All I Did Was Shoot My Man (9 page)

17

ONCE AGAIN Twill
and I were sitting alone in the big sunny room with our backs to the river. We weren’t talking because there was nothing to say. I was executing my profession and Twill was learning everything he could. He wasn’t impressed by wealth the way I was. Even though he was an accomplished thief by the age of fourteen he didn’t really covet money or the things it could buy.

Twill, the son of my heart, was a native of modernity. For him money was a found natural resource like the wind—or dry dung.

LITTLE MINOLITA
appeared at the corner of a doorway to the room. Not the door we’d come through. She was staring at me while picking her nose.

“Come here, you little creature,” I said, proffering my big boxer’s paws.

She opened her mouth, took in a big gulp of air, and then ran at me like a hungry puppy that just saw an unguarded plate.

The ecru-colored child hopped up on my knee and grabbed my index finger.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi yourself.”

She’d never heard that phrase, and the newness of the man and the words made her smile.

“I can pick up Miss Sylvia’s two-pound weights,” she told me.

“I pick up weights too, down at Gordo’s Gym.”

So many new words and ideas. The child started rocking from side to side.

“Do you ride horses?” she asked, reminded by her own movements.

“Never,” I said, shaking my head.

“I do. With Mama.”

“Horses are big.”

Minolita nodded with such vehement seriousness that both Twill and I smiled. She smiled too, basking in the warmth of our attention.

“Minolita,” Velvet said, standing in the same doorway from which her daughter had come.

The child twisted on my knee as if it were her private saddle and said, “Here, Mom.”

“Stop bothering Miss Sylvia’s guests.”

The young woman came into the room with the careless grace of youth. She wasn’t over twenty-one, and I was impressed by her recovery from the shape she was in when last we met.

“I’m not bothering them, Mom. He doesn’t even ride horses.”

Velvet lifted her daughter from my knee and held the child in her arms. She intended to turn away but then stopped.

“I had a dream about you,” she said to me.

“That seems like a waste for a beautiful young woman like yourself.”

“You were in a big dark place,” she said, ignoring the compliment. “Or maybe it was me. Yes. I was in a hole, looking up at the nighttime, and you came and held out your hands. I know that it was you because it was your hands.”

“That’s some dream,” I said. “Or was it a nightmare?”

“ When I woke up the sun was shining,” she said. “My mother was sitting beside me and I was home.”

I wondered how much she really remembered. It didn’t much matter. Hush and I had covered up the particulars with the assassin’s close attention to detail. Even if the man, Bernard Locke, was missed, his body would never be found.

While I was reassuring myself the Mycrofts returned with another young woman. The new girl was about the same age as Velvet but white and heavier—that’s not to say that she was fat.

Velvet heard her mother’s employers and whispered to her daughter, “Come on, little one.”

As they left the child waved to me. I think that was probably the happiest single moment I had all month.

“This is our daughter,” Sylvia Mycroft said, “Mirabelle.”

The young woman had longish light brown hair and wore a violet dress that only made it down to the middle of her powerful runner’s thighs. Her brown eyes were taking in Twill, who managed to pay just enough attention to her legs.

Sylvia ushered her daughter to the couch on the right. She sat near to her. Shelby stayed on his feet. Maybe he thought this tactic would give him some kind of advantage.

“Hello, Mirabelle,” I said.

“Hi.” She had a nice smile.

“This here is Mathers.”

She smiled at him.

“You have something to tell us about your brother?” I suggested.

Shelby coughed, and then said, “Before we start this I need to set down some ground rules.”

“Yes?” I said.

“This is to be a completely confidential conversation. You will not repeat it to anyone, not even Mr. Lewis. I expect you to sign a letter agreeing to that stipulation.”

“Sit down, Mr. Mycroft.”

If anything, he raised his shoulders up higher.

“Sit down,” I said again. “This is not a contest. And furthermore it is not within your sphere of influence. The reason you called me is because you need someone with my particular skills to try and do damage control. I’m not here to have my hands tied. So sit down and let’s talk this out.”

A beat passed and then another. Shelby Mycroft finally gave in and lowered down on the space next to his wife. This surprised me a little. I expected him to lose his temper and send me away. Maybe that’s what I wanted.

The fact that he relented meant that his fears about his son were deep and more troublesome than he let on.

Managing not to smile over my victory, I turned back to Mirabelle. “I was asking about your brother.”

She nodded and looked down at the floor.

“You go to NYU with him?”

“No. I attend the New School nearby.”

