When the Thrill Is Gone (32 page)

Chrystal stepped into my line of sight. She was wearing a revealing negligee and no shoes or slippers. It was the bare feet that told the story.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“After I got off the phone I took a taxi.”

“Why?”

“I was sure that what Cyril was telling me was true. I know him.”

“You do. Then explain this—a man broke into the place where I connected the calls. He stabbed my friend and came within a hair of gutting me.”

“Who sent him?” Cyril asked, the muzzle of my pistol still against the side of his head.

“You did.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Conversation wasn’t a possibility.”

Chrystal took a step toward us.

“Stay where you are,” I told her.

“He hasn’t tried to kill me,” Chrystal stated.

“An armed assassin came to the house where they thought you were calling from. He didn’t come there for me.”

“What are you saying?” Cyril asked.

“That you hired a man named Bisbe to trace the call that came in here tonight. That he went to the place I’d set up—to kill Chrystal, just like he did Shawna and Pinky and, for all I know, Allondra, too.”

“No,” Cyril said to Chrystal. “I did not.”

She was looking confused, worried.

“I can’t believe it,” she said to me.

“Your brother told me that he came to your husband to shake him down.”

“He did not!” Cyril shouted.

“And what did Tally say was Cyril’s answer?” Chrystal asked.

This question wrenched me part of the way out of my murderous haze. Her brother had not actually said Cyril’s name. But who else could it have been?

“You can’t just kill him,” Chrystal said, fighting for her man.

“Yes I can. And it would be self-defense. A guy like this could end my existence with just a shrug.”

“I don’t believe he did it,” the maybe-murderer’s wife said.

Her conviction lowered my gun. I sat down on one side of the billionaire, his wife settled down on the other.

“Tally told me that Shawna sent him to shake down somebody for major money. He had some kind of dirt about Pinky Todd and investment fraud.”

“Pinky thought that we were involved in fraud,” Cyril said. “But we weren’t. There was no connection between us and any insider trading.”

“But if there wasn’t, why would anybody want to kill Pinky or Shawna?”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know, Mr. McGill. But Pinky never had a case against me. I agreed to pay her more money only because Arthur said that that would be easier than going to court.”

“And you’re telling me that Tally never came to you?” I asked.

“He stole silverware from us. Chrystal told Phil that he was not to be allowed in. You remember, honey?”

Chrystal nodded.

“But,” Cyril added, “I do remember that Phil told me that Tally had come around a few weeks ago. He insisted that he talk to me and, and Arthur went down to send him away.”

“Arthur,” I said. “Not Phil.”

“Yes.”

“What was the basis for the insider-trading claim?” I asked.

“An investment firm named Tagmont,” Cyril said. “For all I know they might have really been involved with some kind of illegal activity. I didn’t trust them and so we didn’t trade with them. That’s how our group works. If any one of us is uneasy we don’t get involved.”

“Who brought this Tagmont group to you?”

“It was a man named Lesser. He was an old school buddy of Arthur’s.”

Cyril sat back on the sofa while Chrystal and I stared at each other.

“Your sister thought that Cyril killed Pinky,” I said. “She sent Tally to shake Cyril down but really it was Pelham that was bent. She didn’t know and hired me to protect you from your husband while she collected the money from the shakedown.”

“Arthur’s been with me for eighteen years,” Cyril said.

At that moment Ira Lamont staggered into the room. I was glad he wasn’t dead.

“Hey, Ira,” I hailed. “Come on in and join the gang.”

54

BY THE TIME I got home it was very late.

Cyril, Chrystal, and a slightly battered Ira Lamont had gone to spend the night at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel at Columbus Circle—just in case there was another Bisbe out there. They used a special account that Luke Nye maintained at the hotel for his foreign clients. I called Lieutenant Kitteridge and told him what I knew, leaving out the killing of Bisbe and the near death of Johnny Nightly.

“After talking it over with Tyler and his wife we realized that Pinky Todd really did have something, only it was on Pelham and she didn’t know it. She went to Pelham to give Tyler her demands. He, Pelham, talked Tyler into paying her off. He said that it would be cheaper than a trial, but she must have come back wanting more. Same thing with Shawna. We figure that Tally told Pelham about Shawna being involved. Pelham pegged her as the brains and had her taken out.”

