Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_03

by When the Thrill Is Gone

  “He’s rich,” she said with a disdainful sneer. “And not just your everyday millionaire kinda rich. Cyril’s a billionaire. His family built half the buildin’s over there in New Jersey.”

  “His name is Cyril Tyler?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If he’s so rich why haven’t I ever heard of him?”

  “He likes to keep things quiet. If you don’t need to know about him, you don’t.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “What about me?”

  “What do you do?”

  She speculated a moment too long before answering.

  “I paint,” she said, “on steel.”

  “Steel?”

  “Uh-huh. Big steel plates. That’s what I do. That’s how I met my husband. Cyril bought five big ones. They weighed more than a ton.” Her sneer was a work of art in itself.

  “And you two made a connection.”

  “You could call it that.”

  “And now he’s having an affair and you need ammunition for the divorce.”

  “What I need is to not get murdered.”

  Almost everything you know or ever hear is a lie. Advertisements, politicians’ promises, children’s claims of accomplishments and innocence . . . your own memory. Most of us know it’s so but still cannot live our lives according to this solitary truth. We have to believe in something every moment of our lives. Losing this illusion invites insanity.

  I knew that the woman sitting in front of me was lying. Maybe everything about her was a falsehood, but under that subterfuge there was something true. The fact that I wondered about this underlying reality is what makes me a good detective.

  The intercom buzzer sounded just then.

  I pressed a button on my desk phone and said, “Yes, Mardi?” to the air.

  “Harris Vartan on line five, sir.”

  That’s when I knew it was going to be one of those weeks.

  I held up a finger to hold the place of murder, picked up the phone, and pressed line five.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Leonid.”

  “I’m with a client.”

  “I’ll be dropping by at around five.”

  The phone clicked in my ear but I didn’t lower the receiver immediately. I sat there, listening to my own counsel. Like Iran, I was superstitious. There was something wrong with Chrystal Tyler. If I needed proof of this fact it was that one of the most dangerous men in organized crime had just warned me of his approach. I should have excused myself, given Mardi the week off, and taken a fast jet to the Bahamas.

  At the very least I should have sent the handsome young woman away, but I was distracted by the mystery of time.

  Many and most moments go by with us hardly aware of their passage. But love and hate and fear cause time to snag you, to drag you down like a spider’s web holding fast to a doomed fly’s wings. And when you’re caught like that you’re aware of every moment and movement and nuance.

  I couldn’t tell who was caught, me or Chrystal, but Vartan’s call, rather than warning me off, only pushed me in deeper.

  3

  “IT’S A BIG jump from an affair to murder,” I said after hanging up the dead line, “even for a billionaire recluse. Has he threatened you?”

  “That’s not how Cyril do things.”

  “Then why do you think he might kill you?”

  “Allondra North and Pinky Todd,” she said, as if this should mean something to me.

  “And they are?” I asked, jotting down the names on my thick gray paper blotter.

  “They were both his wives and now they’re dead.”

  The young woman fixed me with a stare that laid claim to a truth that even an old cynic like me would have a hard time denying.

  “Murdered?”

  She looked to her left as if maybe there was someone there next to her, urging her on with the story.

  “Can I smoke in here?” she asked, turning back to me.

  “Sure.”

  She had a ritual approach to opening the bag, producing the red package, and teasing out the cigarette, then the unhooking of a bullet-shaped lighter from a chain, hitherto hidden by the thin silk of her dress. When she lit up I hoped she didn’t notice the widening of my nostrils. Tobacco smoke brought out desire in me. Desire is an emotion that any good detective needs to hide.

  “Murder?” I said to keep our minds on the subject.

  “One night about two years ago I made some sangria spiked with a little red wine but mostly vodka. It was strong and tasted sweet so Cyril drank more than he usually does. That’s what got him talkin’.

  “He told me that him and Allondra would drink and then fight like cats and dogs, that one time they was on his yacht and had a fight. When he woke up in the mornin’ the boat was far away from shore. He had a cut on his head and she was gone. They never fount her body.”

  “He admitted to killing her?”

  “No. He said that he didn’t remember nuthin’. A year later he married Pinky Todd. They didn’t drink or fight, so he thought everything would be fine, but then one day she told him that she wanted a divorce and she needed fifty million dollars or she was gonna tell about how him and his friends was doin’ insider tradin’ on Wall Street.”

  “And he killed her?”

  “He agreed to give her fifteen million, had it set up and everything, and then one day, just a few weeks later, she was walkin’ down Fifth Avenue after shoppin’ and a crazy homeless man hit her in the head with a chunk’a concrete from a construction site. She died right there on the sidewalk.”

  “What happened to the killer?” I asked. The word “killer” brought to mind Harris Vartan. I realized that I was more with him than with Chrystal Tyler.

  “He got away.”

  “Was it nighttime?”

  “Uh-uh. It was the middle’a the day, and the streets were crowded.”

  “That sounds bad, but a murder like that would be very hard to orchestrate.”

  “Cyril believes that he did it.”

  “He believes he did,” I said. “How does that work?”

