Walter mosley leonid mcg.., p.18
Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_02, page 18
“You’re refusing me?” There was actual pain in his voice.
“No. I’m just saying that I need you to work for a client of mine. I will pay your going rate on that and I’ll do what I can for you about Zephyra—I’m just sayin’ that you can’t predict what a woman’s gonna do.”
“You’ll talk to her?”
“Sure. Why not?”
While Tiny pondered the two-word question, I suspected that I’d just revealed to him a major flaw in his isolationist techno-philosophy.
“Um,” he said. “I’ll look up information on this woman.”
My cell phone made the sound of the clang of a single bell. I had another question to ask Tiny but the incoming call was more important.
“I’ll talk to Zephyra in the near future. Bye.”
I hung up the office phone and answered the cell just as it was calling for the next round.
“Hey, Gordo,” I said. “I was wondering if maybe you retired and moved down to Saint Lucia to live.”
“Or die,” he said in a voice that was even more strained and raspy than usual.
39
In the taxi ride downtown I drifted into a reverie about my parents: Tolstoy, the self-styled union organizer and radical Communist revolutionary, and Lena, the pious Harlemite who loved her man as much as any jazz lyricist could imagine. He went off to join a Cuban brigade down in South America soon after my twelfth birthday, leaving me fatherless, and virtually motherless, because Lena took to her bed and died soon after. She was the only proof I ever needed that a person could die from a broken heart.
That began my long and uneasy relationship with the various branches of New York City government—including the NYPD. I was continually running away from foster homes, getting into fights, and doing odd jobs for petty criminals. I was in and out of youth facilities. The foster parents I had weren’t bad people. Many of them, I think, truly cared about me. But my father had trained me and my younger brother, Nikita, as revolutionaries from the time we could toddle. I hated Tolstoy, but at the same time he was my hero, and so there was little I had in common with the petit bourgeois churchgoers who tried to set me on the right path.
Then one day I stumbled into Gordo’s Gym. He was only in his early forties then but he already looked old, craggy. He strapped some gloves on me and put me in the ring with an older, more experienced boy. I lost the round but never stopped coming forward, and so Gordo trained me, for seven years.
Maybe if I had paid closer attention to Gordo, if I would have let his hand guide me, I wouldn’t have taken my homegrown revolutionary training and turned it into piecework for the mob. But I couldn’t stay on boxing’s bicycle—because there was no road, or even a path, that led to my destination.
THEY HAD HIM IN a southwest corner room with three other men on the eighth floor of St. Vincent’s Hospital. He looked even smaller than usual in the big mechanical bed. His eyes were closed when I pulled up the chair.
Gordo’s brown skin was tinged red from decades of blood rising to the surface as he exhorted his boys to give more. He was the color of rage, the man in your corner, win or lose.
“Leonid,” he whispered.
“G.”
He sat up a bit by shifting his knobby shoulders one way and then the other.
“Why you look so glum, boy?” he said. “I’m the one down for the count here.”
I laughed, feeling a pang of guilt that my sick friend was comforting me.
“What they got you in here for, man?”
“First it was pre-ulcers, then it was plain ulcers, that went into bleedin’ ulcers, and now they say I got cancer. An’ I believe it, too, ’cause it hurt like a mothahfuckah.”
“Stomach cancer?”
“A hole in one, boy. You could go up against Tiger Woods, with the right caddy.”
“They gonna operate?”
“Not at first. They wanna nuke it an’ then poison it and then if me an’ it is still alive they might get the cut man.”
“That’s a bitch,” I said.
“Body shot like you wouldn’t believe.” Gordo’s wry smile turned sour.
“What do you need?”
“What’s that lawyer’s name you got?”
“Breland Lewis.”
“I want you to get him to fill out some papers for me.”
“Like what?”
“Augustine.”
“Your nephew?”
“He’s a good man but he don’t have the sense of a termite. I wanna leave him the gym, it’s all I got, but you know he’d mess it up in a week. Rack up some kinda fool debt, or maybe just sell the whole buildin’ an’ blow the money on his good-for-nuthin’ kids or that money-hungry fourth wife’a his.”
“You own the building?”
“What other landlord than me gonna let a sweaty ole gym don’t make a nickel a day stay up there?”
I was astonished. It was a dilapidated old building but it was in the West Thirties, not three blocks from Penn Station. It had to be worth millions upon millions, even in the current real estate slump.
“So what do you want from Breland?” I asked.
“I want him to work out some kinda scheme to leave the place to you and then for you to take care of Augustine. You know, you get a li’l bit and then pass the rest off to him in parcels.”
“Why you gonna trust me, G? You know my track record is not a good one.”
“Shit. You think I don’t know it? Man, if I could find somebody better they’d be sittin’ here right now. But you know, boy, even though you about as crooked as one’a them curly bamboo plants, I figure even they grow toward the sun.”
I laughed instead of tearing up and we changed the subject to De La Hoya and Pacquiao.
