Karma

by Walter Mosley

  “Hello?”

  “Miss Brown?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Leo McGill. You left a message for me?”

  “Mr. McGill. I thought you were in Florida.” The roar of an engine almost drowned out her words.

  “I’m sorry if it’s hard to hear me,” she said. “There was a motorcycle going down the street.”

  “That’s okay. How can I help you?”

  “I’m having a problem and, and, well, it’s rather personal.”

  “I’m a detective,” Miss Brown. “I hear personal stuff all the time. If you want me to meet with you, then you’ll have to tell me what it’s about.”

  “Richard,” she said. “Mallory. He’s my fiancé, and I think he’s cheating on me.”

  “And you want me to prove it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t want to marry a man who will treat me like that.”

  “How did you get my name, Miss Brown?”

  “I looked you up in the book. When I saw where your office was, I thought that you must be good.”

  “I can meet you sometime tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather meet tonight. I don’t think I’ll get any sleep until this thing is settled.”

  “Well,” the detective hesitated. “I have a meeting at ten and then I’m going to see my girlfriend.” It was a private joke, one that the young Miss Brown would never understand.

  “Maybe I can meet you before you see your girlfriend,” Karmen suggested. “It should only take a few minutes.”

  They agreed on a pub on Houston, two blocks east of where Gert Longman lived on Elizabeth Street.

  Just as Leonid was removing the hooked earpiece from his ear Craig Arman entered the bistro. He was a large white man with a broad, kind face. Even the broken nose made him seem more vulnerable than dangerous. He wore faded blue jeans and a T-shirt under a large loose knit sweater. There was a pistol somewhere underneath all that fabric, Leonid knew that. Nestor Bendix’s street accountant never went unarmed.

  “Leo,” Arman said.

  “Craig.”

  The small table that Leonid had chosen was behind a pillar, removed from the rest of the crowd in the popular bistro.

  “Cops got their package,” Arman said. “Our guy was in and out of his place in ten minutes. A quick call downtown and now he’s in the Tombs. Just like you said.”

  “That means I can pay the rent,” Leonid replied.

  Arman smiled and Leonid felt a few ounces being placed on his thigh under the table.

  “Well, I got to go,” Arman said then. “Early to bed, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Leonid agreed.

  Most of Nestor’s boys didn’t have much truck with the darker races. The only reason Nestor ever called was because Leonid was the best at his trade.

  LEONID CAUGHT A CAB on Seventh Avenue that took him to Blarney’s Clover on Houston.

  The girl sitting at the far end of the bar was everything Katrina had once been, except she was blond and her looks would never fade. She had a porcelain face with small, lovely features. No makeup except for a hint of pale lip gloss.

  “Mr. McGill?”

  “Leo.”

  “I’m so relieved that you came to meet me,” she said.

  She was wearing tan riding pants and a coral blouse. There was a white raincoat folded over her lap. Her eyes were the kind of brown that some artist might call red. Her hair was cut short—boyish but sexy. Her tinted lips were ready to kiss babies’ butts and laugh.

  Leonid took a deep breath and said, “I charge five hundred a day—plus expenses. That’s mileage, equipment rentals, and food after eight hours on the job.”

  He had just received twelve thousand dollars from Craig Arman, but business was business.

  The girl handed him a large manila envelope.

  “This is his full name and address. I have also included a photograph and the address of the office where he works. There’s also eight hundred dollars in it. You probably won’t need more than that because I’m almost sure that he’ll be seeing her tomorrow evening.”

  “What you drinkin’, guy?” the bartender, a lovely-faced Asian boy, asked.

  “Seltzer,” the detective asked. “Hold the rocks.”

  The bartender smiled or sneered, Leonid wasn’t sure which. He wanted a scotch with his fizzy water but the ulcer in his stomach would keep him up half the night if he had it.

  “Why?” Leonid asked the beautiful girl.

  “Why do I want to know?”

  “No. Why do you think he’s going to see her tomorrow night?”

