“Time to get up, boss,” she said.
I sat up, fully dressed except for my shoes. I was hungover but hadn’t had a drink. I was an elite mercenary armed with nothing but poetry.
“What time is it?”
“Eight twenty-one,” the ex-con told me.
I scanned the floor, focused on my shoes. Before I could lunge Mardi bent down and actually slipped the boatlike brogans onto my still-stockinged feet. This action soothed someplace deep inside.
“Cyril Tyler is in the outer office,” she said, looking up at my satisfaction.
“What?”
“He was waiting at the door when Iran and I got here,” she continued. “We told him that you weren’t in yet. I didn’t think you were until I realized that only one lock was on.”
“Why didn’t he use the ringer?”
“He was pressing it when we walked up to him.”
That dream was more potent than I imagined.
“What you want us to do, Mr. McGill?” Iran asked.
I stood up, wobbled a bit, and then everything fell into place.
“You go to your desk, Eye. I’m gonna go down to the toilet and wash my face. In ten minutes you bring Mr. Tyler down to see me,” I said to Mardi. “After that get me some coffee and whatever our guest wants.”
The youngsters nodded, and I tried not to feel like I was somehow a fraud.
I FILLED the little bathroom sink with the coldest water I could get out of the spigot then submerged my whole head in the bowl. Fifteen seconds down and I pulled my head out. I gazed at my grizzled face in the stained mirror and dunked down again.
After the third immersion I felt almost good.
Bright-eyed, toweled, and dusted with a rolling adhesive lint remover, I was seated behind my desk, only distantly aware of just how little normalcy my life had in it.
The door swung open. Mardi came in, exhibiting perfect posture, followed by the slouching billionaire.
“Mr. Tyler,” Mardi announced.
He was wearing a blue blazer, white business shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes, and blue jeans. Mr. Cyril Tyler was not designed to wear jeans, especially not blue ones. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter—a mishmash of good intentions and ill design.
And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.
“Good to see you again,” I said.
He nodded and mumbled something, sat in my visitor’s chair and squinted at the light coming in through the windows.
Mardi backed out of the room but didn’t close the door.
“Here we are,” I said to the target.
“What was that message you left supposed to mean?” he asked.
Even when trying to be assertive Cyril seemed vulnerable, weak. He was like the heroic bureaucrat Grand, from Camus’s great novel The Plague, the working-class hero.
“I needed to see you, and everything else I tried failed.”
“I was out of town,” he said. “I just got in last night and happened to see the blinking light on Philip’s message machine.”
“Well,” I said in my best placating tone, “at least we’re here now.”
“You weren’t hired by Chrystal, were you, Mr. McGill?”
“No, sir, I wasn’t, but that’s what she said her name was. And you sent Ira Lamont to bully me into saying that, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did, but it was his idea, not mine. And, anyway, I shouldn’t have told him to come. I should have waited until I got back to the city and come myself.”
“Excuse me,” Iran said, coming through the open door. He was carrying a gray cardboard box that had two fancy paper cups in it. “Chai latté for Mr. Tyler and a large French roast for Mr. McGill.”
He placed the cups down in front of their respective owners and left, closing the door.
“Where were we?” Tyler asked after the interruption.
“You were telling me why you shouldn’t have sent the cowboy to bully me.”
“I didn’t send him to intimidate you.”
“No? Do you know your brother?”
He threw his hands up.
“Ira said that you had come to the house and demanded to speak to me,” he said. “I, I was in Europe. I wanted to come down and face you when I returned, but he said that that wasn’t a good idea and that he should be the one. He said that you sounded angry and he knew how to deal with that.”
“Your brother said all this?”
“Yes.”
“So why are you here now?”
“Ira said that you didn’t know anything. He said that he thought you were just making it all up. But after I heard that message I knew that he was hiding something from me.”
“And what are you hiding, Mr. Tyler?”
He squinted again, this time not from the sunlight.
“Before I say more, Mr. McGill, I want to know why you came to my house misrepresenting yourself.”
“That’s easy,” I said. “I didn’t misrepresent myself.”
“You just admitted that Chrystal didn’t hire you.”
“Her sister Shawna came to me and told me that she was your wife. She said that you had murdered your first two wives, that you had lost a lot of weight and were having an affair. She said that she was worried that you were going to have her offed, too. She had a picture of you two arm in arm. I did my homework. Your previous wives had died under mysterious circumstances. What was I supposed to think?”
Cyril sniffed as if I had insulted him.
“I was not having an affair,” he said.
“But you did kill your wives?”
Tyler closed his eyes and sat back in the chair. He grimaced and shook his head.
“It’s very hard to explain.”
“I just figured out poetry this morning,” I said. “Try me.”
