"Yeah, son?" I said on a sigh.
"Mardi Bitterman's back in town. Her and her sister."
Mardi was a year older than Twill. She and her sister had been molested by their father and I had to intervene when Twill got it in his head to murder the man.
"I thought they had moved to their mother's family in Ireland."
"Turns out that they weren't related," Twill said. "Her father bought Mardi from some pervert. Her sister, too. I don't know the whole story but they had to come home."
"Okay. So what do you want from me?" I was impatient, even with Twill. Maybe the fact that his relationship to me was the same as Mardi to her father cut at me a little.
"Mardi's taking care of her sister and she needs a job. She's eighteen and on her own, you know."
"So?"
"You're always sayin' how much you want a receptionist. I figured this would be a good time for you to have one. You know, Mardi's real organized like. She'd tear that shit up."
Twill was a born criminal but he had a good heart.
"I guess we could try it out," I said.
"Cool. I told her to be at your office in the morning."
"Without asking?"
"Sure, Pops. I knew you'd say yes."
3
I grabbed a cab at Ninety-first and Broadway and told him to take me to an address on Sixtieth near Central Park West. The driver's last name was Singh. I couldn't see his face through the scratched-up plastic barrier.
It didn't make much sense, me taking Katrina back. After twenty years of unfaithfulness on both sides of the bed you would have thought I'd've had enough. I should have turned her away after her banker had run down to Argentina. But she'd asked me to forgive her. How could I seek redemption for all my sins if I couldn't forgive her comparatively minor indiscretions?
And now Katrina wanted to talk--about us. Maybe it was over--now that I had waited too long.
"You sure this is where you want to go?" Mr. Singh asked me.
I looked up to see at least half a dozen police cars, their red lights flashing up and down the block--like Mardi Gras in hell.
If it was any other client I would have turned around.
One police unit showing up at a crime scene was a domestic disturbance; three was a robbery gone bad; but six or more cop cars on the scene meant multiple murder, with the perpetrators still at large.
A goodly number of people were standing along the opposite side of the street looking up and pointing, asking what had happened and giving their opinions on what must have gone down.
"Two of 'em," one older man was saying. He wore slippers, pajamas, and a battered gray parka to keep out the mid-November chill. "Marla Traceman says that it was a black man and a white woman."
I walked up to the front door of the building where there stood a tall policeman with a stomach like a sagging sack of grain, barring anyone from coming into the twelve- story brick structure.
"Move along," the hazel-eyed white man told me. He was maybe fifty, a few years my junior.
"What happened here?" I asked.
His reply was to raise his graying eyebrows a quarter inch. Men who lived their lives by intimidating others often developed such subtleties with age.
"Stackman or Bonilla?" I asked. "Or maybe it's Burnham this far north."
The question was designed to short-circuit a needless confrontation. I knew most of the homicide detectives in Manhattan.
"Who're you?" the six-foot cop asked.
I pay a lot of attention to how tall people are. That's because even though I'm a natural light heavyweight I don't quite make five-six.
"Leonid McGill."
"Oh." The cop's face was doughy and so his sneer seemed to catch in that position like a Claymation character.
"Who's the detective?"
"Lieutenant Bonilla."
"Lieutenant? Guess she got a promotion."
"This is a crime scene."
"Apartment 6H?"
The sneer wasn't going anywhere soon. He brought a phone to his jaw, pressed a button, and muttered a few words.
"Excuse me," a man said from behind me. "I have to get by."
I took half a step to the right and turned. There stood another fifty-year-old white man--maybe five-nine. This one was wearing a camel coat, pink shirt, and too-tight dark-brown leather pants. At his side stood a thin blond child. Possibly twenty, she could have been seventeen. All she had on was a red dress made from paper. The hem barely covered her groin and only her youth held up the neckline.
It was no more than forty-five that night.
The man made the mistake of trying to push past the officer. He was met with a stiff, one-handed shove that nearly knocked him down.
"Hey!" Camel's hair said. "I live here."
"This is a crime scene," the cop replied. His tone promised all kinds of pain. "Go and take your daughter to a coffee shop, or a hotel."
"Who the hell do you think you are?" the outraged john shouted.
The girl grabbed his arm and whispered something in his ear.
"But I live here."
She murmured something else.
"No. No, I want to be with you."
She touched his cheek.
"Mr. McGill?"
A black woman in her late twenties, wearing a neat black uniform, had come out from behind her sadistic senior. She had some kind of rank but wasn't yet a sergeant. We stood eye-to-eye.
"Yes?"
"Lieutenant Bonilla asked me to come and get you."
There was something in the woman's gaze that was . . . curious.
"Thank you."
She turned. I followed.
"Where the hell is he going?" the angry resident hollered. "How can he go in and you keep us out here in the street?"
"Listen, mister," the big-bellied cop said. "You'll have to--"
The glass door shut behind us and I couldn't hear any more of what transpired. But even though I was cut off from the dialogue I knew its beginning--and its end.
