All I Did Was Shoot My Man

by Mosley, Walter

“You can’t wait if she’s not here.”

  “If not,” I speculated, “then why let me in in the first place?”

  “Mr. McGill—”

  “Mr. Plimpton, I’m going to sit on this couch and wait until I speak either to Miss Lowry or somebody she reports to. You can go back into your rats’ maze and tell the king rat that I said so.”

  A tremor went through the reception manager’s thin frame. He almost said something and then didn’t. He turned away and went through the tan door, leaving the dour receptionist to glare at me.

  I put my hands, palms up, on my knees and stared vacantly at the doorknob, counting my breaths and emptying my mind of all malice and love.

  20

  THE ZAZEN PRACTICE calmed me and the aspirin kept back the flood of fever in my blood. Between these two forms of self-medication I drifted over the details of the past few days; my brooding blood son and wild Twill; Zella, my victim and albatross; and Aura . . . The doorknob turned and out came a solidly built black woman with shoulder-length straightened hair and an ocher suit that was well-tailored, exposing her figure without overaccentuating it.

  Even without the heels she would have been an inch taller than I.

  “Mr. McGill?”

  “Yes?”

  “Special Investigator Antoinette Lowry. Will you follow me, please?”

  I rose up, feeling the lightness of the meditation, and went through the doorway behind the brisk-moving agent.

  We turned here and there into one hall after another, passing many a closed door along the way. Finally we reached the end of the maze at a black door that had my guide’s name on it.

  She went through, obviously expecting me to follow.

  I did.

  The first thing you noticed about Antoinette Lowry’s office was how small it was; eight feet wide and only a dozen paces from the entrance to the window wall. This window would have given the illusion of space if it didn’t look directly into another office building across the way. The street separating Rutgers from its neighbor was small and so it seemed as if the woman sitting at the desk next door could have reached out and touched Antoinette’s shoulder if she wanted to. This intimacy added to the closeness of the investigator’s work space.

  Antoinette’s desk was only wide enough to have a top drawer, and there was no other furniture except for a walnut chair that she gestured at while swaying sideways to pass through the narrow space between her desk and the wall.

  We both sat and took a moment to regard each other in the coffin-like booth of an office.

  Antoinette was in her early thirties. Her face was handsome but hard, the kind of look that had to grow on you. In a certain light, after a good conversation (or a couple of drinks), you might suddenly come to think her fetching. She had skin nearly as dark as mine and intuitive eyes. There was the mild patina of a sneer on her lips. I wondered if this expression was normal or if she brought it out especially for people like me.

  “You’re here representing Zella Grisham?” Antoinette asked.

  “She called to tell me that you got her fired and tried to make her homeless.”

  “She’s a criminal. She should be in prison.”

  This brazen claim raised my eyebrows.

  “I knew corporate America had its own private police force,” I said, “but I didn’t realize that they now have commoditized the justice system too.”

  “You get that kind of talk from your Communist father,” she replied, “Tolstoy McGill.”

  If she meant to impress me she succeeded.

  “So it’s not only Zella you’re hounding.”

  “I’m investigating the robbery of fifty-eight million dollars from my employer,” she said. “Fifty-eight million, that’s a lot of money.”

  “ Water under the bridge.”

  “Sheikh al-Tariq gave us that money to assure the delivery of a certain portion of one of his father’s oil tankers would reach Houston,” she said. “Rutgers had to eat the loss. So if they want me searching down the river and to the sea, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And if you show up on my screen, I will use all the resources at my command to follow you.”

  “Are you threatening me, Ms. Lowry?”

  “Merely telling you what I’m doing and what I intend to do. If, along the way, I find that you’re involved in some chicanery or mischief, I will use that knowledge to achieve my ends.”

  “Chicanery? Where in the South are you from, girl?”

  “I will hound Zella Grisham until either she dies or I do. And I will do the same for you, Mr. McGill.”

  “Unless?”

  The sneer morphed into wan complicity.

  “If the company’s money is restored, the hunt will be over.”

  “This is a mighty small office to be issuing such large edicts,” I said.

  “The full weight of Rutgers is behind me.”

  The woman through her window was white, in her twenties, nearly bald, with dark blue or maybe even black lipstick. This image and Antoinette’s words elicited my smile.

  “Zella was framed,” I said. “The judge was convinced of that; that’s why she vacated the sentence.”

  “Judge Malcolm lifted the sentence because we didn’t oppose that decision.”

