Speak of the Devil (11 page)

“We know what you know,” Carroll said.

I indicated the letter. “And I know more than most.”

Leavitt folded his cloth napkin precisely and set it on the table. “Commissioner Carroll says we can count on you, Mr. Malone. I knew your father. Not terribly well, but we had some dealings. And of course I knew his reputation. I had great respect for Harlan Scott.”

“So did I,” I said, maybe a little more tersely than I needed to.

“Tommy says you caught his best genes.”

“Well, Tommy ain’t the most poetical hen in the house. But I’ll take the compliment.”

Leavitt nodded. “I understand you were planning at one time to follow in his footsteps.”

I glanced over at my father’s successor, who was giving his fork a hard look. “I took a few steps in that direction,” I said. “Some things happened and I made an adjustment. I decided the badge might be a little too heavy to carry around after all. I like being a little lighter on my feet.”

Carroll set the fork down, made sure his eyes were nice and dead by the time they met mine. The mayor didn’t seem to notice. He leaned forward and took the letter from me and gazed at it grimly. “We want you to help us stop this creep from doing any more damage, Mr. Malone.”

I picked up my coffee mug. “I’d be happy to, Mr. Mayor. But genes or no genes, I don’t know what you think I can do.”

“We’re going to pay him,” Leavitt said.

“You’re going to
pay
him? You’re going to give this creep a million bucks?”

“That’s what he wants in order to stop. I’m not going to have him ravaging my city. He’s proved his point.”

I looked from Leavitt to Carroll and back again. Good poker faces. “I’m guessing you gentlemen didn’t bring me here to see if I had a spare million on me.”

“You’re going to deliver the money,” Carroll said flatly. He reached out and placed a hand firmly on my wounded shoulder. “That’s what you’re going to do. And then you’re going to never breathe a word about it.”

NIGHTMARE HAD DELIVERED A SECOND LETTER. HE’D LEFT IT IN AN envelope in a freezer bag, tucked beneath the handful of frozen turkeys that remained in the horizontal cooler at a Gristedes grocery store two blocks from the mayor’s residence. A call had come in to the City Hall switchboard at around three-thirty in the morning. The caller was a male with a slight Hispanic accent who identified himself as “the mayor’s worst nightmare.” The operator described him as soft-spoken. The caller had said, “Tell the mayor that if he wants to stop the killings and is ready to talk turkey, he should go buy one at the Gristedes on York. No delay. If you don’t deliver this message immediately, the blood will be on your hands.”

The operator had contacted Philip Byron immediately at his home and played the message for him. Byron had phoned Tommy Carroll, and the two met in front of the Gristedes within the hour. Carroll was armed with a warrant to seize the store’s security-camera tape for the past twenty-four hours. Not ten minutes after they arrived, they were joined by two members of the police department’s bomb squad who’d brought a pair of sniffer dogs. Two clerks, the night manager and four customers were evacuated to a coffee shop two blocks away, where a patrolman was assigned to keep them from leaving until Carroll questioned them. Tommy Carroll and Philip Byron stood next to a barrel of pumpkins while the bomb squad and their dogs traveled up and down the aisles and through the rear storage area. The letter was located beneath the turkeys within five minutes, but Commissioner Carroll had instructed that it not be removed until the bomb sweep was completed.

The men from the bomb squad gave the store a clean bill of health just after five in the morning. Carroll put the plastic freezer bag containing the envelope and letter into a holiday gift bag that he’d appropriated from a display near the front of the store, then led Philip Byron up the block to the coffee shop to question the people they’d detained. Nobody reported seeing anyone poking about in the horizontal freezer section. Carroll took statements from the four customers as to what items each was shopping for in the Gristedes at that hour of the morning. He had them photographed by the patrolman, took their names and addresses and released them. Then he badgered the night manager and the two clerks for descriptions of the people who had come into the store after midnight, which was when their shifts had begun. One of the clerks, a lanky black guy with a silver earring, remembered “a couple of bitches that can kiss my ass” who came in around two o’clock and tried to walk off with two pints of Ben & Jerry’s. “They was dustin’, dude. High as a kite. You want to arrest somebody, those muthafuckas is prime.”

