All I Did Was Shoot My Man

10

It was close to midnight, and the caller registered as unknown.

“Hello?” The only reason I answered is because I believed any distraction would be better than the memories threading through my brain.

“Mr. McGill?”

“Zella?”

“Yes. Can you talk?”

“Sure. Talk.”

“I mean, in person.”

“Okay. Come to my office tomorrow at ten. That’s in the Tesla—”

“I meant now.”

“It’s eleven fifty-seven.”

“You don’t sound asleep.”

Recently released convicts don’t live in the workaday world, not at first. They’ve been locked up in a box, and the shock of freedom breaks all rules. Zella had a problem and a phone, so why not call the only man she knew?

“There’s a place in the East Village called Leviathan...” I said.

I gave her the address and a few special instructions. She made me repeat the directions and agreed to meet there in an hour’s time.

I took a three-minute cold shower, donned a blue suit identical to the one I wore that day, and checked to see that Katrina was still on her belly. After all that I skipped down the ten flights to the street, feeling like a kid having received a reprieve from summer school.

Leviathan was one of the most secret late-night bars in Manhattan. Three floors underground, it was reputed to be a Mafia bomb shelter in the mid-fifties. The bartender/owner was named Leviticus Bowles, though his mother had christened him Eugene.

Leviticus was a born-again ex-con who acquired the deed and keys from a cell mate, Jimmy Teppi, at Attica before that prison was world-renowned. Legend has it that young Leviticus had had Jimmy’s back during some hard times and the mobster was grateful.

Jimmy died not long after the uprising. Mr. Bowles took this as a sign to make a life that kept him away from wardens and prison yards, rancid breath and unrestrained manhood.

Leviathan was beneath a Chinese restaurant equipment store on Bowery. The upper floors of the building were apartments. There was a locked door, with various buttons for the residents. One of these buttons had the name L. Bowles scrawled next to it.

I pressed the button and few moments later a voice said, “Yes?”

“Jimmy T,” I said clearly.

The lock clicked open, and I walked down a narrow hallway, past the stairs that led to the upper-floor apartments, to a doorway that had an electric eye above it.

I looked up at the lens, and the door came open. Three steps in and I found myself at the precipice of one hundred and seventy-two stairs that coiled down into darkness. This spiral was dank and ominous. You knew that you were leaving the world of city-granted licenses and state-enforced regulations.

The vestibule at the bottom of the stairs presented a bright green door that opened immediately.

I was assailed by Sinatra and cigarette smoke, careless laughter and bright lights.

“Mr. McGill,” Tyrell Moss said in greeting.

Tyrell was a tall multi-racial man. Hispanic and black, Asian and some form of Caucasian — he was powerfully built and forever young. He was maybe forty, maybe older, but his smile was that of the God of Youth on some faraway island that had yet to hear of either electricity or clinical depression.

“Moss, man,” I said.

Behind him was a large room with ceilings at least twenty-five feet high. There were small pale yellow tables everywhere and at least eighty patrons. At Leviathan you could smoke cigarettes or cigars, drink absinthe, and it was even rumored that there was an opium den in a back room somewhere.

It was like stepping into an earlier day that never existed.

“I got her set up against the back wall,” Tyrell was saying. “You did invite her, right?”

“Zella?”

“That’s her.”

Walking across the dazzling expanse of Leviathan, I saw many notables. There were no politicians, but their handlers came there to meet and relax; there was a pop star or two; and there were half a dozen bad men with whom I’d done business in the old days.

Zella was wearing the same rayon suit, so I supposed she wouldn’t insult my threads again. She was drinking an amber-colored fluid out of a shot glass. That must have given her great solace after eight years of locked doors and stale water.

“Hey,” I said as I pulled out the chair across from her at the crescent-shaped table.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she replied.

“It means that you’re out of prison, Miss Grisham, and that people don’t use codes or special greetings. It means hello.”

“Then why don’t you say hello?”

I stood up again.

“The drinks are on me, lady. Be my guest. But don’t call again.” I was ready to leave. No use in wasting time on someone who didn’t know how to act on the street, or under it.

“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know you, Mr. McGill, but Breland Lewis says that I should trust you. The problem is that I don’t know him either... but I need, I need to talk to somebody.”

It was a start.

I sat down again.

“What can I do to allay your suspicions?” I asked.

“Do you think I had anything to do with the Rutgers heist?”

“No.”

“What about Lewis?”

“What about him?”

“Is he after that money?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I imagine that someone who knew about framing you had a change of heart and paid him to set you out.”

“Who?”

“I have no idea,” I mouthed.

Zella suspected that I was lying but what could she do? She stared for a dozen seconds or so, and said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you think or him either. It doesn’t because I don’t know anything about any money.”

“Is that why you wanted to meet? To tell me that?”

Distrust and doubt are the first lessons you learn in lockdown. Smiles and kind words mean nothing. Promises and even love are less substantial than toilet paper. Zella couldn’t bring herself to confide in me even though that’s why she’d come to that underground club.

“Hey, Leonid,” a man said.

“Leviticus,” I hailed.

He was maybe five-eight, with the shoulders of a much taller man. His bald head was a pale dome over a shelf-like brow and deep dark eyes. His features were angry, but I’d never seen the bar owner lose his temper.

“Haven’t seen you in years,” he said, looking at me but taking Zella in too.

“It’s a big city and I got commitments in every borough.”

Bowles was wearing an expensive midnight blue silk suit. He looked like a butcher wearing clothes a young mistress bought for him. From his breast pocket he drew out a pack of cigarettes. Before taking one he offered one to Zella. She took the filterless Camel greedily. He waved the pack at me but I shook my head. Then Bowles took one and lit up both himself and my reluctant client.

He took in a deep, grateful breath.

“You’re not here to cause trouble, now are you, LT?” he said before exhaling a cloud of smoke.

“No, sir.”

He smiled and nodded to Zella. Then he walked away, having delivered his message.

“Trouble?” she asked.

“I’m known as a rough-and-tumble kind of guy,” I said. “People like Leviticus try to keep the breakage down to a minimum.”

“Then why let you in in the first place?”

“The kind of trouble I cause can’t be kept out with a locked door.”

“Are you going to be trouble for me?”

“Depends on what you have to ask.”