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 and me and my crew got on his ass. So 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 it was gone,” 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 P.I. 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 beauty in her day. Svelte and raven-haired, from Latvia or Lithuania-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 east European 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 dime.
“What’s for dinner, Kat?” he asked, breathing hard after scaling the five flights to their 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 boy. 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 that that was part of his release agreement.
Twill was the only one who smiled when Leonid entered the room.
“Hey, pop,” he said. “Guess what? 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 nine-fifteen. 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.
When the call was answered Leonid could tell that she was outside.
“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 fiance 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 Elizabeth Street, where Gert Longman lived.
Just as Leonid was removing the hooked earphone 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 hidden somewhere in 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.”
“Tha
t 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 that Leonid was the best at his trade.
~ * ~
Leonid caught a cab on Seventh Avenue that took him to Barney’s Clover on Houston.
The girl sitting at the far end of the bar was everything Katrina had once been except she was blonde 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 Carnegie Hall. But there is no opera scheduled.”
“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 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 whom 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 Rockefeller Center skating rink.
“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 cherry wood 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 from the French bistro.
“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.”
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 you to Joe Haller?”
“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 the 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 no
w 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.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 28