  “He says that he thinks that his mind makes these people die, that if he starts to hate somebody they just perish.”

  Again I thought about Harris Vartan. His was the kind of mind that could feel an anger that brought about death. It would be, one day, a man like him thinking ill of me that would put me in an early, and possibly unmarked, grave.

  The anticipation of Vartan was making me lose interest in Chrystal. I decided to ease her out of the office to face whatever fantasy her husband was entertaining.

  That’s when she reached into the yellow bag and pulled out an impressive stack of hundred-dollar bills. She leaned over, placing the pile upon the desktop, within my reach.

  “Twelve thousand, six hundred dollars,” she said, exhaling smoke. “It’s all I can afford. I got more but I need that in case I have to go somewhere fast.”

  My nostrils flared freely and my eyebrows, I’m sure, raised.

  “I had a necklace of rubies and emeralds that Cyril’s mother gave me,” she said. “I sold it to Sophia Nunn of the Indiana Nunns.”

  I had two kids in college and one who had just dropped out of high school. My rent was low but still needed paying. And Harris Vartan was coming to make me an offer. With Chrystal’s money in my pocket I might be able to turn him down.

  The skin between my fingers actually began to perspire.

  But still I did not reach for the money.

  “You say it’s been two years since you and Cyril had that sangria?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Why didn’t you come to me back then?”

  The blankness of her expression was a wonder to behold. It portended a shift in our communication.

  “I’ve had some hard things happen in my life, Mr. McGill,” she said. “Very hard. People fight. Sometimes they kill. Where I come from you look after yourself first. Cyril and me had it okay. There was a prenuptial agr
eement, and I didn’t know nuthin’ about his business. We never fight. Why would he wanna start havin’ bad thoughts about me?”

  “And so what changed?”

  “Cyril’s always been kinda portly,” she said. “But lately he been losin’ weight and sleepin’ in another bedroom. Late one night, a few weeks ago, I went down the hall to visit and heard him talkin’ on the phone in there. I couldn’t make out what he was sayin’ through the door but it was definitely him bein’ intimate.”

  “And you think it’s a woman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And because of that you’re worried that he might kill you.”

  “He says that he’s the reason his two past wives is dead,” she said. “Wouldn’t you be scared?”

  “Has he acted differently?”

  “He’s sleepin’ in another room,” she repeated, allowing exasperation to spice the words. “He’s losin’ weight and on the phone almost all night long, almost every night.”

  I couldn’t argue with her logic, or the money on the desk.

  “This is a lot of money,” I said. She knew what I meant.

  “I pay for what I need,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “What do you need me to do?” I asked.

  “No’man said that you were the kinda guy could make things happen,” she said.

  “I used to be. Nowadays I’ve changed my spots. Somewhat. What kind of things do you want to happen?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want him to kill me. So maybe you could figure out what I could do to make him back off.”

  “But he hasn’t threatened you.”

  “I already told you—that’s not how he do. Maybe, maybe if you go and talk to him, tell him that you’re lookin’ out for me.”

  “I do that and maybe he’ll start having bad thoughts about me,” I suggested.

  “Are you scared?”

  Her question caused me to smile. My smile brought forth a grin from her lips. We might not have been two peas in a pod, but we were definitely cut from the same bush.

  “I charge a hundred dollars an hour,” I said, reaching for the siren stack of bills. “I’ll hold on to this money as a retainer.”

  “A hundred dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s too much.”

  “Your life isn’t worth that?”

  “Ain’t nobody do this kinda work worth a hundred dollars a hour. No’man only charged three hundred a day.”

  “No’man is dead,” I said.

  “I just cain’t agree to no hundred dollars a hour,” Chrystal Tyler said.

  “How about ninety-nine?” I offered. “For every hour I work I’ll take away a hundred-dollar bill and put a single back in the stack.”

  “That’s still a lot, but at least it’s not no hundred dollars a hour. I could hire ten men down from where I used to live for that kinda money.”

  “And not one of them would make it past Cyril Tyler’s door.”

  “Okay,” she said, reluctantly. “Ninety-nine. But I expect you to be able to prove what you worked for.”

  “Do you have a picture of your husband?”

  That yellow purse was like Felix the Cat’s bag of tricks; all kinds of things came out of it. Chrystal produced a creased five-by-eight photograph that looked like it had been taped into a frame until recently. It was her, in bright red, arm in arm with a chubby man who wore tan trousers and a cream-colored sweater. She was leaning forward and laughing with abandon while he hung back shyly.

  “That was before he started his diet. Some people look better skinny, but you know, sometimes it ain’t no improvement when they lose weight,” she said with that telltale sneer. “Some people born to be fat.”

  It was the only unqualifiedly honest thing she ever said to me.

  4

  TINY “BUG” BATEMAN was not only seriously out of shape, he was also one of the world’s great minds when it came to computer technology and technique. He had created tools for me that I’m sure generals in the Pentagon would have drooled over.

