Speak of the Devil (26 page)

Click.

I had to find Angel Ramos.

Click.

I had to find him before the next sundown.

Click.

The demand for ten million dollars told me one thing: Ramos was losing his cool. It was an irrational sum of money. Call it a hunch, but to me there seemed a desperate smell in it. Whatever had been the purpose of all the pussyfooting around with the “nun” giving us the finger at Gristedes, the original drop at the Cloisters, the million dollars being designated for the Convent of the Holy Order of the Sisters of Good Shepherd and all the rest if it, things had now gotten more blunt. We had two severed fingers in a box, and we had an Uzi jammed into the side of Philip Byron’s head. These recent events squared more clearly with the Angel Ramos I’d been getting to know, the punk who’d steal money from the collection plate and recruit his ten-year-old nephew to run drugs. Call it another hunch, but I didn’t get the feeling Angel Ramos was intending to pass along his latest ransom demand to nuns or monks or anybody else. This was a grab. This was it. This was the enchilada.

My ploy with the Amigo Willy cards had gone bust. I’d figured a few crank calls, at least. I tried Donna Bia’s number again, still not sure what I’d say to her if she answered. She didn’t. I hung up without leaving a message. I looked at my watch. I glanced out the window. Finally, I looked at my feet. “You boys ready?”

They offered no resistance. I picked up the phone and called the rental place I use, up on Fifty-second.

“Saddle up my pony,” I said to the person on the other end. He wasn’t with the program, so I had to translate. I hung up and fetched my blackjack from my desk drawer. A gift from the old man. When he was a beat cop, he’d lifted it from a man who had been number two to take over one of the big Italian crime families. The mobster told him he called it Betty. Betty had cracked some pretty notorious skulls in her day. I lightly slapped the blackjack a few times against my palm. Even with taps, you can feel the bones beginning to worry.

I went into the closet and pulled out my scratched-up bomber jacket and checked through the pockets to be sure I had my black watch cap. All set.

On my way out the door, I told Miss Dashpebble to hold my calls.

SISTER MARY RYAN WAS SURPRISED TO SEE ME. SHE WAS IN HER STREET clothes again, and I wondered if she ever donned the penguin suit.

She cracked, “I don’t suppose you’re here to give us our million dollars back.”

“I would if I could, but I can’t.”

I had been told by the nun who answered the door to wait in the front hallway. Sister Mary showed me into the Great Room. I sat in the chair where Gary Harvey had sat while we were grilling him. From across the room, Jesus looked down at me wearily.

The sister offered me tea and I accepted. By a seemingly invisible signal, the young nun appeared, and Sister Mary put in the order for a pot of tea. I gave the nun a simple smile and she blushed.

“Natividad cannot stop talking about what took place here the other night,” Sister Mary said after the nun had left the room. “With every telling, the details get more and more exciting. The guns get bigger and bigger. She is especially glowing about your Irish friend.”

“Jigs. Yes. Women do glow.”

Sister Mary made a delicate tent of her fingers. “Sister Anne and I have been talking. We would like to contact Mr. Harvey. In the confusion of the other evening, we feel we didn’t tend terribly well to him. I believe very strongly in fate, Mr. Malone. I feel that fate led Mr. Harvey to Good Shepherd.”

“A cold-blooded killer is what led Mr. Harvey to Good Shepherd.”

“The Lord utilizes His agents.”

“No offense, Sister, but the Lord has lost control of that particular agent.”

Sister Natividad floated into the room with a tray and all the tea goodies. She set the tray down on the table in front of Sister Mary. She said, “You must let it sleep.”

“
Steep
, Natividad.”

The nun’s blush was even richer than the last. She stole a glance at me as she left the room.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Natividad is twenty.”

“That seems young.”

“It is.” She smiled. “The older we get, the younger it becomes.”

“I mean to be a nun. I guess I don’t really know at what age a person can become a nun.”

“Technically speaking, there are no restrictions. Of course, with a person who is not yet a legal adult, there has to be complete agreement from the parents or from the legal guardian. In Natividad’s case, she became a nun in the Philippines when she was seventeen. Earlier this year, her family moved to America, and she wanted to remain near them.”

