And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197)

by Mosley, Walter

  For the next ten and a half years Bronk and the Professor were cellmates, bosom buddies, and maybe even lovers. No one bothered the Professor after that, and he became a fount of information and advice for the gen pop of the maximum security prison.

  “I’m sorry,” the Professor said about my wife—Katrina. “How’s she doing now?”

  “Okay. All right. I have her in a sanatorium because she’s still a little loopy.”

  The old man gave a sad smile and sipped his coffee.

  You go to Sweet Lemon, Rinaldo, or Luke Nye when you want more or less specific help. The Professor is a thinker and a witness to the world whose insights change the lenses of perception.

  If an ex-con comes to him he might have a line on a legitimate day job or maybe a connection for something a little less savory. If you find yourself at a crossroads in life he’s the traffic light. And if you just drop by…who knows? The Professor’s eyes are always open, collecting data like a water filter catching all the impurities the seven seas have to offer.

  “Got anything for me, Drake?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen your son Twilliam walking back and forth down here a few times,” he said. “He was wearing tattered blue jeans and a T-shirt with a grease stain on the back hem.”

  “Twill was?”

  “He was indeed.”

  I finished my coffee, put a twenty-dollar bill down on the table, and bid the educated killer good-bye.

  5

  I reached Tivoli Rest Home a few minutes past 7:30 that evening. I decided to walk up to East Eighty-fourth rather than take a subway or taxi because the meals were served at 6:00 and the staff, mainly nuns, were strict about allowing their patients to eat in peace.

  “Mr. McGill,” Sister Alona Alfred said in greeting as I entered the admissions hall.

  “Evenin’, Sister.”

  “I haven’t seen you in a few days. I was wondering where you were.”

  “Down in Philadelphia doing a job.”

  “Were you successful?” she asked. Sister Alona was youngish, in her thirties, and had a complexion that a runway model would have slashed for. Her smile was both infectious and as far from seductive as one could get.

  “I reunited a married couple,” I said.

  “Bless you.”

  —

  Katrina’s private room was on the sixth floor of the nine-story building. I don’t think she’d left that floor since the day I delivered her six weeks earlier.

  The door was open so I didn’t knock. She was lying in the bed; actually she was languishing there. Her left arm was thrown up over her eyes and her right hand hung over the side of the mattress. The blankets were on the bed but not over her because the small room was warm. There had been a cold snap and the heat had been turned on—high.

  There was a chair and a window, pine flooring, gray-green walls, and a cream-colored ceiling that would not tolerate a very tall man. There was a vase of flowers, yellow pansies, on the writing desk she never used and a stack of fashion magazines that our daughter, Shelly, had brought a month before. They hadn’t been touched.

  I went to stand over her but said nothing.

  After a few moments she let the left arm fall to the side. Her pale eyes were staring at me. All I recognized was in that steady stare. Before she tried to kill herself Katrina’s beauty denied her fifty-five years. She could have been forty and, on her better days, thirty-five. She exercised and used all the right unguents to preserve the skin and eliminate wrinkles. But now her flesh seemed to sag and you could see all her years like Marley’s chains.

  “Leonid.”

  I sat. “Baby.”

  “I vas vorried about you.” Usually her inexplicable Swedish accent didn’t come out unless she was drunk. Maybe the drugs they had her on also caused it.

  “Just a job,” I said. “I told Twill to tell you that.”

  “He did. He came tvice and sent Mardi once. She seems a little vorried.”

  “How about Dimitri and Tatyana?”

  “She comes every morning before school but D gets too upset to see me like this.”

  The wounds from her attempted suicide were there on her wrists; jagged lacerations that had cut deep. She looked like she was dying, and our Dimitri loved her more than anything. Of course he’d stay away.

  “We should talk, Katrina.”

  Making a monumental effort, she pushed herself up until she could rest her back against the wall that abutted the head of her bed. In rising she seemed to shrug off a decade or so.

  “What is it, Leonid?” she asked.

  “I’m worried about you, baby. You don’t seem to be getting any better but the doctors all say that there’s nothing physically wrong.”

  “They ask me how I feel every Tuesday and I tell them that I have lost interest in living. Then they go away and I fall asleep again. I’ve been dreaming about my parents and my brother.” Somehow sitting upright stripped her of the accent from a country that she had never even visited.

  “So you still want to kill yourself?”

  “No,” she said, looking toward the small, shaded window. “No. I don’t want to live but I don’t have the will to try suicide again.”

  “Did you tell the doctors that?”

  “They never ask.”

  She turned her gaze to me. I wondered if I should take her home; maybe in familiar circumstances she might begin to feel better.

  “Do you remember when we used to watch the television in the little front room after the children were in bed?” she asked.

  “Whenever I wasn’t on a job.”

  “I’d make you another supper and you would sometimes rub my feet.”

  “I always liked that fourth meal. You’re the best cook in the world,” I said, and I meant it, too.

  “Remember what you would say when we watched Law & Order and all those crazy crimes?”

