All I Did Was Shoot My Man (12 page)

23

THOUGH IT WAS
early evening the summer sun still shown down on Brooklyn. I reached the address on Poindexter a little after seven. What looked like a homeless man in gray clothes sat in the doorway of the boarded-up brownstone.

I say he looked like a homeless person because, even though he had the clothes and state of dishevelment down pat, he wasn’t doing anything; not sleeping or reading, drinking or eating, rifling endlessly through his belongings or engaged in an endless diatribe with some imaginary friend—or enemy. For that matter, he didn’t have any belongings—no backpack or grocery cart filled with the necessities and diversions that all humans (homeless or homed) need to survive.

I walked up to the doorway, where the tousled and unkempt black man lounged, and looked down at him.

“ Wha?” he said, looking up with eyes both clear and unafraid.

He was in his thirties and fit underneath the loose garments. I could see what was probably the outline of a pistol in his right front pocket.

“Lethford,” I said.

His nostrils flared.

“Get the fuck outta here, main,” he replied.

“I don’t think Captain Kitteridge would like that.”

The pile of gray clothes rose up more like a panther than a broken man. He stared hard at me and then stepped aside.

The door seemed to be boarded, but all I had to do was push and it swung open.

The hallway was dark and narrow. At the far end a faint radiance hinted at but did not necessarily promise light. I walked in that direction, running my left hand against the wall. At the end I turned left, finding myself at the foot of what might have been a stairway.

Two silhouettes came from the sides of the barely visible steps. A bright light shone in my face, blinding me.

“ Who are you?” a gruff voice demanded.

“McGill for Lethford.”

“ What for?” the other man, who held the torch, said.

I reached out, pulled the heavy-duty flashlight from his hand, and threw it down on the floor.

“ What the fuck?” one of them said.

Another light snapped on up above. I took a step backward so that the two shadow men could not grab me.

They were both in street clothes with badges and holsters at their belts. The man on the left, the one I’d taken the flashlight from, looked quite angry. His close-cut hairline was receding and his blue-gray eyes were sparks looking for an accelerant.

“McGill?” a voice from above said.

“That’s me.”

A very large dark-skinned man descended halfway down to the first landing of the stairway. Looking up at him, I remembered a time thirty years before when I let Gordo talk me into climbing in the ring with a natural heavyweight.

The guy’s name was Biggie Barnes and he had fists like anvils.

Don’t let him hit ya
was the only advice Gordo gave me at the bell announcing round one.

“Come on up,” the big man said.

I followed in the wake of the giant up four flights. It was a dimly lit journey and my fever made it feel like a ride in a rocking boat. These two elements brought a flicker of fear into the center of my chest.

At any other time I would not have gone to some unknown destination just because Kit asked me to. He was my enemy, my opponent, not a friend.

But I was sick, in love, and seeking redemption. I should have been under the care of two doctors and a Zen monk. Instead I was in Brooklyn with no real way out.

On the fifth floor there were three doors. One of these had a thick dark green curtain hanging over it. The big man pushed the fabric aside and went through. I followed . . . coming into a good-sized room that was lit by bright incandescent fixtures. There were six desks, here and there, with no rhyme or reason; each had a monitor on it and a plainclothes cop to study it.

The windows were sealed with thick black paper. I counted a dozen small digital cameras, supported on poles of various heights, attached to the walls. The video feeds were routed to the monitors.

The images on the screens were of a social club on Pox Street, one over from Poindexter. Black men and women, many bearing dreadlocks, were coming in and out of the storefront establishment.

I had passed the club on my way to the meeting because I decided to walk around the block before approaching Number 26.

The members of the street-level society sounded like Jamaicans. They seemed rather tough.

“Drug dealers,” the big man said, noticing me staring at a screen.

“You Lethford?”

“Come into my office.”

He led me through a real door this time, into a smaller space that had two wooden folding chairs and a peacock blue phone on the pine floor. No carpeting. He shut the door behind us.

