And Sometimes I Wonder About You (25 page)

S
oon after the announcement Melbourne whisked Marella away in his limousine while Sackman asked the doorman to get him a taxi. When they’d gone I asked the front desk for a few pieces of stationery and sat down in the bar to pen a note to my lawyer, Breland Lewis. I put the last three sheets of the serial killer’s confession in an envelope and sealed it; then I wrapped the envelope in my letter. I put this package into another, larger envelope and brought the whole thing to the front desk. The man there put my communication into a FedEx pouch bound for Lewis’s office the next morning.

It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that it hit me. In just a few moments my connection with Marella had been severed, hacked off. For the past week, I realized, her name and face had been repeating over and over in my mind like a madman’s mantra. She was, in many ways, the perfect woman for me. Sure, that passion would kill me one day but we, all of us, die.

I tried to accommodate the loss in my mind, to leave it in the hotel lobby as I rose upward in the elevator car. But when the doors slid open she was still with me and I knew that the best I could hope for was the pain I felt.

“Pop,” Twill greeted when I entered our suite.

“Son.”

“That Mr. Ericson seemed like an all-right guy but you know he’s a fool.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Takin’ off with a woman like Marella is kinda like seein’ a tornado comin’ and runnin’ out to say hello.” Twill was subject to dialect when he waxed philosophical.

“What does a New York City boy know from tornadoes?” I asked.

“I seen my share,” he said. “You want a drink? They got four little cognacs in the minibar.”

We seated ourselves at the coffee table in the common room of the suite. I was thankful for both the liquor and the company of my son.

“You know I would prefer it if you didn’t get killed,” I said.

“I know,” he muttered shyly. “It just looked so simple.”

“That’s not the kind of detectives we are. You keep goin’ it alone and one day you won’t come back.”

“What time tomorrow morning?” he asked and I knew that he had accepted my terms.

“Nine forty-four.”

“Okay,” he said and then stood. “I’ll see you there sometime before nine thirty.”

“Where you going now?”

“I know these people.”

“What people?”

He shrugged. “You know, a girl and some’a her friends. There’s this club over in Somerville where they don’t even start up till midnight.”

“Somerville? How many times have you been up here?”

“A few. You know.”

I couldn’t stop him. In the end I wouldn’t be able to save him. But in the meanwhile I could run interference.

“You’re going in that suit?”

Twill gave me a big smile, beautiful.

He struck a pose and said, “I kinda like it.”

“Be careful.”

“You know it, Pops.”

I was sound asleep, my veins running amber with cognac, when the cell phone sang. If I’d been at home and sure of the safety of my kids I might not have answered.

“Hello?” The digital clock next to the bed read 3:54.

“Do you still want me, Lee?”

Drowsiness, hangover, heartache—all gone.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah I’m here.”

“Are you alone?”

“From the moment you took off.”

“I offered to stay.”

“Yeah. That’s why I thought you were gone forever,” I said honestly. “I had it in my mind to let you go.”

“I’ll call you from time to time, Lee. Maybe one day you’ll be ready.”

“That would be nice,” I said.

“Good-bye.”

I have overslept exactly three times in my life. I’ve gotten up on time through concussion, blood loss, and fever. But that morning I didn’t get out of bed until 9:23.

I staggered to the bathroom but even the ice-cold shower didn’t completely revive me.

I was in the taxi on the way to South Station when I realized that I had left my phone plugged into its charger back at the hotel.

When I got to the small table at the coffee kiosk in the great rotunda of the train station, Twill was sitting there with Celia Landis.

“Hey, Pops,” he greeted as I let my weight fall into the extra chair set there for me. It was a bouncy metal chair dipped in blue latex the same color as Harlan Sackman’s suit.

“You didn’t answer your phone,” my son said. “Five minutes more and I was going to take Celia and go looking for you.”

Even though Twill probably hadn’t been to bed, or at least been to sleep in a bed, he was bright-eyed and alert.

