“Yeah.”
“Do you have a life insurance policy? I’m just worried for the kids.”
“I got better than that. I got a life insurance philosophy.”
“What’s that?” Katrina asked.
“As long as I’m worth more alive than dead I won’t have to worry about banana peels and bad broth.”
Katrina sighed and Leonid climbed out of the bed.
Just as he got to the small TV room, Twill came in the front door.
“It’s three in the morning, Twill,” Leonid said.
“Sorry, Dad. But I got into this thing with the Rafferty sisters and Bingham. It was their parents’ car, so I had to wait until they were ready to go home. I told them that I was on probation but they didn’t care—”
“You don’t have to lie to me, boy. Come on, let’s sit.”
They sat across from each other over a low coffee table. Twill lit up a menthol cigarette and Leonid enjoyed the smoke secondhand.
Twill was thin and on the short side but he carried himself with understated self-importance. The bigger kids left him alone and the girls were always calling. His father, whoever he was, had some Negro in him. Leonid was grateful for that. Twill was the son he felt closest to.
“Somethin’ wrong, Dad?”
“Why you ask that?”
“’Cause you’re not ridin’ me. Somethin’ happen?”
“An old friend died today.”
“A guy?”
“No. A woman named Gert Longman.”
“When’s the funeral?”
“I, I don’t know,” Leonid said, realizing that he never thought about who would bury his ex-lover. Her parents were dead. Her two brothers were in prison.
“I’ll go with you, Dad. Just tell me when it is and I’ll cut school.”
With that, Twill got up and headed for his bedroom. At the door he stopped and turned.
“Hey, Dad.”
“What?”
“What happened to the guy slammed you in the jaw?”
“They had to carry him out.”
Twill gave the father of his heart a thumbs-up and then moved into the darkness of the doorway.
LEONID WAS AT WORK at five. It was dark in Manhattan and in New Jersey across the river. He’d put twenty-five hundred dollars in Katrina’s wallet, dropped the film off at Krome Addict Four Hour Developing Service, and bought an egg sandwich with Bermuda onions and American cheese. He didn’t turn on the lights. As the morning wore on, the dawn slowly invaded his room. The sky cleared and then opened—after a while it turned blue.
Carson Kitteridge came to the door a little before seven.
Leonid ushered him to the back office, where they took their regular seats.
“Did you and Gertie have a fight, Leon?” the cop asked.
“No. Not really. I mean, I might’a got a little fresh and she had to show me the door, but I was sorry. I wanted to take her out to dinner. You’re not dumb enough to think that I would have killed Gert?”
“If somebody gave me information that you were involved with John Wilkes Booth I’d take the time to check it out, Leon. That’s just the kind of guy I think you are.”
“Listen, man. I have never killed anybody. Never pulled a trigger, never ordered a job done. I didn’t kill Gert.”
“You called her,” Kitteridge said. “You called her from that phone on your desk just about when she was getting killed. It speaks to your innocence, but one wonders what you had to talk to her about at that hour, on that night. What were you apologizing for?”
“I told you—I got a little fresh.”
“And here I thought you had a wife.”
“Listen. She was my friend. I liked her—a lot. I don’t know who did that to her but if I find out you can be sure that I’ll let you know.”
Kitteridge made a silent clapping gesture.
“Get the fuck out my office,” Leonid said.
“I have a few more questions.”
“Ask ’em out in the hall.” Leonid stood up from his chair. “I’m through with you.”
The policeman waited a moment. Maybe he thought that Leonid would sit back down. But as the seconds ticked by on the wall clock it began to dawn on him that Leonid’s feelings were actually hurt.
“You’re serious?” he asked.
“As a heart attack. Now get your ass outta here and come back with a warrant if you expect to talk to me again.”
Kitteridge stood.
“I don’t know what you’re playing here, Leon,” he said. “But you can’t put out the law.”
“But I can put out an asshole who doesn’t have a warrant.”
The lieutenant delayed another moment and then began to move.
Leonid followed him down the hall and to the door, which he slammed behind the lawman. He kicked another hole in the front desk and marched back to his office, where his gut began to ache from whiskey and bile.
“YES, MS. BROWN,” Leonid was saying to his client on the telephone later that afternoon. “I have the photographs right here. It wasn’t an older woman like you suspected.”
“But it was a woman?”
“More like a girl.”
“Is there any question about their, um…their relationship?”
“No. There’s no doubt of the intimate nature of their relationship. What do you want me to do with these pictures, and how will we settle accounts?”
“Can you bring them to me? To my apartment? I’ll have the money you put out, and I have one more thing that I’d like you to do.”
“Sure, I’ll bring them to you, if that’s what you want. What’s the address?”
KARMEN BROWN LIVED on the sixth floor. He pressed the number she gave him, sixty-two. He found her waiting at the door.
The demure young thing had on a dark-brown leather skirt that wouldn’t keep her modest if she sat without crossing her legs. Her blouse had the top three buttons undone. She wasn’t a large-breasted girl, but what she had was mostly visible.
Her delicate features were serious but Leonid wouldn’t have called her brokenhearted.
