Trouble Is What I Do

by Walter Mosley

  “Don’t do that, Mr. McGill. The last thing I need is you thinking I’m too delicate to look after myself.”

  I heard the argument. Maybe I even agreed with it. As concerned as I might have been, I had no right to take away her freedom.

  “You don’t need to worry about Catfish,” I said. “Lana says he’s doing great, and I intend to do what he wants, then deal with the response.”

  “But would that get you in trouble?”

  “To paraphrase the great Sugar Ray Robinson,” I said, “trouble is what I do.”

  Mardi smiled for me and then turned on her computer.

  I headed for the main office space and the most serious problem I had to face—my son.

  “Hey,” he said when I stopped at his post. There was a picture of Charles Sternman on his computer screen. Our tech expert, Bug Bateman, had equipped us with a search engine that made Google seem like a covered wagon carrying a meager carton of books.

  I settled my bulk on the edge of his desk and asked, “What’s wrong with you, son?”

  “I only carry when I think there might be a problem, Pops.” Twill gave a slight shrug with his left shoulder.

  “Picking up a suitcase from a Harlem hotel sounded like a problem to you?”

  “It was Mardi,” Twill countered, holding up his palms like the span between two steps on a staircase. “When she pays that much attention to somebody, it means there’s somethin’ up. And Lamont was actin’ funny too.”

  “How would you know that? You just met Lamont.”

  “It’s the way he kept lookin’ up at the door, like he was expecting trouble.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “When I sent you to that pool hall where Jordi Hooper’s heist gang met, did you go there armed?”

  “Course not. If they found out, they would’a tried to hurt me. If I pulled on them, they would’a killed me. And even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten what you sent me there to get. Uh-uh, Pops. Between Mardi bein’ so friendly, Lamont bein’ so nervous, and you sendin’ them to Uncle Gordo—I knew somethin’ was up.”

  Being the father of a criminal genius like Twill is no easy task. He loves me, wants my approval. But when it comes to the life he lives day to day—that will always be conducted according to his real-time discretion.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If you ever get the feeling that you need to go armed, working for me or not, tell me about it first. Whether you’re on the job or just going to some party—tell me first.”

  The beautiful young man mulled the request over just behind his eyes. This wasn’t rudeness, but that Twilliam is a thinker as well as a troublemaker.

  “You got it, Pops,” he said after a hundred seconds or so.

  I sighed and then pulled up one of his phantom co-workers’ chairs to see what his advanced search parameters revealed.

  Maybe half an hour later, his intercom spoke.

  “Twill?”

  “Yeah, Mar?”

  “Do you know where your father is? I can’t reach him.”

  “What is it, Mardi?” I called.

  “Captain Kittridge,” a decidedly masculine voice replied.

  “Come on down, Kit,” I said, betraying little to none of the trepidation I felt. “I’ll be in my office.”

  I was already seated with my back to Lower Manhattan when Captain Carson Kittridge came through the doorway. Kit is even shorter than I, at five five even. We stand eye to eye, but in every other way, we’re opposites. He’s the color of bleached bone and slender enough to be a teenager. As far as I knew, Kit had never broken a law in his life; he rarely bruised a rule. People who are so virtuous usually tend toward vengeance rather than forgiveness.

  “Captain.”

  “What’s this license plate you sent to Officer Broadman?” Another quirk of Kit’s personality was that he had no manners.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” I said, “I sent that text to Benny’s private cell. Isn’t it a breach of a man’s civil rights to monitor his private communications?”

  “Cops have no privacy.” Kit lowered into a client’s chair.

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  “You are if you read my communiqué.”

  That assertion stopped the righteous cop for a beat or two.

  “Tell me what you want with Sal Peretti,” Kit demanded.

  “Never heard of the man,” I lied.

  “You didn’t know the plate you sent belongs to Peretti’s aunt in Paramus?”

  “What do you want, Kit?”

  “Peace on earth and your ass in prison. And, while we’re at it, what the hell is Twill doing here?”

  “Like father, like son.”

  Yet another difference between us was that I honestly liked Kit. He’s smart and dogged, a worthy opponent in an undeserving world. Like any good adversary, in or out of the ring, he sought my downfall while I struggled to stay on my feet.

  “There was a shootout at the Holton Hotel up in Harlem earlier today,” he said.

  “There was a flood in Sudan and probably an earthquake on Mars. What the fuck does any of that have to do with me?”

  “A white guy fired the first shots,” Kit explained. “A slender young African American male returned fire.”

  “Lots of angry young black men in New York,” I said. “Most of them, however, are unemployed. My skinny-assed son spends his days working at that desk where you passed him.”

  The honest cop drew in a deep breath.

  “Look, man,” I said. “I know you been mad that the brass had you shut down surveillance on my activities. I know we’ll never be friends, but why don’t you relax for a minute and have a drink with me? I just got hold of some good whiskey.”

  Kit took four, maybe five long breaths before saying, “You got everybody fooled, don’t you, L.T.? Maybe you even believe the bullshit yourself.…”

  I wondered for a moment if the constant cop was aware of the depth of his own question. I shrugged.

