“ What side are you on, Tatyana?”
The smile my question elicited was clear evidence why I feared for Dimitri’s heart, both physical and metaphysical.
“He came for me when I was in trouble,” she said. “He used everything he had and never blamed me for what I am. He did that once here and then again when I went away.”
I took the space next to her on the sofa.
“You know I don’t make judgments on people, right?” I said.
“How could you?”
“People like us don’t get to say what we think very often. What we know is too close to the bone for that.”
“This is true.” She closed the book.
“So when I tell you that there have probably been quite a few men who have come for you, saved you, that wouldn’t be a lie now would it?”
“I have always looked for powerful men like you and your wife’s son—Twill. Powerful men are what a woman needs—that’s what I believed.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Dimitri loves me.”
“Yeah.”
“Before I met him I thought that love was like money, that even it was money. I give you and you give me. But then I take away from D and he comes for me anyway. He wasn’t strong enough or rich enough but there he was. He looked so silly in his cargo pants and white T-shirt that I almost laughed when I saw him. It was like seeing a silly magic creature from a child’s book.”
“And what does all that mean for my son?”
“I will stay until the magic is gone.”
My cell phone sounded, punctuating her hard truth.
“Excuse me,” I said, rising to my feet. I was tired, very much so.
“Hello?” I said out in the hallway that led to the foyer of our large prewar apartment.
“Have you found Harry or my daughter, Mr. McGill?” Zella Grisham asked.
“I already told you that I got the names of the people that adopted your baby.”
“I want to see them.”
“I know you do. But the law does not recognize the relationship and so I need to go talk to them before I try to put you together.”
“Then talk to them.”
“First I have to get Rutgers off your ass and the cops off mine.”
“I don’t care about them.”
“So then you’re lucky I do. And as long as I have you on the phone can you tell me something?”
“ What?”
“Your ex-friend, Minnie Lesser, what kind of woman was she?”
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Zella said.
“You want me to find Harry and then you’re gonna tie my hands?”
“ What does she have to do with him?”
“Neither one testified at your trial. That puts them together in more than just the bed.”
“She was just a girl like me,” Zella said. “Nothing special.”
“ What did she do for work?”
“She was a secretary.”
“ What kind of secretary?”
“I don’t remember. She worked in a midtown office. Before that she was a temp. That’s how I met her. She temped at my law office. I was the one who introduced her to Harry. We all had dinner one night.”
“ Was she bent?”
“ What do you mean?”
“She seem like the women in prison with you? Like she would steal from her employers?”
“She and my boyfriend cheated on me.”
A rumbling voice sounded in the background over the line.
“Hold on,” Zella said.
A moment later a man’s voice addressed me.
“LT,” Johnny Nightly said.
“Hey, Johnny,” I said, looking at my watch. It was way past two in the morning. That math said more than any male braggadocio.
“ What happened at your place the other day?”
I told him.
“Is this some other case?” he asked.
“No. It’s straight up Rutgers. You should pull up stakes and take her someplace that I never heard of before.”
“That bad?”
“They broke down my front door, man. I came closer to death than I ever have.”
LOVELY AND SYLPH-LIKE, Tatyana sat on the sofa next to her big book. She was pensive and somber.
“Tell me something, Tatyana.”
“Yes, Leonid?”
I stopped for a moment, a little stunned to hear my first name coming from her lips.
“You said ‘my wife’s son.’ ” I continued the question. “ What did you mean by that?”
“It is obvious that Dimitri is your only, how do you say, your only blood child in this house.”
No outsider had ever spoken about it before. I had lived a whole life telling my children that they were mine. Living a lie you begin to think that everyone is fooled but maybe, I thought, the only fool was me.
Tatyana stood up and kissed me on the cheek.
“Good night,” she said.
Watching her leave, I began to think that maybe she would be all right and that Dimitri would too.
BY THE TIME I was back in the foyer Taty was gone and Katrina’s snoring could once again be heard throughout the lower quarters of the apartment. I imagined that she had turned in her sleep, ushering forth the heavy breathing.
Instead of joining her I dragged a hickory chair into the front hall and sat there, leaning against the wall, napping and standing guard in turns.
45
IT WAS MORE SLEEP than watchfulness by four fifty-four that morning. I know the time because that’s what my phone read when I answered it.
