All I Did Was Shoot My Man

by Mosley, Walter

  I glanced at the screens as the men and woman gathered what weapons they had and rushed out of the room. Some of the cops were already wearing their bulletproof vests; others lugged theirs along.

  On the monitors I could see that a black van had crashed into the storefront social club and a cadre of men had jumped out, using semi-automatic weapons against the residents.

  On my journey around the block I had noticed a slender alley that led from Pox to Poindexter. On a monitor I saw a young boy, maybe eight, run down that artery with a skateboard under his arm. A few seconds later a tall man with a pistol in his left hand went the same way . . . I GOT to the street maybe ninety seconds later. The police had used another route. The guards for the stairway and door were gone. The pretend homeless man/sentry was also absent.

  I made it to the alley just in time to see the back of the tall man. He was carrying the boy like a shield in front of him as he backed toward the possible safety of Poindexter.

  There was a lot of shouting and gunfire coming from the POX TURF WAR, as the papers called it the next day.

  I moved in low and relatively quietly. The man wasn’t pointing the gun at the young boy and so I hit him hard in the right kidney and left ear. It was a combination attack, but the punches were so fast as to seem simultaneous.

  The boy hit the ground, bounced up, and tore out of there, leaving the unconscious man, his pistol, and even the rainbow-colored skateboard in the alley.

  I picked up and pocketed the gun so that no other child might retrieve it. Mission accomplished, I walked away from the noise and turmoil.

  It wasn’t my fight, not at all.

  24

  BINGO HAMAN, aka Mr. Human. I was thinking about him as I walked down Flatbush Avenue.

  Bingo was his own impact on any situation. He was famous in the underworld, one of the best heist men in the business. He was compared to people like Cole Younger and Jesse James, Baby Face Nelson and even John Dillinger.

  The myth claimed that he’d never been arrested.

  Maybe it was true.

  I hadn’t met the venerable Mr. Human. He was good enough not to require the services of a cleanup man like I used to be. That is, unless Stumpy Brown had represented him on the Rutgers job.

  At any rate, his extraordinary luck or smarts abandoned him three months earlier at two-sixteen in the morning when he was cruising down the LIE . . . on his way from his girlfriend’s house back to his wife and kids, Luke Nye, the pool shark and endless fount of information, had told me.

  A car with no license plate sped up to pass and fired three dozen shots into the driver’s-side window.

  BLACK MEN hating and killing each other, my crackpot father used to say. That’s the legacy of slavery and capitalism. And you don’t have to be black, you don’t even have to be a man—but it’s black men killin’ each other, still and all.

  By the time that memory surfaced I was on the 1 train headed uptown, thinking about the photograph of the pudgy white face alleged to be Bingo Haman. The only dirt the News could pick up on him was that he was a suspect in a series of robberies around the country. But he was so much more than that. Bingo was a ruthless and merciless killer. He went out on every job fully armed with each weapon cocked.

  They had killed a man on the Rutgers heist, if indeed it was his crew that executed that job and the guard.

  And how could I claim innocence when I used my wiles to cover up for him? Was I any better?

  I STOPPED moving forward at the corner of Ninety-first and Broadway. The light of day was almost gone but I didn’t want to head home yet. So I sat on a bus stop bench and took out my cell phone.

  She answered on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Ms. Lesser?”

  “Yes?”

  “Teresa Lesser?” I added.

  “That’s me.”

  “My name is Alton Plimpton,” I said easily. “I’m a floor manager at Rutgers Assurance.”

  “ Where?”

  “ We’re kind of like an informal international insurance company.”

  “I don’t need any insurance, Mr. Plimpton. Sorry.”

  “ We don’t sell insurance, ma’am. We take in money under short-term conditions to protect the interests of people not covered by international law.”

  “ What does that have to do with me?”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “ We’re running an internal investigation and are willing to pay ten thousand dollars for information leading us to the whereabouts of Mr. Harry Tangelo.”

  At that point the woman admitting to be Teresa Lesser hung up.

  IT WAS very comfortable there in the twilight, on that bench. So much so that it took me a moment to realize that the fever, once again, had caught up to me. I downed the last two aspirin that Twill had given me and made a call.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Johnny?”

  “LT. How you doing?”

  “Good. You?”

  “All healed up.”

  On our last collaboration Johnny Nightly made a slip and got himself shot in the chest by a very accomplished killer. The assassin died and Johnny didn’t—that’s the most one could have hoped for.

