Night Work (15 page)

“How do you figure?”

“He's wearing a wedding ring.” A simple gold band on his left hand. It had been put on a younger man's hand years before and would now be hard to get off.

The van from the Bellevue morgue pulled up over the curb and parked near the dead man. A squad car pulled in behind it, and four patrolmen got out. They gathered with the other two uniforms and talked in low voices while they waited for the detectives.

Al Skinner got out of the morgue van, stopped for a moment to look at the body, and then came to join Cassidy and Orso. He was a wiry, spidery man with bright eyes and black hair that was beginning to fleck with gray. He looked at the dead man for a moment and then shrugged. “Well, at least he's fresh. I've got a couple they just pulled out of the river been in the water at least a month. They've got more gas than Con Ed.”

“No ID on the guy,” Cassidy said. “Get us a picture we can show around. Try not to emphasize the bullet hole.”

“Hey, Cassidy, I'm an artist. You don't have to tell me that stuff.” Skinner went to get equipment out of the van while Cassidy and Orso talked to the six patrolmen.

“Canvass the area. Talk to doormen. Who walks dogs around this time, who goes to work early, find out who the bus drivers are on this route from four thirty in the morning on. We'll want to talk to them. People walk their dogs a couple or three blocks, so let's check buildings three blocks up, three down, and over as far as Park Avenue. If we get nothing, we'll check another block. You guys know the drill.”

The patrolmen split up and went off. Cassidy and Orso watched Skinner take pictures of the dead man from all angles. Two techs brought the stretcher and they slung the body onto it without ceremony, strapped it down, and carried it to the van while Skinner snapped more shots of the chair the man had been sitting on.

“We'll get the chair to the lab,” Skinner said. “Maybe the geniuses there can find something. There's some dirt on the legs, looks like, and there are some cracks in the seat, and stuff in the cracks. Who knows?”

The van left. And now there was nothing to show that a dead man had been sitting there for hours waiting for someone to find him.

“How about a cup of coffee?” Orso said.

“That'd be good.”

“There's a place over on Lex makes coffee that tastes like the real thing, and if you ask nice, the guy'll put a shot of something in it, give it a little punch. Good muffins too. His old lady bakes them.”

“Let's go.”

They walked out of the park and east on 72nd Street. This was the gold coast of New York, the neighborhoods where the rich lived in limestone and granite towers with brassbound doors that led to marble-floored lobbies and wood-paneled elevators run by deferent uniformed elevator men who whisked the inhabitants up to the big, airy apartments that looked out over the city high above the smells and the noise and the scuffle of the streets. Splendid isolation.

“It'd be real nice to be really rich, wouldn't it?” Orso said.

“Most people think so.”

“How is it that some guys get the money, and some guys don't? One of the mysteries of life. I know which group I'm in.”

The coffee shop was on Lexington and 73rd. The counterman nodded to Orso and followed them to a back booth with two mugs and a pot of coffee. He slipped a pint of rye from under his apron and poured a jolt in each mug. Cassidy gestured for him to add a second one to his.

When the counterman went away to get their muffins, Orso said, “You might want to slow down. Don't look at me like that. I'm your partner. I get to say things. You've been on a tear three months now, since you got back. You just might want to take your foot off the gas.”

“Sure. Right.”

“Okay. I'm just saying. You ain't the first guy to be cut loose by a broad.”

“Tony. Drop it.”

“Right. Okay. Let's talk about this guy and his little wooden chair and the funny hole in his head. Why's he there, sitting on the chair at Seventy-second Street? And how the hell did he get there? A dead guy and a kitchen chair, you'd think someone might notice someone making the delivery.”

“Maybe someone did. Chances are the canvass will turn up something. A lot of eyes in that neighborhood.”

“Not so many at night. You ever notice how much of the shit we deal with happens at night? I bet it's seventy percent. They do the work at night, we find out about it during the day.” He took a sip of his coffee. “What do you figure? Two guys to get him there?”

