All I Did Was Shoot My Man (4 page)

6

I WAS USED
to being stopped by the police. My face and name were well known among the law enforcement crowd. They suspected me of everything from contract murder to armed robbery, from kidnapping to white slavery. I had been rousted, arrested, and thrown before more courts than Sweet Lemon Charles knew existed.

Before last year I had my own private cop—Carson Kitteridge. He dropped in on me once a month or so and made sly innuendos. If anyone would ever cause my downfall, it was Carson. But he had stopped contacting me, and police all over the city, even though they still gave me a hard time, seemed to be holding back.

I didn’t know what had happened or why, but I had decided to accept it as a temporary gift from the Patron Saint of Thieves, whoever he or she was.

MORE IMPORTANT
to me, as I ambled up Tenth Avenue, was Lemon Charles. He had taken the life of a habitual criminal and turned it around, if only for a brief span of time. He wrote poetry, dealt in it, slept with a poet at night, and was asked politely to leave by cops that saw him as a tourist guide rather than a petty con.

This was cause for hope.

I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince. Maybe I could become a poet or a fifth-grade math teacher . . . This notion tickled me. The humor caught me by surprise and I laughed so hard that two young women, who were walking in the opposite direction, actually veered out into the street to avoid me. I felt bad about it. I wanted to apologize to them for the outburst. But just the idea of apologizing for my humor sent me on another jag of hilarity.

Finally I went out into the street myself and hailed a yellow cab. The avenues were not safe for young women and poets—not while a laughing hyena like me was on the prowl.

I HAD THE CAB
bring me to my building on the Upper West Side, not a block away from Riverside Drive. Parked out front was a small U-Haul truck. The man sitting in the driver’s seat was a murderer and I was his only friend.

I walked up to the street-side car window, intending to greet Hush, but he was in the middle of a sentence.

“. . . I don’t think that it matters what you do,” he was saying. “I mean, it matters, but it’s more the way you do it and your attention to detail . . .”

“Hey, man,” I said. It wouldn’t do to eavesdrop on Hush for too long. He was a stickler for his privacy.

“Leonid,” he said.

I moved around to see that he was talking to Twill, my youngest and favorite child. We might not have been related by blood, but Twilliam, at the tender age of eighteen, had committed more crimes, and more lucrative ones, than most hoodlums and thieves. I had him in tow as a detective-in-training at my offices, but it was a toss-up if I could save him from his own brilliant, if bent, ways.

“Hey, Pops,” Twill said.

He was wearing faded jeans and a graying but still white T-shirt, the appropriate attire for a young man helping his older brother move out of the house. Twill was always appropriately dressed for any occasion.

“ What’s up, boy?” I asked.

“Everybody’s up there workin’,” he said. “Bulldog and Taty, Shelly, and even Mardi dropped by. Moms ain’t too happy about it though.”

“Her baby’s moving out,” I explained.

“I think it’s more than that.”

“ What do you mean?”

“She’s drinkin’ pretty hard.”

I sighed. That had been Katrina’s MO for some time. At first it was just when she’d sneak out with one of her boyfriends—once or twice a week. She’d come home a little tipsy, happy not sloppy. But lately she’d been drinking every day.

“ Why’ont you go upstairs and help your brother, Twill? I’ll be there in a minute.”

“You got it,” the young man said. He hopped out of the passenger’s seat and headed for the front door to our building.

“That’s some kid you got there,” Hush said.

“He’ll be a helluva man if he survives his own criminal genius.”

“I wouldn’t want to be the one who stood in his way.”

Twill had called Hush to come help in the move. He had the number from an emergency list I’d given him, because, despite his criminal proclivities, he was the most trustworthy member of the family.

Hush had told Twill that he had to check his schedule and then called me to make sure it was okay. He knew that I might be uncomfortable having New York’s most successful assassin (albeit retired) carrying my son’s boxes from the eleventh floor to a moving van.

