Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01 (14 page)

I went into my shell and he hit both shoulders with two untrained roundhouse blows. Every joint in my body rattled.

Once it was only a suspicion, but now it was a fact: I was too old for this.

I looked up just in time to see him jump at me. I fell to the floor and rolled away, letting him crash into the wall.

Any intelligent creature would have stopped a moment after slamming into a wall. But Big Boy just turned and sought me out with his dull, hateful eyes. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t breathing hard. There wasn’t even a bruise from my pinpoint punching or on the part of his head that had put a dent in the plaster wall. It was one of those moments when you realize that only a higher power could see you through.

Whenever a door is opened in my office, hidden digital cameras go to work. They take pictures every few seconds for eight minutes, so the whole fight between me and Big Boy was captured in two-and-a-half-second lapses. I’ve studied the fight more than once, and every time I see it I wonder why I’m not dead.

He hadn’t landed more than a few flush punches but he was so strong that that hardly mattered. I hit him maybe a dozen times with absolutely no effect. I tried to kick him in the balls—I wasn’t proud—but he was too tall and easily avoided my craven attempt at survival.

At one point I ran behind the receptionist’s desk, hoping for just a few seconds’ respite. But the guy, with only one hand, slid the desk across the room and into the wall.

That was one of the most disheartening moments of my deeply unsatisfying life. I had never seen such raw power. And I knew that this man had already murdered Roger Brown, Frank Tork, and Norman Fell. His hateful idiot face told me that he would not listen to my entreaties.

Two half-seconds passed. During the first increment I realized that I was very close to the end of my life—that this man was going to slaughter me and there was no way out. I used the rest of my last second deciding that I should go out on a high note.

I screamed like a berserker Viking and grabbed the backrest of the thirty-six-and-three-quarter-pound swivel chair that nobody but me sat in. I swung that chair up using the last of my fear-induced strength. My nemesis took a step back, and I knew I was done for. But then the backrest came off in my hands and the rest of the chair went flying at the big man’s head.

It hit him and he went down and out.

I fell to my knees wheezing, a Greco-Roman wrestler at the end of a championship bout. When I tried to rise to make the 911 call I fell flat on my face as I had done in Gordo’s Gym a thousand years before.

S
ome upstanding citizen heard the ruckus and called the cops. That citizen should have been me. Don’t get me wrong, I did call the police, but only as my second act of consciousness. That was five minutes later. It took three minutes to get to the phone and two more to call Breland Lewis, my long-time lawyer and sometime friend.

Way before Breland got there I was on my knees, with a plastic tie holding my wrists behind my back. There were eleven cops in the twelve-by-fourteen room, where a good deal of the floor space was taken up by the body of the most powerful man I ever fought.

“This guy’s alive,” one of the boys in blue shouted.

Alive? A blow like he received could have killed a real bear.

There’s a small squad of policemen assigned to the Tesla Building. With so many businesses—and possible crimes—there are always a few cops in the vicinity. Each and every one of them has my name and statistics committed to memory. I was a person of interest to the NYPD. No amount of redemption was going to change that fact.

Sergeant Kenneth Holloway was the officer in charge. He had told me, more than once, always in the exact same words, that “I will see you locked up for forty years, McGill.”

He said it to me again when I was on my knees, but I didn’t have the strength to care.

“Why did you attack him?” Holloway asked.

I looked up and saw skinny, diminutive Breland Lewis shoulder his way past cops twice his size.

“Out of my way,” he peeped like an angry chick. “Mr. McGill is my client and I have every right to see him. Leonid, are you okay?”

“We got your client on attempted murder, Counselor,” Holloway said, grinning ugly.

Looking at those two, I had to wonder about the American idea of a white race. Holloway was tall and beefy, pink-skinned with stingy porcine eyes and ears. Lewis, on the other hand, was a flyweight with fine features carved from the ivory of a recent kill. As far as that went, the white man on the floor had brownish-white skin. He was a Caucasian, too, by American standards, but in ancient Europe those three would all have been considered different races.

