Speak of the Devil (37 page)

“What baby?”

“What baby? Margaret’s baby. What baby do you think?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. King. You’re losing me.”

“The baby. Margaret’s baby. That girl was raped. It got her pregnant. All the nutty stuff she was doing and saying, she didn’t tell anyone until it was too late. She’d refuse to have an abortion, in any case. She’d gotten all holy at that point.”

“Did she have the child?”

“Oh yeah. She had it. Baby girl. She held her for all of ten seconds, then . . .” Ruth snapped her pudgy fingers. “Off to adoption. Never saw her again.”

She leaned down and scooped the dog off the floor, then straightened and held it to her chest. It kicked, but she ignored it. I took ten long seconds of silence. My brain was going muddy. I wasn’t even certain why it was I’d come out here in the first place.

“Mrs. King . . . there was a suicide note. Did the police return that note to you?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Could I see it?”

She was already shaking her head even before I’d completed the question.

“Afraid you can’t. James took it.”

THERE WERE THREE OF THEM. ONE WAS IN THE METAL BUCKET, suspended from a small crane affixed in the bed of the green Parks Department truck. He had a chain saw and was running it like a knife through butter, hacking off the small limbs of one of the large oaks in Carl Schurz Park. The other two, on the ground, were taking up the fallen limbs and tossing them into the growling machine that was hooked to the back of the truck. The limbs came out of the chute on the other end, reduced to chips. A call to the Arsenal in Central Park asking after James King had led me to the eastern edge of Manhattan. I was lucky. The storm had passed, but not before cracking off part of a large limb on one of the trees in Carl Schurz Park. James King was pulling a little O.T. to help take down the rest of the limb.

The bulge of land where Gracie Mansion was situated was visible several hundred yards to the south. As I approached, the man suspended from the crane called out something to his colleagues on the ground. They both took several steps backward. One of them almost bumped into me. He placed a gloved hand on my chest. “Hold up, buddy.”

I saw that a rope had been tied around one of the larger limbs, the loose end of it run through a Y in the tree and coiled around a large spike that had been driven into the trunk about five feet up from the ground. As I watched, the man in the tree worked his chain saw through the large limb. When he was halfway through it, it buckled downward but was held in place partway by the rope. The man continued with the saw. He broke through, and the limb dropped several feet, then jerked to a halt as the rope brought it up short. Instead of falling to the ground, the limb remained in midair, rocking back and forth. And ten dollars to the person who doesn’t think of someone being hanged from a tree until dead.

I took a few steps closer to the truck. The guy who had stopped me asked, “You want something?”

“I’m looking for James King.”

“You’re looking at him.”

“You’re him?”

“No. Him.” He jerked his gloved thumb toward the man with the chain saw. The man in the trees was wearing a white safety helmet and a pair of protective goggles. The goggles made him look like a bug. The man on the ground called up to him, “Hey, Jimmy! Someone here to see you, man.”

James King pulled a lever in his bucket, and immediately the crane began to lower him. He gazed down at me as he descended, or so it seemed; it was difficult to tell because of the goggles. He held the chain saw up near his chest, as if at arms. The blade caught the sunlight on the way down. The bucket was swinging closer to me than I’d expected, and my temptation was to step back. I resisted it. For one thing, the wood chipper was only a few feet behind me. It was still running, still humming, still ready for whatever might be tossed into it. But more than that, an image flashed through my mind. It was of the boy at the parade. The boy with the balloon. It was the image of him standing by as his mother was being placed in the back of an ambulance. The shadow of the bucket swung over my head. But I didn’t budge. This just wasn’t the time to give, not even an inch.

The bucket stopped less than a foot from the ground. James King stepped out of it. He was still holding the chain saw at arms. Above him, directly over his head, the large severed limb continued to sway and rock, side to side.

IT WASN’T HIM.

He was an angry man, possibly a violent man. When he pulled off his helmet and goggles, I saw a man in his late twenties already losing his thinning hair. He had enough of his mother’s face to warrant some sympathies. The thought even dashed swiftly through my brain that he had the eyes of his mother’s dog. His skin was ruddy, recently and harshly burned by the sun. He wore a thick Fu Manchu–style mustache, in need of a trim. There was practically more hair on his lip than remained on his head. He lit up a cigarette while we talked, and the smoke seemed to leach right into his skin.

