Cassidy watched Shaw’s eyes widen in surprise. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Mr Shaw, please get out of the car.’ This was the moment when it could crack. Watkins took a couple of steps back to clear the door. The uniformed cop who had driven Watkins’s car put his hand on his holstered gun and moved away from Watkins to widen the angle in case Shaw came out shooting.
Shaw turned off the car and got out. He looked only at Cassidy while the uniformed cop cuffed his hands behind his back and Watkins relieved him of the .38 under his arm. Brian’s cameraman had moved around to keep Shaw centered in the frame. Brian spoke quietly into his microphone. Rhonda looked up from writing in her notebook and noticed O’Malley and his photographer. She looked at Cassidy and mouthed a sarcastic, ‘Thanks.’ He shrugged. This was O’Malley’s town, and Cassidy needed the story in tomorrow’s paper to give it weight. He needed as much public heat on this as he could get, otherwise it could go out the back door and never be heard of again.
A crowd of people had gathered outside the headquarters building. A man in a gray wool suit broke away from the group and hurried down the driveway. ‘Hello. Excuse me. Hello,’ he called as he came, demanding attention. Watkins said something to the uniformed cop, and the officer took Shaw by the arm and steered him toward the police car in the street. The man in the gray suit asked, ‘What’s going on here?’
He tried to go around Watkins, but Watkins blocked him. ‘Who are you?’
‘Assistant Deputy Director Wickersham. Where are you taking that man? Why is he handcuffed?’
‘He’s under arrest for murder and kidnapping.’
Wickersham stopped as if slapped. Watkins put a hand on his arm and turned him away from the watching crowd. He talked to him in a low voice. Wickersham looked over once toward Shaw and shook his head in disbelief.
When they reached Cassidy, Shaw jerked his arm free of the cop’s grip and stopped. The cop reached for him, but Cassidy waved him off. ‘It’s okay.’
‘I didn’t kill them,’ Shaw said. ‘I didn’t even know they were dead.’
‘The evidence says you did.’
‘Uh-uh. How did you make this happen?’
‘I didn’t.’
Shaw snorted at the lie. ‘I’ll be out in a couple of hours, maybe a couple of days, a week. It doesn’t matter. What then? You’re going to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. The good news for you is it’s not going to last long.’ He nodded to the cop and walked to the back door of the patrol car and waited for the cop to open it. When he did, Shaw ducked inside without help and settled himself on the seat. He did not look at Cassidy again.
THIRTY-THREE
Rhonda’s story ran on the front page of the New York Post. She revisited her encounter with Spencer Shaw in the house on West 4th Street, the murder of Maxie Lively, her own kidnapping, and the escape from Ambrose’s house on Leroy Street. She identified Karl and Magda Brandt as suspected Nazi war criminals. She quoted NYU Professor Junius Morgan on the history of LSD and its possible uses in mind control and interrogations, and the paper ran a sidebar on Chinese brainwashing of American POWs captured during the Korean War. At the end of the article she asked the question: how many other Nazi war criminals were now working for the US Government?
Nobody answered the question. Six congressmen who were veterans of World War Two called for an investigation, but it never got traction. The Nazis were the past. The new threat was Communism.
The arrest of a CIA officer for murder was news in Washington, and Dan O’Malley’s story ran on the front page of the Washington Post. Dulles dismissed the charges as inconsequential compared to the good fight the CIA was leading against the enemies of Democracy. Partisans of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who had always been jealous of the CIA’s rise in power, sharpened their knives and went after the agency’s reputation, pointing out its failure to predict the Suez Crisis, and its failure in Hungary during the recent uprising, but it changed nothing.
ABC, after seeing Brian’s exclusive footage of Shaw’s arrest and hearing his report tying the CIA, Gallien Medical, and Nazi war criminals together, decided his suspension had been hasty. A full hour of Behind the Headlines was devoted to the report. The following day three Democratic Senators and two Republicans called for a special prosecutor to investigate the allegations against the CIA.
