Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_03

by When the Thrill Is Gone

  Common sense told me to turn away, but ninety-nine dollars an hour said differently.

  Finally I picked up the phone and entered a number.

  Somewhere deep in Queens a woman’s voice answered, “Leonid McGill’s line. Hello, Mr. McGill . . . or Mardi.”

  “It’s me, Zephyra,” I said to my TCPA, my self-defined Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant.

  “How can I help you, boss?”

  “I just came from watching your boyfriend spill sweat on Gordo’s floor.”

  “Charles Bateman is not my boyfriend.”

  “Charles?”

  “That’s his name. Didn’t you know?” she said. “I hope you don’t think that his mother and father christened him Tiny, or Bug.”

  “Charles thinks he’s your boyfriend. Why else would he be working out in a grimy gym for the first time in his life?”

  “Did you call for some other reason, Mr. McGill?”

  “I need you to try to get me an appointment with a reclusive billionaire named Cyril Tyler.”

  “Okay. I’ll get right on it.”

  “Don’t you need any other information?”

  “No, sir. One of my clients is a masseuse, very popular among the wealthy. She’s willing to make house calls and travel. Three times she’s been to see Mr. Tyler. Is there any special reason I should give for the visit?”

  “Tell him that it’s an Indian Christmas in July.”

  5

  GETTING OFF THE PHONE with Zephyra, I turned back to the pictures and articles offered up by the Net. I liked the name—the Net—because it made me a fisherman on the shores of some great electronic sea. I’d throw in my meshlike web and pull out treasures such as a series of eleven six-by-four-foot canvases of what at first seemed to be rusted-out and discolored plates of steel. But, as I looked at them, these marred slabs slowly transformed into landscapes and life studies cobbled together by the judicious and crafty application of corrosives, intense heat, and specially made epoxy-based acrylics. There was a lot of stippling and pointillism, very few bold strokes or pools of color.

  There was life in these pieces of art that matched the wildness of the woman who called herself Chrystal Tyler; matched but did not equal. The execution of these paintings was subtle and deft, defiant of the supposed European and Asian hegemony while replicating these forms’ grace and even their sense of history. The woman I’d met had no notion of this subtle and violent challenge to the so-called civilized world’s domination of aesthetics.

  These arresting works were of junkyard landscapes, of yellow and brown streetwise nudes made from what only seemed like rot and decay. I found myself wondering at the woman I had not met. Was she in as much trouble as her imposter claimed?

  And why would anyone come to me pretending to be another in distress? Were they working together, or was this a plot against the real Chrystal Tyler executed by a murderous husband and a jealous cousin? Tyler’s first two wives were both dead—that was a fact. Was I being set up for a patsy in yet a third murder?

  The smile on my lips did not bode well for anyone attempting to dupe me.

  I was sitting there, contemplating the nature of my own perverted mirth when the direct line to my office rang.

  “Yes, Zephyra.”

  “You have a seven p.m. appointment with Cyril Tyler,” she said, adding an address I already knew.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. It was some kind of assistant. I told him what you said and he asked me to hang on. A few minutes later he got back on the line and gave me the seven o’clock option. I took it.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “And Charles is not my boyfriend,” she added.

  “Maybe not, but you won’t ever find another man take the kind of pain he’s swallowing over you.”

  “Is there anything else?” she asked.

  “A whole universe,” I said, and then Bug’s search program chimed again.

  “Call me if you need anything work related,” Zephyra said.

  We both disconnected and I pressed the enter key.

  An image filled my eighteen-inch screen, a close-up of the blood-streaked face of Pinky Todd. Bug’s system must have found its way into some newspaper’s files to come up with that graphic image. Her eyes were wide open and a deep gash in her temple had allowed a rivulet of blood to travel down between those unseeing orbs.

  This photograph sharpened my attention to another level of intensity. Blood is the mainstay of my particular branch of the PI profession; hot blood, spilled blood, common blood with a grudge. There wasn’t always violence attached to the cases I was drawn to, that were drawn to me, but there was always an underlying pulse and at least a predisposition toward a bloody outburst.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the half-aware insight that this was the life I had chosen, that not everyone was prone to this way of being. I wondered, half consciously, if I could change gears and be another kind of man.

  Who knows how far I might have gone down that avenue of thought if the intercom buzzer hadn’t shocked me back to awareness, Pinky Todd’s picture still glowing brightly on my screen.

  “Yes, Mardi?”

  “Harris Vartan, sir.”

  I had almost forgotten him.

  “Show him in.”

  I logged out of Bug’s program, sat back in my worn office chair, and laced my already large hands into one big oversized fist. I could bash through a length of four-by-four hardwood with that cudgel, but that meant nothing next to the power wielded by the man coming down the hall.

  I stood up when the door swung open and Mardi stepped in, leading the modern-day mobster in the pale pearl-gray suit. His shirt was a wan yellow cinched by a maroon tie with flowing skyblue highlights. He had silver hair and olive skin with eyes that rendered black a watery second cousin. Standing five nine, he was seventy-three but could have passed for somewhere in his fifties. He did push-ups and sit-ups every morning and could hold his own with any man, or woman, half his age.

