All I Did Was Shoot My Man (22 page)

46

WHEN I REACHED
the park it was not yet eight.

Somewhere above 101st Street, a few hundred yards in, there’s a huge pile of boulders that come together forming a grotto of stone. I climbed up the man-made hill and was happy to see that no one had been there for a while.

It was going to be a hot day but the morning air still held the chill of night. I hunkered down in the rocky crevice and closed my eyes. Sleep came on in an instant and I was transported to the comparatively peaceful time of my homeless, directionless adolescence.

My dreams were not indecipherable mysteries wrought from unconscious material. Instead they were of people I knew or wanted to know. Zella and Antoinette were there, also Johann Brighton and someone else, someone that might have sent killers to my paper-thin front door.

The path of my life appeared before me—hard and clear. I could, in the dream, turn around and take everything back. I could pass through time and decide not to help Zella or lie to Shelly. I could travel all the way back to the womb and be another person or no one at all. But I was too comfortable on that quartz plinth under the summer’s sun. As I was lying there my life seemed to have enough meaning to engender nostalgia—the greatest enemy of human logic.

I found comfort in that old hiding place. There I had temporarily escaped the evil machinations of an enemy set into motion by my own foolish acts.

My heart was a tin drum; my breath the sighs of a forlorn, slightly out-of-tune cello. But music, no matter how sad it becomes, is still a solace for the soul.

My dreams became incomprehensible and I smiled. New York faded from consciousness. I was all alone in a wilderness before Eden, before good or evil . . .  . . . and when I awoke I was completely refreshed. The medicine had worked. The fever, along with whatever infection that caused it, was gone from my body. Men were trying to kill me, but so what? I was reborn. A born-again agnostic risen from the ashes of faith.

I GOT TO A CAB
on Central Park West and made it to the office by twelve fifty-eight.

“Twill in there?” I asked Mardi.

“Yes, he is,” she said. There was gleam in her eye. We, Twill and I, were her favorite men and she was happy to have us together behind the door where she stood guard.

Twill was at his desk. He stood up when I approached.

“Hey, Pops,” he said.

That morning my son was clad in grays. From his light ash jacket to the coal-colored shoes on his bare feet. His pants were a misty seaside morning, the lead-hued shirt threatened to become blue.

“Call this number,” I said, reciting the digits for the special cell phone Bug Bateman had long ago given my lawyer. “Put it on speakerphone.”

“Sure. Who is it?”

“You’ll see.”

“Hello?” Breland said after four rings.

“I got Twill here with me,” I said, then nodded at my favorite son.

“Mr. Lewis?” Twill uttered, the slightest twinge of discomfort showing around his mouth.

“Yes, Twilliam?”

“Breland called me this morning,” I said. “He wanted to know about how Carson got involved with Kent Mycroft.”

“Look, man,” Twill said to the omnidirectional phone receiver. “I don’t know what Kent did while he was gone from New York but whatever it was he learned how to be a gangster. His crew got their fingers in gambling, drugs, prostitution, and insurance scams. In between they do burglaries. Just about the only thing they don’t do is mugging. But they for sure killed this one guy. Kent and one of his men both say that he did that himself. There might be another one, and there’s other stuff too.”

“You don’t know any of that for sure,” Breland the lawyer argued. “Maybe it’s just a kid trying to make himself look important.”

“I know the difference, Mr. Lewis,” Twill said, managing to get both confidence and deference in his tone. “Kent is crazy and the people working with him are scared of him too.”

“How did the bust come about?” Breland asked.

“You got to understand, man,” Twill said. “I had to make a choice.”

“ What choice?” I said.

“A guy named Lucia had a gift shop on Greenwich Street. He made a deal with Kent to do a torch job on the place. The cops tumbled to the arson and because there was no break-in they arrested Mr. Lucia. But then they let him go the same day. Kent thought he was gonna talk and they were supposed to kill him last night.”

“How could you possibly know all that, Twill?” Breland asked.

I wondered too.

“I met with one of his guys,” Twill admitted. “You know, Kent is smart about business but not people. The guys he works with aren’t all that tough. This one dude was so nervous that it was easy to get him talkin’.

“I called Captain Kitteridge and told him about where Kent and his guys meet. They got contraband in there and merchandise from their burglaries.”

“You turned in your own client?” Breland asked. “Did you know about this, LT?”

“I had to act fast, man,” Twill answered. “Kitteridge said that he’d give the guys worked with Kent deals if they cooperated. That was the best I could do.”

“LT?”

“I didn’t know, Breland,” I said, “but I might have done the same thing. I mean, this kid Kent seems like a bad seed.”

“ What am I supposed to tell his father?”

“ Why tell him anything? He doesn’t know that we know Kitteridge. Maybe when he sees how bad his son is he’ll accept what’s come down.”

“I don’t know. I mean, this is his only son.”

“A son who was planning murder, Breland. You couldn’t expect Twill to let that pass.”

“I have to think about this,” my mostly honest lawyer said. “I have to go.”

When the call was over Twill and I sat there—me on his desk and him in the chair.

“Is there any more to this, Twill?”

“ What you mean, Pops?”

“I’m not sure. You should have called me. I mean, if you want to climb in bed with Carson Kitteridge, there’s a lot you need to know about him and me.”

“Okay. I mean, it just seemed so straightforward. Like you said, I couldn’t turn my back on a murder like that.”

There was more that Twill wasn’t telling me but that fire seemed to be out for the moment so I moved on to the next flare-up.

47

I REACHED an
address in Bayside, Queens, a little after four. There were children moving about the streets and sidewalks on skateboards and bicycles, in-line skates, and even on foot. It was summer and everyone was home except those parents who were still at work, trying to make the rent or mortgage.

