All I Did Was Shoot My Man

16

the interior of the lift was understated, even plain. The walls were unadorned cherrywood and the lights were bare bulbs nestled in mirrored-glass fittings in the four upper corners.

“Sixteen,” I told my son.

He pressed the button and I clasped my hands at my back. The fever had returned, and, once again, I’d forgotten the aspirin on my desk.

“You need this?” Twill asked, holding out a little tin of Bayer in his left hand.

“How did you know that?”

“I didn’t. Mardi gave it to me. She said that you kept forgetting yours.”

I swallowed the coated pills dry before we reached the sixteenth floor.

We exited into a lovely room with a broad green-tinted window that looked down onto the East River and out over Queens. There was only one door. Rich people, in my experience, don’t share anything — not even a hallway in a glorified tenement.

Twill was looking for the doorbell when the oversized pale green door swung inward.

The woman standing there wore a utilitarian black dress adorned only by a thin white collar of modest lace. She was in her forties, handsome, with similar skin color as that of Velvet Reyes. We were the same height exactly. As usual, this pleased me.

“Mr. McGill?” she asked with only a hint of Puerto Rico em-compassing the last syllable.

I nodded.

“Come in,” she said with no smile. “Follow me.”

The circular foyer was maybe eighteen feet in diameter; it went up three floors, with no stairs or ornamentation; there was a domed skylight above. The architect was saying with this simple gesture that nature trumped any attempt Man might make to consecrate the portal to a family’s domicile.

We followed the maid into a room that had a ceiling only twenty feet high. The centerpiece dominating this chamber was a dark metal sculpture of two wrestlers, almost certainly wrought by Rodin. There were no windows in this room and the walls were charcoal gray. The only lights were yellowy spots that showed highlights of the brilliant forms exhibited by the sculpture.

Left to my own devices I would have dallied for an hour or so before that grandeur, but our guide led us onward.

We came to a sunken living room with a wall of glass that looked over a manicured garden that in turn gazed over the river. It was a big cubical room, with four identical large blue sofas that faced one another across a solid-glass coffee table set upon shiny golden globes. Embedded in the thick plate of crystal was a six-by-eight blue painting of a Negro musician playing a fanciful horn. He was sitting in a chair in a lopsided room. There was a broom leaning sadly in the corner.

This was an unknown Picasso.

“Have a seat,” the woman told us. “The Mycrofts will be in in a few minutes.”

We settled in side by side on the sofa with its back to the river. I sat forward, elbows on my knees, while Twill reclined.

Despite, or maybe because of, my class consciousness, I was impressed by the oil in glass. A lot of good money went into this monument to wealth.

I was well on my way to hating the Mycrofts and I hadn’t even met them.

“Hello,” a man said in a modulated tenor.

He was tall (of course) and fit. His mottled tanned skin seemed to come from sportsmanship and not vanity. His trousers were khaki and shirt lime cotton. His feet were moccasined in red-brown leather and his hair was onyx and silver as opposed to the more pedestrian salt-and-pepper.

Behind Shelby Mycroft came a tall thin woman. She was forty-five or — six, a decade less than he, but she looked younger than her years. That was because of the plastic surgery and expensive spa treatments. Her hair tended toward blond, and the metal ball suspended from the impossibly thin chain around her neck was platinum, not silver. Her dress was a luminescent gray that came to mid-calf.

I don’t remember the color of her eyes. That’s probably because our eyes rarely met.

Twill and I both rose.

“I’m Mr. Shelby Mycroft,” he said, extending a hand. “This is my wife, Mrs. Sylvia Mycroft.”

The lines were drawn. I smiled at the possibly unconscious class strategy.

I shook hands with the man, Twill nodded, and we both sat back down.

The Mycrofts lowered on the sofa to our right, smiling demurely.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Sylvia asked.

“Water,” I said.

“Nothing for me, thank you,” Twill added.

She rose and left the room for a moment, returning before her husband started his spiel.

“We were expecting you to come alone, Mr. McGill,” Mr. Shelby Mycroft said, the insincere smile delicately etched on his lips.

“When Breland explained the problem I called my associate Mathers here. He, uh, will probably prove useful.”

“This is a confidential matter.”

I nodded but refrained from showing my temper, or fever.

The maid came into the room carrying a silver platter with two glasses of water on it. She was followed by a greatly transformed Velvet Reyes. The young prostitute/heroin addict was wearing a loose floral dress, and her long black hair was tied up at the back of her head. Behind Velvet came a young girl, maybe three years old. The child had big black eyes that honed in on me. Her mother was taking in my son.

“This is Adonia,” Shelby said of the maid, “her daughter Velvet and granddaughter Minolita.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” the child said and smiled.

“Have I met you?” Velvet asked me.

The question caused Adonia to focus on me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d remember you.”

Adonia put our glasses down on the priceless painting and hurried her brood from the room.

I picked up my glass and, true to his word, Twill left his where it was placed.

There was a moment of silence in the wake of the servants’ departure. Shelby was still a little miffed about Twill’s (aka Mathers’s) presence.

“We were asked to come here at the last minute, Mr. Mycroft,” I said. “I have other appointments to keep.”

He didn’t like my tone.

That was okay — I didn’t like his doorman.

“My... our son Kent is studying political science at NYU,” he said. “He’s twenty-three but young for his age. Recently we’ve been made aware that he’s gotten himself involved with a rough crowd. We’re worried that he might get into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Well... we aren’t exactly sure.”

“Maybe what you heard isn’t true,” I said, “or an exaggeration of the facts.”

“No,” Shelby said.

“How do you know?”

“Someone who knows him at school made us aware. Someone that we trust.”

“Who’s that?”

“What does it matter who told me? I’m telling you.”

At that moment the aspirin kicked in. The fever abated, and it was like I was suddenly aware of my circumstances.

I stood up.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Twill.

He stood too.

“I, I, I don’t understand,” Mr. Shelby Mycroft said, also rising.

“Look, man,” I told him. “I’m only here because Breland asked me to come. You got a problem and I’m here to help. But if you don’t wanna come clean and tell me what you know, then I don’t have the time.”

“I’ve told you what you need to know.”

“Come on,” I said to Twill.

“It’s our daughter, Mr. McGill,” Sylvia Mycroft said. “She’s the one that told us.”

Shelby stood there somehow glowering at both me and his wife at the same time.

“And what did your daughter say exactly?” I asked.

“What I’ve already told you,” Shelby said brusquely.

“I’m going to have to hear it from her.”

“No.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“I’m the one paying for your services, Mr. McGill.”

“Not if I don’t take the job,” I said, looking up into his darkening eyes.

“Shelby,” Sylvia said, glaring at his profile.