“Come in, Mr. McGill.”
The apartment was small—like Gert’s.
There was a table in the middle with a brown manila folder on it.
Leonid held a similar folder in his right hand.
“Sit down,” Karmen said, gesturing toward a blue sofa.
In front of the couch was a small table holding up a decanter half filled with an amber fluid and flanked by two squat glasses.
Leonid opened the folder and reached for the photographs he’d taken.
She held up a hand to stop him.
“Will you join me in a drink first?” the young siren asked.
“I think I will.”
She poured, and they both slugged back hard.
She poured again.
After three stiff drinks, and with a new one in her glass, Karmen said, “I loved him more than anything you know.”
“Really?” Leonid said, his eyes drifting between her cleavage and her crossed legs. “He seemed like kind of a loser to me.”
“I would die for him,” she said, gazing steadily into Leonid’s eyes.
He brought out the dozen or so pictures.
“For this louse? He doesn’t even respect you—or her.” Leonid felt the whiskey behind his eyes and under his tongue. “Look at him with his hand under her dress like that.”
“Look at this,” she replied.
Leonid looked up to see her ample mound of pubic hair. Karmen had pulled up her skirt, revealing that she wore nothing underneath.
“This is my revenge,” she said. “You want it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonid answered, thinking that this was the other thing she wanted him to take care of.
He had been half-aroused since the last night he saw Gert. Not sexy, but prey to a sexual hunger. The whiskey set that hunger free.
She got down on her knees on the blue sofa and Leonid dropped his
pants. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this eager for sex. He felt like a teenager. But push as he would, he couldn’t press into her.
Finally she said, “Wait a minute, Daddy,” and reached around to lubricate his erection with her own saliva.
After his first full thrust he knew he was going to come. He couldn’t do anything about it.
“Do it, Daddy! Do it!” she cried.
Leonid thought about Gert, realizing at that moment that he had always loved her, and about Katrina, who he was never good enough for. He thought about that poor child so much in love with her man that she had to have revenge on him by giving her love away to an overweight, middle-aged gumshoe.
All of that went through his mind but nothing could stand in the way of the pulsing rhythm. He was slamming against Karmen Brown’s slender backside. She was yelling. He was yelling.
And then it was over—just like that. Leonid didn’t even feel the ejaculation. It all blended into his violent, spasmodic attack.
Karmen had been thrown to the floor. She was crying.
He reached to help her up but she pulled away.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “Let me go.”
She was in a heap with her skirt up around her waist and the slick sheen of spit on her thighs.
Leonid pulled up his pants. He felt something like guilt about having had sex with the girl. She was only just a few years older than his wife’s girl, the daughter of the Chinese jeweler.
“You owe me three hundred dollars,” he said.
Maybe sometime in the future he’d tell someone that the best tail he ever had paid him three hundred dollars for the privilege.
“It’s in the envelope on the table. There’s a thousand dollars there. That and the ring and the bracelet he gave me. I want you to give them back to him. Take it and go. Go.”
Leonid tore open the envelope. There he found the money, a ring with a large emerald in it, and a tennis bracelet lined with quarter-carat diamonds.
“What do you want me to tell him?” Leonid asked.
“You won’t have to say a word.”
Leonid wanted to say something but he didn’t.
He went out the door, deciding to take the stairs rather than wait for the elevator.
On the first flight down he thought about Karmen Brown begging for sex and then crying so bitterly. On the third flight he started thinking about Gert. He wanted to reach out and touch her but she was gone.
On the first floor he passed a tattooed young man waiting at the elevator doors.
When Leonid glanced at the young man, he looked away.
He was wearing leather gloves.
Leonid went out the door and turned westward.
He took four steps, five.
He made it all the way to the end of the block, and it was then, when he had the urge to take off his jacket because of the heat, that he wondered why somebody would be wearing leather gloves on a hot day. He thought about the tattoos, and the image of a motorcycle came into his mind.
It had been parked right outside of Karmen Brown’s front door.
HE PRESSED EVERY BUZZER on the wall and someone let him in. He thought about taking the stairs but the elevator was there and open.
On the ride up he was trying to make sense out of it.
The doors slid open and he lurched toward Karmen’s apartment.
The young man with the tattooed arms was coming out. He jumped back and reached for his pocket but Leonid hit him. The young man took the punch hard but he held on to the pistol. Leonid grabbed his hand and they embraced, performing an intricate dance that revolved around their strengths and that gun. When the kid wrenched the pistol from Leonid’s hand, the heavier man let his weight go dead, and they fell to the floor. The gun went off.
Leonid felt a sharp pain at just about the place that his liver was situated. He leaped back from the motorcycle man, grabbing at his belly. There was blood on the lower half of his shirt.
“Shit!” he cried.
His mind went to November 1963. He was fifteen and devastated at the assassination of Kennedy. Then Oswald was shot by Ruby. Shot in the liver, and in excruciating pain.
That’s when Leonid realized that his pain had passed. He turned toward his opponent and saw that he was lying on his back, gasping for air. And then, mid-gasp, he stopped breathing.
