Mr. Hush’s wasn’t the only scent. Moore’s sweat was, if anything, even stronger than it had been in my office.
I noticed a small picture frame standing on the little table. It was a photograph of the woman that Moore had in his wallet.
“Hull,” Tim said and then he burped again. “Roman Hull.”
Finally . . . something that made sense.
“How’s that work?” I asked.
“He, he called me and said to be ready.”
“And?”
“A delivery service dropped off a box about fifteen minutes later. There was this cell phone in it. Maybe fifteen minutes more and I got a call.”
“From Roman?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was another voice. They offered me a whole lot of money. A whole lot.” He emphasized the last words as a kind of explanation. After all, wouldn’t I kill him for the kind of money he was suggesting?
“How do you know Hull?” I asked.
“A long time ago I used to be his driver sometimes. He kept in touch with me when I was in Attica. After I got out he’d give me jobs now and then.”
“Where’s the cell phone?”
“Same guy came and picked it up an hour later. He left me the briefcase, too.”
Hush sat up and Timothy flinched.
“Just to get this straight,” I said. “The money was to kill me.”
The frightened man nodded.
“How do you get in touch with him?”
“I don’t.”
Hush stood up.
“Go on down to the car, LT,” he said.
“Hey, wait!” Timothy pleaded. He cut off in mid-screech when Hush showed him a single finger.
“No,” I said.
“Just step outside the door then,” Hush offered.
“We’re not here to kill anybody.”
“But you heard him.”
“I’m turning over a new leaf,” I said. It sounds comical to me now, but I was deadly serious at the time.
“Me too,” Hush replied, “but this man here tried to murder you. That’s a death sentence.”
“It’s over now.”
Maybe for me. But murder had been unleashed in Hush’s nervous system and he needed time to let it work its way out. I stood very still while the slender merchant of death allowed the demon to sink back into his bones.
I don’t think that Timothy Moore drew a breath.
“Call your friend LouBob,” Hush said to Tim. “Ask him what he thinks you should do now that you’re living when you should be dead.
“I’ll meet you downstairs.” These last words were from Hush to me.
He went out the door. I waited for a few beats and was about to follow when a thought occurred to me.
“Hey, Tim.”
“What? What?”
“That picture on your table.”
“What about it?” he said with the barest sliver of steel in his voice.
“That’s Margot for real?”
“Yeah.”
“She left you, huh?”
He nodded.
“Was it over an Asian girl named Annie?”
“Yeah.”
The truth is always the best way to lie.
Ê€„
47
T
his time I sat in the front seat as Hush drove down toward Manhattan. Most of the way we rode in silence, but a few blocks from my door he began to speak in a voice so deep it seemed to be coming up from out of the ground.
“That was very unprofessional.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Why didn’t you let me kill him?”
“I don’t kill people,” I said. “I mean, I’ve done a lot of things . . . and some of them have ended up with people dying. But I steer clear of anything like that nowadays.”
“Found religion?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just one day I realized something.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s hard to explain. I mean, it’s not a thing, it’s a feeling.”
“Like what?”
He pulled to the curb in front of my building.
“It’s like you walk up behind somebody that you intend to kill,” I said, trying to speak his language, I guess. “There you are with your gun pointed to the back of the man’s head. You feel cold inside. It’s just a job. And all of a sudden you aren’t the man holding the gun but the one about to be shot. And you don’t have any idea that there’s somebody behind you, and all the days of your life have led you to this moment.”
“So it’s like you’re killing yourself,” the assassin intoned.
It felt as if I were instructing a newborn deity who was moments away from ascension.
Hush was staring at me. His eyes tightened.
“So, then, it felt like you were saving my life in there?” he asked.
“And mine.”
Hush’s laugh was a friendly thing, boyish and almost silly.
“I’ll be seein’ you, LT,” he said.
I GOT OUT of the Lincoln and it rolled on its way.
I stopped at the door to my building, imagining going up to the eleventh floor, opening the door, taking off my pants before climbing into bed. Then I saw myself wide-eyed in the dark bedroom next to a woman who never understood me; a woman I could not trust. I think I must have stood there for some time before turning away and walking toward Broadway and the parking garage.
I RANG THE BELL multiple times and still had to wait fifteen minutes for the nighttime attendant to rouse himself from sleep in somebody’s backseat.
ON THE WAY OUT to Coney Island I tried thinking about Roman Hull. He was the patriarch of the clan but, according to Poppy Pollis, Bryant ran the family business. Why would the old man order my murder? Had he been behind all the killings? And if so, why?
