THE PLASTER HAND WITH THE scarlet nails hovered above the playing cards, the head with its thick black hair in braids rocked back and forth with indecision, then hand and head stopped, the yellow light bulb snapped off, and a small blue card dropped from the slot. The plaster eyelids clicked shut.
Life may seem humdrum at the moment but cheer up! The future holds many interesting moments. You have a romantic disposition which may have gotten you in trouble in the past, but you are about to find a new love who will be your TRUE love! A friend wields a great deal of influence in your life. Changes coming soon. You have fine taste in clothing, causing many people to envy you. Drop another nickel in the slot and I will tell more.
Cassidy read the card. How much more could there be, anyway? He dropped it in his pocket, finished the hot dog, wiped a mustard stain from the clothes everybody envied so much, and looked back at the traffic and sunshine on 42nd Street. Half the men were wearing uniforms. He felt suspect without one, like a secret Section Eight who had long conversations with lampposts and the angel Gabriel. The pinball machines clanged and rang and banged all around him. The arcade was full of sailors, a day’s shore leave. Kids. Killing time, waiting. He stood on the sidewalk, watching the Danbury Hotel across the street. It wasn’t the Waldorf. There were full-time residents, who made book out of the lobby, and the room-by-the-hour crowd who liked to gum up the sheets and give the springs a workout.
And then—he saw him moving like a tollbooth through the sunlit, blinking crowd—there was Harry Madrid in a double-breasted gray suit and a Panama hat which had seen a lot of first summery days since coming north. He passed the pawnshop, turned into the lobby of the Danbury, and went to the elevator cage unwrapping a King Edward. The tiles on the floor were chipped and the dust on the potted palms was thick enough to autograph.
Cassidy crossed to the desk and paid the counterman five dollars for the double-breasted gray suit’s room number. He went upstairs knowing too late he’d have gotten the number for a buck. But he was new to this and had to go by what he’d seen tough guys do in the movies.
Madrid was still wearing his suit coat when he answered the knock. The hat was on the bed. The telephone was off the hook. He looked at Cassidy through the smoke from his King Edward, squinting, eyes small and shining, piggish. “You,” he growled, “I wanna see.” He turned back to the telephone, said something, slammed the receiver down. “How’d you know I was here? Nobody knows I’m here.”
“Just wanted to stop by, tell you how sorry I was about Bert. Do they know who did it?”
“Don’t kid a kidder, Lew. Bert was just one more fart in a very big windstorm. A popgun in the big war. The hell with him.”
“Softie.”
Madrid ground out his cigar and tugged a pipe from his pocket, then a yellow oilskin pouch. “Bauman’s cigars ruin all these other things for you.” He fingered tobacco into the bowl; the first puff filled the room with the cloying cherry smell.
“Too bad about Markie Cookson, too.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” Madrid said with a shrug of his massive shoulders. “Heard he’s gone missing … he’ll turn up. His kind always turn up.”
“Not this time, Harry. When you and Bert kill ’em, the bastards stay dead. Like Rocco’s boys down on the shore. You’ve been up to mischief, Harry. I want to know when and where it’s gonna stop … you and me being partners with old Tom and Mr. Lucky. I get worried the way you’re killing people, setting up your own little operation here. All of a sudden I’m getting all faint and girlish at the thought of you free-lancing from a posh place like this … I’m wondering if maybe I’d better remember who my friends are—maybe I’d better go tell Max and Terry what this looks like to me. Dog’s breakfast, Harry. Feel like I’m stepping in it …”
“Your mouth,” Harry Madrid said, “it’s running overtime. You could talk yourself into an early grave—”
“That’s my Harry.”
“You knew I was here. You get the idea somewhere Cookson’s croaked … you’re beatin’ your gums about Rocco’s hoods … You come here and throw a spitter like Bert at me, think I’ll go for it. So Bert shot off his yap to you before you and Terry killed him—hell, it’s a sorry old world, Lew. Football players should stick to being heroes. Take an expert’s word for it. Siddown, Lew.”
A warm breeze fluttered the curtains ten stories above 42nd. He sat in the ancient Morris chair while Harry Madrid poured Old Crow shots into a couple of glasses.
