I endorsed the back of the check given me by Camille Esterhouse for the return of Eddie Martinez and put it, along with the fifteen hundred-dollar bills Marella gave me, into a black envelope that I placed in the outbox on the right front corner of my desk. Mardi knew by the color that she had to make a deposit.
There were phone messages on little pink pieces of paper, phone messages on the service, and e-mails by the score. But there was nothing important, nothing I felt that had to be answered immediately.
At some point I sat back in my chair and swiveled around to look down on southern Manhattan. I had lived on the island my entire life; running wild, committing almost every crime imaginable. For the last six years I’d been trying to climb out of the dung pit and wash myself clean. I think it was just then, on that Tuesday morning, that I understood the metaphor of baptism—it’s funny how some truths hide away in a pocket or a forgotten drawer and show up when they hardly matter anymore.
Considering and then giving up on the notion of salvation, I turned my restless thought-pad to the last twenty-four hours. This had been my time to encounter powerful women: Katrina, who had the will to end her own life either by knife or just waiting in that sanatorium bed to expire; Mardi, who could face the greatest terror in her life and make something good out of it; Aura, who loved me, I knew that, but whose morality was more powerful than our needs. And then there was Marella Herzog, a woman with a dog whistle that could call out the beast in me. I felt that if I could spend a week in her company I might grow back a full head of hair.
These were people who faced their fears and created the world as they moved through it. For some reason this notion made me take out my telephone. I’d call Twill myself and ask what he was up to.
“Mr. McGill?” Mardi said over the intercom.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Captain Kitteridge.”
“On the phone?”
“At my desk.”
Had I heard the buzzer? I didn’t think so.
“Send him on,” I said.
I put the phone down and stared at it. I was experiencing one of those moments in life where I was not the central character but part of a small supporting cast that was there more for atmosphere than for pushing the story forward.
“LT,” he said from the doorway.
Captain Carson Kitteridge was my height but weighed little more than the featherweight Fat Fudge. His skin was carved from porcelain, his eyes the faded blue of a mostly cloudy sky. He always wore cheap suits and ties that had wallpaper designs stamped on them. Carson might have been small and off the rack but when it came to his job he was a like a Jack Russell terrier, willing to go up against a foe ten times his size.
“Come on in, Kit,” I said. “Have a seat.”
We were usually civil. Our paths had crossed many times over the years. It was at least in part due to me that he’d been promoted to captain but it was still his mission in life to get me locked away for the rest of mine.
He stepped in, stared at my new red chairs with something like disdain, and then sat in the same seat that Hiram Stent chose.
“How can I help you?” I asked.
“A confession would be nice.”
“You want a general admission of guilt for you to fill in the crime or is there something particular you had in mind?”
He reached into the side pocket of his sad brown suit jacket and came out with an electronic tablet device. He laid this flat on the table and slid it over to me.
“Just turn it on,” he said, “the rest is self-explanatory.”
I gave the little screen a sneer and then pressed a silver button on the lower left side. Immediately an image appeared; a familiar tableau from a different vantage point. It was the picture of a tall whitish man faced by a smaller, chubby black man with his bald head bowed so that the camera did not catch the features of his face.
I looked up and said, “So?”
Kit reached over and tapped the screen ever so lightly with his middle finger. The picture then turned into a video. The smaller black man squatted down and torqued to the left and a look of pain passed over the white man’s face. I could clearly see the knife falling from the taller man’s hand and then the shorter man coming up with a pretty-well-put-together uppercut.
Lucky for me the attacker’s body hid my face from the camera as I stood.
Then, with my back fully to the lens, I grabbed the back of the enemy’s head and slammed it against the metal wall of the chamber.
The rest of the film-short showed Marella’s face but not mine as I set the man in the corner, grabbed the fanciful suitcase, and walked out of there while searching the floor for loose change that might have fallen from my pocket, or his. I knew the camera was there.
The video stopped for a moment with the attacker and his knife lying quite still, and then the image jumped back to the first frame.
Looking up again I said, “So?”
“That’s you,” Carson said.
“You can’t even see his face.”
“I know your moves.”
“But I am sure the jury does not.”
There came a subtle hum; my phone was set on vibration. I looked down and saw that the call was coming from the Hotel Brown. I tapped the Ignore icon and asked, “Did the man with the knife expire?”
“No.”
“Is he in a coma or unconscious? Do they expect him to die?”
“No.”
“Has he made a complaint or identified me from photos you must have right here on this tablet?”
Kit got tired of repeating his one word in our short play and so he shrugged.
“How about the woman?” I asked. “Have you identified her?”
“Not yet but we expect to. Maybe you could tell me who she is.”
“I don’t even know who the men are.” I tried to keep the smug out of my voice. After all, Kit represented the NYPD and they really didn’t need a reason to break my head—I knew this from firsthand experience.
