When the Thrill Is Gone (26 page)

“Thanks.”

“Let’s go across the hall,” Luke said.

Johnny and I followed him out.

Room 4C DOUBLED as an office. There was a cedar desk and chair next to the window and a round maple table with five chairs in the middle of the room. Carpeting was burgundy and the walls champagne. Luke and I sat while Johnny brought out glasses and a crystal decanter filled with fifty-year-old bourbon.

“What you want me to do, LT?” Luke asked.

This was one of those rooms scattered around New York and the world where anything could be decided. If I wanted them to let Tally die and then to be buried somewhere where he’d never be found, that would be it.

“I’d like to talk to him but I’m afraid it’d kill him,” I said.

“Juanita probably could do somethin’ bring him around long enough to get some answers,” Johnny said before sipping at his glass.

“No,” I said. “No. Call an ambulance and say you found him at the door. Say he came to the place and collapsed or something. Take his ID if he has any and let a doctor see to him. By the time he wakes up, if he ever does, the whole thing’ll be over.”

“So that’s it?” Luke said, straightening his shoulders to get up and go.

“One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Johnny works for you, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what do I have to do to ask him to come do a job for me?” It was a difficult question. People like us had certain protocols when it came to business relationships. Betrayal was the worst sin anyone could commit, and so I asked the question with both Luke and Johnny at the table.

“Johnny’s a free agent,” Luke said, giving me that prehistoric smile he has.

“What you need, LT?” Johnny Nightly, a killer almost as dangerous as Hush, asked me.

“It might be a little risky.”

“And here I thought you wanted a babysitter.”

All three of us grinned and Johnny poured another round.

44

JOHNNY AND I exchanged numbers before he accompanied Luke down to the basement where the men spent most of their time. Luke’s pool hall was one of the most exclusive on the Eastern Seaboard—intended for a rarefied clientele. The greatest hustlers in the world came to play on his perfectly balanced tables. Millions of dollars changed hands in that room each year, and seven percent of that went to the house.

Before leaving, I went back to the sick room to see what shape Tally was in. He looked dead but I knew he wasn’t because Sister Juanita was still dabbing his forehead with alcohol.

I made a sound and Juanita looked up and over, pinning me in place with eyes that had seen more death and suffering than many a mercenary. She was still beautiful in spite of the sixtysome years spread across acres of death.

“Did he say any other names?” I asked.

“Only the ones you already heard.”

“What’re his chances?”

“I seen worse. Much worse. But you know, Leonid, some people die from a cold, others lived through Hiroshima.”

I smiled, and she did, too—for a brief instant.

“I hear you got Gordo up at your place,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“How is he?”

“Stomach cancer. Doctor doesn’t see much hope.”

“What about Gordo?”

“You mean, how does he see his chances?”

She nodded.

“You know ole Gord, he believe in fightin’ till the last round.”

She smiled and said, “He would have survived that A-bomb, unless they dropped it right on his head.”

GOING DOWN THE STAIRS, it came back to me, the year-long affair between Gordo Tallman and Juanita Horn. She’d been called to the gym one day because a Dominican boxer with questionable documentation had fallen badly while sparring. He refused to go to the hospital and Juanita was brought in to set the broken ankle.

For the next twelve months Gordo and Juanita were just about inseparable. And then Gordo shut her out. I was working the heavy bag the day she’d come crying from his office. The gossip was that Juanita had spent a weekend with an old friend of Bell’s, that Gordo found out and cut her off. I never knew for a fact. I didn’t want to know.

ANGELIQUE ARABESQUE’S white Cadillac stood in front of Luke’s place. She was Luke’s driver on the rare occasions he left the pool hall.

A black woman with short bleached white hair and eyes that were gray, naturally, Angelique owned her own limo company and served almost every important personage in the Bronx.

She was leaning against the back door in her white pants suit, watching me. Angelique has a handsome face and a sleek figure, a nasty scar on her right cheek and inelegant hands. Seeing her, you got the feeling she could take care of herself. I’ve heard that she married an accountant but still kept her own books.

