The Sweeney 02 Read online

  She was nodding, but he wondered if she was happy to have requests pressed on her. Well, yesterday she had been quite insistent that she was falling in love with him. A statement like that incurs responsibilities. Then she kissed him warmly, and he felt encouraged and positive about her again.

  He took a cab uptown. It plunged immediately into a traffic jam and paced the bus that he could have taken all the way from Twentieth to Sixty-ninth.

  The secretary was a tiny dowdy lady of about sixty with soup stains on the lapels of her jacket. The jacket was a mud-brown color which matched the decor of the doctor’s office. Regan had assumed that all doctors in New York operated out of restrained palaces of pile carpet with a ticker tape going in the corner. Within a second of meeting Kitson he realized where the profits of the almost seventy-year-old’s practice went, and wondered if all Cassidy’s friends were alcoholics. He wasn’t shown into Kitson’s office. Kitson came out in response to the secretary’s buzz, telling him that Cassidy had just phoned from the lobby.

  “Don tells me you’re in the Scotland Yard Police Department. I was in London once, fourteen days, with the first Mrs. Kitson. I didn’t like it.” He took Regan’s elbow and led him into the elevator and pressed a button. “Don has bad news for me. You know what it is? He asked me to bring morphine and oxygen.” The doctor exhaled bourbon breath into Regan’s face while indicating the tiny oxygen mask and bottle in a small unzipped leather case. “You know Don long?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a good man. Believes in a little bit of law and a lot of order. I’d do anything for him. And believe me, in his ten years in the PD I’ve done it.” But he didn’t expand the statement any further. The elevator reached the lobby and Regan followed the little man out into the street.

  Cassidy was sitting in a Buick Skylark. It was Ciales’s car, though Ciales was not with him. He greeted the old doctor with no particular expression of interest. “Get in, Jerry.” He got out and held the door for the little doctor who got in the back of the car. “Get in.” He said it again to Regan, who was about to open with, “Where are we going?” Regan got into the front seat. Cassidy went around, got into the car, revved it, and marked the spot with two ten-foot strips of burnt rubber.

  “We have much to do. Jerry, you have morphine, oxygen?”

  “What’s the story, Don?”

  “I’m goin’ to take a sick man to a bungalow in Croton-on-Hudson and kick the shit out of him and you are going to be there with oxygen and morphine, etcetera. This is a hardened criminal. He’s not going to talk unless I hit him. I don’t think he’ll die on us, but he has received a lung bullet wound today and there is a risk...”

  “Now just a minute...” the doctor started to demur.

  “Wait,” Cassidy ordered. “I can steal this guy from the hospital with or without you. I’m saying to you, Jerry, to protect a man’s life, come with us. I’m telling you, no force in the world will prevent me from taking this guy and making him talk.”

  The newish six-hundred-bed University Hospital on First Avenue and Thirty-third Street looks across the road one way to the Kips Bay apartments and east to the sprawl of NYU’s large Bellevue medical center, the four-block-long windbreak screening the wind of the East River. As the car approached down Second Avenue, Regan pondered certain facts that were disturbing him.

  Three hours ago Cassidy had patted him on the head and asked him to be a pal and draft his report on the bank job because, as he’d said, “I want to go check out Brown at University Hospital and check that he’s one hundred percent secure. He’s too important a witness for PD to lose.” Now, three hours later, Cassidy and he were heading back with a little doctor to pick up Ciales—and what? Kidnap Brown? It made no sense.

  So Cassidy had organized top security for their witness at the hospital. So how come Cassidy could go in and pull Brown out? Regan had an uncomfortable feeling that if this man was being screened as a grade-A witness, nobody would grab him away without some very senior police officer somewhere along the line giving the nod of unofficial approval.

  In which case, why was Ciales in a doorway down from the main entrance to the hospital? Why the raincoat over the hospital technician’s coat that he was wearing, and why were both he and Cassidy obviously suffering some nerves?

  Ciales got into the car and with hardly a nod to the doctor or Regan indicated for Cassidy to circle the block. On the last parking meter near the main entrance, Ciales signaled Cassidy to pull in.

  Ciales pulled out his wallet and produced a typed form. “This is called a WA Five, Warrant for the Discharge of a Patient in Custody, for medical supervision.”

  “I just walk in and hand the WA Five to reception?”

  “You hit them with the WA Five, Dr. Kitson, and his ID. And I’ll be standing by. I go to the ward with you.”

  “What shape’s Brown in?”

  “He’ll travel a few miles.”

  Cassidy indicated for Kitson to get out of the car. Cassidy got out and slammed the door and looked through the open window at Regan in the front passenger seat. “Get behind the wheel. Start the motor. Get ready for takeoff.”

  Cassidy followed the other two, who were heading across the wide pavement to the hospital entrance.