“What about Allondra North?” the cop asked.

“That’s Florida’s jurisdiction,” I said. “Hey—maybe she really did get blind drunk and fall off the side of the boat.”

“That’s pretty weak, LT.”

“Not if your guys find that Pelham’s been involved in insider trading with a man named Lesser representing a company named Tagmont. Not if you offer Tally immunity and he tells what he said to the lawyer.”

“Who’s your client, Leonid?”

“My client is dead, Carson. I’m just tryin’ to do right by her.”

He wasn’t happy with the story; I wasn’t either. But it’s rare that everything is revealed in a case like this one. Even if Cyril killed Allondra, it was probably because they were fighting, and even then he honestly might not remember.

Sitting at the hickory table in the dining room, I sipped at a snifter of brandy and truly relaxed for the first time in days.

“Mr. McGill?” Elsa Koen said. She was wearing Twill’s old plaid pajamas and a nightgown.

“Elsa. Where did you come from?”

“I was sleeping in Shelly’s room and I heard you come in.” She gave me a tentative stare and then pulled out a chair next to me. “I must ask you something.”

“How’s Gordo?”

“The doctor cannot find any trace of the cancer in his blood. He will not say that he is cancer-free, but . . .”

“What did you want?”

“Mr. Tallman wants to go home.”

“Is he strong enough for that?”

“He still needs help, but if someone were to come by one or maybe two times a day, that might be enough.”

“He’d probably get better even faster in his own home,” I said. “You know, Gordo likes to be independent.”

“Yes,” Elsa said, “but I’m worried about him, about his mind.”

“He seems to be thinkin’ okay to me.”

“He told me that he wanted to hire me to be his full-time nurse. He said that he would pay my fee.”

“So?”

“I told him that this was three hundred dollars a day including agency fees, and he said that was fine. I know that you had to take him in when he got sick. I understand that he is a poor man. Maybe, maybe he’s confused.”

My lawyer and I were the only ones who knew that Gordo owned the twelve-story building that housed his boxing gym, that he was a millionaire several times over. I only took him in because he needed to be among friends.

“Don’t worry about it, Elsa,” I said. “If Gordo wants you, and you’re willing to work for him—”

“Oh yes,” she said. “He is a wonderful man. The only reason I say this is that maybe he is having trouble thinking. I would come help him for nothing.”

“No need for that,” I said. “We’ll make sure you get paid.”

“Hello, you two,” Katrina said from the doorway.

She was wearing a fancy dress designed for someone twenty, or maybe thirty, years younger; still, she looked pretty good in that pink-and-red party frock. Even from a distance we could see the effects of the wine, smell the perfume, and divine the sex. Elsa couldn’t hide her embarrassment for me.

But I was beyond jealousy that night. I’d solved the case, concealed a killing, saved a life, and had come within a millimeter of murder. In that dress Katrina was the sour cherry on the ice cream sundae of my week.

“Hey, babe,” I hailed. “Elsa says that Gordo’s goin’ home.”

“That’s wonderful,” Katrina exhaled. She seemed to ride the current of her fragrant breath from the doorway to a seat at the far end of the table.

“It was your feeling for him that brought him back to life,” she said. “Your strength, Leonid, and Elsa’s passion for him. No, no, don’t turn away, Elsa, I can see how you feel. I know what it’s like when something crazy gets into your heart.”

Silence followed my wife’s keen perceptions. We were all thinking about
something crazy
that had gotten into us in spite of all intentions. We didn’t look into each others’ eyes because there was too much truth in that.

Finally Katrina levered herself up on her feet and said, “I really have to get to bed. The girls and I went to that wine bar on Seventy-ninth. Oh . . . too much.”

She walked unsteadily out the door while Elsa and I kept vigil on the truth she’d spilled like a ruptured oil well into the Gulf of Mexico.

“There was a package for you,” Elsa said after a long contemplative pause.

She got up and walked out into the hall, leaving me with thoughts that ranged down the many paths of my misspent life. I started counting breaths and reached seven before Elsa returned.

