All I Did Was Shoot My Man (15 page)

30

THE FEVER I’d
been experiencing had also been a kind of fuel. If I was weakened, I didn’t know it, or at least I didn’t care. If I was sick, it didn’t conflict with my state of mind or sense of well-being. But now that I was on the mend I could feel the exhaustion in my bones. Rising up out of my teenage son’s client’s chair, I felt twice my weight; like a fighter answering the penultimate bell in a grueling match.

The twenty feet from his desk to my door was like the last mile for a condemned man—I had no idea whether I’d make it under my own power.

I grabbed the doorknob as much to steady myself as to enter my sanctum. I turned the knob, but before I could pull it my cell phone sounded.

Teetering toward my desk, I answered. “Hey, Luke. How’s my client?”

“Fine, last time I saw her,” the pool shark intoned. “I think she likes Johnny. He’s good with ladies just outta prison, opens doors and shit like that. They eat it up.”

“Couldn’t have a better bodyguard than Johnny Nightly.”

“No, sir.”

“So do I need to do anything?”

“No.”

“Then why’d you call?”

“Sweet Lemon.”

The exhaustion increased with that simple two-word declaration. My mind began to wander but my mouth stayed on point.

I took a pill from Helen Bancroft’s little bottle and popped it into my mouth.

“ What did Lemon want?” I said, thinking randomly about the streets of New York and swallowing hard.

“You okay, LT?”

“Not even in a neighborhood where they know the meaning of the word.”

“Lemon says that if you’re interested you could meet him at the White Horse Tavern down in the West Village at twelve-fifteen. You know what he’s talkin’ about?”

“Yeah.”

“Lemon a problem?”

The question seemed deep and broad like a mile-wide river that separated whole cultures. Was Lemon a problem? Probably. Probably he was. But I made a living, my whole life, on problems. Time on this earth for me was navigating the Problem River, making it from side to side, connecting contradictory concepts, struggling against the wind and current, the sun, and creatures, both great and small, but all deadly.

“LT?” Luke said.

“No, Luke. Lemon’s just fine, just doin’ what he does and tryin’ not to.”

“You take care of yourself now, LT.”

I disconnected the call without answering. I knew Luke wouldn’t hold it against me.

I INTENDED
to leave right away but instead I slumped in the chair, leaning backward. My eyes closed of their own accord and something akin to sleep ensued . . . I was thinking about Stumpy’s horrible corpse tied to that chair, besieged by maggots and roaches. Stumpy wasn’t a brave man. Under threat he’d fold with four of a kind in his hand. But the professional gambler was cunning and aware of the lay of the land with just a glance. Whoever it was that tortured him planned to kill him anyway, Stumpy knew that. He held out because whatever it was they wanted was also the only thing keeping him alive.

And there were only two possibilities; either the men who brutalized Stumpy were looking for the money or they knew where it was and they were looking to snip loose threads. There were only two such threads that I knew of: Gert Longman, dead six years now, and me.

This realization didn’t frighten me. I wasn’t worried about becoming a feast for insects in a laundry room somewhere. Understanding that I might be the subject of concern for murderers made me wonder why—not why they were after me but why, or how, I had gotten myself into such a situation.

Why would I ever plant false evidence on a poor woman already going to jail? A woman distraught over her faithless lover and the child in her womb? I tried to remember the state of mind that allowed me to take those actions. I knew the man that did these things intimately, had all of his memories. I could enumerate each and every sin he ever committed. But try as I might I could not bring up the feeling inside that allowed me to do the things I’d done.

Of course men were after me. Of course they wanted to destroy me. Of course they did.

31

I OPENED MY EYES,
understanding that I had been in a kind of existential slumber, an intellectual doze. Rather than being in a true state of restful unconsciousness, I could only be described as a philosophical recluse. My spirit had challenged the pretexts and justifications, allowing the truth of my flawed existence to come to the surface.

I felt completely rested and free.

People wanted to kill me. They had valid reasons even if they were not aware of what those reasons were. I wanted to survive because I couldn’t make up for my sins if these shadowy men achieved their purpose.