The house I had come to visit was small and yellowy with a large yard all around it. Surrounded by bushes and trees, it was the perfect setup for a burglary. But I wasn’t there to commit a crime; not even to investigate one, not really.

I knocked on the front door. It opened immediately, a small redheaded girl child, barely in grade school, standing there behind the screen. The image made me think of Nova Algren; she had once been a child—still was one when she committed her first homicide.

The little girl in front of me wore an orange-and-blue swimsuit.

“Hi,” she said, looking up in stunned surprise.

“Is it Mrs. Braxton, honey?” a man called from inside the house somewhere.

“Uh-uh,” the little girl said.

I was prepared with a story. My name was Farthing, Mr. S. Farthing, and I worked for the adoption agency that helped Sydney and Rhianon Quick get the little red-haired girl standing behind the screen door.

I smiled at the child while footsteps sounded on a carpeted floor behind her.

When the man appeared behind his daughter my lie faded away.

“Yes?” he said. “Can I help you?”

“Hello, Harry,” I replied. “I’m here for Zella.”

“That’s me,” the little girl said a little dismayed.

“Not you,” I said to allay this fear. “It’s somebody else with the same name.”

Harry Tangelo, aka Sydney Quick, exhibited the same surprised stare that plastered his daughter’s face.

“ What do you want?” he asked.

“I need to talk to you about the other Zella.”

“I don’t understand. How did you find me?”

“I’m a detective. Finding people is what we do.”

“Um.”

“Can I come in?”

“ What do you want?”

“My client, the woman with the same name as your daughter, has gotten her sentence overturned.”

“She’s out?”

“And very sorry for the things she’s done.”

Harry Tangelo’s mouth gaped open. His eyes were looking far beyond me.

“Daddy, can I go swimming?” the child asked, already bored with adult gibberish.

“Um, uh . . . Sure, honey. Sure. What was your name again, mister?”

“McGill. Leonid McGill.”

“ Would you like to come out in the backyard, Mr. McGill? I was just filling the little pool for Zell.”

IT WAS JUST
an inflated red rubber tub, fed by a green hose, with water cascading over the side.

Screaming Zella the Second ran and jumped into the man-made puddle with a great splash.

It felt like I had just jumped into the deep end myself. While Harry went to the spigot at the side of the house, to turn off the hose, I watched and wondered what to do next.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill,” Harry said, waving at two redwood chairs that were set in permanently reclined positions.

I lowered into one and he took the other.

We were both a little wary, like boxers in the first round of an out-of-town fight.

Tangelo would have been called cute if he’d been a woman. He had black hair, heavy lips, and eyes that seemed in turn sympathetic, then sad.

“Look at me, Daddy!”

“ What does Zella want?” the adoptive blood father asked.

“To see her daughter and apologize for what she did.”

“The heist or the shooting?”

“She’s been exonerated for the Rutgers thing,” I said. “The DA admitted that he would have let her off on the shooting for diminished capacity.”

“I thought they found part of the money in her storage unit?”

There was a huge elm standing at the corner of the pine fence that separated the Quicks from their neighbors. The shadow that tree threw was like a stain across the green lawn. This darkness seemed appropriate.

“Hello,” a woman called.

“Mrs. Braxton!” the child screamed.

She jumped from the pool and tore out toward the back of the house. There, emerging from the sliding glass door, was a middle-aged woman wearing a violet dress and a white sweater in spite of the heat.

Harry stood up, following the girl toward the house. He spoke to the gray-haired white woman, gesturing toward me.

“Nooooo!” the child complained.

Then little Zella lowered her head and followed the babysitter into the house.

When Harry returned I was ready to engage him in our awkward contest.

“I don’t understand what Zella wants, exactly,” he said.

“I was hired by an attorney named Lewis to investigate the evidence in her conviction,” I said. “ What I found proved that she had nothing to do with the robbery. We got her out of prison and the only thing she wanted was to find her daughter and make amends to you. But honestly, I came here today expecting to meet Sydney and Rhianon—not you.”

My words had the ring of truth to them. Harry grimaced and bit his lower lip.

“I changed my name after getting out of the hospital,” he said. “You know, I was adopted and so it wasn’t my real name, my birth name anyway. And because I was adopted I paid a lot of money to get little Zella. She’s my blood and I won’t have her be a ward of the state like I was.”

“Her mother would love to see her.”

“Her mother shot me three times.”

“That’s over with, Harry,” I said.

It felt good to be involved with a clear-cut element of the case. Zella wanted to see her child. The father had said child and was raising her in comfort and safety.

“Hi, honey,” a woman called from the glass door.

“Hey, babe,” the man known as Sydney Quick said.

I looked up and there, walking across the lawn toward us, was Claudia Burns, aka Minnie Lesser, now aka Rhianon Quick.

I stood up.

She stopped in her tracks, glowering at me.

“ What?” Harry/Sydney asked.

The woman wanted to turn around and run—I could see that clearly.

“I’m already in your house, Minnie,” I said. “I’m already here.”

If epilepsy was in her DNA, she would have succumbed at that moment. She took in a deep breath and approached us.

“You two know each other?” Harry asked.

“Mr. McGill was at the office today,” she said. “He was talking to Mr. Brighton.”

“ What for?”

“Even though the courts exonerated your ex-girlfriend it seems that Rutgers is not so easily convinced,” I said. “They’re hounding my client and I was there to try to get them to lay off.”

“I don’t understand,” Harry muttered. “Are you here looking for Zella’s daughter or because of the robbery?”

“I want you out of this house,” Minnie said to me.

“And I will leave just as soon as I’m satisfied that you and Harry here don’t have anything to do with Brighton, the heist, and the people who tried to kill me a few nights ago.”

“Kill you?” Harry said.

“Give me fifteen minutes and I will be happy to leave.”