“Mr. Brighton,” Plimpton said with a deference that no doubt tore at his nerdy self-esteem.
“ What are you doing here?” the VP asked the manager-at-large.
“Mr. Harlow asked me to inform Mr. McGill that he was not to come here.”
“I don’t remember asking Mr. Harlow to take that action.”
Ah . . . the chain of command.
“ Well, I, we didn’t think that you needed to be bothered.”
Brighton turned his attention from Alton to me.
“Johann Brighton,” he said, extending a hand.
“Leonid McGill.”
Brighton was handsome and charismatic. Mentally, I had to bear down a little not to start liking him.
“Your name has been all over my desk of late, Mr. McGill. I was happy when my secretary told me that you were here.”
“Mr. Brighton,” Alton Plimpton said.
“Come with me, Mr. McGill,” Johann Brighton said, ignoring the underling. “ We’ll go up to my office to talk.”
40
WE PASSED THROUGH the glass wall and entered a door that opened onto a long slender hallway. We followed that vascular path to a cylindrical room with four elevator doors placed at ninety-degree intervals. Brighton held a thick card in front of a crystal green panel and one of the doors slid open.
Inside the chamber a voice said, “Hello, Mr. Brighton, sixty-sixth floor?”
“Yes,” he said.
I was impressed.
“Mr. Plimpton doesn’t seem to like me,” I said, just making conversation.
“Alton has worked for Rutgers thirty-three years. He started in the mailroom.”
“. . . and,” I said, “has only recently realized that coming in at the bottom almost always precludes reaching the top.”
The VP turned his head to regard me. His eyes were green and his aspect somewhere between that of a fox and a wolf; the one creature preying on smaller animals, and the other, with his pack, used to taking down creatures much larger than himself.
Which one, he was wondering, was I?
The elevator door slid open and we were presented with a triple-wide hallway that was tiled in emerald and gold. On the walls hung large still-life oil paintings, mostly landscapes, with the occasional study.
There were no offices on this half-block journey, not until we came to the dead end. There the double walnut doors we encountered swung open automatically and we entered the antechamber to his office.
Not for the first time in my life I had made it to the top. For some reason this made me hanker for a chili dog with chopped onions under a blanket of processed American cheese.
The reception room for Brighton was large and well appointed. There was a window looking out over the Statue of Liberty. The kidney-shaped desk was clean, and the woman behind it—the woman known as Claudia Burns—looked up, attentive to her charming boss’s any need.
She saw me but was unconcerned and unimpressed.
I saw her and was reminded of a photograph I had seen years ago. The hair was shorter and another color, now she wore glasses, but I was sure that the woman sitting there was Harry Tangelo’s lover—Minnie Lesser.
“Hold my calls, C,” the perfectly attired captain of industry said to the woman going under the false name.
“Yes, sir.”
BRIGHTON’S OFFICE WAS the same as many rich and powerful businessmen and -women I’d known in Manhattan. Lots of window space looking out across his domain, good carpeting, and an imposing black desk that wasn’t exactly rectangular. In one corner sat a love seat and a good-sized stuffed chair, both black, both looking to contain more comfort than the average working stiff has ever experienced.
“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.” Johann waved toward the chair.
I took the love seat.
Without missing a beat he sat in the chair meant for me. There he leaned back comfortably.
I put my left forearm on my left knee and the heel of my right palm on the other leg joint.
Brighton smiled and nodded slightly.
“How can I help you, Mr. McGill?”
I sat up and back, crossed my legs and frowned.
“How much did your suit cost?” I asked.
“It was made for me by the personal tailor of a Saudi prince. So I guess you could say that it was either free or priceless.”
“Huh. The only thing anybody ever gave me was grief . . . the most they ever took was blood.”
“That’s very dramatic,” the VP said.
“You think so? Then try this: Last night two assassins broke into my home. They came to kill me while I was up in the bed with my wife, in the same apartment where my children sleep.” My head jerked, releasing an iota of the deep-seated tension in my body and soul.
“They, they actually came into your apartment?”
“They were halfway down the hall before I killed them in their tracks.”
“Oh.” It was Brighton’s turn to lean forward. “You shot them?”
“One,” I said. “I crushed the other’s windpipe with my hand.”
I was sure that Johann Brighton had forgotten the name of the Saudi tailor but I could see in his face that he would never forget mine.
