And Sometimes I Wonder About You (6 page)

I
was looking at the closed door, thinking that everything was possible but little of that possibility was likely. Life was like a rat’s maze tended by some insane god that tortured and shepherded us for some reason he (or maybe she) could no longer remember. Hiram Stent’s fate was etched on a pauper’s grave somewhere, probably before he was born. He would always make the wrong choices, always come up a dollar short. He could have been the ambassador to France and still the handyman would have taken his wife and children.

“Are you okay, Mr. McGill?”

I turned to look at my assistant. She wore a dress that was something like the flappers wore back nearly a century ago. It was sewn from flimsy fabric somewhere between cream and light pink, the hem coming down to her calves. There was faded beading here and there. It occurred to me that this ensemble had a hint of sexuality to it. This was, to say the least, unusual.

Not for the first time I thought of my assistant as a soul that didn’t so much haunt as spiritually guide by a sense of the world that was more intuitive than anything else.

“Mr. McGill?”

“Have a seat, M.”

Mardi made an abortive move for the walnut swivel chair behind her desk but then decided to take the visitor’s chair Aura had been sitting in. I turned my head so that I was looking into her eyes. Mardi didn’t like people looking directly at her—a leftover from childhood, I imagined.

She turned sideways in the padded chair and looked over at her desk; no doubt searching for another pencil to put in its place.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“What?”

“Twill.”

“What about him?”

“Something’s goin’ on with him. When Twill disappears I get the feeling that there’s a door somewhere that should be locked but isn’t.”

Mardi smiled because she understood and appreciated my imagistic bent.

She shook her head.

“You’re his best friend, M,” I said. “You can’t tell me that you don’t know what’s happenin’.”

“He had a meeting with somebody on Monday, after you left,” Mardi admitted. “But then I was out Tuesday and Wednesday. He covered for me. I didn’t see him almost all week.”

Listening to her words, I remembered the dictum—
Truth is the best lie
.

“Who did he meet with?”

“I don’t know. It was out of the office. A woman called, a young woman.”

“You didn’t tell me you were taking time off,” I said, trying to take on the authority of a boss.

“I’m sorry.” Mardi looked at her desk again, willing me to go so she could get away from the inquisition.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

The expression on her face was equal parts surprise, anger, and
don’t you know who the fuck you’re talking to?

“Talk to me, M.”

“My father has been writing me from Ossining over the past year,” she said. This truth dispelled her shyness. Now she was returning my stare.

Mardi’s stepfather was Leslie Bitterman. Once he was an office manager by day and daughter molester by night; that was before he became a full-time resident of the maximum security prison.

“You want me to talk to some people?” I offered.

“What?” she said, almost angrily. “No. No. At first just getting the letters really upset me but not after a while.”

“Does he want something?”

Mardi clasped her hands and pressed her lips against her left wrist—a kiss that was not a kiss.

“Mardi.”

“He sent a letter every week for seven months before I even opened one. He said things like nothing ever happened between us, like he was a normal father trying to reach out to me and Marlene. He asked about my job and if I had a boyfriend…”

The motherfucker.

“I just thought it was sick,” she said, “that he was trying to fuck with us even though he’s locked away.”

Mardi had never cursed in my memory.

“Then I answered him,” she said. If any four words ever sucked the air out of a room it was these.

“What did you say?”

“I was angry. I told him that he didn’t even have a right to think about us much less send letters. I told him that he destroyed my life and he was going to do the same to my sister. I told him that he made me into a murderer because I would have surely killed him if you hadn’t gotten in the way. I don’t know everything I said but it was eight handwritten pages long.”

Mardi wrote in a tiny chicken scrawl. And she only used purple ink.

“Did he give you an answer?” I asked.

“No.”

“No? Then why did you go up there?”

Mardi looked at me and I saw that she had become another person; someone related to the young woman I knew and loved, but now she was both stronger and weaker, more vulnerable.

“I kept thinking about the letter I wrote to him,” she said. “The anger inside me was bigger than anything I’d ever felt. It was even more than the fear I used to have when he’d come into my room when I was a child. I realized that that anger was the largest part of my heart and if I ever wanted to be my own person, my own Mardi, I’d have to do
something…extreme.”

I wanted to ask but my breath wasn’t acting right.

“I wrote another letter,” she said. “It was very short and I wrote it in pencil because I erased it a dozen times until it was exactly what I wanted to say.”

“And?”

“I wrote, ‘I forgive you’ and signed it ‘M’ because when you call me M I always feel that you’re my father. And so I was your daughter letting go of that old corroded anchor that was pulling me down.”

I don’t know how long the silence was that followed those words. I don’t remember reaching out but at some point I realized that we were holding hands.

“And,” I said. I had to clear my throat. “And did he answer?”

