Speak of the Devil (19 page)

Philip Byron’s disappearance—his abduction—was under wraps. He had not made his appearance at the McNally funeral the day before. The police commissioner had ordered officers in the Washington Heights precinct to be on the lookout for Byron’s car. It had been found where he parked it to meet me at the entrance to Fort Tryon Park. Martin Leavitt immediately imagined the worst. Since he was now in possession of a crude bloody crucifix made of two of his deputy’s fingers, those fears had plenty of currency.

He was waiting.

Margo’s eyes were darker than usual. “Let’s go to Mexico.”

“Okay. Where in Mexico would you like to go?”

“Anywhere.”

“Coastal? The interior? You want ruins?”

“All of it. Any of it. Let’s just go.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s leave tonight.”

I picked up my coffee mug and took a sip. “I’m Superman. I’ll be fine.”

“Superman’s a jerk. He’s loaded with personal problems.”

“Batman, then. There’s a real head case.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Is the subject still Mexico?”

Margo set her fork down on her plate and looked across the table at me. “The subject is, my skin is crawling. What kind of person does a thing like that?”

“One with personal problems,” I said. “A head case.”

“Batman?”

“You see? It’s all the same subject.”

“Mexico.” She rapped her finger against the table. “I’m calling a travel agent while you clean up.”

“I’m not in the mood to clean up.”

“Don’t you want to do anything to please me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Like what?”

I got up from the table. “There’s no need to go all the way to Mexico.” I came around to her side of the table. I cupped her elbow in my hand, and she rose like a feather on a draft. We stood a moment, saying nothing.

“You’re a head case,” she whispered, and touched her nose to my chest.

Her arm around my waist, she leaned precariously sideways and switched off the coffee machine on our way out of the kitchen. No chance I was going to let her fall.

TOMMY CARROLL WANTED ME TO MEET WITH REMY SANCHEZ. I SAW him in his office at Midtown North.

“You heard about the fingers?” Sanchez asked before I had even taken a seat. He was standing at the window, tweezering the slats of his venetian blinds, peering out the window. He looked weary.

“I saw them.”

“No shit. You saw them, huh? I missed that detail.” He released the blinds and looked over at me. “I seem to be missing a lot of details these days.”

I shrugged.

Sanchez frowned. “Cat got your tongue?”

“No. I just don’t know what to tell you. If there’s a big picture, I’m not seeing it, either. Just these little pieces.”

“The commissioner wants me to fill you in on Roberto Diaz. He wants me to empty the bucket right into your lap. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I did. I thought it might be fun to get your answer and his answer and see how well they fit together.”

“That’s your idea of fun?”

“When pieces don’t fit together, the truth is usually in the cracks between them.”

“That’s too long for a fortune cookie,” I said. “Did you make that up yourself?”

Sanchez turned back to the window. He fingered the venetian blinds again, then dipped his head to peer though the slats. Something caught his attention. “Do you know what a white shadow is, Malone?”

“A white shadow. No. I don’t.”

He peered a few seconds more through the blinds, then released them. “A white shadow is when something is off. It’s when something out there is not quite the way it’s supposed to be. It’s close, but it’s off. It’s not throwing down the right kind of shadow.”

“I see.”

“There’s a white shadow all over the crap that’s gone down these past couple of days. Something’s not right, I’m just not sure if my giving a damn is worth it.” He pulled back his squeaky desk chair and dropped into it. He ran a hand carefully along his hair. It was glistening, with deep comb grooves. “My wife tells me I need to do a better job of picking my battles. She says life’s too short.”

“What battle are we talking about here, Captain?”

“I’m not sure. I guess that’s the problem.”

“I wish I could help you. But I’m just going in the direction people point me.”

“Somehow I don’t believe that. But okay.” He fiddled with his wedding ring. “I guess we’ve all got a job to do.” He released the ring and clapped his hands together. “Let’s spread Mr. Diaz out on the table, shall we?”

