When the Thrill Is Gone (18 page)

“What do you think about Iran?” I asked.

“He’s nice.”

“You know that’s not what I’m askin’ you. And even if he was nice, that’s probably the least important thing about him.”

“Are you going to hire him?” she asked.

“What makes you think that?”

“You never let anybody else sit at one of our desks before.”

Our.

“He’s had a hard life, M. Maybe harder than he deserves.”

The last few words registered in her pale eyes.

“You’re a good man, Mr. McGill,” she said and I couldn’t help feeling that she had seen inside my head and understood that I had been a party to Iran’s downfall.

“It’s not about me,” I said. “I like the kid. I think he’s got potential.”

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s loyal and knows more than people might think. He’d probably be pretty brave but not like you or Twill. Not many people can be like that.”

She wasn’t looking for a raise or job security. I had stepped in and kept her and my son from becoming murderers. I’d given her a job when she didn’t know what else to do ... And, of course, I made certain that her rapist father was in prison and would never harm another child.

I shook my head and grinned, stood up, and said, “Here I am the man of secrets and I got Dodona answering my phones.”

“Who’s that?”

“Look her up.”

IT WAS TIME to get down to business.

As soon as I was behind my desk I picked up the phone and dialed a newly memorized phone number.

“Mr. Tyler’s line,” Phil, the pastel aide, said.

“Leonid McGill for Mr. Tyler.”

“He’s not in.”

“Find him and get him on a phone, wherever he is.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t do that.”

“I have important information that he hired me to find.”

“Hold on.”

In the silence I wondered if I should just take the money and forget about artists and billionaires. But then I remembered those children. I’d made them a promise.

“Mr. McGill,” Phil said. “You’re on the line with Mr. Pelham.”

“Hello,” the white-on-white man said over a line strained with crackling electric static.

“I asked to speak with Mr. Tyler,” I said.

“He’s indisposed.”

“I can wait until he gets out of the john.”

“Mr. McGill,” Pelham, the soul of patience, said. “Cyril is out of the country and I am at a meeting of one of his boards in Denver. Neither of us can do much for you at the moment. So . . . if you have information, please pass it along.”

“My business is with your boss. It would be unprofessional to pass along private communications.”

“Have you heard from Chrystal?”

“I can only tell Mr. Tyler that.”

“He has given me the authority to debrief you.”

“First I heard of it.”

“I am his lawyer.”

“And I’m his investigator. So if he wants what I got to give he will have to call me.”

I hung up the phone, wondering at Tyler’s lines of communication. Pelham most likely knew about the complaint lodged against me with the NYPD. He was almost certainly the one who filed the grievance. But he gave no inkling of their ploy.

What were they up to?

The intercom buzzed then.

“Yes, Mardi?”

“There’s a Patrick O’Hearn here to see you, sir.”

In the background I could hear a man’s voice mumbling.

Then Mardi added, “He says to tell you that it’s Old Sham.”

I took a deep breath filled with pedestrian uncertainty. I had no desire to speak with Old Sham.

Then I exhaled the words “Send him down.”

29

SHAM O’HEARN was on the short side, only five seven, but still he was taller than I. Originally his nickname probably came from the Irish good-luck flora, the shamrock, but as time went on the word reverted to its true meaning: deception, fraud. Patrick O’Hearn—a living, walking lie.

Sham was thin with hazel eyes and lusterless white skin. He usually wore clothes of gray and yellow with a touch of brown thrown in. That day he had on a checkered brown-and-tan suit that was both new and cheap, a shirt that hinted at gold, and a dark-brown hat with a short brim and a green feather in its band. He was carrying a briefcase that looked as if it were woven from freshly cut hay.

He also wore green-and-yellow tennis shoes. Sham was always ready to run.

“Mr. McGill,” he said upon entering.

I nodded from my chair. No reason to stand up when Sham walked into the room. I had no respect for the man, even when I was a crook.

O’Hearn took any slimy job that slithered up to his door. Worse, he’d go out and find dirt on spouses and business partners and then offer to sell what he knew to the injured parties. He reveled in seducing the wives of cheating husbands and switching sides in the middle of a case if that betrayal increased his bottom line.

