All I Did Was Shoot My Man (26 page)

“But the timing.”

“ When I discovered it I had no reason to think that Claudia and the money had anything to do with each other. It’s not enough to have come from the heist; I mean, that would be millions. There were no other accounts. It’s only when Agent Lowry asked about Claudia that I became suspicious in a larger sense.”

“But you still aren’t going to the company,” I said.

After a significant pause Plimpton said, “It’s a lot of money.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

“The man you want is Johann Brighton,” he said then.

“How did you come to that conclusion?”

“There’s a request from Brighton for Seth to hire Burns. It’s just a note with the words
personal
and
confidential
written in red across the bottom.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes, I am.”

“But what could any of that have to do with the robbery? I mean, if Zella is innocent, and I believe that she is, what could Zella’s boyfriend’s girlfriend have to do with anything?”

“ What are you talking about?”

“Claudia Burns is Minnie Lesser.”

“ Who?”

“The woman that was with Zella’s boyfriend when she shot him.”

“Oh.” He sounded really surprised.

“So how could she be involved with the heist if Zella wasn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Alton said, “maybe this Burns woman found out something about the evidence, proving that Grisham had been framed. All I do know is that Seth received nearly nine hundred thousand directly after Claudia was hired.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll accept your argument for the moment. But even if that’s all true, what can we do but tell Antoinette and her bosses?”

“You get Brighton to confess to you,” he said. “Maybe you can even get him to pay you off. Then you can tell the higher-ups that I hired you because I suspected something I couldn’t prove and I was afraid that if I brought it in-house that Brighton would find out.”

“So you just want me to go to his office with Marryman’s name and see what he does?”

“No. No. They won’t let you in the building now. Harlow has made sure of that. But Brighton has a meeting with a man named Furrows this afternoon at an apartment we own in Tribeca. I’ll cancel Furrows and you can go instead. Confront him with the information and get him to confess and maybe pay you off.”

“You can do that?” I asked. “Cancel a private appointment for a VP like Johann?”

“It’s all computerized,” he said. “You just have to know what codes to enter.”

53

I’D NEVER HAD
a case like that one: a looping snake looking you in the face and attacking from below and behind at the same time.

Leaning way back in my office chair, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the interconnections.

There had been two thefts committed, Nova Algren attested to that. Bingo and his men were blamed for taking fifty-eight million but they only got twelve. There was at least one inside man, Clay Thorn, the guard. He and someone—Brighton or maybe this Seth Marryman—had removed forty-six million before the robbery went down. Clay was double-crossed by his inside confederate. Bingo killed Clay and then hired Stumpy to find a fall guy, Zella. Then Stumpy goes to Harry and gets him to drop out of sight and connect his girlfriend with a job at Rutgers.

Why?

Maybe Seth Marryman wanted to set up Brighton in case an internal investigation found that Thorn wasn’t working alone. That was just stupid enough to make sense.

On the other hand Brighton could have been setting up Marryman.

Zella was innocent. I knew that much. Or did I?

Gert was the contact point on the job, not I. She was the one that told me Stumpy wanted to frame someone. She also pointed me at Zella. That was why I had switched the wrappers and used counterfeit locks on the storage unit. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Gert. But I wanted to make sure that Stumpy couldn’t come back and pull a trick on her—and me. I didn’t trust anybody in those days.

What if Harry and Zella were involved somehow? No. She would have turned him over . . . I spent more than an hour going over the possible scenarios. None of them made much sense. The only thing I could come up with was that no one and nothing could be trusted—not even my own memories of events.

In the middle of this morass I took out a moment to make an insurance call. There are times when the only people you can trust are your proven enemies.

AT TWELVE FIFTY-SEVEN
the buzzer to the outer office sounded. Mardi was at her post so I left that up to her. A few seconds later she spoke to me through the intercom.

“There’s a man I don’t know at the front door,” she said.

I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk, revealing four video monitors attached to the same number of hidden cameras recording my front door from various angles. When I saw who it was I pressed the intercom button and said, “Get Twill to answer it and to bring our guest down here to me.”

YOU KNOW
that it’s bad when you welcome in one trouble just so that you can ignore another.

There came a knock at the door and I said, “Come in.”

Twill pushed the door open and ushered Shelby Mycroft over the threshold.

“You come in too, boy,” I said when it looked as if my son were going to leave. “Have a seat, Mr. Mycroft.”

Twill waited for our client to pick his chair and then he settled in the other. This was a new experience; on-the-job training for my son while being reamed out by an irate client.

“I’m not happy with you, Mr. McGill,” Shelby said.

“I can understand that.”

“Is that all you have to say?” There was a threat in the timbre of his question.

“Your son is a criminal,” I said. “The police arrested him. You can’t hold me responsible for his crimes.”

