Speak of the Devil

5

MARGO SPARED ME THE TRUDGE UP FOUR FLIGHTS. SHE MET ME AT LA Fortuna, right down the street from her apartment. It’s a dark cozy place with old opera LPs and framed photos of opera singers all over its brick walls. Margo once ran into Pavarotti here. He was sitting alone in the garden out back with a cappuccino and a basket of biscotti, reading a paperback copy of Lonesome Dove. She managed to join him, using her own enthusiasm for the book as a wedge, and by the final biscotti, Pavarotti had agreed to let her interview him for part of a fluff piece she was putting together for New York magazine. The tenor wrote her a three-page appreciation letter after the piece appeared.

The owner of the cafe beamed like a brand new mother as I stood at the pie counter trying to decide.

I put my finger on the glass. “The blueberry looks like the one today.”

She pulled out the pie and slid a large slice onto a plate, using her knife to scrape some of the extra goop. She indicated Margo. “And what will it be for the princess?”

Margo answered, “I’m not really hungry, Mrs. Valella. I’ll just steal a few bites from the big guy.”

“You want the cappuccino?”

“Two,” I said. “The big guy doesn’t share everything.”

Margo and I retreated to one of the small tables next to the wall. Enrico Caruso looked over my shoulder as I took my first bite of pie. His mouth was wide open, as if he expected me to funnel a forkful his way. Margo looked like rain on a sunny day.

“You could have been killed.”

I nodded. “ ‘Could have’ is the road to unnecessary suffering. I wasn’t.”

“But you could’ve been.”

“That’s true for everyone,” I said. “You never know when the bus is going to flatten you. It’s why you want to seize the moment.” I tapped my fork against my plate. “How about a piece of pie?”

She ignored me. “At the exact moment you were running around getting shot at less than a block away, I was probably sitting in bed painting my stupid toenails.”

“It would have been stranger had it been the other way around.”

“Oh, shut up. Think about the families, Fritz. Think about all the funerals they’re going to be having over the next couple of days. And there I was painting my toenails. I feel horrible.”

“Are we juxtaposing the tragic with the trivial?”

“I guess we are.”

“And are we getting anything out of it? I mean besides anguish?” She screwed her mouth up into a pucker. With Margo, this is usually the equivalent of a pitcher going into his windup. I waited, but she simply remained that way, her eyes narrowing to slits. Finally, I asked, “Do you have something to say?”

She unpuckered. “Forget it.”

“Look, the whole city is shaken up,” I said. “Unfortunately, that’s the point of these kinds of things.”

“The point. I like that.”

“See? You’re edgy.”

“How about we don’t talk about it?”

“Okay.” I picked up the fork and shoveled the piece of pie into my mouth. “They sure do good pie here, eh?”

She was crying. And I was an idiot. It was quiet crying. A pair of tears ran down her cheeks, followed by another pair. I felt something on my leg. It was the toe of Margo’s shoe. She was locating my shin, and when she found it, she gave it a not insubstantial kick.

“I hate you,” she said in a barely audible voice. She reached a hand across the table and I took it. Mrs. Valella arrived with our cappuccinos. She gave Margo the sort of sympathetic look only an Italian mother can give.

“He will keep you safe and warm, princess,” she said to Margo, setting down the cappuccinos. She shot me a withering look.

Right?

WHEN WE GOT BACK TO MARGO’S, I EXPLAINED THE SITUATION TO HER as best I could. Before leaving City Hall, I had been sworn to secrecy, and had I thought that telling Margo might in any way put her in danger, I’d have remained mum. And she would have understood. But I needed to talk it out-so much of it made no sense to me-and next to her father, Margo is the best sounding board I know.

I swore her to secrecy. She crossed her fingers and said, “Sure.” The tears were gone.

“I have a job,” I told her by way of getting into it. We were in Margo’s living room. One entire wall of the room was taken up with books. Floor-to-ceiling. A former boyfriend of Margo’s built the shelves for her. He even installed one of those moving ladders that glides along a horizontal pole for reaching the high shelves. Good craftsman, but in the end, a lousy boyfriend. I was seated in a wicker chair across from the wall of books. Margo was in no one place for longer than twenty seconds. We were due at her parents’ for Thanksgiving dinner, and she had promised her purple cabbage casserole. She flew in from the kitchen and landed a cutting board in my lap.

“Job is good,” she said. “We like job.” She ducked back into the kitchen.

“We’ll see if job is good,” I called in to her. “The mayor wants me to look after his girlfriend.”

“Really? That’s the job? So you get to meet Rebecca Gilpin.”

“So do you. We’ve got comps to go see her in her big Broadway show tonight. That is, if you want to go.”

Margo poked her head out from the kitchen. “Tonight? You’ve got to be kidding. What the hell is she doing running around on a Broadway stage tonight? Someone just took a shot at her in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Is she a nut?”

“That’s pretty close to how I put the question to the mayor,” I said. “And he was pretty much in agreement with me. But it’s what she wants to do.”

Margo groaned. “The show must go on?”

“Right. It’s some form of thespian testosterone. The mayor took a call from her while we were huddling in Tommy Carroll’s office. Not to disparage our good mayor, but from what I observed, he’s not the only one who wears the pants in that relationship. His plan was for all the theaters to go black tonight. Because of Thanksgiving, a lot of them had already decided not to do a show. But Rebecca Gilpin’s is one of the ones scheduled to run tonight, and apparently, the woman wants to make a statement by, yes, going on with the show.”

