Trouble Is What I Do

by Walter Mosley

  “Tony died the night I met him.”

  “So did Arnold Gorham,” Hush said. “Him and Tony really hated each other.”

  “Can I get you something to eat, Ernie?” I asked.

  “I don’t eat meat.”

  “Not even fish?”

  “Fish flesh is still meat. Don’t worry about me.”

  Standing in line, I had time to think about the depths of the investigation, such as it was. Usually a PI, even one with a criminal history like mine, spends his (or her) exertions in shadows unknown and unsuspected by the people he’s up against. Most of the time, my targets never knew I’d even been there. And on those rare occasions when I have been revealed, I was still the most dangerous man in the room.

  “What can I get for you, sir?” a middle-aged white woman asked me. She had pink hair and three visible, if fading, tattoos.

  “Triple cheese, garlic fries, and three beers, please.”

  “I have to take the caps off the beers,” she apologized. “They can’t leave the dining area.”

  I nodded. She tapped around on the register and came up with a price, which I paid. She handed me a small plastic disk along with the change.

  “It’ll light up and vibrate when your order is ready,” she advised.

  Standing near the pickup station, I looked over the people in and outside the dining area. There were hundreds eating, milling around, or walking with purpose to or from a gated platform. No one looked like an immediate threat.

  This reconnaissance was reflex on my part. Hush and Ernie would have seen any danger before I did. Hush and Ernie, professional killers kickin’ it at a hamburger stand.

  Again I wondered about the steps that brought me to that juncture. It had to do with Twilliam and Mardi singing the blues alongside of Lamont. And Lamont himself so committed to his great-great-grandfather. There was Catfish jumping out of his blues waters into the killing boat of his son. I felt a kinship to all of them, more biology than psychology, more mortal than divine.

  The disk came alive with seven winking red lights, and then it began to pulsate. The timing made me laugh.

  Hush and Ernie were still sitting at the little table, comfortable and quiet. If anyone bothered to really pay attention to them, they might have realized that their own pathetic lives were being played out like late-night reruns on a second-rate cable station.

  “You got any kids, Ernie?” I asked just before taking a bite out of my triple cheeseburger.

  The question threw him. His brows knit, but then he smiled.

  “Six,” he said with pride. “An’ they all beautiful.”

  Hush nodded, then looked at me. “You think we can get outta this mess without any heavy lifting?”

  “I really don’t know. I mean, if I were in their position, I’d think twice before poking the gorilla. And the damage was already done, years ago.”

  “What you mean by that?” Ernie asked.

  I told them about Justine’s blood tests.

  “How bad is this Hilton dude?” Ernie asked.

  “He thinks he’s untouchable,” I said.

  Ernie smiled. “What about Justine? What you think she’s up to?”

  “She says she wants to meet with Catfish.”

  “When?” That was Hush.

  “Tonight.”

  “At my place?”

  “Catfish with you?” Ernie chimed.

  “Yeah. Place I got north of the city. Always room for one more.”

  I said, “Tell Twill to get to Bento’s with Mr. Worry by seven forty-five.”

  “Who’s Twill?” Ernie asked.

  “The new generation,” Hush replied.

  I got to Bellingham’s Eaterie at 7:47. The place was filled with people off from work at their Wall Street grinds. It was a very large room, the center of which was occupied by a circular bar manned by six bartenders attempting valiantly to meet the orders of the many dozens of patrons and waitpersons. The rest of the room was temporarily colonized by two hundred or more diners. The pedestrian volume of the dining room was as loud as Grand Central at rush hour—and then there was the soundtrack: music from the sixties to the eighties pumped up to the max.

  Jerome Eastwood was standing at the host’s podium, a stately gentleman who learned his manners before his ABCs. He spoke with a genteel English accent even though he’d been born in Omaha half a century before.

  Jerry and I had a strictly pecuniary relationship. I’d make a reservation at the restaurant for a Mr. A. K. Fox. After making the reservation, I’d send an email with instructions about what I needed from him. For this service, I showed up and gave him three crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “Mr. Fox,” Jerry greeted.

  “Mr. Eastwood. The joint seems to be jumpin’ tonight.”

  “That’s because tomorrow they could well be leaping from a window if China presses back hard enough on these tariffs.”

  I nodded sagely and asked, “Is she here?”

  “Having sparkling water at table nine.”

  “In fifteen minutes, have one of your staff tell her about the door beyond the ladies’ room.”

  “As you say, Mr. Fox.”

  When we shook hands, I passed him the cash. After that, I sauntered off toward the bar.

  I ordered a snifter of Hennessy Paradis from a bartender who had as a wedding ring the tattoo of a coiled green snake. She was an ash blonde with pale skin and blue eyes that glinted like electric sparks. When she brought my hundred-fifty-dollar drink, I smiled and said, “Not so easy to take off a wedding band like that.”

  “That’s what he thinks.” She smirked, and I toasted her cynicism.