  “ ‘Sometimes I think that everybody in the world is crazy,’ ” I said, quoting myself, “ ‘except for me and you—and sometimes I wonder about you.’ ”

  The smile that crossed her face brought back the old Katrina for a moment, surfacing in the gloom like the body of a whale breaking the surface and then disappearing beneath the waves.

  “Would you like it if I brought you home, Katrina?” I asked. “Dimitri and Tatyana could move back in and I’d watch TV with you and rub your feet.”

  She mustered only half a smile and said, “Sometimes I’m too weak or too sad to go to the bathroom by myself. I won’t be a burden.”

  “Do they make you walk?” I asked.

  “Every day at four. I spend an entire hour preparing for Sister Marie to come and pull me out of bed. We walk from here down to the elevator. She asks me if I want to go down to the recreation area in the basement and I tell her, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ ”

  I wanted to say something kind, to slap her and tell her to snap out of it. I would have torn out my hair if I wasn’t already bald.

  Katrina looked down at her hands. “I’ve disappointed you.”

  “No, baby,” I assured her. “You’re going through a hard time and we just have to see it through.”

  “You are a good man, Leonid.”

  “We both know that’s a lie, Katrina.”

  “No, Leonid,” she said with conviction if not strength in her voice. “I strayed. Twill and Shelly are not your children. You have always known but you raised them with love and you never ran away. You were always there for us.”

  “That’s like complimenting a beaver for having big buckteeth,” I said, “or a lion for his deep voice.”

  “Or a man,” Katrina said, “for living by his nature.”

  I felt uncomfortable receiving these accolades. Katrina and I had been alternately bickering and cheating on each other for decades, and now there she was speaking truth to me. We hadn’t been partners or lovers for so long that in a way we were strangers.

  “You have anything you want me to do about the kids?” I asked. Maybe
thinking about them would help her make it down to the recreation room.

  “Twill is into something,” she said. “Do you have him on some case?”

  “No. He’s just studying the tapes I recorded when I was following people.”

  “When he came to see me he was too happy. You know when things are good with him he just acts, I don’t know, kind of cool. But when something is going on he gets that glitter in his eyes.”

  I knew the look. The problem was I hadn’t seen my son in seven days.

  “The Professor said he saw him wandering around the lower level of Penn Station, said he had his shirttails out.”

  “You saw Drake?”

  I’d forgotten that the academic ex-con had come to a picnic we once gave. He and Katrina talked for hours about ancient recipes he once studied. He might have even written a monograph on the subject as a footnote to his doctoral thesis.

  “What about Shelly?” I asked.

  “That man followed her up to SUNY.”

  “Seldon Arvinil?”

  “He left his wife and daughter to be with our little girl. I suppose she’s happy though. Who am I to deny her that?”

  “You’re her mother.”

  “If I was a good mother she wouldn’t have needed an older man to shelter her heart.”

  Hearing these words reminded me of Sweet Lemon Charles for the second time that day. The next time I saw the prison-made poet I’d ask him what he knew about the poetry of despair.

  6

  The Hotel Brown was nestled between two Middle Eastern consulates on East Sixty-seventh, not far from Fifth Avenue. It was an old hotel with an excellent security staff and high-ceilinged rooms that were well appointed and large. Not a cheap joint.

  I stood across the street and called the hotel operator with the help of 411.

  “Hotel Brown,” a woman said. “How may I direct your call?”

  “Marella Herzog,” I said.

  There was a hesitation and then, “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Leonid McGill.”

  The next thing I heard was a ringing phone.

  “Hello, Leonid,” she said on answering the third ring. “I was wondering when you’d call.”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I told the front desk only to allow calls from you. It was getting so late that I thought maybe I’d have to wait until tomorrow.”

  It was 9:39 by my watch and tomorrow seemed very far away.

  “Are you calling about your money?” she asked when I was silent.

  “I guess that’s part of it.”

  “What else?”

  “I didn’t get my kiss on the cheek.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Across the street.”

  “Come on up,” she said, “room eight twenty-five. I’ll tell the front desk to let you by.”

  —

  There was a time when black men were not allowed to visit fancy hotel rooms unless they wore a service uniform and were delivering flowers or dinner on a tray. There was a time when dark-skinned women would not be allowed to stay in those rooms. But those days are long over. There’s still racism of course. People of color still struggle mightily against misconceptions that are half a millennium old. But these days I can take the elevator up to a femme fatale’s room and no one would bar my way—or warn me off.

  I knocked on her door and she answered—in the nude. The nude. She wore absolutely nothing. Her entire body was an even reddish brown, telling me that she spent a lot of time on unregulated beaches.

  Walking across the threshold, I closed the door with my left hand, went to my knees, and pressed my mouth into the nexus of her legs.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Working my head and neck to separate her thighs maybe four inches midway between the pelvis and the knee, I jabbed softly with my tongue.

  “Oh,” she said with a bit more feeling.

