I unfolded the piece of paper.
Sisters-
In love, respect and reverence, a Gift awaits you. It is yours. This is my wish and decree. You need not allow anyone to talk you out of accepting it. Do not let them. It is yours. I want this for you. You are deserving. You are purity. You are endangered. I love you so much. Your Gift awaits you at the Cloisters. You will claim it with the enclosed claim check. Today. After three o’clock. Please be trusting. Please be swift. I am your lamb. From slaughter comes Grace. I am in tears with happiness over your Gift.
A Friend.
I read the note through twice and handed it to Jigs. I stared out at the dry fountain until he finished it.
“Fruit Loop,” Jigs said.
Sister Mary turned to him. “Excuse me?”
“Your so-called friend, Sister.” Jigs tapped a finger against his head. “He’s got some of the pieces in the wrong place.”
“What is this all about?” she asked.
I asked, “I can trust you to keep a secret?”
She smiled. “Vows of silence are our specialty.”
“This is related to the business at the parade on Thursday.”
“Those horrible shootings?”
“Yes. And the bomb at Barrymore’s.”
“My goodness.”
“Mr. Dugan is right. Your ‘friend’ has his good and bad in a serious twist.”
“How much money is this we’re talking about?”
“A lot. There’s a million dollars in that bag. I’d say that’s a few new coats of paint for the old convent, wouldn’t you?”
Her tone was hushed. “A million dollars.”
“You understand that we have to hold on to that money,” I said.
“May I?” She took the note from Jigs and read from it. “ ‘You need not allow anyone to talk you out of accepting it. Do not let them. It is yours.’ ” She looked over at me. “You are telling me not to accept this money for my convent.”
“He’s responsible for the killing of ten people, Sister. He made an orphan of a three-year-old boy. Others are still in the hospital. If you’ll excuse my saying it, this money is dripping in blood.”
She looked out toward the dry fountain. “Of course.”
I checked my watch. It was nearly five. The museum was closing. The sun had dipped behind the slanted roof, and the temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. I reached for the note. The nun’s hand was trembling.
“What is this all about?” she asked.
“We don’t know, Sister.”
“I must… We must pray for him. We must find forgiveness in our hearts.”
She stood and walked over to the fountain. I couldn’t quite tell, but it looked as if she dipped her hand into it, dry as it was.
Jigs looked over at me. He spoke in a low growl. “First we catch him and beat the living shit out of him. Then we’ll worry about the forgiveness part.”
BEFORE LEAVING THE CLOISTERS, SISTER MARY HAD REQUESTED THAT she be allowed a copy of the note. Gerald Small had photocopied it for her.
“We’ll be in touch,” I told her.
I phoned Margo on our way back to the city, but she didn’t answer. I left her a short, silly message that apparently hit Jig’s funny bone.
“You’d buy the moon for that girl, wouldn’t you?”
I called Tommy Carroll on his cell phone, but he didn’t answer either. I was dumped into voice mail. I left him a short message, too. Not as silly: “He didn’t show. He sent a nun instead. She knows nothing. I’ve got the cash. Call me.”
We stopped at Cannon’s on Broadway at 108th. We brought the million dollars inside with us. Jigs was still disgusted with the yuppie makeover the place had undergone several years back. In our younger days, Jigs and I used to include Cannon’s on our rounds. It always felt as if we were stepping into a cave. Now a new glass front let in so much light from the street that you couldn’t find a dark corner if your life depended on it. Large-screen television sets hung all around the ceiling. Football, ice hockey, motocross, every sport in the book. The old tables had been replaced; no more knife scars and cigarette burns. The bar had been refinished. And with the city’s recent no-smoking policies, you could actually see from one end of the room to the other. Time was at Cannon’s, you’d pick up your darts and have to throw them into a fog.
