Known to Evil

by Walter Mosley

  I followed behind Jake Plumb, gazing into the metal crevices. Some men stared out at me with red-rimmed brown-veined eyes, not hopefully but just for a momentary diversion in a life of deadly dull monotony. Madness and cancer, bloodletting and revolution grew like fungus in rooms such as these. I could feel the ghost of my father urging those souls to prepare to tear down those cages, that building, the whole city if they had to.

  I wondered if Jake Plumb felt any of what I sensed.

  "Right through here, Mr. PI," he said.

  We'd come to a solid steel door with a fingerprint-activated lock on the side. I couldn't help but imagine the men we'd just passed hacking off Plumb's hand and using it, the blood still warm, to pop that lock in their bid for freedom--or revenge.

  HIS WINDOWLESS OFFICE WAS small, and much neater than I'd expected. Even though we were on the seventh floor it felt to me like an OCD bunker in a lull between bombings.

  Plumb's face was flat and wide like a bulldog's but his eyes were Chihuahua-like in their relative size and brightness. His smile was almost a frown.

  "So," he said.

  We were seated across from each other in this sepulchral workspace.

  I didn't reply to the ambiguous beginning of the informal interrogation.

  "What do you want with Mr. Sharkey?" he asked.

  "His lawyer believes in his innocence and does not think he should be here under federal jurisdiction. The car wasn't his, he didn't cross state lines, he didn't have the keys to the trunk on him, and there's no evidence of him ever having been involved in illegal gun sales."

  Plumb's glittery little eyes flared for me.

  "Terrorism," he said.

  "Come on, Agent Plumb. You yourself called Ron a junkie."

  " 'Ron'?"

  "I like to get personal with the people I try to help. There's not the slightest bit of evidence that Ron had anything to do with terrorists or terrorism. You're more of a terrorist than he could ever be."

  That last sentence came unbidden from me.

  "What?" he said. It was definitely a threat.

  "What you got out there, man?" I said. "Haitians and Dominicans, Moroccans, Syrians, and Palestinians? If they're lucky you'll send them home. If they're unlucky you'll send them home in five years. It doesn't matter what they did, but whatever it is, when they leave here they'll hate me because I'm a citizen of a country that treated them like nothing.

  "All Ron Sharkey did was take a joyride. You, on the other hand, got your fist shoved up the ass of every man comes through here."

  I couldn't believe what I was saying. These were certainly my father's words. I don't even know if I believed them.

  Surprisingly, Jake Plumb smiled.

  "Kinda sensitive for a PI, ain't you, Leonid?"

  "Bad day," I said, manufacturing a wry grin.

  "Your lawyer's client had six semiautomatic weapons that had been altered to fully automatic bundled in his trunk," the federal agent told me. "We think that he knows something about it. We're sure that he does. I don't care about him, or you for that matter. All I want is a name. Because with that I can get out of this shithole and have a job in a proper office doing work I can be proud of."

  There was a whole chapter squashed down into those few sentences, things about Jake Plumb that I would never know. But that didn't matter. He was giving me an opportunity, and I was intent on taking it.

  "I'm here to secure Ron's freedom," I said. "I will do my best to achieve that end. If that means getting a name for you, I will try my utmost."

  The bulldog snarled a smile that made me doubt he had ever been happy a day in his life.

  36

  The small visitors' room was illuminated by six one-hundred-watt bare bulbs, and still darkness clung to the corners. The furnishings consisted of a short wood table hemmed in by two metal chairs, one on either side. I had been occupying one of the seats for eight and a half minutes when two federal marshals escorted a jittery Ron Sharkey into the room.

  Dressed in the same clothes as when I'd seen him last, Sharkey was manacled, hand and foot, with a metal band around his lower abdomen. His hand- and ankle-cuffs were attached by thick leather belts to this band.

  "Unchain him," I said to the dark-skinned, probably Hispanic, marshal.

