“I don’t remember,” I said calmly, hollering inside.
“I understand. That was seven years ago. We’d just started the criminal keyword database at that time. Thank God for Homeland Security.
“The doorman gave us a description that fit you to a T, LT. But we couldn’t tie you to the Finn, and Pete’s lawyer kept him out of court, so we had no excuse to bring you in. Even if it was you, that didn’t make any direct connection to the robbery.”
I should have had a pithy comeback. That was our shtick. But I was no longer the man he’d hounded. And all I could think about was what his visit meant.
“Why are you here, Lieutenant?”
Kitteridge’s eyes tightened. I’d never been curt with him on an exploratory visit. We had our roles to play and for the first time in nineteen years I was stepping out of character.
“Camilla Jones,” he said. It was almost a question.
“Who?”
“Roger Brown’s fiancée. He was supposed to meet her night before last at a club on Fifty-seventh. When he didn’t show she called him and he said that he was sick. She thought he sounded nervous but he said no. He didn’t call her all the next day and so last night she went to his apartment and rang his buzzer. Nobody answered. She had the key, decided to use it, and found him dead on the floor. Strangled and beaten like a dog.”
“So?” I whispered.
“So a few days ago the elusive Arnold DuBois left his card at Brown’s office.”
“So?”
“The next day some big white guy came there, looking for Roger. The receptionist, a Juliet Stilman, said that he threatened her. When Roger heard about the guy he begged her not to call the police and snuck out through a side door. He didn’t come to work the next day, and now he’s dead.”
I waited a few moments before asking, “Is that all, Officer?”
“Are you going to tell me what you were doing there?”
I shrugged and made a meaningless gesture with my hands. “Freedom of speech also lets me keep my mouth shut.”
Kitteridge’s furrowed brow darkened his light-gray eyes. He sat forward in the chair.
“It’s said around certain circles that you’ve changed jobs,” he said, suggesting something.
“Soda jerk?”
“Point man for the killer—Hush.”
Of all the things I could be blamed for, murder for hire was one of the few not on the list. I knew Hush. We were friends as far as friendship was possible for either of us, but he’d given up the assassination trade, and I had never been involved in his business.
The idea that I could be a button man brought laughter from deep down somewhere. If I wasn’t sitting at a desk I would have doubled over in dark mirth.
This reaction enraged Kitteridge. He leaped up from the chair and for a moment I thought he might attack me. But the detective took on the role of policeman in a complete and ideal way. He didn’t batter prisoners or produce false evidence. He hated me and mine for not being like him but would never cross his own line.
He turned away and stalked out of my office. I didn’t need to check on his exit like I had with The Suit. I doubt if I could have risen from my chair anyway.
Roger Brown’s death weighed on me.
I wanted to do something but there was nothing left. Fell was dead, and Frank and Roger, too. Each one of them was like a nail through my flesh, pinning me down in that chair.
“It’s the housewives and plumbers,” my father had told me and my brother, Nikita, “the law-abiding and pious, that allow the most heinous crimes to continue. They raise their children and pray to God, while soldiers slaughter dark-skinned families in their country’s name.”
I wished my father were standing there before me right then. If he was, I could rise to my feet and slap his face. I’d tell him that his lessons put Nikita in prison and nailed me to that chair, wishing that I had become a plumber voting the Republican ticket and saluting the Stars and Stripes.
Ê€„
19
The online version of the New York Times had a picture of Roger Brown on the first page of the metro section: a dark and handsome face with doubting eyes. The scar on his right cheekbone reminded me of my handsome son. Roger’s smile was of the unconscious variety, the kind of grin that makes a woman think he’d be attentive, if a little mischievous.
Roger had lived in a good building in the West Village, where murders rarely happened, so there was a splash of sorts. The journalist questioned neighbors and they all testified to how shocked they were.
“He was a nice man,” Doris Diederrot, who lived on the fifth floor, said, “always helpful and friendly.”
“I saw him coming home from the Gristedes just yesterday,” Bob Hahn, the super, said. “He was a very nice, very courteous young man.”
Fear filled the streets of the Village, if you were to believe the copy.
Somewhere around eleven o’clock, two nights before, someone had broken the lock on the front door of the building. There was no nighttime doorman. The assailant or assailants went to the sixth-floor apartment, probably knocked, gained entry, and then beat and strangled the thirty-four-year-old investment advisor to death. No one heard anything. No one saw the attackers leave the building.
I had broken into a nighttime building. I had climbed up and down the back stairs, to and from a murder scene.
Exhaustion from the sleepless night before hit me like a revelation. I got to my feet, staggered across the room, and fell on my hard-cushioned Swedish sofa. I was asleep before my body came to rest.
