IN THE CAR, with the toddler on my lap, I sighed. The fear I felt had nothing to do with my personal safety but with the jeopardy my actions may have placed the children in. I was pretty sure that my client was dead, and that the children were in greater danger in the fortress than they would be with me—but still . . .
I inhaled the various odors that cling to children. We were a few blocks away from the escape and I doubted that anyone would catch up to us.
If they did that would be their bad luck.
“Fatima,” I said.
The child looked up at me. She was holding the hands of the four- and the five-year-old that separated her and her brother.
“Was your mother hurt?”
She nodded. The tears were behind her. I felt that she had swallowed the pain for all her brothers and sisters, that this child had already seen more hardship than I’d accrued in all my brutal fifty-five years.
“Was she scared about anything before that?”
“Mama was always scared about somethin’,” she told me. “She said that there was a robber behind every door, even in the big house.”
“The big house?”
“That’s where Ivan lived with us all.”
“Was Ivan your mom’s boyfriend?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did he hurt her?”
“Uh-uh. It was the man who climbed out the window.”
“I’m going to take you to the house of a really nice lady and her daughter,” I said, wanting to veer away from the underlying pain of loss.
“We want to go stay with our Aunt Chris,” Fatima said.
“Yeah,” one of her little sisters agreed.
“As soon as I find her I’ll be happy to take you to her,” I said. “But I have to get you someplace safe before that.”
“What if we don’t like it there?” the elder child asked.
“If you don’t, then you don’t have to stay.”
She nodded once, and I had to remind myself that she was a child and not the woman she seemed to be.
AURA ULLMAN OWNED a very large top-floor apartment on Gramercy Park West. Her living room window looked down on the private square of green.
Aura’s seventeen-year-old daughter buzzed us through the ground-floor entrance and opened the door once we’d climbed our way to the top. Theda was five ten, weighing no more than a hundred and five pounds with blue-black skin, gray eyes, and wavy brown hair that marked her complicated heritage.
“Hi, Uncle L,” she said, smiling. “Who’re your friends?”
She lowered to her haunches and Fatima’s hard heart melted. The two hugged each other and the rest of the brood surged forward to get in on the action.
“Is your mother here?” I asked.
“You know she’s at work,” the teenager replied. And then she asked the kids, “Are you guys hungry?”
THEY HAD TOMATO Soup, frosted flakes, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, orange juice, milk, and three Cokes. Fatima made sure that all her brothers and sisters sat neatly around the kitchen table while she carried the youngest, Uriah, on her hip.
“Sure they can, Uncle L,” Theda was saying to me. “Mama won’t care if I say okay.”
We had tried to call Aura but she wasn’t answering any of her phones.
Because of her position in real estate, Aura was able to procure her ideal condo. I knew she had the space and the compassion to protect the kids. I would have taken them to my place if it wasn’t for Gordo dying there.
“Tell her it’s only until I find their aunt,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Theda assured me. “Mom likes kids.”
I needed information but it was better to leave the brood under Fatima’s care for a while before asking more questions.
I took out my phone, where I found a text from Mardi saying K io. Wfu. Kitteridge in office waiting for you.
23
“DO YOU MIND if I borrow something from your mom?” I said to Theda. She and Fatima, and to a lesser degree Fatima’s nearest sibling, Boaz, were organizing the children around the living room’s plasma TV to watch the animated Disney film Ponyo on pay-per-view.
“’Course not, Uncle L,” she said.
AURA’S BEDROOM HAD the same sweet scent that I remembered from nearly two years before. I closed the door to the hall and then went to the wall-wide closet. Behind her clothes, underneath a silk scarf hanging, there was a wall safe. I knew the combination.
Inside there was an array of pistols and ammunition, among other things. One gun was a German Luger that had belonged to her father, a Togoan army officer who had gone rogue. He used that selfsame pistol to kill himself before he was to be tried for his crimes. There was a .22, a .32, and a .45 Aura had stockpiled from various offices and apartments that her crews cleaned out over the years. There was also a short-barreled .41-caliber sixshooter that belonged to me. I had left it with her one night when I was going out to meet with a man who had raped my client—Madeline Rutile.
His name was John Ball, and to most of the world he appeared to be an innocent. But when he got on the scent of a certain style of woman his gentility turned into regular intervals of bruising, biting, and humiliation that she would dread daily and carry with her for the rest of her life.
I had a meet set with John Ball one late evening—a job interview, you might say. It was the new, semi-rehabilitated me, pretending to be the old me. He was going to ask me to plant evidence on one of his victims. Her name was Jenna Rider. I had found out, from a weeklong investigation, that Jenna was another one of Ball’s victims. John typically picked women who had something to lose if they went to the police. That way he could rape them with impunity. John was in possession of evidence that Jenna had been involved in an embezzlement scam at a previous job. I convinced Jenna to pretend to have filed a complaint against her tormenter—John. Then I had Randolph Peel, a dishonorably dismissed NYPD detective, get in touch with Ball to tell him of the impending indictment. For twenty-five hundred dollars he turned over the falsified records to the rapist. After that he threw my name at him, told him I was the kind of guy who could whack the girl and plant evidence in such a way as to gut the case against him.