“ What did the police have to say about this?” he asked.
“ What they always say—fill out form twenty-two AB, write an account of the circumstances, and then answer a battery of verbal questions that are recorded and filed away so that one day they can come back and incriminate you.”
“I mean,” Johann said, “ what did they say about the killers? Who were they?”
“European. Probably East European. Men who traveled six thousand miles or more just to see me die.”
Brighton was hard to read. He didn’t make it to that lofty perch with his heart dangling from his sleeve.
“Maybe your dramatic flair is earned,” he said.
“Fuck that. I’m here to ask you why.”
“ What could Rutgers Assurance have to do with assassins in the night?”
“Not Rutgers,” I said. “You.”
“You’ve lost me, Mr. McGill.”
“Oh? Aren’t you the one who said that my name was all over your desk?”
“ Yes, but—”
“And doesn’t my place on your blotter have to do with Zella Grisham, Antoinette Lowry, and fifty-eight million dollars that went away during the biggest heist in Wall Street history?”
“ What does any of that have to do with men trying to kill you?”
“You don’t know?”
He shook his head and held my stare the way your opponent does before the first round of a fight that he just knows he’s going to win.
“Zella Grisham,” I began, “ was arrested for shooting her boyfriend.”
“If you say so.”
“I do and she was. This boyfriend, Harry Tangelo, was in the bed with Zella’s friend Minnie Lesser.” I stopped there to see the cracks appear in the VP’s façade and also because a thrum of rage was rising up somewhere below my heart just above the diaphragm. I don’t think I had ever been so close to violence without perpetrating an actual physical attack.
“I’m not familiar with Grisham’s arrest before the money was found in her possession,” he said. If he could see the rage in me, he didn’t respond.
Maybe he felt secure in physical superiority. Maybe he had a black belt in some Eastern defense art. Whatever he felt he was wrong.
I took a deep breath and held it thrice as long as usual.
Exhaling, I let flow out “How long has your assistant been working for you?”
“ What does that have to do with anything?”
“ Was she in this office when the heist went down?”
“I don’t remember.” If he was nervous, he sure didn’t show it.
“Maybe she knows more about you than you think.”
Words, for the moment, had abandoned the handsome millionaire. His left eye almost closed and I was allowed a glimpse of t
he man behind the corporate veneer. This momentary bout of speechlessness was the first indication I had that my predicament was even more complex than I had thought.
He raised his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Is there anything else, Mr. McGill?”
“ Whoever sent those men into my home is going to pay,” I said. “I might not wear the same species of suit that you got but all men bleed and all men die.”
Brighton stood up and I followed suit.
“Mr. McGill, you have to believe me when I tell you that I, nor anyone else at Rutgers, would consider using paid assassins to solve our problems.”
I WAS ALLOWED to find my way back down the wide hallway to the elevator. The door was open. All I had to do was step in and I was delivered to the twenty-seventh floor. From there I made my way to the outskirts of the glass cage.
The receptionist did her panel-sliding routine and I found myself with her and a dusky-skinned Caucasian man of medium height and middle age, wearing a tan suit with a few dozen scarlet threads shooting through.
“Mr. McGill?” the man said. His face was a pinched isosceles triangle, standing on its pointy chin.
“Yes?”
“My name is Harlow.”
“Yes, Mr. Harlow?”
“You will not be allowed admittance to these premises again.”
“Does that come from you or Mr. Brighton?”
“I am the one speaking, am I not?”
There are few times in a human’s life when the choice is clear and obvious. But there’s always another way, another approach. That’s why most people like a job where there’s a boss and a set of rules written down; a time to arrive and a dollar amount on every hour you toil.
The workingman believes that he has no choice, my long-gone father used to say. He believes that his whole life has been planned out for him. He’s right about the plan but wrong about the destination.
At that moment, in that glass cage, I knew that the only action to take was a solid one-two to the man Harlow’s rib cage and head. I wanted to hit him even though I knew that the act would buy me a prison sentence of interminable length because the rage I felt would certainly kill this stranger.
My action and his death were foregone conclusions.
And then I remembered “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Melville spoke out from his moldering grave, telling me that fate was not inescapable and that this man Harlow would live at least one more day.