My mind, I realized, was still wandering. I thought maybe I should go see a doctor soon.

“This man pushed his way into Leonid’s office and attacked him,” Breland was shouting.

“Then why isn’t LT dead on the floor?” Holloway bellowed.

“Release my client!”

“To Attica, for forty years!”

I wondered what the number forty meant in the cop’s interpretation of justice.

Just then the paramedics barged in. There were four of them in white and blue, two women and two men. There were now eighteen people in the antechamber of my office and spilling out into the hall. It was like a party.

“What’s the combination to your inner office?” Holloway asked me after consulting with the head meat-wagon attendant.

“A secret,” I replied.

I was hoping that Holloway would slap me, not to claim police brutality but to snap me out of the malaise that exertion and a beating had brought on.

The paramedics were turning Big Boy over onto a hydraulic gurney that had been lowered to the floor. He didn’t look good. There was a gash on the left side of his forehead and his tan skin was wending toward blue. He was breathing, though, and even my ideologue father would have to admit that breath is the only true definition of life.

Holloway and Lewis were arguing: the bulldog and the chicklet. I was still breathing hard, and trying to think of something that would make sense in a situation like that.

“What’s goin’ on in here?” a familiar voice commanded.

Everyone went silent as Carson Kitteridge entered, parting the sea of blues and white.

“Your boy tried to murder this man,” Holloway said, triumph buoying his words.

Big Boy was being rolled from the room on the gurney. Kitteridge glanced at him and then turned back to the fat sergeant.

“What’d he say?” Carson asked, nodding in my direction.

“Who cares what he said? It’s obvious what happened. We caught him trying to escape. And I bet ya dollars to doughnuts that when the victim comes to, he’s gonna have that story to tell.”

Kitteridge tried to stifle his sneer. Instead of responding, he went over to my displaced desk and climbed on top. There in the corner he pressed a panel and a section of the wall gave way. Unplugging the digital camera he found there, he hopped down and returned to Holloway.

I didn’t have to look to know what they were seeing. I once had occasion to show Carson pictures taken with the secret camera.

I have to give Holloway credit. He knew when he was beaten.

“Release him,” he said to a sandy-haired minion.

After snipping the plastic tie, the young man even helped me to my feet.

“Tell me something, Sergeant Holloway,” I said while massaging the blood back into my hands. “Why do you make suspects get down on their knees?”

“Makes ’em easier to control,” he said.

If I was an innocent man I might have struck him down. But the truth was, I deserved Holloway. All the years I’d pulled the plug on men who maybe weren’t angels. I was Gordo’s hammer for more than a score of men. That’s why I could be tied up and thrown down on my knees.

That’s why someone will kill me one day.

 

 

 

THEY TOOK MY CAMERA but I didn’t care. All the photos taken were transmitted to a storage device in my inner office. Even if they
lost
the evidence, I had two other cameras and a backup.

Slowly the cops left my offices. Along with the camera they took the swivel chair. Holloway was the last of the uniforms to depart. Before going through the door, he pointed at me, making his thumb and forefinger like the hammer and barrel of an old-fashioned six-shooter. It wasn’t an empty gesture.

“Did they strike you?” Breland asked me.

“No.”

“Did they castigate you?”

“What?”

“Curse you, use harsh or foul language?” he said by way of explanation.

“I know what the word means, man. This is cops and killers here. There might have been some cursing, but damn, it would be a miracle if there wasn’t.”

Breland was an odd guy. A decade older than I, he looked ten years younger. He’d once worked for a lawyer who represented a reputed crime boss and his associates. That’s how we met. When the crime boss and his lawyer were brought down, Breland needed work. I liked the guy, so I sent some fairly honest jobs his way. It turned out that he was the loyal sort, and so, even though I might have been a little slow with my payment schedule, he was always there when the chains rattled at my door.

Kitteridge had taken a seat in one of the surviving visitors’ chairs.

