“Yeah, you do. You know it and I do too. So hop to it, whatever you’re gonna do, and let us be about our business.”
“You should have a little respect,” the doorman advised.
“I give what I get, brother.”
He waited a moment before going back to the deskman. They huddled a few moments, made another call, and then my temporary nemesis came back.
“Go down the hall and take the last set of elevators on your left,” he told me. “Floor sixteen.”
As I went by he added, “I’d like to meet you on the street one day.”
I stopped and turned toward him. This unexpected movement fostered uncertainty; he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.
“I look forward to that with great anticipation,” I told him.
THERE WERE FERNS growing in large ceramic pots along the walls. And six huge tables down the center of the extra-wide walkway. These tables had massive jungle-like floral arrangements on them. Sunlight came into the hallway from a variety of sources, infusing the air with the quality of a natural setting.
When Twill and I got to the mahogany elevator door he pressed the up button.
“Sorry about the way I talked to him, Twill.”
“That’s all right, Pop. We all know you got a bad temper.”
“I try to keep it under control.”
“I know you do.”
16
THE INTERIOR of the lift was understated, even plain. The walls were unadorned cherrywood and the lights were bare bulbs nestled in mirrored-glass fittings in the four upper corners.
“Sixteen,” I told my son.
He pressed the button and I clasped my hands at my back. The fever had returned, and, once again, I’d forgotten the aspirin on my desk.
“You need this?” Twill asked, holding out a little tin of Bayer in his left hand.
“How did you know that?”
“I didn’t. Mardi gave it to me. She said that you kept forgetting yours.”
I swallowed the coated pills dry before we reached the sixteenth floor.
We exited into a lovely room with a broad green-tinted window that looked down onto the East River and out over Queens. There was only one door. Rich people, in my experience, don’t share anything—not even a hallway in a glorified tenement.
Twill was looking for the doorbell when the oversized pale green door swung inward.
The woman standing there wore a utilitarian black dress adorned only by a thin white collar of modest lace. She was in her forties, handsome, with similar skin color as that of Velvet Reyes. We were the same height exactly. As usual, this pleased me.
“Mr. McGill?” she asked with only a hint of Puerto Rico emcompassing the last syllable.
I nodded.
“Come in,” she said with no smile. “Follow me.”
The circular foyer was maybe eighteen feet in diameter; it went up three floors, with no stairs or ornamentation; there was a domed skylight above. The architect was saying with this simple gesture that nature trumped any attempt Man might make to consecrate the portal to a family’s domicile.
We followed the maid into a room that had a ceiling only twenty feet high. The centerpiece dominating this chamber was a dark metal sculpture of two wrestlers, almost certainly wrought by Rodin. There were no windows in this room and the walls were charcoal gray. The only lights were yellowy spots that showed highlights of the brilliant forms exhibited by the sculpture.
Left to my own devices I would have dallied for an hour or so before that grandeur, but our guide led us onward.
We came to a sunken living room with a wall of glass that looked over a manicured garden that in turn gazed over the river. It was a big cubical room, with four identical large blue sofas that faced one another across a solid-glass coffee table set upon shiny golden globes. Embedded in the thick plate of crystal was a six-by-eight blue painting of a Negro musician playing a fanciful horn. He was sitting in a chair in a lopsided room. There was a broom leaning sadly in the corner.
This was an unknown Picasso.
“Have a seat,” the woman told us. “The Mycrofts will be in in a few minutes.”
We settled in side by side on the sofa with its back to the river. I sat forward, elbows on my knees, while Twill reclined.
Despite, or maybe because of, my class consciousness, I was impressed by the oil in glass. A lot of good money went into this monument to wealth.
I was well on my way to hating the Mycrofts and I hadn’t even met them.
“Hello,” a man said in a modulated tenor.
He was tall (of course) and fit. His mottled tanned skin seemed to come from sportsmanship and not vanity. His trousers were khaki and shirt lime cotton. His feet were moccasined in red-brown leather and his hair was onyx and silver as opposed to the more pedestrian salt-and-pepper.
Behind Shelby Mycroft came a tall thin woman. She was forty-five or -six, a decade less than he, but she looked younger than her years. That was because of the plastic surgery and expensive spa treatments. Her hair tended toward blond, and the metal ball suspended from the impossibly thin chain around her neck was platinum, not silver. Her dress was a luminescent gray that came to mid-calf.
