Sophie Bernard was the little sister of Gordo’s third wife, Helen. Helen was from Houston, Texas, and after she and Gordo got married she brought a few members of her family up to New York. Sophie came to live with Gordo and Helen. She was a small woman with big eyes and rich with the empathy that hard men want but can never ask for.
After three months of living with the sisters, Gordo found that he talked more with Sophie than Helen. The marriage foundered sometime soon after that. After a year had passed, Gordo came to Sophie and asked her to marry him. She said that she wanted to but wouldn’t because it would break her sister’s heart. Sophie had promised Helen that she never did anything wrong with Gordo, so if they got married Helen would think that she’d lied.
“Sophie?” I said. “I didn’t even know that you still talked to her.”
“She called,” Gordo said, a little shy. “She called to tell me that Helen had died.”
Oh.
“I said I was sorry and me and Elsa went to the funeral over in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After the ceremony we sat with Soph at a pizza restaurant the family rented out. It was just a nice time, you know? But on the train ride home Elsa says to me, ‘You’re in love with that woman.’ I just laughed. I hadn’t seen Sophie in twenty years. I liked her. I liked her fine but the past was gone.
“At least that’s what I thought. But that night I couldn’t go to sleep. I sat up remembering what it was like those three months I saw Soph every morning over coffee. Elsa was my nurse, she saved my life. I love her but there was something in my heart for Sophie that I couldn’t shake.
“Maybe if Elsa didn’t say anything…But no. I would have been thinking about Soph after that.”
For a moment my old mentor was lost in thought.
Finally he said, “Two days later Elsa told me that she was going back to Germany.”
“What did you say?”
“I couldn’t say a word. I wanted to. I tried. But all I could manage was this miserable face. Elsa kissed me and a few days later she was gone.”
“And then you called Sophie and asked her to marry you again?”
“I’m eighty-three years old, LT. My time is nearly up. I should’a been dead from that cancer. I cain’t tell my heart what to do. Sophie asked me how was Elsa and I said she’d gone back home. Two minutes later I asked her to marry me and she said all right.”
I knew Elsa. I hired her when I thought Gordo would die from cancer. She was a good woman but I could hear the love in Gordo’s voice.
“Congratulations,” I said. “How’s Helen’s family feel about this?”
“Most of ’em back down in Texas” was his answer. “I’m flyin’ up twelve of ’em to come to the ceremony.”
“That’s a mighty big nut, G. You sure you can do it?” I knew he could. Gordo was a rich man. He was a brilliant trainer but his genius was real estate.
“I gotta couple’a things I need from you, LT,” he said instead of taking the bait. I could tell from his tone that talk of love was over.
“What’s that?”
“I got this Chin’ee kid from Hong Kong can fight. Middleweight, you know. Fast as Sugar Ray Leonard with the bones of Marvin Hagler. Ain’t nevah lost a fight an’ been in the ring nineteen times.”
“What’s his name?”
“Chin Wa.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Never fought in the States or on TV. He think he the real deal but I believe that the competition was lacking.”
“And?”
“Fudge be on your bag all mornin’,” Gordo said. “Got him tryin’ to get some pop in them punches, so maybe you could do a couple’a rounds with Chin and see if he got the seven covered.”
“Where’s Iran?” I asked. Iran Shelfly, a heist man that went to prison, partly because of my hidden perfidy, now worked for Gordo.
“He down doin’ a undercard in Philly. I told him if he won I’d get him a real fight. Maybe with that Irish kid ev’rybody love so much.”
—
I went in a corner, shed my clothes, and donned trunks that Gordo kept in a drawer for me. The old man laced my gloves and I entered the center ring with no headgear.
“He gonna hit you,” Gordo warned. I heard him but Marella’s spell of invulnerability was on me again.
After a few minutes a young Asian Adonis came out of the locker room; only Gordo’s prospects, or “health club” customers, got lockers and dressing areas. The rest of us had to rely on the modesty provided by corners, and we took our showers at home.
Chin Wa didn’t have one ounce of fat on his 157-pound frame. He was lithe and smiling. When we faced each other in the middle of the ring I said, “No headgear?”
“You won’t hit my head,” he said. “But I sure hit you.”
And he did, too. I was trying to cover up, throwing uppercuts up top but he knew how to punch and he moved his head like a king cobra on speed. Maybe fifteen seconds into the first round he’d hit me as many times. After a minute or so my uppercut fell a bit and I caught him in the rib cage on the right side. One. I got two more in before Gordo hit the bell.
When the bell to the second round started I could see Chin Wa was angry that I was able to answer. He threw a flurry at me, landing every punch, and I connected once five inches below his diaphragm. Four. For the next minute or so his volume and velocity of punches slowed though he might not have realized it. I got in two right hooks on his left side before Gordo hit the bell again.
By this time we had an audience. It was my guess that most sparring partners that got in with Chin were daunted by his speed.
When the third round started I put my hands down, he smiled, hit me four times and then I let out with a straight right hand to his lower core. He looked at me with real surprise on his face. He tried to raise his arms as if to protect himself from the blows that might be coming but instead the movement twisted his gut muscles and he spun to the canvas like a corkscrew.