  Mardi stopped at the door while Vartan advanced toward me and held out a hand. He didn’t shake hands with everyone. You had to reach a certain level in the hierarchy of sin to even see Vartan, known as the Diplomat to law breakers and police officials alike.

  Until I was fifteen I called him Uncle Harry because he had been a close aide to my father when my father was a union organizer and Vartan was, too. The unions brought Tolstoy McGill to revolution and the violent overthrow of the capitalist dogs, while Vartan took the organized-crime route that labor sometimes offered.

  Though they had taken different paths to their damnations, both men had one overarching philosophy in common: they saw all men’s deeds as acts of fate and therefore were never plagued by guilt or remorse.

  A man’s actions are defined by history, my father had told me a hundred times before he went off to be swallowed whole by the Struggle. Men are bullets shot from an unpredictable and inexhaustible Gatling gun. You may not be able to foresee where they’ll end up, but they are always on their way there.

  “You’re looking fit, Leonid,” Vartan said with half a smile, the most he ever gave.

  “Have a seat,” I replied.

  Mardi exited and Vartan sat, crossing his legs and sitting back like a southern European on a New York vacation.

  In actuality Harris lived in Chicago. From there he ran a syndicate the size of which Al Capone couldn’t have even imagined.

  “How’s business?” he asked.

  “Just took on a new client.”

  “Still on the up-and-up?”

  “More like the up-and-down,” I said, “but, yeah, I’m trying to keep it legal.”

  “Really? It has been mentioned that you have developed a relationship with a man named Hush.”

  “What is it you want, Mr. Vartan?”

  “You used to call me Uncle.”

  I shrugged.

  Vartan waited a moment, to see if I’d show some heart—but he knew better. />
  “I came here to ask you to find a man for me,” he said. “A man named William Williams, a former associate.”

  “Why me?”

  “New York was his last address, and you’re known to me.”

  I took a moment to pretend to consider his request. Then I said, “I will not, under any circumstances, work for you, Mr. Vartan. Not for any amount of money.”

  “I wasn’t intending to pay you,” he said. “I thought that you would do it as a favor for an old friend of the family.”

  “No reason for us to mince words here,” I said. “I’m out of the life, and that means I won’t go back even if someone as dangerous and powerful as you tries to make me.”

  Vartan sat back so comfortably you might have thought he was at home in his den, sitting in his favorite chair. He held his hands palms up and raised his eyebrows.

  “I respect your decision, Lenny,” he said, using a nickname that only he dared use. “But this request has nothing to do with my business or anything illegal that I am aware of. This man is an old friend from my youth. I promised someone that I’d find him—for friendship, not business.”

  I had never known Vartan to out-and-out lie. His trade was solving problems, not deception.

  “And if you do me this service I will be in your debt,” he added.

  I’d burned quite a few bridges in the past few months. A friend of Vartan’s stature would certainly come in handy.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with your business?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s no crime, no vengeance involved?”

  “Correct.”

  “Your word?”

  “If you need it, it’s yours.”

  “I’ll think about it and call you tomorrow. Just give me a number.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  I gave him as hard a stare as a gnat can give a lion and then nodded, accepting his terms.

  “Have you been up to your mother’s grave lately?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “It’s just a question, Lenny.”

  “There’s questions I could ask you, too, Uncle Harry,” I said. “Questions just as tough.”

  Instead of continuing, the Diplomat stood up and went to the door.

  “I can see myself out,” he said.

  That was fine by me.

  6

  THE NUMBER 1 TRAIN at rush hour is a fast-moving mob. Commuting workers and others are piled on top of each other, using anything they can to escape the feeling of melee. Young people form into circles and talk loudly enough to drown out the shrieking of steel on steel. Families huddle, blue-collar workers nap, and almost everybody else is plugged into loud music, last night’s missed TV show, or any game from sudoku to Grand Theft Auto. There are readers, too, concentrating on sensational magazines, nineteenth-century novels, and comic books.

  I usually gravitate toward the end of the platform—the last car is most often the least populous. But I don’t get distracted. I like watching people, seeing how they turn inward and turn away when finding themselves in a throng. You’d think that anyone who’d decided to live in a city like New York, to travel by underground train, would revel in the closely packed company of others—but no.

  One day it came to me that the isolation and alienation of rush hour is like so many marriages I’ve investigated—a lifetime spent together in the same bed and still managing to keep separate and remote.

  In the majority of my marital cases, I got the definite impression that I knew more about the private lives of the couple than either of them did.

  Those three monkeys, my father used to say, Hear No, See No, Speak No . . . Just drop the Evil and you have a civilized prole.

  I CLIMBED OUT of the Ninety-sixth Street station behind an old white man who had to take the steps one at a time. His baggy green trousers were held up by bright red-and-blue suspenders worn over a gray woolen sweater. There were people coming down the other side, so I couldn’t go around.

  “Hurry it up, will ya, man?” a voice behind me said but I had no intention of interfering with the oldster’s pace.

