Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“She’s good, Jenny.”

“We don’t see her much.”

“She’s a busy girl.”

“She still writing about famous people?”

“Among other things.”

“I guess she’s hit the big time. Must be fun work.”

“It’s a hustle. Margo works hard.”

“Plays hard, too, I’ll bet.” I didn’t answer. Jenny set the two beers on the counter. She was still giving me her steady gaze. “How about you, Fritz? Are you working hard?”

“Keeping out of trouble,” I said.

She set a glass on the bar and shot it full of seltzer. “Your work is trouble.” She picked up the glass. “Cheers.”

I drained an inch from my Harp, then set a twenty on the counter.

Jenny ignored the bill. “So, you two are good? You and Margo?”

I nodded. “We’re good.”

“Any news on the way?”

“News?”

“About the two of you?”

I shrugged. “No news.”

She allowed a thin eyebrow to rise. “So you’re not that kind of good.”

I took up the beers. “We’re good, Jenny.”

She scraped the twenty off the bar. “Tell her I said hi. Tell her I wish her continued good luck in the city. Tell her she should interview that Tom Cruise while he’s still cute.”

“I’ll tell her.” I took the beers back to the table. Charlie was watching me closely. “It’s nothing,” I said, setting the mugs down.

“I don’t trust that one farther than I can throw her.”

“I said it’s nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing before.”

“Before is before.”

“My girl is a hundred of that one. Listen, if I ever-”

I cut him off. “Charlie. Just drop it. Come on already.” I slid my mug over and tapped his. He hesitated, putting a long look on me, then he lifted his mug.

“May the cat catch its tail.”

THE NAME. ANGEL. GABRIELLA HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO PROVIDE A LAST name for me. Only the first. She had pronounced it An-hell , which was the kind of irony you could beat a person senseless with.

Angel was an acquaintance of Diaz’s. Gabriella hadn’t been certain when the two first hooked up. She told me she had a vague memory of Diaz mentioning someone named Angel early in their marriage, but the name didn’t really start cropping up on a regular basis until a couple of years later. Charlie picked up on this detail when I related it.

“Prison,” he said. “They appear, they disappear, they appear again. Prison.” I agreed; that’s what I had concluded.

Gabriella encountered this Angel character in the flesh on only two occasions. The last year of her marriage with Diaz, he was away from home half as often as he checked in. It was clear to Gabriella that her husband was involved with drugs, running with a bad crowd. More and more, she said, Diaz arrived home high on God knows what, laughing, sweating, speaking a mile a minute, trash-talking people Gabriella had never even met, trash-talking the police, the mayor, all white people, the Jews, the Arabs, the president. And there was always Angel. Angel this and Angel that. Me and Angel. You should have seen Angel . Finally, one night, Gabriella did see Angel. She was standing at a bus stop on her way to her office-cleaning job when a silver hatchback drove by across the street, vibrating the entire block with a thumpa-thumpa bass blast from a deck of inverted speakers filling the entire hatchback area. The tires squealed as the car ripped a half circle in the middle of the street, pulling to an abrupt stop in front of the bus stop. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa . Diaz came out of the passenger side, and from the driver’s side came a tall mocha-skinned man in a muscle shirt, a silver bandanna and a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses. Gabriella described him as at least six feet and “with muscles he was proud of.” He had a pencil-thin mustache. Diaz had made an overt point of being what Gabriella called “all lovey-dovey, like he was showing off for his friend.” Diaz introduced Angel to Gabriella. She said that Angel had barely acknowledged her. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, and if he even spoke to her directly, it was in a voice pitched as low as the thumping coming from the back of the car. Gabriella commented twice to me about the man’s muscles. What she had said was, “There was no soul. Only a body.”

“Prison,” Charlie said again. “We lock them up, they pump it up. Nice damn system.”

The second time Gabriella encountered Angel, he was trying to rape her.

Gabriella had turned her head away from the picnic table where her daughter was playing with the flowers. She had kept her tiny convulsions under control even as the tears flooded her cheeks.

She had just returned from work, she told me. It was five in the morning. Rosa was still with her grandmother. The apartment was empty. No Roberto. No surprise. Gabriella had showered, put on her nightgown and then gotten into bed, first pulling down the shades against the rising sun. She had drifted swiftly to sleep. The next thing she remembered, the sheets had been pulled back and a man was on top of her. She remembered a vanilla scent and a strong pair of hands forcing her legs apart, a low mumbling voice intoning, “Don’t fight, don’t fight, don’t fight.” She opened her mouth to scream, and one of the hands flashed up from under her nightgown and clamped over her mouth. Gabriella was staring wide-eyed into a pair of pale green eyes, open to no more than a slit. “They looked like the eyes of a goat.” She recognized the pencil-thin mustache. Angel was just entering her when her husband appeared in the doorway and started shouting. Angel attempted to continue, but Diaz threw himself onto the bed and the two men tumbled to the floor. Screaming, Gabriella had hurried off the other side of the bed and run into the bathroom, locking herself in, where she listened to the sounds of the fight. Eventually, the sounds stopped and she heard the front door slam. She waited an extra fifteen minutes, crying and shaking uncontrollably. When she finally emerged from the bathroom, Diaz was passed out on the bed, the pillow under his head draining blood from a small cut on his cheek. She told me that she had wanted to turn her husband’s head into the pillow and suffocate him.

Charlie had barely touched his beer. He picked up his mug and looked at me.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

I TOLD CHARLIE THE REST OF GABRIELLA’S STORY AS I ACCOMPANIED him back to his house. Charlie didn’t like being pushed; he motored his chair on his own. The temperature had dropped considerably and the air smelled like snow. Charlie was underdressed in a sweatshirt and a thin windbreaker. He generated some heat, though, muscling the wheels of his chair. The orange glow at the tip of his cigar led the way.

I told him about Diaz showing up at Gabriella’s workplace accompanied by the woman with the rose tattoo on her arm, and the lawyer coming in to take Gabriella under his wing. Gabriella said she had insisted on using her husband’s infidelity-not Diaz’s violence-as the stated reason for the divorce. Apparently, the woman with the tattoo was more than just a one-night stand; Diaz had taken up with her. Charlie gave me a suggestion on how I might want to follow up on that information. At the house, he let me wheel him up the long ramp.

“You seeing my girl tonight?” he asked, sorting through his keys to find the one to the front door.

“I don’t think so.”

He looked up at me. “You wouldn’t be going back to the bar?”

“Of course not. I’m beat. I’m going home.”

“Just checking.”

I drove back to the city over the Queensboro Bridge. The way there are so many lights on in Manhattan’s buildings all through the night, it looks like you’re driving into a cluster of stars.