On the exhale he said, “I’m married to a wonderful woman, Mr. McGill. I’ve been in love with her for sixteen years.”
I almost believed him.
“You got a photograph?”
He leaned over on one buttock, lifting the other in the armless ash chair. He could have been going for a gun, but since my debacle with Willie Sanderson I had moved a pistol to the outer-office desk; it was in my hand at that very moment.
But all he came out with was a wallet. He flipped it open to the picture of a mousy-looking brunette with big eyes and a painted-on smile. She was in her thirties when the picture was taken. I didn’t believe that he would have gone this far to prepare a lie.
I nodded and he put the wallet away.
“Eighteen months ago I strayed with a little Asian girl named Annie,” Tim said. “It didn’t last long. It was like a forty-eight-hour bug. I was in Atlantic City for a seminar and she was staying in the hotel.
“She came up to see me in the city a few times but I was over her by then and looking for a way to cut it off. Finally I just told her that I loved my wife and that was it.”
“How’d she take it?”
“Pretty good.” He nodded. “Pretty okay. She looked sad but said that she understood. She had a serious boyfriend and was feeling guilty herself.”
“Is this Annie the one blackmailing you?”
“It’s a man that called. But she might be putting him up to it. He says that he’s got pictures. He knows where we stayed and specific details about things we, we did.” Moore hesitated a moment, remembering. “You see, I got this rich aunt that died—Mona Lester. I got a little cash out of it.”
“Did Annie know about the aunt?”
Tim squinted the way some inexperienced boxers do when you hit them with a solid body shot.
“In that first couple’a days I told her almost everything. I thought it was love. I didn’t know.”
“How much they want?”
“Twenty-five thousand.”
“How much you inherit?”
“Two hundred eighty-six thousand, but I thought it was gonna be closer to a million.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Seems like they should have asked for more.”
“I don’t know,” Timothy Moore replied. “The guy on the phone said that he just needed enough to settle a debt he had. He wants me to bring the money to this condemned building on West Twenty-fourth tomorrow night.”
“Why don’t you go to the police? They could grab this guy, twist his arm, and go after the girl. That would be easy and legal.”
“Yeah.” He looked up at me with miserable eyes. “But then there might be an investigation and a trial. Margot would find out. All she’d care about was the affair. I don’t wanna lose my wife, brother.”
It’s always odd when a white man calls me brother, makes me wonder if he’s trying to put one over on me.
But he sounded honestly upset. There was pain there, but still . . . that stench of lilac and sweat.
“So what do want from me, Mr. Moore?”
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars,” he said, as if that was an answer to my question.
“For what?”
“You go to the meeting and get the lowdown on this guy. You tell him that you’re a witness and if he ever shows his face again you’ll go to the cops. Then give him some of the money, and you, you keep the rest. That way I’ll have paid for what I did wrong and, and I can go back to my life with Margot.”
He was near tears.
“How’d you hear about me?”
“Luke Nye,” he said. “Luke Nye said that you might agree to do a job like this.”
“How you know him?”
“Prescott Mimer. I used to tend bar for a friend of Prescott’s on the weekends—for some extra cash.”
“Who’s the friend?”
“What does all this have to do with what I’m asking for, Mr. McGill?”
“Answer my questions, all of my questions,” I said, “or walk out the same way you came in.”
“Karl Zebriski,” he said. “His bar used to be at Fortieth and Second, but now he has a place in the Lamont Towers near Columbus Circle.”
I was nervous listening to the poorly put-together man. On the one hand, he seemed to have real feelings, but on the other someone had tried to kill me once already that week.
Everything he said was reasonable. It could have well been the truth.
My life was on the line, more than one line, but that wasn’t going to give me a break on the rent; only prison did that, because even in death your plot is only leased.
“Give me a number where I can reach you,” I said, pushing a notepad across the desk. “I’ll call you in a few hours.”
“But I’ve got the money right here,” he said, holding up the briefcase.
“Keep it. I’ll call you later and we will see what we shall see at that time.”
There was an argument in his eyes but he could see that there was a brick wall behind mine. He scribbled down a number, nodded, and rose to his feet.
“I really need the help, brother,” he said.
“And I really will call you,” I replied.
42
Crow and Williams,” a young man answered. “How can I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Timothy Moore, please.”
“Mr. Moore is out on personal business. Do you want to leave a message?”
I hung up.
I’d met Prescott Mimer before. He was a construction foreman who liked to hang out in wise-guy bars. I doubted that he’d recognize my voice, so I called him saying that I was a headhunter for office managers and was considering doing some work setting Timothy Moore up with a position.
“He’s all right,” Mimer told me. “I never worked with him or anything. But he seems like a good guy. Did he give you my number for a reference?”
“No. Your name came up in a discussion with a gentleman named Luke Nye. I’m sorry to bother you.”
“That’s okay. It’s just that I can’t help you with his work habits or anything.”