“Are there more questions, Detective?” Breland asked.

“Not here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m taking your client to our offices for an interrogation, a prolonged interrogation.”

“Mr. McGill needs medical attention.”

It occurred to me that the paramedics hadn’t even looked at me. Just the fact that I was under arrest meant that they didn’t care about my health.

“You want a ride to the Rikers medical facility, LT?” Kitteridge asked.

“What grounds you got to arrest me, man?”

“Have you ever heard the words ‘material witness’?”

B
lood leaked slowly from the split on my temple down onto the lapel of my jacket. Now and then a droplet would splash on the pale-green Formica tabletop in the interrogation room.

“We should get you some first aid,” Carson Kitteridge said.

“It’ll wait until I get home.”

“You’re getting blood on my table,” the detective complained.

“I didn’t ask to be here.”

Carson wasn’t happy, but neither was I under arrest. He could have taken me to a prison infirmary but he wanted answers and knew from long, hard experience that I wasn’t the kind of guy that he could bully. The blood was part of our dialogue—if he wanted to have a conversation, it would be with the wounded man he wouldn’t allow to rest after a horrific beating.

“So tell me about Willie Sanderson,” Kitteridge said.

“Who?”

“Come on, LT. Don’t get me mad now.”

“I don’t know anyone named Sanderson.”

“You nearly kill a guy and you don’t even know his name?”

“He’s still alive?”

“Who is he?”

“Never met him before. Never heard of him. I doubt that he’s even human if he survived that flying chair.”

“If he dies it’s manslaughter.”

“Bullshit. That man was trying to kill me. You saw the pictures.”

The cop sat back and did that lacing-his-fingers thing. I’ve never understood what he intends to communicate with that gesture.

“We got one, maybe two men bludgeoned and strangled, and a third who almost fell in line,” he said.

“What men?” I asked.

“Your boy fits the description of the guy who went to see Roger Brown. If you take off the hat and fake whiskers he looks an awful lot like the guy who paid Frank Tork’s bail. That’s what I call suspicious.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Suspicious about your boy Sanderson. I’m just a victim here.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe you were in business with Sanderson,” he suggested. “Maybe he decided to take you down and keep the profits for himself.”

“What business? What profits? I was walking out of my door and he attacked me. He didn’t say a word, and my bankbook’s got cobwebs all over it. I was not in business with him, and I never met him.”

Kitteridge was watching my eyes. He did that often. He believed, I think, that he could tell when a man was lying by looking into his eyes. I believed that he could also.

After a moment he pulled his fingers apart and made an open-palmed plaintive gesture.

“Help me out with this, LT,” he said. “We got some white maniac from Albany killing African-Americans on the street. It has the stink of a hate crime.”

“I never even understood the idea of a hate crime,” I said, wasting time, trying to digest the fact that my would-be killer was from Albany. Was he the one who hired Fell? No. Fell didn’t recognize him when he came in for the kill. “I mean, if you kill somebody with evil intent, it’s murder and you should pay for it. That’s all, right?”

“I can sit here all night,” the cop replied.

I leaned forward and three neat little droplets splashed on the tabletop.

“I’m beat, man,” I said. “I been thumped on, handcuffed, dragged down here, and made to wait for hours while you shuffled papers and drank bad coffee. Let me go home and get cleaned up. Let me get some sleep and maybe I’ll come up with somethin’ for ya.”

“I could arrest you.”

“For self-defense?”

“This isn’t going away,” Carson said. “This is murder. If Sanderson pulls through and incriminates you, all bets are off.”

“I don’t know anything.”

 

 

 

TWILL WAS WAITING near the front desk of the Chelsea station. He wore black trousers and a pin-striped blue-and-white dress shirt that was wanting a pair of cuff links. He was sitting there on a wooden bench next to a young blonde in gold hot pants and a blue halter. The young woman was smiling brightly, chattering away at my son. He nodded sagely now and again and spoke in a low voice.