Cassidy was in a matching chair across from Moulton’s large wooden desk in his office on the third floor of the NYU science building. ‘Dead? Probably dead, otherwise why are the police here?’ He was used to holding the attention of a large classroom of students with provocative questions and half-completed ideas designed to lead the listeners on. ‘So, you want to know what chemical is in the samples.’ He waggled his heavy caterpillar eyebrows and waited for a response.
‘Can you tell us?’ Cassidy, playing along.
‘Of course I can tell you.’ He tapped the two glass tubes against his forehead to show where the knowledge lay. He leaned back in his desk chair, which protested with a groan, and held the test tubes high. ‘D-lysergic acid diethylamide.’ He waited for a reaction. He got nothing but blanks looks.
‘Elucidate, Junius,’ Amy said.
‘Yes, yes. Of course. LSD – 25. From the fungus ergot, which grows on rye and other grains. First made by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in, correct me if I’m wrong, 1938.’
‘What’s it for?’ Orso asked.
‘A very good question. At first there was no application, but in 1943 Hofmann took a larger dose than he intended and discovered that the drug had hallucinogenic properties. Then the pharmaceutical company Sandoz marketed it as Delysid for various psychiatric uses. 1947, I think.’
‘What kind of psychiatric uses?’ Cassidy asked.
‘They were hoping the drug would help retrieve repressed memories, and in some cases it did. For some patients it was effective for relief of anxiety or obsessional neuroses. Hard to control though.’ He scratched vigorously at his scalp with both hands, and then looked at his fingernails to see if they had unearthed anything interesting. ‘The big problem is that it can cause wild mood swings. Some patients got panic attacks, paranoia, thoughts of harming others, suicidal thoughts. It’s difficult to know what dose to use.’
‘If a man who was having mental problems – depression, say – was given too much, could it make him jump out a window?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Could.’
‘Without opening it?’
‘Could, indeed. I’m not a psychiatrist, but the disturbed mind is a powerful engine. Could drive you to almost anything.’
‘Are there any antidotes? Is there something you can give someone who’s having a bad time with it?’ Cassidy lit a cigarette.
‘There is some indication that a tranquilizer helps,’ Moulton said.
‘Who uses it?’ Cassidy asked. ‘Psychiatrists?’
‘Some. Not many. . I have a question.’ He thumped forward in his chair and leaned across the desk to give more weight to what he asked. ‘I deduce from your questions that one of these men committed suicide. Did the other?’
‘No,’ Cassidy said.
‘But both of them had been given LSD before they died. Do you know who gave it to them?’
‘Yes.’
Cassidy made coffee in the kitchen, a towel around his waist, his hair still wet from the shower. Rhonda came in from the bedroom and began to rummage through the living room looking for something.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘My notebook. I had it last night when I got here. Now I can’t find it. I swear to god the thing can move by itself. I spend half my life looking for it.’
‘It’s in the bedroom. I saw it last night.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. In there someplace. Try the top of my bureau.’ She disappeared toward the back of the apartment. Cassidy poured himself a cup of coffee, took a couple of sips, and lit the first and best cigarette of the day.
Rhonda came back from the bedroom a minute later. ‘What’s this? Why do you have this? Who is she?’ Her face was pale, and her intensity made her hand shake. She shoved the photograph of Maxie Lively in front of his face. He had left it with the other things from his pockets on the bureau the night before.
‘She’s a hooker we pulled out of the river. Someone strangled her. She’s connected to that other case we’re working.’
‘She’s the woman who was in the house on 4th Street where that guy tried to grab me.’
‘What?’
‘She’s the woman, the one who tried to get out. He grabbed her, and that’s when I ran. I swear to God. It’s her.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. I’m sure.’
Cassidy dressed and bolted his coffee under the lash of Rhonda’s impatience. They walked quickly to the Ninth Precinct stationhouse on Charles Street.
‘Why do we have to go talk to the cops?’ Rhonda asked. ‘You’re a cop, I know where the house is on West Fourth. Let’s just go there.’