“Too many jobs all at once,” I confessed. “One day I’m gonna have to retire.”

“But not today,” Twill assured our client.

“No,” I agreed. “Not today.”

“Remember,” I told Celia. “I’m here representing you and I will do all the talking. You and Twilliam are my silent backup.”

We were ten steps away from the knobless door of Evangeline Sidney-Gray’s city mansion.

Mounting the stairs, I called out loud, “We’re here.”

It was a three-minute wait.

Black and beautiful, but not necessarily likable, Henry Lawrence Richards answered the door. He didn’t speak at all, just led us through the foyer-turned-office and to an elevator that delivered us to Dame Gray’s top-floor library.

The kids stayed half a step behind as I led them to the rich woman’s bone desk. This time there were three calcified chairs waiting for her visitors. I imagined that there was some butler whose sole job it was to get the right number of chairs set out for whatever guests his mistress entertained.

“Mr. McGill,” she said, looking at my wards.

“Ma’am,” I replied with courtesy and a slight bow of my head.

“And who have you brought with you?”

“Twilliam my son and Celia Landis.”

The shadow that moved across the rich woman’s brow was like the image of a planet turning its face away from the sun.

“I wish to speak with you, my dear,” she said to Celia.

“But instead,” I interposed, “you will be speaking to me.”

“I don’t know who you think you are, Mr.—”

She stopped because I stood abruptly. I took Charles’s letter from my breast pocket and leaned over the desk to put it in her hand.

“This is who I am,” I said.

As she paged through the bloody scrawl of her son’s mind, many emotions crossed the elder’s face. She was in turn horrified, saddened, and disgusted. There were even a few times where she showed a brief smile. I suppose these few happy moments came when she recognized the son she bore when he was still innocent—or at least seemed so.

“This is not the full text,” she said, her voice temporarily drained of authority.

“No,” I agreed. “In the last few pages he talks about a place where he kept his souvenirs.”

“His what?”

“You know,” I said, waving my left hand slightly, “fingers, skin, pictures of frightened faces before the subjects were put to death.”

Celia gasped and Dame Gray snapped her gaze from me to the young blackmailer.

“Where is the rest of this letter?” she asked, still gazing at Celia.

“Far away but safe as long as I and my client remain—what should I
say…unmolested.”

“Give me those pages now or you will never be safe again.”

My laughter surprised me. After all I’d been through a threat from a face I could see and name wasn’t bad.

“Listen, lady,” I said. “You will do as I say or the
Boston Globe
,
Christian Science Monitor
online, and the
New York Times
will all have a copy of the last three pages of your son’s confession.”

Dame Gray was stopped by the threat. She’d probably studied me since our last encounter and knew a thing or two about what I could and would do.

“What do you want?” she spat.

“One and a half million dollars. Five hundred thousand in a trust fund for Hiram Stent’s children—”

“Who is Hiram Stent?”

“The first man Josh Farth murdered trying to get at Celia. Another half a million for Ramona Vasquez, the life partner of the second man your people killed. Then two fifty each for me and Celia here.”

“That’s blackmail, Mr. McGill.”

“I’ve done worse…and so have you.”

“I will not bow down to extortion.”

“Have it your way, Ms. Gray. But I got bills to pay and a few of them come from your people wanting to rob and then kill me.”

“You are preying on my
vulnerabilities,
my weakness,” she said.

“Lady, your son’s been dead eleven years now. And I’m sure you knew or at least suspected that he was a monster. They didn’t find a suicide note but I bet that he left one; that it told you what he had done and probably where the bodies were. That’s why you believed Celia. That’s why you hired Josh Farth to kill her.”

Celia started crying.

“Twill.”

“Yeah, Pop?”

“Take her out of here. I’ll meet you guys back at the room.”

After the young people were gone Evangeline and I continued our conversation.

“So?” I began.

