“I’m not listening to this,” Shelby Mycroft said. He made to stand.
“No?” Twill asked. “ Where you think I heard all that? Mirabelle don’t know it. But when Velvet had her baby and told Kent that you were the father he ran away from home.”
Shelby got a stunned look on his face. The sportsman’s tan started to pale.
“Th-that has nothing to do with my business here,” he stammered.
“ What if I said that on Thursdays you still go out on the yacht with another teenage girl and do the humpity-monkey from nine to midnight? What if I also said that the code for the gate to your gangplank is twenty-seven fifteen? The one to the entrance to the boat is seventy-five twenty-one.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Not only that, man,” my son added. “You got a red lacquer lamp at the edge’a your bed on that boat has some kind of signature at the bottom only somebody in your family would know about. Kent told his crew that if you turned up dead on that boat, he would give any man who handed him that lamp twenty thousand dollars. He got the money in cash in a safe in his apartment.”
Shelby’s lips moved but no sound came out.
“Now, say again how you want my pops to free him,” Twill said.
I was surprised at the sudden aggression in my son’s attitude. I suppose I shouldn’t have been.
“Kent told you this?” he asked.
“It’s common knowledge among his crew. The only reason you aren’t dead already is that he got a bunch’a pussies workin’ for him. That and they were a little nervous about killin’ the girl too.”
Shelby looked to me. All I could do was shrug.
Now I understood why Twill had taken such swift and certain action. He was outraged that a son would go against his father like that. That was probably one of the worst crimes his young mind could imagine.
“So?” I asked Mycroft.
“He said a red lacquer lamp?” Shelby asked Twill.
“ With a signature on the bottom that only somebody from your family would know.”
The rich man sat there looking for the flaw in Twill’s presentation. But it was of perfect geometric design.
“You hired us to do a job and we did you one better,” I said after a while. “He would have gotten himself caught sooner or later but you might not have survived that long.”
“How did he get my codes?” Shelby asked. “I change them every three months.”
“Probably Mirabelle, right?” Twill said. “No reason for her to think that he was out to get you. Maybe he told her that he wanted to take Luscious out there for a night. That way she wouldn’t have told you.”
It’s a wonderful thing to see a billionaire, a captain of industry, reduced to his human parts. His brow creased and his jaw went slack. If he were my opponent in the ring, I’d have known that he was about to go down.
“Are we done here, Mr. Mycroft?” I asked.
“I have to check this out,” he said, “look into, into these allegations.”
“Be my guest. But if it turns out that Twill here is right, you still need to pay us.”
Mycroft got to his feet.
“And one more thing,” I said.
“ What?”
“The arresting officer, Carson Kitteridge, is a friend of the family. Twill and I will tell him about your romps with teenagers. Take that as fair warning from your son.”
54
TWILL RETURNED to my office after seeing Mycroft to the door.
“He’s busted up,” Twill said as he lowered into the seat Mycroft had taken before. “I don’t blame him. Must be hard to have your own blood treat you like that.”
“ Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked the old soul in the young man’s body.
“I didn’t wanna say it out loud, Pops. You know it hurt me just thinkin’ about that mess.”
“Kent’s man could have made all that shit up.”
“Uh-uh.”
“ Why don’t you think so?”
“I went down there and checked it out,” Twill said.
“Down where?”
“I got on the boat and found the red lacquer lamp. The signature on the bottom was made by Kent when he was a child—Winnie-ther-Pooh. Everything my boy told me was true.”
“And why would he tell you anyway?”
“He probably thought that I’d do the deed, you know. I told him that if I did do it, I’d split the money with him.”
“Did you give Kit all that?”
“Naw. I just told him the names of the dead men and said he might wanna ask about that store owner who had his store torched.”
I let that part of our conversation settle for a bit. Then I said, “You got anything you want to know?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“Not even what Mycroft said about me covering for crimes?”
“Hey, Pops. You the boss here. I’m not supposed to be questioning you.”
A QUARTER HOUR later I was in a cab headed down to Greenwich Street in Tribeca. Twill was on my mind. I’d brought him into the business to keep him out of a life of crime. But he’d turned out so much like me I had to wonder if anyone or anything, outside of death, could save him from himself.
My phone vibrated. There was a text message there that read “In place.”
Before I could put it away the phone sounded with three chimes.