“But you see him a lot?” I asked.

“Not a lot. Maybe every two weeks or so. We usually just run into each other on the street. He calls sometimes though. I mean . . . we’re not very close. When I was a sophomore in high school he left home for two years and by the time he got back he was different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Shelby said.

“He was fun when we were kids,” Mirabelle said. “But when he got back he was kind of cold and a little angry.”

Like his father.

“So what kind of trouble do you think he’s gotten into?” I asked.

Twill laced his fingers under his chin, placed his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward.

“I was at this late-night party in the Meatpacking District last week,” she began. “It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually go to, but my girlfriends had met this actor and he was going to be there. It was really late but Tonya had a car, so . . .”

“ Was your brother there?”

“No.” Mirabelle brought her hands together around her bare left knee.

“Then what?” I asked.

“It was a roof party and it was kind of wild,” she said, twisting her shoulders to show her discomfort. “There were all kinds of things going on. Drugs. Sex. I wanted to leave, but Tonya had hooked up with that actor guy and so I felt like I had to wait.”

The girl was uncomfortable talking around her parents. Her version of the story to them was PG rated. I knew this and waited for the details to come of their own accord.

“I went to sit with this girl I met,” she said. “She was African, from Cameroon. We talked for a long time and then this guy I’d never seen before came up to us. He was wearing army fatigues, but I don’t think he was a veteran or anything. He asked if I was Kent’s sister and I said yes. I guess the girl thought there was something going on with us and so she left, and the guy, his name was Roger Dees, sat down next to me.”

Mirabelle shifted in her seat and sat up straight as if trying to throw off the influence of the young man named Roger Dees.

“ What did Roger have to say?” I asked.

“He said that Kent better stay away from the Handsome Brothers because they weren’t going to have their good looks for very long.”

“And what did you think that meant?” I asked.

“I didn’t know but it sounded like a threat. I was so upset that I left the party and took a taxi back to my apartment. The next day I went to Kent’s place and told him what happened. He begged me not to tell Mom and Dad, but his friends—these Handsome Brothers, Jerry Ott, Loring MacArthur, and a girl named Luscious—had been involved in some kind of disagreement with some drug dealer guys. He said that it was all settled, that it was just a misunderstanding, and that Roger Dees didn’t know anything.”

“But you didn’t believe him?”

“My friend Tate told me that Jerry Ott had been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and that a lot of kids got their drugs from him. I, I thought that maybe he had been lying to Kent.”

Looking over at Shelby I said, “Drugs, huh?”

“It’s not Kent,” the father said defensively. “He just knows these people.”

“If it’s not that bad, then why don’t you just confront him yourself?”

Shelby’s hands turned to fists on his knees. His already serious visage hardened.

“The last time we had a confrontation he left New York and we didn’t see him for two years.”

“He’s going to NYU,” I submitted. “I suspect he’d want you to keep on paying his tuition.”

“He’s got a scholarship. He doesn’t take anything from us.”

“Nothing?”

I finally sat back on the blue sofa. The cushion was firm. I was pretending to think about the Mycrofts’ problem but really I was thinking about my father; about how I wished that he would have taken me down with him to the Revolution, wherever that was. My heart throbbed a bit, and I realized that the fever was coming back already. This inner heat wave had caused my irrational mental connections.

Or was it all that illogical?

Twill was a tough kid and capable of being almost invisible. He’d barely said a word since we entered the room. The value of silence was a lesson most young men never learned.

I turned my attention back to Mirabelle.

“Do you ever socialize with your brother?” I asked.

“Sometimes we get a pizza together or something. He likes to talk about political philosophy—Nietzsche and Lenin mostly.”

“Could you get together with him and bring a date?”

“One time he brought that girl Luscious when we had dinner.”

“Call him up. Tell him that you have a new boyfriend, Mathers here. Tell him to bring the girl and you’ll buy the pizza.”

“ We’re hiring
you
,” Shelby said with emphasis.

“You want me to go on a date with your daughter?”

“Certainly not!”

“Then let this happen. Mathers, as you can see, knows how to keep quiet when he should be listening.”

18

“JUST GET the
lay of the land, Twilliam,” I was telling my son in the cab headed back downtown. “I don’t want you to
do
anything. Find out what’s what and report back to me.”

“Okay. All right. But what’s this Mathers stuff?”

“They don’t need to know your name, and I especially don’t want Kent to know.”

“ Why not?”

“Because even though his parents think that he’s an innocent nerd I have some reservations. I don’t want him thinking about you too closely.”

