When the Thrill Is Gone

54

By the time I got home it was very late.

Cyril, Chrystal, and a slightly battered Ira Lamont had gone to spend the night at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel at Columbus Circle — just in case there was another Bisbe out there. They used a special account that Luke Nye maintained at the hotel for his foreign clients. I called Lieutenant Kitteridge and told him what I knew, leaving out the killing of Bisbe and the near death of Johnny Nightly.

“After talking it over with Tyler and his wife we realized that Pinky Todd really did have something, only it was on Pelham and she didn’t know it. She went to Pelham to give Tyler her demands. He, Pelham, talked Tyler into paying her off. He said that it would be cheaper than a trial, but she must have come back wanting more. Same thing with Shawna. We figure that Tally told Pelham about Shawna being involved. Pelham pegged her as the brains and had her taken out.”

“What about Allondra North?” the cop asked.

“That’s Florida’s jurisdiction,” I said. “Hey — maybe she really did get blind drunk and fall off the side of the boat.”

“That’s pretty weak, LT.”

“Not if your guys find that Pelham’s been involved in insider trading with a man named Lesser representing a company named Tagmont. Not if you offer Tally immunity and he tells what he said to the lawyer.”

“Who’s your client, Leonid?”

“My client is dead, Carson. I’m just tryin’ to do right by her.”

He wasn’t happy with the story; I wasn’t either. But it’s rare that everything is revealed in a case like this one. Even if Cyril killed Allondra, it was probably because they were fighting, and even then he honestly might not remember.

Sitting at the hickory table in the dining room, I sipped at a snifter of brandy and truly relaxed for the first time in days.

“Mr. McGill?” Elsa Koen said. She was wearing Twill’s old plaid pajamas and a nightgown.

“Elsa. Where did you come from?”

“I was sleeping in Shelly’s room and I heard you come in.” She gave me a tentative stare and then pulled out a chair next to me. “I must ask you something.”

“How’s Gordo?”

“The doctor cannot find any trace of the cancer in his blood. He will not say that he is cancer-free, but...”

“What did you want?”

“Mr. Tallman wants to go home.”

“Is he strong enough for that?”

“He still needs help, but if someone were to come by one or maybe two times a day, that might be enough.”

“He’d probably get better even faster in his own home,” I said. “You know, Gordo likes to be independent.”

“Yes,” Elsa said, “but I’m worried about him, about his mind.”

“He seems to be thinkin’ okay to me.”

“He told me that he wanted to hire me to be his full-time nurse. He said that he would pay my fee.”

“So?”

“I told him that this was three hundred dollars a day including agency fees, and he said that was fine. I know that you had to take him in when he got sick. I understand that he is a poor man. Maybe, maybe he’s confused.”

My lawyer and I were the only ones who knew that Gordo owned the twelve-story building that housed his boxing gym, that he was a millionaire several times over. I only took him in because he needed to be among friends.

“Don’t worry about it, Elsa,” I said. “If Gordo wants you, and you’re willing to work for him—”

“Oh yes,” she said. “He is a wonderful man. The only reason I say this is that maybe he is having trouble thinking. I would come help him for nothing.”

“No need for that,” I said. “We’ll make sure you get paid.”

“Hello, you two,” Katrina said from the doorway.

She was wearing a fancy dress designed for someone twenty, or maybe thirty, years younger; still, she looked pretty good in that pink-and-red party frock. Even from a distance we could see the effects of the wine, smell the perfume, and divine the sex. Elsa couldn’t hide her embarrassment for me.

But I was beyond jealousy that night. I’d solved the case, concealed a killing, saved a life, and had come within a millimeter of murder. In that dress Katrina was the sour cherry on the ice cream sundae of my week.

“Hey, babe,” I hailed. “Elsa says that Gordo’s goin’ home.”

“That’s wonderful,” Katrina exhaled. She seemed to ride the current of her fragrant breath from the doorway to a seat at the far end of the table.

“It was your feeling for him that brought him back to life,” she said. “Your strength, Leonid, and Elsa’s passion for him. No, no, don’t turn away, Elsa, I can see how you feel. I know what it’s like when something crazy gets into your heart.”

Silence followed my wife’s keen perceptions. We were all thinking about something crazy that had gotten into us in spite of all intentions. We didn’t look into each others’ eyes because there was too much truth in that.

Finally Katrina levered herself up on her feet and said, “I really have to get to bed. The girls and I went to that wine bar on Seventy-ninth. Oh... too much.”

She walked unsteadily out the door while Elsa and I kept vigil on the truth she’d spilled like a ruptured oil well into the Gulf of Mexico.

“There was a package for you,” Elsa said after a long contemplative pause.

She got up and walked out into the hall, leaving me with thoughts that ranged down the many paths of my misspent life. I started counting breaths and reached seven before Elsa returned.

She held in her left hand a shapeless parcel of brown paper wrapped in thick packing tape. She held the thing out to me and turned to leave as soon as I took it.

It weighed no more than a few ounces, with Leonid Trotter McGill, Apt. 11f penned in a fanciful hand that you got the feeling would have been even lovelier writing in some other language.

I needed my penknife to rip open the tough packaging. Inside the tape and brown-paper shell was a ball of wadded-up newspaper that held the locket loaned to me by Fawn David. It had been cleaned and polished meticulously. There were a few scratches along the sides of the ornament, probably due to the jeweler’s attempt at opening it. I pressed the little button on the side and the disc sprang open.

Within there were pictures pasted to either side. On one side was a photograph of me and my brother, Nikita; on the other was a smiling pair, my mother and Tolstoy — otherwise known as William Williams.

Looking at the photos, I felt numb and stupid. My father had survived years after I thought he’d died, after my mother had perished pining for him.

Maybe he was still alive.

My cell phone sounded. It was a relief to answer.

“LT.”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“We went to St. Benedict’s Hospital to talk to Theodore Chambers. He told us that his sister sent him to talk to Tyler but that he only made it to Pelham.”

“And?”

“Theodore told Pelham that he was representing both sisters, that Chrystal had the damning information and that Shawna needed to get paid.

“We went to Arthur Pelham’s residence and asked him to come down to the station for a little talk.”

“What he have to say?”

“He said that he needed to put on some clothes.”

“And?”

“He shot himself in the head in the head.”

I was in an emotional state of shock. The repetition seemed mechanical, as if maybe the phone instead of a human being was doing the talking.

“He killed himself in the toilet?” I asked.

“I guess you were right about something. We’ll start a full investigation tomorrow.”

I tried to have some kind of feeling about the news: joy at the resolution of a case, sadness at the death of a man cornered by his own sins, relief that the trials were over. But in reality I felt nothing. My father might still be alive. Who cared about some lawyer eating a bullet?