Night Work (31 page)

“Hi,” Leah said. “What are you doing here?” She wiped her face with the back of her glove, smearing more dirt across her cheek, and offered herself for a kiss.

“I came to watch you do the spring planting.”

“Yup. We're putting in wheat on the north forty and four acres of corn down by the creek. There is no rest for a woman farming a Park Avenue duplex.” The man in khaki pushed the handcart back toward them. Now it was loaded with boxes of spring flowers. “Fred, this is my brother Michael. Michael, Fred Tyler. He's the green thumb. I just do the heavy lifting.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Tyler said. “I'd shake, but…” He showed a dirt-encrusted hand. He was in his forties, sturdy and compact, and weather-beaten.

“Good to meet you too,” Cassidy said.

Leah scooped up dirt from a planter against the wall between the two sets of doors that led into the living room. The thick, dark root of an espaliered rosebush grew from the planter and spread branches up and out in a fan shape against the wall. Wires fixed to bolts driven into the bricks held the branches. Leah rubbed the dirt between her hands and sifted it back into the planter. “Fred, we talked about replacing the dirt in here. What do you think?”

“I'm going to add some fertilizer, Mrs. Buckman. I checked the pH, and it comes out a bit acid. The lime will take care of that.”

“Whatever you think best. Michael, you have to come when the roses are in bloom. They are so beautiful.”

“I'll clear my calendar.”

She jabbed him with an elbow. “Come on, I'll buy you a glass of iced tea. Fred, would you like a glass of iced tea?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Buckman, I would.”

“I'll send it out.”

The maid brought three glasses of iced tea to the library on a round silver tray. She left two, and carried the third to the gardener on the terrace. Cassidy picked up one of the glasses and went past the desk to look out the window overlooking Park Avenue. Below him the planting season in New York continued. Teams of gardeners were putting flowers in the beds between the southbound and northbound lanes, the yearly ritual that transformed the parkway from the dull brown of winter to the vivid colors of spring, a celebration of life.

Leah came in. She had washed her face and brushed her hair and exchanged her boots for polished moccasins, and she looked beautiful and composed. She picked up the waiting glass and took a long pull. “Ahh, that is good. Do you want something stronger?”

“No, thanks. This is fine.”

“Michael, did you drop by because you missed me, or because you had something you wanted to talk about?”

“Both.”

“Liar. What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about Bob and Jane Hopkins.”

“Which one are you really interested in?”

“Both.”

“I'll start with Jane, then. How's that?”

“Fine.”

“Personal or official?”

“Official.”

“What'd they do?”

“Nothing. They're just a small part of a larger investigation.”

She studied him for a moment while she drank some of the iced tea. “You know, when you were a kid you were a lousy liar. I think because you didn't give a damn whether people knew you were lying or not. Being a cop has made you much better at it.”

“I always know where to come for a compliment.”

“Anyway, Jane Hopkins, Jane Delano when I first knew her. Some collateral connection to the Roosevelt family. She was a few years above me at school here and then at Farmington. She was one of the cool beauties, always going out with boys who were older. You know, the sophomores at college while she was still in school, very sophisticated. A good student, but a wild one under the cool exterior. You know the kind, the one who shows you where to smoke illegally, who knows how to sneak off campus. The girl who always takes the dare, is always the first to jump off the bridge into the river. The one the adults always think of as the perfect young lady and the girls know as the one who gets away with murder.” She saw his expression change. “What?”

“Nothing. What about him?”

“Mild-mannered Bob? A good family, but not much money left. His father was a drunk who ran through it all. Bob made it back and then some according to Mark. Mark calls him the Wall Street assassin. Apparently he is a ruthless dealmaker.”

“What's their marriage like?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Who knows what goes on in someone else's bedroom? She's a major flirt. She was all over you at our party before Christmas. Did you get the feeling that it was real?”

“I barely remembered that I'd met her.”

“That doesn't speak well for her powers of seduction.”

