All I Did Was Shoot My Man

by Mosley, Walter

  WHILE SHE was gone Harry and I tried to have a conversation.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “I mean, did Zell have something to do with the robbery or not?”

  “The courts let her go.”

  “That might be on some kind of technicality.”

  “Might be,” I said, “but isn’t.”

  “But you think Mr. Brown did?”

  “Did what?”

  “Had something to do with the robbery?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. But the people he was working for most definitely did. Zella was framed and then your wife was hired by the company that got robbed. That’s just too much coincidence.”

  “But it’s been years.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “it has.”

  Harry twisted on the lawn chair, trying to contort his body into some kind of understanding.

  “ What was it with you and Minnie?” I asked, if only to keep him from breaking his spine.

  “ What do you mean?”

  “You were living with Zella. She was Zella’s friend. How long were you fooling around behind her back?”

  “The day she shot me was the first time,” he said, suddenly sober and still. “ We were planning to give her a surprise birthday party. Minnie came over and things just got out of hand.”

  “All the way to the chapel,” I agreed.

  “I know it sounds strange but getting shot like that brought Minnie and me closer. She called at the hospital every day and took me to her mother’s house when I got out. She blamed herself for what happened and I just needed somebody to care.”

  There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together, my father used to say, but men and women and their needs are all the same.

  Zella the Second wailed piteously. She was standing at the glass door, staring after the only mother she ever knew. Mrs. Braxton was holding the child’s arm, keeping her from running after Minnie.

  At any other time the stand-in mother’s heart would have melted, I’m sure. But Minnie was on a mission at that moment. She didn’t even hear the girl’s cries.

  “ What is it?” Harry asked Minnie.

  “All dead, right?” I said.

  “A man named Durleth ‘Stumpy’ Brown was found dead this morning in his apartment in Coney Island,” she said.

  The stink had finally brought the law into that laundry room.

  I looked around the manicured backyard. It seemed so cookie-cutter, so anonymous. For years Minnie, Harry, and Zella’s daughter Zella had been hiding from the wrong thing in that yard. But that day they were visited by the Truth wearing an inexpensive blue suit.

  “I don’t understand,” Minnie said.

  “You got to get outta here,” I explained. “I don’t know what it is exactly but somebody is killing anyone who had anything to do with that robbery.”

  “But we weren’t involved in that,” Harry said.

  “You are now.”

  49

  TRAUMA CHANGES the way a brain works. If Harry had never been shot by a woman who claimed to love him, he might have decided to go to the police when given the information I provided. But he knew that the law couldn’t help, that he had no proof anyone was after him. He knew that a man could be shot again and again and that no amount of logic or indignation could stop it.

  “You should leave this house,” I told them. “Drive to the airport or a bus station and disappear in the night. The people that tried to kill me are professional and connected. They’ll know your license plates and credit card numbers, Teresa Lesser’s address over on Hobart Street, and all the friends that the Quicks, Lessers, Tangelos, and Burnses have ever known.”

  “ Why should we trust you?” Minnie Lesser asked.

  “Did you look me up like I asked?”

  She stared, giving a wordless response.

  “Then you know that men broke into my house and tried to kill me. You know that I know what I’m talkin’ about. If I wanted to hurt you, that would already have happened.”

  “ We could call the police,” Minnie argued. “ We should call them.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “Call them. Tell them about your changed names and Stumpy Brown, about the heist and why you’re working at Rutgers. That would be better than waiting here for the people who tried to kill me.”

  I was trying to scare them.

  From the looks on their faces I had succeeded.

  “ We don’t have any money,” Harry said to his wife.

  “ What do you want, Mr. McGill?” Minnie asked me.

  Minnie was a pretty woman. Not as cute as her husband but sexier. Her features were petite and clear-cut. When she got older she’d seem severe, but not yet.

  “I don’t want anything from you, Minnie,” I said. “My trip out here was for Zella. I got the names of the people that adopted her daughter and I was going to ask them to meet her.”

  “But you found something else,” she said.

  “And I gave you my best advice. Four men are dead. They tried to kill me and my family. You were helped by a man working for whoever did the killings, you can bet on that. Take your husband and your daughter and run. I’ll tell Zella what happened. She will have to understand.”

  “ Where can we go?” she asked. “ What can we do? How can we even make a living if these men know everything about us?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago you were telling me that you wanted me to leave,” I said. “Now you want my help?”

  “Yes, we do.” She took her husband’s hand and held it to her breast. He nodded as I felt he must have often done, acquiescing to his bride’s decision.

  The sky was still light but the day was becoming evening. The onset of night made me sensitive to my surroundings.

