The City of Strangers (24 page)

It had taken Stefan Gillespie more than a day of sitting around at Police Headquarters to get up here. Everybody said there was nothing to look at anyway, except the view and the drop. There wasn’t. On the terrace there was the low wall. Inside there was no furniture, just a series of bare rooms. There were wires hanging down where the electricians had been working; there were cans of paint in a corner with the decorators’ ladders and trestles. They were three floors up from Dominic Carroll’s apartment, where Stefan had last seen John Cavendish alive, in a part of the Hampshire House where fitting out and decorating was still going on.

The Headquarters Detective Division had been happy to let Garda Sergeant Gillespie tag along in their investigation into the death of the Irish army officer; he would also provide any liaison that was needed with the Irish consulate. But Stefan had quickly found himself kept at an amenable and good-natured distance from whatever it was that was happening.

Inspector Twomey had tried to dress it up to look better than that. Captain Aaron Phelan had made a point of issuing him with the same gun they all carried, a Colt .38 Police Special. That got a round of applause, but it had taken more time than Stefan felt was convincing to establish exactly which floor the Irish army officer had fallen from. It had taken even longer for the forensic team to clear the thirty-second-floor apartment so that he could see it himself; they had been a very long day finding nothing. Talking to people who had seen John Cavendish at the party and trying to put a time on when he had left and who saw him last, was proceeding at a leisurely pace that felt very out of step with the wham-bam ethos of the Headquarters Detective Division. And Michael Phelan, the detective who had been assigned to keep Stefan in touch with everything, had spent most of his time taking him for coffee, or for lunch, or for yet another drink in McSorley’s after work.

It was clear the general consensus was that Captain Cavendish had wandered up to the thirty-second floor, maybe drunk enough to have lost his way, and had walked out on to the terrace where the railing hadn’t been put up. Then he had taken a step too far in the dark. If it hadn’t been for the fact that only a few days earlier an Irish seaman, who happened to be passing IRA ciphers to Cavendish, had fallen off a transatlantic liner into the Hudson River, after just taking a step too far in the dark presumably, after having a bit too much to drink presumably too, Stefan might not have questioned that consensus.

‘So why was he up here, Michael?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. We don’t know.’

‘Are you any nearer a time?’

‘We still can’t figure exactly when he left the party.’

‘How easy was it to get to this floor?’

‘The elevator would bring you. So would the stairs.’

‘So he just went to the wrong floor?’

‘There are no-access notices all over the elevator and the stairs,’ said Michael Phelan with a shrug, ‘but the electricians were in here the day before. It wasn’t locked up the way it should have been. They were coming back to work the weekend. I guess it shouldn’t have been so easy to get here, but then you wouldn’t assume anybody was going to be wandering around.’

It didn’t sound like the NYPD sergeant was being evasive. But Stefan knew him better than that, even after four days. These were lazy words; they bore little relation to the man who believed he worked for the hardest, sharpest police force on God’s earth. It wasn’t his case; he was there to mind Stefan; but he knew more than this. Stefan Gillespie knew he wasn’t trying.

‘He didn’t seem like he was pissed to me.’

‘The Medical Examiner said he’d had a bit.’

‘So much that he didn’t know where the fuck he was?’

‘I’m just telling you what the report said, Stefan.’

‘Well, you’re right. There’s nothing here. What about the body?’

‘Sure, I can take you to the morgue now.’

It was something else that seemed to have taken longer than it should.

‘Let’s see him then.’

Stefan headed for the lifts. He was irritated by what was going on, or what wasn’t. There seemed to be no reason at all why he wasn’t getting the information and cooperation that Inspector Twomey had been so enthusiastic about telling him he would get in spades, at every stage in the investigation. Something else was going on here. Whatever about the best police force in the world, Stefan knew bullshit; as bullshitters the NYPD only rated average.

The morgue at Bellevue Hospital was like any other morgue; cracked and crazed white tiles and a row of white porcelain body-sized slabs on metal legs; the smell of putrescence almost but not quite hidden behind a wall of disinfectant. It wasn’t one of Manhattan’s finest sights; it certainly had no view of the future as far as John Cavendish was concerned. His body lay on a slab at the far end of the long, cold room. Two other bodies kept him company on adjacent slabs. The Medical Examiner was in court when they arrived; Stefan had the distinct impression he’d probably stay there until they left.

