Speak of the Devil

by Richard Hawke

  “Some days I just want to burn this goddamn chair.”

  32

  I WAS SIXTY FEET UNDERWATER WHEN I REMEMBERED THAT I WAS ABLE to get in touch with Angel Ramos. Or at least I had a shot. A tractor-trailer was stopped in front of me. A yellow sign posted low on the rear door read: HOW AM I DRIVING?

  “You’re not,” I muttered. “You’re stopped.”

  The line of cars in the lane next to me was stopped as well. But at least they could see up ahead, even if all they could see was nothing more than lines of gleaming brake lights. All I had was the truck. J. B. HUNT was printed in mustard and black letters across the rear door. The letters blurred. It was sweat, rolling down from my forehead into my eyes. I took a breath, let it out. And again. Took in, let it out. I wanted to focus on Angel Ramos but didn’t dare; I had to make sure I continued breathing. The traffic didn’t move, but the tunnel seemed to. I cracked open a window. The exhaust fumes didn’t help much. Not at all, in fact. Someone was honking his horn. It was me.

  The tunnel moved again. The traffic began moving with it. Slowly. I switched lanes abruptly, taking the heat of angry horns. Three minutes later-or was it three hours?-the light appeared at the end of the tunnel and grew steadily larger. That’s my mouth, I thought. When I get there, I can breathe.

  I CAME OUT OF THE TUNNEL ONTO THIRTY-FOURTH STREET. TRAFFIC was a tangled mess. Horns were honking from all directions. I rolled down the windows and the volume tripled.

  I called Margo.

  “Where are you?” she asked. “It sounds horrible.”

  “I’m stuck in traffic. Listen, I want you to do me a favor. What are your plans for the afternoon?”

  “Well, I was planning to sit here and eat bonbons all day, but I’ve got to get down to New York magazine and pitch a story idea. Why?”

  “I want you to get Donna Bia’s phone out of there. I’d come get it, but right now I’m heading the opposite direction. I want you to take it out to your father’s.”

  “Okay. But why?”

  “Go fetch it,” I said.

  She replied, “Woof,” then set down her phone. A scooter came buzzing along in between me and the car next to me. Its engine sounded like a loud bee. Margo came back on the line. “Got it.”

  “Take a look at her phone numbers. Check out A and R.”

  “You’re looking for Angel Ramos?”

  “I should have done this last night,” I said. “I blame you. You and your damn sexy poems.”

  “I didn’t hear no complaining.”

  “I’m thinking this is what Cox was after last night,” I said. “The phone.”

  “Yep. It’s here. Just says ‘Angel.’ Do you want me to call him up?”

  “No. Just give me the number.”

  She did. As I was writing it down, Margo said, “Whoa. Hang on.”

  “What?”

  “Here’s another one, Paco. You might find this one even more interesting.”

  “What have you got?”

  “It’s what Donna Bia’s got. Or what she had. L. Cox.”

  “L. Cox?”

  “On her phone.”

  “Leonard Cox? She’s got Leonard goddamn Cox programmed into her phone?”

  “That’s what I’m looking at,” Margo said. “ ‘L. Cox.’ You be the judge.”

  The traffic mess unglued for about ten seconds, then jammed right back up again. I was too slow moving into the space. A car that looked like a running shoe squeezed in front of me.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Margo asked, “What does it mean?”

  “At the very least, it confirms what I’ve already suspected. Leonard Cox is one bad apple.”

  “We both knew that already.”

  “Yes. But now we’re beginning to see just how bad.”

