When the Thrill Is Gone (17 page)

“Why would you owe him anything?”

“He was the fence and he fronted his brother some money. Now he blames me. Stupid, that’s what it is.”

“Did you know that Gorman was stupid before you took this job?” I asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, I knew.”

“So what does that say about you?”

Sometimes a good question from the right source is all one needs. Iran sat back on his bench and looked at me. I could see where he, for the second time in a long time, blamed himself for the trouble he was in.

WE WERE JUST finishing our mince pie and French vanilla ice cream when I decided it was time for action. I took the paper bag and placed the leather satchel on the table.

“What’s this?” Iran asked.

“Sit here and have some coffee,” I said. “Watch my bag and I’ll be back in a bit.”

I stood up and he said, “I want tea.”

“Then have tea.”

THE PEOPLE’S GARDEN behind St. Matthew’s Church was only three blocks away. The property took up most of the block, and a good portion of it was hidden by a high wooden fence and deep foliage around a lovely, community vegetable garden.

I had been a regular visitor, when I was kid hiding from the juvenile authorities. The front door had always been open. It still was. I walked in, hoping to go unnoticed, and moved quickly to the front of the congregation hall and then through a door behind the pulpit.

The gardens were dark so I took the goggles and infrared flashlight from the bag Iran brought from my office. The flashlight and spectacles were a gift from a grateful Bug Bateman. Just the promise of love will turn the most irascible heart to gratitude.

The only reason the entire church wasn’t covered with yellow police tape was that either there was no body or the corpse of my faux client was hidden. I was hoping for the former as I approached the eight-foot mound of compost piled at the far corner of the lot.

Donning cloth gloves, I took up a spade from a wheelbarrel and began poking around the compost heap—looking for the give of fresh-turned soil. I worked my way up to the very top before coming across soft earth.

There I dug down until I came to an obstruction. Then I took a penlight from my pocket and pointed it at the satiny pink fabric. Under the makeshift shroud was Shawna Chambers’ dark, lovely, lying face. Maybe if she had told me the truth I could have saved her. Maybe.

Her hair was combed and her face composed. I couldn’t tell how she’d died, only that she was dead and that her undertakers had tried to make her look as good as a corpse can manage.

Somewhat contradictorily, death is the cause of anxiety. Hurriedly, I pulled the pink fabric over her face and then re-shifted the leaves and soil to hide her. I climbed down the huge pile and made my way quickly back to the street.

Two blocks away I made a pay-phone 911 call.

“Nine-one-one emergency.”

“There’s a dead body buried in the compost heap behind St. Matthew’s Church in the East Village,” I said in a husky voice.

“What is your—” the operator managed to get out before I hung up on him.

BACK AT THE DINER I found Iran reading a
New York Post
.

“You read the papers every day?” I asked.

“No, not really.”

“If you gonna come work in my office you got to read the paper, at least one paper, every morning.”

“Okay,” he said and the temporary deal was struck.

I sat down heavily and probably sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Iran asked.

“What you should ask me is, what’s right?”

“Okay. What’s right?”

“Nothing. Not one damn thing.”

27

“WHERE TO NOW?” Iran asked when we were on the street.

I held up a finger, took out my cell phone, hit a few letters, and sent the call.

“Hello?”

“MD, this is LT.”

Silence was my answer.

“I got somebody for you,” I said. “Is it too late?”

“Not until the last hour of the last day,” she replied.

“Thirty minutes. Maybe less.”

“I’ll be here.”

When her side of the connection broke off I folded my phone and raised that hand in the air.

“Taxi!”

THE YELLOW CAR moved like a fish up toward the Thirties. Our driver had a Spanish name and dark skin. He said not one word from the pickup to the drop-off.

That was in front of a small residential building on East Thirty-third.

I pressed the buzzer and waited.

“Where’s this?” Iran asked.

On the ride he’d asked me where we were going.

To the first question and its iteration I answered, “You’ll see.”

A minute and a half later the dirty white door swung inward. Standing in a light shining from above was Mary Deharain. Mary was tall, thin, and white. She looked to be over fifty but not yet retirement age.

I met her when I was still working the wrong side of the street.

Unknown to her she had been married to a serial killer named Bob Deharain. Mary was no saint but when she discovered her husband’s predilections she contacted me through a mutual acquaintance in the secret world of stolen properties. I gathered evidence against Bob for a murder he committed in Flushing: a housewife whom he’d done terrible things to. This information I made available to the police through a third party.

It was one of the few cases I ever undertook, back then, without asking for a fee.

The next time I met Mary she was dressed as she was the night I brought Iran Shelfly to her understated boardinghouse. She had on a long velvet dress that had at least a hundred coin-shaped mirrors sewn into it. She had many dresses, all of the same style. That night it was a royal-blue costume, its hem touching the floor. She had various versions of the same dress in black, red, yellow, and deep green. I never asked her but I imagined that the mirrors were there to remember all the innocent lives her husband had taken. He was a prolific killer but had only been convicted of the one crime.

“Mr. McGill,” she said and then she turned her intense gaze on Iran.

