He dodged through the light traffic on Delancey and went in under the elevated road. The passing cars and trucks roared and thumped overhead. The area under the roadways was a dumping ground. There were broken bottles, splintered lumber, wheels with no tires, tires with no wheels, a wrecked and mangled baby carriage, old refrigerators, a couple of car doors, a crumpled tricycle, a broken manhole cover, tin cans, punctured fifty-gallon drums. It was strewn haphazardly, but Cassidy was looking for a sense of order that might indicate Freddy’s coop, things piled to make a cave, an abandoned car body with the windows blocked. He found nothing and kept walking toward the river.
The bridge spanned the East River like a giant’s erector set. The towers in the river near the eastern and western shores were made of an interlock of steel girders that rose a hundred feet from the river to the roadway and a hundred feet above the road. The anchor tower on land on the Manhattan side rose in front of Cassidy. Unlike the river towers it was made of big stone blocks. Stone blocks left over from the construction were stacked in the shelter of the roadway. There was something built in the shadows between the stack of blocks and the tower. Cassidy, wary of getting closer, moved until he could see it clearly. It might have been a toolshed during the bridge’s construction fifty years before. It was made of weathered gray boards, and was about ten feet by twelve feet, and roofed in tin. It leaned back on the tower wall as if too tired to stand by itself.
Cassidy looked for a place he could set up to watch the shack. He wanted to talk to Freddy about Leon. And he wanted to know why Freddy had been following him. Freddy was skittish. Cassidy would have to approach him gently. If he tried to muscle him, he would get nowhere, and if Freddy ran, he might not find him again.
He found what was left of a 1946 Hudson coupe in the junk under the roadway – no wheels, no windows, one door hanging by a hinge, no hood, no engine, no trunk lid, no seat – perfect. An orange crate gave him something to sit on with just enough height to see out the front to the shack door twenty yards away. Nobody could get in or out without him seeing. He settled down to wait.
There was a padlock hasp on the front door of the shack, but there was no lock through the hasp. Was there someone inside? Maybe. Maybe it meant there was nothing inside worth stealing. Impatience ate at him as it always did when he had to wait. He counted the stones piled next to the shack but lost count halfway up and had to start again …
He awoke with a jerk. How long had he been asleep? Now there was a padlock on the hasp on the door of the shack. He snapped his head around and caught a glimpse of Freddy as he slipped into the big construction site across Delancey. By the time Cassidy got to the gate, Freddy had disappeared.
A Master padlock secured the door to the shack under the bridge roadway. Cassidy studied the lock and then took a roll of leather from an inside pocket and opened it. He selected a flat tensioner and a small rake from the lock picks it held. He slipped the tensioner into the lock and let it dangle and then pushed in the rake until it stopped. He added pressure to the tensioner and then pulled the rake out fast. The lock clicked open.
Cassidy pulled the door open. There were no windows in the shack, but enough light came through the door so Cassidy could see a rudimentary bed of planks on cinderblocks with a mattress covered by blankets and a pillow without a case. Next to the bed was a wooden box holding three candle stubs of different heights. The top of the crate was covered with wax. A row of hooks held a few jackets and trousers. Two wooden wine boxes that rested on the plank floor below them held shirts, socks, a couple of sweatshirts and a heavy wool sweater. A pair of cracked leather lace-up boots was in the space between the two boxes. A rudimentary stove made from a five-gallon tin sat on a piece of scrap steel in the corner, and a narrow stovepipe ran up through the roof. There was a box full of scrap lumber to feed the stove. Two small pots and a frying pan hung on nails nearby close to a small shelf of canned soups and canned beans. A bookcase of planks and bricks held a dozen or more books. Some of the covers were torn. Some had no covers at all. Three of them were westerns by Max Brand: Outlaw’s Code, The Rangeland Avenger, The Untamed. This was Freddy’s sanctuary.
A piece of cloth hung from two nails above the head of the cot. A yellow Star of David was sewn to the faded blue-and-gray-striped scrap that had been torn from a jacket worn by a prisoner at a Nazi death camp. Next to it hung a framed print of a rabbit, a twin to the Dürer print that hung in Mrs Tanenbaum’s kitchen. Cassidy guessed it was the missing picture that had hung in Leon Dudek’s apartment. A small triangle of dark, shiny paper protruded from the bottom of the frame.
