Trouble Is What I Do

by Walter Mosley

  The room was quite large, its ceiling a good nine feet higher than that of the connecting hall. The floor was laid with bright and shiny tiles that contained every color of the rainbow. There was a huge plasma TV on one wall that played, in equal quarters, four of the major cable news providers. The volume of the TV was muted so as not to interfere with the classical piece being played. There was no desk, just a matching sofa and chair upholstered in something like elephant skin, though I’m sure it was synthetic. The den also sported a full-size refrigerator, a counter with sink and cupboards, a white table that sat four, and a billiards table that I knew could be converted for Ping-Pong.

  “What’s this you got playin’, man?” I asked.

  “Processional Suite in C by Johann Joseph Fux.”

  “Fucks?”

  “Yeah. F-U-X, Fux.”

  “Damn.”

  “You want sumpin’ to drink?” the minor giant asked.

  “I already had my drink for the day.”

  “Well then, come on over to my table an’ tell me what you need.”

  I sat, and the music changed to a piece featuring flute and oboe. I don’t know what the composition was for, but I imagined ballet dancers out on that mostly bare multicolored floor. Then the ample body of my host blocked out the ghostly pirouettes.

  “You into the Sternman wedding?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “I need to be on the security staff.”

  Wolfman stared at me like the supernatural predator he was named for. He tapped the nail of his right middle finger on the white enamel tabletop, not saying anything. I didn’t speak, because I’d already made my request and that was all I was willing to reveal.

  In this way our silences spoke to each other.

  “Antonio Alberghetti got that job,” Wolfman said at last. “He called me six weeks ago to see if I had any guys he could use.”

  “And did you?”

  “This here is my bread and butter you stickin’ your dirty fingers into, Leonid.”

  “If I didn’t step in when Markham Peters put a target on your ass, somebody else be eatin’ that greasy sandwich right now.”

  It wasn’t only the accountant Wolfman owed me for. Two years earlier, Foxy Donk had come to me because she heard from a boyfriend who worked for Peters, a local gangster, that his boss had put up seventy-five hundred dollars to kill her boss. Wolfman had been doing bodyguard work for a Hong Kong businessman named Féng. Markham’s son, Jesse, took a dislike to Féng. Wolfman found it necessary to slap Jesse, and somehow the kid ended up with a broken ankle. I asked my good friend Hush to drop by Markham’s and ask him to pay a kill fee on the hit. I do not believe that there is a man still living who ever said no to Hush—except me, of course.

  “I know all that, Lee,” Wolfman said. “But Millie’s pregnant again and Foxy wanna raise. It’s taken me years to make my contacts.”

  “I know. And I wish I could tell you that there won’t be any blowback, but I can’t say that, either. All I know is that any trouble you get into, I’ll be right there with you.”

  The music changed again. This time it was an organ sonata by Bach that I recognized but could not name.

  “Lonnie Rudolf was the only guy of mine that Alberghetti was interested in,” the security expert relented. Blood debts are hard to ignore.

  “Can you ask Lonnie to step aside for me?”

  “I can ask.”

  “Tell him he’ll still get his money. I already got a client.”

  “Who’s that?”

  I smiled and stood.

  “You see yourself out?” he asked.

  “Foxy wants to tell me something anyway.”

  “Okay. I’ll call Lonnie and see what he has to say.”

  “They call him Two Times, right?”

  “Yeah. Got that from one’a his girlfriends, I forget her name. She used to say, ‘If you cain’t do two times you better off leaving Lonnie alone.’”

  Foxy was working on her nails when I lowered into a chair beside her desk. She turned down the music but continued working on the baby fingernail of her left hand.

  “How are you, girl?”

  “When you gonna call me?”

  Foxy’s thirty-first birthday fell six weeks before. I knew this because she invited me through an email service. I hadn’t come but sent flowers. This because I was so much closer to sixty than I was to thirty-one.