The man had met the woman in some quasi-legal club, probably in an outer borough. They'd done a few lines of coke and come to an agreement on a price; he probably had to pay part or all of that sum before she got into the car service that brought them to the crime-scene apartment building. But she'd leave soon because the hard-on in the john's pants was also pressing on his good judgment. Pretty soon the cop on the door would lose his temper and use the phone to call for backup. The girl would fade into the night and the man would go to jail for interfering with a police investigation.
In the following weeks he'd go back to the club where he'd met her, wanting either the money he'd laid out already or the sex that money had paid for. If his luck changed he wouldn't find her.
THE YOUNG OFFICER BROUGHT me to an elevator and pushed a button for the sixth floor. My heart sank a little then. Irrationally I'd hoped that the crime had nothing to do with my mission.
I wondered if Sam Strange, or even Rinaldo himself, was setting me up for something far more sinister than a talk.
"So you're the infamous Leonid Trotter McGill," the woman cop said. She had a heart-shaped face and a smile that her father loved.
"You've heard about me?"
"They say you've got your finger in every dishonest business in the city."
"And still," I said, "I struggle to make the rent each month. How do I do it?"
Her smile broadened to admit men other than blood relatives.
"They also say that you beat a man twice your size to death just a few months ago."
I saw no reason to call into question a growing mythology.
We were passing the fifth floor.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"Old enough to know better," I said, and the door to the small chamber slid open onto a dingy, claustrophobically narrow hallway.
THERE WERE AT LEAST a dozen uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives standing in and outside of apartment 6H. The woman who brought us there led me past t
wo unwilling uniforms at the door, down a small pink entrance hall, and into a modest living room replete with fifties furniture in baby blue, chrome, and faded red.
"Leonid McGill," newly promoted homicide detective Bethann Bonilla said. It was neither a greeting nor an accusation; just a statement like an infant might make, mouthing a phrase and learning about it at the same time.
Before responding I took in the murder scene.
Equidistant between the baby-blue couch, kitchenette, and window lay the corpse of a blond woman in a brown robe that had opened, probably at the time of her death. The window looked out on the buildings across the street. The dead woman was certainly young at the time of her demise, she might have been pretty. It was hard to tell because half of her face had been shot off.
She lay on her back with one thigh crossed over her pubis as if in a last attempt at modesty. Her breasts sagged sadly. It's always upsetting to see the details of youth on a dead body.
In a corner, behind the blue couch, was what is now commonly called an African-American male in a coal-gray suit. This man was lying on his side. He had been a tall and lanky brown man with a face that was serious but not intimidating. There was the handle of a butcher's knife protruding from the left side of his upper torso. The haft stood out at an odd angle, as if someone had wedged the blade into the man's chest. There wasn't much blood under the wound.
"Congratulations," I said to the detective, who stood only half a head taller than I.
"What?"
"You're a lieutenant now, I hear."
"I work hard," she said as if I were insinuating her position was somehow unearned.
"Yes," I said. "I've experienced that work firsthand."
Four months or so before, Bonilla had been working on a series of murders. For a while she liked me for the crimes. It's a hard business, but even in the worst places you meet people you like.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
Bonilla wore clothes that made her look, for lack of a better word, bulky. A discerning eye could tell that she had a slender figure but in her line of work that didn't get a girl very far. The pants suit she wore was dark green and the shoulder pads made her look like a high school football wannabe.
"I got a call," I said.
"From who?"
"She said her name was Laura Brown." Lying is the private detective's stock-in-trade. I jumped into the role with both feet. "She told me that she needed to find a missing person rather quickly. I told her my day rate and she said she'd double it if I came here tonight."
There were plainclothes detectives standing on either side of me. I pretended that they were straphangers and I was taking the A train at rush hour.
"What was the name of the person she wanted to find?"
"She didn't say and I didn't ask. I figured we'd get down to details when I arrived."
The detective's Spanish eyes bored into me. I noticed that she'd trimmed her black mane but decided that this was not the moment to talk about hairstyles.
"And what are you doing here?" she asked again.
"I just told you."
"Don't get me wrong, Mr. McGill, but you don't seem like the kind of guy who would come into a room where your profit had been cut short."
"I didn't know when I was downstairs what had happened. My client might have been alive. For all I knew the crime was unrelated to my business. I still don't know. What's the victim's name?"
The lieutenant smiled.
I hunched my shoulders.
"What else did this Laura Brown tell you?"
"Not a thing. She said that someone had recommended me but she didn't give a name. That's not unusual. People don't like me thinking about them, I've found. I can't understand why."
"Did she mention anyone?"
"No."
Bonilla squinted and, in doing so, came to a decision.
"We figure the guy for being the shooter," she said, "but there's no gun in evidence. She certainly didn't stab him."
"Anyone hear shots?"
Bonilla shook her head slightly.
"Wow," I said. I meant it. A hit man with a silencer getting killed with a kitchen utensil seconds after he makes his bones.
