Killing Johnny Fry

by Walter Mosley

  KILLING JOHNNY FRY

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Devil in a Blue Dress

  A Red Death

  White Butterfly

  Black Betty

  RL‘s Dream

  A Little Yellow Dog

  Gone Fish in‘

  Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

  Blue Light

  Walkin‘ the Dog

  Workin‘ on the Chain Gang

  Fearless Jones

  Futureland

  Bad Boy Brawly Brown

  Six Easy Pieces

  What Next

  Fear Itself

  The Man in My Basement

  Little Scarlet

  47

  Cinnamon Kiss

  Life out of Context

  The Wave

  Fortunate Son

  Fear of the Dark

  Edited by Walter Mosley

  Black Genius

  The Best American Short Stories 2003

  Maximum Fantastic Four

  KILLING JOHNNY FRY

  A SEXISTENTIAL NOVEL

  WALTER MOSLEY

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author‘s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Walter Mosley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or

  reproduced in any manner whatsoever wathout written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Lyrics from “Isis” by Bob Dylan copyright © 1975 by Ram‘s Horn Music.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Macmillan

  All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural,

  recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Mosley, Walter.

  Killing Johnny Fry : a sexistentialist novel / Walter Mosley.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Translators—Fiction. 2. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction.

  3. Murder—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.088456K55 2007

  813‘.54—dc22

  2006008611

  First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007

  This paperback edition published in 2008

  eISBN: 978-1-59691-227-4

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 42

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  for you

  Content

  Chapter One

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Chapter One

  I decided to kill Johnny Fry on a Wednesday, but it was a week before that I was given the reason. I‘m almost embarrassed about my decision to take a life. It was so pedestrian really.

  It all started on the day I had lunch with Lucy Carmichael at the Petit Pain Café on Amsterdam near 80th Street. Lucy wanted to show me her portfolio because she hoped that I could get her connected with Brad Mettleman, an art gallery agent who loved to take advantage of straw-haired, blue-eyed young women.

  I had met Lucy at a conference of commercial French translators. She was there with her mother. Mrs. Helen Carmichael was a textile importer who needed someone to help her read correspondence from Francophone African nations. She couldn‘t pay even my low rates, but her daughter was beautiful, so I talked to her about university alternatives, taking sidelong glances at the lovely young woman.

  After a while it came out that Lucy, the daughter, was just back from Darfur, where she had taken photographs of starving children. I let it drop that I had done work for Brad Mettleman.

  “The photographers‘ agent?” Lucy said. “I met him one time. He visited my Art-as-a-Business class at NYU. I‘d love to get in touch with him. You know it‘s important for an American audience to see what‘s happening to these people."

  “I‘d be happy to introduce you,” I said.

  I didn‘t mean it, but Lucy took my number and invited me to come with her and her parents to a gallery opening that night.

  When we parted, Lucy kissed me on the cheek, right at the border of the corner of my mouth.

  I knew that Brad would love her. She was slight but well formed, with blond hair that reminded you of a sunny day. Her blue eyes were severe and her face was stern, which, on a beautiful girl like her, gave the impression of passionate intensity.

  I say that Brad took advantage of young women, but the women I‘m thinking of never complained. Certainly I was having lunch with Lucy because she was fair-haired and quite lovely. She had a habit of putting her hand on your forearm and looking you in the eye whenever she talked to you.

  While I was going through the photographs of young children of the Sudan, I was thinking about the kiss she‘d leave me with as I put her in a cab to take her back home to the East Village or Dumbo or whatever artists‘ community she was living in.

  “Politics and art are inseparable,” the young woman was saying as I thumbed my way through the stiff sheets of suffering and death.

  The large-eyed children looked to be at the end of their recuperative powers. I wondered how many of the Sudanese orphans were still alive. I wondered also why I didn‘t seem to care about their fates. It was, of course, awful what was happening in Darfur. Children were dying from being deprived of the most basic necessities. They were being displaced, slaughtered, enslaved, raped. But what got my heart going was the expectation of Lucy Carmichael‘s moist peck on the corner of my mouth.

  “It‘s powerful work,” I remember saying. “I‘m sure Brad would be very excited about it."

  I was also sure that he‘d want more than a provocative kiss for representing her to one of the dozen galleries he worked with around Midtown.

  “Do you think so?” Lucy asked, putting a hand on my bare wrist.

  I looked down at the almost porcelain-white fingertips pressing against my dark brown skin.

  When I think back on it, it was that touch, as much as anything else, that brought on Johnny Fry‘s death sentence. My tongue went completely dry, and no matter how much bottled mineral water I drank, I was still thirsty. That thirst and what I did to slake it were the first two nails in Mr. Fry‘s coffin.

  My breathing became shallow but my heart was thumping hard. I leaned forward three inches. Lucy did not retreat. I had the definite feeling that she wouldn‘t have turned away from a kiss right then.