  He looked at his white partner, received a nod, and then began to undo the four locks that restrained the wan prisoner.

  "Twenty minutes," the white officer said.

  The marshals then left us.

  "Mr.--" Ron began to say, but I pressed a finger to my lips, silencing him.

  I stood up, moved the table against a wall, then brought the chairs together so that, seated, we would be side by side but facing opposite walls.

  I sat down and gestured for him to join me. Then I leaned over and whispered, "The room is definitely bugged, so we are going to have to whisper."

  His BO didn't bother me so much--mostly because his breath smelled like a line of garbage cans behind the greasiest diner on the block.

  "I don't understand, Mr. Tunes. They told me that a guy named Macklil was comin' to see me."

  "That's just a name I use to keep 'em guessin'," I said.

  "Oh. Oh, yeah."

  "You're in trouble, Ron. They're gonna keep you in here till your teeth fall out if they don't get an answer."

  "They'd kill me if I talked."

  "You don't think they will anyway? They know you've been busted. They know you're a user. There's no way they're gonna trust you to stay quiet."

  "But they have to believe me," Ron complained. "I haven't said nuthin' to nobody."

  One outstanding characteristic of most career criminals is their innate innocence. Their worldview is often simple, founded upon a basic equation of honesty and betrayal. Ron had been faithful to the big dog and expected the same treatment back. The only way to break that logic was to add a new variable.

  "I found Irma," I lied in his ear.

  He stood straight up and said, "Where is she?"

  "Be quiet," I commanded, pulling him by the shirt back into the huddle.

  "Where is she?" he whispered.

  "I will take you to her, but first you got to get out of here."

  "Bring her here to me."

  "I don't work for you, Ron. I work for Lewis, and he, for whatever reason, wants you out of here. The only way I can do that is to provide a patsy for the weapons they found in the car you were driving."

  "I can't," he whined.

  It was my turn to stand up.

  It wasn't an empty gesture. I was sick of Ron and his recidivism. I had a job to do, but if the client wasn't willing, then I had to cut my losses. I'd tried to save my victim, but sometimes trying is the best you can do.

  Ron grabbed my hand.

  "No," he whined.

  "I need a name," I said, sitting once more.

  "I don't know who the car belonged to," he said. "I got this, this letter."

  "In the mail?"

  "No. Under the door at Wilma's. Somebody left me an envelope with three hundred dollars and two keys--one for the car door and the other for the ignition. There was a note saying for me to pick up a yellow Chevy that would be parked across the street. I was supposed to drive it to a parking garage in Queens and leave it there."

  "Where?"

  "I forget where exactly. It was in Astoria . . . Pixie Parking. Yeah, yeah . . . Pixie Parking."

  "What else did the note say?"

  "That there'd be another letter with another three hundred if I did what they said. I needed to make the delivery because I already owed out the money they gave me. You see?" he said. "I really don't know nuthin'."

  "If you don't know anything then what are you afraid to tell the feds?"

  Sharkey swayed away from me for a moment there. I reached over and pulled him back.

  "I asked Wilma if she saw who put the letter there and she looked worried," he said. "I know when she gets that look, so I pressed her. She said that she saw Joe Fleming ou
t on the street walking away right after she found the letter."

  "Who's Joe Fleming?"

  "He's like a private bank in the neighborhood."

  "Does he deal in guns?"

  "I never heard about it."

  "Does he know that you owed three hundred?"

  "I always owe somebody somethin'. Joe stopped lending to me a year ago . . . right after he broke my arm."

  I considered the information Ron had given me. It was a crazy story. In my experience crazy stories were too often true.

  "When can I see Irma?" he asked.

  "Soon."

  "How soon?"

  "As soon as I can find a way to get you out of here without getting you killed."

  I could hear, and smell, Ron's ragged breath.

  "How long can you hold out?" I asked him.

  "I'm okay."

  "When are you going to need the pipe again?"

  "I'm off the crack, man," Ron Sharkey said.

