All I Did Was Shoot My Man

55

“Furrows for a four-thirty meeting,” I said to the sour-looking man at the front desk, “suite twelve-oh-three-A.”

“State-issued ID,” he replied.

“Don’t have it.”

“I can’t let you in without ID.” The guard wore a black jacket that had the look of something military. He was a black man of the gray-brown persuasion and my age. He was big but loose, strong but probably slow.

“I wasn’t told about any ID,” I told him. “Just Furrows, twelve-oh-three-A.”

The guard didn’t like me. But he opened up a big ledger on the slender ledge in front him and ran a thick finger down the page. He found something that soured his mouth and then said, “Take the third elevator on your right.”

Suite 1203A was a solitary room furnished with a floor-to-ceiling window that looked down on Greenwich. There were no curtains or window shade. The sun shone in but central air kept the room cold. There were only two chairs in the small room and I took one of them, feeling exposed and vulnerable but not timid or afraid.

It was three forty-seven and I was prepared for the wait. I was ready to die too. It had been a long run and the return of my father signaled an ending to the race.

Sitting there in the exposed room, I thought about my children. They were all damaged and beautiful, expecting the best and dealing with what they had. I wasn’t a failure in my life or theirs but I lacked agency, and this deficiency, I believed, also limited the range of my heirs. I was a counterpuncher by nature and so I’d lived a life of blundering out into the fray, expecting to meet my challenges as they came.

These thoughts were not very complex but it took me a long time to come to them. Before I knew it it was four-thirty and Johann Brighton was coming through the unlocked door.

I stood to meet the handsome CEO-in-waiting.

“Mr. McGill? This is a surprise.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“Absolutely. What are you doing here?”

“I know that Seth Marryman hired Claudia Burns and had her come to work for you.”

“Mr. Marryman died three months ago.”

“He still hired Claudia.”

“So? What could an executive assistant have to do with anything?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“I don’t have time for this, McGill. How did you even get here? And where is the man I was supposed to meet, Mr. Furrows?”

“Alton Plimpton canceled your meeting and slotted me in.”

“Alton? He doesn’t...” Brighton stopped there in the middle of his sentence, putting together thoughts and notions that I would have liked to share.

“What do you have to do with Alton?” he asked.

“He called and asked who I thought was the inside mastermind behind the heist eight years ago. I told him that it was the man who hired Claudia Burns.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because Claudia is actually Minnie Lesser. Minnie Lesser was the girlfriend of the man Zella Grisham shot.”

Brighton took in these claims, wondering about them like a housewife gauging the ripeness of fresh fruits.

“Even if that’s true,” he said. “What does it have to do with Seth?”

The door behind us swung open then. Through it came the sour-faced guard followed by Clarence Lethford, Antoinette Lowry, and Carson Kitteridge. After that came the assassin with the receding hairline from the Quick house in Queens. He was in handcuffs again and shepherded by two uniformed cops. One of them was holding a high-powered rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.

The expression on Lethford’s face would have been perceived as a glowering frown on most men but I knew him well enough by then to see it for what it was — a triumphant smile.

“You were right,” he said to me. “It was a setup. This guy was going to kill you both.”

“How’d he get out of federal custody?” I asked Antoinette.

She shrugged and gave me an apologetic look.

“Plimpton provided him with a good lawyer,” she said. “We picked up Alton boarding a chartered jet headed for the United Emirates. He had sixteen suitcases with forty-one million dollars in them.”

“What is this all about?” Johann Brighton asked.

Kitteridge spoke up then. “Mr. Plimpton told us that he was working for you, Mr. Brighton. But we have the calls he made to this man. He was setting you and Mr. McGill up for an assassination.”

“And you let me walk into the trap?”

“LT didn’t tell us that you were on the guest list.”

“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t know if you weren’t a part of this. I still don’t, for that matter.”

“Would you mind coming down to the station with us, Mr. Brighton?” Lethford asked.

The captain of industry was temporarily out of his depth. He nodded weakly and walked out of the room with the prisoner and police escort.

“We’ll need you to come down and make a statement, LT,” Carson told me.

“What do you think it is, Kit?” I replied.

“The money speaks for itself. From the circumstances I’d say it was all this Plimpton guy. He’s blaming everybody else but he had the money and he called the man with the gun.”

“What about Harlow?”

“Plimpton had been training under Leonard for a few years a while back,” Antoinette said. “He could have figured out the foreign arm, made the contacts he’d need.”

“And how about taking the money from the vault before the heist?” I asked.

“He could have managed that with the help of Clay Thorn,” she said. “That was back before the new security procedures were put into practice. The way Rutgers works with short-term assurances is to put them in storage and use them for credit advances.”

“If they were connected, we’ll find it,” Kitteridge promised. He was not a man to make idle assurances. “Will you come down to the offices at Elizabeth Street this afternoon?”

“In the morning,” I said. “I got a big night in front of me. I’m supposed to have dinner with my father.”

Kit frowned at that. He knew my past better than anyone outside of Aura. He’d studied me the way a wild dog did the skat of his prey.

“I’ll be there at nine,” I said.

Kit didn’t like it but he knew enough to lay off.

“Nine,” he said, pointing at me. Then he walked out of the cold, sunny room.

Antoinette and I were left in the room by ourselves.

“Cutting it pretty close to the bone, weren’t you?” she asked.

“I was thinkin’ about that before your boss walked in.”

“Shall we have a seat?”