Night Work (23 page)

It was too late for the graveyard-shift cops who stopped by in the morning for a pop on the way home, too early for day-shift guys, and except for a few timeless drinkers at the far end of the bar, they had the place to themselves. The bartender was an ex-cop invalided out with a hand shredded by a shotgun blast. Everyone called him Hanno, though that was not his name. It came with the place when he bought it, and he soon stopped swimming against the tide. He came and asked them what they wanted. Cassidy ordered a beer. Orso knew better than to order a martini in Hanno's and asked for a gin on the rocks. Newly had Coca-Cola. Bonner ordered a pint and a shot.

When the drinks came, Bonner dropped his shot glass of rye into the mug of beer, and upended the mug and drank till the shot glass slipped down and bumped against his teeth. He banged the empty mug down and wiped his mouth with a bar napkin and belched. “Jesus, that'll knock your dick stiff. Hanno, another.” The bartender nodded and reached for a new mug. “So what'd you think of that clusterfuck up there. Jesus christ, I hope nobody goes for this Castro asshole, because anyone really wants him, they're going to get him, and it don't matter how many cops are standing around, and then they'll be looking for someone to blame it on, and it won't be any of that daisy chain over there on Centre Street.”

“That's what Mike was saying.” Orso tasted his gin and made a face.

“Yeah? Well that's 'cause Cassidy's a bright boy. You're a bright boy, aren't you, Cassidy?” Everything Bonner said had an edge of belligerence.

“That's what my mother always told me, and she was as objective as a mother can be.”

Bonner snorted and stuck out his hand to stop the stein of beer Hanno slid down the bar. “The first time I got a look at you, you know what I thought?”

“Yes. You thought what the hell is this Park Avenue kid doing on the job.”

“That's right. That's what I thought. You see, Clive? Like I said, this is a bright boy.” Newly nodded but said nothing. “I thought what the fuck are you doing coming in to fuck up my police department? I figured you'd be gone or you'd be behind a desk in Centre Street pretty quick, but you fooled me.” He poured the shot of rye into his beer and took a slug. “You're out there knocking yourself out on the street keeping the animals in line. Good on you.”

“Are you starting a fan club?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You don't give a shit what I think. How are you doing with the stiff on the chair in the park? Getting anywhere?”

“No. No ID. His prints don't come up, so he's never been booked, wasn't in the armed services. We're waiting on a guy to come back to work to ask about the clothes he was wearing.”

“Yeah, we saw the report. Brooks Brothers, and like that.”

“Yes.”

“The guy's got workingman's hands and uptown clothes, and he's sitting on a crappy chair on Seventy-second Street with a bullet in his head. Maybe he's working up there. Newly had the idea that maybe he's a bright guy like you. Ambitious. He looks around and sees how people dress up there. He figures if he dresses like that maybe he gets more work.”

“What kind of work?”

“How the fuck do I know? People renovate their apartments, you know.” He drained the mug, slapped five dollars on the bar, and headed for the door.

Newly said, “Gentlemen,” and tipped his hat and followed.

Cassidy watched them leave. He lit a cigarette. “Okay, what was all that about?”

“He thinks you're a good cop.”

“Come on. He doesn't think anyone but he and Newly is any good.”

“No. He thinks there are maybe twenty good cops on the force. You're one of them.”

“Huh.” He was unused to praise, and did not look for it. His father showered superlatives on everyone and by doing so cheapened their value, and his mother had been brought up and trained by chilly people who assumed that everyone in
their
family would always do his best and therefore praise was unnecessary. Still, Bonner was a cop's cop, and if he thought Cassidy was a good cop, well, he had to admit, it felt good.

“What do you think of his idea that the dead man was working up there?” Orso tasted the gin again and pushed it aside unfinished. “Hey, Hanno, this stuff tastes like turpentine.”

“I've got another bottle tastes like gasoline. You want me to bring you a shot? On the house.”