  All I had to do was set up search templates that he’d developed to interface with his private Internet access system. After seeing Chrystal to the front door, I filled in the names and relationships of the people I was looking for and the system did an in-depth search using logic that Bug had culled and stolen from a thousand different systems.

  I set up queries for Cyril Tyler, Chrystal Chambers-Tyler (she’d left me with her husband’s contact information and the correct spelling of her name), Allondra North, and Pinky Todd.

  Chrystal had refused to give me her address or phone number because “Cyril got pockets so deep he could hide the state of Georgia in ’em. So I know he could buy a couple’a numbers. I’ll call you tomorrow at about four.”

  THE SEARCH SYSTEM was thorough and so never took less than fifteen minutes to work. To fill the time I decided to log on to the shadow account that Bug had fitted for me to eavesdrop on my youngest, and favorite, son—Twill.

  Since his juvenile authority social worker, Melinda Tarris, had signed his release from probation, Twill had dropped out of high school and become quite busy.

  “School just not for me, Pops,” he’d said when informing me of his decision. “I know how to read and write, think and do push-ups already, man.”

  “You know one other thing,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “How to get in trouble.”

  Not quite eighteen, Twill was slender and dark, handsome like a minor demon on a day pass from hell. When he smiled, you smiled; you had to.

  “Don’t worry, Pops. I learned my lessons.”

  He had dropped out of school, but his education—and my trials—were just beginning.

  Among other things I had gleaned, through Bug’s shadow-Net, was that Twill now had an account with an online Panamanian bank owned by an Eastern European concern. He started the account with a two-hundred-fifty-dollar check that Gordo had given him for doing work in the gym. This sum hadn’t changed for three months. But that afternoon Twill’s online account showed a balance of $86,321.44.

  Going into his Twitter account, I found that he’d received, in the past week, 1,216 messages. Each message had a dozen or more return addresses to them. Each address deposited eleven dollars into Twill’s online money-receiving account.

  Twill’s problem had always been that he’s too fast, too good, too smart. Without limitations set on him, a man like that can get deeply into trouble before there’s ever any warning. Men need trouble to gauge their success and temper the extent of their actions.

  I was Twill’s only real problem.

  I WAS WONDERING how to figure out the nature of my son’s latest scam when a chime sounded. The Internet search was over.

  I was presented with a variety of online reports and images for each search. Allondra North’s death had been ruled an accident by a Florida judge, while a distraught Cyril Tyler was exonerated of any foul play.

  “This is a tragedy, not a crime,” Lon Fledheim, Tyler’s attorney, said to the Miami Herald. “It is a private heartbreak.”

  The photograph of Allondra proved that she was biracial, but I couldn’t tell her specific ancestry. There was some white and brown in there, maybe some Asian and black.

  Pinky Todd, a white woman, was killed by a berserker homeless man who all of a sudden went crazy on Fifth Avenue and hit her in the head with a chunk of concrete. The bearded homeless man fled, lashing out at anyone who tried to stop him, and disappeared in the crowd. He was never found.

  Odd.

  Things really got tricky when Bug’s program presented me with an image and a bio of Chrystal Chambers-Tyler. She was indeed an up-and-coming artist who had attended Pratt Institute and produced paintings on highly polished steel canvases. She had reviews from all over the country and her work hung in a few of the smaller museums. Her marriage to Cyril was covered on the society page, and no one criticized her diction or ghetto sense of style. />
  Actually it was the lack of this latter style that made me take a second look at the digital likeness of her. At first it looked fine, but then, on closer examination, I was left wondering at the shape of her eyes and their slant toward the bridge of her nose. It was as if my streetwise client had had plastic surgery in order to look . . . a little different.

  I tapped into the photo system that engaged automatically when someone came in the front door of the reception area. For a period of eight seconds three cameras took a dozen photos each of the new guest.

  The images of the Chrystal Chambers who had come to my office were very close to that of the woman Bug’s program presented to me—but not quite a match. The woman who came to my office was shorter, for starters. On the Net there was an image of Mrs. Chrystal Tyler standing next to her husband in shoes that didn’t have heels. They were equal in height, whereas the photograph on my desk clearly showed that the woman who came to my office was the shorter of the two; not much shorter, no more than an inch.

  Owing to my own stature, nearly five six, I’m oversensitive to height.

  Both women had posed with Cyril. They were definitely related but were not identical twins. Sisters, half sisters, first cousins maybe. But why would one come to my office posing as the other? Especially with such a wild claim.

  There was also a little article on an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar necklace that Cyril’s mother had given to Chrystal. The piece was old and had a name—Indian Christmas. This referred to the country, a source of fine rubies and emeralds for centuries.

  The case was beginning to interest me. Much of what the woman who came to my office said was true. She knew Cyril Tyler, and well, according to the photograph. She knew intimate details about the real Chrystal Tyler’s life and the deaths of Cyril’s previous wives.

  If all this was true, then maybe someone’s life was in jeopardy. The question was—whose?

  FOR NEARLY AN hour I sat in front of that screen, trying to come up with scenarios that might explain what had transpired in my office: the street girl with the pretend billion-dollar husband taking the place of another black woman who was the real article.