And Sometimes I Wonder About You (17 page)

I
flew back to New York’s LaGuardia Airport and took a taxi, arriving at the Tesla Building at 3:56.

I was looking at my watch, just inside the big brass doors of that perfect Art Deco feat of architecture: a huge room replete with blue walls lined with brass plating; pink, black, and green tiled floors done in a curving abstract design, and a broad fresco of workers, naked women, and saints that had no pantheon, just the faith of their people. I liked the classical and yet revolutionary decor despite my dislike of my father and his beliefs. I think I might have smiled a moment before something hard pressed into the right side of my upper back. I looked up at the high reception desk and twisted my lips even before the man behind me spoke.

“Let’s take a walk, Mr. McGill,” an unfamiliar voice said.

I turned my head sixty degrees or so and saw the man I’d first beheld on Monday looking at Marella Herzog and ignoring me. The probable gun he held against my shoulder blade was hidden under the fabric of his dark yellow trench coat. This supposed weapon was held in his left hand, as I could see his right encased in a plaster cast, its swollen fingers poking through.

Beyond the paid stalker’s angry visage I could see that Warren Oh, the Jamaican black-and-Chinese senior guard for the Tesla, was talking on the phone.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Lett?” I asked pleasantly.

“We can go upstairs to your office and you can tell me where Marella Herzog is and how I can get to her.”

“You plan to shoot my receptionist, too?” I asked as if requesting extra butter on my vat of movie theater popcorn.

“Don’t fuck with me, brother,” Alexander Lett said. “I got a cushion on this piece. I’ll be a block away before they even know you’re dead.”

I was beginning to detect a pattern in my life. This model of behavior was a hybrid of capitalist necessity and proletarian existentialist angst; or, more accurately, modern-day potentates and their anger-driven gunsels.

“But surely no one has asked you to kill me, Mr. Lett,” I said. “I mean you didn’t even know me when you took on this job.”

“Move it, McGill.”

“I’d like to, Mr. Lett, but my assistant is a delicate thing and I’d feel terrible if I brought fear or worse into her life.”

“Have it your way.”

These last few words he might have meant for my epitaph. I didn’t think that this was the case but human nature is not always predictable. Lucky for me—prediction had no place in the equation of our interchange.

“Hold it right there,” a third, very authoritative voice demanded.

Alex and I both looked in the direction of the command. There we beheld four policemen; three in uniform and one plainclothes Captain Carson Kitteridge.

Once again I could feel the heartbeat of my wife calling me strong, realizing that strong could also be scared.

Alexander Lett’s olive profile was the epitome of desperation. I could see in that visage the questions that beset men when they’ve taken one step too many down a bad path.
Why did I do it? How can I get out of it?
These are the unanswerable and useless questions that go through our minds when someone shoves a gun in our side or calls for us to halt.

“Let me see your hands,” Kit said clearly.

The civilians crowding the foyer of the Tesla Building were now pressing toward the edges and exits.

“I got a gun in my left,” Alexander Lett admitted loudly.

The fleeing crowd became a bit more frantic.

To his credit Warren Oh stayed at his post.

“Bring it out holding it by the butt,” Kit said, and I wondered if I’d be shot.

There was a tense moment in which many thoughts and sensations transpired.

As the pressure of the muzzle eased from my side and Alexander Lett’s sour breath assailed me, I was thinking that the most important moments of my life had nothing to do with intelligence or insight. I was a brute among brutes and would die according to my nature and its affiliations. This thought comforted me; it allowed that Fate was my master and not free will.

It was then that I saw the long-barreled pistol emerge from under the yellow fabric. Alex held the butt with his forefinger and thumb. The three uniforms moved quickly then, grabbing the gun and throwing the already injured Lett to the hard, multicolored tile floor.

“Go easy on him, Kit,” I said loudly enough for the prisoner to hear. “Alex here an’ me is old friends. He was just jokin’.”

“With a loaded gun?” the captain asked.

“You know, man, you work with dynamite long enough and you start to forget how dangerous the shit is. Right, Alex?”

“Uh-huh,” the confused thug agreed.

“I’m still takin’ him down. If he doesn’t have a license he’s gonna do time. He might anyway. Reckless endangerment.”

After Lett was searched, chained, and trundled off in a police car, Warren Oh and I were informally deposed by a sergeant named Reese. After all that, Kit and I took the elevator upstairs to my office.

The door had been replaced and the wall inside rebuilt. My keys still worked and everything was right with the world.

“How’d you get here so quickly?” I asked Kit when we passed into the empty reception area.

“You know we always have a few men on the Tesla. That many tourists always attract your people.”

My people.
Captain Carson Kitteridge would always see me as a criminal and my race as like-minded felons.

“But why were
you
here?”

“I came by to ask a question.”

“Serendipity then?” I said as I entered the key-code to the back offices.

“Why’d you give Warren the high sign if Lett was a friend of yours?” Kit asked when we were seated in my personal office.

