“You sure you’re an electrician?” he asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said, leavening his tone. “I never known one’a you guys not to come up with some kinda five-thousand-dollar job.”
“Duffy likes Joe,” I said. “He told me to go easy.”
I don’t even remember how I got back to the Tesla Building.
Ê€„
41
Twill, I thought while unlocking the many bolts on my outer office door, was a perfect person. Maybe not a model citizen or a particularly΀… productive member of society, not a law-abiding churchgoer with God always on his mind; but in spite of all his social failings, Twill was capable of making flawless decisions about what he would do and why. His resolution to kill Leslie Bitterman was one of absolute sensibleness. I wanted to kill the man myself, but I wasn’t perfect like my son. I worried about consequences even if I knew the act in front of me was correct.
Whether you killed the finance expert for past acts or to stem future threats, there were few people who would condemn or even question the act itself. The problem was that those few worked for the state of New York and wore black robes.
But Twill’s perfection didn’t matter. Once I was in possession of the facts, making a plan to save my son would be easy. I had resolved that problem and so was feeling good. There were other knots in the cord of my life, but they would unravel, too—I was pretty sure.
I was sitting in the new chair behind my receptionist’s desk, something I often did while reading the mail.
I was hardly even worried when there came a jiggle on the doorknob followed by the sound of the buzzer. I considered going back to my office to consult the monitors, but then I said to myself that I couldn’t live my life worrying about what awaited me every time I heard a knock or ring. That path led to madness.
HE WAS ON the short side and smelled of a thin layer of lilac spread over an acre of sour sweat. In his left hand he held a battered black briefcase. My visitor was dressed in a well-cut dark-blue suit, but his wiry frame undermined the effect. Who knows what genetic background stamped out his oddly long but, then again, flat white face?
“Mr. McGill?” he asked, his lips approximating a smile.
“Who are you?”
“Timothy Moore.”
“Can I help you?”
“Are you Leonid McGill?”
I hesitated. So many things were going on that I wasn’t even certain about answering this simplest of questions. I didn’t like the way Moore smelled but maybe he had some kind of glandular problem. I was busy but no one was paying me, except if I set up a constitutionally innocent man for a mob hit.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “Come on in, Mr. Moore. Have a seat.”
I backed away, letting him into the front office. I decided to meet with him out there. That way I didn’t have to turn my back to enter the codes for the inner sanctum.
I sat down behind the desk and gave Tim Moore my blandest expression.
“Nice office,” he said, lowering tentatively across from me. “Great building.”
He was nervous but that didn’t necessarily portend anything sinister. Unfaithful wives made men uncomfortable; thieving employees sometimes did, too.
“What’s your business, Mr. Moore?”
“I’m an office manager,” he said. “I work for Crow and Williams.”
“I mean, what is your business with me?”
A smile flitted across the little man’s sensuous mouth. This wan grin soon became a grimace.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m not used to these things.”
“You’re here now,” I said. “Just say it—one word after the other.”
“I’m being blackmailed,” he said at half-capacity.
He took out a cigarette.
“No smoking in here,” I informed him. After all, I hadn’t had one since visiting Toolie in the prison infirmary.
He looked at the white paper roll in his hand and then returned it to the pack, put the pack in his jacket pocket, and inhaled deeply as if he were smoking anyway.
On the exhale he said, “I’m married to a wonderful woman, Mr. McGill. I’ve been in love with her for sixteen years.”
I almost believed him.
“You got a photograph?”
He leaned over on one buttock, lifting the other in the armless ash chair. He could have been going for a gun, but since my debacle with Willie Sanderson I had moved a pistol to the outer-office desk; it was in my hand at that very moment.
But all he came out with was a wallet. He flipped it open to the picture of a mousy-looking brunette with big eyes and a painted-on smile. She was in her thirties when the picture was taken. I didn’t believe that he would have gone this far to prepare a lie.
I nodded and he put the wallet away.
“Eighteen months ago I strayed with a little Asian girl named Annie,” Tim said. “It didn’t last long. It was like a forty-eight-hour bug. I was in Atlantic City for a seminar and she was staying in the hotel.
“She came up to see me in the city a few times but I was over her by then and looking for a way to cut it off. Finally I just told her that I loved my wife and that was it.”
“How’d she take it?”
“Pretty good.” He nodded. “Pretty okay. She looked sad but said that she understood. She had a serious boyfriend and was feeling guilty herselfÓ€guilty h.”
“Is this Annie the one blackmailing you?”
“It’s a man that called. But she might be putting him up to it. He says that he’s got pictures. He knows where we stayed and specific details about things we, we did.” Moore hesitated a moment, remembering. “You see, I got this rich aunt that died—Mona Lester. I got a little cash out of it.”
“Did Annie know about the aunt?”
Tim squinted the way some inexperienced boxers do when you hit them with a solid body shot.
“In that first couple’a days I told her almost everything. I thought it was love. I didn’t know.”
“How much they want?”
“Twenty-five thousand.”
“How much you inherit?”
“Two hundred eighty-six thousand, but I thought it was gonna be closer to a million.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Seems like they should have asked for more.”
“I don’t know,” Timothy Moore replied. “The guy on the phone said that he just needed enough to settle a debt he had. He wants me to bring the money to this condemned building on West Twenty-fourth tomorrow night.”
“Why don’t you go to the police? They could grab this guy, twist his arm, and go after the girl. That would be easy and legal.”
“Yeah.” He looked up at me with miserable eyes. “But then there might be an investigation and a trial. Margot would find out. All she’d care about was the affair. I don’t wanna lose my wife, brother.”
It’s always odd when a white man calls me brother, makes me wonder if he’s trying to put one over on me.