“Mr. McGill,” she said as I approached.

“Ms. Arabesque.”

“Mr. Nye asked me to take you wherever you needed to go.”

I’d ridden the subway out there; probably would have taken it back. Angelique was a gesture on the part of Luke. He was saying that he was my friend and he could see by my situation that I needed help.

THE DRIVE BACK to Manhattan didn’t take long. Angelique knew every shortcut. While she drove, I closed my eyes, counting breaths from one to ten and back again, attaining a fragment of bliss by the time the car stopped in front of the Tesla Building.

I’d breezed past the front desk and was halfway to the seventy-second floor when I finally looked at my cell phone. There was a text message from Mardi.
cio
it said. Client in office.

The peacefulness from the meditation was gone in an instant. My heart was thumping while my conscience kicked me in the butt.

For years I wanted a receptionist. I felt that if some innocent young woman was sitting at the front desk, greeting my clients, that I would no longer be a criminal but an upstanding citizen providing a service for John Q. Public. That fantasy was dashed by three simple letters—
cio
.

I banged my fist against the elevator doors, multiple times. When they finally slid open I ran down the hall, keys in hand.

I blundered into the room like a bison crashing a garden party only to find Mardi sitting behind her desk, tapping away at her keyboard. He was sitting on the wooden bench set there for clients, hands clasping a crossed knee.

I was nearly panting, wild-eyed.

“Hi, Mr. McGill,” Mardi said. “Mr. Peters has been waiting patiently.”

The last word was to tell me that everything was all right and I needn’t be worried about her safety. She could read me like a book—a very long tome containing a thousand and one tragedies penned in the blood of as many victims.

Mardi was wearing a simple dress made from a material the color of goldenrod. It might have been hand sewn—she was that kind of girl.

My hand was on the pistol in my pocket, there was a high whining sound in my ear, the room felt as if it were hurtling through space, and I stood there unable for the moment to move either forward or back. I was the condemned man waking from a dream in which he’d forgotten his death sentence, a fireman jarred to consciousness by a five-bell alarm.

Mr.
Peters
was wearing cowboy boots, brown jeans, a gaudy caballero shirt that wanted to be violet but settled back into tan, and a straw hat that seemed to be lacquered.

I hate cowboys, hate them.

“Mr. McGill?” Mardi asked when I refused to act like a normal human being.

I took in a deep breath through my nose.

“Huh?”

“Is anything wrong?”

I exhaled and took in another deep breath.

“Um,” I said on the long journey back to sanity.

I released the pistol and withdrew the hand from my pocket.

I blew out the last breath and said, “Isn’t it time for you to go on home, Mardi?”

She didn’t answer the question. I knew this was because I didn’t sound like myself yet. I had decided to bring my agitation into the conversation.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lamont,” I said. “Follow me.”

45

I LED THE WAY to the inner sanctum, toward my office. Lamont followed silently. After I’d seated him in a blue visitors’ chair, I settled behind the ebony desk and smiled. The blood in my brain was still thrumming.

“How you know my name?” he asked, the drawl a bit more evident than in our last conversation.

“Trade secret,” I said, hunching my shoulders and at the same time leaning back in the reclining office chair. “What can I do for the bastard half brother of Mr. Cyril Tyler?”

“I was born in Cincinnati,” he said, as if I had asked about his origins. “Moved to Texas when I was a kid, though. I worked as a cowboy outside’a Dallas, but I gave that up eight years ago to come to New York. Lookin’ for the easy life, I guess. You know, if you can make it in the rodeo, you can make it anywhere.”

There was an aspect of violence in Lamont’s words. I guess he expected me to be insulted by his putdown of my city, and afraid of his obvious physical superiority. You could see by the way he held himself that it was a foregone conclusion that I’d be intimidated by his natural force.