“We don’t have to worry about that, Kit. Lett is representing some angry ex-boyfriend and he got mad that I sucker punched him, that’s all. We got bigger things to talk about.”

“Like what?”

“You know anything about a guy named Jones got a whole bunch’a kids doin’ crimes for him?”

It was a rare moment to catch Kit off guard; he blinked—twice. He was small and delicate as far as the physical goes, but his will had a steel jacket. Any breach in that armor was a major achievement.

“What do you know about him?”

“Twill got himself mixed up with the dude tryin’ to help a girl lost her heart to one’a Jones’s men.”

“Put Twill on a plane and send him to Pakistan,” Kit said. “I doubt if even Jones got clout there.”

“Who is he?”

“The question is what is he? Child molesting, kidnapping, forced prostitution, blackmail, murder, extortion, smuggling, and sadism. I got a file with forty-six persons either missing or dead, and we think Jones killed
’
em all.”

“Then why not arrest him?”

“I don’t even know what he looks like. No one does. He wears disguises and only makes himself known to the orphans and runaways he controls. Every time we arrest somebody that might know something, either a power from on high lets them go or they die. I’m surprised that Twill even got in without having his throat cut. Jones is bad business. He’s never been arrested. There’s no photo or fingerprint, not a signature or single strand of hair on him.”

“What’s he got on people?”

“What did Lucky Luciano have on J. Edgar Hoover?”

With that sentence Kit was telling me that he would do anything to bring down Jones.

“What would you give to get at him?” I asked.

“I’d lay off your ass for a month of Sundays.”

“Is that a February month or August?”

Kit’s smile was anything but friendly. “If you bring this man down I’ll even lay off the Hiram Stent business.”

I think I must’ve blinked then. Kit smiled as I wondered how he could have possibly linked me with the homeless dead man.

“Who?” I finally managed to utter.

“Hiram Stent. Homeless guy. He was murdered a couple of days ago in Brooklyn.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“I don’t know,” Kit admitted. “When he was being murdered I was at your office trying to keep you from coming to blows with my sergeant.”

“And?”

“Stent was killed in a mugging, at least that’s the way it looks. But he had your address and phone number written on a piece of paper that he’d hidden in his shoe.”

“That doesn’t mean I know him.”

“I don’t care, LT. You bring me Jones and I’ll send Stent to potter’s field.”

“Why you hate this guy so much?”

“I got my reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Like a dozen children murdered and tossed off in alleys and abandoned buildings,” he said. “Like judges, city hall officials, and senior cops getting in the way of every case related to him. I’m a cop, LT. I put people like you behind bars. Either I succeed or I don’t but the people on my side should never block my
investigations.”

I gave that minor soliloquy a moment to settle. There was real passion in the angry cop. Whenever a man as dangerous as Kit expressed rage, you needed to give it a moment to breathe.

That moment gone, I asked, “You got a private cell?”

“Why?”

F
our years ago that block on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx wasn’t even a “neighborhood in transition.” Most of the houses and small apartment buildings were abandoned or lived in by squatters. Back then the four-story house I was going to had two residents: Luke Nye, who passed for a black man but who actually looked to be a direct descendant of the moray eel, and Johnny Nightly, a midnight-colored enforcer who might have at one time been mistaken for Nat King Cole’s younger, more handsome brother.

That was then.

Today Luke’s building houses eight apartments, six of which are inhabited by Hispanic ladies and their children, and maybe a temporary man or two; one unit for Luke and another for Johnny.

The basement of Luke’s place was his main source of income: a huge room that housed three regulation-sized pool tables. It was here that the best players in the world came to compete. Johnny rented the room for anything from ten thousand to one hundred thousand dollars a night, and also ran book for people around the world who both watched and bet on the contests.

But now Luke’s neighborhood was becoming gentrified. The billionaires’ and
multimillionaires’
colonization of the island of Manhattan had driven the middle classes out to Brooklyn, Queens, and even to the Grand Concourse. Luke bought buildings up and down the block, selling to would-be homeowners who wouldn’t cause him trouble.

Other than real estate, Luke’s side business was information. He would, for a thousand-dollar fee, answer solitary questions for people he trusted. Luke knew a great deal about the underworld from New York to New Mexico and all the way to New Delhi.

I was one of those special customers to whom Luke deigned to sell.

The building had a front door but I rarely approached it. My usual route was a concrete path that led around the back, arriving at a weatherworn door that was four steps down from ground level. I could have knocked but, as at Evangeline Sidney-Gray’s door in Boston, there was no need. I waited for maybe a minute and the door opened inward.

Asha Graham stood there. Slender and brown, disdainful and quite lovely, Asha wore an emerald dress that came down around her calves. She had run with half a dozen gangsters, gamblers, and gunmen over the past ten or twelve years; she’d outlived them one at a time. After a while bad men would avoid Asha whenever she came around. They could face a beating or bullet because there was some chance they might survive those encounters, but Asha was a death sentence and no sex in the world was worth that.

