“I do believe that that son of yours would have been just as effective as you if he was on that train from Philly,” she said.
“He’s something else,” I said with pride.
“You know I’m trying my best to forget you, Lee.”
“There’s plenty of time for that,” I said. “A whole life.”
“You’re never going to come with me, are you?”
Instead of answering I took her by both hands.
“It’s like we were almost real for a few days there,” I said. “I don’t think that anybody could ask for more than that.”
—
We, all three of us, checked into a suite that Zephyra had booked for us at the Hotel Bombay.
After I’d shown my ID and credit card I asked the desk clerk, “Shouldn’t you be calling this the Hotel Mumbai?”
The red-brown Indian woman, PASHA her nametag read, smiled and nodded. She was in her forties and a beauty on any continent.
“You have to call it that,” Pasha told me. “But my husband, who owns this hotel, is from Bombay, not Mumbai. Maybe our children will change the name.”
“Do you have a conference room available tomorrow afternoon?” I asked.
“What time?”
“We don’t know for sure but we’ll definitely need it. Can I take from noon to six?”
“I’ll have to check and get back to you later.”
—
After we’d lugged Marella’s hundred-pound suitcase to the rooms I kissed her on the lips.
“We have to go out and do what needs doing,” I told her.
She smiled and said, “You’ll know I believe you if I’m still here when you get back.”
—
Twill and I walked to Cambridge. It was little more than a mile.
“She somethin’ else, Pop,” he said as we were crossing the footbridge that led over to Harvard Square. “I mean that’s a woman you could write about in the history books.”
“You know what we’re doing here, right?” I said, avoiding his invitation to the truth.
“Sure do. If what your girl Celia says is right it should be a breeze.”
—
Melbourne Westmount Ericson was waiting for us near the entrance of the Enclave building. He’d come alone, as I’d asked him to, wearing khaki cargo pants and a pink short-sleeve Polo pullover shirt.
We shook hands and I introduced him to my son.
“You look like a good personal assistant,” Melbourne said to Twill.
“That’s the job.”
“Did you call them?” I asked the billionaire.
“Said that I was considering an endowment,” he said. “After reading about them online I might really do it. It’s really a very interesting enterprise. Combining historical and literary provenance with the weight of ownership, there could be all kinds of interesting study. But there’s one thing.”
“And what thing is that?”
“I’m uncomfortable stealing from these people.”
I might have hated my father. I might have come to the realization that ants and termites were more socialist than Lenin or Marx could ever be when I hadn’t yet reached the age of twenty. But no matter how I feel about blood and philosophy—when I hear a truly wealthy man tell me that he’s uncomfortable with theft I have the desire to wring his neck.
Suppressing my natural response, I said, “Only the book was bequeathed to this institution, and that was a mistake, it doesn’t even show up on the list of gifts. The papers inside are of a personal nature. Imagine if those pictures of Marella got into the hands of some newspaper in DC or New York. Wouldn’t you want me to retrieve them by any means necessary?”
“It’s that bad?” he asked.
“Worse by a factor of forty-nine.”
“Let’s get going,” he said to my son.
I sat down at a bus stop across the street, unsure of what to do with my strangling hands.
Maybe the rage I felt had some kind of outward expression, making me look like a threat while sitting on a wooden bench on an autumn day.
“Excuse me, sir,” a voice said six or seven minutes after I sat.
I looked up and saw a young white cop. He had a pale complexion and a partner that looked nothing like him and yet also would have claimed to be a white man. Something about the disjuncture of their appearance and supposed race reminded me of the rich man who claimed to disdain theft.
“Yes, Officer?”
“What are you doing?”
“Sitting.”
“There’s only one bus that stops here and it just went by,” the second cop said.
“I said I was sitting, not waiting for the bus.”
“This is a bus stop,” the second cop said.
“Is there some kind of law in Massachusetts saying that a tired man can’t sit down at a bus stop without taking a ride?”
“Stand up, sir,” the second policeman ordered.
If I wanted to stay on the case I should have popped up like a tulip in the spring. But there was too much weighing on me: Marella and her man, Jones and those kids, Hiram Stent and his inability to make the right decision.
I looked up at a tree in front of the Enclave across the street. There was a red bird of some kind flitting around the branches, enjoying the experience of dexterity and flight, singing his heart out. For a moment, maybe two, I forgot those cops existed.
Then I felt the hand under my right arm. He, the first cop, tried to lift me. I tensed my muscles and his fingers were trapped. He must have looked frightened because his partner pulled out his gun and said, “Down on your knees!”
I might have died then and there. And those policemen were in as much danger as they feared—maybe more.
But I lowered to my knees while putting unclenched hands in plain sight. That didn’t assure my survival but it was the best choice I had.
Sometimes you might forget who you are and where, but that’s okay because there’s always somebody around that’s happy to remind you.