  That was the hardheaded captain’s cue to stand.

  “You might have convinced Garrity that you’re no longer a threat, but that doesn’t matter to me. I don’t need a surveillance crew to keep tabs on you. I got the one piece of information I’ll ever need to put you away for good.”

  “Oh? And what might that be?” I really was curious.

  “As slick as any crook is,” he said, “one day he’s bound to slip up.”

  Captain Carson Kittridge turned on his heel and stalked out of my aerie.

  I don’t believe he understood that his perpetual watch over my every step was one of the things that kept me sharp.

  After I saw Kit exit Mardi’s office through my surveillance monitor, I punched in Twill’s extension on the intercom and said, “Get your things together. We’re going to put a little surveillance on a man named Peretti.”

  “Sal Peretti?”

  “The same.”

  “Heavy?” he asked over the line.

  “No.”

  Sal Peretti spent his evenings making the rounds of brothels, illicit nightclubs, gambling establishments, and those places where people like Lana Rainier might procure drugs. He was the bagman for various bosses and known for his ability to deliver.

  At night, he was a man on the move.

  But most afternoons, Sal could be found at Derby’s Men’s Club near a nameless alley adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When he was younger, Sal’s betters belonged to a club that was exclusively Italian and housed in Little Italy. But as time has passed, Peretti and his generation have had to settle for a multicultural Caucasian fraternity, an association much like colonial America, when all the different tribes of Europe agreed that they were white people—whatever that meant.

  I rented an outer-borough green cab from a friend of mine. Twill parked the taxi two blocks away, shooing off potential customers by telling them his car had been leas
ed as a limo by a guy from Turkey.

  There was a small bodega across the street from Derby’s. Dressed in my ripest rags, I installed myself on the curb in front of that little store. There I begged for change and offered to help people with anything from opening the door to giving directions. Festooned in a red bandanna, I wore a Korean War army surplus jacket and jeans stained and stiff enough that they could stand on their own.

  I’d placed a beer-can camera lens at the bottom of a city-supplied wire garbage can. The lens transmitted a streaming image of the front of Derby’s Men’s Club to Twill’s computer screen.

  On the whole, it was a fruitful afternoon. The weather was pleasant, so Sal sat at an outside table drinking something from a coffee cup and shooting the shit with other club members.

  “What are you doing here?” someone asked my back when I had just helped an old woman lift her wheeled shopping cart down three steps from the bodega entrance.

  The question was official-sounding, so I pocketed the dollar tip, turned, and said, “Afternoon, Officers.”

  There were two of them standing in a flanking position from which they could easily keep me from running or striking out with some concealed weapon. I didn’t hold that against them. A cop’s beat is hostile territory on the best days.

  One uniform had red hair and a child’s innocent face. The other patrolman had bloodshot eyes. They were both white and under the age of thirty. This last detail was important because younger cops tended not to recognize me.

  “Time to move on,” the bloodshot cop said. I decided to think of him as Player.

  “You heard him, Pops,” his partner added. “Let’s go.”

  I named the redhead cop Joker because I found it humorous that he called me by the same endearment Twill used.

  “But, Officers.” I infused my words with a plaintive tone. “I been given permission to stand here an’ help my fellow man.”

  I grinned and saw out of the corner of my eye a man with his arm in a sling had stopped to talk with Peretti. I wanted to get a better look, but that might have exposed me to discovery.

  “Don’t think we won’t take you into that alley and bust your head,” Player was saying.

  “…like eggplant target practice on Ku Klux Day in June,” Joker said, finishing the threat.

  It was almost too much information. Player was a bad cop and Joker was worse. Also, I suspected that Joker, despite his red hair, had some Italian in him—because of the eggplant slur. The greatest danger was that these guys were a well-oiled team—finishing each other’s sentences, escalating their threat word by word.

  But I had a trick up my tattered sleeve. Flexing the ring and middle fingers of my left hand, like Spider-Man shooting his web, I pincered a card kept in the cuff of my army jacket sleeve. This I proffered for the boy-men to see.

  “What’s that?” red-eyed Player asked.

  “Ma gooj,” I replied with a grin.

  This particular get out of jail free card, sometimes known as a gooj, was given to me by Art Garrity, one of the most highly ranked cops in the NYPD. Even Aryan Brotherhood goose-steppers like Joker had to stop and pay heed to that ticket.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Player asked his partner.

  “I’ll call it in,” the redhead replied, plucking the card from my fingers. “Probably just found it dumpster diving.”

  Joker walked a few yards away to make a call on his cell phone.

  Some months before, Art Garrity’s son Nicholas had been kidnapped by an anarchist group calling themselves the People’s Revolutionary Orgy. PRO demanded the release of thirty-six political prisoners being held on Rikers Island. The nineteen-year-old already had a pinky removed and delivered to One Police Plaza for what they called proof of purchase.

  When chasing down capitalist criminals, I follow the money as tradition demands. But for anarchists and other political extremists, I find it useful to step outside the box. The best radical detective in the world is a man who goes by the name Archibald Lawless.

