KARMA
ALSO BY WALTER MOSLEY
LEONID MCGILL MYSTERIES
Known to Evil
The Long Fall
EASY RAWLINS MYSTERIES
Blonde Faith
Cinnamon Kiss
Little Scarlet
Six Easy Pieces
Bad Boy Brawly Brown
A Little Yellow Dog
Black Betty
Gone Fishin’
White Butterfly
A Red Death
Devil in a Blue Dress
OTHER FICTION
The Tempest Tales
Diablerie
Killing Johnny Fry
The Man in My Basement
Fear of the Dark
Fortunate Son
The Wave
Fear Itself
Futureland
Fearless Jones
Walkin’ the Dog
Blue Light
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
RL’s Dream
47
The Right Mistake
NONFICTION
This Year You Write Your Novel
What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace
Life Out of Context
Workin’ on the Chain Gang
KARMA
THE FIRST LEONID MCGILL STORY
WALTER MOSLEY
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
2010
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2005 by Walter Mosley
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ISBN: 1-101-43808-8
KARMA
Contents
Begin Reading
LEONID MCGILL SAT AT HIS DESK on the sixty-seventh floor of the Empire State Building, filing his nails and gazing at New Jersey. It was 3:15. Leonid had promised himself that he’d exercise that afternoon, but now that the time had come he felt lethargic.
It was that pastrami sandwich, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll have something light, like fish, and then I can go to Gordo’s and work out.
Gordo’s was a third-floor boxers’ gym on Thirty-first Street. When Leonid was thirty years younger, and sixty pounds lighter, he went to Gordo’s every day. For a while Gordo Packer wanted the private detective to go pro.
“You’ll make more money in the ring than you ever will panty-sniffin’,” the seemingly ageless trainer said. McGill liked the idea, but he also loved Lucky Strikes and beer.
“I can’t bring myself to run unless I’m being chased,” he’d tell Gordo. “And whenever somebody hurts me, I wanna do him some serious harm. You know if a guy knocked me out in the ring I’d probably lay for him with a tire iron out back’a Madison Square when the night was through.”
The years went by and Leonid kept working out on the heavy bag two or three times a week. But a boxing career was out of the question. Gordo lost interest in Leonid as a prospect, but they remained friends.
“How’d a Negro ever get a name like Leonid McGill?” Gordo once asked the PI.
“Daddy was a Communist and Great-Great-Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland,” Leo answered easily. “You know the black man’s family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see aboveground is only a hint at the real story.” Leo got up from his chair and made a stab at touching his toes. His fingers made it to about mid-shins, but his stomach blocked any further progress.
“Shit,” the PI said. Then he returned to his chair and went back to filing his nails.
He did that until the broad-faced clock on the wall said 4:07. Then the buzzer sounded. One long, loud blare. Leonid cursed the fact that he hadn’t hooked up the view-cam to see who it was at the door. With a ring like that it could have been anyone. He owed over forty-six hundred dollars to the Wyant brothers. The nut was due and Leonid had yet to collect on his windfall. The Wyants wouldn’t pay any attention to his cash-flow problems.
It might have been a prospective client at the door. A real client. Someone with an employee stealing from him. Or maybe a daughter being influenced by a bad crowd. Then again it could be one of thirty or forty angry husbands wanting revenge for getting found out at their extramarital pastimes. And then there was Joe Haller—the poor schnook. But Leonid had never even met Joe Haller. There was no way that that loser could have found his door.
The buzzer sounded again.
Leonid got up from his chair and walked into the long hall that led to his reception room. There he came to the front door.
The buzzer blared a third time.
“Who is it?” McGill shouted in a southern accent that he used sometimes.
“Mr. McGill?” a woman said.
“He’s not here.”
“Oh. Do you expect him back today?”
“No,” Leonid said. “No. He’s away on a case. Down in Florida. If you tell me what it is you want I’ll leave him a note.”
“Can I come in?” She sounded young and innocent but Leonid wasn’t about to be fooled.
“I’m just the building janitor, honey,” he said. “I’m not allowed to let anybody in any office in this here building. But I’ll write down your name and number and leave it on his desk if you want.”
Leonid had used that line before. There was no argument against it. The janitor couldn’t be held responsible.
There was silence from the other side of the door. If the girl had an accomplice they’d be whispering about how to get around his ploy. Leonid put his ear against the wall but couldn’t hear a thing.
“Karmen Brown,” the woman said. She added a number with the new 646 prefix. Probably a cell phone, Leonid thought.
“Hold on. Let me get a pencil,” he complained. “Brown, you say?”
“Karmen Brown,” she repeated. “With a K.” Then she gave the number again.
