Known to Evil (25 page)

Like hell.

"Do you know how I can speak to Angelique?"

"I'm supposed to see her tomorrow," he said. "If you tell me where you are I could ask her to call."

"I am in Queens, at the Miller Hotel," I said.

The Miller was an electronic fabrication presenting a series of recordings designed to make the caller believe that they're connected to a hotel with an automatic phone system that guides its callers through an arcane pathway ending up with them frustrated and having to leave a message.

I gave him the phone for the hotel and my fictitious room number.

While talking to John I kept my magnified eyes on the front door of his building. If Angie was staying with him there was a good chance that, upon hearing someone call for her, she'd bolt.

"I'll have her call you as soon as I speak to her, Mr. Oure," John was saying.

At the same time a man was walking past the front door of the Prince residence. This man wore a brown windbreaker and tan khaki pants.

"Thank you so much," I said.

"No problem, sir."

The man walked maybe fifty feet up the street and turned. I saw the face in my infrared viewer and snapped the digital camera four times. Then I followed the man back to a dark-colored American-made car parked down toward the other end of the block. I connected the binoculars to my cell phone via a built-in cord, downloaded the pictures, and then sent them to Hush's phone.

I sat there on the roof, wondering what the pudgy little white man meant. He could have been anyone doing anything. Just because he was sitting in a car on Twenty-seventh Street didn't mean that he was looking for Angelique.

My phone vibrated.

Where are you?
the text line asked.

I keyed in the answer.

Meet me at Bundy's.

44

B
undy's Barbeque made the hottest sauce in town, and it was only a few blocks away from John Prince's place.

As long as I was waiting for Hush I ordered a big plate of baby back ribs with collard greens and corn bread. They served olive oil with the bread--to cut down on the glut of trans fats, I guess.

I was feeling emotional, like an army reserve corporal who is playing badminton in the backyard with his daughters one day and in the field in Afghanistan the next.

"You sure know how to get into trouble, don't you, LT?" an unmistakable deep voice rumbled.

He was sliding into the opposite side of the booth.

Hush always wore a dark suit and a monochrome tie. There was a spark of excitement in his usually expressionless eyes.

"What?" I asked.

He held out his phone screen with the picture of the dumpy little man on it.

"You remember I told you about a guy named Patrick?"

Hush liked Bundy's because the booth we preferred to sit in was removed from the rest. It was in the back, near the toilet, and was usually the last place anyone wanted to sit.

"This little guy?" I said.

"He's a stone killer, LT. Either walk away or ice him now."

I pretended to think about his words for a few beats, and then said, "You want some ribs?"

Hush let his spine slap against the navy-blue backrest of his bench. A smile, like a jittery mosquito, flitted across his face.

"I know you try to stay away from me, LT," he said. "I know you want a different kind of life. But once you've seen the battlefield you can't pretend that it doesn't exist."

"I'm not tryin' to hide from anything, man. I got a job to do and killing some guy I never met is not in the description."

"I could take a walk down that street," he offered.

"I need him alive."

"Like a cobra needs a mongoose."

"Like the Scarecrow needs a brain."

Again Hush's smile flittered. He slid to his right and stood in an unbroken motion.

"Call me if you have to, Leonid. If Patrick's involved, I can tell you that this is too deep for you alone."

"I got your number."

I'D BROKEN THE LOCK on my lookout building's front door to allow easy access. That night spent on the slanted roof was peaceful. The November chill was bracing and the threat of the man below was like a promise. He, too, felt that Angie was near.

I was the stalker stalking the stalker stalking, like a lone hyena fixed on the spoor of a lion.

At three in the morning I entered a number.

"Hello," he said in a low, guarded tone. You could hardly discern the Spanish accent.

"Diego."

"Brother man."

"Where are you?"

"Down where Indian blood runs pure and often."