I would have said yes anyway. Twill’s friendliness and generosity could not be suppressed.

And I had an ulterior motive.

“So?” I asked the killer.

“She’s the kinda woman take your life and still you’d have a smile on your face.” He was talking about Tatyana Baranovich, the woman Dimitri was moving out to live with. She was from Belarus and would give Twill a run for his money when it came to working the system while avoiding the consequences.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

“Until the end of the season all aphids are born female and pregnant.”

“Something pertinent.”

“She cares about your boy.”

“You think she’s into anything?” I asked.

Hush was deft and perceptive; he had to be. An assassin deals in absolutes rendered in shades of gray. One slight error could mean his demise.

“I don’t know if she is right now,” he said, “but she will be. No question about that.”

“Yeah,” I said with another world-weary sigh. “I know.”

“You want me to kill her?” It was a joke. But if I had said yes, Tatyana wouldn’t have seen another week.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.

I patted the murderer’s shoulder and headed for the front door.

7

KATRINA AND I
had lived in that apartment for more than twenty years. Most days I walked the ten flights to the eleventh floor. That was both my Buddhist and boxing training.

The Buddhists tell you that you have to be mindful of every act, and acquiescence, in your life. They say that life, everything you do and don’t do, is an action that must be brought into the light of consciousness.

For the boxer it’s simpler—all you have to do is keep in shape.

So I rushed up the hundred and forty steps, looking around at nooks and crannies that I did and did not recognize while concentrating on the increased intensity of my only slightly fevered breathing.

THE DOOR
to our apartment was ajar. I had installed one of the world’s most sophisticated locking systems on the titanium-reinforced portal. The lock was both mechanical and electronic. When the door closed a metal rod was anchored in a slot in the floor below. Only the signal from the family’s keys, or turning the inside knob, would release that bolt.

But what use was it if the door was left open?

I entered the small foyer, closing the door behind me. There were half a dozen boxes stacked in the corner, with a pile of rumpled dirty clothes dumped on top.

The clothes belonged to Dimitri. The fact that they were unwashed and not folded spoke volumes about the drama that I could hear playing out all over the large prewar apartment.

From down the hallway where the bedrooms were I could hear the deep bark of Dimitri’s voice. He was talking to someone; you could tell that by the silences between his rants. He was angry, shouting. This was odd because the only time my blood son ever raised his voice was against me, usually in defense of his mother.

Not that I ever attacked Katrina. It’s just that there was a tight bond between the young man and his mother—a bond much stronger than she and I ever had.

From the dining room came the sounds of argument and shushing. I recognized the contestants by their voices and was about to intrude when Mardi Bitterman came out of the bedroom hallway. She was wearing a dress whose hem came down to her ankles; a faded violet shmata, loose and threadbare—the young woman’s version of Twill’s T-shirt and jeans.

Mardi was five-seven, with pale hair, skin, and eyes. She was slight but had a will tougher than most. There was a midsized cardboard box cradled in her arms.

“Hi, Mr. McGill.” The wan smile she gave me represented greater hilarity than I had guffawing down on Tenth Avenue.

“Mardi. What’s goin’ on?”

My office receptionist and general passe-partout put down the box and sighed. You couldn’t hear the exhalation, only see it in her expression.

“Mrs. McGill is upset that Dimitri’s moving out. I don’t think she likes Tatyana. And Dimitri is mad at his mother, saying all kinds of terrible things down in his room. Twill and I have been doing most of the packing but that’s okay.”

For Mardi, whose parents sold her to a child molester before she even had the defense of language, the war between mother and son must have seemed like happiness.

“ What about Shelly?” I asked.

“She’s spent most of her time trying to calm Mrs. McGill down.”

“Really? What kinda miracle is that?”

Mardi smiled. She never spoke unless she had something to say—a rare quality among Americans of any age.

I headed for the dining room as Mardi made her way back toward the ruckus my eldest child was making.

I stopped at the doorway and listened before entering.

