All I Did Was Shoot My Man

by Mosley, Walter

  I signed on to the Persona Search Engine that Bug had lifted from the State Department. He honed the system down to where it could be used to find almost anyone almost anywhere in the world. You entered as much information as possible—age range, sex, sex preference, race(s), languages spoken, national origin, height . . . There were even places for DNA codes, photographs (for a facial-recognition subroutine), and fingerprints. I gave the program as much information as I could and hit the enter button.

  While waiting, on a hunch I tried calling information and then looking through my phone books for Minnie Lesser—Zella’s supposed good friend and Harry’s paramour at the time of his shooting. She wasn’t anywhere to be found either.

  There was lots of information on Harry up until nine years before, a few months after Zella shot him. But the trail went cold a full ten months before her conviction. He was a sometime carpenter, housepainter, fiber-optic-wire installer, cook, dishwasher, and clerk. He was more or less handsome but had weak eyes. As I looked at the pictures of him I wondered how he managed to fall so far off the radar.

  After noodling on that puzzle for a quarter of an hour, I sicced Bug’s search engine on Minnie Lesser.

  She fell from sight at just about the same time Harry did.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  If I didn’t know for a fact that I was the cause of Zella’s incarceration, I would have begun to suspect the boyfriend and his girl.

  Perusal of the information provided by Bug’s system didn’t help me put together a plan to investigate the disappearances. So I picked up the landline and hit a speed dial button.

  She answered on the fifth ring.

  “Good morning, Mr. McGill,” Zephyra Ximenez, my self-defined Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant, said.

  “Z.”

  “Have you talked to Charles?” That was Bug’s given name.

  “Not for a week or so.”

  “Have you seen him for dinner?”

  “Only at the gym. He’s gotten into good shape.”

  “Yes . . . he has.”

  As much as I wondered about Zephyra’s interest in Bug’s doings, I had bigger problems.

  “I’m going to send you two files on people that I can’t find anything on in the last nine years,” I said. “That’s very strange.”

  “Charles’s programs didn’t turn up anything?”

  “Not an ort.”

  “ Wow. You think they might be dead?”

  “If they are nobody buried them—legally. Neither has anyone reported them missing.”

  “I’ll get right on it. And if you see Charles, tell him I said hello.”

  “You got it.”

  14

  I WAS JUST hanging up with Zephyra when Twill walked into my office. The slender and handsome young man wore silk pants and T-shirt, both black, and a cinnamon-colored jacket with no collar and brass snaps that were not attached. His only flaw was a small scar on his chin—left over from a tumble he took when he was a toddler.

  His perfection was very much like that of Achilles.

  His skin was actually darker than mine. It was as if Katrina’s DNA hadn’t affected him at all while his African father completely informed his elegant features and genetic history.

  “Hey, Pops,” he said. He smiled at me. Twill was usually smiling. As a rule he had everything under control; at least he thought he did.

  The reason I’d brought him in as a detective-in-training was because he had gotten into so much trouble in his adolescent years that I feared he’d go too far and end up in prison.

  “How’s it goin’, son?”

  “I’m bored,” he said, taking one of the chrome-and-cobalt-vinyl visitor’s chairs that faced my desk. “You know, listening to your stakeout tapes and readin’ old files is good and all but I need to do somethin’.”

  “I know, boy. I know. It’s just that the things I been working on don’t have a learning curve built into them. Either that or they’re very personal jobs that I really need to see through for myself. Can you hold on for a few more weeks?”

  “It’s been months already, LT. And you know I had problems sittin’ at my desk in school every day.”

  “Speaking of that, have you looked into the high school equivalency test?”

  “Me and Mardi go over it two hours every day after lunch, if she’s not too busy. I’ll probably take it in September.”

  Since he was five years old he never made a promise that he didn’t keep.

  “I will get you a job,” I said.

  For a moment Twill’s perpetual smile dimmed, but then the grin broke through again.

  “Don’t worry ’bout it, Pops. I know you tryin’. And, who knows? If you hadn’t roped me in here, I might be sittin’ in some jail by now—maybe worse.”

  Unlike Achilles (at least since his sixteenth birthday), Twill did not suffer from false pride nor did he deceive himself with unrealistic optimism. He was tough and smart. But, most of all, he saw the world for what it was.

