Night Watch

by David C. Taylor

  ‘Okay, lady,’ Osgood said, ‘you stay down here while we check out the rest of the joint.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Rhonda said. ‘I’m going with you.’ She held up a hand to stop Osgood’s protest. ‘What am I supposed to do if they come back, scream girlishly and hope one of you gets down here before someone slits my throat? I’ll stay back. I won’t touch anything. I won’t speak. But I’m not staying down here alone.’ She was scared, but more than that she wanted to see the rest of the house. She wanted to know what went on here, and she could not know that standing in the front hall.

  Osgood thought about it for a moment and then nodded. ‘Okay, but if one of us tells you to do something, do it fast.’

  Osgood found the stairwell light switch. The three men unholstered their guns. Osgood nodded and led them up the stairs. Warshak followed. Seeley went third, and Rhonda trailed. The beds in the three bedrooms on the second floor had been used. The beds were unmade. The ashtrays on the bedside tables were full of butts. In one room there was a dark red lipstick on some of the butts, in another the lipstick was a paler shade.

  ‘Two different women,’ Rhonda said. Osgood nodded and led them to the third floor. The three doors off the hall were open. One led to a bathroom. Osgood gestured to Warshak who reached in with one hand and turned on the light and then poked his head and gun into the room. He retreated a moment later shaking his head. Seeley cleared another room.

  ‘You want to stay out here, Miss,’ Osgood said. He led the men into the back bedroom. Rhonda stood back from the door and watched.

  The big bed was a wreckage of sheets and pillow, and a red bedspread was crumpled on the floor. There were two cheap easy chairs with a table between them. Sheer white curtains were drawn across the windows whose panes were painted black.

  Osgood crouched down to inspect the rug near the windows. ‘Blood over here.’

  Rhonda started to enter, but Seeley held up a hand to stop her. ‘Uh-uh. Crime scene.’ She retreated to the hall.

  ‘More over here,’ Warshak said. He was bent over in a corner of the room. Rhonda glanced at the door to the other room and wondered what Seeley might have missed with his cursory inspection. She pushed open the door, turned on the light, and went in.

  Osgood led the two uniformed cops out into the hall. ‘Where’d the broad go?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m right here,’ Rhonda said from the doorway of the other room. ‘You might want to take a look at this.’ She stepped aside and the men crowded past her.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Osgood said when he saw the one-way window into the big bedroom. He moved in for a closer look. He shook his head. ‘Yeah, okay. That’s what’s what.’

  ‘What?’ Rhonda asked.

  ‘A cathouse,’ Osgood said. ‘You know, like prostitutes.’

  ‘I know what a cathouse is,’ Rhonda said.

  ‘Some guys like to watch,’ Seeley said and then coughed to cover his embarrassment.

  ‘You’re lucky you got out, lady,’ Osgood said. ‘You could’ve ended up in a bad situation here. These guys’ll take a woman, feed her drugs till she’s addicted, then turn her out to make money.’

  ‘What happens next?’ Rhonda asked.

  ‘We’ll turn it over to Vice. They’ll try to track who owns the joint, who rented it. They’ll check their snitches. Maybe they’ll get lucky.’

  ‘You don’t sound very confident.’

  Osgood shrugged. ‘It is what it is. People who run these places, they know how to move fast and how to cover their tracks. Chances are they’ll be back in business by next week, if not sooner.’

  ‘What about the woman? She was trying to get out.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, good luck to her.’

  ‘That’s it?’ She could not keep the anger from her voice.

  ‘Hey, we’ll do our best, but what are we going to do? They’re gone. She went with them. You come back to the house and we’ll take descriptions, get a sketch artist in. Maybe someone in Vice will recognize them.’ He did not sound hopeful.

  TWENTY

  Cassidy had breakfast at a brand new diner on Eighth. It was a Buck Rogers dream of curved aluminum, big, slanted windows, Formica-topped tables in weird shapes, and waitresses in high-waisted slacks, ruffled white shirts with black bowties, and funny little hats that looked like fezzes. To pay for all that the joint charged an exorbitant buck twenty-five for a plate of ham and eggs, toast and potatoes, but they threw in the coffee for free.

