There were two message slips on Cassidy’s desk. One was from May, no last name, no number, May Stiles being discreet. Another was from Kay Lockridge, he was to call her at home. Cassidy found May’s number in his address book and called her first. She picked up on the third ring. ‘May Stiles. Your pleasure is our business.’
‘Jesus, May, where’d you get that?’
‘Cassidy? A client in advertising gave it to me. For free.’
‘Worth every penny. You called.’
‘I found the girl you were asking about – Maxie Lively – pretty good name for the business, huh? She used to work out of Marge Gale’s house, but she went out on her own. I’ve got a number for you.’
Cassidy wrote it down. ‘How about an address?’
‘Working girls don’t give out a home address. The last thing you need is some client showing up to tell you he’s sure it was love after all.’
‘Thanks, May.’
He hung up and dialed the long-distance operator and gave her the Lockridge number in Georgetown. Mr Farrington answered and went to find Cassidy’s aunt.
‘Michael, I’m dashing out, and I’m unforgivably late. I asked around about Harry Gallien, and people were not happy that I was doing so. I got some very dark looks. But here’s what I found. Gallien Medical had big military contracts during the war. After the war, many of those dried up. If you want, I can send you a list of the medical supplies and equipment he sold on those contracts. All those contracts were itemized.’
‘And now?’
‘He does have contracts with government agencies, but they’re all black.’
‘Meaning?’
‘There is nothing specific in the budgets as to how much Gallien Medical is paid or what it is paid for. Black budgets are Intelligence related, and they are not itemized.’
‘Can you ask Allen Dulles for details?’
‘No, I can’t.’ There was no leeway in her voice. ‘Michael, I really do have to run. I hope this helps. Talk soon.’ Cassidy was left listening to the dial tone.
He tried the number May Stiles gave him. After six rings an answering machine picked up. He hung up. He found the squad’s reverse directory propping open a window in the locker room. Maxie’s number belonged to an address on East 22nd Street.
He left the precinct in late afternoon. The low autumn sun offered little warmth. Men and women hurrying home from work outnumbered the tourists on Broadway. A wind that promised winter blew from the river, and Cassidy pulled his overcoat tight and thrust his hands in its pocket. He walked the few blocks down to the building where his brother had an office at ABC News.
Brian’s secretary, Claire, was not in the outer reception, and when Cassidy pushed open the door to Brian’s office, he found his brother in shirtsleeves packing papers into a cardboard box. Other boxes, already sealed, were piled near the desk. ‘Hey,’ Brian said with an attempt at cheer, ‘a friendly face. What are you doing here?’ His face looked thin, and his color was bad.
‘I just stopped by to see how you were.’ Brian’s desk no longer held the framed photos of Marcy and the girls. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ve been suspended.’ His face twisted in what might have been a grin. ‘Yeah. A big meeting upstairs. All the company royalty. A lot of headshaking sympathy, expressions of concern and support, pats on the back. Take some time. For your own good. Get checked out. Make sure everything’s all right. A few months. Come back refreshed. Clean bill of health and all that. But the underlying message is that I’m an embarrassment to the network.’ Cassidy could read the pain in his eyes. ‘I was in the crapper up there before the meeting. Bobby Walsh and another guy were in there, and I guess they didn’t know I was there. Walsh loves to pass on the office tittle-tattle. It turns out he’s heard there was some pressure from Washington to knock me down a peg. The network’s license is up for renewal and someone let it slip that there may be irregularities in the application.’
‘And all that could go away if you’re off the air.’
‘Something like that.’ He slammed a couple of books into the box and slapped on some tape. ‘Claire can finish this in the morning. Let’s get out of here before I go out the window.’ It was supposed to be a joke, but it came out flat and hard.
‘Easy, man.’
Brian heard the concern in his voice. ‘Hey, little brother, don’t worry about me. I’m the guy who looks before he leaps, and then takes the stairs. Remember?’
