Walter Mosley: All I Did Was Shoot My Man

These thoughts were not very complex but it took me a long time to come to them. Before I knew it it was four-thirty and Johann Brighton was coming through the unlocked door.

I stood to meet the handsome CEO-in-waiting.

“Mr. McGill? This is a surprise.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“Absolutely. What are you doing here?”

“I know that Seth Marryman hired Claudia Burns and had her come to work for you.”

“Mr. Marryman died three months ago.”

“He still hired Claudia.”

“So? What could an executive assistant have to do with anything?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“I don’t have time for this, McGill. How did you even get here? And where is the man I was supposed to meet, Mr. Furrows?”

“Alton Plimpton canceled your meeting and slotted me in.”

“Alton? He doesn’t...” Brighton stopped there in the middle of his sentence, putting together thoughts and notions that I would have liked to share.

“What do you have to do with Alton?” he asked.

“He called and asked who I thought was the inside mastermind behind the heist eight years ago. I told him that it was the man who hired Claudia Burns.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because Claudia is actually Minnie Lesser. Minnie Lesser was the girlfriend of the man Zella Grisham shot.”

Brighton took in these claims, wondering about them like a housewife gauging the ripeness of fresh fruits.

“Even if that’s true,” he said. “What does it have to do with Seth?”

The door behind us swung open then. Through it came the sour-faced guard followed by Clarence Lethford, Antoinette Lowry, and Carson Kitteridge. After that came the assassin with the receding hairline from the Quick house in Queens. He was in handcuffs again and shepherded by two uniformed cops. One of them was holding a high-powered rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.

The expression on Lethford’s face would have been perceived as a glowering frown on most men but I knew him well enough by then to see it for what it was — a triumphant smile.

“You were right,” he said to me. “It was a setup. This guy was going to kill you both.”

“How’d he get out of federal custody?” I asked Antoinette.

She shrugged and gave me an apologetic look.

“Plimpton provided him with a good lawyer,” she said. “We picked up Alton boarding a chartered jet headed for the United Emirates. He had sixteen suitcases with forty-one million dollars in them.”

“What is this all about?” Johann Brighton asked.

Kitteridge spoke up then. “Mr. Plimpton told us that he was working for you, Mr. Brighton. But we have the calls he made to this man. He was setting you and Mr. McGill up for an assassination.”

“And you let me walk into the trap?”

“LT didn’t tell us that you were on the guest list.”

“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t know if you weren’t a part of this. I still don’t, for that matter.”

“Would you mind coming down to the station with us, Mr. Brighton?” Lethford asked.

The captain of industry was temporarily out of his depth. He nodded weakly and walked out of the room with the prisoner and police escort.

“We’ll need you to come down and make a statement, LT,” Carson told me.

“What do you think it is, Kit?” I replied.

“The money speaks for itself. From the circumstances I’d say it was all this Plimpton guy. He’s blaming everybody else but he had the money and he called the man with the gun.”

“What about Harlow?”

“Plimpton had been training under Leonard for a few years a while back,” Antoinette said. “He could have figured out the foreign arm, made the contacts he’d need.”

“And how about taking the money from the vault before the heist?” I asked.

“He could have managed that with the help of Clay Thorn,” she said. “That was back before the new security procedures were put into practice. The way Rutgers works with short-term assurances is to put them in storage and use them for credit advances.”

“If they were connected, we’ll find it,” Kitteridge promised. He was not a man to make idle assurances. “Will you come down to the offices at Elizabeth Street this afternoon?”

“In the morning,” I said. “I got a big night in front of me. I’m supposed to have dinner with my father.”

Kit frowned at that. He knew my past better than anyone outside of Aura. He’d studied me the way a wild dog did the skat of his prey.

“I’ll be there at nine,” I said.

Kit didn’t like it but he knew enough to lay off.

“Nine,” he said, pointing at me. Then he walked out of the cold, sunny room.

Antoinette and I were left in the room by ourselves.

“Cutting it pretty close to the bone, weren’t you?” she asked.

“I was thinkin’ about that before your boss walked in.”

“Shall we have a seat?”

There was electricity coming from Antoinette’s side of our face-to-face. I could tell by the way she looked at me that I had passed some kind of unconscious test that her id gave every black man.

I’m a twenty-first-century New Yorker and therefore have little time to contemplate race. It’s not that racism doesn’t exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It’s just that I rarely worry about those things because there’s a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day.

Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

That said, Antoinette was one of the racists. She hated her own people because they didn’t see her for what she was. She felt betrayed by black men and then I came along. I brought out a thrill in her heart, and maybe her nether regions. That was all good and well; she was a handsome, brave, and intelligent woman, but I was preoccupied with pain so profound that I could barely tell if it was mine alone.

“Why did you call the cops and me at the last moment?” she asked. There was a queer friendliness to the question.

“I called you right after Alton called me.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who makes snap decisions,” I said. “He’d never betray a VP like Brighton unless it was a sure thing. I thought that they must be working together or maybe that Alton was Johann’s dupe.”

“You were wrong.”

“Yeah. I was and will be again. I’ve spent nearly my whole life in the penalty box but that don’t mean I’m not in the game.”

Antoinette Lowry smiled. I don’t think she was aware of it. She’d been looking for a man like me for her entire life. She hadn’t known that either.

“I’m willing to advance your name for the reward,” she said; a queen offering her throne to a brash, conquering barbarian.

“Six hundred and fifteen thousand,” I said.

“Unless we find more.”

“You won’t. Not that you’ll be able to prove anyway.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Alton probably spent twenty years working on this plan. I bet you’ll find that Harlow will have connections planted between him and Brighton. Maybe he’ll have a numbered account somewhere. You won’t be able to tie it to Plimpton. He wanted to kick up enough dust that he could make his getaway in the sandstorm. If Zella hadn’t got out of jail and the police weren’t looking into the heist again, he might have made it. I’ll tell you what though. Let’s break up the reward between me and Zella Grisham. I’ll take seventy-five thousand and leave the rest for her.”