‘Professional courtesy. It’s not my precinct, it’s theirs. You don’t just come in and start rooting around someone else’s territory without asking.’
The desk sergeant sent them upstairs to talk to Lieutenant Blandon, who turned out to be the cop with the burned face and the crooked smile who had sent the patrolman with Rhonda to the house on West 4th.
‘Yeah, I remember,’ he said. ‘You and Seeley went over, but everyone was gone.’
‘The woman she saw over there ended up in the river,’ Cassidy said. ‘Did anyone ever search the place?’
‘No. Locked it up and sealed it. We were kind of busy that day – two cops shot, and that fucking guy holed up in that bar on Washington. Seeley reported there’s nobody there. We figure it was a whorehouse, and now it isn’t a whorehouse, so not much pressure to do anything about it. Then, you know how it is. You think you’re going to get back to something, but something else comes up, pretty soon the other thing slips.’
‘Do you mind if we go take a look?’
‘No. Go ahead. Anything you find comes back here first, okay?’
When they arrived at the house, Rhonda hesitated on the sidewalk in front and looked up at the house. ‘I’m scared.’ There was no light on in the house, and the windows stared blankly at the street.
‘Rhonda, you don’t have to go in. Go to the diner on Hudson. I’ll meet you there.’
‘No. I have to.’
‘You don’t have to. I’m just going to go in and take a look around. I won’t be more than half an hour.’
‘I have to, Michael. If I don’t, it’s going to stay with me. I won’t be able to shake it.’
‘All right. Don’t worry. There’s no one there. They wouldn’t risk coming back.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure. Plus, I’m here to protect you.’ He flexed one arm.
‘Now I feel better,’ Rhonda said, and managed a smile.
They went up the steps, and Cassidy cut the police seal with his pocketknife. The new padlock on the front door opened to the key the desk sergeant at the Ninth had given him. Rhonda followed him into the front hall with her hand touching the small of his back. The front windows were curtained, and the hall was dim. Cassidy found the switch near the door and turned on the lights.
The air was dusty and stale. The house was quiet. It felt abandoned, lifeless, as if the people in their hurry to leave had sucked the vitality out with them.
‘He was trying to pull me back there’ – Rhonda pointed down the hall – ‘and then the woman came out, and I got away.’
‘Tell me what he looked like.’
‘I told you.’
‘You told me, a blond guy about six-feet tall, maybe thirty-five years old. You told me how much he scared you. You told me how strong his hands were. This is where you saw him. Picture it. Remember it. Tell me again with as much detail as you can.’
She took a deep breath to gather herself. ‘All right.’ She left him there and went to the front door and opened it and went outside. She turned and stood as if waiting for someone to answer the door, and then came back into the front hall. Her eyes were half closed, and she was turned inward toward memory.
‘Okay. He opened the door,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Six feet tall. Blond. Smiling, as if he was happy to se
e me. I told him I was canvassing for the election. He asked me in. I was going to turn around and leave, because this didn’t seem like it could be the house I was looking for, Government agents, and all that. He insisted I come in.’ She opened her eyes wide, and let out a breath. ‘Oh, boy.’ The memory twisted her.
‘It’s all right. Go on.’
‘He grabbed my arm. Hard. I knew, then.’
‘Don’t think about that. Describe his face.’
‘Lean. Almost bony, but good-looking. Blue eyes. His eyebrows were almost red. What do they call it, russet? He hadn’t shaved that day, and his beard was coming in the same color. I remember his hair was really blond. He was smiling, but there was nothing good in it. He was very strong.’ She saw something in Cassidy’s face. ‘What?’
‘He had a gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand, and when he smiled one of his teeth was crooked.’
It startled her. ‘How do you know that?’
‘His name is Spencer Shaw. He works for the CIA. You were in the right house.’ He had told her about Spencer Shaw, about Paul Williger going out the window of the Hotel Astor, about Chris Collins, the advertising executive who died with the same chemicals in his blood. ‘Shaw must have seen you with me somewhere. He needed to know what you were doing here, what you knew. Christ, he must have been surprised when he answered the door, and there you were.’
