Known to Evil (22 page)

"Where can I find this Pinky?"

"He's been dead for three years. At least, nobody's seen 'im in that long."

"This Pressman's freelance?"

"No. He works for some group. I never knew who. But just 'cause I can't name 'em don't mean they can't nail you."

I took two thousand of Alphonse Rinaldo's dollars from my pocket and laid them on Luke's table. One for Pressman and the other for our previous conversation about the pimp Gustav.

"There's another thing," I said.

Luke's amphibian eyes glimmered a bit.

"Loan shark named Joe Fleming."

"What about him?"

"I'm wondering if he'd deal in automatic weapons."

"Maybe if the Russians invaded the East Coast and the Secretary of State asked him personally. Maybe then. But, you know, ole Joe is strictly small time. He's jittery as a baby deer, and, you know, guns are likely to go off."

I placed another wad of money on the table, wondering if I should bear the load myself or allow Rinaldo to treat me.

I WAITED UNTIL I was back in my office to make any calls.

It was just after nine and the sun had been down for hours. Gazing out of my window at the Statue of Liberty's torch burning in the dark of the Hudson, I entered a number.

"Hello, Mr. McGill," the young man said in my ear.

"Tiny."

"How can I help you?" he asked.

This greeting was strange. Tiny "Bug" Bateman was at best monotone and at worst taciturn when I called him. The only reason he worked for me at all was because I had done his father a serious favor, and the one true connection the young whiz kid had to the outside world was his old man.

"There's a woman," I said. "Angelique Tara Lear . . ." I gave him her address, date of birth, place of employment, and school history. "What I'd like is any trace information you might be able to dig up. I'll pay you for this. It's for a client, and there are no favors involved."

"I don't want your money, Mr. McGill."

"Since when?"

"Um ..."

Hesitation?

"You remember that girl you had call me last month on that burglary thing?" he asked.

Someone had stolen a client's grandmother's jewelry. There was some sentimental value attached. I had Zephyra Ximenez call Tiny to pass on my needs, as I was preoccupied with another case.

Zephyra might have been a working woman with a title and a business plan, but she was also beautiful enough to be a runway model in Europe.

"Yeah?" I said.

"I found my discussions with her, um, exhilarating."

"And?"

"I'd like a personal introduction."

"You live on the Internet," I said. "So does she. You know how to get in touch. What more can I do?"

Bug considered himself part of a historically based infrastructural movement that he called
techno-Anarchism
. The members of this (largely unconscious) movement he designated as
monadic particulates
. I could see why the young brown man might be attracted to Zephyra's mind--as well as the rest of her. Of course they hadn't met face-to-face, but I was sure that Bug had found a picture of her online.

"I just want you to put in a good word for me," the computer genius said.

"Listen, Tiny," I said. "You live in a cocoon in a basement in the West Village. She spends most of her time in a house in Queens. What's a word going to do?"

If there existed an Oxford Pictionary, its entry for "butterball" would have been Bug Bateman. He'd work up a good sweat walking a city block on a chilly autumnal afternoon. Even his hands were moist and pudgy. At twenty- nine, he sat in a chair surrounded by computers all day every day, and probably all night every night.

"You're refusing me?" There was actual pain in his voice.

"No. I'm just saying that I need you to work for a client of mine. I will pay your going rate on that and I'll do what I can for you about Zephyra--I'm just sayin' that you can't predict what a woman's gonna do."

"You'll talk to her?"

"Sure. Why not?"

While Tiny pondered the two-word question, I suspected that I'd just revealed to him a major flaw in his isolationist techno-philosophy.

"Um," he said. "I'll look up information on this woman."

My cell phone made the sound of the clang of a single bell. I had another question to ask Tiny but the incoming call was more important.

"I'll talk to Zephyra in the near future. Bye."

I hung up the office phone and answered the cell just as it was calling for the next round.

"Hey, Gordo," I said. "I was wondering if maybe you retired and moved down to Saint Lucia to live."