“Leonid,” the caller said when I grunted, too groggy even to say hello.
“Breland?”
“ What the hell is going on?”
“Are you safe?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am. But I got up early and called my service. There was a message from Shelby Mycroft.”
“ What did he say?”
“You don’t even know?”
“I ain’t gonna play twenty questions with you, man. Either say something or hang the fuck up.”
“Kent has been arrested.”
“Charged with what?”
“Conspiracy, murder, racketeering, and about a dozen other crimes.”
“So, what’s that got to do with me?”
“The chief arresting officer was Carson Kitteridge.”
“Oh.”
“So I’m going to ask you again—what’s going on?”
“I’m . . . not sure. I haven’t talked to Kit about this. Not at all.”
“It can’t be coincidence.”
“Maybe it is. But I promise you that I’ll look into it. Just as soon as the sun comes up.”
“Mycroft wants to see me. He wants me at his house.”
“Don’t go and don’t answer him.”
“I have to do something.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Leonid, Shelby is a powerful man. I can’t just ignore him.”
“You want to make your wife a widow, your children fatherless?”
Silence.
Exhaustion hovered over me like a demon bear. I think for a moment I nodded off even with all that was on my mind.
“I’ll get to the bottom of this arrest and get back in touch with you. But you and the family stay away. If you could see me right now, you’d know why.”
“How’s your family, LT?” the lawyer asked in a conciliatory tone.
“Breathing,” I said. “Sleeping too.”
TWILL’S ROOM was empty.
I removed my blue clothes, took an ice-cold shower in place of eight hours’ sleep, and donned an identical suit. After downing a press pot of French roast coffee I was on the street in front of my building by six.
THERE’S A COFFEE SHOP near Ninety-third and Broadway, Shep’s Schleps. It’s just a counter with a kitchen behind it that makes deliveries from six to six. There Shep’s wife, Nina, served me an egg-and-bacon sandwich with y
ellow mustard and raw onion while I read the sports pages of that morning’s Post. Baseball was in full swing. The Yankees had beaten the Mets, two games to one, in a Subway Series. Wladimir Klitschko failed to knock out David Haye but retained his heavyweight crown.
By six minutes after seven my anger had lowered to a reasonable level. I called Twill’s cell phone and got his answering service.
“This is Twill,” his voice said. “Leave a message.”
“Make sure you’re in the office at one,” I told the mechanism. “You already know what this is about.”
THE BROWN BRICK apartment building was on Ninety-fourth a little east of Broadway. I searched the legend and pressed a little green button.
“Yes?” a woman said.
“Leonid McGill for Seldon Arvinil.”
“ What is this about?”
“College business. I work for the security department.”
“ What happened?”
“Is Mr. Arvinil at home?”
“I’ll get him.”
“MR. MCGILL?” a man asked over the speaker maybe two minutes later.
“Mr. Arvinil.”
“I’ll be right there.”
I backed down the stairs to the middle of the sidewalk, wondering if Seldon owned a pistol. He might have. How many times had the jealous man been killed by the object of his rage? As I pondered this question a white man of slight build appeared at the front door of the brown stack of apartments. He was wearing a square-cut red-and-cream leisure shirt and blue jeans. His hands were empty so I waved instead of drawing my own gun.
“Mr. McGill?” he asked.
I pursed my lips and nodded.
“ What is it?”
“Come on down here, man.”
Arvinil had tanned skin, bushy brown hair crusted a little with gray, and brown eyes. He listed back a bit and then, finding the courage somewhere, walked down the stairs without stumbling.
He faced me eye to eye.
He was three inches taller than I. I had forty pounds on him.
“Yes?” he asked.
“You know why I’m here?”
He winced in answer.
“She’s a child,” I said.
“No.”
“No what?”
“She’s young,” he stammered, “a young woman who is better than I deserve. But she’s a woman, not a child.”
“Just because a girl can have sex doesn’t make her a woman.”
“ Why are you here, Mr. McGill?”
“Your daughter is only a couple of years younger than Shelly,” I said. When he remained silent I added, “ What would she and your wife have to say about what you’re doing?”
“From what Shelly has told me about you that would be letting me off easy,” he said.
I preferred assassins in the night. Them I could fight and kill. Seldon was brave with no muscle, innocent with no excuse.
“ Why?” I asked him.
