Every Man a King

30

Oliya was waiting for me. We squandered three or four sentences and then I showed her the blowup mattress Aja stored in the closet of her office space. She thanked me and was about the process of making her bed when I went into the office. There I logged onto a bogus activity board and entered the real code Quiller gave me for his wife. The website was TINNY-TINY-AND-WRONG-614. I included my name and a temporary phone number. Then I lowered the rope ladder that led from the trapdoor to my upstairs apartment.

Before I could start the climb the cell phone dinged. The entire text consisted of one symbol—∞.

I camped out in the bedroom upstairs, not sleeping all that much. Those intermittent naps were dominated by the dream of having to split a thousand-pound boulder more or less evenly. There were no tools, and even if there had been I didn’t have the skill or experience to accomplish such a task.

When I finally got up I sat at the end-edge of the bed so tired that standing seemed impossible.

One of my many burner phones was in a pants pocket on the floor at my feet. I snagged the slacks with a toe, lifted the phone, and texted the word RED to a number I knew by heart.

Six minutes later the little radio-phone chirped.

“Hey, Mel, what took you?”

“I just dropped Yuri off in Montreal. Drove the sucker up in the trunk. Gave him a little cash and a few addresses.”

“How much cash?”

“Fifty thousand.”

“I can cover it but it’ll take a few weeks.”

“Don’t worry about it, brother. I like having you in my debt.”

“You coming back down?”

“Thought I’d spend the night and cruise back in the morning.”

“I’ll call you.”

Oliya and I got to Silbrig Haus by 8:30 a.m. The front gate knew us and our car. My grandmother met us at the front door. She was using a hollow silver walking stick, but that was the only concession she made to the wound.

“Who’s this?” Grandma B asked, her wide eyes taking my bodyguard in.

“Oliya Ruez,” she replied. “I’m here helping your grandson.”

“He could sure use the help of a good woman,” GB agreed.

“Daddy.” Aja was coming through a middle foyer door.

There was lots of kissing and hugging, relief that everybody was still alive.

After a while the little crowd made it to the breakfast room. I wasn’t surprised that the exploded window had already been replaced.

“Roger joining us?” I asked.

“No. He had to go out of town,” Brenda said.

“Where to?”

“He didn’t say.”

We were halfway through the celebratory meal when Monica showed up. She’d lost at least five pounds. Her hair was wild and there was a button missing on her blouse. She moved woodenly and her eyes were glazed. Looking almost as bad as Quiller had in the bowels of Rikers, she lurched to a chair and sat down on it, somehow askew.

“He’s dying out there,” were her first words to me.

Looking at her, I understood that what we had was never love. Pure love, like distilled nicotine, was as deadly as a bullet through the brain.

“He’s fine,” I said.

“No, he’s not!” she yelled, knocking her heavy chair over as she leapt to her feet.

“Monica!” Grandma B commanded.

“It’s okay, Grandma. She’s worried about her man.”

“It’s not a joke, Joe,” Monica said, trying to keep her words in order.

“I solved the problem,” I said. “Oliya here is gonna take you out to Brownsville, pick up Coleman, and then go to Art Tomey’s office. There your husband can tell them everything he’s done. He’ll lose the money and he’ll probably get fired, but at least he’ll be free and nobody will come after him. You might have to get a job.”

Monica righted the chair and sat back down. Her fists were clenched. Her eyes, like fish eyes, were perpetually stunned and unblinking.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“More than I should have, that’s for sure.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Joe. I need to know what to tell him.”

“Oliya knows how to get there. Art has already made the deal with the feds.”

“And what about the people after him?”

“They’re not gonna be a problem anymore. You’re just gonna have to take my word on that.”

Her startled look turned to hatred. If she had a loaded gun I am sure she would have used it.

“I need to go to him now. Now,” Monica insisted. “Now.”

“Mom, we haven’t finished breakfast yet.”

Standing up again, Monica said, “Now.”

I turned to Oliya and nodded, saying, “You can take the Lincoln.”

The lethal jack-of-all-trades stood too. She motioned to my ex and the two left without another word.

“What’s wrong with her?” Aja asked the universe.

“She’s in love.”

I found Forthright’s observation center on the third floor of the mansion. There were a dozen monitors watched by a single sentry who moved her head back and forth across the screens like a barn cat on the hunt for her next kill.