The smell of rotting flesh was already strong as the mortuary assistant, smoking a black cheroot, pulled back the sheet that covered the G2 man. The body was bruised and the skin was broken; the legs and arms had been straightened, but in places twisted bones pushed the flesh out at odd angles, and in the right leg the shattered femur had burst through the skin.

Stefan walked slowly round the body. He remembered the first time he had met John Cavendish, the intelligence officer who had been so bad at following him through Dublin four years earlier, and had handed him a card that said ‘Lieutenant Cavendish Military Intelligence’. He didn’t imagine the soldier had handed out many of those in New York; that didn’t mean there weren’t people who knew he was doing more than check on the door and window locks at Ireland’s World’s Fair pavilion. It didn’t mean he hadn’t had too much to drink and fallen off a skyscraper either.

He looked at Cavendish’s face and realised he didn’t have the faintest idea whether the man had a wife or a family. He knew nothing about him. They had met only half a dozen times, but there was something, a bond, that meant no one else in New York knew who this man really was; except perhaps for the woman, Kate O’Donnell. He wondered if she knew he was dead; she must have heard. Everyone at the pavilion in Flushing Meadows had to know by now.

‘Did you know him well?’ asked Michael Phelan.

‘No, I hardly knew him at all. I was just talking to him at the party.’

Stefan didn’t quite understand why he was lying. He had done it without thinking, instinctively. He remembered the conversation he had had with John Cavendish at the Hotel Pennsylvania, the day before he died. Lying probably had no purpose at all, but whatever the intelligence officer had intended to trust him with, it felt as if saying nothing about any association, past or present, was how he would have wanted it. As for where that was, the envelope that had to go to G2 in Dublin, it could be that only the dead man knew; or it could be in other hands now, and maybe the same hands had pushed the intelligence officer over the wall at the Hampshire House.

His eyes moved down Cavendish’s body from his face; a lot of bruises. He wasn’t sure what falling thirty-two storeys did, apart from killing you; you’d expect bruises. It occurred to him that no one seemed to have asked whether John Cavendish was alive or dead when he fell. He looked harder at the dead man’s face. He bent closer. Bruises told all sorts of tales.

‘What do you think about the bruises?’ Stefan asked.

‘What do you mean, what do I think?’

‘How many dead bodies have you seen?’

‘More than you probably,’ laughed the detective. ‘Human, that is. You’ve maybe got the upper hand when it comes to dead sheep, right?’

Stefan smiled, still looking down at the corpse.

‘You know when a man’s been beaten up then.’

‘I guess I would.’

‘Wouldn’t you say he was in a fight? Look at the facial bruises.’

‘For fuck’s sake, the man fell thirty-two storeys! How the hell is anybody going to know whether he had a couple of bruises first? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. If he did, maybe he fell over when he was pissed. You’ve seen the autopsy report. The injuries are consistent with what happened to the guy. He’s a mess. Jesus, what else would you expect?’

‘It’s still a question. Is anybody asking it?’

‘Every question that needs to be asked will be asked.’

Sergeant Phelan was tight-lipped now. Somewhere the young NYPD detective had a feeling this case wasn’t being pushed the way Headquarters detectives pushed, but if it wasn’t that was because there was nothing to push. He had been told to keep the Irish policeman out of the way, because he was getting on people’s nerves, people with better things to do. Sergeant Gillespie had seen the reports. The man was drunk and he fell. But he kept pushing, as if there was something missing, as if there was something he didn’t think the NYPD was doing properly. The man wasn’t even a detective, just a hick who was in New York because he was the other end of a pair of handcuffs. Michael Phelan had kept his jokes about sheep and cattle and crime in the Wicklow Mountains to good-humoured banter; maybe Stefan Gillespie needed more serious pointers to the difference between rural Ireland and what happened in New York.

Stefan looked at him with a smile; he could feel a wall going up.