It was obvious that he’d done this kind of work before. The setup was almost seamless. Moore couldn’t prove that Hull had called him, and after that he only spoke to a subordinate. The phone and the cash were probably untraceable.
The cash. I’d offered to split it with Hush but he turned it down. Now the money was mine. Like the gun that the me of my imagination used to commit murder-suicide, Roman Hull had thrown the money at his own backside.
AT 6:00 A.M. SHARP, A Mann walked out his front door with the dachshund on a different-color leash. In the pale morning the accountant was more pink than white, more a citizen than an individual. He waited at the red light at the end of his block, even though there wasn’t a car on the road as far as you could see.
The accountant ambled down the street as steady as a toddler but with dignity and purpose.
I was beginning to like the man.
I watched him until he’d turned a corner and then I began thinking about how to go against a billionaire who had links to the unions and, at least to a degree, to the mob.
Maybe I should have let Hush kill Moore. That would have sent a clear message to Roman.
My right eye started blinking. There was no itch or irritation, just a repetitious wink that got faster. The left eye joined in with the beat and before I knew it I had drifted off into a light, semi-conscious doze.
The sun shone on my face, and so the darkness of my closed eyes was lightened by solar radiance. This crimson glare seemed almost to have a sound, a humming that caught the syncopation of a kind of buzzing. It felt like I could almost count the beats.
My head nodded and then lifted up abruptly.
It was seventeen minutes later and A Mann was waddling back toward his front door.
Could I let him die?
My phone let out a cry of gibbering monkeys.
“Hey, Tone,” I said after the third repetition of my ancestors’ chattering.
“Where’s my accountant?”
“I caught a glimpse of him yesterday afternoon.”
“Where?”
“Saratoga. He was betting on a nag.”
“Where is he now?”
<
br /> “I don’t know. He knew somebody who worked there and they took him into the offices. He was with this blonde that would set you back twenty-five hundred dollars a night.”
“You lost him?”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t matter. I know his tastes and I got a line on the blonde. It might cost me twenty-five hundred but I think I can get to him through her.”
“I don’t care how much you have to spend,” The Suit said. “I need to get to A Mann.”
“No more than a couple’a days, Tony,” I said.
“He spend a lotta time at the track?”
“He was there yesterday.”
“That’s funny. ’Cause, you know, Mann didn’t seem like the gambling type.”
“Maybe it’s the blonde pullin’ him by the nose.”
“Maybe. What’s her name?”
“She called herself Amelia but that was just a dodge,” I said, biting my lip so as not to trip on it. “I’ll have something for you in a couple’a days.”
“All right. But stay in touch.”
“Tony.”
“What?”
“You ever heard of a guy named Roman Hull?”
“No. He have something to do with Mann?”
“Uh-uh,” I grunted. It was worth a try. “It’s this other thing. Don’t worry, though. Mann is number one on my list.”
“With a bullet,” the gangster added.
I WAS HALF the way back to Manhattan when the phone gibbered again.
“Yeah?”
“Hello, Leonid,” Harris Vartan said pleasantly.
“Mr. V,” I said, wondering if it was my phone or Tony’s that was bugged.
“How’s it going witƒ€€wash your searches?”
“What do you want from me?” Maybe I sounded a bit testy.
“You should never lose your composure, Leonid. Even when you’ve lost your temper you should not let it show. The boxer lives by such a creed, does he not?”
“Sometimes they carry him out on a stretcher.”
“In the end we all go out that way.”
No news there. I waited for further information.
“I’ll be checking in on you, Leonid,” Vartan said and the connection was broken.
Ê€„
48
My next stop was two blocks north and half a block west of Gracie Mansion: the directions Hannah had given me to her parents’ New York City home.
It was a six-story red brick manor looming from behind a twelve-foot coral-painted stone wall that was quite thick and imposing. The gate was electric and there was no hiding from the rotating cameras that perched over it like mechanical birds of prey.
I stood across the street, trying to appraise my chances of making some headway. I was still armed and wide awake in spite of only having had a single fifteen-minute catnap in the previous thirty hours.
I didn’t know who was in the house at the time. If Bryant was there I could tell him that his father tried to kill me, or maybe I should say that Norman Fell recommended me. I could tell him that I was a private detective looking into the deaths of three young men, including an old case concerning a certain Thom Paxton.
If Roman was there I could say that I was a friend of Timothy Moore and that I had an urgent message from him.
