“Yeah. Maybe too wise.”
“What did Eddie say?”
“He hugged me. Threw his arms around my neck and pressed his cheek to mine. I think he must have been hoping for a sign to go back home.”
“To Park Avenue,” Marella said.
“To Camille.”
“So did he?”
“She came down this morning, paid my fee, and took her man to the Belmont Arms.”
“That’s a wonderful story,” Marella Herzog said. She placed a hand on mine.
“Why don’t you tell me one,” I suggested, turning my palm upward to press against hers.
“What would you like to hear?”
“Why a stunningly beautiful woman like you would ask to sit next to an old, off-the-rack straphanger like me.”
“You looked like a strong man and so I wanted to sit down next to you.”
“Not before you asked Haystack back there,” I said.
“He looked a little stronger,” she admitted with a smile.
“And what use do you have for strong men?”
“You saw the guy who walked by?”
I nodded.
“He works for a man that I was engaged to down in DC. I saw him on the Acela to New York and got off in Philly. I guess he saw that and followed me.”
“And what does this man want?” I asked.
“To take me back.”
“Why?” I said, thinking about Camille. She was a plain woman with naturally blond hair and a figure made for a ’40s film. She asked me to find Eddie, and when I did she came to him.
“He broke off the engagement. I’m pretty sure he wants the ring back.”
“Why not give it to him?”
“Because it became my property when he gave it and I accepted,” Marella said with all the commitment of an outer-borough storefront lawyer.
“But if he’s so adamant why not let him have it anyway?”
“Because I will not be intimidated by thuggery.” Something about her choice of words seemed…unnatural.
“If that was true you wouldn’t be using me as a buffer.”
She turned to look out the window. We were entering the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey.
After a moment or two she said, “I sold it, got quite a bit of money.” Then she turned to face me again. “Are you a strong man, Mr. McGill?”
“I think so.”
“Can I trust you?”
“In what circumstance do you mean?”
“I need protection.”
I pretended to think about her request, but the answer was a foregone conclusion. After a beat, maybe two, I nodded. “Sure.”
“Sure I can trust you or sure you will help me?”
“Both.”
“And, if you don’t mind me asking, why should I trust you?”
“Because I work for money.”
Marella’s smile seemed to enhance her forest scent.
3
“My bag is two cars up,” she told me a few minutes before we pulled into Penn Station.
“Let’s go,” I said, in a tone that I hoped exuded simple certainty.
We jostled through the cars as the few other passengers were standing up, gathering their jackets and bags.
The train’s swaying made our walking like a conga line on a drunken beach somewhere.
“That’s it,” she said, pointing at an overhead rack. It was a substantial black bag festooned with large pink polka dots. The decorations were frivolous so I was a little surprised at the weight of the suitcase.
“You put this up there yourself?” I asked and then grunted, lowering the bag to the floor.
“Two young men helped me,” she said.
It has always amazed me how a woman’s eyes and her words can find a direct line to my animal heart.
I wrangled the festive bag out onto the platform, then rolled it with Marella at my side. We rode up a half-stage escalator into the middle aisles of Penn Station. She was looking around nervously but I stared straight ahead. I had already seen the man-knife in the reflection of a window on our train. He was close behind us but nearly hidden behind a redcap’s overfull cart.
Even when I lost sight of him I knew he was near us somewhere.
I made a turn down a fairly empty corridor and Marella asked, “Where are we going?” There was fear in her voice, but whether it was due to her pursuer or maybe to some danger I represented, I could not tell.
“Baggage elevator,” I said. “This sucker is too heavy to lug up the stairs. What you got in here anyway?”
“My whole life.”
“That’s either way too little or far too much,” I said as we reached the dull and pitted chrome doors of the elevator car.
I pressed the Up button but the light was out. I couldn’t remember a time when it worked.
“You’re different than you were on the train,” she said as we stood there.
“Then I was on the train,” I said, “now I’m on the job.”
“That reminds me, what are you charging to carry my bag?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Well…if all I have to do is walk you to a taxi I’ll accept a handshake and a kiss on the cheek. But if I have to play bodyguard and make sure that you’re unharmed then the going rate is fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Fifteen hundred!” she exclaimed with a broad smile on her lovely mouth.
“I couldn’t be trusted for less.”
Her nostrils flared and I wondered if I had paid my latest life insurance premium.
“Are you really as tough as you act, Mr. McGill?”
“I truly hope that neither one of us has to find that out today.”
The elevator doors opened and people began to disgorge; five travelers and a bright-eyed redcap whom I’d run into over the years ferrying first-class and infirm passengers along the uncharted routes of the station. His name was Freddy Mason, and his wife I thought might have been Yee.
Marella and I stood aside as the crowd moved past. Then Freddy came out pushing his cart. When he saw me he nodded and frowned. Then, seeing my pickup client, he smiled.
