Speak of the Devil

24

VICTOR RAMOS HAD AN ANGRY RESTING FACE. SMOOTH. NO CREASES, with eyes that were like a simmering python’s. Pale, like Gabriella Montero had said. A pale swamp green. He was seated on the front steps of 807 President, staring into space, when I came up the walk. Despite the cool temperature, he was dressed in a muscle T-shirt. A glaze of perspiration covered his skin. He wore a pair of canvas work gloves and looked like he probably stood six-one or so. His chest was broad, his biceps the size of small pigs.

As it turned out, the angry resting face was simply genetics. When I gave him my name and told him that Rodney at U-Move had said I would find him here, he cracked an easy smile. “Rodney. You bribe him with food?”

“He seemed to have that area covered,” I said. I pulled out one of my business cards and handed it to him. The smile dropped away.

“You’re looking for Angel.”

“How do you know that?

“Because I haven’t done anything wrong. What is it this time?”

“When was the last time you saw your brother?” I asked.

The reptilian eyes rested on me a moment. “Last time was right before the last time he went to jail. Next time could be never, as far as I’m concerned.”

“When did he go to jail?”

“This last time? About a year ago. Before that, a couple of years.”

“Your brother go to jail a lot?”

“My brother’s a fuckup. Yeah, he’s got the prison thing down. He goes in for a little vacation, he gets to hook up with a whole new set of losers, then they let him out too early. Some system, huh?”

“What kind of things does he go in for?”

Ramos ran a tongue over his front teeth. “Pimping’s a big thing. Angel don’t treat women good, I can tell you that. But they come in useful for him. He goes in for all sorts of stupid shit. He’s been hit for robbery, car theft, aggravated assault. Kid stuff for Angel. They’ve never nailed him on anything really big.”

“But he’s done big?”

“What am I going to tell you? You’re the investigator. I guess you’re investigating.”

The door to the brownstone opened, and two men appeared, carrying a couch wrapped in a quilted moving blanket. Ramos sprang to his feet.

“Excuse me.” He placed a hand on my chest and moved me aside as if I were a leaf. The two movers came down the stairs and carried the couch up a metal ramp into the moving van. “I can’t talk,” Ramos said. “That was my break. It’s over.”

“I need to find Angel.”

“Last time I saw him, I tried to take his head off. Son of a bitch was trying to recruit my son for his street crap. His own damn nephew. Boy wasn’t even ten years old.”

“What do you mean, ‘street crap’?”

“What do you think I mean? Drugs. He tried to get Ricky to be one of his delivery boys. It’s a good thing I don’t have a daughter or he’d a been trying to draw her in, too. He strings those girls of his out on his dope, then pimps ’em out so they can pay up. Last I heard, he was running a whole racket. Angel’s nasty, man. What can I say?” He smiled again. “We both got the good looks, but I got the brains. Or maybe I married brains. My wife comes from just over there, Boerum Hill. That’s where we’re raising our family. We’ve got another kid on the way. I never told my wife about Angel trying to hook Ricky into his scene. That’s me and my boy’s secret. We talked it out.”

The two movers emerged from the truck. The shorter one said to Ramos, “Fucking chest of drawers up there’s made of lead.”

“Save it,” Ramos replied.

“Like to fucking chop it into pieces, what I’d like to do.”

The two went back into the building. Ramos turned to me. “I can’t help you. I mean it. I swore off Angel a couple of years ago. Far as I’m concerned, he’s a dead man. I got my family. I got this job, which he almost lost for me once.”

“How about a name?” I said. “Someone he’s tight with. Your brother must have a main man.”

Ramos grinned. “Main man. Listen to you. Only main man Angel ever had took a cop’s bullet in the head when we was all ten. Angel saw it happen. He was right there. Been mister bad boy ever since. No redemption, no return, you hear what I’m saying?”

I heard what he was saying. I heard it clearly. Ramos picked up a weight lifter’s belt from the steps and strapped it around his waist.

“What can you tell me about Angel and a convent up in Riverdale?” I asked. “The Holy Order of the Sisters of Good Shepherd.”

“Convent? I don’t know, man. You mean like nuns?”

“Exactly.”

“Hey, if any of them are young and pretty, that’s about all I can think. Angel’s got no time for religion.”

“You just used the word ‘redemption.’ ”

“Yeah, well, that’s me, not Angel. Our mother took us to church when we were kids. Tried to, anyway. Angel’d take a handful from the collection plate when it came around. That’s about how religious he gets. That and his name. Our parents sure wasted a good name on that one. They thought ‘Victor’ and ‘Angel’ would get us both off in the right direction. Our mother died when Angel was doing one of his stretches. The old man refused to let them bring him out for the funeral. He won’t even talk about him anymore.”