  “And you didn’t because you felt that on the outside Zella might lead you to her confederates.”

  “I’m looking at you, Mr. McGill. NYPD files have you involved with everything from embezzlement to armed robbery.”

  Wow. I wondered if this private cop could succeed where Carson Kitteridge had failed.

  “But,” Antoinette added, “if you help us retrieve our losses, we can offer a one and a half percent reward on all monies returned.”

  “That’s a lotta money.”

  “ What do you say?”

  I sat back and watched the bald white girl laugh at what someone was saying on the phone.

  “My father told me one time that corporations have the rights of citizens but that they are not organic creatures. And so Rutgers doesn’t have the capability of feeling like it has to protect its biological appendages. That said, Ms. Lowry, do not believe that you are safe from the forces unleashed by this . . . campaign.”

  I had to throw down that gauntlet. If somebody wants to threaten you, you have to respond in kind; I learned that lesson not from my father but by raising myself on the streets of New York.

  The special investigator took it pretty well. She considered my words, weighed them. But she was tough too.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “In your investigation have you looked into Harry Tangelo and Minnie Lesser?”

  “They were considered,” Antoinette said candidly, “and rejected. We believe that Zella had some connection to Clay Thorn. It’s possible that you knew him too.”

  Thorn was the guard who was executed during the heist.

  “Harry and Minnie are missing,” I said, “ have been since before Zella went to trial. That’s strange, don’t you think?”

  I could see the suspicion rising in Lowry’s eyes, also the resentment that I could tell her something she didn’t know.

  “ What’s your interest in them?” she asked.

  “I work for the lawyer who got Zella out of hock.”

  “Breland Lewis is your lawyer, Mr. McGill. He’s working for you.”

  That was my cue to stand. Antoinette had come out a point or two ahead in our competition, but I had learned more about her than she had about me.

  “I think I’ll be leaving now, Special Investigator Lowry. If I don’t show up downstairs in a couple of hours, send out a search party. It’s a fuckin’ rat’s nest in here.”

  21

  ON MY WAY uptown on the A train I was thinking about one and a half percent of fifty million. So far Twill was the only operative at my agency bringing in any cash that month.

  I was standing in the middle of the crowded car, holding on to a metal pole, when I noticed the blue-and-pink-haired, much tattooe
d woman standing next to me. She was young and white, flipping through pictures of naked women on her iPad. The moment after I noticed what she was doing she turned her face to me and smiled.

  I thought about LeRoi Jones’s play Dutchman and the bug in the carnivorous plant that I imagined while waiting for Antoinette. I smiled back at the young woman and turned away.

  I had to have learned something in all my fifty-five years.

  COPPER-SKINNED Iran Shelfly was trying to hurt the heavy bag when I came upon him in Gordo’s Gym. He was whaling away on the canvas-covered bale of cotton next to the murky window that looked down on Eighth Avenue.

  I watched the thirty-something ex-con throwing body shots like a real pro. I had wanted Iran to work for me as part of my growing firm but he preferred the ambiance of the gym.

  I couldn’t blame him.

  There were about a dozen men and one woman warming up that afternoon. The formal training sessions would start in an hour.

  “Eye,” I said.

  He stopped and turned to me, sweat pouring off his forehead. He was wearing a tight yellow T-shirt and red trunks. His hands were wrapped but not gloved, and his smile was infectious.

  “Mr. McGill. How you doin’?”

  “If I complained, somebody might shoot me.”

  “And that would only make you madder.”

  “There’s a new tenant at your rooming house,” I said.

  “Zella Grisham. That girl need to learn how to smile.”

  “You don’t like her?”

  “She okay. We talked some, but wherever she’s from she ain’t left there yet.”

  “I have a special interest in her. I want to make sure that she’s safe but I don’t want her knowin’ what I want.”

  “Anything you say, Mr. McGill.” Iran thought he owed me. When he got out of prison I made sure he had a job, and whenever he found himself in trouble I showed him an exit sign.

  Iran was grateful for my help, and I neglected to tell him that I was the one who got him incarcerated in the first place.

  “Thanks, Eye. How’s the job?”

  “I’m so tired every night that I’m asleep ’fore my head hits the pillow. But I always wake up with a smile on my face.”

  The odds were against an ex-con making it in the straight life, but if he learned the trick, he was the happiest man on the street.

  I smiled and went toward the back of the floor-sized room.

  Gordo was sitting at his desk in his cubbyhole office, making checks on a long graph-like form. In some arcane way he used these forms to gauge the progress, or decline, of a boxer’s talents. Other than the names scrawled in the upper left-hand corner, I could never make sense of these charts.