  “You know there are people who would like to see me in jail for even entertaining the thought of being out on a date with you,” I said.

  “So?” Her eyes and warmth and posture were more dangerous than the pistol in my pocket.

  “Gimme a break, will ya, Foxy? You know what you got there. And you see me tryin’ to hold back.”

  “I don’t want no gold ring or no kids,” she declared. “I just want a real man up in my life—at least one time.”

  I wanted to say no. I certainly should have said no. But through my veins flows the blood of humanity, and that genetic code knows only yes and death.

  But thankfully, due to my father homeschooling me on Freud, I had learned how to put off gratification.

  “Let me think on that for a while,” I said. “I’ll call you soon and say what I can.”

  Foxy Donk sneered at me, exhibiting real satisfaction. I believe that she was temporarily sated by my hesitation. I stood up, and she smiled for me.

  “I’ll be seein’ you soon, Leonid.”

  “Yes, baby,” I dutifully replied…and then I was gone.

  On the street again, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I knew Lonnie Rudolf. He’d step aside from the security job if Wolfman asked him to. All I had to do was let him collect the check, and I’d be right next to the bride-to-be. That done, I’d cancel my debt to Ernie Eckles, save the bluesman whose great-great-grandson showed me that my son could sing, and earn a mason jar full of the best whiskey I’d ever tasted.

  Pleased, I took out my phone.

  There were three texts from Mardi and one from Twill.

  Mardi’s texts were all in caps and red.

  HE’S BEEN SHOT MR. M! HE’S BEEN SHOT!

  HE’S NOT DEAD. LAMONT IS PUTTING PRESSURE ON THE WOUND AND TWILL WENT AFTER THE SHOOTERS.

  I TEXTED RAINIER’S CLINIC. SHE CALLED BACK AND SAID THAT THERE’S AN AMBULANCE ON THE WAY.

  All things considered, I was impressed with Mardi’s focus under duress. The fourth text was from Twill.

  photograph of the license plate attached. i hit back but they got away. maybe pink maybe not. we’re in the ambulance on the way to Rainier’s

  That was a lot to process. My ninety-four-year-old client had been shot. Even if they only grazed a finger, he could go into shock and die. Somehow the people working for my client’s son had found him. Hopefully it was at the Harlem hotel. But still…an ambulance could be traced. The worst revelation was that Twill had gone armed and had possibly wounded one of the hit men. That’s what hit back and pink meant. But all that would have to wait. I composed a text, sent it, and then started walking—fast. Rainier’s was on the West Side near Sixty-Eighth, so I’d make it in twelve minutes or less.

  When I took on the case, not three hours earlier, it was about young people, good music, even better whiskey, and a letter for a young woman that said something she needed to know—or not. Now it was blood and tears, bullets and possibly prison time for my son. Goddamn.

  Rainier’s clinic occupied the fifth floor of the five-story Brown Medical Building. Brown’s was made from dark red brick and tenanted by plastic surgeons, orthopedists, blood-work and X-ray laboratories, and one bone specialist. The private elevator that connected the street to Rainier’s exclusive emergency room was large enough to carry six gurneys and twice that many paramedics. This lift brought me to the receptionist’s desk. Tiny, at least partly Asian, and ageless, the daytime admissions officer, Agnes Smalls, sat at her usual post. Next to her stood Lana Rainier.

  Lana was a year or two older than I
, though she looked about a decade younger. She usually wore a white lab coat over a muted pantsuit, with her ample gray-and-brown hair tied up into a bun at the back of her head. She’d held the position of head physician in a series of city emergency rooms over the past twenty-one years.

  At some point along the way, Lana got addicted to heroin. Not opioids with fancy Latin names but smack, black tar, the kind of poison you could once buy in little plastic bags from Hell’s Kitchen to Times Square, from the East Village to Brownsville.

