Night Work (20 page)

“Close your eyes. Think about it for a minute. You come out of your building with Tinker, here. You walk to Fifth and wait to cross to the park. You go. You get to the park and go in. Who do you see? What dogs don't you see?”

The boy closed his eyes and concentrated. The big poodle looked up at him curiously and then yawned showing big, white teeth.

Seth opened his eyes. “The red setter. I haven't seen the red setter for a while.”

“Who walks it?”

“A lady.”

“Where do you see her? Where does she come from?”

“Up there.” He gestured north. “I don't know where, but I see her sometimes coming down Fifth and then going into the park here.”

“Where's the next entrance to the park to the north?”

“Up past Seventy-sixth Street.”

“So this is the closer entrance, which means she probably lives between here and Seventy-fourth. When was the last time you saw her and the setter?”

“I don't know. A few days ago, maybe a week.”

“Since you found the dead guy?”

“No. I don't think so.”

“What does she look like?”

“I don't know. A lady. Brown hair. Old.”

“How old?”

“I don't know. Like my mother.”

“How old is your mother?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thanks, Seth.”

“It'd be cool if I helped you find the killer.”

“Yes, it would.”

 

10

Ex-Sergeant Paco Lopato finished his rum and signaled the bartender for another. The man took an unlabeled bottle from the shelf behind the bar and walked down to refill Lopato's glass.

“
Gracias.”

“Nada.”
He took a dollar from the change in front of Lopato and walked back to where he had been arguing with two other patrons about the baseball careers of two Havana boys, Julio Bécquer, the Washington Senators first baseman, and Minnie Miñoso, the longtime White Sox utility man now playing left field for the Cleveland Indians.

Lopato picked up the glass between forefinger and thumb, a delicate grip for a big man, and drank half the rum in one. It was the kind he liked, harsh and burning and tasting of the cane. When he turned to look at the clock on the wall the gun in his jacket pocket clunked against the front of the bar.

Five more minutes.

He was not drinking for courage. What he had to do was a simple matter, something he had done before. It needed coolness and confidence, and he had both without liquor. He liked this bar. He liked the rum they served. He had time to kill. What else should he do, read a book? He smiled at the thought and took a leather case from his pocket, selected a thin cigarillo, the same kind of small cigars Colonel Fuentes smoked. The cigars were his only expensive luxury. He had stolen one from the Colonel's desk soon after he went to work for him, had liked it, and had started buying them from the tobacconist in Old Havana where the Colonel bought his. When Fuentes had first noticed he smoked them, he raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Well, let him think what he wanted. Lopato smoked them because he liked them, not because he was trying to mimic his betters.

Lopato finished the drink and went out into the night at Columbus Avenue and 91st Street. A Checker cab was parked in front with the
Off Duty
sign lit. Lopato got in the back and said, “
Vamos.
” The driver put aside his copy of
El Diario,
started the engine, and pulled out into traffic.

The cab came down off the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn and parked on a side street near Grand. Down the block a blue neon sign announced Centro Cubano. The driver turned and put an arm across the back of his seat. He spoke in Spanish. “The bar is on the left as you come in. Then the dining room, then the kitchen. They sit at a table at the back on the left. Always the same table. All the way back and on the left. A table for four. There is a photograph of El Morro on the wall above the table so you know it is the right one.”

“Yes.”

“There will be four of them. They are there every Thursday night. If they are all there, do it, or if there are three. If there are only two, do not. The others will hide and it will take us a long time to find them.”

“All right.”

“Go out through the kitchen. No one there will interfere. I will not be here. Go out the back door. Walk to Grand Street. Turn right. You will see the subway entrance. It is the best way to go.”

“All right.”

“Do not worry. No one will try to stop you. They will be scared. They will think only of saving themselves.”

“I'm not worried.”

“Have you done such a thing before?”

“Me? No. Why would you think that? Which end do I point at them? Which end has the bullets?”

“You choose to make a joke.” The driver was offended. “This is not a joke. This is a serious business. War is a serious business.”

