The Sweeney 02 Page 16

  The bar was called Seventh Heaven and it was in a basement. The place was up-lighted from lamps recessed under the glass bar top, sharp light. Regan couldn’t understand why it should be so sharp—it was like a bank of quartz halogens on the snouts of a dozen Monte Carlo Rallye cars. Harsh up-lighting the clientele at 2:00 a.m. was bad news for the vanity of the four retread whores and half a dozen businessmen-turned-down-and-outs that propped the bar along with the thoughtful, distant Regan.

  A whore came and talked to him. Regan stared her away and she lurched off quite pleasantly, no anger, probably realizing he had saved her from some physical exercise she wasn’t really in shape to perform. He had thought about Galliano in the previous bar. In Seventh Heaven he thought about Brown.

  A big man, no police record, clean as the proverbial whistle, bright enough, quick on the uptake after given a lead. His hard plain good looks would no longer be so hot with Cassidy’s amendments to his nose geometry. Physically tough, to take a slug puncture in the lung along with the awesome pain of a broken nose and bruised jaw and broken teeth all in a day’s work. His story seemed like it would check out—well, Regan would know that starting at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow when he started the haul of investigating the Brown statement.

  Regan suddenly sat forward on his stool in the Seventh Heaven as the shock hit his brain, as he realized that all along there had been something wrong with Brown—something that Cassidy, Ciales, any cop with any experience, and that included him, should have reacted to immediately. Brown was obviously an experienced career criminal. Well, the fact is there are always minor black marks on any professional criminal’s record. Not one career criminal gets into his mid-forties without being tripped up at least a couple of times on minor charges. That was it in a nutshell. So why had the police no record at all of Brown and his fingerprints?

  There could only be one explanation, and Regan suddenly knew it. And he was also absolutely sure that Cassidy, Ciales, and Seebohm had not guessed it. The depression lifted marginally for a moment, because if he was right, then this could be the light at the end of the tunnel. One more Scotch, and he would go back to the freezing surveillance office and try and sleep for two or three hours. Then he’d know what to do. He ordered a large Scotch.

  Regan walked into the Fifty-ninth Precinct at 8:00 a.m., bones still thawing out from a night under thin blankets in the office.

  He took a plastic cup of coffee from the automatic vendor behind the charge desk, chatted to the desk sergeant, and got the relevant information. Chief Seebohm never knowingly got to his desk much before half-past nine any morning. This morning would not be any different even though he had the task of locating Cassidy and arresting him. This event would not take place until after consultations with the DA’s office. There was a legal ordinance somewhere that the police department couldn’t arrest other members of the police department without clearance through the DA.

  He went up to Seebohm’s office and talked to the Chiefs secretary, Sergeant Tolmer, who was at his desk. Tolmer, with little convincing, dialed the Chiefs home number.

  Seebohm came on the phone. In the background were noises of his young children shouting at each other and a wife scolding them. “Yes?”

  “Chief Seebohm, this is Inspector Regan.”

  “Why didn’t you take the TWA flight last night?” the Chief snapped.

  “I’m taking it today. I’m sorry I spent an extra twenty-four hours in your town, but I had things to do. However, I shall be on the six p.m. flight tonight, and happy to be on it.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, Inspector.” Seebohm suddenly relented.

  “I wondered if I could ask you a last favor, sir. I have to write a report for my superiors in London.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do that today. I’ll need access to the Galliano-Brown case file. Also, I wonder if I could use your telex facilities to inform London of my departure and give them a brief progress report.”

  Seebohm didn’t smell the rat. “Sure. Let me speak to Sergeant Tolmer.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Regan handed the phone to Tolmer and stood by listening as Seebohm instructed Tolmer to give Regan the files and to organize telex facilities.

  “Sure. Okay, Chief.” Tolmer put down the phone.

  Regan checked his watch. He reckoned he could get the whole thing organized within two hours.

