Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01

by The Long Fall

  49

  Three Hispanic women in black-and-white maid uniforms were working in the big kitchen that we traveled through. The women were different shades of brown and of various ages, heights, and sizes. The only thing that they had in common was that they all spoke Spanish. If I were more sensitive to foreign intonations I might have discerned different accents among them because they certainly were not all from the same country.

  The ladies shot worried glances at us, obviously wondering if I was some kind of threat to the child or them. I have that effect on people often.

  Hannah was oblivious to the servants’ concerns. She brought us to a swinging aluminum door and ushered me through. This led to a short hallway, which ended at a small, lavender-colored oval room that had a bay window looking out over a small vegetable garden, another anomaly for a Manhattan home.

  The room was furnished with two stuffed chairs covered in well-worn and cracked brown leather. The floor was pine, pitted, and somehow fitting for a room where the masters were never meant to be. I sat in one chair while Hannah settled across from me, in half-lotus.

  It took me a moment or two to get my head back into the investigation. I had taken the past few minutes for myself. I was very happy in the presence of the child bearing precious gifts, in that small room, under the only sun that any one of my ancestors had ever known.

  “How’s Fritz?” I asked.

  “He stayed upstate.”

  “Did he recover okay from that spell?”

  “He’s walking and talking again, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t remember what happened. He didn’t remember you. And no, I didn’t tell anyone that you had been to the house. I thought that you wanted to talk to my father and I didn’t want to get in the way. Though I would like to know more about what it is that you want.”

  “Do you really own that painting?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever offered to give away anything like that before?”

  “You mean something so valuable?”

  I nodded.

  Hannah’s face was long and pretty in its youth, but when she concentrated, it took on a more handsome cast. I liked her in spite of all my upbringing.

  “No,” she said finally. “Never. But what does that have to do with my question?”

  “A guy from Albany hired me to find four men,” I said. “I found them. One was dead, another one was in prison, one was awaiting trial for burglary, and the last guy was living the life of an honest citizen. I turned over the information and the three survivors were attacked. Two are dead and the other might be soon. After that, somebody, or maybe two different somebodies, tried to kill me.

  “I don’t want to be used in that manner. I don’t want people to die because of me, and I myself do not wish to be killed. And so I have been investigating, trying to find out who was using me. The detective who hired me doesn’t seem to exist, but I’m good at what I do, and I came up with a name.”

  “What name?” Hannah asked.

  “Roman Hull.”

  “My grandfather?”

  I nodded again.

  “I’m telling you this because you offered me that painting, and also because it’s true. I may have left out a detail or two but you have the gist of why I’m here.”

  Hannah brought her fingers to her temples and traced little circles there.

  “Are you going to kill my grandfather?”

  “People like me don’t kill people like him,” I said. “I just want to get to the truth. I want to know what happened and I want it to stop.”

  “Grandfather Roman used to pinch me and Fritzie when we wouldn’t do what he told us to,” she said. “It got so bad that Dad wouldn’t let him see us until we were teenagers.

  “They say he murdered this race car driver a long time ago and then he married the driver’s widow. They didn’t stay together long, though.”

  “I’ve heard the stories.”

  “He’s upstairs,” she said.

  “Right now?”

  It was her turn to nod.

  “Can I go see him?”

  “I will take you,” she said solemnly, as if the words were a vow.

  WE MADE OUR way back through the kitchen. The domestics were gone.

  I glanced at the painting I coveted as we passed through the hall of masterpieces. The yellow parrot screeched somewhere when we came into the grand entrance hall but I didn’t see it.

  “He’s on the third floor,” Hannah told me as we mounted the stairs.

  Upon reaching the second floor we had to walk around the outer hall to get to the next stairway up. There were doors and other entrances along the hallway leading into rooms and down corridors. At the door closest to the next set of stairs a woman wandered out.

  “Wandered” is the right word. She stepped from the doorway, moving at an odd angle with her head turned as if she were looking behind. It seemed as though she had gotten lost in her own home.

  “Mother,” Hannah said.

  Startled, the woman turned to regard us. She was a creature of exceptional beauty. From the form of her face to the deep blue in her eyes this woman, who was my age, would always be plagued by the petty desires and jealousies of others. Her form was slender and graceful. The pastel violet of her diaphanous robe struggled to match such beauty. Her hair was blond, becoming ethereally light with the white that had begun its encroachment there. When she gazed into my eyes I felt the need to swallow.

  “This is Mr. McGill,” Hannah was saying. “He’s here to see Granddad.”

  Hannah’s mother rested three fingers on the back of my left hand.

  “Are you a friend of Roman’s?”

  “No, ma’am. A guy I know said he wanted to talk to me. A guy named Timothy Moore. Do you know him?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied.

  Hers was the only smile I’d ever seen that I would call resplendent.

  “I hear you once had a servant named Sanderson,” I said, looking for answers haphazardly like a child searching for seashells by the shore.

  “Yes. Lita was her name.”

  “Did she have a son named Willie?”

