Speak of the Devil

10

“IT’S A MAN.”

“What do you mean, it’s a man?”

“I mean it’s a man.”

“That’s a nun.”

“It’s not really a nun.”

“You’ve got X-ray vision?”

“Just wait a second. You’ll see.”

The Gristedes had eight security cameras in the store, though only four of the eight were recording at any one time. The screen I was looking at was divided into four equal squares. Each camera’s image appeared in one of the squares for about ten seconds before the next camera in the rotation clicked in. The nun had made her-or his-appearance in the upper-right-hand portion of the screen just after coming into the store. Each camera recorded an image every two seconds, so the nun’s movement through the produce section was staccato, like that of a figure in an unsophisticated video game. The nun moved in five of these stagger steps right off the screen. A few seconds later, the next camera picked her up.

Him.

It.

Tommy Carroll and I were leaning in close to the screen. Carroll had his finger poised above the pause button on the video player. Martin Leavitt was off by the bay window, watching the sun burning its way through the white sky over the East River.

“We’re estimating around six feet,” Carroll said. “It’s hard to tell with that headgear. You see the pillar with the bananas on it? Top of the nun’s head comes up around that second batch from the top. I called a patrolman to go in and get me a measurement.”

“Nun. Six feet. We can nail this thing in no time.”

Tommy Carroll looked up from the screen. “Your old man had a sarcastic streak. I liked it a lot better in him.”

The next camera picked up the figure. A bag of some sort hung from the nun’s right shoulder.

“This whole nun thing is screwy,” I said. “Have we got ourselves a Norman Bates here?”

“Who’s Norman Bates?”

“You don’t know your Alfred Hitchcock?”

Carroll was still looking horrible. “Who’s Norman Bates?”

“Psycho. The Hitchcock movie. Killed his mother, then dressed up in her clothes whenever he got the burr up his tail to go kill someone.”

“This guy’s not dressing up like his mother. He’s dressing up like a nun. Whose mother is a nun?”

I shrugged. “Mother Superior? Mother. Nun. All I’m saying is the getup must mean something.”

“Right. Something weird.” Carroll turned back to the screen. “Here. Look.”

He tapped his finger against the square in the lower-left quadrant. The image jumped as a new camera clicked in. The horizontal freezer stretched from the bottom of the image to the top. With the lens the camera was using, the freezer looked absurdly long. The nun appeared. First the wimple, then, in the next image, the entire figure. Two images later, the nun was bending over the freezer. In the next image, something shiny was in the nun’s hand. It was the plastic freezer bag containing the envelope.

“Wait,” Carroll said again. Over by the window, Leavitt continued to gaze out at the river, almost as if he’d lost interest.

On-screen, the nun was stuffing the freezer bag beneath one of the turkeys. In the following image, the nun was standing upright again. So far we hadn’t seen a single image of the face.

“That’s what the habit is about,” I said. “It obscures the face.”

“Wait,” Carroll said a third time. The nun pulled something from the shoulder bag and turned away from the camera. Deliberately, it seemed. Carroll pressed the pause button just as the nun turned back. The wimple was tilted up, and the nun was looking directly at the camera. The nun was wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses and a ridiculously large, droopy and obviously fake mustache.

The nun was giving the camera the finger.

IT WASN’T UNTIL SEVEN YEARS AFTER MY FATHER HAD ABRUPTLY stepped down as police commissioner-and disappeared soon after-that the courts weighed in to officially pronounce him dead. It would have been nice to believe that what had really happened was that he simply dropped out of sight by his own choosing and moved on to a quiet incognito life somewhere in the Caribbean, grizzly gray beard, open-collared shirt, leathery tan, maybe the occasional dalliance with the occasional turista. I doubt his wife would appreciate that version of events as much as I do, but that’s a beef I’ve always had about Phyllis Scott: no imagination. Coupled with a haughty self-regard that leaves precious little room for the consideration of others. Funny thing, since she’s a psychiatrist, and not an inexpensive one. You’d think that a healthy degree of compassion and empathy would be one of the job requirements. Imagination, too. But I guess not. Her practice has never been more booming. It seems there are plenty of wealthy, uncentered New Yorkers willing to spill their hearts and guts out to a cold machine like Phyllis Scott to the tune of two hundred dollars an hour. I don’t get it. I’d think an hour in a room with a frisky puppy would do as much for a person’s mental health and would cost a lot less money. But what do I know?

