Walter Mosley - All I Did Was Shoot My Man

The lock clicked and I pushed my way into the reception area.

Mardi stood as I came in. She was wearing a pearl gray dress under a thin white sweater.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill. How are you today?”

“What time did you get in?”

“Seven.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I like to get in early in case there were messages from the night before. You get a lot of late-night calls sometimes.”

“Did I last night?”

“Mr. Lewis has called you four times since five-fifteen. He says that it’s urgent you call him.”

I took out my cell phone and noticed that the battery was dead. Breland could have been calling all night. He knew the home number but was aware of my prohibition about business calls on that line.

The only thing in life that truly frightens me is the anticipation of talking to a lawyer. Even good news from my own lawyer brings up bad feelings and insipient dread.

“If he calls again tell him that you don’t expect me until ten,” I said.

“Okay. Anything else?”

“How’d the rest of the move go?”

“Dimitri was fine after we left your place. Twill took us all to pizza and over to this avant-garde theater in the East Village. They performed a Renaissance play that they modernized some.”

“Twill took you to the theater?”

“I think he’s dating one of the actresses.”

“Did Shelly go too?”

“Uh-uh. She said she was going to meet someone.”

There was more to that story, but I wouldn’t be getting it from Mardi.

“So,” I said, “what do you think about D and Taty?”

She looked up above my head and considered for a moment.

“She loves him,” Mardi said at last. “She really does.”

“You sound surprised. I mean, they’ve been together for a while.”

“At first I think it was just a convenience for her. Don’t get me wrong, she was just using him, Tatyana has had a hard life and she doesn’t have a lot of trust in men. But in the last few months something has changed in her. You can tell by the way she looks at D.”

“Love,” I said.

“You make it sound like a curse.”

“You know about Tatyana, right?”

“She’s had a hard life,” Mardi argued mildly.

“She’s dealt one too.”

“She can’t help what she had to do.”

Mardi had once planned to murder her child-molester father. She knew how to cut the deck as well as my son’s Belarusian girlfriend.

“That’s what I’m sayin’, M,” I said. “The one you fall in love with brings a lifetime of baggage. In Tatyana’s case there’s all kinds of sharp edges tucked in with the nighties and toothpaste.”

“Dimitri loves her.”

“Yes, he does.”

“So what can you do?”

“Keep lots of bandages in the medicine cabinet and hope for the best.”

Back in my office, ensconced behind my oversized ebony desk, I called information and asked for Harry Tangelo’s phone number. There was no listing.

I had phone books in my closet going back six years. Tangelo wasn’t in any of them either.

Lots of people opt not to be in the phone book. If I was Tangelo and tied to a case involving attempted murder and the largest heist in Wall Street history, I might have gotten an unlisted number too. I might have even called on a friend to get me a phone in his name to avoid reporters and cops.

Maybe Tangelo left New York completely.

Failing at normal avenues of research, I signed on to the specially built computer and attendant illegal systems that Bug Bateman had supplied me with.

Bateman was the best hacker in the world, by his own estimation. I have never found reason to argue with that assessment. The young savant and I had met through his father. The beginning of our relationship had been rocky in that he resented his old man foisting off another relic on him for his services. But as the years went by and he met my off-site (and gorgeous) assistant Zephyra Ximenez, Bug had begun to rely on me to help whip his three hundred — plus pounds into a kind of shape that Z would find acceptable.

I signed on to the Persona Search Engine that Bug had lifted from the State Department. He honed the system down to where it could be used to find almost anyone almost anywhere in the world. You entered as much information as possible — age range, sex, sex preference, race(s), languages spoken, national origin, height... There were even places for DNA codes, photographs (for a facial-recognition subroutine), and fingerprints. I gave the program as much information as I could and hit the enter button.

While waiting, on a hunch I tried calling information and then looking through my phone books for Minnie Lesser — Zella’s supposed good friend and Harry’s paramour at the time of his shooting. She wasn’t anywhere to be found either.

There was lots of information on Harry up until nine years before, a few months after Zella shot him. But the trail went cold a full ten months before her conviction. He was a sometime carpenter, housepainter, fiber-optic-wire installer, cook, dishwasher, and clerk. He was more or less handsome but had weak eyes. As I looked at the pictures of him I wondered how he managed to fall so far off the radar.

After noodling on that puzzle for a quarter of an hour, I sicced Bug’s search engine on Minnie Lesser.

She fell from sight at just about the same time Harry did.

Curiouser and curiouser.

If I didn’t know for a fact that I was the cause of Zella’s incarceration, I would have begun to suspect the boyfriend and his girl.

Perusal of the information provided by Bug’s system didn’t help me put together a plan to investigate the disappearances. So I picked up the landline and hit a speed dial button.

She answered on the fifth ring.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill,” Zephyra Ximenez, my self-defined Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant, said.

“Z.”

“Have you talked to Charles?” That was Bug’s given name.

“Not for a week or so.”

“Have you seen him for dinner?”

“Only at the gym. He’s gotten into good shape.”

“Yes... he has.”

As much as I wondered about Zephyra’s interest in Bug’s doings, I had bigger problems.

“I’m going to send you two files on people that I can’t find anything on in the last nine years,” I said. “That’s very strange.”

“Charles’s programs didn’t turn up anything?”

“Not an ort.”

“Wow. You think they might be dead?”

“If they are nobody buried them — legally. Neither has anyone reported them missing.”

“I’ll get right on it. And if you see Charles, tell him I said hello.”

“You got it.”

I was just hanging up with Zephyra when Twill walked into my office. The slender and handsome young man wore silk pants and T-shirt, both black, and a cinnamon-colored jacket with no collar and brass snaps that were not attached. His only flaw was a small scar on his chin — left over from a tumble he took when he was a toddler.

His perfection was very much like that of Achilles.

His skin was actually darker than mine. It was as if Katrina’s DNA hadn’t affected him at all while his African father completely informed his elegant features and genetic history.

“Hey, Pops,” he said. He smiled at me. Twill was usually smiling. As a rule he had everything under control; at least he thought he did.

The reason I’d brought him in as a detective-in-training was because he had gotten into so much trouble in his adolescent years that I feared he’d go too far and end up in prison.

“How’s it goin’, son?”

“I’m bored,” he said, taking one of the chrome-and-cobalt-vinyl visitor’s chairs that faced my desk. “You know, listening to your stakeout tapes and readin’ old files is good and all but I need to do somethin’.”