Jimmy Reese still worked the bar. Except for the blue polo shirt with the Cannon’s cloverleaf logo on it, Jimmy remained unrenovated. His tomato face was a psychedelic of burst blood vessels. Jimmy used to be a boxer. When I was a teenager, I saw him fight a handful of times. He had a peculiar sideways punch that became his signature. At a given moment in the round, he would abruptly shift so that he was standing next to and just a little behind his opponent. It was a sudden move, and when the opponent would start his turn to face Jimmy, the glove would come up. Pop, pop. Rabbit punches, but hard ones. Jimmy called them “nose poppers.” He could do it from either side.
At Cannon’s, especially late at night when he got talking, you’d see Jimmy go sideways behind the bar and feign a few of the punches. On the rare occasions when a real tussle broke out between patrons, he’d land them. They were still plenty hard. Jimmy Reese had stabbed his first wife during a domestic dustup. She lived-it was a superficial arm wound-but she set her two meaty brothers on him. Jimmy managed to KO one with his sideways punches, but the other one took a cast-iron pan to Jimmy’s skull. When his hair started receding a few years ago, you could see the flat spot where the bone reset poorly.
Jimmy’s second wife was named Shirley. That marriage lasted five years. Shirley referred to it as a “five-year food fight,” which, frankly, is putting a soft spin on it. Though Jimmy never stuck a knife in her arm. Nice thing, right? Getting credit for not sticking a knife in your wife’s arm? At the time of his marriage to Shirley, Jimmy had his hand, here and there, in what he referred to as “off-the-record business.” Something to keep the little lady in furs. “Some furs,” Shirley would say, modeling her thin cardigan. Shirley wasn’t a prude about Jimmy’s activities except when she wanted to be, which was usually during their yelling matches. Jimmy’s marginal criminality was always Shirley’s ace in the hole. To be more precise, it gave her the pretext for threatening to play her ace in the hole. “I’ve got connections!” she’d shriek. “I could have you put away!” And it wasn’t bluster. She did have connections. A certain police lieutenant rising swiftly through the ranks was only a phone call away. And Jimmy knew she’d make the call if she wanted to, because he’d already seen her do it. Not on his account, but on account of her teenage son, who wasn’t always mixing in those days with the finest elements Hell’s Kitchen had to offer. Jimmy had seen the police lieutenant answer one of those calls in particular. He’d seen him come down hard on the boy.
Shirley loved the cop. Jimmy knew that. Anyone who knew Shirley knew that. It was a fact-of-Shirley. She never pretended to hide it. Jimmy swallowed the lump for five years until one day he finally stuffed his duffel and moved out. I found him at Butch’s Tavern that night, and he sang me a sad sloppy song about the toll it took on him to share Shirley’s heart with a cop. He actually got a little blubbery at one point, which was embarrassing for both of us. I was only seventeen at the time. It was later in the evening, when Jimmy was back in the whiskey fire and getting sufficiently nasty about Shirley’s cop, that it occured to me I didn’t really want to be sitting right next to him at the bar. I was thinking about Jimmy’s sideways punch. His nose popper. Luckily for me, his fist was mostly occupied in squeezing his dirty bar glass. But I’d seen the punch. I knew how quick it was. And already, at seventeen, I was shaping up to be my old man’s spitting image. My old man the cop. The fast-rising one. There was no telling when Jimmy might finally look up from his fingers and see the enemy’s face floating in the mirror behind the bar. Sitting right next to him. Perfectly positioned. Pop, pop.
“Trouble in twos,” Jimmy crooned as he ran a cloth over the bar in fron
t of Jigs and me. I nodded a greeting. Jigs did his John L. Sullivan imitation, his fists circling ludicrously. Jimmy smirked. “Look at the twig. Bare-bones champion.”
Jigs brought a fist forward in slow motion and tapped it against Jimmy’s chin. “Ha. Rang your bell.”
“My bell, my ass.” Jimmy tossed a pair of coasters on the bar. “What do you hear from your mother, Fritz? The two of you have a great big turkey on Thursday?”
“She’s out in California,” I said.
“California? What takes her to the Golden State? She breaking into the movies?”
“A friend of hers moved out there, swears she died and went to heaven. Queenie thought she’d go out for a visit and get the lowdown on heaven.”
“She’s not thinking of moving out there?”
