All I Did Was Shoot My Man

27

I do my best thinking while walking, but sometimes I wonder if I’d be better off with the blinders of an office cubicle around me, facing a monitor with solitaire on it; the only thing on my mind would be the next card to play and if the boss might be walking by.

I didn’t feel guilty, not exactly. My emotion was more an uneasiness about having sex with my wife because my ex-girlfriend had asked me to come back. This conundrum seemed petty, childish even.

But I knew the perturbation over the drunken sex orgy with my wife was really just a blind for the murders I’d caused. Stumpy Brown, Bingo Haman, and there might have been more; certainly more was coming.

Walking down Tenth Avenue with artists, businessmen and — women, and the homeless, I tried to imagine that desk job. If the worst thing that happened in my life was getting fired because I was a slacker and replaced by a better-educated Hindu from Mumbai, if that was the cruelest event, then I’d feel that I was blessed.

But instead I was godless, blindfolded, and in line for execution by parties unknown. I did the right thing and got the wrong outcome. I could have been a lyric in the Dr. John song.

My cell phone throbbed somewhere between Thirtieth and Twenty-ninth.

“Boss?” Zephyra said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s up today?”

“Not much.”

“I can see from the GPS of your cell phone that you’re headed south. Are you going to see Charles?”

I had to remember to have my tracker disconnected.

“Yeah,” I said. “Anything you want me to tell him?”

“No. Just hi.”

I walked pretty fast, making it down to the intersection of Charles and Hudson Streets in the West Village before nine. A quarter of a block east and seven granite steps down was a shamrock green steel-reinforced door that could stymie a SWAT team or a platoon of advancing Russian militia.

All I had to do was stand in front of that door because a blank white card in my wallet sent out a pulse that made the denizen of the underground bunker aware of my presence.

Thirty seconds after I got there a voice said, “Come on in, LT.”

I pressed the door and it opened. I walked through and the mostly steel portal slammed behind.

Everything seemed as it always had; room after room filled with electronic devices used for intelligence gathering, flat-out spying, and, now and then, triggers for more aggressive acts.

Three chambers down I came to a cavernous space that was once the master bedroom of the subterranean apartment. Now the room was lined with computers and air conditioners. In the very center of these frigid electronics was a round Formica tabletop with a man-sized hole cut in the middle. Twelve plasma and LCD screens encircled this desk. These monitors flowed with images, texts, and less definable waves of color.

Sitting in the hole was a caramel-colored young Adonis. On top of his head were glasses with one blue and one red lens. These I knew he used to see images represented by colors beyond the range of human sight.

“Hey, Bug,” I said.

Tiny “Bug” Bateman (né Charles Bateman) had weighed three hundred pounds when we first met. Somewhere along the way in our dealings he became aware of Zephyra Ximenez. He fell in love with her phone patter and the image he found of her in the virtual world. She told him that he’d have to get in shape if he wanted even a chance with her.

Iran became his trainer and, eighteen months later, he’d lost forty-three percent of his body weight and sixty percent of his fat. Now he ran 10K races and bench-pressed two hundred pounds.

“Leonid,” the beautiful young man hailed.

“Bug,” I said. “You almost ready for a marathon?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“Because a guy named Pheidippides, the first man to run what was to become known as the marathon, ran the distance to warn the Greek army about an enemy attack. He was successful but the exertion killed him. I have no death wish.”

“Did you get my text?” I asked. On the way down I sent a message to Bug about information I needed.

“Yeah. Let me call it up.”

While he was working I thought I’d fill in some gaps.

“Zephyra was asking me about you,” I ventured.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. She sounded like she wanted to know what you were up to.”

The computer genius smiled.

“What’s up, Bug?”

“Z told me when we started going out that she was not an exclusive kinda girl. She said that she had a few men friends and didn’t want any of them clinging to her. So we made a deal that we’d get together only once and at most twice a week.

“I called her one time when I guess I shouldn’t have and she was obviously with somebody else. After that I started going out myself. I met this woman named Marcia, head of Western Hemisphere computer operations for Euro-Bank. I plugged a leak they had and she took me to Johannesburg for a weeklong vacation.”

“That’d do it,” I said.

“Here you go,” Bug announced. “Teresa Lesser has no regular cell phone but that doesn’t mean she might not have a throwaway. She hardly ever makes any outgoing calls from her landline. Up until four years ago she used to call a Margaret Rich once a week on Sundays but then that stopped. Rich is her maiden name. Margaret was probably her mother, probably died.

“For the last nine years she’s talked twice a week to various cell phones, all of them belonging to a woman named Claudia Burns.” Bug hit a few more keys and then said, “Ms. Burns is the executive assistant for a Johann Brighton at Rutgers Assurance Company.”

And curiouser yet.

“Can you pull up an employee flowchart for Rutgers?”

“Sure thing.”

While Bug hit keys and clicked around I wondered. What would Minnie Lesser’s mother have to do with the heist? I was the one who implicated Minnie’s boyfriend’s girlfriend. She had nothing to do with it — did she?

“What you need, LT?” Bug asked.

“Are Johann Brighton and Antoinette Lowry along the same chain of command?”

He worked two mouses at once, moving data across a broad screen that hung from a metal stalk attached to the ceiling.

After some study he said, “No. They work in completely different sections. As a matter of fact they are entirely unconnected. He works under the auspices of the CEO, François Dernier, while she reports upward to the president of the company — Pat Rollins.”

“Can you get me the name, address, and phone number for this Claudia?”

“It’ll be on your phone and computer in under a minute.”

Almost as an afterthought I said, “While you’re at it will you look up a guy named Seldon Arvinil?”

“Anything special?”

“I hope not. He lives in New York and is over forty — I think.”

I took a deep breath and turned to leave the frigid computer room. I hadn’t sat down because there was no chair for visitors in Bug’s electronic playground.

“Leonid,” he said to my back.

“What?”

“There’s somebody upstairs in the apartment that I want you to see.”

“Somebody for me?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d he even know I was gonna be here?”

“All I can say is that you don’t have to worry. Take the second door on your left in the second room. That leads to the stairs.”