Speak of the Devil

31

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.”

Two women walked by laughing. Graduate students. Or maybe even professors. One of them looked astonishingly like Jenny Gray. The Jenny Gray of six years ago. She looked over at me and broke off the laughter. It only made the similarity all the stronger. I lost a few perfectly good heartbeats. I could also feel the blood rising to my cheeks. I switched ears on the phone and shifted the topic.

“By the way, thanks for telling Leonard Cox how to find me this morning,” I said. I went ahead and quoted Margo. “Ever hear of a phone? Or waiting until a decent hour?”

“You were with that girl in Fort Pete. She ends up on the slab. I’m not going to sit on my ass until the sun comes up before I find out what the hell went on.”

“I guess your pocket-cop gave you his report.”

“Don’t you fucking ‘pocket-cop’ me, Malone. I’m the commissioner. They’re all in my pocket. Don’t smart-ass me. Cox told me you had nothing. He did say she scratched your face up pretty good.”

“Ruined my modeling career,” I said. “So anything on her murder?”

“Forensics might come up with something. Miss Bia was definitely killed in the van. They’ve determined that already. The body wasn’t moved. But they might get something off her to tell us where she’d been before she was killed.”

“Expect fibers from the seat of my rental car.”

“They’ve been informed about that. The point is, Ramos either took off Byron’s finger on-site, which I doubt, or else brought it with him. Forensics says it was still fresh. That tells me he had Byron somewhere nearby. The cops picked up a pimp who runs girls in and out of those vans. He’s being worked on. He says an undercover cop was out there last night and took some freebies from his girls, then took a piece out of his skull with a jack. I’ve got a feeling it wasn’t any cop any of us know about.”

“You always had good instincts, Tommy. Except you can drop the freebies part. Didn’t happen. Listen, I’m a little unclear about a few things. Cox. He wasn’t on duty last night. At least he wasn’t when he showed up at Margo’s. He was in his civvies.”

“What of it?”

“He told me he’s saturated in the hood. He knows all the players. Ramos. Donna Bia.”

“Of course. That’s how it works. Everyone knows everyone. My cops better damn well know the scum in their own territory. So what?”

“Nothing, I guess. I’m just not clear on all the logistics. Who found my car? Cox or the cops?”

“Cox is a cop. Or are you forgetting?”

“I still don’t see the point of his coming by Margo’s.”

“I explained that. You spent time with this Bia girl, and you didn’t call in a report.”

“I guess I’d never have made a very good cop after all,” I said. “Probably a good thing I bailed.”

“I’ve got to get going. What’s your plan?”

“To be honest, I don’t really have one. I was all hot for the suicide nun, but you just threw water on it.”

“Drop the nun,” he said again. “Focus on Ramos. Think with your feet.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything more-or I guess the mayor hasn’t-from Ramos?”

“We heard Philip Byron’s third severed finger last night inside that whore’s mouth. The mayor thinks that’s a pretty loud message. So do I.”

“This thing is going to collapse all around him, Tommy. You know that, don’t you? It’s going to collapse around both of you. It can’t stay contained. Cox said one thing last night that I agree with: Angel has lost it. Cox figures he’s popping and snorting and shooting anything he can lay his hands on; he’s probably given up sleep. He’s degenerating. Last week, in a funny way, he was a smooth cookie about all this. Now he’s slicing open his girlfriend’s throat and sticking severed fingers in her mouth? I wouldn’t hold much truck with this five o’clock thing if I were you. That was yesterday’s rant. This is a million dead brain cells later.”

“The minute I hear from forensics, we’re hitting the pavement. We’ve got the Bia murder now. There’s nothing we need to contain about a dead whore. I can flood the area with blue. We’re going to get this bastard by the end of the day if I have to fucking send tanks down the middle of Culver Boulevard.”

“I’m glad to hear you’ve got a plan,” I said.

“Look who’s talking.”

I PICKED UP A RENTAL CAR AT NATIONWIDE ON SEVENTY-SEVENTH Street, just east of Broadway. There was an accident on the approach to the Queensboro Bridge, so I took the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. I hate tunnels. By the time I’m halfway through them, I’ve forgotten how to breathe normally and I’m drenched in sweat. I don’t know why it’s not as severe in the subways, but it isn’t. Phyllis Scott has a theory or two about the tunnel thing, all Freudian, of course. Margo’s got her own theory. Even Jigs Dugan has weighed in on it. I’m so glad everybody gets to take a crack at it. Here’s my theory: I don’t like tunnels.

Charlie Burke was eating a sandwich in front of his television. He was watching a movie about a pair of drag queens driving across the Australian outback.

“Where’s Charlie Burke?” I cried. “What have you done with him?”

“Shut up. Do you want a sandwich?”

“Do I have to fix it myself?”

“Yeah. I just told the help they could spend the day out on my yacht. Sorry.”

“What’ve you got there?”

“Peanut butter.”

“And?”

“And bread.”

“Jesus, Charlie, it’s hell-in-a-handbasket time around here.”