“Is he married?”
“What’s that got to do with a job?”
“It’s an organic grain and cereal company from the Midwest,” I said. “Family business. They like a wholesome picture.”
“Yeah,” Mimer said. “He’s crazy over that woman.
Margaret, I think her name is . . .”
I skipped Zebriski and went straight to Luke Nye. Nye was a pool hustler who played in private tournaments around the city and up and down the East Coast. If you gave a moray eel a couple of hundred million years he would evolve into Luke Nye.
“Hey, LT,” Nye said over the line. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Tryin’ to clean up my act.”
“You callin’ about Tim?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?”
“He came to me yesterday and asked if I knew a detective could help him with somethin’ that wasn’t quite on the up and up. I heard you weren’t in the life anymore, but then I figured you could always say no.”
“Was my name the only one you gave him?”
“You’re one of a kind, LT.”
I COULDN’T SEE a flaw, only smell one. And the smell was all physical.
“Hello?” Tim Moore said through the phone.
“How many numbers in the lock on your briefcase?”
“Three.”
“There’s a variety store a block or so north of Bleecker on the east side of Hudson,” I said. “It’s called Iko’s. Set the lock to six-six-seven and leave it there for a Joan Ligget.”
“Should I put your money in it, too?”
“Yeah. Do that,” I said. “Now give me what you got.”
Fifteen minutes later I was entering Zephyra Ximenez’s number.
“Yes, Mr. McGill?”
“Have somebody pick up a briefcase at Iko’s and leave it with the guys at the front desk of my office
building, ASAP.”
SHELLY AND DIMITRI were sitting down to dinner with their mother when I came in. I had called again, and so Katrina made the service coincide with my ETA. I was carrying the briefcase, less my five-thousand-dollar fee.
“Hi, Daddy,” my daughter said just a bit too loudly.
Dimitri grunted and I nodded to him.
Katrina is the best cook I’ve ever met—bar none. She can make anything. That night she’d prepared red beans and rice with a spicy tomato sauce and filled with andouille and chorizo sausage. In little dishes arranged in the middle of the dining table she had set out grated white cheese, chopped Bermuda onions, green olives, and diced jalapeños—seeds and all.
I pulled up my chair at the head of the table, setting the briefcase beside me. I like a good meal. Katrina beamed from the opposite end and for a brief span I forgot our differences and disconnections.
“Smells great, honey,” I said. “How you doin’, D?”
“Okay, I guess,” Dimitri mumbled.
“How’s school?”
“Fine.”
“You need anything there?”
He shook his head. That meant that he wasn’t going to talk anymore.
But I didn’t care. I was thinking about the young woman of Scandinavian descent whom I had loved passionately for nine months, with sporadic recurrences for a year or two after.
What had Tim compared it to? A forty-eight-hour bug. Our love was more like a couple of years of consumption on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It took us that long to recover. Though the symptoms were gone, I was often reminded of them at dinner.
“I’m going to take a special course in African-American history, Dad,” Shelly said happily, still a bit too loud. “I met with Professor Hill about an independent study he suggested for the fall. We’ll be covering the black relationship to communism . . .”
She went on to regale me about the political commitment and supposed naïveté of Paul Robeson. It seemed that everything Shelly did was intended to make me happy. Sometimes I wondered if it might be a mercy to tell her that I wasn’t her real father.
She was still talking when Twill entered the dining room. Accompanying him was a skinny, teenaged, white waif-child with ash-blond hair and the saddest pale eyes. I had only seen pictures of her as a prepubescent girl but I would have recognized Mardi Bitterman if she were retirement age.
“Mom, Pop,” Twill said brightly. “Sis, Bulldog,” he said to his siblings. “This is Mardi, a friend of mine from school.”
“Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was so soft that it was almost inaudible.
“Late for dinner,” Katrina chided. “Now sit, both of you.”
I could tell by her expression that Katrina wasn’t happy with an unannounced guest. But she knew from past experience that if she complained Twill would leave—which would turn my mood sour.
Twill sat Mardi next to Shelly, knowing that his sister would immediately take the child under her wing. My daughter engaged the wounded wraith of a girl. After a few minutes they were gabbing, newfound friends. Shelly talking loudly with broad facial gestures, and Mardi whispering, sometimes even partially covering her mouth.
Katrina had lost her Mona Lisa smile with a stranger at her table. I doubt if Dimitri’s mood would have changed if we were in the middle of a nuclear war. The girls seemed to be getting along, and Twill, as usual, was ebullient and lively.
“So what’s happenin’, Pop?”
“Lookin’ for a guy in Brooklyn, and a client came in today to get me to talk to somebody givin’ him grief.” I didn’t mind talking about work in broad swaths. This made my job seem mundane and served to lessen any interest my family might have shown.
“You readin’ anything good?” he asked me.
Twill never read a book unless he absolutely had to.
“Picked up this little book on the history of Western philosophy,” I said.