DIEGO WAS A CITIZEN of the Third World. I'd met him when a New York crime boss wanted me to do some divorce work for a movie-star friend of his out in Los Angeles. The target, a minor actress, was half Mexican, from L.A.'s barrio. I was teamed up with Diego to make sure the woman would have more trouble than it was worth in a court. She had a brother who was wild. His name was Valentin. Diego and I made sure that Valentin was caught with evidence linking him to the drug trade and very possibly to a string of killings. There was evidence to clear him, but only we had it.

We paved the way for Tony "the Suit" to offer his aid.

That was back when I was working the dark side of the street.

Diego was a phantom no one knew and few remembered. He had done some import-export work for my employer but we became friends over the job.

"I am what they didn't see when they used to look at your people," Diego had once told me.

"I see you just fine," was my reply.

"WHAT CAN I DO for you, LT?" Diego asked over the phone. I heard the loud screech of a bird in the background.

"I'm told by someone I trust that I might need some serious help," I said.

"What kind of help?"

"I need a face that no one here knows."

"What time is it where you are, amigo?"

"Three oh three in the morning."

"I can be to you by midnight. How long?"

"Three days, tops."

"Okay."

"I got five thousand."

"I'll need seven."

"See you then."

NOT FOR THE FIRST time, I wondered about my commitment to leave the criminal life behind. I worked among killers and thieves, made my livelihood from the fact of their existence. I breathed their air and shared their stench. How could I ever stay on the straight and narrow with a length of chain behind me that would put Dickens's Marley to shame?

Diego and Hush (who was retired but not reformed), and Alphonse Rinaldo, for that matter, were all part of the dark matter that was the glue holding together the known, and unsuspecting, world. I was a free-floating radical that sometimes tended the connection between the lightness and this dark.

AT FIVE-THIRTY IN THE morning I clambered downstairs and took a cab to my office.

I'm no Sherlock Holmes. I can't read cigarette ash or pretend to have the most important and up-to-date forensic science stored in my lobes. Neither am I a master of disguises or dialects.

But I do own a ski hat and an old dark-green trench coat that smells strongly of sour sweat--and other human scents. I have a pair of worn-out boots and tattered cotton gloves. And the past few days had produced the grizzled salt-and-pepper beginnings of a beard.

Add to these a pair of plain-glass, thick-rimmed spectacles, and even a Superman like me can be transformed into a down-at-heels black Clark Kent.

"HEY, YOU!" A MAN shouted in the first-floor entrance hall of the Tesla Building. "What are you doing here?"

"Hey, Warren," I said to the building's security guard. "It's me."

"Mr. McGill? What's, what's wrong, sir?"

"It's that damn economic downturn," I said. "Cutting expenses left and right."

The handsome black and Chinese Jamaican stared at me, trying to make sense of the presentation. I smiled at him and shambled out the revolving door.

My heart was fluttering and the morning was just shedding night.

45

T
wenty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh was my fiefdom that day.

I found a small cardboard box and a shattered ink pen. On a scrap of stiff white paper I scrawled the word
Homeless
and squatted down next to a small alleyway between Patrick's car and John Prince's front door.

Whenever somebody passed I muttered "Sir, please," or "Please help, ma'am." My voice warbled and my outstretched hand shook.

After half an hour I was nearly lost to the role. Every fifth or sixth person, it seemed, dropped something into my box. It was cold that day and so the shiver came naturally to my voice. The pain I felt from losing Aura informed my pleas. Even the money added to my fabricated despair. That was the water that the Hard-Hearted Hannah of song poured on a drowning man.

The hours went by and I brayed like an abandoned baby donkey left alone in the world by the harsh circumstances of life. Until . . .

"Who the fuck you think you is, mothahfuckah?"

It was a white guy backed up by a black man, both in clothes the same vintage as my own. They were quite a bit younger than they looked and still they looked younger than I was.

The white one was speaking and I didn't need any deductive skills to uncover his motives. I had cleared upward of eighty-five dollars in the few hours that I'd been begging, and that piece of real estate was obviously their territory.

My knees hurt as I stood up. You could hear the joints cracking.

