Slowly, but inexorably, as the sub dived from sight a final time, their small ship was going down.
Part Nine
Chapter 39
All in all, Aram Shassad was pleased, as pleased as he could be under the circumstances. He and Hearn had made an important collar.
The case dated back a while, almost a year in fact. Two holdup men had been working out of town, trying out their show in New Haven, when a ballistics test in a Connecticut liquor store linked them to a holdup slaying in Yorkville a year earlier.
The New Haven police had a lead or two. One gunman's sister, it seemed, lived in New Haven with her three children. She and her kids were scared to death of him and his apparent partner. Some loose talk here and there, and on a warm day in early September 1976 Shassad, Hearn, and six other detectives and uniformed men closed in on an apartment in Brownsville. Months of detective work ended in a mad scramble for pants.
Then there'd been that other case, the one which Shassad and Hearn had been reassigned to in the interim per io4 while the Yorkville liquor store trail had gone cold.
The Ryder-Daniels case, as Shassad termed it generically. Shassad thought of it that first Monday after Labor Day when he by chance was driving alone across Eighty-ninth Street.
He saw a solitary figure on the southeast corner, standing alone, apparently waiting, while a beehive of construction men and equipment surrounded the old Sandler mansion on the opposite corner.
'Son of a bitch' thought Shassad, pulling his car to a halt alongside a fire hydrant.
'Daniels' His curiosity overwhelmed him. He parked and stepped out.
Ryder-Daniels had been one of the most perplexing cases. It was now damned to remain forever in limbo, solved but not really solved, closed but having never reached a satisfactory conclusion.
Oh, there'd been the token explanation. But Shassad had never liked it all that much. Too pat. Too set. Too… too… Oh, hell.
He'd put in a lot of hours. He deserved more than seeing two Federal agents one morning in his office way back during a cold stretch of March.
Rota Films had been a front, they'd explained, as if he couldn't have told them that. A counterfeiting operation, using film cans to smuggle money and plates in and out of the United States. Well, he'd conceded, he'd known they were doing something. But he hadn't known what. As for Mark Ryder, the straying young husband who'd stepped out the wrong door at the wrong moment, the Feds had wrapped that one up for Shassad and Hearn, also. A bad case of a mistaken victim, they'd confirmed. And Shassad had already gotten that far, too.
But as for the killers, they'd said, Shassad needn't bother anymore.
The two men had been dealt with, one having been set afloat beneath the Manhattan Bridge, the other having taken a nasty tumble off a Nantucket ferry. All this in confidence, of course, the agents had told the city detectives. The case was all wrapped up and delivered, including that dark-haired young woman. Nothing further for Shassad to do.
'What about that prick Daniels?' Shassad has asked.
The question had been met with shrugs.
'Forget him they'd said.
'He's in bad shape, anyway.'
And Shassad hadn't seen him again, much less bothered to do anything more than think of him occasionally Not again, that is, until this warm, open morning in September.
'Hello, Daniels' said Shassad, walking amiably and casually to the man standing alone on the corner.
'Nothing quite like an old familiar face, is there?'
Thomas turned toward the voice and saw the detective approaching. For a moment he didn't recognize him. Then he did.
'Hello, officer,' he answered without acrimony.
Daniels looked back to the house. He watched. Shassad stood next to him and eyed the large crane in place beside the old structure across the street.
'I know it's not important anymore' Shassad tried cautiously, 'but I'm a curious sort of guy.
'What's that mean?'
'It means I never really got more than half a story. You. Some girl.
The Sandlers. A boat.' He paused, hoping Thomas would expand on it.
When Daniels didn't,. Shassad tried,
'I'd be grateful for whatever you could tell me. Hell. I'd just like to know. To scratch my own itch.'
Thomas could feel the sun's warmth. It was going to be a hot day, he could tell already, one of those misplaced summer days which arrive too late each year. One breeze did sweep across Eighty-ninth, rustling a few leaves which had prematurely fallen.
'Well?' Shassad asked.
'Come on. Give me a break There was so much, really, and it was all shooting through Daniels's mind. Primarily there had been the frigid water, that's what he was thinking of now. There had been the titanic wake from the submarine, the swamping of their small craft and his own mad flailing and floundering through the turbulent, freezing water toward the only thing afloat Zenger's boat, the one he'd rode in out to his rendezvous point.
He remembered the panic as he looked through the waves, losing sight of Leslie.
Then, as his arms and legs started going numb from the cold, he'd reached Zenger's abandoned boat and - shivering and chattering his teeth -had blasted the boat horn to attract her, wherever she was. And just a few seconds later, he remembered, he was buckling to the floorboards, exhausted and overexposed, shivering in what was the advent of a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. Moments later, attracted by the horn, she'd climbed aboard beside him, and had collapsed to the floor with him.
An hour afterward a Coast Guard cutter-attracted by something large and unidentifiable on its radar screen - had come upon them in the drifting boat. He'd been in no condition to explain anything. Not for a while.
Leslie was whisked away by a man named Lassiter from Washington. Thomas hadn't seen her again.
Shassad sighed and was almost about to leave.
'Okay, Daniels,' he said.
'Have it your way. Don't tell me' There was movement on the crane across the street. The yellow sun glistened off its metal.
'It all revolved around the girl Daniels said. Shassad froze, knowing when to listen. 'A girl in the Sandler family. Sort of.'
Daniels glanced at the detective as if he hardly cared whether Shassad knew or not. He was speaking out of a therapeutic need to talk.
Nothing more. Shassad knew it and listened.
'A remarkable woman' Daniels said.
'Bright. Perceptive. Educated. Could be ruthless, 'could be sensitive. She could do a lot of things' He thought.
'Know what she would do best?'
'What?'
'Teach. She taught me that I should get out of law.'
'Oh, yeah?' pondered Shassad.
'What're you going to do instead?'
'Who knows?' Thomas Daniels answered. Then he exclaimed, 'Look!'
Daniels gazed across the street and so did Shassad. The towering crane was moving now, and suspended from the tallest extremity was the bulbous iron wrecking ball.
The ball crashed into the wall of the mansion, hitting it solidly on the cross town side and caving in the old walls as a gingerbread cake would crumble to a little girl's hands.
