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  “Don’t worry about the stain. I’ll take care of the stain.” He stooped to pull a Schaefer from the Kelvinator and popped the cap off with a church key that dangled on a string from the upper hinge.

  “How? Blood and all. It don’t come out easy.”

  “For me to know and you to find out.” He grinned at Cassidy in male conspiracy and drank half the beer without coming up for air.

  “Mrs. Donovan, did you hear anything, a scream, a yell?”

  “No. We was listening to McCarthy going after them Reds, you know? We had it turned up pretty loud, ’cause I was in the kitchen and wanted to hear. Do you think he’ll get them out of government and the Army and all? There seem to be an awful lot of them.”

  “I didn’t fight a war so that these Commie sons of bitches can come in and take over.” Donovan burped. “Root ’em out, says I. Send ’em back where they came from. This ain’t their country.”

  “Did you hear music from up there? Apparently he was playing the radio too. Maybe you heard him turn it on.” The killer used the radio to cover the torture screams. If they had heard it turn on, Cassidy would have a time frame.

  “Nope. Didn’t hear a thing.” He looked to his wife for support, and she shrugged and shook her head.

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Ingram? Not much.”

  “Is that his name?”

  “Yeah. Ingram. Moved in during the summer. Works nights, I think. Coming and going at all hours. Who knows? Scraping by when he first got here. Missed the rent a couple of times. Had to talk to him, a little heart-to-heart. Then he must’ve caught something, ’cause back in the fall the rent starts arriving like clockwork first of the month. Pays what he owes. Bunch of new furniture comes in.”

  “A nice-looking boy,” Mae offered. “Always polite. Says, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Donovan. How are you?’ Helped me carry things a couple of times.”

  “Friends? Visitors?”

  They looked at each other. “Nah,” Donovan said. “Not that I know of. I don’t spy on the tenants, you know? Live and let live, long as they don’t cause trouble.”

  “You said you had to use your keys to open the apartment door. Was the dead bolt locked?”

  “Nah. Just the latch.”

  Cassidy gave Donovan one of his cards. “If you think of anything, call me.”

  “Cassidy, huh? So where’re you from in the Ould Sod? A lot of Cassidys down around Donegal.”

  “If I’m not there, leave a message. I’ll get back to you.”

  He went back upstairs. The sod of Donegal. Not too many of his Cassidys down around there. His father’s name had been Tomas Kasnavietski when he fled the border area between Russia and Poland as a fifteen-year-old to avoid dying in the tsar’s army. The story he told his children was that he had worked his way south, sleeping in the woods, or in haystacks and barns when he was lucky, working when he could, stealing when he had to, avoiding farm dogs and Cossack patrols, until he washed up in Odessa. He stowed away on a Black Sea tramp freighter, was caught, beaten, and thrown off in Istanbul. He survived on the waterfront for six months, thieving and robbing, and then stowed away on another freighter, bound, he was told, for New York, where, he had it on good authority, the streets were paved with gold. Having no idea of geography, he had only brought food for a week. He was discovered ten days out, as the ship cleared the Straits of Gibraltar, when he worked his way out of the hold where he had hidden to try to steal food from the galley. The captain proved to be a man with a generous heart. Instead of throwing him overboard, he put him to work. The ship was bound not for New York but for Quebec City, Canada, where Tomas Kasnavietski jumped ship into a winter as iron hard as any he had left behind in Poland. He crossed the border into Vermont through an evergreen forest knee-deep in snow, and hopped a freight train south.

  A year after he left home, he disappeared into the polyglot slums of New York, where the streets proved to be paved with cobblestones and horseshit. Thomas Cassidy had seemed the perfect American name to his ear, an erasure of the past, a fiction on which to build a bright American future. It was a story his children had gleaned over the years in bits and pieces. Sometimes their father threw a fragment in passing; sometimes, the dinner wine working with the after-dinner bourbon, he spun the stories out to his children sitting near the fire in the darkened library, while his wife, Joan, went to another room to read. To young Michael Cassidy, it had seemed an incredibly romantic adventure, one that he could never match. As a man he understood that it had not been romance but a fight for survival reimagined from a position of comfort and safety.

