Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

A loud knocking sounded.

“Don’t open it,” Margo hissed.

We both knew it was a hollow request.

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, I WAS WORKING A CASE FOR A WOMAN WHO was being stalked by her former employer, an art appraiser at Sotheby’s. The man’s inappropriate attentions while the woman was in his employ had spurred her to look for another job; she landed a parallel position with a smaller auction house. Marlborough’s, on Lexington Avenue. It was soon after the woman started the new job that she began noticing her former boss lurking outside Marlborough’s, as well as showing up on her subway platform at both ends of the workday. He also phoned her frequently at work, offering up perfectly transparent work-related pretenses for the calls, and also at her home, although these calls-technically anonymous and conducted in an ill-disguised low breathy voice-were characterized primarily by utterings concerning underwear and puckered flesh. A friend of a friend of a friend referred the woman to me, and I had agreed to stalk the stalker, in order to corroborate the woman’s tale of harassment so that she could take appropriate legal action and keep the unhinged art appraiser away from her. There was no indication-neither from a look into the man’s past, which I undertook to investigate, nor in his actions-that the art appraiser posed an actual bodily threat to my client. He was a perv and a pest, and she wanted him officially designated as such so that action could be taken to get him out of her life.

And so I had thought little as far as danger was concerned one afternoon when answering a pounding on my inner office door. As Miss Dashpebble was “out,” I answered the door to find the art appraiser standing there mopping his forehead with a pale blue silk handkerchief. Only when I saw what he was holding in his other hand did I reconsider the danger issue. It was a pistol, by my appraisal, a real one. He fired it point-blank. He claimed later that he was attempting to drop it when it went off. There might even have been some truth in this claim, for he certainly proved to have a lousy grip on the gun, which meant that his tugging on the trigger-intentionally or otherwise-tipped the gun’s barrel forward and down so that the bullet that might otherwise have made its way into my spleen instead followed a trajectory directly into my left thigh, some five or six inches above my knee. The man let out a gasp-as did I-then cringed, almost as if he knew what my response was going to be. I grabbed hold of the door frame with my left hand, delaying my fall to the floor just long enough to bring my right arm around in a clean, hooking swing, landing a potent punch directly on my assailant’s chin. At that point, the three of us-me, him and the gun-clattered to the floor. In the now-and-again replays of the scene, often occasioned by my pulling open a door to someone’s insistent knocking, the nonexistent Dashpebble lets out a trilling scream, swiftly dials 911 and asks for help, then steps over from her desk and cracks the troubled art appraiser over the head with the telephone. In real life, I picked up the pistol (using the man’s blue handkerchief, in order to keep his prints intact) and tossed it far back into my office, then dragged myself over to the receptionist’s desk and called 911 myself. By the time the EMS crew arrived, I was propped up against the receptionist’s desk and wearing a blue silk tourniquet around my leg, swearing softly against the pain. The art appraiser was still in the doorway to my office, curled up in a puddle of his own tears.

Which is all to say that it was not a completely steady hand that pulled open Margo’s apartment door. Ever since that incident with the art appraiser, when I answer someone’s knock, my gaze does not first seek out the face. It goes for the hands.

LEONARD COX’S HANDS WERE IN HIS POCKETS. HE WASN’T IN HIS POLICE uniform. He was wearing jeans and a black leather jacket.

“Cop Cox,” I said.

“Malone.”

“May I say how lovely it is to see you? Especially at this hour.”

“You gonna let me in?”

I stepped back from the doorway and he came in. The scent of stale tobacco joined him. I made the introductions. Margo remained cool, opting not to mask her irritation.

“You’ll excuse me if I go back to bed?” she said, aiming her italics as much to me as to Cox. Or so I thought. But she retreated down the hallway with a goofy sliding action, something like a modified cross-country skiing step, and I knew she was only half as peeved with me as she was putting on.

I turned to Cox. “What’s this about? How’d you know to find me here?”

“You weren’t at your place. I checked there first.”

“Which doesn’t explain how you tracked me down here. What’s going on?”

“Carroll said you might be here.”

“Come on.”

He followed me into the living room. He pulled up short when he got there. “Jesus.” His eyes scanned the hundreds of spines.

“That grumpy chick in the bathrobe eats books for breakfast. There’re twice as many as you see. They’re double-shelved.”

“That’s a lot of fucking books.”

“Right. Well, she’s a colossus. But my guess is you aren’t here to borrow the letters of Harold Nicolson. Why have you been asking Tommy Carroll how to find me? Has something happened?” I sat down in the wicker rocker and motioned Cox to have a seat. He took the claw-foot chair.

“We found your car.”

“We?”

“Somebody phoned in an abandoned car with a smashed-in window on Flatbush. It was a rental. We ran it and came up with you. You rented it this evening from Dollar on Fifty-second.”

“Correct.”

“You were talking to the captain earlier tonight. You told him you were going to lean on some whores to try to find Ramos.”

“Yeah, that’s more or less how I put it.”

“Is that how you got your face scraped up?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I had a motor-skill meltdown when I was shaving. I hope you didn’t come over here at three-thirty in the morning just to show off your sleuthing abilities. I rented a car, I went looking for Ramos among people who might know where he is. For this you ask Tommy Carroll where my girlfriend lives?”

“You ran into trouble.”

“Stop telling me what I just did!” My explosion even took me by surprise, but I kept going with it. “Jesus Christ, Cox, you’ve got about five seconds to tell me why you’re here, or else guess what? You’re not here. What the hell is so goddamn important that Tommy Carroll had the nerve to give you this goddamn address?”

Cox hesitated. His eyes hardened. I didn’t care one bit for the smirk he didn’t bother to hide. “Why don’t you keep it down, Malone? You’re going to disturb the little lady.”

I was across the room in two seconds. Cox rose, which made it easier for me to get two fistfuls of his jacket. He was ready for me, though, and he landed a pair of piston shots to my shoulders. I backpedaled, releasing the jacket.

“Assaulting an officer,” Cox said coolly.

“Trespassing.”

“You let me in.”

The desire to leap at him welled up again, but I held my ground this time and waited for it to pass. There’s no gain in two cavemen pounding stones against each other’s heads. I was as irked with myself for losing my temper as I was with Cox for provoking it. He remained standing with his hands at the ready, like a gunslinger in the middle of Main Street. I could see in his expression that he’d be more than happy for me to keep the discourse purely physical. He was at least five years younger than me and two inches taller, and his reactions were probably a little sharper than mine at this particular moment. I was tired, for Christ’s sake. Pimps and blackjacks and prostitutes and pepper spray will do that to you, I don’t care what anyone says. Besides, the last thing I wanted was for Margo to come in and see me and Cox grappling on the floor in front of the fireplace like a couple of rejects from a D. H. Lawrence story.