It would have been impossible to explain in a court of law, or in a marriage counselor’s office, how I believed that every gesture she made, every comment that came from her lips, was considered before its fabrication. Katrina had made herself into the image of a loving wife because she had tried her best to leave and the ground had fallen out from underneath her.
Sometimes I wondered how my life ended up in that sad configuration. How could I be the father to other men’s children, the life-partner of a woman who believed that wealth and beauty somehow combined to make up love?
I was like a man, shovel in hand, finding himself standing in a freshly dug grave but with no memory of having dug it. I stayed there because at least if you’ve hit bottom you had no farther to fall.
“Leonid?” Katrina said in a tone that made me think she’d called to me more than once.
“Yeah?”
“Are you insured?”
Every now and then even my wife could say something to make me laugh.
I AWOKE AT five the next morning, as usual. I’ve always been a nervous sleeper, an early riser, and prone to naps.
After two cups of extra-strong press-pot French roast I honed my thoughts down to the trouble I was facing. I needed to extricate myself, but before I could do that I had to understand the nature of the mess that I was in.
There were plenty of clues: the four men I had searched out, Norman Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman), and the as-yet-nameless person who hired him. The client’s initials, VM or BH, was something—but not much. Even at the moment of his death, when he was confessing to me, Fell had been cagey. The illiterate had made sure not to put a gender on the employer that he was supposedly betraying. I didn’t know if it was a man or woman who’d hired him.
There was also Willie Sanderson, and maybe a kid who died named Thom “Smiles” Paxton.
Someone wanted these low-rent young men killed, and then, to cover their tracks, Norman Fell was destined to die. I didn’t know if I had always been on the hit list or if maybe Sanderson had heard him talking to me and then had been sent to shut my mouth, too.
Sanderson had to be a hired killer—of that much I was almost certain.
But who would want four low-life young men killed? Who’d pay a man’s bail to murder him? The scenario was simple, it just didn’t make sense, like a live cat sealed in a glass globe, or the United States declaring peace.
I WENT TO the den and got online, looking for some event that would hold the four targets together at the time Fell’s client’s son last saw them. That was Óthe>I in early September 1991.
That fall was a very interesting moment in modern American history. The dictatorship of the proletariat was disintegrating in Russia. Gorbachev and Yeltsin made their move to take power from the Soviet congress. The Baltic nations gained their independence and the CIA was looking for a new way to justify its existence.
Out of a thousand executions over the previous fifty years, for the first time a white man was executed for murdering a black man. The Republicans and Democrats were battling over Clarence Thomas’s bid for a seat on the Supreme Court. President de Klerk was having a hard time trying to democratize South Africa while holding back power for his white brothers.
Frank Capra died.
The country was in the midst of a recession, and the political and social world was spinning off its axis, though no one knew in what direction it would go.
A lot was happening but nothing about the four teenagers that I had found for Fell.
Thom Paxton had died that year. I found the entry on the ninety-seventh page delivered by my Bug-designed search engine. It was an article in Newsday when Newsday was a city paper. The young man had died of a broken neck incurred when he fell from a high girder. He and some unnamed friends were trespassing on the site and there was some evidence that the victim was intoxicated.
It was a solid clue, only it would have been better if his last name started with an M or an H as did Fell’s client’s. I tried to find out more about young Thom, who, the article said, was seventeen, but there was nothing more to fetch.
AS LONG AS I was online I looked through my e-mails. I got offers to enhance my penis size and to get rich off of diamonds in South Africa, a holler from a girl named Shirl who swore she could get me out of the funk men my age experience, and a missive, replete with attachments, from Tiny “Bug” Bateman.
Mardi Bitterman had published a story in an online teen magazine about a suicide pact between two sisters who lived in Iraq. The fictionalized children were being tortured for some reason, and the only way they could defend themselves was to die. This wouldn’t have been so bad if Mardi hadn’t also spent many hours browsing sites that claimed to have information on exotic poisons derived from household ingredients.
The father, Leslie, didn’t have anything nearly so dramatic in his digital background, but there was a shadow there. He received a regular certified package that was arranged through a website, which he accessed through his office account, some outfit called Phil’s Olde Tyme Almanack. Bug couldn’t find any other reference to the business, nor could he identify any other customers.
He was sure about the Bitterman address. Which was maybe fifteen blocks from our place.
“I’m drawing a blank on this one, LT,” Bug wrote.
Óe.
<
I turned off the machine and left the apartment before anyone else was up.
AURA WAS WAITING in the antechamber of my office, a much lovelier sight than Carson Kitteridge or The Suit.
“Hey, babe,” I said as nonchalant as I could with a cockroach-sized bump on my left temple.
She put her arms around me and I relented, feeling the air fill my lungs and the full weight of my body evenly distributed on the soles of my feet.
“I wanted to call you,” she whispered in my ear.
“I know.”
“You’ve got to take better care of yourself.”
“I didn’t hit myself in the head.”
She leaned back and stared into my face. There was no plan in her heart, no goal she was reaching for. Aura liked being in my presence. She filled my life with a knowledge and a confidence that I’d never known before. And that was because I tried my best not to lie her, and to never misrepresent who I was.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going into my office and you’re going up to yours,” I said. “For now that’s all we can do.”
“Theda misses you, and so does Trini.”
Trini was a Tibetan spaniel, and Theda was a precocious twelve-year-old whom Aura adopted when her best friend, Nancy, Theda’s mother, died. Twill dropped by their house now and again because they’d gotten to know each other while Katrina was off with Banker Zool.
“I miss them, too,” I said, disentangling myself.
“Call me?” she said before going out the door.
