‘Whose blood is it?’ said Professor Junius Moulton – a big voice from a big man as hairy as a bear wearing a tweed jacket as big as a tent. He held up a hand to block any answer. ‘Not important just now. Maybe never important. Two people, different blood types, obviously, AB positive and O negative.’ He clinked two blood-filled test tubes together and peered over horn-rimmed glasses to where Orso and Amy Parson sat thigh to thigh on an old leather sofa. Amy Parson was in her late thirties. She had a broad Scandinavian face, and big, dark eyes that coolly analyzed anything that came within range. Her blond hair was held back from her high, wide forehead by a black velvet headband. She wore a pale lavender tweed suit with a skirt short enough to show off her legs. When Cassidy first met her outside the building, she examined him in a way that made him feel like a bug on a pin. But she had welcomed him with a warm smile and a firm handshake that allowed him to shake off the feeling.
Cassidy was in a matching chair across from Moulton’s large wooden desk in his office on the third floor of the NYU science building. ‘Dead? Probably dead, otherwise why are the police here?’ He was used to holding the attention of a large classroom of students with provocative questions and half-completed ideas designed to lead the listeners on. ‘So, you want to know what chemical is in the samples.’ He waggled his heavy caterpillar eyebrows and waited for a response.
‘Can you tell us?’ Cassidy, playing along.
‘Of course I can tell you.’ He tapped the two glass tubes against his forehead to show where the knowledge lay. He leaned back in his desk chair, which protested with a groan, and held the test tubes high. ‘D-lysergic acid diethylamide.’ He waited for a reaction. He got nothing but blanks looks.
‘Elucidate, Junius,’ Amy said.
‘Yes, yes. Of course. LSD – 25. From the fungus ergot, which grows on rye and other grains. First made by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in, correct me if I’m wrong, 1938.’
‘What’s it for?’ Orso asked.
‘A very good question. At first there was no application, but in 1943 Hofmann took a larger dose than he intended and discovered that the drug had hallucinogenic properties. Then the pharmaceutical company Sandoz marketed it as Delysid for various psychiatric uses. 1947, I think.’
‘What kind of psychiatric uses?’ Cassidy asked.
‘They were hoping the drug would help retrieve repressed memories, and in some cases it did. For some patients it was effective for relief of anxiety or obsessional neuroses. Hard to control though.’ He scratched vigorously at his scalp with both hands, and then looked at his fingernails to see if they had unearthed anything interesting. ‘The big problem is that it can cause wild mood swings. Some patients got panic attacks, paranoia, thoughts of harming others, suicidal thoughts. It’s difficult to know what dose to use.’
‘If a man who was having mental problems – depression, say – was given too much, could it make him jump out a window?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Could.’
‘Without opening it?’
‘Could, indeed. I’m not a psychiatrist, but the disturbed mind is a powerful engine. Could drive you to almost anything.’
‘Are there any antidotes? Is there something you can give someone who’s having a bad time with it?’ Cassidy lit a cigarette.
‘There is some indication that a tranquilizer helps,’ Moulton said.
‘Who uses it?’ Cassidy asked. ‘Psychiatrists?’
‘Some. Not many. . I have a question.’ He thumped forward in his chair and leaned across the desk to give more weight to what he asked. ‘I deduce from your questions that one of these men committed suicide. Did the other?’
‘No,’ Cassidy said.
‘But both of them had been given LSD before they died. Do you know who gave it to them?’
‘Yes.’
Cassidy made coffee in the kitchen, a towel around his waist, his hair still wet from the shower. Rhonda came in from the bedroom and began to rummage through the living room looking for something.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘My notebook. I had it last night when I got here. Now I can’t find it. I swear to god the thing can move by itself. I spend half my life looking for it.’
‘It’s in the bedroom. I saw it last night.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. In there someplace. Try the top of my bureau.’ She disappeared toward the back of the apartment. Cassidy poured himself a cup of coffee, took a couple of sips, and lit the first and best cigarette of the day.
Rhonda came back from the bedroom a minute later. ‘What’s this? Why do you have this? Who is she?’ Her face was pale, and her intensity made her hand shake. She shoved the photograph of Maxie Lively in front of his face. He had left it with the other things from his pockets on the bureau the night before.
‘She’s a hooker we pulled out of the river. Someone strangled her. She’s connected to that other case we’re working.’
‘She’s the woman who was in the house on 4th Street where that guy tried to grab me.’
‘What?’
‘She’s the woman, the one who tried to get out. He grabbed her, and that’s when I ran. I swear to God. It’s her.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. I’m sure.’
Cassidy dressed and bolted his coffee under the lash of Rhonda’s impatience. They walked quickly to the Ninth Precinct stationhouse on Charles Street.
‘Why do we have to go talk to the cops?’ Rhonda asked. ‘You’re a cop, I know where the house is on West Fourth. Let’s just go there.’
‘Professional courtesy. It’s not my precinct, it’s theirs. You don’t just come in and start rooting around someone else’s territory without asking.’
The desk sergeant sent them upstairs to talk to Lieutenant Blandon, who turned out to be the cop with the burned face and the crooked smile who had sent the patrolman with Rhonda to the house on West 4th.
‘Yeah, I remember,’ he said. ‘You and Seeley went over, but everyone was gone.’
‘The woman she saw over there ended up in the river,’ Cassidy said. ‘Did anyone ever search the place?’
‘No. Locked it up and sealed it. We were kind of busy that day – two cops shot, and that fucking guy holed up in that bar on Washington. Seeley reported there’s nobody there. We figure it was a whorehouse, and now it isn’t a whorehouse, so not much pressure to do anything about it. Then, you know how it is. You think you’re going to get back to something, but something else comes up, pretty soon the other thing slips.’
