Walter Mosley: All I Did Was Shoot My Man

“Not again, Pete,” the women’s toilet interlocutor said.

“No, Joe, it’s not like that,” the towering white man replied. “You know I do any work that they give me. It’s just that these idiots are tryin’ to make me the scapegoat for their mistakes.”

Joe said something but I didn’t hear it because I had slipped into what can only be called a reverie.

Gert Longman was dark-skinned and heavy the way old-time movie stars used to be. Her mother’s parents had come from the Dominican Republic but she didn’t know from Hispaniola. Gert was born and raised on the island of Manhattan. With no accent, and no pretense to history, she had been my lover for six weeks before she found out about Katrina — my wife.

I hadn’t lied to her — not really. I just never thought to mention my circumstances. I mean, Katrina and I hadn’t been intimate or jealous of each other’s lives in years. We had three children but two of them had nothing to do with my DNA. Katrina said they were mine and I went along with the sham because they were in my house and Katrina maintained that house. She also made the best food I ever ate in my life.

But Gert didn’t see things the way I did. She had been hearing wedding bells on those long nights in her SoHo studio.

She cut off our physical relationship but kept contact for the sake of our business.

That enterprise was the perfect blend of our talents and resources.

When I first met her Gert was an office worker in the downtown parole office in Manhattan. That post gave her access to files all over the city. I worked for organized crime and other professional bad men finding patsies for those that felt law enforcement closing in.

Gert would find the right fit and I’d plant false evidence, alter phone records, and forge documents to prove that some other poor slob at least might have been the perpetrator. Sometimes the men I framed went to prison, but, more often than not, there was just enough doubt cast for the District Attorney to call off proceedings against my client.

I kept working with Gert because she was a great resource and because I hoped that one day she would forgive me.

It was only after she kicked me out of her bed that I realized that I felt something akin to love for her.

Gert was my partner in crime but she was also the reason I went straight. That’s because the daughter of one of the men whose life I destroyed grew up. Her name was Karmen Brown and she was as single-minded as any wartime general, child molester, or great film director. She discovered my perfidy, had Gert killed to hurt me, and then, after seducing me, had a man come into her house and choke her to death, intending to frame me for her rape and murder.

I managed to get out from under it, but after that I went straight; at least as straight as a man can get after a lifetime of being bent.

I usually brought work to Gert, but after a while working with me she developed contacts of her own.

Nine years before, a man named Stumpy Brown, a gambler by trade, came to her with a proposition. Someone had robbed the vault of Rutgers Assurance Corporation, a unique organization that took in capital to insure short-term transactions conducted outside the borders of the country. Rutgers held anything of value — paintings, jewelry, or cash. They then used these resources to float short-term loans and investments at outrageous interest rates.

Back then they had been holding a sum of fifty-eight million dollars to assure that an oilman in Galveston received a certain portion of a Saudi Arabian tanker’s load when it landed in port.

It was an illegal deal, and the parties were later censured and fined, but the money was stolen, one of the five guards protecting the vault was murdered execution style, and no one knew who had gotten away with the money.

It was assumed that the guard, Clay Thorn, was the inside man, but he was dead and left no leads.

Stumpy had gotten his hands on fifty thousand dollars from the heist. He wanted Gert to use her magic to further implicate some hapless criminal who no doubt deserved the attention.

It was Zella’s bad luck as much as anything else that made her Gert’s target.

Six days before the robbery Zella Grisham had a serious bout of nausea just before lunch. She was working for real estate lawyers whose offices were down the block from the Rutgers compound. Her kindly boss sent her home, where she found her lover, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend Minnie Lesser.

Zella told the police, and later the courts, that she didn’t remember what happened after that. She didn’t remember going to the dresser, pulling out her daddy’s.32 caliber pistol, or shooting the errant boyfriend in the right shoulder, left ankle, and hip. She never denied it; she just didn’t remember it.

The DA wasn’t hell-bent against her. Public opinion was, she should have killed the bastard. After all, Harry and Minnie had apartments of their own. Many wondered why she hadn’t shot Minnie too.

Two weeks later Gert called me.

She had procured, from Stumpy, a picture of Zella, the key to her storage unit, and the money wrapped in Rutgers bands. One stack had a drop of the dead guard’s blood on it.

“It’s the perfect frame,” Gert said. “And she’s going to prison anyway.”

Even back then, before I’d developed a conscience, I had qualms. It had been discovered that Zella’s nausea came from an unexpected pregnancy. Framing a pregnant woman felt wrong.

But there was a lot of money involved, enough to pay many months’ rent and children’s doctor bills. On top of that, Gert had asked for my help and I still had hopes that she might forgive me one day.

But still, I hesitated. I remember the exact moment, sitting there in Gert’s apartment, looking down on the quaint SoHo street.

And then Gert touched my left hand.

“Do this for me, LT,” she said.

And so I disguised myself as well as I could, took a storage unit on Zella’s floor, and cut off her lock, placing a trunk inside her space. I altered the evidence somewhat because there seemed to be something wrong about the whole deal. I hadn’t talked to Stumpy, nor had Gert told him that I was her operative. The money was good, but I felt that I needed, and that Gert needed, some protection.

After that I made an anonymous phone call to the police, telling them Zella Grisham had a journal in her storage unit where she detailed the assault on Harry Tangelo. They cracked the space and found the evidence linking her with the robbery.

The Da, who might have let the shooting slide on diminished capacity, came down on Zella with everything but the Patriot Act. He demanded that she give up her confederates.

There was a brief window of time where I might have been able to get back with Gert but I felt bad at what I’d done — even way back then when backstabbing was a way of life for me.

All these years later I got a windfall from a grateful client. I took the money and rolled a story for Breland Lewis about padlocks and faulty police work, about false money wrappers and blood that didn’t belong to Clay Thorn, the slaughtered guard.

And now I was standing in the lower level of the Port Authority at Forty-second Street still feeling like a louse.

“Excuse me?” a man said.

I ignored it. People were always asking for handouts at the station. I’d given all that I could for one day.

Zella, if she knew the truth, would have hated me. Knowing that, I harbored a little hatred for myself — and my fellow man.

“Sir?” The voice was more assertive than the usual denizen.

I turned to see that it was a policeman, a white guy maybe five-ten — four and a half inches taller than I.

“Yes?” I said.

“Do I know you?”