Night Watch

by David C. Taylor

  He walked to the brownstone and rang the doorbell. No response. He jabbed the button again and held it down for thirty seconds. He could hear the bell shrill in the house. No one came to the door. Maybe they were gone, out in such a hurry they left all the lights on. If they had, there might be something left behind to indicate their destination. He needed to get into the house. He studied the locks on the front door and then took picks and tension bars from the leather roll in his pocket and went to work. They were good locks, and it took a while before the top one clicked open. The bottom took five minutes more. He put the picks away, drew his gun, and opened the door.

  Magda Brandt lay in the front hall in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut. It gaped like a scream.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Cassidy could picture what had happened. Magda answered the door, and the killer had her before she could turn. He grabbed her and cut her. She would not have made a sound. She lay on her back just inside the inner door with one arm across her stomach and the other flung wide. One leg was straight, and the other was bent at the knee. She had kicked off one of her shoes as she died. Her blouse, white when she put it on, was now dark with blood. The blood left a sweet coppery fume in the air you did not want to smell or taste.

  Karl Brandt was in the living room at the end of the hall. He was sprawled on a rug near an overturned table. He must have been sitting in an armchair near the fireplace reading a book, which now lay open on the floor. The heavy bottom of a highball glass, jagged where it shattered, lay near the table. Brandt’s throat was cut like his wife’s, and there were deep slashes on his cheek and chin, and one of his hands was ripped across the palm. Two cuts through the jacket sleeves of the other arm were soaked with blood. The sound of Magda’s body hitting the floor must have alarmed him, and he had risen and started to turn, and by that time his killer was in the room. The slashes on Brandt’s face and hands were defensive wounds, but he was too late to avoid the attack. From the shape and depth of the cuts Cassidy had a good idea of the weapon used. Brandt had gone down on his back, with his legs splayed and his arms awkwardly stretched out. The killer had dipped a finger in blood and drawn a swastika on his forehead.

  Was the killer still in the house? Cassidy went up the stairs with his gun in his hand. It took him half an hour to satisfy himself that he was alone with the bodies.

  Cassidy had hoped to use the Brandts to break open the Collins and Maxie killings. Threat of deportation to Germany and trial for war crimes might have been enough leverage to get them to testify against Shaw and Ambrose in return for a deal to stay in the States. An ugly deal, but he would have done it to get Shaw and Ambrose. That was before he understood the Brandts had killed Leon Dudek. Would he have offered them the same deal now? The killer took care of that problem, and left him with another. He could arrest Shaw and Ambrose for kidnapping him and Rhonda, but there was no real evidence that they had killed Collins or Maxie unless they testified against each other. That wasn’t going to happen. The CIA would defend them. They had lawyers, money, power, and they could make the problem of Michael Cassidy go away.

  He went to the phone to call the murders into the precinct. Something flicked across his mind trying to get his attention. He waited. He did not know what brought it into sight, maybe some residual effect of the drug they had given him. He looked it over, examined it from all sides, and decided it was workable. If it blew up in his face, it would end his career, and he would probably go to jail. Was it justice, or was it revenge? Sometimes those two were twins. He left the house without making the call.

  Cassidy found Benny the Dip and his sister Candy eating chopped liver on toast tips and drinking soda water mixed with lemonade in Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on Broadway. No booze while working was one of the family rules. Benny and Candy exchanged a look when Cassidy slid into their booth. ‘Hey, Cassidy, what’s up? You hungry? Let me get the waiter over here.’ Benny raised his hand for attention, but Cassidy stopped him.

  ‘That’s okay, Benny. I’ve got a business proposition.’

  Benny and Candy looked at each other again. Candy raised a skeptical eyebrow. ‘What’ve you got?’ Benny asked.

  Cassidy told them.

  ‘Who’s the guy?’ Candy asked.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Cassidy said. ‘And you’re going to have to be really careful. This guy isn’t some boozed-up tourist gawking at the lights while you dip him. He’s dangerous.’

  ‘Are you going to be there in case something slips?’ Benny asked.

  ‘You won’t see me, but I’ll be there.’