“This friend of Angel’s who was killed by a cop. What was his name?”

“Willy. Willy Padilla. They were tight, man. Blood brothers. Willy was a good kid, too. One of those kids who could always crack you up. Always goofing. That little kid could’ve gotten away with anything. Angel and I had an older sister used to say that Willy Padilla was going to grow up and really make the girls cry.” He shook his head. “It was a really fucked-up thing.”

“You have a sister?”

“You want to talk to my sister?”

“You tell me. Does she keep in contact with Angel?”

“Only if he can talk to the dead. You want to see my sister, you can go over to Green-Wood Cemetery. She married a guy who killed her about five months later. It’s a hell of a family.”

“I’m sorry.”

Ramos looked past me into the middle distance. “Yeah, well… Shit happens, I guess.”

“What happened to your sister’s husband?” I asked. “Did he pay for it?”

Ramos returned his gaze to me. The smile on his lips was barely discernible and not particularly pleasant. “Oh, he paid. Mi hermano collected that debt.”

“Angel?”

“Angel can be very talented with a knife.”

“I see.”

Ramos laughed. “Yeah. You see. My ex-brother-in-law, man? After Angel’s little talk with him, he’s not seeing so good anymore.”

He waited for my reaction. I had one, but I didn’t show it to him. “One more thing,” I said. “Do you have any idea where your brother might be hanging out these days? Where was he living before he went to jail?”

“That’s easy. Fort Pete. That’s still Angel’s turf. Is that what you’re asking? You want to find him, here’s what you do. A block off Culver, that’s Murray Avenue. Take it north as far as the Eubie Blake Apartments. It crosses Viceroy. Then south as far as the big brick building where they clean linens. You know, like for restaurants. You can’t miss it. Big brick place, takes up about the whole block. That’s on Lee Street. That’s the strip. You run that strip, including about four blocks over to Hanover Boulevard. And check out a church there called Sweet Music Methodist. It’s just a shell. No church left, just rats and drug dealers. You work those two strips, and you check out that church, and if you can do that and stay alive, you might find someone who knows where Angel’s at. I hope you got some cash. No one in that strip is going to give him up for free. You know what they say-gotta pay to play.”

I pulled out my notebook and jotted down the information. I also wrote down the name of Angel’s childhood friend. “One more thing,” I said.

Ramos chuckled. “I thought the last thing was one more thing.”

“Did you ever know Angel to fool around with explosives?”

“You mean like bombs?”

“That’s right.”

“Shit, yeah. Angel was the king of Molotov cocktails when we were growing up. He’d go down to the waterfront over at Vinegar Hill and smash them against the rocks. They float. I mean, the flames’ll float on the water. Angel loved that. He’d set off two at once and watch them float off down the river.”

“What about something stronger?”

Ramos shrugged. “The dude’s been in three different prisons. You can learn a lot in prison. Knowing Angel? Wouldn’t surprise me.”

I thanked him. He shook his head.

“If you run into Angel, man, you’re not going to be thanking me for nothing.”

I FOUND A COPY SHOP ON SEVENTH AVENUE. IT WAS RUN BY A BIRDBONED young man from the Kashmir region of India. I learned this only because there had been an explosion in Kashmir the day before, and the young man behind the counter was arguing about it with an older man when I came in. The older man was brandishing an Indian-language newspaper like a handful of thunderbolts.

I couldn’t have followed the politics of the argument even if I had wanted to, which I didn’t. I wanted five hundred business-sized cards made up while I waited, and I didn’t want to wait until the two gentlemen had found common ground on the Kashmir issue. I had my own mad bomber to think about.

“Excuse me,” I interjected in a falsely polite voice. “Customer?”

I waited in a Starbucks nearby while my cards were being printed. I thought of calling Margo but remembered that she was interviewing a pop star today for an article in Entertainment Weekly. Or Us. Or People. One of those. Mustn’t interrupt the intellectual musings of the pop star. The Starbucks was filled with pretty young women and baby strollers. I felt lecherous simply for being a man. One of the women smiled at me a trifle too long. A pair in the corner were laughing themselves to tears over God knows what. One of the babies threw up. All to the earthy aroma of caffeine and the sweet strains of Vivaldi in strings. Simply lovely.

My cards were ready. The argument over the bombing in Kashmir had subsided. I paid for my purchase, then took the subway to Fort Petersen. The train briefly came out of the tunnel at one point and revealed a gray world, a large half-empty parking lot, a Home Depot, a massive junkyard mountain and a distant hook of the harbor along with countless tractor-trailer compartments stacked up twenty high. Then the train plunged back into the tunnel, and all I saw in the window was a smoky reflection of my own face, along with the hip-hopper passed out in the seat across the aisle.

