Speak of the Devil

by Richard Hawke

  “Oh!”

  She was still holding the file folder. A piece of paper slipped from it. I bent down and picked it up. It was a blank sheet, except for the handwritten words “Is everything okay?” I straightened and handed the paper to her. She blushed, too. Must be the effect I had.

  “My name’s Fritz Malone,” I said in a low voice. “If you and Paul are fooling around, be smart. Stop. If not, I apologize.”

  She sputtered. “W-what?”

  “As for your husband, I get pictures, I get names and places, I testify in court if you need that. I can put the fear of God in him. Or I can put it in the other woman. There are plenty of approaches. I can also suggest counseling, though there’s one particular counselor I’d strike off my list in this case. Point is, it’s a lot more messy when you use amateur help. The lines can get muddy. If you’d like I’m in the book. You should keep Paul out of it, even if he volunteers.”

  I had no hat, so I had nothing to tip. I winced a smile and moved on.

  The receptionist was taking a personal call as I waited for the elevator. Either that or she was just too overcome with the giggles to help herself.

  I was partway across City Hall Park when Sanchez called me. He said he could spare a few minutes, and we agreed to meet in the park. The wind had picked up, and the sky was definitely threatening to let loose. I veered off to a nearby Starbucks and got two overpriced cups. I returned to the park and eavesdropped on a pair of old men arguing about the election of ’48, the Truman upset over New York governor Dewey. The Dewey man was blaming the whole thing on Dewey’s mustache.

  “I bet you can’t name the last president who won with facial hair,” the Dewey man challenged.

  “Teddy Roosevelt!”

  “Wrong. It was that other guy.”

  “Who?”

  “You know. I can’t remember the name. But you know. That other guy.”

  “It was Roosevelt.”

  “No. It wasn’t him. Jesus Christ. What the hell is his name?”

  It was Taft. But I minded my own business.

  Remy Sanchez showed up and we walked down to the south end of the park, away from City Hall.

  “How was Mr. Carroll?” I asked.

  “That man needs to take a vacation.”

  “You’re not the first person to say so.”

  “He wants me to pull every black and Hispanic undercover I’ve got and send them out to Brooklyn.”

  “To the Ninety-fifth?”

  “It’s like a convention of narcotics officers. He says this guy Ramos is a cop killer. I asked him what cop, and he said that’s not important. He said, ‘He’s a cop killer and I want your men to know it.’ It’s red meat. I asked him if he wanted dogs up there. I meant it as a joke, but he thought about it for a minute.”

  I told him what I needed. Information about the alleged murder-suicide of Officers Pearson and Cash. Specifically, I wanted to know the watercooler talk about McNally and Cox and how they fit into the picture. I knew I hadn’t raised a tame topic. Sanchez’s eyes told me as much.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think I’m looking for motive for Leonard Cox to want to take out his partner. I’m wondering if there’s something in the whole Pearson-Cash thing that might be a key. Even in the papers, the story has a stink to it.”

  “McNally went down in the parade,” Sanchez said. “Diaz shot him.”

  “I know that. And Cox was conveniently on the ground already.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Too many theories. Maybe it means nothing. But all the principals at the parade were from a precinct far, far away. The same one.” I set my coffee down on a bench. “And I’ll be blunt about it. Leonard Cox is as crooked as a corkscrew. My money says he shot Roberto Diaz in cold blood. You know that the ‘hero cop in Central Park’ story is a load of crap, don’t you?”

  “I hear people talking.”

  “Diaz was shot right over there. In the Municipal Building. That’s where I was taken, too. Carroll floated a half-baked story that they were simply protecting the cop killer from the cops until things cooled down. The truth is, the mayor’s been dancing with a blackmailer. He called a bluff, and Diaz shot up the parade. Carroll and Leavitt wanted to make sure Diaz didn’t start singing about how Leavitt had blown it big-time. I figured when Diaz got wasted in the Municipal Building, it was a combination cop-killer-revenge and shutting-up-the-blackmailer, all with one easy bullet. Remy, the guy was handcuffed to a goddamn table. Supposedly, he pulled an ankle piece that Cox missed on arrest, and before he could shoot, Cox blew him away. But now… ” I trailed off.