  I was twice her age, minus a year, but she didn‘t move her hand or her face. She kept smiling and staring.

  I exhaled through my nostrils, quite loudly it seemed to my ears, and all sorts of serious thoughts entered my mind. I had met Lucy‘s father at that gallery opening in NoLita. The short, balding, white man was a year younger than I. His daughter was coming to me for help and she had a young boyfriend named Billy who was living in Boston, working for a theater company there.

  And then there was Joelle, my girlfriend—hell, we might as well have been married. I stayed at her place every weekened and we‘d been together eight years—longer by far than both my marriages put together.

  There was an understanding between Joelle and I that we‘d be monogamous. We didn‘t have to get married or make some kind of material commitment. She made a good living as
a freelance marketing expert for fashion and design companies, while I did all right translating from French and Spanish to English for small businesses, technical companies, and private parties.

  “We have separate lives that are lived together,” Joelle told her younger sister, August, when the latter complained about my intentions.

  “He‘s a man and is therefore a dog,” August told her older sister.

  “I know him better than you,” Joelle told me she‘d said. “He‘s a good man and would never hurt me."

  Lucy‘s hand remained on my wrist through that long train of thought. Her smile had not dimmed. I wanted to lean over that extra six inches and brush those young lips with my hungry mouth. I wanted to but I didn‘t.

  I had already strained my agreement with Jo by telling her I was going to Philadelphia that noon when really my train didn‘t leave until five. Actually, my train reservation had been for noon, but I‘d asked my travel agent to get me a first-class ticket, and she couldn‘t get first-class before the five o‘clock train. By the time I realized I was leaving on the later train, I‘d already told Joelle that I was slated to leave at midday. It was after that that Lucy called, following up on my promise to connect her with Brad. I had only made the offer so she‘d stay near me. But I felt an obligation—and there was the possibility of that good-bye kiss.

  I pulled my hand back and poured another glass full of sparkling water. I drank it down in one thirsty swig.

  The blue eyes across from me sparkled, and Lucy‘s shoulder came forward an inch or so. Too bad, the gesture said. Maybe next time.

  I walked her out to the curb and put her in a taxi. Just before she got in, I promised to call Brad. She kissed me on the lips quickly and then gave me a brilliant smile.

  I stood there on the corner of 80th and Amsterdam watching the taxi wend its way westward through heavy traffic. I remember thinking that I could keep up with the cab on foot. I had to stop myself from following and waving at her.

  When she was finally gone, I realized that I had to go to the bathroom—all that mineral water I downed while watching the curve of Lucy‘s violet blouse with the lime buttons.

  I had the key to Joelle‘s apartment. The doormen knew me by sight. She was across the river, meeting with a boutique jeans distributor from Newark. I‘d go upstairs, do my business, and then call her cell phone and ask her to guess where I was. That would assuage my guilt by letting her know I was still in town.

  Robert, the day man, wasn‘t at his post at her building on 91st and Central Park West. I loped down the hallway toward the third bank of elevators and took car number sixteen to the twenty-third floor.

  Joelle had inherited this apartment from her grandmother, who‘d died twelve years before, when Jo was just twenty. It was a big place. The entrance area led to a hall that came upon a sunken living room, which had large windows that looked out over the park. I loved staying at Joelle‘s place.

  I was happy that I hadn‘t made a move on Lucy.

  They were so silent that I almost walked in on them. Jo was sitting on the top part of the back of the couch. Her black blouse was pulled up to her armpits, above her breasts, and her black pants were almost off—except for the bottom leg, which somehow clung to her left ankle. John Fry wore only a gray silk T-shirt. He was standing there between her legs teasing her sex with his erection.

  She was staring into his eyes, her copper-brown hands gripping his pale white chest and left shoulder. He looked as if he were concentrating on something inside him. Maybe he was holding back. Maybe he was playing with her.

  They kept at that game for some time.

  I noticed that he was wearing a condom—a red one. For some reason the color made me angry. At times he‘d enter her deeply. These were the only moments that she made any sound. A kind of moan that came out as “oh” and, now and then, a “please don‘t."

  I wondered, almost idly, if she would tell me later that she tried to stop him; that she‘d told him no.

  After a while I turned away because I couldn‘t seem to think while watching them.

  Looking down the hall toward the door, I knew that I should go. There was no benefit in confronting them. John Fry was bigger than I was (in every way) and I had no weapon with which to hurt him. And, after all, Joelle was not my wife. We stayed together often, but it was her apartment.

  I decided to leave.

  I walked down the hallway toward the door.

  I had made it through the front door and took the first three steps down the hall when Jo emitted a loud, pain-filled scream. I hurried back down the hall and into the apartment without thinking. It was almost as if I had forgotten what I‘d seen before. All I could think was that my girlfriend, my lover, was in pain.