  “Because he told me that he had to go with his boss to see The Magic Flute at the Met. But there’s no opera scheduled tomorrow.”

  “You seem to have it all worked out yourself. Why would you need a detective?”

  “Because of Dick’s mother,” Karmen Brown said. “She told me that I wasn’t worthy of her son. She said that I was common and coarse and that I was just using him.”

  The anger twisted Karmen’s face until even her ethereal beauty turned into something ugly.

  “And you want to rub her face in it?” Leonid asked. “Why wouldn’t she be happy that her boy found another girl?”

  “I think that the woman he’s seeing is married, and older, way older. If I could get pictures of them, then when I leave him, at least she won’t be so smug.”

  Leonid wondered if that would be enough to hurt Dick’s mother. He also wondered why Karmen suspected that Dick was seeing an older married woman. He had a lot of questions but didn’t ask them. Why question a cash cow? After all, he had two rents to pay.

  The detective looked over the information and glanced at the cash, held together by an oversized paper clip, while the young bartender placed the water by his elbow.

  The photograph was of a man he took to be Richard Mallory. He was a young white man whose face seemed unfinished. There was a mustache that wasn’t quite thick enough and a mop of brown hair that would always defy a comb. He seemed uncomfortable standing there in front of the skating rink at Rockefeller Center.

  “Okay, Miss Brown,” Leonid said. “I’ll take it on. Maybe we’ll both get lucky and it’ll be over by tomorrow night.”

  “Karma,” she said. “Call me Karma. Everybody does.”

  LEONID GOT DOWN to Elizabeth Street a little after ten-thirty. He rang Gert’s bell and shouted his name into the security microphone. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the roar of a passing motorcycle.

  Gert Longman lived in a small studio on the third floor of a stucco building put up in the fifties. The ceiling was low but the room was pretty big, and Gert had set it up nicely. There was a red sofa and a mahogany coffee table with cherrywood cabinets that had glass doors along the far wall. She had no kitchen but there was a miniature refrigerator in one corner with a coffee percolator and a toaster on top. Gert also had a CD player. When Leonid got there she was playing Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter tunes.

  Leonid appreciated the music and said so.

  “I like it,” Gert said, somehow managing to negate Leonid’s compliment.

  She was a dark-skinned woman whose mother had come from the Spanish side of Hispaniola. Gert didn’t speak with an accent, though. She didn’t even know the Spanish tongue. Actually, Gert knew nothing about her history. She was proud to say of herself that she was just as much an American as any Daughter of the American Revolution.

  She sat on the southern end of the sofa.

  “Did Nestor pay you yet?” Gert asked.

  “You know, I been missing you, Gertie,” Leonid said, thinking about her satin skin and the fortyish woman in the teenybopper dress.

  “That’s done, Leo,” Gert said. “That was over a long time ago.”

  “You must still have needs.”

  “Not for you.”

  “One time you told me you loved me,” Leonid replied.

  “That was after you told me that you weren’t married.”

&nbs
p; Leonid sat down a few inches away from her. He touched her knuckle with two fingers.

  “No,” Gert said.

  “Come on, baby. It’s hard as a boil down there.”

  “And I’m dry to the bone.”…but to a woman a man is life, Ella sang.

  Leonid sat back and shoved his right hand into his pants pocket.

  After Karmen Brown had left him at Barney’s Clover, Leonid ducked into the john and counted out Gert’s three thousand from the twelve Craig Arman had laid on his lap. He took the wad from his pocket.

  “You could at least give me a little kiss on my boil for all this,” he said.

  “I could lance it, too.”

  Leonid chuckled and Gert grinned. They’d never be lovers again, but she liked his ways. He could see that in her eyes.

  Maybe he should have left Katrina.

  He handed her the roll of hundred-dollar bills and asked, “Could anybody find a trail from Joe Haller to you?”

  “Uh-uh. No. I worked in a whole ’nother office from him.”

  “How did you find out about his record?”