If the river were whiskey and I was a diving duck . . .
It never hurts to bide your time when there’s an opportunity to do so.
Standing out there in the shadow of Hull’s house, making peace with the fact that I had no idea what to say or why the crimes had been committed, I was still better off knowing that I didn’t know than I would have been otherwise.
Understanding my ignorance, I crossed the street and pressed the cracked plastic button to the rich man’s home.
I smiled up at the camera that watched me from a lens hole in the white, cast-iron gate. I was ready to argue, wrangle, wheedle, and whine at whoever challenged my admittance.
Instead a buzzer sounded and a voice ejaculated, “Come on in! I’ve been waiting for you for two days!”
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I pushed and the heavy gate swung in on well-oiled hinges. After taking three steps I heard the portal slam shut behind me.
Inside I found a surprisingly large bright-green lawn that grew around a few dozen well-manicured rosebushes. The flowering shrubs had big generous blossoms of every color imaginable. Soon-to-be-extinct honeybees drifted lazily from one bloom to another, narcotized by the heavy aromas and rich pollen.
The stone pathway passed thirty feet or so through the unlikely Manhattan yard, bringing me to a marble stairway. This ascended eighteen steps to a very old, coffin-lid-like door.
I was looking for the dark barrier’s buzzer when it swung open, with Hannah hanging on the doorknob, laughing for me.
“I bet you didn’t expect me,” she said.
Today she was barefoot in tight blue jeans and a dark-blue halter, with bits of glitter here and there, covering her small breasts.
“No,” I agreed.
“But I knew that you’d be coming.”
“Did you tell your father I’d be here?”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Are you going to come in, Mr. McGill?” The multiple personalities of her upbringing and education were gone. She was just a sweet young girl, both vulnerable and fearless. I could see in her eyes that she now saw us as good friends that had passed through the gauntlet of her brother’s episode.
She had marked my hesitation correctly. There was something about the ebullience exuding from Hannah that made me want to hang back, or maybe leave. Most guys when they see a damsel in her lonely tower want to ride up and save her—but I knew better. My kind of help shorted out the circuit board, or stripped the gears in your transmission.
She grabbed a couple of my fingers and pulled.
“Come on.”
I allowed her to drag me into the palatial entrance hall. You couldn’t call it an antechamber or foyer. It was a circular room, twenty feet in diameter, with a wide staircase that crawled up the walls for all six floors, ending at a skylight that sprinkled diffuse sunbeams down on this otherworld. The continuous banister made the spiral seem like the lofty box seats of a theater, with the floor as the stage.
In the center of the room was a round mahogany table with a magnificent bouquet of at least a hundred freshly cut flowers arranged in a way that made you feel you were peering into a rain forest or jungle. The florist had to be some kind of genius.
My awe surpassed itself when a hu‹€€o bge, pure-yellow parrot of some kind shrieked and flew out from the tangle of foliage. The bird flew up to the sixth floor and perched on the rail under the glass roof.
“That’s Bernard,” Hannah said, using proper English pronunciation. “He’s my mother’s pet. Daddy wants him in a cage but she says that he has to fly free. The staff is always cleaning up after him.”
Bernard screamed again and then flew somewhere else in his private multimillion-dollar aviary.
“Come on,” the woman-child said.
She led me down a wide hallway that was more like a gallery in an art museum. The paintings here were Impressionist and Post-impressionist masterpieces. There was a Cézanne that I had never seen before, also a Modigliani that was new to me.
I’d spent a lot of my adolescence in art museums—there and the boxing gym with Gordo. I couldn’t draw to save my life but I appreciated the stylized chaos that artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wrought.
At the end of the hall, in a little recessed area on the left, was a very small painting by Paul Klee. It was composed of red and yellow and gold boxes, with defining lines of cobalt here and there. On the right side, in the lower corner, there was a scribble done in a slightly lighter blue that might have been a squiggle becoming a man, or vice versa, and on the upper-left-hand side there was an oval, bisected face that maybe the squiggle-man had lost, or maybe it
was the sun. It was the most arresting painting I had ever seen. While I stopped and stared, Hannah waited patiently.
“It’s beautiful, huh?” she said after a minute or so of appreciative silence.
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you want it?”
Yes, I did, but I didn’t say so.
“You can have it,” she offered in an offhanded way.
“It’s priceless.”
“No. My mother bought it for me for my twelfth birthday. I’d be happy to give it to you.”
I believe that her slamming me in the head with a Louisville Slugger would have made less of an impact.
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