In the background, Cyril and Chrystal chattered on about places they’d gone and things that had gone wrong. He apologized, and she held back forgiveness.
And then a chill. Not a lowering of the temperature of the room, which was pretty warm on that summer’s eve, but a breeze that shouldn’t have been. I cut off the loudspeaker with a finger and looked up.
Instead of green he now wore all black, and he looked all of his forty years, but this was still Fledermaus, the Artful Dodger, community friend of the East Side commune where Shawna Chambers met her end.
“Bisbe?” I said and he smiled. Grinned actually.
The gun was in my pocket and my hands were on the desk.
I wondered.
“You’re like the little boy who runs after bumblebees every day for the whole summer,” he said in a dreamy voice. “Finally, one day just before the fall, you catch one in your little hand, more because the bee made a mistake than you did something amazing, but now you got an angry stinger up against your flesh.”
Instantaneously a knife appeared in Bisbe’s hand. It was like some kind of magic trick. His speed and the fevered intensity in his eyes reminded me of a fighter I once battled, a skinny middleweight named Joe Dudd. I should have been able to beat Joe into early submission, but he was insane, living on a whole other level of violence. After only four rounds he had me on my knees, unable to rise.
I looked at a spot on the floor midway between the entrance, where Bisbe stood, and the desk where I sat. I knew that once Bisbe crossed that line I’d be either lucky or dead.
In order to get to my pistol I’d have to pull my hand back and plunge it into the pocket, pull out the gun without it snagging on the fabric, aim, and fire before my throat was cut. Either that or somehow evade his first lunge and grab him. From his speed, I doubted I could complete either maneuver.
Bisbe took a step.
I kept my eyes on his chest to keep him from guessing my real strategy.
He took another step, crossing the line of my unavoidable demise.
I made to rise.
“Stop!” Johnny Nightly, the arrogant fool, said.
Bisbe turned with amazing quickness. I grabbed at my pocket. Johnny fired his silenced gun, but not before Bisbe threw his knife. Johnny grunted and fell back into the closet from where he came. Bisbe was struck in the middle of his chest with a soft-nosed bullet. He should have been dead but wasn’t.
Out of reflex I hurried to Bisbe’s side. I checked him for weapons while he stared, amazed, at the ceiling. There was nothing—no gun or even a backup blade. He was as much a fool as Johnny.
The pool hall killer lay on his back, half in and half out of the closet. Luckily Bisbe missed by two or three inches and got Johnny just below the left shoulder. His lungs and heart were okay. I didn’t pull the knife out but tore off Johnny’s shirt to expose the wound and for him to use as a bandage.
“I told you not to give him a chance,” I said.
“I never imagined anybody movin’ that fast,” Johnny said. “I’m sorry, LT.”
“He didn’t perforate me,” I said, pressing around the wound.
Bisbe moaned.
I put Johnny’s hand on the makeshift bandage and said, “Can you hold on to this for a minute?”
“Do what you gotta do,” he said.
Bisbe was trying to rise but the wound in his chest was final. He was never getting up again.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit.”
“Can I do anything?” I asked.
The question seemed to give the killer and idea.
“Forgive me.”
“For what?”
“I killed people,” he said. “Men and women. Kids, too. If somebody got in the way or they were too close. I, I, I see now, right now, it was all wrong. I had no right . . .”
He coughed and blood came up out of his lungs. He swallowed as if this were just some minor impediment.
He said, “I never even once worried or thought about who I killed. I just did it like Mama used to do chickens and Daddy did hogs. I never cared, but now I feel it, that it was wrong. I feel it.
“Forgive me.” He grabbed my forearm with surprising strength.
“I forgive you.” What else could I say? “But you know that confession frees the soul. Maybe you could help me.”
“How?” he asked. His eyes were looking beyond me into an empty future.
“Who paid you to kill Chrystal?”
Bisbe chose that moment to die. His last breath butted up against my face and the aspect of life fled.
I waited a moment to give the proper gravity to his passing and then I returned to Johnny Nightly.
“Sorry about this, Johnny.”
“You told me how dangerous he was and I didn’t listen,” Johnny said. “The more fool me.”
53
I CALLED OUR Special line and he answered, “LT?”
“Hey, Hush, you still know that cleaner guy—Digger?”
“Who’s dead?”
“Bisbe.”
“No shit?” It was the most emotion I ever heard in that ex-assassin’s voice—outside his home, at any rate. “You killed him?”
“Johnny Nightly did.”
“And he’s still breathin’?”
“Yeah, but he got a shoulder wound.”
“Gimme the address and leave the keys at the front desk of your office building. Digger’ll be there in two hours. I’ll cover the eighteen-grand fee. You can pay me back.”
The cleaner would come within two hours of picking up the keys, and Bisbe’s body would disappear—forever. Digger was one of the many specialists working the other side of the proverbial tracks in New York. I’d never needed his services before—but there’s always a first time.
“JUANITA HORN,” She said in answer to my second call.
“Can I bring Johnny by, baby?”
“What’s the injury?”
