All I Did Was Shoot My Man (27 page)

55

“FURROWS FOR a
four-thirty meeting,” I said to the sour-looking man at the front desk, “suite twelve-oh-three-A.”

“State-issued ID,” he replied.

“Don’t have it.”

“I can’t let you in without ID.” The guard wore a black jacket that had the look of something military. He was a black man of the gray-brown persuasion and my age. He was big but loose, strong but probably slow.

“I wasn’t told about any ID,” I told him. “Just Furrows, twelve-oh-three-A.”

The guard didn’t like me. But he opened up a big ledger on the slender ledge in front him and ran a thick finger down the page. He found something that soured his mouth and then said, “Take the third elevator on your right.”

SUITE 1203A WAS
a solitary room furnished with a floor-to-ceiling window that looked down on Greenwich. There were no curtains or window shade. The sun shone in but central air kept the room cold. There were only two chairs in the small room and I took one of them, feeling exposed and vulnerable but not timid or afraid.

It was three forty-seven and I was prepared for the wait. I was ready to die too. It had been a long run and the return of my father signaled an ending to the race.

Sitting there in the exposed room, I thought about my children. They were all damaged and beautiful, expecting the best and dealing with what they had. I wasn’t a failure in my life or theirs but I lacked agency, and this deficiency, I believed, also limited the range of my heirs. I was a counterpuncher by nature and so I’d lived a life of blundering out into the fray, expecting to meet my challenges as they came.

These thoughts were not very complex but it took me a long time to come to them. Before I knew it it was four-thirty and Johann Brighton was coming through the unlocked door.

I stood to meet the handsome CEO-in-waiting.

“Mr. McGill? This is a surprise.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“Absolutely. What are you doing here?”

“I know that Seth Marryman hired Claudia Burns and had her come to work for you.”

“Mr. Marryman died three months ago.”

“He still hired Claudia.”

“So? What could an executive assistant have to do with anything?”

“ Why don’t you tell me?”

“I don’t have time for this, McGill. How did you even get here? And where is the man I was supposed to meet, Mr. Furrows?”

“Alton Plimpton canceled your meeting and slotted me in.”

“Alton? He doesn’t . . .” Brighton stopped there in the middle of his sentence, putting together thoughts and notions that I would have liked to share.

“ What do you have to do with Alton?” he asked.

“He called and asked who I thought was the inside mastermind behind the heist eight years ago. I told him that it was the man who hired Claudia Burns.”

“ Why would you say that?”

“Because Claudia is actually Minnie Lesser. Minnie Lesser was the girlfriend of the man Zella Grisham shot.”

Brighton took in these claims, wondering about them like a housewife gauging the ripeness of fresh fruits.

“Even if that’s true,” he said. “ What does it have to do with Seth?”

The door behind us swung open then. Through it came the sour-faced guard followed by Clarence Lethford, Antoinette Lowry, and Carson Kitteridge. After that came the assassin with the receding hairline from the Quick house in Queens. He was in handcuffs again and shepherded by two uniformed cops. One of them was holding a high-powered rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.

The expression on Lethford’s face would have been perceived as a glowering frown on most men but I knew him well enough by then to see it for what it was—a triumphant smile.

“You were right,” he said to me. “It was a setup. This guy was going to kill you both.”

“How’d he get out of federal custody?” I asked Antoinette.

She shrugged and gave me an apologetic look.

“Plimpton provided him with a good lawyer,” she said. “ We picked up Alton boarding a chartered jet headed for the United Emirates. He had sixteen suitcases with forty-one million dollars in them.”

“ What is this all about?” Johann Brighton asked.

Kitteridge spoke up then. “Mr. Plimpton told us that he was working for you, Mr. Brighton. But we have the calls he made to this man. He was setting you and Mr. McGill up for an assassination.”

“And you let me walk into the trap?”

“LT didn’t tell us that you were on the guest list.”

“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t know if you weren’t a part of this. I still don’t, for that matter.”

“ Would you mind coming down to the station with us, Mr. Brighton?” Lethford asked.

The captain of industry was temporarily out of his depth. He nodded weakly and walked out of the room with the prisoner and police escort.

“ We’ll need you to come down and make a statement, LT,” Carson told me.

“ What do you think it is, Kit?” I replied.

