Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_03

by When the Thrill Is Gone

  “Cute little things,” he said. “On the cargo ships I worked, their relation, Brother Rat, always had a berth. The sail-ships of old colonized with both man and rat.”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions, Mr. Chambers.”

  “Call me Nate.”

  “Nate,” I said. “I’m LT, Leonid McGill, a private detective.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m working for your daughter.”

  “Chrystal?”

  “Shawna.”

  “Shawnie? Where she get the money to hire you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “That’s a Russian name—Leonid.”

  “Yes sir, it is.”

  “You don’t sound Russian.”

  “My father was a sharecropper turned Communist.”

  “Negroes do the craziest things,” Nathan Chambers said.

  “Here you think you got ’em pegged in the slums and prisons and they turn around like that mouse, or Brother Rat, an’ move to China an’ open a pizza restaurant.

  “What Shawnie want?”

  “She came to my office and said that her sister was missing and that Cyril, her husband, was planning to kill her, Chrystal. Shawna wanted me to dissuade the husband, but when I went to him he said that he loved your daughter and wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  The retiree’s conversational philosophy dried up for a moment. His face became sober and he wondered.

  “I love Shawnie, but she’s a mess,” he said at last. “Six children by that many men and movin’ from place to place. You just as likely to find her in a Catholic pew as an opium den. For a few years now she been livin’ with this commune, drift from place to place. They like a wild tribe down in South America, think the whole continent is theirs—tax free.”

  “Your son Theodore thinks that she’s probably lying about something,” I said.

  “We all lie about somethin’,” the father told me. “The child who never lies don’t make it past Sunday school.”

  “Why would Shawna lie about Chrystal?”

  “Chrystal reached out for the brass ring an’ come back with platinum,” he said, looking directly in my eye. “Shawnie falled off the hobby horse. She been strugglin’ since the day she was born. Don’t ask me why. She love her sister, though. That’s a fact. But what’s not to love? Chrystal wanted to be a welder like her old man was in the Merchant Marines. I told her she couldn’t and she told me that I was wrong. Damn if she wasn’t right.”

  “Tally said that he was the one who asked you for the tools to draw on steel.”

  “Oh?” Nate said. “Well, maybe he did. But, you know, Teddy got restless hands. He needed to settle on one thing but never could. Football, baseball . . . drawin’ on steel. He did it all, where Chrystal only cared about one.”

  “Have you heard from her?”

  “Two weeks ago Monday she come by. Brought me some walnut fudge and a little square of steel. Said it was a blank canvas for me if I wanted to do a show with her. Hmm. She a good daughter. The best.”

  “You think her mother might know something about her?” I was fishing with the Merchant Marine.

  “Azure,” he said, making three syllables out of the word. “I’ont know. I haven’t seen my wife in three years.”

  “She’s only a few blocks from here, isn’t she?” I asked. If Nate was a friend of mine I would have kept silent, but this was my job.

  “I’d like to see her, I would, but she got nerves. You don’t comport yourself just right and it makes her crazy for days. I bring her flowers every Tuesday, Tuesday. A Miss Rogers at the front desk takes ’em and tells me what she said the week before. I love my wife and my kids, Mr. McGill.”

  I believed him.

  “I learned when I was at sea,” he continued, “that a black man don’t need to let his head hang down, he could have just as big dreams as any white man or Brahmin, Aztec princess or Gypsy king. I gave my children the kind of dreams they could live by, but dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they’re worth a damn they’re bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls’em down.”

  His words washed over me like the ocean they evoked. I ignored the impact for the time being because I had a job to do.

  “Do you know where I can find Shawna?” I asked.

  “No sir. No, sir, I don’t. I never go lookin’ for Shawnie. You know, a man lookin’ for trouble is sure to find it.”

  16

  ON THE STREET I felt like an adolescent again—on the run, back under the radar of the foster-care system. This was due to the broken family, missing sister, and words of Nathan Chambers.

  . . . dreams are like oceans . . .

  All the years I had spent hating my father for his laser-like attention and then abrupt abandonment, and it only took these few words to explain him in a way that the twelve-year-old in me could understand. Dreams are like oceans and sometimes they pull the dreamer down.

  Just a few blocks from the Schmidt Home, Azure Freshstone-Chambers’ residence, I came upon a desolate park. It was a patch of concrete, devoid of vegetation, with three benches set in a circle, looking out. One of these benches was occupied by a street denizen with a shopping cart, three suitcases, and at least eight neatly squared and piled blond nylon bags. I couldn’t tell if the heavily clothed traveler was male or female, black or white. But these details hardly mattered. I sat down, facing the Hudson, though not looking there.

  . . . dreams are like oceans . . .

  Four words and my whole history had been turned on its head, like my father told me Marx had done to Hegel. Forgiveness for his inability was ripped from my chest by this slightly older man who blamed himself for shining a similar light in his own kids’ eyes.

  I could smell my neighbor. The odor was musty, dusty, and yet rich like loam. I wasn’t thinking anything, not really. Nate left no room for conjecture. He told the truth, whether he believed it or not, and I was left with consequences that he’d never know he’d wrought.

