The Sweeney 02 Read online

  Regan positioned himself behind the tripod and looked down through the binoculars at the baskets of flowers and ivy that decorated the restaurant porch jutting out onto the pavement four doorways down from the surveillance office. Stuck among the flowers was a black metal box about a foot square. The box had what looked like a camera lens pointing toward the bank across the street.

  “What do you see, Jack?”

  “Black box with a lens on it.”

  “The first time you’ve seen it? I saw it this morning, Jack. You know what it is?”

  Regan shook his head.

  “It’s a Hanimex Intercept camera. It’s taking a photo every five minutes of the bank reception area and what we see through the two other office windows. The assumption is that any important visitor is going to stay more than five minutes and end up as a snapshot.”

  Regan said nothing. He was angry at himself that he hadn’t noticed the box. It probably couldn’t be spotted from the street but was visible from above. “Police department equipment?”

  “That’s the latest. We never have the latest. I don’t know any law enforcement agency that would have that camera.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “It means we’ve got to watch that camera now, because someone’s going to come within two days to collect and replenish its film. It means we have opposition who are not a law agency. It means somebody else is interested in the Lexington Bank and Trust Company, and if they’re prepared to check out the very latest gadgetry, I would say we are dealing with professionals.”

  The restaurant across from the Lexington Bank and four doors down from the surveillance office was called the De Falla. Despite the name it was Italian. Regan ordered fresh pasta, vitello Tosca, and a bottle of Verdicchio. Christa ordered cream cheese ravioli and scallope alia Modenese.

  He’d worked out the bill after their order. The bill would come out to about forty dollars excluding tip, providing they kept the drinks to a minimum. In this day and age in New York he didn’t know whether this was cheap, medium, or expensive.

  He looked around the restaurant trying to place the clientele. The males of the couples looked like out-of-work schoolteachers, the distaff side a little blowzy and brash. There was a table of eight fortyish girl friends with voices like hacksaws sawing tin, drinking cocktails that looked like cutting fluid. Overlaying this was the sound of a lot of banging and shouting from the kitchen and two loudspeakers carrying 1950s Italian Muzak from a cassette blurred by oxide crap on the tape head.

  Christa said she liked the place. The wine arrived. Regan poured and they began to thaw out from the short but icy walk to the restaurant.

  Christa put her head to one side and studied Regan. “Have you talked to Don?” she asked.

  “Yes, there are some new elements in the job—”

  “About us for God’s sake.” For some reason her smile looked nervous.

  Regan shook his head. “I thought you said you didn’t want me to talk to Don about us.”

  She nodded. “That’s what I said. I was just wondering if you’d gone along with it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Two male pigs like you and Don Cassidy get together and drink, there comes that moment for exchanging information and confidences.”

  “I wouldn’t go against your wishes. However, I would like to have a chat about Don. Tell me,” Regan pushed away the remnants of his pasta, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and changed the subject. “How recently has Don taken to heavy drinking?”

  “He’s always been a heavy drinker.”

  Regan shook his head slightly. “I mean drunk during the day. He’s a detective with some reputation and track record. No cop gets ahead if he’s drunk by every lunchtime. How recently did he start real drinking?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “He, and Ramo, all of them, and I’ve met a dozen of them—those guys in the detectives bureau are all under pressure all the time. Don carried a lot of it ‘cause he’s the best.”

  “Every cop in the world is under pressure,” Regan said.

  “Well, maybe he started drinking more since he and Ciales hit the millionaire black guy.”

  “So a week ago he hits the black guy and takes to the bottle. Is that the whole story?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder. There’s something wrong there.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are we going to make Don the topic for the night’s conversation? I don’t want to.”

  “Okay,” he said, and dropped the subject.

  About nine-thirty, when they were on to coffee and desert, he memorized the names of the proprietor and maitre d’, both listed on the menu, got up, leaving her at the table, and went over to the maitre d’ and asked him for the phone. The man indicated a doorway off to the left of the room. Regan headed down a flight of a dozen steps to the telephone. He checked in the microprint of the Manhattan directory for the De Falla restaurant reservations number—it wasn’t the same as this coin box—and dialed. The phone was answered.

  “Give me Mr. D’Amato,” Regan said gruffly. D’Amato was listed on the menu as the proprietor. A moment later a high Italian voice introduced itself. “Tony D’Amato.”

  “Mr. D’Amato, I have a message from your friends. The camera that’s photographing the bank, somebody’s spotted it. Get rid of it, now.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Doesn’t matter who this is. Get rid of that camera. That is a message from your friends...”

  “What camera? Who is this? Who is talking to me?”

  Regan put the phone down, waited a couple of minutes, and then dialed the same number again. The phone was answered. “May I speak to Ronald Morandi?”

  A moment later the maitre d’ came on the phone, and Regan went through the same routine, instructing Morandi to get rid of the camera, it had been spotted, and putting down the phone when Morandi, like his boss, started to demand who was speaking.