I wondered if his assumptions were based on anything other than bucking broncos.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“You told the faggot that you had information about Chrystal,” he said, another scattershot attempt to rile me. “Cyril sent me over to find out what you know.”

“Like they say in Hollywood,” I said, “I only speak to the talent.”

It took a moment for the meaning of my words to filter through to the cowboy’s understanding. I watched as his bland visage turned to something a bit more sour. He sneered, glanced at the door behind and to his right, and then turned back to me.

“You’ll talk to me,” he promised.

It was an admirable thing, the sinister turn Lamont was able to get into his words. I almost wanted to be scared. He was used to having the upper hand in situations like this, but I didn’t have time to dance with him.

The case was getting away from me. Every step I took toward conclusion got me further away from solution. The only thing I knew for certain was that three women were dead, that these women were either married to Cyril or pretending to be. I was pretty sure that Cyril hadn’t committed the killings himself, at least not all of them, and so there was a man out there who might have accomplished the assassinations—possibly a man named Bisbe.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Lamont,” I said. “Cyril Tyler has not told me that I should report to you.”

“You don’t have a choice, Mr. McGill.”

That was when my thoughts took what might have been considered a non sequitur detour. When I first moved into that suite I had my office completely soundproofed by a music studio professional. Walls, door, ceiling, and floor—even the windows were specialized two-ply for sound reduction.

“We always have a choice,” I said.

On top of the noise-reducing insulation, I had a dozen extra-large, extra-thick plastic bags in the small supply alcove to my right.

“So you tellin’ me that I have to climb over this here desk and beat the answer outta you?” the cowboy asked.

“I’m tellin’ you to cool your horseshoes and chill, my brother. All Cyril has to do is call me and I will tell him what I know.”

Boxing is a wonderful art. It teaches you to move inside of violence while keeping your wits about you and ignoring the potential for harm. You learn to love your enemy more than you would from any Christian sermon, because in the ring your enemy is always a clear reflection of yourself. Ira Lamont’s threat was no more than an opponent in the opposite corner, waiting for the bell. There I was, on my side, anticipating his attack, loving him.

I wanted a fight, but that wasn’t going to solve anything. I wasn’t a boxer but a detective. This wasn’t my battle, it was my dead client’s last request.

“I ain’t your nigger brother.” Ira Lamont was filled with epithets. He came from a place where language was an invitation to violence.

Not so me.

My problem was much more complex than some contest between combatants. What Ira desired was simple, straightforward. He wanted me to kneel before him, to declare him master, and give him the words I kept close. But my needs were convoluted. I had to have Ira go back to where he came from with his dignity intact but still wary of my power. That way he would feel that he could come at me with a chance of victory.

He was to me no more than a ball in play.

“Heavens,” I said, feeling that this was an appropriate response to his insult.

“Are you gonna talk to me?” he said with a note of finality to the twang.

“I don’t think so.”

Ira half-rose from his chair.

I took the pistol from my pocket.

Ira smiled and rose to his full height.

I pointed the gun and he was forced to put another log on the fire of that grin.

I pulled back the hammer.

A thin sheet of worry barely diffused his confidence.

The gun made the sound of a cannon blast when I fired it.

To Ira’s lifelong shame, I’m sure, he flinched and jumped half a step backward. The shot had missed him completely, putting a neat little hole in the wall behind him. He was unharmed but still couldn’t stop the sweat from appearing on his forehead.

I aimed the pistol at his chest.

Our eyes met.

Dimly I realized that I had lost control again. But I felt justified. Lamont had threatened me, called me names, and tried to force information out of me that would put my new client in jeopardy. I had to shoot at him—didn’t I?

I pressed the intercom buzzer four times. This was to tell Mardi to clear out of the office—immediately. We’d set up that signal the first week she came to work for me. And she knew not to come back until I called her on her cell phone.

“One step forward,” I said to Ira Lamont, “and it will be your last.”

The cowboy had his chance. I didn’t know what I’d do if he called me on the threat. He didn’t, either. He actually took a half step backward.