“It’s too late,” Cassidy said. “I’m not a hero anymore. The heroes are all gone now, busy elsewhere; hadn’t you heard?” The bourbon didn’t sit so well with the hot dog.
“Nobody left but us villains, is that it?”
“I think Bert’s death was an accident,” Cassidy said.
Madrid chuckled through the smoke. It circled around his broad fatherly face. A cop of the old school. A flatfoot, Terry used to call him. “Why not? Shot himself three, four times and keeled over. Sounds reasonable. I guess Markie’s death was an accident, too. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Markie’s dead …”
“Let’s,” Cassidy said. “That must have been quite a scene in Markie’s bedroom, Harry. The blue lights, the mirror over the bed, the movie camera, the handcuffs on the big pecker—did you think to film it? Big round bed, all his doodads. So you got fed up with him, maybe you couldn’t break him, so you rammed him up against the wall and blew his head off, very messy; you should have cleaned off the wall. You dumped him off the Jersey shore.”
“Lemme tell you about Markie, Lew. For the sake of argument, y’know. You got a minute?”
“For you? Sure.”
“I been watching Terry for a long time. Watching and thinking about the way your pal Terry lives, how he operates. Then Luciano starts going on about him … now Terry’s playing this big part in my life. And I want him out of it altogether, see. But I can’t quite catch him at the bad stuff. When I get him, I gotta get him good. He’s a cop on the take but half the cops in this town have a Max Bauman somewhere. I hadda do better than a gangster with a fat roll for payoffs … well, Terry never shoulda hooked up with the fat man. I could see him playing ball with Max, but with a pansy like Cookson? Unnatural. Then that kid plugs Terry and I smoke my pipe and keep thinkin’. If this little bumboy Derek Boyce had really killed Sylvester Aubrey Bean, Herrin might have hated Terry for screwing up the course of true love, but he wouldn’t of shot him like that. So I get to thinkin’ maybe Herrin knew Boyce was innocent, the fall guy that Terry set up to spare the real killer the aggravation of going to the chair. I investigate a little on my own time like and it turns out Markie was not only screwing around with this Boyce character … but Markie was also the main purveyor of dope to the queers—how ’bout that! sez I to myself. It hits me that Markie was tight with all these guys, particularly with the very rich Mr. Bean. But old Terry’s investigation skips all that, settles right on Boyce. But there were all sorts of links between the fat man and Bean … turns out Bean’s place was full of Markie’s fingerprints, even some mash notes he’d written Bean … and there were some pictures of a fat man in a mask whipping the shit out of Bean while Derek Boyce watched like a retard. Well, it don’t take Holmes and Watson to figure out that Bean was the victim of what would you like to call it? An excess of enthusiasm, boyish high spirits? They were all hooked on dope, on this creepy witch stuff, all boys together—following me, Lew?”
“At a safe distance,” Cassidy said.
“Terry figured the fat man was too good to waste on the ’lectric chair, doncha see? So he gave ’em a nutsy little fairy like Boyce and kept Markie out of it. Let’s say the fat man was no ingrate.” Harry Madrid tamped the hot ash down into the bowl with a thickly callused fingertip. “Now, Lew, you gotta admit that sending Boyce to the lion’s den was a bad thing to do … I had a damn good case, hypothetical I know, on Cookson, and Terry was right in the middle of it … so I kept gnawing on it, like this bull terrier I got when he gets after a juicy soupbone, and whattaya know, I’m only part of the way home … Terry’s Max Bauman’s boy. And what’s Max’s big crop? Dope. Reefers, coke, heroin … and the fat man was the supplier to the queers. Which makes Terry the middleman taking a helluva cut from Markie’s cost. Now I know for damn sure that Terry wants Markie out of jail … and there’s a chance that Markie has kept a record of his payoffs to Terry so he can bargain with the coppers the day everybody comes knockin’ at his door. Everybody’s ass-deep in this and Markie’s got his own little insurance policy against the rainy day.” Harry Madrid smiled comfortably like a man who has seen the light after a long time in the darkness with everybody else. “Terry’s a bad man,” he said, puffing. “Now, if I can figure out Markie’s having an insurance policy, then so can Terry … but why did Terry decide to pick up that insurance policy now? You got me there—”
“A sixth sense,” Cassidy said.