“For a long time,” he began, “a very long time, I believed that I had an extra-psychic ability—the power to cause harm to people, a power I couldn’t help but despise. If I wanted harm to come to someone, it did. My first wife and I had a fight on our boat. She hit me on the head with a pair of binoculars. I locked myself in the cabin, drank cognac, and nursed an evil hatred toward her. In the morning I was alone on the boat.”
“What about Pinky Todd?” I asked. “You nurse a grudge against her, too?”
“She said that she had information about an investment group I belonged to, that she’d discovered certain illegal transactions we had made. For some reason she thought that she could get a better divorce settlement out of me if she held that over my head.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, “except if the victim had an extra-psychic BB gun.”
“I hadn’t done anything illegal, but I came to a better agreement over a settlement. I was angry. I admit it. And then she was murdered like that. What was I to think?”
“Exactly what Shawna thought—you killed your wife. All that leaves is the affair.”
“I had cancer,” he said.
I believe that if I had an entire lifetime to consider how he might have answered my question, cancer would never have come up.
“Say what?”
“Colon cancer,” he said. “It was pretty bad. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Chrystal about it. I believed that if I said it out loud to a loved one, my fate would be sealed. My doctors were in Geneva, and so I pretended to have work there.”
“How does that translate into an affair?”
“In order to deal with my state of mind I entered into psychotherapy. Daily sessions. My therapist, a woman named Inola Rice, spoke with me every night on the phone. Chrystal asked if I was talking to a girlfriend, but I told her no.
“The one major thing that came out of those sessions with Dr. Rice was that I suffered from a personality disorder that caused me to believe in magical thinking.”
“The belief that your rage caused the deaths of your wives,” I said.
“Exac
tly.”
“If all this is just in your head, then who killed Shawna?”
“Oh my God. Shawna’s dead?” He seemed really moved, exactly the way you’d expect a man to act over the unexpected death of his sister-in-law.
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“I was out of town. I told you that.”
“Shawna hired me to protect Chrystal from you. Soon after, she was murdered. Do you have any idea why any of that might be?”
“No, I don’t. Dead? I can’t believe it.”
He seemed so sincere. I wanted to believe him. It was hard to imagine him hiring an assassin. But he was rich. You didn’t have to do much when you had the kind of bank book that backed him up.
“Shawna left six kids orphaned,” I said.
“I know that. When I leave you, I will find them and bring them home.”
“I took them to their aunt.”
“Chrystal?”
“I gave her your message. She says that she wants to see you.”
“When?”
“I’ll tell her about this conversation,” I said. “If she wants, after that, I’ll call your home phone and make the connection.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’m sure you will be.”
49
THERE WAS AN AWKWARD moment after the end of our conversation. Cyril looked as if he wanted more. I attributed this expectation to the fact that he probably always had people falling over themselves to placate his every whim.
“Is there anything else, Mr. Tyler?”
“Um, I guess not.”
“Do you need me to see you out?”
A cold steeliness entered his gaze. The corners of his mouth turned down.
“Certainly not.” He got up with as much decorum as he could muster and opened the door all by himself.
Through the doorway I watched him amble past Iran and on toward the exit.
I suppose that I should have been thinking about how to wrangle Tyler into a confession, or at least set a decent trap. But instead I was remembering Mardi saying, He was waiting at the door when Iran and I got there.
“Huh.”
I HAD SOME time to kill, pretty much the whole day. Cyril needed to stew and maybe contact his confederates. I was sure, when not faced by the milksop, that he had caused the deaths of his wives and Shawna. His talk about extra-psychic abilities was just flummery designed to give the police and the courts excuses to forgive him.
I SHAVED and brushed my teeth in the little toilet. On the way back I noticed that Iran had earphones on and an iPod on his desk.
“The music good?” I asked.
He didn’t hear the question but noticed that I’d stopped next to him and so pulled off the headset and said, “What?”
“The music. It is good?”
The young man smiled, handing me the headset. I put it on.
“. . . Mr. Martins is still sitting in his chair, reading,” I said in my ear. “Just like he was doing an hour ago . . .”
“Mardi’s been putting your cassette notes on this iPod so that all the cases would be easy to get to,” Iran said. “She told me that I should listen to a few of ’em in case I was thinking about taking a job here.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m thinkin’ that if I wanted to be bored to death I could go back to prison.”
ON THE WAY OUT I stopped at Mardi’s desk.
“I didn’t know that you were moving my tapes to MP3 format.”
“Should I stop?”
“You think Iran would make a good operative?”
“I’m not going out with him,” she said. “You don’t have to worry.”
How did she do that?
I WENT OVER to the Thirty-third Street PATH Station and jumped a train to Hoboken. Chalker Road was just nine blocks from the exit. Number 243 was about five blocks on from there.
I should have called first but for some reason I wanted to get the element of surprise into our meeting.