“He sent another letter. It was the same old gibberish. Me growing into a fine woman and how much he’d learned and thank you about a hundred times. I didn’t read it very closely. I just wrote him and said that I was coming to visit; that I was only coming one time and so he should know what he was going to say.”

“Wow.” For some reason I thought about my earlier sparring session with Chin Wa. If he’d had Mardi’s will I’d’ve never won that match. “And so you went last week.”

“It was horrific,” Mardi said. I’d never heard her use that word before. “They took me to what they call an isolation hut and had me meet him in a room with two guards standing on either side of his chair. Before they’d even let me in I had to let a woman guard give me a body search.”

The conversation stopped for a minute while all the experience and feeling coalesced in the young woman’s mind.

“He had aged twenty years,” she said. “His hair was gray and falling out. He had scars from a knifing and over the left side of his face where somebody had thrown acid on him. He’s blind in his left eye and something’s wrong with his right hand. It was curled up like a bird’s claw.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Nobody likes a child molester in prison. Nobody.”

“He was pathetic. They had him in isolation because otherwise he’d be dead. You know, I wondered why he didn’t mention anything about his troubles in the letters and then I understood that he was trying to pretend that nothing ever happened.

“We had forty-five minutes and talked the whole time. I don’t remember anything we said but he asked if I would kiss him good-bye and I said no.”

That was the end of her story. Her posture was saying that she needed to get up and walk away from the tale. But she stayed in the chair because of me and my relationship to her self-enacted deliverance.

I still wanted to know about Twill but couldn’t bring myself to question her further.

“You’re a strong woman, Mardi Bitterman,” I said at last.

“You think I did the right thing?”

“Every moment since the day you were born.”

T
he rest of the morning was spent behind my big ebony desk going through the mail that had piled up while I was down in Philly. The bills all had checks attached to them, filled out with everything except my signature. Mardi was thorough in that department too.

I endorsed the back of the check given me by Camille Esterhouse for the return of Eddie Martinez and put it, along with the fifteen hundred-dollar bills Marella gave me, into a black envelope that I placed in the outbox on the right front corner of my desk. Mardi knew by the color that she had to make a deposit.

There were phone messages on little pink pieces of paper, phone messages on the service, and e-mails by the score. But there was nothing important, nothing I felt that had to be answered immediately.

At some point I sat back in my chair and swiveled around to look down on southern Manhattan. I had lived on the island my entire life; running wild, committing almost every crime imaginable. For the last six years I’d been trying to climb out of the dung pit and wash myself clean. I think it was just then, on that Tuesday morning, that I understood the metaphor of baptism—it’s funny how some truths hide away in a pocket or a forgotten drawer and show up when they hardly matter anymore.

Considering and then giving up on the notion of salvation, I turned my restless thought-pad to the last twenty-four hours. This had been my time to encounter powerful women: Katrina, who had the will to end her own life either by knife or just waiting in that sanatorium bed to expire; Mardi, who could face the greatest terror in her life and make something good out of it; Aura, who loved me, I knew that, but whose morality was more powerful than our needs. And then there was Marella Herzog, a woman with a dog whistle that could call out the beast in me. I felt that if I could spend a week in her company I might grow back a full head of hair.

These were people who faced their fears and created the world as they moved through it. For some reason this notion made me take out my telephone. I’d call Twill myself and ask what he was up to.

“Mr. McGill?” Mardi said over the intercom.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Captain Kitteridge.”

“On the phone?”

“At my desk.”

Had I heard the buzzer? I didn’t think so.

“Send him on,” I said.

I put the phone down and stared at it. I was experiencing one of those moments in life where I was not the central character but part of a small supporting cast that was there more for atmosphere than for pushing the story forward.

“LT,” he said from the doorway.

Captain Carson Kitteridge was my height but weighed little more than the featherweight Fat Fudge. His skin was carved from porcelain, his eyes the faded blue of a mostly cloudy sky. He always wore cheap suits and ties that had wallpaper designs stamped on them. Carson might have been small and off the rack but when it came to his job he was a like a Jack Russell terrier, willing to go up against a foe ten times his size.

“Come on in, Kit,” I said. “Have a seat.”

We were usually civil. Our paths had crossed many times over the years. It was at least in part due to me that he’d been promoted to captain but it was still his mission in life to get me locked away for the rest of mine.

He stepped in, stared at my new red chairs with something like disdain, and then sat in the same seat that Hiram Stent chose.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“A confession would be nice.”

“You want a general admission of guilt for you to fill in the crime or is there something particular you had in mind?”

He reached into the side pocket of his sad brown suit jacket and came out with an electronic tablet device. He laid this flat on the table and slid it over to me.

“Just turn it on,” he said, “the rest is self-explanatory.”

