The Sweeney 02 Page 6

  The sixth thing about an alcoholic is his companions. Lieutenant Ramo Ciales sat next to Cassidy, two hands around his tumbler of rye. Ciales lacked the bleached skin, dry hair, and dandruff factory. Regan reckoned he was not an alcoholic, but maybe training. Ciales was simply drunk.

  The interview with Captain Seebohm had not been encouraging. Regan had gone from the shooting at the Plaza back to the Alex Hotel, washed his wound, changed his clothes, gone to a drugstore—he’d decided to dress the wound himself; he couldn’t think of anything a hospital could do that he couldn’t. Then he had phoned Seebohm. Seebohm had blown his stack. He had already received a report of a shooting inside the Plaza. Why the hell hadn’t Regan phoned the police right away? Regan had felt his feet slipping into the mire again and had begun to wonder at the serious possibility that he was taking leave of his own senses. Five minutes after Seebohm abruptly cut the call, a prowl car was at the curb outside the Alex. It took Regan at sixty miles an hour, siren shrieking, up to the brownstone edifice of the Fifty-ninth Precinct. Regan walked into the office. Seebohm told him to take off his jacket and shirt. Then the Captain told him to get out of the office and buzzed his intercom for another car to take the Limey cop to the nearest hospital.

  An hour later Regan had walked back into Seebohm’s office, mildly reeling from the antibiotics and antiseptics. Seebohm had obviously been giving it some thought. The thought went something like this: if an English cop in twenty-four hours can get conned by the Mafia and then get shot by persons unknown, and then can keep the shooting private—then avoid that cop like the plague.

  Regan was ready for a brush-off. He reasoned and argued for half an hour. Finally Regan thought he had convinced Seebohm of the facts, which were incontrovertible—he felt legally entitled to remain in New York and recover those papers. He needed police aid and advice. He would cause less trouble with police aid and advice than he would blundering around New York on his own. There was also the chance that he might meet with success. While Regan spoke, Seebohm had been thinking about his own problems in the detectives bureau, plus the problem of Regan, and suddenly he realized he could combine the problems—maybe they’d cancel out. Whatever happened, two problems would now be one kettle of fish and he could more easily keep his eye on it.

  So he assigned Regan help and advice from two of his lieutenants, Cassidy and Ciales. He mentioned something about Cassidy and Ciales being without duties at the moment, pending the outcome of an investigation. Regan smelled a rat.

  “Are these lieutenants, Cassidy and Ciales, in some kind of trouble?” Regan questioned the dour police officer who drove him back to his hotel.

  “Right, up shit creek.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  The police officer turned his narrow eyes on Regan. “You ask them.”

  Regan shouldered his way gently through the last group of noisy drinkers and approached Cassidy and Ciales. “Mr. Cassidy, Mr. Ciales. I’m Jack Regan.”

  Ciales looked up. Cassidy didn’t. “Uh huh,” Ciales said. Then he looked for a stool for Regan. There wasn’t one. Regan stepped across the room, picked up a stool, and headed back. He sat down.

  “It’s cold, isn’t it?” Ciales said, as if wanting an answer, as if he and Cassidy hadn’t left this bar for two weeks and were now curious about the weather.

  Regan said nothing.

  “You drink medicinally, Mr. Regan?” Ciales asked.

  “I drink Scotch and water,” Regan replied.

  “J and B?”

  Regan nodded.

  “We understand you have just buggered yourself in this city,” Ciales offered.

  “Right,” said Regan.

  “And Mr. Seebohm gives you the brush-off. So you are put on to us.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “We don’t understand it, Mr. Regan,” Ciales said. “Did Seebohm tell you we are on unofficial suspension? Did he tell you that?”

  Regan shook his head. He was studying the other man, wondering what generation Cassidy was. First, second generation? Or descendant of the obligatory Irishman who must have conned himself a free hitch on the Mayflower.