It was another unknown number, maybe the same one that called while I was waiting for the assassin in Queens.
“Hello?”
“Trot?”
I believed that I was beyond shock or surprise that deep into the case. A terrorist attack wouldn’t have kept me from my mission. A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer would not have stopped me from finding the people that had sent assassins into my home.
But that voice on the phone nearly managed to derail me.
“Dad?”
“You recognize my voice?”
I began to tremble. Anger, love, rage, and a deep, deep wound opened up in me. I closed my eyes but it made little difference; even with them open I couldn’t distinguish images—only light and dark.
“Son?”
“ Where are you?”
“On a bench in Prospect Park. Can you hear the Congo line playing?”
Yes, in the background there was the sound of African drums.
“ What . . . why are you calling?”
“Tourquois got your number from that friend Lemon. She said you seemed to want to find me, that you knew I was in New York.”
“It’s been forty-four years,” I said. “Mom died because she couldn’t live without you.”
“I wasn’t in the country the first eight,” he said. “I was in the jungle fighting for three and then in prison for three more. It took me two years to make my way back. By then you and Nicky had become men. Your mother was dead already.”
“ Why didn’t you get in touch with us? Why did you hide?”
“It’s hard to explain, son. The Revolution changed me or, I should say, it changed me again. Maybe it even destroyed me. I knew where you were and what you were doing but I . . .”
“You what?”
“I’d like to talk to you face-to-face.”
“Nikita’s in prison,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’m married with three children.”
“ We should meet, son.”
I hadn’t expected the depth of feeling. I hadn’t believed that I’d ever see my father again. Less than an hour before I’d seen the truth dismantle a rich and powerful man. This demolition made me feel superior. But now I saw that I was no better, that life conspired against all of us, eroding everything—even the ground beneath our feet.
“There’s that restaurant you like going to,” my father, Tolstoy McGill, was saying. “The steak house at Columbus Circle. We could meet there for a late dinner, maybe ten or so.”
“How, how do yo
u know where I like to eat?”
“Meet me at the steak house at ten, Trot. I’ll be there. If you want to see me, you’ll be there too.”
“ Why haven’t you tried to get together with me before now?”
“I’ll see you at ten, son.”
The call clicked off in my ear but I didn’t put the phone down, not immediately. The chance to hear my father’s voice had been the single most powerful desire in my life. I missed him terribly, hungered for his attention and his survival. I hated him too but the deep sense of loss drowned out any antipathy like a nuclear bomb detonated over an angry hornets’ nest.
“Here you go,” somebody said.
The cab had come to a stop after a forty-four-year journey. The modern façade of the building was glass and shiny steel. It rose fifteen or sixteen slender floors above its dour brick neighbors like a silver pin jabbed into a concrete fingernail.
Looking up, I wondered if this was the day I’d die. I’d always associated my father with death. Before she passed on, my mother told Nikita and me that she was going to meet my father in the place people go after breath leaves their body.
“That’ll be twelve sixty-five,” the cabbie said.
I handed him a twenty and shambled out of the taxi.
Standing on the broad sidewalk in front of the glass doors, I wondered again about mortality. I had a wife somewhere and grown children that I loved. There was my lover, whose kisses I couldn’t imagine right then. There was a life that had been lived sideways and backward, and hopes that had lost their meaning.
My mind felt empty—the Buddhist ideal. That thought brought a smile to lips. I took a deep breath and headed for the door.
55
“FURROWS FOR a four-thirty meeting,” I said to the sour-looking man at the front desk, “suite twelve-oh-three-A.”
“State-issued ID,” he replied.
“Don’t have it.”
“I can’t let you in without ID.” The guard wore a black jacket that had the look of something military. He was a black man of the gray-brown persuasion and my age. He was big but loose, strong but probably slow.
“I wasn’t told about any ID,” I told him. “Just Furrows, twelve-oh-three-A.”
The guard didn’t like me. But he opened up a big ledger on the slender ledge in front him and ran a thick finger down the page. He found something that soured his mouth and then said, “Take the third elevator on your right.”
SUITE 1203A WAS a solitary room furnished with a floor-to-ceiling window that looked down on Greenwich. There were no curtains or window shade. The sun shone in but central air kept the room cold. There were only two chairs in the small room and I took one of them, feeling exposed and vulnerable but not timid or afraid.