“Iran,” I said, “this is Mrs. Mary Deharain.”

“Ma’am,” my protégé said. He even ducked his shaved head an inch or so.

“Mrs. Deharain has six rooms on the fifth floor and another six on the sixth floor of this building,” I told Iran. “For a hundred and fifty dollars a week she and the girl working for her serve meals and wash bedclothes.”

“I don’t have no money, man. You know that.”

“Room and board is on me,” I said. “On top of that I’ll give you a stipend for doing work in my office.”

“How much is a stipend?”

“We’ll start it at two hundred a week and see how it goes.”

“Breakfast is served at seven,” the severe landlady said. “Lunch at eleven forty-five, and dinner at six-fifteen. No loud music or TV in the rooms. No food, either. No guests.”

“No guests?” Iran said.

“You can be friendly with the other boarders,” I added, “but no personal questions, understand?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I get it.”

I turned to Mary. She nodded. Her face was oval-shaped and lovely but sad, like some long-suffering character from a Dickens novel. She had loved Bob. She still visited him at Attica every third week. He never found out about her betrayal. He didn’t know that she knew about the full range of his crimes.

“I’ll see you at the office in the morning,” I said to Iran.

“What time?”

“Let’s say nine-fifteen.”

I left him at the threshold of the unexceptional building, to make my way into the night.

I LIKE WALKING the nighttime streets of Manhattan. Ever since I was an adolescent on the run from the juvenile and foster-care bureaucracies, I found the darkness and electric light soothing. I feel in control when I see bright neon and deep shadows. This relaxation allows me to think more deeply about the twisted nature of other men and myself.

No one knew where Chrystal was; not her husband, her living sibling, or her parents. She was, most probably, in trouble—big trouble. And the only facts I had to go on were lies: Shawna pretending to be Chrystal, some drawling cowboy acting as if he were a nerdy billionaire; the rich man giving me money and then crying extortion.

There were three dead women: two married to Cyril Tyler and one who had merely pretended to be his wife. I had been paid twenty-two thousand dollars so far and had yet to figure out what task it was I was supposed to accomplish.

I grinned a dark smile on a darker street and once again took out my cell phone to make a call.

“Hello?”

“Hey, baby, what’s up?”

“I came home to a house full of children who say that they’re brothers and sisters but look like a family of cousins,” Aura said.

“I guess you could say that their mother got around.”

“I see.”

“Somebody murdered her, and in the same room where the children were sleeping.”

“My God.”

“I’m sorry to put them with you but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“That’s because you did the right thing,” she said kindly. “They can stay here as long as you need.”

“Can I do the same?”

“No.”

28

IN THE MORNING I awoke next to Katrina. She was sleeping peacefully. Looking at her, I knew that she was deep into her affair, and having such a good time that her usual restlessness was quelled. This didn’t bother me. Katrina and I were connected in ways that I couldn’t explain if I wanted to. We didn’t love each other, not in the marital sense. Our proximity and the children made us family. I wasn’t her brass ring, but the ride was over and I was the best bet on a field of nags.

I dressed quickly and was almost out the door when she said, “Leonid?”

“Yeah?”

“I haven’t seen much of you lately.” She sat up in the bed and stretched languorously.

I met Katrina in her springtime. She was beautiful in a way that only Scandinavians can be. She had hair of blond fire and skin the color of the milk that gods drank before shaking mountains. That was a long time ago, and though she was no longer that stunning youth, her beauty was experiencing a kind of Indian summer, a resurgence that even I could see—and feel.

“You been goin’ out with your friends,” I said.

“I miss you.”

“I’m right here.”

“Can we have a special dinner tonight?”

“Sure. That’d be great. I’m in the middle of a case, but I’ll try my best to get a few hours for dinner.”

She took a deep breath and sighed, lay back in the bed, and closed her eyes.

I liked her very much right then. Live long enough and you can learn to appreciate just about anything.

MARDI WAS ALREADY at her desk at 8:09, when I got in. She wore a medium-gray cotton dress that, I knew from previous days, came down to the middle of her calves. There was a blue stone depending from a silver chain around her neck.

She was organizing and reorganizing her desk, and my life.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill,” she said, standing up.

Her pale blue eyes scoped out my mood. It was hard for her that morning because what I mostly felt was confused resignation.

I walked up to the desk and looked at her papers. Mardi wrote in purple ink. It was one of the few ways she held on to a decimated childhood and so I didn’t complain.

“You want me to run down and get you some coffee?” she asked.

“How’s Marly?” I asked. That was the receptionist’s younger sister, the reason she and Twill had planned to murder her father.

“Fine,” Mardi said with a smile. “She’s going into sixth grade in September. She wants new clothes.”

“We could all go shopping together one Saturday if you want.”

“You’ll spoil her,” the nineteen-year-old woman said.

“That’s what girl children are for.”

“Should I go get you that coffee?”

“No. Sit down. I need to talk to you.”

She lowered into her office chair, the same chair I once used to lay low the man-monster Willie Sanderson. I took her visitor’s seat, hunching forward to put my elbows on my knees.