41
I TOOK A SUBWAY toward midtown and my office. The second-to-the-last car of the A train was empty enough that I could sit on the end, next to the sliding doors. I put in earbuds connected to an ultra-thin MP3 player and listened to the seventies album, Below the Salt, by Steeleye Span, the English folk band. Nasally and dark, mystical and mysterious, the tones seemed to fit my predicament, telling me that the path of my life had been traveled for centuries and who was I to feel so special?
WARREN OH WAS at his post behind the high podium at the front of the Tesla Building.
“ Warren.”
“Mr. McGill.”
“How’s the family?” I asked the Chinese-and-black Jamaican man.
“Mother’s coming to live with us.”
“She is?” I stopped.
“She’s too frail to take care of herself and my aunt died in the spring.”
Our eyes met. Understanding, sympathy, and acceptance of our fates were transmitted without words. He gave me a wan Island smile and I nodded—the perennial New York pessimist.
WHEN THE ELECTRIC LOCK clicked I pushed open the office door expecting to see Mardi, her pale expression of devotion providing a moment of respite from the jagged threat of the streets of New York, encroaching old age, and innate negativity.
Young Ms. Bitterman was there behind her white ash desk but her expression was one of helplessness instead of welcome. Turning my head thirty degrees to the right, I saw the cause of her mild despair. Seated next to each other on my client’s bench was Aura, the woman I loved, and Antoinette, newest leader of a wild pack that had been on my trail for decades.
Aura stood up immediately, taking the two steps needed to reach me.
“Mr. McGill,” Antoinette complained.
“You’ll have to wait a moment, Ms. Lowry.” I took Aura’s hand and led her out into the hallway.
“Bad time?” were the first words she uttered when the door to my office closed behind us.
“If that was all, I wouldn’t need three days.”
“How bad?”
“Baby, I love you. You know that, right?”
When she smiled my heart trilled a high note.
When she kissed me I understood that love is always and only here and now.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you your three days.”
I took her hand and said, “It’s a really hard time, baby.”
“It always is,” she said to my heart.
As Aura walked away I took a moment to breathe before going back into the heavy atmosphere that surrounded my natural enemy and her mindless instinct.
I MOTIONED to Antoinette when I returned to the reception space. She followed me down the aisle to my office. On the way we passed Twill, sitting at his desk, talking on a cell phone.
“Pops,” he said, then nodded at the private agent of industry.
I grunted at my son and plodded toward the back office.
Once Rutgers’s predator was seated I settled in.
“I was informed of the attempt on your life,” she said. She wasn’t impressed by the view or the size of my work space compared to hers.
“Bad news . . .” I said, feeling no compunction to finish the timeworn saying.
“Maybe now you’ll see how it is in your own best interest to cooperate with me.”
I laughed.
“Are you a fool?” Antoinette Lowry wanted to know.
“Lady, I killed two professional assassins while buck naked ten seconds after I’d woken up from a deep sleep. One I shot and the other I ended with my bare hands. Now you tell me what the fuck you could have done but get in my goddamned way?”
“Maybe if you shared information with me the attempt would have never been made.”
“Are you saying that Rutgers had something to do with those men?”
“No,” she said in a tone that revealed much more.
“But maybe somebody else?” I suggested. “Maybe Johann Brighton?”
“No.” This time she was much more certain.
“But there are some shadows up in there. You do business in places where the laws of man are different, sometimes virtually nonexistent.”
That was the beginning of our real conversation. I had shown that I was both capable and wise to the ways of her world. I could tell by the intensity in her gaze that she suddenly saw me as a worthy opponent—or ally.
“ What do you know about your attackers?” she asked.
I covered the important details, as blasé as I could manage.
Antoinette listened closely, trying her best not to show how deeply the particulars of the attempt impacted her.
“Does any of what I say sound familiar?” I asked after cutting off the tale at the interrogation imposed on me at the Elizabeth Street Precinct.
“ Why would it?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one investigating the robbery.”
“From the sounds of it, Mr. McGill, you have called this contract on yourself. For all I know this attempt on your life might have nothing to do with my business.”
“Com’on, girl,” I said. “Don’t be coy with me. Does this shit sound like some street-level thug or even some kinda upscale mobster? Foreign assassins don’t only take a lot of money. You got to have serious connections to make something like that happen.”
“Maybe,” she conceded.
“Anybody hire me is already on a level way below that kind of action. And you know if they’re trying to kill me, I have to be getting close to that fifty-eight million.”
>
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 19