“Oscar should hang up them damn gloves,” Gordo said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because there comes a time when you just don’t win anymore.”
“But there’s always a chance at a comeback,” I said with emphasis.
Gordo considered my words for a few moments and then said, “True that.”
“THEY’RE GOING TO GIVE him radiation and then chemotherapy,” the head nurse at the front station told me. “He’s going to be very weak and will probably have to be sent to a nursing home.”
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“Gordo’s my stepfather. When you release him, me and my wife will take him in.”
The woman, her name was Naomi Watkins, gave me the papers I needed to have signed and ratified. I gave her my card and got my name put at the top of his list of relatives.
WHEN I GOT HOME I told Katrina about my decision. Maybe I should have asked her before making plans. Maybe I would have asked her if she hadn’t run off with that banker for nearly a year.
“That’s as it should be,” she said, surprising me with her calm. “But we may have to get a nurse to be here for those hours that we’re both out.”
Before going off to bed, Katrina added, “Dimitri called.”
“What’d he say?”
“That he’s in love and off with his girl and that they’re in Montreal. I wanted to be mad at him, but I was just so happy to hear his voice.”
“Did he say when he was coming home?”
“A few days.”
“You see?” I said. “I told you that everything was going to be fine.”
At least one of us should believe in happy endings.
40
I spent the latter part of the evening rearranging my den for the time when we took Gordo in. I brought in sheets and put my weapons in the safe, straightened up the desk, and even vacuumed.
After all that, I set up my laptop and got online.
The best detectives in the world are the arbiters of spam. They find you wherever you are, like water seeking its level, like blood-hungry mosquitoes in the wild. I had sixteen unwanted communications for various legal and illegal services, offers coming in from Nairobi to Lima, Hong Kong to West Hollywood. I don’t think this was what modern economists had in mind when they began constructing their definition of “globalization.”
Bug must have been serious about Zephyra because I received a long document from him, giving me all kinds of hitherto unrevealed information about Angie. She’d participated in a few long-distance runs of ten kilometers or more and worked for the Hillary campaign during the primaries. She played Go over the Internet and was pretty good at it, earning an emerald rating in a California club.
There were a lot of other loose details and one salient set of facts: John Prince’s phone number and address—he lived in Chelsea, between Sixth and Seventh. There was even a photograph of the handsome young man. This, as I suspected, was the boyfriend on her bedroom wall.
It was just after three in the morning, time for a man in the private-investigating profession to get to work. But I was tired, exhausted by the welter of details coming at me like the furious punches of a flyweight working a speed bag.
I sat down on the daybed, and the next thing I knew I was on my back, witnessing the miracle of sunlight as it filled the window.
I awoke, hoping that Angie had not died in the night while I wasted time sleeping. I wished I had a number for Dimitri, and an answer for Ron Sharkey.
But all I had was a headache pulsating through my consciousness.
I forced down a serving of muesli and cream, drained two cups of press-pot French roast coffee, and made my way to the street, hoping that today would bring the break I needed to get a leg up on the world.
I CALLED JOHN PRINCE from my office at 8:32.
Hello. This is JP speaking. I’m not here right now and so if you’d like to leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I possibly can.
I hung up, realizing that I hadn’t thought about Aura at all that morning. This evidence of healing did not ease my mind. I didn’t want to be cured from the only real love I had known in my adult life.
“Mr. McGill?” came Mardi’s soft voice over the intercom. She’d come in early.
“Yes?”
“George Toller is out here.”
Did he somehow know that I was thinking about his woman?
“Send him in.”
HE CAME INTO MY office without knocking this time. He wore a disgusting lime suit crosshatched with a generous amount of dark-green and black thread. In his arms he carried three thick manila folders. There was something dramatic in the way he carried himself, as if he bore tidings of great portent. He stood before my desk and dropped the heavy pile of paper, making a loud slamming noise.
His eyes sought mine as a sneer crossed the lips I hated.
“Take-out menus?” I asked.
“Do you have a minute?” he replied, sitting without being invited.
The question was not polite or considerate, it wasn’t even accurate. George Toller believed he’d caught me like a winking Irish-man trapping a leprechaun, and his “minute” was meant to be the rest of my natural-born life.
I didn’t answer, and so he pressed on.
“Terry Swain,” he said.
I blinked innocently.
“Are you telling me that you don’t know Swain?”
“This is your show, Mr. Toller. I’m not telling you anything.”
“You cosigned for Mr. Swain’s hot dog concession, did you not?”
I performed a noncommittal shrug to keep a toe in the realm of good manners.
“Mr. Swain was the building manager before Aura Ullman. He was suspected by the new owners of having defrauded the corporation. They were assembling a good case against him until a lawyer named Breland Lewis stopped criminal proceedings by throwing suspicion on a previous employee who had, conveniently, died.”
“Peter Cooly,” I said. “He died of a heart attack months before I ever even heard of Terry.”
“Breland Lewis is your lawyer.”