“What the hell is the statement?” Margo asked, bringing a large knife and a head of cabbage to me. “I’m an insensitive idiot? I have can-do spirit?”

“Can do what? Can do tap-dance across a crowded stage with a bunch of gay sailors? I’m with you. She should take the night off and think about all the people who weren’t as lucky today as she was.”

“From what you told me, it wasn’t luck, bubba. You saved her life.”

“I threw a bag of bagels at her.”

“You said she ducked. The bullet would have gone right into her head.”

“I still call that lucky. Anyway, the short version of all this is that Leavitt wants me to be her personal shadow.”

Margo took the knife from me and gave the cabbage a few whacks. “Like that.” She handed me back the knife. “But I don’t understand. The killer was killed.”

It was Philip Byron who had suggested that if I needed to explain to anyone why I was Rebecca Gilpin’s bodyguard, I should say there was some concern about copycatters. Nutcases who find inspiration in high-profile tragedies and try to get in on the action.

“I’m supposed to tell you that they’re afraid someone might try to do a copycat thing and take a shot at her,” I said.

“But that’s not it?”

“That’s not it.”

“This is the sworn-to-secrecy part?”

“It is.” I told her about the mayor’s having received a phone call after the parade massacre from the person who had been taunting him the past several weeks about an imminent public tragedy.

“You mean the guy who did this is still out there?”

“The guy who did it is dead. But the guy who was behind it is still very much with us. And he told Leavitt today that the nightmare has just begun. That’s a quote.”

“What the hell is this all about, Fritz?”

“I don’t know. Tommy Carroll said this was all being handled on a need-to-know basis and that I didn’t need to know.”

“And you agreed to that?”

“I didn’t agree to anything. Well, no. That’s not true. I agreed to keep my mouth shut about my shooting this Diaz character in the shoulder. For the time being, anyway.”

“Diaz. The dead Diaz.”

“That’s him.”

“Whom you shot in the shoulder.”

“Correct.”

“But whom we’re being told was killed by a policeman.”

“Correct again.”

“And he died of a shoulder wound.”

“He died of a bullet to the brain.”

“Which you didn’t inflict.”

“Which I didn’t inflict.”

“That was the policeman?”

“Officer Leonard Cox. Our hero du jour.”

“But that didn’t happen at the Bethesda Fountain, right? You said that after you clipped the guy’s wing, both of you were taken into custody.”

“And driven in circles with bags over our heads.”

“Jesus, Fritz. What was that about?”

“My opinion is that it was just a stalling tactic while Tommy Carroll and the mayor scrambled to come up with a plan.”

“That would account for the blindfold and the dipsy-doodle driving. But what about the bag?”

“You have to remember, they didn’t know who this other person was. The trigger-happy citizen who grabbed a cop’s gun and went running after the shooter.”

“You.”

“Me. They didn’t know who or what they had on their hands until they got me somewhere they could talk to me.”

“And what’s wrong with a station house?”

I shrugged. “Too many witnesses? That’s my guess. That’s why the bag in the first place. As best as I figure it, they wanted to make sure that if a photographer somehow happened to snap a picture of this trigger-happy person being led into the Municipal Building, it would be that much more difficult to identify him.”

“Why would they need to hide the person’s identity?”

“You’re not going to like my answer.”

“Try me.”

“It’s just supposition.”

“Supposition me.”

“In case the guy who walked into the Municipal Building under police custody never walked back out.”

“Explain.”

“Until they had a chance to talk to this live wire who’s running around shooting off policemen’s guns, they didn’t know for certain that he wasn’t part of the whole parade-massacre plot. Maybe he’s not Mr. Brave Citizen after all. What do they know?”

“So?”

“So, Tommy Carroll made it pretty clear to me that the mayor’s number one priority is to keep a lid on this whole thing. If word gets out that Leavitt had even an inkling about this in advance, and didn’t do everything in his power to stop it…”

I paused. Margo finished the thought. “He’s screwed.”

“Big-time screwed. Forget Bad Apple. This would bounce him right out of there.”

“So if you’d been a part of the conspiracy, you’re saying you think they would have killed you?”

“It’s only speculation,” I said.

“Pretty wild speculation. I know you’ve run into some unsavory cops now and then, but this sounds more than a little far-fetched.”

I said nothing. I just continued chopping. I could tell the moment it hit her. Her jaw dropped slightly and disbelief flooded her eyes.

“So… wait. Is that what happened to what’s-his-name? Diaz? Oh my God. You said he wasn’t killed out by the fountain. Where was he killed?”

“If you listen to the TV, he was killed out by the fountain. Resisting arrest. One shot to the shoulder, one shot to the skull.”

“By the police.”

“Officer Leonard Cox.”

“So is that really who shot him in the head? In the Municipal Building?”

I plunged the knife into the remainder of the cabbage. “According to Tommy Carroll, that’s one of those need-to-know things that I don’t need to know.”

Margo eyed me. “Fine. But are you going to settle for that?”

“What’s your guess?”

She stepped over to me, took the cutting board from my lap and put herself there. She looked deeply into my eyes.

“No fucking way.”

She took the words right out of my mouth.