Realizing that the blood on him was the kid’s, Leonid stood up.
Karmen lay on the floor in the corner, naked. Her eyes were open and very, very bloodshot. Her throat was dark from strangulation.
But she wasn’t dead.
When Leonid leaned over her, those destroyed eyes recognized him. A deep gurgling went off in her throat and she tried to hit him. She croaked a loud, inarticulate curse and actually sat up. The exertion was too much. She died in a sitting position, her head bowed over her knees.
There was no blood under her nails.
Why was she naked? Leonid wondered.
He went into the bathroom to check the tub—but it was dry.
He thought about calling the hospital but…
The kid had used a .22-caliber long-barrel pistol. Leonid was sure it was the pistol Nora Parsons said that she tossed seventeen years before.
In her wallet the dead girl’s license had the name Lana Parsons.
It was then that Leonid felt the heat from her jewelry and cash in his own pocket.
The killer had a backpack. It contained two envelopes. One was addressed to a lawyer named Mazer and the other to Nora Parsons in Montclair, New Jersey.
The letter to her mother included one of the photographs that Leonid had taken of Richard Mallory and his girlfriend.
Dear Mom,
While you were in the Bahamas with Richard last year I went to your house looking for anything that might have belonged to dad. You know that I loved him so much. I just thought you might have something I could remember him by.
I found a rusty old metal box in the garage. You still had the key in the hardware drawer. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that you hired a detective to prove that daddy was stealing from his company. He must have told you and you figured you could keep his money and your boyfriends while he was dying in prison.
I waited for a long time to figure out what to do about it. Finally I decided to use the man you used to kill daddy to break your heart. Here’s a picture of your precious Richard and his real girlfriend. The boy you say you love. The boy you sent through college. What do you think about that?
And I took the report Leonid McGill made about daddy. I’m sending it to my lawyer. Maybe he can prove some kind of conspiracy. I’m sure you framed daddy and if the lawyer can prove it then maybe they’ll send both of you to prison. Maybe even Mr. McGill would testify against you.
See you in court.
Your loving daughter,
Lana
To the lawyer she sent a yellowing and frayed report that Leonid had made many years before. It detailed how Nora’s husband kept a secret account with money that he’d embezzled from a discretionary fund he controlled. Leonid remembered the meeting with Mrs. Parsons. She’d said that she couldn’t trust a man who was a thief. Leonid didn’t argue. He was just there to collect his check.
Lana had included a copy of the letter to her mother in the lawyer’s envelope. She asked him to help her get justice for her father.
Leonid washed his hands carefully and then removed any sign that he had been in the girl’s apartment. He rubbed down every surface and the glass he drank from. He gathered the evidence he’d brought and the unmailed letters, then buttoned his coat over the bloody shirt and hurried away from the crime scene.
TWILL WAS WEARING a dark-blue suit with a pale-yellow shirt and maroon tie that had a wavering blue line orbiting its center. Leonid wondered where his son got such a fine suit but he didn’t ask.
They were the only two in the small funeral-parlor chapel where Gert Longman lay in an open pine coffin. She looked smaller than she had in
life. Her stiff face seemed to be fashioned from wax.
The Wyant brothers had fronted him fifty-five hundred dollars for the funeral. They gave him their preferential rate of two points a week.
Leonid lingered at the casket while Twill stood to the side—half a step behind him.
Behind the pair, two rows of folding chairs sat like a mute crowd of spectators. The director had set the room for a service, but Leonid didn’t know if Gert was religious. Neither did he know any of her friends.
After the forty-five minutes they were allotted Twill and Leonid left the Little Italy funeral home. The came out into the bright sun shining on Mott Street.
“Hey, Leon,” a voice called from behind them.
Twill turned but Leonid didn’t need to.
Carson Kitteridge, dressed in a dark-gold suit, walked up.
“Lieutenant. You met my son Twill.”
“Isn’t it a school day, son?” the cop asked.
“Grief leave, Officer,” Twill said easily. “Even prison lets up in cases like that.”
“What you want, Carson?” Leonid said.
He looked up over the policeman’s head. The sky was what Gert used to call blue-gorgeous. That was back in the days when they were still lovers.
“I thought that you might want to know about Mick Bright.”
“Who?”
“We got an anonymous call five days ago,” Carson said. “It was about a disturbance in an apartment building on the Upper East Side.”
“Yeah?”
“When the officers got there they found a dead girl named Lana Parsons and this Mick Bright—also dead.”
“Who killed ’em?” Leonid asked, measuring his breath.
“Looks like a rape and robbery. The kid was an addict. He knew the girl from the Performing Arts high school.”
“But you said that he was dead, too?”
“I did, didn’t I? Best the detectives could tell, the kid was high and fell on his own gun. It went off and nicked his heart.”
While saying this, Carson stared deeply into McGill’s eyes.
Twill glanced at his father and then looked away.
“Stranger things have happened,” Leonid said.
Leonid had long since realized that Lana also found the pistol in that metal box of her mother’s. He knew why she’d killed Gert and had Bright kill her. She wanted to hurt him and then send him off to prison, like he’d done to her father.
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