All I Did Was Shoot My Man

48

Harry and Minnie shared the redwood chair next to mine. He had a confused expression on his cute mug while she exuded cold anger.

“Why would you think that these people trying to kill you would have anything to do with Zella?” Harry asked.

“It’s my only active case,” I said, “and the police think that at least three men have already died behind it.”

“What could we have to do with that?” Minnie asked.

“You’re working for Rutgers,” I said. “That’s enough right there.”

“But...” She was about to rebut my claim but then a thought occurred before the words could come out. She turned to Harry and he looked down at the lawn.

“Harry?” she said.

He looked up at me.

Harry/Sydney was not a stupid man but neither did he have a strong character. The look on his face told of how he was smart enough to get into trouble but too weak to fight his way back out again.

“A man came to me,” he said.

“Your friend Stumpy Brown,” Minnie put in.

“I didn’t really know him before then, honey,” Harry said. Then to me, “He offered me money and a way to get out from under all the publicity. He also helped me when I wanted to adopt Zella.”

“Stumpy?” I said. “What kind of name is that?”

“I never knew another name. He said that he worked freelance for Rutgers and that they needed to know about the heist. He offered me some money and a job for Minnie.”

“Didn’t he think that someone at Rutgers might know who she was?”

“What money?” Minnie asked.

“She wasn’t in the papers when the shooting happened,” he said. “That was the week of those big tornadoes in the Midwest. After that she stayed at her mother’s and never came out. All they had were high school pictures without her in glasses and with dark hair.”

I wondered then where Gert had gotten the more current pictures of the girl.

“What money?” Minnie asked again.

“He gave me thirty-three thousand and told me to stay low,” Harry said.

“You said that you were doing telephone sales.”

“Yeah.”

“Why would Stumpy do all that for you?” I asked.

“He wanted me to stay in touch with Zella, to get her to tell me where the money was.”

But, I thought, Stumpy knew that Zella was framed. He was the one that set her up.

“And why get Minnie here a job at Rutgers?”

“He was working for them,” Harry said. “That’s the place where he could get her a job. After that he helped me adopt little Zella.”

“Big Zella says that you never got in touch with her again after she shot you. That’s why she had me looking for you — so she could apologize.”

“That bitch has got no rights in this house,” Minnie said.

“I told Stumpy that I’d try to get the information out of Zell but I just couldn’t,” Harry told me. “She’d already shot me and there was a guy murdered in the robbery. I only went up to the prison one time—”

“You did?” Minnie said.

“—but I didn’t even go in. After Zella shot me my nerve was gone.”

Not one thing he said made even the least sense. Zella didn’t commit the robbery, she knew nothing about it. Stumpy knew better than I who did do the job. It was Bingo and his crew. Wasn’t it?

“What do you have on Brighton?” I asked the incognito couple.

“What do you mean?” Minnie asked.

“He did have something to do with the heist, right?”

“Not that we know of,” Harry answered. “He was just the job that Stumpy’s contact got her hooked up with.”

“And who was Stumpy working for?” I asked. “What was his name?”

“I don’t know. He never said.”

“So it could have been Brighton.”

“Maybe,” Harry said a little helplessly. “But why pretend?”

“You were pretending to talk to Zella.”

“I tried but I just didn’t have the nerve.”

“So what did you tell Stumpy?”

“The first few times I talked to him I said that she still said that she was innocent. And then, after a while, Mr. Brown just stopped calling.”

“He stopped calling and you didn’t get suspicious?”

“About what? He got Minnie a good job. I had the money he promised me. We got, we got little Zella. There was nothing to worry about.”

I sat back in the slanted chair perplexed by the muddle the maybe innocent couple sitting before me presented.

“You said that you had a friend at Rutgers,” Minnie said to her husband, “that it was just a coincidence about the robbery.”

“I was half right.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you wouldn’t have let me go see Zella, and then later, when I never went, it was already too late.”

“Why would Stumpy help you adopt Zella’s child?” I asked.

“It’s my baby too.”

“But what did Stumpy get out of that?”

“You sound like you know him,” Minnie said suspiciously.

“What do you want me to call him — Suspect X?”

Her resultant frown was, for me, like that piece of cake that Proust ate before writing his major opus.

“That’s what people do, boys,” my father would say. “They will follow the leader out of instinct all the while believing that they’re exerting free will.”

I had been following down the wrong trail. The path was set out there in front of me and I was just like that duck, brainwashed by instinct.

“Did Stumpy give you a way to get in touch with him?” I asked Harry.

“No.”

“Do you have an Internet connection?” I asked the executive secretary, Claudia Burns-Quick.

“Yes.”

“The crew that the police think robbed Rutgers was made up of three men,” I said, giving her the names of Bingo and his gang. “While you’re looking do a search on my name over the last few days. I think you’ll see that I’m not lying.”

While she was gone Harry and I tried to have a conversation.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “I mean, did Zell have something to do with the robbery or not?”

“The courts let her go.”

“That might be on some kind of technicality.”

“Might be,” I said, “but isn’t.”

“But you think Mr. Brown did?”

“Did what?”

“Had something to do with the robbery?”

“Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. But the people he was working for most definitely did. Zella was framed and then your wife was hired by the company that got robbed. That’s just too much coincidence.”

“But it’s been years.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it has.”

Harry twisted on the lawn chair, trying to contort his body into some kind of understanding.

“What was it with you and Minnie?” I asked, if only to keep him from breaking his spine.

“What do you mean?”

“You were living with Zella. She was Zella’s friend. How long were you fooling around behind her back?”

“The day she shot me was the first time,” he said, suddenly sober and still. “We were planning to give her a surprise birthday party. Minnie came over and things just got out of hand.”

“All the way to the chapel,” I agreed.

“I know it sounds strange but getting shot like that brought Minnie and me closer. She called at the hospital every day and took me to her mother’s house when I got out. She blamed herself for what happened and I just needed somebody to care.”

There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together, my father used to say,but men and women and their needs are all the same.

Zella the Second wailed piteously. She was standing at the glass door, staring after the only mother she ever knew. Mrs. Braxton was holding the child’s arm, keeping her from running after Minnie.

At any other time the stand-in mother’s heart would have melted, I’m sure. But Minnie was on a mission at that moment. She didn’t even hear the girl’s cries.

“What is it?” Harry asked Minnie.

“All dead, right?” I said.

“A man named Durleth ‘Stumpy’ Brown was found dead this morning in his apartment in Coney Island,” she said.

The stink had finally brought the law into that laundry room.

I looked around the manicured backyard. It seemed so cookie-cutter, so anonymous. For years Minnie, Harry, and Zella’s daughter Zella had been hiding from the wrong thing in that yard. But that day they were visited by the Truth wearing an inexpensive blue suit.

“I don’t understand,” Minnie said.

“You got to get outta here,” I explained. “I don’t know what it is exactly but somebody is killing anyone who had anything to do with that robbery.”

“But we weren’t involved in that,” Harry said.

“You are now.”