“I was under the impression that when you signed on, you became part of God’s family. So to speak.”

“That’s true. But it doesn’t mean you forsake your secular family. We’re still very much in the world, Mr. Malone. As you can see, many of us don’t wear habits anymore. Not to deny tradition, by any means, but we’re not relics, after all. At least we hope we’re not. We’re attempting to bridge the more traditional aspects of who and what we are with the fact of our being in the modern world. God is in my heart. He is not in my clothes.”

She had just started to lift the teapot and had to set it down swiftly as she burst into laughter. “Oh, my. Well, I surely didn’t mean it to sound
that
way!” She laughed again, then reached once more for the teapot. She shot me a look. “I think the tea has had time to sleep, don’t you?”

THE NAME ANGEL RAMOS MEANT NOTHING TO SISTER MARY RYAN. I showed her the picture. She studied it thoughtfully. “He’s a criminal,” she said. “That’s what these numbers mean. He’s been arrested.”

“That’s right.”

“What did he do?”

“As far as what they’ve nabbed him for? Robbery, assault, theft.”

She looked up from the picture. “And what he hasn’t been ‘nabbed’ for?”

“I believe he’s the person behind the Thanksgiving Day shootings and the bombing. I also think he’s kidnapped the deputy mayor. The package that Gary Harvey brought by. It contained . . . Someone cut off two of the deputy mayor’s fingers. I think the man in that picture did it.”

The nun paled. “Oh, my.”

“There’s an ultimatum: ten million dollars in exchange for Mr. Byron’s freedom. Everything’s pointing to Angel Ramos.”

Sister Mary glanced back at the photo. “He looks menacing.”

“That’s a good way of putting it.”

“He must be in torment.”

“Maybe so. But what’s more important right now is that we stop him before he can put anyone else in torment.”

She set the picture faceup on the table, next to the tea tray, then changed her mind and turned it over. “We’ll do anything we can, Mr. Malone. But I don’t honestly know what that is. Besides to pray, of course.”

“We’ll take that. But what we really need is to locate Ramos. The piece that isn’t fitting in is why it is that Ramos went through the whole song and dance Saturday with having us drop the money at the Cloisters, then calling you in. At the end of it all, we still had the money. If it was all just to deliver the package and let us know that he had Philip Byron . . . it doesn’t make any sense. The convent is nowhere near Ramos’s territory. But there has to be some sort of connection. There has to be a link.”

“I can’t imagine what it could be,” Sister Mary said.

“How many nuns are in residence here?” I asked.

“Normally? Fifteen.”

“Why ‘normally’? You don’t have fifteen at the moment?”

“We had a loss recently.” She had picked up her teacup, but she didn’t take a sip. She looked past the cup, off into space. “You probably heard of it. Unfortunately, the papers played it up. More and more, that seems to be what they do.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, just last month. Near the end of October.”

“You don’t mean the Sister Suicide?”

Sister Mary lowered her teacup into her palm. “You might understand, we’re not exactly fond of that term. It’s terribly dehumanizing.”

We were referring to a story that the papers had made hay with for nearly a week, just before Halloween. A nun in full habit had been found by a morning jogger in a wooded section of Prospect Park. She had apparently slit both her wrists. A suicide note had been left next to the body. As Sister Mary said, the papers had jumped all over it.
Sister Suicide
. I recalled the photo that had accompanied the story. It was taken when the woman was in her early twenties, before she joined the sisterhood. She was pretty, and that helped give the story legs for a few extra days. Attractive young nuns slitting their wrists in a public place aren’t your everyday news story. The coverage had been typically sensational and morbid. I had to admit, it had hooked me a little.

Sister Mary Ryan said, “Margaret was a terribly troubled young woman. Of course, guilt is a useless emotion, but we’re only human. It’s there. All of us at the convent feel it. We can’t help but contemplate that we failed Margaret. Her difficulties were known to us. From the moment she arrived at Good Shepherd, it was a struggle for her. She had already suffered considerable tragedy.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.

“No, no. It’s fine. It helps, actually. It’s been especially hard on Natividad. Being so young. Until Natividad arrived, Sister Margaret had been our youngest. She was only thirty-three when she died. Natividad latched on to her immediately. I’d say she looked at Margaret as an older sister. We encouraged the friendship. For both their sakes, actually. Margaret . . . She had a drinking problem.”