I shrugged. “Could be. But I wouldn’t put money on it. Her roots are pretty firm in the local pavement.”
“So what’ll it be?”
We ordered a couple of beers, mine with a half-pound burger on the side. When Jimmy headed off to put in my order, Jigs pulled a cigarette from behind his ear.
“You can’t smoke that in here,” I reminded him. “They’ll put you in Rikers.”
He ran the cigarette under his nose like a Montecristo cigar. “They can’t toss me out for fondling the damn thing.”
The bar was half full. Half empty. A matter of perspective. Jigs eyed a pair of Columbia coeds who were at a table near the door, giggling. He tapped the end of his cigarette against his lips. “I’d trade this for that.”
“That might land you in Rikers, too.”
“Ah, they’re old enough for Cannon’s, they’re fair game.”
“I thought you set up a date with your friend from the Cloisters,” I said.
“Right. Allison. Mustn’t forget.”
“Her friend thinks you’re a creep.”
Jigs’s eyes sparkled. “She does, I know. I’d give away a good tooth to pin that one. Anger like that can be a beautiful thing.”
“You are a creep, Jigs.”
He put the cigarette back behind his ear and gave another glance at the students. “Maybe I am,” he said wistfully.
Our beers arrived.
“Your burger will be right out, Fritz,” Jimmy said. “The cow put up a good fight.” He took off again.
Jigs picked up his beer. “So what’s that brilliant mind of yours telling you? Who do you suppose thought it would be fun to kill a bunch of people, then give a million dollars to a nun? Who comes up with an idea like that?”
I took Jigs’s question into my beer. I didn’t know what in the world I’d been thinking, expecting Nightmare to waltz into the Cloisters and pick up his loot. Even with his no-touch insurance policy in place, it would have been an absurd risk to take. Tommy Carroll was running around hanging video cameras and planting fake nannies on the street while I was flattening my feet all day in a fake mustache and glasses, and for all we knew, our creep could have been sitting snugly at home saying Hail Marys to dirty pictures the whole time. Red tie. Green tie. Wisconsin. NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION. Okay. He got it. And it turns out he didn’t even want the million bucks.
I watched as Jimmy mixed a martini for a guy in a baseball cap down at the other end of the bar. He chilled, he mixed, he shook, he poured. A martini at Cannon’s. If God really were Irish, like they say, the joint would have been in cinders. Past the end of the bar, on the wall, was the pay phone. A chesty woman in a blue denim shirt was hollering in it above the bar noise.
“Shit,” I said.
Jigs cocked his head. “Something good usually follows ‘shit’.”
“The money,” I said. “The note made a specific point that the convent keep the money.”
“If it were me calling the shots, I’d have gone halfsies with them.”
“No. What I mean is, he wants the nuns to have the money, but they don’t have the money.”
Jigs rubbed his fingers absently along his scar. “We have the money.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed. This guy expresses himself in bold statements.”
“You mean he might not be happy if he finds out the sisters didn’t get the money?”
“Right.”
“And he might decide to express that unhappiness?”
“I need to talk to the nuns.”
“You think he’s going to check with them?”
“For all I know, he was spying on us when we left the Cloisters. If he was, he saw who was holding the bag and who wasn’t.”
Jigs toed the backpack. “That sister couldn’t have lifted this bag if her life depended on it.”
“Doesn’t matter. The note made a point of it. So did his phone call. I could’ve carried the bag to her car for her. Or delivered it to the convent myself. Damn. We should have taken the money to her car and arranged a switch for later.”
“Who knows, Fritz? Maybe he was planning to knock the nun over the head and steal the money. The guy’s a loony bin. There’s no telling where he’s coming from.”
I slid off the stool. “I’m going outside to call the convent. If this guy calls them to see if they got the money, I need them to say yes.”
“You’re going to ask a Daughter of Christ to lie?”
“It’s for a good cause.”