  “Now what?”

  “Now I don’t know what to think. I don’t even know which lie to doubt.”

  “You’re thinking Cox set up his partner, then swung by the Municipal Building to silence Diaz.”

  I threw up my hands. “I’m just one little man. What the hell do I know?”

  Sanchez took a sip of his coffee. As he did, his eyes moved around. When he spoke, his volume had dropped by half. “I’m not telling you any of this, okay? That’s straight?”

  “I’m not even here,” I said.

  “Pearson and Cash. Bad apples. Word was that Cash had flipped. Or maybe just Pearson stank and Cash was straight all along. You hear both versions. I.A. was working him to hook some of the others. Don’t quote me on this-don’t quote me on any of this-but supposedly, Cash was wearing a wire when he was killed.”

  “A wire. Was he trying to hook Pearson?”

  “I don’t know. Could be.”

  “Cash was the one who was shot, right? Then it was Pearson who ate his gun?”

  “Right.”

  “So maybe Pearson found out his partner was wearing the wire, and he took him out.”

  “A version of that is the one going around,” Sanchez said. “It’s nice and clean.”

  “You don’t buy it.”

  “You tell me. If Pearson is crooked and he catches his partner trying to trap him and he kills him, is that the kind of guy who turns right around and discovers remorse? I don’t think so.”

  My heart sailed over a speed bump. “So then someone killed Pearson and made it look like a suicide.”

  “Or killed both of them and then set things up to look like that.”

  That was one of Charlie’s theories. It sounded just as plausible coming out of Sanchez’s mouth. Maybe even a little more so.

  Sanchez watched me as I processed what he was telling me. A thought occurred to me. Sanchez knew the thought already. He’d been waiting for me to have it.

  “The wire,” he said.

  “What happened to it? If Cash was wearing a wire, it should have recorded the whole thing.”

  “That’s right. It should have.”

  “But?”

  “It’s missing.”

  “The wire is missing?”

  Sanchez finished off his coffee. “No one wants the papers to get ahold of that information. Not one word about Cash wearing a wire. If I see it tomorrow… Well, you don’t want me to see it tomorrow.”

  “You won’t. Not from me. Jesus, Remy. So whoever killed Cash and Pearson took the wire.”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  I looked over at the Woolworth Building. My gaze drifted south, to the less descript building where Paul Scott worked. I wondered if I had done the right thing in there. My gut told me that Paul had told me the truth, that he wasn’t sleeping with Annette Hartman. He was being her hero. Harlan Scott’s son to the rescue. I knew plenty about that myself. My gut also told me that damsels and their heroes-even paltry ones-have a way of mixing it up at some point if they’re not careful. Neither Paul nor Annette Hartman struck me as being the careful type. You could see it in their lonely eyes. Put another way, they both seemed susceptible to the easy mistakes. So maybe I had done the right thing. At least now they were both on notice. They both knew that the world was watching. So, okay. A good little
day’s work after all.

  I looked over at Sanchez.

  “Captain, it was nice not having this conversation with you.”

  34

  IT WAS 3:25 WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY CAR. I HAD A PARKING TICKET tucked under the wiper. A hundred dollars. This city doesn’t tiptoe around when it comes to passive revenue streams. I got into the car and did an illegal U-turn and took a left onto Pearl Street. At Canal Street I waited at a red light, catty-corner from the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. The elaborate bridge entrance has always reminded me of the Brandenburg Gate. I’m sure that if I ever got over to my forefather’s homeland and saw the real thing, I’d stop making the comparison. But I have no such plans, so I think the illusion’s secure.

  It was 3:42 as I headed up Bowery. I approached Delancey, and a huge green ball bounded in front of the car followed closely by a little Chinese boy with his arms outstretched. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting him. A woman-his mother, I assume-jumped from the curb and grabbed the boy by his collar and nearly jerked him off his feet. Her screeching slashed the air like razors. She jerked the boy in my direction and shook him violently. His moon face showed nothing. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to make him apologize to me, or if I was getting read part of the riot act myself. The ball had continued untouched across the street and come to rest next to a newspaper box. My phone rang. The woman continued to rattle the boy as I answered the phone.

