All I Did Was Shoot My Man (5 page)

8

“. . . THAT BITCH
is always tellin’ me that she wants me to be happy and she wants me to be a man, but the first thing I do on my own and she’s actin’ like the world’s comin’ to an end and, and, and . . .”

These words came from Dimitri through the closed door of his room.

I was carrying his mother down the hall to our bedroom.

Negotiating the doorway without banging her head, I put her down on the bed as gently as possible. We have a big bed, custom-made, one hundred inches square. I considered undressing her, but that might prove a problem if she woke up and came running down the hall to yell some more.

So instead I put a pillow under her head and sat next to her a while, trying to understand how I came to that moment, that place.

As I considered, Katrina’s breathing deepened.

She was a beautiful woman, and brilliant in her own way. For many years she searched for a man who would take her and Dimitri away from me and the other kids. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Twill and Shelly but that they loved me too much.

We didn’t love each other, at least not like man and wife, but we were tied together by a knot of blood, children, and history.

When she began snoring I knew that Kat would be unconscious for hours. I shifted her so that she was sleeping on her stomach, to make sure she didn’t drown in her drunken repose. After that I headed out the bedroom door and back down the hall.

“. . . I MEAN,
what have I ever done to her?” Dimitri was saying as I walked in. He looked at me, hesitated, and then went on. “Taty has only tried to be nice with her. And Mama won’t even say a word if she’s in the room. She just stands there with that look on her face.”

Dimitri had a child’s baseball mitt in his hand. I wondered if he intended to take it to the new apartment. Tatyana, the svelte former prostitute, was on her knees, rolling socks, while Mardi and Twill picked around in the mass of detritus that filled D’s deep closet.

Shelly was sweeping the floor.

“ Why you doin’ that?” Dimitri asked his sister.

“I’m cleaning up so Mom doesn’t have to after you’re gone.”

“ Why? You don’t even like her.”

“She’s our moms, Bulldog,” Twill said. “Only mother you ever gonna have.”

“I wish she was dead,” Dimitri said.

“D!” Shelly cried.

Tatyana kept rolling socks.

“That bitch just wants to—”

“Stop,” I said in a voice that I hadn’t used in fifteen years.

Dimitri, cut off in midsentence, stared at me.

“Come on out in the hall,” I said to my only true son.

I turned to leave the room. He had no choice but to follow in my wake.

WE STOOD
there face-to-face, but Dimitri was looking down at my shoes. D snorted now and then, his shoulders hunched—waiting for the attack.

“I want to ask you something, son,” I said.

“ What?”

“ Why do you think your mother is so upset?”

“Because she doesn’t want me to grow up and be my own man, that’s why.”

“It’s because she’s afraid.”

Dimitri lifted his head to look me in the eye.

“Afraid of what?” he asked.

I didn’t have to answer.

“That was a long time ago,” he complained.

“Two years isn’t all that long. And she was living with that gunrunner in Russia less than a year ago.”

“She didn’t know.”

“That’s why your mother’s afraid,” I said. “Because Tatyana has lived an outlaw’s life. But you’re so in love with her that you deny the truth.”

Dimitri and I look a lot alike. Our faces were not made to express powerful emotions. Our people carried heavy loads and looked into the wind. But right then there was unbridled passion in his eyes and a quiver coming up from his neck.

“So what are you sayin’, Pops? You don’t want me to go?”

“That would be like me tellin’ a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There’s gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, with Taty, there might even be men with guns. All I need you to do is think about that.”

“So you agree with me moving?”

“Honey, I know what that girl means to you. I look at her and even my blood pressure gets dangerous. Just understand that your mother can only do what a mother can do, like you doin’ what you need.”

“And you understand why I dropped out of school for a while?”

“She’s got a good gig at that Columbia program. It’s the man in you workin’ to help her make her way through. But what you got to remember, D, is that it’s a gift, not an investment. Tatyana is not a bankbook.”

That last bit of wisdom put a new wrinkle in my son’s brooding brow. It was one of the longest talks we’d had in a dozen years and carried more meaning than anything we’d discussed since he passed puberty.

There was a question brewing behind his furrowed eyebrows. He even took in a breath to expel the words.

