Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_03

by When the Thrill Is Gone

  I pulled up the desk chair and sighed.

  “It was worth a try,” I said.

  “William used to take me down to a café not far from here sometimes,” Fawn said. “He’d tell me that I could do amazing things if I put my mind to it. I’d have been happy if you found some clue that led to him.”

  She reached over and plucked out the solitary shoe. Shaking it, a metal locket fell out.

  It was at least a hundred years old, made from bronze and silver. The girl tried to pry it open but it didn’t want to come.

  “Let me try,” I said.

  It didn’t work for me, either.

  “Corroded,” I said sagely. “There’s a Swiss locksmith in my neighborhood. Want me to take it there?”

  “Does that mean you’ll bring it back?”

  “Yes.”

  “And can we go to that café and have coffee?”

  50

  EVEN WITH DROPPING the locket off at my neighborhood locksmith I still made it to the Harvell Club by two p.m.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. McGill,” the young Korean receptionist said.

  She was wearing white. All the employees of the club dressed in white. The walls on each floor were a different hue. The entrance, for instance, was all red, fire-engine bright, and loud. The fourth-floor library, where they served cognac, was sky blue from the ceiling to the floor. You had to look out of the window and down on the street if you wanted variety, either that or bring in a color wheel under your coat.

  “Hi, Jeanie,” I said. “I have a guest coming in later on. He’ll be asking for a Beat Murdoch, that’s me.”

  Jeanie had a long face that managed to exude beauty without being pretty; the kind of face that told you to put up or shut up. She smiled briefly and nodded. Members paid a lot of money to be idiosyncratic. I was who I said I was, and that was that.

  THERE WAS a phone booth on the library floor. I used it to call Aura’s cell.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey.”

  “What phone is this?” she asked. “It came up all sevens.”

  “Harvell Club.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you get the phone turned on in that apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t use your name, right?”

  “As far as they know Jasper Real Estate wants that line.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes,” she said, barely perturbed. “Do you want the number?”

  “Can we get together for dinner tomorrow?” I asked, in some way hoping for another day.

  “Maybe we should let things cool down for a while.”

  I let those words settle for a moment and then said, “Let me have the number.”

  I should have been happy that Aura was jealous of Chrystal. After all, that meant she wanted something, that she hadn’t stopped feeling for me. But that was weak consolation. This being the case, it was hard for me to ask the next question.

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I, um, speak to Chrystal?”

  There came a few seconds of muffled silence and then, “Hello? Mr. McGill?”

  “Do you trust your husband?”

  “I want to.”

  “I don’t see how what happened to your sister happened without his involvement. Shawna sent your brother to try and get money out of him, I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “Where’s Tally? I’ve tried his cell phone but it just goes to voicemail.”

  “He’s sick, jaundice. They got him in a hospital in the Bronx.”

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  “I really don’t know. I’ll be happy to take you to him, but first I need you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to call you this evening . . .”

  THE NEXT CALL rang once before it was answered.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Tyler.”

  “Mr. McGill.”

  “Chrystal has agreed to talk to you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “It’s not that easy. You got two dead wives and her sister was murdered. She’s going to call you sometime this evening.”

  “When?”

  “When she calls.” I liked giving powerful men a hard time. But it also made sense to keep him off balance. If he was the bad man I suspected, he might make a mistake.

  “Why should I trust you, Mr. McGill?”

  “What does trust have to do with it? All you got to do is sit by your phone from six to midnight and wait for a call.”

  I hung up on him. That felt good.

  AFTER THAT I went to a little alcove that allowed me a view of pretty much the whole library floor, including the elevator entrance, from a half-hidden vantage point behind a corner and a potted fern.

  Usually I like lying in wait. That’s what detectives do, they sit and watch and wait. If you spend enough time in any one spot you begin to notice patterns. After mapping out the geometrical design of the activity of any room or street you start to see where the model breaks down. It is at this point that your job begins.

  But that afternoon I was nervous, antsy. Not one connection in my life felt easy. My children and wife, Gordo and Aura, even my client didn’t fit in her proper place. There was a killer on the loose and I didn’t know what he looked like, nor was I certain about his relationship to the crime. Rather than setting a trap, I felt as if I were in hiding, afraid of some monstrous consequence to my helplessness and stupidity.

  Such were my thoughts when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, the slender and yet elegant profile of my son.

  Twill was wearing dark slacks and a light-green T-shirt. His shoes were also dark—fabric, not leather. He hadn’t taken the elevator. He’d probably charmed Jeanie into showing him the stairs. This maneuver would allow him to slip into the room and look around in much the same way that I might have.

  I smiled because Twill was good, very good; but I was still better.

  I watched him move around the periphery trying to suss out who might be the mysterious Beat Murdoch.