“Lotsa people know me. You know that, Pops. If I use a fake name and he knows it, that’ll be all the worse.”

“Just do what I say, Junior.”

“Okay, you got it. That Mirabelle’s cute anyway.”

“This is business, son—not pleasure.”

“And I am on the job,” he said, exhibiting a boyish smile.

AFTER THAT
Twill and I reverted to our roles in the modern world: we started checking our cell phones for texts, forwarded e-mails, and voice messages.

I had five voice mails and two texts. They were all from people I knew: Breland Lewis of course, Zella Grisham, Zephyra Ximenez, Carson Kitteridge, and Gordo Tallman—the most important man in my life.

“HEY, LT,”
Breland said. “I heard from Shelby that you were a little hard on them. He said that some guy named Mathers and their daughter are supposed to get together with his son. He’s uncomfortable about getting her too deeply involved, but I told him that you were the best and that you wouldn’t put anyone in danger. Don’t make me a liar, okay?

“About that other thing—Jeanette looked up the adoption papers for Baby Grisham and found that she was taken in by Sidney and Rhianon Quick of Queens. I’ve texted you the particulars.

“Zella called the office when I was in a meeting. I haven’t talked to her yet, but it sounds like she’s in some kind of trouble already.”

THE NEXT MESSAGE
was from Zella.

“Mr. McGill, I know I keep calling you with my problems but I’m just telling you something this time. I tried Mr. Lewis but he’s been in meetings all day, and I thought he’d like to know that this woman, from Rutgers Assurance, came to the place he got me the job and then they told me that they had to let me go. The woman’s name was Antoinette Lowry and she told the floor supervisor that the police would be involved.

“ When I got home Ms. Deharain told me that Lowry had been there too. I thought that she’d kick me out, but she told me that you and her went way back and it would take more than a corporation’s private security force to scare her.

“That made me wonder. I thought that it was Mr. Lewis who was helping me, Mr. McGill—not you.”

WE WERE MOVING
through heavy traffic on First Avenue. I put the phone down a moment, worrying about the choices I made while under the influence of the fever.

Mary Deharain was a client from the old days. I’d gotten her husband arrested for a murder that he did commit. Living on her own and lamenting the hard choice she’d made to have her insane husband sent to prison, Mary ran a boardinghouse for folks who liked to live under the radar.

I’d lodged a lot of clients there. But that wasn’t such a great idea if I didn’t want the client to know that I was looking out for them . . .
“. . . NO HARRY TANGELO,”
Zephyra said in her message. “No Minnie Lesser either. Harry disappeared before his wife’s trial. He was an orphan so there’s no family. The funny thing was that Minnie’s mother, Teresa Lesser, was easy to find. She lives in the Bronx. I ran a check on any missing persons reports on both Tangelo and Lesser. Nothing there either. I’ll send you a text with Minnie’s mother’s information and anything else I found.”

. . . and curiouser.

“I NEED
to have a meeting with you, LT,” was captain-at-large Carson Kitteridge’s single-sentence message.

Kitteridge had studied me over the years. He was my own personal Inspector Javert—intent on making my life miserable. I imagined him rooting around in my trash and going to judges to get wiretapping writs.

Funny thing about a nemesis, however, is that while they’re studying you you learn all kinds of things about them. I knew what Kit was looking for by the tone in his voice and words he used.

For instance: Carson only ever used the word
need
when there was a third party involved. He only asked for a meeting when the crime I was suspected of being involved in was more important than putting my ass in stir. If I was in trouble, he’d just tell me to come down to his office—no ifs, ands, or buts.

And so, from that single sentence, I knew that there was some cop or team somewhere investigating the Rutgers heist and they wanted to talk to me.

“HEY, KID,”
Gordo Tallman, one of the great unsung boxing trainers of this century and the last, said. “I got me a problem that’s your fault even though I can’t be mad at you for causin’ it. Make sure you get down here soon.”

I knew Kit because you had to be able to read a predator’s signs. But I understood Gordo because I loved him, because he took me into his gym and taught me the right hook/left uppercut combination while everybody else was telling me that I shouldn’t be angry for my father abandoning us, leaving my mother to die from a broken heart.

I DISCONNECTED
from the voice mail system and noticed that I’d gotten another text while I was listening.

This message was from Aura Ullman.

Before reading what she had to say I sent a text of my own, to Gordo.

I be by in a few hours, G, just have to do one thing
first.

CALL ME,
was all Aura’s message said. Two words that meant more than anything else that had been said that day.