All I Did Was Shoot My Man (23 page)

48

HARRY AND MINNIE
shared the redwood chair next to mine. He had a confused expression on his cute mug while she exuded cold anger.

“ Why would you think that these people trying to kill you would have anything to do with Zella?” Harry asked.

“It’s my only active case,” I said, “and the police think that at least three men have already died behind it.”

“ What could we have to do with that?” Minnie asked.

“You’re working for Rutgers,” I said. “That’s enough right there.”

“But . . .” She was about to rebut my claim but then a thought occurred before the words could come out. She turned to Harry and he looked down at the lawn.

“Harry?” she said.

He looked up at me.

Harry/Sydney was not a stupid man but neither did he have a strong character. The look on his face told of how he was smart enough to get into trouble but too weak to fight his way back out again.

“A man came to me,” he said.

“Your friend Stumpy Brown,” Minnie put in.

“I didn’t really know him before then, honey,” Harry said. Then to me, “He offered me money and a way to get out from under all the publicity. He also helped me when I wanted to adopt Zella.”

“Stumpy?” I said. “ What kind of name is that?”

“I never knew another name. He said that he worked freelance for Rutgers and that they needed to know about the heist. He offered me some money and a job for Minnie.”

“Didn’t he think that someone at Rutgers might know who she was?”

“ What money?” Minnie asked.

“She wasn’t in the papers when the shooting happened,” he said. “That was the week of those big tornadoes in the Midwest. After that she stayed at her mother’s and never came out. All they had were high school pictures without her in glasses and with dark hair.”

I wondered then where Gert had gotten the more current pictures of the girl.

“ What money?” Minnie asked again.

“He gave me thirty-three thousand and told me to stay low,” Harry said.

“You said that you were doing telephone sales.”

“Yeah.”

“ Why would Stumpy do all that for you?” I asked.

“He wanted me to stay in touch with Zella, to get her to tell me where the money was.”

But, I thought, Stumpy knew that Zella was framed. He was the one that set her up.

“And why get Minnie here a job at Rutgers?”

“He was working for them,” Harry said. “That’s the place where he could get her a job. After that he helped me adopt little Zella.”

“Big Zella says that you never got in touch with her again after she shot you. That’s why she had me looking for you—so she could apologize.”

“That bitch has got no rights in this house,” Minnie said.

“I told Stumpy that I’d try to get the information out of Zell but I just couldn’t,” Harry told me. “She’d already shot me and there was a guy murdered in the robbery. I only went up to the prison one time—”

“You did?” Minnie said.

“—but I didn’t even go in. After Zella shot me my nerve was gone.”

Not one thing he said made even the least sense. Zella didn’t commit the robbery, she knew nothing about it. Stumpy knew better than I who did do the job. It was Bingo and his crew. Wasn’t it?

“ What do you have on Brighton?” I asked the incognito couple.

“ What do you mean?” Minnie asked.

“He did have something to do with the heist, right?”

“Not that we know of,” Harry answered. “He was just the job that Stumpy’s contact got her hooked up with.”

“And who was Stumpy working for?” I asked. “ What was his name?”

“I don’t know. He never said.”

“So it could have been Brighton.”

“Maybe,” Harry said a little helplessly. “But why pretend?”

“You were pretending to talk to Zella.”

“I tried but I just didn’t have the nerve.”

“So what did you tell Stumpy?”

“The first few times I talked to him I said that she still said that she was innocent. And then, after a while, Mr. Brown just stopped calling.”

“He stopped calling and you didn’t get suspicious?”

“About what? He got Minnie a good job. I had the money he promised me. We got, we got little Zella. There was nothing to worry about.”

I sat back in the slanted chair perplexed by the muddle the maybe innocent couple sitting before me presented.

“You said that you had a friend at Rutgers,” Minnie said to her husband, “that it was just a coincidence about the robbery.”

“I was half right.”

“ Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you wouldn’t have let me go see Zella, and then later, when I never went, it was already too late.”

“ Why would Stumpy help you adopt Zella’s child?” I asked.

“It’s my baby too.”

“But what did Stumpy get out of that?”

“You sound like you know him,” Minnie said suspiciously.

“ What do you want me to call him—Suspect X?”

Her resultant frown was, for me, like that piece of cake that Proust ate before writing his major opus.

There comes a time in the lives of ducks

When a window opens and the hatchling looks up

To see his fat mama bump and sway

Through blades and branches . . . That was the beginning of a poem my father used to recite to my brother and me to illustrate the power of instinct. That duck’s mama might have been a rolling wheelbarrow or a crafty crow. The duckling will imprint on anything leading forward.

