Speak of the Devil (21 page)

I rescued the victim. I came up behind Charlie’s wheelchair and announced in a loud voice, “Bill Parcells is a mouse.”

“What!” Charlie whipped his head around. When he saw who it was, he started to introduce me to the guy he’d been lecturing, but discovered that he hadn’t gotten the fellow’s name.

I told the stranger, “Get while the getting’s good.”

He probably walked away a Jets fan.

“May I say you’re looking lovely tonight,” I said to Charlie as I swung into the just vacated chair.

“You may not.”

Jenny Gray was working behind the bar. Her crow-black hair was pulled back from her pale face in a thick, shiny ponytail. She was already looking my direction when I called out to her for a Harp. She gave a slow nod, then pulled me a pint and had it passed hand-to-hand over to me. This had been Charlie’s method for fetching his drinks ever since the shooting. When I was with him, I sometimes adopted the method. Bad habit.

Charlie tapped his glass to mine. “To the pot we piss in.”

Fifteen years and counting, and I’d yet to hear him repeat the same toast twice. I took a hungry pull on the Harp. Charlie’s quizzical eye was on me as I set the glass down. “You’ve learned something.”

Someone had just punched up a Rolling Stones song on the jukebox. I saw Charlie grimace.

“I spoke with Diaz’s ex-wife today,” I said. “She gave me a name.”

Charlie deadpanned. “You’ve already got a name, son.”

Under the table, my foot found the frame of his chair. I gave it a nudge. The chair rolled backward several inches.

“Right,” Charlie said, adjusting his chair back to the table. “So, what did she tell you?”

“It wasn’t something she was keen to talk about at first. You should have seen her, Charlie. The poor woman. She had a three-year-old with Diaz, and she hasn’t told her yet that her daddy is dead. She’s about to have another baby any day. New husband. They’ve been hounded by the press, as you can imagine. The woman was shaking like a leaf. She didn’t come right out and say it, but in a way, she feels sort of responsible.”

“Responsible for what? Her former husband’s rampage?”

“They were married for four years. She was nineteen when they got married. He was abusive to her, and she put up with it for too long. She’s extremely religious. She feels that somehow she should have saved him. Or been able to change him.”

“He was a psycho. If she wants to feel responsible for something, she should feel responsible for not killing him while he slept. He’d be dead, she’d be in jail, and nine people would still be alive. Is that better?”

“She’s worried for her daughter. She’s sick with fear about the girl having her father’s blood. ‘Tainted blood’ was how she put it.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s you and me sitting here with our beers saying it’s ridiculous. But from where Gabriella Montero is sitting, it isn’t so ridiculous. She told me she saw the devil himself in her ex-husband’s eyes. She said the devil comes to the world dressed up like everyday people. ‘Thousands and thousands of devils in the world’ was how she put it. Everywhere you look. And Roberto Diaz was one of them.”

Charlie lifted his glass. “I’m not going to argue with her.”

The Stones song ended, and the muscles in Charlie’s face relaxed as Tony Bennett took over. I went on, summarizing the years that Diaz and Gabriella had spent together. I told him about the guy who’d sued FastCar, about Diaz spitting on him in court and then later, the mugger spitting on him after he’d been beaten with a pipe. I told Charlie about FastCar’s vandalized fleet and about the police assessment that Diaz had hit his wife in the face with an iron. I could see a double frustration in Charlie’s expression. Diaz was dead, but to Charlie, that was too easy a punishment. Charlie would have preferred spotting Diaz at the bar so he could have gone over and grabbed him by the shoulders, hurled him up against the wall and offered up some
real
punishment. That was the first frustration. The second was that even if Roberto Diaz had been loitering at the bar, Charlie was stuck in his damn wheelchair and couldn’t really do much about it. His roughhouse days were well over.

“Wife beaters should be skinned alive,” Charlie said in a low voice. “Your Gabriella is right. She was married to a devil.”

My glass was empty. So was Charlie’s. This time I got up to fetch the beers myself. Jenny Gray was chewing on her lip as she took the empty glasses from me. Her black T-shirt was a tight fit. Plunging V-neck. A “tip teaser” was how she had described it to me once. Her skin was pearl white.

Jenny gave me a steady look. She pulled the beers without so much as a glance at them. “How’s Margo these days, Fritz?”

