All I Did Was Shoot My Man (19 page)

39

THE TRAFFIC WAS
pretty good and I made Lower Manhattan somewhere between two-thirty and three.

That afternoon I told the first-line security desk at Rutgers Assurance that I was there to speak to Johann Brighton. That request altered the mode of access. I was guided to an elevator at the front of the building that took me to the twenty-seventh floor, leaving me at what can only be called a large glass cage where a young receptionist sat behind a bright blue desk.

The carpet surrounding the desk was black, and across from it, against a glass wall, was a row of seven padded yellow chairs.

Beyond the transparent walls were many doorways. For a moment I imagined that I was in a theater where the audience sat center stage and the actors performed on the periphery.

In this flight of fancy I had arrived, no doubt, at intermission.

The nameplate for the lovely café au lait receptionist read
KINESHA MOTUTO
. She looked up at me and smiled.

“Have a seat and someone will be with you,” she said.

“Do you know how long it will be?”

“I’m sure it will be soon,” she said, returning her gaze to the papers on her blue desk.

“ What section is this?”

Kinesha looked up at me pleasantly and said, “Just have a seat, sir. Someone will be with you soon.”

I took the center chair and laced my fingers, prepared for a long wait. But less than a minute later a door behind and to the left of Kinesha swung inward and Alton Plimpton appeared. That day the slight manager wore a dark green suit and a bruised-banana tie. He stared at me a moment from behind the doubtful protection of the glass barrier. Then he rapped on the glass.

Kinesha turned, saw who it was, and touched something on her desk. An invisible panel began rising from the floor, forming a gap large enough for a man to pass through.

Alton walked up as I stood to meet him.

Before he could speak I said, “I’m here to see Johann Brighton.”

“I had your name associated with mine in the visitors’ database,” he replied.

“Funny, there’s a captain in the NYPD that’s done the same kind of thing with me.”

“ What is your business here, Mr. McGill?”

“Mr. Brighton,” I answered.

“Mr. Harlow does not want you on the premises.”

“ Who’s that?”

“It’s enough for you to know that he doesn’t appreciate your presence.”

“Then why did you let me up?”

“ We have a security team standing by.”

“And do you think that they could grab me before I broke your neck?” I hadn’t had much sleep in more than thirty-six hours. The spark on my fuse was entering the body of the bomb.

Kinesha stood up. I wondered if she was part of the security team.

A tall man in a dark suit passed through the space in the glass wall.

“Mr. Plimpton?” the man said.

Alton turned, giving me the opportunity to scrutinize the new corporate player. This man was tall, black-haired, and fit. Either he was wearing a blue suit or I was; we couldn’t both be because our clothes were different species in the capitalist jungle.

“Mr. Brighton,” Plimpton said with a deference that no doubt tore at his nerdy self-esteem.

“ What are you doing here?” the VP asked the manager-at-large.

“Mr. Harlow asked me to inform Mr. McGill that he was not to come here.”

“I don’t remember asking Mr. Harlow to take that action.”

Ah . . . the chain of command.

“ Well, I, we didn’t think that you needed to be bothered.”

Brighton turned his attention from Alton to me.

“Johann Brighton,” he said, extending a hand.

“Leonid McGill.”

Brighton was handsome and charismatic. Mentally, I had to bear down a little not to start liking him.

“Your name has been all over my desk of late, Mr. McGill. I was happy when my secretary told me that you were here.”

“Mr. Brighton,” Alton Plimpton said.

“Come with me, Mr. McGill,” Johann Brighton said, ignoring the underling. “ We’ll go up to my office to talk.”

40

WE PASSED THROUGH
the glass wall and entered a door that opened onto a long slender hallway. We followed that vascular path to a cylindrical room with four elevator doors placed at ninety-degree intervals. Brighton held a thick card in front of a crystal green panel and one of the doors slid open.

Inside the chamber a voice said, “Hello, Mr. Brighton, sixty-sixth floor?”

“Yes,” he said.

I was impressed.

“Mr. Plimpton doesn’t seem to like me,” I said, just making conversation.

“Alton has worked for Rutgers thirty-three years. He started in the mailroom.”

“. . . and,” I said, “has only recently realized that coming in at the bottom almost always precludes reaching the top.”

The VP turned his head to regard me. His eyes were green and his aspect somewhere between that of a fox and a wolf; the one creature preying on smaller animals, and the other, with his pack, used to taking down creatures much larger than himself.

Which one, he was wondering, was I?

The elevator door slid open and we were presented with a triple-wide hallway that was tiled in emerald and gold. On the walls hung large still-life oil paintings, mostly landscapes, with the occasional study.

There were no offices on this half-block journey, not until we came to the dead end. There the double walnut doors we encountered swung open automatically and we entered the antechamber to his office.

Not for the first time in my life I had made it to the top. For some reason this made me hanker for a chili dog with chopped onions under a blanket of processed American cheese.

The reception room for Brighton was large and well appointed. There was a window looking out over the Statue of Liberty. The kidney-shaped desk was clean, and the woman behind it—the woman known as Claudia Burns—looked up, attentive to her charming boss’s any need.

She saw me but was unconcerned and unimpressed.

I saw her and was reminded of a photograph I had seen years ago. The hair was shorter and another color, now she wore glasses, but I was sure that the woman sitting there was Harry Tangelo’s lover—Minnie Lesser.

“Hold my calls, C,” the perfectly attired captain of industry said to the woman going under the false name.

“Yes, sir.”