Cassidy lifted the picture from its nail and turned it over. The cardboard backing was loose. He pulled the piece of paper clear. It was a black-and-white photograph. He carried it to the light at the door to look at it. Eight people were having a picnic in the shade of a tree in a meadow. Five men and three women. Some of the men stood, two sat on the ground near the women, who sat on a blanket next to an unpacked wicker picnic hamper. Next to it was an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne. Even in the black and white of the photograph it was clear that two of the women were blond. The third was a small, dark-haired woman with a thin, attractive face. She wore a long, full, dark skirt and a light-colored blouse with a high collar to which she had pinned an enameled-and-metal swastika. The men all wore uniforms of the SS with their death’s head insignias. Everyone in the picture held a glass of champagne, and they all smiled cheerfully at the camera. A happy day for members of the master race away from the cares of work.
Someone, probably Leon Dudek, had drawn a circle with a pen around the head of the dark-haired woman and the head of one of the standing men. He was taller than the men next to him, a big, good-looking man with thick hair combed back from his forehead.
Why had Dudek circled the man and woman? Because he had seen them in New York.
Cassidy put the photograph into his jacket pocket and hung the rabbit back on the wall and blew out the candles on the table. He looked around to make sure that he had not left any obvious sign of his being there. He hoped that if Freddy discovered the photo was missing, it would simply be one of those mysteries life threw at you, like the solitary sock in the laundry, the book that finally turned up under the bed.
Next to the door was a narrow board shelf nailed between the wall studs. There were three straight razors on it, the kind known as cutthroats. One had an ivory handle, two were black. Cassidy opened the ivory one. The blade was clean, shiny, and sharp. A disturbed place in the dust on the shelf showed where a fourth had lain until Freddy picked it up and put it in his pocket as he went out into the city.
TWENTY-SIX
‘I think I’ve got the rest of the body that goes with the fingertip we found in that guy’s stomach,’ Skinner said over the phone. ‘We just pulled her out of the Hudson. You want to see her, come on down.’
‘The morgue?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Still on the dock. The meat wagon got into a fender bender. They’re sending another, but it’s going to be a while.’
‘We’re on our way.’
Orso came out of the can zipping up his fly. He saw Cassidy pulling his overcoat from the coat tree near the stairs. ‘What’s up?’
‘Skinner thinks he’s got the hooker who had her finger bitten off. A floater in the Hudson.’
Orso grabbed his hat and coat and followed Cassidy down the stairs.
The patrolman leaning against the squad parked at the entrance to the pier on 23rd Street came to attention and tugged the hem of his uniform jacket straight when he recognized Cassidy and Orso.
‘Where’s Skinner?’ Orso asked.
‘Out at the end of the pier, sir,’ the patrolman said.
The wind off the water at the end of the pier was cold. Gulls wheeled and cried against the gray sky. The air smelled of salt and diesel. A mournful foghorn blew as a tug pulled a barge full of garbage downstream through the chop toward its ocean dumping ground. The flying bridge of a moored p
olice launch rose just above the edge of the pier. Al Skinner and a group of men stood near the woman’s body, which lay on a canvas tarp on the concrete. There were a couple of cops from the boat, and a police swimmer in a black suit made of rubber.
Skinner waved a hand in greeting. ‘Cassidy, Orso.’ He gestured to the other men: ‘Valentine and Cappelli. The guy in the condom suit is Wagner. He pulled her out.’ All the men nodded in greeting. Cappelli pointed a finger at Orso and said, ‘Erasmus Hall, Mrs Bishop’s English class.’
Orso laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. All that Moby Dick torture. You’re Molly’s cousin.’
‘You leave my cousin out of it,’ Cappelli said with mock severity, and both of them laughed the way men sometimes do when talking about a girl from their teens.
