All I Did Was Shoot My Man (13 page)

25

THE SUN WAS GONE
when Hush parked on a side street five blocks from the address Luke Nye gave me. It was a square, flat-roofed pink stucco house not far from the ocean in a run-down but quiet part of Coney Island.

The doorway was inside a vestibule, so when no one answered our knock I used my tools to pick the lock and go in—we had already donned thin cotton gloves.

The first thing Hush did when we entered was to sniff the stale air.

“Huh,” he said.

It was a small, impersonal home. The living room had a couch, standing on short wooden legs, and a tan carpet made from cheap synthetic fiber. It could have been a motel room at the Jersey Shore—in 1957.

The bedroom had an unmade queen-sized bed, a dresser with three drawers, and a maple chair. There were various pants and shirts, shoes and socks strewn on the floor. Dust devils conferred in the corners, and I saw three small roaches rubbing antennae on the barred windowsill.

The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes in gray water. The roaches met in greater numbers there.

“Look,” Hush said.

At the end of the kitchen counter was a door with two or three plastic garbage bags stuffed into the crack at bottom.

“That’s where the smell is coming from,” Hush added.

“ What smell?”

Instead of answering, the retired professional killer handed me a blue handkerchief he took from his back pocket. He had a yellow one for his mouth and nose.

When he yanked the door open it seemed as if the room was flooded with poison gas.

The roaches froze for a moment and then headed for the smell.

We did too.

Between the washer and dryer, tied to a kitchen chair, sat Durleth “Stumpy” Brown. His once pink skin was now gray and his flabby face had hardened into a mask. My eyes stung from the gases his body released.

With three fingers of his left hand Hush touched Stumpy’s forehead. Almost immediately a huge gutter roach shot out of the dead man’s right nostril. The creature hit the floor and scrambled out between my black shoes. It was then I became aware of the buzzing of flies.

“They tortured him,” Hush said.

“They’re torturing me.”

The killer laughed, he really laughed. It was a jovial, friendly guffaw.

I learned more about Hush in that moment than I ever wanted to know.

“Let’s get outta here,” I said.

“ What did we come for?” he asked, turning to face me.

“ What they already have.”

26

I GOT HOME
at nearly midnight. The house felt empty, but maybe that was just me.

I went to the hall bathroom and got in the shower. Standing in the doorless stall, under the ice-cold spray, I shivered, and castigated myself for doing wrong even when I was trying to do right.

There was a cardinal rule in boxing: You can’t win if you don’t throw punches, but when you go on the offensive you have to accept the reality that you will most likely get hit. That’s why so many fighters are counterpunchers—they wait for their opponent to make the mistake.

I had taken the initiative; moved to get Zella’s conviction overturned. Shuddering from the cold, I knew that Stumpy and Bingo had been casualties of my ill-considered quest. Rather than helping, I made things worse—much worse.

“You remember when we used to take showers together?”

Katrina was one of the few people who could sneak up on me. I used to kid her that this stealth explained how she roped me into marriage—the joke wore thin in time.

She was wearing a black lace teddy under a yellow-and-black kimono. Her white skin was perfect, her eyes more engaging than I had seen them in years. She held a snifter in either hand, each loaded with a triple shot of cognac.

“Yeah,” I said. “You told me that you couldn’t take the cold.”

Katrina’s blond hair was piled up on her head rather carelessly. I knew she had been drinking because her slight Swedish accent became more pronounced when she was tipsy—tipsy, but not when she was full-out drunk.

I never understood this foreign inflection, seeing how she was born and raised in Middle America.

“I’m very delicate, Leonid.”

“Like white sharks and alabaster.”

“Like a voman.”

I stepped out of the shower and she handed me a plush red towel, leaning back against the sink as I rubbed and blotted the water from my body.

Katrina is a beautiful woman. Past fifty, she’d done everything to keep her body and face young. And though I’m not handsome I have the body of a fighter—hard and blunt. We both had something to look at, it’s just that we were no longer interested in looking.

She handed me a snifter.

If you can’t beat them, become them,
my father once told me.
That’s how the great cultures of the past ultimately tamed and therefore outlasted their conquerors.

THERE’S A SMALL ROOM
on the street side of our apartment. Sometimes we call it the TV room, at others the little front room. There’s just enough space for the maroon sofa and the royal blue stuffed chair, facing an old console TV. Katrina led me there and sat next to me. She clinked my glass and we both drank—deeply.

“I vanted to talk vit you, Leonid.”

I sat back and away from her saying “talk.”