  He followed Tolmer down a corridor to the records section. Five minutes later he was in a cab on his way to the Federal Communication Agencies Headquarters on Thirtieth and Sixth Avenue. And up the huge tower of the building to the fifteenth floor, where both police and FBI, as well as other government and military agencies, shared a Wirephoto transmit and reception console. Within fifteen minutes of arriving in the room he had the official NYPD photos of Brown’s fingerprints being wirephotoed down the Atlantic cable to Wirephoto reception in Scotland Yard, London.

  The Wirephoto clerk was long in hair, short in years, probably about twenty-two. He said he would contact Regan as soon as any telex information came back.

  Regan was a little worried. The guy didn’t look too reliable. But as it turned out he had just been back one hour in the surveillance office on Forty-ninth Street when the phone rang and the young operator came on with the news that he’d just received a telex from London.

  Regan asked him for the contents, then made him repeat the message. The telex from Scotland Yard to Detective Inspector Jack Regan said: WIREPHOTO FINGERPRINTS POSITIVE IDENTIFY GEORGE ANDREW FELLOWES, ALIAS NEEDHAM, ALIAS BROWN, BRITISH CITIZEN BORN LETCHWORTH 4TH AUGUST 1932 MULTIPLE CONVICTIONS FRAUD TOTAL EIGHT YEARS PRISON. RECENT SUSPECT ON MAJOR FRAUDS BRITISH AND CONTINENTAL. HAS MANY LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTERESTS INCLUDING PARTNERSHIP IN MERCHANT BANK, LONDON HIGHLAN SECURITIES, 104 EASTCHEAP, WHICH ALSO PROVIDES HIS ONLY AMERICAN CONNECTION. LONDON HIGHLAN SECURITIES IS ASSOCIATED HANNAN MILLS STOCKBROKERS, 191 WALL STREET.

  Regan put the phone down, picked up the Manhattan directory, and verified the Hannan Mills address. So Brown had no criminal record in America. No one had realized that the reason for this was that he was a British subject and resident. No one had thought of it because the guy had a reasonable American accent. The question now was, Did Regan have the resources? He was on his own—he had no intention of trying to involve Cassidy again, and certainly he was not going to hand the information over to Seebohm. Could he alone follow the lead through—a lead that all his instincts told him had the potential for going the whole way and throwing up the solution to the case?

  The cab deposited him outside the sober ground-floor offices of Hannan Mills Securities. He paid the cabbie, looked around, and then walked straight across the street and in through the foyer of the building opposite.

  He headed toward the elevators, got into one that was empty, and pressed the top-floor button. Moments later he was out in a deserted corridor and he saw immediately what he wanted—a door to the left of the elevator that had FIRE EXIT KEEP CLEAR on it. Regan opened the door, climbed six steps, and was out on the roof.

  This particular roof, Regan decided, was no place for the surveillance of the offices of Hannan Mills. But it was useful for conducting a survey of more favorable sites. Like the office building next door. A very large building, not completely slab-sided, having two indentations at its fourth and the eighth floors. Regan looked over the roof parapet down at the wide-based fourth-floor roof collar of the next-door building.

  Ten minutes later, he was standing on this roof. It was not quite as ideal as the Forty-ninth Street surveillance office, but he could see clearly down into the wide high lobby and stockbrokers’ bustle of the Hannan Mills offices. There should have been the major problem that he would be in full view of maybe a hundred offices, but what interested him was the fortuitous gift of a window-cleaning cradle dumped off its davits near the edge of this roof. The cradle was like a large coffin ten foot by four with slats running down the side. Once inside that coffin, equipped with a pair of binoculars to angle throu
gh the slats, anyone could carry out near-perfect surveillance on the brokers on the other side of the street.

  So Regan went off and found a discount store north of Wall Street and acquired a cheap pair of binoculars, a copy of Sports Illustrated, and a bottle of Scotch, and timed his return for midway through the lunch hour when he could get out on the roof and into the window-cleaning cradle without being spotted.