  Lana’s habit had been found out by her last hospital’s night supervisor, Sherman Wale. It was Wale’s intention to report her to the police. He would have done just that if it wasn’t for the hospital policy that all dealings with the police had to go through the security office. Sitting at the nighttime receiving desk of this office was Plymouth Crews. Lana had saved Plymouth’s mother’s life when she was brought in suffering from a severe infarction. Plymouth called Lana to tell her about what the night supervisor wanted him to do. Lana called a midlevel thug named Dexter Lewis. Dexter offered to have the night supervisor severely beaten, but Lana demurred.

  That’s when I was called in.

  Sherman Wale could have been canonized in his lifetime. He had never stolen, lied, or knowingly caused injury to another human being. He was almost exactly my color and never missed a Sunday at Loving Episcopal. He cared for his aging mother in his own home, believed in honesty, was the soul of honesty, and so I decided, without approaching him, that he could not be moved.

  The next morning, I set up a meeting with the head of the hospital, a woman named Gillis.

  “If you let Dr. Rainier go without police involvement, I can assure you that there will be no nosy journalists looking for more skeletons in your closets,” I said after laying out the problem Sherman Wale represented.

  Gillis was a short woman with bobbed gray hair and rubber-soled, sensible brown shoes.

  “No need for threats, Mr. McGill,” she said. “Dr. Rainier is the best emergency room doctor we’ve ever had. She not only saves lives but afterwards keeps in touch with the patients while they’re recovering. No. I do not want her reported to the police any more than you do. I wish Sherman had come to me. I certainly don’t care what she’s had to do to self-medicate with all the suffering and death she’s seen.”

  After the negotiations were over, I connected Dr. Rainier with a group of investors who knew a good thing when they saw it. They put up serious money for her to establish her own private emergency clinic on Sixty-Eighth. Adding the doctor’s considerable expertise, well-trained staff, and a certain level of discretion she had about reporting the nature of patients’ wounds, Rainier was able to develop a thriving, if not quite kosher, business.

  As an extra added benefit, she took care of me and mine any time of the day or night.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, McGill?” were the good doctor’s first words to me on the day Catfish Worry was shot. “You’re so hard that you put a ninety-year-old man and three children in jeopardy?”

  “Good to know what you think’a me, Doc. I mean, you asked the right question, but it doesn’t seem like you need any answers.”

  “That man is here,” she said in a tone full of dread and threat.

  “We’ll talk about that, but first I wanna know how Catfish is doing.”

  Lana took a moment to recalibrate her thoughts and emotions.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. He was shot in the left shoulder with a small-caliber bullet. He didn’t bleed much because pressure was applied immediately. One of my ex-military surgeons has already removed the bullet.”

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “No extreme physical trauma. No shock. He asked for whiskey to calm his nerves. I gave him some of mine.” She smiled. “He made one young nurse blush by just looking at her.”

  I sighed in relief. “Thank you, Lana. Believe me when I tell you this man’s troubles started before he ever met me. He came to my office less than four hours ago, and I tried to talk him out of going to that hotel. When can he be moved?”

  “I’d like to keep him for observation overnight.”

  “That’s good conservative procedure, Doctor, but the ambulance that brought him here can be traced, and, believe me, you don’t want that kind of fallout.”

  Lana Rainier winced, and then her jaw clenched. She had a long face that was somehow both doughy and elegant.

  “I’m doing the same thing for him that I did for you,” I assured her. “There’s no malice here.”

  Slowly the doctor’s facial tension eased.

  “I know that,” she said. “It’s just that you cut it so close to the bone.”

  “No different than you. Now, where’d you put that man?”

  My clan were the only ones occupying the blue waiting room. The emergency clinic maintained six waiting rooms, coded by a child’s color wheel.

  Mardi was sitting close to Lamont, steadily whispering words of hope and support. In the opposite corner, Twill was speaking more openly to my friend Hush—ex-assassin extraordinaire.

