Known to Evil (21 page)

"I always owe somebody somethin'. Joe stopped lending to me a year ago . . . right after he broke my arm."

I considered the information Ron had given me. It was a crazy story. In my experience crazy stories were too often true.

"When can I see Irma?" he asked.

"Soon."

"How soon?"

"As soon as I can find a way to get you out of here without getting you killed."

I could hear, and smell, Ron's ragged breath.

"How long can you hold out?" I asked him.

"I'm okay."

"When are you going to need the pipe again?"

"I'm off the crack, man," Ron Sharkey said.

"Bullshit."

"No. I started usin' H 'bout seven months ago. I used that to ease off the speed. And then I slowed up on the H. I'm just, I'm just chippin' now. I can go three days and not hardly even sweat."

The best and worst lies are when we lie to ourselves
. My father told me that three days before he was gone for good.

"Hold on, Ron," I said. "I'll be back in under forty-eight hours."

"WHAT WAS THAT SHIT?" Jake Plumb asked me outside the visitors' room.

"What?"

"You weren't supposed to be neckin' in there."

"I don't like microphones."

"Oh no? How do you feel about prison cells? I could throw you in one right now," the agent said. "I could lock you in a room where even a runt like you couldn't stand up straight. I got a dozen judges on my speed-dial wouldn't even blink before signin' the warrant."

It was all true. The government my father railed against had those powers, had been honing them for nearly a century. I was nothing more than a stalk of wheat against Plumb's scythe of justice.

"Make up your mind, then," I said, while sending up a small prayer to the not-God of my father's pantheon. "Because I got places to be--or not."

37

A
gent Plumb took no more than a minute to decide to let me go, but it felt like hours. It was stubbornness and not courage that kept me from falling to my knees, begging him not to imprison me.

I was shivering by the time I'd made it back to the waiting room of that human warehouse. Plumb and Galsworthy ran what an adman might call an "instant prison." At any moment almost any American (barring movie stars, publicly acknowledged billionaires, and sitting members of Congress) could be whisked away to that nameless building, en route to one of our satellite Siberias, and kept there until a botched water torture or the shrug of some judge sent them home.

In the waiting room I went straight for the exit, and then stopped.

Any chance you get to risk your life for the cause is as close to a blessing as a modern man can come.
My father's words had no political meaning to me, but their truth outshone their intent.

"Excuse me, ma'am," I said to the Arab woman slumped in the chair.

She looked up at me but didn't say anything. Her children--an older girl and two toddler boys--also stared.

"Your husband has been moved to the Federal Detention Center in Miami. You'd probably do well to call down there."

ON THE STREET I went over the talk I'd had with Ron. I always do that--replay the words and gestures of an interrogation. Usually I find something that I'd overlooked; often that something has nothing to do with the information I was after.

In this situation I remembered comparing the innocence of criminals to an algebraic equation. That reminded me of the famous
x
, the unknown factor.

In the case of Angie Lear the unknown factor was the black man with no labels in his clothes. The metaphor worked, as far as an intellectual concept was concerned, but it changed drastically when I tried to make it a concrete action in the material world.

The killer was a dangerous man, possibly a hired assassin in league with others of his kind. Delving deeply enough to uncover his name might also set in motion those who would like the questioner silenced.

But time was passing, and someone, maybe even Alphonse Rinaldo, was stalking my client. So I took the A train to the High Street stop and walked over to Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights.

IT WAS ALMOST SIX o'clock by the time I got there, but I was pretty sure that he'd be in.

Randolph Peel's office was just above a bakery and across the street from a bank that was both new and (according to
The New York Times
) failing. I walked up the stairs and knocked on his door, enjoying the smells of bread baking and sugared delights.

A buzzer sounded and I pushed my way into the ex-cop's lair.