“Like who?” my son asked.
“What is it, son?”
“What do you mean?” Even at his most disingenuous, Twill was charming.
“What do you want?”
His grin was perfect.
“Well, you know, Pop,” he said and paused. “You know . . . Mardi here is havin’ a problem at home and I told her she could stay here a night or two.”
“Absolutely not,” Katrina commanded from her end.
Twill didn’t look at her. He was no longer smiling, either.
Even if I hadn’t known about the girl and her father I would have taken the boy’s side.
“You have to learn, Twilliam,” my wife was saying, “that you cannot just waltz in here and make—”
“Kat,” I said.
My wife hates the feline contraction of her name.
“I am not an animal,” she would tell anyone who dared use that appellation.
I told her I would never use the term unless I needed her to pay close attention to what I had to say.
She stopped mid-sentence and glared at me.
“Shall we go to the kitchen?” I suggested.
“WHY DID YOU embarrass me in front of our children?” she asked when we’d reached her bastion.
It was the first time she’d shown anger since coming back home.
“Because I have it on good authority that this girl’s father has been raping her since she was a small child.”
Katrina’s lower jaw fell open. She had been ready to unleash one of her fiery tantrums but my words doused that flame.
“What?”
“You can’t let on to her or Twill that you know anything about it. You know our son. You know what he’s capable of. I need to defuse the situation before it gets out hand. Do you hear me?”
She nodded.
“The girl can stay with you or Shelly. Shell seems to like her, so maybe that would be good. I’ll bunk with Twill. I’ll tell him that you asked me to so that he doesn’t get with the girl, but really I just want to keep my eye on him until I know why he needs her to stay here.”
“Her father?”
I nodded.
“That’s terrible. We should call the police.”
“We will,” I said. “But not until I’m sure that the cops’ll do something.”
I turned toward the door, expecting Katrina to come along with me, but instead she placed a feathery touch upon my wrist. I stopped but could not bring myself to turn and face her. Just as with my contraction of her name, Katrina could do small things that spoke volumes down the corridors of our history.
“Leonid.”
“Yeah?” I said to the door in front of me.
“Look at me.”
I faced her but could not look directly in her eyes.
“You know that I’m trying my best,” she said. “I’m here and I want to be a good wife to you.”
I took in a deep breath and counted one in my mind.
“The past is over,” she said. “I’m here with you now.”
I exhaled and counted.
“Zool went bust,” I said. “I asked a pal of mine to see what happened to him. They say he flew to Argentina an hour before the feds issued a warrant.”
She took it well: no tears or tremors.
“I learned from that, Leonid. I missed my children. I missed my life with you.”
“I’m here, am I not?”
“With one foot out the door and the other one raised to go.”
“What do you want from me, Katrina?”
“I want you to try. I want a life together and to be forgiven for whatever I’ve done wrong.”
I had counted up to ten and started over.
“I don’t know how to do that.” The words came to voice from the empty chamber of my mind.
“Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what happened to you two years ago that made you so much more distant.”
The shock of her knowledge of me was muted by the walking meditation. Maybe even the discipline helped me to see what was right there in front of me. I could
see that no matter what Katrina would do, given a way out, that she had made up her mind to try and make the marriage work while she was there. She wasn’t pretending or lying. My wife wanted, maybe for the first time ever, to make a bridge between her heart and my life. All I had to do was open the way.
I got as far as opening my mouth. An unintelligible sound came out.
“What?” she asked.
That single-syllable question hit my ear like the soft concussion of a far-off explosion. It was little more than a pop, but the seasoned soldier knew that it might very well signify injury or death.
I knew my wife too well to trust that she would never use my words against me. I knew myself too well to pretend to share my life in some guarded, limited way. It was all or nothing for both of us.
That was one of those rare moments that have true meaning in human discourse. Katrina and I had never been closer; our hearts, even if mine was secret, had never been more honest.
But neither of us could break down the decades of detritus that composed our marriage. I could never trust that Katrina would not one day rouse from this feeling. I had seen love turn to hatred too often not to read the portents and signs.
“I’m gonna have to think about this, baby,” I said. “You know I’m the oldest mutt in the kennel and they comin’ out with new breeds and new tricks every day.”
Katrina’s blue eyes, at that moment, were omniscient as far as Leonid Trotter McGill was concerned. She saw my every thought and hesitation. I lost the count of my breathing and she held me with that gaze.
“I will still be here trying to make it work,” she said.
After a moment more of this special torture, my wife of decades made her way from the room.
43
A sober-minded Katrina apologized to Twill and
Mardi. She told them that she’d had a hard day and was getting too upset over little things.
“You are welcome to stay for a day or so,” she said to the girl.
Shelly was so happy that she kissed her new friend on the cheek.
“Can she stay in my room, Mama?”
“Of course.”
Twill was looking at me but I managed to keep my eyes on Katrina.
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