Cassidy and Skinner knelt by the dead woman. Her body was slack in her sodden clothing. She had lost one shoe. The other had snagged a piece of brown paper in the water that wrapped part way up her ankle. There was a piece of eggshell in her wet hair. Her clothes were stained with oil from the river, and water that ran off her had pooled to soak the canvas. Her face was pale. Her eyes were open, and blank as agates. Her mouth gaped. Nothing could have looked more dead.
Skinner pointed to the dead woman’s right hand. The tip of the index finger was missing. The wound looked raw and blue. ‘I saw that, I called you.’
‘Cause of death?’
‘I don’t really know until I do the cut, but check her neck. I’m guessing strangulation.’
Cassidy bent close and saw the bruises fingers had left on the pale skin of her throat. ‘How long has she been dead?’
‘My guess is five days to as much as ten. The air’s been cold. The water’s cold and salt in this part of the river. I’ll know better when I get her on the table.’
‘Hey, Cappelli,’ Cassidy said. ‘You got any idea where she might have gone in the water?’
Cappelli turned away from talking to Orso. ‘Hard to know. Tide in, tide out, current, eddies. Sometimes you drop something off one of these docks you never see it again. Other times, the thing comes back two, three, four times to the same place over a period of a week.’
‘Al, get me a photo I can show around,’ Cassidy said.
‘I’ll do it before the cut. Clean her up, dry her out, a little make up, comb her hair. Pick it up this afternoon.’
The street lamps were on against the early darkness, and the stream of commuter cars on West Street followed their headlights uptown toward the Holland Tunnel, or south toward the end of Manhattan and the bridges to Brooklyn. Spencer Shaw stood in darkness beside an iron pillar under the West Side Highway across from the front of the New York Post building. Cars and trucks rumbled and banged across the pavement dividers overhead, and the pillar vibrated with their passage. People poured out of the building, hurrying with the cold and the wish to get home. Shaw watched for Rhonda Raskin, but she had not yet appeared.
Was the Raskin woman an enemy? Or was she just another road kill on history’s highway? It didn’t matter. It wasn’t up to him to decide. She was interfering with the mission. She had to go. His only regret was the waste of a good-looking woman. And then Cassidy. Yes, Cassidy was going to be, what? Interesting? Fun? Maybe both.
He could see his car parked between a delivery van and a street sweeper half a block away. His driver was an indistinct hump behind the wheel in the gloom under the highway. A good man, Stefan. He did not ask questions about why, only about how or when or where. If Raskin left on foot, Shaw would follow her. If she caught a ride, they’d use the car. Shaw took one of his gloves off and put his right hand in his coat pocket to touch the gun. The suppressor on the barrel made it a long, awkward shape. He also carried a gravity knife in his right pants pocket. It had a five-inch blade that released with a flick of the wrist. Different tools for different situations.
There she was.
Raskin came out onto the sidewalk and stood in the spill of light from the big lobby door. There were other people with her, three men and another woman. They were laughing about something. One of the men said something, and the other woman nodded and then said something to Raskin. She shook her head. They all began to talk to her at once. They were trying to persuade her to do something. She shook her head again. The other woman put a hand on her arm, and one of the men put his hands together in prayer and bent his legs as if he was about to get down on his knees. There was more talk, and then the Raskin woman laughed and nodded, giving in, and the group moved away from the lighted door to the Post and turned east at the corner.
Shaw followed. As he dodged the traffic to cross the broad avenue, he heard the car start up behind him.
Raskin and her friends walked a couple of blocks to Greenwich Street and then went into a pub called the Billy Goat under a sign that showed a goat standing on its hind legs drinking from a foaming stein. Shaw stepped into a doorway across the street. He pulled his coat tight around him against the cold and lit a cigarette, resigned to wait. A minute later he saw his car cruise slowly up the block. He stepped into sight from the doorway, and Stefan went by him and into a parking space near the corner.
An hour later, Rhonda Raskin came out of the pub alone. She paused for a moment in front of the door to button her coat and light a cigarette, and then she started north with a slight wobble in her walk. That last drink on an empty stomach.
