Killing is a profession like any job. Some practitioners are amateurs while others are more professional. Slaughtering cows, pigs, and sheep is a legal arm of the killing vocation; soldiers annihilating warlords’ encampments in Afghanistan are also allowed to massacre without legal consequences. Paratroopers, police officers, property protectors, private security forces, and presidents all have licenses to kill in a broad range of circumstances. Pest exterminators, pet owners, and prison guards are told that there are times when killing is acceptable, even humane. When it came to killing people within the parameters of the law, there was even a moderating term used—“deadly force.”
The men waiting for my appearance weren’t legal and had little concern about the law. None of them were from New York, I’d’ve bet. They’d leave no DNA or fingerprints, images of their naked faces, or signatures. Maybe they planned to kill Aura, maybe even Warren Oh, after the job with me was finished.
My death would be quick and brutal unless they felt I had information…but no; Farth was simply eliminating a rival because I had made some kind of deal with Sidney-Gray.
Competition for entrepreneurs like us in the open market is a bitch.
My heart was beating fast. Even though I was safe, forewarned, and armed on another floor, my primitive brain was fully aware that there were men close at hand that wanted to kill me. I had to exert a good deal of self-control not to go up to their floor and engage them in that battle.
When my phone sounded I jumped. I felt so intimate with my executioners that I believed they could hear me. But they just sat around the door waiting for my arrival.
“My pussy itches,” Marella said when I answered the phone. “What are you doing right now?”
“If it wasn’t life or death I’d be there rubbing ointment on that tickle.”
“You should come away with me, Lee. You know I’m the kinda woman for you.”
Maybe she was.
“Your boy from the train pulled a gun on me looking for you,” I said.
“Really?” she asked in a pedestrian, matter-of-fact tone.
“Bullets and everything.”
“Melbourne wouldn’t have had him do that. He must be acting on his own. I mean you humiliated him when you dunked his ass in the elevator.”
“I don’t know why everybody has to take everything so personal,” I said. “I mean boxers get beat up in the ring every day and they don’t go pullin’ guns on people.”
“If I had the power to love I would love you, Lee.”
That might have been the most romantic thing any woman had ever said to me.
“Look, Mar, I’m into somethin’ right now. Let me call you back.”
“All right. Don’t forget my itch.”
As soon as I disconnected the call, the phone sang out again. This time it was Aura.
“Hey, babe,” I said, hosting a completely different spectrum of emotions.
“Are you all right?”
“Lookin’ at your boy and two of his friends holding guns and waiting patiently.”
“Did you call Kit?”
“Sure did.”
—
Watching Josh Farth sitting there so patiently awaiting my death was unsettling. I felt that I had to do something but there was nothing to do. At almost any other time I would have controlled my anxiety by practicing Zazen breathing, counting my breaths until my thoughts released.
Instead I took a card from my pocket and entered a phone number.
The phone rang once, twice…Josh turned his head quickly…three times and he reached for his jacket pocket.
“Hello,” he said into the phone and my ear.
“Mr. Farth?” I said.
“Mr. McGill? How can I help you?”
His confederates were now looking at him.
“I’ve been considering your case and…”
“And what?”
“I don’t know if I can take it.”
“Why not?”
“It feels wrong.”
“Can I come to you and discuss it further?” he asked. “I mean I have already paid you.”
“Well…yes of course. I’ll have to return the deposit, I guess. I have a meeting set for ten. Why don’t you come up to my place about noon?”
“I’ll be there.”
At that moment there came loud knocking and a muffled voice from outside the meeting room that said something I couldn’t make out. Josh disconnected the call and all three killers got up on their feet. There was no sound for the surveillance equipment but their attention was on the door.
Josh Farth said something loudly at the door. He waited a few seconds and then said something else. One of his partners, a heavyset man wearing a bulky gray suit, moved back toward the corner farthest from the door. Josh and his other friend put their weapons on the conference table. He then said something to his fat friend in the back. After a few words back and forth the big man put his pistol down. The other friend reached for the door and opened it.
With surprising speed the fat man took up his gun again and started shooting. He shot the other man, not Farth, in the back and kept on firing. Then it was like a strong wind, a hurricane, blew into the meeting room. Josh and his big friend were hurled from the door by the hail of bullets.
All three men were dead in less than nine seconds.
41
There were a dozen cops on the fifteenth floor when I got there, maybe four minutes after the shootout. Ten minutes later there were closer to fifty official representatives of the city in and around Suite 9. Two dozen police in plainclothes and uniforms, at least ten paramedics, even a dozen or so traffic cops were placed around the exits to keep gawkers, building employees, and regular customers away. Warren Oh and his number two, Lena Brass, were there.
One of the traffic cops held up a hand to repulse me but a regular cop intervened.
I made it to the side of the doorway to Suite 9 and peered in.
I had seen dead bodies before. There was no attraction for me. I just knew that Kit was going to be angry and I needed him to feel that he was working for the law and not for me.
