All I Did Was Shoot My Man (6 page)

10

IT WAS CLOSE
to midnight, and the caller registered as unknown.

“Hello?” The only reason I answered is because I believed any distraction would be better than the memories threading through my brain.

“Mr. McGill?”

“Zella?”

“Yes. Can you talk?”

“Sure. Talk.”

“I mean, in person.”

“Okay. Come to my office tomorrow at ten. That’s in the Tesla—”

“I meant now.”

“It’s eleven fifty-seven.”

“You don’t sound asleep.”

Recently released convicts don’t live in the workaday world, not at first. They’ve been locked up in a box, and the shock of freedom breaks all rules. Zella had a problem and a phone, so why not call the only man she knew?

“There’s a place in the East Village called Leviathan . . .” I said.

I gave her the address and a few special instructions. She made me repeat the directions and agreed to meet there in an hour’s time.

I took a three-minute cold shower, donned a blue suit identical to the one I wore that day, and checked to see that Katrina was still on her belly. After all that I skipped down the ten flights to the street, feeling like a kid having received a reprieve from summer school.

LEVIATHAN WAS
one of the most secret late-night bars in Manhattan. Three floors underground, it was reputed to be a Mafia bomb shelter in the mid-fifties. The bartender/owner was named Leviticus Bowles, though his mother had christened him Eugene.

Leviticus was a born-again ex-con who acquired the deed and keys from a cell mate, Jimmy Teppi, at Attica before that prison was world-renowned. Legend has it that young Leviticus had had Jimmy’s back during some hard times and the mobster was grateful.

Jimmy died not long after the uprising. Mr. Bowles took this as a sign to make a life that kept him away from wardens and prison yards, rancid breath and unrestrained manhood.

Leviathan was beneath a Chinese restaurant equipment store on Bowery. The upper floors of the building were apartments. There was a locked door, with various buttons for the residents. One of these buttons had the name
L. Bowles
scrawled next to it.

I pressed the button and few moments later a voice said, “Yes?”

“Jimmy T,” I said clearly.

The lock clicked open, and I walked down a narrow hallway, past the stairs that led to the upper-floor apartments, to a doorway that had an electric eye above it.

I looked up at the lens, and the door came open. Three steps in and I found myself at the precipice of one hundred and seventy-two stairs that coiled down into darkness. This spiral was dank and ominous. You knew that you were leaving the world of city-granted licenses and state-enforced regulations.

The vestibule at the bottom of the stairs presented a bright green door that opened immediately.

I was assailed by Sinatra and cigarette smoke, careless laughter and bright lights.

“Mr. McGill,” Tyrell Moss said in greeting.

Tyrell was a tall multi-racial man. Hispanic and black, Asian and some form of Caucasian—he was powerfully built and forever young. He was maybe forty, maybe older, but his smile was that of the God of Youth on some faraway island that had yet to hear of either electricity or clinical depression.

“Moss, man,” I said.

Behind him was a large room with ceilings at least twenty-five feet high. There were small pale yellow tables everywhere and at least eighty patrons. At Leviathan you could smoke cigarettes or cigars, drink absinthe, and it was even rumored that there was an opium den in a back room somewhere.

It was like stepping into an earlier day that never existed.

“I got her set up against the back wall,” Tyrell was saying. “You
did
invite her, right?”

“Zella?”

“That’s her.”

WALKING ACROSS
the dazzling expanse of Leviathan, I saw many notables. There were no politicians, but their handlers came there to meet and relax; there was a pop star or two; and there were half a dozen bad men with whom I’d done business in the old days.

Zella was wearing the same rayon suit, so I supposed she wouldn’t insult my threads again. She was drinking an amber-colored fluid out of a shot glass. That must have given her great solace after eight years of locked doors and stale water.

“Hey,” I said as I pulled out the chair across from her at the crescent-shaped table.

“ What’s that supposed to mean?” she replied.

“It means that you’re out of prison, Miss Grisham, and that people don’t use codes or special greetings. It means hello.”

“Then why don’t you say hello?”

I stood up again.

“The drinks are on me, lady. Be my guest. But don’t call again.” I was ready to leave. No use in wasting time on someone who didn’t know how to act on the street, or under it.

“ Wait,” she said.

“ What?”