The CIA released a statement that suggested that Dr Sebastian Ambrose and Spencer Shaw had been running a rogue operation. Their masters were shocked; shocked that they might have contravened the laws of United States in pursuit of their goals. Sebastian Ambrose, the statement said, had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been hospitalized. He would be made available to the media when and if he recovered.
Stefan Horvath, Shaw’s driver in New York, who was wanted for his part in the kidnapping of Rhonda Raskin, was described as a local hire with no prior connection to the CIA. The Agency had no information as to his whereabouts.
The story moved off the front pages. Christmas came, then the New Year. The story disappeared.
Spencer Shaw’s attorneys waived extradition and he was moved to the Tombs in lower Manhattan to await trial.
THIRTY-FOUR
Cassidy went back to the daily grind of police work: hopped-up drug store robbers, muggers, teenage gang bangers armed with chains and knives and overheated hormones, a guy who threw a hated cat out of the sixth-floor living room window and then threw his wife after it when she complained, rapists, assaults, burglaries, car theft, the underlife of the city.
The hideout was in a five-story brownstone between Ninth Avenue and Tenth in Hell’s Kitchen. It was in the middle of the block, which presented problems. Too many routes for escape: up over the roofs, out the back and through the building behind to the next street, down to the cellar and out into the alley. Uniformed patrolmen were stationed to block those exits. They all hoped the primary team did its job, because they had heard the tales of Connor Finn’s size and strength, and if anyone was going to bleed making the arrest, it might as well be the better-paid detectives.
The primary team was Cassidy and Orso, Bonner and the Newly, and a big patrolman named Pensikov, who carried a heavy steel ram. Orso picked the street door lock. The stairs were dimly lit and smelled of mildew, dust, and coal smoke. Footsteps clattered above them on the stairs. They flattened against the wall. Orso, in the lead, slipped his gun from its holster. Someone appeared on the landing, saw them, and stopped. He was a mean-faced little man in a gangster suit that was too much of everything – the chalk stripes were too wide, the cloth too blue, the shoulders too padded, the waist too cinched, the lapels like wings, and the pants legs too long so they bunched over his shoes. His shirt collar was too loose and his tie was as gaudy as a tropical sunset. The shoes had two-inch heels but they weren’t enough to give him stature. He was a mouse masquerading as a rat on his way out to the evening grift. He read them as cops and took a step back as if to turn and go away.
‘Uh-uh,’ Orso said and jerked his head to show him the way down. As the man squeezed by him on the stairs, Orso marked him with a look. If they didn’t find what they were looking for upstairs, it would be because the mouse made a call, and Orso would remember him. They heard the front door open and close, and they went on up.
The third floor, a dim hallway with a window at the end. There were four apartment doors. The one they wanted was number 44. It was a heavy wood door painted black. Someone had tacked a plastic red rose to the panel under the peephole.
Cassidy and Orso took one side of the doorway. Bonner and Newly took the other. Pensikov stood in front of the door holding the ram in his big hands. He looked to Cassidy for instruction. ‘Knock?’ he whispered.
‘Yeah,’ Cassidy said, ‘with that.’
The four detectives drew their guns. Cassidy nodded to Pensikov. The big cop hefted the ram, eyed the door, took a deep breath, and then swung the ram back and slammed it into the door close to the lock. The wood shredded un
der the blow, and the door exploded inward. The cops went in hard and fast.
Bridey Halloran, Connor Finn’s girlfriend, sat in a worn armchair in a corner near the window. A cigarette burned in the ashtray next to her while she brushed her hair with long, firm strokes. There were spots of blood on her face and arms. She looked at the detectives calmly. ‘How’re you doing, boys? He’s in there.’ She nodded toward the bedroom.
Cassidy and Orso stood in the doorway and looked at the dead man on the bed.
‘It is him, right?’ Orso asked.
‘Oh, yeah. Fucking guy’s the biggest thing I ever saw outside the zoo.’
The only way they knew the man was by his size. His face had been pulped to an unrecognizable mess by the cast-iron skillet that lay on the floor near the bed. A coffee cup and a broken plate lay nearby. The plate was covered with hardening egg yolk. A carving knife stuck up from up from the man’s groin. It must have hit an artery, because the bedclothes were soaked with blood.
