I remembered again what a formidable character Dimitri’s girlfriend was.
“Did you meet my friend Mr. Arnold?” I asked.
There was more than one intention behind the question. Immediately I wanted to derail her insinuation that I dismissed my son’s talents and abilities. I believed in D but he purposely kept me out of his life.
On the other hand, I didn’t only want to know what Hush thought about Tatyana; I was also interested in how she saw the ex-assassin.
“Yes,” she said, shaking out a pair of black-yellow-and-green argyle socks.
“ What did you think of him?”
She rolled the socks, placed them in a box, and selected another pair from a pile on the floor.
“ Well?” I prompted.
“He has dead eyes,” she said to the floor.
“ What do you mean?”
“He is one of those men my babushka used to tell me about.”
“ What men?”
“The tightrope walkers who have their death on one side and yours on the other.”
9
KATRINA’S SNORING could be heard throughout the apartment. She sawed on while the kids packed and carried, ate sandwiches and cleaned. Dimitri spent half an hour whispering with Tatyana in a corner of the kitchen. After that he calmed down. He stopped talking about his mother and woes and concentrated on preparing for his new life with the Mata Hari of the Upper West Side.
After they had all gone, ferried by Hush to the new place, the only sound was Katrina’s rough breathing.
I stayed home out of duty to my wife. She was in pain, more than she ever had been in our long years together—and apart. I suppose I was worried about her.
But the sound of her snoring, for some reason, unsettled me. Soon after the kids were gone I went into the dining room and closed the door. There I took a crystal whiskey glass from the cabinet and poured myself a drink from the decanter.
The snoring was diminished but not extinguished. It sounded like recurring susurration from a storm the other side of thick stone walls.
The cognac didn’t help. Rather than providing bliss it exaggerated my habit of going over and over facts that I knew and could not change.
BRELAND LEWIS had to call in a lot of favors to get Zella’s case back in the courts. He used every bit of his talent and guile to persuade the female convict to let him represent her. Then he had to present new evidence that had to seem to have been derived from a priori investigation and not from actual knowledge concerning the facts in the case.
I had replaced the wrappers on the cash with fakes and used blood from a Lower East Side donor named Rainbow Bill to replace the blood I had been presented with. For ten dollars and a quart of wine I got six good drops.
The lock they snipped off her storage space wouldn’t have opened with the key they’d taken from her. For anyone willing to look closely enough it was obvious that she’d been framed.
I’d gone through those elaborate precautions because the job had been brought to me by Gert and I was worried that Stumpy Brown might have put her in jeopardy somewhere up the line.
Getting my preparations together in front of a sympathetic judge cost money—a lot of it.
Thinking about Zella while listening to Katrina’s faraway exsufflations I remembered the last time I happened upon hard breathing.
IT WAS in an apartment in Queens, not too far from LeFrak City. At three-seventeen on a Thursday morning I entered the building through a side entrance and made it up the stairs without being noticed. The door to apartment 3G was ajar.
Upon entering the dark apartment I heard her ragged breath. Flipping the light switch revealed the young woman, naked and on her haunches, in the corner. There was a hypodermic needle, with a red rubber bulb at the end, lying on the floor between her thighs. She was swaying from side to side, mumbling to herself and breathing like a Greco-Roman wrestler.
In the center of the floor, on a stained white sheet, lay the body of a white man who carried an extra thirty pounds. I knew he was dead by the permanent crease in his left temple; that and the white ceramic box stained with his blood on the sheet next to him. He was on his back. His only article of clothing was a dark green condom.
The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe. I got on my knees next to her and she looked up suddenly.
“Velvet?” I said.
Her fright turned to hazy curiosity.
“Did he attack you?”
“My throat,” she whispered.
She lifted her head and I could see the bluish bruises that told of the fingers strangling her.
“And you hit him with that box?” I asked.
She looked at the body and nodded. This motion pushed her off balance. I moved into half lotus and let her fall into my lap. There she put her arms around my head, as Katrina was wont to do in our rare moments of intimacy.
Just that quickly Velvet was asleep. I wondered if she would die too. That would have made things much easier.
I didn’t need to talk to Velvet Reyes. I had already been informed about her situation—more or less.
“LEONID?” Breland Lewis said on the phone an hour or so earlier.
“Late for you, isn’t it, Bre?” I said lightly, knowing that the weight would soon be coming down.
