I wondered too.
“I met with one of his guys,” Twill admitted. “You know, Kent is smart about business but not people. The guys he works with aren’t all that tough. This one dude was so nervous that it was easy to get him talkin’.
“I called Captain Kitteridge and told him about where Kent and his guys meet. They got contraband in there and merchandise from their burglaries.”
“You turned in your own client?” Breland asked. “Did you know about this, LT?”
“I had to act fast, man,” Twill answered. “Kitteridge said that he’d give the guys worked with Kent deals if they cooperated. That was the best I could do.”
“LT?”
“I didn’t know, Breland,” I said, “but I might have done the same thing. I mean, this kid Kent seems like a bad seed.”
“ What am I supposed to tell his father?”
“ Why tell him anything? He doesn’t know that we know Kitteridge. Maybe when he sees how bad his son is he’ll accept what’s come down.”
“I don’t know. I mean, this is his only son.”
“A son who was planning murder, Breland. You couldn’t expect Twill to let that pass.”
“I have to think about this,” my mostly honest lawyer said. “I have to go.”
When the call was over Twill and I sat there—me on his desk and him in the chair.
“Is there any more to this, Twill?”
“ What you mean, Pops?”
“I’m not sure. You should have called me. I mean, if you want to climb in bed with Carson Kitteridge, there’s a lot you need to know about him and me.”
“Okay. I mean, it just seemed so straightforward. Like you said, I couldn’t turn my back on a murder like that.”
There was more that Twill wasn’t telling me but that fire seemed to be out for the moment so I moved on to the next flare-up.
47
I REACHED an address in Bayside, Queens, a little after four. There were children moving about the streets and sidewalks on skateboards and bicycles, in-line skates, and even on foot. It was summer and everyone was home except those parents who were still at work, trying to make the rent or mortgage.
The house I had come to visit was small and yellowy with a large yard all around it. Surrounded by bushes and trees, it was the perfect setup for a burglary. But I wasn’t there to commit a crime; not even to investigate one, not really.
I knocked on the front door. It opened immediately, a small redheaded girl child, barely in grade school, standing there behind the screen. The image made me think of Nova Algren; she had once been a child—still was one when she committed her first homicide.
The little girl in front of me wore an orange-and-blue swimsuit.
“Hi,” she said, looking up in stunned surprise.
“Is it Mrs. Braxton, honey?” a man called from inside the house somewhere.
“Uh-uh,” the little girl said.
I was prepared with a story. My name was Farthing, Mr. S. Farthing, and I worked for the adoption agency that helped Sydney and Rhianon Quick get the little red-haired girl standing behind the screen door.
I smiled at the child while footsteps sounded on a carpeted floor behind her.
When the man appeared behind his daughter my lie faded away.
“Yes?” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Hello, Harry,” I replied. “I’m here for Zella.”
“That’s me,” the little girl said a little dismayed.
“Not you,” I said to allay this fear. “It’s somebody else with the same name.”
Harry Tangelo, aka Sydney Quick, exhibited the same surprised stare that plastered his daughter’s face.
“ What do you want?” he asked.
“I need to talk to you about the other Zella.”
“I don’t understand. How did you find me?”
“I’m a detective. Finding people is what we do.”
“Um.”
“Can I come in?”
“ What do you want?”
“My client, the woman with the same name as your daughter, has gotten her sentence overturned.”
“She’s out?”
“And very sorry for the things she’s done.”
Harry Tangelo’s mouth gaped open. His eyes were looking far beyond me.
“Daddy, can I go swimming?” the child asked, already bored with adult gibberish.
“Um, uh . . . Sure, honey. Sure. What was your name again, mister?”
“McGill. Leonid McGill.”
“ Would you like to come out in the backyard, Mr. McGill? I was just filling the little pool for Zell.”
IT WAS JUST an inflated red rubber tub, fed by a green hose, with water cascading over the side.
Screaming Zella the Second ran and jumped into the man-made puddle with a great splash.
It felt like I had just jumped into the deep end myself. While Harry went to the spigot at the side of the house, to turn off the hose, I watched and wondered what to do next.
“Have a seat, Mr. McGill,” Harry said, waving at two redwood chairs that were set in permanently reclined positions.
I lowered into one and he took the other.
