Speak of the Devil

by Richard Hawke

  “You have a sister?”

  “You want to talk to my sister?”

  “You tell me. Does she keep in contact with Angel?”

  “Only if he can talk to the dead. You want to see my sister, you can go over to Green-Wood Cemetery. She married a guy who killed her about five months later. It’s a hell of a family.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ramos looked past me into the middle distance. “Yeah, well… Shit happens, I guess.”

  “What happened to your sister’s husband?” I asked. “Did he pay for it?”

  Ramos returned his gaze to me. The smile on his lips was barely discernible and not particularly pleasant. “Oh, he paid. Mi hermano collected that debt.”

  “Angel?”

  “Angel can be very talented with a knife.”

  “I see.”

  Ramos laughed. “Yeah. You see. My ex-brother-in-law, man? After Angel’s little talk with him, he’s not seeing so good anymore.”

  He waited for my reaction. I had one, but I didn’t show it to him. “One more thing,” I said. “Do you have any idea where your brother might be hanging out these days? Where was he living before he went to jail?”

  “That’s easy. Fort Pete. That’s still Angel’s turf. Is that what you’re asking? You want to find him, here’s what you do. A block off Culver, that’s Murray Avenue. Take it north as far as the Eubie Blake Apartments. It crosses Viceroy. Then south as far as the big brick building where they clean linens. You know, like for restaurants. You can’t miss it. Big brick place, takes up about the whole block. That’s on Lee Street. That’s the strip. You run that strip, including about four blocks over to Hanover Boulevard. And check out a church there called Sweet Music Methodist. It’s just a shell. No church left, just rats and drug dealers. You work those two strips, and you check out that church, and if you can do that and stay alive, you might find someone who knows where Angel’s at. I hope you got some cash. No one in that strip is going to give him up for free. You know what they say-gotta pay to play.”

  I pulled out my notebook and jotted down the information. I also wrote down the name of Angel’s childhood friend. “One more thing,” I said.

  Ramos chuckled. “I thought the last thing was one more thing.”

  “Did you ever know Angel to fool around with explosives?”

  “You mean like bombs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Shit, yeah. Angel was the king of Molotov cocktails when we were growing up. He’d go down to the waterfront over at Vinegar Hill and smash them against the rocks. They float. I mean, the flames’ll float on the water. Angel loved that. He’d set off two at once and watch them float off down the river.”

  “What about something stronger?”

  Ramos shrugged. “The dude’s been in three different prisons. You can learn a lot in prison. Knowing Angel? Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  I thanked him. He shook his head.

  “If you run into Angel, man, you’re not going to be thanking me for nothing.”

  I FOUND A COPY SHOP ON SEVENTH AVENUE. IT WAS RUN BY A BIRDBONED young man from the Kashmir region of India. I learned this only because there had been an explosion in Kashmir the day before, and the young man behind the counter was arguing about it with an older man when I came in. The older man was brandishing an Indian-language newspaper like a handful of thunderbolts.

  I couldn’t have followed the politics of the argument even if I had wanted to, which I didn’t. I wanted five hundred business-sized cards made up while I waited, and I didn’t want to wait until the two gentlemen had found common ground on the Kashmir issue. I had my own mad bomber to think about.

  “Excuse me,” I interjected in a falsely polite voice. “Customer?”

  I waited in a Starbucks nearby while my cards were being printed. I thought of calling Margo but remembered that she was interviewing a pop star today for an article in Entertainment Weekly. Or Us. Or People. One of those. Mustn’t interrupt the intellectual musings of the pop star. The Starbucks was filled with pretty young women and baby strollers. I felt lecherous simply for being a man. One of the women smiled at me a trifle too long. A pair in the corner were laughing themselves to tears over God knows what. One of the babies threw up. All to the earthy aroma of caffeine and the sweet strains of Vivaldi in strings. Simply lovely.

