When the Thrill Is Gone

27

“Where to now?” Iran asked when we were on the street.

I held up a finger, took out my cell phone, hit a few letters, and sent the call.

“Hello?”

“MD, this is LT.”

Silence was my answer.

“I got somebody for you,” I said. “Is it too late?”

“Not until the last hour of the last day,” she replied.

“Thirty minutes. Maybe less.”

“I’ll be here.”

When her side of the connection broke off I folded my phone and raised that hand in the air.

“Taxi!”

The yellow car moved like a fish up toward the Thirties. Our driver had a Spanish name and dark skin. He said not one word from the pickup to the drop-off.

That was in front of a small residential building on East Thirty-third.

I pressed the buzzer and waited.

“Where’s this?” Iran asked.

On the ride he’d asked me where we were going.

To the first question and its iteration I answered, “You’ll see.”

A minute and a half later the dirty white door swung inward. Standing in a light shining from above was Mary Deharain. Mary was tall, thin, and white. She looked to be over fifty but not yet retirement age.

I met her when I was still working the wrong side of the street.

Unknown to her she had been married to a serial killer named Bob Deharain. Mary was no saint but when she discovered her husband’s predilections she contacted me through a mutual acquaintance in the secret world of stolen properties. I gathered evidence against Bob for a murder he committed in Flushing: a housewife whom he’d done terrible things to. This information I made available to the police through a third party.

It was one of the few cases I ever undertook, back then, without asking for a fee.

The next time I met Mary she was dressed as she was the night I brought Iran Shelfly to her understated boardinghouse. She had on a long velvet dress that had at least a hundred coin-shaped mirrors sewn into it. She had many dresses, all of the same style. That night it was a royal-blue costume, its hem touching the floor. She had various versions of the same dress in black, red, yellow, and deep green. I never asked her but I imagined that the mirrors were there to remember all the innocent lives her husband had taken. He was a prolific killer but had only been convicted of the one crime.

“Mr. McGill,” she said and then she turned her intense gaze on Iran.

“Iran,” I said, “this is Mrs. Mary Deharain.”

“Ma’am,” my protégé said. He even ducked his shaved head an inch or so.

“Mrs. Deharain has six rooms on the fifth floor and another six on the sixth floor of this building,” I told Iran. “For a hundred and fifty dollars a week she and the girl working for her serve meals and wash bedclothes.”

“I don’t have no money, man. You know that.”

“Room and board is on me,” I said. “On top of that I’ll give you a stipend for doing work in my office.”

“How much is a stipend?”

“We’ll start it at two hundred a week and see how it goes.”

“Breakfast is served at seven,” the severe landlady said. “Lunch at eleven forty-five, and dinner at six-fifteen. No loud music or TV in the rooms. No food, either. No guests.”

“No guests?” Iran said.

“You can be friendly with the other boarders,” I added, “but no personal questions, understand?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I get it.”

I turned to Mary. She nodded. Her face was oval-shaped and lovely but sad, like some long-suffering character from a Dickens novel. She had loved Bob. She still visited him at Attica every third week. He never found out about her betrayal. He didn’t know that she knew about the full range of his crimes.

“I’ll see you at the office in the morning,” I said to Iran.

“What time?”

“Let’s say nine-fifteen.”

I left him at the threshold of the unexceptional building, to make my way into the night.

I like walking the nighttime streets of Manhattan. Ever since I was an adolescent on the run from the juvenile and foster-care bureaucracies, I found the darkness and electric light soothing. I feel in control when I see bright neon and deep shadows. This relaxation allows me to think more deeply about the twisted nature of other men and myself.

No one knew where Chrystal was; not her husband, her living sibling, or her parents. She was, most probably, in trouble — big trouble. And the only facts I had to go on were lies: Shawna pretending to be Chrystal, some drawling cowboy acting as if he were a nerdy billionaire; the rich man giving me money and then crying extortion.

There were three dead women: two married to Cyril Tyler and one who had merely pretended to be his wife. I had been paid twenty-two thousand dollars so far and had yet to figure out what task it was I was supposed to accomplish.

I grinned a dark smile on a darker street and once again took out my cell phone to make a call.

“Hello?”

“Hey, baby, what’s up?”

“I came home to a house full of children who say that they’re brothers and sisters but look like a family of cousins,” Aura said.

“I guess you could say that their mother got around.”

“I see.”

“Somebody murdered her, and in the same room where the children were sleeping.”

“My God.”

“I’m sorry to put them with you but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“That’s because you did the right thing,” she said kindly. “They can stay here as long as you need.”

“Can I do the same?”

“No.”