It was an odd room; taller than it was deep or wide, it gave the impression of having been turned on its side by an earthquake, or maybe some kind of explosion. The shelving was askew, layered with papers and books that communicated no sense of order. There were manila folders and magazines piled on their sides, books leaning one way and then the other, and appliances, like an old-fashioned iron, various staplers, an espresso machine, and even a .38 pistol thrown haphazardly into the mix.

Peel's oak desk was also out of the Apocalypse. It wasn't even on a level plane. There were newspapers, empty beer bottles, a half-eaten sandwich on a paper plate, and piles of papers that seemed to have been thrown there just for serendipity's sake.

The buildings across the street did not right the room. Looking out of the murky panes you might have thought that the whole world had been turned on its side in order to fit the office of the private investigator Randolph Proteus Peel.

"LT," THE SLOPPY EX-COP said. "How's it goin' down in the gutter?"

Randy was big, with equal parts pink and gray skin making up his porcine face. Needing a shave, he was leaning back in an office chair, diddling around with a pencil in his left hand.

The slob, I knew, was ambidextrous.

"Just chippin' at it nowadays," I said in deference to Ron Sharkey.

"That's what they been tellin' me," he said. "Somethin' like you're reformed or somethin'."

"Something like that," I said.

I took a seat on the worn red velvet hassock he used for a visitor's chair. A night bird whizzed past his window. A car honked in the street.

"I see you've cleaned the place up," I said.

"Fuck you."

"I thought that was your mother's job."

He sat up straight.

"What the fuck do you want, McGill?"

Many people liked Randy in spite of his slovenly ways and dishonorable discharge. Most white cops still included him in their picnics and at their kids' Communions. With a little help from these friends he'd wrangled himself a PI's license and started to deal in intelligence.

If you wanted to short-circuit the system and get information outside of official channels, you went to Randy. Given enough time, he could get a copy of a handwritten memo page off the desk of the chief of police.

I put a fold of seven hundred dollars down between the hardening sandwich and a calendar called
Beaver Shot of the Week.
Randy picked up the money and thumbed through the wad.

"A young woman named Wanda Soa was shot dead in her apartment a few days ago," I said before he finished counting. "Her probable assailant was found next to her, also dead. I'd like to get the coroner's photo of his face."

"Come back tomorrow and I'll have it."

"I'll add eight hundred to that if you do it in the next fifteen minutes."

One thing I knew for sure about Randy was that he didn't like to be rushed. Luckily for me, more often than not, he needed cash more than he hated work. He picked up his black phone and entered a number.

"Hey," he said in a husky, almost sexy, voice. "It's me."

Another interesting aspect to the disgraced cop was that women loved him. You'd think that such a disheveled ne'er-do-well would chase any modern girl away. But they flocked around him, agreed to do shocking things for him on desktops, park benches, and in their own marital beds.

He asked for the photo and made an assignation for later in the week. They were talking about a problem with somebody, her husband or boyfriend, when the fax machine started up.

"It's comin' through, babe," he said. "I'll call you back in ten minutes."

I stood up, went around to the fax machine, and tore off the image of the dead man I had seen on Wanda Soa's floor.

I reached into another pocket and pulled out the next payment.

When I turned around Randy was pointing a 9mm pistol at my forehead.

"I could kill you right here and now, Leonid McGill."

I dropped the bundle on his desk.

"But you won't," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because you're a lazy fuck. Because I weigh one hundred eighty-seven pounds, and even if you had a silencer you'd have to get rid of the body or explain it to the cops. Either way you'd miss your evening cartoons."

Randy searched my eyes for fear but found none. I'd given up worrying about my mortality a long time before. The first good body shot I took in the ring cured me of that fear.

Anyway, I knew somebody would shoot me down one day. Why not Randy Peel in Brooklyn Heights?

Peel let out a false laugh and lowered his gun.

"I always wanted to see you flinch, LT," he said behind that empty grin. "I guess you're as tough as they say."

38

I
t was a long ride but all I had to do was catch the 4 train at Borough Hall and take it all the way to the 149th Street stop in the Bronx.