  My cards were ready. The argument over the bombing in Kashmir had subsided. I paid for my purchase, then took the subway to Fort Petersen. The train briefly came out of the tunnel at one point and revealed a gray world, a large half-empty parking lot, a Home Depot, a massive junkyard mountain and a distant hook of the harbor along with countless tractor-trailer compartments stacked up twenty high. Then the train plunged back into the tunnel, and all I saw in the window was a smoky reflection of my own face, along with the hip-hopper passed out in the seat across the aisle.

  I got off the train at Culver Boulevard, the major artery running through Fort Pete. Beauty shops, nail salons, chicken shacks, clothes stores, barbershops, fish-and-chips joints, corner bodegas. I oriented myself using a bus map I’d gotten from the subway attendant, found my north and south, found the two streets Victor Ramos had offered as the boundaries of his brother’s main stomping ground. I went a block east to Murray Avenue and for the next forty minutes made a pest of myself going into business establishments and handing out the cards I’d had made up in Park Slope. Here and there were pockets of men, some older, some younger, hanging out in chairs in front of the bars and barbershops and Laundromats. I stopped and told them that I was looking for Angel Ramos, and I handed each of them a card. At the corner of Viceroy and Columbia, a teenager was selling CDs that he had laid out on a blanket. He wasn’t doing much business as far as I could see, so I made him a proposition. I gave him fifty bucks, doled out a hundred of the cards and assigned him a region. I knew he might just take my money and dump the cards, but if you doubt humanity at every turn, I figure you might as well pack it in.

  I continued passing out the cards and asking after Angel Ramos. I didn’t expect anyone to cough him up, but I wanted the word to saturate his territory. I wanted to draw a reaction from him. I wanted to flush him out. My cell phone number was on the cards, along with an intentionally cryptic message:

  Angel-

  I died, you didn’t. So why you doing this shit?

  Amigo Willy

  Seemed to me like a reasonable ploy. Curiosity is like a drug. When I was twenty, I lost a pretty good friend to a policeman’s bullet. If someone were to hand me a card with a phone number and a bullshit message from my friend, I’d call.

  I found the church that Victor Ramos had mentioned. Its glassless white stucco facade made it look a little like the Alamo. A sign above the door read: SWEET MUSIC METHODIST CHURCH/REV. SALLY BODINE PRESIDING. The front of the church was covered with graffiti, primarily large rounded letters I couldn’t make out. Someone had also drawn a skeleton seated atop a horizontal guitar. The skeleton was holding a paddle that it was dipping into some ripples next to the guitar. The front door of the church was boarded over, and the chipped cement steps were strewn with beer and booze bottles. As promised, a small rat was standing guard, sniffing at one of the bottles.

  The attached building was also abandoned. A large sheet of tin covered the front door. I pushed on the tin and it moved easily. A stale cold air sifted from within. No doubt the way into the church was through this building. A hole in the wall somewhere, I figured. I considered going in but decided that if Angel Ramos was inside and I were to come climbing unannounced through a jagged brick hole in the wall, I wouldn’t get the chance to climb back out.

  My phone went off.

  “Hello?”

  A voice much louder than I was ready for chewed into me. “What the fuck do you think you’re up to?”

  “That depends who’s asking,” I said. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Leonard Cox. What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m just trying to
save the planet, one person at a time.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m standing in front of the Sweet Music Methodist Church. From what I can tell, the music died long ago.”

  “Don’t move.”

  “Okay.”

  “And don’t go inside that building.”

  “One step ahead of you on that.”

  He hung up and I put my cell phone back in my pocket. I passed a minute trying to clear my head of every thought that attempted to intrude. It’s hard work. An unfortunate image of Angel Ramos bursting into the bedroom of Gabriella Montero (formerly Diaz) managed to get through, and I was working to push it back out when a police cruiser rounded the corner and screeched to a halt in front of the abandoned church. The passenger-side door opened as if on its own. I stepped over to the curb. The city’s most recent hero cop was behind the wheel.

  “Get in.”

  I got into the car and closed the door. Cox hit the auto-lock. I turned to face him. “What brings you to the hood?”

  Cox held up something in his hand: one of my cards. “Real cute,” he said. “Who told you about Willy Padilla?”

