Walter Mosley - All I Did Was Shoot My Man

“Are you threatening me, Ms. Lowry?”

“Merely telling you what I’m doing and what I intend to do. If, along the way, I find that you’re involved in some chicanery or mischief, I will use that knowledge to achieve my ends.”

“Chicanery? Where in the South are you from, girl?”

“I will hound Zella Grisham until either she dies or I do. And I will do the same for you, Mr. McGill.”

“Unless?”

The sneer morphed into wan complicity.

“If the company’s money is restored, the hunt will be over.”

“This is a mighty small office to be issuing such large edicts,” I said.

“The full weight of Rutgers is behind me.”

The woman through her window was white, in her twenties, nearly bald, with dark blue or maybe even black lipstick. This image and Antoinette’s words elicited my smile.

“Zella was framed,” I said. “The judge was convinced of that; that’s why she vacated the sentence.”

“Judge Malcolm lifted the sentence because we didn’t oppose that decision.”

“And you didn’t because you felt that on the outside Zella might lead you to her confederates.”

“I’m looking at you, Mr. McGill. NYPD files have you involved with everything from embezzlement to armed robbery.”

Wow. I wondered if this private cop could succeed where Carson Kitteridge had failed.

“But,” Antoinette added, “if you help us retrieve our losses, we can offer a one and a half percent reward on all monies returned.”

“That’s a lotta money.”

“What do you say?”

I sat back and watched the bald white girl laugh at what someone was saying on the phone.

“My father told me one time that corporations have the rights of citizens but that they are not organic creatures. And so Rutgers doesn’t have the capability of feeling like it has to protect its biological appendages. That said, Ms. Lowry, do not believe that you are safe from the forces unleashed by this... campaign.”

I had to throw down that gauntlet. If somebody wants to threaten you, you have to respond in kind; I learned that lesson not from my father but by raising myself on the streets of New York.

The special investigator took it pretty well. She considered my words, weighed them. But she was tough too.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“In your investigation have you looked into Harry Tangelo and Minnie Lesser?”

“They were considered,” Antoinette said candidly, “and rejected. We believe that Zella had some connection to Clay Thorn. It’s possible that you knew him too.”

Thorn was the guard who was executed during the heist.

“Harry and Minnie are missing,” I said, “have been since before Zella went to trial. That’s strange, don’t you think?”

I could see the suspicion rising in Lowry’s eyes, also the resentment that I could tell her something she didn’t know.

“What’s your interest in them?” she asked.

“I work for the lawyer who got Zella out of hock.”

“Breland Lewis is your lawyer, Mr. McGill. He’s working for you.”

That was my cue to stand. Antoinette had come out a point or two ahead in our competition, but I had learned more about her than she had about me.

“I think I’ll be leaving now, Special Investigator Lowry. If I don’t show up downstairs in a couple of hours, send out a search party. It’s a fuckin’ rat’s nest in here.”

On my way uptown on the A train I was thinking about one and a half percent of fifty million. So far Twill was the only operative at my agency bringing in any cash that month.

I was standing in the middle of the crowded car, holding on to a metal pole, when I noticed the blue-and-pink-haired, much tattooed woman standing next to me. She was young and white, flipping through pictures of naked women on her iPad. The moment after I noticed what she was doing she turned her face to me and smiled.

I thought about LeRoi Jones’s play Dutchman and the bug in the carnivorous plant that I imagined while waiting for Antoinette. I smiled back at the young woman and turned away.

I had to have learned something in all my fifty-five years.

Copper-skinned Iran Shelfly was trying to hurt the heavy bag when I came upon him in Gordo’s Gym. He was whaling away on the canvas-covered bale of cotton next to the murky window that looked down on Eighth Avenue.

I watched the thirty-something ex-con throwing body shots like a real pro. I had wanted Iran to work for me as part of my growing firm but he preferred the ambiance of the gym.

I couldn’t blame him.

There were about a dozen men and one woman warming up that afternoon. The formal training sessions would start in an hour.

“Eye,” I said.

He stopped and turned to me, sweat pouring off his forehead. He was wearing a tight yellow T-shirt and red trunks. His hands were wrapped but not gloved, and his smile was infectious.

“Mr. McGill. How you doin’?”

“If I complained, somebody might shoot me.”

“And that would only make you madder.”

“There’s a new tenant at your rooming house,” I said.

“Zella Grisham. That girl need to learn how to smile.”

“You don’t like her?”

“She okay. We talked some, but wherever she’s from she ain’t left there yet.”

“I have a special interest in her. I want to make sure that she’s safe but I don’t want her knowin’ what I want.”

“Anything you say, Mr. McGill.” Iran thought he owed me. When he got out of prison I made sure he had a job, and whenever he found himself in trouble I showed him an exit sign.

Iran was grateful for my help, and I neglected to tell him that I was the one who got him incarcerated in the first place.

“Thanks, Eye. How’s the job?”

“I’m so tired every night that I’m asleep ’fore my head hits the pillow. But I always wake up with a smile on my face.”

The odds were against an ex-con making it in the straight life, but if he learned the trick, he was the happiest man on the street.

I smiled and went toward the back of the floor-sized room.

Gordo was sitting at his desk in his cubbyhole office, making checks on a long graph-like form. In some arcane way he used these forms to gauge the progress, or decline, of a boxer’s talents. Other than the names scrawled in the upper left-hand corner, I could never make sense of these charts.

“Mr. Tallman,” I said.

He looked up and then stood.

“LT,” he said over an extended hand.

Gordo was my height and red-bronze in color. He was a mixture of all the races America had to offer and was therefore referred to as a black man. He had more hair than I did and was somewhere between the ages of seventy-seven and ninety. He was looking younger though. Beating cancer and falling in love was a fountain of youth for him.

“Sit, sit,” the impish trainer said.

His visitor’s chair was a boxer’s corner stool, where you sat for sixty seconds between rounds, getting yelled at, before your opponent proceeded to beat on you again.

“What’s the news, G?” I asked.

Gordo’s brows furrowed, his eyes peered into mine. He could see the fever in me. Probably no one ever knows you as well as your trainer.

But I saw something too. There was a hint of sadness in Gordo’s gaze; something I’d not seen in a long time.

“What’s wrong with you, kid?” he asked.

“You first, old man.”

The trainer sagged back in his green-and-gray office chair. His shoulders slumped down and he shook his head slowly.

“I prob’ly shouldn’t have called you,” he said.

“But you did.”

“She might already be gone.”

“Who?”

“Elsa.”

“Gone? I thought you two were getting married?”