  "Bullshit."

  "No. I started usin' H 'bout seven months ago. I used that to ease off the speed. And then I slowed up on the H. I'm just, I'm just chippin' now. I can go three days and not hardly even sweat."

  The best and worst lies are when we lie to ourselves. My father told me that three days before he was gone for good.

  "Hold on, Ron," I said. "I'll be back in under forty-eight hours."

  "WHAT WAS THAT SHIT?" Jake Plumb asked me outside the visitors' room.

  "What?"

  "You weren't supposed to be neckin' in there."

  "I don't like microphones."

  "Oh no? How do you feel about prison cells? I could throw you in one right now," the agent said. "I could lock you in a room where even a runt like you couldn't stand up straight. I got a dozen judges on my speed-dial wouldn't even blink before signin' the warrant."

  It was all true. The government my father railed against had those powers, had been honing them for nearly a century. I was nothing more than a stalk of wheat against Plumb's scythe of justice.

  "Make up your mind, then," I said, while sending up a small prayer to the not-God of my father's pantheon. "Because I got places to be--or not."

  37

  Agent Plumb took no more than a minute to decide to let me go, but it felt like hours. It was stubbornness and not courage that kept me from falling to my knees, begging him not to imprison me.

  I was shivering by the time I'd made it back to the waiting room of that human warehouse. Plumb and Galsworthy ran what an adman might call an "instant prison." At any moment almost any American (barring movie stars, publicly acknowledged billionaires, and sitting members of Congress) could be whisked away to that nameless building, en route to one of our satellite Siberias, and kept there until a botched water torture or the shrug of some judge sent them home.

  In the waiting room I went straight for the exit, and then stopped.

  Any chance you get to risk your life for the cause is as close to a blessing as a modern man can come. My father's words had no political meaning to me, but their truth outshone their intent.

  "Excuse me, ma'am," I said to the Arab woman slumped in the chair.

  She looked up at me but didn't say anything. Her children--an older girl and two toddler boys--also stared.

  "Your husband has been moved to the Federal Detention Center in Miami. You'd probably do well to call down there."

  ON THE STREET I went over the talk I'd had with Ron. I always do that--replay the words and gestures of an interrogation. Usually I find something that I'd overlooked; often that something has nothing to do with the information I was after.

  In this situation I remembered comparing the innocence of criminals to an algebraic equation. That reminded me of the famous x, the unknown factor.

  In the case of Angie Lear the unknown factor was the black man with no labels in his clothes. The metaphor worked, as far as an intellectual concept was concerned, but it changed drastically when I tried to make it a concrete action in the material world.

  The killer was a dangerous man, possibly a hired assassin in league with others of his kind. Delving deeply enough to uncover his name might also set in motion those who would like the questioner silenced.

  But time was passing, and someone, maybe even Alphonse Rinaldo, was stalking my client. So I took the A train to the High Street stop and walked over to Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights.

  IT WAS ALMOST SIX o'clock by the time I got there, but I was pretty sure that he'd be in.

  Randolph Peel's office was just above a bakery and across the street from a bank that was both new and (according to The New York Times) failing. I walked up the stairs and knocked on his door, enjoying the smells of bread baking and sugared delights.

  A buzzer sounded and I pushed my way into the ex-cop's lair.

  It was an odd room; taller than it was deep or wide, it gave the impression of having been turned on its side by an earthquake, or maybe some kind of explosion. The shelving was askew, layered with papers and books that communicated no sense of order. There were manila folders and magazines piled on their sides, books leaning one way and then the other, and appliances, like an old-fashioned iron, various staplers, an espresso machine, and even a .38 pistol thrown haphazardly into the mix.

  Peel's oak desk was also out of the Apocalypse. It wasn't even on a level plane. There were newspapers, empty beer bottles, a half-eaten sandwich on a paper plate, and piles of papers that seemed to have been thrown there just for serendipity's sake.