  Benny raised his eyebrows. Candy shrugged. Sibling communication. ‘Fifty bucks each, right?’ Candy said. ‘What if he doesn’t show?’

  ‘You still get the money.’

  ‘And a week’s free pass on the Stem,’ Benny suggested.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just thought I’d ask.’

  ‘You better get going.’

  Benny raised his hand for the waiter and mimicked signing a check. ‘You got this?’ Benny asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Cassidy said. ‘Go. I’ll be right behind you.’

  Spencer Shaw came out of his building on 65th Street a few minutes after nine carrying an overnight bag. Shaw lit a cigarette and checked the block out of habit, but he was not worried. If the cops knew where he lived, they would have been on him by now. A man and a woman were walking two small white poodles toward him from Park Avenue, frisky little dogs who roved at the ends of their leashes following interesting smells while their masters flirted the way married couples sometimes do after cocktails and dinner wine. A good-looking blond. He wouldn’t mind jumping that.

  One of the dogs dodged across Shaw’s path, and for a moment the man and the dogs and the couple were tangled up in a dance of leashes, dogs and feet. They disentangled. The man berated the dogs while the woman apologized. ‘Hey, no harm, no foul. Don’t worry about it,’ Shaw said, and the couple went on toward Lexington. The woman looked over her shoulder once and smiled. Nice ass. He wondered if she lived in the neighborhood. Maybe he’d see her around some time. If he ever got back here. Now it was time to move.

  Stefan was in a private clinic off Gramercy Park with a broken arm and broken jaw. They had just made it out of the house as the cops turned onto Leroy Street, lights and sirens. He’d hung around long enough to see them bring Ambrose out on a gurney. He’d left a message for the Brandts, and they would get it whenever they came in from wherever they were having dinner. No panic, just time to lay low till things passed. Cassidy watched from a shadowed doorway as Shaw crossed Park and hailed a cab headed downtown. When the cab disappeared, he walked to Lexington to meet Benny and Candy.

  Bonner and Newly had the frayed look of men who had recently started the night watch and were not yet used to it. Too much coffee, too little sleep, bodies out of whack. ‘What the hell are you doing here, Cassidy?’ Bonner said when Cassidy appeared in the squad room stairs just before ten o’clock. ‘You look like someone’s been beating on you with a stick.’

  ‘Someone has.’ He slumped into a chair, accepted a cigarette from Newly with a nod of thanks and took them through the story of his day. He did not lie, but he did not tell them everything.

  At the end of it Bonner stood up. ‘These Krauts live on Sixty-third? Let’s go get them.’

  ‘Warrant,’ Cassidy suggested, but he knew his man.

  ‘Warrant, my ass. Exigent circumstances. Probable cause. Let’s go kick down their fucking door.’

  The house on 63rd Street still showed light in all the windows. Bonner stomped up the steps like a man killing cockroaches. Cassidy and Newly trailed. Bonner stabbed the bell push with a thick finger and unbuttoned his coat and jacket to clear his gun. After a minute he rang the bell again. They waited. Lacy curtains hung for privacy over the beveled glass panels of the door. ‘Can you see anything?’ Cassidy asked. One of the curtains was slightly askew.

  Bonner put his eye to the gap. ‘Ahh, shit. We’ve
got a dead one in there in the front hall. A broad. Jesus, there’s a lot of blood. I guess we’re going in.’ He stepped back to give himself room to kick the door in, but Newly reached by him and tried the knob with a gloved hand, and the door swung open.

  Magda Brandt lay as Cassidy had left her. Newly and Bonner had seen too many corpses to bother looking for signs of life. Newly pulled his gun and headed for the living room. ‘Is she one of them?’ Bonner asked.

  ‘Yes. Magda Brandt.’

  ‘A cut that deep, whoever did it really didn’t like her.’ Bonner bent down and touched the pool of blood with a fingertip. ‘Skimming over,’ he said, ‘she’s been dead a couple of hours.’

  ‘Another one in here,’ Newly called from the living room.

  They found him crouched down near Karl Brandt’s body. ‘Defensive wounds on the hands and arms. The killer probably took off, but I guess we’d better check it out.’