  I have always loved him without reservation.

  “How you been doin’?” Twill asked with a peculiar slant to his gaze.

  “Okay. Fine. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. For the past few days your eyes been kinda glassy. And sometimes you look off into space . . . like, forever.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, feeling as if I was talking to a peer instead of a young man not yet out of his teens. “I’ve been running a little fever. It’s nothing.”

  Twill’s smile evaporated for a moment and he nodded, agreeing with some notion that I had not put forward.

  I was about to ask him what he was thinking when the buzzer sounded. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was three minutes after ten. A red light was glaring on my desk phone.

  I nodded at Twill and he left with a parting nod.

  I took in a deep breath, picked up the receiver, and pressed the clear plastic cube that was imprinted with the number six.

  “Hello, Breland.”

  “I’ve been calling you since early this morning,” the lawyer said, his lack of civility telling me that something was seriously wrong.

  “Thanks for helping with Zella,” I said, deflecting his urgency. “I picked her up at the bus station. I guess she called you.”

  “Yes. She was very reserved. Minksy at the Rag Factory said that she came in and will be starting work today. I gave Minks your assurance that there won’t be any trouble.”

  “Thanks again.”

  Then came the necessary lull when I was supposed to ask why he called.

  “My phone died,” I explained instead. “That’s why I didn’t get your call. You know, I usually plug it in. But Dimitri moved out and Katrina tied one on. Between those two fiascoes I guess I was a little thrown off.”

  “You remember the Mycrofts, don’t you?” he asked, no longer able to hold back his business.

  I’d never met the billionaire family, but I knew that the Mycrofts’ live-in maid was Velvet Reyes’s mother.

  “ What’s up with them?” I asked.

  “Shelby called me last night. He was very disturbed.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s their son—Kent. They have two children, Kent is the elder. For a while there he was estranged from the family but he’s been back for a couple of years—enrolled at NYU.”

  “College man, huh? He need a math tutor or something?”

  “Your kind of math, LT.”

  “Spell it out, Breland.”

  “It has come to the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Mycroft that their son has fallen in with a very bad crowd down in the Village. He’s an extremely emotional and impressionable young man and they fear for his safety.”

  It was lawyerspeak. I knew from his elocution that Breland felt pressured.

  “ What kinda crowd?” I asked.

  “ We didn’t get into specifics.”

  “No? Are we talkin’ about the Little Rascals or the Purple Gang?”

 
“I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle.”

  “And what is it exactly that the Mycrofts want me to do?”

  “I want you to go see them and give them any help you can.”

  The prospect of visiting a rich man didn’t appeal to me. I hadn’t adopted my father’s political zeal, but I didn’t like the company of the upper classes.

  Prejudices aside, however, I am a private detective in a downward-spiraling economy. When the country’s got a healthy GNP the husband or wife wants to know if a spouse is cheating—they’re willing to pay a man like me to find out. But when jobs are scarce that same spouse knows they need the extra paycheck.

  “I don’t know, Breland.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “These friends of yours seem to have more than their share of trouble.”

  “They have more than their share of cash too.”

  “The last time I dealt with them I had to break a promise I’d made to myself.”

  “It’s not like that this time.”

  “You said you don’t know what the problem is.”

  “He’s just a stupid college kid, LT. Any trouble he’s in is nothing like the other thing.”

  “If it’s so simple why do you need me?”

  “Shelby likes to keep things quiet and confidential. His investment fund caters to blue bloods and old money. The kind of folks that don’t appreciate scandal.”

  “How much money?”

  “Half the Reyes thing.”

  I wasn’t worried. I knew that Breland was telling me the truth, that as far as he knew this was a routine job. I wanted him to squirm a bit, however. Having covered up for Velvet still stung.

  “It would be a deep favor for me and a good payday for you, Leonid.”

  “Just a college kid took a bad turn on the way to the john, huh?”

  “That’s all.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Breland. I’ll go talk to these people and see if it’s as simple as you say.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you have to do something for me in return.”

  “ What’s that?”

  “You still got that old girlfriend, the assistant to the director of the department of records?”

  “Jeanette? I don’t see her anymore, not since Madeline and I renewed our vows.”