ROBERTO TOMAS DIAZ HAD BEEN BORN IN SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, and moved to New York City when he was nineteen. A few years later, he married a Gabriella Rodriguez, who worked at the time as a dispatcher for a car-service company called FastCar, located on Flatbush Avenue in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Diaz took a job driving for FastCar, which he held for just under two years. During this time, Gabriella became pregnant and took a leave of absence. On his way to drop off a customer at La Guardia Airport one afternoon, Diaz rolled the car he was driving. No one was seriously injured, but the customer sued, alleging driver negligence. He claimed to have seen Diaz taking a drink from a liquor bottle. A half-empty bottle of peach brandy was found at the accident scene, but there had been no way to determine if it belonged to Diaz. At the trial, Diaz spit on the customer, for which the judge held him in contempt of court and commanded him to jail for twenty days. FastCar lost the suit and fired Diaz. A month later, the customer was jumped by two men as he was returning to his apartment around eleven o’clock at night. He was beaten severely with a pipe. Both assailants wore ski masks. Before running off, one of the two attackers lifted his mask and spit on the victim. Gabriella Diaz swore to investigating officers the following day that she and her husband had been home together going through a baby book, picking out potential names for the unborn child. Diaz himself had produced the book and pressed it on the officers, showing them the different names that were circled. His behavior had been judged by one of the officers as “extremely hyper.”

The mugging went unsolved.

Diaz held several different part-time jobs while his wife was pregnant. After the baby—a girl they named Rosa—was born, Gabriella went back to work at FastCar, leaving the baby with her mother during her shifts. Diaz came by the dispatcher’s office from time to time, just to hang around. Gabriella’s boss told him he was not welcome, and on one occasion a fight nearly broke out. When two of the company’s vehicles were vandalized soon after—obscenities spray-painted all over them, tires slashed—Gabriella was let go. It wasn’t a week later that the police answered a domestic-disturbance call and found Gabriella Diaz bleeding from a gash in her forehead and baby Rosa on the floor with her crib inverted, shrieking and crying. Stripped to the waist and sweating profusely, Roberto Diaz had told the responding officers that his wife had hit her head falling in the shower. The officers noted that Gabriella’s hair was dry, as was the bathtub when they checked. They also noted that blood from the wound had spotted the blouse Gabriella was wearing, but was presumably not wearing when she took her alleged tumble in the shower. The police discovered an ironing board set up in the kitchen, but the iron was nowhere to be seen. When asked, Gabriella told the police that the iron was broken, so she had thrown it away. When? The day before, she said. The officers put her down as a bad liar. Bad and scared.

No charges were filed.

The divorce came through less than a year later. Gabriella had found a new job with a company that cleaned office buildings after hours. Her schedule allowed her to spend time with Rosa during the day and to be away from her husband for a large part of the evening. Diaz had a job at that point, spotty work with a moving company. At nights he went to the bars. His daughter stayed with her grandmother until Gabriella came by after work to pick her up and take her home.

One evening Gabriella was vacuuming the corridor of a law office near Borough Hall when her husband appeared with a woman on his arm. The two were clearly stoned. The woman was in a skimpy hot-pink dress and wore a tattoo of a rose on her upper arm. Diaz referred to the woman as his girlfriend and demanded that Gabriella show the woman where the bathroom was. Gabriella pointed her in the right direction, and the woman sashayed down the corridor. An argument broke out between Gabriella and Diaz. One of the lawyers who had been working late responded to the hubbub in time to see Diaz swinging the hard plastic part of the vacuum-cleaner hose like a baseball bat, right into Gabriella’s mouth. The lawyer intervened and was met with enough violent swings of the hose that he required medical attention.

The lawyer’s services for Gabriella Diaz’s divorce proceedings were conducted completely pro bono. Alimony, for what it was worth. No child visitation. A restraining order. Diaz emerged from his five-month prison term for assault a single man and, if possible, an angrier one.

“THAT TAKES US UP TO A YEAR AGO,” SAID REMY SANCHEZ, SQUARING a small stack of papers on his desk and setting them to the side. “Since that time, he was quiet as a mouse. He got the apartment in Fort Greene and seems to have kept pretty much to himself. We netted one complaint from a female resident of his apartment building who said Diaz used to leer at her whenever he saw her, but that’s about it. He got the job with Delivery on Demand and held it until about a month ago.”

“What were the conditions of his leaving?”

“The company didn’t want to say at first. But apparently, Diaz had been opening the packages he was delivering.”

“Nosy?”

