All I Did Was Shoot My Man

by Mosley, Walter

  Not only the tableful of tourists with their pints and bitters were listening to the lecture but people all over the bar were enthralled. The bartender, a red-faced man, was smiling at the effect.

  The young man continued, and I found myself taken by his ideas and obvious passion.

  Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned to see Sweet Lemon Charles. At the bus station his skin looked olive under the fluorescent lights but in the window, bathed in natural, if murky, sunlight, he was more a wallet brown.

  “She’s sumpin’ else, huh?” he said.

  With a twitch of his head he indicated a small white girl with short brown hair, standing behind the lecturer. She was slight, but still with a figure under the maroon dress. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty but she had a look that would make a man pass up a dozen comelier girls just to see her smile.

  “That’s Morgan?” I asked.

  “Yep. My girl.”

  “She could be your daughter, man.”

  “Every young girl needs a daddy until she has kids of her own.”

  “That’s pretty good, Lemon. You read it somewhere?”

  “Auntie Goodwoman,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Shhh!” a woman seated at the bar near us hissed. She wasn’t part of the paying group, but still . . . “Let’s go outside, LT,” Lemon suggested.

  ON HUDSON in the afternoon there was lots of foot traffic. People walked dogs and toted laptop computers in dull-colored rectangular valises. There was every race, gender, subgender, and age, hoofing it around us.

  Lemon lit up a cigarette and I stood close to share the secondhand smoke.

  “So this is your new gig?” I asked. It was an obvious question but safer than the ones lurking at the back of my mind.

  “Oh yeah,” the lifetime thief opined. “I live, breathe, and fuck poetry twenty-four hours a day. Morgan had me go out to Wyoming to this writers’ retreat with her. They gave us a cabin out on the prairie. You know one night I saw a coyote not six feet from our front door. A coyote and me!”

  “You got any scams?” I asked. I had to.

  “They go through my mind,” he said with unusual candor. “You know how people get all trustin’ when they’re excited. They want you to help them lose their money, or at least that’s how it seem.

  “One night this woman and her husband wanted me to score for them. They would’a paid two hundred dollars for what I could get for fifty. But instead I went back to Morgan’s place and wrote a prose poem of what my auntie would say after I had did what would’a been so easy for me to do.

  “Now that’s what I do every time I’m tempted—by anything. I plan that to be my first book. I call it Sour Lemons, Sweet Nevermind.”

  The grifter was beginning to get to me and that’s always a problem. The best con men believe their stories up until the moment they let you down. They’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, and then, all of a sudden, they see a different light, take the money and run, before either one of you knows what happened.

  “ What you call me for, Lemon?” I asked.

  The question snapped him out of his reverie of poetry and sex, bad thoughts and the alternative of words never spoken by a woman that died before he went wrong.

  “I asked around all over the place, LT,” he said. “It was easy enough ’cause I had a name. I was at a readin’ last night and there was this woman there that Morgan knows, Tourquois Wynn. Tourquois used to be a adjunct creative writing professor at Hunter College. When she was there, five years ago, she had this older black man student named William Williams. He was in her fiction class.”

  The chill that flowed into where fever had lain for so many days almost made me shiver. I considered various inappropriate responses: 1) I thought about hitting Lemon with a roundhouse right, knocking him unconscious; 2) I might have taken off, running up the street, back to where there were no answers to unanswerable questions; and, 3) I entertained putting my fingers in my ears and chanting, “Nah, na, na, na naaa, na, na, na, naaaa, na na, na, na na, na.”

  “This Tourquois still at Hunter?” I pronounced the name as he did—Tur-kwa.

  “No. She got a tenure-track job at NYU after her first book of poetry won the Sanders Prize. She told me that Williams said that he named himself after a writer because before, when he was a politico, he said that the movement ground him down until he was just a mirror. He said that when a man becomes simply a reflection that writing is the only honest thing he can do.”

  That simple explanation meant that the man in the fiction class was my father, Clarence Tolstoy William Williams McGill. There was no doubt in my mind. I had to clasp my hands to keep them from shaking.

  “Did she know how to get in touch with him?”

  “Said she hadn’t talked to him since that class five years ago. I believed her. But me and Morgan said that the three of us should meet up for a early dinner at the Nook Petit down on Seventh at seven. You could come with. Maybe you got a question she can answer.”

