“Hello?”
“Hi, Mr. M,” Zephyra Ximenez said. “You have a couple of minutes?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“A Mr. Towers called your office and cell seven times yesterday afternoon. I only answered because you said you wanted me to. He was very rude. I hope you tell him that I really don’t know how to get in touch with you sometimes.”
“Sorry. I’ll talk to him.”
“He never left a message but there’s still the one from the day before that you haven’t listened to.”
“Thanks, Z,” I said. “You’re a pal.”
“I love it when you talk like the old movies.”
“That mean you’ll go out with me?”
“Fifty years ago? No problem.”
I DIALED THE NUMBER to the answering machine that Zephyra kept at her house. I use a machine because I can be sure when I erase the tape that no one else will be able to retrieve it. The automated voice told me that I had one message.
“Hello, Mr. McGill, this is Ambrose Thurman. I’m afraid that I haven’t been completely honest about the investigation you conducted for me. I was trying to protect my client.
“To begin with, my name is not Thurman but Fell, Norman Fell. I do live in Albany. I am a detective. I used a fake name because my client di«se >
“But that’s all water over the dam now. It has come to my attention that Mr. Frank Tork has been murdered—”
I heard a slight sound in the background of the recording.
“—who are you?” Fell said with a gasp.
There was a stifled yell and a thud, a clattery jumble of hard items, maybe even the smack of a skull against the desktop. There came a sickening gurgle and choking sound and then the hiss and shuffle of something heavy being moved. I pressed the phone so hard against my ear that it hurt.
After a moment the phone was placed gently in its cradle.
Ê€„
21
I listened to Norman Fell’s last words eleven times, moving the receiver from left ear to right. I listened from behind closed eyes, and with my head bowed. Once I even pinched myself. But try as I might I couldn’t get any more out of the recording than I did on the first hearing.
Of all the things I’d done wrong I had never been a party to murder, at least not directly. I had killed, but that was in self-defense. So hearing the panic in Fell’s voice in those last moments struck a deep chord in me. The killer was brutal and remorseless, he hadn’t spoken one word or uttered a sound.
When I put down the phone I realized that my fingertips had gone numb. Looking around the office, I noticed a clump of dust in the corner next to the Swedish couch. There was a solitary cloud hanging in the sky, perfectly framed by my old-fashioned window. I wanted to get up and open the window but my body said that it wasn’t moving, that it was going to stay put.
The shade of white of the ceiling, I noticed for the first time, was subtly different than the white of the walls. I wondered if that was because of some kind of electrical or plumbing work they had done above and when it came to repainting they were unable to match the hue; maybe they just didn’t care.
I realized how absurd my meandering was, so I decided to pull my mind back to the murder. But instead I conjured up a name somewhat like Norman’s. It was the name of a man I’d never actually met: Fellows Scott.
Scott was an investment banker at Bowman Towne Home Security. He was in charge of loans and foreclosures. Fellows had managed to make a loan to a collective town in southeast Alabama named People. He was aware that some years from the date of the loan the property would grow in value exponentially because of a plan he’d been made privy to by one his wealthier Japanese clients.
Fellows Scott gave the people of People a loan with a balloon payment that would have choked a sperm whale. But this odd collective of college professors a®"3"nd farmers had a plan. They were building a dam. With that they could not only power their collective but could also sell the extra electricity, making more than enough money to pay off Bowman Towne.
“Socialists should never put their trust in capitalism.” That was something my father said almost every day. “The hot lead of the revolution is far more trustworthy.”
When Scott heard about the dam, he offered to make another loan and to find a contractor who would give them the best possible bargain.
It really wasn’t such a good deal. The substandard materials used to fabricate the dam gave way in four years. Seven people died. The town was nearly destroyed. And that big red balloon floated all the way from People to lower Manhattan. Sadly, Fellows had no choice but to foreclose and sell to his foreign clients, who built a large car-parts factory in the hole that had once been a dam.
A romantic might tell you that Fellows couldn’t help himself. He had a reason to be so greedy. He loved gambling and prostitutes. Almost all of his ill-gotten gains went into these pastimes.
I got this story from Gert Longman, the perennial temp who went from place to place, helping me find patsies who could take the weight on the various jobs I had taken on.
Fellows Scott’s employers knew about his wanton ways but they had no desire to fire someone who had brought in so much lucre. So they made him vice president of a bank in Queens.
His luck went bad when Sam Beakman burgled that branch. He had an inside man give him the codes he needed to get next to the vault. Gert had long ago met a reformed working girl who knew the story of the town called People. It seems that Fellows, who was close-mouthed as a rule, was a regular blabbermouth with prostitutes. I guess he’d never heard of the six degrees of separation.