I found some honey in the cabinet and showed him what a more complete sandwich looks like. I asked if he was hell-bent on seeing how things worked out for the Australian drag queens or whether he could spare a few minutes to maybe help me track down a cold-blooded killer and save untold numbers of lives.

“It’s your call, Pops,” I said. “I know how people’s priorities change as they get older.”

Charlie picked up the remote and killed the TV. He asked me to fetch him a beer from the refrigerator and to get one for myself if I wanted. I passed.

“Full alert, eh?”

“Something like that.”

I took a seat on the couch and laid out for him everything I knew to that point concerning Angel Ramos. I gave him all the pieces. We slipped right into our old shorthand. He asked a few questions along the way, all of them good. I had him completely up to speed by the time he’d finished his beer.

“You’re talking fast,” he noted, setting aside the empty.

“Philip Byron’s only got five fingers, two thumbs, and maybe five hours left.”

“I’d be worrying bigger than Philip Byron if I were you.”

“I am, trust me.”

Charlie wheeled himself over to the window and stared out. Less than a minute later, he wheeled back around to face me. “The question. What’s a cop from the embattled Ninety-fifth doing all the way in Manhattan working the parade and getting gunned down by a lowlife from the same Ninety-fifth?”

“Kevin McNally?”

“Uh-huh. You’re figuring Diaz was working as partner with Angel Ramos, right? So Ramos has planted him out there at the parade with a Beretta in his belt. Officer McNally gets shot. That’s a Fort Pete shoot-out on the streets of Manhattan. Coincidence?”

“You hate coincidence.”

“I surely do.”

“I had this same notion last night, right before I went to see Tommy Carroll,” I said. “I haven’t had the time to even think about it.”

“So think about it.”

“What are you saying, that McNally was actually the target of the Thanksgiving Day shooting?”

“He got hit. We know that much.”

“What about Rebecca Gilpin? I definitely saw Diaz take aim at her.”

“One thing at a time, hoss. Stick with the cop for now. Okay, so there’s a mess going on out in the Ninety-fifth. It’s the Bad Apples. Is this McNally a Bad Apple?”

“When the mayor and Carroll were holding their press conference after the shooting, a reporter I was standing next to asked Carroll the same question.”

“What did Carroll answer?”

“As I recall, he didn’t. He bitched at me later about how the press was pissing on a fallen cop.”

Charlie wheeled over to the desk where he kept his computer and fired it up. Before he was grounded in a wheelchair, Charlie’s patience with things like computers and other similar gadgets had been nil. The last of the Luddites. But losing his range the way he had put a new spin on everything. Now he was Mr. Keyboard.

“Play it out,” Charlie said as he waited for his programs to come up. “Say McNally was the target. Or one of the targets. Anybody else of interest hit?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I haven’t really focused on the other people who were shot. There was a woman with a little boy. I was standing next to them when Diaz opened up.”

“That’s the problem when the cops close the books as quick as they did on this one. All the good investigating that could be done is just stopped.”

“Once they had Diaz in a body bag, they called it a day.”

“They knew it wasn’t a damn day.”

“McNally’s partner was there, too,” I said. “Cox. He was also working the parade. That’s two men from Fort Pete, plus Diaz.”

“The hero cop. He sure didn’t get hit. He chased the perp.”

“I chased the perp.”

“He chased the both of you.”

Charlie’s screen sizzled as a mountain scene appeared. He hit a few keys, waited, then hit a few more. “Where was Cox when his partner was hit? Do we know?”

“In fact, we do. Cox was helping a blind man who had suffered a heart attack. He was down on the pavement doing CPR.”

“Okay. So if Diaz was trying to take out both cops, maybe he couldn’t get Cox because Cox had dropped out of sight.”

“If,” I said.

“Everything is if.”

Right. Doubt everything.

Charlie muttered, “Bad Apple,” as he hit the keys again. Comfortable as he was getting with computers, he was still a two-finger man on the keys. He punched them hard, as if squashing an armored bug each time.

“It’s a little screwy, don’t you think?” I said. “If you want to kill your local neighborhood cop-or cops-why would you do something so elaborate, not to mention so public, an entire borough away? For that matter, how would Diaz and Ramos know that Cox and McNally were going to be working the parade? Or exactly where they’d be? See? It begins to fall apart.”

Charlie was only half listening. He had brought up something on his screen. “Pull up a chair, Fritz. Let’s get educated.”