  Cassidy went back into Ingram’s apartment. The body had been strapped to a gurney for the trip to the morgue, and Cassidy had to step aside to let the morgue team maneuver out the door. Al Skinner, the lead tech, was crouched in the living room. He had pulled up a corner of the white carpet and was examining the underside.

  “Find something?” Cassidy asked.

  “Hey, Cassidy, how’re you doing? Nah. I was just checking. You see this carpet? You know what it cost? There’s a place over on Twenty-ninth and Third under the el there, ABC Carpets. You know that place? Best deal in town. I was in with the wife a couple of weeks back, I saw one just like this. You know what it went for? Four hundred and fifty bucks. You turn your back, I’m going to slide this thing out of here.” Skinner grinned and stood up. He was a spider of a man, dark and wiry, with lank brown hair and bright blue eyes.

  “What’ve you got for me?” Cassidy tapped a Lucky Strike down on his thumbnail and lit it with his Zippo. He offered one to Skinner, who shook his head.

  “Stuff’ll kill you.”

  “What won’t?”

  “Multiple tearing wounds to the torso and abdomen consistent with the pliers we found in the sink. Right now, I’ve got no cause of death. None of the wounds killed him. There’s a lot of blood, but he didn’t bleed out.” He handed a manila envelope to Cassidy, who dug in it and found the dead man’s wallet. Gold letters stamped on the leather showed it was from T. Anthony, an expensive leather shop on Madison Avenue. “A hundred seventy-five bucks in cash. Almost two weeks at my salary. Finders keepers, but I’ll split it with you, ’cause I’ve got a generous heart.”

  There was an expired New Jersey driver’s license in the wallet with an address in Englewood. According to the license, Alexander Ingram was twenty-four years old. Cassidy wrote down the address, and when he slid the license back in, he found another card. “Huh.”

  “What? Did I miss a couple of hundred?”

  “An Equity card.”

  “What’s that?

  “Actors’ union.”

  Cassidy shook the envelope out on the coffee table to see what else Ingram’s pockets had held. Loose change, a blue silk handkerchief, a gold penknife, a ring of keys, a gold Ronson cigarette lighter, an alligator-skin cigarette case holding six Chesterfields and a hand-rolled tucked to one side. He took it out and sniffed it. “Reefer.” He dropped it back in the envelope. “Anything else?” he asked Skinner.

  “Not till I get him on the table. Where’s your partner? He owes me ten bucks on the Yankees game.”

  “In court. Testifying.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to settle up for him? No? Okay.” Skinner gathered up Ingram’s belongings and left.

  Scalabrine was waiting for Cassidy on the landing. “Nothing. Nobody heard nothing. The apartment right above is empty. There’s an old lady across the hall wouldn’t hear a gun go off you stuck it in her ear.”

  “Okay. Tape and seal the place when Crime Scene is finished. Then get a couple more men and canvass the area. I want to know if anyone saw somebody use the fire escape from this apartment, or saw someone come out of the alley down there.”

  “Sure. Uh, Detective, are you going to say anything about my being in the Chinaman’s?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks.”

  * * *

  Cassidy found Skinner downstairs on the s
idewalk watching the attendants slide the gurney into the van. Rubberneckers clustered on the neighboring stoops. There were not many. Dead bodies were not rare in Hell’s Kitchen, and the cold March drizzle was discouraging. The streetlights were on and the rain-slick pavement glistened.

  “You’d think winter’d give us a break,” Skinner said. “Sally wants to go upstate to look at antique stores on Saturday. I told her, it snows, she’s on her own, I’m not leaving the apartment.”

  “Call me tomorrow after the cut.”

  “Tomorrow? I’ve got six stiffs and a floater-bloater waiting. I’m understaffed, and the new guys they hired must’ve learned anatomy in an auto body shop.”

  Cassidy took a ten-dollar bill from his pocket and showed it to Skinner, who looked around quickly to see if anyone was watching.

  “You know, Cassidy, you can get arrested for bribery.”

  “Not in this town.”

  Skinner snaked the ten from his hand and slipped it in his pocket. “Give me a couple of days. I’ll call you. Hey, and tell Orso I want my sawbuck.”