I got off the train at Culver Boulevard, the major artery running through Fort Pete. Beauty shops, nail salons, chicken shacks, clothes stores, barbershops, fish-and-chips joints, corner bodegas. I oriented myself using a bus map I’d gotten from the subway attendant, found my north and south, found the two streets Victor Ramos had offered as the boundaries of his brother’s main stomping ground. I went a block east to Murray Avenue and for the next forty minutes made a pest of myself going into business establishments and handing out the cards I’d had made up in Park Slope. Here and there were pockets of men, some older, some younger, hanging out in chairs in front of the bars and barbershops and Laundromats. I stopped and told them that I was looking for Angel Ramos, and I handed each of them a card. At the corner of Viceroy and Columbia, a teenager was selling CDs that he had laid out on a blanket. He wasn’t doing much business as far as I could see, so I made him a proposition. I gave him fifty bucks, doled out a hundred of the cards and assigned him a region. I knew he might just take my money and dump the cards, but if you doubt humanity at every turn, I figure you might as well pack it in.

I continued passing out the cards and asking after Angel Ramos. I didn’t expect anyone to cough him up, but I wanted the word to saturate his territory. I wanted to draw a reaction from him. I wanted to flush him out. My cell phone number was on the cards, along with an intentionally cryptic message:

Angel-

I died, you didn’t. So why you doing this shit?

Amigo Willy

Seemed to me like a reasonable ploy. Curiosity is like a drug. When I was twenty, I lost a pretty good friend to a policeman’s bullet. If someone were to hand me a card with a phone number and a bullshit message from my friend, I’d call.

I found the church that Victor Ramos had mentioned. Its glassless white stucco facade made it look a little like the Alamo. A sign above the door read: SWEET MUSIC METHODIST CHURCH/REV. SALLY BODINE PRESIDING. The front of the church was covered with graffiti, primarily large rounded letters I couldn’t make out. Someone had also drawn a skeleton seated atop a horizontal guitar. The skeleton was holding a paddle that it was dipping into some ripples next to the guitar. The front door of the church was boarded over, and the chipped cement steps were strewn with beer and booze bottles. As promised, a small rat was standing guard, sniffing at one of the bottles.

The attached building was also abandoned. A large sheet of tin covered the front door. I pushed on the tin and it moved easily. A stale cold air sifted from within. No doubt the way into the church was through this building. A hole in the wall somewhere, I figured. I considered going in but decided that if Angel Ramos was inside and I were to come climbing unannounced through a jagged brick hole in the wall, I wouldn’t get the chance to climb back out.

My phone went off.

“Hello?”

A voice much louder than I was ready for chewed into me. “What the fuck do you think you’re up to?”

“That depends who’s asking,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Leonard Cox. What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m just trying to save the planet, one person at a time.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m standing in front of the Sweet Music Methodist Church. From what I can tell, the music died long ago.”

“Don’t move.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t go inside that building.”

“One step ahead of you on that.”

He hung up and I put my cell phone back in my pocket. I passed a minute trying to clear my head of every thought that attempted to intrude. It’s hard work. An unfortunate image of Angel Ramos bursting into the bedroom of Gabriella Montero (formerly Diaz) managed to get through, and I was working to push it back out when a police cruiser rounded the corner and screeched to a halt in front of the abandoned church. The passenger-side door opened as if on its own. I stepped over to the curb. The city’s most recent hero cop was behind the wheel.

“Get in.”

I got into the car and closed the door. Cox hit the auto-lock. I turned to face him. “What brings you to the hood?”

Cox held up something in his hand: one of my cards. “Real cute,” he said. “Who told you about Willy Padilla?”

The question surprised me. “Who told you about Willy Padilla?”

He ignored my question. “Ramos has contacted the mayor.”

It didn’t take a detective to note that Cox had also landed Angel’s last name. “When?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Sometime this morning.”

“How did he contact him?”

“E-mail.”

I glanced out the window. I didn’t imagine the information superhighway had made a turn into Sweet Music Methodist Church. “What did he say?”

“He wants ten million dollars.”

“For the convent or for himself this time?”

Cox put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. The light at the corner was red. Cox flipped a switch, burped his siren and pulled through the intersection. “Who the hell knows? Crazy spic nigger. He also sent a picture. Deputy Mayor Byron.”

I took a sharp breath. “Dead or alive?”

“Alive. With a fucking Uzi pointed at his head.”