We were both a little wary, like boxers in the first round of an out-of-town fight.
Tangelo would have been called cute if he’d been a woman. He had black hair, heavy lips, and eyes that seemed in turn sympathetic, then sad.
“Look at me, Daddy!”
“ What does Zella want?” the adoptive blood father asked.
“To see her daughter and apologize for what she did.”
“The heist or the shooting?”
“She’s been exonerated for the Rutgers thing,” I said. “The DA admitted that he would have let her off on the shooting for diminished capacity.”
“I thought they found part of the money in her storage unit?”
There was a huge elm standing at the corner of the pine fence that separated the Quicks from their neighbors. The shadow that tree threw was like a stain across the green lawn. This darkness seemed appropriate.
“Hello,” a woman called.
“Mrs. Braxton!” the child screamed.
She jumped from the pool and tore out toward the back of the house. There, emerging from the sliding glass door, was a middle-aged woman wearing a violet dress and a white sweater in spite of the heat.
Harry stood up, following the girl toward the house. He spoke to the gray-haired white woman, gesturing toward me.
“Nooooo!” the child complained.
Then little Zella lowered her head and followed the babysitter into the house.
When Harry returned I was ready to engage him in our awkward contest.
“I don’t understand what Zella wants, exactly,” he said.
“I was hired by an attorney named Lewis to investigate the evidence in her conviction,” I said. “ What I found proved that she had nothing to do with the robbery. We got her out of prison and the only thing she wanted was to find her daughter and make amends to you. But honestly, I came here today expecting to meet Sydney and Rhianon—not you.”
My words had the ring of truth to them. Harry grimaced and bit his lower lip.
“I changed my name after getting out of the hospital,” he said. “You know, I was adopted and so it wasn’t my real name, my birth name anyway. And because I was adopted I paid a lot of money to get little Zella. She’s my blood and I won’t have her be a ward of the state like I was.”
“Her mother would love to see her.”
“Her mother shot me three times.”
“That’s over with, Harry,” I said.
It felt good to be involved with a clear-cut element of the case. Zella wanted to see her child. The father had said child and was raising her in comfort and safety.
“Hi, honey,” a woman called from the glass door.
“Hey, babe,” the man known as Sydney Quick said.
I looked up and there, walking across the lawn toward us, was
Claudia Burns, aka Minnie Lesser, now aka Rhianon Quick.
I stood up.
She stopped in her tracks, glowering at me.
“ What?” Harry/Sydney asked.
The woman wanted to turn around and run—I could see that clearly.
“I’m already in your house, Minnie,” I said. “I’m already here.”
If epilepsy was in her DNA, she would have succumbed at that moment. She took in a deep breath and approached us.
“You two know each other?” Harry asked.
“Mr. McGill was at the office today,” she said. “He was talking to Mr. Brighton.”
“ What for?”
“Even though the courts exonerated your ex-girlfriend it seems that Rutgers is not so easily convinced,” I said. “They’re hounding my client and I was there to try to get them to lay off.”
“I don’t understand,” Harry muttered. “Are you here looking for Zella’s daughter or because of the robbery?”
“I want you out of this house,” Minnie said to me.
“And I will leave just as soon as I’m satisfied that you and Harry here don’t have anything to do with Brighton, the heist, and the people who tried to kill me a few nights ago.”
“Kill you?” Harry said.
“Give me fifteen minutes and I will be happy to leave.”
48
HARRY AND MINNIE shared the redwood chair next to mine. He had a confused expression on his cute mug while she exuded cold anger.
“ Why would you think that these people trying to kill you would have anything to do with Zella?” Harry asked.
“It’s my only active case,” I said, “and the police think that at least three men have already died behind it.”
“ What could we have to do with that?” Minnie asked.
“You’re working for Rutgers,” I said. “That’s enough right there.”
“But . . .” She was about to rebut my claim but then a thought occurred before the words could come out. She turned to Harry and he looked down at the lawn.
“Harry?” she said.
He looked up at me.
Harry/Sydney was not a stupid man but neither did he have a strong character. The look on his face told of how he was smart enough to get into trouble but too weak to fight his way back out again.
“A man came to me,” he said.
“Your friend Stumpy Brown,” Minnie put in.
“I didn’t really know him before then, honey,” Harry said. Then to me, “He offered me money and a way to get out from under all the publicity. He also helped me when I wanted to adopt Zella.”