Old habits die hard.

“THAT BITCH
has stolen my son’s soul,” Katrina wailed.

“Don’t say that, Mom,” Shelly, ever the middle child, said. “D’s twenty-three years old. It’s time for him to move out.”

“My whole life is shit. Dimitri is, and you are too. Sluts and bastards, is all you are.”

“Mom,” Shelly pleaded. “You just had too much to drink, that’s all. Dimitri loves you. I do too.”

I never thought I’d hear Michelle say those words to her mother again. When Katrina left me for an Austrian/Argentinian banker Shelly wrote her off. Things had to be really bad for her to find forgiveness now.

“Bullshit,” Katrina was saying. “Bullshit. You’re just like your father. He sent that monster to help so nobody could stop my baby from leaving.”

“Twill called Mr. Arnold, not Daddy.”

Arnold was not Hush’s real name but one of his many aliases. What’s in a name anyway?

“He’s a piece-of-shit killer, and your father is too.”

“Daddy didn’t do anything, Mom.”

I walked in then. Regardless of the rancor between Katrina and me I didn’t want to see Shelly punished over accusations that were closer to the truth than a loving daughter could ever believe.

Katrina was sitting at the large hickory dining table, my private crystal decanter of fifty-year-old cognac unstoppered before her. I didn’t see a glass.

My wife of twenty-four years had passed the half-century mark but maintained a good deal of the beauty of her Scandinavian youth. That beauty was marred by the sour sneer on her face. Her hair was the blond of a young girl and her eyes blue like the North Sea. It was no wonder that Katrina had so many young lovers.

Shelly was dark-skinned in the way people from Southeast Asia are. Her eyes were Asian also but modified by her mother’s bloodline. Her father had been killed in a natural disaster before Katrina got the chance to leave me for him.

My daughter was on her knees next to her mother.

“ What’s going on in here?” I said in a strong voice.

Both women looked up, startled by a genetic memory.

Shelly smiled and stood up.

Katrina’s left nostril lifted. “Fuck you,” she said.

“Mo-om,” Shelly complained.

“ Why don’t you go help your brother, baby,” I said to my daughter. “I’ll take over here.”

“Yes, you little slut. Move out with him. See if I care.”

Near tears, my little girl ran from the room. The fever flashed back and I clenched my hands into fists.

“Are you going to hit me?” Katrina asked, putting her hands up in false fright.

She was surprised when I took two steps forward and grabbed her by both wrists.

“ Wha?” she cried.

“Calm down now, Katrina. You know I’m not happy with D movin’ out and dropping out of school. But he’s a man now and there’s no way to stop him.”

“As if you cared,” she said, a little cowed by my speed, strength, and uncommon willingness to use them.

I let her go and pulled a chair up next to her. I then offered my hands for her to hold. She didn’t take up the offer, but at least her belligerence ebbed a bit.

“ What’s wrong, baby?” I asked.

After decades of marriage it took only a few words for a sermon’s worth of communication. I never called Katrina baby. The fact that I did meant I was ready to do whatever I could to assuage her pain.

But she was still angry.

“ What do you want me to say?” she spat. “That not one dream I ever had came true? That my children are all disappointments and you were never there when I needed you? And after all that even my own body betrays me and there’s nothing left, no one left.”

“D’s only movin’ six blocks from here,” I said. “And Shelly’s a good girl.”

“Huh,” Katrina grunted. “Ask Seldon Arvinil about that.”

“ Who?”

At that moment the dam broke and she reached out for my proffered hands.

“Oh, Leonid.”

I leaned over and picked her up, lifting her into my lap.

She put her arms around my head and squeezed.

“I’ve lost everything,” she whispered, “everything.”

“Not me. You still got your bad penny.”

She patted my bald head and hummed. I could smell the brandy on her breath—it was good stuff.

She put her cheek against mine and exhaled in the way I knew foretold sleep.

“Your skin is hot,” she said and then nodded off.