“Sit,” he said in a tone that was neither friendly nor hostile.

The big black man wore a short-sleeved black shirt, black cotton pants, and black shoes. I could tell by his right ankle that his socks were white.

“So,” he said, “do you know why I wanted to see you?”

“ Who are you, man?” I replied.

He bit the left side of his lower lip and so refrained from slapping me for my insolence.

The cop had a long face and almost no hair except the few sprouts of white that showed on his chin. He was my age, more or less, and the whites of his eyes were no longer that color.

“Captain Clarence Lethford,” he said, “Special Investigations Unit.”

“Huh.”

“Do you know why I wanted to see you?”

“ We’re not gonna get anywhere with you treating me like a trainee,” I said. “I’m here because Carson Kitteridge asked me to come. Now, if you have something to say, then say it.”

Big men throw around their weight from an early age. At some point they assume this is a God-given right. Every now and then it’s good for a short guy like me to disrupt that surety.

“I expect some civility out of you, McGill.”

“Is that it? Because you know absence is the ultimate form of bein’ civil. If I’m not there, I can’t insult you.” I stood up.

“Sit down.”

“Fuck you.”

That was the moment we had to get to. He was either going to hit me, let me leave, or get down to the business at hand.

“I was the chief NYPD liaison officer on the Rutgers heist,” he said.

I sat down.

“I was working that case,” he continued, “until Zella Grisham was charged with complicity.”

“Oh.” I crossed my right leg over the left, lacing my blunt fingers around the knee. This made me think of Mirabelle Mycroft and so I released the joint.

“Yeah,” Lethford agreed. “Oh.”

I think he expected me to start shaking and confess or something. It would take more than one confrontation to break him of his big-man complex.

When he saw that I wasn’t made of straw he continued. “They got me to look over the case again when Breland Lewis got her cut loose. First thing I did was go to the shylock’s file. I found a flag there with your name on it.”

“He hired me to help her decompress into civilian life.”

“Kit says that Lewis is your boy.”

“And that means?”

“It means that maybe you had something to do with the heist,” Lethford said, holding up his thick left thumb. “It means that even if the brass says to lay off you, I’m gonna crawl up your ass until I see brain. It means that maybe I was wrong about Grisham, that maybe you got her out because she knows something that can make your retirement plan shine.”

Every time he said the word
means
he showed another finger—not necessarily in proper order. He put up the pinkie for the retirement plan.

“No, Captain,” I said. “The only thing to glean from my involvement and her freedom is that she did not commit the crime and that the real culprits are still out there.”

“ Why would they fake the money wrappers and make her the patsy?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, falsely answering the perfectly sensible question. “My job was to help prove that she didn’t have any connection to the heist. I accomplished that end.”

“You’re dirty, McGill.”

“That’s the general consensus,” I agreed.

“And I’m the one who’ll take you down.”

“That brings us to the reason I’m here,” I said. “Kitteridge said that I might be in some kind of trouble . . . and not necessarily from arrest and conviction.”

“Bingo,” the big cop replied. It was not the exhortation of victory.

At that moment the door to the little meeting room slammed open.

“Captain!” a young white cop shouted. She seemed both angry and afraid. “They’re shooting out there!”

Lethford surged up so violently that his chair fell over. He rushed past me into the observation nerve center.

I followed.

“Get the hell out there!” he shouted. “Hurry up!”

I glanced at the screens as the men and woman gathered what weapons they had and rushed out of the room. Some of the cops were already wearing their bulletproof vests; others lugged theirs along.

On the monitors I could see that a black van had crashed into the storefront social club and a cadre of men had jumped out, using semi-automatic weapons against the residents.

On my journey around the block I had noticed a slender alley that led from Pox to Poindexter. On a monitor I saw a young boy, maybe eight, run down that artery with a skateboard under his arm. A few seconds later a tall man with a pistol in his left hand went the same way . . .
I GOT
to the street maybe ninety seconds later. The police had used another route. The guards for the stairway and door were gone. The pretend homeless man/sentry was also absent.

