Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I did. I thought it might be fun to get your answer and his answer and see how well they fit together.”

“That’s your idea of fun?”

“When pieces don’t fit together, the truth is usually in the cracks between them.”

“That’s too long for a fortune cookie,” I said. “Did you make that up yourself?”

Sanchez turned back to the window. He fingered the venetian blinds again, then dipped his head to peer though the slats. Something caught his attention. “Do you know what a white shadow is, Malone?”

“A white shadow. No. I don’t.”

He peered a few seconds more through the blinds, then released them. “A white shadow is when something is off. It’s when something out there is not quite the way it’s supposed to be. It’s close, but it’s off. It’s not throwing down the right kind of shadow.”

“I see.”

“There’s a white shadow all over the crap that’s gone down these past couple of days. Something’s not right, I’m just not sure if my giving a damn is worth it.” He pulled back his squeaky desk chair and dropped into it. He ran a hand carefully along his hair. It was glistening, with deep comb grooves. “My wife tells me I need to do a better job of picking my battles. She says life’s too short.”

“What battle are we talking about here, Captain?”

“I’m not sure. I guess that’s the problem.”

“I wish I could help you. But I’m just going in the direction people point me.”

“Somehow I don’t believe that. But okay.” He fiddled with his wedding ring. “I guess we’ve all got a job to do.” He released the ring and clapped his hands together. “Let’s spread Mr. Diaz out on the table, shall we?”

ROBERTO TOMAS DIAZ HAD BEEN BORN IN SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, and moved to New York City when he was nineteen. A few years later, he married a Gabriella Rodriguez, who worked at the time as a dispatcher for a car-service company called FastCar, located on Flatbush Avenue in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Diaz took a job driving for FastCar, which he held for just under two years. During this time, Gabriella became pregnant and took a leave of absence. On his way to drop off a customer at La Guardia Airport one afternoon, Diaz rolled the car he was driving. No one was seriously injured, but the customer sued, alleging driver negligence. He claimed to have seen Diaz taking a drink from a liquor bottle. A half-empty bottle of peach brandy was found at the accident scene, but there had been no way to determine if it belonged to Diaz. At the trial, Diaz spit on the customer, for which the judge held him in contempt of court and commanded him to jail for twenty days. FastCar lost the suit and fired Diaz. A month later, the customer was jumped by two men as he was returning to his apartment around eleven o’clock at night. He was beaten severely with a pipe. Both assailants wore ski masks. Before running off, one of the two attackers lifted his mask and spit on the victim. Gabriella Diaz swore to investigating officers the following day that she and her husband had been home together going through a baby book, picking out potential names for the unborn child. Diaz himself had produced the book and pressed it on the officers, showing them the different names that were circled. His behavior had been judged by one of the officers as “extremely hyper.”

The mugging went unsolved.

Diaz held several different part-time jobs while his wife was pregnant. After the baby-a girl they named Rosa-was born, Gabriella went back to work at FastCar, leaving the baby with her mother during her shifts. Diaz came by the dispatcher’s office from time to time, just to hang around. Gabriella’s boss told him he was not welcome, and on one occasion a fight nearly broke out. When two of the company’s vehicles were vandalized soon after-obscenities spray-painted all over them, tires slashed-Gabriella was let go. It wasn’t a week later that the police answered a domestic-disturbance call and found Gabriella Diaz bleeding from a gash in her forehead and baby Rosa on the floor with her crib inverted, shrieking and crying. Stripped to the waist and sweating profusely, Roberto Diaz had told the responding officers that his wife had hit her head falling in the shower. The officers noted that Gabriella’s hair was dry, as was the bathtub when they checked. They also noted that blood from the wound had spotted the blouse Gabriella was wearing, but was presumably not wearing when she took her alleged tumble in the shower. The police discovered an ironing board set up in the kitchen, but the iron was nowhere to be seen. When asked, Gabriella told the police that the iron was broken, so she had thrown it away. When? The day before, she said. The officers put her down as a bad liar. Bad and scared.

No charges were filed.

The divorce came through less than a year later. Gabriella had found a new job with a company that cleaned office buildings after hours. Her schedule allowed her to spend time with Rosa during the day and to be away from her husband for a large part of the evening. Diaz had a job at that point, spotty work with a moving company. At nights he went to the bars. His daughter stayed with her grandmother until Gabriella came by after work to pick her up and take her home.

One evening Gabriella was vacuuming the corridor of a law office near Borough Hall when her husband appeared with a woman on his arm. The two were clearly stoned. The woman was in a skimpy hot-pink dress and wore a tattoo of a rose on her upper arm. Diaz referred to the woman as his girlfriend and demanded that Gabriella show the woman where the bathroom was. Gabriella pointed her in the right direction, and the woman sashayed down the corridor. An argument broke out between Gabriella and Diaz. One of the lawyers who had been working late responded to the hubbub in time to see Diaz swinging the hard plastic part of the vacuum-cleaner hose like a baseball bat, right into Gabriella’s mouth. The lawyer intervened and was met with enough violent swings of the hose that he required medical attention.

The lawyer’s services for Gabriella Diaz’s divorce proceedings were conducted completely pro bono. Alimony, for what it was worth. No child visitation. A restraining order. Diaz emerged from his five-month prison term for assault a single man and, if possible, an angrier one.

“THAT TAKES US UP TO A YEAR AGO,” SAID REMY SANCHEZ, SQUARING a small stack of papers on his desk and setting them to the side. “Since that time, he was quiet as a mouse. He got the apartment in Fort Greene and seems to have kept pretty much to himself. We netted one complaint from a female resident of his apartment building who said Diaz used to leer at her whenever he saw her, but that’s about it. He got the job with Delivery on Demand and held it until about a month ago.”

“What were the conditions of his leaving?”

“The company didn’t want to say at first. But apparently, Diaz had been opening the packages he was delivering.”

“Nosy?”

Sanchez shook his head. “Paranoid. Remember how Son of Sam said his neighbor’s dog was telling him to go out and kill pretty girls on lovers’ lanes? Well, Diaz didn’t have a dog, but according to one of his coworkers, he was convinced that the packages he was delivering contained coded messages meant specifically for him.”

“So Diaz was receiving messages from packages he was delivering.”

Sanchez shrugged. “That’s how it is with some of them. A nut job in Minneapolis had cereal boxes telling him to kill prostitutes and cut off their feet-you remember that one? He had a whole refrigerator full of them. First thing he did when the police found the feet was ask the cops to wear gloves when they handled them! He didn’t want the police getting their grubby hands all over them. He had cleaned them all with peroxide. Just like the cereal boxes told him to.”