  I considered the thoughts Charlie had been throwing out. In particular the one about Cox having set up his partner to be shot by Diaz at the Thanksgiving parade. Cox’s number being listed in Donna Bia’s phone wasn’t definitive proof that this was what had happened, not by a long shot. But Donna Bia was Angel Ramos’s woman. Or his property. I recalled Cox practically drooling on Margo’s rug when he was talking about Donna, and how he had seemed to know awfully well how things stood with Angel and Donna. I had the feeling Leonard Cox figured in there somewhere. He had practically lamented the pointless loss of a perfectly good sex object when Donna Bia had turned up with her throat slashed. If Donna Bia had Cox programmed into her phone, chances were strong that Angel Ramos knew how to get ahold of the neighborhood cop. Cox was on the wrong side. This wasn’t just one of the bullying abuses the papers had talked about. This was the other one, the partnering abuse. Leonard Cox was in cahoots with Angel Ramos. Maybe it was uneasy cahoots, but as I saw it, that didn’t really make any difference. The more I thought about it, sitting there stuck in traffic, the more convinced I was becoming that Leonard Cox had set up his partner to be killed by Roberto Diaz. This left almost everything else a complete muddle, but as far as puzzle pieces go, it was a nice shiny one.

  “Are you still there?” It was Margo.

  “I’m still here. And I might be here until Doomsday, from the look of things.”

  “Sad.”

  “Look. I definitely want you to get that phone out to Charlie. You never know, Cox might be planning to come back around for another look. There might be other good stuff on the late Miss Bia’s phone. Get it out to Queens.”

  “Do you really think it was the phone he was after?” Margo asked. “How would he have known you had it?”

  “I think you got it right, what you said last night. I think what happened after Donna had her fun with me was that she got ahold of Cox somehow, obviously not on her phone, and told him what had happened. Or she told Angel and he told Cox. However it happened, Cox knew she’d lost her phone in my car. The last thing he wants is for me to start scrolling through her numbers. It’s definitely why he came over.”

  “Okay. I’ll take off right now. After I swing by the magazine, I’ll head over to Dad’s. What are you going to do?”

  I looked at the clog of cars and trucks all around me. The sense of permanence, of taking root, was growing palpable.

  “I’m going to age gracefully,” I said. “Right here on Thirty-fourth Street. Maybe you’ll come by someday and visit me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Get moving,” I said.

  We hung up. I surveyed the scene again. You, too. For Christ’s sake, get moving. I checked the time. It was approaching two.

  A minute later, it was a minute later.

  33

  DOUBT EVERYTHING.

  I drove to Midtown North and asked to see Remy Sanchez. I was told that he had left five minutes earlier to go downtown for a meeting with the police commissioner. I returned to my car and got onto the West Side Highway, which was a safer road to run red lights on than the more congested so-called surface streets. I parked a block from One Police Plaza and jogged across the bricks to the glass doors leading into the building. I took a seat on a metal bench out front. Unless Sanchez had driven down with his cherry light spinning, I was pretty certain I’d beaten him.

  I had. After a few minutes of waiting, I spotted Sanchez coming across the plaza. I rose from the bench as he approached.

  “Captain Sanchez.”

  He stopped. “What are you doing?”

  “I need to talk with you.”

  “You want to- Suddenly, I’m Mr. Popular.” He indicated the glass doors. “El jefe wants to see me.”

  “I need to talk to you about the problems in the Ninety-fifth. It’s important.”

  “That’s not my precinct.”

  “I know. I also know that inside dope the rest of us never hear has a way of making its way from precinct house to precinct house. The old invisible stream.”

  “What if it does? Why should I talk to you about it?”

  “I think there’s a link between the problems at the Ninety-fifth and the crap that
went down on Thanksgiving. I’m not exactly sure what it is.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why I should talk to you.”

  “You know the latest on Philip Byron?” I asked. “Another one of his fingers ended up in the mouth of a murdered woman last night?”

  He nodded tersely. “I got that.”

  “The guy who’s holding Byron, he’s a punk out of the Nine-five. I think he’s got a substantial tie-in with some of the cops up there. They might even be helping him stay hidden, I don’t know.”

  “Does Carroll know all this?”

  “Some of it,” I said. “Truth is, I don’t really know how much he knows.”

  “Look, I’ve got to get in there. Carroll said he’s got to be somewhere at three. I don’t know what all this is about. Why don’t you just talk to Carroll?”

  “I want street-level information,” I said.

