Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01 (5 page)

I had worked my way through South America and Asia before Twill came back to mind. I couldn’t let him know that I had bugged his IP. Not that I was worried about him getting upset but because this wouldn’t be the last intervention I’d have to make in his formative years. It wasn’t the first, either.

At the age of fourteen he had already spent six months in a juvenile facility for stealing middle school property.

“I got the idea from something you said, Dad,” he’d told me when we got home from the police station after his initial arrest.

“From me?”

“You were always sayin’ how people in Africa and other places didn’t have the tools they needed to compete, so I found out about the School Supply Fund and set up a fake office to sell computers to them.”

“How much property did you move?” I asked. The boy had been arrested for stealing five computers and three microscopes.

“A lot,” young Twill answered.

He’d organized a group of adolescent thieves at eleven schools, kids that he’d met through his sister’s Leadership Camp the previous summer. They had cleared over fifteen thousand dollars and still gave the NGO a great deal.

Luckily the authorities didn’t have enough of an imagination to delve into the depths of Twilliam’s crimes. But I was put on notice to keep him out of trouble.

When I looked up, the sun was setting. Twill always gave me both worry and wonderment. He was the only person I’d known who met me halfway in life.

 

 

 

AT ABOUT 8:30 I walked across from the Tesla to the East Side and took a subway up to Eighty-sixth Street. From Lexington I walked two blocks north, and east for three. There I came to the Crenshaw, an exclusive little hotel that catered to an upscale clientele.

The doorman, clad in a red coat and black trousers, gave me a look like Juliet had at Berg, Lewis & Takayama. I smiled as pleasantly as I could, walked past him, and made my way to the bar. It was a dark room of red lampshades and dark-stained wood. I was half an hour early but Ambrose was already there at a small round table near the high bar. He was seated in a spindly chair with his hands clasped on his lap. I remember thinking that he was just sitting there, not reading a newspaper or a book, not searching his BlackBerry for e-mails and text messages. He wore a dark-gray suit with a bright-red vest and a checkered blue-and-white ascot. His glass frames were small and rectangular, and his blue, blue eyes didn’t miss a thing.

“Mr. McGill,” he said through a meaningless smile. “Have a seat.”

He gestured at a sturdier chair across from him.

I sat, putting an elbow on my left knee and a palm on my right. I took that position to let Thurman know that I meant to get down to business.

“Wonderful weather, isn’t it?” he said. “They talk about global warming but every year seems more moderate than the last, cooler and more habitable.”

“Why does your client want these names?” I said.

Ambrose swiveled his head slowly, making sure that no one was listening.

“Why does anybody want anything?” he asked, moving his shoulders in a kind of bound-up shrug.

“I do it for the money,” I said. “But not if it causes trouble for somebody who doesn’t deserve it.”

Ambrose smiled.

“I’m not joking with you, man,” I said. “I need to know what you’re going to use this information for.”

Thurman was in his forties but looked older. He was bulbous, with a receding hairline and pudgy, pale hands. He used his little mitts to pull down the Ben Franklin spectacles, peering over the frames at me through the gloom of the posh bar.

“I was told that you were the kind of man who did a job with no questions asked,” he said.

“Who told you that?”

“It doesn’t matter who it was. What matters is that I seem to have been misinformed.”

“I used to be a heartless kind of guy, Mr. Thurman,” I said. “If a job needed me to be cold-blooded, cruel, or blind I was willing to oblige. But today I need to know what you plan to do with what I give you.”

“Are you trying to up your remuneration?” he asked, missing the honesty in my tone.

“Not really.”

Thurman pushed his foppish glasses up and sat back in his chair. Considering me, he took in a deep breath through his nostrils.

“A person, the name doesn’t matter, had a son who died tragically and comparatively young. It was one of those quick and terrible diseases that come out of nowhere and leaves a happy home bereft.

