Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“Roberto Diaz wasn’t working alone,” I said. “He was working with a partner. The partner is still dangerous. I need to find out who he is.”

Montero held my gaze. “We don’t know who is the partner. Roberto was not in our life. Please.”

I pressed. “Other people could die. This man is holding a hostage. He’s extremely dangerous. I know this is painful for your wife, but you have to understand.”

“She is pregnant.”

I glanced over toward the bench. “I see that. Congratulations to you both.”

Montero reached up and stroked his small mustache. He let out a sigh. “Show me something. Do you have a badge?” I pulled out my wallet and showed him my PI license. He gave it a long look. “I will talk to her. Wait here.”

He stepped back to the swing and lifted the little girl into his arms. She threw her arms around his neck and looked over at me with a disapproving face. Montero carried her to the bench and set her down. Gabriella handed the child the flowers and shooed her away. Rosa went to a nearby picnic table and began laying the flowers out on the table, one by one. Hector Montero spoke with his wife. She listened, then nodded. Montero kissed her on the cheek and signaled me to come over. As I approached the bench, he joined the little girl at the picnic table. Gabriella Montero was struggling to stand.

“Don’t get up,” I said.

She had not gotten far. She fell back heavily on the bench and looked up at me. Her eyes were as black as the twin shotgun barrels I’d faced just a half hour earlier.

“I am in hell,” she said.

LUCKY THING FOR CHARLIE BURKE, HIS LOCAL WAS JUST TWO BLOCKS from his house. In the days before an idiot’s bullet put him in a wheelchair, the lucky part had to do with Charlie’s having to negotiate only those two blocks safely after too many pints. Nowadays the paltry distance between home and bar meant that at least Charlie could get himself there and back on his own with no real problem, weather depending.

He was at the bar when I arrived. He was gassing about the Giants to some poor fool who didn’t know better. If Charlie had his way, a goon squad would be sent out to abduct Bill Parcells from his current coaching job, his retirement, his deathbed, whatever, and forcibly return him to the Meadowlands and chain him to the hometown bench. A long chain, of course, so he could still range up and down the sidelines and bite the heads off the referees.

Charlie’s victim was caught in the “but” cycle. “But… but… but…” I could have told him that you can’t elbow your way into Charlie’s Giants rant. The best thing to do is drink your drink, find something completely different you want to roll around in your mind, and nod now and then. Charlie is perfectly happy to go it alone. Prime him just right, and he’ll pitch his Giants tirade to a two-year-old.

I rescued the victim. I came up behind Charlie’s wheelchair and announced in a loud voice, “Bill Parcells is a mouse.”

“What!” Charlie whipped his head around. When he saw who it was, he started to introduce me to the guy he’d been lecturing, but discovered that he hadn’t gotten the fellow’s name.

I told the stranger, “Get while the getting’s good.”

He probably walked away a Jets fan.

“May I say you’re looking lovely tonight,” I said to Charlie as I swung into the just vacated chair.

“You may not.”

Jenny Gray was working behind the bar. Her crow-black hair was pulled back from her pale face in a thick, shiny ponytail. She was already looking my direction when I called out to her for a Harp. She gave a slow nod, then pulled me a pint and had it passed hand-to-hand over to me. This had been Charlie’s method for fetching his drinks ever since the shooting. When I was with him, I sometimes adopted the method. Bad habit.

Charlie tapped his glass to mine. “To the pot we piss in.”

Fifteen years and counting, and I’d yet to hear him repeat the same toast twice. I took a hungry pull on the Harp. Charlie’s quizzical eye was on me as I set the glass down. “You’ve learned something.”

Someone had just punched up a Rolling Stones song on the jukebox. I saw Charlie grimace.

“I spoke with Diaz’s ex-wife today,” I said. “She gave me a name.”

Charlie deadpanned. “You’ve already got a name, son.”

Under the table, my foot found the frame of his chair. I gave it a nudge. The chair rolled backward several inches.

“Right,” Charlie said, adjusting his chair back to the table. “So, what did she tell you?”

“It wasn’t something she was keen to talk about at first. You should have seen her, Charlie. The poor woman. She had a three-year-old with Diaz, and she hasn’t told her yet that her daddy is dead. She’s about to have another baby any day. New husband. They’ve been hounded by the press, as you can imagine. The woman was shaking like a leaf. She didn’t come right out and say it, but in a way, she feels sort of responsible.”

“Responsible for what? Her former husband’s rampage?”

“They were married for four years. She was nineteen when they got married. He was abusive to her, and she put up with it for too long. She’s extremely religious. She feels that somehow she should have saved him. Or been able to change him.”

“He was a psycho. If she wants to feel responsible for something, she should feel responsible for not killing him while he slept. He’d be dead, she’d be in jail, and nine people would still be alive. Is that better?”

“She’s worried for her daughter. She’s sick with fear about the girl having her father’s blood. ‘Tainted blood’ was how she put it.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s you and me sitting here with our beers saying it’s ridiculous. But from where Gabriella Montero is sitting, it isn’t so ridiculous. She told me she saw the devil himself in her ex-husband’s eyes. She said the devil comes to the world dressed up like everyday people. ‘Thousands and thousands of devils in the world’ was how she put it. Everywhere you look. And Roberto Diaz was one of them.”

Charlie lifted his glass. “I’m not going to argue with her.”

The Stones song ended, and the muscles in Charlie’s face relaxed as Tony Bennett took over. I went on, summarizing the years that Diaz and Gabriella had spent together. I told him about the guy who’d sued FastCar, about Diaz spitting on him in court and then later, the mugger spitting on him after he’d been beaten with a pipe. I told Charlie about FastCar’s vandalized fleet and about the police assessment that Diaz had hit his wife in the face with an iron. I could see a double frustration in Charlie’s expression. Diaz was dead, but to Charlie, that was too easy a punishment. Charlie would have preferred spotting Diaz at the bar so he could have gone over and grabbed him by the shoulders, hurled him up against the wall and offered up some real punishment. That was the first frustration. The second was that even if Roberto Diaz had been loitering at the bar, Charlie was stuck in his damn wheelchair and couldn’t really do much about it. His roughhouse days were well over.

“Wife beaters should be skinned alive,” Charlie said in a low voice. “Your Gabriella is right. She was married to a devil.”

My glass was empty. So was Charlie’s. This time I got up to fetch the beers myself. Jenny Gray was chewing on her lip as she took the empty glasses from me. Her black T-shirt was a tight fit. Plunging V-neck. A “tip teaser” was how she had described it to me once. Her skin was pearl white.

Jenny gave me a steady look. She pulled the beers without so much as a glance at them. “How’s Margo these days, Fritz?”