  I NEEDED TO go on with the case, but there wasn’t room for it in my mind right then. I might have sat there in the company of that fragrant phantom for hours if my phone had not sounded.

  It was the growling of a bear, a stranger—maybe.

  “Hello.”

  “What’s wrong, Lenny?” Harris Vartan asked. “You sound upset.”

  The tide of my thoughts receded. Vartan was another kind of force of nature.

  “I’ll look for the guy,” I said.

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Tell me something, Uncle Harry.”

  “What’s that, Lenny?”

  “Did you talk to my father before he left the country the last time?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he didn’t want to go but, knowing what he knew, he didn’t know how to stay.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. That’s right.”

  “I begged him to stay,” Harris said. “I told him what would happen if he died.”

  “So,” I said, the period of his guilty sentence, “what do you have for me?”

  There was only a brief pause on the line, Harris paying deference to the pain he knew in me.

  “Corinthia Mildred Highgate,” he said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “She knew Williams and last saw him somewhere between ten and twenty years ago. She lived in Manhattan then. Maybe she still does—if she’s alive.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really. Williams knew this Highgate. If you can locate her, and she’s still alive, I’d like you to ask where he might be.”

  AFTER GETTING off the phone with the ghost of Christmases past, I called another number.

  “Hello?” he said, panting like a fat dog after a young bitch in heat.

  “What’s up, Bug?” I asked the systems whiz kid.

  “How many push-ups can you do, Mr. McGill?”
/>   “Eighty or so—if I get warmed up first.”

  “Eighty?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Straight out? I mean, not on your knees or an incline?”

  “Straight out.”

  “I have to stop after three.”

  “Three months ago you’d have stopped before you started.”

  He took in a breath, tried to talk, inhaled again, and said, “What can I do for you?”

  “You know those messages Twill’s been getting on Twitter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want you to send the eleven dollars to him and give that fake address Zephyra has for me in Queens.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “I don’t remember. Call her and find out.”

  “Um . . .”

  “What?”

  “Uh . . . you want me call her?”

  “I take it you want to do a lot more than talk with Zephyra.”

  “Yeah but . . . I mean, um, you know.”

  “Listen, kid, the girl wants something from you. There’s no doubt about that. Maybe she just wants to be friends, but if that’s so, why’d she say that you should get in shape?”

  “We only saw each other alone that one time.”

  “I’m not askin’ you to go see her. Just call.”

  I broke off the connection and glanced over at the resident of the adjacent bench.

  What might have been a black man was in reality a middle-aged white woman rearranging her nylon bags to achieve some aesthetic effect that escaped me.

  She looked up at me with her broad potato face and smiled.

  Taking this as a good omen I waved, then set my feet back on the path to Azure.

  17

  MRS. A. ROGERS was in her middle fifties, like me, but she’d taken a very different path getting there. She was white with comfortable padding, delicate, and at ease with the insipid tranquility of her job. Her desk was a small maple table that had a green blotter, a tan phone with an array of buttons on it, and a solitary framed photograph of herself, ten years younger, standing with a friendly bearlike man, his arms circled around her and his smiling eyes peering into the lens.

  Above Mrs. Rogers’ head, a gray sign, stamped upon in blocky yellow letters, said ADMITTANCE. The reception room was little more than a vestibule. This was the wasp waist of the upscale mental institution through which visitors and professionals passed like grains of sand ticking off the monotonous microseconds that made up the infinity where Mrs. Rogers patiently waited.

  She smiled in bland welcome.

  “Leonid McGill for Azure Chambers,” I said.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “Chrystal sent me with a message.” I’d learned my lesson. Even though Shawna had hired me, I had to keep up her lie if I didn’t want to be frowned upon and turned away.

  “A message?” this middle-aged woman from the middle of Middle America said.

  “Yes. I’m supposed to speak with her about something . . . private. I’ve been prepped on how to comport myself in her presence, and Mr. Tyler is aware of the visit.”

  The second key for entrée would certainly be Tyler. The milksop nerd was a god among citizens like A. Rogers.

  The prisoner loves his warden, my father’s words came back to me. The slave fairly worships his master, and the worker deifies even the name of the rich man.

  Her gray eyes fixed on me, A. Rogers’ smile dimmed.

  “Mr. Chambers told me to tell you hello,” I said, trying to keep the ember of that smile alive. “He told me how you always deliver his flowers.”

  A brief schism of mild pain passed through the otherwise plain woman’s face.

  “He’s such a dear man,” she said.

  I nodded, ever so slightly.

  “I hate doing that to him, but even flowers are too much for Azure,” A. Rogers said to me, her temporary confessor. “I give them to other women residents. Those poor souls would love to have a husband like Nathan.”

  I tried to look understanding.

  It was this tame expression that finally overcame the passive barrier, the infinite boredom of that room.

  “Have a seat, Mr. McGill,” Mrs. Rogers said.