  The buildings across the street did not right the room. Looking out of the murky panes you might have thought that the whole world had been turned on its side in order to fit the office of the private investigator Randolph Proteus Peel.

  "LT," THE SLOPPY EX-COP said. "How's it goin' down in the gutter?"

  Randy was big, with equal parts pink and gray skin making up his porcine face. Needing a shave, he was leaning back in an office chair, diddling around with a pencil in his left hand.

  The slob, I knew, was ambidextrous.

  "Just chippin' at it nowadays," I said in deference to Ron Sharkey.

  "That's what they been tellin' me," he said. "Somethin' like you're reformed or somethin'."

  "Something like that," I said.

  I took a seat on the worn red velvet hassock he used for a visitor's chair. A night bird whizzed past his window. A car honked in the street.

  "I see you've cleaned the place up," I said.

  "Fuck you."

  "I thought that was your mother's job."

  He sat up straight.

  "What the fuck do you want, McGill?"

  Many people liked Randy in spite of his slovenly ways and dishonorable discharge. Most white cops still included him in their picnics and at their kids' Communions. With a little help from these friends he'd wrangled himself a PI's license and started to deal in intelligence.

  If you wanted to short-circuit the system and get information outside of official channels, you went to Randy. Given enough time, he could get a copy of a handwritten memo page off the desk of the chief of police.

  I put a fold of seven hundred dollars down between the hardening sandwich and a calendar called Beaver Shot of the Week. Randy picked up the money and thumbed through the wad.

  "A young woman named Wanda Soa was shot dead in her apartment a few days ago," I said before he finished counting. "Her probable assailant was found next to her, also dead. I'd like to get the coroner's photo of his face."

  "Come back tomorrow and I'll have it."

  "I'll add eight hundred to that if you do it in the next fifteen minutes."

  One thing I knew for sure about Randy was that he didn't like to be rushed. Luckily for me, more often than not, he needed cash more than he hated work. He picked up his black phone and entered a number.

  "Hey," he said in a husky, almost sexy, voice. "It's me."

  Another interesting aspect to the disgraced cop was that women loved him. You'd think that such a disheveled ne'er-do-wel
l would chase any modern girl away. But they flocked around him, agreed to do shocking things for him on desktops, park benches, and in their own marital beds.

  He asked for the photo and made an assignation for later in the week. They were talking about a problem with somebody, her husband or boyfriend, when the fax machine started up.

  "It's comin' through, babe," he said. "I'll call you back in ten minutes."

  I stood up, went around to the fax machine, and tore off the image of the dead man I had seen on Wanda Soa's floor.

  I reached into another pocket and pulled out the next payment.

  When I turned around Randy was pointing a 9mm pistol at my forehead.

  "I could kill you right here and now, Leonid McGill."

  I dropped the bundle on his desk.

  "But you won't," I said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because you're a lazy fuck. Because I weigh one hundred eighty-seven pounds, and even if you had a silencer you'd have to get rid of the body or explain it to the cops. Either way you'd miss your evening cartoons."

  Randy searched my eyes for fear but found none. I'd given up worrying about my mortality a long time before. The first good body shot I took in the ring cured me of that fear.

  Anyway, I knew somebody would shoot me down one day. Why not Randy Peel in Brooklyn Heights?

  Peel let out a false laugh and lowered his gun.

  "I always wanted to see you flinch, LT," he said behind that empty grin. "I guess you're as tough as they say."

  38

  It was a long ride but all I had to do was catch the 4 train at Borough Hall and take it all the way to the 149th Street stop in the Bronx.

  It was a pleasant ride that gave me time to think. . . .

  There's a four-story building a block and a half off the shabbiest part of the Grand Concourse. Whatever paint it once had is gone and most of the floors are unoccupied. Now and again a squatter comes in to inhabit one room or another, but a guy named Johnny Nightly finds them soon enough, batters them about the head and shoulders, and then offers them twenty dollars for the promise that they will never come back.