“I think Bonner gave us a hint to see if we'll check it out,” Cassidy said. “If we do, even if nothing comes of it, we're okay. If we don't, he'll think we're just assholes like the rest of them.”

“Do you care what Bonner thinks?”

“He's a shit, but he's a good cop.”

“So what do we do?”

“We check it out.”

*   *   *

Orso went to check on the sanitation men who had worked the early shift the week the man was shot, and Cassidy went to the station house and worked the phones to the Department of Buildings until he had a list of people who had applied for construction permits in a six-block area near where the dead man was found. The first was a town house. It had started out as a single-family town house, was broken into apartments and was being made into a single-family home again. The foreman looked at the photograph and shook his head. “Nah. I mean maybe I've seen him around, but I don't recognize him. You're welcome to show it to the guys inside. Maybe one of them knows him.”

They didn't.

The second was in an apartment building on 73rd Street. The doorman swore he had never seen the man, and that if he hadn't seen him, the guy had never been in the building. Cassidy, unconvinced of the man's infallibility, went up to show the photograph to the workers renovating the apartment on the eighth floor. The apartment had a wonderful view over the park, but the three men ripping apart the kitchen did not recognize the dead man. There was nobody home at the third address, a four-story limestone house with an imposing door of glass and black iron near the corner of 73rd and Fifth Avenue. The fourth address held a team of Italian artisans putting in a stained-glass window who passed the photo of the dead man around like a holy relic, discussed it at length in the music of their language, agreed that they had never seen the man, and then crossed themselves in unison. The fifth and sixth addresses produced the same lack of result.

Cassidy sat on a bench against the wall outside Central Park and lit a cigarette. The sun filtered down through the trees behind him and warmed his back. For a New Yorker like Cassidy, the steady rush of traffic on Fifth Avenue was as soothing as the flow of a river. There was something he was missing, something he should have been looking for. What was it? A man is killed and left in Central Park in the early morning. The location is specific. He was put in place so someone could see him. How did the killers know that person would see him? Because it was his habit to go past that spot in the early morning. Who did that? People on their way to work? Possibly. Does someone from one of these gold coast addresses walk through Central Park to work? Unlikely. Who, then?

A young woman in blue jeans and a windbreaker came out of the park pulled by six dogs. Some were large, some small, and some in between, and they all strained forward on their leashes while she leaned back like a water skier. Her piercing whistle brought them to heel at the curb, and when the light changed, a word of command sent them out into the street, and she let them tow her across.

Dogs. What had young Seth said? Someone was missing from the usual dog-walking rotation. A woman with a red setter. How many of the apartments he had just visited had dogs? The first one, the town house, was gutted from top to bottom. No one lived there. No dog. The eighth floor apartment with the new kitchen? There had been a water bowl in the dining room on a rubber mat. For a dog or for a cat? He didn't know. There had been a dog in the apartment with the Italian glass men. He heard it yapping behind a door. No evidence of an animal in the last apartment. Across the street, the dog walker turned in at the limestone town house and keyed the door while her charges milled about in front of her. One of them was a red setter. Before Cassidy could dodge through traffic and cross the avenue, they had disappeared inside.

Five dogs were trapped in the vestibule between the outer door, with its glass and black wrought iron, and the glass and wood inner door that led to the front hall of the house. The red setter was not among them. When they saw Cassidy climb the steps, they began to bark and circle each other. A small terrier threw itself at the glass three times. Cassidy saw the young woman come into the hall from a room near the back of the house. She opened the inside door and stepped into the vestibule and said something to the dogs that quieted them. She looked out at Cassidy through the glass and bars of the front door, and her eyes widened when she recognized the badge he held up to the glass. She pointed a finger at her chest and mouthed
me
? He shook his head and shouted at the glass, “I need to talk to you.” She quieted the dogs again, opened the big door, and slipped out through a narrow opening while holding the terrier back with one foot. “Angus is the curious one,” she explained. “He gets into all kinds of mischief if you let him.”