The two “muthafuckas” aside, the only customer coming into the store between midnight and three-thirty who’d drawn any of the employees’ attention was a nun who, according to the night manager, arrived at around three.

“It’s just not something you see a lot,” the night manager said. “She had all the nun stuff on. The big hat and everything?”

The clerk with the earring corroborated. “Total penguin, you know what I’m saying? Got the big old blinders on? And our lady’s tall, too, Jack. Like six-one or something. That shit’s all fucked up, man.”

The nun hadn’t purchased anything. According to the night manager, she’d come into the store, disappeared down one of the aisles and was back out the door in five minutes.

The smart-mouthed clerk chimed in again. “A religious fucking experience. Little lady penguin, man. What’s that about?”

After questioning the employees a little longer, Carroll and Philip Byron accompanied them back to the store, where Carroll procured the security tapes. Byron had phoned the mayor to alert him to what was going on. Leavitt met Carroll and Byron at the front door of Gracie Mansion and took them directly to his office in the rear of the mansion, overlooking the East River, where they studied the security tape and the contents of the plastic freezer bag.

That was then. Approximately six o’clock in the morning.

I got my look at around eight.

“IT’S A MAN.”

“What do you mean, it’s a man?”

“I mean it’s a man.”

“That’s a nun.”

“It’s not really a nun.”

“You’ve got X-ray vision?”

“Just wait a second. You’ll see.”

The Gristedes had eight security cameras in the store, though only four of the eight were recording at any one time. The screen I was looking at was divided into four equal squares. Each camera’s image appeared in one of the squares for about ten seconds before the next camera in the rotation clicked in. The nun had made her—or his—appearance in the upper-right-hand portion of the screen just after coming into the store. Each camera recorded an image every two seconds, so the nun’s movement through the produce section was staccato, like that of a figure in an unsophisticated video game. The nun moved in five of these stagger steps right off the screen. A few seconds later, the next camera picked her up.

Him.

It.

Tommy Carroll and I were leaning in close to the screen. Carroll had his finger poised above the pause button on the video player. Martin Leavitt was off by the bay window, watching the sun burning its way through the white sky over the East River.

“We’re estimating around six feet,” Carroll said. “It’s hard to tell with that headgear. You see the pillar with the bananas on it? Top of the nun’s head comes up around that second batch from the top. I called a patrolman to go in and get me a measurement.”

“Nun. Six feet. We can nail this thing in no time.”

Tommy Carroll looked up from the screen. “Your old man had a sarcastic streak. I liked it a lot better in him.”

The next camera picked up the figure. A bag of some sort hung from the nun’s right shoulder.

“This whole nun thing is screwy,” I said. “Have we got ourselves a Norman Bates here?”

“Who’s Norman Bates?”

“You don’t know your Alfred Hitchcock?”

Carroll was still looking horrible. “Who’s Norman Bates?”

“
Psycho
. The Hitchcock movie. Killed his mother, then dressed up in her clothes whenever he got the burr up his tail to go kill someone.”

“This guy’s not dressing up like his mother. He’s dressing up like a nun. Whose mother is a nun?”

I shrugged. “Mother Superior? Mother. Nun. All I’m saying is the getup must mean something.”

“Right. Something weird.” Carroll turned back to the screen. “Here. Look.”

He tapped his finger against the square in the lower-left quadrant. The image jumped as a new camera clicked in. The horizontal freezer stretched from the bottom of the image to the top. With the lens the camera was using, the freezer looked absurdly long. The nun appeared. First the wimple, then, in the next image, the entire figure. Two images later, the nun was bending over the freezer. In the next image, something shiny was in the nun’s hand. It was the plastic freezer bag containing the envelope.

“Wait,” Carroll said again. Over by the window, Leavitt continued to gaze out at the river, almost as if he’d lost interest.

On-screen, the nun was stuffing the freezer bag beneath one of the turkeys. In the following image, the nun was standing upright again. So far we hadn’t seen a single image of the face.

“That’s what the habit is about,” I said. “It obscures the face.”

“Wait,” Carroll said a third time. The nun pulled something from the shoulder bag and turned away from the camera. Deliberately, it seemed. Carroll pressed the pause button just as the nun turned back. The wimple was tilted up, and the nun was looking directly at the camera. The nun was wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses and a ridiculously large, droopy and obviously fake mustache.

