Speak of the Devil (12 page)

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the foyer, Phyllis’s voice came from the rear of the town house. “I’ll be right with you! Have a seat!”

I stepped into the living room and did what I could to make myself comfortable amid leather and metal furniture not too terrifically designed for that purpose. I sat facing a large piece of modern art on the wall that I might have titled
Ode to a Bowling Pin in the Snow
. It was new since I’d last visited. Also new was a pair of large chrome gooseneck standing lamps set on either side of the tall bay windows, their chrome hoods inclined toward each other over a black lacquered Asian table like a pair of alien heads in consultation. The room was spotless. I checked to see if I’d tracked in any dirt.

After another minute, Phyllis came in from the dining room. I rose. Even in her early sixties, she moved with a liquid grace. She was wearing bone-colored slacks and a ribbed maroon sweater. She was painfully slender, essentially hipless. The hair pulled back from her angular face was frosted the color of fresh straw. Her expression, as always, was a little bemused, a little aloof. A gold bracelet jangled on her arm as she reached for my hand. “You’re prompt.”

“You said noon. That one’s easy. Both hands straight up.”

Her hand felt like gelatin. I didn’t dare give it a real squeeze. I sat back down as Phyllis lowered herself into a leather sling chair across from me. She made an L of her arms, settling her chin into her hand. I imagined an echo from hundreds of sessions across the hall:
So, tell me about your childhood
.

“You just missed Paul.”

“I saw him,” I said. “I ran into him out front. He embraced me like the bastard half brother I am.”

She allowed the bemusement to flower. “You threaten him.”

“Because I pack heat?”

“You know perfectly well why. Because you’re rough and Paul is smooth. You are your father and he is not.”

I do enjoy chewing the fat with shrinks. They cut right to the heart of the matter. I asked, “Does he know that he had all the advantages of life and I had approximately half of them?”

“He does. Which is what makes his unhappiness all the more profound. His leg up hasn’t exempted him from pain.”

“Ha ha,” I said. “Fooled him.”

“What happened to your arm, Fritz?”

A copy of the
Times
was on the glass coffee table to my left. The pair of pictures above the fold told the story. I didn’t.

“I banged it,” I said. “I’ll live.”

Phyllis sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. “How’s your mother, Fritz?” She added to the body language by crossing her arms. A foot jiggled impatiently.

“She’s fine. She’s out in California visiting a friend.”

“And how is her drinking?”

I took the question in the chest. As intended, I’m sure. “That’s direct.”

Phyllis blinked like a Siamese cat. “You’d prefer not to say.”

“It’s a question of what I think she might prefer.”

“I take it, then, that she’s still wrestling with it. It’s very sad.”

“She’s enjoying her visit with her friend,” I said.

“There’s no need to be defensive, Fritz.”

I gave her a false smile. “You know how it is.”

“Actually, I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Some other time. You can put me on the meter.”

“That’s not very funny.”

“Then by all means don’t laugh.”

“I was only asking a question,” she said coolly. “I wasn’t intending to probe.” Her gaze broke away from mine. It looked almost like she was purposely showing me her profile, then I realized she was looking down at the newspaper on the glass table. “This is so wretched.” She leaned forward and picked up the paper, scanning the front page. “What has this world come to? I can only imagine the kinds of people capable of acts like these. It’s horrible.”

“Can you?” I asked. “I mean, a person who did something as depraved as either of those killings—could he actually walk around afterward, behaving just as normally as you and me?”

“Absolutely. Psychotics can blend right in. They don’t wear sandwich boards declaring their homicidal rage.”

“That would certainly be convenient for the authorities.”

“And so many of the people you see who
do
look like they’re ready to pull out a machete in a crowded subway, it’s all bluff and bluster. They wouldn’t actually do it in a million years. It’s all verbal. Their anger is precisely the result of their inability to act. Their impotence. The world has them so tied down and hamstrung that their only tool is to yell or rant or simply start looking like something the cat dragged in. Their social-misfittedness is their attack. Other than that, they couldn’t be less dangerous.”