I couldn’t believe that anyone liked Sham O’Hearn; not even his mother, or his reflection in the glass.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Can I sit down?”

“Are you gonna be here that long?”

He lowered onto the chair nearest the door, perching at the edge. There was an apology in his eyes, a squinty twitch, too.

“I’m sorry about this, Mr. McGill,” he said.

“Sorry about what?”

“I took a job and, and if I want to get paid I had to ... you know.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re here, Sham. And if you don’t start making sense I’m gonna put you out.”

“Times have been very hard,” the fifty-something Irishman said. “I wouldn’t have taken the job if I knew.”

“I’m in the middle of a case, man. You got something to do with that?”

“I, I don’t think so.”

“Then say what you got to say and get outta here.”

The straw briefcase was on his lap. He opened it and took out a nine-by-twelve manila folder.

“I could have sent this,” he said. “But I didn’t want you searching me down. It wasn’t my idea to bring them here, and if it wasn’t for the cash, the money I need for my rent . . . You, you know I gave up my office and I’m working out of my apartment now. I can hardly afford that.”

I put out my hand. He could live in the street for all I cared.

Screwing up his courage, my so-called peer handed the folder across the table. He had to leave his chair for a moment to accomplish the transfer but he did so from a squat, not standing up straight.

The folder contained nine glossy photographs. They were all of Katrina and a much younger man having what I can only call enthusiastic sex. There was fellatio and doggie-style, sixty-nine and what was most likely anal. There were fingers and tongues, thighs and acrobatics—sex as I have never had it with anyone.

As I sifted through the photographs, my mind was dominated by two thoughts. First I wondered how Sham got such great shots. Katrina and her boyfriend were obviously in a private suite somewhere. The photos were taken from a variety of angles, and with a telephoto lens.

My second thought was actually a surprise. Katrina’s lover wasn’t Dimitri’s older schoolmate, Bertrand Arnold. It was a dark-skinned Negro, possibly an African, with a jagged Y-shaped scar on his powerful left buttock. He wore a light-blue condom and she a pair of red high-heeled shoes.

I stood up from my desk.

“I didn’t know it was your wife when I took the job,” Sham said all in a rush. “You know what it’s like. You do this kind of work.”

“How much did he pay for these?” I asked.

“Six, six thousand. A thousand up front and the rest after I make the delivery.”

“How will he know you did that?”

“He said that he would know.”

“Get outta here, Sham,” I said.

“Listen, man—”

“I said, get out.”

That was all he needed. Sham rose, turned, and fled from the room in one fluid dancelike motion.

I put the pictures back in the folder and that in the top drawer of my desk. Mardi never went through my drawers. I waited a few minutes for Sham to have vacated the floor. Then I left for a place I knew in Greenwich Village.

THE BROWN BAG BAKERY had taken over a space that had once been an antique toy store on Bleecker Street. It was all glass and chrome, making it seem more like twenty-first-century robotics than a comfortable shopping bag.

Two young women with a variety of piercings and multicolor hairdos smiled as they sold cream puffs, cupcakes, and the occasional loaf of bread to the throng of customers. At the far end of the counter, standing toward the back, was Bertrand Arnold in white pants and a black T-shirt, covered by a denim blue apron. He had brown skin, straight black hair, and a boy’s face, though I knew he was in his mid-thirties.

I walked straight up to Mr. Arnold and looked him in the eye.

His face went through its paces quickly. At first he was surprised to see me, and then, almost immediately, he remembered that I was a private detective and would have found him out. He had tried to hide his identity by having Sham get the photos to me but somehow that hadn’t worked. He resigned himself to my presence there and gestured toward a door that led into the back. I held out my hand for him to go first.

He led me past a huge refrigeration unit into a big kitchen where other brown-skinned, straight-haired men were preparing the breads and pastries for a wall of ovens. From there we went into a small hallway lined with lockers. This hallway ended at his office door.

He sat behind the desk. I sat on top of it.