  Cassidy’s eyes came up and met Regan’s. He decided to speak. “We are on unofficial suspension from the PD because the crime we have committed is so heinous that I’m not even going to tell you what it is. Ramo, tell the Englishman our crime.”

  “Guy in hospital. In coma. We put him there,” Ciales said. “If he moves from hospital to city morgue we get rapped with manslaughter, maybe murder.”

  It was left at that for a moment while Regan’s drink arrived, and Ciales ordered refills for himself and Cassidy. Then Ciales continued. “A week ago in a car, four a.m., number Sixty-seven East Sixty-third.”

  “A brownstone,” Cassidy said, shaking his head, as if that was another item of evidence against them.

  Ciales nodded. “We’re watching Sixty-seven. The door opens on Sixty-eight. Out comes this blackamoor with a white girl in pajamas. He throws her down the steps. She’s hollering. We figure the black guy is unloading this white girlie, but she don’t want to go. She goes back upstairs and she sticks her nails in his eyes. He hits her hard.” Ciales shook his head, either at the sad memory of the actual event, or what was to come after. “So we go and hit the guy. First we hit him with fists. Then boots. We hit him for ten minutes. He don’t go down,” the Puerto Rican cop said. “He’s laughing at us. Then Don Cassidy here hits him with his gun. The side of his head. He don’t go down. I left out something. All the time he’s hitting us. Not well, but okay. So we hit this guy for twenty minutes, then suddenly he goes down. And he’s out and he’s in a coma. And at the hospital they count and he has one hundred and sixteen lacerations and bruises on him. We’re clean,” Ciales added. “Minor bruises.”

  “Not clean,” Cassidy corrected. “In the shit.”

  Ciales paused while he thought out the simplest way to express it. “Tonight, one week after that night, the guy is still in coma. There’s a chance he could die. That way we ain’t going to be useful to you, we’ll be under arrest. Docs say indications are slowly he’ll come around. The moment he does, he’ll make a statement, and we have problems. So chances are we’re going to be busy, too busy to help you.”

  Regan looked to Cassidy. Cassidy said nothing.

  “Here’s the epilogue,” Ciales went on. “You heard of Tamla Motown, or Motown?”

  “No,” Regan said.

  “It’s a multimillion-dollar music and disk outfit. The blackamoor—he doesn’t own that, he owns Stashtower. That’s number two. They try harder. We hit a guy whose personal fortune is ten million base.”

  There was a long silence at the table while the two American cops considered once again the serious consequences of hitting a millionaire and the power of the legal process in its relation to the size of the checkbook. Cassidy spoke. “Of necessity, we drink to that.”

  Cassidy’s eyes came up from his drink, studied Regan again, and made a decision. “Okay,” he said, as if he’d made a series of calculations arriving at a conclusion. “We’ll discuss Galliano, Cohen, and company, as if it was possible to get back your papers. But first we get drunk. Then we eat. Then we all get laid. Then we’ll talk about your problem, Mr. Regan...”

  When the incident happened, Regan had that nightmare moment of not knowing where the hell he was. He thought he was in a tunnel, somewhere like the Queens Midtown Tunnel, but as the side of the car disintegrated and the glass in the windows exploded into powder diamonds, the car heeled over forty degrees and Regan saw sky and stars beyond the streetlight neon, saw them dimly, like a last blurred photo flash before eternity.

  The two tires on the near side of Cassidy’s battered Chevrolet had been torn off. Cassidy was drunk in the driver’s seat, and the car was still traveling at seventy miles an hour.

  It was one of those moments of danger where time is suspended, where events can be itemized, numbered, and ticked off as they follow their
preordered progress to a biblical finale. The curiosity about this phenomenon of frozen time is that the person headed into danger feels that somehow the situation can be salvaged if only he can get the sequence of the events that are happening around him clear in his mind, that the comprehension of how the crisis came about will somehow lessen the impact and violence of its impending conclusion.

