Night Work (19 page)

“Are you saying one of my guys did something?” Mr. Bruckner, no first name offered, had been checking a delivery of fifty-pound bags of fertilizer when Cassidy found him at a loading dock. The badge did not impress him. Cassidy could have the rest of the city, but this was his territory.

“No. I'm saying he might have seen something related to a crime.”

“'Cause I know my guys. I don't got no bad apples in the barrel. I weed 'em out. Bad apples don't last, and I can spot them.” He had the weathered face of a man who spent most of his time outdoors, unusual in the city, and wore corduroy trousers tucked into green rubber boots, a dark blue shirt with a tan wool tie, and a worn tweed jacket with patches at the elbows and cuffs. He wasn't a big man, but he stood with his arms crossed and his legs spread, as if daring Cassidy to challenge him, a man protecting his ground and his people. Cassidy liked him for that. He offered him a cigarette and shook out one for himself and lit them both with his Zippo.

“Thanks. I'm a Camels man, myself, but I like a change.” Bruckner drew hard on the Lucky.

“I'm not looking at your guys for this in any way, Mr. Bruckner. I just need to talk to people who might have been in the area between four thirty in the morning and, say, seven o'clock, seven thirty. They might have seen something.”

“I got nobody there before five. Shift begins at five.”

“Okay, five.”

“Barney Rose and Kevin Rotella. They're planting the flowerbeds up to the Conservatory Water. The model boat pool? You know it?”

“I know it.” His brother, Brian, had given him a model boat for his eleventh birthday, and he had sailed it there until the discovery of girls refocused him.

“Okay, then. Rose and Rotella. Good guys. You won't find them out there now. Shift begins at five a.m. Five to one. Talk to them.”

“I will. Thanks.”

“Yeah. Sure. Forget about it.”

*   *   *

Rain began to fall at the end of the day as Cassidy got off the subway at 12th Street, a light misting spring rain that seemed a benediction, a promise of new life. It blurred the lights in the tall buildings uptown and made the streets shine. Cars swished by on the avenues. A couple walking hand in hand stopped to kiss under a streetlamp on the corner of Hudson Street, oblivious to his passing. A white-haired man in a stained apron stood at the back door of a restaurant smoking a cigarette. His eyes were closed and his face turned up to receive the blessing. A stylish woman in a white raincoat with a red scarf protecting her hair gave him a look that on other nights might have turned him from his path. He stopped to buy groceries, and then walked the empty sidewalks the last few blocks west to his building at the end of Bank Street. He owned a loft on the top floor, which he had bought with money his mother had left him. It consisted of a big bedroom and bath and a big living room with exposed brick walls separated from the kitchen by a long black walnut counter.

Cassidy, his hair wet from a long, hot shower, stood at the tall west-facing windows and looked out at the river over the roofs of the piers. The rain dulled the lights of the distant New Jersey shore to a glow. A low barge slipped downstream, its bow tracked by its running lights. It was pushed by a tug with a red-and-black superstructure and a bold white “M” painted on its smokestack. Somewhere upriver a foghorn moaned. He took a sip of his martini, cold and clear, and then another, and waited for that first warming burst of alcohol in the system, the loosening of knots. Was it true what Lieutenant Tanner had said? Had he slipped? Be honest. He probably had. Too many lost nights, nights in bars and clubs, nights in strange beds. Too many lost days, the brain slowed by hangover sand in the gears. Days slid away with little to show for them. The list of witnesses to a liquor store robbery was still in his desk drawer, the people not called, one of the many things pushed off until tomorrow and then tomorrow and then tomorrow.
You're an asshole, Cassidy. Get over yourself.

Jesus, enough honesty for now. Another drink would take care of that, a drink, and then somewhere cheerful for dinner. Maybe Bello'
s
over on Bleecker, pasta and veal and a bottle of Barolo. Who could he call to join him? Maybe Brian. No. Brian would be home with his wife and daughters. Anyone else? No. All right, dinner alone with the newspaper, and then Toots Shor's. There were always people at Toots's who were glad to see him. They liked him better than he liked himself.