  “Luke there?” I asked.

  A moment passed, and then, “Hey, Leonid. What’s up?”

  “I got some issues.”

  “ With me?”

  “A thing or two you could help me with.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’m looking for an address and I need you to put up a woman for a week or so. You got any empty rooms upstairs?”

  “No problem with the room.”

  “She should probably stay out of sight and maybe Johnny could look in on her now and then.”

  “That’s easy.”

  Luke Nye was many things. He’d killed men, dealt in women, even pulled a heist or two in his time. He’d been a regular jack-of-all-trades until deciding on pool as his major and dealing in information as his minor in the ongoing adult education University of Life.

  “And then there’s Stumpy Brown,” I said.

  “ What about old Stumpy?”

  “You got numbers on him?”

  “Five hundred a night for the room and a thousand for Stumpy,” he said.

  “HELLO?” she said on the house phone in the downstairs hall of Mary Deharain’s rooming house.

  “It’s Leonid, Zella.”

  “Oh . . . What do you want?”

  “There’s a guy named Iran Shelfly lives there. He’s in room three-oh-six.”

  “I’ve met him.”

  “He’s a friend of mine. I sent him a text, telling him to drive you out to another friend’s in the Bronx. I think you’ll be safer there until I figure out this thing with Rutgers.”

  “ What are you up to?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “ Why?”

  “Because Breland is paying and I need the work.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that heist. There’s no money you can get out of me.”

  “I know that, Zella.”

  It was the closest I would ever come to a confession. It wasn’t enough to bring me to justice but I think she heard it; I could tell by her silence. After that I explained what was going to happen to keep her safe. She didn’t argue.

  “YEAH?” he said.

  That particular phone never rang—a fact that had something to do with the security system associated with it. No one could eavesdrop on or trace any call to that number.

  “Hush?”

  “ What’s up, LT?”

  “Are you working?”

  Hush, since retiring from the assassination business, had been employed as a limousine driver. Don’t ask me why. He had more money than Gordo.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Hush said.

  “Tell me what?”

  “I bought the company. All twenty-seven cars now drive f
or me. I just keep my regulars and get to spend more time with Thackery and Tamara.”

  It was hard to imagine Hush as a family man even though I had been a guest at his house half a dozen times. It seemed both illogical and unfair.

  “You want to come get me and take a ride out to the beach?” I asked.

  “Okay.”

  “HELLO?” Katrina said.

  “Hey, babe,” I said, nearly biting my tongue for saying the same thing to both Katrina and Aura.

  “Leonid.” There was relief in her voice. “ Where are you?”

  I was only four blocks away but I said, “In Brooklyn. I’m deposing a witness for Breland.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Yes . . . very.”

  “I’ll wait up for you.”

  SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER Hush drove up in a black Lincoln Town Car. I hopped in next to him. He was wearing dark but not black clothes; chocolate brown jeans and a dusk-colored T-shirt. His dark blue sailor’s shoes were made from heavy canvas. His brown hair worked as its own camouflage.

  I hadn’t told him that we were on serious business—he just knew.

  Going down the West Side Highway, I explained about Zella and the complications that had arisen. He listened and nodded and drove.

  We went through the tunnel at the bottom of Manhattan and made our way to the Gowanus Expressway, headed south.

  “ Why don’t you just leave well enough alone?” he asked when approaching the Belt Parkway.

  “You mean leave Zella to rot in jail for something she didn’t do?”

  “She shot her man.”

  “They wouldn’t have been so harsh for that alone. I mean, she’d gone crazy.”

  “It’s crazy to get her out of prison.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know. When I’m in bed early in the morning I wake up sometimes and think about the people I’ve wronged. Some of them, most of them, were pretty bad to begin with. I can live with that. But people like Zella . . . I mean, what good is life if you can’t stand up?”

  “That’s what boxers do, right?”

  “ What?”

  “They get knocked down and stand up again.”

  “Yeah. If you’ve never been knocked down, then you’ve never been in a fight.”

  25

  THE SUN WAS GONE when Hush parked on a side street five blocks from the address Luke Nye gave me. It was a square, flat-roofed pink stucco house not far from the ocean in a run-down but quiet part of Coney Island.

  The doorway was inside a vestibule, so when no one answered our knock I used my tools to pick the lock and go in—we had already donned thin cotton gloves.

  The first thing Hush did when we entered was to sniff the stale air.

  “Huh,” he said.