Shaw stepped out of the doorway to follow her. As he passed the car he raised a hand to the driver to wait. Raskin stopped on the corner and looked south. She was probably looking for a taxi, because the nearest subway was blocks away.
Greenwich Street was quiet. A few cars waited blocks south at a red light, but none of them showed the roof light of a cab. Shaw saw no pedestrians. Okay, wait till the cars pass. He pulled his hat down to shade his face confident that she would not recognize him until too late. He slipped the knife out of his pocket and held it down by his leg. Even with the suppressor, the gun made a noise like two shingles slapping together, enough to draw someone’s attention. Better the knife. She was about twenty yards away. Just walk to her, not too fast. Too fast and she spooks. A woman alone on a street at night, she’ll spook easily. If she moves, call her name. That’ll hold her for a second or two, and then you’re on her. One up under the solar plexus going for the heart. Across the throat. Into the car, and gone. Blood on the coat, of course. That couldn’t be helped. Another unsolved killing in the city. One of many. Okay, let’s go. He did not know it, but he was smiling.
‘Rhonda. Rhonda, wait up.’
A woman’s voice.
Shaw stepped back into the shadows. The other woman from the Post was hurrying toward the corner. ‘Share a cab?’
‘Sure,’ he heard Raskin say. ‘If we can ever find one.’
They stood talking while they waited. He could not hear what they were saying, but occasionally laughter would rise. A few minutes later a cab came up the street and pulled to the curb.
Shaw waved up the car, and they followed the taxi uptown through heavier traffic flow north of Greenwich Village. The cab turned east on 22nd Street and north again on Madison. It went right on 70th and stopped opposite a building in the middle of the block between Lexington and Third. No one got out. ‘Drive on by and pull over near the corner,’ Shaw said.
As the car slid by the taxi, Shaw glanced over with his hand up blocking his face in case she was looking in his direction. The two women were talking animatedly in the back seat. The building where the cab stopped had no doorman. There was a shallow lobby with bell pushes next to apartment numbers, and then a locked inner door leading to the elevator lobby.
Stefan pulled over next to a fire hydrant and shut off the headlights. Shaw watched over his shoulder. Rhonda Raskin got out and went into her building. Shaw opened the door. ‘Keep the motor running.’ He put his hand on the gun in his pocket. The cab carrying the other woman went by him and turned up Third Avenue.
Shaw could see Raskin through the glass front door. She was looking
for her keys in her purse with the concentration of the slightly drunk. Wait till she gets her key in the lock; go in fast before she can shut the door.
She found the keys.
Shaw watched her put the key in the lock of the inner door. She put her shoulder to the door, and pushed it open.
Shaw moved quickly for the outside door. He put his gloved left hand up to shove it open. The pistol was in his right. One push, and he was in. His left hand caught the inner door just before it closed. Step into the lobby. One in the back to drop her. One in the head to make sure.
He started to push open the inner door.
Inside the lobby the elevator door opened and a man and a woman stepped out. They stopped to talk to Raskin. Shaw slipped the gun into his pocket, turned, and went out. When he looked back, Raskin was getting into the elevator. As the couple came out through the front door, Shaw walked quickly to the car.
‘Well, shit,’ Shaw said as he dropped into the front seat. ‘Okay, drop me at the Boom-Boom Room. Then you can go home.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Whose blood is it?’ said Professor Junius Moulton – a big voice from a big man as hairy as a bear wearing a tweed jacket as big as a tent. He held up a hand to block any answer. ‘Not important just now. Maybe never important. Two people, different blood types, obviously, AB positive and O negative.’ He clinked two blood-filled test tubes together and peered over horn-rimmed glasses to where Orso and Amy Parson sat thigh to thigh on an old leather sofa. Amy Parson was in her late thirties. She had a broad Scandinavian face, and big, dark eyes that coolly analyzed anything that came within range. Her blond hair was held back from her high, wide forehead by a black velvet headband. She wore a pale lavender tweed suit with a skirt short enough to show off her legs. When Cassidy first met her outside the building, she examined him in a way that made him feel like a bug on a pin. But she had welcomed him with a warm smile and a firm handshake that allowed him to shake off the feeling.
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