49
The policemen actually arrested me; took me to the station, snapped me face-forward and profile, took fingerprints, then interrogated me about various crimes that had happened with a black face maybe somewhere involved.
The whole show didn’t take long. When it was done they allowed me a phone call.
“Mr. McGill?” she said.
“Hey, Z. You back from the motherland?”
“Are you in Boston?”
“Cambridge jail.”
—
Sitting on a cot in a cell built for one, behind slatted iron bars, I felt unusually calm. I was the honey badger and Marella was the honey; Ericson, Jones, and Dame Gray were the common death threats along the way. And there I was, in the Cambridge jail, imprisoned for nothing I’d done wrong.
It could have been worse and there was still a chance that it might get that way.
These thoughts occurred to me in snatches because I was counting breaths and breathing ever so lightly.
—
At some point later a man in a black uniform came to pull me out of my meditation cell. He told me that I was being released.
“On bail?” I asked.
“No,” the barrel-shaped pink-skinned man said. “Just released.”
He led me to a room much like the one I’d been questioned in, but instead of inquisitors Melbourne Westmount Ericson and Twill were waiting for me. Along with them was a short chocolate-colored man in a ridiculous powder-blue suit that fit him like a medium glove on an extra-large hand.
“Harlan Sackman,” the new man said, holding out a hand. He had barely an inch on me.
I suppose he had a strong grip.
“I’ll be representing Mr. Ericson while he’s in Mass.,” the lawyer said. “The police have come to understand that their men were overzealous.”
“Overzealous? They arrested me for sitting on a street corner bench.”
“Actually,” Sackman said, “they arreste
d you for refusing a direct order.”
Sackman rankled me. I didn’t like his clothes or his profession, but what bothered me most was that he endorsed the behavior of the police. I never liked it when a person so identified with their oppressor that they forgave them.
“Come on, Pops,” Twill said, seeing my reaction. “Mr. Ericson and me did what you wanted.”
“Everything?” I asked my son while still staring at the powder-blue suit.
“Oh yeah.”
—
There was a stretch limo waiting outside the stationhouse. The four of us climbed inside and I gave the driver the name of our hotel.
We didn’t speak on the short ride.
When we got there I separated from the herd and asked the front desk if they had managed to get us the conference room. They had.
That’s when I got nervous.
There were all kinds of things that could have gone wrong. Maybe Ericson really wanted revenge and had his driver call ahead to whatever assassins he might have employed. Maybe Marella had run off as she’d said she might.
“To the room?” Twill asked me.
Ericson and the apologist Sackman were standing ten feet off discussing something.
“You got it?” I asked Twill.
“Of course.”
“Let me see.”
From inside his jacket he pulled out a packet of folded paper, about seven or eight sheets deep. I took the trove from him and pocketed it.
“Any trouble?”
“No,” Twill replied. “No airport machine, no body search. You were right when you said they’d never do a security scan on their own kind. When him and the head man sat down I asked if I could walk around the rooms. I went right to the shelf that Celia told us about. The history book was in the Swedish Bible. The letter was in a hole dug out in between the pages.”
Twill said no more because Melbourne and his lawyer approached us.
“Ninth floor,” I told them before they could ask.
—
Marella stood up from the conference table when we entered the room. She wore a tight white dress, its hem somewhere above the knee. Her dark skin against the formfitting fabric sent a chill through me.
She hadn’t been reading or writing when we arrived; just sitting there patiently like I had in my jail cell. It struck me that we’d not discussed literature. Maybe she was like most Americans, rarely if ever reading a book. That didn’t bother me at all. We weren’t all going to be readers. I could study Proust while she shopped for tight white dresses—the division of labor.
“Mar,” Melbourne Ericson said, all breathless.
“Sit down, Mel,” she said. “And who are you?”
“Harlan Sackman. I’m Mr. Ericson’s lawyer. I’m here to—”
“Wait outside,” she said as if maybe she was completing his sentence. “Mel and I need to talk one-on-one if we’re going to work anything out.”
I noted that her little black holster-purse was on the table. That might have bothered me if it wasn’t for the sexy white dress; that was the statement of intent for the billionaire.
“That’s okay, Harlan,” Melbourne said. “We’ll speak alone and then, if we need your help, we’ll bring you in.”
“Are you sure?” the lawyer asked his meal ticket.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?” I asked Marella.
“You’re cute” was her answer.
—
Outside the conference room stood five stuffed chairs, placed there for less important players in the larger corporate games. Harlan and Twill were on their phones immediately reading texts, listening to messages, and making calls. I was anachronistic, taking out the handwritten letter penned by Charles Gray on both sides of each sheet. The lines in the lettering were so fine I decided that he must have been using a crow-quill nib.
The content was horrifying. There had been rapes and murders, mutilations and long-term starvations, tampering with genitals, eyes, and fingers; death served in a broad variety of ways and recounted in a dispassionate tone that made the content all the worse.