“The money speaks for itself. From the circumstances I’d say it was all this Plimpton guy. He’s blaming everybody else but he had the money and he called the man with the gun.”

“ What about Harlow?”

“Plimpton had been training under Leonard for a few years a while back,” Antoinette said. “He could have figured out the foreign arm, made the contacts he’d need.”

“And how about taking the money from the vault before the heist?” I asked.

“He could have managed that with the help of Clay Thorn,” she said. “That was back before the new security procedures were put into practice. The way Rutgers works with short-term assurances is to put them in storage and use them for credit advances.”

“If they were connected, we’ll find it,” Kitteridge promised. He was not a man to make idle assurances. “ Will you come down to the offices at Elizabeth Street this afternoon?”

“In the morning,” I said. “I got a big night in front of me. I’m supposed to have dinner with my father.”

Kit frowned at that. He knew my past better than anyone outside of Aura. He’d studied me the way a wild dog did the skat of his prey.

“I’ll be there at nine,” I said.

Kit didn’t like it but he knew enough to lay off.

“Nine,” he said, pointing at me. Then he walked out of the cold, sunny room.

Antoinette and I were left in the room by ourselves.

“Cutting it pretty close to the bone, weren’t you?” she asked.

“I was thinkin’ about that before your boss walked in.”

“Shall we have a seat?”

56

THERE WAS ELECTRICITY
coming from Antoinette’s side of our face-to-face. I could tell by the way she looked at me that I had passed some kind of unconscious test that her id gave every black man.

I’m a twenty-first-century New Yorker and therefore have little time to contemplate race. It’s not that racism doesn’t exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It’s just that I rarely worry about those things because there’s a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day.

Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

That said, Antoinette was one of the racists. She hated her own people because they didn’t see her for what she was. She felt betrayed by black men and then I came along. I brought out a thrill in her heart, and maybe her nether regions. That was all good and well; she was a handsome, brave, and intelligent woman, but I was preoccupied with pain so profound that I could barely tell if it was mine alone.

“ Why did you call the cops and me at the last moment?” she asked. There was a queer friendliness to the question.

“I called you right after Alton called me.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who makes snap decisions,” I said. “He’d never betray a VP like Brighton unless it was a sure thing. I thought that they must be working together or maybe that Alton was Johann’s dupe.”

“You were wrong.”

“Yeah. I was and will be again. I’ve spent nearly my whole life in the penalty box but that don’t mean I’m not in the game.”

Antoinette Lowry smiled. I don’t think she was aware of it. She’d been looking for a man like me for her entire life. She hadn’t known that either.

“I’m willing to advance your name for the reward,” she said; a queen offering her throne to a brash, conquering barbarian.

“Six hundred and fifteen thousand,” I said.

“Unless we find more.”

“You won’t. Not that you’ll be able to prove anyway.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Alton probably spent twenty years working on this plan. I bet you’ll find that Harlow will have connections planted between him and Brighton. Maybe he’ll have a numbered account somewhere. You won’t be able to tie it to Plimpton. He wanted to kick up enough dust that he could make his getaway in the sandstorm. If Zella hadn’t got out of jail and the police weren’t looking into the heist again, he might have made it. I’ll tell you what though. Let’s break up the reward between me and Zella Grisham. I’ll take seventy-five thousand and leave the rest for her.”

“Really?”

“She spent all those years in prison. Somebody should pay for it.”

“ Why you?”

“ Why not?”

“There has to be more to it than that.”

“Maybe.” I gazed across the short space between us, thinking that everything we see and experience is always in the past: the light from stars, a brief expression of love.

“You’re an intriguing man, Mr. McGill.”

“Most of the time I wish I had become a dull plumber. What are you gonna do, Annie?”

“ What do you mean?” She didn’t balk at the pet name.

“You can’t stay at Rutgers. They need to bury this as soon as possible. You won’t be able to stomach the changes they’ll put you through.”

This was a new thought in the security officer’s mind. I put it there because the passion growing in her was too much for me to deal with right then. I needed time to go over my entire life and put it in order. I might even have to murder somebody before the night was through.

“I got to go,” I said.

“To meet your father.”

“Yeah. To meet my old man.”

“Are you close?”

“I’ll drop by your office sometime tomorrow,” I said. “ We can see about this reward thing then.”