This was business as usual for a guy like me. I have never, in my life, colored within the lines.
The night I was going to meet with John I was first at Aura’s. My clothes and gun were on her pink-and-aqua chair. When I told her what I was going to do she made me leave my gun.
“You might lose your temper, Leonid,” she said, “and kill him.”
“He’d deserve it,” I replied.
“But you do not.”
I left the pistol and went to Ball’s office. When he put out a hand in friendship, I coldcocked him.
I had expected to come away just with the information he kept on Jenna but instead I hit the jackpot. John kept a file cabinet with two drawers in his office. The top stack was the evidence he’d gathered on more than thirty women. The bottom held pictures, videos, and other remembrances of his predatory romps. Six of the files were still active—including my client’s.
Aura was right. I would have killed him right there if I had kept my gun. Instead I relieved him of the contents of the top drawer.
I reported the attack on Ball to a cop named Willis Philby, whose specialty was sexual predation. I made my departure before the cops got there, leaving a couple of damning pictures out in plain view.
Charges were made and John, who has resources, is still on trial today. I returned the various files to their victims and bought Aura a single cabochon ruby depending on a slender 24-karat gold chain.
“MOM CALLED,” Theda told me when I came out of the bedroom a couple of pounds heavier.
“What she say?”
“That we’d see when she got home. But I could tell that she’s going to say okay.”
ON THE STREET I felt safer with the pistol in my pocket. I had a carry license and reason to feel threatened. Beria might very well be looking
for me. Maybe Shawna wasn’t actually dead, but I had to play it like she was. The children needed time to calm down and feel safe before I could question them; Aura’s presence would accomplish that end.
In the meantime I had to protect myself while roaming the streets of New York.
I’d been paid a lot of money, but for what purpose was not clear.
Shawna hired me to protect Chrystal, but now Shawna herself might be the victim. Cyril wouldn’t be climbing through eighthfloor windows to murder women, but his money could hire a whole regiment of black-ops mercenaries to accomplish such a task.
This speculation was all fiction, pulp fiction, not worth the calories it consumed.
WARREN OH, the Afro-Sino-Jamaican, was at the front desk of the Tesla Building. He was a beautiful man: sixty but looking forty, with two children, half a dozen grandchildren, and a mother who was pushing the century mark.
“Hello, Mr. McGill,” Warren said.
“Mr. Oh.”
“Are you in for the afternoon?”
A solitary note tolled. It was the sound of the bell that started or ended a round. I looked at my phone.
“Maybe not,” I told the security man. “Hello,” I said into the phone.
“There’s a couple’a guys here hasslin’ Iran,” the elderly Firpo said.
“I’ll be right there.”
GORDO’S GYM WAS six blocks from my office. A cab would have taken too long, so I ran. Really, full-out ran. I bumped into people, veered into traffic, ran against red lights, huffing heavily as I went. I didn’t stop at the front door, either. I took the stairs two and three steps at a time until I was closing in on the fifth floor.
There I found two men dragging a slightly bloodied Iran Shelfly into the stairwell. The young ex-con wore the same clothes he’d been in the last time I saw him. The men were dressed in dark clothes that were not business attire or blue collar—more like thugland leisure wear. They were coming onto the landing while I was still two strides down. There was no time to get fancy or even try to fight. Iran was a good scrapper and they had obviously bested him.
So I reached into my pocket and came out with the revolver.
The two towering white men noticed the gun. They paid extra-close attention when I cocked the hammer.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking that I needed to get to my calm place, that my violence was escalating at an alarming rate.
But the gun was out, so I had to go with the script as it was being written.
“Do I have to say any more?” I asked the man who was right there in front of me.
The ugly white man smirked. He moved as if he were going to take a step down.
“Gorman,” the other guy, who was standing behind Iran, said. “That’s LT McGill.”
Gorman’s eyes shifted, reflecting the knowledge that he was far too close to death.
“This ain’t none’a your business, McGill,” he said.
“Get the fuck outta here or make your move, man.” I’ve found that bad dialogue often accompanies stupid situations.
The standoff was no more than twenty seconds old, but it felt as if I had enough time to recite the Book of Genesis.
The guy behind Iran put up his hands and moved to the wall. I backed my way up around them, my gun leveled at Gorman’s chest.
“This is a mistake,” the headman said.
“Yours,” I agreed.
The toady started down the stairs, leaving Gorman alone with Iran and me. Even without a gun we could hurt him.
Realizing his untenable situation, the one named Gorman took a step down, hesitated, and then took another.
“I’ll be seeing you around, Iran,” he said before turning his back and picking up speed.
24
“LEAN YOUR HEAD back, boy,” Firpo—the tuba-playing, mopwielding, sometimes cut man—commanded.