  In five hours, Cassidy, Ciales, and Regan had covered sixteen bars and spent $200 on alcohol. Regan knew they had spent $200 because Ciales paid for every drink after he had collected $200 from the owner of the third bar. Regan’s recollection of events and their timing became vague around midnight, when they hit a black bar just over the river in Queens, and Cassidy joined a game of craps and profited by $130. “We now have the bills to pay for the ass.” Cassidy sent Ciales off to the phone to locate three girls and negotiate within a price range. Then more bars, all hazy to Regan now. And then Ciales phoned some more and came up with the names of three Chinese girls who lived somewhere around West Thirty-eighth Street. And Cassidy glowered a bit and said he didn’t know if he was that interested in three Chinese girls, and Ciales was by now falling asleep and fell off his chair. And they had piled out of the bar and pushed him into a cab where he lay on the floor snoring. They had then crossed the river to head back to Fifty-ninth and pick up Cassidy’s car from a Park-O-Mat. The car was a 1968 Chevrolet Impala with front and rear fenders missing, and a V8 engine that was shaking the rest of the body to pieces. There was a brief exchange between Cassidy and Ciales about the best route to Thirty-eighth Street, and Regan forgot how that was resolved, and then they were moving through fairly heavy traffic down Ninth Avenue and heading into the mess of the exit from the Lincoln Tunnel.

  The truck started to pull alongside them at West Fiftieth Street. Cassidy was officially speeding—on about fifty-five knots. Regan had noted, as Cassidy and Ciales must have done, that the mother driving the truck must have been as tanked as they were, and maybe more, because the high-rise he was driving was forty feet long on sixteen wheels and not built for slipping in and out of the lanes of cruising cabs and the lost souls of New York midnighters closeted in their misted Chryslers.

  It was some kind of r-amp, and they were heading down, and it was around Fortieth Street and there were signs for the Lincoln Tunnel, and Cassidy’s car was at some speed, seventy, which is twenty miles an hour beyond the resources of its brakes, when the road dropped and became concrete contained in long slab walls on each side, and Regan saw the sixteen-wheel forty-foot megalith of truck pulling alongside also at seventy, and he thought: “Jesus, if that thing waves about any more it’s going to hit us.” Followed by the first crunch of metal hitting metal. Followed by, “The bastard is trying to kill us!” said aloud to the two cops in the front, who already were aware of this and taking the only action possible —Cassidy slamming on the brakes and horn, Ciales folding his knees and back and sliding down, compacting himself below the windshield for the crash that was about to come.

  Then the unseen truck driver, expertly pacing Cassidy’s braking efforts and having tested what a nudge would do, swung the wheel of the truck over and drove the huge wall of speeding metal in to collide with Cassidy’s Chevrolet, to swat it like a fly among the concrete walls and pillars of the ramp.

  The Chevy hit and scraped down the walls, and tore off two tires and a telephone box that was on the wall and some wiring, which flashed and burned; then the front wing folded into three strips and ripped off past Regan’s near-side door, which itself buckled up and piled into the car. And Regan saw lights and the sky and dimly some stars. But the truck driver had missed one element in his killer’s calculation. The Chevrolet’s front wheels, now locked sideways, were excavating deep lines down 150 yards of road surface, causing a drag factor considerably more efficient than the factory-installed dual braking system. The car, decelerating faster than the truck, dropped out of the space between the truck and the wall. Presumably the trucker’s plan was to pace the braking of the Chevy and keep swatting it against the wall until its total disintegration. Cassidy came out behind the truck, fingers white on the steering wheel that wouldn’t obey him. The car bounced across to the opposite wall of the single-lane entrance, hit a streetlight and snapped it like a match, spun four times, and turned upside down, seesawing lazily around on its flattened roof.

