All of it seemed useless until one name sprang out at me. Michael Cassidy.
I scrolled back. Estranged wife of one of Isolde’s former clients, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ethan Ore, Ms. Michael Cassidy was Law Addison’s live-in lover at the time of his disappearance and was thought to have fled with him.
Ms. Michael Cassidy.
I started a new search, typing in “Michael Cassidy.”
Again, there were thousands of results. Some were for a male actor by that name, but more for the woman. She was famous, apparently. Hundreds of jpeg images of her, and though the hairstyle and coloring were different, I recognized her from the first shot. Those crazy green eyes were unmistakable. She was the woman from Owl’s hotel room.
I clicked on her bio. Her father was Kimble Cassidy, lead singer of the ’70s rock band Leavenworth. She was the child of his third marriage, this one to a back-up singer he met on the band’s fourth reunion tour. He died of a brain aneurysm when she was eleven.
In the mid-1990s, she’d risen to what passes for fame nowadays as part of a reality TV show featuring children of dead celebrities, and gained notoriety from two drug busts on heroin possession, which got her booted from the program.
Shortly thereafter, Michael Cassidy met and married a young actor and wannabe Orson Welles by the name of Ethan Ore. Ore subsequently rose to fame of his own for writing and directing an independent film called Dazey Miller.
I checked the IMDB listing and read the synopsis: “Daughter of has-been rock star gets turned onto drugs by members of her father’s band and becomes a call-girl in Milwaukee until a Rwandan cab driver helps her get clean.”
The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay that year, but it didn’t win. Maybe because Ore’s screenplay, far from original, had mirrored his wife’s true story. The week before the Oscars, Michael Cassidy had been busted again buying heroin from an undercover cop in L.A. The couple separated shortly after, but there was no record of their divorce being finalized.
I started a new search, this one on Ethan Ore. Fewer hits this time, but the very first one surprised me with another unexpected connection. Ore’s new film, Reneg, was being screened this week at the same West Side Film Festival that had premiered the unfortunate Craig Wales’ new star vehicle. In fact, Ore’s film had been rescheduled at the last minute to provide a more prominent time slot for Wales’ movie. It was after that screening that Craig Wales had overdosed.
Law Addison, Michael Cassidy, heroin, Craig Wales, Ethan Ore, and Owl. I was trying to wrap my mind around it, wondering what it all meant, wondering if it meant anything at all. It didn’t have to. Nothing had to mean anything. After all, this was New York City and there was the random element to take into account, the six-degrees effect; always layer upon layer of non sequiturs to wade through. I should’ve known that by now, but I persisted in seeking out connections.
I was still turning all of it over in my head, like a wire cage of bingo numbers, when my downstairs doorbuzzer buzzed.
I got up, went over to the intercom, pushed the SPEAK button, and asked who it was. But I got no answer. I shrugged and went back to my desk.
I was just clicking on a browser link to the West Side Film Festival when I heard a key turning in my lock.
I looked up as my office door swung open.
“What the hell? Come right in, why don’t you?”
No point in my saying it, he was already inside.
My old boss, Matt Chadinsky, had lost weight, but he was still built like a concrete traffic divider, with a hard expression on his face I wanted to veer away from.
“I called,” he said. “Your fucking phone’s been busy.”
“I was on the Internet.”
“What, you still using dial-up? Shit, Payton, churn your own fucking butter, too?”
I ignored it. I logged off the Internet and folded down the lid of my laptop without turning it off. I said, “You’ve lost weight, Matt. And shaved off your mustache.”
Matt touched his bare upper lip like someone checking his wallet on a crowded subway.
“Yeh, over a year ago.”
He sat on my couchbed, planting his ass down on my pillow. Where I put my head at night. Not the stuff dreams are made of.
I asked, “How’d you get in?”
He held up his hand, my other spare set of keys dangling from his forefinger. He tossed them overhand to me. I fumbled catching them and had to stoop to pick them up off the floor.
Matt said, “Time you got ’em back. What’s with your fucking place anyway? Moving out or did Goodwill repo you?”
“I’m keeping to the essentials these days.”
“Sure, whatever. How come you didn’t return my calls?”
“I was out.”
“Where the fuck’ve you been? I told you to stay put. What the hell’s going on, Payton? I talked to my guy over at the Ninth, and he said the responding unit didn’t have your name. Who’d you talk to on scene?”
“No one. I didn’t stick around. I had a job to do.”
“Yeh, right. I can see how busy you are.”
“The job Owl hired me for.”
“Job? What job?”
“Doesn’t matter now, it’s been taken care of.”
“No. No-no-no, that’s not how this is goin’ to work. I ask questions, you answer. Now what job?”
“Tail job. So I—”
“You go off, leave him lying dead in the street? What kind of fucking head case are you? You call me an hour after—”
“How do you know when—”
“I told you, I called my precinct guy. He finally helped me track down where they took Owl’s body. No fucking help from you there. As usual.”
Heat seeped up my neck into my face. So much for the happy reunion. Nothing had changed in five years between us; it might as well have been the last time we spoke, after my final assignment for Metro.
It was a simple job, all I had to do was watch a door, a door without a handle that never opened, an outside utility door set flush in a blank two-story-high brick wall at the rear of the Baruch Houses apartment complex below Houston, from midnight to 5 a.m., Tuesday thru Saturday, in late March of 2003.
And still I managed to screw it up…
I was seated behind the wheel of an agency car, a blue Honda Accord, parked south of the access ramp to the FDR Drive.
It was temp work Matt had fielded to me to help me get by, never telling me what I was there for, except to verify that the door always remained closed.
It wasn’t much of a door, especially after hours and hours of looking at it. If not for the outer hinges, it might’ve just been an immovable steel plate. The hardest part of the job was not falling asleep while listening to the sough of traffic on the FDR. But looking back, I’d’ve been better off if I had fallen asleep. That at least would have been understandable in the eyes of Matt, more than what actually happened.
It was about 4:30 a.m. when I caught sight of the girl rushing down the road, first in my rear view mirror and then as she passed by at an awkward half-run, a willowy white girl in her late teens casting quick looks over her shoulder. In the mirror, a car came into view approaching at a slow roll, a green late-model Impala with a rusted undercarriage and its headlights switched off. It passed by, closing in on the girl until a bend in the road ahead cut them off from view.