“Stumpy?” I said. “ What kind of name is that?”
“I never knew another name. He said that he worked freelance for Rutgers and that they needed to know about the heist. He offered me some money and a job for Minnie.”
“Didn’t he think that someone at Rutgers might know who she was?”
“ What money?” Minnie asked.
“She wasn’t in the papers when the shooting happened,” he said. “That was the week of those big tornadoes in the Midwest. After that she stayed at her mother’s and never came out. All they had were high school pictures without her in glasses and with dark hair.”
I wondered then where Gert had gotten the more current pictures of the girl.
“ What money?” Minnie asked again.
“He gave me thirty-three thousand and told me to stay low,” Harry said.
“You said that you were doing telephone sales.”
“Yeah.”
“ Why would Stumpy do all that for you?” I asked.
“He wanted me to stay in touch with Zella, to get her to tell me where the money was.”
But, I thought, Stumpy knew that Zella was framed. He was the one that set her up.
“And why get Minnie here a job at Rutgers?”
“He was working for them,” Harry said. “That’s the place where he could get her a job. After that he helped me adopt little Zella.”
“Big Zella says that you never got in touch with her again after she shot you. That’s why she had me looking for you—so she could apologize.”
“That bitch has got no rights in this house,” Minnie said.
“I told Stumpy that I’d try to get the information out of Zell but I just couldn’t,” Harry told me. “She’d already shot me and there was a guy murdered in the robbery. I only went up to the prison one time—”
“You did?” Minnie said.
“—but I didn’t even go in. After Zella shot me my nerve was gone.”
Not one thing he said made even the least sense. Zella didn’t commit the robbery, she knew nothing about it. Stumpy knew better than I who did do the job. It was Bingo and his crew. Wasn’t it?
“ What do you have on Brighton?” I asked the incognito couple.
“ What do you mean?” Minnie asked.
“He did have something to do with the heist, right?”
“Not that we know of,” Harry answered. “He was just the job that Stumpy’s contact got her hooked up with.”
“And who was Stumpy working for?” I asked. “ What was his name?”
“I don’t know. He never said.”
“So it could have been Brighton.”
“Maybe,” Harry said a little helplessly. “But why pretend?”
“You were pretending to talk to Zella.”
“I tried but I just didn’t have the nerve.”
“So what did you tell Stumpy?”
“The first few times I talked to him I said that she still said that she was innocent. And then, after a while, Mr. Brown just stopped calling.”
“He stopped calling and you didn’t get suspicious?”
“About what? He got Minnie a good job. I had the money he promised me. We got, we got little Zella. There was nothing to worry about.”
I sat back in the slanted chair perplexed by the muddle the maybe innocent couple sitting before me presented.
“You said that you had a friend at Rutgers,” Minnie said to her husband, “that it was just a coincidence about the robbery.”
“I was half right.”
“ Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you wouldn’t have let me go see Zella, and then later, when I never went, it was already too late.”
“ Why would Stumpy help you adopt Zella’s child?” I asked.
“It’s my baby too.”
“But what did Stumpy get out of that?”
“You sound like you know him,” Minnie said suspiciously.
“ What do you want me to call him—Suspect X?”
Her resultant frown was, for me, like that piece of cake that Proust ate before writing his major opus.
There comes a time in the lives of ducks
When a window opens and the hatchling looks up
To see his fat mama bump and sway
Through blades and branches . . . That was the beginning of a poem my father used to recite to my brother and me to illustrate the power of instinct. That duck’s mama might have been a rolling wheelbarrow or a crafty crow. The duckling will imprint on anything leading forward.
“That’s what people do, boys,” my father would say. “They will follow the leader out of instinct all the while believing that they’re exerting free will.”
I had been following down the wrong trail. The path was set out there in front of me and I was just like that duck, brainwashed by instinct.
“Did Stumpy give you a way to get in touch with him?” I asked Harry.
“No.”
“Do you have an Internet connection?” I asked the executive secretary, Claudia Burns-Quick.
“Yes.”
“The crew that the police think robbed Rutgers was made up of three men,” I said, giving her the names of Bingo and his gang. “ While you’re looking do a search on my name over the last few days. I think you’ll see that I’m not lying.”
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 22