  After moving forward with no real plan, Twill went to one of the small round pine tables in the center of the room and sat. From there he slowly and meticulously scanned the entire room. Toward the end of this intense study he came across my smiling face.

  “Pops?” he mouthed.

  I got up and sauntered over to his post.

  Taking a seat, I said, “Hey, Twill, what are you doing here?”

  “Meetin’ somebody. A friend. What about you?”

  “Me too.”

  “Who?”

  I smiled and put my left palm down on the table.

  “This shit is gonna have to stop, boy.”

  “What?” he said, still looking for a way out.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Those MetroCards.”

  Twill bit the right side of his lower lip, squinted with that eye, and let his head tilt to the right. It was something like the reaction I used to get from an opponent after delivering a good left hook to the body.

  “Damn, Pops,” he said. “How’d you get on to me?”

  “Twill,” I said, “I love you, son. I would do anything to protect you, even from yourself. But you got to straighten up. I’m not gonna be around forever.”

  Twill sat back and shook his head. I was the only person in the world who could still amaze him.

  “What did you think you were doing?” I asked.

  “Poor people need to ride the rails, Pop,” he said. “It’s not like I’m takin’ all that much, and I’m providing a service for them that’s under the poverty line. I see this more like a political statement than anything else.”

  “A political statement?”

  “Yeah. Like Joe Stalin. You know, he was a bank robber before he became the king’a Russia.”

  The events and characters of the past are never in control of their own historical commentary, I remembered my father once saying
.

  I laughed—way too loudly for that particular room.

  “Son,” I said.

  “Yeah, Pops?”

  “Please.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to take a period of four years to be guided by me. Four years where you take my lead and don’t break any laws without conferring with me first. It’ll be like a college education, with the exception that you’ll be the only student in your class.”

  “How does that work?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t, but I’ll figure out something.”

  “Okay, Pops. I’ll wait for your lead.”

  “You have to give up this counterfeiting business now.”

  “Okay,” he said as easily as if I had asked him to pass the gravy.

  “What about your partners?”

  “I did the whole thing online. They don’t know who I am—or at least they don’t know that they know. I’ll just say I’m turning the business over to them. I got the read/write stripe machine and Internet interface in a basement in Queens.”

  I ORDERED a cognac and Twill had green tea. We talked for a while longer. I promised to hold the money he’d made thus far and he accepted my custodianship. He told me again that he didn’t see what was wrong with what he was doing and I told him to believe in me for the time being.

  When I suggested that it was time to leave he got a little cagey and said, “Let me go out there first, Pops. Gimme five minutes and then you go.”

  “Why?”

  “I got these four dudes out there layin’ for Beat Murdoch. You know, with guns an’ shit.”

  51

  I CALLED HOME on the way over to the apartment Aura set me up with. Katrina answered after seven rings.

  “Hello?”

  “The old man still walkin’ on his own?”

  “His blood work is amazing, Leonid. The doctors have him and Elsa down there right now to redo everything.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Remission.”

  “No.”

  “Remission.” The repetition of the word proved Katrina’s deep knowledge of my soul. She understood my fears and distrust and that I hadn’t traveled very far from my early adolescence when my father abandoned us and my mother died soon after. She knew that I needed her to repeat the word in the tone of the emotion it carried.

  “He is very healthy, Leonid. He is strong again.”

  I closed my eyes and stood stock-still in the middle of the busy walkway. People bumped into me and made angry comments but I didn’t care. This was the most wonderful, and therefore the most dangerous, thing that had happened in my life over the past year.

  Remission. Survival when the odds are against you. Somebody you love who doesn’t leave, doesn’t die.

  “Leonid,” Katrina said through the Bluetooth in my ear.

  “I have to go, Katrina.”

  “But—”

  “I have to go.”

  “I want to talk to you about Dimitri.”

  “If you’re worried you don’t have to be. Between me and Twill he’s fine. And if you’re worried about his girlfriend . . . well, I am, too. But what you gonna do when a man falls like that?”

  “He’s a boy.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But she is most definitely a woman.”

  “Leonid.”

  “If I don’t hang up this phone and get my head together I’ll probably be dead before morning. Do you understand that?”

  “I will talk to you at breakfast.”

  WHAT I SAID to Katrina was absolutely true. The elation I felt over Gordo’s possible survival threw all of my natural defenses into disarray. I wanted to celebrate, to dance in the streets and drink down a whole bottle of brandy. I had mourned that boxing trainer the way the Apostles had grieved over Jesus. He might as well have been dead and buried, but here he was, maybe risen and alive.

  I stopped at a little brown stoop on Eighteenth between Sixth and Seventh. There I sat, trying to remember that this was just a lull between rounds, that my opponent had been playing with me up until now and that the possibility of getting knocked out was real, and even probable.