“I don’t know you, Mr. McGill, but Breland Lewis says that I should trust you. The problem is that I don’t know him either . . . but I need, I need to talk to somebody.”

It was a start.

I sat down again.

“ What can I do to allay your suspicions?” I asked.

“Do you think I had anything to do with the Rutgers heist?”

“No.”

“ What about Lewis?”

“ What about him?”

“Is he after that money?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I imagine that someone who knew about framing you had a change of heart and paid him to set you out.”

“ Who?”

“I have no idea,” I mouthed.

Zella suspected that I was lying but what could she do? She stared for a dozen seconds or so, and said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you think or him either. It doesn’t because I don’t know anything about any money.”

“Is that why you wanted to meet? To tell me that?”

Distrust and doubt are the first lessons you learn in lockdown. Smiles and kind words mean nothing. Promises and even love are less substantial than toilet paper. Zella couldn’t bring herself to confide in me even though that’s why she’d come to that underground club.

“Hey, Leonid,” a man said.

“Leviticus,” I hailed.

He was maybe five-eight, with the shoulders of a much taller man. His bald head was a pale dome over a shelf-like brow and deep dark eyes. His features were angry, but I’d never seen the bar owner lose his temper.

“Haven’t seen you in years,” he said, looking at me but taking Zella in too.

“It’s a big city and I got commitments in every borough.”

Bowles was wearing an expensive midnight blue silk suit. He looked like a butcher wearing clothes a young mistress bought for him. From his breast pocket he drew out a pack of cigarettes. Before taking one he offered one to Zella. She took the filterless Camel greedily. He waved the pack at me but I shook my head. Then Bowles took one and lit up both himself and my reluctant client.

He took in a deep, grateful breath.

“You’re not here to cause trouble, now are you, LT?” he said before exhaling a cloud of smoke.

“No, sir.”

He smiled and nodded to Zella. Then he walked away, having delivered his message.

“Trouble?” she asked.

“I’m known as a rough-and-tumble kind of guy,” I said. “People like Leviticus try to keep the breakage down to a minimum.”

“Then why let you in in the first place?”

“The kind of trouble I cause can’t be kept out with a locked door.”

“Are you going to be trouble for me?”

“Depends on what you have to ask.”

11

DEAN MARTIN was
singing “Amore” and there was laughter from a table of young black gangster wannabes. Zella was halfway through her cigarette and working on a second shot of whiskey. We hadn’t gotten to anything pertinent yet but we’d cleared a few hurdles.

I wasn’t trying to be her friend. It was enough to seem like I wasn’t an enemy. Her cigarette and whiskey helped toward that end. And the fact that I was willing to walk away meant that I had hard feelings of my own. Putting that all together, Zella almost felt almost comfortable enough to speak.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“Always. You know I haven’t had a decent meal in almost ten years.”

“Leviathan has great steaks.”

“You know what I thought about every day since they sent me up to Bedford Hills?”

I shook my head, wishing that I could have a cigarette too.

“Two things,” she said. “The most important is that I regret giving up my baby. I delivered her and relinquished all my rights because I thought that I’d be in prison until she grew to be a woman and I didn’t want her to spend her whole childhood waiting for a mother who would never come. I was wrong, and now I want to see her more than anything.

“Can you find my daughter for me, Mr. McGill?”

“ Why?” I asked, serious as a judge at the Inquisition.

“I just told you.”

“ Wherever this child is now, she’s with the only parents she’s ever known. I can find her, but not if you want to rush in without a meeting with the people who took her in after you gave her up.”

“Yes. Yes, I understand that.”

Zella’s previous beauty was returning. There was color in her face, and the beginning of a certain poise that prison wouldn’t have allowed.

“ What’s the second thing?” I asked.

“Harry.”

“Tangelo?”

She nodded, lowering her head as she did so.

“ What? You sorry you didn’t kill him?”

“I don’t even remember shooting him in the first place,” she said, raising her head defiantly. “The doctors call it selective amnesia. The trauma of shooting him wiped the memory from my head. The first thing I knew, I was in the police station being questioned by a woman named Ana Craig. She told me what happened.”

“But you must’ve been mad at what he’d done.”

“He didn’t deserve being shot and scared like that. Harry’s a weak man. I can only imagine how he felt when I kept on shooting at him. I’m actually glad that Minnie hit me . . . stopped me from killing him.”

