Sebastian Ambrose’s brownstone on Leroy Street was in a row of similar houses halfway down the block from Greenwich. Cassidy found the address by running Ambrose’s phone number against the squad’s reverse directory. He needed to find Shaw. Cassidy knew almost nothing about Shaw’s habits, except that he worked with Ambrose. Eventually Ambrose and Shaw would come together. When they did, Cassidy would start tracking Shaw.
Cassidy watched the front of Ambrose’s house from a deep doorway across the street. There were lights on behind the curtained downstairs windows on the first floor. The top floors were dark.
Occasionally someone moved behind the windows on the first floor, a dark shape against the lighted curtains. Cassidy’s feet were cold. His back ached. He began to resent the warmth of the people in the house, the liquor they were drinking, their enjoyment of their evening while he waited out here in the cold for someone to fucking do something.
A few minutes after nine the front door opened. A man and a woman came out. They paused at the top of the steps to say something to Ambrose who stood in the lighted doorway. They went down the steps and walked east on Leroy Street. He could not see them well. The man was big, and wore no hat. The woman was small. She had her arm tucked in his and that she talked to him animatedly with her face turned up toward him. Occasionally he nodded. Cassidy caught a fragment of her laughter.
Who were they? Should he follow them? What if Shaw was still in the house and he missed him. Shaw was the important one. He let them go. An hour later the lights went off on the first floor. Shaw never showed. Cassidy walked home, tired and cold, eager for a hot shower and a glass of cognac.
The next night brought the first real freeze of the season.
Orso stamped his feet against the cold. ‘They say it’s going to be a bitch of a winter. Snow up to our ass. You ever been on a stakeout where it wasn’t freezing or hot as hell?’
‘Never,’ Cassidy said. ‘Or raining. It’s a natural law.’
They had been in the doorway across from Ambrose’s house for two hours. In that time no one had gone in or come out of the house.
‘Sorry to have dragged you away from Amy,’ Cassidy said.
‘Forget about it. It’s probably a good thing. If I hang around all the time, she’s going to take me for granted. Besides, I owe you. I’ve been fucking up, haven’t I? I’ve been letting everything slide for her.’
‘Yes, you have.’ They had been partners for four years. There was no reason to shade the truth.
‘You’ve been carrying me. I know. Jesus, Mike, it’s just that I can’t get her out of my mind. I can’t concentrate. We have breakfast, and she has to go off to work, and I think, okay, pull yourself together and go do the job, and then half the time I hang around until I know she’s out of class, and we go have lunch or something. I am fucked, man. I am truly fucked.’
‘How about I shoot you?’ Cassidy said.
‘That’d do it. Or I could quit.’ He glanced over to see Cassidy’s reaction.
That surprised Cassidy. ‘Quit? Then what would you do?’
‘I don’t know. I ought to be able to find something. My cousin Pete keeps telling me I should come work in his wholesale business.’
‘Uh-huh. Bathroom fixtures. That sounds exciting. I’m thinking of getting into that myself.’
‘I’d be making more money. Amy makes more than I do. That’s not right, where the woman makes more than the man. That’s going to cause some problems.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I don’t know what the fuck I am any more. You tell me. Am I serious?’
‘I don’t know, Tony. Are you?’
‘I don’t know.’
They were quiet for a while as they thought about the change Orso had proposed and what it might mean to each of them.
Orso pulled his coat tighter. His breath came in plumes. ‘What are we going to do with Shaw if we find him? We’ve got nothing on him.’
‘Rhonda can put him with Maxie in the house on West Fourth. The fingertip in Collins puts Collins and Maxie together. The traces of that LSD shit on the broken glass in the refrigerator says they gave the stuff to Collins in that house. It’s the same stuff that was in Williger when he went out the window.’
‘Circumstantial crap, and you know it. It doesn’t prove that Shaw was there when Collins was there. It doesn’t prove that Shaw killed Maxie. A good lawyer’s going to kick our ass. We could just shoot him, and that would be the end of it. Hey …’ Orso gestured with his head. The door to Ambrose’s house was open. The couple from the other night, the big man and the small woman, were walking down the steps while Ambrose stood in the door and spoke to Spencer Shaw. Shaw said something in turn, nodded in agreement, and then went down the steps to join the couple. Ambrose waved from the top of the steps and then went inside and closed the door.
‘If they split up, you take the couple. I’ll take Shaw,’ Cassidy said.
‘You going to clip him?’
‘No.’
‘Want me to?’
‘No.’
Orso shrugged at Cassidy’s short-sightedness. They waited until Shaw and the couple were well down the block before following. Neither Shaw nor the couple looked around. When they turned the corner onto Hudson and disappeared, Cassidy and Orso sped up.
Shaw and the couple stopped halfway up the block. Cassidy and Orso watched from the cover of a newsstand in front of a convenience store. The big man was bare-headed and he did not wear gloves. Maybe he was impervious to the cold. A breeze ruffled his thick hair, and he used one hand to stroke it back in place while he held the other up to catch a cruising cab. Shaw talked with the woman. She was small and vital, a woman whose hands were always in motion, gesturing, stabbing the air for emphasis, touching Shaw’s arm to massage home a point. Her back was turned, the collar of her coat was up, and she wore a hat that covered her hair, and Cassidy could tell nothing about her beyond her size.
