Speak of the Devil (32 page)

“When she killed herself. I’m assuming she was drinking at that point.”

The nun looked down at the ground. “She was in a lot of pain this time. This time was different. She had . . . She was difficult to talk to. She felt hopeless.”

“Did you have any idea exactly how desperate she was? Had she ever mentioned suicide before?” The young nun raised her head and looked for a long time out at the small fountain. I watched as her dark eyes began to glisten. She said nothing. “Natividad?”

“I should have known.” Her voice wasn’t much louder than a whisper.

“Why should you have known?”

“I just should have. She did not have to die like that. I should have been a better friend. I should have saved her. I knew she was in pain.”

“But you didn’t know she was going to kill herself. Isn’t that right?”

The whisper again. “I don’t know. Maybe I did.”

A thought occurred to me. “Sister Margaret was found out in Prospect Park. All the way out in Brooklyn. That’s an awfully long way from here.”

“That is where she used to live. Before she joined the order.”

“Is that why she went all the way out there to kill herself?”

She looked over at me. Her face seemed preposterously small inside the white wimple. Her cheeks pressed against the hard fabric. “I cannot answer your questions.”

“Cannot or will not?”

“Margaret was my only friend here. I’m very lonely without her.”

“Natividad. Did Sister Margaret have addiction problems that went beyond alcohol? Did Margaret have a drug problem?”

“No.”

“You say that with certainty.” Or, I thought, too quickly.

“Because it’s true.”

“And you would have known? If she had a problem like that, you would have known?”

“Yes.”

I pulled out the picture of Angel Ramos. I’d asked Sister Mary to get it for me. I set it down on the bench between us. “Did you ever see Sister Margaret with this man?”

“No.”

“Did Sister Margaret ever say anything about someone named Angel? Or Ramos?”

“No.”

“Except for when she went there the last time, did Sister Margaret go out to Brooklyn often? Did she visit with her family?”

“Her parents are both dead.”

“Any other family?”

“She did not see them.”

“So . . . trips to Brooklyn? That you were aware of? For any reason?”

“No.”

“Sister Natividad, are you keeping something from me?” She didn’t answer. I tapped a finger against the photograph on the bench. “This man is responsible for the deaths of many people. In fact, he murdered a woman just last night. In Brooklyn, as a matter of fact.” The nun started but remained silent. “Somehow this man knew Margaret. His note to the convent and Margaret’s suicide note have too much in common to be coincidence. I don’t understand the connection or why he’s making it, but it’s there. This man is evil. He’s a bad man. He’s a drug dealer, among plenty of other things. Do you think it’s possible that Margaret . . . that your friend was somehow involved with this man?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t
think
so.”

“I don’t know.”

“But if anyone here knows, it would be you. Isn’t that right? You were her best friend here. You two talked. You shared your thoughts.”

“She talked to people at her meetings, too. When she went. She said she felt good talking with strangers. She said sometimes it was easier than talking with God. Or with the other sisters.”

“You’re talking about A.A. meetings?”

She nodded.

“Do you know where she went to her meetings? Did she go to the same place or did she move around?” I knew that some alcoholics prefer going to different meetings. “Grazing” was how it was put to me once.

“There is one she liked in Columbia.”

“Columbia. You mean Columbia University?”

“Yes. It’s not only with regular people but also with students. Margaret liked that. She used to tease me that I should come with her and meet a nice college boy.”

“I didn’t know nuns had time for nice college boys.”

“It was a joke. She was teasing me.”

“Did she ever mention anyone in particular who she enjoyed seeing when she went to the meetings?”

“Yes, she did. There is a man named Bill. She said Bill was a nice person. She enjoyed talking with him.”

“Bill. Any last name?”

“I think no one says their last name.”

“What was Margaret’s last name, by the way?” I asked.

“It was King. She was Margaret King.”

“You miss her,” I said.

She smiled. “I talk to her every day. Out here, where she was happy.”

I looked around the tiny arbor. It was pleasant but not a lot of space. A fifteen-by-fifteen square within which to be happy. I stood up.

“Well, when you talk with her again . . .” I stopped. I had no closer. I looked down dumbly at the young nun. I heard a splashing sound, and the finches darted from the fountain and over the roof of the convent.

