And Sometimes I Wonder About You

34

I flew back to New York’s LaGuardia Airport and took a taxi, arriving at the Tesla Building at 3:56.

I was looking at my watch, just inside the big brass doors of that perfect Art Deco feat of architecture: a huge room replete with blue walls lined with brass plating; pink, black, and green tiled floors done in a curving abstract design, and a broad fresco of workers, naked women, and saints that had no pantheon, just the faith of their people. I liked the classical and yet revolutionary decor despite my dislike of my father and his beliefs. I think I might have smiled a moment before something hard pressed into the right side of my upper back. I looked up at the high reception desk and twisted my lips even before the man behind me spoke.

“Let’s take a walk, Mr. McGill,” an unfamiliar voice said.

I turned my head sixty degrees or so and saw the man I’d first beheld on Monday looking at Marella Herzog and ignoring me. The probable gun he held against my shoulder blade was hidden under the fabric of his dark yellow trench coat. This supposed weapon was held in his left hand, as I could see his right encased in a plaster cast, its swollen fingers poking through.

Beyond the paid stalker’s angry visage I could see that Warren Oh, the Jamaican black-and-Chinese senior guard for the Tesla, was talking on the phone.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Lett?” I asked pleasantly.

“We can go upstairs to your office and you can tell me where Marella Herzog is and how I can get to her.”

“You plan to shoot my receptionist, too?” I asked as if requesting extra butter on my vat of movie theater popcorn.

“Don’t fuck with me, brother,” Alexander Lett said. “I got a cushion on this piece. I’ll be a block away before they even know you’re dead.”

I was beginning to detect a pattern in my life. This model of behavior was a hybrid of capitalist necessity and proletarian existentialist angst; or, more accurately, modern-day potentates and their anger-driven gunsels.

“But surely no one has asked you to kill me, Mr. Lett,” I said. “I mean you didn’t even know me when you took on this job.”

“Move it, McGill.”

“I’d like to, Mr. Lett, but my assistant is a delicate thing and I’d feel terrible if I brought fear or worse into her life.”

“Have it your way.”

These last few words he might have meant for my epitaph. I didn’t think that this was the case but human nature is not always predictable. Lucky for me — prediction had no place in the equation of our interchange.

“Hold it right there,” a third, very authoritative voice demanded.

Alex and I both looked in the direction of the command. There we beheld four policemen; three in uniform and one plainclothes Captain Carson Kitteridge.

Once again I could feel the heartbeat of my wife calling me strong, realizing that strong could also be scared.

Alexander Lett’s olive profile was the epitome of desperation. I could see in that visage the questions that beset men when they’ve taken one step too many down a bad path. Why did I do it? How can I get out of it? These are the unanswerable and useless questions that go through our minds when someone shoves a gun in our side or calls for us to halt.

“Let me see your hands,” Kit said clearly.

The civilians crowding the foyer of the Tesla Building were now pressing toward the edges and exits.

“I got a gun in my left,” Alexander Lett admitted loudly.

The fleeing crowd became a bit more frantic.

To his credit Warren Oh stayed at his post.

“Bring it out holding it by the butt,” Kit said, and I wondered if I’d be shot.

There was a tense moment in which many thoughts and sensations transpired.

As the pressure of the muzzle eased from my side and Alexander Lett’s sour breath assailed me, I was thinking that the most important moments of my life had nothing to do with intelligence or insight. I was a brute among brutes and would die according to my nature and its affiliations. This thought comforted me; it allowed that Fate was my master and not free will.

It was then that I saw the long-barreled pistol emerge from under the yellow fabric. Alex held the butt with his forefinger and thumb. The three uniforms moved quickly then, grabbing the gun and throwing the already injured Lett to the hard, multicolored tile floor.

“Go easy on him, Kit,” I said loudly enough for the prisoner to hear. “Alex here an’ me is old friends. He was just jokin’.”

“With a loaded gun?” the captain asked.