“My son was a monster as you say, Mr. McGill. But I am not. I have a large family. One granddaughter and two of my grandsons have political ambitions and this kind of notoriety would be a deep wound in our legacy. Can you see that?”

“I’ll send you the names and all pertinent information about the people you have to pay,” I said. “I will also send you the name of a lawyer that will handle the transactions.”

“And the letter will remain safe?”

“It will be destroyed the day you die.”

She scrawled something on a small piece of paper.

“My private e-mail,” she said.

I stood up and almost left but then I remembered that there was one more facet to our business.

“And one other thing, ma’am.”

“What’s that?”

“You will almost certainly get in touch with people like Josh; maybe some of his friends. You will ask them if there’s a way to eliminate me and Celia so quietly that the apparatus I set up will not spring into action.” She stared at me, trying to hide this truth. “But when you talk to them make sure you say that I have an insurance policy and its name is Hush.”

I
slept on the train ride back from Boston that afternoon. Twill set up the electronic Go board and I may have placed a tile or two but then everything slowed down and I was having a dream about my father when I was ten and Nikita eight.

Along with my mother we were staying at a vacation cottage in western Long Island that the Communist Party maintained. It was a simple house with three bedrooms and a kitchen, living room, and bathroom with a shower. But Nicky and I loved it because we were only six blocks from the beach. Every morning we got on the communal bikes left by Comrade Hastings, the man who owned the house, and tore out for the water. We spent hours there ripping and running, swimming and exploring.

Nicky usually came back before I did because he’d get really ravenous. I was hungry too but one of my father’s lessons was that a true revolutionary could overcome any physical feeling that controlled his actions. So I stayed longer gazing at the water while my stomach grumbled and Nicky was eating apple pie.

One day I was coming back from the beach alone, proud of my hunger. My father and Nicky were in the front yard. Nicky was squatting down in a corner of the lawn near the curb watching something with intensity. All he wore was swimming trunks.

Back near the front porch my father was looking down at the green hose. The nozzle was pushed into a hole in the soil.

Looking at them, I remembered that my father had promised Comrade Hastings, an old white man who smelled like vitamins, that he would take care of his gopher problem. The home owner said that he wasn’t a Nazi and wouldn’t condone the use of gas. My father told him that all he’d have to use was water.

I was rolling to a stop on my too-large three-speed bike. My father and Nikita were maybe a dozen feet apart with their backs turned to each other. My hunger blended with the hatred I’d learned to feel for the Nazis.

“Hello, Mr. Gopher!” my brother yelled happily.

I saw something small, brown, and maybe struggling at the patch of ground my brother watched.

Suddenly my father yelled, grabbed a hoe that was leaning against the porch, and ran to my brother’s side, where he slammed the sharp edge of the tool down on the struggling brown head.

Nicky fell back on his butt screaming and crying. He jumped to his feet and ran for the house shouting, “Mama! Mama! Mama!”

My father brought the blade down again and again.

My mother came out onto the porch and knelt down to embrace Nicky.

“He did it!” my brother said, pointing at Dad. “He killed Mr. Gopher!”

I woke up with a start. From the looks of it Twill and Celia had just finished with a kiss. She’d come along with us because there were things at her apartment that she needed.

“How long?” I asked, the panic I felt tamped down under my groggy demeanor.

“Ten, twelve minutes from Penn Station.”

I took up my phone and made the call.

“LT?” he answered on the second ring.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been trying to get to you for hours. Where’s Twill?”

“Here with me on the train. Why?”

“We did it. We busted the whole fucking crew. There’s not enough jail cells to hold them all. We got almost everyone except for Jones and a couple or three others. Just when the busts were going down one of our techs intercepted a message that referred to Twill and you by name. I sent cops to your place. Your wife and that friend of your father were there. We moved them out. It’s not going to be safe until we have Jones.”

“Have you identified him?” I asked.

