All I Did Was Shoot My Man (10 page)

19

A FEW MINUTES LATER
the cab pulled up in front of the Tesla Building. I was still thinking about my messages and how they formed the pattern of my day.

“Pops,” Twill said.

“You get out of here,” I told him. “Go up to the office and tell Mardi to give you two hundred dollars out of petty cash. Use it for the pizza and anything else you might need.”

“ What about you?”

“I got places to be.”

I GAVE THE DRIVER
a Wall Street address and sat back while he put up a tactical offense against the midday traffic.

As he struggled silently I thought about Aura.

We hadn’t seen much of each other in the last half year. I was pretty sure that she was using a private entrance to the building and taking the freight elevator to avoid running into me.

We loved each other, but I was married and living a life that seemed hell-bent on destruction. Aura could have handled either situation, but dealing with both was just too much for her.

I tried to decipher her message but found that it was beyond my abilities and so I took two more aspirin, sat back, and started counting my breaths until reaching ten, at which point I started the count over again.

“MISTER?”
the small brown-skinned cabbie said.

I’d been sound asleep in the back of the cab. It was an animal nap—dreamless and broad.

THE ENTIRE
first floor of the block-long office building comprised the Rutgers Assurance security system. First there was a desk where you made your bid for admission.

I started out by asking to speak with Antoinette Lowry. When asked the nature of my business I let it drop that I represented a woman named Zella Grisham. This proposal, along with a state-issued picture ID, caused the visitors’ turnstile to unlock. I passed through and walked down a wide pale green hallway that had no doors or other ornamentation. I suspected hidden cameras backed up by computer software and human wetware that studied the travelers there looking for clues to their motives.

By the time I reached the next room, carpeted in deep red and furnished all in mahogany, the receptionist had prepared a badge with my name and picture on it. She was young, possibly Korean, and smiling.

“Go down this hall, Mr. McGill,” she said, gesturing in case I was deaf or didn’t speak English, “and take the second elevator on your right.”

The orange passageway was also spacious and bulged out in places where there were elevator doors. When I got to my destination I realized that there was no button to push.

All that security and they were still ripped off for fifty-eight million dollars.

I wondered if some member of the security force noted my smile.

THERE WERE
more hurdles to pass before I got to the modern antechamber with a solitary, rather aged receptionist and a tan couch. Needless to say I passed every barrier: like a flightless bug making his way into the interior of an insect-eating plant.

There were no magazines or other distractions there, in what seemed like my own private waiting room; no clock or monitors, wall calendars or framed photographs of the gray-headed sentinel’s family. She, the hard-eyed receptionist, was white and wrinkled. She wore glasses and had not smiled in years. Behind her desk was a tan door, off center in a bare white wall.

I sat for maybe three minutes before taking out my cell phone.

This action caught my guard’s attention.

I had no new messages.

For a few moments I considered calling Aura and finally decided that this wasn’t the right environment to talk about lost love. But I had the phone in my hand and so I decided to call my daughter—why not?

I began entering numbers.

“No cell phone usage in the building,” the nameless picket said.

I smiled, nodded, and brought the phone to my ear.

“Hi, Dad,” she said after the third ring. She sounded a little out of breath.

“Hey, doll.”

“How are you?”

“I was worried when you didn’t come home last night.”

“I stayed at Gillian’s house. We had like a slumber party, five of us girls.”

“ Was it fun?”

“Yeah. Was there anything you needed to talk to me about?”

“I’m sorry about your mother. She’s having a tough time.”

“I know.”

Somebody cleared his throat just then.

I looked up to see a little guy in a light gray suit and a burgundy tie, not silk. He was wisp thin and had a mustache that was once black but had frosted over a bit. The invasion of white hairs was a subtle warning to the thatch on his head.

“Mr. McGill,” he said.

I held up a finger and said, “But you don’t have to worry about her, baby. I’ll make sure that she’s okay.”

“I know you will, Dad.”

“Talk to you later?”

“Okay. Bye.”

I folded the phone and pocketed it, stood up and realized that the little guy was still taller than I.

“No cell phone use in the building,” he said.

Had the receptionist called him? I didn’t hear her. Was there a special button under her desk expressly for cell phone emergencies?

“Sorry,” I said.

“I’ll have to ask you for your phone,” he said, holding out his left hand.

“More than that,” I said. “You’ll have to take it.”

The little white guy had bushy eyebrows that furrowed. There was no gray in them yet.

“You’re here to see Miss Lowry?”

So he hadn’t come for the phone.

“Yes.”

“My name is Alton Plimpton,” the man said. “I’m a general manager for Rutgers.”

“ What’s that exactly?”

“All senior receptionists answer to my office,” he said proudly.

I could tell that he expected me to be very impressed.

“And Miss Lowry?” I asked.

“She’s not here and her supervisor is indisposed, so I came over to see if I could help.”

“Miss Lowry doesn’t report to you?”

“No.”

“Does she work for your boss?”

“Um . . . no.”

“Then you can’t help.”

“But she isn’t here.”

I sat down.

“I can’t think of any place I’d rather wait. What else could you do in a room like this?”

“You can’t wait if she’s not here.”

“If not,” I speculated, “then why let me in in the first place?”

“Mr. McGill—”

“Mr. Plimpton, I’m going to sit on this couch and wait until I speak either to Miss Lowry or somebody she reports to. You can go back into your rats’ maze and tell the king rat that I said so.”

A tremor went through the reception manager’s thin frame. He almost said something and then didn’t. He turned away and went through the tan door, leaving the dour receptionist to glare at me.

I put my hands, palms up, on my knees and stared vacantly at the doorknob, counting my breaths and emptying my mind of all malice and love.

