All I Did Was Shoot My Man

by Mosley, Walter

  “That’s true, things are different today. When young people like you look at the world you see trouble but not like the mess Gordo’s seen. He learned to cover up early on. I didn’t know about all of what he owned until a few minutes ago.”

  “You? But you’re his best friend.”

  “You can leave him, Elsa, but be sure about it. He’s a good man and he loves you. You are the only reason he survived that cancer. All three of us know that.”

  22

  I LEFT ELSA pondering the pedestrian and impromptu history lesson.

  One thing I know, Trot, my father once said. You can’t be in love with a woman and practice Revolution at the same time.

  But don’t you love Mama? I asked fearfully.

  I do, surely. But not when I’m doin’ Revolution.

  I don’t understand, Daddy.

  When I’m with your mother, he said, she’s the only thing in the world. There is no economic infrastructure or class struggle. When it’s just me and her it’s husband and wife—that’s all.

  That was one of the many fragments of conversation that had clattered around in my head for decades. Walking down the stairs, I realized that what I learned from my father was not what he had meant. He wanted to make me a better soldier, but I, slowly and over time, came to believe that men were not only alienated from their labor, and therefore from one another, but they were also, in a similar way, alienated from themselves by the passions they felt pitted against the things they had to do.

  I was at the exit door on the first floor before I knew it. I meant to stop by the gym to tell Gordo what had transpired but, at the threshold of the street, I thought that there was really nothing to say. Either Elsa was going to leave or she wasn’t. When G went upstairs he’d find out for himself. I’d talked to her like he wanted me to but there was no telling what her decision would be.

  I FOUND MYSELF walking east on Thirty-third. I was in trouble but it didn’t seem too bad. Rutgers would probably put some pressure on me but I knew how to push back.

  The cell phone throbbed against my left thigh. I pulled it out and saw that it was Aura calling. I wanted to flip the phone open but my thumb refused. The vibrations ceased and the little green light of the display faded to black. It felt like watching something die.

  I had stopped walking and stood there on the busy thoroughfare, feeling something close to grief over a missed phone call.

  Then the screen lit up again.

  It was Aura.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “ Why didn’t you answer?” she asked.

  I tried to find the words to lie but they evaded me.

  “ What’s goin’ on, babe?” I asked.

  “I miss you calling me baby.”

  It wasn’t just lies that escaped me, I couldn’t tell the truth either. I wanted to say how much I loved her, how that love had disappeared like it had with my father when he was being a soldier and not a husband. The feeling struck like an unconscious memory roaring into existence, necessarily unexpected and painful like plague boils erupting from glands deep in the neck.

  “Um,” I said.

  Aura laughed.

  “Leonid?”

  “Yeah . . . Yes, Aura.”

  “I know that I’ve been stringing you along. It isn’t, hasn’t been fair, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was stuck. I love you so much but you scare me.”

  A horn honked. For some reason that sound made me aware of a woman ranting almost incoherently on the corner a dozen yards away. People were hustling around, moving to the beat of their happenstance lives. This all seemed proper. Life was a cacophony, I’d always known it. Every once in a while there was a piece of beautiful music amid the dissonance, but lucidity was a danger in an irrational world—my father had taught me that too.

  Aura made sense. She said that I frightened her.

  “Leonid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you going to talk?”

  “. . . mothahfuckah try an’ tell me what to do,” the ranting woman cried, “but he don’t even have a appendix . . .”

  “Sure,” I said. “I mean, I want to but I don’t know what to say.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Like seaweed loves the sunlight,” I said in free-association mode.

  “I love you.”

  “. . . and the niggers was cowboys and all the white men were cryin’ . . .”

  “ What can I do, Aura?” I asked.

  “I want you back in my life.”

  A deep silence set in on me. The people and traffic and crazy woman all stopped making their noises. My mind was like an ovum and her words the impregnating germ. Nothing else could get through. Nothing else mattered.

  I forgot where I was going, fought off the desire to sit down on the curb. I wasn’t sure what I wanted; instead I had become something else, transformed by a desire I thought had died.

  “Leonid.”

  “Yes, Aura.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  I nodded.

  “Leonid.”

  “Yes, I heard you. I hear you.”

  “Am I too late?”

  “If you had asked me that first, I would have probably said yes.”

  “Can we try again?”

  “I need seventy-two hours to answer that question,” I said. I don’t know why. “Seventy-two hours and I will tell you what I can do.”