There was no one else waiting for the elevator, which I regretted, and there seemed to be no one else around. So I ushered Marella Herzog into the empty chamber and girded myself for what I knew was coming.
When she was against the corrugated back wall of the metal car I set the suitcase up in front of her—to create an extra buffer. I looked up at the polished metal reflector in the left corner and saw him coming even before Marella yelled, “Watch out!”
He timed it almost perfectly. The doors were already closing when he lunged through. There was something in his left hand. It could have been a pistol but I suspected a more intimate weapon. Either way I’d have to turn before he could expect me to cower in fear.
All those years working out in Gordo’s boxing gym had honed my reflexes until they almost had minds of their own. I couldn’t go ten rounds anymore but in a profession like mine survival was rarely about endurance.
Already low to the ground, I crouched down and spun on my left heel. I grabbed his left wrist and broke it with one fast torquing motion but I had no intention of stopping there. I raised up and delivered a left uppercut to the tall man’s jaw before seeing the hunting knife he had dropped when his wristbone broke. I grabbed his head with my right hand and slammed it against the wall. It bounced very nicely and my client’s stalker, whoever he was, fell unconscious to the floor.
I glanced up at Marella. If she had any response it was not in her face.
Moving quickly, I set the olive-skinned man in the back corner to the right so that it looked as if he was sitting there, grabbing some sleep where he could. That way the first thing an unsuspecting passenger might have thought was that he was a drunk using a public conveyance as his bedroom.
I noticed that he was still breathing.
That was fortunate.
Our luck held, because there
was no one waiting for the baggage elevator. We had taken nineteen steps before someone yelled for help.
Twenty-eight steps later we were taking the escalator up to the Eighth Avenue exit. It was there we saw four uniformed cops come barreling down the stairs.
“Should we try to run?” Marella whispered in my ear. Those were the first words she’d spoken since the encounter.
“Only if we want to get caught.”
—
There was a long line waiting for cabs at that time in the afternoon. The sirens of two police cars and one ambulance wailed to a stop not half a block away from us. While policemen and paramedics hurried into the station, Marella and I attached ourselves to the end of the taxi line.
“I guess I owe you some money,” she said after a few minutes’ wait.
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Will you take a check?”
“No.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. She wasn’t more than half an inch taller than I but her caramel heels added an inch to that.
“I like strong men,” she said.
“Why? So they can protect you?”
“I like to watch them come.”
A woman standing in front of us turned slightly, cocking her ear in our direction.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Underneath, on top, or looking over his belly button,” she said. “Strong men who know their strength give it up because they don’t have to pretend.”
The woman in front of us on line touched the shoulder of the guy she was with. They were both white and in their twenties. She leaned over to whisper something and he turned to look.
“Is that offer in lieu of my fee?” I asked.
“Next!” the cab controller shouted. He might have said it more than once.
The nosy couple realized that he was calling to them and reluctantly returned to their lives.
“I’m staying at the Hotel Brown in the East Sixties,” she said.
“I know the place.”
“I should have the money in the next hour or so.”
I took out a business card and handed it to her.
“Call me when you’re ready to pay up,” I said, and she smiled.
“I guess you are as tough as you think,” she said.
“Next!”
4
Marella Herzog’s cab pulled away leaving me a little stunned. My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman’s club at twilight. It was this unusually calm and yet powerful beat that allowed me to go back into Penn Station. I guess I felt somewhat invulnerable and unconcerned with consequences or danger.
The main hall of the transportation hub was a little more frenetic than usual; like an ant colony that had just perceived some kind of physical threat. I counted nine police uniforms and actually saw the wheeled gurney that carried our unconscious attacker toward the front exit.
I was taking a greater chance than most civilians because half the NYPD had at least passing familiarity with my face. In my younger days I had been the danger. I was a private investigator who only worked for underworld figures setting up other crooks for their crimes. I had relinquished my evil ways but the police never forget and rarely forgive, so cops who weren’t even out of high school when I was active knew my mug shot.
I wasn’t worried because the police would have assumed that our attacker’s attacker had fled. Also I wasn’t going to be in the area of their ad hoc investigation for more than thirty seconds.
At the bottom of the escalator I took a hard left past the public toilets, through a short hall that housed a newsstand and a doughnut shop, and then down a concrete stairway into the long hall that led to the station’s commuter trains.
—
The lower-level arcade was a triple-wide passage with dozens of shops selling everything from orange pop to used books. If you were on your way out of the city, headed for some suburban home, you could get whatever you needed on that unnamed, underground, two-block-long street.
Strolling among the crowd, I considered the fight I’d just had along with the concept of organized sport. One day elevator fighting might become a recognized competition. The walls, floor, and ceiling would be made from transparent, steel-hard plastic and its audience mostly young and dissatisfied. The gladiators might enter the car on the first floor and travel upward, stopping at each stage to take on another challenger. The height of the ride would be the classification of the fighter, and anyone who made it to the top would be champion.