  At 2:20 p.m. he was seated in his cradle, cold, but shielded from the cut of the wind by the box sides, stoking up his body fuel with an occasional sip of Scotch, and punctuating that and the odd glance at Sports Illustrated with a regular two-minute check through the binoculars at the Hannan Mills staff returning from lunch.

  He had a few momentary lapses of self-confidence. He realized now that he was mounting watch on an institution, a stockbroker operation about which he knew nothing, studying it presumably to spot something he could not actually put a name to. On the other hand, this could be the break in the loss of progression on the investigation. No one but he had thought that one up, that Brown might be English, and the more he thought about it, it became more probable that Seebohm and company would still know nothing of the discovery, assuming that interdepartmental law agencies were no more efficient in New York than they were in London.

  After Regan had conned Seebohm’s Sergeant Tolmer and gotten the Brown fingerprints onto wire, he’d gone from the Federal Communications office back uptown and restored Brown’s prints to the file. Tolmer had simply given him the file on Seebohm’s instructions and had not seen Regan either take the prints out or put them back. Unless there was some automatic feedback from the Federal Communications building to the Fifty-ninth Precinct specifying exactly what facilities had been given to the London cop, there should be no reason why Seebohm would know anything about the Brown discovery.

  For the next three hours Regan tried to balance the ratio of the inroads of cold into his static body and the input of Scotch to keep it warm. He began to think it would be a losing battle. The cloud was lowering and the temperature dropping.

  He studied the Hannan Mills building, memorizing its salient points. High-columned main room divided into areas by rugs and low partitions. A dozen guys in ties behind desks —maybe a maximum of fifteen—always about twenty clients wandering in from time to time, presumably getting investment advice, today’s prices, profits and losses. A variation on the Lexington Bank but involving four times the personnel and custom. This afternoon, Regan decided, he’d study the setup visually; tomorrow he’d work out some approach to go inside, identify, and get to talk with a senior member of the firm.

  The afternoon wore on and the light faded, and his resolution to stay on his perch till the outfit closed up, presumably about six, wavered. He had visions of hot coffee and he had consumed three-quarters of a bottle of Scotch and felt stupid about it and guilty, because if something did happen, he’d be found waltzing on the margins of sobriety, and that might be a problem. At 5:45 p.m., the dark, a colder blanket, settled over the thousand terraces and fluorescent windows of Wall Street. Regan’s breath started to silhouette and steam inside the cradle. He didn’t need the binoculars to see that the trading day on the street was over and the exodus was on. He watched the ritual of coats and hats, briefcases being filled, chauffeurs arriving at doors with black cars for the privileged, and the unprivileged financial ants making off for cabs or subways.

  He saw two chauffeurs going into Hannan Mills and fanning out to look for their masters. One went to the guy at a raised-pedestal desk in the middle of the room, the other went to the back of the room, then turned aside at a glassed phone booth by the elevators and picked up the phone, presumably to call his boss.

  Regan gingerly stretched his limbs. He would have to wait another twenty minutes at least till the office migration was over with no likely spotters left to see him get out of his cradle. He maneuvered himself into a position so that he could push the binoculars down into his overcoat pocket. He paused, and for no good reason, decided to have a final look at Hannan Mills before he stowed the binoculars away.

  He put them to his eyes, angled them down, and studied the half dozen by now familiar faces still left in the office, and also the faces of the two chauffeurs who had just arrived.

  The first, a dark-skinned guy, Mexican-looking, had features difficult to distinguish under his chauffeur’s cap. The second guy, the one who was on the telephone by the elevators, turned around just as Regan’s binoculars framed in on him. Regan moved the focus wheel to get the sharpest definition on the man. Not that he really needed it—he’d seen the face before. He hadn’t worn a chauffeur’s uniform the last time; it had been an extremely expensive Saville Row suit. But there was no mistaking the identity of this guy in the chauffeur’s uniform speaking on the house phone. His name was Ettore Senti. When Regan had arrested the men at the Aerial Hotel, Senti had made the loudest protests.