“This person, the parent, was once a rough-and-ready sort with no money and few prospects. They lived on the Bowery and raised their son there. These young men were his friends. Next month will mark the first anniversary of the boy’s death, and my client, the boy’s parent, wishes to include his old friends together in the memorial service.”

“Why would your client need all four names or none?”

“It was a promise they made to themselves. I’m not sure but I believe there’s more than a little superstition involved.”

“Names?” I asked.

“No names, Mr. McGill.”

It was a plausible story. Whoever was looking for the young men hadn’t known them since they were teenagers. Roger was upset by someone knowing about his old life, not someone who might be after him today. And, anyway, I was broke and the rent was due.

“It cost me twelve hundred dollars to get this information,” I said. “So before I hand it over to you I need to see eleven thousand, two hundred dollars, right here, right now.” I tapped the table in a fast two-finger tattoo, like some bongo drummer from the fifties.

“Here?” Thurman said, gazing around.

There was no one else except the bartender in the room. She was a young thing with red hair and a sharp nose.

“Have you got a room upstairs or do you have people meet you here just to impress them?” I asked.

T
here were two dark-wood elevator doors next to the front desk. Ambrose pressed the button and we stood there in silence, waiting for a car to come. Two very young women wearing extremely short and sheer party dresses were talking to the dour, gray-headed man who stood behind the reception desk. The girls were shadowed by two older women, one wearing a fox stole, in June, the other attired in a coral Chanel dress, the cost of which would have paid my office rent through Christmas. The older women were visibly disturbed by the particular manifestation of youth before them.

The man behind the desk was acutely aware of the older ladies; he probably knew them by name.

“Are you sure?” the young brunette was saying to the skeptical night manager. “Did you look under Mr. Charles, um, Smith?”

The man shook his head, forcing a smile from somewhere deep down where there had never been levity or light.

“No, Frankie,” the blonde of the two said. “Smythe. Chandler Smythe. He’s in the Coolidge Suite.”

The blonde didn’t look at the man. Her relationship was bonded to the brunette with the bad memory.

“That’s right, Tru.”

“This is unbelievable,” the woman with the dead canine wrapped around her throat said.

The night man was already on the phone, already talking to rich Mr. Smythe. With the receiver still to his ear he managed a constipated grimace, then said, “You can go right up,” to the girls. “It’s on the eleventh floor.”

At that moment a muted chime sounded and the elevator doors opened. I moved inside the chamber, followed by a slightly distracted Ambrose Thurman. The door was already closing when one of the children—I think it was Tru—cried, “Hold that door!”

I heard the call but it didn’t move me. I was conducting business. When I was on the job I resisted any diversions. But Ambrose’s arm shot out and a new kind of smile, a grin actually, restructured his pear-shaped face.

“Ladies,” he said as Tru and Frankie joined us.

“Eleventh floor, please,” Tru replied in a surprisingly business-like tone.

The elevator car was stylish with lobster-pink velvet walls and an actual crystal chandelier hanging above. The metal fittings were gold-plated and brilliant, but the mechanism was clearly from the same era. The car climbed slowly as the not-so-subtle scent of the girls’ perfumes filled the space.

“You’re a boxer, huh?” brown-haired Frankie said to me somewhere around floor three.

“Say what?”

“I can tell by your hands. It’s those big knuckles and scars.” There was a severe cast to her topaz-brown eyes.

“I coulda got that from bar fights,” I speculated.

“Uh-uh,” Frankie said, dismissing my words as only a woman thinking she’s beautiful could. “You’ve got strong hands and a boxer’s shoulders. I could tell just by the way you stand there, so easy.”

With just those few words the child had gotten past half of my natural defenses. She had named me for what I was with a lazy kind of intensity.

“I had an old man was a boxer,” she said. “He had a middleweight belt for four months—twelve, thirteen years ago.”

“What’s your name?” Ambrose asked Tru.

She didn’t answer him. She was too busy watching her friend dissect me.