  “She had children,” Mrs. Hull said. “I never met them, though. Bryant didn’t like it when the staff used our house for day care.”

  “But didn’t your husband help Lita’s son get into the Sunset Sanatorium?”

  All those words seemed to confuse the lady. She sniffed at the air but didn’t answer.

  “I met Mr. McGill up at the house in Albany, Mom,” Hannah said to break the silence.

  “Oh?” She had a mild interest. “Did you also meet my son, Mr. Mac? Mick?”

  “McGill,” I said, wondering when she would remove her fingers. “And yes, I did meet him.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Nice young man. Serious.”

  “He’s sullen and ungrateful,” she said, her lightness suddenly shot through with storm. “But blood is blood.”

  “I have a son like that,” I said. “He doesn’t know how to talk to people even though he’s twenty-one. I figure it’s just because his feelings are so deep down inside him.”

  My words seemed to have an impact on her. Her face organized itself so that she almost saw me.

  “Deep inside,” she echoed. “Yes, yes. You’re right about that. Bryant says that there are debts to be paid, but all debt comes down to blood, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t know the answer to her question.

  “Blood debt,” she continued, “is the curse of mankind.”

  “We have to go, Mother,” Hannah said.

  Mrs. Bryant’s fingers were still on the back of my hand.

  “Yes,” she said, looking deeply into me. “It was so nice meeting you.”

  I moved my hand and took a step back.

  “Come on,” Hannah said.

  Halfway up the stairs I looked back and saw that Hannah’s mother was watching us as if in a terrible rapture.

>   50

  We made our way to the third floor without any more interruptions or a word spoken between us. Hannah’s natural élan seemed dampened by her mother’s beauty and peculiar ways.

  We came to a black door with a small wreath of dried yellow sweetheart roses hung from it. Hannah gave me a sickly smile.

  “My grandfather’s room,” she said. “He told Fritzie that a black door and yellow roses will keep any curses away.”

  I nodded and we both looked at the door.

  “Your mother seems distracted.”

  “This is one of her good days.”

  I smiled.

  “You think it’s funny,” she said with no emotion that I could discern.

  “My whole childhood I dreamed about living in a house like this,” I replied.

  “What do you think now?”

  The parrot cried out and flew over our heads just then and we both laughed.

  Hannah took a step forward and knocked on the ritualistic portal.

  One of the maids from the kitchen opened the door a crack and stared out nervously.

  “This is Mr. McGill, Rosa. He’s here to see my grandfather.”

  “I don’t know, Miss Hannah,” Rosa said with very little accent. “Your grandfather is resting.”

  “Who is it?” a man’s voice bellowed from beyond the olive-and-gold-skinned woman.

  “Miss Hannah,” Rosa said, turning her head back to the room.

  “What she want?”

  “She brought a man to see you.”

  “Show him in, then, girl,” the unpleasant and very masculine voice commanded.

  I became aware of recorded piano music. The composition had no style to it. It wasn’t jazz or classical or even elevator covers of pop tunes—just notes strung together in tight mathematical patterns with no heart.

  Rosa stepped away, giving me the room to enter. At the same moment, Hannah took a step backward.

  I looked at my young friend with the question on my face.

  “I never go into Grandpa’s room,” she said.

  I’ve gotten less information out of month-long investigations.

  IT WAS DIM and hot in Roman Hull’s cavernous room. There was a cloying sweet smell in the humid air, accompanied by that relentless, soulless music. When the door shut behind me an irrational flash of panic pulsed in my chest. I saw no windows. The space was set up like a studio apartment cut into quarters. The area to my immediate right was a hot-plate kitchen with shelves and a small table set for one. To the left was an office with an oak desk and a plush red chair. Deeper in, there was a den or library on the left and a sleeping space on the right.

  Only the makeshift bedroom was inhabited. There before the bed sat an old man in an ornate electric wheelchair. He would have been tall if he stood up. His face was cadaverous and sunken. He might have once been a white man but now he was gray with all the inferences that came with that color.

  Next to him, sitting in a pine folding chair, was a small hard-eyed woman definitely from below Mexico. She wore clothes that were neither made nor sold on this continent, fruit blues and blood reds made from coarse cloth and a purple scarf that wrapped around her head and chin. Her Indian blood had not yet been conquered by the Spanish invaders, and if you had asked me what she was doing there I would have said, without hesitation, “Waiting for death.”

  Golden-hued Rosa stood behind his chair.

  “You here to see Bryant?” the gray man asked.

  He wore bright-yellow pajamas that reminded me of the wild bird shitting in the hallway, and fat Toolie sweating in prison. There was a maroon blanket across his lap.

  “No,” I said, covering the seven steps that separated us. “I came to see you.”

  “What business could a Negro in a bad suit have with a man like me?” he asked. He squinted and smiled when he spoke. His teeth were gray also.

  Regardless of these facial expressions, the only life left in Roman’s body was in his eyes. They were a standard brown with a feral, hateful light burning brightly from behind. If I was a superstitious man I’d have thought I was in the presence of Beelzebub’s consigliere.