All right. Cut the crap.

In the end he didn't make the second drink. He scrambled eggs and made bacon and toast and ate sitting at the long counter between the kitchen and dining room. Dylan had once handcuffed him to its steel brace so she could make her escape from New York after she had been unmasked as a Soviet agent. He listened to
Steamin' with the Miles Davis Quintet
, one of the last recordings Davis did with Prestige. Davis's long melodic lines intertwined with Coltrane's energetic solos, backed by Red Garland on piano, Philly Joe Jones on drums, and Paul Chambers on bass. He drank a couple of glasses of red wine while he ate and went to bed resigned to spending the night looking at the ceiling and fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.

A dream woke him in darkness—
fragments of a fight with his brother who wasn't his brother, gunfire, trees strung with colored lights, the woodshed of the Mexican ranch of his teenage summers, but not the woodshed, a loud, droning voice full of metal.
He lay in the dark reaching for the images, but they faded away.

*   *   *

Cassidy ate breakfast at four in the morning at the Bickford's on Seventh Avenue. Two cabbies on break played gin at the corner table while a third slept with his head on his arms. An old woman, birdlike in her thinness, with flyaway white hair under a paste and rhinestone tiara, and bright red lipstick that only approximated her mouth, waved wildly from the bulwark of bags that surrounded her at a table near the door. Cassidy nodded to her, nearly a bow, and said, “How are you, Your Highness?” as he went past to take a stool at the counter. She nodded to him regally and made a gesture with her hand, a blessing. She told whoever would listen that she was Anastasia, the lost daughter of the last Tsar of the Russias, and no one in the Village said no.

The waitress brought him a cup of coffee. “What can I get you, Mike?”

“A short stack, sausage, orange juice.”

“You got it.”

“Kate, has the princess eaten?”

“A cup of coffee, a glass of water. She gives her welfare money to
her people.
No one can get her to stop.”

“Get her whatever she wants on me.”

The early edition of the
Daily News
groused that Fidel Castro refused to pledge that Cuba would join the U.S. in the Cold War against Russia. Cuba, he said, would remain neutral. A spokesman for the State Department said that there could be no neutrality in a matter this grave. With us or against us—there was no middle ground in American foreign policy.

Cassidy finished his last cup of coffee as one of the cabbies came off break and rode the man's hack uptown. The cabbie was content with silence and Cassidy was grateful for that. He loved the city in the blue predawn hours when it was at its quietest. A few optimistic taxis cruised. Trucks made their early deliveries before rush hour locked down the streets. There was almost no one on the sidewalks, a few drunks tacking home from the late-night bars near Union Square, the night cleaning crews leaving the big office buildings along Park Avenue South, early shift workers headed for the breakfast restaurants. There was more traffic around Grand Central as they went up the elevated street and through the short eastern tunnel and out onto Park Avenue. The cab turned left on 72nd Street and stopped at the corner of Fifth Avenue. Cassidy passed money over the seat back and waited for his change.

“Do you like the city?”

“What?” the driver said.

“I asked if you liked the city. It's beautiful at this time of the morning. Like some big animal just waking up and stretching. We're lucky to live here. I love it,” he said. It was easy to confess to a stranger, a man he would never have to talk to again.

The cabbie checked him in the rearview mirror. Love? What kind of whacko did he have in the backseat? “Sure. Greatest city in the world. I've never been anywhere else. Why would I go? What've they got that we don't got?”

A Parks Department truck was parked on the path at the southern end of the Conservatory Waters. A grand name for a shallow concrete oval bowl a couple of hundred feet in diameter. It was bounded by a low, curved parapet against which he used to lie to launch his sailboat, the concrete warm on his belly in the summer, and cool in the fall and spring. The bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen near the northwestern end had been put in after his time. Two men in khaki work clothes were planting flowers in a broad bed of newly turned earth near the low brick boathouse.