BRIGHTON’S OFFICE WAS
the same as many rich and powerful businessmen and -women I’d known in Manhattan. Lots of window space looking out across his domain, good carpeting, and an imposing black desk that wasn’t exactly rectangular. In one corner sat a love seat and a good-sized stuffed chair, both black, both looking to contain more comfort than the average working stiff has ever experienced.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.” Johann waved toward the chair.

I took the love seat.

Without missing a beat he sat in the chair meant for me. There he leaned back comfortably.

I put my left forearm on my left knee and the heel of my right palm on the other leg joint.

Brighton smiled and nodded slightly.

“How can I help you, Mr. McGill?”

I sat up and back, crossed my legs and frowned.

“How much did your suit cost?” I asked.

“It was made for me by the personal tailor of a Saudi prince. So I guess you could say that it was either free or priceless.”

“Huh. The only thing anybody ever gave me was grief . . . the most they ever took was blood.”

“That’s very dramatic,” the VP said.

“You think so? Then try this: Last night two assassins broke into my home. They came to kill me while I was up in the bed with my wife, in the same apartment where my children sleep.” My head jerked, releasing an iota of the deep-seated tension in my body and soul.

“They, they actually came into your apartment?”

“They were halfway down the hall before I killed them in their tracks.”

“Oh.” It was Brighton’s turn to lean forward. “You shot them?”

“One,” I said. “I crushed the other’s windpipe with my hand.”

I was sure that Johann Brighton had forgotten the name of the Saudi tailor but I could see in his face that he would never forget mine.

“ What did the police have to say about this?” he asked.

“ What they always say—fill out form twenty-two AB, write an account of the circumstances, and then answer a battery of verbal questions that are recorded and filed away so that one day they can come back and incriminate you.”

“I mean,” Johann said, “ what did they say about the killers? Who were they?”

“European. Probably East European. Men who traveled six thousand miles or more just to see me die.”

Brighton was hard to read. He didn’t make it to that lofty perch with his heart dangling from his sleeve.

“Maybe your dramatic flair is earned,” he said.

“Fuck that. I’m here to ask you why.”

“ What could Rutgers Assurance have to do with assassins in the night?”

“Not Rutgers,” I said. “You.”

“You’ve lost me, Mr. McGill.”

“Oh? Aren’t you the one who said that my name was all over your desk?”

“ Yes, but—”

“And doesn’t my place on your blotter have to do with Zella Grisham, Antoinette Lowry, and fifty-eight million dollars that went away during the biggest heist in Wall Street history?”

“ What does any of that have to do with men trying to kill you?”

“You don’t know?”

He shook his head and held my stare the way your opponent does before the first round of a fight that he just knows he’s going to win.

“Zella Grisham,” I began, “ was arrested for shooting her boyfriend.”

“If you say so.”

“I do and she was. This boyfriend, Harry Tangelo, was in the bed with Zella’s friend Minnie Lesser.” I stopped there to see the cracks appear in the VP’s façade and also because a thrum of rage was rising up somewhere below my heart just above the diaphragm. I don’t think I had ever been so close to violence without perpetrating an actual physical attack.

“I’m not familiar with Grisham’s arrest before the money was found in her possession,” he said. If he could see the rage in me, he didn’t respond.

Maybe he felt secure in physical superiority. Maybe he had a black belt in some Eastern defense art. Whatever he felt he was wrong.

I took a deep breath and held it thrice as long as usual.

Exhaling, I let flow out “How long has your assistant been working for you?”

“ What does that have to do with anything?”

“ Was she in this office when the heist went down?”

“I don’t remember.” If he was nervous, he sure didn’t show it.

“Maybe she knows more about you than you think.”

Words, for the moment, had abandoned the handsome millionaire. His left eye almost closed and I was allowed a glimpse of the man behind the corporate veneer. This momentary bout of speechlessness was the first indication I had that my predicament was even more complex than I had thought.

He raised his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Is there anything else, Mr. McGill?”

“ Whoever sent those men into my home is going to pay,” I said. “I might not wear the same species of suit that you got but all men bleed and all men die.”

Brighton stood up and I followed suit.

“Mr. McGill, you have to believe me when I tell you that I, nor anyone else at Rutgers, would consider using paid assassins to solve our problems.”

I WAS ALLOWED
to find my way back down the wide hallway to the elevator. The door was open. All I had to do was step in and I was delivered to the twenty-seventh floor. From there I made my way to the outskirts of the glass cage.

The receptionist did her panel-sliding routine and I found myself with her and a dusky-skinned Caucasian man of medium height and middle age, wearing a tan suit with a few dozen scarlet threads shooting through.

“Mr. McGill?” the man said. His face was a pinched isosceles triangle, standing on its pointy chin.

“Yes?”

“My name is Harlow.”

“Yes, Mr. Harlow?”

“You will not be allowed admittance to these premises again.”

“Does that come from you or Mr. Brighton?”

“I am the one speaking, am I not?”

There are few times in a human’s life when the choice is clear and obvious. But there’s always another way, another approach. That’s why most people like a job where there’s a boss and a set of rules written down; a time to arrive and a dollar amount on every hour you toil.

The workingman believes that he has no choice,
my long-gone father used to say.
He believes that his whole life has been planned out for him. He’s right about the plan but wrong about the destination.

At that moment, in that glass cage, I knew that the only action to take was a solid one-two to the man Harlow’s rib cage and head. I wanted to hit him even though I knew that the act would buy me a prison sentence of interminable length because the rage I felt would certainly kill this stranger.

My action and his death were foregone conclusions.

And then I remembered “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Melville spoke out from his moldering grave, telling me that fate was not inescapable and that this man Harlow would live at least one more day.