They agreed that they did not want to go to a bar where they might meet someone they knew, and that ruled out Sardi’s and Dempsey’s and the theatrical watering holes. They walked east on 44th Street and turned into a joint just west of Sixth Avenue that they had never tried. They both ordered martinis up with a twist. The waitress nodded, stuck her pencil into her hair and went away.
‘The only job I ever wanted was broadcast news,’ Brian said. ‘I went into the booth at the radio station at Yale freshman year and thought, Jesus, I’m home. And TV was even better. Well, I guess that’s the end of that.’
‘You’ll be back.’
‘No. Not at ABC, not at NBC, not at CBS. Not unless I can do something spectacular. Maybe I can find a job at some independent somewhere, but I’m out of the big leagues. Nobody’s going to touch me after this. And I don’t even know what happened. I get up in the morning and I’m Brian Cassidy, respected investigative reporter for a respected news program. The next day I’m a naked drunk laughing stock.’ He stopped talking while the waitress brought the drinks.
‘Anything else, boys?’
‘How about two more in ten minutes,’ Brian said. ‘The only good thing this week is that the medical report came in from Sibley. I didn’t have any alcohol in my blood. There was some other stuff they haven’t identified, but no alcohol.’
‘What other stuff?’
‘They don’t know what it is. They’ve sent it down to the NIH to see if they can identify it.’
‘Did you tell ABC?’
‘Sure. But it cut no ice. The way they see it, if I wasn’t drunk, I was high on something else. What the hell happened that day?’
‘Someone snatched you off the street in DC,’ Cassidy said. ‘A team of at least three men who knew what they were doing and had done it before. One to drive, two, maybe three to subdue and load you. Probably in a van.’ Brian watched him without speaking. ‘Why’d it happen? They thought you knew something they didn’t want you to know. They wanted to question you, and they wanted to neutralize you so that any report you made would be dismissed.’
‘Report on what, for Christ’s sake?’
‘I don’t know exactly, but it has something to do with Harry Gallien, Gallien Medical, and drug experiments the CIA is running.’
‘Harry Gallien? I talked to Harry Gallien twice on the phone and once in person about political contributions. He gave a thousand bucks to Congressman Williams, and Congressman Williams gave it back. What’s the big story?’
‘I asked you to check on a couple of names with the Department of the Army, remember?’ Brian nodded. ‘The Army was just a cover. One of them used to work for Gallien. You disappeared. I came into town and started looking for you, going back over your day. The next thing I know four pros carrying no ID try to snatch me off a street in broad daylight. One of them was outside Gallien’s building when I came out. They’re probably the same team that took you.’
Brian took a slug of his martini. Cassidy could sense his brother’s brain whirring as he went back over what he had said. ‘But I wasn’t investigating Gallien Medical. I didn’t know it had anything to do with the CIA. I was just looking for you.’
‘Because I was investigating something that is connected to the CIA. But I didn’t know it either. And since we’re brothers, they thought we were working together.’
‘Would the CIA really have the balls to kidnap a journalist and a New York cop off the streets of the capital?’ Brian asked.
‘Small risk, big gain. You don’t remember what happened to you. You don’t know who did it to you. If they’d gotten me, I’d have the same amnesia you have. If they have a drug that does that, they probably have a drug that makes people tell them what they want to know.’
‘Those fucks. They stole from me. They stole my memory and time, my dignity. They stole my job. They upset my family. They did it like swatting a fly. What do they think we know? What makes it so goddamned important?’
‘I don’t know. We’re missing something. We’ve got a dead chemical guy. What was he doing that’s so secret? Chemical warfare experiments? Bio-warfare experiment? We assume that the Army is working on that stuff, and there’s no reason the CIA wouldn’t be involved. If they thought that’s what you were onto and they wanted to back you off, they would have said you were in danger of exposing classified information and they would prosecute you if you did. It has to be something they really don’t want known. It’s still out there, and we’re going to find it.’
‘We are?’
‘Sure. Because that’s what we do.’
Brian smiled for the first time in days.