  Regan remained for a while in the passenger seat, deliberating a theory he had just worked out that went like this: there were two kinds of unidentified influences on the investigation, from the police or another powerful agency—one influence for good (like aid in getting into the hospital complete with proper warrant), the other malicious (like Seebohm deciding to use Regan’s report as a signed admission of technical manslaughter). The problem was how to set about identifying them. Now he saw another possibility that the two influences were in fact one. That some agency was prepared to give them unofficial help provided he, Cassidy, and Ciales looked like they were on some hot trail, but would clamp down on them when the trail ran cold. There was, of course, another completely different way of looking at that, the one that Regan suddenly realized he favored—that there was an unidentified, highly important influence out there which could put real pressure on people like Seebohm, which was prepared to allow Regan, Cassidy, and Ciales a free run as long as they were heading up a dead end, but if at any time the three cops looked like they were getting somewhere would stamp on them from a great height.

  The man was obviously sick. The parchment skin was drawn and there were pain lines over his face and around the gray hollows of his eyes. Regan wondered how the hell Cassidy thought he could wring real communication out of this traumatized man—the pain and shock he was suffering were presumably larger than anything that Cassidy had to offer. And yet the irrefutable logic of it was that the investigation could go no further forward unless this man talked.

  The exit of Brown from the hospital had not gone off without incident. Regan had been sitting in the car, engine ticking over, working out possible further extensions of his theories, when he saw the three of them—the two cops and Brown—coming out of the door of the hospital, the man sitting in a wheelchair being pushed by Ciales in his white coat. Just outside the door Ciales applied the brake on the wheelchair and with the help of a prison hospital orderly, who didn’t look too happy about the suggestion, got Brown out of the chair. Brown’s own protests meanwhile got more and more voluble until he was maneuvered into the backseat, where he slumped back and for the moment was silent. Then suddenly there was a cop trotting out of the gate, heading in a purposeful way down to the Buick. The rear door of the car had just been pulled closed by Ciales.

  Regan revved the engine. “Do we go?” he asked Cassidy.

  Cassidy studied the big guy approaching, then shook his head. He wound down the window. “Can I help you?” he asked the guard.

  “Are you the senior officer here?” the cop asked.

  “Right.”

  “Sir, you have to go back to the lobby office and sign the patient register.”

  Cassidy hesitated tempor
arily. Then he got out of the car. “Wait,” he said to Regan.

  He was back a minute later.

  “What d’you think?” Ciales asked as soon as Cassidy had climbed back in the car.

  “I don’t know.” Cassidy turned to Regan. “Drive off slow and easy.” He worked it out for a moment, then turned to Ciales. “Ramo, I think you have to go back to Fifty-ninth Precinct and see what happens when the news breaks that Brown’s out. And if it looks bad, ring us at Croton.”

  “Okay.”

  They dropped Ciales off at the next corner.

  Regan drove on. Cassidy sat in the front acting as route finder. They made a circuitous way out of New York, going north, then doubling back on their trail once around the Hamilton Avenue Bridge overpass approach to check that they weren’t being followed, which also involved Cassidy getting out of the car to look up to see that no PD helicopter was sky-tracking them.

  Regan drove at medium speed, switching his eyes every so often from the road, which was light on midafternoon traffic, to the man huddled in a blanket in the back.

  Brown had said nothing except one sentence a minute after the car pulled away from the hospital. “Where are you taking me?” he asked. No one answered, and he didn’t pursue it. The only sound now that came out of him was a groan every time the car hit a hole in the road.

  The journey took an hour and a quarter. Brown’s eyes closed twice, but Dr. Kitson gave him a shake and he came awake again. Twice also the little doctor signaled to Regan to stop the car for a moment while he checked Brown over. Neither time did the little doctor look concerned.

  Regan was surprised to see some traces of fine snow on the windward west slopes of the Hudson, and got a slight jolt that he had not seen a TV nor heard a radio weather report since coming to New York. There were a few isolated white droppings on the grass as he drove up the incline to the empty bungalow perched on the hill below the rock.

  Brown by now needed quite a lot of maneuvering to get him out of the car. Cassidy went ahead and opened up the bungalow. Regan and Dr. Kitson pulled and pushed the heavy man slowly and by degrees out of the back of the car, and then up the slippery slope and the wooden steps into the hallway of the low building.

  “In here,” Cassidy directed. Brown was contributing no real effort toward staying on his own feet. Regan, taking most of the weight, steered him in the door and at Kitson’s command sat him down on a bunk bed.

  Brown sat on the bed fully conscious. His eyes went from one cop to the doctor to the other cop, worried eyes.

  “Jacket and vest off. Carefully,” Kitson said.

  That took more awkward maneuvering. At one point when Cassidy tried to pull the vest up at the area of the wound the big man’s eyes closed in pain, but he said nothing. Three minutes later Brown was bare to the waist, save for the yards of bandages around the lower half of his chest. Kitson examined the bandages. Then he laid out the medical equipment on the table and brought his blood pressure apparatus over to the bedside.

  Cassidy walked out of the room, followed by Regan, headed into the kitchen, picked up the electric kettle, took it to the sink, filled it, and plugged it in.