“That’s what people do, boys,” my father would say. “They will follow the leader out of instinct all the while believing that they’re exerting free will.”

I had been following down the wrong trail. The path was set out there in front of me and I was just like that duck, brainwashed by instinct.

“Did Stumpy give you a way to get in touch with him?” I asked Harry.

“No.”

“Do you have an Internet connection?” I asked the executive secretary, Claudia Burns-Quick.

“Yes.”

“The crew that the police think robbed Rutgers was made up of three men,” I said, giving her the names of Bingo and his gang. “ While you’re looking do a search on my name over the last few days. I think you’ll see that I’m not lying.”

WHILE SHE
was gone Harry and I tried to have a conversation.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “I mean, did Zell have something to do with the robbery or not?”

“The courts let her go.”

“That might be on some kind of technicality.”

“Might be,” I said, “but isn’t.”

“But you think Mr. Brown did?”

“Did what?”

“Had something to do with the robbery?”

“Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. But the people he was working for most definitely did. Zella was framed and then your wife was hired by the company that got robbed. That’s just too much coincidence.”

“But it’s been years.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it has.”

Harry twisted on the lawn chair, trying to contort his body into some kind of understanding.

“ What was it with you and Minnie?” I asked, if only to keep him from breaking his spine.

“ What do you mean?”

“You were living with Zella. She was Zella’s friend. How long were you fooling around behind her back?”

“The day she shot me was the first time,” he said, suddenly sober and still. “ We were planning to give her a surprise birthday party. Minnie came over and things just got out of hand.”

“All the way to the chapel,” I agreed.

“I know it sounds strange but getting shot like that brought Minnie and me closer. She called at the hospital every day and took me to her mother’s house when I got out. She blamed herself for what happened and I just needed somebody to care.”

There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together,
my father used to say,
but men and women and their needs are all the
same.

Zella the Second wailed piteously. She was standing at the glass door, staring after the only mother she ever knew. Mrs. Braxton was holding the child’s arm, keeping her from running after Minnie.

At any other time the stand-in mother’s heart would have melted, I’m sure. But Minnie was on a mission at that moment. She didn’t even hear the girl’s cries.

“ What is it?” Harry asked Minnie.

“All dead, right?” I said.

“A man named Durleth ‘Stumpy’ Brown was found dead this morning in his apartment in Coney Island,” she said.

The stink had finally brought the law into that laundry room.

I looked around the manicured backyard. It seemed so cookie-cutter, so anonymous. For years Minnie, Harry, and Zella’s daughter Zella had been hiding from the wrong thing in that yard. But that day they were visited by the Truth wearing an inexpensive blue suit.

“I don’t understand,” Minnie said.

“You got to get outta here,” I explained. “I don’t know what it is exactly but somebody is killing anyone who had anything to do with that robbery.”

“But we weren’t involved in that,” Harry said.

“You are now.”

49

TRAUMA CHANGES the
way a brain works. If Harry had never been shot by a woman who claimed to love him, he might have decided to go to the police when given the information I provided. But he knew that the law couldn’t help, that he had no proof anyone was after him. He knew that a man could be shot again and again and that no amount of logic or indignation could stop it.

“You should leave this house,” I told them. “Drive to the airport or a bus station and disappear in the night. The people that tried to kill me are professional and connected. They’ll know your license plates and credit card numbers, Teresa Lesser’s address over on Hobart Street, and all the friends that the Quicks, Lessers, Tangelos, and Burnses have ever known.”

“ Why should we trust you?” Minnie Lesser asked.

“Did you look me up like I asked?”

She stared, giving a wordless response.

“Then you know that men broke into my house and tried to kill me. You know that I know what I’m talkin’ about. If I wanted to hurt you, that would already have happened.”

“ We could call the police,” Minnie argued. “ We should call them.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “Call them. Tell them about your changed names and Stumpy Brown, about the heist and why you’re working at Rutgers. That would be better than waiting here for the people who tried to kill me.”

I was trying to scare them.

From the looks on their faces I had succeeded.

“ We don’t have any money,” Harry said to his wife.

“ What do you want, Mr. McGill?” Minnie asked me.

Minnie was a pretty woman. Not as cute as her husband but sexier. Her features were petite and clear-cut. When she got older she’d seem severe, but not yet.

“I don’t want anything from you, Minnie,” I said. “My trip out here was for Zella. I got the names of the people that adopted her daughter and I was going to ask them to meet her.”

“But you found something else,” she said.

“And I gave you my best advice. Four men are dead. They tried to kill me and my family. You were helped by a man working for whoever did the killings, you can bet on that. Take your husband and your daughter and run. I’ll tell Zella what happened. She will have to understand.”