  The front page of the Post was taken up with the shooting at a bar on the waterfront. Witnesses reported that an argument about football became a shoving match, a fistfight, and then gunplay. The shooter barricaded himself in the men’s room. The cops were called to talk the guy out. The shooter fired shots through the door. The cops broke down the door and shot him sixteen times. Cassidy figured the cops got bored with talk that was getting them nowhere and were pissed off at the shots through the door. The thing ended the way it was headed the moment the gun came out of the guy’s pocket to support his point that Charlie Conerly was too old to be playing quarterback for the New York Giants.

  On page eight, Cassidy found a story under Rhonda’s byline describing the house on West Fourth, the attempt by the man to keep her there, the young woman with the wounded hand who tried to flee, and Rhonda’s return to the house with cops from the Ninth, the same precinct that was involved with the shooting at the bar. A busy day for the Ninth. She wrote about the search of the house and the discovery of the viewing room next to the upstairs bedroom, and the cop’s conclusion that the place had been used as a whorehouse. A good story, concisely written with just enough flare and color to pop it up above the rest of the gray prose on the page.

  Orso was in the squad room when Cassidy arrived. He had his elbows on his desk, and his hands supported his head as he pored over a book open in front of him.

  ‘What are you reading?’ Cassidy asked.

  Orso shut the book with a look of relief and shoved it in a desk drawer. ‘Physics.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about physics. I can’t talk to Amy about what she does.’

  ‘Oh, boy.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I know. But what am I going to do? I’m that far gone. I went over to the high school yesterday and found my old science teacher, Mr Root. He gave me the book. Basic physics text. I thought he’d laugh his ass off, but he just gave me the book and patted me on the shoulder, and said he admired me. Fucking guy never gave me higher than a C minus when I was in his class.’

  The phone rang on Cassidy’s desk. Nothing much good ever came through that phone. He let it go while he lit a cigarette and picked it up on the fourth ring. ‘Cassidy.’

  ‘Al Skinner, Mike. I’ve got another one of those guys with that stuff in him.’

  ‘What guy? What stuff?’

  ‘The guy who went out the window over at the Astor. He had stuff in him. You didn’t read the report?’

  ‘What report?’

  ‘I sent it over, what? A week ago, ten days ago at least.’

  ‘I was on night watch. Night watch screws everything up. Let me see if someone put it in my desk. Hold on.’ He put the phone down and went through the drawers in his desk and found a manila envelope with his name on the front in Skinner’s scrawl. ‘I got it. What am I looking for?’

  ‘Second page, down near the bottom. A note after the toxicology report.’

  Cassidy ran his finger down the page. ‘Okay, I got it. “Unidentified chemical compound evident in decedent’s blood.” So what is it?’

  ‘Hey, it says unidentified, because I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘But you will.’

  There was silence on the other end of the phone for a moment. ‘Jesus, Cassidy. I sent it down to the FBI lab. They’ll let me know in a month, if I’m lucky. But, like I said at the top, I’ve got another stiff with the same stuff in him. And a couple of other things make him interesting …’ Skinner waited.

  ‘Oka
y. What?’

  ‘He had his underpants on backward.’

  ‘Sure. Why not? What else?’

  ‘I found someone’s fingertip in his stomach.’

  The fingertip lay in a Petri dish of formaldehyde on a small metal stand near the morgue table where the dead man’s body lay. The meat of the fingertip was grayish, and it was raggedly cut at the base.

  ‘You can see the flesh is little degraded by the stomach’s gastric juices,’ Skinner indicated with the point of a scalpel. The fingernail polish was still bright red.

  ‘Cause of death,’ Cassidy asked.

  ‘Broken neck.’

  They turned their attention to the body on the table. The dead man’s head was bent to one side at an ugly angle. His eyes were open in the stone stare of the dead.

  ‘Where’d they find him?’