  When I got back to the vantage point onto the living room, I realized my error. Jo was on her stomach on the floor and John Fry hovered over her, pressing down slowly with his hips. I could see the red shaft pressing deep and deeper into her rectum. He was whispering into her ear words that I heard only as a rumble. She was nodding vigorously, saying, “Yes, yes. Oh yes, Daddy."

  Daddy.

  I made it to the hall again. Again there was a shout of ecstasy. But this time I pushed the elevator button and took car number eighteen down to the first floor.

  “Hello, Mr. Carmel,” Robert, the doorman, said as I approached his desk.

  There was a wary look in his eye. I could tell that he knew about Johnny Fry and Jo. He was her doorman. Every Christmas she gave him a $200 tip. He wasn‘t going to burn that bridge. No, sir.

  I took my wallet out of my pocket and said, “Funniest thing. I came by because I thought I left my wallet here, but halfway up in the elevator I looked in my briefcase and there it was. I never put it here, but I guess I did this time. Sorry I didn‘t check in, but you weren‘t here."

  I didn‘t know how long the doorman had been away from his post, but it didn‘t matter. He wasn‘t going to tell Joelle about me if he didn‘t have to.

  Our business was finished, but I loitered a moment more. Robert (I never knew his last name) had lighter skin than mine, and there was some crimson in the pigment. His eyes might have had a mild Asian cast and his accent was definitely not of the United States.

  “You follow boxing?” I asked him, thinking that Jo was probably shouting upstairs and realizing with a mild shock that I had not closed the door to her apartment.

  Would she and Johnny Fry laugh at the open door? Would they imagine her neighbors stopping to listen to her screams of ecstasy?

  “No,” Robert said. “I like football. You know, soccer."

  “See you later,” I said.

  I walked out of the building, the Eliot, and headed south on Central Park West.

  To my right were the monolithic residential apartment buildings and to the left was Central Park. I followed that path down to the Museum of Natural History. I went in there hoping to use the men‘s room. I bought a ticket, located the toilet, and then wandered around the exhibit of North American mammals.

  The wolves running in the night were magnificent. At one time those taxidermied mannequins were powerful, bloodthirsty, and pure, living on the outskirts of mankind and his petty concerns. Gazing at those creatures, I felt a hollowness in my chest, a feeling akin to infatuation. Their freedom exhilarated me.

  I spent some time wandering around the exhibits, jealous of the animals and their instinctual lives. Now and then a cluster of children would roll past laughing, gazing in awe, playing. I heard them, but my eyes witnessed their movements as if there was total silence in the room. It was the same silence I came upon when Jo stared Johnny Fry in the eyes as he entered her, moved away, and entered her again.

  Two teenage girls were giving me furtive glances and giggling. One of them was heavyset, wearing a sea-green sweater. She had red-brown skin like Robert‘s, but her hair was blond. Her friend wore a pink tube top with no bra and little need of one. She was white but not Caucasian. She was whispering, giggling, star
ing at my crotch.

  That‘s when I noticed that I‘d gotten an erection thinking about Jo and Johnny.

  I turned away, walked down a long corridor into the Hall of Fishes, and with an inelegant move, shifted myself around so that the hard-on wasn‘t so terribly obvious.

  After that I left the museum and walked down past Columbus Circle, down Seventh Avenue with its delis, electronics shops, hotels, and tourist stores.

  Somewhere between 50th Street and 42nd, I passed an adult video store. I walked past the door and then turned back. I went in and strolled up and down the aisles of DVD pornography. The films were arranged into various subjects. There were black, interracial, amateur, Asian, BDSM, anal, come shots, bi, animal, chicks with dicks, gay, lesbian, and then there was a broad area where it was straight, nonviolent, generally white sex. Just beyond the vanilla I found a DVD in the small Features section. This was a story starring a woman named Sisypha Seaman. It was a tale about a woman who was having an affair with some young stud and what happened when her husband found out.

  I‘d never bought a film like that before. It‘s not that I didn‘t want to, but I was always too ashamed to bring something like that up to the cashier. I was afraid that the clerk would be a woman and she‘d sneer at me needing to see sex instead of finding my own girlfriend and having real love in my life. I had a girlfriend, but she wouldn‘t know that, and how could I tell her without sounding like a pathetic liar?

  But I wasn‘t afraid that day, not at all. I carried the DVD case, titled The Myth of Sisypha, to the front of the store, where an East Indian man sat on high so that he could see what was going on down the aisles.

  “Yes, sir,” he said with a slight sing to his voice. “Is that all, sir?"

  “Yes. That‘ll be all. How much?” I was beginning to get nervous. I worried someone would come in and see me, recognize me.

  Instead of answering, the clerk picked up a microphone and shouted something, in Hindi I suppose. He read a number from the back of the DVD jacket and stared down the center aisle expectantly.