The setup involved two doctored phone records, which Bug was happy to provide, and a key to a safe-deposit box with a little of the stolen money inside.
The police love gamblers who spend their nights with whores; juries hate that kind of guy. Scott’s involvement in the fraud, and his malicious intent toward the town of People, came out in the trial. Bowman Towne are still in court over the suit against them.
Beakman died in an armed-robbery attempt before the Scott case ever came before a judge. Fellows died of strangulation the next year in what the newspaper article called a sexual assault.
Gert told me that Fellows deserved what he got.
“Yeah, I know, babe,” I said. “But don’t we deserve it, too?”
THE PHONE RANG and I answered reflexively.
“Hello?”
“So what’s the answer, LT?” Tony the Suit asked.
“To what question?” I replied.
I knew that he’d never speak literally about something so serious over the phone. I guess I was feeling kind of mean and so without a fly to pluck the wings from I decided to torture Tony.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Sure I do, Tony. You’re looking for real estate and I’m looking for a new profession.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m looking for a house all right. Can you find it for me?”
“No problem, man. I will do that for you.”
Tony was silent a moment, not completely understanding the meaning that underlay my lighthearted demeanor.
“But you gotta do me a favor, Tone,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“My secretary told me that you were kinda rough with her on the phone.”
“That bitch wouldn’t put me through.”
“If you speak harshly to her again our deal is off. Do you understand that?”
“She’s more than just a secretary for you, huh?”
“She means more to me than your whole fucking family,” I said, using every ounce of the iron in my jaw.
I wanted to see how serious Tony was about finding A Mann. If it was, as he said, just to have a talk about some old business sheets, he wouldn’t have allowed me to speak to him like that.
“Okay, LT,” he said. “You don’t have to get all upset. I’m sorry. I’ll leave the little girl alone. Scout’s honor.”
; It was then that I knew what he had on his mind. Business as usual, in my world.
Ê€„
22
The best time to kill someone is when they’re going through a door. While passing from one place to another most people are a little off guard, distracted by the subtle displacement separating here from there.
He hit me on the upper part of my left temple as I was walking from my outer office into the Art Deco hallway. It was the hardest I’d been struck, by a fist, since Big Pink knocked me out of boxing. This was no weak-sister amateur like back-alley Jonah. No. Whoever hit me had a lot of practice and good muscle to back it up.
As I half-sailed through the atmosphere toward my fau¶ itx receptionist’s desk I passed from the real world into a limbo back over thirty years, when George Foreman bounced Joe Frazier around the ring like a fat kid thumping on a basketball.
I was that basketball, and somewhere Gordo was shouting, “Get up, kid! Get up! You can’t let him do that! Get in close! Cut off his power!”
I was in a supine pose and saw no reason to get up and let George hit me like that again. It was comfortable there on my back on the canvas, or maybe it was the floor. Flat on his back is the safest place for a boxer who has met his better.
The referee must have been distracted. Maybe he was trying to get George to go to a neutral corner. I started the count for him so when he got to me he wouldn’t have to recite all those numbers.
“One—two—three,” I counted but then I heard something slam.
I lost my place and had to start all over at one. By the time I got to four a clawless she-bear had decided to shamble into the ring and caress me by the throat. The problem was that this Ursus arctos horribilus didn’t understand that she was far too strong. The bear wanted to caress me but she might have choked me to death if she wasn’t careful.
I do believe that I would have passed pleasantly into unconsciousness if it wasn’t for those paws around my throat. It was an intimate embrace—until I couldn’t breathe.
Sparring and working out at Gordo’s gym was more than just an exercise regimen for me. It also kept me in touch with a boxer’s quick reaction time. Boxers can fight when they’re out on their feet; they can feel a blow coming from behind their heads. A boxer, like a chess player, sees many moves ahead. He has physical speed far beyond normal human reflexes. And, most of all, his profession is survival.
That was my job, too.
I brought my fists together on either side of the big bear, George Foreman’s head—at least that’s what my addled brain told me I was doing.
The man who was on top of me fell back, allowing me to get to my feet. Even squatting down on one knee he was nearly my height. I hit him with everything I had and all he did was stand up straight. I swung again but he took a step back with his long, pillar-like legs, crossing over to the front door, which, in my stupor, I heard slamming.
I had all of two seconds to appraise my white male attacker. He was six five at least, wearing army surplus fatigues from a jungle war, not Iraq. His fists were bigger than Sonny Liston’s and his face was both slack and spiteful. The hair was a golden brown, and if someone told me he weighed three hundred pounds I wouldn’t have been surprised.
He came at me, quickly and lithe, like a born athlete. Lucky for me his ability was from nature, not training. I sidestepped the lunge and clocked his jaw with a solid right hook. He swung his left arm and nearly knocked me down with the push. I have a low center of gravity, however, so I sidled away like a crab.