I pressed. “What if it were one of your patients who commited one of these attacks? Therapists have the inside track, so to speak. If the person was under psychiatric care, do you think his therapist would be able to suss it out?”

“There’s no saying. Could be. And don’t think that after events like what happened yesterday, therapists all around the city aren’t running a mental inventory of their patients to see if any of them have shown the seeds of this kind of violence.”

“Did you run an inventory?”

“There’s no avoiding it.”

“Did you come up with anything?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t share it with you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. Not the particulars. No names. But I mean in the abstract. Are any of the people you’re currently seeing capable of something like what happened?”

She gave me a level look and paused before responding. “Yes. I’d say one or two of them are.”

“You practice a dangerous profession,” I said.

“Harlan used to note that as well. He said the two of us probably had deep-seated death wishes.”

“Sure was a cheerful guy, wasn’t he? How about the both of you chose professions so that you could help other people? That has a nicer ring to it.”

She glanced down at the paper again. “There’s no doubt that the police are going to be flooded with calls from people claiming responsibility. Events like these speak to the imagination of unwell people. I could probably launch an entire new practice with the people who are going to come out of the woodwork on this.” She tossed the paper back on the table and leveled me with her ice-blue eyes. New subject. “I want to thank you for coming over, Fritz.”

“What is it you want? When you called the other day, you were pretty tight-lipped.”

“It’s Paul. I think he’s mixed up in something he shouldn’t be.”

“Trouble?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Linda thinks he is having an affair.”

“I see.”

“But she’s not sure. His behavior has been somewhat furtive lately. And he is keeping an erratic schedule. Paul tends to shut down when Linda tries to draw him out.”

“Has she put the question to him?”

“No. She’s too nervous.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Let me guess. He denies it.”

“He gets angry. And yes, he denies it. The problem is, Linda says Paul came home one night last week with a shiner. Maybe you saw.” She tapped her right eye. “He tried to pass it off with a story about getting hit on the street by a bike messenger, but Linda is certain he was lying. Paul is not a good liar.”

“As a mother, that should make you happy.”

“As a mother, I’m concerned about my son. Linda says he hasn’t slept an entire night through in well over a week. He’s scared about something. But we can’t bully him into telling us what he’s up to. He’s a grown man.” She considered me for a moment. “I would like you to look into it, Fritz.”

“You want me to bully him?”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“If he won’t tell you, he sure as hell won’t tell me.”

“I don’t mean for you to ask him.”

“You mean for me to snoop on him.”

Phyllis’s sweater had an oversize turtleneck. She poked a finger into the loose fabric and twisted it as she spoke. “That’s what you do for a living, isn’t it?”

“I don’t snoop on my family for a living.”

“Paul and you are family only in the most marginal sense of the word.”

“There are a hundred other private investigators you could call in for this,” I said. “I can give you some recommendations.”

“But I don’t know what it is they’re going to uncover.”

“If they’re any good, it’ll be the same thing I’d uncover.”

She released the collar. “What I mean is, I don’t know what they’ll do with the information once they have it. I really don’t want strangers rooting about in my son’s personal life.”

“So then you
do
want me because I’m family.”

She recrossed her legs with military swiftness. “You enjoy being difficult?”

“I’m just trying to get us both on the same page. You want me to snoop on Paul to see why he’s getting into fights and can’t sleep. You want to be able to tell me to keep my mouth shut about it when I find out what he’s up to. And the reason I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut is because Paul and I share the same father. But I’m not supposed to view this as snooping on my own flesh and blood.”

“You could care less about Paul,” she said flatly.

“It might not be an affair. It might be something else. I just need to warn you that investigations don’t always go where the client thinks they’ll go. If I were to uncover something unsavory or illegal, why would I be inclined to keep quiet about it?”

“Because I asked you to.”

“I see.”

“I would be your client. I would be the one paying you for your services.”

“No family favors.”

“I’m not family.”

I gave my head a scratch. “The overall logic is a little shaky.”

