Speak of the Devil

33

DOUBT EVERYTHING.

I drove to Midtown North and asked to see Remy Sanchez. I was told that he had left five minutes earlier to go downtown for a meeting with the police commissioner. I returned to my car and got onto the West Side Highway, which was a safer road to run red lights on than the more congested so-called surface streets. I parked a block from One Police Plaza and jogged across the bricks to the glass doors leading into the building. I took a seat on a metal bench out front. Unless Sanchez had driven down with his cherry light spinning, I was pretty certain I’d beaten him.

I had. After a few minutes of waiting, I spotted Sanchez coming across the plaza. I rose from the bench as he approached.

“Captain Sanchez.”

He stopped. “What are you doing?”

“I need to talk with you.”

“You want to- Suddenly, I’m Mr. Popular.” He indicated the glass doors. “El jefe wants to see me.”

“I need to talk to you about the problems in the Ninety-fifth. It’s important.”

“That’s not my precinct.”

“I know. I also know that inside dope the rest of us never hear has a way of making its way from precinct house to precinct house. The old invisible stream.”

“What if it does? Why should I talk to you about it?”

“I think there’s a link between the problems at the Ninety-fifth and the crap that went down on Thanksgiving. I’m not exactly sure what it is.”

“That still doesn’t explain why I should talk to you.”

“You know the latest on Philip Byron?” I asked. “Another one of his fingers ended up in the mouth of a murdered woman last night?”

He nodded tersely. “I got that.”

“The guy who’s holding Byron, he’s a punk out of the Nine-five. I think he’s got a substantial tie-in with some of the cops up there. They might even be helping him stay hidden, I don’t know.”

“Does Carroll know all this?”

“Some of it,” I said. “Truth is, I don’t really know how much he knows.”

“Look, I’ve got to get in there. Carroll said he’s got to be somewhere at three. I don’t know what all this is about. Why don’t you just talk to Carroll?”

“I want street-level information,” I said.

Sanchez smiled, but without much humor. “Muchas gracias for the demotion.”

“You know what I mean. Carroll’s half cop, half politician. That’s the job. You’re a captain, but you still hear the beer talk.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Let me give you a quote: ‘When pieces don’t fit together, the truth is usually in the cracks between them.’ You remember saying that to me? You were talking about a white shadow. You said a white shadow was all over this thing. You were right. And right now I don’t need the kind of light Tommy Carroll is going to shine on it. All I can ask you to do is trust me.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of my cards. “There’s my cell number. You said Carroll’s got to be somewhere at three, so you’re only going to be in there for half an hour. I’ll stick around. Call me when you get out of your meeting. I just need to bounce a few things off you.”

Sanchez looked at the card, then pocketed it. “I’ll call you. It might be to tell you to stuff it, but I’ll call you.”

“Good. And listen, don’t tell Carroll we talked.”

He had pulled the glass door open. He paused. “Look at me, Malone,” he said. “What do you think? Was I born yesterday?”

The sky had darkened while we spoke. Low gray clouds were settling in over the city. I had time to kill. I realized that Paul Scott’s office was nearby. There was nothing I could think to do about Angel Ramos until after I’d talked with Sanchez, so I decided I might as well rattle a chain for my other client. I called Information and got the address of Futures Now. They were located on the west side of City Hall Park, near the Woolworth Building. I hoofed it over and took the elevator to the eighth floor.

“I’m looking for Paul Scott,” I said to the woman at the front desk. The words FUTURES NOW hung on the wall behind her in silver block letters. The woman was wearing a headset. They’re plenty popular now, but they still make me think of air-traffic controllers. She directed me to take a seat as she punched a button on her console.

“Paul? There’s someone to see you.” She looked up at me. “May I have your name, please?”

Almost without thinking, I replied, “Nicholas Finn.” That’s the name I keep at the ready for those times when my job requires an identity dodge. I’ve got a folder full of falsified Nicholas Finn documents back at my office. The name had been an easy one to choose. The real-life Nicholas Finn had died not ten feet from me back when I was still attending John Jay. It wasn’t an easy death to forget. Let’s say, impossible. Years later, when Charlie Burke suggested I put together an alias to have at the ready, Nick Finn had slid into my skin so quickly I’d felt an actual chill. Why I gave it to the receptionist, I can’t say. She repeated it into the phone, then said to me, “He’ll be right out, Mr. Finn.”