  Table nine was out of the line of sight from my position at the bar. That is, except for a mirror hanging from one of the posts holding up the shelving. Through that small window, I could see Justine Sternman in a conservative gray dress suit sipping effervescent water and looking around pensively. She was alone, and I couldn’t make out anyone else watching her.

  The cognac was very good. Not ecstatic like Eckles’s bootleg, but what was?

  A waitress clad in the prescribed LBD walked up to table nine. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought the server was asking Justine did she need anything else? The waitress departed, and my target waited ninety seconds or so before getting up and heading for the toilet.

  The waitress had told Justine to take a door beyond the entrance to the restroom. The door was usually locked, but it would be open when she tried it. There was a similar door beyond the men’s room. I took that exit, following a long corridor behind the back wall of the restaurant until I came upon the ultrasocialite in the pearl-gray dress.

  “Oh!” she said, tensing at the sight of me. “Mr. Rudolf? They…the woman downstairs at the restaurant told me that you, you went off duty. And so did the man who received my letter.… I don’t understand.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “You’re a smart woman, Miss Sternman. My real name is McGill. Leonid McGill. You can appreciate that I’ve had to be careful. The men after your grandfather have already tried once to kill him.”

  “Kill him,” she repeated the words.

  “Someone feels strongly that his blood should not be recognized in your line.”

  “My father.”

  “How many cell phones do you have?”

  “One. Why?”

  I took a glistening bag from my sports-coat pocket, saying, “A man with enough money could have somebody trace your phone even without a bug. This bag will make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  She handed me the phone; I sealed it in the bag and then put the bag in my pocket.

  “How do you know that I don’t have some other kind of tracking device on me?” she asked.

  “I don’t. That there is what is known as an article of faith.”

  “Faith in what?”

  “In my assumption that you would not knowingly involve yourself in the murder of an innocent man.”

  “You can’t
be certain of that,” she said.

  “I can’t be certain that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning. That doesn’t keep me from sleeping like a baby. Shall we go?”

  “Go where?”

  “I have your grandfather somewhere close.”

  Justine looked deeply into my eyes. I don’t know what she was searching for, or if she found it. But she gestured with her left hand, and I led the way.

  In almost every way, Bento’s was the opposite of Bellingham’s. It was a sedate Japanese restaurant with tables up front and private dining rooms in back. A middle-aged Japanese woman dressed in what I can only assume was traditional garb took us to one of the back rooms. She pulled open a jade-green door and ushered us in.

  Twill was there with Catfish Worry, the elder’s arm no longer in a sling. Catfish stood and took two steps toward us as the door to our small room closed behind.

  Young white hands and ancient brown fingers reached out for one another.

  “Ain’t you sumpin’?” the grandsire said.

  “Mr. Worry.”

  “Everybody call me Catfish, girl.”

  “I’ve dreamt about you for years.”

  They were both near tears.

  “I been seein’ you since before you was born.” Catfish whispered so as not to break the spell.

  Twill got to his feet, putting a hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  “Hm?” Catfish glanced at my son, who nodded toward the table. “Oh yeah. Come on, child. Let’s sit. You hungry?”

  “No, Grandfather. No.”

  They sat side by side while Twill and I stood sentry at the door. I suppose we should have left the room, but there was something gravitational about the meeting between the Mayflower and the deep cleft of slavery that followed in its wake.

  “Why didn’t you and my grandmother stay in England?” Justine asked. The question was so gently put that there was no hint of accusation.

  “I was already wed to a beautiful woman name of Ernestine Charles. We had four chirren down Mississippi an’ I loved ’em all. An’ Ernestine needed a man, the father of her boys and girls. I loved your grandmother too, but one day her father would’a fount out, he would. And then what would’a become’a Lu and our son?”

  “My father,” Justine allowed. “He tried to kill you.”

  “I shouldn’t’a gone to ’im. I shouldn’t’a made him scared like that. His whole life he’s been a white man, and there I come kickin’ that high ladder right out from under him.”

  “But he had no right to hurt you, no cause.” The blueblood took the bluesman’s hands again.

  “You sayin’ that ’cause you from a inside world, girl.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You cain’t see the ugliness, the need in people who been broke down and walked on.”

  “Need? He needs to hate you?”

  “I been playin’ in juke joints from Selma to Yokohama for ovah seventy years. People love my blues ’cause it talk to ’em. It wash over ’em an’ pulls out they pain. Charles must’a suspected that there was a secret like me off in the high grass somewhere. I’m just glad it turned out to hate rather than in on him.”

  This last declaration set Justine back in her chair.

  “People like me play to that darkness,” Catfish continued. “We put to song what make a grown man cry.”

  The hand on my shoulder made me aware that I was leaning toward the newfound blood relations.

  “Let’s go out, Pops,” Twill said.

  I ordered twelve pieces of toro sashimi. Twill got a tempura fish plate.

  When my gut was full of fatty tuna, I looked up at Twill and said, “My father left me when I was a boy.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I never wanted that to happen to my kids.”

  “We’re all with you, Dad. No matter what happens, we’re with you.”