Phyllis runs her practice out of the first floor of the town house she shared with my father on Sixty-sixth Street, right off Park Avenue. Beside the scores of bitter, befuddled, destructive, frightened and generally unhappy people who have spent time within the building’s walls (I’m speaking clinically here), the town house has also been terra cognita to Paul and Elizabeth Scott, my father and Phyllis’s two children. My half siblings. Elizabeth I like. She never begrudged me and my mother our status as the marginal second family. The open secret. Her kindness to my mother, especially, has always won rave reviews from me. Paul is another story, and not one I’d pick up and read if I had a choice.

Paul Scott was coming down the steps of his mother’s town house as I approached. I had hoofed it over from Gracie Mansion after viewing the Gristedes tape and going over so-called Nightmare’s latest message. When Paul spotted me, he darkened like a rain cloud. He stopped on the bottom step. I’m sure the height advantage made him feel superior. I noticed a slight discoloration next to his right eye. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m thinking about buying the place and wanted to come by and kick the tires.”

“Very funny.”

Paul looked a lot like his mother, a fact I’ll admit gave him not unpleasant features. Unfortunately, he tended to do unpleasant things with them. He was doing one of those things now. This particular one made him look like he was sniffing a foul odor.

“I’m here to see your mother.” I said. “Is the doctor in?”

“Why do you want to see her?”

“I’m selling raffle tickets. Want one?”

He made his sniffing face again. “She’s busy.”

“I’m sure she is. She’s expecting me. I’ll bet she’s been primping and prepping for this day for nearly a week. I know I have.”

“You’re a real stooge, Malone, you know that?”

It was a point of honor with Paul Scott that he had never in his life uttered my first name. At least not to my face. The closest he ever got was a phase in the beginning of his voice-cracking years when he tried to get some mileage out of referring to me as “Shitz.” I gave him ten free passes before rewarding him with a bloody nose. Immediately thereafter, his mother the top-shelf shrink declared that I had “anger issues.”

“Mommie dearest summoned me a few days ago,” I said when he showed no sign of vacating the steps. “We have an appointment.”

“Professionally?” He sounded horrified.

“Not today, but who knows? Maybe I can fit in a little couch time before I go. I’m sure my unresolved conflicts would sink the Titanic.”

“I’ve got to go,” Paul said curtly. And he went. No hugs, no kisses. I can’t say whether his stiffness as he moved down the sidewalk was because he knew I was watching him or if he was having troubles with the stick up his tail. I headed up the steps and pushed the buzzer. A few seconds later, the door clicked and I pushed it open.

The black and white tiles of Phyllis’s enclosed entryway were set at a diagonal, which I would think the more loosely tethered of her patients might find disorienting, even a little bit threatening. On the left was the glass and metal door that her patients used to access her waiting area and office. A second buzzer was required to gain entrance. The door to the town house itself was a heavy oak slab that required a little muscle to push open. There was a second click, and I leaned into the door with my good shoulder.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the foyer, Phyllis’s voice came from the rear of the town house. “I’ll be right with you! Have a seat!”

I stepped into the living room and did what I could to make myself comfortable amid leather and metal furniture not too terrifically designed for that purpose. I sat facing a large piece of modern art on the wall that I might have titled Ode to a Bowling Pin in the Snow. It was new since I’d last visited. Also new was a pair of large chrome gooseneck standing lamps set on either side of the tall bay windows, their chrome hoods inclined toward each other over a black lacquered Asian table like a pair of alien heads in consultation. The room was spotless. I checked to see if I’d tracked in any dirt.