—
“Inside’a your lip bleedin’,” Gordo said as I put on my clothes in the corner.
He lifted the left side of my lip with two fingers and rubbed a crystal of pure alum against the cut. It stung for a moment and then came the tangy taste of the chemical. The intimacy of boxers and their trainers is something akin to love.
“Thanks, LT,” Gordo said. “It would’a taken Chin up to the middle ranks to learn that a heavy hitter can have a brain. You could’a been the best in the world at one time.”
“The way I take hits I would have most certainly been punch-drunk by now.”
Gordo looked down then. He knew the ravages of the sweet science like anybody else.
“Have you seen Twill around?” I asked my oldest friend.
“Not for ovah a week now. But Dimitri come in every night, him and that Mata Hari girl he been datin’.”
“Does Tatyana box?”
“Naw. She just stretches and do that yoga stuff while he in trainin’.”
“But no Twill?”
Gordo shook his head and shrugged.
8
I got up to the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building at a few minutes before 7:00. Now and then I try to get into the office before Mardi. It’s a kind of competition for us. Though usually quiet, and always reserved, Mardi is likely to give me a certain look when I come in and she’s already there. The look says, You see? I am the better worker here. So now and then I like to come in early to stick out my tongue at her.
But when I turned the corner headed toward my office I forgot about the silly rivalry.
Standing there beside my office door was a medium-sized white man in an ill-fitting brown suit. He was five-seven or -eight but with bad posture and a sagging belly, though he was not overweight.
When he saw me approaching, the man forced a hopeful look into his depressed features. As I came up to him he said, “Mr. McGill?”
“Yes?”
“My name is Stent,” he said. “Hiram Stent.”
His features were what I could only call indistinct. There was no ridged border between his lips and the surrounding skin. His eyes were murky, neither brown nor green. And Hiram Stent’s skin was tan but not from day labor or last summer’s visits to the beach. His leathery rind came from long hours of overexposure and a little too much alcohol that worked to cure this finish from the inside out.
“Oh yeah.” I was working the first of seven keys on the office door. “Mardi gave you an early appointment. But you know, Mr. Stent, we don’t open till ten.”
“I didn’t know so I came early so I wouldn’t miss you or anything.”
I was pretty adept at the locks and so the door soon came open and I ushered my scruffy would-be client in.
I crossed past Mardi’s big blond desk and went to the metal door that protected the greater part of my office suite from the outside world. I placed my electronic card next to the little screen at the right side of the door. This caused a virtual number pad to appear. On this pad I entered the seventeen-digit code and the heavy door swung open.
“After you, Mr. Stent.”
As he went by I noticed two things: a scent and his shoes. The odor had a dry earthy bouquet that I remembered from when I was a happy child with a mother and a father playing in the dirt. The shoes were the real giveaway though; black at one time, they were now turning gray and wearing thin, almost shapeless from many more miles of walking than they were designed for. Those soles knew the pavement from long association and little or no respite.
“This way,” I said to my visitor.
I led him down the long aisle of empty cubicles toward my office.
“You have a large staff,” he said, looking from side to side at the empty desks.
“Only the receptionist and my son.”
“Then why all these offices?”
“I have the ambition of being a big fish one day. I figure if I have the room to grow there’s a chance it might happen.”
By then I was shepherding him into my office.
I went behind my extra-large ebony desk and sat with my back to the window that looked down the isle of Manhattan to the swirly new World Trade Center.
“Sit,” I told my guest, and he perched on the closest red and boxy office chair that Mardi said looked better with my black desk.
“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. McGill,” Hiram Stent said.
The man’s physical presence was a puzzle in itself. The hair on top of his head had turned a dirty blond. The tier under that was the brown of a pecan shell and there was a spotty ridge below that which was almost all gray. These layers showed that Mr. Stent was much in the sun, a natural brunet, and very possibly under great strain. He was no more than forty but some of those years had been long and hard.
I was silent while studying the middle-aged man.
He was getting nervous.
“I’d like to hire you, Mr. McGill,” he said.
“How did you find your way to me?” I asked.
“What do you mean, um, I took the number six train.”
“I’m asking you where you heard my name. I don’t advertise.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding. “I heard your name from a man called Rooster.”
“Red Rooster Collins?”
“I don’t know his full name.”
“Black man, red hair and tall?”
“That’s him.”
Rooster was a man I knew; not an important man but a well-connected one. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic and so often spent his time, when off his meds, in places that might house a man like Stent.
“How can I help you, Mr. Hiram Stent?”
There was a story behind his vague features, the burning coal of a problem that turned his stomach and kept him up at night. But when asked he was struck dumb.
“Why did you want to see me?” I said, hoping that a rearticulation of the question would loosen his tongue.
“My name is Hiram Stent,” he said. “I was the CFO of Lipsky, Van der Calm, Tryman, and Wills for twelve years.” He said these words and stopped, hoping to have made some kind of impact.
“Chief financial officer,” I said to urge him on.