‘I didn’t know anything. I thought I was in the wrong house. I was looking for the house where Bill Long was taken after he wrote about Nazi scientists being brought to the States after the war …’ She stopped while understanding surfaced. ‘Is that the connection? Nazis? They were using Nazis for something here.’
‘We think they were doing experiments in mind control. Nazi scientists? Maybe.’
‘What if they’re the ones Leon Dudek saw?’
Cassidy shook his head. ‘No. No.’ It was too wild a coincidence. ‘We don’t know if he saw anybody.’
‘What if?’
Cassidy led her past the stairs toward the back of the house. There was an empty bottle of wine on one of the kitchen counters and the bottoms of the glasses in the sink held crusts of dried red wine. A first-aid kit lay on the table. Next to it was a bottle of Mercurochrome, a roll of gauze, a roll of white surgical tape, and a pair of scissors.
‘She had a bandage on her hand,’ Rhonda said.
He opened the refrigerator. It held a bottle of milk with about an inch left, a piece of cheese going green, an unopened bottle of white wine, three bottles of Coca Cola, and a narrow wooden tray with low sides made of wooden slats about two inches high. He pulled it out. An inch of rubberized material filled the bottom. A dozen holes a half-inch across and a half-inch deep had been cut into the rubber. Cassidy put the tray on the table and crouched to look into the refrigerator. Broken glass glinted on the bottom shelf. He used a business card to scrape the pieces of glass to him. The glass was very thin, and the pieces were mostly splinters and specks, but there were two larger bits. One was narrow-neck sealed at the top. The other was a round piece that must have been the bottom of the broken thing. Rhonda looked over his shoulder while he put the bottom piece into one of the holes in the rubber liner of the tray.
‘What was it?’ she asked.
He showed her the narrow neck. ‘It’s a drug ampoule. People get careless when they’re in a hurry.’
It took them almost an hour to examine the rest of the house. It looked the same as when Rhonda had been there with the cops.
Hours on the phone over three days led Cassidy to the dead end he suspected he would find. Records from the phone company, electricity and gas records, rental records from the real-estate office, copies of rent checks from the house on West Fourth all led to dummy companies, fake addresses, disconnected phones. The house had been rented and occupied by phantoms.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Sebastian Ambrose’s brownstone on Leroy Street was in a row of similar houses halfway down the block from Greenwich. Cassidy found the address by running Ambrose’s phone number against the squad’s reverse directory. He needed to find Shaw. Cassidy knew almost nothing about Shaw’s habits, except that he worked with Ambrose. Eventually Ambrose and Shaw would come together. When they did, Cassidy would start tracking Shaw.
Cassidy watched the front of Ambrose’s house from a deep doorway across the street. There were lights on behind the curtained downstairs windows on the first floor. The top floors were dark.
Occasionally someone moved behind the windows on the first floor, a dark shape against the lighted curtains. Cassidy’s feet were cold. His back ached. He began to resent the warmth of the people in the house, the liquor they were drinking, their enjoyment of their evening while he waited out here in the cold for someone to fucking do something.
A few minutes after nine the front door opened. A man and a woman came out. They paused at the top of the steps to say something to Ambrose who stood in the lighted doorway. They went down the steps and walked east on Leroy Street. He could not see them well. The man was big, and wore no hat. The woman was small. She had her arm tucked in his and that she talked to him animatedly with her face turned up toward him. Occasionally he nodded. Cassidy caught a fragment of her laughter.
Who were they? Should he follow them? What if Shaw was still in the house and he missed him. Shaw was the important one. He let them go. An hour later the lights went off on the first floor. Shaw never showed. Cassidy walked home, tired and cold, eager for a hot shower and a glass of cognac.
The next night brought the first real freeze of the season.