  “I can call somebody,” I said. “He will come and he will hide you for the time it takes me to either follow this thing down or die trying. But if I do this, you have to promise to meet with Zella. She deserves to know her daughter.”

  Harry looked to Minnie. She finally nodded.

  “HELLO,” Johnny Nightly said, answering his cell.

  I explained as much as I could over the phone, asking him to come, without the elder Zella, and bring the Quicks and their adopted blood daughter to a safe haven.

  “Okay, LT,” he said. “I’ll do it. Luke said that he wanted to teach Zell how to play pool anyway. But I need to tell you something, man.”

  “ What’s that, Johnny?”

  “I’ve gotten to like your client. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her.”

  “ We’re on the same page, then,” I said.

  JUST BEFORE DARK the Quick family and I put a hole in the pine fence at the back of their yard. We walked through the next yard, down the driveway, and out to the street one block over. Nobody questioned us but, even if they did, what could they say?

  A dark blue van with no windows was parked at the corner. Johnny Nightly, the deadly handsome coal black killer, was seated behind the wheel. He smiled at me and I nodded politely.

  “This here is Johnny,” I said to the Quicks. “Do what he tells you and you’ll have a ninety-nine percent survival rate.”

  I would have said a hundred percent except for the time when Johnny made that minor slip. That mistake cost him a serious stint in the hospital and had nearly caused his death and mine.

  Harry, Minnie, and Zella the Second climbed into the back of the van. I slid the door shut and slapped it.

  Johnny drove off to parts unknown.

  BACK IN the Quick residence I turned off the lights and made sure that all the windows were closed and locked—all except one. A solitary window at the side of the house, where the bushes were thickest, I left unlocked and partly open.

  That window opened into the dining room. I put a chair in the little hallway that led from there out to the kitchen. Then I sat back comfortably, doing what PIs do best—waiting in darkness.

  I had the whole night ahead of me. If nothing
happened by morning, I’d go to Kitteridge and tell him what I knew. He’d probably tell Clarence Lethford. That’d be okay with me.

  There was a faintly sweet floral scent on the air, in the darkness. I liked sitting there inhaling that flavor. Many times I had considered getting out of the PI business. As long as I did that kind of work I was vulnerable to my criminal past. But I didn’t want a regular job, a boss, or a business telling me what to do. All I wanted was an unfamiliar shadow that slowly blended with my own.

  AT ELEVEN FORTY-SEVEN my cell phone vibrated in its pocket. A few seconds later I took it out to see who had called. It was a 917 area code but the number was unfamiliar.

  “My dear and dead friend was instructed to hire Mr. B to cover his tracks,” Miss Nova Algren’s recorded voice said. “And the number he garnered was twelve, not fifty-eight.”

  Bingo hired Stumpy. That meant that he also arranged for Minnie to work for Brighton.

  AT ONE TWENTY-NINE I was still in the dark, still wondering where the other forty-six million had gone. The phone throbbed again. This time it was an unknown number. I didn’t answer and there was no message.

  At two thirty-seven I saw a brief flash of light near the open window at the side of the dining room.

  I stood up from my chair.

  There came the slightest rustle from the bushes and then the window slowly opened wide. I held my breath with the kind of excitement that had some distant connection to fear. At that moment I was fatherless, childless, and wholly alone in a life that existed only right then and was oddly perfect.

  The man who came in was maybe five-seven.

  The fever returned in an instant and I welcomed its reckless burn.

  Just before the professional killer could begin his late-night prowl I lunged forward with a precision I’d practiced in Gordo’s gym for decades.

  He reacted to my presence half a second too late. By the time he’d reached for whatever weapon he carried I cracked his jaw like Barry Bonds hitting a fastball. But, even falling backward, his right foot jutted out in a nearly perfect shotokan sidekick.

  I was thrown backward, landing on my ass.

  Swiveling on the floor, I rose up moving toward the home invader. I expected that man to be out, but bad men like myself spend endless hours going through the scenarios of street fighting. We have to be ready for adversity.

  My opponent had been stunned. He was staggering in shadow, reaching for something on his person. I grabbed a maple chair and swung it at him. I followed the chair, falling upon the man as he grunted in pain.

  I hit him more times than necessary but by then my actions were mostly chemical, like a soldier ant or a teenager in love.

  50

  FROM THE TRUNK of my car I had retrieved the tools needed for the confrontation. I had plastic ties for my prisoner’s wrists and ankles, thick black electric tape for his mouth.

  In the light I could see that he was white with dark hair. His hairline was receding but I put him at thirty—maybe even younger. I used nylon rope to lash him to a dining room chair.