Iran was seated in Gordo’s office chair while Firpo ministered to the wound over his left eye.
Firpo was small and wiry, with shiny black skin and eyes that see without looking. He had a full head of hair with less gray than one would have expected of his advanced years.
“I coulda taken ’em if I saw ’em comin’,” the younger man complained.
I was standing guard over them, the .41 in my hand.
“If a man sees a club swingin’ at ’im, he duck and run,” Firpo said, dismissing the young man’s bravado.
“I coulda taken ’em,” Iran repeated.
“Put your head back.”
In an odd way I appreciated this disruption of my case. The rough-and-tumble of brutish men and their misplaced confidence is just the kind of forum for my talents. Figuring out who’s who among siblings and billionaires was challenging, if not out of my league completely. Lost children and their murdered mother set off an echo in my heart like a depth charge dropped on a submarine that ran silent but got found out anyway.
“Lay back, Iran,” I said. “We got to get outta here before your friends decide to find some balls.”
THERE WAS a back stairwell that led to a blocked-off alleyway. Across the alley was the door to an office building on Thirty-fifth Street. I had the only key to that door because I’d changed the lock for Gordo some months before; insurance policies aren’t all paper and ink.
We made our way to the street and I gave Firpo a twenty to get home.
“I’ll call you when we open the gym again,” I told him.
“I need that job, LT,” he said.
“You’ll keep getting a check while this shit works out.”
IRAN AND I headed toward my office from there.
“I coulda taken ’em,” Iran said again as we entered the Tesla’s elevator.
“So what?”
“Huh?”
“So what if you coulda? So what difference does that make? The fact is they got you. The fact is, if Firpo didn’t call and I didn’t come, your ass would be dumped in some alley and roaches would be crawlin’ in your mouth.”
“Say what?” Iran challenged. He needed to fight.
“Those men were gonna jack you up, Eye. There’s no lie to that.”
“But—”
“Tell me sumpin’, boy.”
“Wha?”
“If I was your trainer and sent you out against an opponent, a skinny little dude no one ever heard of before, and the first thing he does is throw a wild punch that sets you down for the ten count. If that happened, what would you say to me?”
The dawning of truth on the younger man’s face was a comfort to me. Just the idea that someone, somewhere, could learn even just a single line of truth meant that there was hope.
“Yeah,” he said. “I get you.”
The doors slid open and we headed down toward what might very well have been a whole new set of problems.
CARSON KITTERIDGE was seated across the desk from Mardi, chatting happily, when Iran and I walked in. Carson stood up immediately because, in spite of any familiarity between us, we were, in the end, enemies—and you get on your feet when an enemy walks into the room.
We’re the same height, more or less, both of us under five six, at any rate. He’s balder than I am, and that’s where the similarities end. Carson is a white man, pale. He’s a featherweight where I’m a light-heavy. His eyes are the color of an overcast sky on a bright day. His suit and tie were machine washable, not the only indication that he was unmarried.
“Lieutenant,” I said.
Mardi rose behind him.
“Mr. Shelfly,” the cop said. “You been in a fight?”
“I work in a boxin’ gym, man. Of course I been in a fight. You should see the other guy.”
“Have a seat, Iran,” I said. “Get him whatever he needs to keep up his strength, Mardi. Boxer gets hit that hard, might need some coffee or something.
“Lieutenant,” I said then, “shall we go back into my office?”
WALKING DOWN the long aisle of empty cubicles, followed by the detective whose primary job it was t
o see me in the dock, charged with a raft of felonies, I felt at ease. Life is nothing without its challenges and only the dead are truly peaceful.
“I could tell that boy how he got convicted,” Carson suggested before we’d gotten half the way to my office.
I stopped and turned to face his threat.
“That’s the way you wanna play, we don’t have to go any further than right here,” I said.
“What?” he said. I think he was truly surprised at my anger.
“My father always told me that there’s a line you need to have that people can’t cross. I might one day be your prisoner, Lieutenant, but I will not be your bitch.”
The policeman stared at me. It was the look that had broken down many a confident thug.
“What’s with you, LT?”
“You want to drag me downtown? I can call my lawyer right now.”
“Who’s talkin’ about arrest?”
“If you want to go tell Iran some fancy guesses you got, then get on with it.”
Kitteridge put up his hands in false surrender. This reminded me of the man called Fledermaus: an emerald piece in an otherwise black-and-white jigsaw puzzle.
“I’m sorry,” the cop said. “Let’s start over. I’m here to tell you something—something you want to know.”
I turned back, leading the way to my office and wondering how long a man with my kind of temper could survive. By any sane reckoning I should already be dead and buried.
This realization in itself made me a survivor. Maybe I could start my own reality TV show. I smiled as we entered my office.
“Have a seat, Lieutenant.”
I got behind my desk while he sat down and crossed one leg over the other. The lines between us had been drawn years before. We were no longer the same men we were when we met, but we were still fighting the same war.
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