“Maybe we can have lunch.”

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

THE RESOLUTION
of criminal cases was often like that—anticlimactic. A little guy with big ideas crushed by the pressures cultivated in his own mind. He’d robbed his own company, had his confederate murdered, and then used the ill-gotten resources to cover his crimes.

I wondered why his wife had left him. Maybe if she had stayed he might never have gone bad.

I’d been walking for nearly an hour before I was even aware of it. I couldn’t remember green lights or anyone I’d passed.

I came to the entrance of the C train at Twenty-third Street. I even went down to the turnstiles with a MetroCard in hand. But I couldn’t go through. The world was closing in on me. Every misstep I’d ever taken had brought me to that hole in the ground. I scurried up the concrete stairs like a coal miner running from an underground collapse.

Most of the men who died at Plimpton’s behest had been condemned because of my actions. Alton Plimpton was my pawn before I ever knew his name. I was a virulent pathogen loosed on the world, wreaking carnage merely by my existence. I had evolved from my father, another deadly virus that rode invisibly and silently on the air—looking for a home in the lungs of children.

AFTER ANOTHER HOUR
of walking I decided to take a bus up the West Side, reaching my building sometime after seven. Walking up the stairs, I wondered about the plan in Alton’s mind. He had set up Zella and wanted to keep that subterfuge going. Maybe he’d always planned to destroy Brighton. The police would never get enough evidence to try him for murder but Rutgers would make sure that he paid for his crimes.

THERE WAS MUSIC
coming from down the hall of bedrooms, emanating from Dimitri’s room. He was in there with his femme fatale unafraid, and probably unaware, of the dangers she engendered.

Twill’s room and Shelly’s were empty. I was happy not to have to see either of them. Maybe they’d both be better off if I had disappeared like my father had . . . It was then I noticed that there was no scent in the air.

When Katrina was on her game she cooked every night. And she had gotten better. There should have been a meal in the making.

“Katrina?” I called down the hall.

Dimitri came to the door of his room.

“You seen your mother, Bulldog?” I asked him.

“She’s down in the bedroom,” he said.

“How’s it goin’?” I asked him.

Tatyana came out from behind him, wearing one of his yellow dress shirts—and nothing else. She was a gorgeous woman. I noted that fact about every third time I saw her.

“Fine,” Dimitri said, answering my question.

I walked past the young lovers.

“Katrina?” I called again.

OUR BED
was unmade. That was a more severe warning than the three chimes of the late-night alarm to my mind. Katrina never left an unmade bed. She tucked the blankets in at hotels and other peoples’ houses. She’d dust a waiting room if you gave her the rag.

HER SKIN
was white to begin with but add to that the deep red of the tepid bathwater, from the blood she’d lost, and my wife looked like a dead swan in the darkening waters of her suicide.

“Dimitri!” I shouted.

I had already gotten my arms under her body. I was lifting her from the tub, staining our turquoise tiles to an approximate violet.

“Dimitri!”

I heard the first thump of his heavy foot on the wooden floor.

I felt for her pulse but my own heart was beating too fast to feel what little her vein might be giving.

“Dimitri!”

“Mom!” he yelled, coming through the bathroom door.

With the strength of despair he shouldered me aside, reaching for the comatose woman. I went with the push, going to the cabinet for bandages and maybe an anticoagulant.

“Dimitri!” Tatyana shouted. She had jumped on his back, hooking her forearm across his throat. She yoked him while saying, “Let your father take care of her. She needs him to help stop the bleeding.”

As my son fell back he went down on his knees. I used bath towels to dry the skin around the deep wounds on her wrists.

“Call nine-one-one,” I said to the Belarusian.

She darted from the room.

“Mom!” Dimitri bellowed. “Mom!”

I slathered the salve on the wounds and tied the bandages first around the cuts themselves and then as tourniquets applied just below the elbows.

“Hold these,” I said to Dimitri, indicating the bandages on her wrists. “Hold them tight.”

He lurched forward, his knees slipping on bloody water, and did what I asked.

Tatyana ran back in. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. While Dimitri held her arms I huddled around Katrina’s alabaster body in an attempt to keep her warm.

“Did you leave the front door open?” I asked Tatyana.

She nodded, staring hard at the maybe dead woman in my arms.