"Or die," he said in a voice that was even more strained and raspy than usual.

39

I
n the taxi ride downtown I drifted into a reverie about my parents: Tolstoy, the self-styled union organizer and radical Communist revolutionary, and Lena, the pious Harlemite who loved her man as much as any jazz lyricist could imagine. He went off to join a Cuban brigade down in South America soon after my twelfth birthday, leaving me fatherless, and virtually motherless, because Lena took to her bed and died soon after. She was the only proof I ever needed that a person could die from a broken heart.

That began my long and uneasy relationship with the various branches of New York City government--including the NYPD. I was continually running away from foster homes, getting into fights, and doing odd jobs for petty criminals. I was in and out of youth facilities. The foster parents I had weren't bad people. Many of them, I think, truly cared about me. But my father had trained me and my younger brother, Nikita, as revolutionaries from the time we could toddle. I hated Tolstoy, but at the same time he was my hero, and so there was little I had in common with the petit bourgeois churchgoers who tried to set me on the right path.

Then one day I stumbled into Gordo's Gym. He was only in his early forties then but he already looked old, craggy. He strapped some gloves on me and put me in the ring with an older, more experienced boy. I lost the round but never stopped coming forward, and so Gordo trained me, for seven years.

Maybe if I had paid closer attention to Gordo, if I would have let his hand guide me, I wouldn't have taken my homegrown revolutionary training and turned it into piecework for the mob. But I couldn't stay on boxing's bicycle--because there was no road, or even a path, that led to my destination.

THEY HAD HIM IN a southwest corner room with three other men on the eighth floor of St. Vincent's Hospital. He looked even smaller than usual in the big mechanical bed. His eyes were closed when I pulled up the chair.

Gordo's brown skin was tinged red from decades of blood rising to the surface as he exhorted his boys to give more. He was the color of rage, the man in your corner, win or lose.

"Leonid," he whispered.

"G."

He sat up a bit by shifting his knobby shoulders one way and then the other.

"Why you look so glum, boy?" he said. "I'm the one down for the count here."

I laughed, feeling a pang of guilt that my sick friend was comforting me.

"What they got you in here for, man?"

"First it was pre-ulcers, then it was plain ulcers, that went into bleedin' ulcers, and now they say I got cancer. An' I believe it, too, 'cause it hurt like a mothahfuckah."

"Stomach cancer?"

"A hole in one, boy. You could go up against Tiger Woods, with the right caddy."

"They gonna operate?"

"Not at first. They wanna nuke it an' then poison it and then if me an' it is still alive they might get the cut man."

"That's a bitch," I said.

"Body shot like you wouldn't believe." Gordo's wry smile turned sour.

"What do you need?"

"What's that lawyer's name you got?"

"Breland Lewis."

"I want you to get him to fill out some papers for me."

"Like what?"

"Augustine."

"Your nephew?"

"He's a good man but he don't have the sense of a termite. I wanna leave him the gym, it's all I got, but you know he'd mess it up in a week. Rack up some kinda fool debt, or maybe just sell the whole buildin' an' blow the money on his good-for-nuthin' kids or that money-hungry fourth wife'a his."

"You own the building?"

"What other landlord than me gonna let a sweaty ole gym don't make a nickel a day stay up there?"

I was astonished. It was a dilapidated old building but it was in the West Thirties, not three blocks from Penn Station. It had to be worth millions upon millions, even in the current real estate slump.

"So what do you want from Breland?" I asked.

"I want him to work out some kinda scheme to leave the place to you and then for you to take care of Augustine. You know, you get a li'l bit and then pass the rest off to him in parcels."

"Why you gonna trust me, G? You know my track record is not a good one."

"Shit. You think I don't know it? Man, if I could find somebody better they'd be sittin' here right now. But you know, boy, even though you about as crooked as one'a them curly bamboo plants, I figure even they grow toward the sun."

I laughed instead of tearing up and we changed the subject to De La Hoya and Pacquiao.