ANGELIQUE ARABESQUE picked me and Johnny up in front of the building where the artist, Bisbe, awaited his final rites. She dropped me at the Tesla Building and then proceeded to ferry Johnny up to Harlem, where Juanita would nurse him to health.
“You want me to come back for you after I drop Johnny off?” Angelique offered.
“No, baby,” I said. “The business I got needs to be done alone.”
She gave me a speculative look, and then snorted, just a little. There had always been electricity between me and the driver. But I was in no mood for any further human contact—unless that connection included Cyril Tyler’s blood.
I WAS MAD. Not angry, but insane with rage. Cyril Tyler had fooled me just enough; he embarrassed me. And I’m not the kind of man you want to make a fool of.
I got some tools and papers from my office, dropped off the Thirty-first Street apartment keys for Digger at the front desk, and grabbed a cab up to Cyril Tyler’s building.
All I had to do was flash a forged senior city inspector’s ID at the beefeater on duty and take the elevator to the eighteenth floor. From there I went out to the fire escape at the end of the hall and climbed up to the vacant nineteenth floor. Using a grappling hook and a thick rope, I crawled up the wall to the roof. It took some struggle, and a couple of times I nearly lost my grip. But I had madness and rage in my sinews—that and real, honestto-my-father’s-not-God’s hatred.
I MADE IT across the lawn with no challenge. The door to Arthur Pelham’s porch-office was open. The door beyond that was ajar.
This was going to be easy. Digger would make $36,000 off me in one night.
“Mr. McGill,” Ira Lamont said from the opening to the hotpink hallway. “You bring that pistol?”
“I don’t need it for you, son,” I said.
He took off his lacquered hat and dropped it to the floor, where it clattered and wobbled.
I hate cowboys.
There was some kind of martial-arts style to his attack. It seemed like Brazilian capoeira. He came in low and tried to brush my legs out from under me w
ith a sweep.
I took a long step backward and he tried the same maneuver again. This time I moved to the side and he put his booted foot through the glass window-door of Pelham’s office. From there Lamont leapt in the air, a missile of muscle and bone. I waited for him to get airborne before throwing a straight right at the place where his jaw would soon be. When that blow connected, I bounced a left hook off his right temple.
Ira hit the ground like a big bag of sand. He might have been dead, but that didn’t bother me. Someone had tried to murder my client, had nearly killed my friend. I myself was living on time borrowed from earlier that evening.
If getting my revenge meant that Ira Lamont had to die, then so be it.
I walked down the long bright hall to the brown-on-brown pulp-fiction library but there was no one there. I wandered onward into a white dining room that was populated by a big wooden table and a dozen chairs. There was a huge chandelier suspended above the dining area but the lights were off. I passed from there into another room, a pale blue and light gray living room. The colors of the room reminded me of something. It was the same color scheme that Azure Chambers had to protect her from any loud thoughts or notions.
Cyril was there, sitting on an oyster-shell-colored sofa, drinking what might very well have been a two-thousand-dollar shot of nineteenth-century cognac. The bottle on the table next to him looked that old. I brought out the gun that I hadn’t needed for Ira. I was going to kill Cyril. The only reason I hesitated was that it seemed a bit irrational. But between one dead mother, six orphaned children, and the overweening privilege of the wealthy, I had come for my father’s justice, for revenge on the dream that dragged him down.
Cyril was dressed in a faded blue housecoat. Staring up at his Nemesis, me, his gaze froze. I took two steps forward, brought the barrel to the side of his head and set my thumb on the hammer. Something about Cyril’s passivity seemed like a confession, the acceptance of his sentence.
There came a whispery sound in my ears. I realized that this was the sound of my blood literally singing for the death of this man.
“Mr. McGill,” Chrystal said softly. “Leonid.”
If it was a man with a gun I’d’ve been dead already. I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply, and accepted this perceived death.
Then I raised my lids upon a new scene in the same setting.
Chrystal stepped into my line of sight. She was wearing a revealing negligee and no shoes or slippers. It was the bare feet that told the story.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“After I got off the phone I took a taxi.”
“Why?”
“I was sure that what Cyril was telling me was true. I know him.”
“You do. Then explain this—a man broke into the place where I connected the calls. He stabbed my friend and came within a hair of gutting me.”
“Who sent him?” Cyril asked, the muzzle of my pistol still against the side of his head.
“You did.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Conversation wasn’t a possibility.”
Chrystal took a step toward us.
“Stay where you are,” I told her.
“He hasn’t tried to kill me,” Chrystal stated.
“An armed assassin came to the house where they thought you were calling from. He didn’t come there for me.”
“What are you saying?” Cyril asked.
“That you hired a man named Bisbe to trace the call that came in here tonight. That he went to the place I’d set up—to kill Chrystal, just like he did Shawna and Pinky and, for all I know, Allondra, too.”
“No,” Cyril said to Chrystal. “I did not.”
She was looking confused, worried.
“I can’t believe it,” she said to me.
“Your brother told me that he came to your husband to shake him down.”
“He did not!” Cyril shouted.
“And what did Tally say was Cyril’s answer?” Chrystal asked.