The nun was giving the camera the finger.

IT WASN’T UNTIL SEVEN YEARS AFTER MY FATHER HAD ABRUPTLY stepped down as police commissioner—and disappeared soon after—that the courts weighed in to officially pronounce him dead. It would have been nice to believe that what had really happened was that he simply dropped out of sight by his own choosing and moved on to a quiet incognito life somewhere in the Caribbean, grizzly gray beard, open-collared shirt, leathery tan, maybe the occasional dalliance with the occasional turista. I doubt his wife would appreciate that version of events as much as I do, but that’s a beef I’ve always had about Phyllis Scott: no imagination. Coupled with a haughty self-regard that leaves precious little room for the consideration of others. Funny thing, since she’s a psychiatrist, and not an inexpensive one. You’d think that a healthy degree of compassion and empathy would be one of the job requirements. Imagination, too. But I guess not. Her practice has never been more booming. It seems there are plenty of wealthy, uncentered New Yorkers willing to spill their hearts and guts out to a cold machine like Phyllis Scott to the tune of two hundred dollars an hour. I don’t get it. I’d think an hour in a room with a frisky puppy would do as much for a person’s mental health and would cost a lot less money. But what do I know?

Phyllis runs her practice out of the first floor of the town house she shared with my father on Sixty-sixth Street, right off Park Avenue. Beside the scores of bitter, befuddled, destructive, frightened and generally unhappy people who have spent time within the building’s walls (I’m speaking clinically here), the town house has also been terra cognita to Paul and Elizabeth Scott, my father and Phyllis’s two children. My half siblings. Elizabeth I like. She never begrudged me and my mother our status as the marginal second family. The open secret. Her kindness to my mother, especially, has always won rave reviews from me. Paul is another story, and not one I’d pick up and read if I had a choice.

Paul Scott was coming down the steps of his mother’s town house as I approached. I had hoofed it over from Gracie Mansion after viewing the Gristedes tape and going over so-called Nightmare’s latest message. When Paul spotted me, he darkened like a rain cloud. He stopped on the bottom step. I’m sure the height advantage made him feel superior. I noticed a slight discoloration next to his right eye. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m thinking about buying the place and wanted to come by and kick the tires.”

“Very funny.”

Paul looked a lot like his mother, a fact I’ll admit gave him not unpleasant features. Unfortunately, he tended to do unpleasant things with them. He was doing one of those things now. This particular one made him look like he was sniffing a foul odor.

“I’m here to see your mother.” I said. “Is the doctor in?”

“Why do you want to see her?”

“I’m selling raffle tickets. Want one?”

He made his sniffing face again. “She’s busy.”

“I’m sure she is. She’s expecting me. I’ll bet she’s been primping and prepping for this day for nearly a week. I know I have.”

“You’re a real stooge, Malone, you know that?”

It was a point of honor with Paul Scott that he had never in his life uttered my first name. At least not to my face. The closest he ever got was a phase in the beginning of his voice-cracking years when he tried to get some mileage out of referring to me as “Shitz.” I gave him ten free passes before rewarding him with a bloody nose. Immediately thereafter, his mother the top-shelf shrink declared that I had “anger issues.”

“Mommie dearest summoned me a few days ago,” I said when he showed no sign of vacating the steps. “We have an appointment.”

“Professionally?” He sounded horrified.

“Not today, but who knows? Maybe I can fit in a little couch time before I go. I’m sure my unresolved conflicts would sink the
Titanic
.”

“I’ve got to go,” Paul said curtly. And he went. No hugs, no kisses. I can’t say whether his stiffness as he moved down the sidewalk was because he knew I was watching him or if he was having troubles with the stick up his tail. I headed up the steps and pushed the buzzer. A few seconds later, the door clicked and I pushed it open.

The black and white tiles of Phyllis’s enclosed entryway were set at a diagonal, which I would think the more loosely tethered of her patients might find disorienting, even a little bit threatening. On the left was the glass and metal door that her patients used to access her waiting area and office. A second buzzer was required to gain entrance. The door to the town house itself was a heavy oak slab that required a little muscle to push open. There was a second click, and I leaned into the door with my good shoulder.