“A complaint has come in on you, LT,” my nemesis said, his hazy eyes reflecting a faraway, hidden sun.
“What kinda complaint?”
“Cyril Tyler says that you forced him to hire you by making accusations about his wife that he now knows are false.”
He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in the visitor’s chair.
I just sat there, blinking like a suburban housewife whose insurance-salesman husband just brought home a two-hundredpound dead stag and threw it down on the dining room table.
“So you just waltz in here and warn me about an active police investigation?”
“I owe you a favor,” he said with a pout and a shrug.
“Uh-uh, no. You too much of a cop for that. You might tell the other cops I’m no good for this, but that wouldn’t extend to you warnin’ me. No. Not the Carson Kitteridge I know.”
“Maybe I’ve changed,” he said, unable to hide his smirk.
“More likely the pope became a Unitarian—and married his sister.”
The cop squinted. This was a bad sign—for somebody. The good lieutenant was one of the smartest cops the NYPD had to offer. He was also honest to a fault. That was bad news to evildoers like myself. If Carson was on your tail, you were bound to go down, sooner or later—bound to.
“Look, LT,” he said, all pretense and banter gone. “This Tyler has two dead wives in his wake. One, a New Yorker, fell off a boat in Florida, and the other was murdered by a crazed homeless man who somehow miraculously avoided capture. I was thinking that the information you had might get me closer to understanding these deaths.”
“I did not extort the man,” I said. “I told him that a woman claiming to be his wife had come to me afraid that he might intend her harm. He said he wanted me to bring him to her. I said that that would break client confidentiality. He offered me money to deliver a message. I took his money.”
“What was the message?”
“You’ll have to ask him that question.”
“Did you deliver it?”
“Not as of yet.”
“You need me on this, LT. I’m sure that this woman really is in danger.”
“That might be true, but have you ever known me to take the easy road?” I stood up then. “I think it’s time I got back to my business, Lieutenant. If I come across something that’ll help you with these killings I promise I’ll give you a ring.”
He stayed in his chair another dozen seconds and then rose, slowly.
“Don’t take too long,” he said. “All Tyler has to do is raise his voice and you will be thrown down into a hole that even Alphonse Rinaldo can’t dig you out of.”
25
WHEN THE GOOD LIEUTENANT left I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk and fiddled with the controls until the four monitors there showed him passing down the aisleway, and then through Mardi’s office. I didn’t have to watch him. Kitteridge was a straight arrow. He wouldn’t perform an illegal search or plant any bugs on the premises. When he brought me down it would be on the strength of his police work, not the devious ways of people like me.
Iran jumped up when the cop entered. I liked that. The kid knew how to act. Mardi smiled sweetly and nodded at some blandishment Carson uttered.
When he was gone from the offices I closed the drawer.
The words “Alphonse Rinaldo” reverberated in the room as if Carson was saying them over and over. Rinaldo was the most powerful man I had ever met; the self-styled Special Assistant to the City of New York had helped many times when I found myself in the rarefied atmosphere of billionaires and high-end politicos. But the downtown ringmaster had cut me off for doing a private job too well. Losing Rinaldo’s support was like blowing up the George Washington Bridge.
Oh well.
I got to my feet, a boxer to the end, and walked the same route that Kitteridge had just taken.
“IRAN,” I SAID and he stood up again. “There’s a row of eight desks and cubicles in here. Pick one and stay there until I come back or call.”
He stuck out his bottom lip and nodded.
“If Mardi needs anything, do what she asks,” I continued. “And, Mardi.”
“Yes, Mr. McGill?”
“If Iran wants to set himself up with a computer or something, you give him what you can.”
“Where you going, sir?” she asked.
“To make a mistake most likely.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m going to do a favor for a friend.”
CORINTHIA HIGHGATE LIVED in the slums of the Upper East Side. It wasn’t a ghetto, just a block of poorly maintained brownstones with tiny one-bedroom apartments and few running elevators. To the north and south, east and west there were fancy blocks where rich people traveled in upscale limos while on this street the denizens wore tattered sneakers and pulled rickety wheeled carts.
“Hello?” she said through the crackling building intercom.
“Miss Highgate?”
“Yes?”
“This is Ambrose Thurman.”
“Who?”
“I called about William Williams.”
The lady took a moment for recollection.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh yes. You, you wanted his books.”
“I wanted to buy them from you,” I reminded her.
“Oh. How much were you willing to pay?”
“I’d have to see them first, ma’am.”
“Who are you again?”
“Bill’s nephew-in-law.”
“Yes . . . that’s right.”
The buzzer sounded and I strode up to the fourth floor, to 4C, where the buzzer board told me that C. Highgate lived.
“Hello?” she said to my knock.
“It’s Ambrose Thurman, ma’am.”
If an inanimate object could hesitate, that’s just what Miss Highgate’s door did. At first it didn’t move at all, then the knob wobbled, shook, turned. It came open maybe three inches and was stopped by a sudden jerk.