A small smile flickered on the nun’s face. “Maybe she was listening to us the whole time already.”

I looked at my watch. Closing on ten. If that’s the case, I thought, I wish to hell she’d start speaking up.

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEETING OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS was held in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel, a barrel-shaped brick building on the east side of the campus. It was a windowless, bunkerlike room with mud-colored walls, the only illumination coming from a dozen banged-metal wall sconces that gave off little pie slices of dirty light. I had been told by the helpful woman in the administration office that every Friday and Saturday night, the place served as a college coffeehouse.

I came down into the room via a spiral stone staircase. The tables had been shoved against the wall, and several dozen folding chairs were lined up in a pair of semicircles, the open ends of which faced a cheap pine podium. The smell of caffeine permeated the room. Hell, the
feel
of caffeine permeated the room.

There was no one there. I’d called the number Information gave me, and the person who’d answered let me know there was a meeting at ten. I’d hoped to catch the tail end of it. Or, barring that, a straggler or two. But no luck. I went over to the industrial-sized coffeemaker on the chipped card table and put my hand on it. Still a little warm. I ran an inch into a Styrofoam cup and sampled it. Quaker State could have been their supplier. I emptied the cup into a potted ficus tree, realizing too late that it was a plastic potted ficus tree.

I pounded back up the spiral stairs into the sun. I had half a mind to pop down the few blocks to Cannon’s and have my mother’s ex-husband slide me a short glass. The next meeting in the basement was scheduled for twelve-thirty, and I wasn’t going to hang around for that.

Halfway across campus, I got an idea. I retraced my steps to the bunker. I scribbled out a note on the back of one of my cards and propped it on the coffeemaker, tucked into the red plastic handle.

Back outside, my cell phone went off just as I reached Broadway. It wasn’t Bill. How nuts would that have been? It was Tommy Carroll returning my call. I ducked back inside the university gates to keep down the traffic noise.

Carroll got straight to the point. “Stacy says you’ve got something about Nightmare’s notes. What is it?”

“Do you have his notes with you?”

“No. Just tell me what you’ve got.”

I told him what I had discovered—actually, what Sister Natividad had discovered—about the similarities in the notes from Nightmare and the one written by Sister Margaret King sometime before she slipped into the bushes in Prospect Park and opened up both her wrists. Carroll listened without comment as I told him about my talk with Sister Natividad. I told him I wasn’t convinced that Sister Margaret might not have had a drug situation on top of her alcohol dependency. “It’s the only real link with Ramos that I can imagine. Margaret King was from Brooklyn. It’s a stretch, but maybe there’s something there.”

Carroll gave me a long silence to listen to after I finished. Then he said, “Drop it.”

“Drop it? Are you kidding? Margaret King is the link between Ramos and the convent. The bastard was signaling that in his note. That’s why I wanted to take a look at the other—”

“So what? So some dead nun is the link.”

“You don’t find that interesting?”

“What I don’t find it is helpful. We’ve got until five o’clock to collar this Ramos prick. What your nun has to do with any of this doesn’t get us any closer to finding him. Stay on point.”

Two women walked by laughing. Graduate students. Or maybe even professors. One of them looked astonishingly like Jenny Gray. The Jenny Gray of six years ago. She looked over at me and broke off the laughter. It only made the similarity all the stronger. I lost a few perfectly good heartbeats. I could also feel the blood rising to my cheeks. I switched ears on the phone and shifted the topic.

“By the way, thanks for telling Leonard Cox how to find me this morning,” I said. I went ahead and quoted Margo. “Ever hear of a phone? Or waiting until a decent hour?”

“You were with that girl in Fort Pete. She ends up on the slab. I’m not going to sit on my ass until the sun comes up before I find out what the hell went on.”

“I guess your pocket-cop gave you his report.”

“Don’t you fucking ‘pocket-cop’ me, Malone. I’m the commissioner. They’re
all
in my pocket. Don’t smart-ass me. Cox told me you had nothing. He did say she scratched your face up pretty good.”

“Ruined my modeling career,” I said. “So anything on her murder?”

