Walter Mosley: All I Did Was Shoot My Man

“Why did you call me, Mr. Plimpton?”

“I think I know how Claudia Burns got hired.”

“Tell Ms. Lowry.”

“I don’t trust her.”

“You think she’s involved somehow?”

“No. But she works for the higher-ups. I don’t believe that she will have my best interests at heart.”

“You think that she’ll take all the glory for herself.”

“Can I hire you, Mr. McGill?”

“Sure you can. But it’ll cost ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand!”

“That’s my corporate rate.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Can you borrow it?”

“I’m not a rich man, Mr. McGill. I’ve worked for Rutgers my entire life but I have an ex-wife and two children near the end of high school. If I put out that much money, I’d have to have guarantees that you will produce.”

“Guarantees come with washing machines, Alton, and even they have time limits.”

“Are you sure that the man who hired Miss Burns was involved with the heist?”

“I can’t see it any other way.”

“Why?”

“Am I hired?”

The floor manager didn’t answer immediately.

For that moment I fell into a waking daydream; in that reverie I was set upon by a boa constrictor. I was fast. I’d grabbed its head but it’d looped its tail around my left leg. With my free hand I got it by the tip of that tail but then it encircled my neck with the central bulk of its slithering scales.

That snake was my unwanted case. It was both my telephone cord and my fault.

Fault: Responsibility, and also a natural material flaw. I was wrong no matter what way you looked at it.

“All right, Mr. McGill,” Alton Plimpton said. I’d almost forgotten that he was there. “I’ll pay you. But it’ll take me a few days to come up with the money. I’ll have to borrow it.”

“Great. Come by my office with the cashier’s check or the cash and I’ll get right on it.”

“We can’t wait on this, Mr. McGill,” Plimpton said. His voice had become brittle.

“You expect me to help you without some kind of assurance?” I smiled at my use of the last word.

“You could, you could start to investigate and only turn the information over after I paid,” he suggested.

“Okay,” I said. I shouldn’t have agreed. If I were advising Twill about the business, I would have said that people don’t call you on the phone and throw information at you like that. As a matter of fact, if I was anyone else instructing my son, I’d have never suggested PI work.

“Okay,” I said again. “Who is it that hired Claudia?”

“That’s a difficult question.”

“With a two-word answer.”

“Johann Brighton is the reason she was hired but it was Seth Marryman that completed the paperwork.”

“Not Harlow?”

“No. Leonard has nothing to do with it.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Seth died three months ago,” Alton said. “It was a heart attack, completely unexpected. I knew his family and was asked by Human Resources to help with anything they needed. I’ve been with the company for so long that I’ve done that with other unexpected deaths. Seth’s wife, Virginia, told me that he had papers from the company in a trunk in their attic. Removing any information from the workplace is strictly forbidden. I should have told somebody but that might have affected the monies his family received so I took them to my place and asked her not to tell anybody else.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite.”

“He had a file on Claudia Burns. It was her employment assignment and a letter he’d signed recommending her. He was very specific in stipulating that she be assigned to Brighton. He even had Brighton’s previous assistant promoted to make the job available.”

“That’s not much to go on,” I said, “him being dead and all.”

“There was also a document detailing a Swiss account with eight hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars in it. It’s a numbered account. Seth made less than I did. There’s no way he saved up that much. The deposit goes back eight years, just nine months after the robbery.”

“Explain something to me, Alton,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody about this?”

“If I turned those files in, his wife might have lost that money and maybe his retirement too.”

“But the timing.”

“When I discovered it I had no reason to think that Claudia and the money had anything to do with each other. It’s not enough to have come from the heist; I mean, that would be millions. There were no other accounts. It’s only when Agent Lowry asked about Claudia that I became suspicious in a larger sense.”

“But you still aren’t going to the company,” I said.

After a significant pause Plimpton said, “It’s a lot of money.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

“The man you want is Johann Brighton,” he said then.

“How did you come to that conclusion?”

“There’s a request from Brighton for Seth to hire Burns. It’s just a note with the words personal and confidential written in red across the bottom.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes, I am.”

“But what could any of that have to do with the robbery? I mean, if Zella is innocent, and I believe that she is, what could Zella’s boyfriend’s girlfriend have to do with anything?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Claudia Burns is Minnie Lesser.”

“Who?”

“The woman that was with Zella’s boyfriend when she shot him.”

“Oh.” He sounded really surprised.

“So how could she be involved with the heist if Zella wasn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Alton said, “maybe this Burns woman found out something about the evidence, proving that Grisham had been framed. All I do know is that Seth received nearly nine hundred thousand directly after Claudia was hired.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll accept your argument for the moment. But even if that’s all true, what can we do but tell Antoinette and her bosses?”

“You get Brighton to confess to you,” he said. “Maybe you can even get him to pay you off. Then you can tell the higher-ups that I hired you because I suspected something I couldn’t prove and I was afraid that if I brought it in-house that Brighton would find out.”

“So you just want me to go to his office with Marryman’s name and see what he does?”

“No. No. They won’t let you in the building now. Harlow has made sure of that. But Brighton has a meeting with a man named Furrows this afternoon at an apartment we own in Tribeca. I’ll cancel Furrows and you can go instead. Confront him with the information and get him to confess and maybe pay you off.”

“You can do that?” I asked. “Cancel a private appointment for a VP like Johann?”

“It’s all computerized,” he said. “You just have to know what codes to enter.”

I’d never had a case like that one: a looping snake looking you in the face and attacking from below and behind at the same time.

Leaning way back in my office chair, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the interconnections.

There had been two thefts committed, Nova Algren attested to that. Bingo and his men were blamed for taking fifty-eight million but they only got twelve. There was at least one inside man, Clay Thorn, the guard. He and someone — Brighton or maybe this Seth Marryman — had removed forty-six million before the robbery went down. Clay was double-crossed by his inside confederate. Bingo killed Clay and then hired Stumpy to find a fall guy, Zella. Then Stumpy goes to Harry and gets him to drop out of sight and connect his girlfriend with a job at Rutgers.