‘Connor Finn,’ Orso said. ‘I guess he wishes he hadn’t sharpened that knife so well now.’
Cassidy turned back into the living room. ‘How are you, Bridey?’
‘I’m okay. How are you?’ She was calm, except for the metronomic strokes of the brush.
‘What happened here, Bridey?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her hair crackled with static electricity under the brush.
‘You don’t know?’
She shrugged and stopped brushing long enough to drag on the cigarette. She blew smoke and asked Orso, ‘You got a girlfriend?’
‘Me? Yeah,’ Orso said.
‘Are you nice to her?’
‘Yeah. Sure. Most of the time.’
‘Fucking Finn there wasn’t nice to me. He was always giving me the needle. “Bridey, do you have to wear your hair like that? Bridey, you overcooked the fucking steak. Bridey, you do that again, I’m going to slap you hard.” He did that a couple of times, and he could hit. Today it was the eggs. He asks for them over easy. I give them to him over easy like always. He says they’re too hard. He says I can’t do a fucking thing right. I go back to the kitchen and I’m thinking about it. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Never satisfied. Always picking at me. I think, okay, it’s going to keep on going like this, ain’t never going to stop. I hear him snoring in there. So I go in with the frying pan and give him a couple of whacks to keep him down. Then I think, what the hell, he’s going to wake up sometime, and that ain’t going to be good. So I go back in the kitchen and get the knife.’
‘You’ve got to come in with us, Bridey.’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know.’ She put the brush down. ‘Let me get my purse.’
Councilman John Franzi arrived at the stationhouse the next afternoon. He was a tall, portly middle-aged man in an expensive suit and a black cashmere overcoat, a survivor of countless political skirmishes. He carried his fedora in his left hand to leave his right hand free for handshakes, back slaps, and shoulder rubs which he dispensed to every cop he could reach along with his automatic smile. He brought a photographer and a press aide with him to make sure his time in the squad room was properly memorialized. There was a group picture with John Franzi in the middle of the four arresting officers, and then shots of the councilman and the individual cops shaking hands, the councilman grinning while the cops stood stolidly looking down the lens with distaste. Lieutenant Tanner was summoned from the sanctuary of his office for a photo and to hear Franzi’s blessing.
‘A great piece of police work today. The city and the department should be proud of these men for getting a piece of scum like Connor Finn off the streets.’ No mention of Bridey’s helpful handiwork with a frying pan and a carving knife. ‘These drug dealers are poisoning our children, and we will not tolerate it any longer. They will discover they are no match for New York’s finest, and they will regret the day they took up their filthy commerce. I am going to recommend honors for the participating officers here, and you can be sure that when we take up the needs of the various precincts in committee that the Nineteenth will have its champion in me.’ He stood still for one more photograph at the top of the stairs, blessed them with one more smile, and with a wave, was gone. The squad appreciated the effort he made to lie to them, but they knew that in the end the silk-stocking precincts would get the gravy and they would get the gristle.
THIRTY-FIVE
Three days before Spencer Shaw went to trial, the DA’s office discovered that his bloodstained wallet was no longer in the evidence locker. Without the wallet, any case against Shaw was circumstantial. The doorman at his apartment building told the police that Shaw had left the building around nine o’clock, which gave him time to get to the Brandts’ house and kill them. But no weapon had been found, no bloody clothes. A canvass of the neighborhood around the Brandts’ had produced no witnesses who could put Shaw at the scene. The DA decided to drop the murder charges and prosecute the kidnappings of Cassidy and Rhonda Raskin.
The lead prosecutor was a crackling-smart, perpetually pissed-off Brooklyn-born lawyer named Ted Lombardi who hated to lose. His round head was prematurely bald. It topped narrow shoulders and a long neck and made him look like an angry turtle. Lombardi had handled the prosecution of six or seven of Cassidy’s arrests over the years, and they had developed an easy friendship.