“Terry must of found all the records of the payoffs because I sure as hell didn’t. And I figure Terry killed Bert because Bert was there following my orders—to bring me the stuff that would incriminate Terry. Don’t tell me a shitload of lies, okay? Life’s too short. So Terry’s got the evidence and I’m back where I started … it’s a game for chrissakes, Lew, don’t look at me like that. You know about games. Look at your leg, that was a game. Well, this is our game, Terry’s and mine, and Terry’s losin’. He may not think so, but he’s losin’ and the other guys have got the ball. You’d do well to remember that, Lew. I want Terry. Lucky wants Terry. He’s a dead man … and you’re the only guy with any chance, any chance, of getting him out alive. Want me to be honest with you? I don’t think you can do it, kid. Now, what the hell do you want? You didn’t tell me how you got here.”
“I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on,” Cassidy said. “I have to hear everybody’s lies. What was that number you pulled with Rocco’s boys—”
“Don’t look at me. Gangland massacre. I’m clean.”
“You, Harry? Clean?” Cassidy shook his head.
Madrid stood up, knocked his pipe out on the windowsill. The wind whipped the ashes out into space. “Everybody’s dirty so far as I can see. You’re not getting any cleaner yourself, Lew.” He grinned. “Forget Rocco’s boys. Look at it this way, the world’s a better place without them. Whoever killed them, he oughtta get a medal.” The grin turned into a small laugh.
“I saw you kill ’em,” Cassidy said.
“Did you at that? Well, you know what I think? I think it was a vision, Lew. Or the DTs maybe.”
“You came in a motor launch, you came up out of the dunes to the parking lot and opened up on ’em. I saw it happen.”
“No kidding? Anybody else see me do this?”
Cassidy stared into the hard little eyes.
“I mean, hell, Lew. Uncorroborated testimony …” Madrid shrugged. “People, they’re seein’ things all the time, things that never happened … it’s just one of those things.” His hand was on the doorknob. A sepia picture hung on the flowered paper beside the door. A frontiersman was standing up in a canoe while an Indian paddled. At least he had a paddle. “I’ll be in touch. We’re still counting on you, Lew. Give us Terry and Max, we might throw Terry back.” He held his pipe in his hand,” chuckling as he closed the door.
Waiting for the elevator, Cassidy wondered just where the interview had gone wrong. Sometimes you had the feeling that you were the only one who ever got surprised. He was glad to get through the musty lobby. But he was standing in front of the pawnshop, staring at a team photograph of the ’07 Yale footballers without really seeing it, when he felt a very large paw on his shoulder.
Bennie the Brute said, “Lew.”
“Well”—Cassidy looked at the polka-dot bow tie—“I don’t know why I should be surprised. How are you, Bennie?” He felt like something caught in a powerful vortex he could only partly control. He could beat his tiny fists on the windowpanes, make a noise, pretend it made a difference, and then a hand as big as his head would drop on his shoulder. Nothing surprised him anymore. Except the belief that he still had some control.
“Don’t be alarmed, Lew.”
“All right, Bennie. I won’t.”
“You looked alarmed for a second there, Lew. Mr. Bauman would like to see you.” He nodded back along the curb where the Chrysler sat like a huge cream puff. He gently touched Cassidy’s elbow, the slightest pressure. “We been following you, Lew. You shouldn’t hang around with guys like Mr. Madrid.”
“That’s good, Bennie, really good. Harry thinks his Danbury office is a secret.”
“Looks like Harry’s wrong again. He’s all wet about a lot of things.” He opened the rear door and Cassidy got in beside Max Bauman. Bennie waited patiently until Cassidy’s leg was tucked in, then closed the door with a heavy solid click.
They were slowly heading uptown after Bennie had made a left. Horns were honking and children were holding balloons and the pretty girls were out in their summer dresses.