‘I’ve just got a job to do, Michael. I didn’t ask for it. I’ve the consul general on my back here and I’ll have to put in a report to the Garda Commissioner when I get back. Whatever fucking questions I get, I’ll have to have an answer. I don’t know anything about Captain Cavendish’s family, but you know how these things go. If he’s got a wife, she’s going to want to talk to someone who was there, someone who’s got answers, even if they’re not great ones. That means me, doesn’t it? Have you never had to do that?’

Michael Phelan nodded; he had. He knew how it felt.

‘I get you, but when there’s no answers there’s no answers.’

‘I know,’ said Stefan. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

He looked at John Cavendish one more time, with a faint nod. It was all he had to offer. Before long an undertaker would be doing what could be done to slow the body’s decay and would seal him in a coffin. A closed car would carry him through New York to one of the piers on the Hudson or the East River. He would be loaded into the hold of a liner. All the way across the Atlantic, somewhere above him, hundreds of people would eat and drink, dance and sing, laugh and quarrel, sleep and make love. At Cobh he would be loaded into the guard’s van of a train, en route to an undertaker’s by the Grand Canal, and eventually, before his removal to the Church of Our Lady Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, to his home in Leinster Road, Rathmines.

In the main office of the Headquarters Detective Division, Stefan Gillespie sat at Michael Phelan’s desk and typed the bare bones of the report he would take back to Ireland. He had spoken to the consul on the phone in Inspector Twomey’s office, and in a conversation that remained elliptical, partly because of where he was and partly because that’s how Leo McCauley wanted it anyway, he confirmed what he already knew.

There were questions to be asked about people who had spoken to John Cavendish at Dominic Carroll’s St Patrick’s Day celebration, but none of those questions could be about the reasons a G2 man was in New York that had nothing at all to do with the World’s Fair. Whatever he wasn’t getting from the NYPD, there were things he wasn’t giving them. The police questioning of party guests had been slow and unmethodical. It had, so far, involved only a few people, including police officers who had been at the Hampshire House that night. Most of them didn’t know who John Cavendish was, and none of them knew anything about the time he left the party. Stefan had been there when the staff working at the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair were questioned. They all knew Cavendish; some of them had spoken to him in the course of the evening; none of them had seen him leave.

Kate O’Donnell was someone Stefan had particularly wanted to talk to; she was the only person who obviously knew the army officer well, and she had clearly made some arrangement to meet him. But he didn’t say that. He had been cautious about saying anything except that he had the impression the two of them knew each other as colleagues at the World’s Fair. But Miss O’Donnell hadn’t yet been interviewed; she had been uncontactable the previous day and since there was no urgency about any of this, no one was in any particular hurry to find her.

Stefan had raised the odd encounter between Cavendish and the Cork hurlers. In what had seemed like no more than some random, drunken misunderstanding he had still not forgotten the look of hatred in the face of the young man who had spoken to John Cavendish so aggressively. The idea that someone needed to follow up a kid the captain didn’t even know, with too much whiskey in him, didn’t impress anyone in the Headquarters Detective Division. A detective had spoken to the team’s coach, but all the bainisteoir could tell them was that the player in question had spent most of the night back at the hotel throwing his guts up. Now the hurlers had embarked on the
Normandie
and were on their way back to Ireland. But the questions that couldn’t be asked, because Stefan Gillespie couldn’t talk about them, were the ones that really made John Cavendish’s death suspicious.

Nothing could be asked about Seán Russell and what the IRA chief of staff knew about the captain’s activities in New York; certainly nothing could be asked about what Dominic Carroll knew. Nothing could be asked about the German intelligence officer who was in the apartment that night. John Cavendish had joked about the Abwehr man, Herr Katzmann, but if the relationship between the Nazis and the IRA in America was as real as the G2 man thought, there might not be much to laugh about. Cavendish not only possessed IRA ciphers that a man had already died for, he had told Stefan he was about to find the key to cracking the code that would let them be read. If these messages mattered, wasn’t that something worth killing for?

As his two fingers typed up his empty report, Michael Phelan appeared with two cups of coffee and a look of some surprise on his face.