  Lawless is a modern-day acolyte of Mikhail Bakunin and Emma Goldman. He doesn’t take money, and he rarely works for the cops. But if you can convince him that any dissident group is using a political excuse for criminal activity, he might decide to help. To that end, I entered a code on a mostly unknown entity called the Chartreuse Web.…

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Leonid here, Archibald.”

  “Mr. Detective. What brings you to my dacha?”

  I explained the situation, being very careful not to lie or even mildly exaggerate any facts.

  “Are you being paid for this job?” Archibald asked.

  “It’s a favor for the boy’s father—Art Garrity.”

  There was a moment of silence. If Lawless didn’t like the request, he would simply disengage the connection. If he thought I was lying, he’d cancel my code.

  “There’s a man who runs a pickpocket ring at Penn Station,” the professional anarchist said.

  “Billy Wrongman,” I said. “He’s the one wears a velvet jacket with the letters N-I-L embossed on the back.”

  “That’s your man.”

  Billy told me that the leader of the PRO was a woman named Mozelle Tot. Among other things, she was a serious opium smoker. That being such a rarefied addiction, it was the easiest thing in the world for me track her down and follow her to the Queens warehouse where Nicholas was being held.

  Mr. Garrity loved his son as much as I did Twill. So he quashed Kit’s ongoing reconnaissance of my movements and gave me a gooj that would get me out of any jam short of political assassination.

  When Joker got back to us, he was no longer smiling. He walked right up to my face, nearly quivering with rage. Then, with an act of pure will, he handed the card back to me.

  “Is there,” he said, and then he paused. “Is there anything we can do for you, sir?”

  Player was astonished. I glanced over at the guys in front of Derby’s. They were wondering about us too.

  “Put the cuffs on me and take me to your car,” I said as if I was a major and he a private. “Drive me six blocks away and then let me out.”

  “You want us to make it rough?” Joker asked, I thought a little hopefully.

  “Not if you want to hold on to your shield, son.”

  “What’s goin’ on?” Player whined.

  “Just put the cuffs on him, George. Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

  “Where you comin’ from, Pops?” Twill asked when I finally made it back to the green cab. “I couldn’t see you at all through the lens there for a while.”

  I explained what happened.

  “Damn, Dad,” he said with a chuckle. “Like the man says, ‘If it wasn’t for bad luck…’”

  “What about the guy in the sling?”

  “That’s the dude I shot. Looks like I got him in the same place he hit Mr. Worry. I guess karma really is a bitch.”

  I decided to stay in the taxi with Twill. We saw Sal head out from Derby’s a few minutes shy of four. A car from Starzine Motorcoach and Limo Service picked him up, so we didn’t have much time. The beer-can camera cost me thirty-five hundred dollars, but I just had to hope no one was pulling recyclables out in the neighborhood that evening.

  I took the wheel.

  Half the way across the Manhattan Bridge, Twill gave a whoop and holler.

  “What?” I asked.

  Looking at the computer screen, he said, “I just got into the Starzine GPS tracking system. The car Peretti’s in is number one twenty-seven. We could track him from here to Inner Mongolia.”

  That night we took an excursion of all the five boroughs. Sal went to clubs and drug dens and restaurants—all leading to an assignation with a young Asian woman with bright blue hair. I supposed that Sal’s deal with the girl’s pimp was that he got to get it on with her now and then.

  They went down a dimly lit alley in Flushing about 11:45. She led him to a doorway and went in first as he looked around to make
sure they were alone.

  The shadow my son and I had chosen to hide in was proof against the bagman’s night vision.

  They were gone for five minutes, more than enough time for Twill and me to construct a flexible plan.

  There were four possible scenarios, the most likely of which was Sal coming out first. Two had Blue Hair in the lead, and, least likely, three was them coming out arm in arm. The wild card was Sal leaving by another exit, but that was okay because we could still track his limo via GPS.

  The bagman proved predictable. When he stepped out of the doorway, I sucker punched him and kicked the door shut on the girl. Twill wedged a metal garbage can under the doorknob.

  After applying handcuffs and a passable gag, we wrangled the unconscious gangster into the trunk of the cab and headed for an office building I knew on the East Side of Upper Midtown Manhattan.

  Sal didn’t come to until after he’d been chained to a bronze chair in a one-room subbasement that only I had access to.

  “What is this shit?” The left side of Sal’s jaw had blown up to twice its normal size. I suspected he was in serious pain.

  I kept quiet while he looked around. Part of my interrogation technique was the circumstances into which he’d been placed. The floor was concrete and cold. The walls were pale green with foamy white corrosion here and there. It was only me and him and a bare forty-watt lightbulb. I’d sent Twill to pick up the beer-can camera and then go home to tell his mother and my father that I’d be working all night.

  Half my childhood all the way into my fifties, I thought my father had died in Chile while fighting for the worldwide revolution. For forty years he’d been dead. Then he showed up in New York and moved in with me and my family. He promised that everything was different now, that he only wanted to be there for his grandchildren like he wasn’t for me and Nikita, my brother.

  He’d promised my mother that he’d be home from South America in eighteen months. While waiting, she died of a broken heart.