All I Did Was Shoot My Man

40

We passed through the glass wall and entered a door that opened onto a long slender hallway. We followed that vascular path to a cylindrical room with four elevator doors placed at ninety-degree intervals. Brighton held a thick card in front of a crystal green panel and one of the doors slid open.

Inside the chamber a voice said, “Hello, Mr. Brighton, sixty-sixth floor?”

“Yes,” he said.

I was impressed.

“Mr. Plimpton doesn’t seem to like me,” I said, just making conversation.

“Alton has worked for Rutgers thirty-three years. He started in the mailroom.”

“... and,” I said, “has only recently realized that coming in at the bottom almost always precludes reaching the top.”

The VP turned his head to regard me. His eyes were green and his aspect somewhere between that of a fox and a wolf; the one creature preying on smaller animals, and the other, with his pack, used to taking down creatures much larger than himself.

Which one, he was wondering, was I?

The elevator door slid open and we were presented with a triple-wide hallway that was tiled in emerald and gold. On the walls hung large still-life oil paintings, mostly landscapes, with the occasional study.

There were no offices on this half-block journey, not until we came to the dead end. There the double walnut doors we encountered swung open automatically and we entered the antechamber to his office.

Not for the first time in my life I had made it to the top. For some reason this made me hanker for a chili dog with chopped onions under a blanket of processed American cheese.

The reception room for Brighton was large and well appointed. There was a window looking out over the Statue of Liberty. The kidney-shaped desk was clean, and the woman behind it — the woman known as Claudia Burns — looked up, attentive to her charming boss’s any need.

She saw me but was unconcerned and unimpressed.

I saw her and was reminded of a photograph I had seen years ago. The hair was shorter and another color, now she wore glasses, but I was sure that the woman sitting there was Harry Tangelo’s lover — Minnie Lesser.

“Hold my calls, C,” the perfectly attired captain of industry said to the woman going under the false name.

“Yes, sir.”

Brighton’s office was the same as many rich and powerful businessmen and — women I’d known in Manhattan. Lots of window space looking out across his domain, good carpeting, and an imposing black desk that wasn’t exactly rectangular. In one corner sat a love seat and a good-sized stuffed chair, both black, both looking to contain more comfort than the average working stiff has ever experienced.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.” Johann waved toward the chair.

I took the love seat.

Without missing a beat he sat in the chair meant for me. There he leaned back comfortably.

I put my left forearm on my left knee and the heel of my right palm on the other leg joint.

Brighton smiled and nodded slightly.

“How can I help you, Mr. McGill?”

I sat up and back, crossed my legs and frowned.

“How much did your suit cost?” I asked.

“It was made for me by the personal tailor of a Saudi prince. So I guess you could say that it was either free or priceless.”

“Huh. The only thing anybody ever gave me was grief... the most they ever took was blood.”

“That’s very dramatic,” the VP said.

“You think so? Then try this: Last night two assassins broke into my home. They came to kill me while I was up in the bed with my wife, in the same apartment where my children sleep.” My head jerked, releasing an iota of the deep-seated tension in my body and soul.

“They, they actually came into your apartment?”

“They were halfway down the hall before I killed them in their tracks.”

“Oh.” It was Brighton’s turn to lean forward. “You shot them?”

“One,” I said. “I crushed the other’s windpipe with my hand.”

I was sure that Johann Brighton had forgotten the name of the Saudi tailor but I could see in his face that he would never forget mine.

“What did the police have to say about this?” he asked.

“What they always say — fill out form twenty-two AB, write an account of the circumstances, and then answer a battery of verbal questions that are recorded and filed away so that one day they can come back and incriminate you.”

“I mean,” Johann said, “what did they say about the killers? Who were they?”

“European. Probably East European. Men who traveled six thousand miles or more just to see me die.”

Brighton was hard to read. He didn’t make it to that lofty perch with his heart dangling from his sleeve.

“Maybe your dramatic flair is earned,” he said.

“Fuck that. I’m here to ask you why.”

“What could Rutgers Assurance have to do with assassins in the night?”

“Not Rutgers,” I said. “You.”

“You’ve lost me, Mr. McGill.”

“Oh? Aren’t you the one who said that my name was all over your desk?”

“Yes, but—”

“And doesn’t my place on your blotter have to do with Zella Grisham, Antoinette Lowry, and fifty-eight million dollars that went away during the biggest heist in Wall Street history?”

“What does any of that have to do with men trying to kill you?”

“You don’t know?”

He shook his head and held my stare the way your opponent does before the first round of a fight that he just knows he’s going to win.

“Zella Grisham,” I began, “was arrested for shooting her boyfriend.”

“If you say so.”

“I do and she was. This boyfriend, Harry Tangelo, was in the bed with Zella’s friend Minnie Lesser.” I stopped there to see the cracks appear in the VP’s façade and also because a thrum of rage was rising up somewhere below my heart just above the diaphragm. I don’t think I had ever been so close to violence without perpetrating an actual physical attack.

“I’m not familiar with Grisham’s arrest before the money was found in her possession,” he said. If he could see the rage in me, he didn’t respond.

Maybe he felt secure in physical superiority. Maybe he had a black belt in some Eastern defense art. Whatever he felt he was wrong.

I took a deep breath and held it thrice as long as usual.

Exhaling, I let flow out “How long has your assistant been working for you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Was she in this office when the heist went down?”

“I don’t remember.” If he was nervous, he sure didn’t show it.

“Maybe she knows more about you than you think.”

Words, for the moment, had abandoned the handsome millionaire. His left eye almost closed and I was allowed a glimpse of the man behind the corporate veneer. This momentary bout of speechlessness was the first indication I had that my predicament was even more complex than I had thought.

He raised his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Is there anything else, Mr. McGill?”

“Whoever sent those men into my home is going to pay,” I said. “I might not wear the same species of suit that you got but all men bleed and all men die.”

Brighton stood up and I followed suit.

“Mr. McGill, you have to believe me when I tell you that I, nor anyone else at Rutgers, would consider using paid assassins to solve our problems.”

I was allowed to find my way back down the wide hallway to the elevator. The door was open. All I had to do was step in and I was delivered to the twenty-seventh floor. From there I made my way to the outskirts of the glass cage.

The receptionist did her panel-sliding routine and I found myself with her and a dusky-skinned Caucasian man of medium height and middle age, wearing a tan suit with a few dozen scarlet threads shooting through.

“Mr. McGill?” the man said. His face was a pinched isosceles triangle, standing on its pointy chin.

“Yes?”

“My name is Harlow.”

“Yes, Mr. Harlow?”

“You will not be allowed admittance to these premises again.”

“Does that come from you or Mr. Brighton?”

“I am the one speaking, am I not?”

There are few times in a human’s life when the choice is clear and obvious. But there’s always another way, another approach. That’s why most people like a job where there’s a boss and a set of rules written down; a time to arrive and a dollar amount on every hour you toil.

The workingman believes that he has no choice, my long-gone father used to say. He believes that his whole life has been planned out for him. He’s right about the plan but wrong about the destination.

At that moment, in that glass cage, I knew that the only action to take was a solid one-two to the man Harlow’s rib cage and head. I wanted to hit him even though I knew that the act would buy me a prison sentence of interminable length because the rage I felt would certainly kill this stranger.

My action and his death were foregone conclusions.

And then I remembered “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Melville spoke out from his moldering grave, telling me that fate was not inescapable and that this man Harlow would live at least one more day.