A minute later, Paul appeared. He saw me and automatically scanned the reception area.

“Mr. Scott?” I said, standing up.

He fixed on me. “What the hell is this about?”

“I was in the neighborhood. I thought maybe you had time for a coffee.”

“What’s this about?” he said again.

I asked, “Is there a place we can talk?”

Paul said nothing. The receptionist was watching with increased interest. Paul glanced at her, then at me. “Come on.”

I followed him through a door to a large room that was divided up into clusters of cubicles. The walls were celery green and the cubicles a pale blue. People were sitting at their desks tapping away on keyboards and talking softly on phones. In the center of the room was a copy machine. A woman with red hair stood in front of it. The lid was lifted and the lightning-blue light from the copier was playing over her face. She looked up as Paul and I paused at the door. Paul led me along a row of cubicles, past a room with a swinging door and into an office about the size of a roach motel. He ushered me in, glancing out at the sea of cubicles before closing the door. I looked around for a place to sit. The only chair was behind the small desk. Good breeding told me not to grab it. Paul didn’t take it, either. He remained at the door, loading his weapons.

“What are you doing here, Malone?”

I flipped a conceptual coin. It came down on the side of not pussyfooting.

“Your wife and your mother suspect that you’re having an affair,” I said. “I was asked to look into it. It’s a dirty job, et cetera, et cetera. I begged off, but Phyllis said she’d rather keep it in the family, so to speak. Better me than some other Joe Gumshoe. I’ve been preoccupied lately, but since I was in the area, I thought I should try to earn my nickel.”

Paul’s skin had turned the color of putty. “My mother is paying you to spy on me? I can’t believe this. Does Lizzy know about this?”

The question was pure Paul. The nervous sibling. Paul Scott could be in a room all by himself, and he’d decide the shadows were ganging up on him. He hated that Elizabeth and I got along 100 percent better than she and he did. He hated this nearly as much as he had hated my relationship with our old man. I threw him a bone.

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit. If Linda knows, Lizzy knows. That’s great. I really love family secrets.”

He showed no signs of moving from where he stood. Helen Keller herself could have read the body language. Made me think of a novelty doormat: NOT WELCOME.

I checked my watch. This had to go quick. I sat down on the edge of the small desk. “Her name is Annette Hartman. Her husband’s name is Bob. Or Robert. I guess it depends on how friendly you are with him. My guess is that you’re not. Friendly with him, I mean. Our friend Bob is left-handed. I mention that only to show off my sleuthing skills. You had a boo-boo around your right eye the other day, and your mother says Linda thinks you got clocked by your girlfriend’s husband.” I held my fingers to my temples and narrowed my eyes, as if I were receiving a transmission. “You eat lunch together, sometimes Mexican. Sometimes you go to the Raccoon Lodge after work, and if I’m not mistaken, Mrs. Hartman is at this very minute making photocopies of something that is too large to fit on the glass.”

I dropped the telepathic act. “Look. Paul. Your wife is distressed, your mother is concerned, and for what it’s worth, your half brother thinks you should keep away from other people’s wives. If you and Linda have a problem with your marriage, or if you’ve got a problem with your life, find a long-term fix, not a short-term one.”

As if on cue, a light knocking sounded on the door. Paul opened it. The redhead was standing there, a look of concern on her face. She handed Paul a folder.

“Here’s the file you asked for,” she said. She spoke stiffly, as if reading from a script.

Paul looked momentarily confused. “It’s okay,” he said. “This is my half brother.”

“Your…” Her face relaxed. “Oh. Okay. I just… okay.” She took the folder back from and looked past him. “Sorry.” She moved off. Paul closed the door. I hadn’t expected a smug expression to be on his face, but that’s what was there.

“That was Annette,” he said.

I tapped my finger against my head. “I figured.”

“She’s a friend of mine.”

“We’re all adults here.”

“No. I mean, she’s a friend of mine. We’re friends. That’s all we are.”

“I’ve said my piece.”

“For your information, Annette’s husband is the one having an affair. He’s an A-number-one prick. She deserves someone a lot better than him.”

“But that someone’s not you?”

