Walter Mosley - Known to Evil

EVEN ONCE HE WAS back in his hole, Tiny was still a little off at first. I kept having to repeat myself when explaining about the Leontine Building and the man named Shell.

In order to prime him for more challenging work, I had him look up the license-plate number I got from Lonnie, the redheaded ex-con, but that was just a rental to a guy named Bob Brown.

"And you want to know where this Shell is?" Tiny asked once we were back into the meat of my visit.

"If that'll help me find out who he's working for," I said. "I need to know who's behind all this."

After some time Tiny settled down to his usual brilliance and brought his bug-eyes to bear on the subject of Oscar Shell.

Problems showed up immediately when it became clear that no one by that name worked for any company situated in the Leontine Building. No Oscar Shell had ever rented space there. As a matter of fact, there wasn't an Oscar Shell that fit Angie's description anywhere in the tristate area.

"This isn't gonna work," Tiny said after an hour on the bully's trail. "How about we take another route?"

"The building?" I asked.

From there the fat genius went into overdrive.

T. D. Donnie and Sons were listed as the owners of the Leontine but they actually owned less than one percent of the building, making their money as absentee property managers. The corporation they answered to was Graski Incorporated, which was located in Chicago. Graski had gone out of business in 1955, however, though the corporate name was owned by a woman named Hedda Martins of Miami. Hedda had died three years earlier, and a Florida lawyer's report had informed her heirs that Hedda was a small partner in a company in San Francisco called Real Innovations. RI had listed among its properties the Leontine.

The trail might have ended there, except for one of Hedda's pesky heirs-a man named Thom Soams. Soams filed suits in New York, Illinois, Florida, and California in an attempt to receive payment for what he felt was the heirs' rightful due. After two and half years of wrangling with a new firm, Mallory Investments, Soams collected the sum of $22,307.31 in settlement.

Mallory Investments was a subsidiary of Regents Bank of New York, a private institution owned lock, stock, and barrel by a sometime socialite oddly named Sandra Sanderson III.

It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but at least I had a business, and maybe even a name.

The articles we pulled up on Sanderson painted her as a hands-on tyrant in her multibillion-dollar business. She fought long and hard against anyone who stood in her way. The New York skyline owed a lot to Regents Bank, which collected its interest with a stopwatch and a stable of lawyers.

Her son, Desmond, had died of a rare heart disease at the beginning of 2008, and Sandra had gone into seclusion, which was peculiar, because mother and son had been on the outs for years.

The structure of this story put me in a rather literary frame of mind.

If Desmond was Grendel, and Sandra Grendel's mama, then maybe Alphonse was Beowulf and this was all a reenactment of a classic masterpiece.

I smiled to myself, leaning on Tiny's round white table as I read the articles he'd produced for me.

"Uh-oh," the genius said.

"What?"

"Somebody's trying to track me down."

"Regents?"

"Not by the signature, but you can bet whoever it is, they work for them."

"How close are they?"

"I've laid down four thousand ninety-six false trails," he said, unrattled. "They might could get through them all, but I doubt it."

"What if they do?"

"If they pushed hard enough they might break the shield on my place."

"That's a lot of work, isn't it?"

"I hacked their database," he said blandly. "They're worth billions. But don't worry, I have a lot of traps set. It's very unlikely that they'd make it all the way here."

" 'Unlikely' is not a word I swear by," I said. "Maybe we should get you out of here for a couple of days."

"No."

"No?"

"No one drives me from my home. My life's work is here in this room. I'll die before I let anyone take it from me or me from it."

"You don't really mean that," I said.

"This bunker could withstand a nuclear blast," he told me. I believed him. "It would take a crew of construction engineers just to take down my front door. Being underground, I don't have any assailable walls, and the apartment overhead is mine, with a reinforced floor. There's booby traps all down the hallway and even in the toilet and I have plastic explosives embedded in all four walls of this room. If they ever got this far-they'd never get out."

I didn't doubt a word that Tiny had said. I did, however, wonder if he had considered how vulnerable someone like Zephyra would make him. She wouldn't agree to live in a hole, or to a suicide pact, in order to protect data.

"You got a pencil?" I asked him.

He reached under the table, coming out with a cheap retractable pen and a violet notepad. I scribbled down a phone number and pushed the tiny binder back at him.

"What's this?"

"That's a special number that every important person in the city has. It connects to a solitary 911 operator who has at her beck and call an elite SWAT unit, one in each borough. All you have to do is call that number and the police will be here in force in under five minutes-no questions asked."

In my years moving among gangsters and bent businessmen I'd accumulated a whole treasure trove of information. The special emergency number came from Alphonse Rinaldo himself.

"Wow." It was a rare thing to impress Bug.

"Yeah," I said. "Before you level the block, you might just use that."

Regents Bank's main office was on Sixth, at Fifty-third. They owned the entire building. The ground floor brought to mind a futuristic grand ballroom with forty-foot ceilings and crystal walls. The floor was a huge mosaic, a copy of an Australian Aboriginal rock painting depicting their god, the Great Lizard, passing over the Land of Man.

Most of the floor was empty of furniture or partitions. Small groups stood here and there, discussing who knows what. There was a large semicircular desk toward the far end of the vast room where three young women waited to grant or disallow entrance to the higher levels of Regents.

The desk was made from plastic, or maybe glass, with an emerald tint. The young women were Asian, African-American, and Hispanic-all young and, to one degree or another, lovely.

"Yes? Can I help you?" the smiling Asian child asked.

"Leonid Trotter McGill," I said. "For Mr. Oscar Shell."

"What department?"

"He's a special operative in the employ of Sandra Sanderson the Third."

Something like fear entered the young woman's eyes. However, the smile managed to keep a place hold on the lower half of her face.

She turned to her girlfriends and huddled.

A guard with an earphone entered from stage right. I gazed wistfully at the red-and-ochre mosaic tiles at my feet.

All three of the women stood and approached me.

"What is your business?" the black woman asked me.

"Is Mr. Shell here?"

"That's not what I asked you."

"The only thing you need to know is that my business with you is getting to Mr. Shell."

No one there liked me.

"I'm sorry, we, we don't have anybody by that name here," the Hispanic woman said.

"Then I'll leave."

The suited guard took a step toward me.

Evoking my beloved, and favorite, son, I did a single shoulder shrug and made to turn away.

"Excuse me," the Asian woman said.

I noticed then that all three were the same height.

"Yes?"

"Does this business have to do with Regents?"

"No," I said. "I'm pretty sure not. At least I hope not."

"What does that mean?"