  The question surprised me. “Who told you about Willy Padilla?”

  He ignored my question. “Ramos has contacted the mayor.”

  It didn’t take a detective to note that Cox had also landed Angel’s last name. “When?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Sometime this morning.”

  “How did he contact him?”

  “E-mail.”

  I glanced out the window. I didn’t imagine the information superhighway had made a turn into Sweet Music Methodist Church. “What did he say?”

  “He wants ten million dollars.”

  “For the convent or for himself this time?”

  Cox put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. The light at the corner was red. Cox flipped a switch, burped his siren and pulled through the intersection. “Who the hell knows? Crazy spic nigger. He also sent a picture. Deputy Mayor Byron.”

  I took a sharp breath. “Dead or alive?”

  “Alive. With a fucking Uzi pointed at his head.”

  25

  COX AND I AGREED THAT HE WOULD DRIVE ME OUT OF FORT PETERSEN and over to Flatbush Avenue, where I’d be able to catch a gypsy cab back into Manhattan. The subway would have been just as quick, if not quicker, but I think better with actual space to stare off into. In the subway, except for the occasional elevation, you’re literally in the dark.

  As we headed for Flatbush, Cox told me that the instant Commissioner Carroll had shared the name Angel with him, he knew who we were dealing with.

  “I had that moving company on my list for Diaz. U-Move. Carroll told me you’d flushed out the name Angel… bang. I know Angel Ramos used to work at that place, too.”

  “So you’re already familiar with Angel Ramos?”

  “Anybody working the Nine-five who didn’t know Angel Ramos might as well flush his badge down the can.”

  “The good old Ninety-fifth Precinct.”

  “One goddamn crack about that Bad Apples crap, and you’re walking.”

  Not much of a threat, but I took the meaning. “Was your partner involved in any of that?”

  Cox whipped his head to face me. “What’d I just say?”

  “You said no cracks. That wasn’t a crack, it was a question.”

  “The whole thing is hype,” Cox said. “They’re just trying to sell papers. McNally was clean.”

  “What about those two cops? The murder-suicide. That doesn’t sound like hype.”

  “You want to stick to the topic?”

  “Fine. Tell me about Angel Ramos.”

  “He’s a punk. Big strong punk, but a punk. There’s a lot of gang action back there in the hood. I’m sure that’s no surprise. That church you were standing in front of like a fucking target is one of the hangouts for Ramos and his crowd. The guy’s got a whole racket going. He’s got a string of girls he likes to dole out. Running any drugs you can think of.”

  “So you’ve been keeping an eye on him?”

  “We’ve got an operation here to try and clean the shit off the street. That means creeps like Ramos. Except all we’ve ever gotten him on is robbery and banging heads. He’s slippery. Now, with this whole stupid Bad Apple stink, our operation’s pretty much shut down. The criminals are having a nice laugh while the cops investigate the cops. Great way to clean up crime, isn’t it?”

  “Have you ever dealt with Ramos personally?”

  “Hell, yeah, I’ve been in the bastard’s face plenty of times. He’s cold. A punk like that’s not going to live to see thirty.”

  “Did you ever see him with Roberto Diaz?”

  The radio began to crackle. Cox reached over and turned it off. “I never saw Diaz until last Thursday. Son of a bitch, too. I’m standing there at the parade with my thumbs up my ass and suddenly this old blind guy with a dog falls down right in front of me. He was having a heart attack. What the hell’s a blind guy doing at a parade in the first place? I was down there doing CPR when the shooting started. Me and the blind guy were just about trampled to death by people running from the shooter. I didn’t even see my partner lying on the street. I finally got clear and everyone was screaming that two guys with guns went running into the park. First time I ever laid eyes on Diaz was when he was down by the fountain.”

  I was tempted to ask him about the last time he laid eyes on Diaz-alive, anyway-in the Municipal Building, but I figured he’d just threaten to make me walk the last block and a half. We reached Flatbush and he pulled over. As I shouldered open the door, Cox picked up my Amigo Willy card from the seat. “What are you hoping for with this stunt?”