My gun was in the inner office. So that was out of the question. The front door was closed, and I wasn’t fast enough to open it before he could drag me down and strangle me for good.
He tried to grab me but I ducked under and hit him in the midsection with two perfect uppercuts.
He didn’t even grunt.
I backed away and he lunged again. I ducked and punched for all the good it did me. He looked like he was going to jump again so I went low. But he didn’t come all the way. He stopped and threw an uppercut of his own. I think I might have discovered a new galaxy at that moment, seeing that my opponent had just ripped a hole in the fabric of my reality.
I went into my shell and he hit both shoulders with two untrained roundhouse blows. Every joint in my body rattled.
Once it was only a suspicion, but now it was a fact: I was too old for this.
I looked up just in time to see him jump at me. I fell to the floor and rolled away, letting him crash into the wall.
Any intelligent creature would have stopped a moment after slamming into a wall. But Big Boy just turned and sought me out with his dull, hateful eyes. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t breathing hard. There wasn’t even a bruise from my pinpoint punching or on the part of his head that had put a dent in the plaster wall. It was one of those moments when you realize that only a higher power could see you through.
Whenever a door is opened in my office, hidden digital cameras go to work. They take pictures every few seconds for eight minutes, so the whole fight between me and Big Boy was captured in two-and-a-half-second lapses. I’ve studied the fight more than once, and every time I see it I wonder why I’m not dead.
He hadn’t landed more than a few flush punches but he was so strong that that hardly mattered. I hit him maybe a dozen times with absolutely no effect. I tried to kick him in the balls—I wasn’t proud—but he was too tall and easily avoided my craven attempt at survival.
At one point I ran behind the receptionist’s desk, hoping for just a few seconds’ respite. But the guy, with only one hand, slid the desk across the room and into the wall.
That was one of the most disheartening moments of my deeply unsatisfying life. I had never seen such raw power. And I knew that this man had already murdered Roger Brown, Frank Tork, and Norman Fell. His hateful idiot face told me that he would not listen to my entreaties.
Two half-seconds passed. During the first increment I realized that I was very close to the end of my life—that this man was going to slaughter me and there was no way out. I used the rest of my last second deciding that I should go out on a high note.
I screamed like a berserker Viking and grabbed the backrest of the»bacdiv thirty-six-and-three-quarter-pound swivel chair that nobody but me sat in. I swung that chair up using the last of my fear-induced strength. My nemesis took a step back, and I knew I was done for. But then the backrest came off in my hands and the rest of the chair went flying at the big man’s head.
It hit him and he went down and out.
I fell to my knees wheezing, a Greco-Roman wrestler at the end of a championship bout. When I tried to rise to make the 911 call I fell flat on my face as I had done in Gordo’s Gym a thousand years before.
Ê€„
23
Some upstanding citizen heard the ruckus and called the cops. That citizen should have been me. Don’t get me wrong, I did call the police, but only as my second act of consciousness. That was five minutes later. It took three minutes to get to the phone and two more to call Breland Lewis, my long-time lawyer and sometime friend.
Way before Breland got there I was on my knees, with a plastic tie holding my wrists behind my back. There were eleven cops in the twelve-by-fourteen room, where a good deal of the floor space was taken up by the body of the most powerful man I ever fought.
“This guy’s alive,” one of the boys in blue shouted.
Alive? A blow like he received could have killed a real bear.
There’s a small squad of policemen assigned to the Tesla Building. With so many businesses—and possible crimes—there are always a few cops in the vicinity. Each and every one of them has my name and statistics committed to memory. I was a person of interest to the NYPD. No amount of redemption was going to change that fact.
Sergeant Kenneth Holloway was the officer in charge. He had told me, more than once, always in the exact same words, that “I will see you locked up for forty years, McGill.”
He said
it to me again when I was on my knees, but I didn’t have the strength to care.
“Why did you attack him?” Holloway asked.
I looked up and saw skinny, diminutive Breland Lewis shoulder his way past cops twice his size.
“Out of my way,” he peeped like an angry chick. “Mr. McGill is my client and I have every right to see him. Leonid, are you okay?”
“We got your client on attempted murder, Counselor,” Holloway said, grinning ugly.
Looking at those two, I had to wonder about the American idea of a white race. Holloway was tall and beefy, pink-skinned with stingy porcine eyes and ears. Lewis, on the other hand, was a flyweight with fine features carved from the ivory of a recent kill. As far as that went, the white man on the floor had brownish-white skin. He was a Caucasian, too, by American standards, but in ancient Europe those th¾t kree would all have been considered different races.
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