I gave the little screen a sneer and then pressed a silver button on the lower left side. Immediately an image appeared; a familiar tableau from a different vantage point. It was the picture of a tall whitish man faced by a smaller, chubby black man with his bald head bowed so that the camera did not catch the features of his face.

I looked up and said, “So?”

Kit reached over and tapped the screen ever so lightly with his middle finger. The picture then turned into a video. The smaller black man squatted down and torqued to the left and a look of pain passed over the white man’s face. I could clearly see the knife falling from the taller man’s hand and then the shorter man coming up with a pretty-well-put-together uppercut.

Lucky for me the attacker’s body hid my face from the camera as I stood.

Then, with my back fully to the lens, I grabbed the back of the enemy’s head and slammed it against the metal wall of the chamber.

The rest of the film-short showed Marella’s face but not mine as I set the man in the corner, grabbed the fanciful suitcase, and walked out of there while searching the floor for loose change that might have fallen from my pocket, or his. I knew the camera was there.

The video stopped for a moment with the attacker and his knife lying quite still, and then the image jumped back to the first frame.

Looking up again I said, “So?”

“That’s you,” Carson said.

“You can’t even see his face.”

“I know your moves.”

“But I am sure the jury does not.”

There came a subtle hum; my phone was set on vibration. I looked down and saw that the call was coming from the Hotel Brown. I tapped the Ignore icon and asked, “Did the man with the knife expire?”

“No.”

“Is he in a coma or unconscious? Do they expect him to die?”

“No.”

“Has he made a complaint or identified me from photos you must have right here on this tablet?”

Kit got tired of repeating his one word in our short play and so he shrugged.

“How about the woman?” I asked. “Have you identified her?”

“Not yet but we expect to. Maybe you could tell me who she is.”

“I don’t even know who the men are.” I tried to keep the smug out of my voice. After all, Kit represented the NYPD and they really didn’t need a reason to break my head—I knew this from firsthand experience.

“The victim,” Captain Kitteridge said, “is Alexander Lett, recently from Virginia. He woke up in a hospital bed with a broken wrist and a knot the size of a tangerine on his forehead. When we asked him about the knife he said that he just found it and was bringing it to the lost and found. He said that the attacker must have thought he was threatening him with said knife and acted out of reflex.”

“If he told you all that then why are you here?”

“What’s goin’ on, LT?”

“I don’t know.”

Kit stared at me. It’s a wonder that he could make such dreamy eyes into a threatening glower. I felt the danger but I’d been surrounded by danger my entire life—that was my stock-in-trade.

I guess this truth was apparent; Kit stood up.

“You know, LT,” he said. “I believe you when you say that you’re trying to clean up your act and get it right. But this is not the way. Lett seems like serious business. This bug is going to sting you—if you’re lucky.”

He turned and walked out.

My smartphone buzzed at me again like the hornet Kit was warning me about. I waited for the vibrations to subside and then I picked up the little transmitter to make my own warning call.

“Hello?” he said on the fourth ring, just when I was sure I’d get his service.

“Twill?”

“Hey, Pop.”

There was music playing somewhere—loud music. The heavy beat was accompanied by the hubbub of many people talking, laughing, shouting, and jostling around.

It was 10:56 in the morning.

“What’s goin’ on, Twill?”

Before he could answer, someone spoke to him calling him something with the word “itch” in it. Twill answered whoever it was with a word or two and then said to me, “Hold up a second, Pop. I’ll go someplace a little more quieter.”

The party sounds slowly subsided until they were just background noise, like traffic heard through a storm window.

“What can I do for you, Pop?”

“Where are you?”

“At a warehouse party in the Bronx.”

“At this time of mornin’?”

“It only started at three,” he said pleasantly, as if talking about a favorite TV show. “I’m workin’.”

“On what?”

“Missin’ person.”

“Missin’ person for who?”

“Kathy Ringgold.”

“Don’t make me ask you for every detail here, Twill. You’re supposed to be in the office.”

“Okay, Pop, okay. You don’t have to get mad. There was this girl I went to high school with named Kathy Ringgold. She broke up with this guy Roger and then, after a week or two, wanted him back. But he was gone from his room and his phone had been disconnected. Nobody knew where he went and Mardi had told her that I was a detective now, so she asked me to find him. I ain’t chargin’ her or nuthin’ but I figure I can work on my detective chops doing a simple girl-wants-boy-back kind of job. Like you on the Martinez gig. Did you find him?”

Ignoring the question, I asked, “That’s why you’re at this party?”

“He think he’s a DJ and so he always around places like this askin’ for work. I’m just doin’ the do.”

“Have you been to see your mother?”

“I’m goin’ there this evenin’,” he said. “Right after I take a little nap.”

“I want you in the office tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

We said our good-byes and I put the phone down.

The only thing I got out of our discourse was that Twill was lying and his trouble was deep.