20

THE ZAZEN PRACTICE
calmed me and the aspirin kept back the flood of fever in my blood. Between these two forms of self-medication I drifted over the details of the past few days; my brooding blood son and wild Twill; Zella, my victim and albatross; and Aura . . . The doorknob turned and out came a solidly built black woman with shoulder-length straightened hair and an ocher suit that was well-tailored, exposing her figure without overaccentuating it.

Even without the heels she would have been an inch taller than I.

“Mr. McGill?”

“Yes?”

“Special Investigator Antoinette Lowry. Will you follow me, please?”

I rose up, feeling the lightness of the meditation, and went through the doorway behind the brisk-moving agent.

We turned here and there into one hall after another, passing many a closed door along the way. Finally we reached the end of the maze at a black door that had my guide’s name on it.

She went through, obviously expecting me to follow.

I did.

The first thing you noticed about Antoinette Lowry’s office was how small it was; eight feet wide and only a dozen paces from the entrance to the window wall. This window would have given the illusion of space if it didn’t look directly into another office building across the way. The street separating Rutgers from its neighbor was small and so it seemed as if the woman sitting at the desk next door could have reached out and touched Antoinette’s shoulder if she wanted to. This intimacy added to the closeness of the investigator’s work space.

Antoinette’s desk was only wide enough to have a top drawer, and there was no other furniture except for a walnut chair that she gestured at while swaying sideways to pass through the narrow space between her desk and the wall.

We both sat and took a moment to regard each other in the coffin-like booth of an office.

Antoinette was in her early thirties. Her face was handsome but hard, the kind of look that had to grow on you. In a certain light, after a good conversation (or a couple of drinks), you might suddenly come to think her fetching. She had skin nearly as dark as mine and intuitive eyes. There was the mild patina of a sneer on her lips. I wondered if this expression was normal or if she brought it out especially for people like me.

“You’re here representing Zella Grisham?” Antoinette asked.

“She called to tell me that you got her fired and tried to make her homeless.”

“She’s a criminal. She should be in prison.”

This brazen claim raised my eyebrows.

“I knew corporate America had its own private police force,” I said, “but I didn’t realize that they now have commoditized the justice system too.”

“You get that kind of talk from your Communist father,” she replied, “Tolstoy McGill.”

If she meant to impress me she succeeded.

“So it’s not only Zella you’re hounding.”

“I’m investigating the robbery of fifty-eight million dollars from my employer,” she said. “Fifty-eight million, that’s a lot of money.”

“ Water under the bridge.”

“Sheikh al-Tariq gave us that money to assure the delivery of a certain portion of one of his father’s oil tankers would reach Houston,” she said. “Rutgers had to eat the loss. So if they want me searching down the river and to the sea, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And if you show up on my screen, I will use all the resources at my command to follow you.”

“Are you threatening me, Ms. Lowry?”

“Merely telling you what I’m doing and what I intend to do. If, along the way, I find that you’re involved in some chicanery or mischief, I will use that knowledge to achieve my ends.”

“Chicanery? Where in the South are you from, girl?”

“I will hound Zella Grisham until either she dies or I do. And I will do the same for you, Mr. McGill.”

“Unless?”

The sneer morphed into wan complicity.

“If the company’s money is restored, the hunt will be over.”

“This is a mighty small office to be issuing such large edicts,” I said.

“The full weight of Rutgers is behind me.”

The woman through her window was white, in her twenties, nearly bald, with dark blue or maybe even black lipstick. This image and Antoinette’s words elicited my smile.

“Zella was framed,” I said. “The judge was convinced of that; that’s why she vacated the sentence.”

“Judge Malcolm lifted the sentence because we didn’t oppose that decision.”

“And you didn’t because you felt that on the outside Zella might lead you to her confederates.”

“I’m looking at you, Mr. McGill. NYPD files have you involved with everything from embezzlement to armed robbery.”

Wow. I wondered if this private cop could succeed where Carson Kitteridge had failed.

“But,” Antoinette added, “if you help us retrieve our losses, we can offer a one and a half percent reward on all monies returned.”

“That’s a lotta money.”

“ What do you say?”

I sat back and watched the bald white girl laugh at what someone was saying on the phone.

“My father told me one time that corporations have the rights of citizens but that they are not organic creatures. And so Rutgers doesn’t have the capability of feeling like it has to protect its biological appendages. That said, Ms. Lowry, do not believe that you are safe from the forces unleashed by this . . . campaign.”

I had to throw down that gauntlet. If somebody wants to threaten you, you have to respond in kind; I learned that lesson not from my father but by raising myself on the streets of New York.

The special investigator took it pretty well. She considered my words, weighed them. But she was tough too.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“In your investigation have you looked into Harry Tangelo and Minnie Lesser?”

“They were considered,” Antoinette said candidly, “and rejected. We believe that Zella had some connection to Clay Thorn. It’s possible that you knew him too.”

Thorn was the guard who was executed during the heist.

“Harry and Minnie are missing,” I said, “ have been since before Zella went to trial. That’s strange, don’t you think?”

I could see the suspicion rising in Lowry’s eyes, also the resentment that I could tell her something she didn’t know.

“ What’s your interest in them?” she asked.

“I work for the lawyer who got Zella out of hock.”

“Breland Lewis is your lawyer, Mr. McGill. He’s working for you.”

That was my cue to stand. Antoinette had come out a point or two ahead in our competition, but I had learned more about her than she had about me.

“I think I’ll be leaving now, Special Investigator Lowry. If I don’t show up downstairs in a couple of hours, send out a search party. It’s a fuckin’ rat’s nest in here.”