Max Bauman shook Cassidy’s hand, leaned back, and looked out at the crowds of girls on their lunch hour and soldiers and sailors wandering through the city most of them had never seen before. They were only at the beginning. They were going to see a lot of things they’d never seen before and die in places they’d never dreamed of and maybe some of them would even get back to New York someday and try to remember the young men they’d been so long ago.
“I’m a direct man,” Bauman said, “when it comes to business. But let me ask you a question before we get down to cases. What business do you have with a rascal like Harry Madrid?”
Cassidy was waiting for an elaboration on the question. None came. “Condolences about Bert Reagan. That was my business with him.”
“Strong feelings to inspire you to go to his little undercover headquarters. He’s working with the FBI now. Isn’t that amazing, Lew?”
“Amazing.”
“How did you know where to find him, Lew?”
“Bert mentioned it once, I think. Look, what the hell is this, Max?”
“Take my advice, Lew. Wash your hands of this man, this Harry Madrid. He has a bad history.”
“I don’t get the point of this—”
“Harry Madrid is tampering in my business, Lew. He is trying to upset what I like to think of as the natural order of things. I will not stand for it. I refer, of course, to the coldblooded murders of my associates from Florida. Terry tells me you personally saw him … after the shooting was over. A massacre—”
“Harry said I was having a vision—”
“He knows you saw what happened?”
Cassidy nodded.
“And how did he come by that information?”
“I just told him.”
“You told him. Now, that is amazing.” Max stared out the window. He didn’t sound amazed. “In a way, it would be possible to make a case for Harry Madrid believing he was only doing his job. Perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt. Do you think I should give Harry Madrid the benefit of the doubt?”
“I don’t feel all that warmly toward Harry.”
“I am sincerely glad to hear this from your own lips, Lew. Because I have no intention of giving Harry Madrid anything but possibly a cement necktie. So you wonder why don’t I do it? It would be child’s play. I know about his hotel office, I know about his connection with Mr. Hoover’s bureau, I know about his friendship with certain criminal elements … You may not believe this, Lew, but Harry Madrid was a bagman—yes, as God is my witness—a bagman for a fellow I’ve known a long time, a man who has grown twisted and evil with the years … Lucky Luciano! Yes, Harry Madrid would do anything for Lucky. Until Lucky ran into some bad luck …” He leaned forward, tapped Bennie’s shoulder. “Through the park, Bennie. Lovely day. Trees leafing out.” He reached across and tapped Cassidy’s knee. “That’s the kind of man Harry Madrid is. When he murdered my associates from Florida, the thought crossed my mind—he is doing this terrible thing for Lucky Luciano. Luciano torments me from his prison cell!”
Bennie swung across 59th and glided into the park. The racket of the city faded. “Look at those squirrels, Lew. They planned ahead, they stored up nuts for the long winter, and they survived. They were vigilant. Survival is all. Goddammit!” His calm burst like a ruptured blood vessel. His face splotched with anger; saliva welled in the corners of his mouth. “Rocco, a man I’ve done business with for twenty years! Rocco thought I had his men murdered—me! It’s like one of the Bard’s bloody histories! Well, Lew, I convinced him it wasn’t me … he bought something from me, a first order of some of my goods, you might say, and he paid me a million dollars … well, I let him keep the goods and I gave him back the million! Just to show him I had nothing to do with the massacre—that we were still pals! Now,” he sighed, struggling to control himself, “you’d think that would be bad enough, wouldn’t you, Lew?”
“Bad enough,” Cassidy agreed.
“But the worst is yet to come.” He took a deep breath, a man going off the high dive. “Somebody told Madrid those men would be there … somebody told him I would be there! Harry Madrid could have killed me. And Rocco, for that matter. If we hadn’t changed our plans at the last minute. Listen to me, Lew.” Veins pulsed in the forehead and Cassidy looked away, found the bloodshot eyes. Not a great improvement. “I have been betrayed! The fucking serpent is at my boson, Lew.”
Cassidy nodded. He didn’t want to ask the name of the serpent. The car seemed full of them.
Bauman whispered, “Did Terry betray me, Lew?”