  “Ran off a list of likely employees for the company and did a background search on about twenty.”

  “From your desk?”

  “From a public library computer terminal.”

  “Can’t they trace you back on that?” Leonid asked.

  “No. I bought an account with a Visa number I got from Jackie P. It’s some poor slob from St. Louis. There’s no tracing that. What’s wrong, Leo?”

  “Nuthin’,” the detective said. “I just want to be careful.”

  “Haller’s a dog,” Gert added. “He’d been doin’ them girls around there for months. And when Cynthia Athol’s husband found out and came after him, Joe beat him so bad that he had to go to the hospital. Broke his collarbone. He beat Chris Small with a strap just two weeks ago.”

  When Nestor asked Leonid to find him a patsy for a midday crime, Leonid came to Gert, and she went to work as a temp for Amberson’s Financials. All she had to do was come up with a guy with a record who might have been part of the heist; a guy who no one could connect with Nestor.

  She did him one better. She came up with a guy that no one liked.

  Haller had robbed a convenience store twelve years before, when he was eighteen. And now he was a gigolo with some kind of black belt in something. He liked to overwhelm the silly office secretaries with his muscles and his big thing. He didn’t mind if their significant others found out because he believed he could take on almost any man one on one.

  Gert had been told that he once said, “Any woman with a real man wouldn’t let me take her like that.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gert said. “He deserves whatever happens to him, and they’ll never follow it back to me.”

  “Okay,” Leonid said.

  He touched her knuckle again.

  “Don’t.”

  He let his fingers trail up toward her wrist.

  “Please, Leo. I don’t want to wrestle with you.”

  Leonid’s breath was shallow and the erection was pressing against his pants. But he moved away.

  “I better be going,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Gert agreed. “Go home to your wife.”

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to get through security at the Empire State Building. Leonid worked late at least three nights a week.

  He didn’t want to go home after Gert had turned him down.

  He never knew why he took Kartrina back in.

  He never knew why he did anything except if it had to do with the job.

  Leonid became a PI because he was too short to qualify for the NYPD when he was eligible. They changed the requirements soon after that, but by then he’d already been busted for unlawful entry.

  He didn’t care. The private sector was more lucrative, and he could work his own hours.

  HE FOUND a Richard Mallory in the phone book that had the same address that Karmen Brown had typed out on her fiancé’s fact sheet. Leonid dialed the number. Someone answered on the third ring.

  “Hello,” a tremulous man’s voice asked.

  “BobbiAnne there?” Leonid asked in one of his dozen accents.

  “What?”

  “BobbiAnne. She there?”

  “You have the wrong number.”

  “Oh. All right,” Leonid said and then hung up.

  For a dozen minutes by the big clock on the wall Leonid thought about the voice of the man who might have been Richard Mallory. Leonid thought that he could tell the nature of anyone if he could talk to them just as they were roused out of a deep sleep.

  It was 2:34 a.m., and Richard, if that was Richard, sounded like a straightforward guy, a working stiff, somebody who didn’t cross the line over into the Life.

  This was important to Leonid. He didn’t want to get involved following some guy who might turn around and blow his head off.

  AT HALF PAST THREE he called Gert.

  “—six-two-oh-nine,” the recording of her voice said after five rings. “I’m not available right now but if you leave a message I’ll be sure to call you back.”

  “Gertie, it’s Leo I’m sorry about before. I miss you, honey. Maybe we can have dinner tomorrow night. You know—I’ll make it up to you.”

  He didn’t hang up for a few seconds more, hoping that Gert was listening and would decide to pick up.

  THE BUZZER WOKE HIM. The clock had it just past nine. The window was filled with cloud—just a pillowy white gauze that didn’t give three inches’ visibility.

  The buzzer jangled his dull mind again. Another long ring. But this time Leonid wasn’t awake enough to have fear. He stumbled down the hall in the same suit he’d been wearing for over twenty-four hours.

  When he opened the front door the two thugs pushed in.

