Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“I’m listening,” I said. “Either give me something to hear or leave.”

“You ran into Donna Bia tonight.”

“For God’s sake, Cox, please don’t start in with the play-by-play again. Yes. I did. How do you know that?”

“I know it, that’s all. What did she tell you?”

I indicated my face. “She let her fingers do the talking.”

“Are we getting any closer to Ramos?”

“Is that why you’ve come over here at three-thirty in the morning? To ask me that? No. We’re not. She pretended she was going to take me to him. She pretended she was about to call him. That’s when she sprayed me.”

“Sprayed you?”

“Pepper spray. It was in her purse. I guess a girl’s got to protect herself.”

“I guess she must have used up all her protection on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Donna Bia’s body was found in the back of a laundry van at the Niagara Company lot just after midnight. Her throat had been sliced from one end to the other.”

My knees weakened. “Who found her?”

“Anonymous tip.”

“Good old anonymous tip. Is that where she was killed? In the van?”

“Hard to say yet. But it looks like it. There’s something else.”

“What’s that?”

“In her mouth. The M.E. on the scene found something in her mouth.”

“Besides teeth and tongue?”

“A finger. Sliced off at the base.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. “Hers?”

“A man’s.”

“Philip Byron’s.”

He nodded “M.E. says it was a fresh cut. He figures the finger got chopped near the same time Donna Bia got the ugly smile. Same knife.”

“Ugly smile. I haven’t heard that one.”

Cox ran a finger across his throat in a lazy arc. “She was one real piece of ass, you know?” he said. “Serious good stuff. Our goddamn Angel is really getting out of hand.”

COX STAYED ANOTHER TWENTY MINUTES OR SO. I PRESSED HIM, AND he told me that on getting word of Donna Bia’s murder, he had gone directly to the Flea Club to “rattle some of those nigger spics” and see if he could get any information about Donna’s activities and whereabouts in the hours prior to her throat being slashed from ear to ear. That’s when he learned about me. Not by name, of course, but the most cursory description was all he needed, especially once my window-smashed rental car was located.

“So you knew that Donna hung out at the Flea Club,” I said.

“Sure. It’s one of those spots.”

“Why didn’t you go looking for her once Angel’s name surfaced?”

“You mean like you did?”

“Okay. Yes.”

“I planned to. But it’s not like I could put on civvies and just go walking into the Flea like you did. This is my beat. They know me. If I approached Donna publicly, that’s a lot of eyes that have seen her getting the shakedown from a cop. Do you think she’s going to give up Angel when she knows word’ll come right back to him?”

I thought about this. It made sense. “Why do you think Angel killed her?” I asked. “The one thing she did not do was lead me to him. The way she behaved in that car, he should have given her a medal.”

“Maybe Angel didn’t believe her story.”

“Or maybe it was the fact that she went far enough to get in my car in the first place.”

Cox made a snorting sound. “Ramos? Not a chance. Donna might have been his main hump but she wasn’t like his wife or anything. He could handle her going down on other men. She was part of his cash flow, for Christ’s sake.”

“So why give her the ugly smile?”

Cox shrugged. “Got me. I think at this point, Angel’s probably keeping himself so high there’s no telling why the hell he’s doing any of this. The finger shit? That’s ugly. This boy’s over the edge. Who knows? Maybe Donna shows up, tells him a private dick was using her to get to him. He asks her some questions, and she doesn’t answer the way he wants her to. Boom. Out comes the knife. Or maybe he just figures he got lucky this time, and next time someone’s going to squeeze her better than you did. But let me tell you something. You shouldn’t try to overthink someone like Ramos. Don’t try putting logic to it. He’s a homicidal dopehead. He’s been pissing blood since he was a kid. Guy like that is just pure evil, end of story. He doesn’t give a crap about killing people. Killing Donna like that? If anything, it probably got his rocks off. By now it’s probably already ‘Donna who?’ ”

He asked for something to drink, and I went into the kitchen and got him a glass of water. If he had something harder in mind, he didn’t say so. He set the glass down, then said there was one more matter he wanted to run by me.

“Guy I talked to outside the Flea told me that Donna had bitched a blue streak to him that she lost some shit from her purse when the two of you had your little fight.”

“You might call it little.”

“The guy said she was real upset.”

“Yeah, the things we think are important. She won’t be needing them now.”

“So she did lose some stuff in your car? Can I have a look?”

“Hold on.”

I went down the hallway to the bedroom. The bedside light was on. Margo was sitting up in bed, reading a book of poetry by Deborah McAlister. Her face was pinched into a frown.

“Those poems are going to give you wrinkles,” I said.

“They’re good.”

“But you’re frowning.”

“It’s called focus. There are layers within layers.”

“Isn’t that always the way?”

I went to the opposite side of the bed and pulled Donna Bia’s phone and lipstick and drug vial from the drawer of the bedside table.

Margo folded her book onto her finger. “Hero cop still here?”

“He’s leaving soon.”

“I don’t like him.”

“I don’t like him, either,” I said. “We’ll keep him off our Christmas list.”

“As if.” She scooted up on her pillows. “What are you doing with those things?”

“Donna Bia was found murdered a couple of hours ago. Throat slashed.”

“Nice.”

“Cox was curious about the stuff that fell out of her purse. Someone told him that Donna’d been crabbing about it.” I came back around the foot of the bed.

Margo set her book down on the sheets. “Wait.”

“What?”

She said nothing for a moment. She was thinking. Sometimes when Margo’s thinking, she looks like her father, that same out-of-focus stare.

“Maybe he just wants the drugs.”

I held up the vial. “This?”

“I don’t like him,” she said again. “What’s he doing here?”

“I told you. He came by to tell me about Donna. He knew that I’d been with her earlier tonight.”

The frown had returned. “Ever hear of a phone? Or waiting until a decent hour?”

“That’s just cops,” I said. “They don’t give a damn.”

“This is the guy you think shot Roberto Diaz in cold blood, right?”

“That’s the man.”

“He should be in prison, not sitting in my living room. I don’t think you should give him what he’s asking for. I don’t trust him.”

“Margo, I’m sure a cop like Cox can get ahold of all the dope he wants, if that’s what he’s into. He’s hardly going to come all the way over here at three-thirty in the morning just to lift a little vial of whatever this is. Besides, he didn’t even know what fell out of Donna’s purse. He was just told ‘stuff.’ ”

“That’s what he’s telling you.”

“That’s what he was told by some guy.”

“That’s what he’s telling you.”

“How would some guy he’s talking to know the specifics of what fell out of the purse?”

“Maybe it wasn’t some guy. Maybe Cox actually talked to Donna.”