All I Did Was Shoot My Man (7 page)

12

KATRINA WAS STILL
snoring so I settled in on the cot in my office. Between the buffers of the traffic from the street and a solid oak door I was able to drift off; not that sleep was any succor.

Freud says that dreams use the content of the past day or so to chum the depths of a timeless unconscious.
That’s what my father taught me when I was eleven years old, wishing that I could go to a normal school. I wanted to learn about cowboys and steam engine trains, spacemen and naked women—all the things that I was sure other little kids were learning.

In the dream that night my father was lecturing about guilt.

He was wearing a white suit and a brown T-shirt. He was old, but because he was sitting behind an ivory-colored desk I couldn’t tell if he was infirm or not.

“A truly guilty man is like a maniac,” he was saying (maybe to me). “He doesn’t know his disposition because he believes in a set of rules that defy the beliefs of the worker.

“The worker deals in reality and rules. She cannot afford insanity or feel guilt because she is the law and the foundation upon which the law is based.

“You, Leonid,” he said, shifting his gaze in such a way that I was the only subject in the world. “You are both insane and guilty of terrible acts performed in the haze of your madness. You don’t know it. You don’t realize or even remember the crimes you have committed. You believe in the lies of the despot and have therefore sentenced yourself to the ultimate punishment.”

This pronouncement tore at my heart. I wanted to speak up, to deny the accusations leveled by my judge, my father. I tried to speak but my voice was gone. I tried to stand but found that I had no legs. My arms ended in stumps. And though I racked my brain I couldn’t recall the good things that I’d done.

“You are the living dead,” someone said.

I wanted to cry but I had neither breath nor eyes.

I wanted to wake up but instead I fell into a dark cavern of pitiless sleep.

IF A DEAD MAN
could shake off that ultimate repose, he would have felt like I did with the sun lancing painfully into my eyes that morning. My body was too heavy to lift, the air so thick that breathing felt liquid, viscous. The thought that I was experiencing a heart attack went through my mind and I sat bolt upright, then laughed.

“A dead man scared to life,” I muttered, and smiled again.

KATRINA WAS
on her back in the bed, fully clothed. Her eyes might have been open.

“You up?” I asked.

“ What happened?” She tried to rise on her left arm, but the elbow slipped out from under her and she fell back on the pillow.

I turned to her and held out my hands.

Pulling her to an upright position, I smiled at the similarities between us that morning.

“ Well?” she said.

“Dimitri moved to his new place and you passed out.”

“Did I make a fool of myself?” She covered her face with her hands.

“Mothers get a dispensation when it comes to seeing their firstborn go out into the world.”

She put down her hands and gazed right through me. At that moment she looked every one of her fifty-three years.

“That woman is no good for him,” she said.

“She’s a piece’a work,” I agreed, “that’s for sure. But D’s got to find it out on his own. He’s never had a woman before. And you know how men are.”

“Don’t you care?”

“ What do you want me to do, Katrina? Try and break his spirit? Make him into a child rather than letting him become a man?”

“She could get him killed. You know that.”

“He knows it too.”

She let go of my hands and turned away.

I waited a moment and then went to take my cold shower.

An hour later I was leaving the house. Katrina didn’t come out to say goodbye.

13

IT WAS SEVEN-THIRTY
exactly when I got to my offices on the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building. There was light coming from under the door so I pressed the buzzer instead of taking out my keys.

The lock clicked and I pushed my way into the reception area.

Mardi stood as I came in. She was wearing a pearl gray dress under a thin white sweater.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill. How are you today?”

“ What time did you get in?”

“Seven.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I like to get in early in case there were messages from the night before. You get a lot of late-night calls sometimes.”

“Did I last night?”

“Mr. Lewis has called you four times since five-fifteen. He says that it’s urgent you call him.”

I took out my cell phone and noticed that the battery was dead. Breland could have been calling all night. He knew the home number but was aware of my prohibition about business calls on that line.

The only thing in life that truly frightens me is the anticipation of talking to a lawyer. Even good news from my own lawyer brings up bad feelings and insipient dread.

“If he calls again tell him that you don’t expect me until ten,” I said.

“Okay. Anything else?”

“How’d the rest of the move go?”

“Dimitri was fine after we left your place. Twill took us all to pizza and over to this avant-garde theater in the East Village. They performed a Renaissance play that they modernized some.”

“Twill took you to the theater?”

“I think he’s dating one of the actresses.”

“Did Shelly go too?”

“Uh-uh. She said she was going to meet someone.”

There was more to that story, but I wouldn’t be getting it from Mardi.

“So,” I said, “ what do you think about D and Taty?”

She looked up above my head and considered for a moment.

“She loves him,” Mardi said at last. “She really does.”

“You sound surprised. I mean, they’ve been together for a while.”

“At first I think it was just a convenience for her. Don’t get me wrong, she was just using him, Tatyana has had a hard life and she doesn’t have a lot of trust in men. But in the last few months something has changed in her. You can tell by the way she looks at D.”

“Love,” I said.

“You make it sound like a curse.”

“You know about Tatyana, right?”

“She’s had a hard life,” Mardi argued mildly.