NO FIRE OR FALLING in that dream. I was in a vast flower garden at the height of the blooming season. Every kind of rose and peony, orchid and dahlia filled the field with their brilliance and scents. Huge and deadly Japanese hornets buzzed among the blossoms. Broad-headed scaly-skinned serpents coiled through the soil at my feet. There were vultures overhead and thorns aplenty but I passed through without a bite, stab, or sting.
Around the perimeter of this twisted Eden was a barbed-wire fence. Every ten feet or so, on the other side of the fence, an armed uniformed guard stood at attention. I wondered if they were set there to keep the unsuspecting public out or to protect the obvious riches from plunderers.
The giant hornets’ humming was deep and sonorous. They hovered, oblivious to my presence. There seemed to be a message for me in all this profusion and threat. I couldn’t discern the meaning, but I knew that if I suddenly understood, the creatures would become aware of me and the soldiers would get me in their sights.
So I took long steady breaths and waited for some sign. I appreciated the beauty not only of the flora but also the loveliness of the deadly bees and fanged snakes, the cut of the soldiers’ uniforms and the effortless glide of vultures riding on thermals overhead.
WHEN I OPENED my eyes Aura was sitting in the blue chair six inches from me. Her smile said that she was happy to see me coming awake.
“I’m sorry I let that cop in but—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
As I sat up a groan escaped my throat that spoke of all my fifty-three years.
“He could have gotten every building inspector in the city down here if I didn’t let him in,” Aura said, unable to stem the excuse.
“You’d think so, but Kitteridge doesn’t work like that. He might be the only truly honest cop in the whole city. Imagine that? One clean cop and his major goal in life is putting my ass behind bars.”
“He wanted the combination to the inner door but I told him I didn’t have it,” she said.
Aura and Twill were the only ones who knew the access code to my inner doors.
“Don’t worry, babe. Tryin’ to stop the law is like holding back the rain. It’s what they call an exercise in futility. If you’d made him wait in the hall he would have probably taken it out on me.”
“What does he want?” she asked, her bronze visage somber yet calm. It wasn’t what an aficionado would call beautiful, but sti
ll it was the kind of face that gave you hope.
I told her everything, about my search for the four young men and the three ensuing deaths. Talking to Aura was like opening a vein.
The first thing you learned in my line of business was that you never give up any information that you don’t absolutely have to. Katrina knew nothing about my business. But Aura represented a whole new movement in my life. The time I spent with her was painfully honest. I never lied, except about my recurring dream. Sometimes, when something was just too secret to share, I’d say, “I can’t talk about that, babe. So please don’t as£pler lk me.”
“WHAT ABOUT THE dream?” she asked after I’d told her about coming upon the corpse of Norman Fell.
Her question had a two-tiered design. First, she was telling me that she accepted my story and was on my side. Secondly, since I seemed to have let her deeper into my life, she wanted to know more.
“I’m in a building,” I said, relieved to finally put the nightmare into words. “It’s burning, burning, and I’m running from room to room. I think that maybe I’m the last man left alive but that doesn’t matter because soon I’ll be dead, too . . .” I told her about the window and the long fall. “It’s like my life is one long tumble off the side of a mountain. I’m falling through the air and certain to die. There’s no way that I can be saved. No cushion or twist or turn.”
Aura took one of my hands in hers and squeezed.
“I love you, Leonid McGill.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“You don’t know what love is?”
“Maybe I do, maybe not. But what I don’t understand is how you can listen to all this and still have any feelings for me whatsoever. I left you for another woman. I caused the deaths of at least two men. And you know I’ve done much worse in years gone by.”
Aura’s smile was in another place than the one I was addressing. She nodded at something, not what I’d said, and then waited as this unspoken knowledge settled around us.
She took my other hand, leaned forward, and kissed my lips lightly.
“You are a man on the road,” she told me.
“What does that mean?”
“My father murdered many men back in his country. But I would have still loved him if only he could face what he had done. Instead he lied and blamed others for his crimes. He ran off the road, out of the sun. But you are right out there in the light of day. That’s all I want from my man.”
Her man.
I took in a breath but it didn’t work. I took in another.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Twenty after one.”
“In the afternoon?”
Aura nodded and gave me that enigmatic smile.
“I’ve been sleepin’ since nine?”
She nodde£e=">
“How long have you been here?”
“I came up a little while after the policeman left,” she said. “At first I just wanted to make sure that you were okay. Then I stayed to watch over you while you got some rest.”
Ê€„
20
Aura kissed me again. It would have been the perfect moment for us to come together once more if it wasn’t for the madwoman running around the couch, shrieking at the top of her voice. That madwoman was my life.