“I told you, we’re just friends. Work buddies.”

“And your black eye?”

“Yeah. That was her husband. Annette’s been worried sick that her husband was seeing someone. She wasn’t positive, but she suspected. She confided in me and I told her I’d look into it.”

“Look into it?”

He blushed. He knew he had blushed, and he wished he hadn’t. Which only made him blush all the more.

“Yeah,” he said defensively. “So what? She asked me.”

“What does Annette do here?” I asked.

“Here? She’s in marketing.”

“What’s your job?”

“Mainly development. Why?”

“Nothing. I’ve never worked in an office. I guess I don’t know the part where the marketing person asks the development guy to spy on her husband for her. I don’t know, Paul. Professionally speaking, you’re taking a potential client away from the likes of me. That’s more my game, you know.”

It was a cheap shot, and I regretted it the moment I said it. Paul Scott’s Daddy issues-and I knew he had them-were probably not finding a whole lot of resolution in this closet-sized office on the edges of Cubicle Land. The last thing he needed was me tweaking him for playing detective.

“Why don’t you just get out of here?” Paul said testily. “Some of us have work to do.”

Some of us have work to do. Honestly, it made me want to cry.

I pushed off the desk and he stepped aside. “That way.” He pointed, as if I’d forgotten which way we’d come. I heard his door close behind me. As I passed the room with the swinging door, it swung open and I nearly collided with the one and only Annette Hartman.

“Oh!”

She was still holding the file folder. A piece of paper slipped from it. I bent down and picked it up. It was a blank sheet, except for the handwritten words “Is everything okay?” I straightened and handed the paper to her. She blushed, too. Must be the effect I had.

“My name’s Fritz Malone,” I said in a low voice. “If you and Paul are fooling around, be smart. Stop. If not, I apologize.”

She sputtered. “W-what?”

“As for your husband, I get pictures, I get names and places, I testify in court if you need that. I can put the fear of God in him. Or I can put it in the other woman. There are plenty of approaches. I can also suggest counseling, though there’s one particular counselor I’d strike off my list in this case. Point is, it’s a lot more messy when you use amateur help. The lines can get muddy. If you’d like I’m in the book. You should keep Paul out of it, even if he volunteers.”

I had no hat, so I had nothing to tip. I winced a smile and moved on.

The receptionist was taking a personal call as I waited for the elevator. Either that or she was just too overcome with the giggles to help herself.

I was partway across City Hall Park when Sanchez called me. He said he could spare a few minutes, and we agreed to meet in the park. The wind had picked up, and the sky was definitely threatening to let loose. I veered off to a nearby Starbucks and got two overpriced cups. I returned to the park and eavesdropped on a pair of old men arguing about the election of ’48, the Truman upset over New York governor Dewey. The Dewey man was blaming the whole thing on Dewey’s mustache.

“I bet you can’t name the last president who won with facial hair,” the Dewey man challenged.

“Teddy Roosevelt!”

“Wrong. It was that other guy.”

“Who?”

“You know. I can’t remember the name. But you know. That other guy.”

“It was Roosevelt.”

“No. It wasn’t him. Jesus Christ. What the hell is his name?”

It was Taft. But I minded my own business.

Remy Sanchez showed up and we walked down to the south end of the park, away from City Hall.

“How was Mr. Carroll?” I asked.

“That man needs to take a vacation.”

“You’re not the first person to say so.”

“He wants me to pull every black and Hispanic undercover I’ve got and send them out to Brooklyn.”

“To the Ninety-fifth?”

“It’s like a convention of narcotics officers. He says this guy Ramos is a cop killer. I asked him what cop, and he said that’s not important. He said, ‘He’s a cop killer and I want your men to know it.’ It’s red meat. I asked him if he wanted dogs up there. I meant it as a joke, but he thought about it for a minute.”

I told him what I needed. Information about the alleged murder-suicide of Officers Pearson and Cash. Specifically, I wanted to know the watercooler talk about McNally and Cox and how they fit into the picture. I knew I hadn’t raised a tame topic. Sanchez’s eyes told me as much.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. I think I’m looking for motive for Leonard Cox to want to take out his partner. I’m wondering if there’s something in the whole Pearson-Cash thing that might be a key. Even in the papers, the story has a stink to it.”

