All I Did Was Shoot My Man (2 page)

2

“DO I KNOW YOU?”
Zella asked as I approached her. Her coarse red hair was combed back but otherwise untamed. It wanted to stand up like porcupine quills or an angry cat’s back.

There was an unmistakable ripple of violence in her body language—no doubt learned at her previous stint in the women’s maximum security prison at Bedford Hills, before her transfer to the milder setting of the Albion facility.

This is Zella Grisham,
Gert Longman’s words rang in my ears from nine years before.

It was a photograph taken to fit in a wallet. I had already seen her on the front pages of the
Post
and the
Daily News
. That face had adorned the upper half of the front page of the B section of the
Times
too.

“No,” I said in answer to Zella’s question. “I was sent here by Breland Lewis. He asked me to meet your bus to—”

“Lewis? That’s that lawyer, right?”

“Yes. He asked me to—”

“Tall black guy,” she said.

“ White,” I said, “and short. Even shorter than I am, with no bulk either.”

Zella was thirty-six and no longer pretty as she had been before her incarceration. There were three strands of gray that I could see. She took that moment to tie the mane back with a black elastic designed for that task.

“And he sent you?” It was more an accusation than a question.

“He had a court case today but wanted somebody to meet you when you got in.” It sounded like a lie, even to me.

“He didn’t say that he was going to send anybody,” she said, “or come himself, for that matter.”

I wanted to answer but there was really nothing to say. I was standing right there, obviously to meet her.

“I don’t even know why he’s helping me,” she added in a tone that undercut her words. “I mean, he was right. I didn’t belong in prison. All I did was shoot my man when I found him with his dick in my best friend, in my bed, under the quilt that my Aunt Edna made for me.

“But even so there’s a lotta women locked away when they shouldn’t be. A lotta women separated from their family . . . their children . . .”

She stopped at that point. I knew why. If we had been friends I would have put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Breland didn’t tell me anything but to come and meet you here,” I said—the words echoing in the chambers of my fevered mind.

“Okay,” she said. “You’ve met me. Now what?”

“Uh, well, Breland, Mr. Lewis, has, um, found you a place to stay, and a job too. He wanted me to take you to those places and make sure you got settled in.”

I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to talk to or look at Zella Grisham but there are times when you have to do things that eat at you.

“ What’s your name?” she asked.

“Leonid McGill.”

“And do you work for Mr. Lewis or does he work for you?”

“I . . . I don’t know what you mean, Miss Grisham.”

“It’s a simple question. Here you know me by my face. A nigger in a cheap blue suit at Port Authority waiting at the door like a fox at my grandmother’s henhouse.”

I resented her calling my suit cheap. It was sturdy, well crafted, a suit that had three identical blue brothers between my office and bedroom closet. It’s true that it cost less than two hundred dollars, but it was sewn by a professional tailor in Chinatown. The price tag doesn’t necessarily speak to quality—not always.

As far as the other things she said I made allowances for her being from rural Georgia and having just gotten out of prison after eight years. Socially and politically, American prisons are broken down according to race: black, white, Hispanic and the subdivisions therein—each one demanding complete identification with one group attended by antipathy toward all others.

“I’m working for Lewis,” I said. “I thought that would be obvious by me being here and knowing your name.”

“Listen, man,” she said with all the force her hundred-and-ten-pound frame could muster. “I don’t know anything about any millions of dollars. I don’t know how the money got in my storage unit. I do know that Madison Avenue lawyers don’t donate their time to white trash like me, getting them out of prison and sending apes like you to meet them. I also know that I’m not going anywhere with you.”

I was stymied there for a brief moment. Zella was understandably suspicious. I should have expected as much. After a cheating man, a duplicitous best friend, then being framed for the biggest heist ever in Wall Street’s history, sent to prison for attempted murder, but only because she refused to give up confederates she never had, and finally, when someone really wants to help her, she becomes suspicious.

For all her bad timing—I couldn’t blame her.

“Listen, lady,” I said. “I don’t know anything about all that. Lewis paid my daily nut to get down here to meet you and take you where he said to go. If you say no, that’s fine with me. I’ll just give you the information he gave me and you can make up your mind from there.”

I took one of two envelopes from my breast pocket and handed it to her. She hesitated a moment and then took the letter from me.