  ‘The bottom of the stairs at the Fourteenth Street subway station. It was supposed to look like he fell down the stairs, but we didn’t believe it.’ Skinner raised a finger to begin a count. ‘One, he was on his back there, but the blood had pooled in the front ’cause wherever he died, he lay on his stomach for a while.’ Another finger up. ‘And his underpants were on backward, so someone dressed him in a hurry.’ Another finger. ‘And if he took a dive there, the abrasions on his forehead would be full of dirt and concrete dust. What he’s got are mahogany splinters. There’s no wood on that stairway. I mean, what do they think we are over here, idiots? Jesus, that chaps my ass.’

  ‘Somebody hit him with a piece of wood?’ Orso asked. He had been impatient since they arrived at the morgue, and he checked his watch for the fifth time.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe Mantle could lean on a bat hard enough to put a man’s head at that angle. I think he took a header from up high someplace, and slammed his head into the door or the wood paneling at the bottom with all his two hundred pounds behind him. Something like that. And, by the way, he had just gotten laid, ’cause there was spermicide from some broad’s diaphragm all over his dick.’

  ‘The girl with the missing fingertip,’ Orso suggested.

  ‘Sure. Why not?’ Skinner said. ‘Bring her in, and we’ll see if the tip fits.’

  ‘When did it happen?’ Cassidy lit a cigarette off the butt of the one he was smoking, a futile attempt to block out the heavy smell of the morgue.

  ‘They found him the beginning of last week. He was in a drawer here till I had time to do the cut.’

  ‘Any identification?’

  ‘No, but he’s an uptown guy. The suit he was wearing is better than anything I’ve got hanging in the closet. There’s the mark on his wrist from a watch, and on his pinky finger on the right hand from a ring. They took those. Robbery?’

  ‘Or they would identify him,’ Cassidy said. ‘Let’s go take a look.’

  The dead man’s clothes hung in a locker near Skinner’s office. The suit was a gray flannel with a chalk stripe. The shirt was yellow broadcloth, and the tie was a predominantly maroon-and-yellow paisley. The shoes were dark wingtips. All the clothes came from J. Press. A laundry mark was stamped into the waistband of the suit pants. Cassidy copied it into his notebook, while Orso went through the pockets of the jacket. He found nothing.

  When they finished, they found Skinner in his office rattling a typewriter. A full skeleton hung from the ceiling behind his desk. Its teeth clenched a large cigar, and one of its bone hands held a martini glass with an olive glued into it.

  ‘Tell me about this chemical you found,’ Cassidy said.

  ‘Like I said, I don’t know what it is, but it shows up in this guy’s blood and it was in the blood of that Williger guy who went out the window at the Astor. I sent it down to Quantico to the FBI lab. Don’t hold your breath on getting a result.’

  ‘You can’t tell us anything about it?’

  ‘You bring me someone who’s got some arsenic in him, cyanide, even curare, I’ll tell you in a second, but this one is beyond even my vast knowledge.’

  ‘What about the fingertip?’ Orso asked, and glanced at his watch again.

  ‘Female. Mid-twenties. Well nourished. Smoker. Give me a little time, I can probably tell you the name of the nail polish. He bit it off her. I found some skin particles between his teeth. First time I’ve seen that one. I had a guy in here once had someone’s ear in his stomach, a broad with a piece of a guy’s dick, but this is the first fingertip.’

  Cassidy and Orso went out onto First Avenue, grateful to be out of the heavy smell of the morgue. ‘What do you think?’ Orso asked.

  ‘This opens up the Williger case again. We’re going to have to look at that as a possible homicide. If we can ID this guy maybe we’ll find a connection to Williger – work, friendship, family. See if we can figure out how they both have the same chemicals in their bodies. Have you heard of any new drugs out there?’

  ‘No. Same old: horse, reefer, cocaine. They say there are still some opium dens down in Chinatown, but no white cop’s going to find them. Is that what you think it is, someone’s putting out a new drug, and both these guys found it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He took a sip of coffee and lit a cigarette. ‘What’s the name of that detective up in the Nineteenth who keeps a book of laundry and dry cleaner marks? Finley?’