  “ Why you doin’ this, Lemon?” I asked. It was a reflex question, like right cross after a left hook to the body.

  “Favor.”

  “I thought you were leavin’ my world behind.”

  “That’s right. I stay out of the life. But everybody says that you don’t mess wit’ gangsters no more, LT. And even if you did, a guy like me might need a friend someday.”

  “Someday is fine, but how much do you want right now?”

  “Nuthin’, man. All I ask is that you remember that I gave you this.”

  32

  I’VE ALWAYS LIKED the West Village, through all of its varied incarnations. When I was a kid it was a wasteland, with lots of factories and old Italians, the Meatpacking District, and even a few private homes. As time went on would-be artists, aspiring models, and prostitutes (of various persuasions) moved in. There were late-night clubs where jazz musicians sometimes showed up after their uptown gigs.

  Back then it wasn’t a tourist destination, with overpriced trés chic clothes shops and big hotels; you didn’t have to plow through crowds of tourists or the investment bankers who transformed every building into million-dollar plasterboard condos and seven-thousand-dollar-a-month one-bedroom apartments.

  The West Village had changed, and changed again, but it still had charm. After a little wander I sat myself down at an outside café on Hudson south of Christopher. There I ordered a café au lait with almond biscotti and waited for inspiration.

  I missed the old West Village. I missed my fever too. Both felt like history to me; places where I could hide.

  “HELLO?” she said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Mr. McGill?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there something wrong?” Zella Grisham asked.

  “No. I’m just sitting here on the street, waiting to meet a friend of my father’s.”

  “Oh. Then why are you calling?”

  “This and that. I might have a line on the people who adopted your daughter. I’m going to get in touch with them in a few days, saying that you’d like to meet.”

  “ What are their names?”

  “I need to make the first contact, Zella.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “Not in the eyes of the law, and we need to keep the law from looking too hard at you.”

  She had no words to say about that.

  “ What else?” she asked. “ What else did you have to say?”

  “How are they treating you there?”

  “Mr. Nightly has been very kind. He’s had family that spent time in prison.”

  “You should keep your head down,” I said. “Lotsa people interested in that heist. Some of them still think you might know something.”

  “ What do you mean?”

  “I mean, keep your head down. I will find out what’s goin’ on and tell you when you can come back up for air.”

  “ What about Harry?” she as
ked quickly before I could disconnect.

  “He went missing right before your trial.”

  “Killed?” There was real distress in her voice.

  “I doubt it. Usually when somebody’s murdered there’s a body or at least a complaint about a missing person. I think he must have moved away. But don’t worry, I’m still looking.”

  “Um.”

  “ What?”

  “I don’t really understand why you’re helping me but Johnny says that you’re somebody I can trust . . . so . . . thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  WHILE I WAS composing a text message a call was coming through. I sent the text and answered, “Hello, Breland.”

  “Mycroft called and asked where we were on the case. He wanted your number but I told him that it would probably be better for me to be the go-between.”

  “Smart.”

  “Do you have anything?”

  “Tell me something, Breland.”

  “ What’s that, LT?”

  “Is this like the other thing we did with this guy?”

  “ What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you want me to save an innocent boy or to get a rich kid out of a jam of his own making?”

  “You think that Kent isn’t just a kid out of his depth?”

  “Might not be.”

  There was silence on the other end of the wireless connection. Breland Lewis had a brilliant mind; a lawyer’s mind, but brilliant still and all. It felt good that he was using that intelligence on my question.

  “I guess that would just be a case of a silk purse and the sow’s ear,” he said.

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, “because you know I’m plum out of spot remover.”

  “Keep me informed.”

  TALKING ABOUT the billionaire made me think of my father. As much as I disliked the arrogant Mycroft, at least he was trying to help his son; at least that.

  My father had taught me to hate the rich. He called them the enemies in a class war that every man, woman, and child was a part of because the division of labor was the Maginot Line between us and our destroyers.

  I loved my father and so believed him. And because I believed him I hated men like Mycroft. It took me a long time to understand that I stood on both sides of the battle that every resident of the modern world faced. I was a grown man before I understood that Mycroft, in spite of his privilege, could have luck just as bad as Zella’s. His money was a force to reckon with but it could not shield his soul.

  “Hey, Pops.”

  And there Twill was. Even though I had sent him the message to meet me at the outside café I was surprised and delighted to see him.