  It was a small, impersonal home. The living room had a couch, standing on short wooden legs, and a tan carpet made from cheap synthetic fiber. It could have been a motel room at the Jersey Shore—in 1957.

  The bedroom had an unmade queen-sized bed, a dresser with three drawers, and a maple chair. There were various pants and shirts, shoes and socks strewn on the floor. Dust devils conferred in the corners, and I saw three small roaches rubbing antennae on the barred windowsill.

  The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes in gray water. The roaches met in greater numbers there.

  “Look,” Hush said.

  At the end of the kitchen counter was a door with two or three plastic garbage bags stuffed into the crack at bottom.

  “That’s where the smell is coming from,” Hush added.

  “ What smell?”

  Instead of answering, the retired professional killer handed me a blue handkerchief he took from his back pocket. He had a yellow one for his mouth and nose.

  When he yanked the door open it seemed as if the room was flooded with poison gas.

  The roaches froze for a moment and then headed for the smell.

  We did too.

  Between the washer and dryer, tied to a kitchen chair, sat Durleth “Stumpy” Brown. His once pink skin was now gray and his flabby face had hardened into a mask. My eyes stung from the gases his body released.

  With three fingers of his left hand Hush touched Stumpy’s forehead. Almost immediately a huge gutter roach shot out of the dead man’s right nostril. The creature hit the floor and scrambled out between my black shoes. It was then I became aware of the buzzing of flies.

  “They tortured him,” Hush said.

  “They’re torturing me.”

  The killer laughed, he really laughed. It was a jovial, friendly guffaw.

  I learned more about Hush in that moment than I ever wanted to know.

  “Let’s get outta here,” I said.

  “ What did we come for?” he asked, turning to face me.

  “ What they already have.”

  26

  I GOT HOME at nearly midnight. The house felt empty, but maybe that was just me.

  I went to the hall bathroom and got in the shower. Standing in the doorless stall, under the ice-cold spray, I shivered, and castigated myself for doing wrong even when I was trying to do right.

  There was a cardinal rule in boxing: You can’t win if you don’t throw punches, but when you go on the offensive you have to accept the reality that you will most likely get hit. That’s why so many fighters are counterpunchers—they wait for their opponent to make the mistake.

  I had taken the initiative; moved to get Zella’s conviction overturned. Shuddering from the cold, I knew that Stumpy and Bingo had been casualties of my ill-considered quest. Rather than helping, I made things worse—much worse.

  “You remember when we used to take showers together?”

  Katrina was one of the few people who could sneak up on me. I used to kid her that this stealth explained how she roped me into marriage—the joke wore thin in time.

  She was wearing a black lace teddy under a yellow-and-black kimono. Her white skin was perfect, her eyes more engaging than I had seen them in years. She held a snifter in either hand, each loaded with a triple shot of cognac.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You told me that you couldn’t take the cold.”

  Katrina’s blond hair was piled up on her head rather carelessly. I knew she had been drinking because her slight Swedish accent became more pronounced when she was tipsy—tipsy, but not when she was full-out drunk.

  I never understood this foreign inflection, seeing how she was born and raised in Middle America.

  “I’m very delicate, Leonid.”

  “Like white sharks and alabaster.”

  “Like a voman.”

  I stepped out of the shower and she handed me a plush red towel, leaning back against the sink as I rubbed and blotted the water from my body.

  Katrina is a beautiful woman. Past fifty, she’d done everything to keep her body and face young. And though I’m not handsome I have the body of a fighter—hard and blunt. We both had something to look at, it’s just that we were no longer interested in looking.

  She handed me a snifter.

  If you can’t beat them, become them, my father once told me. That’s how the great cultures of the past ultimately tamed and therefore outlasted their conquerors.

  THERE’S A SMALL ROOM on the street side of our apartment. Sometimes we call it the TV room, at others the little front room. There’s just enough space for the maroon sofa and the royal blue stuffed chair, facing an old console TV. Katrina led me there and sat next to me. She clinked my glass and we both drank—deeply.

  “I vanted to talk vit you, Leonid.”

  I sat back and away from her saying “talk.”

  “Sit up,” she said and I obeyed.

  I was wearing my blue suit pants and a T-shirt that was once white.

  “ Where are the kids?” I asked.

  “Dimitri is vit his whore. Twill—who knows where he goes? He said he vas vorking for you. And Michelle is out somevair sucking on an old married man
’s cock.”