“Find her, Mr. McGill. You’re a detective. You can do things that I don’t know about just like I can work with monies in ways that you probably don’t understand.”
“Speaking of money,” I said. “How do you plan to pay for my services?”
“Ten percent.”
“Ten percent of ten percent of ten percent?”
“I figure that to be a little more than a hundred thousand dollars,” he said, his voice filled with impossible hope.
“Mr. McGill, are you in?” Mardi Bitterman said over the intercom.
“Hey, Mardi, I’m back here with Mr. Stent.”
“You’re in early.”
“Earlier than you,” I said with just a hint of satisfaction in my voice.
Then I turned my attention back to the homeless man who dreamed about millions. If I were ever to teach a class on being a PI the first thing I’d say is to never take a case like Stent’s. There’s no percentage in it—ten or otherwise.
“I can’t help you, Mr. Stent,” I said.
“I’ll sign any contract you want.”
“It’s not that. It’s not that you’re unemployed or distressed or lost. I like you. I feel for your predicament but I don’t believe that what this man is telling you is true.”
“I have the letter.”
“I’m sure you do. I’m sure there’s a Celia Landis out there somewhere and that some man calling himself Shonefeld is looking for her. But wealthy people don’t offer poor people a million dollars for a name and an address; not unless there’s something hinky going on.”
“But they said that they’re looking for her. What other reason could they have?”
I stood up and walked around the desk, handed Hiram back his frayed photograph, and gestured for him to stand.
“What am I going to do?” he asked as if I was his only friend in the world.
Maybe I was.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Hiram. I can’t take this case because, in my professional opinion, something in this story stinks.”
“But…”
I put my hand on his shoulder and he stopped talking. I walked him down the untenanted aisle, past Mardi’s desk, and through the front door.
He never said another word.
9
I watched Hiram Stent walk down the hallway toward the elevators. He didn’t look back. I almost called to him. After all, I had money from Camille Esterhouse and Marella Herzog (if indeed that was her real name). I could afford to do a good deed for some poor schlub down on his luck. But the truth was that Hiram couldn’t be helped. Whatever I did, it would just turn out bad.
“How are you this morning, Mr. McGill?” Mardi asked my back as Stent turned the corner.
I closed the door and turned to my pale assistant, slight and white. Her gray-blue eyes carried all the sadness of the last days of autumn and her voice was so soft that it could have been a memory.
“Fine,” I said. “And you?”
“I’m okay.”
“How’s your sister?”
“Just entered middle school. She loves the ocean and wants to be an oceanographer.”
I sat down in one of the blue-and-chrome visitor’s chairs that used to be in my office.
“You’re hardly ever in this early anymore,” she said.
“I used to be this early?”
“Mmmm-hm. When I first worked here.”
She was right. My schedule had slowly shifted since Mardi began to shoulder some of the responsibility. She had been Twill’s classmate. Barely in her twenties and she made more difference in my life than almost anyone ever had.
“Now that I’m here you can tell me about it,” I said.
“About what?” she said, searching her desk for something to do with her hands.
“Twill.”
She picked up a bright yellow disposable mechanical pencil and set it in a ceramic mug used to hold such things. This process took just long enough for the door buzzer to sound.
I was sure that it was Hiram Stent come back to beg me. I would have probably given him a day or two—after all, failure is a big part of being human.
“It’s Ms. Ullman,” Mardi said, looking down at the monitor I had installed in her desk drawer.
I could feel my Adam’s apple writhe in my throat.
I got to my feet and, stumbling a little, took the two and a half steps to the entrance.
When I pulled the door open Aura said, “Oh!”—shocked that it was me.
Tall for a woman, she had a few inches on me. Aura was the color of pure gold that hadn’t been polished for some years. She was nearing the midway mark in her forties with a generous figure that would never go out of style. Her hair was naturally wavy and darkly blond. Her surprised eyes were not brown but that’s as far as I would go trying to define the color. Her mother, I knew, was Danish and her father black Togolese.
Aura was the plant supervisor of the Tesla Building. She was very efficient at her job. The only task she ever failed at was getting me evicted. She tried, and might have succeeded, but then we kind of fell in love.
“Didn’t expect me?” I said to my sometime lover.
“Um,” she said. “I wanted to ask Mardi something.”
“She’s right here,” I said, moving backward and to the side, allowing her room to come in.
Mardi was already on her feet.
“Good morning, Ms. Ullman,” she said. “How can I help you?”
“Um,” she said again.
“I’ll go back to my office and let you ladies talk.”
“No,” Aura said with more emphasis than was necessary.
“Why don’t I go downstairs and get you guys some coffee and bagels?” Mardi offered.
“Thank you,” Aura said to my assistant.
The next thing I knew, Aura and I were sitting in my old visitor’s chairs more or less facing each other.
We had a lot to talk about and nothing to say.
