And Sometimes I Wonder About You

14

We caught a taxi on Broadway and cruised down to the Thirties and the Tesla Building. A middle-aged doorman I didn’t recognize was sitting behind the high Art Deco reception desk. He was a bronze-colored man with light caramel eyes.

“Can I help you?” he asked in the slightest of Spanish accents.

His question was not an offer. This made me wonder how serious the break-in was.

“Leonid McGill,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, derailed by a name. “Um, uh... There’s been a, a break-in... Somebody was hurt.”

“You stay here, Pop,” I said to my father. Even then it wasn’t lost on me that I called him what Twill called me.

I headed for the elevators.

“You can’t go up there,” the doorman commanded.

I pressed the elevator button with my left hand and felt for the pistol in my pocket with the right.

My father came up beside me and when I looked at him he nodded. He’d seen me retrieve the .45 from my office drawer.

“I’m with ya, Trot.”

“You can’t go up there,” the guard said again. His voice was filled with threat.

I took the gun out of my coat pocket and let it hang at my side; he calmed right down.

When we got to my office the door was gone and Rich Berenson, what stood for a third of the nighttime security force for the building, was standing in the gap.

It was no mean feat breaking down my office door. It was reinforced with titanium bars. There was a burned scent in the air and so I suspected an explosive of some type.

What kind of trouble could I have been in, to be invaded by professionals with bombs?

“LT,” Rich said.

When I approached the door the guard’s posture stiffened, telling me that it was probably worse than I imagined.

Rich is a tall white guy, bald on top with a graying ponytail down past his shoulders in back. He’d once been a policeman in Ohio somewhere, then retired at fifty and came to New York to be a security guard. There was a divorce and a married woman in the mix of his decision but all of that was over and done by the time we’d met.

I’d put the pistol back in my pocket in the elevator but the downstairs guard had probably warned Rich, his boss.

“Step aside, Mr. Berenson,” I said.

“The police are in there,” he replied as an explanation of his refusal.

“My office,” I said. “My cops.”

“Let him in,” a voice I knew declared.

Rich stepped aside and I entered Mardi’s reception area trying to make sense of the quiescent detritus left by the carnage that had hit the room.

The first thing I saw was the man-sized hole in the wall next to my impregnable inner-office door. I had always known that it would be possible to break down the plaster and wood wall, but I thought that I’d be on the other side with weapons ready if that were ever to happen.

The man who allowed me into my own space was the uniformed Sergeant Jess Dalton of the NYPD. He was glaring at me and my father. Behind him another policeman came out through the wounded wall. Just seeing that enraged me. I might have said something but I kept my peace in deference to the dead man stretched out in front of Mardi’s desk. He’d been shot and then bled quite a bit before his heart gave out.

“McGill,” Sergeant Dalton said — it was not a greeting. “What do you know about this?”

“You kiddin’ me, right, Sergeant? I mean I hope you don’t think I broke down my own damn door and killed Hector Laritas because I wanted to get rich on the insurance claim.”

I knew the dead man. He was another third of nighttime security at the Tesla. Young when I’d last seen him and always with a smile, he was Twill’s age and my anger was growing.

“You got it all worked out, huh?” Dalton said with a grin that clawed at the single shred of civility I had left.

Dalton was tall, his first mistake with me, and bulky from the wrong kind of exercise. He was forty years old, no more, and the color of a white napkin stained with olive oil.

“You better back up, man,” I said to the cop. “Back up or back it up.”

Buddha had departed the building, and all that he left was rage. My office, my door, my wall, my guard, my father... Dalton’s hand moved toward his firearm. His younger partner looked a little confused. I was absolutely sure of what I’d do. I didn’t have to draw out my gun — just reach in the pocket and shoot them both through my coat.

“What’s happening in here?” my archenemy/guardian angel said.

Carson Kitteridge came in behind me. It wasn’t the first time that his mere presence saved someone’s life.

“Break-in, Captain,” Sergeant Dalton said, suddenly compliant. “We got a call from Seko Security System about this office. By the time we got here it’s like you see it.”

“Seko called you too, LT?” Kit asked. He was standing on my fallen front door and so had a couple of inches on me.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t they tell you to wait for the police to call?”

“Would you?”

A glimmer of a smile crossed the veteran cop’s lips and then he looked down on the dead stare of Hector. The humor dissipated and Kit’s dreamy eyes were suddenly awake.

“What were they after?” he asked me.

“I can’t tell you,” I said. “Everybody so far’s been body-blockin’ me.”

“Let him in the office,” the captain said to the sergeant.

The uniforms moved to the side and I took a step toward the hole in the wall.

“Who are you?” Kit asked.

I turned and saw that the question was addressed to Tolstoy. He had almost successfully become a shadow in the corner of the office, but when I moved he made to follow.

“Bill Williams,” he said, not extending a hand. “I’m an old friend of Trot’s father. We were having a drink when the call came through.”

Carson Kitteridge is a human lie detector and all his antennae were up. But since most of what my father said was mostly true, the captain did not pounce.

“This is an active crime scene, Mr. Williams,” Carson did say. “You’ll have to leave.”

My father looked like the man I once knew for a moment there. He was an outlaw at heart, like every true revolutionary. The rules did not apply as far as he was concerned. But he could see that Carson was a man to be reckoned with.

“Yes sir,” he said to my own personal cop. “See you later, Trot.”

He turned and walked out through the broken doorway.

I watched him go, wondering how many decades it would be before I saw him again.