  Sanchez smiled, but without much humor. “Muchas gracias for the demotion.”

  “You know what I mean. Carroll’s half cop, half politician. That’s the job. You’re a captain, but you still hear the beer talk.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Let me give you a quote: ‘When pieces don’t fit together, the truth is usually in the cracks between them.’ You remember saying that to me? You were talking about a white shadow. You said a white shadow was all over this thing. You were right. And right now I don’t need the kind of light Tommy Carroll is going to shine on it. All I can ask you to do is trust me.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of my cards. “There’s my cell number. You said Carroll’s got to be somewhere at three, so you’re only going to be in there for half an hour. I’ll stick around. Call me when you get out of your meeting. I just need to bounce a few things off you.”

  Sanchez looked at the card, then pocketed it. “I’ll call you. It might be to tell you to stuff it, but I’ll call you.”

  “Good. And listen, don’t tell Carroll we talked.”

  He had pulled the glass door open. He paused. “Look at me, Malone,” he said. “What do you think? Was I born yesterday?”

  The sky had darkened while we spoke. Low gray clouds were settling in over the city. I had time to kill. I realized that Paul Scott’s office was nearby. There was nothing I could think to do about Angel Ramos until after I’d talked with Sanchez, so I decided I might as well rattle a chain for my other client. I called Information and got the address of Futures Now. They were located on the west side of City Hall Park, near the Woolworth Building. I hoofed it over and took the elevator to the eighth floor.

  “I’m looking for Paul Scott,” I said to the woman at the front desk. The words FUTURES NOW hung on the wall behind her in silver block letters. The woman was wearing a headset. They’re plenty popular now, but they still make me think of air-traffic controllers. She directed me to take a seat as she punched a button on her console.

  “Paul? There’s someone to see you.” She looked up at me. “May I have your name, please?”

  Almost without thinking, I replied, “Nicholas Finn.” That’s the name I keep at the ready for those times when my job requires an identity dodge. I’ve got a folder full of falsified Nicholas Finn documents back at my office. The name had been an easy one to choose. The real-life Nicholas Finn had died not ten feet from me back when I was still attending John Jay. It wasn’t an easy death to forget. Let’s say, impossible. Years later, when Charlie Burke suggested I put together an alias to have at the ready, Nick Finn had slid into my skin so quickly I’d felt an actual chill. Why I gave it to the receptionist, I can’t say. She repeated it into the phone, then said to me, “He’ll be right out, Mr. Finn.”

  A minute later, Paul appeared. He saw me and automatically scanned the reception area.

  “Mr. Scott?” I said, standing up.

  He fixed on me. “What the hell is this about?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. I thought maybe you had time for a coffee.”

  “What’s this about?” he said again.

  I asked, “Is there a place we can talk?”

  Paul said nothing. The receptionist was watching with increased interest. Paul glanced at her, then at me. “Come on.”

  I followed him through a door to a large room that was divided up into clusters of cubicles. The walls were celery green and the cubicles a pale blue. People were sitting at their desks tapping away on keyboards and talking softly on phones. In the center of the room was a copy machine. A woman with red hair stood in front of it. The lid was lifted and the lightning-blue light from the copier was playing over her face. She looked up as Paul and I paused at the door. Paul led me along a row of cubicles, past a room with a swinging door and into an office about the size of a roach motel. He ushered me in, glancing out at the sea of cubicles before closing the door. I looked around for a place to sit. The only chair was behind the small desk. Good breeding told me not to grab it. Paul didn’t take it, either. He remained at the door, loading his weapons.

  “What are you doing here, Malone?”

  I flipped a conceptual coin. It came down on the side of not pussyfooting.

  “Your wife and your mother suspect that you’re having an affair,” I said. “I was asked to look into it. It’s a dirty job, et cetera, et cetera. I begged off, but Phyllis said she’d rather keep it in the family, so to speak. Better me than some other Joe Gumshoe. I’ve been preoccupied lately, but since I was in the area, I thought I should try to earn my nickel.”

