Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_03

by When the Thrill Is Gone

  He also wore green-and-yellow tennis shoes. Sham was always ready to run.

  “Mr. McGill,” he said upon entering.

  I nodded from my chair. No reason to stand up when Sham walked into the room. I had no respect for the man, even when I was a crook.

  O’Hearn took any slimy job that slithered up to his door. Worse, he’d go out and find dirt on spouses and business partners and then offer to sell what he knew to the injured parties. He reveled in seducing the wives of cheating husbands and switching sides in the middle of a case if that betrayal increased his bottom line.

  I couldn’t believe that anyone liked Sham O’Hearn; not even his mother, or his reflection in the glass.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Are you gonna be here that long?”

  He lowered onto the chair nearest the door, perching at the edge. There was an apology in his eyes, a squinty twitch, too.

  “I’m sorry about this, Mr. McGill,” he said.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “I took a job and, and if I want to get paid I had to ... you know.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re here, Sham. And if you don’t start making sense I’m gonna put you out.”

  “Times have been very hard,” the fifty-something Irishman said. “I wouldn’t have taken the job if I knew.”

  “I’m in the middle of a case, man. You got something to do with that?”

  “I, I don’t think so.”

  “Then say what you got to say and get outta here.”

  The straw briefcase was on his lap. He opened it and took out a nine-by-twelve manila folder.

  “I could have sent this,” he said. “But I didn’t want you searching me down. It wasn’t my idea to bring them here, and if it wasn’t for the cash, the money I need for my rent . . . You, you know I gave up my office and I’m working out of my apartment now. I can hardly afford that.”

  I put out my hand. He could live in the street for all I cared.

  Screwing up his courage, my so-called peer handed the folder across the table. He had to leave his chair for a moment to accomplish the transfer but he did so from a squat, not standing up straight.

  The folder contained nine glossy photographs. They were all of Katrina and a much younger man having what I can only call enthusiastic sex. There was fellatio and doggie-style, sixty-nine and what was most likely anal. There were fingers and tongues, thighs and acrobatics—sex as I have never had it with anyone.

  As I sifted through the photographs, my mind was dominated by two thoughts. First I wondered how Sham got such great shots. Katrina and her boyfriend were obviously in a private suite somewhere. The photos were taken from a variety of angles, and with a telephoto lens.

  My second thought was actually a surprise. Katrina’s lover wasn’t Dimitri’s older schoolmate, Bertrand Arnold. It was a dark-skinned Negro, possibly an African, with a jagged Y-shaped scar on his powerful left buttock. He wore a light-blue condom and she a pair of red high-heeled shoes.

  I stood up from my desk.

  “I didn’t know it was your wife when I took the job,” Sham said all in a rush. “You know what it’s like. You do this kind of work.”

  “How much did he pay for these?” I asked.

  “Six, six thousand. A thousand up front and the rest after I make the delivery.”

  “How will he know you did that?”

  “He said that he would know.”

  “Get outta here, Sham,” I said.

  “Listen, man—”

  “I said, get out.”

  That was all he needed. Sham rose, turned, and fled from the room in one fluid dancelike motion.

  I put the pictures back in the folder and that in the top drawer of my desk. Mardi never went through my drawers. I waited a few minutes for Sham to have vacated the floor. Then I left for a place I knew in Greenwich Village.

  THE BROWN BAG BAKERY had taken over a space that had once been an antique toy store on Bleecker Street. It was all glass and chrome, making it seem more like twenty-first-century robotics than a comfortable shopping bag.

  Two young women with a variety of piercings and multicolor hairdos smiled as they sold cream puffs, cupcakes, and the occasional loaf of bread to the throng of customers. At the far end of the counter, standing toward the back, was Bertrand Arnold in white pants and a black T-shirt, covered by a denim blue apron. He had brown skin, straight black hair, and a boy’s face, though I knew he was in his mid-thirties.

  I walked straight up to Mr. Arnold and looked him in the eye.

  His face went through its paces quickly. At first he was surprised to see me, and then, almost immediately, he remembered that I was a private detective and would have found him out. He had tried to hide his identity by having Sham get the photos to me but somehow that hadn’t worked. He resigned himself to my presence there and gestured toward a door that led into the back. I held out my hand for him to go first.

  He led me past a huge refrigeration unit into a big kitchen where other brown-skinned, straight-haired men were preparing the breads and pastries for a wall of ovens. From there we went into a small hallway lined with lockers. This hallway ended at his office door.

  He sat behind the desk. I sat on top of it.

  “You know why I’m here?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to pay that detective,” he said.

  “I don’t know why not. He didn’t give up your name.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “The minute I saw those pictures I knew you paid for them.”

  “How?”

  “Because you been wettin’ yo’ beak in Katrina’s fountain for six months and more,” I said. “You went to Atlantic City together in March and then turned around the next month and met her in Chicago when she lied and said that she was at a family reunion.”