“The victim,” Captain Kitteridge said, “is Alexander Lett, recently from Virginia. He woke up in a hospital bed with a broken wrist and a knot the size of a tangerine on his forehead. When we asked him about the knife he said that he just found it and was bringing it to the lost and found. He said that the attacker must have thought he was threatening him with said knife and acted out of reflex.”
“If he told you all that then why are you here?”
“What’s goin’ on, LT?”
“I don’t know.”
Kit stared at me. It’s a wonder that he could make such dreamy eyes into a threatening glower. I felt the danger but I’d been surrounded by danger my entire life—that was my stock-in-trade.
I guess this truth was apparent; Kit stood up.
“You know, LT,” he said. “I believe you when you say that you’re trying to clean up your act and get it right. But this is not the way. Lett seems like serious business. This bug is going to sting you—if you’re lucky.”
He turned and walked out.
My smartphone buzzed at me again like the hornet Kit was warning me about. I waited for the vibrations to subside and then I picked up the little transmitter to make my own warning call.
—
“Hello?” he said on the fourth ring, just when I was sure I’d get his service.
“Twill?”
“Hey, Pop.”
There was music playing somewhere—loud music. The heavy beat was accompanied by the hubbub of many people talking, laughing, shouting, and jostling around.
It was 10:56 in the morning.
“What’s goin’ on, Twill?”
Before he could answer, someone spoke to him calling him something with the word “itch” in it. Twill answered whoever it was with a word or two and then said to me, “Hold up a second, Pop. I’ll go someplace a little more quieter.”
The party sounds slowly subsided until they were just background noise, like traffic heard through a storm window.
“What can I do for you, Pop?”
“Where are you?”
“At a warehouse party in the Bronx.”
“At this time of mornin’?”
“It only started at three,” he said pleasantly, as if talking about a favorite TV show. “I’m workin’.”
“On what?”
“Missin’ person.”
“Missin’ person for who?”
“Kathy Ringgold.”
“Don’t make me ask you for every detail here, Twill. You’re supposed to be in the office.”
“Okay, Pop, okay. You don’t have to get mad. There was this girl I went to high school with named Kathy Ringgold. She broke up with this guy Roger and then, after a week or two, wanted him back. But he was gone from his room and his phone had been disconnected. Nobody knew where he went and Mardi had told her that I was a detective now, so she asked me to find him. I ain’t chargin’ her or nuthin’ but I figure I can work on my detective chops doing a simple girl-wants-boy-back kind of job. Like you on the Martinez gig. Did you find him?”
Ignoring the question, I asked, “That’s why you’re at this party?”
“He think he’s a DJ and so he always around places like this askin’ for work. I’m just doin’ the do.”
“Have you been to see your mother?”
“I’m goin’ there this evenin’,” he said. “Right after I take a little nap.”
“I want you in the office tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there.”
We said our good-byes and I put the phone down.
The only thing I got out of our discourse was that Twill was lying and his trouble was deep.
12
The rest of the day I concentrated on the e-mails that didn’t need answering. Seventeen of these were replies to my ad in the New York Literary Review. Some Bills and Williams, lonely johns, and a few vanity presses thought that I might really be looking for them. But none of these people or places were the self-named Tolstoy McGill, my missing father. For half my childhood and all of my adult life I had thought the anarchist-revolutionary had perished in South America fighting some dictatorship or another. But Tolstoy wasn’t dead. I’d made an appointment to meet him for dinner one night but Katrina decided that afternoon to kill herself and my father once again faded into speculation.
By 7:14 I was through for the day. Mardi was still at her desk. I sometimes got the feeling that she would work twenty-four hours a day if she could.
“Who’s looking after your sister?” I asked.
“Marlene’s staying at our downstairs neighbors’ apartment tonight. Their daughter Peg is her best friend. They move back and forth between the apartments.”
Mardi looked up at me and I turned away before our eyes could focus on each other.
“Am I going crazy or did Kit just knock on the door?” I said to the door.
“I had Bug give me a button to turn off your buzzer when I’m in,” she said. “I figure we both don’t have to be bothered.”
“What if you forget to turn it back on?”
“It’s on a two-hour timer. After that it goes back to both.”
I would have liked to find something wrong with her logic but Mardi was a bright kid with an old soul; just the kind of employee you wanted in a world filled with a starstruck workforce and electronic memories.
Even her smile was knowing.
“In the old days,” I said, “when I was younger than you are now, people would say ‘you’re a good egg’ to people who did right most of the time.”
“Really?”
“You’re a good egg, Mardi.”
“Am I?” she said, looking me straight in the eye.
A microsecond of fear clutched at my heart, not quite long enough to get a good grip.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, thinking for the second time that this week was going to be a challenge.