  “Have a seat.”

  He pulled up a chair, motioned at our waitress, and ordered a Chinotto soda.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, LT, I think maybe we should bow outta this one.”

  “Your first case and you want to let it go?”

  He held out his left hand; a gesture of offering.

  “Mr. Mycroft said that he thinks that his son is just caught up in something he don’t get, but the way Kent tells it he’s the big boss. He told me that him and his crew started out robbin’ pimps and drug dealers and small gambling operations. Then, after a while, they started runnin’ their own businesses. He told me that he killed two men himself.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I believe he’s crazy. Don’t get me wrong, Pops. He’s just another dude doin’ business, as far as I’m concerned, but you the one told me that you cain’t save a fish from drowning.”

  I laughed, and the waitress came up with the small bottle of bitter Italian soda and a chilled glass. She was short and wide, with a yard-long smile for my son.

  “And that’s not all,” Twill said when the young woman went away.

  “ What else?”

  “Kent told me that him and his father hated each other, that they been at each other’s throats forever.”

  “ Why’s that?”

  “I don’t even wanna go into it, man. Just a lotta gossip, as far as I’m concerned. But we shouldn’t get in it. I know that much for sure.”

  “Tell me something, Twill.”

  “ What’s that, Pops?”

  “ Why would a guy you just met give you all that?”

  “He knew who I was.”

  “ What?”

  “Not that you’re my father or that I’m workin’ for his father,” Twill said, putting up both hands and tamping them against my palpable anxiety. “I’ve done a few things down around the Village. They know me pretty good in his circles. That’s why he had his girl tap me. He thought I was usin’ his sister to meet him so that we could do some work together.”

  My son the gangster. I hadn’t brought him in to work for me a moment too soon.

  “You should let this drop, Twill. If he’s running a violent crew, I don’t want you to get in the crosshairs.”

  “That’s cool. So you gonna drop it?”

  “I can’t do that. I promised Breland to see it through.”

  “So you gonna keep on workin’ it?”

  “Until I agree with your conclusion at least.”

  “ Well, then . . . maybe I could get at it another way.”

  “ What do you mean?”

  “If Kent knows who I am, that means I know people that know him and his. I could ask around. I mean, if you still wanna do this thing.”

  “You could ask and he wouldn’t know?”

  “I can be as quiet as a midnight owl on a garter snake.”

  What kind of bedtime stories had I told my son?

  33

  AFTER TWILL LEFT I ordered a glass of red wine and called Gordo.

  “I don’t know what you said to Elsa, son, but she unpacked her bags and wouldn’t even talk about leavin’. She made me a plate of meat and potatoes and said she wanted to get in the bed early.”

  “You deserve it, old man. She probably figure to be in your will soon so now she gonna sex you to death.”

  “One can only hope.”

  I HUNG AROUND the little café until seven. Then I followed Christopher Street over to Seventh Avenue. From there I wended my way south until coming to the Nook Petit. It was a little restaurant, hardly more than a café, on the western side of the street. It was next door to a storefront performance space that had been a makeup store six months earlier and a Thai restaurant six months before that.

  Sexy Morgan, the poet, was in a window seat next to the ageless (but old) Sweet Lemon Charles. Between them sat a black-haired woman with pale skin and very beautiful eyes. I couldn’t make out their color but their size and shape said that when it came to aesthetic evolutionary perfection these eyes had topped the scales. Other than that, she was plain. The blouse was a flat blue. I’d’ve bet even money that the skirt underneath was knee-length and black.

  Lemon saw me staring, stood up, and waved me in.

  When I passed through the front door a woman wearing a bejeweled purple-and-red turban approached.

  “Can I help you?” she asked. Her smile was practiced but not insincere.

  “My friends are at that table over there.”

  “LT,” LEMON SAID. “Glad you could make it, brother. Here, sit, sit.”

  He gestured at the chair he’d occupied. There was a lot of communication in that offer. He wanted me to sit next to Tourquois, of course, but also the only other chair had its back to the window. Lemon was telling me that he understood how vulnerable I’d feel in that position and also proving, in some symbolic way, that he had left that lifestyle behind. So he sat with his back to the street while I got to sit next to the woman with the lovely eyes.

  “Morgan,” Lemon said. “This is the guy I was tellin’ you about—Leonid McGill.”

  The sexpot cutie pursed her lips and held her hand out across the table.