“They’re an investment company,” he said, “specializing in midsized corporations and family businesses.”
“Okay.”
“Because,” he said, and then he cleared his throat. “Because most of the work is done on computers and the phone, Charles Wills decided that the firm should move to Wyoming, where real estate is cheap and so we could either lower costs or increase our assets. The downtown Manhattan landlord was raising the rent from six to sixteen thousand a month.”
“That’s a lot of money,” I noted.
“I guess it is. That’s why they decided to relocate. They offered to take me with them.”
“But you didn’t go,” I surmised.
“My wife didn’t like the idea and I…I thought that I could, I could get another job easily enough. I mean, I have an MBA and twelve years’ experience working for LVTW.”
“But that was the time of the market slump,” I said.
“Exactly, the economic slump,” he said, grabbing onto the phrase like it was a lifeline. “I couldn’t get work anywhere, anywhere. And even when things got better no one wanted a CFO who’d been unemployed for three years. I only knew how LVTW worked and I was too old for most entry positions. My wife took the kids and left to go stay with her family while I was job hunting. She connected with an old boyfriend…”
I didn’t need to ask anything; his story was as obvious as a pair of worn shoes.
“I kept looking,” he said. “When I asked Lois to come back she said no. When I called again she’d had her number disconnected. Her mother wouldn’t tell me where she went. I haven’t seen my children for two years.”
There were tears in his reptilian eyes.
“After a while I lost the condo on Thirty-third and now I stay in a rooming house on Flatbush in Brooklyn when I can get enough money together…”
“So why are you here, Mr. Stent?”
“Lois’s old boyfriend is a handyman. He doesn’t make much. I was being paid nearly two hundred thousand when LVTW moved out west. If I had that kind of money now I could buy a plane ticket and go down to Florida and get my family back.”
His tone was plaintive, his dreams the dreams of a child. I felt for the guy.
“But why are you here?” I asked.
“I need to get back on my feet, Mr. McGill,” he said. It seemed to me that he’d lost the thread of his purpose.
“And how could I help with that?”
“By finding, locating Celia Landis.”
I was half convinced that Stent had lost his mind from sorrow, homelessness, and alcohol consumption. But then he uttered a real name. I wondered if there was an actual person attached to the name.
“And who is that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I mean I’ve never met her.”
“Then why are you looking for her?”
“A guy, a man named Bernard Shonefeld, sent a letter to my old address and a neighbor who knew me sent it on to my post office box. You know I keep that box in case my children ever need me—they’ll know how to find me.”
“Bernard Shonefeld,” I said.
“He’s doing work for a law firm in San Francisco—Briscoe/Thyme. They’re looking for this Celia Landis woman…young woman. I think she’s twenty-eight or -nine. That’s what Mr. Shonefeld said.”
“Why is a law firm in San Francisco asking you about a woman that you don’t know?” I was fascinated by the twists and turns of his hapless story.
“They said, Shonefeld told me that, that this Celia Landis is a distant cousin on my mother’s side. I never heard of her but Briscoe/Thyme had been looking for her for a long time, eleven months, and all they could locate was me.”
“What did they say they wanted with Celia?” I asked.
“Her grandfather, on the other side of her family, people I’m not relate
d to, died and left her many millions of dollars. The estate tasked the lawyers to find her for a ten percent fee. Shonefeld told me that they’d give me ten percent of that if I could find her.”
“Did this Shonefeld ask you for money?” I asked.
“No. No. He just said that I should find her and I’d get ten percent of ten percent of over a hundred million dollars. That’s at least a million, more than enough to go down to Miami and get Lois and the kids back.
“I used the computers at the New York Public Library to try and find her through the genealogy search engines. But there wasn’t anything. I tried every kind of search but there was nothing.”
“Did you try asking your mother?” I asked.
“Mom died when I was seventeen and she was estranged from her family because they didn’t like my dad because he was Catholic. He’s dead too. Dad’s family is from Canada somewhere and I’m an only child. But I did find one of Mom’s sisters in Newark. I called out there and told her that I was looking for Celia because I didn’t have any family and I heard she might be in New York. Mr. Shonefeld told me that he believed that she was in New York. She, my aunt Charlotte, said that she had a picture of Celia from a high school graduation photograph. She said that she’d sell it to me for seventy-five dollars. After that I did day work and collected bottles until I had enough to take a train out there and buy the picture.”
From the breast pocket of his threadbare brown suit he brought out a tattered square of paper. He stood up and leaned across the desk to hand it to me. It was a snapshot of a pretty girl, somewhere in her late teens, with long brown hair and red lips. She was smiling at the camera, pushing her left shoulder forward in an inviting way.
“You paid seventy-five dollars for this? Why?”
“I thought maybe a private detective could find her. I mean that’s what she looks like and she comes from around Princeton, New Jersey.”
“Did you look?” I asked.
“Just on the Internet and in the phone book. She’s not there and Aunt Charlotte said that most of her family is dead or in the wind. That’s the words she used—‘either dead or in the wind.’ ”
“And what do you want from me?”
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 4