  Two people in a restaurant business have the key to the front door—the owner and his maitre d’. Cassidy had reckoned that the Hanimex equipment would probably have been installed above the porch at night, access to the porch being gained from inside the restaurant. However, it would be more or less confirmation of guilt of owner or maitre d’ if later tonight he went back to the surveillance office and found the Hanimex had been removed in the last few hours.

  He went upstairs to the table and asked for the bill.

  Out on the pavement he gave her a kiss and put her in a cab. She’d said earlier her roommate was coming back tonight from a West Coast trip and she’d thought it wouldn’t be a good idea for the girl to walk in and find Regan installed. They made a date to phone each other in the morning.

  He waved off the cab, moved up the street, let himself into the front door, and climbed to the second-floor office. He checked and saw that the Hanimex was still in position, then settled down with a battered copy of The New York Times and this afternoon’s paper cup with half his whisky slug still in it.

  He maneuvered his chair so he had an angle down the street to the camera on the portico of the De Falla restaurant. The liter of Verdicchio, most of which he’d drunk, sat heavily in his gut, its alcohol tiring into him. He felt fatigue, but his brain oddly alert and nervous. It was a strange situation. There were two of them watching the front of an empty bank—he and a machine. An ownerless machine ticking away with a click of scientifically exposed night snapshot every five minutes. It was just the idea that here he was, world-worn, physically exhausted by lunchtime sex, drugged with alcohol, blearied by lack of sleep, competing with a machine. Surely the machines have it. Soon the whole business of the war on crime would be conducted by Hanimex, Honeywell, Sony, and Hasselblad. Police software watching criminals’ software and vice versa—and a jewel theft only able to take place when a failure occurred in one or the other of the antagonists’ electronics. Regan fell asleep.

  He was awoken sudd
enly by the door opening and Cassidy falling into the room. Ciales was with him. It looked at first as if Cassidy had tripped over a slightly raised floorboard on the carpetless area by the door. A second look at the cop lurching up from his knees with a one-word roar of obscenity and it was obvious that Cassidy was well liquored. “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “Shit. The Hanimex camera still there?”

  “Yes. D’you expect something to happen now, in the middle of the night?”

  “No, darling,” Cassidy said and fell into a chair, then remembered something. “We came to get you. We’re going to check out some bars.”

  Ciales’s eyes were gray-hooded and his face pale. “I’m going to no bars. I’m goin’ home.”

  “Jesus, I’d thought he’d never leave,” Cassidy said loudly to Regan.

  Ciales retreated to the door.

  “Hey, wait!” Cassidy shouted. The command could probably be heard in the De Falla restaurant.

  Ciales stopped.

  “One last drink, Ramo. Just one drink.”

  Ciales looked at Cassidy glassily. “Okay, maybe just a little one.”

  Cassidy cheered, got up, grabbed Regan’s arm, pulled him to his feet, and gave him a push in the direction of the door. Then he looked down at the bank and addressed the building. “Don’t move. We’ll be back.”

  Regan didn’t know how they got there. He thought he knew the physical progression—a series of bars, maybe six, three or four cabs, and then they were under blank fluorescent lights blinking and disoriented by the pall of midnight silence, and the formaldehyde smell of a cavernous hospital. What he wondered at was the mental progression. Who had made the decision and why and when to come to the hospital midway up Riverside Drive to visit the black man that Cassidy and Ciales had comatized?

  The black man was named Ferdinand Lacrosse. He occupied a private suite on the seventh floor with picture windows overlooking the river. The suite was one of six off another reception area. The night nurse who watched over these charges nodded familiarly to Cassidy and Ciales. Cassidy turned into a short corridor and opened the door to suite 705.

  The big man lay like a black porcelain figure, encased in uncreased white sheets. The man’s eyes seemed fractionally open, studying the ceiling of a five-thousand-bucks-a-week suite which he had never seen. His breathing made hardly perceptible movements or sounds.

  There were four medical charts pinned along the bottom of the bed footboard. Cassidy took them and laid them out on an adjacent table, pushing aside a large bowl of roses, spilling water and flowers out of the bowl. Cassidy’s eyes were glowering in concentration.

  “How’s he doing?” Ciales inquired quiet-voiced.

  Cassidy turned and looked at the recumbent man. Then he leaned back against the table. “You black motherfucker,” he hissed through his teeth, “what’s your game?” He turned to Ciales and Regan as if they could explain it. “How does he do it? Four days, temperature, respiration, blood pressure, heat loss, same figures. It’s impossible...”

  “What figures?” Ciales asked.

  “Fuck off,” Cassidy said, as if Ciales was being deliberately stupid. Then he relented. “Four days at the bottom of this chart is the word ‘critical.’ Five days ago it said ‘improve.’ All the days before that ‘critical.’ How can he be back on ‘critical’? How can there be no change? How long is this gook going to hang us up, Ramo?”

  “Don’t shout. The man’s sick,” Ramo warned.

