He was just about to tell me; I was finally going to get an answer to the reason for the murders my investigation had made possible.
“It—” Roman managed to say before the door to the room slammed opened.
“Dad,” a man called.
Looking toward the light, I saw him coming. He wore a gray suit with a burgundy tie and hard-soled, oxblood shoes.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I stood up to meet the visitor because his demeanor was less than friendly.
He was taller than I, and white the way old paintings of American presidents are white. His hair was black and gray and his eyes tended toward brown. Behind him stood Rosa, behind her Margarita—Hannah brought up the rear. Her “never,” I supposed, became “hardly ever” when her father preceded her into her grandfather’s room.
“Leonid McGill,” I said, holding out a friendly hand. “I was just asking your father a couple of questions, Mr. Hull.”
“Get out of here,” he said, not taking up my offer of greeting.
The women behind him were silent.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
Roman was sniggering behind me. The piano music played like razor blades chipping away at my spine.
“No,” Bryant Hull said.
I looked up at him, thinking that everybody I met seemed to be taller than I.
“It might be worth your while to hear me out.”
“Leave my house or I will call the police.”
I didn’t have the time to go to jail right then, so I nodded and held my hands open at shoulder level in a sign of surrender. I was playing for time. Maybe he would ask a question in anger that would allow me the verbal foothold of a reply.
“Bryant,” a familiar voice said. “Bryant, what’s wrong? You sound angry.”
Coming into the dark and masculine room was the impossibly feminine form of Hannah’s mother. She glided up next to her husband.
They didn’t seem to fit together—he a prefabricated manikin dressed and groomed to look like a billionaire, and she the Nordic interpretation of a Mediterranean goddess.
She placed her fingers on the back of his hand.
“Hannah,” Bryant said.
“Yes, Dad?”
“Take your mother back to her room.”
“But, Bryant,” his wife said.
“Bunny, please just go with Hannah.”
Bunny.
Roman had begun a rolling, heavy cough.
Margarita went to him.
Bryant turned to me and I was feeling as if Willie Sanderson had just unloaded one of his haymakers on the back of my head.
“Are you leaving?” the rich man asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.”
Ê€„
51
I once read a monograph, written by a man named Harlan Victorious Lowe, called Creativity and Quirks of the Mind. The author claimed, among other things, that creative thought often happens in the mind’s peripheral vision, when that metaphorical sight is jogged by obvious mainstream thinking. In other words—when one thing comes to light, the illumination often floods the dark corners with brightness.
Bunny was a blazing sun in the rabbit warren of my mind.
I jumped into a taxi two blocks from the Hull mansion and sat in the backseat, almost catatonic from the realizations as they bombarded me.
On the street in front of the Tesla Building I called Tiny the Bug.
“Yes, LT?”
“I want you to create me a website in somebody else’s name,” I said. “How many minutes will that take?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“That’s money, not minutes.”
“Thousand dollars an hour starting twenty seconds ago.”
“Sold.”
I gave him the details. He grunted twice, asked four questions, and then disconnected the line.
ONE OF MY REALIZATIONS was that I had no choice but to give Tony the Suit A Mann’s address.
Back at my desk I placed the call.
“Yeah,” a man, not Tony, answered.
“Lucas?”
“Who’s this?”
“Leonid McGill.”
“Oh,”ž€"1e he said. The circumspection evinced by that single syllable told me that Tony was out of the loop as far as Vartan was concerned.
“What do you want?” Lucas asked softly.
“Peace in the Middle East and a brown-skinned president in the Oval Office. And, oh yeah, to talk to your boss about A Mann.”
“What man?”
Somebody asked a question in the background and Lucas, the leg-breaker, covered the mouthpiece to answer.
Various muffled sounds ensured, and then Tony was on the line.
“This job is just between us, LT,” were his first words, then, “What you got for me?”
“A man’s neck size and address.”
“Where do we meet?”
“You got my money?”
“You know I’m good for it.”
“And you know how I work, Tony. After the job is done I get paid. Job is done and you haven’t given me a dime. We haven’t even agreed on a price.”
“I thought you’d do it for a favor.”
“No.”
“You don’t want to mess with me, McGill.”
“Mess with you? I don’t even wanna talk to you. But if we do talk I expect to get paid. Fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Are you crazy?”