“Had to be. He was a big man. Even if they brought him and the chair in a car, they had to get them onto the sidewalk where they left him. Got to be two guys for that.”

“A warning you said, but who's getting warned about what? In other circumstances I might say some goombah wants to let some other goombah know, but I can't think of any hoods who live up there on Fifth.”

“A business deal gone bad. Maybe someone took someone for a bundle and he didn't like it.” Cassidy sipped the loaded coffee and liked the bite and the warmth that spread through his chest.

“Rich people don't do that. They hire lawyers to fight their fights.”

“Rich people do what everybody else does. They cheat. They steal. They kill. When I was in eighth grade the mother of one of the kids in my class shot the kid's father with the pearl-handled pistol he gave her. She said she thought he was a burglar when she found him in the hall outside their bedroom at three in the morning. They'd had some break-ins in the neighborhood, in the brownstones up the block.”

“What floor were they on?” Orso dunked a piece of muffin in his coffee.

“Twentieth.”

“Uh-huh. That was a very ambitious burglar. I don't suppose he asked the elevator man for a ride. Walked up twenty flights. Was going to walk down twenty carrying the loot. Probably doing it for his health. Doctor's orders—get some exercise. Did she go for the high jump, the wife?”

“No. Not even prosecuted. The father owns half of downtown. Family goes back to the Dutch. The old man sat on the Mayor's Commission for This and That, the Policy Board for Such and Such. You know the drill. He didn't want the family name dragged through the dirt of a trial, so it all went away.” The people in the towers overlooking Central Park held the same boiling passions as people in the tenements in Hell's Kitchen, but when the lid blew off, there was often someone there to mop up the spill.

“Got away with murder because of Dad,” Orso said. “Shit. I knew I should have been smarter about choosing my parents.”

 

7

The doorman at 740 Park Avenue ran an eye over the young woman Cassidy followed into the lobby. He touched the brim of his hat and said, “Good evening, Mr. Cassidy,” and raised an eyebrow, a man-to-man gesture of admiration. She was worth admiring. She had auburn hair cut short against the fashion of the day; a narrow, intelligent face; large, dark eyes, a thin-lipped, severe mouth that promised a dark and interesting sensuality; and a lush body in a black cocktail dress enlivened by an embroidered silk emerald shawl. High heels set off her dancer's legs. Her name was Marie (formerly Mary) LaGrange (formerly Kowalski), a Broadway actress who was beginning to excite some notice from the critics and the theater community. She had been singled out as “the only good thing” in
The Belles of Canton
, a sex romp that closed three days after opening. She had parlayed that into the part of the younger sister with the club foot in
Going Around the Other Way
, a turgid but sincere kitchen-sink drama that had lasted a hundred twenty-three performances, and she had auditioned for a juicy part in Tom Cassidy's new play,
A Way of the World
. It was, Cassidy was sure, coincidence that she found the producer's son so fascinating. Cassidy's father was a successful Broadway producer, and Marie was not the first actress who found Cassidy attractive during the casting process. He knew how it would end. If she did not get the part, there would be a couple of weeks of withdrawal, some tears of regret, a promise of continuing friendship to show that it had been him, not the opportunity, that had attracted her. If she did get the part, the break would be quick and surgical. His role was over. The theater was a tough business. A girl had to hustle if she was going to make it. No harm, no foul. Fun while it lasted.

As they rode up in the elevator at 740 Park Avenue, he wondered how the callback had gone. Marie stood close to the door, so the elevator man, a white-haired Irish gnome named Jimmy, only had to turn a little to appreciate her profile.

“How's it going, Jimmy?”

“Great, Mr. Cassidy. Great. You know why?”

“Why?”

“'Cause I realized it's a wonderful world. No matter where you are, beauty is all around us.” He brought the car to a smooth halt, clashed the doors open, and gave Cassidy a wink, “Even in an elevator.” Cassidy followed Marie out into the chatter and laughter of the cocktail party being given by his sister, Leah, and her husband, Mark Buckman.