“She’s dealt one too.”

“She can’t help what she had to do.”

Mardi had once planned to murder her child-molester father. She knew how to cut the deck as well as my son’s Belarusian girlfriend.

“That’s what I’m sayin’, M,” I said. “The one you fall in love with brings a lifetime of baggage. In Tatyana’s case there’s all kinds of sharp edges tucked in with the nighties and toothpaste.”

“Dimitri loves her.”

“Yes, he does.”

“So what can you do?”

“Keep lots of bandages in the medicine cabinet and hope for the best.”

BACK IN MY OFFICE
, ensconced behind my oversized ebony desk, I called information and asked for Harry Tangelo’s phone number. There was no listing.

I had phone books in my closet going back six years. Tangelo wasn’t in any of them either.

Lots of people opt not to be in the phone book. If I was Tangelo and tied to a case involving attempted murder and the largest heist in Wall Street history, I might have gotten an unlisted number too. I might have even called on a friend to get me a phone in his name to avoid reporters and cops.

Maybe Tangelo left New York completely.

Failing at normal avenues of research, I signed on to the specially built computer and attendant illegal systems that Bug Bateman had supplied me with.

Bateman was the best hacker in the world, by his own estimation. I have never found reason to argue with that assessment. The young savant and I had met through his father. The beginning of our relationship had been rocky in that he resented his old man foisting off another relic on him for his services. But as the years went by and he met my off-site (and gorgeous) assistant Zephyra Ximenez, Bug had begun to rely on me to help whip his three hundred–plus pounds into a kind of shape that Z would find acceptable.

I signed on to the Persona Search Engine that Bug had lifted from the State Department. He honed the system down to where it could be used to find almost anyone almost anywhere in the world. You entered as much information as possible—age range, sex, sex preference, race(s), languages spoken, national origin, height . . . There were even places for DNA codes, photographs (for a facial-recognition subroutine), and fingerprints. I gave the program as much information as I could and hit the enter button.

While waiting, on a hunch I tried calling information and then looking through my phone books for Minnie Lesser—Zella’s supposed good friend and Harry’s paramour at the time of his shooting. She wasn’t anywhere to be found either.

There was lots of information on Harry up until nine years before, a few months after Zella shot him. But the trail went cold a full ten months before her conviction. He was a sometime carpenter, housepainter, fiber-optic-wire installer, cook, dishwasher, and clerk. He was more or less handsome but had weak eyes. As I looked at the pictures of him I wondered how he managed to fall so far off the radar.

After noodling on that puzzle for a quarter of an hour, I sicced Bug’s search engine on Minnie Lesser.

She fell from sight at just about the same time Harry did.

Curiouser and curiouser.

If I didn’t know for a fact that I was the cause of Zella’s incarceration, I would have begun to suspect the boyfriend and his girl.

Perusal of the information provided by Bug’s system didn’t help me put together a plan to investigate the disappearances. So I picked up the landline and hit a speed dial button.

She answered on the fifth ring.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill,” Zephyra Ximenez, my self-defined Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant, said.

“Z.”

“Have you talked to Charles?” That was Bug’s given name.

“Not for a week or so.”

“Have you seen him for dinner?”

“Only at the gym. He’s gotten into good shape.”

“Yes . . . he has.”

As much as I wondered about Zephyra’s interest in Bug’s doings, I had bigger problems.

“I’m going to send you two files on people that I can’t find anything on in the last nine years,” I said. “That’s very strange.”

“Charles’s programs didn’t turn up anything?”

“Not an ort.”

“ Wow. You think they might be dead?”

“If they are nobody buried them—legally. Neither has anyone reported them missing.”

“I’ll get right on it. And if you see Charles, tell him I said hello.”

“You got it.”

14

I WAS JUST
hanging up with Zephyra when Twill walked into my office. The slender and handsome young man wore silk pants and T-shirt, both black, and a cinnamon-colored jacket with no collar and brass snaps that were not attached. His only flaw was a small scar on his chin—left over from a tumble he took when he was a toddler.

His perfection was very much like that of Achilles.

His skin was actually darker than mine. It was as if Katrina’s DNA hadn’t affected him at all while his African father completely informed his elegant features and genetic history.

“Hey, Pops,” he said. He smiled at me. Twill was usually smiling. As a rule he had everything under control; at least he thought he did.

The reason I’d brought him in as a detective-in-training was because he had gotten into so much trouble in his adolescent years that I feared he’d go too far and end up in prison.

“How’s it goin’, son?”

“I’m bored,” he said, taking one of the chrome-and-cobalt-vinyl visitor’s chairs that faced my desk. “You know, listening to your stakeout tapes and readin’ old files is good and all but I need to
do
somethin’.”

“I know, boy. I know. It’s just that the things I been working on don’t have a learning curve built into them. Either that or they’re very personal jobs that I really need to see through for myself. Can you hold on for a few more weeks?”

“It’s been months already, LT. And you know I had problems sittin’ at my desk in school every day.”

“Speaking of that, have you looked into the high school equivalency test?”

“Me and Mardi go over it two hours every day after lunch, if she’s not too busy. I’ll probably take it in September.”