  “But you still know her number, right?”

  “ What do you need?”

  “I want to know the name and address of the family that adopted Zella Grisham’s baby.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “You want me to go talk to these friends’a yours or what?”

  “It’ll cost something.”

  “I’ll pay it.”

  “I was asking for a favor, Leonid.”

  “I did your favor the last time I had dealings with these people.”

  “You were paid for that.”

  “Not enough to risk spending twenty years in the joint.”

  15

  TWILL WAS SITTING two desks away from my office door in the long two-sided aisle of sixteen desks. I’d obtained my suite quasi-legally when the previous building manager had a problem that only a guy like me could fix. It involved a fake bank account and re-forged documents. The new owners hired Aura Ullman to get me out, but instead we fell in love.

  Aura and I had broken off our liaison; at first because Katrina came back to me after leaving for the Austrian/Argentine banker, Andre Zool, and then because Aura realized that one day I would probably die violently and she didn’t think that she could bear that weight.

  TWILL WAS WORKING on a sketch with a yellow number two pencil. For years and years I had seen both my sons make little drawings. I never paid much attention. I guess it was because there was so much to worry about with each one, for different reasons, that there wasn’t much room for simple pride.

  The drawing he was working on was a lovely three-point perspective of the hallway before him. It wasn’t angular or forced, a delicate rendition of flowing space—solid and yet suspended like mist.

  “Hey, boy.”

  “ What’s up, Pops?” He had earbuds on, listening to my boring stakeout logs no doubt.

  He turned off the tape machine and looked up from the drawing.

  “I might have a case you could help me with, son.”

  “ What’s that?”

  I explained about the wealthy family with the wayward son, leaving out Velvet and the slaughtered john.

  After hearing me out Twill said, “Cool. Just let me go change my shirt.”

  “I’ll meet you out at the front desk.”

  MARDI WAS WORKING on two computer screens and a scanner, reading in and then moving my various documents from one system to another.

  “How’s it goin’, M?”

  “Dimitri called when you were on the phone. He said that he and Tatyana want to invite you over for a housewarming dinner.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Do you want me to make you a doctor’s appointment?”

  “ What for?”

  “Your fever.”

  “I’ll live.”

  She gave me a mild scowl that I managed to ignore.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “I want to get a water tank in here for drinking,” she said. “You know, I was reading this article on drinking water in America and—”

  “Fine,” I said. “I read the same piece.”

  Twill came out into the reception area then. He’d switched the black silk T-shirt for a pink cotton dress shirt buttoned up to the neck. I had to admit, it did make him look more professional—and less sinister.

  “ Where you guys going?”

  “Pops might be lettin’ me work on a case,” Twill told Mardi, who was also his best friend.

  “That’s great.”

  “ We’ll see,” I told them.

  THE MYCROFTS LIVED in a rococo monstrosity so far over in the eighties that it overlooked the East River. There was a doorman outside the open double copper doors and a deskman visible across the wide green-and-white marble hall.

  The doorman was tall and tan, probably mostly Caucasian, with broad shoulders and a sexual leer on his mobile lips.

  “Yes?” he asked me.

  “Leonid McGill for Shelby Mycroft.”

  “And?” he asked, nodding once in Twill’s direction.

  “My associate.”

  “Are you expected?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  That question didn’t seem to need an answer, so I didn’t provide one.

  The doorman moved his lips around some, waiting for, maybe even expecting, an answer to his non-question.

  When it finally became clear that our conversation was over he said, “ Wait here,” like a crew boss talking to his minions.

  As he walked away I glanced at my son. He didn’t seem bothered. I didn’t expect he would be.

  After some talking and electronic communications the doorman sauntered back across the wide floor. He waited a moment before addressing us.

  “Mr. Mycroft is expecting you,” he said to me, “but no one else.”

  “If you wish,” I said in a bland tone, “you can walk back over there and call him again. Tell him that there are two of us down here and either we’re both coming up or nothing.”

  “ What’s his name?”

  “Fuck you.”

  The lips froze at that moment and I regretted losing my temper in front of Twill. But sometimes I just get mad at those that take out their life failures on people shorter than them.

  “I don’t have to let you in,” the doorman told me.