Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

It took me and Sergeant Dalton to pull the warped office door open. We all got behind my desk and I turned on the monitor system in the bottom drawer of my desk. Whenever someone enters the front door of the reception area three cameras come on for ninety seconds. The first few frames were smoke-filled but then the three intruders appeared through the haze. They wore face masks, of course, and gloves. Before the minute and a half was up they’d started beating on the wall with two oversized sledgehammers.

“They knew what they were doing,” Kit said. “They knew you pretty good, LT.”

I didn’t reply because whatever I said would have only been redundant.

“What did they want?” Dalton asked.

“Information,” Kit and I said together.

“They tried to download the computer files.” I was gesturing at the big memory stick they’d attached to my Bug-special computer.

“Is that your device?” Kit asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. Hector probably came in and the sentry shot him. The office door was givin’ ’em problems and the system wouldn’t cooperate. They knew a lot but they didn’t know that my files are downloaded every night, erasing whatever was held in the temporary files. They realized it was useless and just ran, just ran.”

“Who was it?” Kit asked me.

“You saw ’em, man. They had masks and shit. How’m I gonna know who it was?” I was that taciturn teenager living on the street again.

“What are you working on?”

“I don’t have a job right now.”

“You still say that wasn’t you smashing Alexander Lett’s head into that wall?” Kit suggested.

“It ain’t him.”

“He checked himself out of the hospital.”

I looked Kit in the eye so that his wetware lie detector had full access.

I said very clearly, “It ain’t him.”

“What about Twill?” Kit asked.

“He’s out workin’ with some girl he knew in high school. Her boyfriend changed his phone number and he’s lookin’ for the new one,” I said but I was wondering about Twill too.

“It’s a murder,” Kit told me. “We’ve got to do this by the numbers.”

“I know.”

My father and I got to the Tesla just after midnight. It was 4:00 in the morning before the police finished their questions. They didn’t take me down to some precinct because I hadn’t witnessed the crime firsthand. I answered their battery of questions four or five times, all the while Kit staring at me, searching for the lie. But I passed and the coroner’s men came. Hector was taken to the morgue and Rich Berenson was saddled with the unenviable task of calling the young man’s wife. Better him than the cops.

While all of this was happening the forensics team came through dusting and vacuuming, photographing, crawling through, and in other ways examining the crime scene.

They left admonishing me not to touch anything before forensics came in later.

After that I lifted the front door and wedged it into the hole, went down to my office, and sat.

When the phone rang I knew it was Aura.

“Are you all right?” she asked me.

“Fine.”

“Do you need me to come down?”

“No.”

“Are you okay, Leonid?”

“Not quite right yet but I intend to be.”

—

It wasn’t until about 6:00 that I signed on to my personal computer. The first thing I looked up was the inmate list for the supermax Indiana prison where my brother was slated to spend the greater portion of the rest of his life. Most systems couldn’t get that kind of information but Bug had hacked every important database in the United States and then some. He let me use his access because I was the man, with Iran Shelfly’s help, who had turned him from a blob into an Adonis.

My father said that Nikita was no longer in prison. My computer couldn’t tell me who decided to break down my doors but at least I could see where my brother had gone.

But there I failed too.

There was no record of Nikita McGill ever being incarcerated there or anywhere else in the federal system of prisons. When I looked deeply enough I found a death certificate that was issued a year before the last time my brother and I had talked. He died in Columbus, Ohio, the obituary said.

A homeless man identified as Nikita Angus McGill died of coronary complications at Sutter Street Homeless Center leaving no family.

“Coincidence” is a word that had been removed from the detective’s lexicon. Maybe Marella was just a lucky happenstance. Maybe my father ringing the doorbell when I was on the phone with her was a mere fluke. But when a convicted criminal disappears from prison records and a dead man decorates my front hall — that had to mean something, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what that something was.

It wasn’t until after 7:00, after Mardi called on my cell phone and I went out to reception to let her in, it wasn’t until then that I remembered Hiram Stent.

I started by using another of Bug’s programs. The unproclaimed genius had created an entire virtual world for himself. He even had programs set with updatable key words that read the papers and websites for him in the morning, delivering edited versions of the news before he dove in for himself.

All I had to do was type in the name “Hiram Stent” and I got six hits on his death.

He was found at around midnight, not long after someone had used a bomb to break down my office door, in an alley off a side street half a block from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Hiram had been stabbed multiple times in the torso, neck, and face; his pockets had been torn out. His wallet had probably been taken but the canny indigent had hidden his identification (and probably a few bucks) in his shoe. The authorities suspected a mugging. There were no witnesses and the investigation was ongoing. Anyone with information was to call Crimestoppers.

While reading the articles about Hiram I decided to take his case. I had failed the sad man in life but maybe I could make up for some of that.

While dedicating myself to a dead man’s quest, a name popped into my head — Twitcher. That was what the voice I’d overheard on the phone had called my son: Twitcher.

That’s how my brain works: a question, maybe not even articulated, goes down through my mind and I stew on it until an answer comes, or not. Sometimes I simmer over a question for years and suddenly one day the answer just appears like Athena from her father’s brow.

“Mr. McGill?” Mardi said. She was carrying a cardboard box from the upscale coffee shop on the first floor. Therein were a large black coffee, two apple-fritter doughnuts, and a real apple — this last item because she felt that I should eat at least one healthy thing each day.

After laying the box on my desk she said, “I called Mr. Domini about the door. He said that he’ll come fix it by end of day. Seko Security said that a temporary security system will be installed before the end of the day and that they’ll have a permanent solution by the middle of next week.”

I had good insurance on my office and my systems. It’s not if something will go wrong, it’s when.

I spent the rest of the morning searching the Net, and elsewhere, for two women: Celia Landis and Lois Stent.

Hiram’s wife was easy. She was born Lois Miriam Bowman to Lawrence Frank and Melissa Marie Bowman in Tampa, Florida, in 1983. She married Hiram in 2003, had Lisa in ’04 and William in ’06. The separation came in ’11. In that same year divorce papers were served but that hadn’t gone very far. Hiram’s lawyer was a man named Tracey Tremont.

I called Melissa Marie Bowman because her husband, Larry, had died of a heart attack three years earlier.