Night Work (37 page)

“Hey, I could do this one in my sleep with a butter knife and a spoon.” He drank the whiskey and put the glass down with a sigh. “Everything I like is bad for me. Michael, are you going to get the guys who did this to her?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Hurt them, the fuckers. Selena, you'll be in my dreams until I see you again.” He lifted her hand and kissed it, and pressed it against his heart, picked up his bag, and went out the door.

Cassidy went into the bedroom to check on Alice. She had turned in the bed and the covers were awry. He pulled them back around her and turned off the light on the bedside table and crouched down for a moment to smooth the hair back from her face. When he stood, Dylan was watching from the doorway. She turned away abruptly.

When he came into the living room, she had her bag over her shoulder and her hand on the door knob. “I'll see you, Michael.”

“Dylan, wait. Where are you going? Stay.”

“No. I don't think so.”

“How do I get ahold of you?”

“Uh-uh. It's okay. Everything's okay.” But her smile held regret and then she was gone.

 

23

Cassidy woke at first light, gray dawn in the windows of the bedroom and birds trilling from the cornice that ran just below the sills. Spring is here, they were insisting. Alice groaned in her sleep next to him. He slipped out of bed, careful not to wake her, and padded naked into the kitchen and put the coffee on before taking a shower. He stood by the window, a towel around his waist, and drank coffee as the sun touched the tops of the trees on the Palisades across the river. A black-and-red Moran tug had the river to itself as it towed a barge downstream toward the ocean. Seagulls circled and dove over the roofs of the piers. Early morning, when the world still seemed at peace.

Alice cried out his name from the bedroom.

He put the mug down and went to find her curled in a fetal position, her arms clasped around her stomach. He knelt by the bed and put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and looked at him with wide, frightened eyes. “I thought you'd gone. I thought I was alone.”

“No.”

“Alone.” Full of anguish. The worst thing in the world.

“No. I'm right here.” He put an arm around her and she buried her face against him, and he could feel her tears on his chest. When he shifted his arm, she gasped in pain. “I'm sorry,” he said, no comfort at all.

“They hurt me. They really hurt me. They wouldn't stop. I told them I didn't have it, but they wouldn't stop.”

“It's all right. They won't be back. It's over. You're going to be all right.” Silly, useless words against her pain and fear. “Here, the doctor left you some pills. Take a pill. It'll help.” He refilled her glass from the jug on the bedside table and supported her while she sat up and took the pill.

“I have to go to the bathroom.” The pain drained the blood from her face when he helped her out of the bed, and he could see that she clenched her jaw against crying, but a moan escaped. He put an arm around her waist, and she leaned against him as they navigated to the bathroom. When she saw herself in the mirror, she gasped. Her face was swollen and livid, and one of her eyes was blackened, and there was dried blood at the corner of her mouth. Her torso and stomach were bruised and there was a place on her arm that looked like someone had ground it with a rasp. She put a hand on the sink to steady herself and pulled his arm from around her waist. “Go away. You can't look at me like this. Go away.”

“It's all right, Alice. Just let me…”

“Go away, Michael. Go away. Leave me alone. Don't look at me. Don't look at me. Just please go away.”

He started to protest, to offer help, but he saw that she did not want it, so he left, closing the door as he went. He heard the shower start as he was dressing. It was still running when he went into the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. The men who had come to beat her here in his apartment had no fear of Cassidy as a cop and no fear of Frank Costello, so Costello's power in the Mob was waning. Other men were rising, Vito Genovese, who had tried to have Costello killed in 1956, Carlo Gambino, once a Costello underboss who wanted to move up, and Meyer Lansky, always Meyer Lansky, the little man who loved numbers.

He heard the shower stop. A few minutes later she called for him. She was in bed propped up on the pillows. The shades were down and the curtains drawn, and the room was as dark as she could make it, but there was still enough light to see the bruises on her face. He sat on the side of the bed and she took the mug of coffee he had brought her. “Thank you.”