“Has a young woman never made your heart sing?”
I suppose he expected me to think of the women I’d known, young and older. But what I thought about was the lie I’d let Shelly live with, the bullet holes in her wall. If she wasn’t out rutting with this graying history professor, she’d be wounded or dead and I’d be to blame.
The biceps in both my arms ached with violence and exhaustion. I realized that I couldn’t speak without attacking, so I turned and walked away, heading farther east.
46
WHEN I REACHED the park it was not yet eight.
Somewhere above 101st Street, a few hundred yards in, there’s a huge pile of boulders that come together forming a grotto of stone. I climbed up the man-made hill and was happy to see that no one had been there for a while.
It was going to be a hot day but the morning air still held the chill of night. I hunkered down in the rocky crevice and closed my eyes. Sleep came on in an instant and I was transported to the comparatively peaceful time of my homeless, directionless adolescence.
My dreams were not indecipherable mysteries wrought from unconscious material. Instead they were of people I knew or wanted to know. Zella and Antoinette were there, also Johann Brighton and someone else, someone that might have sent killers to my paper-thin front door.
The path of my life appeared before me—hard and clear. I could, in the dream, turn around and take everything back. I could pass through time and decide not to help Zella or lie to Shelly. I could travel all the way back to the womb and be another person or no one at all. But I was too comfortable on that quartz plinth under the summer’s sun. As I was lying there my life seemed to have enough meaning to engender nostalgia—the greatest enemy of human logic.
I found comfort in that old hiding place. There I had temporarily escaped the evil machinations of an enemy set into motion by my own foolish acts.
My heart was a tin drum; my breath the sighs of a forlorn, slightly out-of-tune cello. But music, no matter how sad it becomes, is still a solace for the soul.
My dreams became incomprehensible and I smiled. New York faded from consciousness. I was all alone in a wilderness before Eden, before good or evil . . . . . . and when I awoke I was completely refreshed. The medicine had worked. The fever, along with whatever infection that caused it, was gone from my body. Men were trying to kill me, but so what? I was reborn. A born-again agnostic risen from the ashes of faith.
I GOT TO A CAB on Central Park West and made it to the office by twelve fifty-eight.
“Twill in there?” I asked Mardi.
“Yes, he is,” she said. There was gleam in her eye. We, Twill and I, were her favorite men and she was happy to have us together behind the door where she stood guard.
Twill was at his desk. He stood up when I approached.
“Hey, Pops,” he said.
That morning my son was clad in grays. From his light ash jacket to the coal-colored shoes on his bare feet. His pants were a misty seaside morning, the lead-hued shirt threatened to become blue.
“Call this number,” I said, reciting the digits for the special cell phone Bug Bateman had long ago given my lawyer. “Put it on speakerphone.”
“Sure. Who is it?”
“You’ll see.”
“Hello?” Breland said after four rings.
“I got Twill here with me,” I said, then nodded at my favorite son.
“Mr. Lewis?” Twill uttered, the slightest twinge of discomfort showing around his mouth.
“Yes, Twilliam?”
“Breland called me this morning,” I said. “He wanted to know about how Carson got involved with Kent Mycroft.”
“Look, man,” Twill said to the omnidirectional phone receiver. “I don’t know what Kent did while he was gone from New York but whatever it was he learned how to be a gangster. His crew got their fingers in gambling, drugs, prostitution, and insurance scams. In between they do burglaries. Just about the only thing they don’t do is mugging. But they for sure killed this one guy. Kent and one of his men both say that he did that himself. There might be another one, and there’s other stuff too.”
“You don’t know any of that for sure,” Breland the lawyer argued. “Maybe it’s just a kid trying to make himself look important.”
“I know the difference, Mr. Lewis,” Twill said, managing to get both confidence and deference in his tone. “Kent is crazy and the people working with him are scared of him too.”
“How did the bust come about?” Breland asked.
“You got to understand, man,” Twill said. “I had to make a choice.”
“ What choice?” I said.
“A guy named Lucia had a gift shop on Greenwich Street. He made a deal with Kent to do a torch job on the place. The cops tumbled to the arson and because there was no break-in they arrested Mr. Lucia. But then they let him go the same day. Kent thought he was gonna talk and they were supposed to kill him last night.”
“How could you possibly know all that, Twill?” Breland asked.
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 21