  My hands were shaking from the rush of battle. I took one of the pills that Dr. Bancroft had given me and sat in front of the unconscious assassin while letting the logic of polite society reestablish itself in my heart and mind.

  The transition was like one of the old black-and-white movies where Mr. Hyde slowly turns back into Dr. Jekyll. The physics of the change were all internal. The killer in my chest slowly ebbing, leaving its human husk spent and exhausted on the shores of civilization.

  THE WOULD-BE and has-been killer was still unconscious. I took out my cell, found a number I’d called not long before, and pressed enter. After saying as few words as possible I disengaged the call and sat back in a chair, wondering what kind of fool takes on an unknown quantity in the dark without benefit of a weapon or a friend.

  There could have been two or more killers assigned to the Quick family. How would I have fared against those kind of odds?

  The answer to that question was quite simple. I had already killed two men, and even though that act provided ugly satisfaction in my heart it didn’t help me to figure out my client’s problems or my own. Anyway—if I had hefted a gun and pointed it at the killer, he would have probably relied on his reflexes rather than raise his hands in surrender—that’s what I would have done.

  When I looked up I saw that the assassin’s eyes were open. His jaw was swollen and the left eye was almost closed but he wasn’t complaining. He was using that lopsided stare in a vain attempt to intimidate me.

  I considered killing him but then decided to wait a little while more.

  AT THREE FORTY-FOUR I was wondering about the phone call I had missed—the unknown number that left no message. It was late for a call that wasn’t an emergency. I worried that I’d missed something important.

  Just then the doorbell rang.

  The assassin looked up attentively. I shrugged at him and lumbered off to the front door.

  The navy dress blended almost perfectly with her dark skin. And she was wearing coral-colored lipstick. The makeup was probably my biggest surprise that night.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you were looking for excuses to call me” were Antoinette Lowry’s first words.

  “I like seeing you,” I admitted. “But that’s because when you’re not there in front of me I have to wonder what you’re doing behind my back.”

  She smiled, saying with that fleeting exhibition of humor that, just possibly, I could be the first black man in a very long time that she might give a second look.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let me show you something.”

  I led her into the living room.

  She came in and stood beside me, looking at my human package and exhibiting no surprise whatsoever.

  “ Who is he?” she asked.

  I went into the long explanation of how I came to that little house in Queens. I mentioned Minnie and Harry, with all their names, and Johann Brighton too. I talked about Bingo and his dead men and my conviction that the hit list had expanded to include a primarily innocent family of three.

  “Parlez-vous français?” she asked the prisoner.

  He nodded and then shot a glance at me. I tried my best to look as dull and brutish as I could; this because Antoinette did not first ask the man if he could speak English.

  She reached into her nylon bag and came out with a good-sized blackjack. She showed him the bludgeon, they came to a tacit understanding, and then she ripped the tape from his mouth.

  “ What are you doing here?” she asked in French. Her accent could have come from a Parisian’s lips.

  “Rien,” he said—nothing.

  “You are in a tight situation, my friend,” she continued in the foreign tongue. “This man has already killed two who tried to get at him. If you want to go home, you have to give.”

  “ What promise can you offer me?” he said. The French he spoke was from farther south, maybe as far down as Algiers.

  Antoinette smiled while I stared stupidly off into space.

  “The men I work for are more frightening than you,” the man said.

  “Fine,” Antoinette told him.

  She stood up and put the blackjack back in her bag. Before she could turn away he said, “ Wait.”

  “ What?”

  “I don’t know anything. They gave me my orders in a meeting in Berlin. Passports, papers . . . a phone. I only got the address of this house today.”

  “You were supposed to kill these people?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

  Antoinette turned to me. “He doesn’t know anything,” she said.

  “ What was all that he said, then?”

  “He’s worried about you.”

  “Me?”

  “He thinks you’ll kill him.”

  “ Where’d he get that idea?”

  Antoinette gave me a knowing, lying smile.

  The problem with people like Ant
oinette, people who have only partly comprehended that race is no longer the primary defining factor of American life, is that they, her and her kind, unknowingly keep watch over the masters’ wealth; and that the power of that wealth maintains all the ignorance of centuries of classism, racism, and the hierarchy that ignorance demands.

  Antoinette knew that my brother and I were homeschooled by a father, a man descended from Southern sharecroppers. She knew that I was an orphan before my thirteenth year. Armed with this partial knowledge, she assumed that I was not versant in any foreign language, especially not one as important and inaccessible as French. But indeed I am conversant in French and Spanish—German too. We spoke all those languages in my house and at the radical meetings my father dragged us to.