“Let me up.”
There was a hesitation. I had given him a lot of information. I’d lost his seed money and talked to the cops, mentioning his name. I already knew where he lived and so had a way of getting to him.
While he was thinking over his options I saw a small wooden wedge on the concrete outside the outer door of the double-doored entrance. People must have used that little hardwood triangle from time to time when they were moving in their furniture and large appliances.
I picked it up.
“Okay,” Tim said. “Come on, then.”
He buzzed the outer and inner doors only long enough for me to go through one and race the eight feet to grab the other. Hush stayed outside so as not to be seen. He couldn’t make it to the outer door in time but that was okay. I just walked halfway down the hall toward the elevator and doubled back to prop the inner door open with the mover’s wedge, and then opened the outer door for Hush.
We took the stairs at a quick pace. At the third floor, I made my way down toward 3A while Hush stood just insiû€tood jusde the stairwell.
I knocked on the door and it opened immediately. Now there were only four inches of chain separating me from my killer.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Open up, Tim,” I said. “I need some answers.”
“Answers about what?”
“Who did you tell about the money?”
“No one. Why?” The wiry little guy wore an emerald-green robe over purple pajamas. He was nervous, and also confused, trying desperately to work out what my being at his door meant. I noticed that his right hand was hidden from view.
“Somebody knew. He came up behind me on my way to the meet, slammed me in the back of the head, and stole the briefcase.”
While I spoke Hush moved in accordance with his name. When he was a foot to my right I slammed my shoulder against that door. The chain broke and the door swung open—fast. Moore didn’t have time to yelp. He was knocked senseless, sprawled out on the floor while Hush and I rushed in, me retrieving the pistol the point man had dropped and Hush securing the door.
I picked Tim up by his shoulders and threw him into a big yellow chair. Hush moved through a doorway to our right and I checked out the space we were in.
The sofa chair was the only seat in the room. It was placed in front of a seventy-two-inch plasma TV with a small table on the side. The floor was made from wide, dark slats of wood and was heavily sealed.
Moore moaned in the chair and slid down. I let him slump onto the floor. I wasn’t concerned about posture or propriety.
The assassin came back in, telling me with a quick gesture of his head that there was no one else in the apartment.
I was somewhat troubled that we worked so well together.
Hush squatted down in front of our target and pinched his cheek until the skin was bright red.
Moore’s eyes came open and fear filled them to the brows.
Hush showed him his pistol.
“We are going to talk,” he said. “Understand?”
Moore nodded.
“Get in the chair,” I ordered, partly to wrest control of the interrogation from Hush.
Tim was a little unsteady getting up but he made it.
“You were tû€3">“You rying to have me killed,” I said in a markedly pleasant tone. “Why?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Don’t finish that sentence. Don’t lie. I am all out of patience. Just answer my question and maybe you’ll see another day.”
Moore burped loudly. It had a wet sound to it.
I could see a dozen lies forming and dissipating behind his eyes.
Hush settled on the arm of the big chair, holding his pistol almost carelessly. This pose might have seemed unprofessional, but I could see the ever-growing concern in Moore’s eyes. Something about Hush reeked of finality.
Mr. Hush’s wasn’t the only scent. Moore’s sweat was, if anything, even stronger than it had been in my office.
I noticed a small picture frame standing on the little table. It was a photograph of the woman that Moore had in his wallet.
“Hull,” Tim said and then he burped again. “Roman Hull.”
Finally . . . something that made sense.
“How’s that work?” I asked.
“He, he called me and said to be ready.”
“And?”
“A delivery service dropped off a box about fifteen minutes later. There was this cell phone in it. Maybe fifteen minutes more and I got a call.”
“From Roman?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was another voice. They offered me a whole lot of money. A whole lot.” He emphasized the last words as a kind of explanation. After all, wouldn’t I kill him for the kind of money he was suggesting?
“How do you know Hull?” I asked.