“You must be joking—”
“Do I strike you as a man who’s joking?”
Cassidy shook his head.
“I want to know if Terry is betraying me. I want you to find out … don’t spare my feelings, Lew. If a man has a cancer, he wants to know. The cancer must be cut out. And if Terry is true to me as ever, well, I’ll make it up to him. Lew, I’m at a loss … there was no one else I could come to.” His tongue flicked along dry, cracked lips. It was his lizard impression. “You’ve played ball for my team, you’ve given everything. I trust you, Lew.”
“All right. I’ll see what I can do, Max.”
“You don’t sound happy. But do your best. I’ll do something nice for you, Lew.”
Cassidy got out of the car near the Metropolitan Museum. He said he wanted to do some walking, give his leg some exercise. Once he leaned down at the window.
“Max, you’re forgetting someone else who could have set you up.”
“Oh? Now, who would that be?”
“Who benefited most?”
“What are you saying?”
“Rocco himself. Gunsels are a dime a dozen. Kill expendable men of your own to prove your innocence.”
Bauman’s face grew pinched and red again, as if he’d just swallowed something with hair on it.
“Just a thought,” Cassidy said, stepped back from the car, watched it slip into the Fifth Avenue traffic. He didn’t know who had tipped Madrid. But there were a great many possibilities, Rocco being merely the one he thought Max would find most confusing.
Jesus, he wished people would stop asking him to spy on Terry …
“Here’s to you, amigo.” Terry lifted his glass. “You saved my life on that staircase. Reagan would have iced me without batting an eye.” Night had fallen on Park Avenue, the lights were shining in the windows, and you could smell summer coming. Terry was looking like a millionaire. He wore a maroon-and-blue-striped robe with padded shoulders from Sulka. Navy blue pajamas. He got Cassidy settled on the couch with his leg up on a hassock and brought him a hefty Scotch. There was something comforting about watching him play with the silver ice tongs and hearing the solid clicking of the cubes in the crystal. Everybody was after Terry but Terry didn’t know it. Ignorance was bliss. But he knew somebody was after him. Harry Madrid was always out there, barking, clawing. Which one of them, he wondered, watching Terry enjoying himself, was in the cage? Remembering Harry’s remarks, watching Terry, you began to realize how raw Terry must have rubbed the old copper.
“You got me out of the soup, amigo,” Terry said again, tilting his glass at Cassidy once more.
“So you owe me an explanation,” Cassidy said. “We’d better get it out of the way.”
He sat on a stool at the bar. He was grinning in a lopsided way, making a major production of clipping and lighting one of Max’s cigars. It was built along the lines of a rifle barrel. Glenn Miller was stringing the pearls on the record player.
“All right,” he said. “Fella risks his life for you, fella gets an explanation. Reagan and Madrid had some of this figured out, I don’t deny that. Markie was a generous, grateful soul when it came to services rendered. Technically I was on the take … but that’s not quite as bad as it sounds. What Harry’s been doing—hell, guys have been telling me this for months, you can’t keep a secret among a bunch of cops—he’s been poking around the Sylvester Bean murder, trying to pin it on Markie … and on me for covering up for Markie. Well, the fact is Markie didn’t have a damn thing to do with Bean’s murder. He had a crush on him at one time but that didn’t come into it. Harry was adding two and two and crapping out. Derek Boyce killed Bean, though my own guess is that he was too hopped up to know what the hell he was doing. Raggedy Ann and Andy time, y’know? I figure Bean got Boyce high as King Kong on the Empire State Building and said he wanted to be tortured in a nice genteel way. A little gentlemanly sadism, that’s what Bean enjoyed.”
“Masochism,” Cassidy said.
“All comes down to the same thing. Anyway, Boyce was listening to voices from out near Jupiter somewhere and got carried away. That’s my guess. Boyce’s brain was a piece of green cheese by the time we got him. Anyway, he was the right guy. Harry was chasing the wild goose.