“How are you?”

“Better. The hot water helped, and the pill is working.”

“Good. You'll hurt today and maybe tomorrow, and you'll be stiff, but it will get better every day.” Knowledge hard won from beatings he had suffered. What he knew and what she now knew was that the beatings connected you back to the animal we were before we had the language to talk about fear and death, when waking moments were spent attuned to threats, the rustle in the underbrush, the click of shifting pebbles, the hints of dangers that were waiting to snatch you out of life. Once you had been there, it was hard to come all the way back. Once you had been there, you were forever aware that the veneer of civilization was too thin to trust.

She sipped the coffee and studied him over the rim. “Will they come back?”

“No, they won't, but just to be sure I'll call the precinct over on Perry and have them station a patrolman outside the building.”

“Thank you.” She drank more of the coffee and then handed him the mug to put on the bedside table. “The woman who came in, the one with the gun, she was with you in Havana at the Tropicana on New Year's Eve.”

“Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“Her name is Dylan McCue.”

“She saved my life. I was about to give up. I was just going to let go. I could feel myself slipping, and I was just going to let go, because I couldn't take it anymore. And then she came in. Michael, why did she have a gun? Who is she? Is she a cop?”

“Yes. In a way.” How to explain Dylan? Best to let it go.

She yawned. “Wow, that pill is strong.” Her voice softened and slurred. “You won't go until you call for a cop, will you?”

“No. I'll stay until he's downstairs.”

“Michael.”

“Yes.”

“They really hurt me.” She sounded almost surprised.

“I know.”

“I want to thank her.” Her voice blurred.

“I'll tell her.”

“Good.” She closed her eyes.

*   *   *

Cassidy met Orso at the coffee shop on Lexington with the good muffins and the counterman with a pint of rye in his apron. Orso was in the back booth hunched over a mug of coffee. He had the sullen look of a man with a hangover. His face was raw from Fuentes's assault, and the line of black stitches made the skin at the corner of his mouth seem paler than usual. He still wore the suit he had worn the day before, and there were dark patches of dried blood on his shirt. He was usually a fastidious man, and Cassidy wondered what was making him slide. “What the hell happened to you?” He asked as Cassidy slid into the booth across from him.

Cassidy reflexively touched the abrasion high on his forehead. “Somebody kicked me while I was tied up in a sack.”

“One of those nights, huh? You've got to find a better class of people to run around with.”

The counterman came with a basket of muffins and a mug of coffee for Cassidy. He slipped the pint of rye from his pocket and put it on the table. “You guys look like you could use this.” Then he went away.

Orso poured whiskey in their mugs. “So, tell.”

Cassidy told him about the missing half million, the men trying to beat information out of Alice, and Dylan's rescue.

“Who were the three guys?” Orso asked.

“Longo and Carelli, and the new bagman, Jimmy Greef. Do you know him, Greef?”

“Jimmy Greef? There was a Big Sal Greef ran numbers for Anastasia awhile back. He ended up in the river. I think he had a son. Could be this guy. You going to go back at them?”

“Yes. When I get the chance, I will.”

“Half a million dollars. Jesus, what I could do with that.” He shook his head, a mistake that made him wince.

“Yeah, wine, women, and song, and then you'd waste the rest.”

“You don't know what the fuck I'd do with it. You've got money, so the stuff doesn't matter to you. You don't have a fucking idea what it's like not to have it.”

“Whoa, easy. I was just making a joke.” Where'd that anger come from?

“You think I can get anyone in the family to help with the old lady? My mother's going to end up in some fucking county ward.”

“I thought your father's insurance money was going to take care of that.”

“Yeah? Well, it's not. Okay? It's not.”

“Tony, if you need help, come to me.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay. Yeah, I know you do. I'm sorry. That fucking spic kicked the shit out of me yesterday. I had a couple too many pops at Toots's and slept in the back room there. I woke up feeling like shit. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. Any word on Fuentes?”