  “You knew?”

  “Listen, kid, when you meet a woman willin’ to betray one man to be with you, then you can bet dollars to doughnuts that she will do the same goddamned thing to you.”

  “If you knew, then why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you do something?”

  I took out my .41 magnum and placed it on the desk between us.

  Bertrand was transfixed by the weapon.

  “Is this what you want?” I asked him.

  All the love and betrayal and jealousy flowed away in the face of that ugly black gun.

  “No,” Bertrand said clearly, without a falter or hesitation.

  “If you do one more thing to try an’ mess with my wife I will be back. Do you understand me?”

  “You’re, you’re here to protect her?”

  “She ain’t much, I’ll give you that, but she’s Dimitri’s mother, and I will not stand for you to try and bring her down.”

  “But she was with me,” the baker said, “for months. Aren’t you mad about that? Aren’t you angry about D’Walle?”

  “There’s only two things I need to know,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Did Dimitri know about you and his mother?”

  “No. He’s been distracted ever since he met Tatyana.”

  “Do you know where Dimitri is?”

  “He borrowed some money from me and flew to Paris. He said that Tatyana was going to meet him there.”

  “Then there’s nuthin’ else between you and me, Bert,” I said. “But if you do anything else to mess with Katrina, if you just go yell at her in my house, I will destroy you—completely.”

  I let those words hang in the air a moment and then retrieved my pistol.

  30

  BACK OUT ON Bleecker Street—with its tourist shops and old-time Italian specialty markets, its storefront fortune-tellers and overpriced clothes designers—I wondered about time and the people who wasted it. Almost every hour of every day was a wasteland of TVs, radios, lying newspapers, and people like Bertrand Arnold railing against his predestined fate. It wouldn’t matter so much
if the malingerers of the world didn’t want to drag me into their ditherings. What did I care about the newest reality show about truckers or bail bondsmen? What did it matter to me if a cow in New Zealand gave birth to the world’s first three-headed calf or who my wife cuckolded me with?

  Why would a man having an affair with someone’s wife reveal her infidelity to him? Could revenge heal his broken heart or mend Katrina’s errant ways? If I shot D’Walle, whoever he was, would Bertrand have gotten what he wanted?

  It was like blasting a cloud of butterflies with a shotgun because you were earthbound and jealous—it made no sense and was a waste of the little time we had to make sense in.

  Thinking these thoughts, feeling the weight of the pistol in my jacket pocket, I found that I had walked across town to Broadway and was on my way north. My thoughts were fragmented and weightless. It was the state of mind a boxer is put in by a solid right hand to the side of his head. Things are a-jumble but he knows that there’s one important fact that needs immediate attention. Maybe there was a three-headed calf somewhere, but that knowledge won’t help the situation.

  Keep your gloves up, Gordo shouted at every arrogant young boxer who thought he was too fast, too slick to get hit. But even the thought of Gordo sent me veering off course. The man who took the place of my father . . . dying in the same room where I had planned the demolition of many an innocent, and not so innocent, life.

  This last thought arrived with me at the front door of Aura Ullman’s apartment building. Instinct and a sense of duty had brought me there. The children were my clients now and their mother’s death was my job.

  “Yes?” came the answer to my ring.

  “Aura?”

  “Leonid,” she said as the buzzer sounded.

  SHE WAS AT the open door when I got there, the sun flooding into the hallway from behind her. She smiled and held out both hands to me. I took them, pulled ever so slightly, and felt her ambivalent resistance.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The living room was a mess. Children’s clothes and toys, coloring books and storybooks strewn here and there. There were smudges on the TV screen and a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a paper plate set on a chair that belonged in the dining room.

  Aura smiled and I learned something about her: she loved the disarray of children.

  “I had to buy clothes for all of them,” she said proudly. “They said that you took them away without time to pack.”

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  She smiled and gestured toward the wall-sized window that looked down on the private park.

  In a small clearing Theda and Fatima were leading the brood in a lopsided circle dance. Theda held the littlest boy, Uriah, and Boaz carried his smallest sister. They were laughing and singing.

  Aura smiled down on them.

  “Thank you, Leonid,” she said.

  “I love you,” I replied.

  “Let’s sit down.”

  I SAT IN a blue cushioned chair and she on the off-white sofa that had suffered some stains in the last twenty-four hours.

  Noticing me notice the spots, she said, “I can get the furniture reupholstered after you’ve found their aunt.”

  I wanted to ask her what she’d found out from Fatima and her little clan but there was a question on the table.

  “There’s no time for us, Leonid,” she said.

  “I can make time.”

  “No,” she said, “you can’t. You’ve got too much to do, too many irons in the fire.”

  “We could leave New York. I’d do that for you.”

  “I can’t allow myself to go there,” she said. “Please ... be my friend for the time being.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe forever.”

