Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_03

by When the Thrill Is Gone

  Her use of this last word shocked me. I was made suddenly aware of the complexity of Chrystal. She was the odd combination of the hood and a postdoctoral student, of a merchant marine and a woman who lives in perfect equanimity as long as no one brings a hot color into her line of sight.

  “You say ‘the violence that formed him’?”

  “His father was a brute,” Chrystal said. “He beat him and his brothers, and his mother, too. The only way that Cy could get back at his father was to pretend, in his mind, to have killed him.”

  “How does the inheritance play out?” I asked.

  “I made him do a prenuptial agreement separating our monies before we were married, but on our fourth anniversary he tore up his copy of the agreement. He said that he loved me and trusted me.”

  “Seven years, right?” I said, referring to the length of their marriage.

  She nodded.

  “He hired me to give you a message,” I said.

  “What?”

  “ ‘I love you and would never be upset about anything having to do with your actions or oversights.’ ”

  The inept wording brought an ever-so-slight smile to Chrystal’s lips.

  “I have to ask you something,” I said.

  “Will it keep me from climbing up on you again?”

  “Probably.”

  “That’s a talent,” she said. “It’s harder to turn a woman off, you know.”

  “You don’t seem shocked about the possibility of Shawna’s death.”

  “You’re a talented man, Mr. McGill.”

  “What was it about Shawna?” I asked.

  “Is she really dead?”

  “I think so.”

  Chrystal took a moment to ponder the lifelong relationship between herself and the woman her mother called a wild creature.

  “Instead of working with steel, my sister wrought art on her own body and mind,” the postdoctoral ghetto sailor proclaimed. “She made babies and enemies and never took the easy way, not once in her life. I loved her but I’m not surprised if she’s dead.”

  I nodded because there was nothing to say about the artist’s sober view of life, love, and death.

  “I’ll take the train back this morning,” I said. “The kids will be with you by tonight.”

  “No,” she said. “If Shawnie’s dead, then I need to find her and bury her and take Fatima and them someplace safe.”

  “You’re probably safer away from New York.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not worried about that,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I have you, don’t I?”

  39

  WE WERE ON the road in the yellow Prius, well on our way to the train station, when my phone made the sound of a growling bear. The Bluetooth was already in my ear because I had called to get my messages. So all I had to do was reach into my pocket and press a button to make the connection.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Chrystal touched my shoulder.

  “Mr. Mack-gill?” a woman said.

  “Yeah?”

  “This Seema.”

  “Why . . . hello, Seema,” I said with forced sangfroid. “What can I do for you?”

  “Did you mean what you said yesterday?”

  “Every word.”

  “Can you come get me right now?”

  “It might take an hour or so, but I’ll get there sooner if I can. Where are you?”

  “I stoled his money,” she replied, giving me a way out, I supposed.

  “You mean the money you collected by asking strangers for a train ticket to nowhere?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then it’s really your money.”

  “I’m at a laundromat on Phillips called Dusty’s.”

  “That’s an odd name for a place to clean clothes.”

  “That’s the name of the woman that owns it,” Seema said with no humor whatsoever. “She was a friend’a my mother’s.”

  “Does Brody know where you are?” I asked.

  “You remebah his name?”

  “Does he know where you are?”

  “He thinks I’m out shoppin’ fo’ food, but if he looks in his money draw he gonna know what I did.”

  “Give me the address and I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  I disconnected the call when I had what I needed, handed the phone to Chrystal, and asked her to enter the address in my GPS.

  “Where we going?” she asked with no distrust that I could glean.

  I explained about Seema and Brody.

  “Hm,” she grunted.

  “What?”

  “Most people would have just waved that girl on and gone about their business.”

  “Turn left in fifty yards,” commanded a woman’s voice from my phone.

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right about that,” I said, to Chrystal, not the phone.

  “Is it some kind of sickness with you?” She might have been serious.

  “Can I drop you somewhere while I take care of this?” I replied.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “It might be a little risky.”

  Her grin might have been mine in the mirror.

  DUSTY’S COIN-OP LAUNDROMAT was a dingy little place with a big exhaust pipe over the front door letting out great gouts of steam.

  “You have arrived at your destination,” the GPS woman said.

  When I drove past the establishment, Chrystal said, “It’s right there.”

  “We’ll go around the block.”

  Everything looked all right. Brody was nowhere to be seen and there weren’t any lookouts waiting in the recesses or doorways on Phillips Avenue.

  There was an alleyway behind the little laundry. A pass through there showed me a back door.

  I drove around the block again, finally parking across the street and at the far end from Dusty’s.

  “Got anything that needs cleaning?” I asked Chrystal.

  “Just my mind.”

  “Well, come on, then.”

  “You’re not going to ask me to stay in the car?”

  “You’re safer with me.”