“Mirabelle tells me that your man Mathers here is actually your son, Twilliam.”

I shot Twill a look and he shook his head, denying having given up that information.

“ Where’d she get that?” I asked.

“From Kent. He recognized the boy.”

“Yes,” I said. “He is my son. So what?”

“He’s a criminal himself,” Shelby said, trying to attain some kind of moral parity.

“ What is it you want exactly, Mr. Mycroft?”

“Your son is a free man,” he said. He paused then, expecting me to connect his dots.

“This is not your boardroom, brother,” I replied, the man of the streets rising under my skin. “Spell out what you mean or walk away.”

“I’ve asked around about you,” he said. “It’s said that you’re specialty is altering evidence in order to contaminate criminal investigations.”

Glancing at Twill again, I saw a kind of boredom glazing his eyes.

“I have an appointment, Mr. Mycroft.”

“Cancel it.”

“You got two minutes to say something to me or I’m gonna come around this desk and kick your ass . . . hard.”

I put my hands on the desk. I have big scarred hands.

This physical display impressed the billionaire.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you. Either my son finds his way out of this predicament or you make me and all of my money and influence your enemy.”

I won’t lie. I considered shooting him. I did. But Twill was sitting there and I knew my anger came from other sources.

“Excuse me,” Twill said.

“Shut up,” Shelby Mycroft said to my son.

That got me to my feet.

“Stand up, man,” I said.

“Pops,” Twill said in a most diplomatic way.

“ What?”

“Mr. Mycroft don’t wanna hear from me but I could still tell you what I got to say. He can listen or he can leave.”

“Go on,” I said, sitting down again.

“The problem starts in the womb but the story begins with a eighteen-year-old girl named Velvet,” he said. His words reminded me of the way I often spoke. “This girl Velvet was wild and kinda confused. She used to kiss Kent in the laundry room and then fuck his father on a yacht on the Hudson.”

“I’m not listening to this,” Shelby Mycroft said. He made to stand.

“No?” Twill asked. “ Where you think I heard all that? Mirabelle don’t know it. But when Velvet had her baby and told Kent that you were the father he ran away from home.”

Shelby got a stunned look on his face. The sportsman’s tan started to pale.

“Th-that has nothing to do with my business here,” he stammered.

“ What if I said that on Thursdays you still go out on the yacht with another teenage girl and do the humpity-monkey from nine to midnight? What if I also said that the code for the gate to your gangplank is twenty-seven fifteen? The one to the entrance to the boat is seventy-five twenty-one.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Not only that, man,” my son added. “You got a red lacquer lamp at the edge’a your bed on that boat has some kind of signature at the bottom only somebody in your family would know about. Kent told his crew that if you turned up dead on that boat, he would give any man who handed him that lamp twenty thousand dollars. He got the money in cash in a safe in his apartment.”

Shelby’s lips moved but no sound came out.

“Now, say again how you want my pops to free him,” Twill said.

I was surprised at the sudden aggression in my son’s attitude. I suppose I shouldn’t have been.

“Kent told you this?” he asked.

“It’s common knowledge among his crew. The only reason you aren’t dead already is that he got a bunch’a pussies workin’ for him. That and they were a little nervous about killin’ the girl too.”

Shelby looked to me. All I could do was shrug.

Now I understood why Twill had taken such swift and certain action. He was outraged that a son would go against his father like that. That was probably one of the worst crimes his young mind could imagine.

“So?” I asked Mycroft.

“He said a red lacquer lamp?” Shelby asked Twill.

“ With a signature on the bottom that only somebody from your family would know.”

The rich man sat there looking for the flaw in Twill’s presentation. But it was of perfect geometric design.

“You hired us to do a job and we did you one better,” I said after a while. “He would have gotten himself caught sooner or later but you might not have survived that long.”

“How did he get my codes?” Shelby asked. “I change them every three months.”

“Probably Mirabelle, right?” Twill said. “No reason for her to think that he was out to get you. Maybe he told her that he wanted to take Luscious out there for a night. That way she wouldn’t have told you.”

It’s a wonderful thing to see a billionaire, a captain of industry, reduced to his human parts. His brow creased and his jaw went slack. If he were my opponent in the ring, I’d have known that he was about to go down.

“Are we done here, Mr. Mycroft?” I asked.

“I have to check this out,” he said, “look into, into these allegations.”

“Be my guest. But if it turns out that Twill here is right, you still need to pay us.”

Mycroft got to his feet.

“And one more thing,” I said.

“ What?”

“The arresting officer, Carson Kitteridge, is a friend of the family. Twill and I will tell him about your romps with teenagers. Take that as fair warning from your son.”

54

TWILL RETURNED to
my office after seeing Mycroft to the door.

“He’s busted up,” Twill said as he lowered into the seat Mycroft had taken before. “I don’t blame him. Must be hard to have your own blood treat you like that.”

“ Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked the old soul in the young man’s body.

“I didn’t wanna say it out loud, Pops. You know it hurt me just thinkin’ about that mess.”

“Kent’s man could have made all that shit up.”

“Uh-uh.”

“ Why don’t you think so?”

“I went down there and checked it out,” Twill said.

“Down where?”

“I got on the boat and found the red lacquer lamp. The signature on the bottom was made by Kent when he was a child—
Winnie-ther-Pooh
. Everything my boy told me was true.”

“And why would he tell you anyway?”

“He probably thought that I’d do the deed, you know. I told him that if I did do it, I’d split the money with him.”

“Did you give Kit all that?”

“Naw. I just told him the names of the dead men and said he might wanna ask about that store owner who had his store torched.”

I let that part of our conversation settle for a bit. Then I said, “You got anything you want to know?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Not even what Mycroft said about me covering for crimes?”

“Hey, Pops. You the boss here. I’m not supposed to be questioning you.”

A QUARTER HOUR
later I was in a cab headed down to Greenwich Street in Tribeca. Twill was on my mind. I’d brought him into the business to keep him out of a life of crime. But he’d turned out so much like me I had to wonder if anyone or anything, outside of death, could save him from himself.

My phone vibrated. There was a text message there that read “In place.”

Before I could put it away the phone sounded with three chimes.

It was another unknown number, maybe the same one that called while I was waiting for the assassin in Queens.

“Hello?”

“Trot?”

I believed that I was beyond shock or surprise that deep into the case. A terrorist attack wouldn’t have kept me from my mission. A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer would not have stopped me from finding the people that had sent assassins into my home.

But that voice on the phone nearly managed to derail me.

“Dad?”

“You recognize my voice?”

I began to tremble. Anger, love, rage, and a deep, deep wound opened up in me. I closed my eyes but it made little difference; even with them open I couldn’t distinguish images—only light and dark.

“Son?”

“ Where are you?”

“On a bench in Prospect Park. Can you hear the Congo line playing?”

Yes, in the background there was the sound of African drums.

“ What . . . why are you calling?”

“Tourquois got your number from that friend Lemon. She said you seemed to want to find me, that you knew I was in New York.”

“It’s been forty-four years,” I said. “Mom died because she couldn’t live without you.”

“I wasn’t in the country the first eight,” he said. “I was in the jungle fighting for three and then in prison for three more. It took me two years to make my way back. By then you and Nicky had become men. Your mother was dead already.”

“ Why didn’t you get in touch with us? Why did you hide?”

“It’s hard to explain, son. The Revolution changed me or, I should say, it changed me again. Maybe it even destroyed me. I knew where you were and what you were doing but I . . .”

“You what?”

“I’d like to talk to you face-to-face.”

“Nikita’s in prison,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m married with three children.”

“ We should meet, son.”

I hadn’t expected the depth of feeling. I hadn’t believed that I’d ever see my father again. Less than an hour before I’d seen the truth dismantle a rich and powerful man. This demolition made me feel superior. But now I saw that I was no better, that life conspired against all of us, eroding everything—even the ground beneath our feet.

“There’s that restaurant you like going to,” my father, Tolstoy McGill, was saying. “The steak house at Columbus Circle. We could meet there for a late dinner, maybe ten or so.”

“How, how do you know where I like to eat?”

“Meet me at the steak house at ten, Trot. I’ll be there. If you want to see me, you’ll be there too.”

“ Why haven’t you tried to get together with me before now?”

“I’ll see you at ten, son.”

The call clicked off in my ear but I didn’t put the phone down, not immediately. The chance to hear my father’s voice had been the single most powerful desire in my life. I missed him terribly, hungered for his attention and his survival. I hated him too but the deep sense of loss drowned out any antipathy like a nuclear bomb detonated over an angry hornets’ nest.

“Here you go,” somebody said.

The cab had come to a stop after a forty-four-year journey. The modern façade of the building was glass and shiny steel. It rose fifteen or sixteen slender floors above its dour brick neighbors like a silver pin jabbed into a concrete fingernail.

Looking up, I wondered if this was the day I’d die. I’d always associated my father with death. Before she passed on, my mother told Nikita and me that she was going to meet my father in the place people go after breath leaves their body.

“That’ll be twelve sixty-five,” the cabbie said.

I handed him a twenty and shambled out of the taxi.

Standing on the broad sidewalk in front of the glass doors, I wondered again about mortality. I had a wife somewhere and grown children that I loved. There was my lover, whose kisses I couldn’t imagine right then. There was a life that had been lived sideways and backward, and hopes that had lost their meaning.

My mind felt empty—the Buddhist ideal. That thought brought a smile to lips. I took a deep breath and headed for the door.