I broke the connection with my middle finger.
Sitting there, staring out the window at New Jersey, I wondered how many times I could get away with a move like that without getting myself killed. That brought a smile to my heart. I was alive, damn it, and that felt very, very good.
A colony of monkeys gibbered in my breast pocket.
“Yeah, Tone?”
“Okay,” he said.
“Good. I’m real busy right at the moment. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you where you can give me the cash.”
“Today.”
“Tomorrow I’ll call with a time and place. You bring the cash and I’ll give you what you need.”
I pressed the red button before he cou£€€ yold complain.
INTUITION GUIDED MY next call.
The first number I called put me directly into voice mail telling me that that particular cell phone had been turned off.
Then I dialed the oldest number I know.
“Hello?” a tremulous voice answered.
“Mardi?”
“Hi, Mr. McGill.”
“Let me speak to Twill, honey.”
“Um . . .”
“It’s important.”
“He’s not, he’s not here.”
“Not there? Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she stammered.
I didn’t need any peripheral creativity to worry about where he might be.
“Listen closely to me, Mardi,” I said. “I know about your father, what he’s done to you, and that you’re worried about your sister. I know what Twill plans to do to him. But you don’t have to worry about any of that anymore. I can take him down without you and my son going to prison. But you have to tell me where Twill is right now.”
Silence.
“Mardi,” I said. “Twill will spend the next twenty years in prison. You will, too. Who’s going to take care of your sister if that happens?”
“He’s . . .”
“Yes?”
“There’s a street fair on our block this afternoon.”
“I thought that was next week.”
“Daddy got it wrong. He has to rush down to the Village to get the photographs he’s selling. He should be back by now . . .”
I RACED DOWN to the street and caught a cab on Sixth. I gave the Pakistani driver a fifty-dollar bill and promised him another hundred if he could get me to the Bitterman block in under ten minutes.
We were maybe four minutes into the drive when I realized that I
’d left my gun at the office. I considered turning around to get it but I couldn’t see any reason for going after my son armed.
Hyenas yipped in my hand as we were crossing S£€€y seventy-ninth Street.
“Where are you?” I asked Carson Kitteridge.
“Downtown,” he answered. “Why?”
“I gotta call you back.”
“Sanderson’s escaped,” he said before I could switch him off.
“How could a man with a fractured skull stand up, much less escape?”
“Desperation.”
We were nearing the Bitterman block.
“I gotta go, Carson,” I said. I don’t ever remember calling him by his first name before.
The street was blocked off, so I threw the hundred in the front seat and bolted from the cab. My foot hit the curb at an awkward angle and I went down, twisting my left ankle badly. But I got up and walked through the pain, just like Gordo taught me when I was a kid.
It was a bright sunny day and there were a thousand people milling and meandering down the center of the blocked-off street. I limped along, looking this way and that for my son.
My son.
I looked for him through racks of cheap jewelry, past the steam rising from a sausage vendor’s kiosk, and across a cell-phone seller’s cart. I bobbed up and down, moving in an erratic line past stacks of old Life magazines and piles of vintage vinyl albums.
I was bumping into people because of my awkward gait, handing out “Excuse me’s” like a politician pressing palms and saying, “Glad to meet ya.” I didn’t want to call out Twill’s name, just in case he shot the child molester before I got to him.
“Hey, watch out!” a man shouted. I think I might have stepped on his foot.
He pushed me as I was bringing weight down on my sore ankle and I fell. But that wasn’t punishment enough for whatever insult I had inflicted. He reached down to grab me by my lapels. I concentrated on him for the moment. He was a white guy, in his early forties, with various tattoos on his muscular forearms and that part of his chest that was exposed by an open dark-blue shirt. I remember seeing a skull with a serpent coming out of its eye socket.
I clamped onto his decorated forearms and pushed with my good foot. When I was standing again, and he was understanding the strength of the hands crushing his arms, I saw a slender figure in a dark-green hoodie off to my left.
“Motherfucker!” my tattooed antagonist hissed.
I swiveled my hips, throwing him to the ground as I lunged toward the overdressed figure sporting the form and grace of my son.
“Twill, stop!”
