All I Did Was Shoot My Man

9

Katrina’s Snoring could be heard throughout the apartment. She sawed on while the kids packed and carried, ate sandwiches and cleaned. Dimitri spent half an hour whispering with Tatyana in a corner of the kitchen. After that he calmed down. He stopped talking about his mother and woes and concentrated on preparing for his new life with the Mata Hari of the Upper West Side.

After they had all gone, ferried by Hush to the new place, the only sound was Katrina’s rough breathing.

I stayed home out of duty to my wife. She was in pain, more than she ever had been in our long years together — and apart. I suppose I was worried about her.

But the sound of her snoring, for some reason, unsettled me. Soon after the kids were gone I went into the dining room and closed the door. There I took a crystal whiskey glass from the cabinet and poured myself a drink from the decanter.

The snoring was diminished but not extinguished. It sounded like recurring susurration from a storm the other side of thick stone walls.

The cognac didn’t help. Rather than providing bliss it exaggerated my habit of going over and over facts that I knew and could not change.

Breland Lewis had to call in a lot of favors to get Zella’s case back in the courts. He used every bit of his talent and guile to persuade the female convict to let him represent her. Then he had to present new evidence that had to seem to have been derived from a priori investigation and not from actual knowledge concerning the facts in the case.

I had replaced the wrappers on the cash with fakes and used blood from a Lower East Side donor named Rainbow Bill to replace the blood I had been presented with. For ten dollars and a quart of wine I got six good drops.

The lock they snipped off her storage space wouldn’t have opened with the key they’d taken from her. For anyone willing to look closely enough it was obvious that she’d been framed.

I’d gone through those elaborate precautions because the job had been brought to me by Gert and I was worried that Stumpy Brown might have put her in jeopardy somewhere up the line.

Getting my preparations together in front of a sympathetic judge cost money — a lot of it.

Thinking about Zella while listening to Katrina’s faraway exsufflations I remembered the last time I happened upon hard breathing.

It was in an apartment in Queens, not too far from LeFrak City. At three-seventeen on a Thursday morning I entered the building through a side entrance and made it up the stairs without being noticed. The door to apartment 3G was ajar.

Upon entering the dark apartment I heard her ragged breath. Flipping the light switch revealed the young woman, naked and on her haunches, in the corner. There was a hypodermic needle, with a red rubber bulb at the end, lying on the floor between her thighs. She was swaying from side to side, mumbling to herself and breathing like a Greco-Roman wrestler.

In the center of the floor, on a stained white sheet, lay the body of a white man who carried an extra thirty pounds. I knew he was dead by the permanent crease in his left temple; that and the white ceramic box stained with his blood on the sheet next to him. He was on his back. His only article of clothing was a dark green condom.

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe. I got on my knees next to her and she looked up suddenly.

“Velvet?” I said.

Her fright turned to hazy curiosity.

“Did he attack you?”

“My throat,” she whispered.

She lifted her head and I could see the bluish bruises that told of the fingers strangling her.

“And you hit him with that box?” I asked.

She looked at the body and nodded. This motion pushed her off balance. I moved into half lotus and let her fall into my lap. There she put her arms around my head, as Katrina was wont to do in our rare moments of intimacy.

Just that quickly Velvet was asleep. I wondered if she would die too. That would have made things much easier.

I didn’t need to talk to Velvet Reyes. I had already been informed about her situation — more or less.

“Leonid?” Breland Lewis said on the phone an hour or so earlier.

“Late for you, isn’t it, Bre?” I said lightly, knowing that the weight would soon be coming down.

He explained that a wealthy client of his had a live-in maid who had a daughter with a drug problem. This young woman, Velvet, had called her mother a while before — hysterical. She told about a man inviting her to his apartment and then trying to kill her. She fought him off but now she didn’t know what to do.

Velvet didn’t have to say that the invitation included a monetary transaction or that the john promised some good aitch to sweeten the pot — so to speak.

The facts pretty much spoke for themselves. Maybe he was really going to kill Velvet, maybe not. But he probably said that that was his intention. The bruises proved that he was squeezing hard enough to kill. She grabbed for anything to fight him off with and found the porcelain box. He fell over and she called her mother. Her mother told the rich man, he called Breland, Breland called me, and in the meanwhile Velvet found the dead man’s stash. She used this to blunt the trauma of near death and murder.

With the child (I knew from Breland that she’d just turned twenty) on my lap I fished the cell phone out of my blue jacket pocket and pressed three digits.

“Leonid,” Breland said before I heard a ring.

I explained the situation, and asked, “So what is it exactly that you want from me?”

“I want you to fix it.”

“You know I’m straight now, man. And even when I was bent I didn’t take on jobs like this.”

“Come on, LT. This is for a very important client of mine. And you told me yourself that it looks like self-defense.”

“Then why not call the cops and defend her yourself?”

“It’s complicated.”

I could have pressed him, maybe even talked him out of what he was asking for. But Breland was not only my lawyer, he was a friend. He had been there for me when any other sane man would have walked away.

“I’ll call you back.”

Sitting at the hickory table, listening to Katrina’s snoring in the distance, I thought about the ugly apartment with the dead man and the ravaged young woman. I had been in many rooms like that over the years. That tableau could have been a painting representing my whole previous life when I still hated my father and believed that dealing in darkness was the only way I could survive.

“Yeah?” Hush said on the second ring. It was past three on that Thursday morning. Velvet was still asleep and the nameless corpse was still dead.

“I got a situation here.”

“Where?”

“Yeah, Leonid?” Breland said.

“You got two choices,” I told my lawyer. “Either I call the cops for nothing or you come up with fifty thousand, cash.”

“I can double that and have it in your hands by noon.”

What could I say? I needed that much to get Zella out of hock. I’d lose ten thousand points on my bid for redemption, but no boxer ever won a match without getting hit — except maybe Willie Pep.

“I got somebody on the way,” I said. “It’ll all be cleaned up in an hour.”

It was a sour memory, even more so when I thought of Zella’s response to my offer of help.

That’s when I remembered my advice to Dimitri — It’s a gift, not an investment... I smiled at my own blind insight, and at just that moment my cell phone sang.