“I’ll put it on his desk,” Leonid promised. “He’ll get it the minute he gets back to town.”
“Thank you,” the young woman said.
There was hesitation in her voice. If she was a thinking girl she might have wondered how a janitor would know the whereabouts of the private detective. But after a moment or two he could hear her heels clicking down the hall. He returned to his office to stay a while, just in case the girl, and her possible accomplice, decided to wait until he came out.
He didn’t mind hanging around in the office. His sublet apartment wasn’t nearly as nice, or quiet, and at least he could be alone. Commercial rents took a nosedive after 9/11. He picked up the ESB workspace for a song.
Not that he’d paid the rent in three months.
But Leonid Trotter McGill didn’t worry about money that muc
h. He knew that he could pull a hat trick if he had to. Too many people had too many secrets. And secrets were the most valuable commodity in New York City.
At 5:39 the buzzer sounded again. But this time it was two long blasts followed by three short. Leonid made his way down the hall and opened the front door without asking who it was.
The man standing there was short and white, balding and slim. He wore an expensive suit with real cuff links on a white shirt that had some starch in the collar and cuffs.
“Leon,” the small white man said.
“Lieutenant. Come on in.”
Leonid led the dapper little man through the reception area, along the hallway (that had three doors down its length), and finally into his office.
“Sit down, Lieutenant.”
“Nice office. Where’s everybody else?” the visitor asked.
“It’s just me right now. I’m in a transition phase. You know, trying to develop a new business plan.”
“I see.”
The slender white man took the chair in front of Leonid’s desk. From there he could see the long shadows across New Jersey. He shifted his gaze from the window to his host. L. T. McGill, PI.
Leonid was short, no taller than five seven, with a protruding gut and heavy jowls. His skin was the color of dirty bronze and covered with dark freckles. There was a toothpick jutting out from the right side of his mouth. He wore a tan suit that had been stained over time. His shirt was lime green, and the thick gold band on his left pinky weighed two or three ounces.
Leonid McGill had powerful hands and strong breath. His eyes were suspicious and he would always appear to be a decade over his actual age.
“What can I do for you, Carson?” the detective asked the cop.
“Joe Haller,” Carson Kitteridge said.
“Come again?” Leonid let his face wrinkle up, feigning ignorance if not innocence.
“Joe Haller.”
“Never heard that name before. Who is he?”
“He’s a gigolo, and a batterer. Now they’re trying to tell me he’s a thief.”
“You wanna hire me to find something on him?”
“No,” the cop said. “No. He’s in the Tombs right now. We caught him red-handed. He had thirty thousand right there in his closet. In the briefcase that he carried to work every day.”
“That makes it easy,” Leonid said. He concentrated on his breathing, something he had learned to do whenever he was being questioned by the law.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Carson said.
“Is there a problem, officer?”
“You were seen speaking to Nestor Bendix on January four.”
“I was?”
“Yeah. I know that because Nestor’s name came up in the robbery of a company called Amberson’s Financials two months ago.”
“Really?” Leonid said. “What does all that have to do with Joe whatever?”
“Haller,” Lieutenant Kitteridge said. “Joe Haller. The money he had in the bag was from the armored car that had just made a drop at Amberson’s.”
“An armored car dropped thirty thousand dollars at the place?”
“More like three hundred thousand,” Kitteridge said. “It was for their ATM machines. Seems like Amberson’s had got heavy into the ATM business in that neighborhood. They run sixty machines around Midtown.”
“I’ll be damned. And you think Joe Haller and Nestor Bendix robbed them?”
Lieutenant Carson Kitteridge stayed silent for a moment. His gray eyes taking in the rough-hewn detective.
“What did you and Nestor have to say to each other?” the cop asked.
“Nothing,” Leonid said, giving a one-shoulder shrug. “It was a pizza place down near the Seaport if I remember right. I ducked in there for a calzone and saw Nestor. We used to be friends back when Hell’s Kitchen was still Hell’s Kitchen.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Not a thing. Really. It was just a chance meeting. I sat down long enough to eat too much and find out that he’s got two kids in college and two jail.”
“You talk about the heist?”
“I never even heard about it until you just said.”
“This Joe Haller,” the policeman said. “He practices what you call an alternative lifestyle. He likes married women. It’s what you might call his thing. He finds straight ladies and bends them. They say he’s hung like a horse.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. What he does is gets the ladies to meet him at hotels near where he works and goes in to teach them about how the other eight inches live.”
“You’ve lost me, Lieutenant,” Leonid said. “I mean, unless one of the she-guards at Amberson’s is Haller’s chicken.”
The elegant policeman shook his head slightly.