She held in her left hand a shapeless parcel of brown paper wrapped in thick packing tape. She held the thing out to me and turned to leave as soon as I took it.

It weighed no more than a few ounces, with
Leonid Trotter McGill, Apt. 11f
penned in a fanciful hand that you got the feeling would have been even lovelier writing in some other language.

I needed my penknife to rip open the tough packaging. Inside the tape and brown-paper shell was a ball of wadded-up newspaper that held the locket loaned to me by Fawn David. It had been cleaned and polished meticulously. There were a few scratches along the sides of the ornament, probably due to the jeweler’s attempt at opening it. I pressed the little button on the side and the disc sprang open.

Within there were pictures pasted to either side. On one side was a photograph of me and my brother, Nikita; on the other was a smiling pair, my mother and Tolstoy—otherwise known as William Williams.

Looking at the photos, I felt numb and stupid. My father had survived years after I thought he’d died, after my mother had perished pining for him.

Maybe he was still alive.

My cell phone sounded. It was a relief to answer.

“LT.”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“We went to St. Benedict’s Hospital to talk to Theodore Chambers. He told us that his sister sent him to talk to Tyler but that he only made it to Pelham.”

“And?”

“Theodore told Pelham that he was representing both sisters, that Chrystal had the damning information and that Shawna needed to get paid.

“We went to Arthur Pelham’s residence and asked him to come down to the station for a little talk.”

“What he have to say?”

“He said that he needed to put on some clothes.”

“And?”

“He shot himself in the head in the head.”

I was in an emotional state of shock. The repetition seemed mechanical, as if maybe the phone instead of a human being was doing the talking.

“He killed himself in the toilet?” I asked.

“I guess you were right about something. We’ll start a full investigation tomorrow.”

I tried to have some kind of feeling about the news: joy at the resolution of a case, sadness at the death of a man cornered by his own sins, relief that the trials were over. But in reality I felt nothing. My father might still be alive. Who cared about some lawyer eating a bullet?

55

IT TOOK THREE WEEKS to get a meeting set with Harris Vartan. First he was on a business trip, and then some kind of emergency arose. I spoke to his assistant, Hamish Oldhan.

“I’m sorry, Mr. McGill,” the assistant to the Diplomat of Crime told me. “But Mr. Vartan wanted me to make sure and to tell you that you are uppermost in his thoughts and that he will call you at the first opportunity.”

In the meantime I went out to see Fawn David, ostensibly to return her locket but actually to see if I could find out anything else about the father whom I had in turns idolized, lost, hated, and forgiven, and who I now saw in a shadowy cleft somewhere between reunion and revenge. I had the jeweler carefully and completely remove the picture of my brother and me. Fawn loved the locket and said that she would carry it always.

I scoured the room where my father had lived while I was acting out a criminal life across the river in Manhattan. There were no more clues. He wasn’t anywhere on the Internet or in any of a dozen libraries I’d sifted through.

Elsa took Gordo home to his rooms atop the building no one knew he in fact owned. Katrina made sumptuous meals and smiled more brightly every day. Only the fact that she drank too much let on that there was something unresolved in her life.

The Artist, Bisbe, disappeared off the face of the earth. Chrystal and her six nieces and nephews moved into Cyril Tyler’s rooftop home with little worry of him slaughtering them in their sleep. Ira Lamont called the office one afternoon and asked if I’d like to give him a rematch.

“You caught me off guard,” the cowboy complained. “If I knew you was a boxer I’d have planned it different.”

I just hung up on him.

Two days later Chrystal called to tell me that Cyril would be out of town for a few days.

“I hear you,” I said. “But you and me both know where that’d go.”

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“Petrified.”

“So is that a no?”

“Yes, it is.”

AND THEN ONE EVENING, sometime after ten and before Katrina returned from her night out with
the girls
, my cell phone sounded.

“Hello?”

“Mr. McGill,” a man said.

“Hamish.”

“Tomorrow afternoon. Anywhere in Manhattan you want. Shall we say about two?”

“The Red Lantern on Forty-eighth,” I said. “I’ll be bringing two guests.”