  Regan watched the man. There was no way to phrase the question subtly. “Don, what are you going to do with him?”

  Cassidy swung around on him. “I told you. I’m going to make him talk.” He said it sharply.

  “How are you going to make him talk?”

  “Christ, Regan.” Cassidy had lost his temper and his voice began to climb. “Get out! Fuck off!”

  “No.” Regan’s voice was quiet.

  “Listen,” said Cassidy, making a sudden large effort to control himself. “The reason I’m here is because you lost some fucking papers. Now we have a lead, a professional criminal, Brown, who under normal circumstances would not talk, but I am going to make him talk. And I don’t want you around when I do. So get out, Jack. Get out of the house. Go sit in the fucking car...”

  Regan turned and walked from the kitchen through the living room and out the front door.

  He sat in the car. He certainly was not about to leave the bungalow. He turned on the radio and took out a cigarette. He had been there about three minutes when the front door opened. Kitson came out, down the steps, and got in beside him.

  The little doctor said nothing, lit a cigarette, coughed on it, and stared out of the windshield down at the river looking gray and slow-motion below.

  Regan broke the silence. “What’s Brown’s condition?”

  “Fair.”

  “What’s Cassidy going to do?”

  “He’s going to hit him...”

  To Regan it was madness. “The man’s just out of shock. Isn’t there a chance a second shock could kill him—Cassidy could kill him?”

  The doctor gave his verdict like he was discussing the possibility of a hurricane happening in the next five years in Long Island Sound. “I don’t think so.”

  “Shit, I’m going to stop this.” Regan stubbed out his cigarette and opened the door. Suddenly he found the little doctor’s viselike grip on his arm. “Hold it,” Kitson commanded. “Nothing you can do is going to stop Cassidy. If he says this is his only lead on his case, and this is the only way, I believe him and you should believe him. I’ve trusted his judgment for ten years. His judgment is plenty good.”

  The little old doctor sensed that Regan was, in fact, undecided and tried to put on more healing balm. “He won’t kill him. He’ll get information. If the guy earns a broken wrist or missing teeth, who knows, he may deserve it.”

  Regan didn’t answer. He sat looking at the low leaden skies threatening more snow on the hills, and let the situation just wash over him. It was true. There had been one single problem on this case all the way—no information at all about anything. And now here was a man who knew something, and another man capable of getting it out of him. His entire training over years of detective work in Scotland Yard went against this kind of thing. Regan somehow felt it was as humiliating for him to have to go along with it as it was for Brown to experience it. And all this was made worse by his instinct that the case was going to get a lot nastier in its progress to a conclusion.

  Cassidy hit him twice. The two men sitting in the car didn’t hear the blows but heard through a slightly open window of the car the response. Two screams at a half minute’s interval. Then another interval of about a minute with neither Regan nor Kitson speaking, and then the door of the bungalow opened and Cassidy stood there beckoning them to come inside.

  They got out of the car, went up to the bungalow, and conferred in the hall. Cassidy reckoned the guy should be ready to talk as soon as Kitson had cleaned him up. The three men entered the bedroom. Brown lay out on the bunk, semiconscious, blood running down the side of his neck and fanning out across the bed linen and pillows.

  Cassidy’s first punch had broken the man’s nose. Then, after he’d stopped screaming, he had demanded that Brown should tell him about the deal.

  “What deal, what deal?!” Brown had hollered. Cassidy had hit him with a right hook straight in the teeth, and knocked out a lower left incisor. Brown had screamed again and then gone into a semifaint. Then Cassidy dragged him up on his feet and had held him waving there a second. Then he’d said, “The next one is a kick in the balls. You ready to talk?” Brown had nodded and collapsed back onto the bed. Cassidy had then gone out and gotten Kitson and Regan.

  It took Kitson ten minutes to clean up the mess and check Brown’s wound under his bandages. It was bleeding freshly but not badly. The little medic took Cassidy aside and whispered that he might only have five minutes or so before Brown passed out.

  Cassidy went over to the recumbent man. “So you want to know ‘what deal’? The deal, all the deals. The theft of documents from this English cop—that deal. The talk that the cop had in a car with you about some Dibouti, African deal—that deal. And a bank robbery. You remember you were sitting in a bank when it was robbed? That deal! Start!” Cassidy said gri
mly.

  Brown’s tongue licked around the dry blood and bruise of his lips, tested the gap in his teeth, and made some husky sounds. Then he started. “You know about the big deal. It was in the papers that we robbed the English cop.”

  “Assume we know nothing. Start from the beginning,” Regan said.

  “The beginning?”

  “Right,” Cassidy agreed.

  “The big deal. American aid in the form of military equipment to the new independent government of Dibouti. Know about that?”

  “No questions. Just talk,” Cassidy insisted.

  “I don’t know about politics, except I hear about this deal. The American government gave two hundred million dollars’ worth of military equipment to the government of Dibouti. It’s a new government, and it’s pro-American. The U.S. needs a friend in North Africa.”