“A long time ago I used to be his driver sometimes. He kept in touch with me when I was in Attica. After I got out he’d give me jobs now and then.”
“Where’s the cell phone?”
“Same guy came and picked it up an hour later. He left me the briefcase, too.”
Hush sat up and Timothy flinched.
“Just to get this straight,” I said. “The money was to kill me.”
The frightened man nodded.
“How do you get in touch with him?”
“I don’t.”
Hush stood up.
“Go on down to the car, LT,” he said.
“Hey, wait!” Timothy pleaded. He cut off in mid-screech when Hush showed him a single finger.
“No,” I said.
“Just step outside the door then,” Hush offered.
“We’re not here to kill anybody.”
“But you heard him.”
“I’m turning over a new leaf,” I said. It sounds comical to me now, but I was deadly serious at the time.
“Me too,” Hush replied, “but this man here tried to murder you. That’s a death sentence.”
“It’s over now.”
Maybe for me. But murder had been unleashed in Hush’s nervous system and he needed time to let it work its way out. I stood very still while the slender merchant of death allowed the demon to sink back into his bones.
I don’t think that Timothy Moore drew a breath.
“Call your friend LouBob,” Hush said to Tim. “Ask him what he thinks you should do now that you’re living when you should be dead.
“I’ll meet you downstairs.” These last words were from Hush to me.
He went out the door. I waited for a few beats and was about to follow when a thought occurred to me.
“Hey, Tim.”
“What? What?”
“That picture on your table.”
“What about it?” he said with the barest sliver of steel in his voice.
“That’s Margot for real?”
“Yeah.”
“She left you, huh?”
He nodded.
“Was it over an Asian girl named Annie?”
“Yeah.”
The truth is always the best way to lie.
Ê€„
47
T
his time I sat in the front seat as Hush drove down toward Manhattan. Most of the way we rode in silence, but a few blocks from my door he began to speak in a voice so deep it seemed to be coming up from out of the ground.
“That was very unprofessional.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Why didn’t you let me kill him?”
“I don’t kill people,” I said. “I mean, I’ve done a lot of things . . . and some of them have ended up with people dying. But I steer clear of anything like that nowadays.”
“Found religion?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just one day I realized something.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s hard to explain. I mean, it’s not a thing, it’s a feeling.”
“Like what?”
He pulled to the curb in front of my building.
“It’s like you walk up behind somebody that you intend to kill,” I said, trying to speak his language, I guess. “There you are with your gun pointed to the back of the man’s head. You feel cold inside. It’s just a job. And all of a sudden you aren’t the man holding the gun but the one about to be shot. And you don’t have any idea that there’s somebody behind you, and all the days of your life have led you to this moment.”
“So it’s like you’re killing yourself,” the assassin intoned.
It felt as if I were instructing a newborn deity who was moments away from ascension.
Hush was staring at me. His eyes tightened.
“So, then, it felt like you were saving my life in there?” he asked.
“And mine.”
Hush’s laugh was a friendly thing, boyish and almost silly.
“I’ll be seein’ you, LT,” he said.
I GOT OUT of the Lincoln and it rolled on its way.
I stopped at the door to my building, imagining going up to the eleventh floor, opening the door, taking off my pants before climbing into bed. Then I saw myself wide-eyed in the dark bedroom next to a woman who never understood me; a woman I could not trust. I think I must have stood there for some time before turning away and walking toward Broadway and the parking garage.
I RANG THE BELL multiple times and still had to wait fifteen minutes for the nighttime attendant to rouse himself from sleep in somebody’s backseat.
ON THE WAY OUT to Coney Island I tried thinking about Roman Hull. He was the patriarch of the clan but, according to Poppy Pollis, Bryant ran the family business. Why would the old man order my murder? Had he been behind all the killings? And if so, why?
It was obvious that he’d done this kind of work before. The setup was almost seamless. Moore couldn’t prove that Hull had called him, and after that he only spoke to a subordinate. The phone and the cash were probably untraceable.