Sanchez shook his head. “Paranoid. Remember how Son of Sam said his neighbor’s dog was telling him to go out and kill pretty girls on lovers’ lanes? Well, Diaz didn’t have a dog, but according to one of his coworkers, he was convinced that the packages he was delivering contained coded messages meant specifically for him.”

“So Diaz was receiving messages from packages he was delivering.”

Sanchez shrugged. “That’s how it is with some of them. A nut job in Minneapolis had cereal boxes telling him to kill prostitutes and cut off their feet—you remember that one? He had a whole refrigerator full of them. First thing he did when the police found the feet was ask the cops to wear gloves when they handled them! He didn’t want the police getting their grubby hands all over them. He had cleaned them all with peroxide. Just like the cereal boxes told him to.”

“So that would have been Diaz’s defense? ‘Aliens were writing me secret messages telling me to shoot up the Thanksgiving parade’?”

“Commissioner Carroll wants you to put it together,” Sanchez said. He emphasized “you.” He made no effort to hide how he felt about it. “On this end? Diaz shot up the parade. Diaz is dead. Case closed.”

“And you’re wondering why Carroll is putting a freelancer on the trail of a closed case.”

“I’m wondering if I should wonder,” Sanchez said.

“White shadow.”

“I’m not an idiot, Malone. I know damn well the parade shooting is mixed up with the bomb at Barrymore’s. And now we’ve got Philip Byron’s fingers coming to us in a box. And we’re keeping quiet about it. This is all real bullshit. Give me the force your old man ran any day.” He balled his hands together and tapped his knuckles against his lips. “Yeah. There’s a white shadow, hombre. No doubt about it. All I can tell you, Malone, is to be careful. You step into a white shadow, guess what?”

“Tell me.”

“You disappear.”

I MET ELIZABETH SCOTT FOR LUNCH AT OUEST. SHE WAS SITTING AT A table in the back room, next to the window, working on a Bloody Mary. She looked fuzzy. Her hair. Her eyes. Even the set of her clothes. I told her so. She’s my half sister, we can lay things out fairly straight.

“You look fuzzy.”

“Very perceptive, Fritz. That’s exactly how I’m feeling.”

“Rough night?”

“I’ve had rougher.”

I took a seat. “How are the Bloodies?”

“Soothing. Stingy.”

The waitress appeared. Her blond ponytail danced as if it were on a spring. I pointed at Elizabeth’s glass. “One of those.”

The waitress took off. Elizabeth’s eyes followed as she took another sip of her drink.

“She’s cute,” I said.

Elizabeth cocked an eyebrow. “You want to arm-wrestle for her?”

“Take her,” I said. “I’m loyal to the court of Princess Margo.”

“Of course you are. So what’s the scrabble there, anyway? Are you ever going to make an honest woman of that girl?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“She’s not pushing for it?”

“Her mother married a private eye. She doesn’t want to be her mother.”

Elizabeth made a face. “Who does?”

“I don’t think you really have to worry about that,” I said.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Where would you like me to start?”

She put a finger to her lips. “Let’s see. Phyllis starves herself so she looks like Audrey Hepburn, while I like a nice bloody steak every once in a while?”

“Okay. That works.”

“She took a perfectly nice Jewish nose and had it whittled down to an afterthought, while I happen to be rather fond of my own lovely battering ram?”

“You exaggerate.”

My Bloody Mary arrived. Elizabeth reached across the table and tapped my glass. “May the wind always blow you down. Or whatever that is.”

I took a sip. Soothing. Stingy. Just like the lady said.

The brunch menu included a salmon-and-goat-cheese omelet. I ordered it along with a side of toast. The food arrived in under five minutes. Elizabeth took two bites of her eggs Benedict and moved on to my toast.

“I can call the cute waitress back and order some more toast,” I said.

“Fritz, do I look like a girl with any flirt left in her this morning?”

“It’s afternoon,” I reminded her.

“Oy.”

“Just trying to be helpful.”

The restaurant was full, but unlike a lot of places, it handled sound well. An acceptable level of murmuring and occasional laughter. High ceilings, that was a lot of it. Except for the window tables, most of the seating was large plush red banquettes. It was a relatively new restaurant in the relatively restaurant-starved Upper West Side. The room was warm; the window next to me was dappled with moisture up to the table line. It brought a thin chill to my leg.