“That’s not what you said at the bus station this morning.”

“All I meant was that I was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing. If somebody hadn’t framed me for that heist, the DA would have let me out on diminished capacity.”

“So what do you want to do about Harry Tangelo?”

“I want to apologize to him,” she said. “I want to look him in the eye and say I’m sorry.”

If she was just some prospective client that walked in my office, I would have turned her away. Mothers and guilty lovers, they use private detectives like paper towels in a public toilet.

But Zella wasn’t a stranger. If she was a runaway train, I was guilty of switching the tracks.

“I can probably find out who your child was adopted by,” I said, “but I can’t promise that they will agree to meet you. I can also locate Harry Tangelo, but the same holds true for him.”

Zella brought out the envelope of cash that I’d given her that morning. This she placed on the crescent table.

“I spent a little more than sixty-seven dollars of it but you can have the rest.”

“You get what you pay for,” I said, leaving the white envelope on the pale yellow tabletop.

“ What does that mean?”

“You’re hiring me to see your child and old boyfriend. I’ll probably be able to find them, but the meetings, as I said, might prove to be a little more tricky. You hold on to the money until I come back with some answers.”

“You don’t want the money?”

“Not until I know that I can earn it. I wouldn’t want a hot-blooded mama like you to think I had cheated.”

That was the first time I’d seen her smile.

It was a nice smile. Very nice.

“So what now?” she asked.

“I buy you another drink, put you in a cab, and tomorrow I start the job you gave me.”

“That’s all?”

“Unless you need me to find somebody else.”

“No.”

“And you don’t plan to shoot Tangelo anymore, right?”

She smiled again. “No, Mr. McGill, and . . .” She paused, looking at me directly.

“ What?”

“I wanted to apologize for what I said to you at the bus station this morning. I was raised better than that.”

“Hey. If you can’t lose your temper after eight years being locked up for a crime you didn’t commit and another one you weren’t responsible for, then this would be a harder world than anyone could bear.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. McGill. It has been hard. Maybe I’ll take you up on that drink.”

NEAR TWO
in the morning I put a slightly tipsy Zella Grisham into a yellow cab, paid her fare up front, and even kissed her on the cheek. The way she leaned into that kiss I could probably have climbed in with her. But I try my best to maintain a certain decorum with my clients.

ON THE STREET
I considered taking the subway uptown. I think pretty well surrounded by the rumble of the underground rails.

“Leonid,” a man called.

I was unarmed and on an empty street. That could have been the moment of my death. Could have been. Probably would be one day. But not that night. It wasn’t my assassin but Carson Kitteridge, recently promoted to captain on the NYPD. His was an at-large position that allowed him to work wherever he was needed.

Carson was even shorter than I, five-five—no more. Pale white, he had less hair than I did. His suit was light-colored and well worn.

“Kit,” I said. “I thought they reassigned you after the promotion.”

He strolled up next to me with no expression that I could read.

I’m a burly guy, in excess of one-eighty in my boxers. Kit isn’t even a lightweight, but there’s a gravity to him that makes bad guys think twice. For many years his main goal was putting me in prison. Possibly my greatest single achievement was denying this brilliant cop that aspiration.

“ What you up to, LT?”

“Headed home. That is, unless you wanted to grab a drink. You on duty?”

“ What you up to, LT?” he said again.

“ Why don’t you tell me?”

“ What do you have to do with Zella Grisham?”

“I was hired to meet her at the bus station. She liked the color of my skin and the cut of my suit and asked me out for a drink.”

“ What was she talking about?”

“This and that. Nothing special.”

“The heist?”

“Claims she didn’t do it. I believe her.”

“You armed?” he asked.

That was an unexpected question, enough so to make me look around the dark street. I had a license to carry a concealed pistol. I’d been granted that when I used to have friends in high places.

“No,” I said. “ Why?”

“Just wondering if you knew what you were getting into,” Carson said. “I see you don’t.”

“ What’s that supposed to mean?”

A wan smile passed across the policeman’s lips and vanished—like a shark’s fin.

“See you later, Leonid,” he said.

With that he turned and walked away, making the most of his ominous innuendos.

I stood there a few moments more. Again I thought about taking the subway, but when a yellow cab slowed down to see if I needed a ride I jumped in, knowing that Carson Kitteridge never made idle threats.