatiently refused coffee. ‘No, thanks. Let’s go.’ They walked south and east toward Leon Dudek’s address on East Third. She was a long-legged woman, and she matched Cassidy’s pace. ‘Tell me about Leon Dudek.’

  ‘I don’t know much,’ Cassidy said. ‘Polish, late forties, early fifties. Drove a hansom cab in the park for the last four years. I don’t know what he did before that. The people at the stable didn’t know him well at all. They liked him, but he wasn’t someone who went out for a beer after work. The thing everybody said about him was that he was gentle, and sad.’

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘He was in a concentration camp during the war.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus. And the killing? Anything about that?’

  ‘Not much. His wallet was gone, so it might have been a robbery.’

  ‘You’re not going to get a hell of a lot from a guy driving one of those horse cabs.’

  ‘It’s New York. There are people who’ll take you down for the pennies in your loafers, but I don’t think it was a robbery. I think it was made to look like one. I think he knew the guys.’

  ‘Guys?’

  ‘According the ME at the morgue one held him and the other did the blade work.’

  ‘How could he tell?’

  ‘There were bruises on Dudek’s arms as if someone gripped him hard there.’

  The Lower East Side was traditionally an immigrants’ neighborhood: Irish, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Jews of all those nations had washed ashore there. The lucky and the ambitious moved up and out, and the next wave seeking the American dream took their places in the tenements and rundown apartment buildings. Rhonda stopped in front of a store offering Friedman’s Kosher Wines and, in smaller letters, tobacco and sundries.

  ‘This is where we always stopped to buy wine for Seder on the way to my grandparents’ apartment. A bottle of wine, cigars for Zeyde and Dad, and a candy bar for my brother and me. But not to be eaten until after the meal. Very strict on that.’

  ‘I didn’t know your grandparents lived down here.’

  ‘We’re only scraping the surface of what you don’t know about me.’

  Laundry hung from the iron railings of the six-story tenements on 3rd Street and from clotheslines strung on pulleys across the airshafts. The building where Leon Dudek had lived was halfway along the block. Two women sat on wooden kitchen chairs taking the sun on the sidewalk. A third was on the fire escape above them collecting laundry from the railings and folding it into a wicker basket. They could have been sisters. They all wore formless dresses in gray or brown cotton that extended to their ankles, and earth-tone wool overcoats. Their gray heads covered with dark scarves. Their faces were lined by time, work, and worry. They were aware of Cassidy and Rhonda the moment they turned the corner. Strangers to the neighborhood were viewed with suspicion. They tracked Cassidy and Rhonda along the block and then flicked their eyes away when they stopped in front of the building.

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies. How are you today?’ Cassidy said with what he hoped was disarming charm.

  The women looked back at him with flat, wary gazes.

  ‘Is this where Leon Dudek lived?’

  One of the women picked up knitting from her lap and began to shuttle the needles.

  Cassidy showed them his badge. ‘I’m a policeman. I’d like to speak to whoever knew Mr Dudek.’

  The knitter said something in a language Cassidy did not understand. He picked out the word Cossack, which is what his father had called him when he joined the cops. Rhonda snorted in amusement.

  ‘Is there someone in the building I could talk to? A super?’

  Neither woman looked at him. The one who wasn’t knitting dug in her coat pocket and found half a cigarette. She lit it with a kitchen match scraped across the pavement next to her chair. She said something to the knitting woman and then sucked greedily on the cigarette. The woman on the fire escape said something that made both the women on the sidewalk laugh shortly. The knitter replied. Whatever she said drew nods and grunts of agreement.

  ‘Well, at least they think you’re good-looking,’ Rhonda said. ‘But that one said, “Good-looking men are a dime a dozen and mostly not worth the price.”’

  ‘Tell them if they don’t cooperate, I’ll send an ugly cop down to talk to them. We’ve got plenty.’

  Rhonda said something in Yiddish, and the women laughed.

  The door to the building opened and a young man in a worker’s blue coveralls, a cheap nylon windbreaker, and a cloth cap came out. When he saw Cassidy and Rhonda, he hesitated as if to go back into the building.

  Cassidy’s badge was still in his hand. ‘Hey, buddy, I’d like to talk to you.’

  The young man ducked his head and went around the women without going near Cassidy.

  ‘Hey, hold on a second,’ Cassidy said to him, but he walked away quickly, head down. Cassidy had a fleeting impression of a boy in his late teens or early twenties. There was something about the side of his face. Maybe a scar. ‘Hey, stop. I just want to talk to you.’

  The boy took off running.

  ‘Shit.’

  Cassidy went after him. The boy was quick. He dodged between parked cars and went out into the street. Brakes squealed and horns blew. The kid flew around a corner, and when Cassidy followed he found a garbage can upended and rolling toward him. Cassidy went over it like a low hurdle and stretched out, but he could not gain. The boy juked past a man pushing a rack of clothes on hangers, ignored the outraged shout of a woman with a baby carriage, yanked open the door to a diner, and disappeared inside. By the time Cassidy came through the door, the only evidence of the kid was the door bouncing back from the wall at the end of the room. Somewhere at the back another door slammed. The open door led to a storeroom. The second one was closed, and when Cassidy yanked it open, he was in time to see the boy slip through a narrow opening in a high board fence that blocked the end of the alley. It took Cassidy a few seconds to understand that he would never fit through the gap. The kid was gone.

  Cassidy went back into the diner gasping for breath. Goddamn cigarettes. He u
sed to be able to run.

  The only other person in the place was the counterman, a heavy black-haired man with a thick mustache. He watched Cassidy warily. One hand was under the counter holding whatever weapon he kept for comfort: knife, machete, baseball bat, gun. Cassidy showed him his badge and the man relaxed.

  ‘Do you know the kid who just ran through here?’ Cassidy asked. He sat on a counter stool to catch his breath.

  ‘What’d he do?’ The man had an Italian accent.

  ‘He didn’t do anything as far as I know.’

  ‘Then why you chasing him?’

  ‘I’m a cop. He ran. I chased. That’s what cops do when people run. Instinct and training. Like Pavlov’s dog.’

  ‘Whose dog?’

  ‘Never mind. Give me a coke, will you?’

  ‘Fountain or bottle?’

  ‘Bottle.’ Cassidy slid a quarter onto the counter. The man popped the top off a Coke and slid Cassidy the bottle.

  ‘You want a glass?’

  ‘No, thanks. Tell me about the kid.’

  ‘You really got no beef with him?’

  ‘No beef. Let’s start with a name.’

  ‘That’s Freddy. Maybe not his real name, but what everyone calls him, Freddy. Pazzo, a little crazy.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t talk much. Nervous like a cat. You be talking to him, suddenly he just turn and walk away, no reason. Just, boom, gone.’

  ‘Does he live in that building down there in the middle of the block, the one where the women are talking?’

  ‘Yeah, he coops in a place in the basement. But not just there. A couple or three other places around the neighborhood. Not regular rooms, but places. Like I hear he’s got some sort of cave over there under the bridge.’

  ‘What does he do? Does he work? Go to school?’

  ‘School, no.’ A half-laugh. ‘Nah, nah. He scuffles, you know? He runs errands. You need something carried from here to there, he do that. You need help tearing something down, building something, he help if it’s not too complicated. He been known to pick up stuff that fell off the back of a truck. Not telling nothing, but if you ask, he maybe could get you a carton of cigarettes without the tax stamps. The hustle. You know what I mean?’