  But it was when I got the left thigh on my shoulder and stood straight up that I believe she was more shocked than I was to be received by a russet-skinned beauty at a door on the eighth floor of a room which, not all that long ago, excluded our ancestors.

  She grabbed onto my hairless head but she didn’t have to worry. I wouldn’t have let her fall. Between my shoulders, hands, and tongue she either had a powerful orgasm or did a very good job at pretending.

  “Let me down,” she said when the shudders subsided.

  I moved my shoulder and then my chest until I was holding her in the cradle of my arms.

  “You’re very strong,” she said and then kissed me for the first time.

  I rubbed my nose against her chin.

  “Lucky I don’t have an engagement ring in my pocket,” I replied.

  She hugged my head then with even more passion than she had shown before.

  “Lie down with me,” she commanded.

  And so there we lay: her completely naked and me fully dressed and fully erect.

  She touched the urgent bulge in my trousers and said, “We’ll take care of that in just a bit.”

  “We better,” I warned, “before it takes care of itself.”

  Marella laughed out loud, actually guffawed and punched my arm. She was a solidly built woman; in her thirties, as I’ve already said, but with the pampered body of a woman ten years younger.

  “Do you think you killed that guy?” she asked.

  “Naw,” I said dismissively.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I went back in the station after you left.”

  “You did? Wasn’t that rather reckless?”

  “Nobody saw us,” I said.

  I considered explaining my idea of the elevator-gladiator sport.

  She unzipped my blue trousers.

  “He saw us,” she said while fishing around for the flesh in my pants.

  “Um…he was still out.”

  “How do you know that?” She found what she was looking for. Her fingers were cold.

  “Oh,” I said. “He passed maybe twelve feet away from me on a wheeled gurney pushed by two women.”

  “Your turn,” she told me and we didn’t talk about anything for a while.

  —

  “I think I can safely say that I have never met a man like you,” Marella Herzog said at 1:51 by the lighted digital numerals on the clock next to her side of the bed. We were both naked by then, drinking honor-bar cognac. My pants, which were neatly folded on a plush red chair that sat against the wall, had an extra fifteen hundred dollars in them.

  “I can say without a doubt,” I replied, “that I have met all the failed attempts that first the Hebraic and then the Christian God made trying to come up with a woman like you.”

  “You’re good,” she said. “It’s a wonder that you haven’t been shot down by a town full of frightened citizens.”

  It struck me that our conversation was like an aged wine rather than a freshly squeezed juice. If I believed in the gods I swore by, or maybe their Hindu counterparts, I would have said that we were old souls that had known each other at many other times, in other reincarnations.

  “So what do you plan to do about the man that wants his ring back?” I asked.

  “How old are you?”

  “Almost fifty-six.”

  “And you laid that guy out and held me up on your shoulders like my daddy did when I was a little kid.”

  “I hope not just like that.”

  “No. The other way around.”

  “You needed a man who wouldn’t mind the ride,” I said. “I guess I needed a woman like that too.”

  She leaned over toward her end table and poured another miniature bottle into her near-empty glass. I realized, watching that supple and sinuous movement, that life was the only magic all humanity could agree upon.

  “I don’t think I have anything to worry about, Mr. McGill. You nipped that problem in the bud.”

  “Rich men sometimes have armies of guys like that one on the train,” I advised.<
br />
  “I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” she countered. “I still have your card if something comes up in the next day or two, and after that I’ll be far, far away from here.”

  Who was I to question the perfect Lilith, the precise Mary Magdalene?

  “Can I sleep here with you tonight?” I asked.

  “Only if you don’t mind if I wake you up once or twice.”

  7

  I was back down near Penn Station at 5:17 the next morning, making my way up the stairs of a nondescript brick building just a few blocks away. When I’d woken up at 4:00 Marella was still asleep. After an ice-cold shower I threw on my blue suit, kissed her, and said good-bye. She sighed, smiled, and turned the other way.

  I left the Hotel Brown certain that my business with Ms. Herzog was yet to be completed. I was wondering if this was a good thing as I pushed open the door to Gordo’s Gym on the fifth floor of the nameless, unremarkable building.

  There were already a dozen boxers and half that many trainers hard at work. Two of four makeshift rings had opponents practicing how to dismantle their opposition. My usual heavy bag near a murky window was being used by a featherweight named Brian “Fat Fudge” Lowman. He was making that bag sway, which is no mean feat for a man that small.

  “Hey, LT,” a gravelly voice hailed.

  It was Gordo Tallman, the red-bronze surrogate father who had taught me that my best talent was absorbing pain and then giving it back with some interest. He had thought that I’d use that equation getting a light-heavy championship belt, but instead I plied it on the streets.

  “Gordo,” I said. Standing face-to-face, we were the same height. He didn’t weigh much more than Fat Fudge but his will was unbreakable. “How you doin’?”

  “I’m gettin’ married,” he said.

  “You and Elsa set a date?” I asked.

  “Me and her broke up.”

  “Broke up? You just got engaged. What happened?”

  “Sophie.” It was a one-word treatise on Gordo Tallman’s life.