‘Do you mind if we go take a look?’
‘No. Go ahead. Anything you find comes back here first, okay?’
When they arrived at the house, Rhonda hesitated on the sidewalk in front and looked up at the house. ‘I’m scared.’ There was no light on in the house, and the windows stared blankly at the street.
‘Rhonda, you don’t have to go in. Go to the diner on Hudson. I’ll meet you there.’
‘No. I have to.’
‘You don’t have to. I’m just going to go in and take a look around. I won’t be more than half an hour.’
‘I have to, Michael. If I don’t, it’s going to stay with me. I won’t be able to shake it.’
‘All right. Don’t worry. There’s no one there. They wouldn’t risk coming back.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure. Plus, I’m here to protect you.’ He flexed one arm.
‘Now I feel better,’ Rhonda said, and managed a smile.
They went up the steps, and Cassidy cut the police seal with his pocketknife. The new padlock on the front door opened to the key the desk sergeant at the Ninth had given him. Rhonda followed him into the front hall with her hand touching the small of his back. The front windows were curtained, and the hall was dim. Cassidy found the switch near the door and turned on the lights.
The air was dusty and stale. The house was quiet. It felt abandoned, lifeless, as if the people in their hurry to leave had sucked the vitality out with them.
‘He was trying to pull me back there’ – Rhonda pointed down the hall – ‘and then the woman came out, and I got away.’
‘Tell me what he looked like.’
‘I told you.’
‘You told me, a blond guy about six-feet tall, maybe thirty-five years old. You told me how much he scared you. You told me how strong his hands were. This is where you saw him. Picture it. Remember it. Tell me again with as much detail as you can.’
She took a deep breath to gather herself. ‘All right.’ She left him there and went to the front door and opened it and went outside. She turned and stood as if waiting for someone to answer the door, and then came back into the front hall. Her eyes were half closed, and she was turned inward toward memory.
‘Okay. He opened the door,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Six feet tall. Blond. Smiling, as if he was happy to see me. I told him I was canvassing for the election. He asked me in. I was going to turn around and leave, because this didn’t seem like it could be the house I was looking for, Government agents, and all that. He insisted I come in.’ She opened her eyes wide, and let out a breath. ‘Oh, boy.’ The memory twisted her.
‘It’s all right. Go on.’
‘He grabbed my arm. Hard. I knew, then.’
‘Don’t think about that. Describe his face.’
‘Lean. Almost bony, but good-looking. Blue eyes. His eyebrows were almost red. What do they call it, russet? He hadn’t shaved that day, and his beard was coming in the same color. I remember his hair was really blond. He was smiling, but there was nothing good in it. He was very strong.’ She saw something in Cassidy’s face. ‘What?’
‘He had a gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand, and when he smiled one of his teeth was crooked.’
It startled her. ‘How do you know that?’
‘His name is Spencer Shaw. He works for the CIA. You were in the right house.’ He had told her about Spencer Shaw, about Paul Williger going out the window of the Hotel Astor, about Chris Collins, the advertising executive who died with the same chemicals in his blood. ‘Shaw must have seen you with me somewhere. He needed to know what you were doing here, what you knew. Christ, he must have been surprised when he answered the door, and there you were.’
‘I didn’t know anything. I thought I was in the wrong house. I was looking for the house where Bill Long was taken after he wrote about Nazi scientists being brought to the States after the war …’ She stopped while understanding surfaced. ‘Is that the connection? Nazis? They were using Nazis for something here.’
‘We think they were doing experiments in mind control. Nazi scientists? Maybe.’
‘What if they’re the ones Leon Dudek saw?’
Cassidy shook his head. ‘No. No.’ It was too wild a coincidence. ‘We don’t know if he saw anybody.’
‘What if?’
Cassidy led her past the stairs toward the back of the house. There was an empty bottle of wine on one of the kitchen counters and the bottoms of the glasses in the sink held crusts of dried red wine. A first-aid kit lay on the table. Next to it was a bottle of Mercurochrome, a roll of gauze, a roll of white surgical tape, and a pair of scissors.
‘She had a bandage on her hand,’ Rhonda said.
He opened the refrigerator. It held a bottle of milk with about an inch left, a piece of cheese going green, an unopened bottle of white wine, three bottles of Coca Cola, and a narrow wooden tray with low sides made of wooden slats about two inches high. He pulled it out. An inch of rubberized material filled the bottom. A dozen holes a half-inch across and a half-inch deep had been cut into the rubber. Cassidy put the tray on the table and crouched to look into the refrigerator. Broken glass glinted on the bottom shelf. He used a business card to scrape the pieces of glass to him. The glass was very thin, and the pieces were mostly splinters and specks, but there were two larger bits. One was narrow-neck sealed at the top. The other was a round piece that must have been the bottom of the broken thing. Rhonda looked over his shoulder while he put the bottom piece into one of the holes in the rubber liner of the tray.
‘What was it?’ she asked.
He showed her the narrow neck. ‘It’s a drug ampoule. People get careless when they’re in a hurry.’
It took them almost an hour to examine the rest of the house. It looked the same as when Rhonda had been there with the cops.
Hours on the phone over three days led Cassidy to the dead end he suspected he would find. Records from the phone company, electricity and gas records, rental records from the real-estate office, copies of rent checks from the house on West Fourth all led to dummy companies, fake addresses, disconnected phones. The house had been rented and occupied by phantoms.