  One was black with a bald head and gold-rimmed glasses, while the other was white with thick greasy hair.

  They each had five inches on Leonid.

  “The Wyants want forty-nine hundred,” the black man said. His mouth on the inside was the color of gingivitis. His eyes behind the lenses had a yellowy tint.

  “Forty-six,” Leonid corrected groggily.

  “That was yesterday, Leon. That interest is a motherfucker.” The black man closed the door and the white one moved to Leonid’s left.

  The white hooligan grinned and Leonid felt a hatred in his heart that was older than his Communist father’s father.

  The white man had coarse chestnut hair that had been hacked rather than cut. His eyes were bisected between blue and brown and his lips were ragged, as if he had spent a portion of his earlier life soul-kissing a toothy leopard.

  “We wake you up?” the black collector asked, just now remembering his manners.

  “Li’l bit,” Leonid said, stifling a yawn. “How you been, Bilko?”

  “Okay, Leon. I hope you got the money, ’cause if you don’t they told us to bust you up.”

  The white man snickered in anticipation.

  Leonid reached into his breast pocket and came out with the thick brown envelope he’d received the night before.

  While counting out the forty-nine hundred-dollar bills, Leonid had a familiar sensation: the feeling of never having as much money as he thought he did. After his debt and interest to the Wyants, this month’s rent and last on his apartment, after his wife’s household expenses and his own bills, he would be broke and still three months behind on his office rent.

  This made him even angrier. He’d need Karmen Brown’s money and more if he was going to keep his head above water. And that white fool just kept on grinning, his head like a wobbling tenpin begging to fall down.

  Leonid handed the money to Bilko, who counted it slowly while the white goon licked his ragged lips.

  “I think you should tip us for havin’ to come all the way up here to collect, Leon,” the white man said.

  Bilko looked up and grinned. “Leon don’t tip the help, Norman. He’s got his pride.”

  “I
knock that outta him right quick,” Norman said.

  “I’d like to see you try it, white boy,” Leonid dared. Then he looked at Bilko to see if he had to take on two at once.

  “It’s between you two,” the black capo said, holding up one empty hand and one filled with Leonid’s green.

  Norman was faster than he looked. He laid a beefy fist into Leonid’s jaw, knocking the middle-aged detective back two steps.

  “Whoa!” Bilko cried.

  Norman’s frayed lips curved into a smile. He was looking at Leonid as if he expected him to fall down.

  That was the mistake all of Leonid’s sparring partners made at Gordo’s gym. They thought the fat man couldn’t take a punch. Leonid came in low and hard, hitting the big white man three times at the belt line. The third punch bent Norman over enough to be a sucker for a one-two uppercut combination. The only thing that kept Leonid’s foe from falling was the wall. He hit it hard, putting his hands up reflexively to ward off the attack he knew was coming.

  Leonid got three good blows to Norman’s head before Bilko pushed him away.

  “That’s enough now, boy,” Bilko said. “That’s enough. I need him on his feet to get back out on the street.”

  “Take the asshole outta here, then, Bilko! Take him outta here before I kill his ass!”

  Dutifully Bilko helped the half-conscious, bleeding white man away from the wall. He pointed him at the door and then turned to Leonid.

  “See you next month, Leon,” he said.

  “No,” Leonid replied, breathing hard from the exertion. “You won’t be seeing me again.”

  Bilko laughed as he led Norman toward the elevators.

  Leonid slammed the door behind them. He was still in a rage. After all his pay he was still broke and hard-pressed by fools like Bilko and Norman. Gert wouldn’t take his calls, and he didn’t even have a bed that he could sleep in alone. He would have killed that ugly fool if it wasn’t for Bilko.

  Leonid Trotter McGill let out a roar and kicked a hole in the paneled veneer of his nonexistent receptionist’s desk. Then he picked up the phone, called Lenny’s Delicatessen on Thirty-fifth Street, and ordered three jelly doughnuts and a large cup of coffee with cream.