“Hey, Bulldog,” Twill said at just the wrong moment.

“ Wha?”

“Come help us bring all these boxes downstairs.”

Twill, Mardi, and Shelly all came out, carrying boxes. From long experience they all knew how touchy things were between me and Dimitri. I was sure that they meant to help, to get him working, so that I didn’t lose my temper and knock him to the floor.

“Okay,” the man/boy said.

He stomped back into the room, grabbed three boxes, then followed his siblings and Mardi down the hall.

I went into the room to see Tatyana, sitting comfortably on the floor, working with D’s clothes and smaller items. She was wearing thin cotton pants the color of beached coral and a sky blue blouse that was loose and yet still somehow appreciative of her figure.

I hunkered down easily, part of the boxer’s side of my daily training, and looked at her.

“Not a very pleasant induction into the family,” I said.

“She loves him,” Tatyana Baranovich explained, shrugging her left shoulder.

“Even still, it must not feel too good.”

“It is not my business about what happens between a son and his mother. I can only be here for him if he wants me.”

She was working with the socks and watches, cuff links that D had never used and scraps of paper that he was always making notes and little drawings on.

“He’s been making those little doodles since he was a child,” I said.

“He has great talent.”

She stopped working then and looked straight at me. There seemed to be an accusation in the words.

I remembered again what a formidable character Dimitri’s girlfriend was.

“Did you meet my friend Mr. Arnold?” I asked.

There was more than one intention behind the question. Immediately I wanted to derail her insinuation that I dismissed my son’s talents and abilities. I believed in D but he purposely kept me out of his life.

On the other hand, I didn’t only want to know what Hush thought about Tatyana; I was also interested in how she saw the ex-assassin.

“Yes,” she said, shaking out a pair of black-yellow-and-green argyle socks.

“ What did you think of him?”

She rolled the socks, placed them in a box, and selected another pair from a pile on the floor.

“ Well?” I prompted.

“He has dead eyes,” she said to the floor.

“ What do you mean?”

“He is one of those men my babushka used to tell me about.”

“ What men?”

“The tightrope walkers who have their death on one side and yours on the other.”

9

KATRINA’S SNORING could
be heard throughout the apartment. She sawed on while the kids packed and carried, ate sandwiches and cleaned. Dimitri spent half an hour whispering with Tatyana in a corner of the kitchen. After that he calmed down. He stopped talking about his mother and woes and concentrated on preparing for his new life with the Mata Hari of the Upper West Side.

After they had all gone, ferried by Hush to the new place, the only sound was Katrina’s rough breathing.

I stayed home out of duty to my wife. She was in pain, more than she ever had been in our long years together—and apart. I suppose I was worried about her.

But the sound of her snoring, for some reason, unsettled me. Soon after the kids were gone I went into the dining room and closed the door. There I took a crystal whiskey glass from the cabinet and poured myself a drink from the decanter.

The snoring was diminished but not extinguished. It sounded like recurring susurration from a storm the other side of thick stone walls.

The cognac didn’t help. Rather than providing bliss it exaggerated my habit of going over and over facts that I knew and could not change.

BRELAND LEWIS
had to call in a lot of favors to get Zella’s case back in the courts. He used every bit of his talent and guile to persuade the female convict to let him represent her. Then he had to present new evidence that had to seem to have been derived from
a priori
investigation and not from actual knowledge concerning the facts in the case.

I had replaced the wrappers on the cash with fakes and used blood from a Lower East Side donor named Rainbow Bill to replace the blood I had been presented with. For ten dollars and a quart of wine I got six good drops.

The lock they snipped off her storage space wouldn’t have opened with the key they’d taken from her. For anyone willing to look closely enough it was obvious that she’d been framed.

I’d gone through those elaborate precautions because the job had been brought to me by Gert and I was worried that Stumpy Brown might have put her in jeopardy somewhere up the line.

Getting my preparations together in front of a sympathetic judge cost money—a lot of it.

Thinking about Zella while listening to Katrina’s faraway exsufflations I remembered the last time I happened upon hard breathing.

IT WAS
in an apartment in Queens, not too far from LeFrak City. At three-seventeen on a Thursday morning I entered the building through a side entrance and made it up the stairs without being noticed. The door to apartment 3G was ajar.

