Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

I looked from Leavitt to Carroll and back again. Good poker faces. “I’m guessing you gentlemen didn’t bring me here to see if I had a spare million on me.”

“You’re going to deliver the money,” Carroll said flatly. He reached out and placed a hand firmly on my wounded shoulder. “That’s what you’re going to do. And then you’re going to never breathe a word about it.”

NIGHTMARE HAD DELIVERED A SECOND LETTER. HE’D LEFT IT IN AN envelope in a freezer bag, tucked beneath the handful of frozen turkeys that remained in the horizontal cooler at a Gristedes grocery store two blocks from the mayor’s residence. A call had come in to the City Hall switchboard at around three-thirty in the morning. The caller was a male with a slight Hispanic accent who identified himself as “the mayor’s worst nightmare.” The operator described him as soft-spoken. The caller had said, “Tell the mayor that if he wants to stop the killings and is ready to talk turkey, he should go buy one at the Gristedes on York. No delay. If you don’t deliver this message immediately, the blood will be on your hands.”

The operator had contacted Philip Byron immediately at his home and played the message for him. Byron had phoned Tommy Carroll, and the two met in front of the Gristedes within the hour. Carroll was armed with a warrant to seize the store’s security-camera tape for the past twenty-four hours. Not ten minutes after they arrived, they were joined by two members of the police department’s bomb squad who’d brought a pair of sniffer dogs. Two clerks, the night manager and four customers were evacuated to a coffee shop two blocks away, where a patrolman was assigned to keep them from leaving until Carroll questioned them. Tommy Carroll and Philip Byron stood next to a barrel of pumpkins while the bomb squad and their dogs traveled up and down the aisles and through the rear storage area. The letter was located beneath the turkeys within five minutes, but Commissioner Carroll had instructed that it not be removed until the bomb sweep was completed.

The men from the bomb squad gave the store a clean bill of health just after five in the morning. Carroll put the plastic freezer bag containing the envelope and letter into a holiday gift bag that he’d appropriated from a display near the front of the store, then led Philip Byron up the block to the coffee shop to question the people they’d detained. Nobody reported seeing anyone poking about in the horizontal freezer section. Carroll took statements from the four customers as to what items each was shopping for in the Gristedes at that hour of the morning. He had them photographed by the patrolman, took their names and addresses and released them. Then he badgered the night manager and the two clerks for descriptions of the people who had come into the store after midnight, which was when their shifts had begun. One of the clerks, a lanky black guy with a silver earring, remembered “a couple of bitches that can kiss my ass” who came in around two o’clock and tried to walk off with two pints of Ben & Jerry’s. “They was dustin’, dude. High as a kite. You want to arrest somebody, those muthafuckas is prime.”

The two “muthafuckas” aside, the only customer coming into the store between midnight and three-thirty who’d drawn any of the employees’ attention was a nun who, according to the night manager, arrived at around three.

“It’s just not something you see a lot,” the night manager said. “She had all the nun stuff on. The big hat and everything?”

The clerk with the earring corroborated. “Total penguin, you know what I’m saying? Got the big old blinders on? And our lady’s tall, too, Jack. Like six-one or something. That shit’s all fucked up, man.”

The nun hadn’t purchased anything. According to the night manager, she’d come into the store, disappeared down one of the aisles and was back out the door in five minutes.

The smart-mouthed clerk chimed in again. “A religious fucking experience. Little lady penguin, man. What’s that about?”

After questioning the employees a little longer, Carroll and Philip Byron accompanied them back to the store, where Carroll procured the security tapes. Byron had phoned the mayor to alert him to what was going on. Leavitt met Carroll and Byron at the front door of Gracie Mansion and took them directly to his office in the rear of the mansion, overlooking the East River, where they studied the security tape and the contents of the plastic freezer bag.

That was then. Approximately six o’clock in the morning.

I got my look at around eight.

“IT’S A MAN.”

“What do you mean, it’s a man?”

“I mean it’s a man.”

“That’s a nun.”

“It’s not really a nun.”

“You’ve got X-ray vision?”

“Just wait a second. You’ll see.”

The Gristedes had eight security cameras in the store, though only four of the eight were recording at any one time. The screen I was looking at was divided into four equal squares. Each camera’s image appeared in one of the squares for about ten seconds before the next camera in the rotation clicked in. The nun had made her-or his-appearance in the upper-right-hand portion of the screen just after coming into the store. Each camera recorded an image every two seconds, so the nun’s movement through the produce section was staccato, like that of a figure in an unsophisticated video game. The nun moved in five of these stagger steps right off the screen. A few seconds later, the next camera picked her up.

Him.

It.

Tommy Carroll and I were leaning in close to the screen. Carroll had his finger poised above the pause button on the video player. Martin Leavitt was off by the bay window, watching the sun burning its way through the white sky over the East River.

“We’re estimating around six feet,” Carroll said. “It’s hard to tell with that headgear. You see the pillar with the bananas on it? Top of the nun’s head comes up around that second batch from the top. I called a patrolman to go in and get me a measurement.”

“Nun. Six feet. We can nail this thing in no time.”

Tommy Carroll looked up from the screen. “Your old man had a sarcastic streak. I liked it a lot better in him.”

The next camera picked up the figure. A bag of some sort hung from the nun’s right shoulder.

“This whole nun thing is screwy,” I said. “Have we got ourselves a Norman Bates here?”

“Who’s Norman Bates?”

“You don’t know your Alfred Hitchcock?”

Carroll was still looking horrible. “Who’s Norman Bates?”

“ Psycho . The Hitchcock movie. Killed his mother, then dressed up in her clothes whenever he got the burr up his tail to go kill someone.”

“This guy’s not dressing up like his mother. He’s dressing up like a nun. Whose mother is a nun?”

I shrugged. “Mother Superior? Mother. Nun. All I’m saying is the getup must mean something.”

“Right. Something weird.” Carroll turned back to the screen. “Here. Look.”

He tapped his finger against the square in the lower-left quadrant. The image jumped as a new camera clicked in. The horizontal freezer stretched from the bottom of the image to the top. With the lens the camera was using, the freezer looked absurdly long. The nun appeared. First the wimple, then, in the next image, the entire figure. Two images later, the nun was bending over the freezer. In the next image, something shiny was in the nun’s hand. It was the plastic freezer bag containing the envelope.

“Wait,” Carroll said again. Over by the window, Leavitt continued to gaze out at the river, almost as if he’d lost interest.

On-screen, the nun was stuffing the freezer bag beneath one of the turkeys. In the following image, the nun was standing upright again. So far we hadn’t seen a single image of the face.