  “Old gumshoe trick,” I said. “Trolling for information.”

  “You’re wasting your time. No one’s going to respond to that.”

  Au contraire, I thought as Cox pulled off down the street. You just did.

  TOMMY CARROLL WASN’T IN HIS OFFICE. STACY INFORMED ME THAT Carroll hadn’t been feeling well and that he had gone home. Stacy looked pale and unhappy. I wondered if she knew the scuttlebutt concerning Philip Byron, but I didn’t ask. I did go ahead and ask her if she had a boyfriend.

  She gave me a suspicious look. “Why?”

  “If you do, I think you ought to go see him, that’s all. You look as if you could stand some TLC.”

  She hesitated a moment before responding. “I can’t.” The words came out almost in a whisper.

  “So then you do have one. Why can’t you go see him?”

  Whatever minor veil had seemingly lifted quickly descended. She looked at me with robotic eyes. Even her blazer seemed to harden. “I will note for the commissioner that you came to see him.”

  “No need. I’ll catch him at his place.”

  “I told you, he’s not feeling well.”

  I dared to touch her on the shoulder. “Honey, your boss is likely to be feeling a whole lot worse before this thing is over.”

  IT WAS RUSH HOUR. I TOOK THE SUBWAY TO TWENTY-EIGHTH STREET and walked the few blocks to Murray Hill. A pair of policemen were standing over what we used to call a drunken bum on the sidewalk at Lexington and Thirtieth. The bum was asleep. His head was leaning on the brick wall below a travel-agency window, which showed a large poster of a carefree guy and a dishy woman running along a tropical beach. It looked as if the scene were sprouting directly from the poor drunk’s head, as if he were dreaming it. Not such a bad dream. Kind of made me want to tell the cops to just leave him be.

  As I approached Tommy Carroll’s building, the unformed thought that had been nagging me since my conversation with Leonard Cox finally formed. McNally at the parade. A cop from the embattled Ninety-fifth Precinct, far from home base. Gunned down by a shooter who-more and more, it seemed-had been acting on instructions from a known troublemaker from the selfsame precinct. I rolled the thought around and played with it while I waited to be buzzed into Carroll’s building, then put it away fo
r later.

  Betsy Carroll answered the door. “Oh my God, it could be Harlan himself standing there. Come in, Fritz. It’s been too long.”

  She insisted on taking my coat. My.38 was in one of the pockets. I had a twinge, then I remembered that this demure woman was licensed and well trained. I recalled one of my first visits to a shooting range-in the basement of a building on West Twenty-second Street-and my father pointing out to me the small woman in the big goggles.

  “They told me downtown that Tommy’s not feeling good,” I said. “I hope it’s okay, my coming over.”

  Betsy Carroll gave me a measured look. She was pastier than I recalled from the last time I’d seen her, which had probably been around a year or so ago. The skin around her sharp cheekbones and usually pointy chin was beginning to fall. I realized that the pasty look was partly because of the contrast with her shoe-black hair.

  “Tommy hasn’t told you, has he?” she said in a low voice.

  “Told me what?”

  “He hasn’t told anyone at work. I just thought you… Maybe because you and he… Oh, Jesus, Fritz. Tommy has cancer. The big stupid bear smoked himself to lung cancer and now it’s got him. It’s not good. He hasn’t told you, has he?”

  “He hasn’t said a word.”

  “Then don’t you say a word. He’d kill me. We were supposed to go to Tortola this week and get a little sun. Just, you know, relax. I had to look that word up in the dictionary and show it to Tommy.”

  “Jesus, Betsy, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “He’s scheduled to start radiation in a few weeks, but he’s not sure he wants to. Now with all this damn… whatever it is going on, he’s not going anywhere. I swear, Fritz, the man is going to allow no time between working and dying to-”

  She clamped her eyes closed. Her fists, too. A few seconds later, tears emerged from under the eyelids. She drew a sharp intake of breath and opened her eyes. “He wants to die with his boots on. The rest of his life comes second. It always has. All of it.” She wiped her tears with the backs of her hands and gave the approximation of a smile. “Men.”