  DUSTY’S COLORING MATCHED her name. Her skin was grayish brown, like some mouse fur, and her eyes glinted an unhealthy yellow hue. Seated behind an old teacher’s desk, she was my age but looked older.

  The establishment was a long, slender aisleway with doublestacked washing machines and solitary dryers down the right side and wooden benches on the left. There were no customers in sight, but five or more of the machines were running.

  I supposed people dropped their clothes off with Dusty and she washed them, charging by the pound.

  “You got laundry?” she blurted.

  “It’ll just take a minute,” I said.

  “No funny business in here, mistah.”

  “Just lookin’ for a friend.”

  “This ain’t no bar,” she said, “ain’t no ho’ house.”

  “It’s okay, DD,” a voice called from behind a big chrome washing machine that stood like a sentry guarding the rest of its machine brothers and sisters. The huge unit had a round glass door throwing up flashes of red and orange inside the frothing of dirty suds.

  Seema poked her head around the side of the vibrating chrome-and-glass monster. Her eyes fixed instantly on Chrystal.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “The friend I came down here to visit,” I said simply. Every word was true, even if there were some temporal disconnections.

  Seema was suspicious, still wearing the dowdy clothes she’d had on the day before. The only additions to her ensemble were a little red cloth bag, clutched in both hands, and a swollen, discolored left eye.

  “So?” she said.

  “That’s what I should be asking you, girl. Here we are. What do you want?”

  “I need to get outta here,” she said. “I need to get away from him.”

  Saying this, she glanced at Chryst
al, and I realized that she was thinking that I had been offering to take her on in some romantic or maybe business capacity. This was a revelation, because I was distracted by the ill-advised dalliance with my client.

  “You got family?” I asked.

  “Not that I wanna see. An’ anyway, Brody know all my people.”

  “You ever been to Eastern Light?” Chrystal asked.

  “You mean the church ovah past the seaport?”

  “It’s a retreat,” Chrystal said to the both of us. “The people who run it are Hindu, but they don’t practice or proselytize.”

  “Huh?” Seema said.

  “Brody out there,” Dusty warned.

  There was a sea-green ’80s Chevrolet driving past the front door of the store. I reached into my pocket laying my hand on a gun I had no license to carry in Maryland. I could feel my back muscles bulging and had to take a deep breath to ease my natural impulses.

  “Let’s go out the back,” I said to my charges.

  They knew to take direction at a moment like that.

  THE BACK DOOR of Dusty’s led into an alley that smelled of maggots and human feces. The lane was wide enough for a small car, and there were various denizens reclining in doorways, crevices, and other nooks and niches. I kept my hand on the pistol as I led the women.

  We came out on Allen Street and walked the half block to Phillips. As we crossed the avenue toward my sunny little car, I saw Brody, followed by two other men, walking into Dusty’s. At that moment he glanced in my direction, looked right at me. Seema was on the other side, hidden by my bulk. Brody didn’t recognize my suit or frame.

  Lucky for him and his friends.

  EASTERN LIGHT was a temple of ancient East Asian design located in a nicer part of town. On the way over, Chrystal explained the place to both of us.

  “They offer shelter for people, body and mind,” Chrystal said. “They teach classes, serve meals, and have small rooms with cots for special cases.”

  “And how come you know so much about them?” I asked.

  “I volunteer, and I also contribute money.”

  “Brody gonna find me here,” Seema said.

  “I doubt it,” Chrystal assured her. “They’re under everybody’s radar, and they don’t take many residents. For the first little while, at least, you will be in the inner circle and even the day visitors won’t see you.”

  “I’m not givin’ ’em my money,” Seema said.

  “They have their own resources,” my client replied. “If you want to hold on to that little bag, that’s fine, no one will try and take it from you.”

  “So you just gonna leave me here?” Seema directed this question to me.

  “For the time being, sugar. You need a place to get centered.”

  “I thought you wanted me to be with you.”

  “I never said that. I said I’d get you away from Brody. That meant I’d get you someplace safe, but I’m not a pimp or a gangster. I’m a detective, like the card says.”

  “What if I don’t like it here?”

  We were parked at the ornate gate of the temple grounds. Chrystal was sitting next to me, while Seema sat in the center of the backseat. I turned around to look her in the face.

  “If you don’t like it, you can just leave, or call me and I’ll either come down myself or send somebody I trust to get you.”

  “How’m I gonna call? Do they even have a phone in there?”

  I reached into William Williams’ satchel and came out with a small black phone wrapped in a power cord, one of the throwaways that Bug kept me supplied with. This I handed to the girl.

  “You still have my card?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Did Brody give you that black eye?”

  Another nod.

  “Then let Chrystal take you in there, and give it three days before you make up your mind what to do.”

  It wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what she expected. But Seema didn’t have much choice.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I waited in the car while my client escorted the girl through the gate and gardens and into the lavish domed building. I sat there for a quarter of an hour wondering at the odd connection between me and the solid-steel artist.