I made it to the alley just in time to see the back of the tall man. He was carrying the boy like a shield in front of him as he backed toward the possible safety of Poindexter.

There was a lot of shouting and gunfire coming from the
POX TURF WAR
,
as the papers called it the next day.

I moved in low and relatively quietly. The man wasn’t pointing the gun at the young boy and so I hit him hard in the right kidney and left ear. It was a combination attack, but the punches were so fast as to seem simultaneous.

The boy hit the ground, bounced up, and tore out of there, leaving the unconscious man, his pistol, and even the rainbow-colored skateboard in the alley.

I picked up and pocketed the gun so that no other child might retrieve it. Mission accomplished, I walked away from the noise and turmoil.

It wasn’t my fight, not at all.

24

BINGO HAMAN, aka
Mr. Human. I was thinking about him as I walked down Flatbush Avenue.

Bingo was his own impact on any situation. He was famous in the underworld, one of the best heist men in the business. He was compared to people like Cole Younger and Jesse James, Baby Face Nelson and even John Dillinger.

The myth claimed that he’d never been arrested.

Maybe it was true.

I hadn’t met the venerable Mr. Human. He was good enough not to require the services of a cleanup man like I used to be. That is, unless Stumpy Brown had represented him on the Rutgers job.

At any rate, his extraordinary luck or smarts abandoned him three months earlier at two-sixteen in the morning when he was cruising down the LIE . . .
on his way from his girlfriend’s house back to his wife and kids,
Luke Nye, the pool shark and endless fount of information, had told me.

A car with no license plate sped up to pass and fired three dozen shots into the driver’s-side window.

BLACK MEN
hating and killing each other,
my crackpot father used to say.
That’s the legacy of slavery and capitalism. And you don’t have to be black, you don’t even have to be a man—but it’s black men killin’ each other, still and
all.

By the time that memory surfaced I was on the 1 train headed uptown, thinking about the photograph of the pudgy white face alleged to be Bingo Haman. The only dirt the
News
could pick up on him was that he was a suspect in a series of robberies around the country. But he was so much more than that. Bingo was a ruthless and merciless killer. He went out on every job fully armed with each weapon cocked.

They had killed a man on the Rutgers heist, if indeed it was his crew that executed that job and the guard.

And how could I claim innocence when I used my wiles to cover up for him? Was I any better?

I STOPPED
moving forward at the corner of Ninety-first and Broadway. The light of day was almost gone but I didn’t want to head home yet. So I sat on a bus stop bench and took out my cell phone.

She answered on the fourth ring.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Lesser?”

“Yes?”

“Teresa Lesser?” I added.

“That’s me.”

“My name is Alton Plimpton,” I said easily. “I’m a floor manager at Rutgers Assurance.”

“ Where?”

“ We’re kind of like an informal international insurance company.”

“I don’t need any insurance, Mr. Plimpton. Sorry.”

“ We don’t sell insurance, ma’am. We take in money under short-term conditions to protect the interests of people not covered by international law.”

“ What does that have to do with me?”

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“ We’re running an internal investigation and are willing to pay ten thousand dollars for information leading us to the whereabouts of Mr. Harry Tangelo.”

At that point the woman admitting to be Teresa Lesser hung up.

IT WAS
very comfortable there in the twilight, on that bench. So much so that it took me a moment to realize that the fever, once again, had caught up to me. I downed the last two aspirin that Twill had given me and made a call.

“Hello?” he said.

“Johnny?”

“LT. How you doing?”

“Good. You?”

“All healed up.”

On our last collaboration Johnny Nightly made a slip and got himself shot in the chest by a very accomplished killer. The assassin died and Johnny didn’t—that’s the most one could have hoped for.

“Luke there?” I asked.