“Would he be jealous?”

“I've heard they have an open marriage.”

“You mean they can take lovers and it doesn't matter?”

“Something like that. I think there are some rules, like you can't make a public spectacle and you can't bring it home.”

“How do you know this?”

Leah was embarrassed, a rare moment. “We had lunch one day last year. She called out of the blue and asked me. We went to one of those dark little French restaurants in the mid-fifties where men take women who aren't their wives. Martinis and then wine with the meal. The talk was all over the place—people we knew, places we'd been, but toward the end she got around to it, how sophisticated our family was because we grew up in the theater. How worldly all that must have made us. Fewer rules. A broad-minded understanding of how life really works. And then a very deft and subtle suggestion that Bob found me fascinating and she found Mark fascinating, and we were all intelligent, mature people who didn't need to be bound by the mundane rules that shackled most people.”

“God, I didn't know we were that cool. Did you tell Mark?”

“Of course.”

“Was he tempted?”

She grabbed a magazine and swatted him. “Ooohh, you bastard. Of course he wasn't tempted. He laughed. What's this all about, anyway?”

“Do you think Bob Hopkins is capable of violence?”

She looked at him seriously. “You're not going to tell me, are you?”

“No. Not yet. It's all guesswork right now. There's nothing to tell.”

“Okay. Bob, violent? I don't know. Half the women I know have been hit by their husbands. Has he hit Jane? A fifty-fifty chance.”

“Come on.”

“Why are you so shocked? Men think it's a God-given right to smack their wives.”

“Mark?”

“No. Not Mark. He doesn't have the instinct, and he knows that if he did do it, I would be out the door so fast. Speaking of which, I've got to go pick up the boys. Do you want to walk with me?”

“I can't.”

“Okay. Was this a help?”

“Yes, I think so. What do women do when their men hit them?”

“I don't know. Maybe a few slip a little ground glass in the guy's hamburger, but most of them just take it.”

She found her purse and they rode down in the elevator together. “I hear you have a new woman in your life,” Leah said.

“Where'd you hear that?”

“We were at Peter Sanborn's for cocktails. Somebody mentioned it. I can't remember who. New York's a small town, Michael. You can't get away with anything. Do we get to meet her?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“I don't know. I'll talk to her. We'll figure something out. You and Mark can come slumming to the Village.”

They kissed, brushing cheeks, under the awning outside the building. Then she went north to pick up the twins at nursery school, and he walked south to the precinct.

 

19

It was long after midnight when ex-Colonel Diego Fuentes turned west on 54th Street away from the lights of Broadway and the people looking for one more drink, one more laugh before heading home. By the time he reached Eighth Avenue he was alone on the street. He stopped in front of the six-story brownstone just east of Eighth Avenue, where the Italian restaurant called Mario's occupied the ground floor
.
Unlike the last time he had been here, the restaurant was closed. Looking past the artificial plants in the darkened window he could see the chairs turned upside down on the tables. There was one light left on behind the bar so the beat cop could check for intruders as he made his rounds. Fuentes checked his watch. He was on time, one thirty in the morning, a conspirator's hour.

Voices, laughter. Fuentes stepped into the shadowed doorway. A couple stopped on the corner of Eighth Avenue for a clinch and then crossed the street, wobbling a bit, their arms around each other. He waited until they were out of sight and then rapped on the glass of the door. Nothing. He rapped again, harder. A door opened at the back of the restaurant and light spilled into the front room. A man threaded through the tables and came to the front door. He examined Fuentes through the glass, and then unlocked the door and opened it. He turned without saying anything and went back through the room. Fuentes closed the door and followed.