“No, he's still on the dangle.”

“I'm going to go talk to Jane Hopkins about Casey Allen. I've got a few questions. Other than that we've got nothing till this evening. Why don't you take the day, get some rest?”

“Yeah, I might do that.”

“I'll check with Clarkson's office, but I don't think we're on till five. We can meet at the house and walk over to where they're setting up for Castro.”

“Yeah. Good. Okay. Look, I'm sorry about going off on you. I've been kind of nervy these last few weeks.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“All right. Thanks.” Orso heaved himself to his feet, touched Cassidy on the shoulder as he went by, and left the diner. Cassidy watched him go and wondered what was eating him. It couldn't just be his mother's finances. Even if the insurance she got from her late husband wasn't much, she owned her house outright, and that had to be worth something. But what did he know about the pressures of too little money? He had always had more than enough, and he had been brought up to regard it with a certain disdain. It was hard for him to believe that money was grinding Orso, but it didn't matter. He would cover for his partner the way Orso had covered for him during the first couple of months when he came back from Cuba and was trying to drive Dylan out of his head with booze and women.

Dylan. Where was she? He wanted to see her. He wanted to talk to her, to be with her.
Stop. Don't think about her. There is nothing there but pain.

He returned what was left in the bottle to the counterman, paid the bill, and went out into a day that was turning warm. Big cotton clouds floated above the building tops, and the breeze that came off the river was warm. He stopped at a phone booth on the corner and called the hotel where Castro and his people were staying and asked for Ribera's room. His excuse was to talk about Castro's rally that night in Central Park, but he knew that the real reason was to ask Ribera how he could get in touch with Dylan.

Which rules, the head or the heart?

Ribera did not answer the phone.

*   *   *

Cassidy rang the bell at the Hopkins house on 73rd Street. A maid in a black uniform appeared from the back of the house. She opened the barred front door, and Cassidy explained who he was, and she let him wait in the living room while she went to find Mrs. Hopkins. The room was dim and cool, and though the traffic on Fifth Avenue was no more than twenty yards away, it could barely be heard through the thick stone walls. The house was in the middle of a big, raucous city, but it was as quiet and private as a hilltop in the country. If you had enough money you could live like this where nothing could touch you. An illusion, he knew, but it was an illusion people wanted and paid for.

The scrabble of toenails on the marble of the hall announced the arrival of the red setter, Lucky, who approached Cassidy eagerly, sniffed him to make sure he was not an impostor, and then butted his hand for affection. Cassidy scratched his head and watched Jane Hopkins enter the room. She wore a dark green dress of some light material. The top was cut low and held up by two straps, and the full skirt molded to her legs when she walked. She looked bright, fresh, and clean, as if she had just been taken out of the box. Lucky saw that he was going to be ignored, and went to lie on a throw rug in front of the fireplace.

“Michael, how nice of you to drop by. To what do I owe the pleasure? Have you come to accuse me of bank robbery or murder?” She threw it away like a bright line from a Broadway play. She brushed his cheek with a kiss, sat down on the sofa, and leaned forward to take a cigarette from the silver box on the coffee table, giving him a chance to look down the front of her dress. She held the cigarette expectantly between two fingers until he dug his Zippo from his pocket and lit it. “Now, darling, don't loom over me. Come sit.” She patted the sofa cushion next to her, but Cassidy chose a chair across from her where he could watch her face while they talked. She looked disappointed and said, “I don't bite, you know.”

“That's not what I've heard.”

She smiled, and then snapped her even, white teeth together with an audible click. She was used to tipping men off balance, and she enjoyed it. “What happened to your face? Have you been in a fight? Should I ask how the other guy looks?”

“I never saw him.”

“What an interesting life you lead, Michael Cassidy.”

“Let's talk about Casey Allen.”

“Fine. Let's.”

“The day that he was killed, Friday, you told me you and your husband left on a planned trip to San Francisco.”