  Somehow Regan sobered, and he was scrambling through the small hole of broken rear window out of the car, followed by Cassidy and Ciales. Cars on the road behind were beginning to scream into a simultaneous braking operation. Some succeeded and others didn’t, and there was the sound of metal hitting metal. But already Cassidy was grabbing Regan and pushing him into a trot. The Chevy was pouring gasoline out of its trunk. And when they were about a hundred yards away from the scene, it blew up, showering burning gas over everything within ten yards—including twenty cars.

  They ran through the sharp night air for a block, and then Cassidy grabbed Regan and pushed him against a wall as if he were angry. Ciales sat on the curb, breathing like a pneumonia case and hating the two of them. He should have been killed when the truck hit the car. He should have been killed when the Chevrolet crashed and burned. He’d survived, but still he was angry.

  Cassidy held Regan against the wall, still trying to catch his breath. Ciales got up off the pavement and started to wander off. “Where are you going?” Cassidy barked.

  “To phone headquarters. I got the number of that truck...”

  “Shithead,” Cassidy shouted at him. “That was a General Mills sixteen-wheel oiler. You think it’s registered in the name of the guy who tried to murder us? It’s now parked two, three blocks away with the guy hightailing it. Wake up your goddamn ideas.”

  Now he moved his attention to Regan, whom he was still pinning against the wall. “We hit the blackamoor a week ago.

  I don’t think that truck was meant for us. So it was meant for you. Let me tell you, that was a very professional attempt to assassinate you. You better take care of yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you staying in town?”

  “Alex Hotel, West Fifty-fourth Street.”

  “I hate guests. But for your safety you’ll move in with me.” Cassidy released Regan. “You say you don’t know why the guy shot you in the Plaza, right? Now you say you don’t know why the guy hit us with the oiler?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, start fucking thinking. Someone’s going to kill you. There has to be a good reason for that kind of thing.”

  Cassidy lived on the top floor of a converted warehouse on Eleventh Avenue and West Eighteenth overlooking piers 58 to 60. The rumble of traffic rolled Regan out of his uneasy sleep about nine in the morning. He smelled burning bacon and toast. He was on a mattress on the floor. His memories of arriving here last night were vague.

  It was a single room with a john and a shower off it and a high skylighted roof—the smoke of incinerating breakfast had twenty feet to rise to hit the grimy panes. Regan climbed off the mattress and fell on his knees. He stayed there for some seconds. The hangover seemed to present an insuperable wall between decisions and the mechanics of carrying them out.

  Regan checked the room out. It was twice as long as it was high, freezing cold, as homespun as an aircraft hangar, and with enough empty bottles stacked in piles to start a Scotch distillery. There were two or three pieces of electronics, a Sony quad synthesizer and a television tuned to the 9:00 a.m. news with the sound turned off.

  “Breakfast?” Cassidy inquired brightly—no trace of a hangover in his voice.

  “I’d like to take a shower,” Regan said.

  “Sure,” Cassidy agreed. “Towels in there. You need help?”

  Regan shook his head. He made an effort of will, got up, felt suddenly a stab from the shoulder wound of yesterday, felt it turn into a dull pain, and started to stagger across the floor. “What happened to Ramo?” he croaked.

  “Last time I saw him he was vomiting on a cab
driver.”

  Fifteen minutes later Regan was back, now half alive. At Cassidy’s gestured invitation he sat down at a battered oak refectory table and looked at two burned eggs. Then he noticed Ricky Rossi’s passport on the table. “Don, where did you find this passport?”

  “On the floor.” Cassidy spoke with his mouth full of toast. “That’s where you dropped your jacket and most of your possessions last night.”

  “I suppose I should give it to the FBI?”

  “I don’t think it’s much use to them. I’ve had a look at it. I reckon it’s a fake. Is the photo a good likeness of the guy at the Aerial Hotel?”

  Regan checked with another look at the little man with the bad toupee. “It’s pretty close.”

  “Well, we’ve got the description on the police net. But don’t hold out too much hope on that. It’s not easy to find people in this town.”