  The caller was Bill from the Columbia University A.A. meeting. The minute I mentioned the name Margaret King, he groaned. “Jesus Christ.”

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you about her,” I said.

  There was a long silence.

  “Well… okay. I guess.”

  The rain had started. Big fat drops splattered on my windshield. Loose newspapers in the street leaped to life in the gusty wind. I turned off Bowery. Hit the FDR Drive, headed north.

  No traffic problems.

  3:51.

  I EXPECTED A MAN, BUT BILL WAS A BOY. A STUDENT. HE TOLD ME HE was nineteen, a sophomore at Columbia, studying political science. He envisioned a future for himself that included the United Nations. He told me that he had gone on a tour of the United Nations Building when he was nine years old, and the memory of the place had never left his system. He was lanky, five-eleven, with a not unpleasant strong-boned face, slightly soulful, slightly sad brown eyes and a loose awning of blond hair. We met at a place called the Underground, directly across from Cannon’s. It used to be a bookstore, it used to sell crystals, it used to sell used CDs, it used to house the offices of a community weekly. Typical New York City pedigree. Now it was a coffeehouse, comedy club and college hangout. Students were draped here and there on various pieces of ratty furniture as if placed just so by a meticulous set designer. Bill and I sat across from each other at a small table. Someone had carved CHE SUCKS on my side of the table. Radical Republicanism.

  Bill was upset with Margaret King, even a full month and a half after her suicide. She had deceived him. She had deceived everyone at the Columbia meeting. She hadn’t told anyone that she was a nun. Bill found out only when the TV and the newspapers brought out their “Sister Suicide” stories. He described for me the shock, disbelief and anger he had to balance with his grief, and he said he wasn’t yet sure which was going to come out on top. He was more direct than I would have expected from a nineteen-year-old. I suspected the experience of standing up in front of a group of people in a church basement and reliving your soul’s lowest moments can do that. I didn’t ask, but I learned anyway that Bill had been going to A.A. meetings since his junior year in high school. In his admirably frank manner, he told me that discovering his problem and beginning his cure at such an early age had made him feel older than he actually was.

  “I don’t really socialize much with my peers. I can’t stand most of the stuff they talk about. I can’t relate to it. I mean, I hope they’re having fun. I guess they are.”

  He was a swimmer. He said he spent hours and hours in the pool doing laps. He had a bit of a crooked smile.

  “I’m a little obsessive.” He laughed. “If a person can be a ‘little’ obsessive.” He was drinking a cup of herbal tea. He stared into it a moment, then looked back up at me. There was a visible ache deep behind his eyes.

  “I was teaching Margaret how to swim. She said she’d always wanted to learn.”

  I TRIED GETTING AHOLD OF TOMMY CARROLL ON MY WAY OUT TO Brooklyn, but he wasn’t in. Neither was Stacy. The skies had opened up, the rain slapping sideways in a gusty wind. Despite the first wave of the evening rush, I made decent time. As I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, the clock on the Watchtower Building read 4:53. If Angel Ramos was sticking to his pledge, dangerous ground was shifting somewhere out there. My having not heard anything from Carroll told me that either nothing was happening, or if it was, I was out of the loop.

  Fair’s fair. He didn’t know what I knew, either.

  Margaret King had been raped and severely beaten when she was seventeen. The attack had taken place in Prospect Park. Bill couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that the attack took place in the same part of the park where Margaret ended her life sixteen years later. As would happen after her suicide, the seventeen-year-old Margaret had been spotted by a morning jogger. The attack had taken place in the winter-February-and Margaret’s prone body had been frosted with a thin layer of snow. The jogger had called 911, and Margaret was taken to New York Methodist Hospital, where her injuries were treated. She wasn’t lucid at first, and when she finally did come around and begin to grasp what was taking place, she denied that she had been raped. Vehemently. When asked if she was saying that the sex had been consensual, she attempted to deny that she had been involved in sex of any sort. In this case, the doctors knew best, or at least better. A sexual-assault counselor was brought to Margaret, and the woman promptly had one of her eyes very nearly gouged out by the frightened seventeen-year-old girl.