Her name was Naomi Stern. She was an athletic young woman with a mass of curly brown hair and guileless brown eyes. She was studying at Hunter College on Park Avenue, and she picked up extra money by walking dogs. She'd been doing it for three years, and she had a group of regular clients. It was clear that she thought of the dogs as her clients, not their owners.

“Do you walk them in the morning?” Cassidy asked.

“No. Usually the owners walk them before they go off to work or whatever, and I come do a late-morning or early-afternoon walk, and that holds them until the owners get home.”

“The people who live here”—he checked his list—“Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hopkins? They have the red setter.”

“Yes. Lucky. That's his name.”

“Do you know when they get home?”

“Why? Did they do something?”

“No. They might have seen something we need help with.”

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed that there was no greater drama. “Well, they're away, and they won't be back until the end of the week, so I'm walking Lucky three times a day.”

“You have a key to the house.”

“Sure.” The perfect innocence of the innocent. “Why? Oh, I get it. I could run off with all their stuff. Is that what you think?” She was offended.

“No, no. I was just wondering how it worked. They've been having some renovation done, haven't they?”

“A pipe burst upstairs, and when they started to get it fixed, they decided to knock down a wall and do some other stuff. I think it's pretty much done now.”

“Did you ever see the men working on it?”

“I saw one of them once when I came to pick up Lucky.”

Cassidy showed her the photo. “No. The guy I saw wasn't as big as this guy. At least I don't think so. This guy looks big. The other guy had longer hair. This guy looks pretty strange. What's wrong with him?”

“He's dead.”

“Dead? Wow. What happened?” She was still young enough to be surprised by death.

“Someone shot him.”

“God, how awful.”

“When did Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins leave?”

“Uh, let's see. They left me a note for when I came to walk Lucky in the afternoon asking me to take him out in the mornings too. I was late because I had a Modern History jap.”

“Jap?”

“Yeah, you know, a surprise quiz. Like Pearl Harbor?”

“Ahh.”

“So it must have been last Friday.”

“And they left suddenly.”

“Yes, I guess so. I mean they hadn't said anything to me. But they've done that before. He goes away on business, or something, and she decides to go at the last minute. I don't mind, 'cause it means more money for me.” The dogs in the vestibule were howling in protest at their confinement. Naomi looked back at them in concern and raised a hand, but it did no good. “Is there anything else? The dogs…”

“No. Go ahead.”

She released the dogs, and Cassidy watched as they towed her down the block.

 

13

“Orso talked to the sanitation department guys, the ones who used to work the early shift up there around Seventy-second Street,” Cassidy said.

“The ones who wake me up at dawn banging the cans around?” Alice asked.

“Banging cans is part of their job. It lets the citizens know that their tax dollars are being spent on hardworking men.”

They were in a wooden booth in Chumley's on Bedford Street in the Village. The old speakeasy had been a literary watering hole since Prohibition, and the walls displayed the book jackets of the writers who came to drown their demons or prime their muses: Eugene O'Neill after he'd made enough money to upgrade from the flop houses and gin mills of the Bowery, Dos Passos, Ring Lardner, Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, Hemingway, the self-proclaimed world heavyweight champion.

The small, shaded lamp on the table cast a golden light, and Alice, half in the light and half in shadow, was beautiful and mysterious. The joint was full. Laughter rose above the hum of conversation, the rattle of silver on china, and the clink of ice in glasses, the companionable New York nighttime sounds Cassidy loved.

“There was a trash barrel twenty feet from where the dead guy was sitting, but of course they didn't notice him when they emptied it.”

“How could that be? Twenty feet.” She leaned forward to light her cigarette from the match Cassidy held.

“One thing you learn. People are blind. They walk along in their own little worlds, and they don't see anything outside those worlds. And if they do, they don't know what the hell they've seen. Four eyewitnesses will give you four different stories about what happened and four different descriptions about who did it.”