—
I ran up all ten flights to the eleventh floor of our family apartment, a block east of Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side. There was a new locking system since a pair of East European assassins had broken in and tried to end my career. I used two keys and a remote control so small that it was hardly larger than the button that worked it. The kids didn’t argue about the new process because I left the bullet holes in the wall where the killers missed.
Another reason the kids didn’t mind was because two of them had moved out and the youngest, Twill, rarely spent the night.
I’m not what most people would think of as a family man. I don’t come home for dinner every evening—many nights I don’t come home at all. But over the decades I got used to a wife that cooked and kids that complained. The muted sounds through the large prewar apartment had made a place in what some might call my heart. And so the emptiness in the apartment felt…wrong.
I went to the dining room, poured forty-year-old cognac into a crystal snifter, and sat at the big hickory dining table. It wasn’t lost on me that I’d sat behind a desk all day long only to come home and pull up a chair at another table. Maybe I could invite Mardi and her sister to live with me.
When I was pouring the third drink I decided to call Marella. Somewhere in the afternoon I had picked up the phone and stared at her number. I realized that talking to her would just call for more passion—and I didn’t think I had any more to give. But saying good-bye to Mardi, thinking I should invite her to live with me, made Marella a necessity, not an option.
When I informed the hotel operator of my name she put the call through.
“Hello, Leonid.”
“Hey.”
“Are you downstairs again?”
“No. I’m home.”
“Do you want some company?”
“Who is Alexander Lett?”
“Who?”
“Alexander Lett. That’s the name of the guy I slammed into the wall yesterday.”
“I didn’t know his name. I couldn’t prove that he was sent by my ex. But he did follow me from DC.”
“And this all over an engagement ring?”
“Yes.”
“Why does it seem like more than that?”
“It’s a very, very expensive ring.”
“You called me this morning,” I said.
“As soon as I woke up.”
“What did you want?”
“You.”
“For protection?”
“I never had a man put me on his shoulders backward before.”
“That was my first time too.” I was feeling that beast thing again. I liked the heavy beat it brought to my heart.
“You want me to come over?” she asked. “Maybe I could ride you on my back this time.”
I once knew a man named Robin. He was a handsome man with beautiful eyes. For a while in the ’90s Robin was a source of information I used quite a lot. He always denied that he was what he was, a heroin addict.
I asked him one day after watching him shoot up, “How can you say you aren’t addicted when you shoot that shit in your arm every damn day?”
“Not every day,” he murmured, his eyes like twin planets bathed in the radiance of the sun. “Every once in a while when the hunger gets too strong I make myself wait for two days before takin’ it. As long as I can do that I keep my options open.”
“How about dinner tomorrow night?” I suggested to Marella, thinking of how Robin died of an overdose before the new millennium. “There’s a French place not far from your hotel. It’s called the Chambre du Roi.”
“Why not now?”
“I have to talk to a man I know,” I said. “His name is Robin and he always has good information for me.”
“Well, I guess if I have to…I’ll wait.”
There was a short spate of silence then, the kind of quiet that occurs when two strangers feel a passion in full bloom—what else is there to say? They have no history, only a future.
Marella was the wrong woman at the wrong time, but how long could I hope to survive anyway?
>
The buzzer from downstairs interrupted our communion.
“Somebody’s at the door,” I said.
“That Robin guy?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s the name of that restaurant again?”
“Chambre du Roi. I’ll make the reservation for eight.”
“Don’t stand me up,” she said.
“Not even if I could.”
We ended the call and I just sat there a little stunned by the teenaged hormones flooding my good sense.
The buzzer sounded again.
I walked down the hall to the foyer and pressed the onyx button on the brass-plated intercom.
“Yes?”
“It’s your father, Trot.”
13
I pressed the button to release the lock eleven floors below, then opened the front door and went out into the hall. Standing there, I watched the digital number plate that the landlord had installed over the elevator doors on every floor. I preferred it when there was a pewter arrow that swung in an arc, pointing to copper numbers beaten into a black iron half-circle that had flames coming from it like it was a sun and the elevator car was some kind of spaceship.
The display was counting backward, 8, 7, 6, 5…
Trot. That’s what he called me when I was a boy; Leonid Trotter McGill. He had given both Nikita, my brother, and me Russian names in honor of the Revolution he harbored in his heart.
“I’m leavin’ your slave name McGill,” he often said, “because it’s slaves that riot and revolt. When you boys come to the end and the slave master has been overthrown, then you can choose names that will usher in the new world.”
The display had an emerald 1 glistening in its blackness.
“It’s only men with blood on their hands can claim the end of history,” Tolstoy, my father, would say. “That’s because the capitalists and their lackeys have blood from the soles of their feet all the way up to their ankles. They walk on the workers’ blood, stride through it like hyenas after slaughterin’ a whole flock’a sheep.”
Whenever my father talked about the workers I got a little confused. Of the four of us only my mother had a job. Was it my mother’s blood that the hyenas strode through?
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 6