  When they were sure the house was secure Bonner used a handkerchief to pick up the phone in the front hall to call the murders in to the precinct. The medical examiner’s team arrived twenty minutes later.

  Cassidy did not know the team leader. He was a burly, taciturn, black-haired man named Tolliver who was no longer surprised by what his fellow citizens did to each other in the dark hours. He greeted the detectives, listened to their report without comment, nodded, and went to work.

  Cassidy, Newly, and Bonner sat at the kitchen table smoking and talking until Tolliver rapped knuckles on the doorjamb. ‘You might want to come see this.’

  They followed him to the living room. Karl Brandt’s shrouded corpse was on a gurney. A manila envelope holding the contents of his pockets rested on his chest. Tolliver pointed to a blood-soaked leather wallet that lay on the dead man’s stomach. ‘We found this under him when we rolled him. Jack got photos before we moved it.’

  ‘So his wallet fell out when he went down. So what?’ Cassidy said.

  ‘Uh-uh. His wallet’s in the envelope. This is someone else’s.’

  ‘Did you check it?’

  ‘Yeah. To make sure he didn’t carry two for some reason.’ He poked the wallet open with the point of a pencil. A Maryland driver’s license behind a plastic window identified the owner as Spencer W. Shaw and gave an address in Chevy Chase.

  ‘Do you know him?’ Bonner asked Cassidy.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he knew these people, the Brandts?’

  ‘Yes. The Brandts were the ones who picked me up. Shaw and another guy got Rhonda. They were all in the house on Leroy.’

  ‘Came to shut them up, I guess.’

  ‘Did you find a weapon?’ Newly asked Tolliver.

  ‘No. From the wounds, it was a thin blade, a really sharp knife, or a straight razor. By now it’s probably in a storm drain somewhere.’

  ‘Dropped his wallet in the struggle with Brandt, I guess,’ Newly said. ‘I wish all our killers were that considerate.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Bonner asked Cassidy.

  ‘I’m with Newly.’

  ‘Yeah. The guy’s going to shit a brick when he reaches for his wallet to buy a drink. I’d love to see that moment.’

  By the time Cassidy got home the temperature had dropped hard. Sleet hissed against the cab roof. He paid the driver and made a dash for the door and the sleet blew against his face like cold, wet sand while he unlocked the door. Upstairs he poured bourbon over ice and carried his drink to a window. The sleet rattled the panes and turned the pier lights to soft halos. He sipped the whiskey and thought about what he had done. He had crossed a line. He had crossed it in small ways before, but never like this. Did it bother him? Not if it worked. He finished the drink and went to bed and slept hard.

  In the morning he walked to St Vincent’s to talk to Ambrose. The skies were clear; the air was still, and cold enough to crackle.

  Ambrose was gone. He had made a call to his lawyer after he regained consciousness. Around three in the morning the cop on guard went to take a leak. When he got back to the room, Ambrose had disappeared. The handcuffs that had held him were still attached to the bed rail.

  From where he stood near the stripped car body under the elevated roadway to the Williamsburg Bridge, Cassidy could see the front door of Freddy’s shack. The padlock was through the hasp. It took Cassidy less than a minute to pick the lock, and he left the door open wide to let light into the room and to warn Freddy off if he came back while Cassidy was there. He did not want a confrontation with the young man before he did what he had come to do. Three straight razors were on the shelf near the door when Cassidy was here before. Now there were four. The fourth had a yellowing ivory handle smeared with blood. Dried blood caked around the blade and sealed it shut.

  He put the razors in a brown paper bag he found near the stove, locked the door again, and walked to the river. He threw the bag as far out as he could. The current caught it and swirled it downstream, and he walked along the bank watching it until the water soaked through the paper and it sank out of sight.