  I drove down the ramp at the end of the bridge and turned onto Atlantic, then at Court Street, I took a right. Five o’clock. I turned on the radio, then changed my mind and turned it off. I preferred the silence. I needed it. To think.

  MARGARET KING WAS COMPLETELY UNRELIABLE. AT FIRST SHE CLAIMED that she had not been attacked at all. Not just not raped, but not even attacked. Later she changed her story. She said that she had been hit by a car and that the car hadn’t stopped and that she’d staggered into the park and passed out there. Later, she said it was a van. Then a city bus. At one point, she even said that she had fallen out a window and crashed through a skylight.

  “Margaret had a lying problem,” Bill had told me during our talk at the Underground. “She said she was always lying, always making things up, always exaggerating. She said she couldn’t help herself, she lived half in the real world and half in a bunch of fantasies. Heck, maybe not even always half and half. Falling through the skylight? She said she actually laughed later, when her nurse friend told her the details of the story. Margaret didn’t even remember telling it. She said she remembered the little details, the made-up details, but she thought they had come from a dream. She was… she was a real troubled person. I guess from the very beginning.”

  Bill had taken a long look at the ceiling before going on. “Who knows? She’s dead now. That’s real. But maybe she lied all along. I mean, she did. She lied when she never mentioned anything about being a goddamn nun.”

  Bill’s voice had remained calm and cool and steady, even as he described how he had gradually found himself being drawn closer and closer to Margaret King. She was fourteen years older than he. He said she was pretty. He said she could be silly, girlish, even a little flirtatious. He said he worked to keep his feelings subdued and to keep his fantasies from getting out of hand. He knew that he was essentially a loner and that he was responding-or trying to keep himself from responding-to the simple attractions of an older woman with whom he shared a destructive drive. He considered himself an intelligent person,
and he figured he had things in hand.

  He didn’t.

  Margaret’s story, as told to me by Bill, was that she had eventually conceded the obvious to the authorities and was willing to state that, yes, she’d been accosted while walking alongside a wooded area of Prospect Park, then dragged amid the trees, where she’d been beaten and raped and left in a tangle of bushes. She was humiliated by the experience. She also gave so many conflicting descriptions of her attacker that the police ultimately had nothing to go on. An investigation was launched, but nothing ever came of it. Margaret’s attacker went untouched.

  Bill’s story was that he was keeping Margaret King afloat in the Columbia pool one afternoon in late September when a jolt went through him. Margaret was on her back, her arms outstretched. Bill was supporting her, with one arm in the small of her back and one hand lightly prodding the back of her knees to keep them afloat. Except for the two of them, the pool was empty. Bill said he was walking her slowly around in little circles while she-eyes closed-chattered away at him, mainly about her early childhood. Like Bill, Margaret had been an only child. The stories had a certain embellished ring to them, and Bill suspected that once again, Margaret was making them up. Her stories in the basement of St. Paul’s sometimes touched on her early life, and those too often sounded exaggerated and fantasized. The versions she was telling in monologue while being supported in the swimming pool had the same unreliable tone. Bill told me that he honestly didn’t remember what had prompted him, but Margaret had just concluded a whopper about a family vacation to Greece, where she and a little Greek boy named Spiro had hitched rides on the fins of dolphins in the Mediterranean, when the next thing he knew, he was bent over Margaret and kissing her strongly on the mouth. She responded. He slid his hand up from her back to support her head and keep it from bobbing beneath the water, and she curled her body and let it float into his. The kiss went on for what felt like ages. Bill had continued stepping along the bottom of the pool, and eventually the two bumped up against the side of the pool. They finally came up for air. Several minutes later, the two were wrapped together on the floor of the steam room of the men’s locker room, lying atop a mountain of towels that Bill had grabbed from the laundry bin outside the showers. They made love in a short, violent burst, then remained on the towels, clinging to each other for several minutes afterward while the hot mist spewed from the steam room’s floor jets, several feet away. Bill said that Margaret had cried and cried and cried.