“ Where can we go?” she asked. “ What can we do? How can we even make a living if these men know everything about us?”

“Fifteen minutes ago you were telling me that you wanted me to leave,” I said. “Now you want my help?”

“Yes, we do.” She took her husband’s hand and held it to her breast. He nodded as I felt he must have often done, acquiescing to his bride’s decision.

The sky was still light but the day was becoming evening. The onset of night made me sensitive to my surroundings.

“I can call somebody,” I said. “He will come and he will hide you for the time it takes me to either follow this thing down or die trying. But if I do this, you have to promise to meet with Zella. She deserves to know her daughter.”

Harry looked to Minnie. She finally nodded.

“HELLO,”
Johnny Nightly said, answering his cell.

I explained as much as I could over the phone, asking him to come, without the elder Zella, and bring the Quicks and their adopted blood daughter to a safe haven.

“Okay, LT,” he said. “I’ll do it. Luke said that he wanted to teach Zell how to play pool anyway. But I need to tell you something, man.”

“ What’s that, Johnny?”

“I’ve gotten to like your client. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her.”

“ We’re on the same page, then,” I said.

JUST BEFORE DARK
the Quick family and I put a hole in the pine fence at the back of their yard. We walked through the next yard, down the driveway, and out to the street one block over. Nobody questioned us but, even if they did, what could they say?

A dark blue van with no windows was parked at the corner. Johnny Nightly, the deadly handsome coal black killer, was seated behind the wheel. He smiled at me and I nodded politely.

“This here is Johnny,” I said to the Quicks. “Do what he tells you and you’ll have a ninety-nine percent survival rate.”

I would have said a hundred percent except for the time when Johnny made that minor slip. That mistake cost him a serious stint in the hospital and had nearly caused his death and mine.

Harry, Minnie, and Zella the Second climbed into the back of the van. I slid the door shut and slapped it.

Johnny drove off to parts unknown.

BACK IN
the Quick residence I turned off the lights and made sure that all the windows were closed and locked—all except one. A solitary window at the side of the house, where the bushes were thickest, I left unlocked and partly open.

That window opened into the dining room. I put a chair in the little hallway that led from there out to the kitchen. Then I sat back comfortably, doing what PIs do best—waiting in darkness.

I had the whole night ahead of me. If nothing happened by morning, I’d go to Kitteridge and tell him what I knew. He’d probably tell Clarence Lethford. That’d be okay with me.

There was a faintly sweet floral scent on the air, in the darkness. I liked sitting there inhaling that flavor. Many times I had considered getting out of the PI business. As long as I did that kind of work I was vulnerable to my criminal past. But I didn’t want a regular job, a boss, or a business telling me what to do. All I wanted was an unfamiliar shadow that slowly blended with my own.

AT ELEVEN FORTY-SEVEN
my cell phone vibrated in its pocket. A few seconds later I took it out to see who had called. It was a 917 area code but the number was unfamiliar.

“My dear and dead friend was instructed to hire Mr. B to cover his tracks,” Miss Nova Algren’s recorded voice said. “And the number he garnered was twelve, not fifty-eight.”

Bingo hired Stumpy. That meant that he also arranged for Minnie to work for Brighton.

AT ONE TWENTY-NINE
I was still in the dark, still wondering where the other forty-six million had gone. The phone throbbed again. This time it was an unknown number. I didn’t answer and there was no message.

At two thirty-seven I saw a brief flash of light near the open window at the side of the dining room.

I stood up from my chair.

There came the slightest rustle from the bushes and then the window slowly opened wide. I held my breath with the kind of excitement that had some distant connection to fear. At that moment I was fatherless, childless, and wholly alone in a life that existed only right then and was oddly perfect.

The man who came in was maybe five-seven.

The fever returned in an instant and I welcomed its reckless burn.

Just before the professional killer could begin his late-night prowl I lunged forward with a precision I’d practiced in Gordo’s gym for decades.

He reacted to my presence half a second too late. By the time he’d reached for whatever weapon he carried I cracked his jaw like Barry Bonds hitting a fastball. But, even falling backward, his right foot jutted out in a nearly perfect shotokan sidekick.

I was thrown backward, landing on my ass.

Swiveling on the floor, I rose up moving toward the home invader. I expected that man to be out, but bad men like myself spend endless hours going through the scenarios of street fighting. We have to be ready for adversity.

My opponent had been stunned. He was staggering in shadow, reaching for something on his person. I grabbed a maple chair and swung it at him. I followed the chair, falling upon the man as he grunted in pain.

I hit him more times than necessary but by then my actions were mostly chemical, like a soldier ant or a teenager in love.