When the Thrill Is Gone

13

By early afternoon I was standing in front of the municipal courthouse downtown, waiting. I had on one of my four dark-blue all-purpose suits and size twelve triple-E dullish, black leather shoes. My white shirt had grayed a bit after hundreds of washings at Lin Pao’s French Cleaners, and one of my socks was black while the other was dark brown. I’d become the downtrodden workingman that my father always wanted me to be — but with a twist.

I was also a predator that lived on the invisible ether of personal information. Not digital bullshit, I stalked people’s souls, took from them their most precious possessions, their secrets. And even though I performed this heinous job day in and day out, still I would have called myself rehabilitated — a simple wretch who had once been a monster.

What was I doing there, on the street, waiting? I wasn’t sure. In the past forty-eight hours I’d collected twenty-two thousand dollars in advances to protect a woman I had not met from a man who might be in love with her. A working-class hero from my father’s cracked pantheon would never work on such a project. Realizing this, I smiled, feeling that I’d dodged the revolutionary’s bullet — at last.

At that very moment I looked up and saw a young milk-chocolate-brown man clad in a fancy suit of synthetic olive-green snakeskin coming down the broad concrete staircase. He was skipping happily, moving fast. He, like I did, felt that he was getting out of a bad situation. I wondered, as I moved to block his egress, if I was as misguided as he.

“Tally Chambers?” I said in a mild voice.

“Say what?” His grin disappeared like a small white rabbit down a deep dark hole.

“My name’s Leonid McGill,” I said quickly. “Your sister Shawna hired me. She gave me the money to pay your bail.”

“Shawna?” he said, stopping in spite of all instinct.

“Your other sister, Chrystal, is missing and Shawna felt that you might be able to help finding her.”

Tally Chambers’ hair was close-cropped and his head was sleek, styled for speed. He eyed me, wanting to run, but worried about his sisters and, on top of that, wondering how money was traveling through their hands into mine.

“I don’t understand,” he said truthfully.

“Shawna came to my office and said that Chrystal had disappeared,” I said in my most effective, matter-of-fact tone. “She, Shawna, said that she was worried that Chrystal’s husband had either killed her or that she was so scared of him that she ran to ground.”

“How much Shawna pay you?”

“She gave me twelve thousand. I used eleven hundred to pay ten percent of your bail.”

“Shit.” Tally swayed away from me, ready to walk on.

I touched his arm with a blunt finger and said, “Chrystal gave Shawna a ruby and emerald necklace that she sold to a woman named Nunn from Indiana.”

That stopped him.

“No.”

“Hey, man. I’m all up in your family business. I’m not trying to hurt you. Does anybody hate you enough to go into debt eleven thousand dollars over your bond?”

For a few moments he took the question seriously. Was there someone who’d pay good money to have him hurt or killed? Was there?

“You know there isn’t, Tally,” I said to the unspoken question.

I was a mind reader, and he a true believer. We made a connection and now all I needed were his secrets.

“So what is it exactly you need with me?” Tally asked, giving in, for the moment, to my superior, moneyed position.

“Shawna wanted me to get you out of jail,” I began.

“How she even know I was there? I haven’t seen her in days.”

“How many days?”

“Four... maybe five.”

“What did you guys talk about?”

Theodore Chambers clearly remembered the conversation.

“I don’t remember,” he said. “Just shootin’ the shit is all.”

The kid was going to be a puzzle. That was fine by me.

“When she couldn’t find Chrystal, Shawna went looking for you,” I said. “When you were nowhere to be found, she came to me. I did a citywide systems search and found that you’d been arrested. I told her and she said to get you sprung.”

“Why didn’t she come herself?”

“With both brother and sister missing she went into hiding,” I said. “I don’t even know where she is. She calls me to get her updates.”

While Tally wondered at my story I got a closer look at him. The whites of his eyes were darkening and encroached upon by blood vessels. There was an odor coming off him that was mildly organic and not at all healthy.