“You know why I’m here?” I asked.

“I’m not going to pay that detective,” he said.

“I don’t know why not. He didn’t give up your name.”

“He didn’t?”

“The minute I saw those pictures I knew you paid for them.”

“How?”

“Because you been wettin’ yo’ beak in Katrina’s fountain for six months and more,” I said. “You went to Atlantic City together in March and then turned around the next month and met her in Chicago when she lied and said that she was at a family reunion.”

“You knew?”

“Listen, kid, when you meet a woman willin’ to betray one man to be with you, then you can bet dollars to doughnuts that she will do the same goddamned thing to you.”

“If you knew, then why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you do something?”

I took out my .41 magnum and placed it on the desk between us.

Bertrand was transfixed by the weapon.

“Is this what you want?” I asked him.

All the love and betrayal and jealousy flowed away in the face of that ugly black gun.

“No,” Bertrand said clearly, without a falter or hesitation.

“If you do one more thing to try an’ mess with my wife I will be back. Do you understand me?”

“You’re, you’re here to protect her?”

“She ain’t much, I’ll give you that, but she’s Dimitri’s mother, and I will not stand for you to try and bring her down.”

“But she was with me,” the baker said, “for months. Aren’t you mad about that? Aren’t you angry about D’Walle?”

“There’s only two things I need to know,” I said.

“What?”

“Did Dimitri know about you and his mother?”

“No. He’s been distracted ever since he met Tatyana.”

“Do you know where Dimitri is?”

“He borrowed some money from me and flew to Paris. He said that Tatyana was going to meet him there.”

“Then there’s nuthin’ else between you and me, Bert,” I said. “But if you do anything else to mess with Katrina, if you just go yell at her in my house, I will destroy you—completely.”

I let those words hang in the air a moment and then retrieved my pistol.

30

BACK OUT ON Bleecker Street—with its tourist shops and old-time Italian specialty markets, its storefront fortune-tellers and overpriced clothes designers—I wondered about time and the people who wasted it. Almost every hour of every day was a wasteland of TVs, radios, lying newspapers, and people like Bertrand Arnold railing against his predestined fate. It wouldn’t matter so much if the malingerers of the world didn’t want to drag me into their ditherings. What did I care about the newest reality show about truckers or bail bondsmen? What did it matter to me if a cow in New Zealand gave birth to the world’s first three-headed calf or who my wife cuckolded me with?

Why would a man having an affair with someone’s wife reveal her infidelity to him? Could revenge heal his broken heart or mend Katrina’s errant ways? If I shot D’Walle, whoever he was, would Bertrand have gotten what he wanted?

It was like blasting a cloud of butterflies with a shotgun because you were earthbound and jealous—it made no sense and was a waste of the little time we had to make sense in.

Thinking these thoughts, feeling the weight of the pistol in my jacket pocket, I found that I had walked across town to Broadway and was on my way north. My thoughts were fragmented and weightless. It was the state of mind a boxer is put in by a solid right hand to the side of his head. Things are a-jumble but he knows that there’s one important fact that needs immediate attention. Maybe there was a three-headed calf somewhere, but that knowledge won’t help the situation.

Keep your gloves up,
Gordo shouted at every arrogant young boxer who thought he was too fast, too slick to get hit. But even the thought of Gordo sent me veering off course. The man who took the place of my father . . . dying in the same room where I had planned the demolition of many an innocent, and not so innocent, life.

This last thought arrived with me at the front door of Aura Ullman’s apartment building. Instinct and a sense of duty had brought me there. The children were my clients now and their mother’s death was my job.

“Yes?” came the answer to my ring.

“Aura?”

“Leonid,” she said as the buzzer sounded.

SHE WAS AT the open door when I got there, the sun flooding into the hallway from behind her. She smiled and held out both hands to me. I took them, pulled ever so slightly, and felt her ambivalent resistance.

“Come in,” she said.

The living room was a mess. Children’s clothes and toys, coloring books and storybooks strewn here and there. There were smudges on the TV screen and a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a paper plate set on a chair that belonged in the dining room.