The cash. I’d offered to split it with Hush but he turned it down. Now the money was mine. Like the gun that the me of my imagination used to commit murder-suicide, Roman Hull had thrown the money at his own backside.
AT 6:00 A.M. SHARP, A Mann walked out his front door with the dachshund on a different-color leash. In the pale morning the accountant was more pink than white, more a citizen than an individual. He waited at the red light at the end of his block, even though there wasn’t a car on the road as far as you could see.
The accountant ambled down the street as steady as a toddler but with dignity and purpose.
I was beginning to like the man.
I watched him until he’d turned a corner and then I began thinking about how to go against a billionaire who had links to the unions and, at least to a degree, to the mob.
Maybe I should have let Hush kill Moore. That would have sent a clear message to Roman.
My right eye started blinking. There was no itch or irritation, just a repetitious wink that got faster. The left eye joined in with the beat and before I knew it I had drifted off into a light, semi-conscious doze.
The sun shone on my face, and so the darkness of my closed eyes was lightened by solar radiance. This crimson glare seemed almost to have a sound, a humming that caught the syncopation of a kind of buzzing. It felt like I could almost count the beats.
My head nodded and then lifted up abruptly.
It was seventeen minutes later and A Mann was waddling back toward his front door.
Could I let him die?
My phone let out a cry of gibbering monkeys.
“Hey, Tone,” I said after the third repetition of my ancestors’ chattering.
“Where’s my accountant?”
“I caught a glimpse of him yesterday afternoon.”
“Where?”
“Saratoga. He was betting on a nag.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He knew somebody who worked there and they took him into the offices. He was with this blonde that would set you back twenty-five hundred dollars a night.”
“You lost him?”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t matter. I know his tastes and I got a line on the blonde. It might cost me twenty-five hundred but I think I can get to him through her.”
“I don’t care how much you have to spend,” The Suit said. “I need to get to A Mann.”
“No more than a couple’a days, Tony,” I said.
“He spend a lotta time at the track?”
“He was there yesterday.”
“That’s funny. ’Cause, you know, Mann didn’t seem like the gambling type.”
“Maybe it’s the blonde pullin’ him by the nose.”
“Maybe. What’s her name?”
“She called herself Amelia but that was just a dodge,” I said, biting my lip so as not to trip on it. “I’ll have something for you in a couple’a days.”
“All right. But stay in touch.”
“Tony.”
“What?”
“You ever heard of a guy named Roman Hull?”
“No. He have something to do with Mann?”
“Uh-uh,” I grunted. It was worth a try. “It’s this other thing. Don’t worry, though. Mann is number one on my list.”
“With a bullet,” the gangster added.
I WAS HALF the way back to Manhattan when the phone gibbered again.
“Yeah?”
“Hello, Leonid,” Harris Vartan said pleasantly.
“Mr. V,” I said, wondering if it was my phone or Tony’s that was bugged.
“How’s it going witƒ€€wash your searches?”
“What do you want from me?” Maybe I sounded a bit testy.
“You should never lose your composure, Leonid. Even when you’ve lost your temper you should not let it show. The boxer lives by such a creed, does he not?”
“Sometimes they carry him out on a stretcher.”
“In the end we all go out that way.”
No news there. I waited for further information.
“I’ll be checking in on you, Leonid,” Vartan said and the connection was broken.
Ê€„
48
My next stop was two blocks north and half a block west of Gracie Mansion: the directions Hannah had given me to her parents’ New York City home.
It was a six-story red brick manor looming from behind a twelve-foot coral-painted stone wall that was quite thick and imposing. The gate was electric and there was no hiding from the rotating cameras that perched over it like mechanical birds of prey.
I stood across the street, trying to appraise my chances of making some headway. I was still armed and wide awake in spite of only having had a single fifteen-minute catnap in the previous thirty hours.