“McNally went down in the parade,” Sanchez said. “Diaz shot him.”

“I know that. And Cox was conveniently on the ground already.”

“Meaning what?”

“Too many theories. Maybe it means nothing. But all the principals at the parade were from a precinct far, far away. The same one.” I set my coffee down on a bench. “And I’ll be blunt about it. Leonard Cox is as crooked as a corkscrew. My money says he shot Roberto Diaz in cold blood. You know that the ‘hero cop in Central Park’ story is a load of crap, don’t you?”

“I hear people talking.”

“Diaz was shot right over there. In the Municipal Building. That’s where I was taken, too. Carroll floated a half-baked story that they were simply protecting the cop killer from the cops until things cooled down. The truth is, the mayor’s been dancing with a blackmailer. He called a bluff, and Diaz shot up the parade. Carroll and Leavitt wanted to make sure Diaz didn’t start singing about how Leavitt had blown it big-time. I figured when Diaz got wasted in the Municipal Building, it was a combination cop-killer-revenge and shutting-up-the-blackmailer, all with one easy bullet. Remy, the guy was handcuffed to a goddamn table. Supposedly, he pulled an ankle piece that Cox missed on arrest, and before he could shoot, Cox blew him away. But now… ” I trailed off.

“Now what?”

“Now I don’t know what to think. I don’t even know which lie to doubt.”

“You’re thinking Cox set up his partner, then swung by the Municipal Building to silence Diaz.”

I threw up my hands. “I’m just one little man. What the hell do I know?”

Sanchez took a sip of his coffee. As he did, his eyes moved around. When he spoke, his volume had dropped by half. “I’m not telling you any of this, okay? That’s straight?”

“I’m not even here,” I said.

“Pearson and Cash. Bad apples. Word was that Cash had flipped. Or maybe just Pearson stank and Cash was straight all along. You hear both versions. I.A. was working him to hook some of the others. Don’t quote me on this-don’t quote me on any of this-but supposedly, Cash was wearing a wire when he was killed.”

“A wire. Was he trying to hook Pearson?”

“I don’t know. Could be.”

“Cash was the one who was shot, right? Then it was Pearson who ate his gun?”

“Right.”

“So maybe Pearson found out his partner was wearing the wire, and he took him out.”

“A version of that is the one going around,” Sanchez said. “It’s nice and clean.”

“You don’t buy it.”

“You tell me. If Pearson is crooked and he catches his partner trying to trap him and he kills him, is that the kind of guy who turns right around and discovers remorse? I don’t think so.”

My heart sailed over a speed bump. “So then someone killed Pearson and made it look like a suicide.”

“Or killed both of them and then set things up to look like that.”

That was one of Charlie’s theories. It sounded just as plausible coming out of Sanchez’s mouth. Maybe even a little more so.

Sanchez watched me as I processed what he was telling me. A thought occurred to me. Sanchez knew the thought already. He’d been waiting for me to have it.

“The wire,” he said.

“What happened to it? If Cash was wearing a wire, it should have recorded the whole thing.”

“That’s right. It should have.”

“But?”

“It’s missing.”

“The wire is missing?”

Sanchez finished off his coffee. “No one wants the papers to get ahold of that information. Not one word about Cash wearing a wire. If I see it tomorrow… Well, you don’t want me to see it tomorrow.”

“You won’t. Not from me. Jesus, Remy. So whoever killed Cash and Pearson took the wire.”

“That’s how it looks.”

I looked over at the Woolworth Building. My gaze drifted south, to the less descript building where Paul Scott worked. I wondered if I had done the right thing in there. My gut told me that Paul had told me the truth, that he wasn’t sleeping with Annette Hartman. He was being her hero. Harlan Scott’s son to the rescue. I knew plenty about that myself. My gut also told me that damsels and their heroes-even paltry ones-have a way of mixing it up at some point if they’re not careful. Neither Paul nor Annette Hartman struck me as being the careful type. You could see it in their lonely eyes. Put another way, they both seemed susceptible to the easy mistakes. So maybe I had done the right thing. At least now they were both on notice. They both knew that the world was watching. So, okay. A good little day’s work after all.

I looked over at Sanchez.

“Captain, it was nice not having this conversation with you.”