The defense team came from Sullivan and Cromwell. They arrived each day in a phalanx, armored in beautifully hand-tailored suits. They had a rich, elegant glow as if they were polished each morning with soft wads of old money.
The prosecution was built on Cassidy’s and Rhonda’s testimony. The defense countered with witnesses who swore that Cassidy had been drunk and disoriented on Hudson Street the morning in question, that the Brandts had publicly identified themselves as doctors and had volunteered to help him, that Cassidy had entered the car willingly. Shaw testified that Dr Ambrose suggested Cassidy be restrained on the bed in the house on Leroy Street until his disorientation passed. Ambrose, still suffering from his nervous breakdown, was not available to testify. The defense lawyers were not as successful with Rhonda, though they tried their best. They painted her as a promiscuous slut who drank too much and slept around, as an overly ambitious woman who would do anything for a story. Under the cover of national security considerations and the restrictions of classified information, they managed to exclude all testimony that pertained to the house on West 4th Street and to any experiments that might have been going on inside the house on Leroy Street. In the end, the jury found Spencer Shaw not guilty of kidnapping but guilty of the lesser charge of unlawful restraint. The judge took a moment to praise Shaw’s war record before sentencing him to three years in a medium-security facility in upstate New York.
Cassidy stood near the prosecution table and watched the bailiffs come to escort Shaw back to the holding cells. The defense lawyers shook hands and patted each other on the shoulder in congratulations while Ted Lombardi looked on sourly.
‘Kicked your ass around the courtroom,’ Cassidy said.
‘Yeah. National security, my ass,’ Lombardi said. ‘Of course it would have been nice if the fucking police department could hold onto the key evidence.’
‘Not the first time something grew legs in the evidence locker and walked away.’
‘Well, at least he’s off the street for a couple of years.’
‘Doesn’t seem like much,’ Cassidy said. ‘He killed two people we know about and at least one we suspect.’
‘You know what?’ Lombardi said. ‘I’m thinking maybe I’m on the wrong side. I’ve got a good mind to give up all this shit and join Sullivan and Cromwell. I love those suits.’
‘Great suits. Do you think they’d have you?’
‘Sure. Once I got the transplant – cut out the wop, put in the wasp.’
Before leaving the courtroom, Shaw looked back at Cassidy. He smiled and winked and then allowed the bailiffs to take him away.
THIRTY-SIX
Rhonda and Cassidy began to slip by
each other: missed phone calls, canceled dinner dates, work obligations that pulled them in different directions. The affair was running on fumes, and neither one of them wanted to admit it.
The dream came back for the third time in a week, a dark, thick, suffocating menace that yanked Cassidy out of sleep, his heart pounding. He lurched out of bed, knocked the bedside lamp to the floor, banged against the wall, clutched the doorjamb to the bathroom to keep from falling, and stood gasping as his heart raced. He fumbled along the bathroom wall until he located the light switch and flipped it up. The sudden light pushed away some of the dream’s darkness. He turned on the shower and, while it warmed up, studied himself in the mirror. His face was drawn and pale. He thought about the dream. When had it first started? When had it gone away? What made it come back? The dream had begun in early September, not long before Leon Dudek’s murder and Paul Williger’s jump from the Hotel Astor window, not long before Cassidy met Spencer Shaw for the first time. The dream came with greater frequency during the next weeks. It stopped when Shaw told him he was going to kill him.
Cassidy lit another cigarette and stared out the window. Could that be it? The dream was of a coming threat. The threat turned out to be Shaw. Once he knew that, the dream disappeared. So why was it back? Shaw was in prison. But Shaw had friends, and the CIA had a long reach. He could have found someone to carry out the threat. Would killing Cassidy by remote control give Shaw the same pleasure? Maybe his arrest had pushed him to the point of just wanting Cassidy dead. He could think of no other reason for the dream to have come back so intensely. Why not ask Shaw? The guy loved telling Cassidy he was going to kill him. He’d probably get a kick out of telling him it was still going to happen. And if it wasn’t Shaw? If the dream was about something else that was coming? Fuck it. Don’t worry about that yet. Shaw first.
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