He explained that a wealthy client of his had a live-in maid who had a daughter with a drug problem. This young woman, Velvet, had called her mother a while before—hysterical. She told about a man inviting her to his apartment and then trying to kill her. She fought him off but now she didn’t know what to do.
Velvet didn’t have to say that the invitation included a monetary transaction or that the john promised some good aitch to sweeten the pot—so to speak.
The facts pretty much spoke for themselves. Maybe he was really going to kill Velvet, maybe not. But he probably said that that was his intention. The bruises proved that he was squeezing hard enough to kill. She grabbed for anything to fight him off with and found the porcelain box. He fell over and she called her mother. Her mother told the rich man, he called Breland, Breland called me, and in the meanwhile Velvet found the dead man’s stash. She used this to blunt the trauma of near death and murder.
With the child (I knew from Breland that she’d just turned twenty) on my lap I fished the cell phone out of my blue jacket pocket and pressed three digits.
“Leonid,” Breland said before I heard a ring.
I explained the situation, and asked, “So what is it exactly that you want from me?”
“I want you to fix it.”
“You know I’m straight now, man. And even when I was bent I didn’t take on jobs like this.”
“Come on, LT. This is for a very important client of mine. And you told me yourself that it looks like self-defense.”
“Then why not call the cops and defend her yourself?”
“It’s complicated.”
I could have pressed him, maybe even talked him out of what he was asking for. But Breland was not only my lawyer, he was a friend. He had been there for me when any other sane man would have walked away.
“I’ll call you back.”
SITTING AT the hickory table, listening to Katrina’s snoring in the distance, I thought about the ugly apartment with the dead man and the ravaged young woman. I had been in many rooms like that over the years. That tableau could have been a painting representing my whole previous life when I still hated my father and believed that dealing in darkness was the only way I could survive.
“YEAH?” Hush said on the second ring. It was past three on that Thursday morning. Velvet was still asleep and the nameless corpse was still dead.
“I got a situation here.”
“ Where?”
“YEAH, LEONID?” Breland said.
“You got two choices,” I told my lawyer. “Either I call the cops for nothing or you come up with fifty thousand, cash.”
“I can double that and
have it in your hands by noon.”
What could I say? I needed that much to get Zella out of hock. I’d lose ten thousand points on my bid for redemption, but no boxer ever won a match without getting hit—except maybe Willie Pep.
“I got somebody on the way,” I said. “It’ll all be cleaned up in an hour.”
IT WAS a sour memory, even more so when I thought of Zella’s response to my offer of help.
That’s when I remembered my advice to Dimitri—It’s a gift, not an investment . . . I smiled at my own blind insight, and at just that moment my cell phone sang.
10
IT WAS CLOSE to midnight, and the caller registered as unknown.
“Hello?” The only reason I answered is because I believed any distraction would be better than the memories threading through my brain.
“Mr. McGill?”
“Zella?”
“Yes. Can you talk?”
“Sure. Talk.”
“I mean, in person.”
“Okay. Come to my office tomorrow at ten. That’s in the Tesla—”
“I meant now.”
“It’s eleven fifty-seven.”
“You don’t sound asleep.”
Recently released convicts don’t live in the workaday world, not at first. They’ve been locked up in a box, and the shock of freedom breaks all rules. Zella had a problem and a phone, so why not call the only man she knew?
“There’s a place in the East Village called Leviathan . . .” I said.
I gave her the address and a few special instructions. She made me repeat the directions and agreed to meet there in an hour’s time.
I took a three-minute cold shower, donned a blue suit identical to the one I wore that day, and checked to see that Katrina was still on her belly. After all that I skipped down the ten flights to the street, feeling like a kid having received a reprieve from summer school.
LEVIATHAN WAS one of the most secret late-night bars in Manhattan. Three floors underground, it was reputed to be a Mafia bomb shelter in the mid-fifties. The bartender/owner was named Leviticus Bowles, though his mother had christened him Eugene.
Leviticus was a born-again ex-con who acquired the deed and keys from a cell mate, Jimmy Teppi, at Attica before that prison was world-renowned. Legend has it that young Leviticus had had Jimmy’s back during some hard times and the mobster was grateful.
Jimmy died not long after the uprising. Mr. Bowles took this as a sign to make a life that kept him away from wardens and prison yards, rancid breath and unrestrained manhood.
Leviathan was beneath a Chinese restaurant equipment store on Bowery. The upper floors of the building were apartments. There was a locked door, with various buttons for the residents. One of these buttons had the name L. Bowles scrawled next to it.