“Markie was questioned during the investigation, no favoritism. But I treated him like a human being—not Harry’s style—and he appreciated that. I could have turned the whole thing into a Page One Extra. I mean, hell, Markie and Bean were old pals, belonged to the same coven of witches, probably had their robes run up by the same mysterious gypsy woman. Yeah. I peeled the scab off all this witchcraft stuff but what was the point in scaring the pants off everybody? Hell, they’re just a bunch of harmless loonies. Markie knew I could have blown the gay world to smithereens if I’d been out to grab some headlines. But he watched and he saw me keep my word. I didn’t make the poor old fairies the scapegoats, I sat on the lid and made it tight.
“Markie was a sweet guy, really. He told me he’d like to show his thanks. You think I’d turn him down?”
Cassidy interrupted: “You did take it, then? And the drug side, Markie supplying the gay community?”
“Markie moved some reefers, some coke, sure. I put him in touch with Max on that. It was between them. Look, Markie was buying a friend on the inside and I let him. He felt better and safer. And I sure put the cash to good use. What the hell? Nobody got hurt, amigo.”
“What are you talking about, Terry? Nobody got hurt? What about dear sweet old Markie?”
“You know what I mean. Nobody got hurt in my deal with Markie. Sure, Harry killed him but that’s different. Harry’s psycho. He’s obsessed with me. With getting me. Markie was a natural victim, Harry’s a predator.”
“He’s a monster.”
Terry nodded philosophically, watching the Havana grow an ash. “Well, you gotta know Harry. Personality quirk. He figures some guys are expendable. And Markie was expendable because he was a hophead and a fairy. Harry’s sort of old school about that. Traditionalist. The way old Harry looks at things there’s only one thing worse than fairies and that’s cops who get above their station, a show-off cop … like me. Not a cop on the take—just the show-offs. A cop who thinks he’s smarter than the system. Well, hell, I am smarter.”
“But Markie’s dead,” Cassidy said. “The money tree’s been cut down.”
“Well, the same thought occurred to me, believe it or not. And I’ve been thinking. I can’t make a living being an honest cop. This lousy job has forced me into taking money from people to create the illusion that they have a tame cop … and I can’t even give them honest value. So”—he slid down off the stool and began changing the stack of records on the changer spindle—“so I’ve decided to rethink the situation. I want to hear your thoughts about the future. What should the kid do with his life?”
“Punt.”
Terry laughed. He was so damned happy, so intensely alive, dancing along the abyss. For a moment Cassidy couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t share it. But he kept laughing at all the beasts in his dark night, his eyes twinkling, moving around the room, reflected in the mirrors, swirling an imaginary girl to the Glenn Miller records.
Bean, Boyce, Herrin, Markie, his little nameless boyfriend, Irvie Bauman on the Yorktown, five gunsels blown to shit in a parking lot … They were all dead but there was a war on and people were dying everywhere. And nothing was the way it had been once and it would never be again. Karin was fading, the love-light fading like a beautiful song, and he’d told another woman he loved her …
Terry lifted his glass again, managed to stop laughing, tears on his cheeks. “To absent friends!” he said and began to laugh again.
Without quite realizing why, Cassidy heard himself laughing along with Terry, as if there were some great joke.
One morning in May, walking in Central Park with the city’s towers rising in a balmy haze around them, Cassidy asked a question that had been on his mind since Max had made his crazy suggestion about Terry’s betraying him. There hadn’t been any contact with Max and Bennie for a couple of weeks. Max and Cindy were said to have gone to Los Angeles on the train. If they had, Bennie had certainly gone with them.
“Somebody had to tip Madrid so he could stage his little wake-up party in the parking lot. Who would you bet on?”
Terry leaned on a railing, staring down into a lake, staring at the man he saw looking back. He was still drawing his NYPD check and probably a retainer from Max. But he was looking around for something else. Maybe the face in the lake had an answer.
“Well, it all depends, doesn’t it? If they figured Max and Rocco were gonna be there, then you gotta ask yourself who wants to climb over Max and Rocco … if it was a question of putting away some of Rocco’s infantry, it’d look like Max was the source. Whatta you think, sport?”
“I think whoever did it set it up thinking Max was going to be there, then it was too late to change it.”