The elevator opened directly into the large front hall paved in black-and-white tiles with a staircase that curved up to the second floor. The large living room was off the hall through a wide arched doorway. The furniture was expensive and comfortable, big sofas, deep chairs, American antique tables, some of which held silver-framed pictures of family members. Cassidy stopped in the archway, as he often did, to admire the painting by Claude Monet of
La Gare Du Nord
that hung over the fireplace where birch logs burned. The triangle of the station's roof gave structure to the painting. A train engine was a dark blob in the low center, and behind it was the impression of an apartment building, everything softened by clouds of steam and smoke.

Two maids dressed in black uniforms with white lace–trimmed aprons circulated through the crowd of guests offering hors d'oeuvres from silver trays. A bartender mixed drinks at a small bar in the corner, and a servant in black trousers and a white jacket carried them to the thirsty.

Cassidy's brother-in-law, Mark Buckman, stood near the windows overlooking Park Avenue talking to a group of businessmen in dark suits, and their women in cocktail dresses, girdled and coiffed, and wearing the jewelry one could wear without ostentation this early in the evening. The privileged of New York, secure in their belief that the world was ordered to their satisfaction. Mark was a stocky, powerful man in his mid-thirties. He had an open face and an easy manner. He had gone bald in his twenties and now shaved his head daily, and his skull looked like it could stop a bullet. He was a former Yale hockey star who had the reputation as a player who could see the whole rink, who was aware of all the skaters and where they were going. It was an alertness that he still possessed, and he gave Cassidy a slight tilt of his head to acknowledge his arrival without losing a beat of what was being said to him. Cassidy had been wary of him when he first dated Leah, but in the seven years that they had been married, he had grown to like him and respect him. Mark had inherited a hundred thousand dollars from his grandfather and had run it into a fortune before he was thirty with the same apparent ease with which he had scored goals. The men around him were older, but it was clear that he held their attention. The ability to make money brought great respect in this crowd.

“There's your father,” Marie said. “I'm going to go say hello. Are you coming?”

“You go ahead. I'll see him later.” His father waved him over from where he stood near the fireplace. Cassidy waved back and mouthed, “Five minutes.” Marie stopped twice, once to air kiss Albert London, an elegant silver-haired man of sixty-five, one of America's greatest stage actors and a director with a string of hits on Broadway, a useful man to know. She stopped again to kiss and body press the best-looking man in the room, a young actor named Newman who had just opened in Tennessee Williams's
Sweet Bird of Youth.
She laughed at something he said, touched him on the cheek, and whirled away. She looked back once to show him how difficult it was to leave him.

Cassidy looked for his sister and saw her coming down the stairs from the second floor. She saw him and posed for a moment with her arms flung wide and her hip cocked and then came down in a rush, a quick switch from elegant sophisticate to tomboy, typical of her, that made him smile. They met in the hall, and hugged and then she pushed back and looked him over carefully.

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh, what?”

“Tomcat. I look at you and I think, tomcat, battle scarred and dragging a little, but still howling on the fences at night.”

“Thank you. I feel much better about myself now. You, however, continue to be beautiful, though, I suppose, it will all fall away someday and you'll be one of those lumpy old East Side ladies with blue hair and a huge purse eating lunch at Longchamps.”

“Oh, you shit. I will get you for that.”

She was a beautiful woman. Her hair was as black and smooth as a raven's wing. She wore a blue cocktail dress that matched her eyes, and dark red high heels that matched the small rubies in her necklace and earrings. The planes and angles of her face, so like his own, were more abrupt and prominent than he remembered and it suddenly struck him that she was nearly thirty, that the girl he had grown up with was gone, replaced by a woman of poise and confidence. In the early days with Mark, she had chafed under the restrictions of marriage, and he had half expected her to bolt just to show that she could. Maybe the birth of her children had brought her this new calm. Still, he sensed that there remained something dangerous inside her like an unexploded charge.

“I was just upstairs making sure the boys weren't killing each other.” She and Mark had three-year-old twins.

“How are you, really?” He was always aware of how close she was to running off the rails.