  THIRTY-TWO

  CIA headquarters in Washington, DC was set back from E Street on a semicircular driveway north of The Lincoln Memorial. Some of the buildings had been thrown up as temporary offices during World War II, but the main building, which had housed the OSS during the war, was a solid work of cut stone with imposing Ionic columns supporting a heavy, unadorned cornice above the front entrance. A sign on a fence near the gate admitted that this was CIA headquarters. It was said that the sign had been put up at the request of President Eisenhower after an aide was sent for a meeting there and could not find the building. Ike suggested that most people in Washington knew where the CIA hung out, and so they might as well do something for the few who did not.

  Just after ten o’clock a gray Ford sedan pulled into the driveway and parked at the apex of the curve. Cassidy watched Spencer Shaw get out of the car and enter the building.

  Cassidy watched through binoculars on a tripod at a window in a building a block away. He had spent three days watching the CIA’s front entrance from this unused office on the sixth floor. Every day he filled the tin ashtray on the desk to overflowing. Occasionally he emptied it into the tin wastebasket that held the paper wrappings and empty bottles from his lunches. He used the phone on the desk to make three calls after Shaw went into the building. Finished, he looked around the office to make sure he had left nothing important, then left without locking the door behind him.

  Just after eleven Spencer Shaw came out of CIA Headquarters. He got into the Ford and ran it down the driveway. A Washington, DC police car pulled across the gate to block it before Shaw reached the street. Another police car went in through the other gate and ran around the drive’s curve until it blocked the Ford from behind. A detective and a uniformed cop got out of the car blocking the front of the Ford. The cops behind opened their doors in case they were needed but stayed in the car. Cassidy dodged through the cars on E Street that had slowed to see what was happening and joined the detective at the gate.

  ‘Mike, is that the guy?’ Sam Watkins asked. Watkins was a tall, thin man with a bony face and dark eyes that women found trustworthy, sometimes to their regret. He had a calm, unruffled way of going about his business.

  ‘That’s him.’ Shaw stared at them through the windshield of the car. Both his hands were on the steering wheel, and his shoulders were hunched forward with tension. He returned Cassidy’s look without blinking.

  ‘Okay. Let’s go get him.’

  ‘Hold on a second.’

  A car pulled up to the curb just down the block. Brian Cassidy got out of the front seat. He opened the rear door, and Rhonda Raskin got out and smoothed her skirt down. She nodded and started toward the waiting men. She carried a reporter’s notebook and a pen in one hand. She lifted the other slightly in greeting to Cassidy. He nodded back but made no move to join her. She moved to where she could see Shaw in the car and began to make notes. Another man got out of Brian’s car. He reached bac
k in to retrieve a sixteen-millimeter movie camera, and then he and Brian walked up toward where Cassidy waited with the DC cops. Behind him another car parked, and Dan O’Malley, the reporter from the Washington Post, got out with a photographer.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do all this?’ Watkins asked, nodding toward the reporters. He had a cop’s shyness about the public witnessing an arrest.

  ‘TV, New York and DC newspapers, a righteous arrest, you’re going to be a hero cop,’ Cassidy said.

  ‘The dream comes true. Let’s do it.’

  As Brian approached, he was speaking into a small microphone clipped to the lapel of his jacket. A portable voice recorder about the size of a hardback book was slung from his shoulder. The cameraman had moved out into the street so that he could film from an angle that included Brian, the police, and the car in the driveway. Cassidy heard Brian say, ‘This is Brian Cassidy. We are outside the headquarters of the CIA in Washington, DC. Washington police officers, accompanied by a detective from the New York City Police Department, are approaching the car you see parked in the driveway …’ Cassidy stopped listening. He walked around the blocking cop car and stood in front of the Ford. Shaw looked at him through the windshield with angry eyes.

  Watkins tapped on the driver’s window. Shaw kept looking at Cassidy. Watkins rapped hard with his knuckles. Shaw turned his head. Watkins signaled for him to roll down the window. Shaw shifted in his seat. Watkins put his hand on his gun. Shaw rolled the window down about a foot.

  ‘Mr Shaw,’ Watkins said, ‘I’d like you to step out of the car. You’re under arrest.’

  ‘What for?’ Shaw did not look at Watkins. He looked at Cassidy.

  ‘The kidnapping of Miss Rhonda Raskin, and the murder of Karl Brandt and Magda Brandt.’