For the next half hour, we read through every account and reference to the Bad Apple scandal that Charlie could come up with online. I was familiar with the general thrust of the accusations. A number of cops in the Ninety-fifth had allegedly been turning the neighborhoods they were supposed to be protecting into little fiefdoms. It was alleged that illegal raids would be held on the homes of suspected drug dealers, sometimes preceded by false calls to 911 as a means of “justifying” the raids, and that money was stolen as well as drugs, which the cops would later either sell back to the original owners or tag as their own and return to the dealer with the stipulation that the cops be cut in on the profit when the drugs were sold on the street. One editorial cartoon showed several cops standing with their hands stuffed with cash, looking up at the clouds and whistling at the sky while, all around them, dealers and users feverishly went about their business. The accusations also reported some cops tipping off dealers to impending legit raids. Payback was in money, drugs, sex or any combination of the three. Blackmail sex was said to be a common occurrence. A cop with a baggie of dope, according to the reports, could demand sex on the spot by threatening to plant the evidence and proceeding directly to the arrest. One woman was reported in The Village Voice as having a regularly scheduled rendezvous with two officers from the Ninety-fifth for just this sort of shakedown. “They call it a ‘baggie blow,’ you know what I mean? They come right in my apartment and tell my son to go on outside. Then they hold up that fucking baggie and shake it like it’s a little bell or some shit.”

The most extensive report, a piece in the Times, broke down the alleged police abuse into two categories: bullying and partnering. The first category was less scandalous. In many ways, this one was business as usual. Shakedowns, threats, minor blackmail, sex on demand. It was the alleged abuses in the second category that were threatening to make the Bad Apple story a significant one. Partnering abuses. Collusion. Mutual back-scratching. Working things out to the benefit of both sides. Blurring even the idea that there were sides. That sort of abuse on the side of the police was the worst imaginable. “Criminals with Uniforms” was how one of the headings put it.

Caught up in the allegations was Brooklyn district attorney David Sack, who was reportedly aware of the validity of some of the accusations but had been willing-unnamed sources said-to turn a blind eye, especially in the cases of falsified raids and falsified evidence, so long as he could count on a healthy conviction rate. When Charlie read this, he commented, “It looks good on the résumé.” It was Sack’s relationship with Martin Leavitt that had begun to turn up the heat on City Hall in recent weeks. The two had worked together closely when Leavitt was a prosecutor in Brooklyn. Leavitt was referred to in several accounts as having been David Sack’s mentor.

“Mentor,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that someone who teaches his tricks to someone else?”

The final related accounts concerned the murder-suicide of the two policemen at the end of October. No specific motive for either act was expressly spelled out, though there were implications that it was a case of one bad cop killing another, then taking his own life. There were also rumors that the cop who was murdered was a stoolie who had been informing on his fellow officers, a bad cop working to save his tail. The two dead cops were named Jay Pearson and Thomas Cash. However, it was a second pair of names that caught my eye. Charlie’s as well. These were the names of the first officers on the scene. The alleged murder-suicide had taken place in a junkyard some hundred yards from a Home Depot parking lot on the edge of Fort Petersen. Someone had phoned 911, reporting shots fired in the area. The closest officers to the scene arrived within minutes of the 911 call. They attempted to revive both of the men, but according to an EMS spokesman, Pearson and Cash had already “expired” by the time their colleagues arrived.

Commended for their efforts in attempting to save the men were Officers Kevin McNally and Leonard Cox.

“How’s that song go?” Charlie asked, swiveling his chair away from the computer. “They’re just too good to be true?”

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“A couple of things. You asked before how it was possible for Diaz and Ramos to know that two cops from the hood were going to be working the parade and where they’d be working it?”

“Right.”

“What if they didn’t know? What if one of these wonderful cops told them?”

“Which cop?”

“I’m liking the one who didn’t end up taking a bullet.”

“You mean Cox set up his partner? But why?”

“Could be one of a hundred reasons. I told you, it’s just a thought.”

“Any other thoughts rattling around in there?”

“Sure. Try this one. Cox and McNally first on the scene at this junkyard? I buy that. But how about Cox and McNally first on the scene before there is a scene? And then they proceed to make one.”

“Make one what?”

“A scene. They shoot both the other cops, Pearson and Cash, then set it up to look like a murder-suicide. They leave the scene, phone in a fake 911, turn around and go right back.”

“That’s quite a set of thoughts,” I said. “Do they come with any motives?”

Charlie rubbed at the back of his neck. “Motives for taking out the cops at the junkyard? Could be anything. You saw what we just read. You’ve got a damn orgy of corruption going on out there. Rotten cops tripping over each other. Hell, it could have been a crooked cop turf war for all we know. Or maybe Pearson and Cash were both Boy Scouts and the other two decided to take them out.”

“And Cox setting up McNally at the parade?”

“Bad guys always turn on each other. Don’t you know your Shakespeare? Look, I’m just gassing here, Fritz. Maybe Cox did the cop shooting at the junkyard and he was getting nervous about his partner knowing it. There are a thousand things it could be. We’re not gonna answer it all sitting here on our asses.”

Charlie wheeled himself to the refrigerator and got another beer. He cracked it open and took a long pull. He slipped the can into the cup holder on his chair and wheeled back over to the computer and shut it down. He took a second sip of beer, then gazed thoughtfully at the zip-top ring as he plucked at it lightly with his finger, making a small twang. His chest expanded and he let out a largely silent sigh, still twanging on the zip-top ring.

“Some days I just want to burn this goddamn chair.”