After another minute, Phyllis came in from the dining room. I rose. Even in her early sixties, she moved with a liquid grace. She was wearing bone-colored slacks and a ribbed maroon sweater. She was painfully slender, essentially hipless. The hair pulled back from her angular face was frosted the color of fresh straw. Her expression, as always, was a little bemused, a little aloof. A gold bracelet jangled on her arm as she reached for my hand. “You’re prompt.”

“You said noon. That one’s easy. Both hands straight up.”

Her hand felt like gelatin. I didn’t dare give it a real squeeze. I sat back down as Phyllis lowered herself into a leather sling chair across from me. She made an L of her arms, settling her chin into her hand. I imagined an echo from hundreds of sessions across the hall: So, tell me about your childhood.

“You just missed Paul.”

“I saw him,” I said. “I ran into him out front. He embraced me like the bastard half brother I am.”

She allowed the bemusement to flower. “You threaten him.”

“Because I pack heat?”

“You know perfectly well why. Because you’re rough and Paul is smooth. You are your father and he is not.”

I do enjoy chewing the fat with shrinks. They cut right to the heart of the matter. I asked, “Does he know that he had all the advantages of life and I had approximately half of them?”

“He does. Which is what makes his unhappiness all the more profound. His leg up hasn’t exempted him from pain.”

“Ha ha,” I said. “Fooled him.”

“What happened to your arm, Fritz?”

A copy of the Times was on the glass coffee table to my left. The pair of pictures above the fold told the story. I didn’t.

“I banged it,” I said. “I’ll live.”

Phyllis sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. “How’s your mother, Fritz?” She added to the body language by crossing her arms. A foot jiggled impatiently.

“She’s fine. She’s out in California visiting a friend.”

“And how is her drinking?”

I took the question in the chest. As intended, I’m sure. “That’s direct.”

Phyllis blinked like a Siamese cat. “You’d prefer not to say.”

“It’s a question of what I think she might prefer.”

“I take it, then, that she’s still wrestling with it. It’s very sad.”

“She’s enjoying her visit with her friend,” I said.

“There’s no need to be defensive, Fritz.”

I gave her a false smile. “You know how it is.”

“Actually, I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Some other time. You can put me on the meter.”

“That’s not very funny.”

“Then by all means don’t laugh.”

“I was only asking a question,” she said coolly. “I wasn’t intending to probe.” Her gaze broke away from mine. It looked almost like she was purposely showing me her profile, then I realized she was looking down at the newspaper on the glass table. “This is so wretched.” She leaned forward and picked up the paper, scanning the front page. “What has this world come to? I can only imagine the kinds of people capable of acts like these. It’s horrible.”

“Can you?” I asked. “I mean, a person who did something as depraved as either of those killings-could he actually walk around afterward, behaving just as normally as you and me?”

“Absolutely. Psychotics can blend right in. They don’t wear sandwich boards declaring their homicidal rage.”

“That would certainly be convenient for the authorities.”

“And so many of the people you see who do look like they’re ready to pull out a machete in a crowded subway, it’s all bluff and bluster. They wouldn’t actually do it in a million years. It’s all verbal. Their anger is precisely the result of their inability to act. Their impotence. The world has them so tied down and hamstrung that their only tool is to yell or rant or simply start looking like something the cat dragged in. Their social-misfittedness is their attack. Other than that, they couldn’t be less dangerous.”

I pressed. “What if it were one of your patients who commited one of these attacks? Therapists have the inside track, so to speak. If the person was under psychiatric care, do you think his therapist would be able to suss it out?”

“There’s no saying. Could be. And don’t think that after events like what happened yesterday, therapists all around the city aren’t running a mental inventory of their patients to see if any of them have shown the seeds of this kind of violence.”

“Did you run an inventory?”

“There’s no avoiding it.”

“Did you come up with anything?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t share it with you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. Not the particulars. No names. But I mean in the abstract. Are any of the people you’re currently seeing capable of something like what happened?”

She gave me a level look and paused before responding. “Yes. I’d say one or two of them are.”

“You practice a dangerous profession,” I said.

“Harlan used to note that as well. He said the two of us probably had deep-seated death wishes.”

“Sure was a cheerful guy, wasn’t he? How about the both of you chose professions so that you could help other people? That has a nicer ring to it.”