  ON THE TRAIN, Chrystal and I sit side by side, mainly in silence. I used the time to consider the murder of my initial client; also Dimitri and Twill; also Gordo on his deathbed; and, to a lesser degree, the man William Williams.

  An hour into the ride I called Seema.

  “Hello?” she said after the sixth ring.

  “Seema.”

  “Mr. Mack-gill?”

  “How are you?”

  “Okay, I guess. They food taste funny but they nice.”

  “You feel safe?”

  “I guess. They give me this tiny little room and told me that I could work anywhere I want to for my rent—the kitchen or the laundry, whatevah.”

  “I’ll call you at the end of the week to see how you’re doing.”

  “If I get cleaned up, can I come down to you?”

  “It’s not about that, girl. I’m just helping you.”

  “Okay. But you gonna call, right?”

  “Definitely.”

  If Chrystal heard this conversation she gave no sign of it. She just stared out the window, blinking now and then like a camera on a very slow shutter release.

  40

  AS WE WERE PULLING into the Newark train station I turned to gaze at her profile.

  The train was pulling out again before she asked, “What?”

  “You say that you and Cyril don’t have a very powerful erotic connection.”

  I didn’t need to say anymore. She understood the implications.

  “I know a man,” she said. “His name is Lod, he lives in Astoria. We . . . we get together sometimes.”

  “Cyril know about him?”

  “Maybe not his name, but he knows.”

  “How about a big guy, dressed all in brown, maybe pretends that he’s Cyril sometimes.”

  “Him and me? I don’t think so.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “That’s Cyril’s bastard stepbrother—Ira Lamont.”

  There was a full stop at the end of her answers. I needed more information, but her tone told me to slow it down. I didn’t mind. I was just another lemming—standing on line.

  “AUNT CHRIS!” a child yelled when we came into the door.

  Then all the children mobbed the woman their mother had pretended to be. They hugged and kissed and finally got down on the floor, the whole gang of them.

  The four-year-old, Dorian, moved away after a while. The copper-colored boy picked up a stuffed tiger and started a conversation with it.

  “Dorian,” Chrystal said playfully.

  “Yes?” he said in the same tone and timbre.

  “Don’t you love me anymore?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said, still looking at his doll.

  “Then come here and give me some sugar.”

  The boy laughed and ran back into the brood.

  AFTER A GOOD WHILE of playing and reconnecting, Theda took the kids to her room for the castle game that everyone liked to play. Aura, Chrystal, and I sat at an oval table that looked down on Gramercy Park, there to sip wine and discuss murder.

  “So you don’t know what your sister was talking about when she came to my office?” I asked Chrystal.

  “No,” she said, “not at all. I mean, I did feel pushed out by Cyril, and I was worried about his history with wives ending up dead, but he didn’t want to kill me. And even if he did I wouldn’t go to Shawnie about that. She could hardly hold her own life together.”

  “But you gave her the money she paid me with.”

  “I gave her fifty thousand dollars. Some of it was for her and some to give to Tally if he needed it. She said that she wanted to get out of that commune and get a job in a beauty shop.”

  “And you just gave her that much money?” I asked.
r />   “Yeah. Why?”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “So? My husband owns a farm in Brazil that would take you three weeks to hike across. My room in his house is worth a million dollars on the open market. And, anyway, I don’t really care about money.”

  Aura was silent, listening to a conversation both spoken and unspoken.

  “Fatima told me that they buried her mother in a garden near where they lived,” Chrystal said.

  “I called the police. If they found her it should have been in the papers.”

  “It was,” Aura said. “This morning. The police found her yesterday.”

  Without being asked, Aura went into the kitchen and came back with the Post. The story was pushed to page eight because of a drug overdose in Hollywood, a has-been star who made the headlines one last time.

  We were silent while Chrystal read her sister’s pop obituary.

  The children’s laughter wafted in from down a hallway and through a door.

  Chrystal put the paper down and looked at me.

  “I have no idea what’s going on here,” she said. “But I want you to find out who did this.”

  “She hired me to protect you,” I said.

  “She can stay here, Leonid,” Aura said. “No one knows, and the children need her.”

  “Thank you,” Chrystal said and the deal was sealed.

  “I’m not the police,” I said to anyone who wanted to listen. “I don’t arrest people, or solve crimes for that matter. I will look into this deeply enough to make sure you and Shawna’s kids are safe. But when I get anywhere near the truth I’ll turn it over to the cops. Arresting people and bringing them to trial is what you pay your taxes for.”

  “Okay. I just need to know.”

  That was the end of our little tête-à-tête-à-tête. It was time for me to get out there and make the streets safe for artists and orphans. But sitting at that table, between those two women (either one of whom I loved more than my wife of twenty-odd years), I was frozen.

  That’s when Chrystal reached across the table and touched my left wrist.