The big man held the taxi door open. The woman shook hands with Shaw and got in the cab. The big man nodded to Shaw and followed her in. The parting was no more than polite. They knew each other but they were not friends.
Shaw walked uptown.
Orso darted into the street and hailed a cab. Cassidy saw him lean forward to show his badge to the driver, and then the cab took off.
Cassidy let Shaw get a block lead, and then went after him.
Shaw wore a tawny camel’s hair coat that stood out like a beacon on the night streets. He stopped occasionally to look in store windows. He waved off the invitation of a group of drunks standing in front of a bar on the corner of Christopher Street. He stopped in the middle of the block to light a cigarette. Cassidy stepped into a dark doorway across the street. Shaw looked around casually, and then went on. It was too casual. Shaw was checking for tails. Did he sense something, or was it just the precaution of a man who works the shadows? To be safe, Cassidy dropped back half a block. A few blocks farther on he watched Shaw duck down into the subway at 14th Street.
Cassidy counted to fifteen, and then went halfway down the stairs and crouched to the bottom. Shaw was just pushing through the turnstile. Cassidy went down the rest of the stairs fast while he searched his pockets for a subway token. He did not find one.
A train pushed air and noise ahead of it as it approached the station. Cassidy shoved a quarter at the uniformed man in the ticket booth, grabbed the offered token, ignored the man’s shout of, ‘Your change,’ and rushed the turnstile. Where was Shaw? Was he headed uptown or downtown? A downtown train stopped in a squeal of metal. There were only a few people waiting on the platform, and Cassidy did not see Shaw among them. The train pulled out. The platform was empty.
Cassidy moved until he could see the uptown platform. Shaw leaned against a pillar and smoked a cigarette. A puff of stale air tinged with the smell of burned electricity announced a train coming along the track. The rattle and squeal of its wheels grew louder. People shuffled toward the platform edge in anticipation of its arrival. Shaw dropped his cigarette and mashed it out with his shoe and moved to stand with a group of people just back from the edge of the platform. The engine and the first cars of the train howled into the station, brakes and wheels grinding. It slowed and stopped with a lurch and a banging of couplings. The doors hissed open. Behind Cassidy a group of college students, boys and girls together came whooping through the turnstiles and running for the train. They stampeded down the stairs. Cassidy went with them. When they got to the bottom, they all tried to crowd through the same door, forcing the conductor to hold the train. Cassidy ducked low, peeled off, ran to the car behind, and jumped in through the forward door just as it started to close.
The couplings jerked tight and the cars banged into motion. Cassidy looked over the shoulders of the two men who stood between him and the end doors to the next car. He could see past the scrum of college students to where Shaw stood in the middle of the car holding on to a pole and swaying with the movement of the train. 23rd Street, Penn Station, then 42nd Street. People got on and off. Shaw did not change positions. At Seventh Avenue and 53rd, the train turned east. As it pulled into Lexington and 53rd, Shaw looked up. When the doors opened, he was the first off the car. Cassidy waited and followed people out of the car and up the stairs.
Cassidy held back for a moment at the top of the stairs, and then went out onto the street. He checked downtown and then uptown and spotted the brightness of Shaw’s coat heading north. He dodged across traffic to the other side of the street and followed half a block behind. At 56th Street Shaw turned the corner and walked toward Park Avenue. He went in under the awning of a large brick apartment building on the north side of the street. The doorman greeted him cheerfully, ‘Good evening, Mr Shaw, getting cold,’ and pulled open the big brass-bound door.
Cassidy found Orso leaning against the bar at Toots Shor’s. Orso saw Cassidy come in and raised a hand to the bartender and pointed at Cassidy. A martini arrived just as Cassidy did. ‘Thanks, Al.’ Cassidy raised his glass to Orso. He took a sip. ‘God, that’s good. What’d you find out about Ambrose’s friends?’
‘They live at 23 West 63rd Street. A brownstone. Mr and Mrs Brandt. Karl and Magda. They’ve been there about three years. Very nice people, according to the neighbor who’s out walking his dog. He thinks they’re doctors of some kind. He’s impressed by that. Very tidy. No garbage cans left on the street. Flowers in the window boxes. Good morning, good evening, when they meet on the street. Very proper. Very orderly. It’s the best thing about Germans, he says. They’re orderly.’
‘They’re German?’ Cassidy put his glass down and stared at his partner.
‘What about it?’
‘Leon Dudek is looking for Nazis in New York. He gets killed about four blocks from where two Germans live.’
‘Could be a thousand Germans living on the West Side near the park.’
‘How many are working for the CIA doing something weird with mind-control chemicals?’
‘It’s a reach, Mike.’
‘Is it?’ Cassidy dug in his pocket and found the copy he had made from the photograph in Freddy’s hideaway. He put it on the table and touched the small woman sitting among the men on the picnic. ‘Is that her, what’s her name, Brandt?’
Orso studied it. ‘Yeah, that’s her.’
‘Do you see the husband?’
‘Yeah. The big guy in the middle, smiling. That’s him. Where’d you get this?’
‘It came out of Leon Dudek’s room.’
‘What’s the connection?’
‘The camp. He knew them from the camp.’