  “You have seventy-one,” she said, bringing a smile to my face.

  “I’ll call you at . . .”—I looked at my watch—“. . . four-seventeen three days from now.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Talk to you later.”

  THE PHONE RANG once and he answered, “Kitteridge.”

  “You called?” I asked.

  “LT,” he said in way of greeting. “Good to hear from you.”

  “ What’s the problem, Captain?”

  “There’s somebody I want you to talk to.”

  “ Who’s that?”

  “There’s a short street over in Flatbush called Poindexter.”

  “I know it.”

  “Twenty-six is the address. All you have to say is Lethford.”

  “And why am I going there?”

  “Because you don’t want those kids of yours to be fatherless.”

  I’d called Kit to snap me out of the daze that talking to Aura cast on me.

  It worked.

  “Somebody’s trying to kill me?” I asked.

  “I believe that your name might be on a list somewhere.”

  “ What kind of sense does that make?”

  “You think you’re so innocent that no one could ever mean you harm?”

  “No. What I wonder is why would you care?”

  “I’m a cop, LT. It’s my job to protect the welfare of even garbage like you.”

  I disconnected the call. No reason to argue or protest. I was interested at the obvious anger that Kit was feeling. He rarely showed his feelings. I didn’t much either. That’s why we might have been friends in another life.

  23

  THOUGH IT WAS early evening the summer sun still shown down on Brooklyn. I reached the address on Poindexter a little after seven. What looked like a homeless man in gray clothes sat in the doorway of the boarded-up brownstone.

  I say he looked like a homeless person because, even though he had the clothes and state of dishevelment down pat, he wasn’t doing anything; not sleeping or reading, drinking or eating, rifling endlessly through his belongings or engaged in an endless diatribe with some imaginary friend—or enemy. For that matter, he didn’t have any belongings—no backpack or grocery cart filled with the necessities and diversions that all humans (homeless or homed) need to survive.

  I walked up to the doorway, where the tousled and unkempt black man lounged, and looked down at him.

  “ Wha?” he said, looking up with eyes both clear and unafraid.

  He was in his thirties and fit underneath the loose garments.
I could see what was probably the outline of a pistol in his right front pocket.

  “Lethford,” I said.

  His nostrils flared.

  “Get the fuck outta here, main,” he replied.

  “I don’t think Captain Kitteridge would like that.”

  The pile of gray clothes rose up more like a panther than a broken man. He stared hard at me and then stepped aside.

  The door seemed to be boarded, but all I had to do was push and it swung open.

  The hallway was dark and narrow. At the far end a faint radiance hinted at but did not necessarily promise light. I walked in that direction, running my left hand against the wall. At the end I turned left, finding myself at the foot of what might have been a stairway.

  Two silhouettes came from the sides of the barely visible steps. A bright light shone in my face, blinding me.

  “ Who are you?” a gruff voice demanded.

  “McGill for Lethford.”

  “ What for?” the other man, who held the torch, said.

  I reached out, pulled the heavy-duty flashlight from his hand, and threw it down on the floor.

  “ What the fuck?” one of them said.

  Another light snapped on up above. I took a step backward so that the two shadow men could not grab me.

  They were both in street clothes with badges and holsters at their belts. The man on the left, the one I’d taken the flashlight from, looked quite angry. His close-cut hairline was receding and his blue-gray eyes were sparks looking for an accelerant.

  “McGill?” a voice from above said.

  “That’s me.”

  A very large dark-skinned man descended halfway down to the first landing of the stairway. Looking up at him, I remembered a time thirty years before when I let Gordo talk me into climbing in the ring with a natural heavyweight.

  The guy’s name was Biggie Barnes and he had fists like anvils.

  Don’t let him hit ya was the only advice Gordo gave me at the bell announcing round one.

  “Come on up,” the big man said.

  I followed in the wake of the giant up four flights. It was a dimly lit journey and my fever made it feel like a ride in a rocking boat. These two elements brought a flicker of fear into the center of my chest.

  At any other time I would not have gone to some unknown destination just because Kit asked me to. He was my enemy, my opponent, not a friend.

  But I was sick, in love, and seeking redemption. I should have been under the care of two doctors and a Zen monk. Instead I was in Brooklyn with no real way out.