It was three forty-seven and I was prepared for the wait. I was ready to die too. It had been a long run and the return of my father signaled an ending to the race.
Sitting there in the exposed room, I thought about my children. They were all damaged and beautiful, expecting the best and dealing with what they had. I wasn’t a failure in my life or theirs but I lacked agency, and this deficiency, I believed, also limited the range of my heirs. I was a counterpuncher by nature and so I’d lived a life of blundering out into the fray, expecting to meet my challenges as they came.
These thoughts were not very complex but it took me a long time to come to them. Before I knew it it was four-thirty and Johann Brighton was coming through the unlocked door.
I stood to meet the handsome CEO-in-waiting.
“Mr. McGill? This is a surprise.”
“It is?”
“Yes.”
“Completely?”
“Absolutely. What are you doing here?”
“I know that Seth Marryman hired Claudia Burns and had her come to work for you.”
“Mr. Marryman died three months ago.”
“He still hired Claudia.”
“So? What could an executive assistant have to do with anything?”
“ Why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t have time for this, McGill. How did you even get here? And where is the man I was supposed to meet, Mr. Furrows?”
“Alton Plimpton canceled your meeting and slotted me in.”
“Alton? He doesn’t . . .” Brighton stopped there in the middle of his sentence, putting together thoughts and notions that I would have liked to share.
“ What do you have to do with Alton?” he asked.
“He called and asked who I thought was the inside mastermind behind the heist eight years ago. I told him that it was the man who hired Claudia Burns.”
“ Why would you say that?”
“Because Claudia is actually Minnie Lesser. Minnie Lesser was the girlfriend of the man Zella Grisham shot.”
Brighton took in these claims, wondering about them like a housewife gauging the ripeness of fresh fruits.
“Even if that’s true,” he said. “ What does it have to do with Seth?”
The door behind us swung open then. Through it came the sour-faced guard followed by Clarence Lethford, Antoinette Lowry, and Carson Kitteridge. After that came the assassin with the receding hairline from the Quick house in Queens. He was in handcuffs again and shepherded by two uniformed cops. One of them was holding a high-powered rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.
The expression on Lethford’s face would have been perceived as a glowering frown on most men but I knew him well enough by then to see it for what it was—a triumphant smile.
“You were right,” he said to me. “It was a setup. This guy was going to kill you both.”
“How’d he get out of federal custody?” I asked Antoinette.
She shrugged and gave me an apologetic look.
“Plimpton provided him with a good lawyer,” she said. “ We picked up Alton boarding a chartered jet headed for the United Emirates. He had sixteen suitcases with forty-one million dollars in them.”
“ What is this all about?” Johann Brighton asked.
Kitteridge spoke up then. “Mr. Plimpton told us that he was working for you, Mr. Brighton. But we have the calls he made to this man. He was setting you and Mr. McGill up for an assassination.”
“And you let me walk into the trap?”
“LT didn’t tell us that you were on the guest list.”
“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t know if you weren’t a part of this. I still don’t, for that matter.”
“ Would you mind coming down to the station with us, Mr. Brighton?” Lethford asked.
The captain of industry was temporarily out of his depth. He nodded weakly and walked out of the room with the prisoner and police escort.
“ We’ll need you to come down and make a statement, LT,” Carson told me.
“ What do you think it is, Kit?” I replied.
“The money speaks for itself. From the circumstances I’d say it was all this Plimpton guy. He’s blaming everybody else but he had the money and he called the man with the gun.”
“ What about Harlow?”
“Plimpton had been training under Leonard for a few years a while back,” Antoinette said. “He could have figured out the foreign arm, made the contacts he’d need.”
“And how about taking the money from the vault before the heist?” I asked.
“He could have managed that with the help of Clay Thorn,” she said. “That was back before the new security procedures were put into practice. The way Rutgers works with short-term assurances is to put them in storage and use them for credit advances.”
“If they were connected, we’ll find it,” Kitteridge promised. He was not a man to make idle assurances. “ Will you come down to the offices at Elizabeth Street this afternoon?”
“In the morning,” I said. “I got a big night in front of me. I’m supposed to have dinner with my father.”
Kit frowned at that. He knew my past better than anyone outside of Aura. He’d studied me the way a wild dog did the skat of his prey.
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 26