  “Hey!” the voice insisted.

  I stopped and turned to face a thirtyish young man dressed in a style of someone ten, or even twenty, years his junior: a blaring red T-shirt with a writhing form drawn upon it and jeans that hung down on his hips. He was white but that hardly mattered. He could have been any race and still held the same misconceptions as to his place in the world.

  At first the young man thought he could bowl right over me. After all, he did his exercises and watched kung-fu movies. So I held up a hand like a steam shovel.

  He stopped and gave me the look—that gaze of resentment and threat that has yet to reach a physical aspect.

  “If you’re lucky,” I said before he could announce his own undoing, “you will one day get to be old enough and infirm enough to have some young man yellin’ at you to hurry it up. If you’re unlucky you’ll lay hands upon me.”

  The young man took half a step back. He thought about attacking, and then thought better. I watched him for the appropriate amount of time and then resumed my climb.

  I love the subway system and the people it brings together. It’s better than any sitcom or pop song. The subway and its nerve centers are like a jazz sonata, bringing the past into the future—all the generations crammed together in dissonant and almost unbearably sharp focus.

  OTHER THAN THE FACT that it was constructed from glazed white brick instead of dark red, the building was nondescript. Nineteen stories high and taking up nearly the whole block, it had two fire-escape systems that I could see—one in the front down the middle, and the other cascading down the side, leading into a fenced-in alleyway.

  I look for fire escapes wherever I go. This because of a dream I used to have every night and that still recurs now and then. I’m in a burning building, on a high floor, and there’s no escape . . .

  THE DOORMAN WORE an immaculate red-and-blue-trimmed uniform. The costume itself didn’t set him apart from others in his profession but the punctilious attention to detail spoke reams about his persona.

  He was a coffee-and-cream-colored man and, of course, taller than me by half a foot or more. He moved into the doorway at the top of the stone stairs to block me. To him I might as well have been a young man in a garish red T-shirt and slouching jeans.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  He had a beautiful voice. If his mother had paid more attention, or had his father been more understanding, he might at that moment have been preparing to sing opera in Cleveland, or maybe Orlando. Instead he positioned his big gut in my face, a living shield for his betters.

  “Leonid Trotter McGill for Cyril Tyler.”

  “Who?”

  “Which ‘who’ do you wanna know about?”

  “Say what?” He had a good scowl, but I had a great left hook and so was unimpressed.

  “I mentioned two names,” I said. “And in answer to my declaration you asked ‘Who.’ ”

  “I never heard of a Cyril Tyler.”

  “Then either this is your first day on the job or you’re stupid.”

  He took one step down the granite stairs.

  “Why spill blood and teeth when you could just pick up the phone, brother?” I asked.

  A friendly voice is often the most threatening.

  He looked at me and pointed. “Wait here.” And then went to his little vestibule to make the inquiry.

  I wondered if Cyril had a private exit; if he had ever walked in or out the front door.

  I took a deep breath, and then another. Events had been tumbling down too fast and I was losing the grip on my temper. And, as any fighter can tell you, while you have to stay hot in a fight, you can’t let yourself burn out of control.

  “Take the elevator to floor nineteen,” the doorman said, breaking into my reverie. “Turn left when you get out, walk down the hall to the other car, and take that up one floor.�
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  “That’s one more floor than you got,” I said.

  Big Red’s reply was to step aside and allow me entrée.

  WHEN I GOT into the tiny vestibule-lift the button for nineteen was already lit. This gave me the impression that not just anyone was allowed access to the top floor. I rode up without interruption and emerged into a hallway of apartments with doorways but no doors; no furniture or ornaments or tenants either. It was a floor full of vacancies in a neighborhood where the rent on a one-bedroom ranged from three to five thousand dollars a month.

  Fake-Chrystal wasn’t lying when she sneered about Tyler’s wealth.

  The light-green paint on the second set of elevator doors was cracked and peeling in places. Underneath, the metal was beginning to rust. This reminded me of Real-Chrystal’s steel canvases.

  There was no button but the doors opened for me when I arrived and closed after I got in. The trip upward was little more than the distance between the floor and ceiling and when the doors came open I found myself standing at the edge of a broad, bright-green suburban lawn.

  One the other side of this verdant expanse was an oversized ranch-style house with a glassed-in porch and a red-brick chimney.

  “Mr. McGill?” The voice came from my right.

  The young man was slender and would only be called African-American by an American with a fixation on race. His skin was lighter than many a Mediterranean and his hair was curly but light brown. His features marked him as one of my people: broad nose and generous lips. His expression told me, however, that we had nothing in common.

  “My name is Phil,” he said, somehow making even this bland statement condescending. “You’re here to see Mr. Pelham?”

  I took a moment before answering, my momentary silence a reply to his attitude.

  Phil was wearing a pale lavender suit and gave off the scent of violets. I wondered what he might smell like if the suit was strawberry red.

  “My appointment is with Mr. Tyler,” I said at last.

  “Come with me,” Phil replied as he turned and made his way across the lush lawn.