“Narrows the field,” Terry said thoughtfully. “Who’s got a motive? Motive and opportunity, that’s all a cop ever thinks about. Well, we don’t really know who had opportunity ’cause we don’t know who all might have known about the meeting … but it’s not so hard to think of motive. Money’s a motive, power’s a motive; that’s what matters to guys like Max and Rocco. And, believe me, Lew, the plot hardly ever changes. Thing like what happened in Jersey, it’s always some guy who figures it’s his turn, he’s waited long enough. The serpent in the bosom.” Terry grinned.
It was the second time Cassidy had been told about the serpent in the bosom. “So who are you nominating?”
“Obvious,” Terry said. “But none of our affair—”
“Who?”
“It’s always the closest person to you, the Judas. The traitor is always the one you trust the most …”
“Who?”
“Bennie,” Terry Leary said.
It was all a puzzle and the problem was you couldn’t be sure what was really important. Cassidy could identify the players without a program. That wasn’t the problem. What mattered was getting a picture of the connections. But they were all blurred.
Terry and Harry Madrid were both cops, had worked together, you’d think they were on the same side. But they weren’t. Terry had already killed one cop with the gun strapped inside his pants leg and it looked like Harry was willing to do damn near anything to put Terry down.
Terry worked for Max Bauman … but Max thought Terry was betraying him … to Harry Madrid, of all people. And Harry was working with a hotshot politician like Tom Dewey and the biggest mobster of all, Luciano, to bring Max Bauman down, to put Dewey in Albany, and to get Luciano out of the slammer. And Luciano was in line to get Terry, too.
Max thought Harry Madrid was a scoundrel, at least partially because he’d been a bagman for Luciano in the old days. Conversely, Max’s good right hand was Bennie the Brute … and Terry figured Bennie was in fact the serpent Bauman felt writhing at his bosom.
And Cassidy was supposed to be watching Terry for Madrid and Bauman while he was in fact the only player on the field who was betraying Max … and Max trusted him. Betrayal—because Cassidy had fallen for Cindy Squires, who belonged to Max. But even that hadn’t gone unnoticed. Bennie the Brute had seen it coming all along.
It was a puzzle.
And in Cassidy’s eyes nothing was more puzzling than Cindy Squires and his feelings for her. He hadn’t seen her or had word from her since the night at the shore. The longer her silence, the more he thought about her. He played their conversation again and again in his mind, all of it, so often sticking on her harsh judgments of herself, or on the image of the little girl sitting swinging her legs on the country gravestone, or on her pleas for help, the arrangement she’d suggested …
He spent too damn much time thinking about her, which was dumb in several ways. She was Max Bauman’s girl. Which made all the other reasons unimportant. But he thought of her adolescent’s breasts and the sturdy width of her hips and the sapphire eyes and the voice that stayed on one note so much of the time. After a while he began consciously trying to push her out of his mind, exercising what passed for his will. He didn’t mention her to Terry, didn’t ask Terry if he’d seen her. Sometimes he’d find a matchbook on the coffee table and Terry’d have been to Heliotrope. But Cassidy didn’t ask and he didn’t go to Heliotrope. But he read his Bleak House …
And he’d think about Karin, too. He’d think about the downy hair on her tan arms and he’d get out the photo albums and look at them for hours. Karin on the ice back in ’36. Karin with Paul Cassidy outside the Beverly Wilshire. Karin, Lew, and Terry on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City … a great many pictures. And he’d close his eyes and see her on the day she’d left to go back to Germany, all dressed up in a navy blue suit with white piping and blue and white spectators. He’d taste her lipstick and her tears and kiss the hair at her temples and kiss her delicate ears and she’d whisper things in German and then he’d fall asleep and dream of her and wake up afraid he’d never see her again.
As summer crept up on them, the last day of May was no different from any other day that spring. The flowers were in bloom and the trees green, just as if there were no war at all. Bing Crosby was in great voice on the radio and Gabriel Heatter tried to find something hopeful in the war news but night after night he came up with the sentence that was becoming his trademark and part of the American landscape. Ah, there’s bad news tonight …
Cassidy went to bed that last night of May thinking of Karin.
He didn’t know she was already dead.