Seemingly to underscore my perceptions he emitted a mid-lung cough.

“So what do you want, man?” he asked when the hacking subsided.

“Shawna wants to help you,” I said. “She told me to get you out of jail and then question you about your sister. If you cooperate, I’m supposed to supply a lawyer to get you outta this jam and give you twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Show me the money,” he said, suddenly all ears and bloodshot eyes.

I took three fresh new hundred-dollar bills from my pocket and handed them over.

“This only three hundred,” he said.

“Down payment on the talk we have.”

Theodore “Tally” Chambers was twenty-nine years old. I knew that from Mardi’s research. His state of health made him look older, while his state of mind was reminiscent of a much younger man. I had him on my hook, but this didn’t offer me any comfort. Usually, when things went too easily something was bound to go wrong.

“I got to get to my house, man,” he told me and then he coughed some more.

“In Vinegar Hill?” Mardi’s research had been thorough.

“Yeah,” he said behind big reddish-brown eyes.

I hailed a cab and we piled in. Tally gave the driver his address after we both closed our doors.

“I don’t go to Brooklyn,” the foreign white man told us.

I smiled, thinking that this trouble was just the speed bump I needed.

“We’re not getting out of this car until you stop in front of the address my friend gave you.”

“I don’t know how to get there,” the middle-aged driver said.

“You take the Brooklyn Bridge—” Tally started saying.

“I’m not going!”

“Oh yes you are, my friend,” I said calmly. “Because if you don’t we’re gonna sit back here all day long.”

The man turned around in his seat, showing us a white wood baton that was about two feet long. Tally reached for the door but I laid a hand on his forearm and smiled for our mustachioed driver.

“Listen to me, brother,” I said in a modulated but still threatening voice. “I have been in the ring my whole fuckin’ life. Hit me with that stick and I will beat you until your own brother will not know your face.”

I meant what I said, the driver could tell. He turned around and shifted the car into drive.

“Which way?” he asked.

On the way over the bridge I began the interrogation.

“Have you ever heard that Cyril was violent or threatening toward Chrystal?” I asked.

“Naw, man. But, you know, I never had much to do with him. Only time we evah really spoke was at the weddin’, an’ even then it was like he wasn’t even talkin’ to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was just a whole bunch’a words. He talked but didn’t listen, then moved on like I didn’t make no difference at all.”

“So you didn’t like him?”

“I’m not married to the mothahfuckah,” he said, raising his voice.

The driver looked up nervously into the rearview mirror.

The bark got Tally coughing again.

“Was Shawna close to him?” I asked after he got his lungs under control.

“Shawna don’t care ’bout nobody, man. That’s why I wondered why she send you to me.”

This brotherly revelation renewed my speculations about Shawna’s motives.

“She told me she cared,” I said. “She gave me the money for your bond.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I bet.”

There was something behind this private wager but it would take longer than a taxi ride to tease it out.

We made it to Brooklyn and Tally guided our reluctant driver through a labyrinthine journey to a house in a run-down neighborhood.

When we got out I gave the driver a fifty and said, “Keep the change.”

“Fuck you, nigger,” he said to me before hitting the gas.

I grinned, watching the yellow cab fishtail down the street. The man was Eastern European and unschooled in the ways of American racism. He used that word to hurt me and express his fear and resentment. But in truth it was I who had oppressed him.

There is no balance between men unless everything around them is even. My father used to say those words to me. On that ramshackle street in Brooklyn I began to understand their meaning.

“Come on, Mr. McGill,” Tally said at my back.

He was walking down a lane between two six-story apartment buildings. I followed until we got to a little cove where a small tarpaper dwelling was nestled like a dying rat.

“Hey, asshole!” a voice called.

I glanced to my left and saw two good-sized young black men moving toward us. They were both wearing black leather jackets and blue jeans — uniforms of the street. Tally took a step back.

“So here’s the rub,” I said out loud.

“What you say, mothahfuckah?” the fatter of the two thugs said.

I grinned broadly.