I don’t remember the color of her eyes. That’s probably because our eyes rarely met.
Twill and I both rose.
“I’m Mr. Shelby Mycroft,” he said, extending a hand. “This is my wife, Mrs. Sylvia Mycroft.”
The lines were drawn. I smiled at the possibly unconscious class strategy.
I shook hands with the man, Twill nodded, and we both sat back down.
The Mycrofts lowered on the sofa to our right, smiling demurely.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Sylvia asked.
“ Water,” I said.
“Nothing for me, thank you,” Twill added.
She rose and left the room for a moment, returning before her husband started his spiel.
“ We were expecting you to come alone, Mr. McGill,” Mr. Shelby Mycroft said, the insincere smile delicately etched on his lips.
“ When Breland explained the problem I called my associate Mathers here. He, uh, will probably prove useful.”
“This is a confidential matter.”
I nodded but refrained from showing my temper, or fever.
The maid came into the room carrying a silver platter with two glasses of water on it. She was followed by a greatly transformed Velvet Reyes. The young prostitute/heroin addict was wearing a loose floral dress, and her long black hair was tied up at the back of her head. Behind Velvet came a young girl, maybe three years old. The child had big black eyes that honed in on me. Her mother was taking in my son.
“This is Adonia,” Shelby said of the maid, “her daughter Velvet and granddaughter Minolita.”
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi,” the child said and smiled.
“Have I met you?” Velvet asked me.
The question caused Adonia to focus on me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d remember you.”
Adonia put our glasses down on the priceless painting and hurried her brood from the room.
I picked up my glass and, true to his word, Twill left his where it was placed.
There was a moment of silence in the wake of the servants’ departure. Shelby was still a little miffed about Twill’s (aka Mathers’s) presence.
“ We were asked to come here at the last minute, Mr. Mycroft,” I said. “I have other appointments to keep.”
He didn’t like my tone.
That was okay—I didn’t like his doorman.
“My . . . our son Kent is studying political science at NYU,” he said. “He’s twenty-three but young for his age. Recently we’ve been made aware that he’s gotten himself involved with a rough crowd. We’re worried that he might get into trouble.”
“ What kind of trouble?”
“ Well . . . we aren’t exactly sure.”
“Maybe what you heard isn’t true,�
�� I said, “or an exaggeration of the facts.”
“No,” Shelby said.
“How do you know?”
“Someone who knows him at school made us aware. Someone that we trust.”
“ Who’s that?”
“ What does it matter who told me? I’m telling you.”
At that moment the aspirin kicked in. The fever abated, and it was like I was suddenly aware of my circumstances.
I stood up.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Twill.
He stood too.
“I, I, I don’t understand,” Mr. Shelby Mycroft said, also rising.
“Look, man,” I told him. “I’m only here because Breland asked me to come. You got a problem and I’m here to help. But if you don’t wanna come clean and tell me what you know, then I don’t have the time.”
“I’ve told you what you need to know.”
“Come on,” I said to Twill.
“It’s our daughter, Mr. McGill,” Sylvia Mycroft said. “She’s the one that told us.”
Shelby stood there somehow glowering at both me and his wife at the same time.
“And what did your daughter say exactly?” I asked.
“ What I’ve already told you,” Shelby said brusquely.
“I’m going to have to hear it from her.”
“No.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
“I’m the one paying for your services, Mr. McGill.”
“Not if I don’t take the job,” I said, looking up into his darkening eyes.
“Shelby,” Sylvia said, glaring at his profile.
17
ONCE AGAIN Twill and I were sitting alone in the big sunny room with our backs to the river. We weren’t talking because there was nothing to say. I was executing my profession and Twill was learning everything he could. He wasn’t impressed by wealth the way I was. Even though he was an accomplished thief by the age of fourteen he didn’t really covet money or the things it could buy.
Twill, the son of my heart, was a native of modernity. For him money was a found natural resource like the wind—or dry dung.
LITTLE MINOLITA appeared at the corner of a doorway to the room. Not the door we’d come through. She was staring at me while picking her nose.
“Come here, you little creature,” I said, proffering my big boxer’s paws.
She opened her mouth, took in a big gulp of air, and then ran at me like a hungry puppy that just saw an unguarded plate.
The ecru-colored child hopped up on my knee and grabbed my index finger.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi yourself.”