He sat on the retaining wall overlooking the river. He’d set the chain saw down gently next to him, as if he might snatch it back up without warning.

“I still hate her. I guess I’ll rot in hell, but I can’t help it. She destroyed my family. Here’re my parents, taking her in, and what does she do? She puts a spike right in my father’s heart. Then what? She turns around and becomes a
nun
? She was a little teenage slut, and then she becomes a nun? That’s great, huh? I guess she’s ‘saved.’ ” He made the sarcastic quotation marks in the air. “How about saving my damn father? Ever think of that? Do you know what happens to a person’s reputation when he gets accused of something like that? He got cleared, but so what? The stain is there, man. You can’t get it out. Everywhere he went after that, you could just see it. He was the guy who maybe raped his own niece. He lost friends. He lost his job. His life was over, it was just a matter of waiting around until he died. Meanwhile, little bitch Maggie is off with her nuns. Well, I guess she finally got her ending, too. My crazy mother went to the funeral. Not me, man. No way in hell. As far as I’m concerned, they couldn’t dig her grave deep enough. All the way to hell’s what I’d like. Jesus. Don’t get me started.”

It was a little late to avoid. He finished his cigarette and lit another one. The move was seamless.

“You know, when we were kids, I liked her. She was my only cousin, and we used to play together. Maggie kind of dropped me once she became a teenager. I guess that’s normal, I don’t know. She was getting into boys. Shit. Like I’m suddenly a frog or something? Aw, man, Uncle Ronnie and Aunt June. That nigger breaks in and kills them in their frigging beds. This is me rotting in hell again, man, but I wish he’d dragged Maggie out from under her bed and killed her, too. Why not? She’s dead now anyway. But at least my old man would’ve been spared all that crap.”

He threw his cigarette away in disgust. I half expected him to grab up the chain saw and start to work on the retaining wall. Instead, he stared off into space.

I looked past him to the river. Halfway across, a barge was being nudged upriver by a towboat. I don’t know where they came up with the name “tugboat.” I’ve been staring all my life out at the water that runs around this island, and not once have I ever seen one of those boats tugging anything. They
push
. They settle up against the rear of something fifty times their size, and they start pushing. I know it’s a metaphor for something, but in all these years, I’ve never quite placed it.

James King was not Nightmare. He was
describing
nightmares, but that was as far as it went. He told me that he had taken Margaret’s suicide note because he wanted to plunge a knife into it, to rip it into a hundred shreds, to spit on it and burn it. Phyllis Scott would no doubt posit that King had some “unresolved issues.” Sadly, ravaging his cousin’s final words probably hadn’t given the man anything near the “closure” he sought. I was looking at an open wound sitting on the retaining wall. Open and oozing and aching.

But I wasn’t looking at Nightmare. James King wasn’t holding Philip Byron. He wasn’t playing puppet master to Angel Ramos. When I’d checked in with the Parks Department administrative office at the Arsenal, I’d been told at first that James King was out of town, on vacation in Florida. A second look at the records had shown that—no—his vacation had ended just the day before. Monday. He’d remained in Florida an extra day to avoid traveling on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Today was King’s first day back at work. King confirmed that for me. So did his sunburned face.

But even more than all that was the simple fact that he made no effort whatsoever to disguise a character that seemed all too capable of going to a very dark place and considering very dark deeds. Charlie Burke says to doubt everything. Fine. But James King gave me nothing to doubt. He pleaded guilty to ongoing rage and to an impotent act of revenge on his cousin’s suicide note. More than the fact that he had been more than a thousand miles away during the past week of carnage, those were his alibis.

I thanked him for his time. He placed his hands behind him on the wall and leaned back. For a moment I thought he was going to swing his legs over his head and follow his cousin to the grave. He looked miserable.

He looked off to his left. “Funny,” he said.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing, really. I was just thinking about Maggie. She was a drunk, you know.”

“I know about that.”