Two cops had been shot; one through his left hand and another in her bulletproof Kevlar vest. She was winded and he looked chagrined, like a lumberjack more ashamed of having lost control of his saw than unhappy about the fact that he was bleeding.
Kit had come out of the suite and was approaching the woman cop when he noticed me.
“What the fuck you get me into here, LT?” he asked. “Three calls on you this week and every time it gets worse.”
“You got somebody could oversee the aftermath?” I asked.
Kit understood and turned.
“Sanchez!”
“Yeah, Captain!” a man said from the other end of the hall.
“Take over till I get back.”
—
We didn’t speak in the elevator or on the walk down the hall to my suite. We didn’t utter a word until we were both seated in my office.
“Don’t get mad, Kit,” I said. “I came to you in good faith. Aura called about a man wanting to meet with me without me knowing it. I told you that. That’s why you brought so many cops with you.”
“Dead bodies are never appreciated downtown,” he said. “And this new mayor really comes down hard.”
“They shot first.”
“How do you know that?”
“Aura has a camera on all her day-suites.”
“It’s recorded?”
“No,” I lied. “I turned off the recorder when I got in.”
“The NYPD is not here to eliminate your enemies.”
“Not my enemies, Kit, your suspects.”
“Suspects in what?”
“If you look close enough I’m sure you’ll find that it was these three that killed the security guard in here and also that Hiram Stent you said had my name in his pocket.”
“So you did know Stent?”
“Yes I did but I didn’t know it at the time you asked. A few d
ays ago a man calling himself Bernard Shonefeld made an early morning appointment. He said that he was looking for a missing woman and would I help?”
“What woman?”
“Honey Larue,” I said. “It was a stripper’s stage name. He said he didn’t know if it was real. He offered me seventy-five dollars to find her but I demurred. I didn’t care if he was a stalker but seventy-five dollars does not nearly cover my nut.”
“What does this have to do with Hiram Stent?”
“When you asked about him I looked him up on the Net. When I saw his picture I realized who he was.”
“And you didn’t call me why?”
“I would have, Kit. I was busy and when we talked last night I just didn’t think about it.”
“And so why do you think these three after you have anything to do with Stent?”
“Because one of them came to me the day after Shonefeld and offered me ten thousand dollars to find a Honey Larue.”
“Which one?”
“The guy wearing the coal-gray suit.”
“But you didn’t know that when you called me,” he said warily.
“No. I had no idea who was going to show up.”
“And Alexander Lett doesn’t have anything to do with it?”
“I thought you had him in jail for that gun.”
Carson bit his lower lip. I knew that this meant great consternation for the excellent policeman.
“It wouldn’t be Lett anyway,” I said. “He’s working solo looking for a woman he thinks I know.”
“Do you know her?”
“I met her once and that’s it,” I said. “But listen, Kit, it turns out that Twill has a guy on the inside of Jones’s organization.” I knew that this bit of news would stop any other conversation.
“You put some kid in jeopardy with a madman like that? How’d you let that happen?”
“He was already in. A kid they call Nathan came to Twill, told him about Jones, and asked could my son help him dig out. Twill came to me. I asked you about him but Twill hadn’t told me about this Nathan.”
“I wanna meet this kid.”
“Sure. But he’s in the wind right now.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He’s scared. Me and Twill met with him down at South Street Seaport and told him that we need information to give to you so you could catch the motherfucker. He had Twill’s number and said he’d call when he knew the next time Jones was meeting his people.”
“You don’t have an address, a phone number, nothing?”
I stuck out my lower lip and shook my head.
“Where’s Mardi?” the canny cop asked.
“After the break-in I gave her the week off. She’s down in the Bahamas with her little sister.”
“I want to look through her desk,” he said.
“Not without a warrant.”
“You got something to hide, LT?”
“Always. You know Mardi got information on a dozen clients at her desk. I can’t have you stickin’ your nose into all that.”
From inside my pocket the phone played its little melody.
Kit was staring at me.
The phone finally gave up.
“I could arrest you, LT.”
“Don’t I know it, brother,” I said, reminding myself of Hush. “But I’m telling you the truth. The men shot at you killed Hector Laritas and the man you call Hiram Stent. And I have a mole in the Jones Gang. Give me three days, a week tops, and I will give you the wherewithal to bring down that whole mob.”
Kit stared at me. It wasn’t a friendly gaze. Though almost everything I had just said was the truth, it was selective and he knew it. But Jones for him was like a naked pinup model asking directions: wherever she wants to go, you do too.
“Three days,” the captain said at last. “And the DA will be in touch to depose you about the shootout.”
“Always happy to do my civic duty, Captain.”
42
I walked the captain all the way to my newly rebuilt front door, saw him out, and watched him until he disappeared around the corner. Only then did I close that door and throw its seven locks.
I was halfway back to my private office when the phone sounded again.
“Hello.”