"Oscar should hang up them damn gloves," Gordo said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because there comes a time when you just don't win anymore."

"But there's always a chance at a comeback," I said with emphasis.

Gordo considered my words for a few moments and then said, "True that."

"THEY'RE GOING TO GIVE him radiation and then chemotherapy," the head nurse at the front station told me. "He's going to be very weak and will probably have to be sent to a nursing home."

"No," I said.

"No?"

"Gordo's my stepfather. When you release him, me and my wife will take him in."

The woman, her name was Naomi Watkins, gave me the papers I needed to have signed and ratified. I gave her my card and got my name put at the top of his list of relatives.

WHEN I GOT HOME I told Katrina about my decision. Maybe I should have asked her before making plans. Maybe I would have asked her if she hadn't run off with that banker for nearly a year.

"That's as it should be," she said, surprising me with her calm. "But we may have to get a nurse to be here for those hours that we're both out."

Before going off to bed, Katrina added, "Dimitri called."

"What'd he say?"

"That he's in love and off with his girl and that they're in Montreal. I wanted to be mad at him, but I was just so happy to hear his voice."

"Did he say when he was coming home?"

"A few days."

"You see?" I said. "I told you that everything was going to be fine."

At least one of us should believe in happy endings.

40

I
spent the latter part of the evening rearranging my den for the time when we took Gordo in. I brought in sheets and put my weapons in the safe, straightened up the desk, and even vacuumed.

After all that, I set up my laptop and got online.

The best detectives in the world are the arbiters of spam. They find you wherever you are, like water seeking its level, like blood-hungry mosquitoes in the wild. I had sixteen unwanted communications for various legal and illegal services, offers coming in from Nairobi to Lima, Hong Kong to West Hollywood. I don't think this was what modern economists had in mind when they began constructing their definition of "globalization."

Bug must have been serious about Zephyra because I received a long document from him, giving me all kinds of hitherto unrevealed information about Angie. She'd participated in a few long-distance runs of ten kilometers or more and worked for the Hillary campaign during the primaries. She played Go over the Internet and was pretty good at it, earning an emerald rating in a California club.

There were a lot of other loose details and one salient set of facts: John Prince's phone number and address--he lived in Chelsea, between Sixth and Seventh. There was even a photograph of the handsome young man. This, as I suspected, was the boyfriend on her bedroom wall.

It was just after three in the morning, time for a man in the private-investigating profession to get to work. But I was tired, exhausted by the welter of details coming at me like the furious punches of a flyweight working a speed bag.

I sat down on the daybed, and the next thing I knew I was on my back, witnessing the miracle of sunlight as it filled the window.

I awoke, hoping that Angie had not died in the night while I wasted time sleeping. I wished I had a number for Dimitri, and an answer for Ron Sharkey.

But all I had was a headache pulsating through my consciousness.

I forced down a serving of muesli and cream, drained two cups of press-pot French roast coffee, and made my way to the street, hoping that today would bring the break I needed to get a leg up on the world.

I CALLED JOHN PRINCE from my office at 8:32.

Hello. This is JP speaking. I'm not here right now and so if you'd like to leave a message I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can.

I hung up, realizing that I hadn't thought about Aura at all that morning. This evidence of healing did not ease my mind. I didn't want to be cured from the only real love I had known in my adult life.

"Mr. McGill?" came Mardi's soft voice over the intercom. She'd come in early.

"Yes?"

"George Toller is out here."

Did he somehow know that I was thinking about his woman?

"Send him in."

HE CAME INTO MY office without knocking this time. He wore a disgusting lime suit crosshatched with a generous amount of dark-green and black thread. In his arms he carried three thick manila folders. There was something dramatic in the way he carried himself, as if he bore tidings of great portent. He stood before my desk and dropped the heavy pile of paper, making a loud slamming noise.

His eyes sought mine as a sneer crossed the lips I hated.

"Take-out menus?" I asked.

"Do you have a minute?" he replied, sitting without being invited.