Known to Evil

22

It was after two when I got home. I couldn't imagine subjecting myself to the test of the stairs, so I took the elevator and opened the front door quietly, hung the hideous yellow suit on the rack in my den, and then lay down on the daybed, sighing like a black bear on the first day of hibernation. I'd only had five little glasses of cognac, but at my age, and at that hour, it was enough to make the world around me jiggle and spin-on the verge of flying apart.

Bonilla presented me with a serious problem that I identified with my seemingly permanent headache.

Captain James Charbon didn't like the stink of me. He was a hardworking official who had many open cases, and so most of the time he left me alone. But when there was an investigation on his desk-one that had my name anywhere attached-he became hell-bent on getting me charged with something, anything.

This passion was brought about by extraordinary conceit.

When Charbon was a detective working the street he prided himself on a nearly perfect success rate.

I was the one exception.

A woman I knew named Lana Stride had been indicted for her involvement in the murder of a Park Avenue psychiatrist. She was guilty, the police said, of finding and giving to Brooks Sanders the name of the mental-health professional who had persuaded Brooks's wife to seek a divorce. If Lana had considered her actions she would have probably known what Brooks would do. But Lana was a lush and didn't remember what she'd done.

Sammy Stride, Lana's brother, offered me $2,500 to find Lana an alibi. It just so happened that I had once done a barely legal job for a state senator who Lana told me she knew when she was a cocktail hostess. Using the chit for a job done gratis, I asked the good legislator to tell the police, on behalf of our mutual acquaintance, that he was with her on the afternoon that Brooks had said she told him about the shrink and his wife.

State senator trumps confessed murderer 12,341 times to 1.

The senior officer on the case, James Charbon, had been looking to return the favor for seven years. From the moment he found out, from Carson Kitteridge, that I was a close confidant of Lana's brother, he made it a lifelong goal to hobble me.

Luckily I was mildly inebriated and exhausted from a frustrating day of weak leads, so Charbon felt like a faraway threat that could be managed-later.

I turned on my side.

The killing of Wanda Soa was a mistake, but it was professional, still and all. The killer had been paid by somebody. And that somebody, I was pretty sure, was not Alphonse Rinaldo. It could have been a man named Grant, who paid good money to Shad Tandy, but maybe not. Grant could have been working for Rinaldo. He might have gotten the address to be passed on to me.

I closed my eyes and lay deathlike in my wife-beater and boxers. I thought about Lizette Lear leaving her house every night for some neighborhood bar where there were cigarettes and men and alcohol, all variables in an equation that often altered but never changed.

After a night of carousing, Lizette would find herself coming back to consciousness in a hospital, the drunk tank, or, if it was a lucky night, maybe she'd awaken to nausea in her own bed. But whenever she opened her eyes, Angie would be there to wipe her face and hold her hand.

I so closely identified with the feeling that I opened my eyes to break the hermeneutic connection.

Katrina was sitting next to me in a chair that she must have pulled up. I hadn't heard the movement. I had been dreaming, not thinking.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Bad dream," I said.

"Why are you sleeping out here, Leonid?"

"I didn't, I didn't want to wake you."

"How do you feel?"

I sat up, experiencing a host of physical symptoms: my hands were hot, feet cold, head still hurt, and my stomach felt like a child's balloon filled with water and ready to burst.

"I'm just fine," I said.

Neither of us spoke for a time. I could hear the folding alarm clock ticking on my desk. Those were the seconds of my life creeping sideways into a vast unknown.

"I'm worried about Dimitri," Katrina said. She was worried about a lot of things, but our brooding son was always the most important.

"Not Twill?" I asked.

"Don't bait me, Leonid."

"Twilliam is the one risking getting thrown back into kid jail in order to be with his brother," I said. "He's the one taking chances."

"Dimitri is your son." It was the closest she'd ever come to admitting Twill and Shelly were other men's offspring.

"I have to lie down."

"I'm going to call the police."

"And what will you tell them?"

"That our son is missing."

"I spoke to him today."

"He hasn't talked to me."

"If you call the cops the least that will happen is that Twill will be sent back to juvie. If they're into something shaky, they both might go."

"Dimitri is a good boy," Katrina intoned.

"He's with Twill, honey, and you know what Twill is like."

Silence reigned for a while. I put a hot hand on my cold, bald, aching head.

"Come to bed," Katrina said, capitulating.

"I don't think that's a very good idea. Let me just lie back down here and I promise I will get your son to call you as soon as possible, hopefully tomorrow."

With that I lay back on the daybed, a vampire lowering into his coffin, a mummy into dust.

I WAS SICK IN the shower the next morning but stayed under the icy November waters until the hangover was filed into memory with all its hundreds of brothers.

Shelly and Katrina were still asleep when I left the apartment at 7:47.

I had fried pork chops, scrambled eggs, and two triple espressos at a diner on Fifty-seventh. The wonderful thing about knowing you won't die of old age is that you can enjoy the wrong things in life without trepidation or guilt.

I ARRIVED AT THE advertising agency of Laughton and Price at 9:17. Their main offices are a few blocks south of Hunter College, on the seventh floor of an old stone building.

I was feeling pretty good but not yet ready for stairs.

The elevator opened on a glass door that was watched over by a young caramel- colored receptionist who sat at a desk, which, in turn, sat behind a short copper wall.

I waved.

She glowered.

I smiled.

Her resolve faltered.

I hunched my shoulders and she pressed the buzzer.

"Good morning," I said, pressing my thighs against the copper wall.

"May I help you?"

She was American, no doubt, but at least one of her parents, I was sure, had come from a British island in the Caribbean. One of the joys of living in New York is that there are so many types of black people here. Africans, Islanders, upper and lower classes, professionals, southerners, and any combination of the aforementioned.

"Saint Lucia?" I said.

"What?"

"Your parents. Are they from Saint Lucia?"

"My, my father was born there. Who are you?"

"My name is John Tooms."

"And what do you want with me, Mr. Tooms?"

"Nothing, Babbett," I said, using the name on her nameplate. "I'm here to speak to Larry Spender about Angelique Lear."

"But how did you know about me?"

"Elocution," I said. "The way you hold your shoulders. And there's something about people from your father's island-they make you feel friendly."

Babbett smiled, and so did I.

"Have a seat, Mr. Tooms. I'll tell Mr. Spender that you're here."

THERE WAS A LITTLE grotto of pink chairs around a chrome table upon which were piled expensive design and fashion magazines that I'd never heard of. They were the kind of magazines that could have naked women with exposed nipples on the cover without the censors going crazy. This was art, not pornography… but the women still warmed my brandy-soaked blood.

"Mr. Tooms?"

He wore a nice yet inexpensive suit that was medium gray. His brown eyes, which clashed with the color of the suit, were sad, but still he managed a smile. This was one of the small braveries of the modern world: people who were able to remain civil even while they suffered depression, cancer, and losses that could never be recouped.

"Mr. Spender?"

"You have news about Angie?" He was in his late forties but aging fast. Though he had more hair than I did, people still would call him bald.

And though he was more white than anything else, you could see by Mr. Spender's varied features that his people had been in America for a very long time. His rounded nose and small eyes, fleshy cheeks and wavy brown hair spoke of the many races that crossed Europe, Africa, and then the Atlantic to set up a life in the melting pot that very few call home.

"Can we go to your office?" I suggested.

"Sure."