  Regan half clambered, half fell out of the basket and tried to run but couldn’t, his legs numb with cold. But some kind of desperate determination got him across the roof and down the stairs to the elevator well. For the elevator to arrive, a full minute. Then from the pavement outside the building to the nearest crosswalk—the traffic was going too fast to attempt a suicide jaywalk—another two minutes. So from the roof to the moment he pushed open the door of number 191 Wall Street—approximately three and a quarter minutes of burned-nerve anticipation—it would be more than likely that Senti in chauffeur’s guise would have disappeared from the elevator lobby somewhere into the building, an irretrievable needle in a hundred-office haystack. But there he was, in his peaked hat, still speaking on the internal telephone, worry on his face as Regan closed the ten yards between them. Not worry at Regan’s approach, because Senti hadn’t seen him, but worry at some news that was coming over the phone that was not only bad news, but evidently something that must be dealt with immediately, because Senti banged down the phone and veered off left from the elevators, through double doors and into a corridor that made off in the direction of the rear of the building.

  Regan increased his pace marginally. He knew Senti hadn’t spotted him, and he wanted the option of a few seconds to debate whether to tail this guy or just grab him. Regan pushed open the doors and entered the corridor.

  It was empty except for two business guys deep in a discreet Wall Street chat. Senti was passing them. Regan used them as cover to gain a few yards on his quarry. If the gangster-turned-chauffeur looked around, the two guys heading toward Regan would block his view. Senti turned left into another corridor off this corridor.

  Regan passed the two men and increased his pace again.

  He heard the sound that must have been a footfall behind him; he just didn’t have the time to turn. Something hit him on the back of the skull so hard at first he thought it was a bullet and that he was dying. Who could have done it to him? It could only be one of the two Wall Street guys; Senti wasn’t even in the corridor. Then he realized it wasn’t a bullet, it must be something like a lead-pipe blackjack covered by a sock. Whatever it might be was academic. His head exploded in excruciating pain, and instantly everything was darkness. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.

  He was aware of early-morning voices, like service people, a postman, a doorman, talking somewhere near, their words impinging into his injured dreams, but not enough to wake him. He was aware of intense cold, of being still for a long time, like a salmon laid out’on a marble slab. He was aware of a noise like a banging window, which turned out to be a banging door. And finally he was aware of the sounds of destruction that had taken place around him—chairs, tables being overturned, windows broken, papers thrown around, bedding stripped, mattresses hacked open, crockery, plates, and books thrown across the room. But he could do nothing about all that because he was welded solid into the black steel drum of unconsciousness, the drum spinning and spinning until he felt nothing but dizziness and nausea. And then he was aware of a hand, his hand, reaching up to t
ouch the back of his head and finding a bruise there like a hard-boiled egg. And then he was coming conscious and trying to get his bearings, and failing because it all seemed too mad.

  He was lying in the third-floor corridor outside Cassidy’s apartment. The door had been so violently forced open that one of its four wooden panels was splintered across. It was hanging off its top hinges, gently banging against its frame in the sharp river breeze coming in through the broken main windows. Regan, spread-eagled on the floor, raised his head minutely for a worm’s eye view of the destruction inside the apartment. It was professional and complete. The guys that had worked it over had either gotten what they wanted or alternatively left no stone unturned.

  How had he got here? Why here? and Who had brought him? seemed the lead questions. Well, of course, the address of this apartment was in his notebook, available to whoever had knocked him unconscious in the Hannan Mills building. Had Cassidy’s apartment been wrecked by the people who had assaulted him? And what were they looking for? What did they think he had to hide in an apartment? Regan could think of nothing.

  He lay there shivering on the ice-cold linoleum. There was another priority before a decision on a sequential list of questions—from where he lay he could see on top of Cassidy’s bed, on top of the ripped mattress, a machine that looked like an electronic calculator, and a handwritten note propped against it. He relaxed for a minute. Then, calling on physical reserves about whose existence he had serious doubts, he somehow energized his arms and back muscles and legs and got himself up onto his knees.