The thirty-something beauty might have become an old maid if not for Luke. He had seen everyone around him perish before their time. He believed in curses of course, all gamblers did, but he felt that his juju was at least as strong as Ms. Graham’s.

“Mr. McGill,” she said. It wasn’t quite a friendly greeting. Asha wasn’t the kind of woman to smile and fawn; she came from the guffaw and fuck, drink yourself senseless and die finishing school for young women.

“Asha.”

“You here for Luke or Johnny?”

“Can I have both?”

Asha let go of the slightest of smiles and stood to the side. I went past her, going down twelve more steps into one of the most important pool rooms in the world. Past the three tables was a sitting area with three red sofas set in a triangle about a circular table with a top made from a single piece of lapis lazuli. The room was bright because there was no game. There was a bottle of gin and a teapot on the blue table.

“LT,” Luke said, rising up from a sofa. He spent most of his time in the pool room. That was his life now that he had given up pimping, stealing, dealing, and murder-for-hire.

“Luke,” I said, shaking the hand he offered.

“Leonid,” Johnny Nightly said. He also rose and shook my hand.

When we were all seated Luke asked, “Who can do what for you today, LT?”

“The who is you,” I said, “and the what is two names. An underground Fagin wannabe named Jones and a guy who’s probably in the life named Paulie DeGeorges.”

That was one of the few times I saw a moment of hesitation in Luke’s face.

“DeGeorges,” he said, pondering. “What’s his thing?”

“I’m not sure. There’s a girl way out of her depth that has stolen something that’s very valuable and maybe important for other reasons. She’s probably hoping to use this guy to help her work it through. But I really don’t know anything about him except for the name and that the one time anybody saw him he was wearing a bow tie.”

Luke thought for a moment more and then went to an oak wall at the back of the room. There he slid a panel aside and pulled out an unusual contraption. The greater part of the machine looked like an old-fashioned complex shortwave radio. This was attached to a very ordinary, if outdated, black rotary phone. He set a few dials on the radio portion of the machine, the phone gave a short burp of its ring, and then Luke raised the receiver, dialed six numbers, and, after a forty-five-second wait, said, very clearly, “Paulie DeGeorges.”

He then hung up the phone and returned to a red sofa next to Asha. I had a couch to myself and Johnny occupied the other.

“Tea or gin, Mr. McGill?” Asha asked.

“Better give him tea,” Luke suggested. “With the kinda questions he’s askin’ he’s gonna need all his wits.”

While Asha poured my English Breakfast, Luke continued, “If you can forget Jones, that would be your best option; maybe your only one. He the baddest motherfucker in three states. Slick as oil and deadly as a volcanic eruption. Only man I ever heard of could make somebody commit suicide rather than go up against him.”

“What’s his thing?” I asked, to see if there was more than what Twill and his clients knew.

“Children,” Luke said simply. “The greatest weakness of any species is its young. If they don’t survive, the story is over. If they do, they will bury us.”

“In English, Luke.”

“He got children doin’ his work. They steal for him, prostitute for him, and they will kill, too. He brings
’
em in and makes them his creatures. If they cross him they die. If they talk it don’t matter because they don’t really know nuthin’. Nobody knows his name and he’s got dirt on at least a few people in every court, precinct, and government office. Nobody knows what he looks like, or where he calls home. If I was to make book on it I’d say that he was once a part of the juvenile protection department. From there he found out how to use children. But no one knows.”

“No way to beat him?” I asked the man who many believed had all the answers.

“Get somebody in close,” Luke speculated. “Close enough to kill him and brave enough to die. I don’t think he’s the kind of guy trusts anybody with his secrets, so a suicide run would end whatever problem it was that somebody had.”

I was hoping that Twill hadn’t come up with the same conclusion.

The rotary phone rang once, then the sounds of a dot-matrix printer started up. After maybe eight minutes the sounds stopped and Johnny went to the back wall, pulled out a drawer, and removed half a dozen sheets of paper. He glanced through them and then handed the sheets to Luke. Without reading the contents he passed the pages on to me.

I folded the papers and put them in my inside breast pocket.

“What is that?” I said, gesturing at the apparatus.

“That is to me what I am to you,” Luke said.

“What do I owe?”

“The same,” he said. “Always the same. One thousand dollars.”

“What about for Jones?”

“I hand out death notices for free. Public service, you know.”

“LT,” he called.

I had almost made it to the sidewalk in front of Luke Nye’s house.

I turned and waited for Johnny to reach me.

“You need some help on this, man?” he asked.

I took a moment to consider the offer. Johnny was long and lean, powerful and deadly. He was the kind of guy you wanted on your side when the shit came down. I had three deadly forces to contend with, and only two hands. Luke was right when he said that our children are our greatest weakness. Twill was my son and I felt vulnerable for him.

But Johnny almost died the time before last when I needed his help.

“No, Johnny,” I said. “I got this one covered.”