“Sit up,” she said and I obeyed.

I was wearing my blue suit pants and a T-shirt that was once white.

“ Where are the kids?” I asked.

“Dimitri is vit his whore. Twill—who knows where he goes? He said he vas vorking for you. And Michelle is out somevair sucking on an old married man’s cock.”

Katrina and I were definitely man and wife. Maybe we were no longer in love but we knew how to get under each other’s skin.

“That’s something you know a lot about,” I said, wanting to attack my daughter’s attacker.

I downed the rest of the cognac and Katrina reached back behind the other side of the sofa, producing the new bottle. She poured me another drink.

“I vas looking for love,” she said, her blue diamond eyes staring into my brown ones.

To say I felt the stirrings of an erection would be a gross understatement. This biological reaction was shocking to me but not to Katrina. She looked down on the lengthwise tent of my trousers and shifted over, laying her left hand on it.

“I used to kiss yours,” she said. “I used to cry out for you.”

Her grip tightened and I thought about pushing the hand away. Instead I took another drink.

Katrina started moving her hand up toward my belly button and then down again.

“Do you vant to come like this?” she whispered. “Like a teenage boy on a date with some fast girl.”

“Ummmmmm.”

“Or do you vant me to show you what I have done with my lovers? Do you vant me to take you right here on this couch?” Her voice was getting stronger. “Do you vant to get on your knees and suck the pussy?”

“ What . . . ?” I said.

“Vat did you say?” she asked me. She leaned over and gave me a wet kiss.

“ What did you do?” I asked. “ With them.”

I already knew. One of her old boyfriends had hired a detective to take pictures of her with the new man. The jilted lover sent the photos to me, expecting that I would exact retribution. He miscalculated. I threatened him and put the pictures in my safe.

But hearing her tell me was better than any pictures. Having her position me and encourage my manhood was exactly what I needed right then.

I don’t think that Katrina was trying to help me. She was just angry at life and getting back at the world by seducing me. It made no sense but I wasn’t really thinking . . . “Shouldn’t I use a condom?” I remember asking at some point.

“I don’t need it anymore,” she said into my ear.

IN THE MORNING
I woke to find the empty fifth of cognac on the night table next to our bed. Naked, Katrina was on her back, half out from under the covers, and snoring. The erection from the night before reappeared but I was sober enough to ignore it this time.

I lurched from the bed and went down the hall, holding a towel around my waist in case one of our kids had come in during the night.

Another cold shower and I was out the door and down to the street. I felt like a young man with a hangover. My dick was waiting for any excuse, as my mind wandered from here to there with no direction, no reason.

I stopped at a greasy spoon on Seventy-first Street and ordered fried pork chops with an American cheese and garlic omelet. That, with home fries, white toast, and grape jelly, put enough poison in my system to slow down the rampaging hormones awakened by a woman who I now understood was overwhelmed by her change of life.

27

I DO MY
best thinking while walking, but sometimes I wonder if I’d be better off with the blinders of an office cubicle around me, facing a monitor with solitaire on it; the only thing on my mind would be the next card to play and if the boss might be walking by.

I didn’t feel guilty, not exactly. My emotion was more an uneasiness about having sex with my wife because my ex-girlfriend had asked me to come back. This conundrum seemed petty, childish even.

But I knew the perturbation over the drunken sex orgy with my wife was really just a blind for the murders I’d caused. Stumpy Brown, Bingo Haman, and there might have been more; certainly more was coming.

Walking down Tenth Avenue with artists, businessmen and -women, and the homeless, I tried to imagine that desk job. If the worst thing that happened in my life was getting fired because I was a slacker and replaced by a better-educated Hindu from Mumbai, if that was the cruelest event, then I’d feel that I was blessed.

But instead I was godless, blindfolded, and in line for execution by parties unknown. I did the right thing and got the wrong outcome. I could have been a lyric in the Dr. John song.

My cell phone throbbed somewhere between Thirtieth and Twenty-ninth.

“Boss?” Zephyra said.

“Yeah.”

“ What’s up today?”

“Not much.”

“I can see from the GPS of your cell phone that you’re headed south. Are you going to see Charles?”

I had to remember to have my tracker disconnected.

“Yeah,” I said. “Anything you want me to tell him?”

“No. Just hi.”

I WALKED
pretty fast, making it down to the intersection of Charles and Hudson Streets in the West Village before nine. A quarter of a block east and seven granite steps down was a shamrock green steel-reinforced door that could stymie a SWAT team or a platoon of advancing Russian militia.