“Oh, damn,” she whispered and the door closed again.
There came some clinking and the slither of the chain against the slot and jamb. The knob did its dance. The door slowly swayed until finally a small white woman with blue-gray hair was revealed, peering through thick-lensed round-frame glasses that magnified her eyes.
She was wearing a dark dress with white designs on it. I couldn’t make out the nature of the print because of the looseknit maroon shawl that covered it.
“Miss Highgate,” I said with as kind a smile as a man like me can muster.
“Yes.” The word had finality to it, as if I were the Grim Reaper and she understood she could no longer bar my entrance.
“Can I come in, ma’am?”
“I suppose.”
She was in her seventies and just a little unsure on her pins. We waited a moment for her to move to one side. I walked into the living room of her apartment. It was a good-sized space and mostly bare. No carpeting on the floor, or even curtains in the small window. In the center of the room there was a dark table, maybe oak, and two folding metal chairs. There were some papers stacked on the floor under the window and a pillow next to a doorway that led further into her domicile.
“Spring cleaning?” I asked.
“What?”
“Where’s all your stuff?”
“I hate clutter, Mr. Thurman,” she said. “I had my grandniece throw out or sell everything I don’t need.”
“No TV? No radio?”
“There’s a radio next to my bed, and TV is just a buncha junk.”
I grinned and she said, “Have a seat.”
She smiled down on me, giving the impression that we were old friends together again after many years of separation.
“Would you care for some port?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She doddered out of the doorway next to the pillow and I sat, peacefully plotting my way back into Cyril Tyler’s domain.
I didn’t like it that he had tu
rned me over to the police; that was a dirty trick, in my book. I wanted to ask him about it, but first I needed to look into the children’s allegations about their mother—and I couldn’t do that until the sun went down.
I smiled at the beam of sunlight on the hardwood floor, thinking, the darkness is my friend.
Miss Highgate came back into the room with a liquor bottle in her left hand and two tiny green liqueur glasses in her right. She set these down on the graceless table and took the opposite chair.
“Will you pour?” she asked me. “My hands shake sometimes and this is the good stuff.”
Appreciating her choice of words, I pulled out the cork-lined stopper and poured out an ounce for each of us.
It was good stuff.
“Lee was your uncle, you say?” she asked at the onset of our second shots.
“My stepfather’s brother,” I said.
“I was going to say that you don’t look much like him.”
Her attempt at humor—I thought.
“Should we take a look at his books?” I suggested.
“Will you pour me another glass?”
I did so, happily.
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Thurman?”
“Elevator inspector,” I said. “I’m the guy that signs those little forms that they keep under glass in every car.”
“How interesting.”
“Are you retired?”
“Yes. I worked at Blisscomb’s Cosmetics for forty-four years. I had the same desk the whole time. When I got there it was brand new. By the time I left they called it an antique. That was ten years ago.”
“How do you keep yourself occupied?” I asked, realizing that the biggest price I was going to pay for those books was time and conversation.
“Online poker.”
“Come again.”
“I gamble online. Gambling was one of the things Bill liked about me. He’d take me to Atlantic City and I’d win at the poker table until the pit boss would tell us it was time to go. I see all of the cards of the deck in order in my head. When a card is played it disappears from the array. That way I know what my opponents can and cannot have.
“I played until my hands start to ache. Lee loved to take me to Atlantic City. He used to say that gambling was the best chance a working stiff would ever get.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Twenty-five years. I was nearly forty when I finally met Lee. He used to call it our red-letter day.”
Ah, port wine, the Great Lubricator.
“Um . . . ,” I said, truly hesitant.
“What, Mr. Thurman? What did you want to know?”
“Why did Bill leave?”
“I was a fool,” she said. “My family didn’t approve, and my exhusband wanted to try again, at least that’s what he said. Now that I look back on it I think my mother put him up to it. I told Bill it was over, and right after he was gone Julian left me again.”
She pushed her empty glass at me and I obliged.
She downed the shot and gestured for another.
“Maybe you should slow down a little,” I said.
She looked at me and smiled.
“You might not be his blood but you remind me of him,” she said. “Somebody might think that you’re not to be trusted, but I know better. I knew better about Lee but didn’t follow my own instincts. I still play poker because of him.”
“Can I see those books now, Miss Highgate?”
“I suppose. Will you leave as soon as you see them?”
“I think there’s still a couple of shots left in this bottle.”
She smiled merrily and rose.
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, by Jacques Lacan; The Descent of Man, by Charles Darwin; Kapital; Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear; The Gift of Death, by Jacques Derrida; The Concept of Anxiety, by Søren Kierkegaard. These were the volumes contained in an old leather satchel with double-grips for the hand and a strap for the shoulder.
“If he got very excited by something he’d scribble notes in the margins,” Corinthia told me. She was nursing the glass of port I’d poured.