There was a dinner table for twelve in the back room. It was covered with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Candles in straw-covered Chianti bottles ran down the center. Between them were open bottles of wine and bottles of water. Men occupied all the chairs except one. They did not look alike, were of different sizes and shapes, but all were stamped with a competent brutality. They glanced at Fuentes when he entered and then went back to their conversations and the plates of antipasto in front of them. Santo Trafficante sat at the head of the table. He glanced at Fuentes through his black-rimmed glasses, nodded, and then turned to talk to Joe Stassi, who sat on his left. Fuentes sat down at the empty place in the middle of the table. The men on either side of him checked him briefly but said nothing to him. He assumed they were ignoring him to unsettle him, to put him on the defensive, to make him more amenable to whatever was going to be discussed. He had used the same techniques himself. He ate a piece of salami, and tasted the red wine in the tumbler in front of him. Not bad. He liked Spanish wines better, but this was not bad. He ate a pepper and an anchovy and some cured meat he could not identify, sipped the wine, and listened to the talk around him.

He had met here before, but usually with two or three men with common interests. The meetings had been exploratory to see whether their common interests could lead to joint action. This was different. Something had been decided and Fuentes had been called here to learn what that decision was.

The small man to his left jiggled with energy, and his leg jerked up and down in quick rhythm. He cut small bites from the plate in front of him and stabbed them into his mouth with his fork, talking all the time across Fuentes to the man on his right, a big, stolid guy with a face like a ham under a cap of curly black hair, who offered an occasional grunt to hold up his end of the conversation.

“I don't get it,” the little man said. “I get out of the joint, I ask them to put me back to work. They give me a job. That's okay. But I'm a little guy, right? So what do they give me, a fucking guy's built like an elephant, makes you, Alfie, look anemic, you know what I'm saying? Okay, the job's the easy part. It don't take more to drop a big guy than a little guy, but then I'm out in some Jersey swamp for the rest of the night digging a hole big enough to bury a horse. Why is that? Why don't I ever get a little guy? Some sort of joke or something? I don't get it.”

Fuentes assumed the story was told for his benefit. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't. It amused him that they would work so hard to show him how dangerous they were. He knew they were dangerous. Did they understand that he was too? Three women came out of the kitchen to clear plates and serve new ones. He picked at the ravioli, tasted the veal, ate half the cannoli, and drank some more of the wine but stopped when he began to feel it.

The women cleared the table. The men got up and left and went into the front room to the bar, except for Santo Trafficante and Joe Stassi, who remained. Stassi gestured and Fuentes went down to the end of the table and took a chair next to Stassi. A woman brought a bottle of clear liquid and three small glasses. “Grappa,” Stassi explained, and poured. They raised their glasses. “Salute,” Stassi and Trafficante said. “Salud,” Fuentes replied.

“Now,” Trafficante said. “How are we going to kill this motherfucker? Your guy? Our guys? How?” He poured another glass of grappa and drank half of it, and Fuentes realized he was drunk. “It has to be here. It has to be this week, here in New York. If he gets back to Havana we'll never get to him. He has too many friends. If he gets back there the first thing he's going to do is take the hotels and casinos. Jesus christ, we're already down forty percent just on the take 'cause Americans are scared to go over there. Bunch of fucking bearded guys walking around with guns. Who the hell needs that on vacation?”

Stassi took a sheet of paper out of his pocket and pushed it across to Fuentes. “This is Castro's schedule in New York.”

“How'd you get it?”

“We've got a guy.” He left it at that.

They didn't trust him. Well, he didn't trust them. He studied the schedule. “Your men are a rifle team, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So, when he comes out of the hotel? From a building across the way?”

“Sometimes the cops take him out a side door. Sometimes they've got the car pulled right up tight and you don't get a look before he gets in. We were thinking about the thing he's doing in Central Park.”

“It will be night.”

“Castro will be on stage under the lights.”

“Where will your men be?”

“There's a place. We've looked it over. It'll do.”

“How far?”

“Three hundred yards.”

“Ahhh.” Meaning, a long shot at night. “I've done this work. I've done security. President Batista had many enemies, but he is going to die in bed. The first thing the police will do is check every place a man with a rifle can hide inside a five-hundred-yard perimeter. If you've found such a place, so will they.”