  Paul’s skin had turned the color of putty. “My mother is paying you to spy on me? I can’t believe this. Does Lizzy know about this?”

  The question was pure Paul. The nervous sibling. Paul Scott could be in a room all by himself, and he’d decide the shadows were ganging up on him. He hated that Elizabeth and I got along 100 percent better than she and he did. He hated this nearly as much as he had hated my relationship with our old man. I threw him a bone.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. If Linda knows, Lizzy knows. That’s great. I really love family secrets.”

  He showed no signs of moving from where he stood. Helen Keller herself could have read the body language. Made me think of a novelty doormat: NOT WELCOME.

  I checked my watch. This had to go quick. I sat down on the edge of the small desk. “Her name is Annette Hartman. Her husband’s name is Bob. Or Robert. I guess it depends on how friendly you are with him. My guess is that you’re not. Friendly with him, I mean. Our friend Bob is left-handed. I mention that only to show off my sleuthing skills. You had a boo-boo around your right eye the other day, and your mother says Linda thinks you got clocked by your girlfriend’s husband.” I held my fingers to my temples and narrowed my eyes, as if I were receiving a transmission. “You eat lunch together, sometimes Mexican. Sometimes you go to the Raccoon Lodge after work, and if I’m not mistaken, Mrs. Hartman is at this very minute making photocopies of something that is too large to fit on the glass.”

  I dropped the telepathic act. “Look. Paul. Your wife is distressed, your mother is concerned, and for what it’s worth, your half brother thinks you should keep away from other people’s wives. If you and Linda have a problem with your marriage, or if you’ve got a problem with your life, find a long-term fix, not a short-term one.”

  As if on cue, a light knocking sounded on the door. Paul opened it. The redhead was standing there, a look of concern on her face. She handed Paul a folder.

  “Here’s the file you asked for,” she said. She spoke stiffly, as if reading from a script.

  Paul looked momentarily confused. “It’s okay,” he said. “This is my half brother.”

  “Your…” Her face relaxed. “Oh. Okay. I just… okay.” She took the folder back from and looked past him. “Sorry.” She moved off. Paul closed the door. I hadn’t expected a smug expression to be on his face, but that’s what was there.

  “That was Annette,” he said.

  I tapped my finger against my head. “I figured.”

  “She’
s a friend of mine.”

  “We’re all adults here.”

  “No. I mean, she’s a friend of mine. We’re friends. That’s all we are.”

  “I’ve said my piece.”

  “For your information, Annette’s husband is the one having an affair. He’s an A-number-one prick. She deserves someone a lot better than him.”

  “But that someone’s not you?”

  “I told you, we’re just friends. Work buddies.”

  “And your black eye?”

  “Yeah. That was her husband. Annette’s been worried sick that her husband was seeing someone. She wasn’t positive, but she suspected. She confided in me and I told her I’d look into it.”

  “Look into it?”

  He blushed. He knew he had blushed, and he wished he hadn’t. Which only made him blush all the more.

  “Yeah,” he said defensively. “So what? She asked me.”

  “What does Annette do here?” I asked.

  “Here? She’s in marketing.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “Mainly development. Why?”

  “Nothing. I’ve never worked in an office. I guess I don’t know the part where the marketing person asks the development guy to spy on her husband for her. I don’t know, Paul. Professionally speaking, you’re taking a potential client away from the likes of me. That’s more my game, you know.”

  It was a cheap shot, and I regretted it the moment I said it. Paul Scott’s Daddy issues-and I knew he had them-were probably not finding a whole lot of resolution in this closet-sized office on the edges of Cubicle Land. The last thing he needed was me tweaking him for playing detective.

  “Why don’t you just get out of here?” Paul said testily. “Some of us have work to do.”

  Some of us have work to do. Honestly, it made me want to cry.

  I pushed off the desk and he stepped aside. “That way.” He pointed, as if I’d forgotten which way we’d come. I heard his door close behind me. As I passed the room with the swinging door, it swung open and I nearly collided with the one and only Annette Hartman.