“No.”

I disconnected the call.

“Can you put up Twill here at your apartment until I call to say it’s okay?” I asked the ex-stripper.

“No problem,” she said. “Of course.”

I entered A-U into my smartphone and then hit the Call icon.

“Leonid?”

“You home, Aura?”

“Yes.”

“I need to drop by and pick up something.”

It was 10:00 at night and I was coming home at last. I had dropped by Aura’s to retrieve a heavy-duty .45 caliber pistol I had put there some years before. Black men in my position, from gangbangers to hit men to NRA fanatics, learned that it was best to have a woman somewhere holding your piece.

We kissed at the door. Maybe it was the shootout at the Tesla or just the proximity and the metaphor of the gun. But once we started kissing it just wouldn’t stop.

“Will you be coming back, Leonid?” she asked when I was leaving for real at 9:30.

“I think so,” I said as honestly as I could.

When I opened the door to the vestibule of my building my mind was already up the stairs and in my office trying to figure out if it was finally time to run. As I was reaching for the door of the stairwell they came out of the super’s tool closet—fast.

Two men, each grabbing an arm and pushing me toward the back door of the first floor. That led to the back of my building’s property.

“Open!” one man shouted as they slammed my face into the door.

A second later the portal opened and I was dragged in.

I struggled but these guys were big and had some training. Together they were stronger than I and they kept me off balance by shaking and pushing me and kicking me in the legs.

The door opened into a hall that was like a connecting room to another door that went outside. In front of that door was a very large man in a big knee-length coat. He had a full and fake auburn beard. His eyes, open wide, were some kind of false blue created by badly made contact lenses. In his right hand, held high above his fedora-covered head, was an angry-looking fifteen-inch butcher’s knife.

“No one defies Jones!” the madman ejaculated.

That was the moment that I should have died. The puppet master was all facade except for the blade that was about to find my heart. The men that grabbed me were plenty strong at first but they had not done a proper study of adrenaline and its power of
multiplication.

With renewed strength I, my brother’s friend the gopher, turned into that honey badger again. I jerked to the left in the narrow passage, slamming the man on the trajectory side into the wall. I didn’t have to worry about the man on my right because Jones’s knife plunged deeply into his chest. The sound he made was so human, so mortal, that even in my frantic state of mind I noted it.

As the knifing victim grunted and groaned I turned like a dervish throwing the left-arm man into Jones. The cult leader roared out and lunged at me with his blade. I went low and moved so that we exchanged places in that room too small. Before facing Jones I delivered a blow to the forehead of the last standing minion with the heel of my right hand against his forehead. The back of his skull slammed into the wall and he crumpled to the floor.

Jones roared again and I produced my .45.

“The math is not in your favor,” I warned.

He lowered the knife and bowed his masked head. If I hadn’t spent thousands of hours over dozens of years studying the referee’s line
protect yourself at all times
, I might have died then, because Jones suddenly delivered an upthrust of the blade. He pierced my left shoulder but that didn’t stop the bellow of my gun.

I knew that I must have been frightened because I shot the madman six times.

After it was over I didn’t know what to do. I held on to the gun even though it was empty. I didn’t want to go out of the door because who knew what might be out there?

I was weak and getting weaker when the door to the vestibule flew open. Two uniformed cops rushed in, their pistols aimed at me.

“Drop the gun!” one of them commanded.

Gun?

I looked at my left hand and saw that there was blood dripping from my fingers. Then I looked at the right. There was a gun in it. I tried to let it go but the hand refused to respond.

“My hand,” I said. “It’s not working.”

One of the cops, a brave young white man, swatted my hand and the revolver fell.

“Come on out here and sit on the stairs, Mr. McGill,” a man said.

“Why?”

“That knife in your shoulder.”

I saw the haft of the blade. I thought that it was so deep that it might be sticking out of my back. Jones had come close to my heart; like Marella, like Aura, like…