Known to Evil (3 page)

In the following weeks he'd go back to the club where he'd met her, wanting either the money he'd laid out already or the sex that money had paid for. If his luck changed he wouldn't find her.

THE YOUNG OFFICER BROUGHT me to an elevator and pushed a button for the sixth floor. My heart sank a little then. Irrationally I'd hoped that the crime had nothing to do with my mission.

I wondered if Sam Strange, or even Rinaldo himself, was setting me up for something far more sinister than a talk.

"So you're the infamous Leonid Trotter McGill," the woman cop said. She had a heart-shaped face and a smile that her father loved.

"You've heard about me?"

"They say you've got your finger in every dishonest business in the city."

"And still," I said, "I struggle to make the rent each month. How do I do it?"

Her smile broadened to admit men other than blood relatives.

"They also say that you beat a man twice your size to death just a few months ago."

I saw no reason to call into question a growing mythology.

We were passing the fifth floor.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Old enough to know better," I said, and the door to the small chamber slid open onto a dingy, claustrophobically narrow hallway.

THERE WERE AT LEAST a dozen uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives standing in and outside of apartment 6H. The woman who brought us there led me past two unwilling uniforms at the door, down a small pink entrance hall, and into a modest living room replete with fifties furniture in baby blue, chrome, and faded red.

"Leonid McGill," newly promoted homicide detective Bethann Bonilla said. It was neither a greeting nor an accusation; just a statement like an infant might make, mouthing a phrase and learning about it at the same time.

Before responding I took in the murder scene.

Equidistant between the baby-blue couch, kitchenette, and window lay the corpse of a blond woman in a brown robe that had opened, probably at the time of her death. The window looked out on the buildings across the street. The dead woman was certainly young at the time of her demise, she might have been pretty. It was hard to tell because half of her face had been shot off.

She lay on her back with one thigh crossed over her pubis as if in a last attempt at modesty. Her breasts sagged sadly. It's always upsetting to see the details of youth on a dead body.

In a corner, behind the blue couch, was what is now commonly called an African-American male in a coal-gray suit. This man was lying on his side. He had been a tall and lanky brown man with a face that was serious but not intimidating. There was the handle of a butcher's knife protruding from the left side of his upper torso. The haft stood out at an odd angle, as if someone had wedged the blade into the man's chest. There wasn't much blood under the wound.

"Congratulations," I said to the detective, who stood only half a head taller than I.

"What?"

"You're a lieutenant now, I hear."

"I work hard," she said as if I were insinuating her position was somehow unearned.

"Yes," I said. "I've experienced that work firsthand."

Four months or so before, Bonilla had been working on a series of murders. For a while she liked me for the crimes. It's a hard business, but even in the worst places you meet people you like.

"Why are you here?" she asked.

Bonilla wore clothes that made her look, for lack of a better word, bulky. A discerning eye could tell that she had a slender figure but in her line of work that didn't get a girl very far. The pants suit she wore was dark green and the shoulder pads made her look like a high school football wannabe.

"I got a call," I said.

"From who?"

"She said her name was Laura Brown." Lying is the private detective's stock-in-trade. I jumped into the role with both feet. "She told me that she needed to find a missing person rather quickly. I told her my day rate and she said she'd double it if I came here tonight."

There were plainclothes detectives standing on either side of me. I pretended that they were straphangers and I was taking the A train at rush hour.

"What was the name of the person she wanted to find?"

"She didn't say and I didn't ask. I figured we'd get down to details when I arrived."

The detective's Spanish eyes bored into me. I noticed that she'd trimmed her black mane but decided that this was not the moment to talk about hairstyles.

"And what are you doing here?" she asked again.

"I just told you."

"Don't get me wrong, Mr. McGill, but you don't seem like the kind of guy who would come into a room where your profit had been cut short."

"I didn't know when I was downstairs what had happened. My client might have been alive. For all I knew the crime was unrelated to my business. I still don't know. What's the victim's name?"

The lieutenant smiled.

I hunched my shoulders.

"What else did this Laura Brown tell you?"

"Not a thing. She said that someone had recommended me but she didn't give a name. That's not unusual. People don't like me thinking about them, I've found. I can't understand why."

"Did she mention anyone?"

"No."

Bonilla squinted and, in doing so, came to a decision.

"We figure the guy for being the shooter," she said, "but there's no gun in evidence.
She
certainly didn't stab him."

"Anyone hear shots?"

Bonilla shook her head slightly.

"Wow," I said. I meant it. A hit man with a silencer getting killed with a kitchen utensil seconds after he makes his bones.

At that moment I really hated Alphonse Rinaldo.

4

W
hen I was maybe five, my father, an autodidact Communist, took me down to Chinatown. He was always trying to teach me lessons about life. That day he bought me a woven finger-trap. I pressed my fingers in from either side of the bamboo tube at his request.

"Now pull them out," he said.

I remember smiling and yanking my hands apart, only to have the fingers tugged at by the stubborn toy. Try as I might the cylinder held like glue to my fingers. My father waited till I was near tears before telling me the secret: you had to press both fingers
toward
each other, increasing the size of the tube, before you were able to get free of it.

The humiliating experience left me in a sour mood.

"What have you learned from this?" my father asked after buying me a ten-cent packet of toffee peanuts from a street vendor in Little Italy.

"Nuthin'," I said.

Tolstoy McGill was tall and very dark-skinned. I inherited his coloring. He laughed and said, "That's too bad because I just taught you one of the most important lessons that any man from Joe Street Sweeper to President Kennedy needs to learn."

Like all black children, I loved President Kennedy, and so my father had my interest in spite of the mortification I felt.

"What?" I asked.

"It's always easier getting into trouble than it is getting out."

