All I Did Was Shoot My Man

46

When i reached the park it was not yet eight.

Somewhere above 101st Street, a few hundred yards in, there’s a huge pile of boulders that come together forming a grotto of stone. I climbed up the man-made hill and was happy to see that no one had been there for a while.

It was going to be a hot day but the morning air still held the chill of night. I hunkered down in the rocky crevice and closed my eyes. Sleep came on in an instant and I was transported to the comparatively peaceful time of my homeless, directionless adolescence.

My dreams were not indecipherable mysteries wrought from unconscious material. Instead they were of people I knew or wanted to know. Zella and Antoinette were there, also Johann Brighton and someone else, someone that might have sent killers to my paper-thin front door.

The path of my life appeared before me — hard and clear. I could, in the dream, turn around and take everything back. I could pass through time and decide not to help Zella or lie to Shelly. I could travel all the way back to the womb and be another person or no one at all. But I was too comfortable on that quartz plinth under the summer’s sun. As I was lying there my life seemed to have enough meaning to engender nostalgia — the greatest enemy of human logic.

I found comfort in that old hiding place. There I had temporarily escaped the evil machinations of an enemy set into motion by my own foolish acts.

My heart was a tin drum; my breath the sighs of a forlorn, slightly out-of-tune cello. But music, no matter how sad it becomes, is still a solace for the soul.

My dreams became incomprehensible and I smiled. New York faded from consciousness. I was all alone in a wilderness before Eden, before good or evil... ...and when I awoke I was completely refreshed. The medicine had worked. The fever, along with whatever infection that caused it, was gone from my body. Men were trying to kill me, but so what? I was reborn. A born-again agnostic risen from the ashes of faith.

I got to a cab on Central Park West and made it to the office by twelve fifty-eight.

“Twill in there?” I asked Mardi.

“Yes, he is,” she said. There was gleam in her eye. We, Twill and I, were her favorite men and she was happy to have us together behind the door where she stood guard.

Twill was at his desk. He stood up when I approached.

“Hey, Pops,” he said.

That morning my son was clad in grays. From his light ash jacket to the coal-colored shoes on his bare feet. His pants were a misty seaside morning, the lead-hued shirt threatened to become blue.

“Call this number,” I said, reciting the digits for the special cell phone Bug Bateman had long ago given my lawyer. “Put it on speakerphone.”

“Sure. Who is it?”

“You’ll see.”

“Hello?” Breland said after four rings.

“I got Twill here with me,” I said, then nodded at my favorite son.

“Mr. Lewis?” Twill uttered, the slightest twinge of discomfort showing around his mouth.

“Yes, Twilliam?”

“Breland called me this morning,” I said. “He wanted to know about how Carson got involved with Kent Mycroft.”

“Look, man,” Twill said to the omnidirectional phone receiver. “I don’t know what Kent did while he was gone from New York but whatever it was he learned how to be a gangster. His crew got their fingers in gambling, drugs, prostitution, and insurance scams. In between they do burglaries. Just about the only thing they don’t do is mugging. But they for sure killed this one guy. Kent and one of his men both say that he did that himself. There might be another one, and there’s other stuff too.”

“You don’t know any of that for sure,” Breland the lawyer argued. “Maybe it’s just a kid trying to make himself look important.”

“I know the difference, Mr. Lewis,” Twill said, managing to get both confidence and deference in his tone. “Kent is crazy and the people working with him are scared of him too.”

“How did the bust come about?” Breland asked.

“You got to understand, man,” Twill said. “I had to make a choice.”

“What choice?” I said.

“A guy named Lucia had a gift shop on Greenwich Street. He made a deal with Kent to do a torch job on the place. The cops tumbled to the arson and because there was no break-in they arrested Mr. Lucia. But then they let him go the same day. Kent thought he was gonna talk and they were supposed to kill him last night.”

“How could you possibly know all that, Twill?” Breland asked.

I wondered too.

“I met with one of his guys,” Twill admitted. “You know, Kent is smart about business but not people. The guys he works with aren’t all that tough. This one dude was so nervous that it was easy to get him talkin’.

“I called Captain Kitteridge and told him about where Kent and his guys meet. They got contraband in there and merchandise from their burglaries.”

“You turned in your own client?” Breland asked. “Did you know about this, LT?”

“I had to act fast, man,” Twill answered. “Kitteridge said that he’d give the guys worked with Kent deals if they cooperated. That was the best I could do.”

“LT?”

“I didn’t know, Breland,” I said, “but I might have done the same thing. I mean, this kid Kent seems like a bad seed.”

“What am I supposed to tell his father?”

“Why tell him anything? He doesn’t know that we know Kitteridge. Maybe when he sees how bad his son is he’ll accept what’s come down.”

“I don’t know. I mean, this is his only son.”

“A son who was planning murder, Breland. You couldn’t expect Twill to let that pass.”

“I have to think about this,” my mostly honest lawyer said. “I have to go.”

When the call was over Twill and I sat there — me on his desk and him in the chair.

“Is there any more to this, Twill?”

“What you mean, Pops?”

“I’m not sure. You should have called me. I mean, if you want to climb in bed with Carson Kitteridge, there’s a lot you need to know about him and me.”

“Okay. I mean, it just seemed so straightforward. Like you said, I couldn’t turn my back on a murder like that.”

There was more that Twill wasn’t telling me but that fire seemed to be out for the moment so I moved on to the next flare-up.