ON THE STREET,
walking south, I considered Zella. She was a textbook case of a woman who suffered a severe case of bad luck. From the man she chose to be her lover to the woman she thought of as a friend, she had chosen badly. Having a loaded gun where she could grab it was a bad idea, but the worst thing about Zella’s life was completely out of her control—me. I was bad luck, pure undiluted calamity; for Katrina, Aura, Zella Grisham, and one hundred and seven other poor souls who had been blindsided by my machinations. I was Typhoid Mary’s meaner older brother, the ire of Moses on the unsuspecting peasants of the Nile Valley. I planted false evidence, sicced the dogs on unsuspecting citizens simply because I didn’t like them and was being paid to trap someone, anyone, that would fit the bill. I was a minor, mischievous deity loosed upon naïve humanity for the entertainment of the gods.

Back in the hippie days we would have been seen as Karmic siblings, Zella and I, working out the misdeeds of previous lives. But in 2011 the metaphysical world, as well as the physical universe, was comprised almost completely by corporate plans, prayers, and plagues.

I was so distracted by these useless esoteric reflections that I came up on the White Horse Tavern unawares. It was after one and there were quite a few people at the tables and bar—regulars, tourists, and the odd drop-in.

At a table in the corner, in the front room by the window, a group of nine people were being addressed by a young man wearing black jeans, a dark green sports jacket, and a T-shirt that read
GINSBERG FOR
RAJAH
.

“. . . among many of the recognized and lauded lights of the New York poetry scene the allure of Dylan Thomas has faded,” the clean-shaven raven-haired young white man proclaimed. “They criticize everything from his depth of linguistic complexity to the obvious melodrama of his most well-known works. But what these poetry pontiffs fail to understand is that Thomas was a people’s poet, a man that connected song and meter and the concerns of every human being living their lives and suffering the consequences. His work, in its every repetition, fights for the survival and the lifeblood of a form that most so-called great poets have moved beyond the reach of the common man. . . .”

Not only the tableful of tourists with their pints and bitters were listening to the lecture but people all over the bar were enthralled. The bartender, a red-faced man, was smiling at the effect.

The young man continued, and I found myself taken by his ideas and obvious passion.

Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned to see Sweet Lemon Charles. At the bus station his skin looked olive under the fluorescent lights but in the window, bathed in natural, if murky, sunlight, he was more a wallet brown.

“She’s sumpin’ else, huh?” he said.

With a twitch of his head he indicated a small white girl with short brown hair, standing behind the lecturer. She was slight, but still with a figure under the maroon dress. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty but she had a look that would make a man pass up a dozen comelier girls just to see her smile.

“That’s Morgan?” I asked.

“Yep. My girl.”

“She could be your daughter, man.”

“Every young girl needs a daddy until she has kids of her own.”

“That’s pretty good, Lemon. You read it somewhere?”

“Auntie Goodwoman,” he said, shaking his head.

“Shhh!” a woman seated at the bar near us hissed. She wasn’t part of the paying group, but still . . . “Let’s go outside, LT,” Lemon suggested.

ON HUDSON
in the afternoon there was lots of foot traffic. People walked dogs and toted laptop computers in dull-colored rectangular valises. There was every race, gender, subgender, and age, hoofing it around us.

Lemon lit up a cigarette and I stood close to share the secondhand smoke.

“So this is your new gig?” I asked. It was an obvious question but safer than the ones lurking at the back of my mind.

“Oh yeah,” the lifetime thief opined. “I live, breathe, and fuck poetry twenty-four hours a day. Morgan had me go out to Wyoming to this writers’ retreat with her. They gave us a cabin out on the prairie. You know one night I saw a coyote not six feet from our front door. A coyote and me!”

“You got any scams?” I asked. I had to.

“They go through my mind,” he said with unusual candor. “You know how people get all trustin’ when they’re excited. They want you to help them lose their money, or at least that’s how it seem.

“One night this woman and her husband wanted me to score for them. They would’a paid two hundred dollars for what I could get for fifty. But instead I went back to Morgan’s place and wrote a prose poem of what my auntie would say after I had did what would’a been so easy for me to do.

“Now that’s what I do every time I’m tempted—by anything. I plan that to be my first book. I call it
Sour
Lemons, Sweet Nevermind
.”

The grifter was beginning to get to me and that’s always a problem. The best con men believe their stories up until the moment they let you down. They’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, and then, all of a sudden, they see a different light, take the money and run, before either one of you knows what happened.