I pressed the button and few moments later a voice said, “Yes?”
“Jimmy T,” I said clearly.
The lock clicked open, and I walked down a narrow hallway, past the stairs that led to the upper-floor apartments, to a doorway that had an electric eye above it.
I looked up at the lens, and the door came open. Three steps in and I found myself at the precipice of one hundred and seventy-two stairs that coiled down into darkness. This spiral was dank and ominous. You knew that you were leaving the world of city-granted licenses and state-enforced regulations.
The vestibule at the bottom of the stairs presented a bright green door that opened immediately.
I was assailed by Sinatra and cigarette smoke, careless laughter and bright lights.
“Mr. McGill,” Tyrell Moss said in greeting.
Tyrell was a tall multi-racial man. Hispanic and black, Asian and some form of Caucasian—he was powerfully built and forever young. He was maybe forty, maybe older, but his smile was that of the God of Youth on some faraway island that had yet to hear of either electricity or clinical depression.
“Moss, man,” I said.
Behind him was a large room with ceilings at least twenty-five feet high. There were small pale yellow tables everywhere and at least eighty patrons. At Leviathan you could smoke cigarettes or cigars, drink absinthe, and it was even rumored that there was an opium den in a back room somewhere.
It was like stepping into an earlier day that never existed.
“I got her set up against the back wall,” Tyrell was saying. “You did invite her, right?”
“Zella?”
“That’s her.”
WALKING ACROSS the dazzling expanse of Leviathan, I saw many notables. There were no politicians, but their handlers came there to meet and relax; there was a pop star or two; and there were half a dozen bad men with whom I’d done business in the old days.
Zella was wearing the same rayon suit, so I supposed she wouldn’t insult my threads again. She was drinking an amber-colored fluid out of a shot glass. That must have given her great solace after eight years of locked doors and stale water.
“Hey,” I said as I pulled out the chair across from her at the crescent-shaped table.
“ What’s that supposed to mean?” she replied.
“It means that you’re out of prison, Miss Grisham, and that people don’t use codes or special greetings. It means hello.”
“Then why don’t you say hello?”
I stood up again.
“The drinks are on me, lady. Be my guest. But don’t call again.” I was ready to leave. No use in wasting time on someone who didn’t know how to act on the street, or under it.
“ Wait,” she said.
“ What?”
“I don’t know you, Mr. McGill, but Breland Lewis says that I should trust you. The problem is that I don’t know him either . . . but I need, I need to talk to somebody.”
It was a start.
I sat down again.
“ What can I do to allay your suspicions?” I asked.
“Do you think I had anything to do with the Rutgers heist?”
“No.”
“ What about Lewis?”
“ What about him?”
“Is he after that money?”
“I can’t say for sure, but I imagine that someone who knew about framing you had a change of heart and paid him to set you out.”
“ Who?”
“I have no idea,” I mouthed.
Zella suspected that I was lying but what could she do? She stared for a dozen seconds or so, and said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you think or him either. It doesn’t because I don’t know anything about any money.”
“Is that why you wanted to meet? To tell me that?”
Distrust and doubt are the first lessons you learn in lockdown. Smiles and kind words mean nothing. Promises and even love are less substantial than toilet paper. Zella couldn’t bring herself to confide in me even though that’s why she’d come to that underground club.
“Hey, Leonid,” a man said.
“Leviticus,” I hailed.
He was maybe five-eight, with the shoulders of a much taller man. His bald head was a pale dome over a shelf-like brow and deep dark eyes. His features were angry, but I’d never seen the bar owner lose his temper.
“Haven’t seen you in years,” he said, looking at me but taking Zella in too.
“It’s a big city and I got commitments in every borough.”
Bowles was wearing an expensive midnight blue silk suit. He looked like a butcher wearing clothes a young mistress bought for him. From his breast pocket he drew out a pack of cigarettes. Before taking one he offered one to Zella. She took the filterless Camel greedily. He waved the pack at me but I shook my head. Then Bowles took one and lit up both himself and my reluctant client.
He took in a deep, grateful breath.
“You’re not here to cause trouble, now are you, LT?” he said before exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“No, sir.”
He smiled and nodded to Zella. Then he walked away, having delivered his message.
“Trouble?” she asked.
“I’m known as a rough-and-tumble kind of guy,” I said. “People like Leviticus try to keep the breakage down to a minimum.”
“Then why let you in in the first place?”
“The kind of trouble I cause can’t be kept out with a locked door.”
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 5