Walter Mosley - All I Did Was Shoot My Man

The orange passageway was also spacious and bulged out in places where there were elevator doors. When I got to my destination I realized that there was no button to push.

All that security and they were still ripped off for fifty-eight million dollars.

I wondered if some member of the security force noted my smile.

There were more hurdles to pass before I got to the modern antechamber with a solitary, rather aged receptionist and a tan couch. Needless to say I passed every barrier: like a flightless bug making his way into the interior of an insect-eating plant.

There were no magazines or other distractions there, in what seemed like my own private waiting room; no clock or monitors, wall calendars or framed photographs of the gray-headed sentinel’s family. She, the hard-eyed receptionist, was white and wrinkled. She wore glasses and had not smiled in years. Behind her desk was a tan door, off center in a bare white wall.

I sat for maybe three minutes before taking out my cell phone.

This action caught my guard’s attention.

I had no new messages.

For a few moments I considered calling Aura and finally decided that this wasn’t the right environment to talk about lost love. But I had the phone in my hand and so I decided to call my daughter — why not?

I began entering numbers.

“No cell phone usage in the building,” the nameless picket said.

I smiled, nodded, and brought the phone to my ear.

“Hi, Dad,” she said after the third ring. She sounded a little out of breath.

“Hey, doll.”

“How are you?”

“I was worried when you didn’t come home last night.”

“I stayed at Gillian’s house. We had like a slumber party, five of us girls.”

“Was it fun?”

“Yeah. Was there anything you needed to talk to me about?”

“I’m sorry about your mother. She’s having a tough time.”

“I know.”

Somebody cleared his throat just then.

I looked up to see a little guy in a light gray suit and a burgundy tie, not silk. He was wisp thin and had a mustache that was once black but had frosted over a bit. The invasion of white hairs was a subtle warning to the thatch on his head.

“Mr. McGill,” he said.

I held up a finger and said, “But you don’t have to worry about her, baby. I’ll make sure that she’s okay.”

“I know you will, Dad.”

“Talk to you later?”

“Okay. Bye.”

I folded the phone and pocketed it, stood up and realized that the little guy was still taller than I.

“No cell phone use in the building,” he said.

Had the receptionist called him? I didn’t hear her. Was there a special button under her desk expressly for cell phone emergencies?

“Sorry,” I said.

“I’ll have to ask you for your phone,” he said, holding out his left hand.

“More than that,” I said. “You’ll have to take it.”

The little white guy had bushy eyebrows that furrowed. There was no gray in them yet.

“You’re here to see Miss Lowry?”

So he hadn’t come for the phone.

“Yes.”

“My name is Alton Plimpton,” the man said. “I’m a general manager for Rutgers.”

“What’s that exactly?”

“All senior receptionists answer to my office,” he said proudly.

I could tell that he expected me to be very impressed.

“And Miss Lowry?” I asked.

“She’s not here and her supervisor is indisposed, so I came over to see if I could help.”

“Miss Lowry doesn’t report to you?”

“No.”

“Does she work for your boss?”

“Um... no.”

“Then you can’t help.”

“But she isn’t here.”

I sat down.

“I can’t think of any place I’d rather wait. What else could you do in a room like this?”

“You can’t wait if she’s not here.”

“If not,” I speculated, “then why let me in in the first place?”

“Mr. McGill—”

“Mr. Plimpton, I’m going to sit on this couch and wait until I speak either to Miss Lowry or somebody she reports to. You can go back into your rats’ maze and tell the king rat that I said so.”

A tremor went through the reception manager’s thin frame. He almost said something and then didn’t. He turned away and went through the tan door, leaving the dour receptionist to glare at me.

I put my hands, palms up, on my knees and stared vacantly at the doorknob, counting my breaths and emptying my mind of all malice and love.

The Zazen practice calmed me and the aspirin kept back the flood of fever in my blood. Between these two forms of self-medication I drifted over the details of the past few days; my brooding blood son and wild Twill; Zella, my victim and albatross; and Aura... The doorknob turned and out came a solidly built black woman with shoulder-length straightened hair and an ocher suit that was well-tailored, exposing her figure without overaccentuating it.

Even without the heels she would have been an inch taller than I.

“Mr. McGill?”

“Yes?”

“Special Investigator Antoinette Lowry. Will you follow me, please?”

I rose up, feeling the lightness of the meditation, and went through the doorway behind the brisk-moving agent.

We turned here and there into one hall after another, passing many a closed door along the way. Finally we reached the end of the maze at a black door that had my guide’s name on it.

She went through, obviously expecting me to follow.

I did.

The first thing you noticed about Antoinette Lowry’s office was how small it was; eight feet wide and only a dozen paces from the entrance to the window wall. This window would have given the illusion of space if it didn’t look directly into another office building across the way. The street separating Rutgers from its neighbor was small and so it seemed as if the woman sitting at the desk next door could have reached out and touched Antoinette’s shoulder if she wanted to. This intimacy added to the closeness of the investigator’s work space.

Antoinette’s desk was only wide enough to have a top drawer, and there was no other furniture except for a walnut chair that she gestured at while swaying sideways to pass through the narrow space between her desk and the wall.

We both sat and took a moment to regard each other in the coffin-like booth of an office.

Antoinette was in her early thirties. Her face was handsome but hard, the kind of look that had to grow on you. In a certain light, after a good conversation (or a couple of drinks), you might suddenly come to think her fetching. She had skin nearly as dark as mine and intuitive eyes. There was the mild patina of a sneer on her lips. I wondered if this expression was normal or if she brought it out especially for people like me.

“You’re here representing Zella Grisham?” Antoinette asked.

“She called to tell me that you got her fired and tried to make her homeless.”

“She’s a criminal. She should be in prison.”

This brazen claim raised my eyebrows.

“I knew corporate America had its own private police force,” I said, “but I didn’t realize that they now have commoditized the justice system too.”

“You get that kind of talk from your Communist father,” she replied, “Tolstoy McGill.”

If she meant to impress me she succeeded.

“So it’s not only Zella you’re hounding.”

“I’m investigating the robbery of fifty-eight million dollars from my employer,” she said. “Fifty-eight million, that’s a lot of money.”

“Water under the bridge.”

“Sheikh al-Tariq gave us that money to assure the delivery of a certain portion of one of his father’s oil tankers would reach Houston,” she said. “Rutgers had to eat the loss. So if they want me searching down the river and to the sea, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And if you show up on my screen, I will use all the resources at my command to follow you.”