All I had to do was stand in front of that door because a blank white card in my wallet sent out a pulse that made the denizen of the underground bunker aware of my presence.

Thirty seconds after I got there a voice said, “Come on in, LT.”

I pressed the door and it opened. I walked through and the mostly steel portal slammed behind.

Everything seemed as it always had; room after room filled with electronic devices used for intelligence gathering, flat-out spying, and, now and then, triggers for more aggressive acts.

Three chambers down I came to a cavernous space that was once the master bedroom of the subterranean apartment. Now the room was lined with computers and air conditioners. In the very center of these frigid electronics was a round Formica tabletop with a man-sized hole cut in the middle. Twelve plasma and LCD screens encircled this desk. These monitors flowed with images, texts, and less definable waves of color.

Sitting in the hole was a caramel-colored young Adonis. On top of his head were glasses with one blue and one red lens. These I knew he used to see images represented by colors beyond the range of human sight.

“Hey, Bug,” I said.

Tiny “Bug” Bateman (né Charles Bateman) had weighed three hundred pounds when we first met. Somewhere along the way in our dealings he became aware of Zephyra Ximenez. He fell in love with her phone patter and the image he found of her in the virtual world. She told him that he’d have to get in shape if he wanted even a chance with her.

Iran became his trainer and, eighteen months later, he’d lost forty-three percent of his body weight and sixty percent of his fat. Now he ran 10K races and bench-pressed two hundred pounds.

“Leonid,” the beautiful young man hailed.

“Bug,” I said. “You almost ready for a marathon?”

“Never.”

“ Why not?”

“Because a guy named Pheidippides, the first man to run what was to become known as the marathon, ran the distance to warn the Greek army about an enemy attack. He was successful but the exertion killed him. I have no death wish.”

“Did you get my text?” I asked. On the way down I sent a message to Bug about information I needed.

“Yeah. Let me call it up.”

While he was working I thought I’d fill in some gaps.

“Zephyra was asking me about you,” I ventured.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. She sounded like she wanted to know what you were up to.”

The computer genius smiled.

“ What’s up, Bug?”

“Z told me when we started going out that she was not an exclusive kinda girl. She said that she had a few men friends and didn’t want any of them clinging to her. So we made a deal that we’d get together only once and at most twice a week.

“I called her one time when I guess I shouldn’t have and she was obviously with somebody else. After that I started going out myself. I met this woman named Marcia, head of Western Hemisphere computer operations for Euro-Bank. I plugged a leak they had and she took me to Johannesburg for a weeklong vacation.”

“That’d do it,” I said.

“Here you go,” Bug announced. “Teresa Lesser has no regular cell phone but that doesn’t mean she might not have a throwaway. She hardly ever makes any outgoing calls from her landline. Up until four years ago she used to call a Margaret Rich once a week on Sundays but then that stopped. Rich is her maiden name. Margaret was probably her mother, probably died.

“For the last nine years she’s talked twice a week to various cell phones, all of them belonging to a woman named Claudia Burns.” Bug hit a few more keys and then said, “Ms. Burns is the executive assistant for a Johann Brighton at Rutgers Assurance Company.”

And curiouser yet.

“Can you pull up an employee flowchart for Rutgers?”

“Sure thing.”

While Bug hit keys and clicked around I wondered. What would Minnie Lesser’s mother have to do with the heist? I was the one who implicated Minnie’s boyfriend’s girlfriend. She had nothing to do with it—did she?

“ What you need, LT?” Bug asked.

“Are Johann Brighton and Antoinette Lowry along the same chain of command?”

He worked two mouses at once, moving data across a broad screen that hung from a metal stalk attached to the ceiling.

After some study he said, “No. They work in completely different sections. As a matter of fact they are entirely unconnected. He works under the auspices of the CEO, François Dernier, while she reports upward to the president of the company—Pat Rollins.”

“Can you get me the name, address, and phone number for this Claudia?”

“It’ll be on your phone and computer in under a minute.”

Almost as an afterthought I said, “ While you’re at it will you look up a guy named Seldon Arvinil?”

“Anything special?”

“I hope not. He lives in New York and is over forty—I think.”

I took a deep breath and turned to leave the frigid computer room. I hadn’t sat down because there was no chair for visitors in Bug’s electronic playground.

“Leonid,” he said to my back.

“ What?”

“There’s somebody upstairs in the apartment that I want you to see.”

“Somebody for me?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d he even know I was gonna be here?”

“All I can say is that you don’t have to worry. Take the second door on your left in the second room. That leads to the stairs.”