Since he was five years old he never made a promise that he didn’t keep.

“I will get you a job,” I said.

For a moment Twill’s perpetual smile dimmed, but then the grin broke through again.

“Don’t worry ’bout it, Pops. I know you tryin’. And, who knows? If you hadn’t roped me in here, I might be sittin’ in some jail by now—maybe worse.”

Unlike Achilles (at least since his sixteenth birthday), Twill did not suffer from false pride nor did he deceive himself with unrealistic optimism. He was tough and smart. But, most of all, he saw the world for what it was.

I have always loved him without reservation.

“How you been doin’?” Twill asked with a peculiar slant to his gaze.

“Okay. Fine. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. For the past few days your eyes been kinda glassy. And sometimes you look off into space . . . like, forever.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, feeling as if I was talking to a peer instead of a young man not yet out of his teens. “I’ve been running a little fever. It’s nothing.”

Twill’s smile evaporated for a moment and he nodded, agreeing with some notion that I had not put forward.

I was about to ask him what he was thinking when the buzzer sounded. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was three minutes after ten. A red light was glaring on my desk phone.

I nodded at Twill and he left with a parting nod.

I took in a deep breath, picked up the receiver, and pressed the clear plastic cube that was imprinted with the number six.

“Hello, Breland.”

“I’ve been calling you since early this morning,” the lawyer said, his lack of civility telling me that something was seriously wrong.

“Thanks for helping with Zella,” I said, deflecting his urgency. “I picked her up at the bus station. I guess she called you.”

“Yes. She was very reserved. Minksy at the Rag Factory said that she came in and will be starting work today. I gave Minks your assurance that there won’t be any trouble.”

“Thanks again.”

Then came the necessary lull when I was supposed to ask why he called.

“My phone died,” I explained instead. “That’s why I didn’t get your call. You know, I usually plug it in. But Dimitri moved out and Katrina tied one on. Between those two fiascoes I guess I was a little thrown off.”

“You remember the Mycrofts, don’t you?” he asked, no longer able to hold back his business.

I’d never met the billionaire family, but I knew that the Mycrofts’ live-in maid was Velvet Reyes’s mother.

“ What’s up with them?” I asked.

“Shelby called me last night. He was very disturbed.”

“Oh?”

“It’s their son—Kent. They have two children, Kent is the elder. For a while there he was estranged from the family but he’s been back for a couple of years—enrolled at NYU.”

“College man, huh? He need a math tutor or something?”

“Your kind of math, LT.”

“Spell it out, Breland.”

“It has come to the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Mycroft that their son has fallen in with a very bad crowd down in the Village. He’s an extremely emotional and impressionable young man and they fear for his safety.”

It was lawyerspeak. I knew from his elocution that Breland felt pressured.

“ What kinda crowd?” I asked.

“ We didn’t get into specifics.”

“No? Are we talkin’ about the Little Rascals or the Purple Gang?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle.”

“And what is it exactly that the Mycrofts want me to do?”

“
I
want you to go see them and give them any help you can.”

The prospect of visiting a rich man didn’t appeal to me. I hadn’t adopted my father’s political zeal, but I didn’t like the company of the upper classes.

Prejudices aside, however, I am a private detective in a downward-spiraling economy. When the country’s got a healthy GNP the husband or wife wants to know if a spouse is cheating—they’re willing to pay a man like me to find out. But when jobs are scarce that same spouse knows they need the extra paycheck.

“I don’t know, Breland.”

“You don’t know what?”

“These friends of yours seem to have more than their share of trouble.”

“They have more than their share of cash too.”

“The last time I dealt with them I had to break a promise I’d made to myself.”

“It’s not like that this time.”

“You said you don’t know what the problem is.”

“He’s just a stupid college kid, LT. Any trouble he’s in is nothing like the other thing.”

“If it’s so simple why do you need me?”

“Shelby likes to keep things quiet and confidential. His investment fund caters to blue bloods and old money. The kind of folks that don’t appreciate scandal.”

“How much money?”

“Half the Reyes thing.”

I wasn’t worried. I knew that Breland was telling me the truth, that as far as he knew this was a routine job. I wanted him to squirm a bit, however. Having covered up for Velvet still stung.

“It would be a deep favor for me and a good payday for you, Leonid.”

“Just a college kid took a bad turn on the way to the john, huh?”

“That’s all.”

“I’ll tell you what, Breland. I’ll go talk to these people and see if it’s as simple as you say.”

“Thank you.”

“But you have to do something for me in return.”

“ What’s that?”

“You still got that old girlfriend, the assistant to the director of the department of records?”

“Jeanette? I don’t see her anymore, not since Madeline and I renewed our vows.”

“But you still know her number, right?”

“ What do you need?”

“I want to know the name and address of the family that adopted Zella Grisham’s baby.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You want me to go talk to these friends’a yours or what?”

“It’ll cost something.”

“I’ll pay it.”

“I was asking for a favor, Leonid.”

“I did your favor the last time I had dealings with these people.”

“You were paid for that.”

“Not enough to risk spending twenty years in the joint.”