“Paulie DeGeorges, Mr. McGill,” the scammer fop said.
“Mr. DeGeorges,” I hailed. “And how are you on this glorious fall morning?”
“Fine,” he said, a little breathless at receiving true etiquette. “I was just telling Violet that it’s warm enough that we could picnic in Central Park.”
I heard his ex-wife utter something in the background.
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She was expecting you to give her that money, I guess,” he said to me, and then to her, “Quiet, honey, we’re doin’ some business.”
Violet was not about to be shushed and she said so. I heard her yelling and then a few other noises. Finally there came the sounds of open air and traffic.
“Sorry, Mr. McGill,” Paulie said. “Violet gets angry and the only thing that cures it is either time or martinis.”
“What you got for me, Mr. DeGeorges?”
“I talked to Coco and she said that she’d agree to meet you but she wanted me there too.”
“When?”
“As soon as you can.”
My knuckle and cheekbone were both throbbing to the beat of my heart. That’s life, said the Buddha and Sinatra.
“That Excellent Bean joint only had a front door, right?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“I’ll get that seat in the back,” I said. “She and I can sit there and talk. You take a place near the front to make sure I don’t do anything hinky.”
“I don’t know if she’ll like that,” Paulie cautioned.
“That’s the only way I’ll do it. Tell her. Bring a gun if you need to. I don’t care. All I want is some private conversation with her.”
“I’ll ask.”
“See you there in forty-five minutes.”
—
Fifteen minutes later I was ensconced at the same table Paulie had claimed the day before. I could have made it in ten but first I took some money from the wall safe where Mardi was storing the deposits I’d given her. I put a certain amount in a brown envelope.
At the Excellent Bean I perused a monograph by an uneven writer I read sometimes. The title of the book was The Graphomaniac’s Primer: A Semi-Surrealist Memoir. The book was less than a hundred pages, printed but from a handwritten manuscript; mostly composed of entire pages of letters written in rows wedged so closely together that they morphed into various textures. The page of lowercase a’s enchanted me. It was reading without reading. There was a scattering of prose pages and a few drawings in between. The essays were about neuroses and how humans could not survive without them, and also brief analyses of memoir, art, and even a few possibly autobiographical sketches.
“Mr. McGill?”
I looked up to see Coco/Celia dressed in dark blue jeans and a light blue T-shirt. She wore no makeup or jewelry. Her eyelashes were her own and the blue and white tennis shoes on her feet could have been bought at any time over the last sixty years.
“Coco?” I said. “Celia?”
She glanced back toward the entrance. Paulie was sitting at the table closest to the door, trying to look like a bodyguard. His shirt was yellow, his jacket deep green, and his bow tie white with red polka dots.
“Paulie told me to tell you that he has a gun,” she said.
“Good for him,” I said brightly. “Have a seat, will you?”
She considered my request, looked back at Paulie, and then lowered to sit at the very edge of the walnut chair across from me.
She was thinner than in her photographs and there were dark patches under her eyes.
“What else did he tell you?” I asked.
“That you were a detective who specialized in cases like mine and, and that you could help me, maybe…I mean
if you thought that it was in your best interest.”
“It’s like we were brothers,” I said.
“Who,” she said and then she swallowed. “Who sent you?”
“A man named Hiram Stent.”
The question lodged itself in her brow before making it to her lips.
“Who is that?”
“I’m told he’s a distant cousin of yours on his mother’s side.”
“But, but I don’t know him.”
“And neither did he know you,” I said. “But a lawyer in San Francisco sent a man of many names to ask Hiram if he knew about you. The lawyer offered a lot of money for knowledge of your whereabouts.”
Celia jerked her head around frantically, expecting to see men coming for her from every corner. She looked so frightened that Paulie stood up from his chair.
I held up a hand to assure both the popinjay and the stripper that there was nothing to worry about.
“Hiram never found out anything about you,” I said. “And I didn’t take his case anyway.”
“Then why are you here?” she said, almost shouting.
A few heads at surrounding tables turned our way.
“After I refused him somebody murdered Hiram; probably the man of many names. I’m willing to bet that Hiram told the man that he tried to engage me but that I had warned him, Hiram, that the whole thing was probably a scam. Most likely that’s what got him killed and my office door blown off its hinges.”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” the petite young white girl said.
“I know,” I commiserated. “It’s very complex. But I can cut through the fog by saying that it all started when you stole a thirteenth-century edition of Herodotus’s Histories from a private library called the Enclave.”
The surprise on Celia’s face was gratifying. I always liked it when I had a fact by the nuts.
“You know about that?”
“Didn’t Paulie tell you?”
“He just said that you might be able to help.”
“He’s right about that. I might be able to help if you can answer some questions.”
She was trembling. Twenty feet away Paulie was still on his feet. I began to think that the scam artist was probably what he said—an anachronism of chivalry lost in the modern world; a fifth or maybe sixth Musketeer.
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 20