  “Timothy Moore,” I answered, now standing over him. “My name is Leonid McGill.”

  I expected at least a little fear behind those satanic eyes. But Roman wasn’t going to crumple that easily.

  “Rosa, Margarita,” he said while staring up at me, “give me and Mr. McGill a few minutes alone.”

  The women moved without hesitation or complaint. Fifteen seconds after his request they were gone, leaving the menfolk behind to play their ridiculous games.

  “Sit, Mr. McGill,” Roman said, gesturing toward the chair that Margarita had vacated. “That was the right word, right?”

  “Sit?”

  “Negro. You people still call yourselves that sometimes, don’t you?”

  “I’m here about your interest in my well-being,” I said, “not terminology.”

  “Oh? Educated, are you? No pullin’ the wool over your woolly eyes.”

  If we were in Missouri sometime before 1980 he might have riled me some.

  I smiled.

  “Why did you ask Timothy to kill me?”

  “I used to know a man named Timmy but not any Moore, Moor,” he said and then laughed.

  “It’s not funny, Roman. It’s not funny and it takes more than bad puns to make me angry. What makes me mad is a man trying to kill me and I don’t even know why.”

  The octogenarian shook his head and smiled.

  “I can’t help you, Moor,” he said. “I never leave this floor.”

  I understood then. Roman was dying and he knew it. His life had been limited to that room, with strangers looking after him. His own granddaughter wouldn’t come to visit him even when she lived under the same roof. My presence there represented a lifeline.

  I shrugged and stood up.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  I turned my back to him and took a couple of steps toward the door.

  “Don’t you want to know about Timothy Moore?” he called after me.

  “You don’t know anything,” I said, not turning. “It must’ve been Bryant who made the call.”

  “Bryant doesn’t have the balls to kill a man,” Roman said in his strongest, most masculine voice. “I’m the one who gave him the thirty thousand to give you, and promised him a hundred more if he did the deed.”

  That bought him half a turn.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Come back over here and sit your nigger ass down,” was his reply.

  I knew the cautionary rhyme of sticks and stones, but Roman was getting under my skin. I found myself wondering what my most excellent son Twill would have done in this situation.

  Thinking of Twill brought a smile to my face. The anger dissipated and I returned to the servant’s chair.

  “Why do you want me dead, Mr. Hull? I never did anything to you.”

  “It was just business.”

  “What business?”

  “The most important kind,” he said. “Family business.”

  “Do I represent a danger to someone in your family?”

  He was just about to tell me; I was finally going to get an answer to the reason for the murders my investigation had made possible.

  “It—” Roman managed to say before the door to the room slammed opened.

  “Dad,” a man called.

  Looking toward the light, I saw him coming. He wore a gray suit with a burgundy tie and hard-soled, oxblood shoes.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  I stood up to meet the visitor because his demeanor was less than friendly.

  He was taller than I, and white the way old paintings of American presidents are white. His hair was black and gray and his eyes tended toward brown. Behind him stood Rosa, behind her Margarita—Hannah brought up the rear. Her “never,” I supposed, became “hardly ever” when her father preceded her into her grandfather’s room.

&nbs
p; “Leonid McGill,” I said, holding out a friendly hand. “I was just asking your father a couple of questions, Mr. Hull.”

  “Get out of here,” he said, not taking up my offer of greeting.

  The women behind him were silent.

  “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”

  Roman was sniggering behind me. The piano music played like razor blades chipping away at my spine.

  “No,” Bryant Hull said.

  I looked up at him, thinking that everybody I met seemed to be taller than I.

  “It might be worth your while to hear me out.”

  “Leave my house or I will call the police.”

  I didn’t have the time to go to jail right then, so I nodded and held my hands open at shoulder level in a sign of surrender. I was playing for time. Maybe he would ask a question in anger that would allow me the verbal foothold of a reply.

  “Bryant,” a familiar voice said. “Bryant, what’s wrong? You sound angry.”

  Coming into the dark and masculine room was the impossibly feminine form of Hannah’s mother. She glided up next to her husband.

  They didn’t seem to fit together—he a prefabricated manikin dressed and groomed to look like a billionaire, and she the Nordic interpretation of a Mediterranean goddess.

  She placed her fingers on the back of his hand.

  “Hannah,” Bryant said.

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Take your mother back to her room.”

  “But, Bryant,” his wife said.

  “Bunny, please just go with Hannah.”

  Bunny.

  Roman had begun a rolling, heavy cough.

  Margarita went to him.

  Bryant turned to me and I was feeling as if Willie Sanderson had just unloaded one of his haymakers on the back of my head.

  “Are you leaving?” the rich man asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  51

  I once read a monograph, written by a man named Harlan Victorious Lowe, called Creativity and Quirks of the Mind. The author claimed, among other things, that creative thought often happens in the mind’s peripheral vision, when that metaphorical sight is jogged by obvious mainstream thinking. In other words—when one thing comes to light, the illumination often floods the dark corners with brightness.