  I went over to Lamont and Mardi. They were so concentrated on each other that they didn’t notice me at first. I placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and he stood right up.

  “Mr. McGill.”

  “Sit down. Sit down,” I said. “The surgeon is finished. If everything is all right, you and Catfish will go with that man over there talking to Twill.”

  I pulled up a chair.

  “Who is he?”

  “He’ll take you to a safe place and stay there with you until I can clear things up.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McGill. You tried to warn us.”

  “I want to go with them,” Mardi said. There’s steel in that girl.

  “No, honey.” I placed my hand on hers. “I need you in the office. And once Hush places them, no one can know where they are. Not even you.”

  “Can he protect C-Paw?” Lamont wanted to know.

  “Yes.”

  “We shouldn’t’a gone to that hotel,” the young man lamented. “All it was was some clothes an’ guitar strings.”

  “Don’t worry, Lamont. Nobody’s dead.”

  I got up and went to the other corner to greet my friend and Twill.

  “Hey, Pops,” Twill greeted. He was smiling as always. As comfortable as a cat sitting in a sunlit window.

  “You and I have to talk,” I told him.

  “I know. First we get Catfish settled, and then I’m all yours.”

  Talking to Twill was like playing a game of Go; words were pieces that accrued on all sides until, in the end, victory was the child of sacrifice.

  “You got the dimensions?” I asked the man known as Hush.

  There was nothing exceptional about him. The professional killer was of medium height with a slight build and skin that Americans called white. He had brown eyes and hair. No, there was nothing to set him apart except that he could kill anyone, anywhere, with anything at all.

  “Yeah,” he said in his low rumble of a voice. “Very professional crew. You want me to go after ’em?”

  “No. I promised Tamara that I wouldn’t be the cause of you falling off that wagon. I just need you to salt my client away.”

  Hush gave me one of his rare smiles. He was retired, married, and a father. Killing haunted him, called to him, it was the only thing he had a passion for—before having a son.

  “Okay. I’ll keep ’em both safe, Leonid,” Hush promised. “You can do the rest.”

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  The walls of the post-op room were the palest the color pink could be before giving in to white. Catfish Worry lay beneath white sheets up to his neck. The bluesman’s head was nestled on a white pillow. Add all that to the container of opalescent walls, and his face shone like a black pearl.

  “Sorry, Mr. McGill,” he said.

  “Water under the bridge,” I assured him. “This is my friend Hush. Hush, this is Mr. Catfish Worry.”<
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  “Pleased to meet you,” Hush said.

  “You got dead eyes, brothah.”

  “They’ve seen a lot.”

  “Oh yeah? What they see in me?”

  “He’s going to take you someplace safe,” I said by way of answering the question. “In the meantime, I’ll get that letter to your granddaughter. If I can, I’ll stop your son from trying anything else against you.”

  “He that good, Dead-eye?” Catfish asked Hush.

  “Better’n most,” my friend replied, falling easily into blues patter.

  Things moved smoothly after that, like a gurney gliding down a linoleum hallway carrying the condemned to that final appointment.

  There was a secret way out of the Brown Medical Building. My entire tribe took the express elevator to the basement and then climbed some stairs through to an exit on Sixty-Seventh Street. Hush had one of the cars used for his limo company waiting to receive him, Catfish, and Lamont. Twill, Mardi, and I took the subway downtown.

  We didn’t talk on the ride. Mardi was sad over her new friends’ suffering. I was angry at Twill for carrying a gun and at myself for not suspecting that he would.

  We got to the Tesla Building and my offices in less than half an hour. Twill went on to the inner office space while Mardi took up her post as sentry. I stood for a moment before her desk, trying to gather my thoughts.

  “I’m going to move you to the main space,” I said after an overly long span of silence.

  “You don’t want me answering the door anymore?”

  “You will, but we’ll automate the lock so you can ring people in without putting yourself in jeopardy.”