“You know, man, you work with dynamite long enough and you start to forget how dangerous the shit is. Right, Alex?”

“Uh-huh,” the confused thug agreed.

“I’m still takin’ him down. If he doesn’t have a license he’s gonna do time. He might anyway. Reckless endangerment.”

After Lett was searched, chained, and trundled off in a police car, Warren Oh and I were informally deposed by a sergeant named Reese. After all that, Kit and I took the elevator upstairs to my office.

The door had been replaced and the wall inside rebuilt. My keys still worked and everything was right with the world.

“How’d you get here so quickly?” I asked Kit when we passed into the empty reception area.

“You know we always have a few men on the Tesla. That many tourists always attract your people.”

My people. Captain Carson Kitteridge would always see me as a criminal and my race as like-minded felons.

“But why were you here?”

“I came by to ask a question.”

“Serendipity then?” I said as I entered the key-code to the back offices.

“Why’d you give Warren the high sign if Lett was a friend of yours?” Kit asked when we were seated in my personal office.

“We don’t have to worry about that, Kit. Lett is representing some angry ex-boyfriend and he got mad that I sucker punched him, that’s all. We got bigger things to talk about.”

“Like what?”

“You know anything about a guy named Jones got a whole bunch’a kids doin’ crimes for him?”

It was a rare moment to catch Kit off guard; he blinked — twice. He was small and delicate as far as the physical goes, but his will had a steel jacket. Any breach in that armor was a major achievement.

“What do you know about him?”

“Twill got himself mixed up with the dude tryin’ to help a girl lost her heart to one’a Jones’s men.”

“Put Twill on a plane and send him to Pakistan,” Kit said. “I doubt if even Jones got clout there.”

“Who is he?”

“The question is what is he? Child molesting, kidnapping, forced prostitution, blackmail, murder, extortion, smuggling, and sadism. I got a file with forty-six persons either missing or dead, and we think Jones killed ’em all.”

“Then why not arrest him?”

“I don’t even know what he looks like. No one does. He wears disguises and only makes himself known to the orphans and runaways he controls. Every time we arrest somebody that might know something, either a power from on high lets them go or they die. I’m surprised that Twill even got in without having his throat cut. Jones is bad business. He’s never been arrested. There’s no photo or fingerprint, not a signature or single strand of hair on him.”

“What’s he got on people?”

“What did Lucky Luciano have on J. Edgar Hoover?”

With that sentence Kit was telling me that he would do anything to bring down Jones.

“What would you give to get at him?” I asked.

“I’d lay off your ass for a month of Sundays.”

“Is that a February month or August?”

Kit’s smile was anything but friendly. “If you bring this man down I’ll even lay off the Hiram Stent business.”

I think I must’ve blinked then. Kit smiled as I wondered how he could have possibly linked me with the homeless dead man.

“Who?” I finally managed to utter.

“Hiram Stent. Homeless guy. He was murdered a couple of days ago in Brooklyn.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“I don’t know,” Kit admitted. “When he was being murdered I was at your office trying to keep you from coming to blows with my sergeant.”

“And?”

“Stent was killed in a mugging, at least that’s the way it looks. But he had your address and phone number written on a piece of paper that he’d hidden in his shoe.”

“That doesn’t mean I know him.”

“I don’t care, LT. You bring me Jones and I’ll send Stent to potter’s field.”

“Why you hate this guy so much?”

“I got my reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Like a dozen children murdered and tossed off in alleys and abandoned buildings,” he said. “Like judges, city hall officials, and senior cops getting in the way of every case related to him. I’m a cop, LT. I put people like you behind bars. Either I succeed or I don’t but the people on my side should never block my investigations.”

I gave that minor soliloquy a moment to settle. There was real passion in the angry cop. Whenever a man as dangerous as Kit expressed rage, you needed to give it a moment to breathe.

That moment gone, I asked, “You got a private cell?”

“Why?”