I went out to the sidewalk. There was nothing about the lights of upper Broadway worth writing a song about. I called Information on my cell phone and got a number for the Convent of the Holy Order of the Sisters of Good Shepherd. I dialed and asked to be put through to Sister Mary Ryan. While I waited, I kicked myself for not contacting Tommy Carroll from the Cloisters to have him place a tap on the convent’s phone. The sister came on a minute later.
“Sister Mary? It’s Fritz Malone.”
“Mr. Malone. I was just going to call you.”
“I need to ask if you-Why were you going to call me?”
“We just received a call,” she said. “Sister Anne received it.”
My heart sank. “From him?”
“He wanted to find out if we had received his gift.”
“What did Sister Anne tell him?”
“She told him that we received his gift but under the circumstances, we could not possibly accept it. She asked if he would come to the convent and meet with her.”
“She shouldn’t say that. That is definitely not a good idea.” A fire engine was tearing up Broadway, its siren blaring. I had to wait it out. When I could hear again, I said, “I guess it doesn’t matter. I assume he said no.”
“No, no. That’s just it, Mr. Malone. That’s why I was about to call you. He said he would love to come by. We’re expecting him any minute.”
17
I CALLED TOMMY CARROLL’S CELL NUMBER AS JIGS AND I SPED UP THE West Side Highway. Jigs’s old Ford Fairlane swayed like a waterbed as he coasted from lane to lane.
Carroll picked up on the third ring. He answered snarling. “Where the hell have you been! Do you know what’s going on? What the hell’s this crap about a nun picking up the money?”
I gave him the short version. Jigs was leaning on his horn. A slow-moving car in front of us drifted to the other lane.
“Holy hell,” Carroll muttered when I told him about Sister Anne’s invitation to the killer. “What is she planning to do, serve him tea and hear his fucking confession?”
“We’ll be there in eight minutes,” I said.
Jigs looked over at me. “Six.”
Carroll asked, “Who’s we?”
“I’ve got Jigger Dugan with me.”
“Jigger… That’s just great, Fritz. How the hell did he enter the scene?”
“I brought him in. No offense, but I preferred having an independent contractor watch my back on this one. I didn’t want to end up with another bag over my head.”
“You’ve got Francis Dugan and a million dollars cash in the same car? You tell that punk he lays a fingernail on any of that-”
“You’re breaking up,” I said. I crank
ed the window partway down and stuck the phone into the wind for a few seconds. Jigs chuckled. I pulled the phone back in. “Do you want to weigh in with a plan, Tommy? We’re almost in Riverdale.”
“Philip Byron is missing.”
“I heard. But that’s not the point. What do you want me to do when I get to the convent?” This time the connection really did break up. “I missed that. Say it again.”
“I said shoot to kill.”
I took a beat. “You mean like with Diaz?”
Carroll exploded. “Now, you stick to the point, you prick! Leave Diaz out of this. If you confront this bastard and determine it’s definitely him, you take him out!”
“Take him out? Not in? No citizen’s arrest?”
“Out.”
“If he’s just sitting there talking to a nun, I’m sure as hell not going to waltz in there and shoot him. Are you nuts?”
Jigs glanced at me. “That’s nuts.” He swung into the right lane to take the next exit.
Carroll conceded. Not happily. “Okay, then, contain him. If he’s already in the convent, let it stand. You and Dugan stake out the exits, then wait. I’m sending a blue-and-white up there. Give me the address. I’m coming up, too.”
I gave him the address.
“Whatever the hell you do, do not let this guy slip away. If you’ve got a problem with it, you tell Dugan he’s got my okay to take the bastard out. Dugan’s got no problems with pulling a trigger. You tell the little mick he can dip his dirty paw into that bag of money if he gets this guy.”
“I’m not telling him that, Tommy. We’ll keep the creep from getting away, but that’s it. And tell your boys not to come in roaring with the lights and sirens. We have no idea what kind of firepower he’ll be bringing. I don’t think you want a bunch of nuns being held hostage in their own convent. That is a nightmare.”
“This ends tonight,” Carroll grumbled. He hung up.
“What’s the word from Super Cop?” Jigs asked as he pulled to the end of the ramp.
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