This question wrenched me part of the way out of my murderous haze. Her brother had not actually said Cyril’s name. But who else could it have been?
“You can’t just kill him,” Chrystal said, fighting for her man.
“Yes I can. And it would be self-defense. A guy like this could end my existence with just a shrug.”
“I don’t believe he did it,” the maybe-murderer’s wife said.
Her conviction lowered my gun. I sat down on one side of the billionaire, his wife settled down on the other.
“Tally told me that Shawna sent him to shake down somebody for major money. He had some kind of dirt about Pinky Todd and investment fraud.”
“Pinky thought that we were involved in fraud,” Cyril said. “But we weren’t. There was no connection between us and any insider trading.”
“But if there wasn’t, why would anybody want to kill Pinky or Shawna?”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know, Mr. McGill. But Pinky never had a case against me. I agreed to pay her more money only because Arthur said that that would be easier than going to court.”
“And you’re telling me that Tally never came to you?” I asked.
“He stole silverware from us. Chrystal told Phil that he was not to be allowed in. You remember, honey?”
Chrystal nodded.
“But,” Cyril added, “I do remember that Phil told me that Tally had come around a few weeks ago. He insisted that he talk to me and, and Arthur went down to send him away.”
“Arthur,” I said. “Not Phil.”
“Yes.”
“What was the basis for the insider-trading claim?” I asked.
“An investment firm named Tagmont,” Cyril said. “For all I know they might have really been involved with some kind of illegal activity. I didn’t trust them and so we didn’t trade with them. That’s how our group works. If any one of us is uneasy we don’t get involved.”
“Who brought this Tagmont group to you?”
“It was a man named Lesser. He was an old school buddy of Arthur’s.”
Cyril sat back on the sofa while Chrystal and I stared at each other.
“Your sister thought that Cyril killed Pinky,” I said. “She sent Tally to shake Cyril down but really it was Pelham that was bent. She didn’t know and hired me to protect you from your husband while she collected the money from the shakedown.”
“Arthur’s been with me for eighteen years,” Cyril said.
At that moment Ira Lamont staggered into the room. I was glad he wasn’t dead.
“Hey, Ira,” I hailed. “Come on in and join the gang.”
54
BY THE TIME I got home it was very late.
Cyril, Chrystal, and a slightly battered Ira Lamont had gone to spend the night at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel at Columbus Circle—just in case there was another Bisbe out there. They used a special account that Luke Nye maintained at the hotel for his foreign clients. I called Lieutenant Kitteridge and told him what I knew, leaving out the killing of Bisbe and the near death of Johnny Nightly.
“After talking it over with Tyler and his wife we realized that Pinky Todd really did have something, only it was on Pelham and she didn’t know it. She went to Pelham to give Tyler her demands. He, Pelham, talked Tyler into paying her off. He said that it would be cheaper than a trial, but she must have come back wanting more. Same thing with Shawna. We figure that Tally told Pelham about Shawna being involved. Pelham pegged her as the brains and had her taken out.”
“What about Allondra North?” the cop asked.
“That’s Florida’s jurisdiction,” I said. “Hey—maybe she really did get blind drunk and fall off the side of the boat.”
“That’s pretty weak, LT.”
“Not if your guys find that Pelham’s been involved in insider trading with a man named Lesser representing a company named Tagmont. Not if you offer Tally immunity and he tells what he said to the lawyer.”
“Who’s your client, Leoni
d?”
“My client is dead, Carson. I’m just tryin’ to do right by her.”
He wasn’t happy with the story; I wasn’t either. But it’s rare that everything is revealed in a case like this one. Even if Cyril killed Allondra, it was probably because they were fighting, and even then he honestly might not remember.
Sitting at the hickory table in the dining room, I sipped at a snifter of brandy and truly relaxed for the first time in days.
“Mr. McGill?” Elsa Koen said. She was wearing Twill’s old plaid pajamas and a nightgown.
“Elsa. Where did you come from?”
“I was sleeping in Shelly’s room and I heard you come in.” She gave me a tentative stare and then pulled out a chair next to me. “I must ask you something.”
“How’s Gordo?”
“The doctor cannot find any trace of the cancer in his blood. He will not say that he is cancer-free, but . . .”
“What did you want?”
“Mr. Tallman wants to go home.”
“Is he strong enough for that?”
“He still needs help, but if someone were to come by one or maybe two times a day, that might be enough.”
“He’d probably get better even faster in his own home,” I said. “You know, Gordo likes to be independent.”
“Yes,” Elsa said, “but I’m worried about him, about his mind.”
“He seems to be thinkin’ okay to me.”
“He told me that he wanted to hire me to be his full-time nurse. He said that he would pay my fee.”
“So?”
“I told him that this was three hundred dollars a day including agency fees, and he said that was fine. I know that you had to take him in when he got sick. I understand that he is a poor man. Maybe, maybe he’s confused.”
My lawyer and I were the only ones who knew that Gordo owned the twelve-story building that housed his boxing gym, that he was a millionaire several times over. I only took him in because he needed to be among friends.
“Don’t worry about it, Elsa,” I said. “If Gordo wants you, and you’re willing to work for him—”
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