“I’ll pay you in cash, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I still accept cash. Fits so snugly in my wallet.”

“Good. Then we have a deal.” She sealed her own conclusion with a sharp nod.

I asked, “Does Paul know that this is why I’m here?”

“I didn’t say anything to him about your visit.”

“You knew that I was coming today at noon. You didn’t go out of your way to keep him from seeing that I was coming by to speak with you.”

She turned her palms to the ceiling. “Let him wonder. That’s not really important. What’s important is that you find out what he’s up to and I’m able to see to it that he stops doing it.”

“He’s a grown man,” I reminded her.

She considered me a moment. “You do remind me of Harlan.”

“What would he have done in a situation like this?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

I did. “The old-school method,” I said. “He would have grabbed Paul by the ankles and dangled him from an upstairs window until he coughed up the goods.”

“Precisely.”

“But you’re going to count on my tact and delicacy?”

“Your tact.”

“And what about my delicacy?”

The high-priced psychiatrist gave a closed-lipped smile. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about your delicacy.”

NIGHTMARE WAS ONE BALLSY PIECE OF WORK. MAYBE BRILLIANT. Maybe naively stupid. Reckless, to be sure. Contemptuous of authority. An attention hound. Insecure. Angry. Vainglorious. Deluded. And he liked to dress up in nuns’ clothing.

Phyllis was right: could be anyone.

There are several fairly standard ways of handling a money drop. Often the person making the demand will designate a somewhat remote area where he (it’s usually a he) can get a decent sense of who’s lurking nearby. In the case of kidnapping, the kidnapper is holding the plumb card. So long as the hostage is still being held, no one is going to swoop down on the kidnapper in the middle of the pickup.

But in this case, Nightmare’s hostage wasn’t a single frightened person who was going to be released on a random street corner once the money had been paid and the kidnapper had safely blended back into the woodwork. It was the entire city. Or if it
was
one person, it was New York City Mayor Martin Leavitt. Whichever way you wanted to look at it, Nightmare held all the cards. And like I said, the way he was playing them was ballsy, brilliant, stupid and reckless all at once.

He wanted the hand-off to be done at the Cloisters Museum in the middle of a crowded holiday weekend.

In the coat-check room.

See? Ballsy.

“WHAT AN IDIOT,” MARGO SAID. “YOU GRAB HIM RIGHT THERE. OR you follow him and grab him later. He’s putting himself right in your hands.”

And I was putting a calamari right in my mouth. It was a tad overcooked—when I chewed, it chewed back. Calamari is tricky that way. It either melts in your mouth or it refuses to go down without a struggle. I had a pilsner glass of Carlsberg Elephant at hand to help subdue the calamari. Across the small table, Margo was confronting a spinach salad of Olympian proportions. She seemed uncertain where to start.

Margo and I were in the back room of Miss Elle’s Homesick Bar and Grill on West Seventy-ninth Street. Except Miss Elle had recently sold the place to a mystery writer named Dorian, and now the sign out front said Dorian’s. But it still looked like Miss Elle’s, the food still tasted like Miss Elle’s, and the hurly-burly crowd of regulars at the small bar in the front were Miss Elle’s regulars. So what’s in a name? It was still a duck.

Margo was reminding me of Tinker Bell today, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Technically speaking, there’s nothing remotely Tinker Bellish about her.

“Can’t do it,” I said to her. “His note made it clear that if anyone tries to grab him at the museum, or if he’s picked up later, we’ll be seeing another bloody mess.”

“If you nab him, how can he do anything?”

“For starters, he could rig himself with explosives. We know he has the means. He could blow. But even if it’s not that, we have to worry about another accomplice.”

“You mean you can’t pick him up because he might have instructed someone that if you do, they should wreak havoc again somewhere else in the city. Preferably where there are big crowds.”

Margo was wearing a sort of leafy green blouse. Maybe that’s why I was thinking of Tinker Bell. But maybe not.

“Exactly. The guy has a built-in insurance policy.”