Known to Evil

40

I spent the latter part of the evening rearranging my den for the time when we took Gordo in. I brought in sheets and put my weapons in the safe, straightened up the desk, and even vacuumed.

After all that, I set up my laptop and got online.

The best detectives in the world are the arbiters of spam. They find you wherever you are, like water seeking its level, like blood-hungry mosquitoes in the wild. I had sixteen unwanted communications for various legal and illegal services, offers coming in from Nairobi to Lima, Hong Kong to West Hollywood. I don't think this was what modern economists had in mind when they began constructing their definition of "globalization."

Bug must have been serious about Zephyra because I received a long document from him, giving me all kinds of hitherto unrevealed information about Angie. She'd participated in a few long-distance runs of ten kilometers or more and worked for the Hillary campaign during the primaries. She played Go over the Internet and was pretty good at it, earning an emerald rating in a California club.

There were a lot of other loose details and one salient set of facts: John Prince's phone number and address-he lived in Chelsea, between Sixth and Seventh. There was even a photograph of the handsome young man. This, as I suspected, was the boyfriend on her bedroom wall.

It was just after three in the morning, time for a man in the private-investigating profession to get to work. But I was tired, exhausted by the welter of details coming at me like the furious punches of a flyweight working a speed bag.

I sat down on the daybed, and the next thing I knew I was on my back, witnessing the miracle of sunlight as it filled the window.

I awoke, hoping that Angie had not died in the night while I wasted time sleeping. I wished I had a number for Dimitri, and an answer for Ron Sharkey.

But all I had was a headache pulsating through my consciousness.

I forced down a serving of muesli and cream, drained two cups of press-pot French roast coffee, and made my way to the street, hoping that today would bring the break I needed to get a leg up on the world.

I CALLED JOHN PRINCE from my office at 8:32.

Hello. This is JP speaking. I'm not here right now and so if you'd like to leave a message I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can.

I hung up, realizing that I hadn't thought about Aura at all that morning. This evidence of healing did not ease my mind. I didn't want to be cured from the only real love I had known in my adult life.

"Mr. McGill?" came Mardi's soft voice over the intercom. She'd come in early.

"Yes?"

"George Toller is out here."

Did he somehow know that I was thinking about his woman?

"Send him in."

HE CAME INTO MY office without knocking this time. He wore a disgusting lime suit crosshatched with a generous amount of dark-green and black thread. In his arms he carried three thick manila folders. There was something dramatic in the way he carried himself, as if he bore tidings of great portent. He stood before my desk and dropped the heavy pile of paper, making a loud slamming noise.

His eyes sought mine as a sneer crossed the lips I hated.

"Take-out menus?" I asked.

"Do you have a minute?" he replied, sitting without being invited.

The question was not polite or considerate, it wasn't even accurate. George Toller believed he'd caught me like a winking Irish-man trapping a leprechaun, and his "minute" was meant to be the rest of my natural-born life.

I didn't answer, and so he pressed on.

"Terry Swain," he said.

I blinked innocently.

"Are you telling me that you don't know Swain?"

"This is your show, Mr. Toller. I'm not telling you anything."

"You cosigned for Mr. Swain's hot dog concession, did you not?"

I performed a noncommittal shrug to keep a toe in the realm of good manners.

"Mr. Swain was the building manager before Aura Ullman. He was suspected by the new owners of having defrauded the corporation. They were assembling a good case against him until a lawyer named Breland Lewis stopped criminal proceedings by throwing suspicion on a previous employee who had, conveniently, died."

"Peter Cooly," I said. "He died of a heart attack months before I ever even heard of Terry."

"Breland Lewis is your lawyer."

"This is America, Mr. Toller. Breland is his own man, as I am mine."

"The relationship between the lawyer, the embezzler, and you," he said, "along with the ridiculously low fifteen-year lease you procured is evidence of fraud, at the very least."

Something about Toller's tone reminded me of the posturing of the teenagers at the now-and-again middle schools of my so-called youth. He was playing a role but didn't know it, pretending that he was somehow wounded by actions taken before he was ever involved. He was talking, and I was hearing him, but I wasn't listening-at least not all that closely.

"… you were arrested for tampering with police evidence in nineteen eighty-nine…" he said.

I was thinking that I had to take the next step in uncovering the reason that the assassin was in Soa's apartment.

"… nineteen ninety-two you were arrested along with Gonzalez family members on an organized-crime charge…"

I was thinking about Dimitri, the brooding, bulky young man, kissing some beautiful Russian girl, filling his heart with love. I was also thinking that love never seems to last-except where there's blood involved.

"… in nineteen ninety-six you were arrested on charges of battery…"

With love and blood bound together in my thoughts, the wildflowers on the old stereo box came to mind. Something about their delicate beauty seemed out of place in my life.

A bubble of something like regret formed in my chest.

Toller was reciting a new litany in an angry tone.

I looked up and saw that he was actually reading from his accumulated indictment.

"What does all that shit tell you, Mr. Toller?" I asked, cutting off his rant.

"Excuse me?"

I stood up.

"What does all that shit in your files tell you?"

"I will thank you to keep a civil tongue when addressing me, Mr. McGill."

"All right," I said. "How about this? In exactly ten seconds I'm going to walk around this desk. If you are still in the room I'm going to beat you to death with your own motherfucking files. One…"

Toller leaped to his feet, grabbed his papers, and hurried from the room.

I finished the count and went after him.

There were a few loose sheets that had fallen in the hallway.

When I got to the antechamber of my office, Mardi was sitting at her desk. She wore a champagne- colored dress with puffy sleeves.

"Mr. Toller left," she said.

I blinked and wondered if I was actually that close to murder. I decided that I was, and that maybe I needed professional help. So I walked back to my office and called the deadliest man I have ever known.