“There’s an address in the Garment District for a woman needs an assistant and another one for a rooming house in the east thirties. You don’t have to go to either one if you don’t want. It’s just my job to tell you about them.”

While she was looking at the information I continued: “Breland also said that he wanted you to call him and check in if you had any questions. He said that you already had his number.”

If anything, Zella was getting angrier. The fact that I could keep her attention worried her, made her feel that she was being trapped somehow.

“ Would you like me to wait until you’ve spoken to your lawyer?” I asked.

“No, I wouldn’t. What I’d like is for you to leave.”

“You know I’m really not trying to trick you, Miss Grisham.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you’re trying to do or what you want,” she said. “I’d send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick.”

Sex. It’s the bottom line of human relations. Eight years in prison and it blends in with every emotion—hate, fear, loneliness.

“There’s one more thing,” I said.

“ What?” She hefted the strap of her rucksack and actually took a step away.

I took the second, thicker envelope from my pocket.

“He wanted me to give you this at the end of the day. I guess this is the end so . . .”

She was even more hesitant the second time. I stood there, holding the envelope toward her.

“There’s money in it,” I said. “Twenty-five hundred dollars. Just ask Breland if you think I stole any of it.”

Her fingers lanced forward and snagged the packet.

“ What’s it for?” she asked without looking inside.

“Like I said, lady, I’m just the errand boy, a private detective who’s taking any work he can get during the economic downturn.”

She had nothing to say about my rendition of current events so I took a business card from my wallet and handed it to her.

“I know you’re suspicious of me, Miss Grisham, but here’s my card anyway. If you should ever find that you need assistance, and I haven’t earned my day’s wages yet, call me and I’ll do what I can.”

Zella shoved the envelopes and card into her rucksack and moved toward the escalator. I stayed where I was while she rode up toward the main floor, looking back now and then to make sure I wasn’t following.

3

I WAS STANDING
at the empty bus queue, listening to the young men rhyme. The man in the horn-rimmed glasses that had been questioning the ladies on the state of their toilet was now speaking to a very tall, older white man wearing blue overalls with a nametag declaring
PETE
over the left breast. Pete was leaning on a long-handled push broom.

“Not again, Pete,” the women’s toilet interlocutor said.

“No, Joe, it’s not like that,” the towering white man replied. “You know I do any work that they give me. It’s just that these idiots are tryin’ to make me the scapegoat for their mistakes.”

Joe said something but I didn’t hear it because I had slipped into what can only be called a reverie.

GERT LONGMAN
was dark-skinned and heavy the way old-time movie stars used to be. Her mother’s parents had come from the Dominican Republic but she didn’t know from Hispaniola. Gert was born and raised on the island of Manhattan. With no accent, and no pretense to history, she had been my lover for six weeks before she found out about Katrina—my wife.

I hadn’t lied to her—not really. I just never thought to mention my circumstances. I mean, Katrina and I hadn’t been intimate or jealous of each other’s lives in years. We had three children but two of them had nothing to do with my DNA. Katrina said they were mine and I went along with the sham because they were in my house and Katrina maintained that house. She also made the best food I ever ate in my life.

But Gert didn’t see things the way I did. She had been hearing wedding bells on those long nights in her SoHo studio.

She cut off our physical relationship but kept contact for the sake of our business.

That enterprise was the perfect blend of our talents and resources.

When I first met her Gert was an office worker in the downtown parole office in Manhattan. That post gave her access to files all over the city. I worked for organized crime and other professional bad men finding patsies for those that felt law enforcement closing in.

Gert would find the right fit and I’d plant false evidence, alter phone records, and forge documents to prove that some other poor slob at least might have been the perpetrator. Sometimes the men I framed went to prison, but, more often than not, there was just enough doubt cast for the District Attorney to call off proceedings against my client.

I kept working with Gert because she was a great resource and because I hoped that one day she would forgive me.

It was only after she kicked me out of her bed that I realized that I felt something akin to love for her.

Gert was my partner in crime but she was also the reason I went straight. That’s because the daughter of one of the men whose life I destroyed grew up. Her name was Karmen Brown and she was as single-minded as any wartime general, child molester, or great film director. She discovered my perfidy, had Gert killed to hurt me, and then, after seducing me, had a man come into her house and choke her to death, intending to frame me for her rape and murder.

I managed to get out from under it, but after that I went straight; at least as straight as a man can get after a lifetime of being bent.