The only time that Charles showed any emotion in his writing was when he wrote about his mother (who he assumed would already be dead). He blamed her for the homicides, for creating a monster.
…it was my mother, who, by withholding her love made me into a thing that has no relation to right and wrong…
I read the letter through twice, making my plans. I was almost through the third pass when the conference room door opened and Melbourne and Marella came out. The last words of Charles’s confession were in my mind. I go now to my death having completed a life’s work in less than two decades.
“Congratulate me,” Melbourne Westmount Ericson said to Harlan Sackman.
While they were shaking hands and smiling, Marella came up to me.
“Say the word and we can leave right now,” she said, telling me many things.
I wanted to go. I wanted to leave everything behind me and, like my father, disappear into history.
“If you ever have a problem I’ll be there” was my reply.
Sackman approached us then with his felicitations for the bride-to-be…once more.
Melbourne reached out a hand to me and I grabbed it, pulling him close.
“If anything happens to her I will kill you,” I whispered. “Don’t make any mistake about that. So if it’s love I wish you well. Otherwise…”
“You don’t have to worry, Mr. McGill,” he said, managing a calm voice despite the pain in his hand. “I love her more than anything.”
What could I say? Marella wasn’t in jeopardy, Melbourne was.
50
Soon after the announcement Melbourne whisked Marella away in his limousine while Sackman asked the doorman to get him a taxi. When they’d gone I asked the front desk for a few pieces of stationery and sat down in the bar to pen a note to my lawyer, Breland Lewis. I put the last three sheets of the serial killer’s confession in an envelope and sealed it; then I wrapped the envelope in my letter. I put this package into another, larger envelope and brought the whole thing to the front desk. The man there put my communication into a FedEx pouch bound for Lewis’s office the next morning.
It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that it hit me. In just a few moments my connection with Marella had been severed, hacked off. For the past week, I realized, her name and face had been repeating over and over in my mind like a madman’s mantra. She was, in many ways, the perfect woman for me. Sure, that passion would kill me one day but we, all of us, die.
I tried to accommodate the loss in my mind, to leave it in the hotel lobby as I rose upward in the elevator car. But when the doors slid open she was still with me and I knew that the best I could hope for was the pain I felt.
—
“Pop,” Twill greeted when I entered our suite.
“Son.”
“That Mr. Ericson seemed like an all-right guy but you know he’s a fool.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Takin’ off with a woman like Marella is kinda like seein’ a tornado comin’ and runnin’ out to say hello.” Twill was subject to dialect when he waxed philosophical.
“What does a New York City boy know from tornadoes?” I asked.
“I seen my share,” he said. “You want a drink? They got four little cognacs in the minibar.”
—
We seated ourselves at the coffee table in the common room of the suite. I was thankful for both the liquor and the company of my son.
“You know I would prefer it if you didn’t get killed,” I said.
“I know,” he muttered shyly. “It just looked so simple.”
“That’s not the kind of detectives we are. You keep goin’ it alone and one day you won’t come back.”
“What time tomorrow morning?” he asked and I knew that he had accepted my terms.
“Nine forty-four.”
“Okay,” he said and then stood. “I’ll see
you there sometime before nine thirty.”
“Where you going now?”
“I know these people.”
“What people?”
He shrugged. “You know, a girl and some’a her friends. There’s this club over in Somerville where they don’t even start up till midnight.”
“Somerville? How many times have you been up here?”
“A few. You know.”
I couldn’t stop him. In the end I wouldn’t be able to save him. But in the meanwhile I could run interference.
“You’re going in that suit?”
Twill gave me a big smile, beautiful.
He struck a pose and said, “I kinda like it.”
“Be careful.”
“You know it, Pops.”
—
I was sound asleep, my veins running amber with cognac, when the cell phone sang. If I’d been at home and sure of the safety of my kids I might not have answered.
“Hello?” The digital clock next to the bed read 3:54.
“Do you still want me, Lee?”
Drowsiness, hangover, heartache—all gone.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah I’m here.”
“Are you alone?”
“From the moment you took off.”
“I offered to stay.”
“Yeah. That’s why I thought you were gone forever,” I said honestly. “I had it in my mind to let you go.”
“I’ll call you from time to time, Lee. Maybe one day you’ll be ready.”
“That would be nice,” I said.
“Good-bye.”
—
I have overslept exactly three times in my life. I’ve gotten up on time through concussion, blood loss, and fever. But that morning I didn’t get out of bed until 9:23.
I staggered to the bathroom but even the ice-cold shower didn’t completely revive me.
I was in the taxi on the way to South Station when I realized that I had left my phone plugged into its charger back at the hotel.
When I got to the small table at the coffee kiosk in the great rotunda of the train station, Twill was sitting there with Celia Landis.
“Hey, Pops,” he greeted as I let my weight fall into the extra chair set there for me. It was a bouncy metal chair dipped in blue latex the same color as Harlan Sackman’s suit.
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 24