All I Did Was Shoot My Man

24

Bingo Haman, aka Mr. Human. I was thinking about him as I walked down Flatbush Avenue.

Bingo was his own impact on any situation. He was famous in the underworld, one of the best heist men in the business. He was compared to people like Cole Younger and Jesse James, Baby Face Nelson and even John Dillinger.

The myth claimed that he’d never been arrested.

Maybe it was true.

I hadn’t met the venerable Mr. Human. He was good enough not to require the services of a cleanup man like I used to be. That is, unless Stumpy Brown had represented him on the Rutgers job.

At any rate, his extraordinary luck or smarts abandoned him three months earlier at two-sixteen in the morning when he was cruising down the LIE... on his way from his girlfriend’s house back to his wife and kids, Luke Nye, the pool shark and endless fount of information, had told me.

A car with no license plate sped up to pass and fired three dozen shots into the driver’s-side window.

Black men hating and killing each other, my crackpot father used to say. That’s the legacy of slavery and capitalism. And you don’t have to be black, you don’t even have to be a man — but it’s black men killin’ each other, still and all.

By the time that memory surfaced I was on the 1 train headed uptown, thinking about the photograph of the pudgy white face alleged to be Bingo Haman. The only dirt the News could pick up on him was that he was a suspect in a series of robberies around the country. But he was so much more than that. Bingo was a ruthless and merciless killer. He went out on every job fully armed with each weapon cocked.

They had killed a man on the Rutgers heist, if indeed it was his crew that executed that job and the guard.

And how could I claim innocence when I used my wiles to cover up for him? Was I any better?

I stopped moving forward at the corner of Ninety-first and Broadway. The light of day was almost gone but I didn’t want to head home yet. So I sat on a bus stop bench and took out my cell phone.

She answered on the fourth ring.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Lesser?”

“Yes?”

“Teresa Lesser?” I added.

“That’s me.”

“My name is Alton Plimpton,” I said easily. “I’m a floor manager at Rutgers Assurance.”

“Where?”

“We’re kind of like an informal international insurance company.”

“I don’t need any insurance, Mr. Plimpton. Sorry.”

“We don’t sell insurance, ma’am. We take in money under short-term conditions to protect the interests of people not covered by international law.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re running an internal investigation and are willing to pay ten thousand dollars for information leading us to the whereabouts of Mr. Harry Tangelo.”

At that point the woman admitting to be Teresa Lesser hung up.

It was very comfortable there in the twilight, on that bench. So much so that it took me a moment to realize that the fever, once again, had caught up to me. I downed the last two aspirin that Twill had given me and made a call.

“Hello?” he said.

“Johnny?”

“LT. How you doing?”

“Good. You?”

“All healed up.”

On our last collaboration Johnny Nightly made a slip and got himself shot in the chest by a very accomplished killer. The assassin died and Johnny didn’t — that’s the most one could have hoped for.

“Luke there?” I asked.

A moment passed, and then, “Hey, Leonid. What’s up?”

“I got some issues.”

“With me?”

“A thing or two you could help me with.”

“Shoot.”

“I’m looking for an address and I need you to put up a woman for a week or so. You got any empty rooms upstairs?”

“No problem with the room.”

“She should probably stay out of sight and maybe Johnny could look in on her now and then.”

“That’s easy.”

Luke Nye was many things. He’d killed men, dealt in women, even pulled a heist or two in his time. He’d been a regular jack-of-all-trades until deciding on pool as his major and dealing in information as his minor in the ongoing adult education University of Life.

“And then there’s Stumpy Brown,” I said.

“What about old Stumpy?”

“You got numbers on him?”

“Five hundred a night for the room and a thousand for Stumpy,” he said.

“Hello?” she said on the house phone in the downstairs hall of Mary Deharain’s rooming house.

“It’s Leonid, Zella.”

“Oh... What do you want?”

“There’s a guy named Iran Shelfly lives there. He’s in room three-oh-six.”

“I’ve met him.”

“He’s a friend of mine. I sent him a text, telling him to drive you out to another friend’s in the Bronx. I think you’ll be safer there until I figure out this thing with Rutgers.”

“What are you up to?” she asked.

“I’m trying to help.”

“Why?”

“Because Breland is paying and I need the work.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that heist. There’s no money you can get out of me.”

“I know that, Zella.”

It was the closest I would ever come to a confession. It wasn’t enough to bring me to justice but I think she heard it; I could tell by her silence. After that I explained what was going to happen to keep her safe. She didn’t argue.

“Yeah?” he said.

That particular phone never rang — a fact that had something to do with the security system associated with it. No one could eavesdrop on or trace any call to that number.

“Hush?”

“What’s up, LT?”

“Are you working?”

Hush, since retiring from the assassination business, had been employed as a limousine driver. Don’t ask me why. He had more money than Gordo.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Hush said.

“Tell me what?”

“I bought the company. All twenty-seven cars now drive for me. I just keep my regulars and get to spend more time with Thackery and Tamara.”

It was hard to imagine Hush as a family man even though I had been a guest at his house half a dozen times. It seemed both illogical and unfair.

“You want to come get me and take a ride out to the beach?” I asked.

“Okay.”

“Hello?” Katrina said.

“Hey, babe,” I said, nearly biting my tongue for saying the same thing to both Katrina and Aura.

“Leonid.” There was relief in her voice. “Where are you?”

I was only four blocks away but I said, “In Brooklyn. I’m deposing a witness for Breland.”

“Is it safe?”

“Yes... very.”

“I’ll wait up for you.”

Seventeen minutes later Hush drove up in a black Lincoln Town Car. I hopped in next to him. He was wearing dark but not black clothes; chocolate brown jeans and a dusk-colored T-shirt. His dark blue sailor’s shoes were made from heavy canvas. His brown hair worked as its own camouflage.

I hadn’t told him that we were on serious business — he just knew.

Going down the West Side Highway, I explained about Zella and the complications that had arisen. He listened and nodded and drove.

We went through the tunnel at the bottom of Manhattan and made our way to the Gowanus Expressway, headed south.

“Why don’t you just leave well enough alone?” he asked when approaching the Belt Parkway.

“You mean leave Zella to rot in jail for something she didn’t do?”

“She shot her man.”

“They wouldn’t have been so harsh for that alone. I mean, she’d gone crazy.”

“It’s crazy to get her out of prison.”

“Yeah, but...”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. When I’m in bed early in the morning I wake up sometimes and think about the people I’ve wronged. Some of them, most of them, were pretty bad to begin with. I can live with that. But people like Zella... I mean, what good is life if you can’t stand up?”

“That’s what boxers do, right?”

“What?”

“They get knocked down and stand up again.”

“Yeah. If you’ve never been knocked down, then you’ve never been in a fight.”