Aura stood up, pulling my hands and bringing me to my feet.
“I’ll be in my office if you need me,” she said.
Watching Aura leave was never an easy thing. But I didn’t have the time to brood.
THE ILLITERATE NORMAN FELL kept pretty good bookkeeping records. Most of the entries were expenses. He knew a few awkwardly spelled words, like “offiss supplys” and “offiss expens.” Now and then he took in some cash. There was a four-hundred-dollar payment from someone designated as TR. Another, two hundred dollars, was attributed to Jo M. The fees were all paltry except for those received from one set of initials.
Norman had received four payments of twenty-five thousand dollars, the last of which was paid on the day, or maybe the day before, he died. The initials next to these entries were simply VM—except for the first entry, where, next to the VM, there was a BH in parentheses.
I imagined the joy the untutored Fell must have felt when he could use a symbol like the parentheses. I would have felt sorry for him if it hadn’t been for Gordo’s hammer.
It was a story the boxing trainer had told thirty-some years before.
I’d just had a club fight with a sturdy journeyman light heavy from Philadelphia named Mike “Big” Pink. It was just an unsanctioned exhibition bout, neither amateur nor professional. Pink was almost twice my age and had slowed down quite a bit. But in the fourth round he hit me so hard that I was lifted up off my feet. I fell on the ropes and then bent down as if I were inspecting my feet for stink. He chased me for that round and the next two, looking for the knockout. That was the day I decided not to be a professional boxer. I managed to stay on my feet. And even though Big Pink beat me, it was a split decision on the cards. But I felt that blow for weeks afterwards. It was in my fingers and knees, my chest and back. I never wanted to get hit like that again.
When I informed Gordo of my decision was when he told me about the hammer, in an attempt to talk me out of quitting.
“There’s a big fat hammer up above, beyond the blue in the sky,” he told me. “It’s just up there waitin’. One day, when you least expect it, that hammer comes streakin’ do¦ig wn on you like Big Pink’s fist. That’s the ultimate test for a boxer, for any man. It’s the punch you don’t see comin’. There’s nothing you can do about it but try your best and recover. That’s what you did against Mikey. You did good.”
That was my final exam as a boxer. I passed the test and quit the same day. But what I hadn’t understood at the time was that Gordo wasn’t just talking about the ring. That hammer was waiting for everybody. It came at you in the form of cancer, infidelity, the tax man, or a comet out of the western sky here to annihilate any creature over fifty kilos in weight. The hammer had come down on Norman Fell; it was watching me with two steely eyes.
I SAT BACK from the ledger pages and looked at the palms of my hands. I have big hands with thick, blunt fingers. When Twill was a little kid he’d always be asking to arm wrestle with me. He’d sit down, thump his sharp elbow on the dining table, and try his very best to pin my arm. I’d let him strain for a minute or so and then I’d press down, taking his arm off the table and pushing him all the way to the floor. He’d squeal and laugh and shout No fair! He’d always win by default.
I had more strength in one hand than Twill did, even as a teenager, in his entire body.
There was nothing else for me to do about the ledger entries so I called Tiny to see what progress he had made.
“Hey, LT,” the young man answered. He didn’t even give me a chance to ask the question, just launched into the report. “The girl’s name is Mardi Bitterman. She paid for the IP with her father’s credit card. His name is Leslie. He’s an office manager for Parley and Lowe, a company that buys up debt and liquidates properties.”
“Anything on ’em?” were my first words.
“Not even a parking ticket. The girl is a fair student. She has a younger sister, Marlene, but the mother’s not on the scene.”
“Died?”
“I can’t find anything on that. She’s just not there.”
“Thanks, Bug. Can you dig a little deeper?”
“Are you paying?”
“The going rate.”
I CALLED TWILL and he answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Pops. What’s happenin’?”
“I wanted to ask—” I began.
“Hold on a minute,” he interrupted. And then, to someone else, “It’s my father, Teach. Mom’s in the hospital and I might have to go help.” Another moment passed and he said, “What can I do for you, Dad?”
“Y«ontomeou could start by not lying to your teachers.”
“It’s almost the end of the perio
d,” he said. “And you know I wouldn’t even be in summer school if it wasn’t for my sentence.”
“No lying.”
“Okay. Done.”
“I want to get together with you soon. Make sure you’re home tonight. All night.”
“Uh . . . I did have some plans.”
“For me, junior.”
After a momentary pause he said, “You got it, Pops.”
GETTING OFF THE PHONE, I took a deep breath, and then another. I had liked the slow breathing in the dream. I tried not to worry about the problems that surrounded me. My mantra, behind the breathing was, I’m alive and safe, ambulatory and able to think.
It worked until the landline rang.
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