  Cassidy flicked his cigarette into the gutter and turned east to Broadway.

  The drizzle softened to mist that muted the blare of the neon. Cassidy nodded to Charley One Leg, shrouded in a black wool coat that dragged on the pavement as he leaned on his crutch and hawked tickets for the second-floor dance hall on the corner of 50th. It was early, and only three sailors on leave, their romantic optimism fueled by cheap booze, took a chance and climbed the stairs past the framed photos, glossy head shots with white smiles, the hair just so, taken when the women waiting above were young, optimistic, still sure that their break was just around the corner, the next audition, the next open call.

  A bearded man in a white robe stood on a milk crate at the corner of 49th and tried to interest the hurrying people in the fast-approaching end of the world. The clatter and bong of pinball machines and the whoops of players at the shooting games rattled out the open door of the arcade on 47th. Just past it was a discount store that had been GOING OUT OF BUSINE$$$$ for six years. It sold cheap portable radios, Japanese cameras, World War II surplus equipment, and knives that couldn’t hold an edge AT ROCK BOTTOM PRICE$$$$$. Four punks sneered at passersby as they leaned against the window of a Pokerino parlor under a tinny speaker that crooned Perry Como, the collars of their leather jackets turned up, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, pompadoured hair slicked back to ducktails, pegged jeans tucked into engineer boots. They looked at Cassidy with cold eyes as if deciding whether to eat him. He measured them in return and smiled, and they turned away with elaborate indifference. Past them, three jittery dopers with jumpy eyes and neck tendons like wires were chopping open Benzedrine inhalers on the glass of a pinball machine just inside the door. Nighttime on Broadway—the Stem, as the denizens called it—and everybody was having a good time. Jesus, he loved it.

  The sidewalk was crowded. Out-of-towners moved slowly, eyes raised toward the Planters sign in the Square that poured endless neon peanuts from its bag and the Camel cigarette man who blew five-foot smoke rings from the billboard on the Claridge hotel. Impatient New Yorkers, immune to the scene, jostled them in their rush to get wherever it was they were rushing to. Cassidy walked fast, a New Yorker’s pace. He slipped through gaps, turned his shoulders to slide past gawkers, still playing the game from his childhood of going as quickly as possible without touching anyone, a skill, Gwen said when he told her about it, that he brought into his personal life.

  Tony Orso stepped out of an Orange Julius halfway down the block carrying a cup of juice in one hand and a rolled newspaper in the other. He saw Cassidy and drank the juice while he waited for him. He wore a white nylon shirt, a short, wide orange-and-green tie, and scuffed shoes, with what he called his testifying suit, a cheap off-the-rack number from Robert Hall that he wore only when he went to court. Three years before, dressed as he usually dressed, he had testified as the arresting officer of a bunco artist posing as a priest who had bilked people out of thousands of dollars. The jury acquitted the man, and Orso learned later that some of the jurors, noting the elegance of his clothes, decided that he dressed too well to be an honest cop and that they could not trust the testimony of someone so obviously corrupt against the word of a man of God. From then on, he wore his testifying suit.

  “How’d it go?” Cassidy asked.

  “Twenty to life. Sayonara, baby. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” Orso crushed the paper cup and tossed it in a trash can. “I hear you caught one.”

  Cassidy told him about Ingram.

  “Tortured, huh? What do you think the guy was after?”

  “No idea. We’ll start checking in the morning, friends, family, whatever. Someone’s going to know something. He had a beef with a business partner. Someone thinks he stole something and wanted it back. You know how it goes. Somebody gets a half-smart idea and a couple of days later he’s explaining to us that he didn’t mean to hurt him, it just got out of hand.”

  “What’re you doing now? You want to go get loaded? I always work better with a hangover.”

  “I’m meeting my brother and sister for dinner at Sardi’s.”

  “I’ll walk a ways with you.” They walked south. “You tell that sister of yours she wants to give up the Park Avenue life and move to a walk-up in Bed-Stuy, I’m the man for her.”

  “I don’t see how she can turn down that offer.”

  “Not if she’s smart. Ah, shit. Look at that,” Orso said.