  “Mr. Tallman,” I said.

  He looked up and then stood.

  “LT,” he said over an extended hand.

  Gordo was my height and red-bronze in color. He was a mixture of all the races America had to offer and was therefore referred to as a black man. He had more hair than I did and was somewhere between the ages of seventy-seven and ninety. He was looking younger though. Beating cancer and falling in love was a fountain of youth for him.

  “Sit, sit,” the impish trainer said.

  His visitor’s chair was a boxer’s corner stool, where you sat for sixty seconds between rounds, getting yelled at, before your opponent proceeded to beat on you again.

  “ What’s the news, G?” I asked.

  Gordo’s brows furrowed, his eyes peered into mine. He could see the fever in me. Probably no one ever knows you as well as your trainer.

  But I saw something too. There was a hint of sadness in Gordo’s gaze; something I’d not seen in a long time.

  “ What’s wrong with you, kid?” he asked.

  “You first, old man.”

  The trainer sagged back in his green-and-gray office chair. His shoulders slumped down and he shook his head slowly.

  “I prob’ly shouldn’t have called you,” he said.

  “But you did.”

  “She might already be gone.”

  “ Who?”

  “Elsa.”

  “Gone? I thought you two were getting married?”

  Elsa Koen was the private nurse that Katrina had hired for Gordo when he came to stay with us while being treated for stomach cancer. At the time we thought that he had come to us to die.

  The German nurse had fallen in love with the old guy even though she thought he was nearly homeless.

  “ What happened?” I asked.

  “I told her about my properties.”

  “Plural?”

  I had always thought that Gordo rented the fifth-floor gym. There was a property supervisor and everything. It turned out that he owned the entire building; fifteen stories in lower midtown Manhattan.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got two more buildings three blocks up.”

  “Fully rented?”

  “Yep. Skidmore manages them too.”

  “Damn. So, so you told Elsa about that and she just said she was leavin’?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There had to be sumpin’ else. You want a prenup or somethin’?”

  “No. I told her what’s mine is yours.”

  “Damn.”

  “Talk to her for me, will ya, LT? Elsa respects you.”

  The full range of sadness showed on Gordo’s face. But it wasn’t the grief that moved me. Gordo never asked anybody for anything. He was a boxer that lived by the philosophy that you didn’t admit defeat—not ever. You might get knocked on your ass, but even then you used every ounce of strength you had to try and beat the count.

  “Okay,” I said.

  THE STAIRWAY to Gordo’s illegal fifteenth-floor apartment had a small window at every landing. These looked west on Thirty-fourth Street toward the Hudson River. I took the steps two at a time to make up for the exercise I hadn’t done in the gym.

  Gordo’s door was ajar.

  I knocked anyway.

  There was no answer so I went in.

  “Hello?” I said. “Elsa?”

  The rabbit warren apartment must have had eleven rooms but it took up less than twelve hundred square feet. The ceilings were low, and many rooms didn’t have windows.

  I found Elsa in a tiny windowless chamber that contained a dirty cream-colored sofa and a portable TV. There were three pale blue suitcases sitting in front of her. She’d been crying.

  “Elsa.”

  She looked up at me, letting her head tilt to the side.

  “ What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.

  She opened her mouth but words were temporarily unavailable.

  The nurse had red hair and pale skin. She wasn’t beautiful but she was fair—in every way.

  I sat down next to her and she hugged me.

  “Tell me about it,” I prompted.

  She let go and tried to find something to do with her hands.

  “I don’t know,” she said at last, clasping her palms together tightly between her knees.

  She was wearing a plaid skirt and a black T-shirt, no stockings or socks, and white nurse’s shoes.

  Elsa hadn’t been in her forties for very long, and she looked younger still.

  “Gordo told you about his property,” I said.

  “ Why?”

  “ Why what?”

  “ Why did he lie?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He should have told me before we, we got together.”

  “Maybe he should have but he couldn’t—that’s a fact.”

  The words were said with such certainty that Elsa got suddenly intent.

  “ Why not?” she asked.

  “ When you moved away from your parents’ house it was already the nineties, right?”

  “ What does that have to do with anything?”

  “ When Gordo was born we were in the Great Depression,” I continued. “That was back when a black man never owned anything that a white man couldn’t take from him. Back when they could p
ut up signs that said ‘White Only.’ ”

  “So? It’s not like that anymore.”