“He was the nicest boyfriend I ever had,” Frankie was saying. “He was real strong, but gentle as a girl.”

The machinery of the elevator hummed softly. I took the wallet out of my back pocket and handed the girl my card, my real card with a cell phone number that I actually answered sometimes.

“Here you go, Frankie,” I said, saying her name just to show her that I paid attention too.

She took the stiff piece of paper and opened her tiny purse, which was made from an actual jumbo clamshell. She put my card in and took out a pink one.

“Oh my God,” Tru whispered.

I took the card and read the name printed in red letters on the pink paper—Frankee Tayer. There was a handwritten number across the bottom. The personal touch.

The elevator doors opened on the eighth floor and we left Tru and Frankee on their trek to the Coolidge Suite. My heart rate had increased and I was a little confused moving into the hall behind Ambrose.

“Are you going to call her?” he asked me as we got to room 808.

“No need,” I said, watching him fit the magnetic keycard into the slot of the lock.

“Why not?”

“The high point of our entire relationship was just now.”

The Albany detective smiled and pushed the door open. He gestured for me to enter, and I passed from one reality to another.

 

 

 

IT WAS WHAT they call a junior suite—a largish room with a small couch and a cushioned chair across from a queen-sized bed. Ambrose took the sofa and I sat in the chair. He didn’t offer me a drink or any more small talk. He was ready for business.

The scent of the girls’ perfume was still in my nose. I snorted once in order to get my head back into business. Ambrose was looking at me like a counterpuncher in the early rounds of a hard fight—waiting for me to make the first move.

I didn’t oblige him. Tru and Frankee had thrown me off balance. I needed more time for my head to clear.

“What about the twenty-five-hundred advance?” the prig feinted.

“What about it?” I jabbed.

“Shouldn’t that cover your expenses?”

“I told you that you had to give me the advance just for me to look into the case, that it was in no way against my fee or to cover expenses.”

After a moment or two of this face-off Thurman pulled a huge wallet from his breast pocket, producing a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. One at a time he began putting bills on the low coffee table before us. As he stacked the notes, we both counted. I was experiencing the lust for women and the need for money (or maybe it was the other way round). When Thurman reached one hundred twelve he stopped, put the rest of the stack back in his wallet, and returned the wallet to its pocket.

The heap of bills lay there before me, a come-on that was hard to resist. Through a supreme act of will I managed not to reach out for the cash.

“Just to know,” Ambrose said, “what were the expenses?”

“Those street names you gave me were for underage kids,” I said. “The law, as you know, tries to protect their identities. But I know a cop, got drummed out of the force for an injudicious liaison.”

Thurman smiled at the last two words. He liked pretentious language.

“My friend,” I continued, “has contacts that can get to information without bothering with judges and writs and all that nonsense.”

While paying close attention to my every word, the detective still had the concentration to take a cigarette from a pack in his vest pocket. He picked up a lighter from the table.

“What was this detective’s name?”

He set fire to the cigarette. My nostrils widened, pulling in the aroma. I hadn’t had a cigarette in ten months and I missed them every single day.

“No names,” I said, “remember?”

“Okay. What do you have?”

“Toolie’s real name is Theodore Nilson. He’s doing eighty-six years upstate for aggravated assault.”

“Eighty-six years?”

“Ain’t that a bitch? Poor kid gets his day in court with a defense attorney just outta college and the judge gives him triple-time just for being stupid.

“Jumper’s name is Frank Tork. Frankie’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E.”

Thurman was staring hard at me, submitting my words to memory. I wasn’t worried about being cheated; the money was on the table. The only problem I had was finishing the list.

“Big Jim was born, and died, under the name James Wright. He succumbed to complications from a hot spike on the same day that we invaded Iraq for the second time. I don’t know if the two had anything to do with each other—the heroin could have come from Afghanistan.”

I stopped there, inhaling the secondhand smoke as best I could.