Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

Harvey was not our man. Twice in one day, our man had sent a messenger: first the nun, now this guy Harvey, who knew nothing. Harvey told us he’d been approached in a bar near Yankee Stadium by a man he could describe only as “quiet.” Carroll asked him what he meant by that.

“Quiet,” Harvey repeated. “Spoke in this real soft voice. Almost like a whisper. You could barely see his lips move.”

I pressed. “But what did he look like? White? Black? Hispanic?”

“Puerto Rican, I guess,” Harvey said. “It’s dark in the bar, you know? I wasn’t, like, staring at him.”

Carroll looked up beseechingly at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ.” Sister Anne made a face.

Harvey said that after a few drinks, the “quiet” man asked if he wanted to make a little money. He had a package he wanted delivered. He would pay Harvey two hundred dollars to deliver it to an address in Riverdale. Harvey told us that he had negotiated for taxi fare above and beyond the two hundred. He seemed proud of this fact. His instructions were to not simply leave the package at the door but to deliver it personally. He was told that he would be invited inside.

“He told me to ask for a glass of wine,” Harvey said.

Indeed, a half-empty glass of red wine sat on the table next to the chair where Harvey had been sitting when I’d rousted him from the room.

Tommy Carroll drilled him with several dozen questions about the quiet man. Had Harvey ever seen him before? Was there anything distinctive about the clothes he was wearing? Harvey told us that the man wore a wool watch cap. Dark blue. Or black. Maybe dark green. He said he was wearing aviator sunglasses.

“What about his hair?” Carroll asked. “Did it stick out from the cap? Long? Short? Kinky? Give us something, goddammit.”

Harvey couldn’t remember if any of the guy’s hair had poked out from under the watch cap or, if so, anything particular about it.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It could have been a wig. Face it, Tommy, the guy was invisible.”

Carroll agreed. He was also disgusted. He glared at Harvey, who was glaring at the half-finished glass of red wine. “This scum knows nothing.” Carroll called Leonard Cox inside. Cox and I exchanged another cool look. Carroll instructed Cox to take Harvey back to the bar where he had encountered the guy in the watch cap. “Ask around. Put the jitters in the owner. Lean on the bartender. You know the routine. See if there’s anyone who can give us anything useful.”

Harvey went off with Cox. Carroll turned to Sister Anne, who had been sitting in an upholstered chair at the far end of the room. “I’d like to see that package, Sister.”

Sister Anne had already opened the shoe-box-sized package. It hadn’t exploded. That was the good news. Inside the box was a smaller box. It was addressed simply: ML. Carroll looked at me and nodded. Martin Leavitt.

“We need to take this with us,” Carroll announced. “We’ve got to get the crime lab on it.”

Sister Anne narrowed her eyes, but she nodded. “I understand.”

Carroll cleared his throat. “We’re in the middle of an ongoing investigation here. I’m sorry I can’t give you the details at this point, but I’m going to ask for your cooperation in keeping all this to yourselves for the time being.”

Outside, he muttered, “I want to see what the hell this is.”

“Do you want my guess? It’s nothing that’s going to make you happy,” I said. “This guy is all about pulling our chain. This is all one big sick joke to him.”

Jigs offered, “Maybe it’s a hand buzzer.”

We took the package to Carroll’s car. He set it on the hood and opened it.

Jigs was wrong. It wasn’t a hand buzzer.

I was right. It didn’t make Tommy Carroll happy.

I FLIPPED OFF MY CELL PHONE AND SET IT DOWN ON THE TABLE NEXT to my plate.

“Confirmed. The prints are Philip Byron’s.”

Margo’s chin was in her hand. Her other hand was holding her fork. She was letting the tines drop onto her bacon like a slow-motion jackhammer. Her appetite was gone.

“Everyone already knew,” she said.

“They did. Now it’s official.”

“Horrible.” She let the fork drop again. “Incredibly horrible.”

She was right.

It was an index finger and a pinky. Severed. Bound together by coarse brown twine into the shape of a cross. In case there was any mistake about the intended shape, the nail of the index finger had been scrawled on: a crude happy face in red ink. That’s what had been in the package that Gary Harvey had delivered to the Convent of the Holy Order of the Sisters of Good Shepherd. Even Jigs Dugan had gotten a chill.

No note. No new demands. No new hoops to jump through. Everyone was waiting. It would come.

Something would come.

Philip Byron’s disappearance-his abduction-was under wraps. He had not made his appearance at the McNally funeral the day before. The police commissioner had ordered officers in the Washington Heights precinct to be on the lookout for Byron’s car. It had been found where he parked it to meet me at the entrance to Fort Tryon Park. Martin Leavitt immediately imagined the worst. Since he was now in possession of a crude bloody crucifix made of two of his deputy’s fingers, those fears had plenty of currency.

He was waiting.

Margo’s eyes were darker than usual. “Let’s go to Mexico.”

“Okay. Where in Mexico would you like to go?”

“Anywhere.”

“Coastal? The interior? You want ruins?”

“All of it. Any of it. Let’s just go.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s leave tonight.”

I picked up my coffee mug and took a sip. “I’m Superman. I’ll be fine.”

“Superman’s a jerk. He’s loaded with personal problems.”

“Batman, then. There’s a real head case.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Is the subject still Mexico?”

Margo set her fork down on her plate and looked across the table at me. “The subject is, my skin is crawling. What kind of person does a thing like that?”

“One with personal problems,” I said. “A head case.”

“Batman?”

“You see? It’s all the same subject.”

“Mexico.” She rapped her finger against the table. “I’m calling a travel agent while you clean up.”

“I’m not in the mood to clean up.”

“Don’t you want to do anything to please me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Like what?”

I got up from the table. “There’s no need to go all the way to Mexico.” I came around to her side of the table. I cupped her elbow in my hand, and she rose like a feather on a draft. We stood a moment, saying nothing.

“You’re a head case,” she whispered, and touched her nose to my chest.

Her arm around my waist, she leaned precariously sideways and switched off the coffee machine on our way out of the kitchen. No chance I was going to let her fall.

TOMMY CARROLL WANTED ME TO MEET WITH REMY SANCHEZ. I SAW him in his office at Midtown North.

“You heard about the fingers?” Sanchez asked before I had even taken a seat. He was standing at the window, tweezering the slats of his venetian blinds, peering out the window. He looked weary.

“I saw them.”

“No shit. You saw them, huh? I missed that detail.” He released the blinds and looked over at me. “I seem to be missing a lot of details these days.”

I shrugged.

Sanchez frowned. “Cat got your tongue?”

“No. I just don’t know what to tell you. If there’s a big picture, I’m not seeing it, either. Just these little pieces.”

“The commissioner wants me to fill you in on Roberto Diaz. He wants me to empty the bucket right into your lap. Why do you suppose that is?”