Orso stamped his feet against the cold. ‘They say it’s going to be a bitch of a winter. Snow up to our ass. You ever been on a stakeout where it wasn’t freezing or hot as hell?’
‘Never,’ Cassidy said. ‘Or raining. It’s a natural law.’
They had been in the doorway across from Ambrose’s house for two hours. In that time no one had gone in or come out of the house.
‘Sorry to have dragged you away from Amy,’ Cassidy said.
‘Forget about it. It’s probably a good thing. If I hang around all the time, she’s going to take me for granted. Besides, I owe you. I’ve been fucking up, haven’t I? I’ve been letting everything slide for her.’
‘Yes, you have.’ They had been partners for four years. There was no reason to shade the truth.
‘You’ve been carrying me. I know. Jesus, Mike, it’s just that I can’t get her out of my mind. I can’t concentrate. We have breakfast, and she has to go off to work, and I think, okay, pull yourself together and go do the job, and then half the time I hang around until I know she’s out of class, and we go have lunch or something. I am fucked, man. I am truly fucked.’
‘How about I shoot you?’ Cassidy said.
‘That’d do it. Or I could quit.’ He glanced over to see Cassidy’s reaction.
That surprised Cassidy. ‘Quit? Then what would you do?’
‘I don’t know. I ought to be able to find something. My cousin Pete keeps telling me I should come work in his wholesale business.’
‘Uh-huh. Bathroom fixtures. That sounds exciting. I’m thinking of getting into that myself.’
‘I’d be making more money. Amy makes more than I do. That’s not right, where the woman makes more than the man. That’s going to cause some problems.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I don’t know what the fuck I am any more. You tell me. Am I serious?’
‘I don’t know, Tony. Are you?’
‘I don’t know.’
They were quiet for a while as they thought about the change Orso had proposed and what it might mean to each of them.
Orso pulled his coat tighter. His breath came in plumes. ‘What are we going to do with Shaw if we find him? We’ve got nothing on him.’
‘Rhonda can put him with Maxie in the house on West Fourth. The fingertip in Collins puts Collins and Maxie together. The traces of that LSD shit on the broken glass in th
e refrigerator says they gave the stuff to Collins in that house. It’s the same stuff that was in Williger when he went out the window.’
‘Circumstantial crap, and you know it. It doesn’t prove that Shaw was there when Collins was there. It doesn’t prove that Shaw killed Maxie. A good lawyer’s going to kick our ass. We could just shoot him, and that would be the end of it. Hey …’ Orso gestured with his head. The door to Ambrose’s house was open. The couple from the other night, the big man and the small woman, were walking down the steps while Ambrose stood in the door and spoke to Spencer Shaw. Shaw said something in turn, nodded in agreement, and then went down the steps to join the couple. Ambrose waved from the top of the steps and then went inside and closed the door.
‘If they split up, you take the couple. I’ll take Shaw,’ Cassidy said.
‘You going to clip him?’
‘No.’
‘Want me to?’
‘No.’
Orso shrugged at Cassidy’s short-sightedness. They waited until Shaw and the couple were well down the block before following. Neither Shaw nor the couple looked around. When they turned the corner onto Hudson and disappeared, Cassidy and Orso sped up.
Shaw and the couple stopped halfway up the block. Cassidy and Orso watched from the cover of a newsstand in front of a convenience store. The big man was bare-headed and he did not wear gloves. Maybe he was impervious to the cold. A breeze ruffled his thick hair, and he used one hand to stroke it back in place while he held the other up to catch a cruising cab. Shaw talked with the woman. She was small and vital, a woman whose hands were always in motion, gesturing, stabbing the air for emphasis, touching Shaw’s arm to massage home a point. Her back was turned, the collar of her coat was up, and she wore a hat that covered her hair, and Cassidy could tell nothing about her beyond her size.
The big man held the taxi door open. The woman shook hands with Shaw and got in the cab. The big man nodded to Shaw and followed her in. The parting was no more than polite. They knew each other but they were not friends.
Night Watch Page 26