“No. No. This is how I see it, Leon,” the policeman said. He sat forward in his chair and laced his fingers. “Nestor pulled off the robbery but somebody let it slip so me and my crew got on his ass. He calls on you to find him a pigeon and you give him Haller. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. But you set up the Romeo and now he’s looking at twenty years in Attica.”
“Me?” Leonid said, pressing all ten fingers against his breast. “How the hell you think I could do something like that?”
“You could pluck an egg out from under a nesting eagle and she’d never even know,” Kitteridge said. “I got a man in jail and his alibi girlfriend saying that she never even heard his name. I got an armed robber laughing at me and a PI more crooked than any crook I ever arrested lyin’ in my face.”
“Carson,” Leonid said. “Brother, you got me wrong. I did see Nestor for a few minutes. But that’s all, man. I’ve never been to this Amberson’s place, and I never heard of Joe Haller or his girlfriend.”
“Chris,” Kitteridge said. “Chris Small. Her husband has already left her. That’s what our investigation has accomplished so far.”
“I wish I could help you, man, but you got me wrong. I wouldn’t even know how to set up some patsy for a crime after it was committed.
Carson Kitteridge stared mildly at the detective and the darkening neighbor state. He smiled and said, “You can’t get away with it, Leon. You can’t break the law like that and win.”
“I don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’, Lieutenant. Maybe the man you caught really is the thief.”
KATRINA MCGILL WAS a svelte beauty in her day. From Norway or Sweden—Leonid was never sure which one. They had three kids, of which at least two were not Leonid’s. He’d never had them tested. Why bother? The Scandinavian beauty had left him early on for a finance lion. But she got fat and the sugar daddy went broke, so now the whole crowd (minus the sugar daddy) lived on Leonid’s goodwill.
“What’s for dinner, Kat?” he asked, breathing hard after scaling the five floors to his apartment door.
“Mr. Barch called,” she answered. “He said that either you pay up by Friday or he’s going to start eviction.”
It was the square shape of her face and the heaviness around her eyes that made her ugly. When she was young, gravity was in suspense, but he should have seen the curtain coming down.
The kids were in the living room. The TV was on but no one was watching. The oldest boy, the red-headed Dimitri, was reading a book. He had ochre skin and green eyes. But he had Leonid’s mouth. Shelly, the girl, looked more Chinese than anything else. They used to have a Chinese neighbor when they lived on Staten Island. He worked at an Indian jewelers’ center in Queens. Shelly was sewing one of Leonid’s jackets. She loved her father and never questioned her mother or the face in the mirror.
Shelly and Dimitri were eighteen and nineteen. They went to City College and lived at home. Katrina would not hear of them moving out. And Leonid liked having them around. He felt that they were keeping him anchored to something, keeping him from floating away down Forty-second Street and into the Hudson.
Twill was the youngest. Sixteen and self-named. He’d just come home after a three-month
stay at a youth detention center near Wingdale, New York. The only reason he was still in high school was because that was part of his release agreement.
Twill was the only one who smiled when Leonid entered the room.
“Hey, Pop,” he said. “Mr. Tortolli wants to hire me at his store.”
“Hey. Good.” Leonid would have to call the hardware man and tell him that Twill would open his back door and empty out the storeroom in three weeks’ time.
Leonid loved him, but Twill was a thief.
“What about Mr. Barch?” Katrina said.
“What about my dinner?”
KATRINA KNEW how to cook. She served chicken with white wine sauce and the flakiest dumplings he had ever eaten. There was also broccoli and almond bread, grilled pineapples, and a dark fish sauce that you could eat with a spoon.
Cooking was difficult for Katrina since her left hand had become partially paralyzed. The specialist said that it was probably due to a slight stroke. She worried all the time. Her boyfriends had stopped calling years before.
But Leonid took care of her and her kids. He even asked to have sex with her now and then because he knew how much she hated it.
“Did anybody else call?” he asked when the college kids were in their rooms and Twill was back out in the street.
“A man called Arman.”
“What he say?”
“There’s a little French diner on Tenth and Seventeenth. He wants to see you there at ten. I told him I didn’t know if you could make it.”
When Leonid moved to kiss Katrina she leaned away and he laughed.
“Why don’t you leave me?” he asked.
“Who would raise our children if I did that?”
This caused Leonid to laugh even harder.
HE REACHED BABETTE’S FEAST at 9:15. He ordered a double espresso and stared at the legs of a mature woman seated at the bar. She was at least forty but dressed as if she were fifteen. Leonid felt the stirrings of the first erection he’d had in over a week.
Maybe that’s why he called Karmen Brown on his cell phone. Her voice had sounded as if it should be clad in a dress like that.
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