  Down the block, a man talked earnestly to a young woman who leaned her back against a drugstore window. She wore a gingham dress with a full skirt supported by can-can petticoats, a fuzzy pink angora sweater, and pumps with two-inch heels. Her blond hair was held in place by a black velvet band. She looked like a girl on the way to the prom or the grange hall dance and might as well have worn a sign saying Just off the bus. The man had one hand up on the glass by her head and leaned in to talk to her with practiced intimacy. He was a good-looking slick in black trousers pegged tight at the ankles above pointed half boots, a dark yellow one-button roll jacket, a green shirt open at the collar, and a stingy-brim porkpie hat with a bright red feather in the hatband. He smoked through a black cigarette holder clenched in his teeth. His black hair was combed to a ducktail. He leaned in close to say something to the girl’s ear, and then pulled back and laughed and put his free hand on her arm and rubbed it up and down. She watched him with the fascination of a mouse held by a cobra’s weave.

  Orso said, “Hey, Flea, what’s happening?” The man started to turn from the girl with a startled expression, and then Orso slapped him on the back with the rolled newspaper in what looked to anyone nearby like a friendly gesture. Pain washed Flea’s face, and his knees buckled. Orso turned him away from the girl with an arm around his shoulder and slapped him on the chest with the paper and said, “Let’s you and me have a little talk,” and moved him to the curb.

  The girl looked scared.

  “It’s all right, Miss,” Cassidy said, and showed her his badge. “What’s your name?”

  “Juney Gilmore. What’s going on? What happened? Did we do something wrong? I was leaning on the window. Is that okay? I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. That’s okay. Everything’s fine. My partner just had something to say to Flea. How long have you been in town? Do you mind my asking?”

  “I’ve been here a week. I’m staying at the Barbizon. Do you know the Barbizon? It’s really swell.” The Barbizon was a hotel for single women on East 63rd and no men were allowed above the first floor. “I’ve got a job starting on Monday. Secretary in a law firm on Lexington. Stickney & Decker?”

  “How’d you meet Flea?”

  At the curb, Orso still held the man with an arm around his shoulders, and Flea was bobbing his head in agreement with whatever Orso said.

  “Flea? Is that his name? He said his name was Steve.” She was beginning to relax. “It was real clumsy of me, I guess. I was walking
and looking up at that sign with the man blowing smoke rings, and I bumped right into him and almost knocked him down. But he was real nice about it.”

  “I’m sure he was.” Bump into a tourist who was not paying attention. Lift his wallet, or, if you were Flea, start a conversation and see if it took you where you wanted to go. “Flea’s a pimp, miss.”

  “What?” She looked over wide-eyed to where Flea and Orso talked.

  “A pimp. He uses women to…”

  “You think I don’t know what a pimp is? I know what a pimp is. Just because I don’t come from New York doesn’t mean I don’t know things.”

  “Flea specializes in young women new to the city.”

  She looked over again, and Cassidy wondered whether he saw more curiosity than fear in her face.

  Orso put his face close to Flea’s and said something hard, and then he slapped Flea on the chest again with the newspaper and turned him loose. Flea walked away without looking back, hunched over with his arms hugging his chest as if holding something in.

  The newspaper Orso carried wrapped a lead pipe. He always carried a rolled newspaper when he walked the Stem, and the paper always held the pipe. Some people, like Flea, Orso said, just needed a little extra encouragement to do the right thing.

  “Miss Gilmore is staying at the Barbizon before she starts a job next week,” Cassidy told Orso. “Juney, this is Detective Orso.”

  “How do you do.” She offered a white-gloved hand.

  Orso took it and held it. “How about we put you in a cab. You’ll be back at the hotel in ten minutes, safe and sound.”

  She took her hand back, and her face set. “I’m not a child.”

  “No, I can tell. You certainly are not a child. But still…”

  “You sound like my parents. The big, bad city. I can take care of myself.”

  “Of course you can.” Orso looked over at Cassidy with a raised eyebrow. Cassidy shrugged.

  “I have places I want to go and things I want to see, and when I’m done, I’ll go back to the hotel. I’m going to the Automat for dinner.”