When he swiveled his head to look at me the hood fell away. He had on a fabric skullcap, which threw me for an instant. Also, I had never seen that look on Twill’s face—but I recognized it. He was a man but seconds away from a desperate and final act. I looked a little farther to the left and saw, behind a large flat folding table, the man I had heretofore only seen buggering little Mardi Bitterman on a computer monitor. Behind him was a canvas screen hung with colorful photographs of panda bears, zebras, and other creatures reminiscent of childish wonder.
Adrenaline is a miracle compound. It ramped through my system like Popeye’s spinach or Captain Marvel’s “Shazam!” This internal elixir reached my ankle, temporarily curing me and setting my feet in motion. I reached Twill in an impossibly short span, grabbing him by both arms because, among other gifts, my son is ambidextrous. He tried to pull away but one thing I had on him was strength.
“It’s over, boy,” I said.
A familiar smile twitched across Twilliam’s lips.
“Hey, Pops,” he said.
“Are you Twill McGill?” a man asked. Not just a man, but Leslie Bitterman. “Where’s my daughter? I know that she’s with you.”
I don’t know what he planned to do next but it didn’t matter because I let go of my son and slapped Leslie hard enough to knock him on his ass. He was sitting on the curb, shaking his head to clear out the stars and cobwebs.
“Hey!” the white man who had pushed me down said.
He was coming right at me.
With my slap-hand I brought together his dark-blue shirt collar and pulled his face close to mine.
“I got a gun in my pocket and nothing to keep me from shooting you dead right here, right now.”
I don’t know if it was the words or the tone of my voice that convinced the guy but he fell back and melted away into the mass of unsuspecting humanity.
Ê€„
52
I took Twill by his right wrist and dragged him away from the street fair like an angry nanny might do with a naughty five-year-old. We didn’t stop moving for six blocks.
“Dad. Dad!”
I realized that my mind had been racing ahead without me.
“What?”
“What’s wrong with your foot?”
“My what?”
iv height="1em"
“You’re limping.”
His words, it seemed, brought the pain back into my ankle.
We were standing on the western sidewalk of the Natural History Museum. Twill led me to a bench there.
Willie Sanderson was on my mind. Where was he?
Who would the monster kill next?
“Dad?”
“You don’t have to worry about Mardi’s father anymore,” I said. “I know what he did to her and I’ll take care of him. But you should have come to me, son. You should always come to me when you have a problem.”
“Mardi didn’t want anybody to know.”
“There’s no secrets between us, Twill. I would no more betray that girl than you would. Don’t you know that?”
“I guess.”
“And what kind of fool are you, planning to walk up to somebody and shoot him in broad daylight in front of a thousand people?”
“How’d you know I planned to shoot him?”
“Don’t you think I know your hiding places, boy? And I’d have to be blind not to see what was goin’ on with that girl. What I couldn’t see was how making yourself a martyr in front of a street full of people was going to help.”
“No, man,” he said to me as if I were one of his school friends. “I had this.” He pulled the fabric hat from his head. In his hand the woolen skullcap opened into a ski mask. “That way nobody could see my face and . . .”
Twill stood up and pulled the sweatshirt-hoodie up over his head. Underneath he was wearing an ugly but bright orange-red Hawaiian shirt festooned with images of pelicans and pineapples.
My irrepressible son grinned.
“I woulda walked away with the gun at my side and then pulled off the hoodie in an alley two blocks away. Then I’da made it into Central Park, where there’s a rock I’d put the gun under.”
It wasn’t a half-bad plan. You’d have to be focused to pull it off, but Twill never had an attention deficit.
“Listen, son,” I said in spite of how impressed I was. “You’re smart and fearless. But you don’t know everything. That man deserves anything he gets but not by you taking the law in your own hands. Killing is wrong and I don’t want you involved with anything like that.” Sometimes I marvel at the simplicity of communication between people who share closeness. I was raised on the Hegelian dialectic, but there is no love in that language.
“That’s why you ran out there after me?” Twill asked, but I felt that there was another question on his mind.
“I’d die to protect you,” I replied to the unspoken interrogative.
Twill sat there on the public bench, staring into my eyes. I have rarely felt closer to another human being.
After a moment he nodded.
“I’m sorry, Pops,” he said.
I held out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Grab a cab home and put the pistol in my office, in the desk.”
“All right. But put that away. I got my own money.”
The Long Fall lm-1 Page 26