  On the fifth floor there were three doors. One of these had a thick dark green curtain hanging over it. The big man pushed the fabric aside and went through. I followed . . . coming into a good-sized room that was lit by bright incandescent fixtures. There were six desks, here and there, with no rhyme or reason; each had a monitor on it and a plainclothes cop to study it.

  The windows were sealed with thick black paper. I counted a dozen small digital cameras, supported on poles of various heights, attached to the walls. The video feeds were routed to the monitors.

  The images on the screens were of a social club on Pox Street, one over from Poindexter. Black men and women, many bearing dreadlocks, were coming in and out of the storefront establishment.

  I had passed the club on my way to the meeting because I decided to walk around the block before approaching Number 26.

  The members of the street-level society sounded like Jamaicans. They seemed rather tough.

  “Drug dealers,” the big man said, noticing me staring at a screen.

  “You Lethford?”

  “Come into my office.”

  He led me through a real door this time, into a smaller space that had two wooden folding chairs and a peacock blue phone on the pine floor. No carpeting. He shut the door behind us.

  “Sit,” he said in a tone that was neither friendly nor hostile.

  The big black man wore a short-sleeved black shirt, black cotton pants, and black shoes. I could tell by his right ankle that his socks were white.

  “So,” he said, “do you know why I wanted to see you?”

  “ Who are you, man?” I replied.

  He bit the left side of his lower lip and so refrained from slapping me for my insolence.

  The cop had a long face and almost no hair except the few sprouts of white that showed on his chin. He was my age, more or less, and the whites of his eyes were no longer that color.

  “Captain Clarence Lethford,” he said, “Special Investigations Unit.”

  “Huh.”

  “Do you know why I wanted to see you?”

  “ We’re not gonna get anywhere with you treating me like a trainee,” I said. “I’m here because Carson Kitteridge asked me to come. Now, if you have something to say, then say it.”

  Big men throw around their weight from an early age. At some point they assume this is a God-given right. Every now and then it’s good for a short guy like me to disrupt that surety.

  “I expect some civility out of you, McGill.”

  “Is that it? Because you know absence is the ultimate form of bein’ civil. If I’m not there, I can’t insult you.” I stood up.

  “Sit down.”

  “Fuck you.”

  That was the moment we had to get to. He was either going to hit me, let me leave, or get down to the business at hand.

  “I was the chief NYPD liaison officer on the Rutgers heist,” he said.

  I sat down.

  “I was working that case,” he continued, “until Zella Grisham was charged with complicity.”

  “Oh.” I crossed my right leg over the left, lacing my blunt fingers around the knee. This made me think of Mirabelle Mycroft and so I released the joint.

  “Yeah,” Lethford agreed. “Oh.”

  I think he expected me to start shaking and confess or something. It would take more than one confrontation to break him of his big-man complex.

  When he saw that I wasn’t made of straw he continued. “They got me to look over the case again when Breland Lewis got her cut loose. First thing I did was go to the shylock’s file. I found a flag there with your name on it.”

  “He hired me to help her decompress into civilian life.”

  “Kit says that Lewis is your boy.”

  “And that means?”

  “It means that maybe you had something to do with the heist,” Lethford said, holding up his thick left thumb. “It means that even if the brass says to lay off you, I’m gonna crawl up your ass until I see brain. It means that maybe I was wrong about Grisham, that maybe you got her out because she knows something that can make your retirement plan shine.”

  Every time he said the word means he showed another finger—not necessarily in proper order. He put up the pinkie for the retirement plan.

  “No, Captain,” I said. “The only thing to glean from my involvement and her freedom is that she did not commit the crime and that the real culprits are still out there.”

  “ Why would they fake the money wrappers and make her the patsy?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said, falsely answering the perfectly sensible question. “My job was to help prove that she didn’t have any connection to the heist. I accomplished that end.”

  “You’re dirty, McGill.”

  “That’s the general consensus,” I agreed.

  “And I’m the one who’ll take you down.”

  “That brings us to the reason I’m here,” I said. “Kitteridge said that I might be in some kind of trouble . . . and not necessarily from arrest and conviction.”

  “Bingo,” the big cop replied. It was not the exhortation of victory.

  At that moment the door to the little meeting room slammed open.

  “Captain!” a young white cop shouted. She seemed both angry and afraid. “They’re shooting out there!”

  Lethford surged up so violently that his chair fell over. He rushed past me into the observation nerve center.
r />   I followed.

  “Get the hell out there!” he shouted. “Hurry up!”