“Yeah. A drunk and a nun and now dead. Some life. Back when she was a teenager, after my aunt and uncle were killed and everything? Before she got attacked and accused my father of being the one who did it, we kind of got to be friends again. For a little while. She really needed someone to talk to. For a while, it was me.” He stroked his mustache as his thoughts turned a little more gently to the past. “She had a huge crush on the guy who prosecuted her parents’ killer. Huge crush. She was all of sixteen and seventeen, and she kept telling me how she was in love and she bet he was in love with her, too, and how one day they’d get married and everything would be great. She’d be the queen in her castle. You know how girls can get.”

“Sure,” I said. From just outside the park, I heard several sirens. Police. Ambulance. I couldn’t say which. From the corner of my eye, I saw two men in suits take off running in the direction of York Avenue.

King picked up the chain saw and cradled it in his lap. A second set of sirens kicked up. These seemed to be coming from the direction of Gracie Mansion. King hoisted the chain saw up onto his shoulder as if he were Paul Bunyan. A smirk of sorts—it was hard to tell—appeared beneath the mustache.

“If Maggie’s dreams had come true, none of that other stuff would’ve happened. Maybe my father’d still be alive.” This time he let out a small laugh. “And Maggie’d have been a big deal. Queen of the whole city.”

“What do you mean?”

Something was definitely going on. A cop on a bicycle was pedaling our way as fast as he could.

“The prosecutor,” King said. “Maggie’s dreamboat. That was Martin Leavitt. He was a big hotshot in Brooklyn at the time. Mr. Law and Order. If she really could’ve landed him, she’d be fat and happy now. It would’ve all been different, just like she said. Up at that mansion. Might not be a castle, but I’ll bet Maggie’d have been all right with that.”

“Leavitt?”

The bicycle cop flew by, his legs pumping like twin pistons. His face was a mask of grimness.

King slid off the wall. “Hey, man, where’s the fire?”

Still more sirens sounded. I wheeled around. The feeling came over me again, the one like I was in a tunnel. I was standing stock-still, but it felt like everything around me was rushing past at breakneck speed. It was enough of a feeling that I must have staggered. King grabbed hold of my arm.

“Hey, man, are you okay?”

PIER 17 JUTS OUT INTO THE EAST RIVER JUST A FEW BLOCKS NORTH OF Wall Street. Until the early eighties, it was just one more on the growing list of Manhattan’s abandoned piers, home to seagulls, drunks, junkies and a few gay men looking for another few gay men. The only feature of note was the nearby Fulton Fish Market, which operated out of mainly open-air stalls located along the water running north from the pier, primarily in the shadow of the elevated FDR Drive.

That all changed when an urban development group called the Rouse Company struck a deal with the city to develop the pier, along with a portion of the real estate adjacent to it, for commercial purposes. They called it the South Street Seaport. The original vision of the Rouse Company was an urban mall stretching all the way north along the river to the Brooklyn Bridge, a quarter mile away from the pier. This plan, however, would have required more cooperation from the people who controlled the Fulton Fish Market (a loose consortium of Chinese and Italian mafia, along with, of course, the fishmongers themselves) than those people were willing to provide. So the plans got scaled back somewhat. The Rouse Company recobbled the foot of Fulton Street and renovated the existing buildings, most of which dated back to the seventeen hundreds and the area’s heyday as the city’s thriving boatbuilding district, but which, like the piers, had become increasingly ghostlike over the years as New York’s maritime identity diminished. Vintage streetlamps were installed, and a general “Ye Olde” flavor was mandated for the signage of the merchants who were subsequently lured to the area.

Meanwhile, out on Pier 17 itself, a three-story glass and metal structure was erected. A pavilion. A faux-weathered brass roof was bolted into place, and there it was: a large, light-filled shopping mall on Manhattan’s East River. The Gap, Sharper Image, Banana Republic . . . only a shut-in or an isolated Montanan doesn’t know the general run of stores that populate these kinds of places.

There’s general agreement that the success of the South Street Seaport mall has been somewhat less than what either the Rouse Company or the merchants who pay their exorbitant rents to do business there had hoped it would be. I can recall stopping at the place with Margo one Christmas Eve and our being two of seven shoppers in the entire mall; a hired chorus of around twenty had stood at the garland-wrapped railing overlooking the main floor and serenaded us with holiday tunes.