“Forensics might come up with something. Miss Bia was definitely killed in the van. They’ve determined that already. The body wasn’t moved. But they might get something off her to tell us where she’d been before she was killed.”

“Expect fibers from the seat of my rental car.”

“They’ve been informed about that. The point is, Ramos either took off Byron’s finger on-site, which I doubt, or else brought it with him. Forensics says it was still fresh. That tells me he had Byron somewhere nearby. The cops picked up a pimp who runs girls in and out of those vans. He’s being worked on. He says an undercover cop was out there last night and took some freebies from his girls, then took a piece out of his skull with a jack. I’ve got a feeling it wasn’t any cop any of us know about.”

“You always had good instincts, Tommy. Except you can drop the freebies part. Didn’t happen. Listen, I’m a little unclear about a few things. Cox. He wasn’t on duty last night. At least he wasn’t when he showed up at Margo’s. He was in his civvies.”

“What of it?”

“He told me he’s saturated in the hood. He knows all the players. Ramos. Donna Bia.”

“Of course. That’s how it works. Everyone knows everyone. My cops better damn well know the scum in their own territory. So what?”

“Nothing, I guess. I’m just not clear on all the logistics. Who found my car? Cox or the cops?”

“Cox is a cop. Or are you forgetting?”

“I still don’t see the point of his coming by Margo’s.”

“I explained that. You spent time with this Bia girl, and you didn’t call in a report.”

“I guess I’d never have made a very good cop after all,” I said. “Probably a good thing I bailed.”

“I’ve got to get going. What’s your plan?”

“To be honest, I don’t really have one. I was all hot for the suicide nun, but you just threw water on it.”

“Drop the nun,” he said again. “Focus on Ramos. Think with your feet.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything more—or I guess the mayor hasn’t—from Ramos?”

“We heard Philip Byron’s third severed finger last night inside that whore’s mouth. The mayor thinks that’s a pretty loud message. So do I.”

“This thing is going to collapse all around him, Tommy. You know that, don’t you? It’s going to collapse around both of you. It can’t stay contained. Cox said one thing last night that I agree with: Angel has lost it. Cox figures he’s popping and snorting and shooting anything he can lay his hands on; he’s probably given up sleep. He’s degenerating. Last week, in a funny way, he was a smooth cookie about all this. Now he’s slicing open his girlfriend’s throat and sticking severed fingers in her mouth? I wouldn’t hold much truck with this five o’clock thing if I were you. That was yesterday’s rant. This is a million dead brain cells later.”

“The minute I hear from forensics, we’re hitting the pavement. We’ve got the Bia murder now. There’s nothing we need to contain about a dead whore. I can flood the area with blue. We’re going to get this bastard by the end of the day if I have to fucking send tanks down the middle of Culver Boulevard.”

“I’m glad to hear you’ve got a plan,” I said.

“Look who’s talking.”

I PICKED UP A RENTAL CAR AT NATIONWIDE ON SEVENTY-SEVENTH Street, just east of Broadway. There was an accident on the approach to the Queensboro Bridge, so I took the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. I hate tunnels. By the time I’m halfway through them, I’ve forgotten how to breathe normally and I’m drenched in sweat. I don’t know why it’s not as severe in the subways, but it isn’t. Phyllis Scott has a theory or two about the tunnel thing, all Freudian, of course. Margo’s got her own theory. Even Jigs Dugan has weighed in on it. I’m so glad everybody gets to take a crack at it. Here’s my theory: I don’t like tunnels.

Charlie Burke was eating a sandwich in front of his television. He was watching a movie about a pair of drag queens driving across the Australian outback.

“Where’s Charlie Burke?” I cried. “What have you done with him?”

“Shut up. Do you want a sandwich?”

“Do I have to fix it myself?”

“Yeah. I just told the help they could spend the day out on my yacht. Sorry.”

“What’ve you got there?”

“Peanut butter.”

“And?”

“And bread.”

“Jesus, Charlie, it’s hell-in-a-handbasket time around here.”

I found some honey in the cabinet and showed him what a more complete sandwich looks like. I asked if he was hell-bent on seeing how things worked out for the Australian drag queens or whether he could spare a few minutes to maybe help me track down a cold-blooded killer and save untold numbers of lives.