Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“Not my gun. I lifted it from a dead cop.”

“McNally.”

“We didn’t have the chance to properly introduce ourselves.” I indicated the bag on the table. “What gives, Tommy? Some bizarre new suspect-protection program? I know you’ve got budget crunches, but paper bags? What are we doing here? Why aren’t we in a police station?”

“I can’t talk right now.” He looked at his watch once more. “Look. I need to hear your story. I need it short and sweet. We’ll talk again later. And I mean soon. An hour. But I’ve got to be three fucking places at once right now, and one of them can’t be here. For the record, you’re not here, either. Now, what the fuck happened out there? Give it to me clean. And quick. I mean it.”

Carroll glanced at his watch three more times in the two minutes it took me to tell my side of the story. As I spoke, his eyes moved to the wall behind me, as if maybe he was using it as a place to project my story.

“That’s it,” I said when I was finished. “How many casualties are we talking?”

His eyes snapped back to me. “First reports from the scene have seven confirmed dead. That could change, of course. It’s nuts out there. We don’t know what they’re getting at the hospitals. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

I sent an eyebrow up the pole. “You’ve got seven dead. One cop and at least a couple of kids. You might want to think about putting the word ‘lucky’ away for another day.”

“Seven isn’t seventeen.”

“It’s not zero, either.”

He waved it off. “Were there any other people in the vicinity when you shot this guy? Did you notice?”

I shrugged. “Nobody else was by the fountain. I know that much. If there had been, I wouldn’t have shot. Why? Are you looking for witnesses?”

“I’m just trying to picture the scene.”

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“Look. I don’t want you talking to anyone about this. Okay? Nobody. It’s important. Not until you and I have had a chance to talk.”

“This isn’t a talk?”

“Not enough of one. I’ve got to get over to City Hall. The mayor is facing the cameras in about ten minutes. I’m sure he’ll want me to say a few words.”

Of course he would. My father had held Tommy Carroll’s post for four years before his abrupt resignation nearly fifteen years ago. I know how it works. During the time my old man was top cop, it seemed that I used to see him more often on the tube than I did in real life. The other large reason for that was that he didn’t live with my mother and me. He hadn’t been married to my mother. He was married to another woman. The real wife. That’s why I don’t share his name. He and the wife lived uptown, in every sense of the word, just off Park Avenue, along with their two kids. So he didn’t get down to see us all that much. It was less than a week after he stepped down from his post that he disappeared. Then no one saw him at all, not even the rich wife and the well-tended kids. It was soon after this that I met Margo’s father. I hired him to nose about for the old man, and before the year was out, I had a PI license of my very own. It made it easier to join in the hunt. For all the good it did.

I was twenty-five then, a couple of years of John Jay already under my belt, followed by something of a flameout, then a couple of years behind a bar on Ludlow Street. Now I finally had a legal gun in my pocket. It wasn’t exactly following in the old man’s footsteps, but I’d say overall it has worked out fine. I’m my own boss. I fetch my own coffee. I answer my own phone. If I don’t like a case, I don’t take the case. Life could be worse… as that little flameout showed me.

And I’m one up on the old man’s former colleague sitting across the table from me: I’ve had my nose broken only once.

Tommy Carroll leaned forward. “Look, I want you to sit tight-”

I cut him off. “I’m not going to sit in this hole waiting for you.”

“I just told you, I’ve got to get the hell over to City Hall.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“You know the Three Roses?”

“I know it.”

“Go there. I’m sure they’ll have the tube on. You can watch the show. Give me another ten minutes after Leavitt and I wrap things up, then come over to City Hall. You know Stacy, my assistant? I’ll have her positioned out on the steps to look for you. She’ll escort you in.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He handed me a twenty. “Live it up.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” I said, pocketing the bill. “But may I say for the record that something is very fucked up here?”

He stood up. Tommy Carroll standing up is like an ocean liner rising up on its aft.

“You may say it,” Carroll said. “But not for the record.” He jabbed a thick finger against the tabletop. “There is no record.”

COMMISSIONER CARROLL LET ME OUT THROUGH A BASEMENT DOOR. It led out to the corner of Police Plaza, where on weekdays you’ve got a half-dozen or so food kiosks waiting to serve lunch to the hundreds of civil servants who’ve been up in the Municipal Building all morning, passing the city bureaucracy around from office to office and desk to desk. This being Thanksgiving, the plaza was deserted. Two police cars were parked at the curb on Centre Street. The two cops who had brought me in, plus the one who had collared the shooter, stood next to the cars. One of these patrol cars, I thought, should be parked in front of a hospital, not here.

“Avoid them,” Carroll said. “Just circle around them and get to the bar. And I’m serious about this, Fritz, don’t breathe a word to anyone until after we’ve talked. Promise me.”

I nodded. A nod is not a promise. I was calling Margo the moment I got to the bar. And no big ugly police commissioner was going to stop me.

I traced a wide circle around the two police cars. Only Gumdrop looked over my way. I shot him with a finger pistol and trotted across the street.

The Three Roses is tucked into an alley-like street that sees all of a single wedge of sunshine for approximately ten to twenty minutes once a day, depending on the season. The bar is two doors in from the corner, between a pizza joint and a bail bondsman’s office. I moved into the shadowed street, went flat against the wall of the pizza joint, and looked back over toward the cop cars. The police commissioner was talking with his men. Whatever he was saying, he was using his hands to emphasize his point, slapping the knuckles of one into the open palm of the other. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or he was just being emphatic. My experience with Tommy Carroll is that there’s not much difference. This went on for about a minute, then he checked his watch for maybe the hundredth time, turned and started back for the door he and I had used. One of the cops went with him. The one who had nabbed the shooter.

I went back down the shadowy street and into the bar. As Carroll had predicted, the television set was on. The handful of patrons were all gazing up at it. The expressions on their faces were pretty much identical. They were watching a replay of footage that had been taken several minutes after the Beretta had done its damage. The Mother Goose float was in the center of the screen. Several bodies were visible lying on the street and on the far sidewalk, being tended to by either EMS or regular folks from the crowd. People wandered in zigzags all over the street. An old-timer at the bar was shaking his bony head in dismay. “That’s one fucked-up parade.”

I asked the bartender for a glass of seltzer and took it to the rear of the place, where I wedged my shoulder into a corner so I could use the pay phone on the wall and still keep an eye on the television. Margo answered on the second ring.