Why not?
Halfway down the arcade was an upscale coffee shop named Cheep’s. There was no logo for the espresso joint so I never knew if the name came from the false promise of lower prices or the cry of a small bird. At any rate, Cheep’s had two young black women and an older black man taking orders and serving overpriced coffee in paper cups. There were four small tables in the recess, three of which were most often untenanted because commuters were defined by forward motion, not sitting and sipping in a man-made hole.
One small round table had a regular occupant, however—a man known to most as the Professor. An older and diminutive white man, the Professor always wears a loose-fitting, threadbare suit, the color of dust. His cotton T-shirt is invariably navy and his back forever against the wall. The Professor is one of the many sources I go to to find out what’s happening in my town.
I got on line for coffee, watching the passageway peripherally. A few cops walked down looking for someone to raise his hand and say, “I did it. I beat up the guy holding the knife and then came down here to hide.”
“Can I help you, mistah?” the young woman who took orders asked. Her straightened hair was maybe two feet long and equal parts pink, turquoise, and dark brown. She had golden pins through either side of her upper lip and eyes that had seen things.
“Large coffee,” I said. “Dark roast.”
For some reason my order, or its delivery, made her smile. As had been its purpose since humans became a species, the smile socialized me.
“How are you today?” I asked.
“Rather be out there with you, Mr. McGill.”
My reaction to being recognized was twofold. First I lost the feeling of invulnerability. She had pierced my imagined force field with just a few words. Then I wondered who she was. Maybe twenty and a few pounds over the limit imposed by American TV, movies, and fashion magazines…
“Sherry, right?” I said. “Shelly’s friend.”
“That’s good,” she complimented. “I was only over at your house one time.”
“Can you guys hurry it up,” a man’s voice said from behind. “Some people have trains to catch.”
I turned around, the full 180 degrees. He was, of course, a few inches taller, what passes for white, and younger than me by two decades. But that wasn’t enough. I’d lost my immunity to injury but my super strength was solidly in place. The gray-suited man gazed at me with his light brown eyes and then looked away.
When I turned back, my coffee was there in front of me, Sherry smiling over it.
“How much I owe you?”
“This one’s on the house,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“If you come back sometime in the morning it won’t be so busy.”
“I will,” I said and then moved to the side.
I had never been flirted with by one of my daughter’s friends. At most other times I’d have probably shrugged it off, but Marella’s explosive intrusion had torn up the tracks of my regular route and I was now on foot in unfamiliar territory.
—
“Professor,” I said, standing at his table.
“Leonid,” he answered in a soft, sophisticated tone of erudition. “How are you?”
“Pretty good,” I said. “I was passing through and thought I’d drop by and say hello.”
“Sit down. Drink your coffee.”
I lowered into the chair
at his side so that I could see out and see him at the same time.
“How are you?” the Professor asked again.
“My wife tried to commit suicide a few months back,” I said. “Dealing with her, I may have gone off orbit a bit.”
The Professor was one of the select few whose vision I trusted. There are all kinds of categories in the streetwise intelligence business. There was Sweet Lemon Charles, who had given up the Life for poetry but still wandered the old streets and passed rumors that most likely had roots in reality. Alphonse Rinaldo was the most powerful man in city government and yet he had no official post. You only went to Rinaldo for Category 5 difficulties. Luke Nye had specific information on criminals only.
But the Professor was another thing completely. Born Drake Imago, he was once an Ivy League philosophy professor teaching in the gulfs between Hegel and Marx, Marx and the Frankfurt School, the Frankfurt School and certain political activists in ’60s European and American politics. He’d had a rivalry with another professor, a man named Hendricks, for years. Hendricks always stayed ahead of the Professor, getting the bigger grants, awards, and more prestigious accolades.
One day the Professor came home to find Hendricks in flagrante delicto with his wife. After calling the police, the Professor sat down to his manual typewriter and, with his hands still wet with the blood of his victims, typed a confession starting with the first crime committed against him by Hendricks: when he stole the Professor’s idea about Obfuscative Language and the Tyranny of Philosophy.
Receiving a life sentence, the Professor spent twelve years in maximum security—this because he showed no remorse for the brutality of his crime. During the first eighteen months he’d been beaten, raped, slashed, nearly starved to death by criminals that stole his food, and driven temporarily insane by the sights, sounds, and smells of nonstop human distress. That, as he is happy to tell all and sundry, was his basic education.
Then he met a young man named Bronk. When the Professor was being beset by a rat-faced con with tattoos all around the edges of his face, Bronk saved him and asked if he could write down what Bronk felt. Completely illiterate, Bronk had committed a string of armed robberies and was then incarcerated without having the chance to communicate with his family. His mother lived in the hills of Kentucky and didn’t have a phone. The Professor sat down with Bronk and after a series of twelve questions he crafted a letter that expressed things that Bronk had not even realized he felt.
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 2