It was a ranch-style home, smaller and yet similar to Cyril Tyler’s abode, painted dark blue and bright red. There were two concrete walkways, one leading through the middle of the ragged lawn to the front door and the other at the far-right side next to a divider hedge and running down to a destination beyond the house.
I pressed the nacreous, rectangular button and waited patiently. After a while the door came open and a young woman, in her early thirties, glided up behind the screen in a sleek, brand-new, state-of-the-art wheelchair.
“Yes?”
“Leonid McGill,” I said. “I called about Mr. Williams.”
“Oh yes,” she said happily. “Come on in. Come in.”
She rolled the chair back from the doorway with obvious skill and I pulled open the screen door.
The hall would have been wider if there weren’t bookshelves on either side. The lower ledges were crowded with books, knickknacks, and papers, while the higher ones were nearly empty. This told me that Fawn David lived alone, though this had not always been the case.
She led me down the hall, through an austere-looking living room and into a solarium where three of the walls were made from sectioned glass. The tiered metal shelving on all sides was filled with various shades of greenery. There were little flowers now and again, baby green tomatoes, and crawling vines. Two cats, one white and the other calico, stalked me from the underbrush.
“Sit down, Mr. McGill,” Fawn said and gestured.
There was a small, cast-iron chair that had been painted white set next to a violet iron table. I sat, comfortably cushioned by some fat and a lot of muscle. Fawn’s heart-shaped face was white like porcelain and yet seemed so soft that I had to hold myself back from reaching out and touching it.
She smiled and I felt a clutching in my chest. This disturbed me but, I reminded myself, I wasn’t there for self-analysis.
“You have a beautiful house, Miss David.”
“It’s really all my mother’s doing. She added on the sun room and paid off the mortgage. I just inherited it.”
“Is your mother here?”
“She died six years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This house is all her doing.”
“Still, it’s yours,” I said, “and beautiful.”
She smiled brighter and moved her right shoulder in my direction.
I noticed the multicolored cat gazing at me from the depths of vegetation and thought about the artist—Bisbe. It struck me that if I made any error, this sunny room and beautiful, crippled woman might be my last moments of sensual pleasure.
“You remind me of him,” she said.
“Who?”
“Bill Williams, as you call him. He lived in a room my mother had in back. He helped to build this greenhouse.”
“And how do I remind you of him?”
“You use logic to bring happiness. William always looked at the world the way it was, but he didn’t let that get him down. He used to tell me that my paralysis would help me hone my attention down to the point where my life would make more sense than most other people’s ever would. He was right.”
“You could tell that from one thing I said?”
“You look a little like him, too,” she said. “I mean, he was tall and slender and his face was long. He had a full head of hair at sixty but your skin color, it’s just about the same.”
“William Williams is black?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“No. All I had was a name.”
“You must be a very good detective.”
“Either that or a really bad one.”
“I don’t know how much help I can be, Mr. McGill. I was just twenty the last time I saw William. He moved out and we never heard from him again. He’d be in his late seventies by now.”
“I suppose you’ve had a lot of tenants since then.”
“No. Mother got sick not long after William moved and I couldn’t really manage an apartment. I suppose whatever
was there when he moved out is still in there. It’s not easy for me to get down there, so I don’t go.”
“Would you like to try now?”
“I have no idea where the key is.”
“Locks are my specialty.”
FIRST I CARRIED a bamboo chair down the slender tree-flanked path to the door of the small rental unit, then I went back up and cradled Fawn David in my arms. After installing her in the chair, I returned for her wheelchair. Only then did I use a special metal tool I carried around in case I encountered a simple lock.
“You’re strong and innovative,” Fawn said when the lock slid open.
“And I used to be young and handsome, with a full head of hair.”
“You’re still handsome,” she said. “I like mature men.”
The room was dusty—very much so. The mattress and sofa chair had been infested by mice, but the table lamp still worked and everything else was more or less unaffected by the passage of time.
Bill Williams had a very austere lifestyle. There was a small table that stood in for a desk, the stuffed chair, the bed, an empty bookcase except for a milk-colored plastic pitcher and cup, and a trunk placed at the foot of the headless bed.
“William would sit at that desk writing all night long,” Fawn said. “Back then we had a ramp set up so I could come down. He always stopped working when I came. We talked for hours sometimes.”
“Where was he from?”
“He never said. I asked him and sometimes I used to try and trick him into telling me. But he’d always say that he had no history before he came here. It seemed like some kind of joke.”
“Or a man who was hiding from something.”
“I used to think that,” Fawn agreed. “He was very secretive, but then he was generous, too.”
“You mind if I crack open the trunk?”
She shook her head. I got the feeling she was just happy for the company. I was, too.
The lock on the trunk was easier than the door but at first glance it hardly seemed worth the bother. One brown shoe, a wife-beater undershirt, and a frumpy old pair of green gardener’s pants was all the treasure it held.
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