She glanced down at the paper again. “There’s no doubt that the police are going to be flooded with calls from people claiming responsibility. Events like these speak to the imagination of unwell people. I could probably launch an entire new practice with the people who are going to come out of the woodwork on this.” She tossed the paper back on the table and leveled me with her ice-blue eyes. New subject. “I want to thank you for coming over, Fritz.”

“What is it you want? When you called the other day, you were pretty tight-lipped.”

“It’s Paul. I think he’s mixed up in something he shouldn’t be.”

“Trouble?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Linda thinks he is having an affair.”

“I see.”

“But she’s not sure. His behavior has been somewhat furtive lately. And he is keeping an erratic schedule. Paul tends to shut down when Linda tries to draw him out.”

“Has she put the question to him?”

“No. She’s too nervous.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Let me guess. He denies it.”

“He gets angry. And yes, he denies it. The problem is, Linda says Paul came home one night last week with a shiner. Maybe you saw.” She tapped her right eye. “He tried to pass it off with a story about getting hit on the street by a bike messenger, but Linda is certain he was lying. Paul is not a good liar.”

“As a mother, that should make you happy.”

“As a mother, I’m concerned about my son. Linda says he hasn’t slept an entire night through in well over a week. He’s scared about something. But we can’t bully him into telling us what he’s up to. He’s a grown man.” She considered me for a moment. “I would like you to look into it, Fritz.”

“You want me to bully him?”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“If he won’t tell you, he sure as hell won’t tell me.”

“I don’t mean for you to ask him.”

“You mean for me to snoop on him.”

Phyllis’s sweater had an oversize turtleneck. She poked a finger into the loose fabric and twisted it as she spoke. “That’s what you do for a living, isn’t it?”

“I don’t snoop on my family for a living.”

“Paul and you are family only in the most marginal sense of the word.”

“There are a hundred other private investigators you could call in for this,” I said. “I can give you some recommendations.”

“But I don’t know what it is they’re going to uncover.”

“If they’re any good, it’ll be the same thing I’d uncover.”

She released the collar. “What I mean is, I don’t know what they’ll do with the information once they have it. I really don’t want strangers rooting about in my son’s personal life.”

“So then you do want me because I’m family.”

She recrossed her legs with military swiftness. “You enjoy being difficult?”

“I’m just trying to get us both on the same page. You want me to snoop on Paul to see why he’s getting into fights and can’t sleep. You want to be able to tell me to keep my mouth shut about it when I find out what he’s up to. And the reason I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut is because Paul and I share the same father. But I’m not supposed to view this as snooping on my own flesh and blood.”

“You could care less about Paul,” she said flatly.

“It might not be an affair. It might be something else. I just need to warn you that investigations don’t always go where the client thinks they’ll go. If I were to uncover something unsavory or illegal, why would I be inclined to keep quiet about it?”

“Because I asked you to.”

“I see.”

“I would be your client. I would be the one paying you for your services.”

“No family favors.”

“I’m not family.”

I gave my head a scratch. “The overall logic is a little shaky.”

“I’ll pay you in cash, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I still accept cash. Fits so snugly in my wallet.”

“Good. Then we have a deal.” She sealed her own conclusion with a sharp nod.

I asked, “Does Paul know that this is why I’m here?”

“I didn’t say anything to him about your visit.”

“You knew that I was coming today at noon. You didn’t go out of your way to keep him from seeing that I was coming by to speak with you.”

She turned her palms to the ceiling. “Let him wonder. That’s not really important. What’s important is that you find out what he’s up to and I’m able to see to it that he stops doing it.”

“He’s a grown man,” I reminded her.

She considered me a moment. “You do remind me of Harlan.”

“What would he have done in a situation like this?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

I did. “The old-school method,” I said. “He would have grabbed Paul by the ankles and dangled him from an upstairs window until he coughed up the goods.”

“Precisely.”

“But you’re going to count on my tact and delicacy?”

“Your tact.”

“And what about my delicacy?”

The high-priced psychiatrist gave a closed-lipped smile. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about your delicacy.”