  Maybe an hour later, Catfish and Justine came out from their private confessional. They seemed pleased and relieved, pensive and, in Justine’s case, determined.

  “So?” I asked when they joined us at our table.

  “Is my grandfather still in danger, Mr. McGill?”

  “Black man in danger if he wake up early or sleep in late,” Catfish answered.

  I smiled. “Yeah. He’s in danger.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Set up a meeting with your father. Tomorrow afternoon at a place called Mama So’s.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Don’t worry. His people know.”

  “I need an address. I want to be there too.”

  “Why did you take off your engagement ring after you read that letter?” I don’t know why I asked.

  “Because I knew that it was a symbol for my father and all the people faithful to him.”

  “You didn’t know that before?”

  “I did, but it was never in words. It was something I couldn’t say, even to myself. But when I read Grandmother Lucinda’s letter, I knew the life I was living was a lie. I was just keeping up appearances because no one knew the truth.”

  “Part of the lie was your wedding?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think the truth will be in that room with your father and Catfish?”

  “Yes.”

  At almost any other time, I would have said that either I go alone or I drop the case. But there was something about seeing Catfish and Justine together that placed a limit on my sense of authority.

  “Your father is in with some bad people, Justine. There’s a man named Zeal, and a whole raft of killers come along with him.”

  “I understand you’re trying to protect me, Mr. McGill. Grandfather told me that you took his case for a bottle of whiskey. I’ll pay your fees and expenses, but I have to be at that meeting.”

  “What do you say, Catfish?” I asked.

  “Why are you asking him?” Justine said.

  “Because he’s my client, not you.”

  “Well,” Catfish Worry began, “I know these some bad people. But this girl got her grandmother’s heart. I don’t want her there, but I think she got to be.”

  It was the wrong way to play it. I knew that. But this whole case was like the wisdom of a boxer: If you don’t want to get hit, you should stay out of the ring.

  “Twill.”

  “Yeah, Pops?”

  “You’re going to take Catfish and Justine up to Nyack tonight. Tomorrow at four, bring them to Mama’s.”

  Twill gave me a quarter nod.

  “I’ll get the word to your old man’s people when and where to meet,” I said to Justine.

  “Thank you, Mr. McGill,” she said.

  Her gratitude felt like the condemned offering her executioner a good-morning smile.

  “Keep it,” I said.

  Everything was set by ten the next morning. Thugs and socialites, blood letters and bluesmen, were all ready to read their lines and make their vows.

  I was sitting at Mardi’s desk—the only beating heart in the office complex. Some days, when you’re sitting alone with the truth, you question whether or not there’ll be a tomorrow. That was one of those days for me.

  When mortality weighs heavily like that, people are apt to make odd choices. I guided my internet provider to the New York Times website and read those articles they made available. I don’t usually read the news. My experience has been that at its best, news reporting is an approximation of the slant on the truth that reporters, editors, and advertisers want the public to know.

  But that day, I don’t know why, I wanted to be entertained by trying to figure out the truth behind the half lies. I skipped ten or twelve stories about the president. Finance held no interest. I did come across one interesting item.

  A few minutes past two on the previous afternoon, at a flophouse in Brownsville, an African American man known only as Monty was found dead on the roof. He’d been shot in the forehead and must have died immediately. There were no witnesses. No one heard the gunshot.
There was no suspect, and even though Monty was a heroin addict, it wasn’t clear why he was killed.

  The phone rang. I knew the number on the display panel.

  “Hello, Katrina. You know you shouldn’t be using your cell when I got you with Hush.”

  “I don’t like that man. He’s cold inside.”

  “Believe me when I tell you that cold is the only way you want him.”

  “I need to talk to you about something,” she said.

  “Twill told you what was going on, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. You’re trying to help that nice man Mr. Worry.”

  “So, knowing that, couldn’t this wait till tomorrow?”

  “I’m in love with your father,” my wife of a quarter century said.

  It was that good left hook you’d been trying to stay away from for nine rounds; the one chance your opponent had of putting you down. A knockout punch when victory was almost in reach.

  I wasn’t so much thinking about boxing as feeling it. My muscles tensed with shoulders hunched up high. If I wasn’t seated at Mardi’s desk, I would have probably gone to one knee.

  While I grappled with these physical responses, Katrina kept talking. She said that nothing had happened, that my father had been a perfect gentleman. While they were out at Nyack, she had finally revealed her feelings to him. He told her that he would never cross that line—he would rather die.

  In the ring of my mind, the referee had counted eight and I was up on my feet. I was hurt, but there was no pain. Instead there flowed the numbness that had been the solace of my childhood.

  “Katrina,” I said, cutting off her endless explanatory chatter.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Why would you choose this moment to tell me this? Matter of fact, why tell me at all?”

  I was dead inside; outside she was silent.

  After a few moments of this standoff, I sighed.

  “We’ll talk when I see you tonight,” she said.

  “You ever think about what it’s like to act in one of those long-running plays on Broadway?” I said.

  “What?”