Forthright was smoking a cigar, seated in a big blocky chair pressed up against the far corner of the large room. The outsize piece of furniture most resembled an old-time electric chair.

“I was just getting ready to come down and find you,” he announced.

“Where’s Roger?” I said. “I need to speak to him.”

“I doubt that.”

“You know something I don’t?”

“Quiller’s dead.”

“How?”

“Cyanide, they say.”

“Who says?”

“The news, Rikers Island, federal prosecutors, probably every conspiracy theorist in America.”

“They said he was under arrest?”

“It wasn’t so clear. They’re saying that he’d been taken into custody for selling state secrets some time ago but only yesterday was when they charged him.”

Of course he killed himself. Of course he did. They’d boxed him in, probably threatened Mathilda...

“You got a car I can borrow, Forth?”

I parked the mirror-bright chrome-colored Jaguar under the building I lived and worked in. Making my way upstairs I swore never to drive that four-wheeled looking glass anywhere else.

The key dragged a little in the lock, but I had too much on my mind to worry about office repairs.

“Mr. Oliver,” a woman’s voice said somewhat graciously as I crossed the threshold. “It’s so good to meet you at last.”

Other than myself, there were three people in the room. The older woman who greeted me and two suited men, one big and the other slight. They were all on the lighter side of the skin spectrum.

Upon hearing the woman’s voice, my mind cleared from its muddle. The first decision I had to make was — fight, flight, or wait and see. There was a longish hallway behind me and I had to believe the men were armed. My own gun was in a pocket. Getting to it would have taken too many seconds. I could have tried a physical assault, but I was outnumbered and the guys had a street sense of professionalism about them.

So, I affected a smile and said, “Hello.”

The woman was standing next to Aja’s desk with an expression on her lips that she probably thought was a smile. Not all that much past seventy, she was around five-nine, with a rose-colored serape draped over a darker maroon dress, or maybe just a skirt that was ankle-length.

“We were hoping you’d come back sooner than later.”

“Who are you?” I asked pleasantly.

The smaller henchman approached me holding out both hands and reaching toward my chest. When he got close enough I jutted my palm into his sternum, making him stumble back a step or two.

“I don’t get patted down in my own office.”

The larger guy and his partner were moving toward me. There was just enough time to draw out and fire the pistol. I would have done so if the lady hadn’t spoken up.

“Billings, Ray, Mr. Oliver is correct. This is his property.”

Billings and Ray moved back to their previous positions.

“My name is Cassandra Ferris-Brathwaite,” the woman said. “You’ve heard of me?”

“My grandmother might be your stepmother someday soon. So I guess we’ll be step-siblings or cousins or something.”

She lost the false smile completely.

I thought, goody.

“Would you like to take a seat?” Cassie offered.

“You don’t tell me what to do in my office.”

“No reason to be stubborn,” she said.

“What do you want?”

“I need your help with a problem I’m having.”

“I already have a job, two actually.”

Nodding, she said, “Working for my father.”

“What do you want?” I asked again.

“My father is old. He’s been making bad decisions. That’s not going to work because thousands of people depend on our company for their daily bread. MDLT needs new blood at the helm.”

“As I understand it, that’s for the courts to decide.”

Shrugging, she said, “Maybe you can help.”

“I don’t see how.”

“You have my father’s trust. You can speak to him for me and my brother.”

“And what would you have me say?”

“That it’s time for him to step down.”

“Look, I don’t have anything to do with your business squabbles. Your father hired me to find out if Alfred Xavier Quiller was guilty of the crimes he was charged for.”

“And was he?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And were you able to exonerate him, to keep Zyron International from bunging him in an underground cell?”

Hm.

“The old man’s time is running out,” she said into my bemused silence.

“He is old,” I agreed. “Why not just wait?”

“Don’t fuck with me. I could have you back in Rikers,” she said, snapping her fingers, “like that.”

I was thinking that this was probably the one responsible for my grandmother getting shot.

“I know what my father is afraid of, Mr. Oliver.”

“And what is that, Mrs. Ferris-Brathwaite?”

“The truth.”

“You mean if I told him that zero is neither a positive nor a negative integer he’d scream and jump out the window?”

The little guy had a large nose. Under that schnozzle his rubbery lips formed into an understanding smile. You never know when someone will appreciate a good joke.

“I think we should sit down,” Cassandra said. “Won’t you join me?”

The boss, of course, sat in the swivel chair behind the desk. The henchmen took their natural positions, standing more or less at attention behind her.