When we met, my wife had left me for a banker named Zool. He turned out to be an embezzler who ran off, somewhere down in South America, leaving Katrina and my blood son, Dimitri, high and dry. And so Katrina returned just when my relationship with Aura was beginning to take form.
We, Aura and I, broke up for a while and had started to get back together a few times. The latest breakup had to do with Katrina again. Aura felt guilty making love to a man whose wife was suicidal.
“How’s Katrina doing?” Aura asked.
“Kinda faded, I guess.”
“Does she need new medication?”
“She needs something,” I said, “but don’t we all?”
Aura decided to ponder that question.
It struck me that sadness had as many striations as a rainbow—only in grays. Hiram Stent was sad because of a miscalculation. He believed that his education, his station in life, would allow him to make choices about how he might live. He lost his job, his wife, and his children; he’d lost his vanity and hope all because somebody named Wills wanted to do financial planning while living on a ranch.
Aura and I, on the other hand, loved each other fiercely but when together we turned morose and downcast.
Mardi had been molested as a child, repeatedly and over many years, and so her sadness descended when there was nothing for her to concentrate on.
“My daughter got into Mount Holyoke,” Aura was saying.
“Good for her,” I said.
“Are you working?” she asked then.
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“I finished one job,” I said. “That was a domestic beef. Those kinds seem to resuscitate now and then. I helped a woman who was being stalked but that only treated the symptom. And then there’s Twill.”
Aura smiled. Most people’s moods lighten when they hear my son’s name. He’s just that kind of guy.
“What about him?” Aura asked.
“He’s been absent and then seen wearing clothes not his styl
e. He hasn’t called in to me and that usually means that he’s into something either illegal or dangerous, or both. Since he’s working with me now it’s more than likely that he’s taken on a job I wouldn’t approve of.”
“He’s got a lot of facets,” Aura agreed.
The jeweler’s term brought Marella to mind. I realized that her skin was very close to the same hue as Aura’s. I wondered if that was the reason I’d taken such risk. Maybe I thought that if I put my life on the line I could receive a night of familiar love.
“What are you thinking, Leonid?”
“That we should have dinner one night next week.”
“I’m free for lunch next Monday,” she said.
Lunch—a single word that says, I don’t want to be alone with you in the evening when you might, and I might, get confused and break the unspoken rules that were chiseled for us on the tombstone your wife almost made.
I didn’t answer and then the door came open. Mardi entered with a small gray cardboard box holding our coffees and bagels.
“That was fast,” I said.
“The coffee cart is usually on floor sixty-five this time of morning,” she said.
Aura stood up and told us both, “I have a meeting down in my office in a few minutes. I’m going to have to take my coffee and run.”
I stayed in my chair.
Aura gathered her coffee and bread.
“So we’ll have to make a plan for Monday,” she said.
“We’ll see,” I replied.
She looked a little lost for a moment and then left.
When the door closed I took out my smartphone and started entering a text.
“She seems a little upset,” Mardi commented.
I erased what I had been typing and said, “Both of us I guess.”
I started typing again.
“She’s a nice lady,” Mardi continued, trying to draw me in.
Instead of answering I sent the text to Aura’s phone. It read: I LOVE YOU.
10
I was looking at the closed door, thinking that everything was possible but little of that possibility was likely. Life was like a rat’s maze tended by some insane god that tortured and shepherded us for some reason he (or maybe she) could no longer remember. Hiram Stent’s fate was etched on a pauper’s grave somewhere, probably before he was born. He would always make the wrong choices, always come up a dollar short. He could have been the ambassador to France and still the handyman would have taken his wife and children.
“Are you okay, Mr. McGill?”
I turned to look at my assistant. She wore a dress that was something like the flappers wore back nearly a century ago. It was sewn from flimsy fabric somewhere between cream and light pink, the hem coming down to her calves. There was faded beading here and there. It occurred to me that this ensemble had a hint of sexuality to it. This was, to say the least, unusual.
Not for the first time I thought of my assistant as a soul that didn’t so much haunt as spiritually guide by a sense of the world that was more intuitive than anything else.
“Mr. McGill?”
“Have a seat, M.”
Mardi made an abortive move for the walnut swivel chair behind her desk but then decided to take the visitor’s chair Aura had been sitting in. I turned my head so that I was looking into her eyes. Mardi didn’t like people looking directly at her—a leftover from childhood, I imagined.
She turned sideways in the padded chair and looked over at her desk; no doubt searching for another pencil to put in its place.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“What?”
“Twill.”
“What about him?”
“Something’s goin’ on with him. When Twill disappears I get the feeling that there’s a door somewhere that should be locked but isn’t.”
Mardi smiled because she understood and appreciated my imagistic bent.
She shook her head.
“You’re his best friend, M,” I said. “You can’t tell me that you don’t know what’s happenin’.”