“This is wonderful,” I said. “My sister Katrina will be very happy.”
“Why didn’t you bring her with you?”
“She doesn’t get out of the house much.”
“I understand,” the septuagenarian said, nodding at her own bare cell.
“You say Bill moved to New Jersey when you two broke up?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you remember where?”
“Hoboken. That’s it, Hoboken. I used to have a number, but it got thrown out with the bathwater.”
The lock in the door started making scratching noises.
A middle-aged white woman, maybe forty-five, entered, carrying a plain paper bag by its paper handles. She had a womanly figure and a handsome face. Seeing me stopped her in her tracks the way someone might freeze if they saw a huge gutter roach scaling a whitewashed wall.
“Aunt Corinthia,” she said, looking at me. “Is everything all right?”
“Come in, June,” my hostess said. “Come in. I want you to meet, Mr., um, Mr. Thurman.”
I stood.
June stood still.
I smiled.
Whatever facial expression she made, it wasn’t welcoming.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Mr. Thurman, honey,” Corinthia said. “Come on in and close the door.”
June’s hair was too brown and her breasts stood up like a young woman’s might—the nearly magic technology of dyes and modern-day bras. Her reaction to me could have been panic or passion.
“I came to buy my uncle’s books from your aunt,” I said, putting a crack in the wall of fear that loomed between us.
June was one of those New Yorkers who lived in a world populated by only the people of her choosing. I was sure that she rarely, if ever, talked to strangers, or even wondered at all the brown skins and strange accents that surrounded her on every street. She had her relatives and her church, her friends, and maybe a part-time job—just like any other white Christian woman from the heart of Middle America.
“Junie,” her aunt said. “Come in and meet Mr. Thurman . . . and close the door.”
One of the by-products of such an insular life was an irrational obedience. June wanted to run away screaming but instead she came toward us, a lamb to the slaughter, just like her aunt had been before the application of sweet wine.
“Port?” I offered.
26
JUNE AND CORINTHIA had the same port wine gene; half an hour after her initial fright June was seated upon a third folding chair at the bare table in that unadorned room. She was laughing and free.
I remember thinking that in years gone by those women would have been afraid of me because I (or, more correctly, my dark skin) represented a fear-inducing other. But now they felt that they were the other and I was somehow an envoy of the dominant people. They saw my friendliness as a kindness rather than the obeisance that my father’s sharecropper parents offered up with their smiles and deferential silences.
I paid one hundred dollars for the books and two hundred for the old light-brown leather satchel.
June kissed my cheek at the door.
It was a heartfelt kiss, sensual in its innocent placement.
Even though I was there under an alias, I felt I was experiencing a real connection with those women in that tomblike dwelling in the depths of the Upper East Side.
I CALLED MARDI and had her tell Iran to meet me at Rudy’s, a small take-out restaurant on Avenue C.
“Tell him to bring me that special flashlight and the other stuff Bug gave me,” I added.
I GOT THERE first. There were three tables in the place. I sat toward the back, leafing through William Williams’ lost library. I hadn’t read some of the books but I was acquainted with all the authors. I liked Williams’ taste. He was a complex thinker who worried about a pedestrian world. He’d scribbled notes on almos
t every page.
Evolution makes better murderers, he jotted on the title page of The Descent of Man. Below that he scrawled, Darwin meets Dante in the sentiments of this title.
I actually grinned at some of his idiosyncratic jibes.
“Hey, boss,” Iran said, pulling me from my intellectual eavesdropping.
It’s funny how a phrase shines a light on what’s happening and then illuminates a path just up the way. Iran worked for Gordo but had been hired by me. Now I was using him as an operative in my evolving relationship to the world.
“You bring it?” I asked.
“Right here.” He placed a plain brown paper bag on the table and sat down opposite me.
“What you readin’?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet. You eat?”
“Some potato chips and a soda.”
I handed him a twenty and said, “Go up to the counter and order us two of the specials.”
While he did this I turned a page on Darwin.
Evolution and politics are inextricably intertwined, Bill wrote. The question is, is it a science in the strict sense of the word? And also, can biology somehow replace the domination of Capital?
Who was this guy?
When Iran returned I put away the old hardback and turned my attention to the politics of crime.
“So explain to me this thing with Gorman,” I said.
“I already told you back when you gimme the job at Gordo’s.”
“That was when our lawyer called me and said you were in trouble,” I said. I used Breland to keep tabs on many of the people I had wronged. “He told me that you were in trouble with a man named Gorman but that was all.”
Iran sucked a tooth and said, “He just stupid.”
“Not so stupid he couldn’t find you and kick your ass.”
“Oh, man,” he whined.
“Tell me the story, Iran.”
“Me and Gorman’s brother—”
“What’s his brother’s name?”
“Alvin, but everybody calls him Leech.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
“Me and Leech—”
“Hold up,” I said because the cook, in his stained and, in places, singed apron was bringing our meat-loaf platters.
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