“She’s good, Jenny.”

“We don’t see her much.”

“She’s a busy girl.”

“She still writing about famous people?”

“Among other things.”

“I guess she’s hit the big time. Must be fun work.”

“It’s a hustle. Margo works hard.”

“Plays hard, too, I’ll bet.” I didn’t answer. Jenny set the two beers on the counter. She was still giving me her steady gaze. “How about you, Fritz? Are you working hard?”

“Keeping out of trouble,” I said.

She set a glass on the bar and shot it full of seltzer. “Your work
is
trouble.” She picked up the glass. “Cheers.”

I drained an inch from my Harp, then set a twenty on the counter.

Jenny ignored the bill. “So, you two are good? You and Margo?”

I nodded. “We’re good.”

“Any news on the way?”

“News?”

“About the two of you?”

I shrugged. “No news.”

She allowed a thin eyebrow to rise. “So you’re not that kind of good.”

I took up the beers. “We’re good, Jenny.”

She scraped the twenty off the bar. “Tell her I said hi. Tell her I wish her continued good luck in the city. Tell her she should interview that Tom Cruise while he’s still cute.”

“I’ll tell her.” I took the beers back to the table. Charlie was watching me closely. “It’s nothing,” I said, setting the mugs down.

“I don’t trust that one farther than I can throw her.”

“I said it’s nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing before.”

“Before is before.”

“My girl is a hundred of that one. Listen, if I ever—”

I cut him off. “Charlie. Just drop it. Come on already.” I slid my mug over and tapped his. He hesitated, putting a long look on me, then he lifted his mug.

“May the cat catch its tail.”

THE NAME. ANGEL. GABRIELLA HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO PROVIDE A LAST name for me. Only the first. She had pronounced it
An-hell
, which was the kind of irony you could beat a person senseless with.

Angel was an acquaintance of Diaz’s. Gabriella hadn’t been certain when the two first hooked up. She told me she had a vague memory of Diaz mentioning someone named Angel early in their marriage, but the name didn’t really start cropping up on a regular basis until a couple of years later. Charlie picked up on this detail when I related it.

“Prison,” he said. “They appear, they disappear, they appear again. Prison.” I agreed; that’s what I had concluded.

Gabriella encountered this Angel character in the flesh on only two occasions. The last year of her marriage with Diaz, he was away from home half as often as he checked in. It was clear to Gabriella that her husband was involved with drugs, running with a bad crowd. More and more, she said, Diaz arrived home high on God knows what, laughing, sweating, speaking a mile a minute, trash-talking people Gabriella had never even met, trash-talking the police, the mayor, all white people, the Jews, the Arabs, the president. And there was always Angel. Angel this and Angel that.
Me and Angel. You should have seen Angel
. Finally, one night, Gabriella did see Angel. She was standing at a bus stop on her way to her office-cleaning job when a silver hatchback drove by across the street, vibrating the entire block with a
thumpa-thumpa
bass blast from a deck of inverted speakers filling the entire hatchback area. The tires squealed as the car ripped a half circle in the middle of the street, pulling to an abrupt stop in front of the bus stop.
Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa
. Diaz came out of the passenger side, and from the driver’s side came a tall mocha-skinned man in a muscle shirt, a silver bandanna and a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses. Gabriella described him as at least six feet and “with muscles he was proud of.” He had a pencil-thin mustache. Diaz had made an overt point of being what Gabriella called “all lovey-dovey, like he was showing off for his friend.” Diaz introduced Angel to Gabriella. She said that Angel had barely acknowledged her. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, and if he even spoke to her directly, it was in a voice pitched as low as the thumping coming from the back of the car. Gabriella commented twice to me about the man’s muscles. What she had said was, “There was no soul. Only a body.”

“Prison,” Charlie said again. “We lock them up, they pump it up. Nice damn system.”

The second time Gabriella encountered Angel, he was trying to rape her.

Gabriella had turned her head away from the picnic table where her daughter was playing with the flowers. She had kept her tiny convulsions under control even as the tears flooded her cheeks.