“ What you call me for, Lemon?” I asked.

The question snapped him out of his reverie of poetry and sex, bad thoughts and the alternative of words never spoken by a woman that died before he went wrong.

“I asked around all over the place, LT,” he said. “It was easy enough ’cause I had a name. I was at a readin’ last night and there was this woman there that Morgan knows, Tourquois Wynn. Tourquois used to be a adjunct creative writing professor at Hunter College. When she was there, five years ago, she had this older black man student named William Williams. He was in her fiction class.”

The chill that flowed into where fever had lain for so many days almost made me shiver. I considered various inappropriate responses: 1) I thought about hitting Lemon with a roundhouse right, knocking him unconscious; 2) I might have taken off, running up the street, back to where there were no answers to unanswerable questions; and, 3) I entertained putting my fingers in my ears and chanting, “Nah, na, na, na naaa, na, na, na, naaaa, na na, na, na na, na.”

“This Tourquois still at Hunter?” I pronounced the name as he did—Tur-kwa.

“No. She got a tenure-track job at NYU after her first book of poetry won the Sanders Prize. She told me that Williams said that he named himself after a writer because before, when he was a politico, he said that the movement ground him down until he was just a mirror. He said that when a man becomes simply a reflection that writing is the only honest thing he can do.”

That simple explanation meant that the man in the fiction class was my father, Clarence Tolstoy William Williams McGill. There was no doubt in my mind. I had to clasp my hands to keep them from shaking.

“Did she know how to get in touch with him?”

“Said she hadn’t talked to him since that class five years ago. I believed her. But me and Morgan said that the three of us should meet up for a early dinner at the Nook Petit down on Seventh at seven. You could come with. Maybe you got a question she can answer.”

“ Why you doin’ this, Lemon?” I asked. It was a reflex question, like right cross after a left hook to the body.

“Favor.”

“I thought you were leavin’ my world behind.”

“That’s right. I stay out of the life. But everybody says that you don’t mess wit’ gangsters no more, LT. And even if you did, a guy like me might need a friend someday.”

“Someday is fine, but how much do you want right now?”

“Nuthin’, man. All I ask is that you remember that I gave you this.”

32

I’VE ALWAYS LIKED
the West Village, through all of its varied incarnations. When I was a kid it was a wasteland, with lots of factories and old Italians, the Meatpacking District, and even a few private homes. As time went on would-be artists, aspiring models, and prostitutes (of various persuasions) moved in. There were late-night clubs where jazz musicians sometimes showed up after their uptown gigs.

Back then it wasn’t a tourist destination, with overpriced
trés chic
clothes shops and big hotels; you didn’t have to plow through crowds of tourists or the investment bankers who transformed every building into million-dollar plasterboard condos and seven-thousand-dollar-a-month one-bedroom apartments.

The West Village had changed, and changed again, but it still had charm. After a little wander I sat myself down at an outside café on Hudson south of Christopher. There I ordered a café au lait with almond biscotti and waited for inspiration.

I missed the old West Village. I missed my fever too. Both felt like history to me; places where I could hide.

“HELLO?”
she said.

“It’s me.”

“Mr. McGill?”

“Yeah.”

“Is there something wrong?” Zella Grisham asked.

“No. I’m just sitting here on the street, waiting to meet a friend of my father’s.”

“Oh. Then why are you calling?”

“This and that. I might have a line on the people who adopted your daughter. I’m going to get in touch with them in a few days, saying that you’d like to meet.”

“ What are their names?”

“I need to make the first contact, Zella.”

“She’s my daughter.”

“Not in the eyes of the law, and we need to keep the law from looking too hard at you.”

She had no words to say about that.

“ What else?” she asked. “ What else did you have to say?”

“How are they treating you there?”

“Mr. Nightly has been very kind. He’s had family that spent time in prison.”

“You should keep your head down,” I said. “Lotsa people interested in that heist. Some of them still think you might know something.”

“ What do you mean?”

“I mean, keep your head down. I will find out what’s goin’ on and tell you when you can come back up for air.”

“ What about Harry?” she asked quickly before I could disconnect.

“He went missing right before your trial.”

“Killed?” There was real distress in her voice.