Barney Rose and Kevin Rotella were both in their late twenties. Rose was a tall, bony man with a shock of straw-colored hair, blue eyes, and a narrow face with an overbite that made him look like a hungry chipmunk. Kevin Rotella was a couple of inches shorter and a few pounds heavier. His dark hair was swept up into a pompadour and held in place by some goo that glistened in the light from the streetlamp overhead. He had sleepy brown eyes, bedroom eyes, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up on muscular arms, one of which sported a tattoo of the Marine Corps insignia and the words “Semper Fi.”

When Cassidy showed them his badge, Rotella put down a flat of plants he was carrying and lit a cigarette, and Rose got up from where he had been digging in the rich earth.

“What can we do for you, Officer?” Rotella asked. He accepted a cigarette from the pack Rose offered and bent to the lighter.

“Were you here Monday morning?”

“Monday? Sure. We're here, right around here, every morning Monday through Friday. It's planting season. Do you know how many plants we've got to get in the ground? A lot. What do they tell us, Barney? How many thousand?” Rotella was clearly the spokesman, a man who liked the sound of his voice.

“Twelve thousand.” Rose's voice was thin and soft, as if he did not use it much.

“There you go. Twelve thousand plants. Takes a lot of time. So why do you ask? About Monday, that is?”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary when you came on shift?”

They looked at each other. Rotella shrugged. “I don't know. Out of the ordinary like what?”

“There was a dead man sitting on a chair near the Fifth Avenue entrance. Someone shot him and then brought him into the park.”

“You're kidding.”

“We figure he was brought here around five in the morning, about when you guys went on shift.”

“We heard about a dead guy found in the park, but we didn't see nothing, did we, Barney?”

“No.”

“Nobody parked near the entrance, maybe up on the sidewalk for a few minutes?”

“We come in from the west side. The garage where we pick up the truck's over there. No reason to go over to Fifth unless we're putting in new plantings, and that won't happen till next week.”

“Okay. If you think of anything, give me a call.” He gave each of them his card and walked over to Fifth Avenue and sat on a bench just outside the park entrance. The sun now slanted light from the East River down 72nd Street. People came out of the buildings into the morning, men in suits on their way to work, women herding children off to school, teenagers still half asleep, dog walkers. Delivery vans arrived carrying food from Gristedes, dry cleaning, plumbing supplies, orders from Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue. People got off the buses at the stops on either side of the avenue. How many people had he seen in the last two hours? Hundreds. The avenue jammed with traffic as the sun rose higher and promised a warm day.

At seven thirty Seth Rutherfurd and his dog came out of 19 East. They paused for a moment on the corner, ignored the red light, and jaywalked through a break in traffic, a New York kid.

“Did you find the killer yet?” The dog sat and followed the conversation.

“No.”

“Do you know who the dead man is?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Mr. Mac remembers you at school. He says you used to get into a lot of trouble.”

“I did.”

“What did you do?”

“I was a wiseass.”

“Huh, yeah.” The boy grinned in recognition.

“It didn't do me a lot of good.”

“No.” Recognition again. The dog found little of interest in the talk. It stood and tugged at the leash. “I've got to go.”

“Okay.” Cassidy watched the boy enter the park. He got up from the bench and walked to the corner where he could see into the park. From where he stood a bush, bright with new green growth, hid where the chair and the dead man had been. Whoever the man had been left for had to go into the park to see him. Then what? You see a dead man you know. What do you do? You don't call the cops. Why not? Because you're scared. You recognize that he was left for you to see by someone who knew you would go by that spot that day. How did he know? Maybe you went by it every day. Maybe you didn't go anymore. Maybe finding the dead man meant you couldn't go back there again.

“Seth.” The boy turned to his call and waited for him while the big poodle lifted his leg on a tree. “Do a lot of the people who walk dogs walk them in the park?”

“Some do.”

“Do you walk Tinker every day?”

“Yes. Unless I'm sick or something.”

“Do you see the same people every day?”

“Mostly, I guess.”

“In the last few days has anyone been missing, anyone who usually walks when you do, but you haven't seen?”

The boy thought about it. “I don't know. I mean, we don't always come out at exactly the same time, and I guess I haven't been paying attention. You know, I don't know who they are, a lot of them. They just say hello sometimes if our dogs stop to sniff. I know the dogs better.”