“He had a meeting with somebody on Monday, after you left,” Mardi admitted. “But then I was out Tuesday and Wednesday. He covered for me. I didn’t see him almost all week.”
Listening to her words, I remembered the dictum—Truth is the best lie.
“Who did he meet with?”
“I don’t know. It was out of the office. A woman called, a young woman.”
“You didn’t tell me you were taking time off,” I said, trying to take on the authority of a boss.
“I’m sorry.” Mardi looked at her desk again, willing me to go so she could get away from the inquisition.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
The expression on her face was equal parts surprise, anger, and don’t you know who the fuck you’re talking to?
“Talk to me, M.”
“My father has been writing me from Ossining over the past year,” she said. This truth dispelled her shyness. Now she was returning my stare.
Mardi’s stepfather was Leslie Bitterman. Once he was an office manager by day and daughter molester by night; that was before he became a full-time resident of the maximum security prison.
“You want me to talk to some people?” I offered.
“What?” she said, almost angrily. “No. No. At first just getting the letters really upset me but not after a while.”
“Does he want something?”
Mardi clasped her hands and pressed her lips against her left wrist—a kiss that was not a kiss.
“Mardi.”
“He sent a letter every week for seven months before I even opened one. He said things like nothing ever happened between us, like he was a normal father trying to reach out to me and Marlene. He asked about my job and if I had a boyfriend…”
The motherfucker.
“I just thought it was sick,” she said, “that he was trying to fuck with us even though he’s locked away.”
Mardi had never cursed in my memory.
“Then I answered him,” she said. If any four words ever sucked the air out of a room it was these.
“What did you say?”
“I was angry. I told him that he didn’t even have a right to think about us much less send letters. I told him that he destroyed my life and he was going to do the same to my sister. I told him that he made me into a murderer because I would have surely killed him if you hadn’t gotten in the way. I don’t know everything I said but it was eight handwritten pages long.”
Mardi wrote in a tiny chicken scrawl. And she only used purple ink.
“Did he give you an answer?” I asked.
“No.”
“No? Then why did you go up there?”
Mardi looked at me and I saw that she had become another person; someone related to the young woman I knew and loved, but now she was both stronger and weaker, more vulnerable.
“I kept thinking about the letter I wrote to him,” she said. “The anger inside me was bigger than anything I’d ever felt. It was even more than the fear I used to have when he’d come into my room when I was a child. I realized that that anger was the largest part of my heart and if I ever wanted to be my own person, my own Mardi, I’d have to do something…extreme.”
I wanted to ask but my breath wasn’t acting right.
“I wrote another letter,” she said. “It was very short and I wrote it in pencil because I erased it a dozen times until it was exactly what I wanted to say.”
“And?”
“I wrote, ‘I forgive you’ and signed it ‘M’ because when you call me M I always feel that you’re my father. And so I was your daughter letting go of that old corroded anchor that was pulling me down.”
I don’t know how long the silence was that followed those words. I don’t remember reaching out but at some point I realized that we were holding hands.
“And,” I said. I had to clear my throat. “And did he answer?”
“He sent another lett
er. It was the same old gibberish. Me growing into a fine woman and how much he’d learned and thank you about a hundred times. I didn’t read it very closely. I just wrote him and said that I was coming to visit; that I was only coming one time and so he should know what he was going to say.”
“Wow.” For some reason I thought about my earlier sparring session with Chin Wa. If he’d had Mardi’s will I’d’ve never won that match. “And so you went last week.”
“It was horrific,” Mardi said. I’d never heard her use that word before. “They took me to what they call an isolation hut and had me meet him in a room with two guards standing on either side of his chair. Before they’d even let me in I had to let a woman guard give me a body search.”
The conversation stopped for a minute while all the experience and feeling coalesced in the young woman’s mind.
“He had aged twenty years,” she said. “His hair was gray and falling out. He had scars from a knifing and over the left side of his face where somebody had thrown acid on him. He’s blind in his left eye and something’s wrong with his right hand. It was curled up like a bird’s claw.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Nobody likes a child molester in prison. Nobody.”
“He was pathetic. They had him in isolation because otherwise he’d be dead. You know, I wondered why he didn’t mention anything about his troubles in the letters and then I understood that he was trying to pretend that nothing ever happened.
“We had forty-five minutes and talked the whole time. I don’t remember anything we said but he asked if I would kiss him good-bye and I said no.”
That was the end of her story. Her posture was saying that she needed to get up and walk away from the tale. But she stayed in the chair because of me and my relationship to her self-enacted deliverance.
I still wanted to know about Twill but couldn’t bring myself to question her further.
“You’re a strong woman, Mardi Bitterman,” I said at last.
“You think I did the right thing?”
“Every moment since the day you were born.”
11
The rest of the morning was spent behind my big ebony desk going through the mail that had piled up while I was down in Philly. The bills all had checks attached to them, filled out with everything except my signature. Mardi was thorough in that department too.
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 5