It was a pleasant ride that gave me time to think. . . .

There's a four-story building a block and a half off the shabbiest part of the Grand Concourse. Whatever paint it once had is gone and most of the floors are unoccupied. Now and again a squatter comes in to inhabit one room or another, but a guy named Johnny Nightly finds them soon enough, batters them about the head and shoulders, and then offers them twenty dollars for the promise that they will never come back.

They never do.

The basement of the dilapidated building is a very modern, unregistered pool hall run and tenanted by my comrade Luke Nye. That was the man I was going to see.

I followed a lighted path around the back of the building and approached a cast-iron cage that was painted grass green. There was no button or brass knocker to announce visitors. All you had to do was stand there. Within a minute a buzzer sounded or it didn't.

That evening it did.

I pushed the gate open, walked through the weather-beaten door, and clambered down the dank wooden stairs into darkness. When I reached the bottom a door swung open before me. The world revealed was all yellow light and green relief.

Johnny Nightly was standing to the right, holding the door open.

Johnny was tall and slender, black as the darkness I had just come from, and able, it was rumored, to kill without question or remorse.

"Good afternoon, Mr. McGill," Johnny said. He was a very courteous man, pleasant, and a good conversationalist when he had to be.

"Hey, Johnny. What's up?"

"Everything is nice and peaceful," he said from within an aura of seemingly unshakable calm.

"LT!" Luke called from the third table in a line of three. "Come on over here."

The floor-through room was uninhabited except for the hustler and his bodyguard. The ceiling was high enough to hang three large dark-blue crystal chandeliers that were formed in an abstract symmetry like spiders' webs beaded with blue dew. The walls were shiny green with the sheen of lacquered metal.

Luke was of medium height with a face that resembled a water-going snake. His eyes were slits and his nose so wide that it didn't seem to stand out from his face. His brown skin had a greenish tinge and his head was shaved bald.

Luke Nye was an animator's dream of an alternate evolution of humanity.

"Hey, Luke," I said.

We shook hands and slapped shoulders.

"Must be somethin' important to have you come all the way out to the Bronx," he said.

I handed him the fax from Randolph Peel's machine.

Luke took the flimsy, grayish sheet, glanced at the image, and handed it back to me.

That was all the time he needed.

Crime revealed itself in different manifestations throughout the various terrain of New York and, probably, the rest of the world. Many groups had very organized systems of criminals: The Russians and Italians, Irish and Chinese had their mafias, gangs, and tongs. These were what you might call highly developed organisms like tigers or flies. There were such groups in the African-American community, gangs and blood brotherhoods that paid allegiance to some central figure or ideal. But the black community also had an impressive number of wildcards and jacks-of-all-trades. Luke Nye was one of these.

He was a born leader who also had a gift with the pool cue. He was tough, smart, and independent-minded. He didn't take orders and didn't expect people to bow before him. He'd been in and out of prison, had killed a man or two, dabbled in the sex trade, gambling, armed robbery, and even counterfeiting--all this before he settled down to high-stakes pool and the dissemination of information.

For a thousand dollars Luke might answer any question you had. He was friendly with bad men from up in his neighborhood all the way down to Wall Street. Information rose like chalk dust from the people who played in his little parlor, and sometimes he'd sell what he knew.

"You sure you want this, LT?" he asked.

"The only way I can answer that is for you to tell me his name."

"It's not in a name," he said with a smile. "It's what that name does and who he does it for."

"That mean I have to pay three thousand dollars?"

"Naw, man. I'll give you it all if you want it."

I nodded.

"The name he's been going by on Flatbush is Sam Bennett," Luke said. "But his given name is Adolph Pressman. He was born in Jamaica to a black Jamaican mother and a white German father. Still a citizen of the island there, I hear.

"He's what your friend Hush might call a mid-level hit man. I met him once when he was doing bodyguard work for a man named Pinky."