I WAS REMINDED OF my father's lesson while wondering how to get away from Detective Bonilla and her investigation.

"Maybe you should come down to the precinct with me," she suggested.

"No," I said, feeling the bamboo walls closing in.

"Material witness," she said. Those were her magic words.

"So is this Laura Brown?"

"Doesn't matter," Bethann said. "She told you her name was Laura Brown."

"I've given you everything I have."

Bonilla was one of the new breed of cops who didn't see the world in black and white, so to speak. My actions in the last case she worked, the one that, no doubt, earned her the promotion, were inexplicable. On the one hand, I had beaten a much larger, much stronger man to death; on the other hand, I had saved the life of a young woman by putting myself into jeopardy.

"Come in here," she said, leading me into the bedroom.

The other cops stared at us but little Bethann was made from stern stuff. She wasn't intimidated by the men she worked with.

THE BEDROOM WAS SLOPPY the way some young women are. There were clothes everywhere. Pastel-colored thong panties and stockings and shoes were scattered across the floor. The bed itself was unmade. Open makeup containers were spread across the vanity.

"There's a standing order to bring you in if there's ever a chance to do so," Bethann said to me when we were out of earshot of the rest of New York's finest.

"If you say so."

"Why is that?"

"Haven't they told you?"

"I'm asking you."

I looked at the thirty-something officer, wondering about the possibilities for, and ramifications of, truth.

"THE TRUTH," MY IDEOLOGUE father once told me, "changes according to what point of view is beholding it."

"What does that mean?" I must have been about twelve because not too long after that Tolstoy was gone forever. My mother soon followed him the only way she could--in a casket.

"A dictator sees the truth as a matter of will," he said. "Anything he says or dreams is the absolute truth and soon the people are forced to go along with him. For the so-called democrat, the truth is the will of the people. Whatever the majority says is the law and that law becomes truth for the people.

"But for men like us," my father said, "the only truth is the truth of the tree."

"What tree?" I asked.

"All trees," Tolstoy McGill proclaimed. "Because the truth of the tree is its roots in the ground, and the wind blowing, and the rain falling. The sun is a tree's truth, and even if he's cut down his seed will scatter and those roots will once again take hold."

"DO YOU BELIEVE THAT a man can change, Lieutenant?" I asked Bethann Bonilla.

"What does that have to do with my question?"

"That order to arrest me refers to another man," I said. "The man I used to be. I can't deny my history and I won't admit to a thing. All I can tell you is that you will never catch me doing the things your department thinks I'm doing. I'm not that man anymore."

The detective felt my confession more than she understood it. She wondered about me--it wouldn't be the last time.

"Do you know anything about what happened here tonight?" she asked.

"Is the dead girl Laura Brown?"

After a moment's hesitation the policewoman said, "No. I don't think so."

"And what is her name?"

"You'll find out in the morning news anyway, I guess. It's Wanda Soa. At least we're pretty sure. A few neighbors gave us descriptions. One outstanding detail is a tiger tattoo on her left ankle."

"I don't know a thing about it, then. She might have been using the name Brown. She might have called me. The caller ID said unknown. You're welcome to check my home phone records. But I've already told you all that I know."

Often--in books and movies and TV shows--private detectives mouth off to the police. They claim civil rights or just run on bravado. But in the real world you have to lie so seamlessly that even you are unsure of the truth.

My father didn't teach me that. He was an idealist who probably died fighting the good fight. I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.

"You can go home, Leonid," Bonilla said. "But you haven't heard the last of this."

"Don't I know it. I'm still trying to figure out the finger-trap my father bought me when I was five."

5

O
n the street again, I was loath to go home. I didn't know what Katrina wanted to talk about but another loss right then would have thrown me off balance in the middle of a tightrope act with no net.

So I went down to a bar called the Naked Ear on East Houston. It was once a literary bar where striving young writers came to read their poetry and prose to each other. Then for a long time it was a haven where NOLITA (that's the real estate acronym for North of Little Italy) stock traders met to flirt and brag. Since the current reversals on Wall Street the bar was floundering, looking for a new identity.

I was told by the owner that they didn't change the name because the word "naked" seemed to bring in curious newcomers every day.

I didn't care what they called themselves or who sat at the mahogany bar. I only went to the Ear for two reasons. One was to think, and drink, when I was in trouble; the other was to pay my respects to Gert Longman.

I HOOKED UP WITH Gert back when I was more crooked than not. She identified criminal losers who had not yet been caught at their scams and perversions. I framed these lowlifes for crimes that other crooks needed to get out from under--all for a fee, of course.

As is so often the case with deep passion, I didn't understand the kind of woman Gert was. Because she did work for me, I figured that she was bent, too.

She had a great smile and a fine derriere.

When we became lovers I neglected to tell her that I was married, not because I was ashamed but because I didn't think it mattered. How was I to know that she had dreams of two- point-five children and a picket fence?

We broke up but still worked together from time to time. I offered to leave Katrina, but Gert told me that it was over, completely.

And then one day the daughter of a man I'd caused to go to prison had someone kill Gert, just to see me cry.

I toasted her loss with three cognacs at least once a month. I never liked going to cemeteries.

LUCY, THE SKINNY BRUNETTE bartender, smiled when I mounted a stool in front of her.

"Hello, Mr. McGill."

"You remember my name."

"That's a bartender's job, isn't it?" Lucy had very nice teeth.

"It used to be that Republicans believed in less government, and people all over the world saw America as the land of opportunity. Things change."

"I guess I'm a throwback, then. Three Hennesseys straight up?"

"You're a relic."

While the thirtyish bartender went to fetch the brandy I turned my mind toward yet another reason I came to that bar: whenever I find myself in serious trouble, I take a time-out and try to fill in the shady areas with reason.