  ‘No. Uh, it’s like that. Uh, Fernly. Jack Fernly.’

  ‘Right. I’m going to give him a call, see if he can help us out with the dead guy’s laundry mark.’

  ‘Sure. Hey, Mike, how about I take off for a while? I told Amy maybe I could break away for lunch.’ He threw it away, but Cassidy could see that he wanted to go.

  ‘Sure. Go ahead. I’ll catch you later. If anything’s happening, I’ll leave a message at the desk.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’ Orso was relieved. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘After your physics lesson, call around to the emergency rooms. See if a woman came in missing a fingertip.’

  Orso gave him the finger and said, ‘Okay.’ He hailed a cab and got in without looking back. Cassidy envied him. The man was in love, and Cassidy wasn’t, and hadn’t been since Dylan died two years ago.

  Detective Jack Fernly had an office the size of a large closet off the main squad room in the Nineteenth Precinct on Lexington Avenue at 67th Street. It was just big enough to hold a desk and desk chair, two filing cabinets, and a visitor’s chair with a standing ashtray next to it. Fernly was a pudgy man with limp colorless hair who looked at the world with inquisitive blue eyes through horn-rimmed glasses. He had been an ineffectual street cop who had found his calling as the encyclopedic memory of the precinct. He remembered faces, aliases, obscure evidentiary facts, tenuous connections between crimes and criminals, dates, the minutiae of cold cases, and what he didn’t remember he could find in his file cabinets. A smart precinct commander had taken him off the street and made him a one-man research bureau available to any cop who needed his skills.

  Fernly studied the laundry mark Cassidy had copied from the dead man’s suit. He pushed it aside, closed his eyes, and tipped back in his chair for a moment. ‘Triple A Cleaners on Lex and 78th. The west side of the street right next to a flower shop.’

  Cassidy shook his head in admiration. ‘Amazing.’

  Fernly grinned. ‘An easy one. Bring me something hard the next time.’

  ‘Thanks, Jack.’

  Fernly waved away the thanks and went back to the book he had been reading when Cassidy arrived.

  Triple A Cleaners was where Fernly had said it would be, on Lexington sandwiched between a flower shop and a locksmith. A bell tinkled over the door when Cassidy went in. It was a narrow room with a counter that ran from wall to wall ten feet inside the door. Behind it clean clothes in plastic bags hung from metal racks, and blue boxes of freshly laundered shirts waited on shelves for pick up. The place smelled of steam, and cleaning chemicals. A well-used, black Singer sewing machine on a treadle table waited under the street window.

  A woman came out from the back room and stood behind the cou
nter. Her gray hair was pulled back and pinned. She wore a black dress with an elaborate silver clip at the throat. She looked at Cassidy with the distant politeness of someone who faces many strangers during her workday. ‘May I help you?’

  He showed her his badge and a Polaroid photograph of the dead man Skinner had taken at the morgue. ‘Do you know this man? Apparently he’s had cleaning done here.’

  She picked up the photograph to examine it. She turned it to the light to see better, and then looked up at Cassidy. ‘Yes. This is Mr Collins. Has he been in an accident?’

  ‘Do you have an address for him?’

  ‘Yes. We offer pickup and delivery. It’s convenient for people who work, and they don’t mind paying a little extra.’

  ‘May I have it?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’ She went to a wooden file box at the end of the counter and thumbed through the index cards in the box until she found the one she wanted. Cassidy wrote down the address, thanked her, and went out into the street.

  Collins lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of a building on 76th Street between Lexington and Third. The building superintendent let Cassidy in with a passkey and then stood in the doorway and watched while Cassidy explored. A leather sofa and a matching leather chair were placed to view the big wood boxed television. A wood-cased record player was next to the TV. Framed travel posters from Paris decorated the walls. The bed in the bedroom was unmade, and there were dishes in the sink in the kitchen – marks of bachelor life. A dish on the desk held some business cards with Collins’s name and the company he worked for on them. Cassidy picked one up and put it in his pocket. There was no sign of a struggle. Chris Collins had left his apartment one morning for a day at work not knowing that he would never see it again.