I USUALLY BROUGHT
work to Gert, but after a while working with me she developed contacts of her own.

Nine years before, a man named Stumpy Brown, a gambler by trade, came to her with a proposition. Someone had robbed the vault of Rutgers Assurance Corporation, a unique organization that took in capital to insure short-term transactions conducted outside the borders of the country. Rutgers held anything of value—paintings, jewelry, or cash. They then used these resources to float short-term loans and investments at outrageous interest rates.

Back then they had been holding a sum of fifty-eight million dollars to assure that an oilman in Galveston received a certain portion of a Saudi Arabian tanker’s load when it landed in port.

It was an illegal deal, and the parties were later censured and fined, but the money was stolen, one of the five guards protecting the vault was murdered execution style, and no one knew who had gotten away with the money.

It was assumed that the guard, Clay Thorn, was the inside man, but he was dead and left no leads.

Stumpy had gotten his hands on fifty thousand dollars from the heist. He wanted Gert to use her magic to further implicate some hapless criminal who no doubt deserved the attention.

It was Zella’s bad luck as much as anything else that made her Gert’s target.

Six days before the robbery Zella Grisham had a serious bout of nausea just before lunch. She was working for real estate lawyers whose offices were down the block from the Rutgers compound. Her kindly boss sent her home, where she found her lover, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend Minnie Lesser.

Zella told the police, and later the courts, that she didn’t remember what happened after that. She didn’t remember going to the dresser, pulling out her daddy’s .32 caliber pistol, or shooting the errant boyfriend in the right shoulder, left ankle, and hip. She never denied it; she just didn’t remember it.

The DA wasn’t hell-bent against her. Public opinion was, she should have killed the bastard. After all, Harry and Minnie had apartments of their own. Many wondered why she hadn’t shot Minnie too.

Two weeks later Gert called me.

She had procured, from Stumpy, a picture of Zella, the key to her storage unit, and the money wrapped in Rutgers bands. One stack had a drop of the dead guard’s blood on it.

“It’s the perfect frame,” Gert said. “And she’s going to prison anyway.”

Even back then, before I’d developed a conscience, I had qualms. It had been discovered that Zella’s nausea came from an unexpected pregnancy. Framing a pregnant woman felt wrong.

But there was a lot of money involved, enough to pay many months’ rent and children’s doctor bills. On top of that, Gert had asked for my help and I still had hopes that she might forgive me one day.

But still, I hesitated. I remember the exact moment, sitting there in Gert’s apartment, looking down on the quaint SoHo street.

And then Gert touched my left hand.

“Do this for me, LT,” she said.

And so I disguised myself as well as I could, took a storage unit on Zella’s floor, and cut off her lock, placing a trunk inside her space. I altered the evidence somewhat because there seemed to be something wrong about the whole deal. I hadn’t talked to Stumpy, nor had Gert told him that I was her operative. The money was good, but I felt that I needed, and that Gert needed, some protection.

After that I made an anonymous phone call to the police, telling them Zella Grisham had a journal in her storage unit where she detailed the assault on Harry Tangelo. They cracked the space and found the evidence linking her with the robbery.

THE DA,
who might have let the shooting slide on diminished capacity, came down on Zella with everything but the Patriot Act. He demanded that she give up her confederates.

There was a brief window of time where I might have been able to get back with Gert but I felt bad at what I’d done—even way back then when backstabbing was a way of life for me.

ALL THESE YEARS
later I got a windfall from a grateful client. I took the money and rolled a story for Breland Lewis about padlocks and faulty police work, about false money wrappers and blood that didn’t belong to Clay Thorn, the slaughtered guard.

And now I was standing in the lower level of the Port Authority at Forty-second Street still feeling like a louse.

“EXCUSE ME?”
a man said.

I ignored it. People were always asking for handouts at the station. I’d given all that I could for one day.

Zella, if she knew the truth, would have hated me. Knowing that, I harbored a little hatred for myself—and my fellow man.

“Sir?” The voice was more assertive than the usual denizen.

I turned to see that it was a policeman, a white guy maybe five-ten—four and a half inches taller than I.

“Yes?” I said.

“Do I know you?”

“Is that a trick question or are you hitting on me?”

“ What?”

I angled myself toward the escalator and walked away before the cop could figure out the ordinance that I’d broken.