At that moment I really hated Alphonse Rinaldo.
4
When I was maybe five, my father, an autodidact Communist, took me down to Chinatown. He was always trying to teach me lessons about life. That day he bought me a woven finger-trap. I pressed my fingers in from either side of the bamboo tube at his request.
"Now pull them out," he said.
I remember smiling and yanking my hands apart, only to have the fingers tugged at by the stubborn toy. Try as I might the cylinder held like glue to my fingers. My father waited till I was near tears before telling me the secret: you had to press both fingers toward each other, increasing the size of the tube, before you were able to get free of it.
The humiliating experience left me in a sour mood.
"What have you learned from this?" my father asked after buying me a ten-cent packet of toffee peanuts from a street vendor in Little Italy.
"Nuthin'," I said.
Tolstoy McGill was tall and very dark-skinned. I inherited his coloring. He laughed and said, "That's too bad because I just taught you one of the most important lessons that any man from Joe Street Sweeper to President Kennedy needs to learn."
Like all black children, I loved President Kennedy, and so my father had my interest in spite of the mortification I felt.
"What?" I asked.
"It's always easier getting into trouble than it is getting out."
I WAS REMINDED OF my father's lesson while wondering how to get away from Detective Bonilla and her investigation.
"Maybe you should come down to the precinct with me," she suggested.
"No," I said, feeling the bamboo walls closing in.
"Material witness," she said. Those were her magic words.
"So is this Laura Brown?"
"Doesn't matter," Bethann said. "She told you her name was Laura Brown."
"I've given you everything I have."
Bonilla was one of the new breed of cops who didn't see the world in black and white, so to speak. My actions in the last case she worked, the one that, no doubt, earned her the promotion, were inexplicable. On the one hand, I had beaten a much larger, much stronger man to death; on the other hand, I had saved the life of a young woman by putting myself into jeopardy.
"Come in here," she said, leading me into the bedroom.
The other cops stared at us but little Bethann was made from stern stuff. She wasn't intimidated by the men she worked with.
THE BEDROOM WAS SLOPPY the way some young women are. There were clothes everywhere. Pastel-colored thong panties and stockings and shoes were scattered across the floor. The bed itself was unmade. Open makeup containers were spread across the vanity.
"There's a standing order to bring you in if there's ever a chance to do so," Bethann said to me when we were out of earshot of the rest of New York's finest.
"If you say so."
"Why is that?"
"Haven't they told you?"
"I'm asking you."
I looked at the thirty-something officer, wondering about the possibilities for, and ramifications of, truth.
"THE TRUTH," MY IDEOLOGUE father once told me, "changes according to what point of view is beholding it."
"What does that mean?" I must have been about twelve because not too long after that Tolstoy was gone forever. My mother soon followed him the only way she could--in a casket.
"A dictator sees the truth as a matter of will," he said. "Anything he says or dreams is the absolute truth and soon the people are forced to go along with him. For the so-called democrat, the truth is the will of the people. Whatever the majority says is the law and that law becomes truth for the people.
"But for men like us," my father said, "the only truth is the truth of the tree."
"What tree?" I asked.
&n
bsp; "All trees," Tolstoy McGill proclaimed. "Because the truth of the tree is its roots in the ground, and the wind blowing, and the rain falling. The sun is a tree's truth, and even if he's cut down his seed will scatter and those roots will once again take hold."
"DO YOU BELIEVE THAT a man can change, Lieutenant?" I asked Bethann Bonilla.
"What does that have to do with my question?"
"That order to arrest me refers to another man," I said. "The man I used to be. I can't deny my history and I won't admit to a thing. All I can tell you is that you will never catch me doing the things your department thinks I'm doing. I'm not that man anymore."
The detective felt my confession more than she understood it. She wondered about me--it wouldn't be the last time.
"Do you know anything about what happened here tonight?" she asked.
"Is the dead girl Laura Brown?"
After a moment's hesitation the policewoman said, "No. I don't think so."
"And what is her name?"
"You'll find out in the morning news anyway, I guess. It's Wanda Soa. At least we're pretty sure. A few neighbors gave us descriptions. One outstanding detail is a tiger tattoo on her left ankle."
"I don't know a thing about it, then. She might have been using the name Brown. She might have called me. The caller ID said unknown. You're welcome to check my home phone records. But I've already told you all that I know."
Often--in books and movies and TV shows--private detectives mouth off to the police. They claim civil rights or just run on bravado. But in the real world you have to lie so seamlessly that even you are unsure of the truth.
My father didn't teach me that. He was an idealist who probably died fighting the good fight. I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.
"You can go home, Leonid," Bonilla said. "But you haven't heard the last of this."
"Don't I know it. I'm still trying to figure out the finger-trap my father bought me when I was five."
5
On the street again, I was loath to go home. I didn't know what Katrina wanted to talk about but another loss right then would have thrown me off balance in the middle of a tightrope act with no net.
Known to Evil Page 2