THE RECEPTION AREA of my office had been cleaned up. Even the holes in the wall were spackled and awaiting a new coat of paint. Aura took care of me as best she could. If I was a good guy I would have told her not to wait, to find a new man who deserved her attention. And I wouldn’t have said it because there was no chance of us getting back together. Katrina could leave at any moment. The problem was that I might, one day soon, find myself free and available. But then what? Would she end up murdered just for being my friend, as had Gert Longman? Would she end up snarling at me as she died, like that girl calling herself Karmen Brown had done?
AFTER APPRECIATING THE job well done and castigating myself for not being able to live without hope, I went through to my office and lay down on the sofa. There were fires burning all around me, but I slept long and hard.
Ê€„
26
I jerked awake at 11:07 when the buzzer from the front entrance went off. It’s not a loud sound, but who knew what new assassin might have been pressing that button? I went over to my desk, opening the second drawer on the right side. The small monitor was connected to four concealed electric eyes that covered every possible angle outside my front door.
Lieutenant Kitteridge had the woman he was with stand to the side so that the one camera he knew about wouldn’t reveal her. This gave me pause, but not in a doorstopper kind of way. I just wondered who she was and what her presence might portend.
As I have said many times, the honest cop and I had no love lost between us. He despised me and I had a healthy dislike for him. But I understood as I made my way toward the front that he was one of the few people, outside of a handful of intimates, that I trusted implicitly. I knew that he wouldn’t bushwhack me, wouldn’t set me up just to see me fall. He was the better man and I had to respect him regardless of any other feelings I harbored.
“Who is it?” I called through the outer door.
“Police,” Kitteridge said in a false authoritative tone. I remember thinking that he must’ve been in a good mood.
“Who’s that with you?” I asked. I had to. Every now and then the cop needed to be shown that I was a step ahead.
“Sergeant Bethann Bonilla,” he replied evenly, without any show of surprise.
I opened the door. The thirtyish sergeant was a head taller than her colleague. She had half a head on me. She was slender but wore a bulky blue suit to give the illusion of substance. As white as Kitteridge, she had black eyes and hair that whispered the accent of her last name.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“Let us in, LT.”
WHEN WE WERE all seated in my office there was a moment of silence: those few seconds before the first round of the main event, before the bell rings and all hell breaks loose.
There was a very long cargo ship cruising down the Hudson, under the Statue of Liberty. Its passage gave me ideas that led far away from that room.
“Sergeant Bonilla is the newest addition to midtown Homicide,” Carson said. “She’s hoping to make you her first collar.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I got a thick neck.”
Bonilla smiled in a way that I didn’t quite get. But one thing was for sure—she wasn’t intimidated by me.
“You know, that’s always howÖre— I thought it should be,” I opined.
“What’s that, Mr. McGill?” Bonilla asked. Her voice was pleasant and throaty.
“A man should always be introduced to his executioner. That way there’s nothing shadowy or sinister about the deed. If the government is gonna kill you, everything should be aboveboard and nothing kept secret.”
There was that smile again.
“Willie Sanderson’s still in a coma,” Kitteridge said, throwing my philosophical line of reasoning off track.
“What you should be saying is that he’s still dead,” I said, “with little hope left for his resurrection.”
“This coma might become a permanent condition,” Carson said as a retort and in preparation for some other kind of attack.
Bonilla’s stare was starting to make me feel uncomfortable.
“We’d like to know what you can give us on Mr. Sanderson,” she said.
“The first time I met the man was at the wrong end of his big fist,” I told her. “I was a fool not to check the monitor before going out. I’ll probably be that same fool again someday soon.”
I was going out of my way trying to be witty. Maybe I had a concussion or something.
“Sanderson has a long history of violence,” Carson put in. There was a definite competitive tone to his voice. “From assault and battery all the way to intent to commit murder and manslaughter. The doctors say that he has some kind of chemical imbalance. It’s a condition that I can’t even pronounce which causes a state of mind that the lawyers and scientists say make up a valid claim for insanity. He can’t help it if he’s off his meds. But our doctors tell us that he’s been on the right drug for at least the last thirty days.”
It was a nice little speech that didn’t seem to require a reply, so I leaned back and nodded.
“Now it’s your turn to give,” Carson prompted.
I hunched my shoulders and consciously kept from looking in Bonilla’s direction.
“We have a record of you flying to Albany recently,” she said in spite of my cold shoulder.
The shiver bounced back and went through me.
“So?”
“You know,” Kitteridge said.
“How did you find out about my flight?”
“We’re not gonna debate the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, LT,” KÛiotiv itteridge instructed. “What were you doing in Albany?”
When your opponent has the edge on you it’s best to go on the offensive.
“Excuse me for being cautious,” I said, “but I’m the victim of an assault, not a suspect in a murder, as far as I know. I haven’t killed anybody but still I’m being interrogated by a homicide detective. So before I answer any questions, please put these pieces together for me.”
“Sanderson murdered Roger Brown,” Bonilla said. “His skin was found under the slain man’s fingernails.”
“And a business card with your fingerprint on it,” Carson tag-teamed, “with Roger’s adolescent nickname scrawled at the bottom, was in Brown’s pocket. You visited Frank Tork a few days before he was killed in the same fashion that Brown was. Sanderson then came after you. You see the pattern?”
I was waiting for the three-minute bell but I knew it was not to come.
“Ambrose Thurman,” I said.
“Who?” the police said in unison.
“About a month ago a guy named Ambrose Thurman called me. He said he wanted to hire me to find someone and would front me twenty-five hundred dollars for the legwork. He wanted to meet at the Crenshaw. I needed to keep up on my grocery bills and expected him to pay for the drinks.”