The men were tall for mendicants, around six foot each. I looked at them, knowing that I should have just given up their piece of my action to keep things running smoothly.

But if I had ever in my life been able to make sensible choices like that I wouldn't have been on that street, in my marriage, under the scrutiny of New York's finest, or in any other way known to evil.

"Y'all two mothahfuckahs better step the hell back," the man I was playing said.

The white guy (who had Mediterranean blue eyes) took half a step forward before seeing the knife with the brass-knuckled handle in my right fist. No one but those two could see it thanks to the barrier of my stinking coat.

Oh shit,
said the faces of both men.

"You best to step back or die right here," I said. "I'ma be around for a day or two and then I'll be movin' on. I can leave you bleedin' or I can leave you whole."

The white man took a step back, bumping into his friend. They knew better than to make some parting threat. I was obviously deranged and their luck was not yet a certainty.

A shiver went through my body and I sat back down, realizing, or maybe re-realizing, that I was my own worst enemy. The rage in me couldn't be tamped down for long.

AT ABOUT TWO IN the afternoon I put a Bluetooth bud in my right ear and diddled the cell phone in my pocket. After negotiating an invisible obstacle course of codes I arrived at a single message at the nonexistent Miller Hotel.

"Mr. Oure?" a young woman's pleasant but sad voice asked. "Hi. I think this is your room. This is Angelique Lear. I don't remember you but I know, I knew, your niece. If you call the same number you called yesterday after eight tonight I'll tell you what I can."

It was the first time I'd heard my client's voice. She chose her words carefully but it was obvious that she wanted to offer some kind of closure to her friend's kin.

I was liking her all the more, which was good, because my street role was difficult. The air was cold and my joints were rusty.

FOR THE NEXT FIVE hours I bleated and begged, stood up to stamp my feet now and again, and kept an eye on the two street entrepreneurs that I had humiliated.

They passed by every hour or so, keeping their distance but studying me still and all. I had made a mistake alienating them but that water had passed under the bridge and flowed out to sea hours before.

I wasn't worried about my newfound antagonists. The trouble I had was in the nature of any through street: Angie could come from either direction. If she came from the west, I was between her and Patrick. If she came from the east, she had to pass him before she passed me. My little piece of turf, I decided, was too far away from Patrick's car--and so I started talking to myself.

"Goddamn mothahfuckahs!" I shouted, leaping up from the wall as if it were alive and my enemy. I kicked my box, scattering change and dollar bills over my little piece of turf. I kicked it again and followed it.

"Oh no," I promised. "You two ain't gonna get me. Shit. I will break y'all necks."

I hunkered down against a wall not seven feet from Patrick's car. The driver's seat was by the curb, so I had my hat pulled down, my coat collar pulled up, and kept my head bowed as I called out curses to imagined foes.

This was the test.

If Patrick was just on a fact-finding mission he would ignore me. But if he was there to kill my soft-spoken client, then my presence would prove unacceptable.

"People sittin' in they mothahfuckin' cars spyin' on us," I said to two passing teenagers, pointing at Patrick. "They got spies all ovah the city tryin' to bring us down."

I was hoping that by calling attention to him, I would force Patrick to retreat and reconsider his plan. The last thing he wanted was people looking at his car--or his face.

The boys laughed at me and passed on.

Patrick looked into the driver's-side mirror. There he must have seen the slender young woman bopping along, grooving on the invisible music of life.

"Miss," I said when she was within earshot. "Miss, let me ask you something."

"What's that, father?" the brown-skinned girl asked. She wore brightly striped hose that shot up under a brown leather skirt. Her sweater was Afghan and the voluminous multicolored hat I thought was probably the repository for long dreadlocks.

"What you think a white man be doin' just sittin' in his car lookin' at a man like me?"

I pointed at Patrick and the child turned to look.

He did a masterful job of turning his head just enough not to seem obvious but at the same time obscuring his features.

"Do you need something, father?" the girl asked.