  Cassidy went to the bedside and looked. “Now listen, motherfucker, get it moving, get out of here. I won’t be hung up by you...” It was almost as if Cassidy felt there was cognizance, understanding, behind the half-opened eyes and slow lift and drop of the chest.

  Then Cassidy shrugged at the inutility of it all and was suddenly heading for the door. Ciales and Regan followed him out.

  The hangover settled into the space behind the first worry line on Regan’s forehead and sat there pulsing pain down a red-hot steel wire into his eyes and then on to his guts. He had gone to bed in the sleeping bag. The bag was on top of the bare mattress which lay next to the window view down on pier 59. In the morning he was still in the sleeping bag but he had rolled off the mattress onto the floor. He woke at 7:10. Cassidy, still fully clothed, snored deeply, face down in the pillow of his bed. Regan dressed quietly, didn’t make coffee, worried that the noise would disturb his host. He had no wish to deal with Cassidy’s hangover for at least another few hours, when he’d got his own various functions together.

  He walked the streets through the paralyzing air. To the frost of the cement canyons was added the sharp cutting edge of sea wind and smell coming upriver from the Atlantic and slicing through the docks to hit and punch his face, which felt like iced sailcloth. At first he concentrated on moving fast to get his circulation going. Then his concentration drifted elsewhere.

  He was three blocks down from Cassidy’s warehouse aerie when he realized he was being followed. He still felt sufficiently threatened by his own physical condition that he contrived to brush this new threat off and to turn it over to the back of his mind. It was a walking tail, two guys tracking on opposite sides of the street, both dressed as Con Edison maintenance men.

  He had the Magnum, and he’d checked it as he dressed this morning; part of the dress was Cassidy’s shoulder holster and the gun. So he felt confident enough. He knew he was an okay marksman. He knew that from the buff Small Arms Competence Log, which got a new entry once every year in the basement shooting range at New Scotland Yard. The fact was, that normally he was aesthetically against putting a bullet in the winding coils of some guy’s intestines, but on this particular morning, with his specific style of hangover, he could imagine the experience being mildly pleasurable.

  He wanted coffee, but he needed to be in the open near some cover. He found exactly what he wanted. It was on a corner demolition site near Thirty-sixth Street, a Dodge truck with ben burgers in scraped paint on the side, and an open rear hatch with proprietor inside pushing plastic mugs and franks and burgers out into the driving gloves of half a dozen long-distance truckers. Regan ordered coffee and a frank, noted the semicircle of sixteen-wheel oilers around and a Winnebago camper parked to the rear, and caught the obscene phrases and jokes shouted into the wind. Then there were some loud remarks from the guys as the back door of the Winnebago opened and one of their confreres came out buttoning his fly. Behind the confrere all could see a middle-aged whore counting bills and adjusting the rig of her scarlet corsets.

  A tall guy asked the customer about the goods. He replied that the veteran was worth ten dollars a full French, but not worth the twelve dollars that she was demanding.

  The inquirer was satisfied and headed off for the Winnebago camper to get at least one part of his anatomy warm.

  Regan drank his coffee like a blood transfusion and watched the two Con Edison guys just out of the corner of his eyes, freezing to death in doorways about forty yards away, and significantly leaving him beyond the range of any arsenal they carried. He drank another coffee, relishing its warmth, knowing with every sip of fire he got from the liquid, the Edison guys’ blood dropped one more degree. After half an hour he reckoned their reactions would have been positively slowed by the cold. He paid for his coffees, turned, and ran like hell.

  He ran because he didn’t feel particularly like a confrontation. He ran because he didn’t think a shunt with two torpedoes would contribute anything toward his current investigation, which had to do with the Lexington Bank.

  Their frozen leg muscles blew it for the two guys. He lost them in a sprint across two blocks with three changes of direction. He thumbed a cab and gave the Forty-ninth Street surveillance office address.

  The place was cold. Maybe at seven-thirty the heating hadn’t been switched on. Regan had bought a New York Times from an automatic newsstand, and after a quick look at the blank facade of the bank, he got into the camp bed, wrapped a blanket around himself, turned to the sp
orts pages, and tried to make head or tail of games, leagues, scores, and names, all unfamiliar. If you want to feel homesick, turn to the sports pages of a foreign newspaper. He fell asleep.

  Just after nine he woke; the room somehow had gotten even colder. He took a quick look out the window at the bank and the street and noted that the Hanimex camera was still in position on the restaurant porch. He decided on more coffee before a phone call to Cassidy to wake him up and discuss the day’s tactics, included in which a chat about the whole validity of a routine surveillance by the case’s key personnel, which policy Regan was beginning to have serious doubts about. He went downstairs into the street, turned left, walked a couple of blocks, found a Howard Johnson, and had breakfast. He arrived back at the office at ten minutes to ten and decided to give Cassidy ten more minutes. He had, on the way to the Howard Johnson, crossed the street and checked the facade of the bank and noted its opening hours —ten till five. He sat and read the rest of the paper with the same sensation of alienation and disorientation.