But he sounded honestly upset. There was pain there, but still . . . that stench of lilac and sweat.
“So what do want from me, Mr. Moore?”
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars,” he said, as if that was an answer to my question.
“For what?”
“You go to the meeting and get the lowdown on this guy. You tell him that you’re a witness and if he ever shows his face again you’ll go to the cops. Then give him some of the money, and you, you keep the rest. That way I’ll have paid for what I did wrong and, and I can go back to my life with Margot.”
He was near tears.
“How’d you hear about me?”Ó€ut me?”<
“Luke Nye,” he said. “Luke Nye said that you might agree to do a job like this.”
“How you know him?”
“Prescott Mimer. I used to tend bar for a friend of Prescott’s on the weekends—for some extra cash.”
“Who’s the friend?”
“What does all this have to do with what I’m asking for, Mr. McGill?”
“Answer my questions, all of my questions,” I said, “or walk out the same way you came in.”
“Karl Zebriski,” he said. “His bar used to be at Fortieth and Second, but now he has a place in the Lamont Towers near Columbus Circle.”
I was nervous listening to the poorly put-together man. On the one hand, he seemed to have real feelings, but on the other someone had tried to kill me once already that week.
Everything he said was reasonable. It could have well been the truth.
My life was on the line, more than one line, but that wasn’t going to give me a break on the rent; only prison did that, because even in death your plot is only leased.
“Give me a number where I can reach you,” I said, pushing a notepad across the desk. “I’ll call you in a few hours.”
“But I’ve got the money right here,” he said, holding up the briefcase.
“Keep it. I’ll call you later and we will see what we shall see at that time.”
There was an argument in his eyes but he could see that there was a brick wall behind mine. He scribbled down a number, nodded, and rose to his feet.
“I really need the help, brother,” he said.
“And I really will call you,” I replied.
Ê€„
42
Crow and Williams,” a young man answered. “How can I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Timothy Moore, please.”
“Mr. Moore is out on personal business. Do you want to leave a message?”
I hung up.
I’d met Prescott Mimer before. He was a construction foreman who liked to hang out in wise-guy bars. I doubted that he’d recognize my voice, so I called him saying that I was a headhunter for office managers and was considering doing some work setting Timothy Moore up with a positioÖ€…n.
“He’s all right,” Mimer told me. “I never worked with him or anything. But he seems like a good guy. Did he give you my number for a reference?”
“No. Your name came up in a discussion with a gentleman named Luke Nye. I’m sorry to bother you.”
“That’s okay. It’s just that I can’t help you with his work habits or anything.”
“Is he married?”
“What’s that got to do with a job?”
“It’s an organic grain and cereal company from the Midwest,” I said. “Family business. They like a wholesome picture.”
“Yeah,” Mimer said. “He’s crazy over that woman.
Margaret, I think her name is . . .”
I skipped Zebriski and went straight to Luke Nye. Nye was a pool hustler who played in private tournaments around the city and up and down the East Coast. If you gave a moray eel a couple of hundred million years he would evolve into Luke Nye.
“Hey, LT,” Nye said over the line. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Tryin’ to clean up my act.”
“You callin’ about Tim?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?”
“He came to me yesterday and asked if I knew a detective could help him with somethin’ that wasn’t quite on the up and up. I heard you weren’t in the life anymore, but then I figured you could always say no.”
“Was my name the only one you gave him?”
“You’re one of a kind, LT.”
I COULDN’T SEE a flaw, only smell one. And the smell was all physical.
“Hello?” Tim Moore said through the phone.
“How many numbers in the lock on your briefcase?”
“Three.”
“There’s a variety store a block or so north of Bleecker on the east side of Hudson,” I said. “It’s called Iko’s. Set the lock to six-six-seven and leave it there for a Joan Ligget.”
“Should I put your money in it, too?”
“Yeah. Do that,” I said. “Now give me what you got.”
Fifteen minutes later I was entering Zephyra Ximenez’s number.
“Yes, Mr. McGill?”
“Have somebody pick up a briefcase at Iko’s and leave it with the guys at the front desk of my office building, ASAP.”
SHELLY AND DIMITRI were sitting down to dinner with their mother when I came in. I had called again, and so Katrina made the service coincide with my ETA. I was carrying the briefcase, less my five-thousand-dollar fee.
“Hi, Daddy,” my daughter said just a bit too loudly.
Dimitri grunted and I nodded to him.
Katrina is the best cook I’ve ever met—bar none. She can make anything. That night she’d prepared red beans and rice with a spicy tomato sauce and filled with andouille and chorizo sausage. In little dishes arranged in the middle of the dining table she had set out grated white cheese, chopped Bermuda onions, green olives, and diced jalapeños—seeds and all.
I pulled up my chair at the head of the table, setting the briefcase beside me. I like a good meal. Katrina beamed from the opposite end and for a brief span I forgot our differences and disconnections.
“Smells great, honey,” I said. “How you doin’, D?”
“Okay, I guess,” Dimitri mumbled.
“How’s school?”
“Fine.”
“You need anything there?”
He shook his head. That meant that he wasn’t going to talk anymore.
But I didn’t care. I was thinking about the young woman of Scandinavian descent whom I had loved passionately for nine months, with sporadic recurrences for a year or two after.
What had Tim compared it to? A forty-eight-hour bug. Our love was more like a couple of years of consumption on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It took us that long to recover. Though the symptoms were gone, I was often reminded of them at dinner.
“I’m going to take a special course in African-American history, Dad,” Shelly said happily, still a bit too loud. “I met with Professor Hill about an independent study he suggested for the fall. We’ll be covering the black relationship to communism . . .”