“This is America, Mr. Toller. Breland is his own man, as I am mine.”
“The relationship between the lawyer, the embezzler, and you,” he said, “along with the ridiculously low fifteen-year lease you procured is evidence of fraud, at the very least.”
Something about Toller’s tone reminded me of the posturing of the teenagers at the now-and-again middle schools of my so-called youth. He was playing a role but didn’t know it, pretending that he was somehow wounded by actions taken before he was ever involved. He was talking, and I was hearing him, but I wasn’t listening—at least not all that closely.
“. . . you were arrested for tampering with police evidence in nineteen eighty-nine . . .” he said.
I was thinking that I had to take the next step in uncovering the reason that the assassin was in Soa’s apartment.
“. . . nineteen ninety-two you were arrested along with Gonzalez family members on an organized-crime charge . . .”
I was thinking about Dimitri, the brooding, bulky young man, kissing some beautiful Russian girl, filling his heart with love. I was also thinking that love never seems to last—except where there’s blood involved.
“. . . in nineteen ninety-six you were arrested on charges of battery ...”
With love and blood bound together in my thoughts, the wildflowers on the old stereo box came to mind. Something about their delicate beauty seemed out of place in my life.
A bubble of something like regret formed in my chest.
Toller was reciting a new litany in an angry tone.
I looked up and saw that he was actually reading from his accumulated indictment.
“What does all that shit tell you, Mr. Toller?” I asked, cutting off his rant.
“Excuse me?”
I stood up.
“What does all that shit in your files tell you?”
“I will thank you to keep a civil tongue when addressing me, Mr. McGill.”
“All right,” I said. “How about this? In exactly ten seconds I’m going to walk around this desk. If you are still in the room I’m going to beat you to death with your own motherfucking files. One ...”
Toller leaped to his feet, grabbed his papers, and hurried from the room.
I finished the count and went after him.
There were a few loose sheets that had fallen in the hallway.
When I got to the antechamber of my office, Mardi was sitting at her desk. She wore a champagne- colored dress with puffy sleeves.
“Mr. Toller left,” she said.
I blinked and wondered if I was actually that close to murder. I decided that I was, and that maybe I needed professional help. So I walked back to my office and called the deadliest man I have ever known.
41
Hush likes his steaks rare to bloody, and so I made a reservation at a steak house at the upscale mall on the southwestern arc of Columbus Circle. The young hostess walked me to a booth in a dark corner of the airy restaurant. The ex-hit man was there before me, lounging thoughtfully behind a glass of tap water, no ice.
“LT,” he said in greeting.
I shoved in opposite the most excellent assassin in New York history. He was a plain-looking white man of average height and build with medium brown hair and darker brown eyes. He didn’t make much of an impression except for his deep voice. But that wasn’t much of a distinction because he rarely spoke.
I was always a little uncomfortable around Hush—maybe more than a little. He knew a thousand ways to kill a man and dozens of techniques to make the body disappear. He was the classic cold-blooded killer who seemed to the world to have no heart or conscience.
Outside of his wife, I was the only person to know both his true name and his professional history.
“Hush,” I said.
“You look tired, LT.”
“Work’s aplenty.”
“I ordered you a Wild Turkey and a rib eye,” he said. “They’re coming.”
“Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”
“All I had was a simple day of airport runs,” he said.
After retiring from the killing trade Hush became a limo driver for an elite company that sometimes needed bodyguarding along with a driver’s license. I really don’t know why he even had the job. Hush didn’t need the money.
I took the faxed photograph of the dead man and pushed it across the table. Hush laid a hand down on the face as a woman’s voice said, “Wild Turkey neat.”
She was a young blonde with a severe hairdo that would have been right at home in the conservative part of the sixties. Her makeup was perfect, and even though she was plain you could see that she would make an impact wherever she went.
“Thank you,” I said.
As she left, Hush lifted his hand and looked at the picture. Then, with a single digit, he pushed it back across to me.
“I’ve been informed that he’s in your old profession,” I said.
“Adolph Pressman. A hack. Okay for a bullet in the back of the head, but no good at all for something that requires finesse. Looks dead.”
“Somebody blindsided him while he was killing a girl.”
“Sloppy.”
We paused on that word for a few moments and the severe blonde came back with our orders.
That finished, I asked, “Well?”
“Adolph, he’s kind of like, what do you call it? A spoke in a wheel, if the wheel is a society of killers. Well . . . not a society really because none of them know each other. The only really dangerous part is the hub—a man named Patrick.”
“Patrick what?”
Hush shook his head and stuck out his lower lip.
“All I can tell you is that going after Patrick is not for the faint of heart.”
“I have never fainted in my life.”
Hush smiled and sipped his water.
“Tamara wants to move back up to New York,” he said.
I had all the information I needed. If Hush had known where I could find Patrick he would have told me. I could have left right then, but it just wouldn’t be friendly to use somebody like that. Besides, I was hungry.