She had just returned from work, she told me. It was five in the morning. Rosa was still with her grandmother. The apartment was empty. No Roberto. No surprise. Gabriella had showered, put on her nightgown and then gotten into bed, first pulling down the shades against the rising sun. She had drifted swiftly to sleep. The next thing she remembered, the sheets had been pulled back and a man was on top of her. She remembered a vanilla scent and a strong pair of hands forcing her legs apart, a low mumbling voice intoning, “Don’t fight, don’t fight, don’t fight.” She opened her mouth to scream, and one of the hands flashed up from under her nightgown and clamped over her mouth. Gabriella was staring wide-eyed into a pair of pale green eyes, open to no more than a slit. “They looked like the eyes of a goat.” She recognized the pencil-thin mustache. Angel was just entering her when her husband appeared in the doorway and started shouting. Angel attempted to continue, but Diaz threw himself onto the bed and the two men tumbled to the floor. Screaming, Gabriella had hurried off the other side of the bed and run into the bathroom, locking herself in, where she listened to the sounds of the fight. Eventually, the sounds stopped and she heard the front door slam. She waited an extra fifteen minutes, crying and shaking uncontrollably. When she finally emerged from the bathroom, Diaz was passed out on the bed, the pillow under his head draining blood from a small cut on his cheek. She told me that she had wanted to turn her husband’s head into the pillow and suffocate him.

Charlie had barely touched his beer. He picked up his mug and looked at me.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

I TOLD CHARLIE THE REST OF GABRIELLA’S STORY AS I ACCOMPANIED him back to his house. Charlie didn’t like being pushed; he motored his chair on his own. The temperature had dropped considerably and the air smelled like snow. Charlie was underdressed in a sweatshirt and a thin windbreaker. He generated some heat, though, muscling the wheels of his chair. The orange glow at the tip of his cigar led the way.

I told him about Diaz showing up at Gabriella’s workplace accompanied by the woman with the rose tattoo on her arm, and the lawyer coming in to take Gabriella under his wing. Gabriella said she had insisted on using her husband’s infidelity—not Diaz’s violence—as the stated reason for the divorce. Apparently, the woman with the tattoo was more than just a one-night stand; Diaz had taken up with her. Charlie gave me a suggestion on how I might want to follow up on that information. At the house, he let me wheel him up the long ramp.

“You seeing my girl tonight?” he asked, sorting through his keys to find the one to the front door.

“I don’t think so.”

He looked up at me. “You wouldn’t be going back to the bar?”

“Of course not. I’m beat. I’m going home.”

“Just checking.”

I drove back to the city over the Queensboro Bridge. The way there are so many lights on in Manhattan’s buildings all through the night, it looks like you’re driving into a cluster of stars.

I gave Jigs Dugan a call when I got to my place. I told him I could use his services if he could use a little cash. Light lifting, I said. Easy money. He was okay with that, so I gave him the details.

An hour after lights-out, I still wasn’t asleep. I got up and put a little milk and bourbon together and got back into bed. The face of
An-hell
floated near my ceiling. Slitted eyes, pencil-thin mustache, silver bandanna on his head. I summoned an image of the old man. My father.
Get this punk out of here. I need some shut-eye
.

I finally slept. I looked for Margo in my dreams. I had to skirt around that goddamn Jenny Gray and her pearl-white neckline, but at last I found Margo. Laugh me to sleep, sweetie. I’ll owe you. I’ll gladly owe you.

TOMMY CARROLL’S ASSISTANT HANDED ME MY FIRST CUP OF COFFEE of the day. She was dressed in a powder-blue suit and looked as stern as an unsexed schoolmarm.

“You don’t take sugar.” It was a statement, not a question, and it happened to be correct. I looked to see if I could find a hair out of place on her head. Not one. I considered asking if she had a boyfriend. I was thinking Jigs, just to muss her hair up a little.

“Commissioner Carroll will be right with you.”

“Thank you, Stacy.”

The door closed behind her. Thirty seconds later, it opened again. I stopped blowing on my coffee and greeted Tommy Carroll. “Morning, Commish.”

He grunted and moved directly to his desk. “Where are we? What’ve you got?”

I told him, “Angel something-or-other. An associate of Roberto Diaz’s. Likely ex-con. Diaz looked up to him. Extremely violent. The guy tried to rape Diaz’s wife several years ago with Diaz in the next room. Don’t ask me why, but I’m getting a ‘fearless’ vibe.”