  There is no victory until the final victory, my father used to say. His words came back to me and I sighed. Let your comrades celebrate in their foxholes and their trenches, but you remember that the war is still raging and that your enemy is sharpening his bayonets even while your friends laugh and sing.

  Those words got me on my feet. They propelled me down the street toward a resolution that was uncertain at best.

  I HAD MADE it to within seven blocks of my destination when my phone sounded again. I looked at the little blue screen and hit the green button.

  “Hey, Z.”

  “Mr. McGill.”

  “What you got for me?”

  “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

  I stopped again.

  “What?” There was a smile on my face—I could feel it.

  “I want to know what you think I look like.”

  I drew a deep breath in through my nostrils and took a step.

  “Zephyra,” I began, “beauty is your ugly-duckling little cousin who’s been hiding in the corner ever since you walked in the room. If you were my girl I’d put shutters on the windows and break every camera in the house.”

  She giggled and said, “You’re a fool.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m serious,” she said into the unseen silence.

  “I’m right, too, girl. And I’m sure you don’t need my word for it. So tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I kinda like Charles.”

  “You mean Bug?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “I always liked talking to him,” she said. “From the first time you took us out to lunch. I told him to lose weight. I really shouldn’t have done that, but he wanted to go out with me and I didn’t know what to say.”

  “He’s working out three hours a day. Must’a lost twenty pounds so far.”

  “I know. I don’t want to hurt him, Leonid.” That was the first time she ever called me by my first name. It was my week for firsts. “And I know if we . . . get intimate I’ll probably end up dropping him.”

  “There’s no problem there, Z.”

  “But he’s so serious. He wants me.”

  “Just tell him you can’t be like that right now. Tell him that he can go out with you on Wednesdays but don’t ask about Friday nights. Tell him that you’re still playing the field and that if he wants more he needs to go someplace else.”

  “But—”

  “Tell him that and let him make up his own mind. For him it will be a mitzvah.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Something that only a woman like you can do for the man he will become someday.”

  AFTER THAT CALL with Zephyra I was calm again. I don’t know what it was about her wish to keep her beauty in check that eased my own fears, but I walked a little faster—and made one last call.

  There was no answer but I got a call back in less than a minute.

  “Hey, LT,” he said.

  “You in place?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Stay there till it’s over, or something goes wrong, okay?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Remember,” I cautioned, “do not hesitate.”

  “Never do.”

  52

  I WALKED INTO the fourth-floor apartment on Thirty-first Street for the first time. It was a small two-bedroom with bare, pitted oak floors and smudged, unadorned walls. I moved quickly down the tiny foyer, turning the corner into the living room. The only furniture there was a heavy walnut desk and chair set against a window. A big black phone sat on the desk, and blondish-green Venetian blinds were pulled down over the window behind it. To the left there was a closet door. I dragged the heavy desk across the floor until it was away from the window and facing the closet.

  “Home again, home again, jiggety jig,” I said aloud bef
ore sitting in the chair on the right side of the desk.

  I took in a deep breath and entered a number on the phone.

  “Hello?” Chrystal Chambers-Tyler said, answering on the second ring.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  I pressed a button and entered another number.

  I didn’t even hear the ring before Cyril Tyler answered, “Chrystal?”

  “Cyril?” she said.

  I could hear them both without the aid of the receiver because the loudspeaker was automatically engaged.

  “How are you?” the creampuff, maybe killer, asked.

  “How are you?”

  “I miss you, Chris.”

  “Mr. McGill told me that you had cancer, that that’s why you were on the phone every night and why you lost weight.”

  “I was afraid to tell you. Even after the chemo worked, I was scared to say the words.”

  “I’m your wife, Cyril. We should be able to share our hard times.”

  “I know, honey. Can I still be your baby boy?”

  Cyril and Chrystal probably expected privacy on their call, maybe even deserved it, but I wasn’t going to sacrifice any opportunity to do my job for something as meaningless as civility.

  I listened, without blushing, while the estranged couple talked about what they’d been going through in their solitudes. Less like lovers and more like lifelong friends, they sounded silly and childish. But for three dead women it might have seemed charming.

  I was still carrying around William Williams’ satchel and took out one of the largest books—Will and Ariel Durant’s The Age of Napoleon from their eleven-volume masterpiece, The Story of Civilization. So while the lovers, one of whom might have been a bona fide serial killer, whispered silly nothings to each other, I read about France.

  I had no idea that in 1780, France was the most populous nation in all Europe, including Russia; that Paris was the largest city, with the most-educated populace. My father had taught me a lot about the French Revolution, but he took a definite Marxist slant that left out all the romance and pedestrian contradictions.