Walter Mosley - All I Did Was Shoot My Man

I was well on my way to hating the Mycrofts and I hadn’t even met them.

“Hello,” a man said in a modulated tenor.

He was tall (of course) and fit. His mottled tanned skin seemed to come from sportsmanship and not vanity. His trousers were khaki and shirt lime cotton. His feet were moccasined in red-brown leather and his hair was onyx and silver as opposed to the more pedestrian salt-and-pepper.

Behind Shelby Mycroft came a tall thin woman. She was forty-five or — six, a decade less than he, but she looked younger than her years. That was because of the plastic surgery and expensive spa treatments. Her hair tended toward blond, and the metal ball suspended from the impossibly thin chain around her neck was platinum, not silver. Her dress was a luminescent gray that came to mid-calf.

I don’t remember the color of her eyes. That’s probably because our eyes rarely met.

Twill and I both rose.

“I’m Mr. Shelby Mycroft,” he said, extending a hand. “This is my wife, Mrs. Sylvia Mycroft.”

The lines were drawn. I smiled at the possibly unconscious class strategy.

I shook hands with the man, Twill nodded, and we both sat back down.

The Mycrofts lowered on the sofa to our right, smiling demurely.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Sylvia asked.

“Water,” I said.

“Nothing for me, thank you,” Twill added.

She rose and left the room for a moment, returning before her husband started his spiel.

“We were expecting you to come alone, Mr. McGill,” Mr. Shelby Mycroft said, the insincere smile delicately etched on his lips.

“When Breland explained the problem I called my associate Mathers here. He, uh, will probably prove useful.”

“This is a confidential matter.”

I nodded but refrained from showing my temper, or fever.

The maid came into the room carrying a silver platter with two glasses of water on it. She was followed by a greatly transformed Velvet Reyes. The young prostitute/heroin addict was wearing a loose floral dress, and her long black hair was tied up at the back of her head. Behind Velvet came a young girl, maybe three years old. The child had big black eyes that honed in on me. Her mother was taking in my son.

“This is Adonia,” Shelby said of the maid, “her daughter Velvet and granddaughter Minolita.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” the child said and smiled.

“Have I met you?” Velvet asked me.

The question caused Adonia to focus on me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d remember you.”

Adonia put our glasses down on the priceless painting and hurried her brood from the room.

I picked up my glass and, true to his word, Twill left his where it was placed.

There was a moment of silence in the wake of the servants’ departure. Shelby was still a little miffed about Twill’s (aka Mathers’s) presence.

“We were asked to come here at the last minute, Mr. Mycroft,” I said. “I have other appointments to keep.”

He didn’t like my tone.

That was okay — I didn’t like his doorman.

“My... our son Kent is studying political science at NYU,” he said. “He’s twenty-three but young for his age. Recently we’ve been made aware that he’s gotten himself involved with a rough crowd. We’re worried that he might get into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Well... we aren’t exactly sure.”

“Maybe what you heard isn’t true,” I said, “or an exaggeration of the facts.”

“No,” Shelby said.

“How do you know?”

“Someone who knows him at school made us aware. Someone that we trust.”

“Who’s that?”

“What does it matter who told me? I’m telling you.”

At that moment the aspirin kicked in. The fever abated, and it was like I was suddenly aware of my circumstances.

I stood up.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Twill.

He stood too.

“I, I, I don’t understand,” Mr. Shelby Mycroft said, also rising.

“Look, man,” I told him. “I’m only here because Breland asked me to come. You got a problem and I’m here to help. But if you don’t wanna come clean and tell me what you know, then I don’t have the time.”

“I’ve told you what you need to know.”

“Come on,” I said to Twill.

“It’s our daughter, Mr. McGill,” Sylvia Mycroft said. “She’s the one that told us.”

Shelby stood there somehow glowering at both me and his wife at the same time.

“And what did your daughter say exactly?” I asked.

“What I’ve already told you,” Shelby said brusquely.

“I’m going to have to hear it from her.”

“No.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“I’m the one paying for your services, Mr. McGill.”

“Not if I don’t take the job,” I said, looking up into his darkening eyes.

“Shelby,” Sylvia said, glaring at his profile.

Once again Twill and I were sitting alone in the big sunny room with our backs to the river. We weren’t talking because there was nothing to say. I was executing my profession and Twill was learning everything he could. He wasn’t impressed by wealth the way I was. Even though he was an accomplished thief by the age of fourteen he didn’t really covet money or the things it could buy.

Twill, the son of my heart, was a native of modernity. For him money was a found natural resource like the wind — or dry dung.

Little Minolita appeared at the corner of a doorway to the room. Not the door we’d come through. She was staring at me while picking her nose.

“Come here, you little creature,” I said, proffering my big boxer’s paws.

She opened her mouth, took in a big gulp of air, and then ran at me like a hungry puppy that just saw an unguarded plate.

The ecru-colored child hopped up on my knee and grabbed my index finger.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi yourself.”

She’d never heard that phrase, and the newness of the man and the words made her smile.

“I can pick up Miss Sylvia’s two-pound weights,” she told me.

“I pick up weights too, down at Gordo’s Gym.”

So many new words and ideas. The child started rocking from side to side.

“Do you ride horses?” she asked, reminded by her own movements.

“Never,” I said, shaking my head.

“I do. With Mama.”

“Horses are big.”

Minolita nodded with such vehement seriousness that both Twill and I smiled. She smiled too, basking in the warmth of our attention.

“Minolita,” Velvet said, standing in the same doorway from which her daughter had come.

The child twisted on my knee as if it were her private saddle and said, “Here, Mom.”

“Stop bothering Miss Sylvia’s guests.”

The young woman came into the room with the careless grace of youth. She wasn’t over twenty-one, and I was impressed by her recovery from the shape she was in when last we met.

“I’m not bothering them, Mom. He doesn’t even ride horses.”

Velvet lifted her daughter from my knee and held the child in her arms. She intended to turn away but then stopped.

“I had a dream about you,” she said to me.

“That seems like a waste for a beautiful young woman like yourself.”

“You were in a big dark place,” she said, ignoring the compliment. “Or maybe it was me. Yes. I was in a hole, looking up at the nighttime, and you came and held out your hands. I know that it was you because it was your hands.”

“That’s some dream,” I said. “Or was it a nightmare?”

“When I woke up the sun was shining,” she said. “My mother was sitting beside me and I was home.”

I wondered how much she really remembered. It didn’t much matter. Hush and I had covered up the particulars with the assassin’s close attention to detail. Even if the man, Bernard Locke, was missed, his body would never be found.