“It is for those on the bad end of the gun.”

“All right then. Go. It's time.”

Lopato took his time getting out to show the driver he was not in charge. The driver took off before the door closed completely. Lopato watched the cab turn left at the corner and disappear. He straightened his jacket and started toward the restaurant in the middle of the block under the blue neon sign.

Lopato stopped just inside the door. The bar was on his left, as the cabdriver had said. The people lining the bar spoke in Spanish with the rhythms and accents of Cuba. The drinkers were mostly men, though there were a few women too. Some turned to look at him and then turned back to their drinks. They didn't know him, and they didn't care, just another Cubano looking for a drink or a meal. He stopped at the entry to the dining room. It was a large room full of people, most of them talking in loud voices, the shouts and laughter familiar to anyone who had spent time in Havana restaurants. People out for a good time. People who liked to live, who liked good food and good drink, who liked the tension a new woman brought to their lives. The smell of the food started the juices in his mouth. He had not found a good Cuban restaurant in the Upper West Side neighborhood where he was living. This clearly was a good one. Well, he would not be back to find out how good, not after tonight's work.

The table at the back on the left was in shadow, but Lopato could see that all four chairs were occupied. He put his hand in his jacket pocket and touched the butt of the gun, a Colt .45 automatic issued to him by SIM, part of the generous supply of weapons sent to Batista's government by the U.S. Army. He walked toward the back, pausing to let waiters with trays get by. The people at the back table leaned toward one another in heated conversation, unaware of his approach. There were three empty wine bottles on the table, and one of the men poured the glasses full from a recently opened one. Lopato glanced at the wall and found the photo of El Morro. No mistake, then. These were the ones. A thin, narrow-headed man with a pencil-line mustache and oiled hair, a white-haired man whose heavy paunch rested on his splayed thighs, a blond with a long face like a horse, and a woman mulatta, her thick gray hair pulled back from her strong face. They hadn't said there would be a woman. Well, there was. So be it. What did it matter? He did not know why this was necessary. It was enough that Colonel Fuentes needed it done.

They looked up without alarm when Lopato neared. Perhaps they were expecting the waiter. He took the Colt from his pocket and shot the man with the mustache in the temple. The shot was shockingly loud in the room, and for a moment afterward there was silence. The man slammed sideways and fell from his chair. Lopato shot the horse-faced man directly across the table twice in the chest, and he was thrown back against the wall. That's when the screaming began. The heavy man began to rise, his eyes wide, his head swiveling for an escape. Lopato shot him in the face, and the heavy bullet threw him into a man trying to flee the neighboring table. The woman sat still, her hands on the table in front of her, her eyes closed so as not to see what was coming. Lopato shot her twice.

He turned, gun ready, but no one came to interfere. The archway from the dining room to the bar was jammed with people fighting to get out. Lopato pushed aside a fallen chair and went through the swinging door into the kitchen. The whole business had not taken more than ten seconds. The kitchen staff stood wide-eyed watching him as he came through the door. A cook in a stained white apron held a big chef's knife. When he saw the gun, he dropped the knife, and it clattered to the floor. Lopato walked through the narrow room past the stove with its steaming pots and sizzling grill. The juices started in his mouth again at the fragrances of the cooking food. The back door was propped open with a milk crate to let in fresh air. He pushed through and went out into the alley and down the street to the avenue. He turned right, as instructed, and walked to the subway station at the end of the block. He would ask Colonel Fuentes. Perhaps he knew of a good restaurant on the West Side.

 

11

Cassidy read the
Herald Tribune
while he ate breakfast in a diner on Bleecker Street. Ho Chi Minh had gone on the radio in Hanoi to declare a “people's war” to unite all of Vietnam. The Soviet Union announced plans to launch Luna-2, its second spacecraft with a mission to probe the moon. The new Cuban government had nationalized the telephone industry, an affiliate of International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Senator George Smathers of Florida was quoted as saying, “It is clear that Castro hasn't yet learned that you can't play ball with the Communists.” Senator Smathers, “Georgie,” last seen taking a tour of La Cabaña fortress with his arm around the waist of a pneumatic brunette. What was her name? Alice. If Smathers wasn't qualified to speak on the dangers facing Cuba, who was?