My reaction must have showed.

“You’re surprised by the idea of a nun having a drinking problem?”

“I guess I am.”

“I always find it surprising that people are surprised. It’s what I was just saying. We’re human. We’re not saints.” She gave a coy smile. “At least not yet. We’re not without our problems, Mr. Malone. We’re mortal, and we suffer mortal failings. We do have a focus and a path and a calling and the assistance of our faith, and those are all wonderful securities. But we’re flesh, and not without sin. And I’m not going to pretend that Sister Margaret always made life at Good Shepherd particularly easy. She didn’t. She represented a formidable challenge. But in many ways, I think that might have been the gift she brought to us, at great cost to herself. Her difficulties challenged us to show the true depths of our compassion. Alcoholism is such a wretched disease. In the end, I suppose it took hold of Sister Margaret more forcefully than we did. Along with all her sadness and all her troubles.”

She lowered her head. An image of my mother rose in my mind. Two images, really. In the one, she was flashing her seductively appealing smart-aleck smile and raising her glass in a ribald toast. Shirley Malone, life of the party. In the other . . . well, let’s just say the party had gone on a bit too long. A gem without luster. I shook the images from my head and picked up the photograph of Angel Ramos. I waited until Sister Mary looked back up before I spoke. “I’m sorry, Sister.”

“I guess I shouldn’t let myself ramble so.”

“Can I ask you to show this to the rest of the sisters? As soon as possible? If any of them have even an inkling that they’ve seen this man before, or have any information about him, I need to know immediately.”

She leaned forward and took the photograph from me. She studied it a moment. “I know you’re going to find this man, Mr. Malone. I have faith.”

That made one of us.

I GOT MY FIRST RESPONSE TO MY AMIGO WILLY CARDS AS I HEADED down the West Side Highway. It was a male voice. No discernible accent.

“You put these cards out?”

“Yep,” I said.

“You think you’re funny. Well,
fuck you
.”

He hung up. I punched in *69, but the caller’s number was blocked. Probably a pay phone. Since I already had the phone out, I punched in the code for Margo. She answered on the first ring. “Hello, sailor.”

Caller ID. It still creeps me out.

“What’s new, pussycat?” I said.

“I should be asking you. Where are you?”

“Streaking past Riverside Church, on a bearing heading south.”

“Any exit plans? Like maybe Seventy-second Street?”

“Afraid I can’t. Not right now.”

I gave her a brief rundown on my day. I left out the part about Tommy Carroll’s cancer. An irritating voice in my head said, Need-to-know basis. When I was finished, Margo asked, “Where does that leave you?”

“I’m going back out to Fort Pete.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“You want company?”

“No. You stay put.”

“What do you think you can accomplish in Fort Petersen, besides getting yourself in trouble?”

It was a good question, and I didn’t have a good answer. “If Angel Ramos is holding Philip Byron out there someplace, I want to at least be in the ballpark.”

“I’m not hearing an action plan here.”

“I’ll bob, I’ll weave.”

“Oh, great.”

In front of me, a red sports car bobbed and weaved. It also swerved into my lane, nearly clipping my bumper. I hit the brakes and leaned on my horn. The driver shot a hairy arm out the window to show me his finger, but I wasn’t impressed. I squeezed on the gas, running my bumper right up to his, close enough to kiss it. Apparently, I also muttered my innermost thoughts.

“What’d you just call me?” Margo asked.

“Nothing. Sorry.” The sports car swerved back to its original lane. I swerved right with it.

“My last boyfriend never talked to me like that,” Margo said.

“Neither does this one. A guy just cut me off.”

“
I’m
going to cut you off.”

As if on cue, our connection began to break up. The sports car did a little fake to the left, then roared on ahead. Margo was burbling on the phone and I almost lost her, but we got clear as I passed the railroad yards.

“What were you saying?”

“I was saying please come over tonight. I don’t care how late it is.”

“Or early?”

“Either way. This is where my fantasies of you holding down a nice job as a shoe salesman start to kick in.”