I pulled one of three visitors’ chairs up as close as I could to the desk. That way the pistol pocket was hidden.

“What do you know about A. X. Quiller?” I asked the lady in charge.

She took her time with the question, relishing it.

“It’s time for my father to step down,” she said as if it were an answer.

“He thinks that passing the company over to its employees is a better move.”

“Corporations are capitalist entities,” the lady said, quoting something. “You know where I learned that?”

“No.”

“My father.” She delivered the line like a bad actor on a country stage.

Sitting back, pretending that the words had the intended effect, I let my right hand fall to its knee.

“Um,” I articulated, “maybe he learned something along the way since then.”

“My father,” she said with true spite. “Did you know that he competed in fencing at the ’58 Olympics?”

“That was Rome, wasn’t it?”

“He didn’t achieve a medal, but our family gave so much money that they made him an assistant coach to the American team for many years after that.”

My client’s daughter liked to parse out information like treats to a slavering lapdog.

“He worked with the team in ’76, in Montreal.” Her eyes took on a demonic cast. “That’s where he met eighteen-year-old Valeria Ursini. Have you ever heard of George Laurel?”

“No.” My expectant heart was pounding so hard that if I were hooked up to a lie detector it would have been shooting off fireworks.

“He was murdered at Yale in ’77.”

“How did you get my name, Mrs. Ferris-Brathwaite?”

“Aren’t you interested in George Laurel?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Why not?”

“Answer my question first.”

The heiress did not like to be spoken to like that. It took her a moment to compose herself. As she suppressed rage I leaned over to rest my left elbow on the edge of Aja’s desk. With that torque to my torso, my right hand now rested on the pistol pocket.

“Move it back,” Billings, the larger bodyguard, said.

I did so, leaving the right hand where it lay.

“A confidential agent at Zyron International passed your name along. They had done some work for me recently and you were involved in the same, um, arena.”

“A. X. Quiller.”

“Mr. Quiller keeps in-depth files on the rich and powerful. My father has an entry in that record. Did you know that?”

“Quiller’s dead.”

“Yes. But the records still exist.”

“Okay. And that’s why you’re here?”

“My father had an affair with the Ursini girl. When she finished with the competition he gave her a scholarship to Yale. She met another, age-appropriate man, George Laurel. When my father found out he had Laurel killed.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Oh yes. Quite sure.”

“He told you all this?”

“I need you to deliver a message to my father,” she said. “I need you to explain to him that it would be in his best interest to step down.”

“Really? You have talked to the man, haven’t you?”

“If... he does not accept this request, I would like you to help us in other ways.”

Whoa. Detective work is often dubious, but this was the first time I’d ever been asked to take a life. I think that maybe that truth was writ large across my face.

“You could be a rich man,” the lady offered.

I moved my hand away from the gun because if I pulled it out there’d be three, or four, dead bodies to clean up and cart off.

“How much?” I asked with complete insincerity.

She spoke a number.

“I’d like to be rich,” I said, this time truthfully. “Really I would. Your father’s never mentioned this George guy you’re talking about, and when I asked him if Quiller had anything on him, he said no.”

“Of course he did,” the lady said, balling the words up in a sneer. “He’s a murderer.”

“Patricide is also murder,” I pointed out.

The lady looked directly into my eyes. The effect was chilling. I looked up at the gunsels behind her.

“Don’t worry about them,” she said. “They’re loyal to me.”

“Will you be telling anyone else about this?”

“You think I’m a fool?”

“I think you have a brother.”

“No, Mr. Oliver, my brother is a follower. I don’t bother him with the details of what must be done.”

I believed her. I wanted to shoot her. Instead I took in a deep breath.

On the exhalation I said, “I’m going to need half up front.”

“So you can take it and run?”

“In a way,” I agreed. “I mean, once he’s dead, people are definitely going to look at me, look for me.”

Cassandra Ferris-Brathwaite went to some deep inner place reserved for psychotics and the infinitely wealthy. I silently swore that I’d never again take a case like this. Grandma B was right about her boyfriend and his world.

“Ten percent,” she said, and I knew that I was reprieved.

“In cash. Here. Tomorrow at six.”

Giving me a curt nod, she ascended from the swivel chair without needing the aid of her arms. Aged Aphrodite.

“My men will be here then,” she said.

I followed the entourage to the door and then watched them head down the hall.

I had twenty-four hours.