Cassidy finished his second cup of coffee, paid the bill, and went out into a cool morning. White, puffy clouds floated above the city. He lit the first and best cigarette of the day and walked east along Bleecker until he reached Lafayette, and then turned south. It took him twenty minutes and two Luckys to reach 240 Centre Street. Police Headquarters was a massive limestone-and-granite building between Broome and Grand Streets, a monument to power in the Beaux Arts style, designed to impress both the officer and the miscreant with the majesty of the Law. On the streets nearby were the gun shops, saloons, uniform tailors, and restaurants that served the cops, and the reporters, lawyers, and bail bondsmen who fed off them. The Headquarters Restaurant on Grand Street was connected to 240 Centre by a tunnel, a convenience for police brass who did not want to be seen entering the speakeasy during the tiresome years of Prohibition.

The cavernous marble-floored lobby was crowded with uniformed cops, bail bondsmen, lawyers, singly or in disputatious clumps, bureaucrats carrying grease and grit for the government machine in their bulging briefcases, lawbreakers, defiant or cowed, about to be fed into the hungry mouth of the system.

Cassidy rode the elevator up alone, walked the long echoing corridor, and entered Deputy Chief Clarkson's outer office. He glanced at his watch as he did—nine forty-five—right on time. His preference, he knew, would have been to arrive five minutes late, just in case anyone thought he cared what the chief wanted. A childish instinct, but one he found hard to suppress. The deputy chief's secretary, a uniformed policewoman with brown hair like a helmet glanced up from a sheaf of papers she was reading. She examined him for a moment through gold wire-rimmed glasses. “Detective Cassidy?”

“Yes.”

She got up, knocked once on the massive wood door to the chief's office, and went in without waiting for a reply. She returned a moment later and shut the door behind her. “Please wait.” She sat down at her desk and went back to her papers.

Cassidy wandered the room and looked at the old framed photos on the walls, pictures of police officers from a younger city, some at crime scenes, standing over bodies sprawled on the sidewalk, next to a delivery truck crushed and tilted against a light pole, the broken driver slumped out the window, or leading handcuffed criminals into station houses, the lawbreakers' faces often hidden by upheld hands or tilted fedoras. He sat down on one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs and lit a cigarette. What did the deputy chief want? There was no point in guessing at it. He would know soon enough.

At ten o'clock on the dot, the secretary looked up and said, “You may go in.”

Deputy Chief Clarkson's office looked west toward the river and New Jersey and north toward the towers of Midtown. The walls were dark wood paneled but enlivened by large framed prints of Winslow Homer sailing scenes. The carved wood desk was massive, the floor thickly carpeted in dark blue. A comfortable leather sofa and two leather armchairs were grouped around a coffee table with a glass top, but they were not for Cassidy. A wooden armchair, twin to the one in the outer office, waited centered and squared in front of the desk. Cassidy walked to it and sat down.

Deputy Chief Harold Clarkson glanced at Cassidy and then continued to read the papers on his desk. Cassidy had never met the chief before. He was a slight man with black hair painted on a neat, narrow skull, pale skin, dark eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth like a razor cut through the flesh. He wore a white shirt and a black tie with faint red figures, and a black suit. He was as opaque and impenetrable as slate.

“You're an interesting cop, Detective Cassidy.” He did not mean it as a compliment. His voice was thin and sharp, his tone cool. It was like listening to a steel needle. “One week people want to give you a medal, the next they want to fire you.” Clarkson's hands rested on the desktop. They were narrow and long-fingered, and the nails were cut short, manicured, and buffed. “You grew up on the Upper East Side. You're father's a successful Broadway producer. You went to one of those fancy East Side schools with a bunch of Rockefellers. Why'd you become a cop?” He meant: you had money. People with money don't join the cops.