“I doubt it. Usually when somebody’s murdered there’s a body or at least a complaint about a missing person. I think he must have moved away. But don’t worry, I’m still looking.”

“Um.”

“ What?”

“I don’t really understand why you’re helping me but Johnny says that you’re somebody I can trust . . . so . . . thank you.”

“No problem.”

WHILE I WAS
composing a text message a call was coming through. I sent the text and answered, “Hello, Breland.”

“Mycroft called and asked where we were on the case. He wanted your number but I told him that it would probably be better for me to be the go-between.”

“Smart.”

“Do you have anything?”

“Tell me something, Breland.”

“ What’s that, LT?”

“Is this like the other thing we did with this guy?”

“ What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you want me to save an innocent boy or to get a rich kid out of a jam of his own making?”

“You think that Kent isn’t just a kid out of his depth?”

“Might not be.”

There was silence on the other end of the wireless connection. Breland Lewis had a brilliant mind; a lawyer’s mind, but brilliant still and all. It felt good that he was using that intelligence on my question.

“I guess that would just be a case of a silk purse and the sow’s ear,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” I said, “because you know I’m plum out of spot remover.”

“Keep me informed.”

TALKING ABOUT
the billionaire made me think of my father. As much as I disliked the arrogant Mycroft, at least he was trying to help his son; at least that.

My father had taught me to hate the rich. He called them the enemies in a class war that every man, woman, and child was a part of because the division of labor was the Maginot Line between us and our destroyers.

I loved my father and so believed him. And because I believed him I hated men like Mycroft. It took me a long time to understand that I stood on both sides of the battle that every resident of the modern world faced. I was a grown man before I understood that Mycroft, in spite of his privilege, could have luck just as bad as Zella’s. His money was a force to reckon with but it could not shield his soul.

“Hey, Pops.”

And there Twill was. Even though I had sent him the message to meet me at the outside café I was surprised and delighted to see him.

“Have a seat.”

He pulled up a chair, motioned at our waitress, and ordered a Chinotto soda.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“I don’t know, LT, I think maybe we should bow outta this one.”

“Your first case and you want to let it go?”

He held out his left hand; a gesture of offering.

“Mr. Mycroft said that he thinks that his son is just caught up in something he don’t get, but the way Kent tells it he’s the big boss. He told me that him and his crew started out robbin’ pimps and drug dealers and small gambling operations. Then, after a while, they started runnin’ their own businesses. He told me that he killed two men himself.”

“You believe him?”

“I believe he’s crazy. Don’t get me wrong, Pops. He’s just another dude doin’ business, as far as I’m concerned, but you the one told me that you cain’t save a fish from drowning.”

I laughed, and the waitress came up with the small bottle of bitter Italian soda and a chilled glass. She was short and wide, with a yard-long smile for my son.

“And that’s not all,” Twill said when the young woman went away.

“ What else?”

“Kent told me that him and his father hated each other, that they been at each other’s throats forever.”

“ Why’s that?”

“I don’t even wanna go into it, man. Just a lotta gossip, as far as I’m concerned. But we shouldn’t get in it. I know that much for sure.”

“Tell me something, Twill.”

“ What’s that, Pops?”

“ Why would a guy you just met give you all that?”

“He knew who I was.”

“ What?”

“Not that you’re my father or that I’m workin’ for his father,” Twill said, putting up both hands and tamping them against my palpable anxiety. “I’ve done a few things down around the Village. They know me pretty good in his circles. That’s why he had his girl tap me. He thought I was usin’ his sister to meet him so that we could do some work together.”

My son the gangster. I hadn’t brought him in to work for me a moment too soon.

“You should let this drop, Twill. If he’s running a violent crew, I don’t want you to get in the crosshairs.”

“That’s cool. So you gonna drop it?”

“I can’t do that. I promised Breland to see it through.”

“So you gonna keep on workin’ it?”

“Until I agree with your conclusion at least.”

“ Well, then . . . maybe I could get at it another way.”

“ What do you mean?”

“If Kent knows who I am, that means I know people that know him and his. I could ask around. I mean, if you still wanna do this thing.”

“You could ask and he wouldn’t know?”

“I can be as quiet as a midnight owl on a garter snake.”

What kind of bedtime stories had I told my son?