  I had killed men with my bare hands, taken enough punishment to have died many times over myself. I had enemies and a special policeman assigned to bring me down and send me to prison. There were people suffering at that very moment because I had framed them. And yet there I was—a teenager with a gaping heart.

  I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, remembering what was important and why I was there.

  “Have the children told you anything?” I asked.

  “Only that they want to go live with their Aunt Chris in a house on top of a big building.”

  “Did they talk about what happened to their mother?”

  “I think she was murdered, Leonid.”

  I didn’t want to say what I knew right then. She loved having those children in her house and there didn’t seem to be any reason to corroborate her fearful empathy.

  Luckily the front door flew open, spilling in children along with their laughter and thumping grace.

  “Hello,” Aura said, rising for her daughter and the small mob.

  They laughed and greeted and talked about needing water and bathrooms and a DVD.

  Theda and Aura started to work on these needs while the oldest sister stood to the side, arching her body in an odd, mature way.

  “Fatima,” I said.

  The girl widened her eyes and walked toward me. She held out her hand and I led her out onto the tiny balcony.

  Pulling the glass door shut, I sat on one of the two pink cast-iron chairs out there. Fatima climbed into my lap as if we had known each other for her entire life.

  “I like you, Fatima,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” she agreed.

  “And I’m going to be honest with you because that’s the only way we’ll be able to help each other.”

  “All right.”

  “You know your mother’s gone, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so we have two things that we have to do,” I said.

  Fatima put her right hand against my chin and rubbed the stubbly hair there. Through my peripheral vision I could see Aura watching us from inside the apartment.

  “What two things?” Fatima asked.

  “I have to find your aunt so that I can get the man who made your mom go away and so that you can go live with Chrystal.”

  “We want to be with our Aunt Chris,” Fatima said with emphasis.

  “So we want the same thing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tell me what you know about Aunt Chris,” I said.

  “She’s beautiful and brave and never lies about anything she says she’ll do,” Fatima said in one breath. “And one time when Mama Shawna was sick she promised to take all of us to live with her if anything ever happened to Mama.”

  “That’s very nice of her,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea where Auntie Chris might go if she wanted to get away for a while?”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. Aunt Chris told me that I shouldn’t never tell anybody, not even Mama.”

  “And have you ever told anyone?”

  “Only Boaz, and he didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, Fatima,” I said, “I know all about secrets. I have so many of them that I forget what they are sometimes. And I don’t want to make you tell something you promised not to, but I have to find Chrystal and you have to decide if finding her is worth telling her secret. I mean, do you think that she’d want you to tell me?”

  Her serious face enchanted me: a child making her mind work in ways that felt impossible but must be done.

  “I think she wants us to find her,” she said at last.

  “Where can we do that?”

  “Maybe at her getaway house in Saltmore, Altmore, something. It’s a place that she bought a long time ago when she sold her first painting. It’s a big secret, so you can’t tell anybody else. It’s a little white house with a yellow one on the right and a gray one on the left. And you have to take a train ride to get there.”

  “Thank you, Fatima,” I said. “You can count on me, I will find Chrystal.”

  A FEW BLOCKS away from Aura’s I made a c
all on my cell phone.

  “Hello?” a pleasant voice answered on the seventh ring.

  “Tam? It’s LT.”

  “Mr. McGill,” she said.

  “That open offer for dinner good for tonight?”

  “Absolutely. We’re eating at about six-thirty. Timothy will be in maybe an hour before that.”

  “I’ll get there as close to six-thirty as I can.”

  I got off the phone and shivered like a wet dog.

  31

  WASTING TIME IS a big problem in the world we live in, that’s for sure. But it doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to know what the goal is for every step we take. Sometimes we do things that are not directly connected and yet are still significant.

  These activities, in a life like mine, might at times be dangerous, or even foolhardy; but life, even at its best, is a sucker’s enterprise. No deity would trade places with one of us fool mortals, not even for an instant.

  AT 6:24 I knocked at a door to a one-family home on Fifth Avenue not far north of Washington Square Park. It was a fivestory pink affair with dark-green vines growing on the walls. The stairs were greenish marble and the oak door ancient. There were three hidden camera lenses watching me, two from in front and one from the branches of a tree at the sidewalk.

  A man answered the door. He was not a centimeter over five nine, with a slender (but not thin) frame, combed short brown hair, and eyes the same tone. His trousers were green and his tan shirt square-cut.

  He was wearing an old pair of brown, backless slippers.

  “LT,” he said. He even smiled.

  Slippers.

  I nodded and muttered something that was meant to sound like a greeting.

  “Come on in,” the man said, moving backward and gesturing broadly with his left arm.

  The foyer, and every other room I had seen in that home, had dark hardwood floors and teal-colored walls.

  “Can I take your jacket?” the man asked.

  As I shook my head I could hear the thunder of little feet.

  “Surprise, Uncle L!” the seven-year-old boy yelled.