  I looked around and noticed a spindly rosewood chair that was, I thought, unlikely to hold my one hundred and eightythree pounds. I took this offer as a challenge. Maybe Mrs. Rogers was testing me to see if I could manage not to break her furniture before she trusted me with Azure.

  I sat delicately, tensing my thighs to lessen the burden on the chair. But as my weight tilted unerringly earthward I realized that there was a strength in that doelike seat that one wouldn’t, one couldn’t, have imagined.

  I sat there while the mild-mannered woman went about reading and amending notes on tiny slips of pink paper. She hadn’t made a call or sent any other message that I could discern.

  I had begun to wonder if her offer of a seat was just a kindness and not an invitation when a door to her right opened.

  The woman who came into the vestibule-office was Mrs. Rogers’ spiritual twin. She was in her thirties, dressed in a nurse’s uniform instead of civvies, caramel colored, and thin, with a severe cast to her face. But, still, Colette Martin had all the earmarks of bland resistance.

  “Mr. McGill?” Nurse Martin said.

  I never did figure out how she knew my name. I only knew hers because of the name tag over her tiny left breast.

  “Yes?”

  “Come with me.”

  I got to my feet and followed Nurse Martin into a long hallway where the walls, floors, and ceiling were the same nearly colorless gray hue. Every fifteen feet or so we passed a set of greenish-yellow elevator doors. Three elevator banks down, Colette stopped, pulled a keychain from her clamshell white pocket, and carefully chose a key that fit into a slot next to the lift. The doors slid open immediately and we entered into a surprisingly large space.

  Choosing another key, Colette turned the lock for floor seventeen.

  There was no further verbal communication between Nurse Martin and me. There was nothing to impart, nothing to gain by words. I simply stood, waiting to arrive, and then, when the doors slid open, she moved to the side, indicating to me by this gesture that I’d be getting off by myself.

  THE SITTING ROOM I entered was a palette of pastel blues and grays. There was a window, but its light-gray shade was pulled, a diaphanous blue curtain drawn over that. The table in the corner was almost, but not quite, white, and the chairs (relations of the fawn downstairs) had considered green but gave up half the way there.

  I don’t think that I’d ever experienced such spatial peace. It was like the experience of a zazen breath exhaled into a room where it had become both real and ethereal.

  “Hello.”

  She was what the old folks called high yellow, the color of a darkening lemon. Her gown was creamy blue with a hint of satin, somewhere. The gray-and-brown hair was coarse, combed back from a well-defined round face that was understated and yet deeply aware.

  We might have shared the same birth year.

  “Mrs. Chambers,” I said.

  “Azure,” she replied, making it three syllables as her husband had.

  It made me happy to think that even in their separation she and Nate were of the same mind.

  She turned her head slightly and I understood that she was offering me a chair.

  I also knew that I should leave my hands at my side, speak in a modulated tone, and keep my eyes focused on her while not staring her directly in the face. She was royalty and I a subject, but this distinction had nothing to do with hierarchy; it was more a system of shared duty.

  It was as I lowered into my chair that I realized a piano sonata was playing softly, maybe in another room.

  My host did not sit. She stood behind the chair across the table from me, resting her delicate hands on its back for support.

  Behind Azure the wall was recessed. In this shallow alcove sat the only aberration in an otherwise per
fect environment. It was a thin, coal-colored table against the wall supporting golden frames of the picture-portraits of her children and husband.

  “And your name is?” she asked, giving me her full beneficent attention.

  “McGill,” I said, hoping that the word wasn’t too pointy or sharp.

  “You have a message for me from Chrystal?”

  I glanced at the portraits behind her.

  “Your daughters look very much alike.”

  “Very.”

  “Did people confuse them for each other from time to time?”

  “When they got to be eleven and twelve they used to switch places. They never fooled me, but even their aunts and uncles were tricked sometimes.”

  “How could you tell the difference?” I asked.

  “If they were standing you could always see that Shawnie was the shorter one. But when they were alone or sitting down you could tell by their eyes. Chrystal has the eyes of an ancient, and Shawnie has the look of a wild creature that stumbled into civilization and can’t find her way back to the wilderness.”

  Hearing this analysis, I could imagine the long talks that she and Nate must have had. I felt the pain of his loss—and hers.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Where?”

  “This, this place.”

  “Oh,” she said, “yes. I have a condition, a mental condition.”

  “You seem very normal to me.”

  “In here I do. But the noise and mess outside drives me crazy. There’s a science word for it but it’s what our mothers would have called nerves. Doctors say that there’s a medicine I could take but I’d rather just keep everything around me quiet and peaceful. That way I don’t have to feel like I’m sick.

  “You’re smiling, Mr. McGill.”

  “Oh? I hadn’t realized. I guess it’s because what you’re saying is that you are only emotionally disturbed when there’s someone else in the room.”

  Azure laughed. It was a very pleasant sound.

  “Yes. And only a kindly gentleman like yourself, who keeps still, can know the real me.”

  “Who pays for all this?”

  “That’s a very blunt question, sir.”