She’d never heard that phrase, and the newness of the man and the words made her smile.
“I can pick up Miss Sylvia’s two-pound weights,” she told me.
“I pick up weights too, down at Gordo’s Gym.”
So many new words and ideas. The child started rocking from side to side.
“Do you ride horses?” she asked, reminded by her own movements.
“Never,” I said, shaking my head.
“I do. With Mama.”
“Horses are big.”
Minolita nodded with such vehement seriousness that both Twill and I smiled. She smiled too, basking in the warmth of our attention.
“Minolita,” Velvet said, standing in the same doorway from which her daughter had come.
The child twisted on my knee as if it were her private saddle and said, “Here, Mom.”
“Stop bothering Miss Sylvia’s guests.”
The young woman came into the room with the careless grace of youth. She wasn’t over twenty-one, and I was impressed by her recovery from the shape she was in when last we met.
“I’m not bothering them, Mom. He doesn’t even ride horses.”
Velvet lifted her daughter from my knee and held the child in her arms. She intended to turn away but then stopped.
“I had a dream about you,” she said to me.
“That seems like a waste for a beautiful young woman like yourself.”
“You were in a big dark place,” she said, ignoring the compliment. “Or maybe it was me. Yes. I was in a hole, looking up at the nighttime, and you came and held out your hands. I know that it was you because it was your hands.”
“That’s some dream,” I said. “Or was it a nightmare?”
“ When I woke up the sun was shining,” she said. “My mother was sitting beside me and I was home.”
I wondered how much she really remembered. It didn’t much matter. Hush and I had covered up the particulars with the assassin’s close attention to detail. Even if the man, Bernard Locke, was missed, his body would never be found.
While I was reassuring myself the Mycrofts returned with another young woman. The new girl was about the same age as Velvet but white and heavier—that’s not to say that she was fat.
Velvet heard her mother’s employers and whispered to her daughter, “Come on, little one.”
As they left the child waved to me. I think that was probably the happiest single moment I had all month.
“This is our daughter,” Sylvia Mycroft said, “Mirabelle.”
The young woman had longish light brown hair and wore a violet dress that only made it down to the middle of her powerful runner’s thighs. Her brown eyes were taking in Twill, who managed to pay just enough attention to her legs.
Sylvia ushered her daughter to the couch on the right. She sat near to her. Shelby stayed on his feet. Maybe he thought this tactic would give him some kind of advantage.
“Hello, Mirabelle,” I said.
“Hi.” She had a nice smile.
“This here is Mathers.”
She smiled at him.
“You have something to tell us about your brother?” I suggested.
Shelby coughed, and then said, “Before we start this I need to set down some ground rules.”
“Yes?” I said.
“This is to be a completely confidential conversation. You will not repeat it to anyone, not even Mr. Lewis. I expect you to sign a letter agreeing to that stipulation.”
“Sit down, Mr. Mycroft.”
If anything, he raised his shoulders up higher.
“Sit down,” I said again. “This is not a contest. And furthermore it is not within your sphere of influence. The reason you called me is because you need someone with my particular skills to try and do damage control. I’m not here to have my hands tied. So sit down and let’s talk this out.”
A beat passed and then another. Shelby Mycroft finally gave in and lowered down on the space next to his wife. This surprised me a little. I expected him to lose his temper and send me away. Maybe that’s what I wanted.
The fact that he relented meant that his fears about his son were deep and more troublesome than he let on.
Managing not to smile over my victory, I turned back to Mirabelle. “I was asking about your brother.”
She nodded and looked down at the floor.
“You go to NYU with him?”
“No. I attend the New School nearby.”
“But you see him a lot?” I asked.
“Not a lot. Maybe every two weeks or so. We usually just run into each other on the street. He calls sometimes though. I mean . . . we’re not very close. When I was a sophomore in high school he left home for two years and by the time he got back he was different.”
“Different how?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Shelby said.
“He was fun when we were kids,” Mirabelle said. “But when he got back he was kind of cold and a little angry.”
Like his father.
“So what kind of trouble do you think he’s gotten into?” I asked.
Twill laced his fingers under his chin, placed his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward.
“I was at this late-night party in the Meatpacking District last week,” she began. “It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually go to, but my girlfriends
had met this actor and he was going to be there. It was really late but Tonya had a car, so . . .”
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 8