A moment passed, and then, “Hey, Leonid. What’s up?”

“I got some issues.”

“ With me?”

“A thing or two you could help me with.”

“Shoot.”

“I’m looking for an address and I need you to put up a woman for a week or so. You got any empty rooms upstairs?”

“No problem with the room.”

“She should probably stay out of sight and maybe Johnny could look in on her now and then.”

“That’s easy.”

Luke Nye was many things. He’d killed men, dealt in women, even pulled a heist or two in his time. He’d been a regular jack-of-all-trades until deciding on pool as his major and dealing in information as his minor in the ongoing adult education University of Life.

“And then there’s Stumpy Brown,” I said.

“ What about old Stumpy?”

“You got numbers on him?”

“Five hundred a night for the room and a thousand for Stumpy,” he said.

“HELLO?”
she said on the house phone in the downstairs hall of Mary Deharain’s rooming house.

“It’s Leonid, Zella.”

“Oh . . . What do you want?”

“There’s a guy named Iran Shelfly lives there. He’s in room three-oh-six.”

“I’ve met him.”

“He’s a friend of mine. I sent him a text, telling him to drive you out to another friend’s in the Bronx. I think you’ll be safer there until I figure out this thing with Rutgers.”

“ What are you up to?” she asked.

“I’m trying to help.”

“ Why?”

“Because Breland is paying and I need the work.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that heist. There’s no money you can get out of me.”

“I know that, Zella.”

It was the closest I would ever come to a confession. It wasn’t enough to bring me to justice but I think she heard it; I could tell by her silence. After that I explained what was going to happen to keep her safe. She didn’t argue.

“YEAH?”
he said.

That particular phone never rang—a fact that had something to do with the security system associated with it. No one could eavesdrop on or trace any call to that number.

“Hush?”

“ What’s up, LT?”

“Are you working?”

Hush, since retiring from the assassination business, had been employed as a limousine driver. Don’t ask me why. He had more money than Gordo.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Hush said.

“Tell me what?”

“I bought the company. All twenty-seven cars now drive for me. I just keep my regulars and get to spend more time with Thackery and Tamara.”

It was hard to imagine Hush as a family man even though I had been a guest at his house half a dozen times. It seemed both illogical and unfair.

“You want to come get me and take a ride out to the beach?” I asked.

“Okay.”

“HELLO?”
Katrina said.

“Hey, babe,” I said, nearly biting my tongue for saying the same thing to both Katrina and Aura.

“Leonid.” There was relief in her voice. “ Where are you?”

I was only four blocks away but I said, “In Brooklyn. I’m deposing a witness for Breland.”

“Is it safe?”

“Yes . . . very.”

“I’ll wait up for you.”

SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER
Hush drove up in a black Lincoln Town Car. I hopped in next to him. He was wearing dark but not black clothes; chocolate brown jeans and a dusk-colored T-shirt. His dark blue sailor’s shoes were made from heavy canvas. His brown hair worked as its own camouflage.

I hadn’t told him that we were on serious business—he just knew.

Going down the West Side Highway, I explained about Zella and the complications that had arisen. He listened and nodded and drove.

We went through the tunnel at the bottom of Manhattan and made our way to the Gowanus Expressway, headed south.

“ Why don’t you just leave well enough alone?” he asked when approaching the Belt Parkway.

“You mean leave Zella to rot in jail for something she didn’t do?”

“She shot her man.”

“They wouldn’t have been so harsh for that alone. I mean, she’d gone crazy.”

“It’s crazy to get her out of prison.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. When I’m in bed early in the morning I wake up sometimes and think about the people I’ve wronged. Some of them, most of them, were pretty bad to begin with. I can live with that. But people like Zella . . . I mean, what good is life if you can’t stand up?”

“That’s what boxers do, right?”

“ What?”

“They get knocked down and stand up again.”

“Yeah. If you’ve never been knocked down, then you’ve never been in a fight.”