Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“That is where she used to live. Before she joined the order.”

“Is that why she went all the way out there to kill herself?”

She looked over at me. Her face seemed preposterously small inside the white wimple. Her cheeks pressed against the hard fabric. “I cannot answer your questions.”

“Cannot or will not?”

“Margaret was my only friend here. I’m very lonely without her.”

“Natividad. Did Sister Margaret have addiction problems that went beyond alcohol? Did Margaret have a drug problem?”

“No.”

“You say that with certainty.” Or, I thought, too quickly.

“Because it’s true.”

“And you would have known? If she had a problem like that, you would have known?”

“Yes.”

I pulled out the picture of Angel Ramos. I’d asked Sister Mary to get it for me. I set it down on the bench between us. “Did you ever see Sister Margaret with this man?”

“No.”

“Did Sister Margaret ever say anything about someone named Angel? Or Ramos?”

“No.”

“Except for when she went there the last time, did Sister Margaret go out to Brooklyn often? Did she visit with her family?”

“Her parents are both dead.”

“Any other family?”

“She did not see them.”

“So… trips to Brooklyn? That you were aware of? For any reason?”

“No.”

“Sister Natividad, are you keeping something from me?” She didn’t answer. I tapped a finger against the photograph on the bench. “This man is responsible for the deaths of many people. In fact, he murdered a woman just last night. In Brooklyn, as a matter of fact.” The nun started but remained silent. “Somehow this man knew Margaret. His note to the convent and Margaret’s suicide note have too much in common to be coincidence. I don’t understand the connection or why he’s making it, but it’s there. This man is evil. He’s a bad man. He’s a drug dealer, among plenty of other things. Do you think it’s possible that Margaret… that your friend was somehow involved with this man?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so.”

“I don’t know.”

“But if anyone here knows, it would be you. Isn’t that right? You were her best friend here. You two talked. You shared your thoughts.”

“She talked to people at her meetings, too. When she went. She said she felt good talking with strangers. She said sometimes it was easier than talking with God. Or with the other sisters.”

“You’re talking about A.A. meetings?”

She nodded.

“Do you know where she went to her meetings? Did she go to the same place or did she move around?” I knew that some alcoholics prefer going to different meetings. “Grazing” was how it was put to me once.

“There is one she liked in Columbia.”

“Columbia. You mean Columbia University?”

“Yes. It’s not only with regular people but also with students. Margaret liked that. She used to tease me that I should come with her and meet a nice college boy.”

“I didn’t know nuns had time for nice college boys.”

“It was a joke. She was teasing me.”

“Did she ever mention anyone in particular who she enjoyed seeing when she went to the meetings?”

“Yes, she did. There is a man named Bill. She said Bill was a nice person. She enjoyed talking with him.”

“Bill. Any last name?”

“I think no one says their last name.”

“What was Margaret’s last name, by the way?” I asked.

“It was King. She was Margaret King.”

“You miss her,” I said.

She smiled. “I talk to her every day. Out here, where she was happy.”

I looked around the tiny arbor. It was pleasant but not a lot of space. A fifteen-by-fifteen square within which to be happy. I stood up.

“Well, when you talk with her again…” I stopped. I had no closer. I looked down dumbly at the young nun. I heard a splashing sound, and the finches darted from the fountain and over the roof of the convent.

A small smile flickered on the nun’s face. “Maybe she was listening to us the whole time already.”

I looked at my watch. Closing on ten. If that’s the case, I thought, I wish to hell she’d start speaking up.

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEETING OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS was held in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel, a barrel-shaped brick building on the east side of the campus. It was a windowless, bunkerlike room with mud-colored walls, the only illumination coming from a dozen banged-metal wall sconces that gave off little pie slices of dirty light. I had been told by the helpful woman in the administration office that every Friday and Saturday night, the place served as a college coffeehouse.

I came down into the room via a spiral stone staircase. The tables had been shoved against the wall, and several dozen folding chairs were lined up in a pair of semicircles, the open ends of which faced a cheap pine podium. The smell of caffeine permeated the room. Hell, the feel of caffeine permeated the room.

There was no one there. I’d called the number Information gave me, and the person who’d answered let me know there was a meeting at ten. I’d hoped to catch the tail end of it. Or, barring that, a straggler or two. But no luck. I went over to the industrial-sized coffeemaker on the chipped card table and put my hand on it. Still a little warm. I ran an inch into a Styrofoam cup and sampled it. Quaker State could have been their supplier. I emptied the cup into a potted ficus tree, realizing too late that it was a plastic potted ficus tree.

I pounded back up the spiral stairs into the sun. I had half a mind to pop down the few blocks to Cannon’s and have my mother’s ex-husband slide me a short glass. The next meeting in the basement was scheduled for twelve-thirty, and I wasn’t going to hang around for that.

Halfway across campus, I got an idea. I retraced my steps to the bunker. I scribbled out a note on the back of one of my cards and propped it on the coffeemaker, tucked into the red plastic handle.

BILL. PLEASE CALL. URGENT.

Back outside, my cell phone went off just as I reached Broadway. It wasn’t Bill. How nuts would that have been? It was Tommy Carroll returning my call. I ducked back inside the university gates to keep down the traffic noise.

Carroll got straight to the point. “Stacy says you’ve got something about Nightmare’s notes. What is it?”

“Do you have his notes with you?”

“No. Just tell me what you’ve got.”

I told him what I had discovered-actually, what Sister Natividad had discovered-about the similarities in the notes from Nightmare and the one written by Sister Margaret King sometime before she slipped into the bushes in Prospect Park and opened up both her wrists. Carroll listened without comment as I told him about my talk with Sister Natividad. I told him I wasn’t convinced that Sister Margaret might not have had a drug situation on top of her alcohol dependency. “It’s the only real link with Ramos that I can imagine. Margaret King was from Brooklyn. It’s a stretch, but maybe there’s something there.”

Carroll gave me a long silence to listen to after I finished. Then he said, “Drop it.”

“Drop it? Are you kidding? Margaret King is the link between Ramos and the convent. The bastard was signaling that in his note. That’s why I wanted to take a look at the other-”

“So what? So some dead nun is the link.”

“You don’t find that interesting?”

“What I don’t find it is helpful. We’ve got until five o’clock to collar this Ramos prick. What your nun has to do with any of this doesn’t get us any closer to finding him. Stay on point.”