Upon entering the dark apartment I heard her ragged breath. Flipping the light switch revealed the young woman, naked and on her haunches, in the corner. There was a hypodermic needle, with a red rubber bulb at the end, lying on the floor between her thighs. She was swaying from side to side, mumbling to herself and breathing like a Greco-Roman wrestler.

In the center of the floor, on a stained white sheet, lay the body of a white man who carried an extra thirty pounds. I knew he was dead by the permanent crease in his left temple; that and the white ceramic box stained with his blood on the sheet next to him. He was on his back. His only article of clothing was a dark green condom.

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe. I got on my knees next to her and she looked up suddenly.

“Velvet?” I said.

Her fright turned to hazy curiosity.

“Did he attack you?”

“My throat,” she whispered.

She lifted her head and I could see the bluish bruises that told of the fingers strangling her.

“And you hit him with that box?” I asked.

She looked at the body and nodded. This motion pushed her off balance. I moved into half lotus and let her fall into my lap. There she put her arms around my head, as Katrina was wont to do in our rare moments of intimacy.

Just that quickly Velvet was asleep. I wondered if she would die too. That would have made things much easier.

I didn’t need to talk to Velvet Reyes. I had already been informed about her situation—more or less.

“LEONID?”
Breland Lewis said on the phone an hour or so earlier.

“Late for you, isn’t it, Bre?” I said lightly, knowing that the weight would soon be coming down.

He explained that a wealthy client of his had a live-in maid who had a daughter with a drug problem. This young woman, Velvet, had called her mother a while before—hysterical. She told about a man inviting her to his apartment and then trying to kill her. She fought him off but now she didn’t know what to do.

Velvet didn’t have to say that the invitation included a monetary transaction or that the john promised some good aitch to sweeten the pot—so to speak.

The facts pretty much spoke for themselves. Maybe he was really going to kill Velvet, maybe not. But he probably said that that was his intention. The bruises proved that he was squeezing hard enough to kill. She grabbed for anything to fight him off with and found the porcelain box. He fell over and she called her mother. Her mother told the rich man, he called Breland, Breland called me, and in the meanwhile Velvet found the dead man’s stash. She used this to blunt the trauma of near death and murder.

With the child (I knew from Breland that she’d just turned twenty) on my lap I fished the cell phone out of my blue jacket pocket and pressed three digits.

“Leonid,” Breland said before I heard a ring.

I explained the situation, and asked, “So what is it exactly that you want from me?”

“I want you to fix it.”

“You know I’m straight now, man. And even when I was bent I didn’t take on jobs like this.”

“Come on, LT. This is for a very important client of mine. And you told me yourself that it looks like self-defense.”

“Then why not call the cops and defend her yourself?”

“It’s complicated.”

I could have pressed him, maybe even talked him out of what he was asking for. But Breland was not only my lawyer, he was a friend. He had been there for me when any other sane man would have walked away.

“I’ll call you back.”

SITTING AT
the hickory table, listening to Katrina’s snoring in the distance, I thought about the ugly apartment with the dead man and the ravaged young woman. I had been in many rooms like that over the years. That tableau could have been a painting representing my whole previous life when I still hated my father and believed that dealing in darkness was the only way I could survive.

“YEAH?”
Hush said on the second ring. It was past three on that Thursday morning. Velvet was still asleep and the nameless corpse was still dead.

“I got a situation here.”

“ Where?”

“YEAH, LEONID?”
Breland said.

“You got two choices,” I told my lawyer. “Either I call the cops for nothing or you come up with fifty thousand, cash.”

“I can double that and have it in your hands by noon.”

What could I say? I needed that much to get Zella out of hock. I’d lose ten thousand points on my bid for redemption, but no boxer ever won a match without getting hit—except maybe Willie Pep.

“I got somebody on the way,” I said. “It’ll all be cleaned up in an hour.”

IT WAS
a sour memory, even more so when I thought of Zella’s response to my offer of help.

That’s when I remembered my advice to Dimitri—
It’s a gift, not an investment . . .
I smiled at my own blind insight, and at just that moment my cell phone sang.