Known to Evil (2 page)

"I'll get it," Shelly shouted. She hurried from the room into the hall, where the cordless unit sat on its ledge.

Katrina smiled at me. Even this made me wonder. She'd been back home for nearly a year. In that time her smile had been tentative, contrite. She wanted me to know that she was there for the long run, that she was sorry for her transgressions and wanted to make our life together work. But that evening her smile was confident. Even the way she sat was regal and self-assured.

"Dad, it's for you."

2

S
tanding up from my chair and moving into the hallway, I felt as if I were displaced, another man, or maybe the same man in a similar but vastly different world: the working-poor lottery winner who suddenly one day realizes that riches have turned his blood to vinegar.

"Hello?" I said into the receiver.

I was expecting an acquaintance or maybe a credit-card company asking about a suspect charge. No one who I did business with had my home number. The kind of business I was in couldn't be addressed by an innocent.

"Leonid," a man's voice said, "this is Sam Strange."

"Why are you calling me at my home?" I asked, because though Strange was the legman for Alphonse Rinaldo, one of the secret pillars of New York's political and economic systems, I couldn't allow even him to infringe on my domestic life, such as it was.

"The Big Man called and said it was an emergency," Strange said.

Sam worked for the seemingly self-appointed Special Assistant to the City of New York. I say seemingly, because even though Alphonse Rinaldo was definitely attached to City Hall, no one knew his job description or the extent of his power.

I had done a few questionable jobs for the man before I decided to go straight. And while I was no longer engaging in criminal activities I couldn't afford to turn him down without a hearing.

"What is it you want?" I asked.

"There's a young woman named Tara Lear that he wants you to make contact with."

Sam rarely, if ever, spoke Rinaldo's name. He had an internal censor like those of old-time printers who replaced "God" with "G-d" in books.

"Why?"

"He just wants you to speak to her and to make sure everything's all right. He told me to tell you that he would consider this a great favor."

Being able to do a favor for Special Assistant Rinaldo was like winning six lotteries rolled into one. My blood might turn into high-octane rocket fuel if I wasn't careful.

Not for the first time I wondered if I would ever get out from under my iniquitous past.

"Leonid," Sam Strange said.

"When am I supposed to find this young woman?"

"Now . . . tonight. And you don't have to find her, I can tell you exactly where she is."

"If you know where she is why don't you just tell him and he can go talk to her himself?"

"This is the way he wants it."

"Why don't you go?" I asked.

"He wants you, Leonid."

I heard Twill say something in the dining room but couldn't make out the words. His mother and Shelly laughed.

"Leonid," Sam Strange said again.

"Right now?"

"Immediately."

"You know I'm trying to be aboveboard nowadays, Sam."

"He's just asking you to go and speak to this Lear woman. To make sure that she's all right. There's nothing illegal about that."

"And I'm supposed to tell her that Mr. Rinaldo is concerned about her but can't come himself?"

"Do not mention his name or refer to him in any way. The meeting should be casual. She shouldn't have any idea that you're a detective or that you're working for someone looking after her welfare."

"Why not?"

"You know the drill," Strange said, trying to enforce his personal sense of hierarchy on me. "Orders come down and we do as we're told."

"No," I said. "That's you. You do what you're told. Me--I got ground rules."

"And what are they?"

"First," I said, "I will not put this Tara's physical or mental well-being into jeopardy. Second, I will only report on her state of mind and security. I will not convey information that might make her vulnerable to you or your boss. And, finally, I will not be a party to making her do anything against her will or whim."

"That's not how it works and you know it," Sam said.

"Then go on down to the next name on the list and don't ever call this number again."

"There is no other name."

"If you want me you got to play by my rules."

"I'll have to report this conversation."

"Of course you do."

"He won't like it."

"I'll make a note of that."

He gave me an address on West Sixtieth and an apartment number.

"I'll be staying at the Oxford Arms Club on Eighty-fourth until this situation is resolved," he said. "You can call me there anytime, day or night."

I hung up. There was no reason to continue the conversation, or to wish him well, for that matter. I never liked the green-eyed agent of the city's Special Assistant.

Alphonse had two conduits to the outside world. Sam was the errand boy. Christian Latour, who sat in the chamber outside Alphonse's office, was the Big Man's gatekeeper and crystal ball combined. I liked Christian, even though he had no use for me.

I stood there in the hall, trying to connect the past fifteen minutes. Dimitri's uncharacteristic barking at his brother and their mother's newfound confidence, the crude vase and its lovely flowers, and, of course, the memory of Aura in her heartfelt concern and almost callous betrayal.

I WENT TO THE closet in our bedroom, looking to find one of my three identical dark-blue suits. The first thing I noticed was that the clothes had been rearranged. I didn't know exactly what had been where before, but things were neater and imposed-upon with some kind of strict order. My suits were nowhere in sight.

"What are you doing?" Katrina asked from the doorway.

"Looking for my blue suit."

"I sent two of your blue suits to the cleaners. You haven't had them cleaned in a month."

"What am I supposed to wear?" I said, turning to face her.

Sometimes when Katrina smiled I remembered falling in love with her. It lasted long enough to get married and make Dimitri. After that things went sour. We never had sex and rarely even kissed anymore.

"You have the ochre one," she said.

"Where's the one I wore home tonight?"

"In the hamper. The lapels were all spotted. Wear the ochre one."

"I hate that suit."

"Then why did you buy it?"

"You bought it for me."

"You tried it on. You paid the bill."

I yanked the suit out of the closet.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"It's a job. I have to go interview somebody for a client."

"I thought you didn't take business calls on our home phone."

"Yeah," I said, taking off my sweatpants.

"Leonid."

"What, Katrina?"

"We have to talk."

I continued undressing.

"The last time you said that I didn't see you for eight months," I said.

"We have to talk about us."

"Can it wait till later or will you be gone when I get home?"

"It's nothing like that," she said. "I've noticed how distant you've been and I want to, to connect with you."

"Yeah. Sure. Let me go take care of this thing and either we'll talk when I get back, or tomorrow at the latest. Okay?"

She smiled and kissed my cheek tenderly. She had to lean over a bit because I'm two inches shorter than she.

I PUT ON THE dark-yellow suit and a white dress shirt. Since I was going out for such an important client I even cinched a burgundy tie around my neck. The man in the mirror looked to me like a bald, black-headed, fat grub that had spent the afternoon drying in the sun.

I was shorter than most men, and if you didn't see me naked you might have thought I was portly. But my size was from bone structure and muscles developed over nearly four decades working out at Gordo's Boxing Gym.

"HEY, DAD," TWILL CALLED as I was going out the front door of our eleventh-floor prewar apartment.

"Yeah, son?" I said on a sigh.

"Mardi Bitterman's back in town. Her and her sister."

Mardi was a year older than Twill. She and her sister had been molested by their father and I had to intervene when Twill got it in his head to murder the man.

"I thought they had moved to their mother's family in Ireland."

"Turns out that they weren't related," Twill said. "Her father bought Mardi from some pervert. Her sister, too. I don't know the whole story but they had to come home."

"Okay. So what do you want from me?" I was impatient, even with Twill. Maybe the fact that his relationship to me was the same as Mardi to her father cut at me a little.

"Mardi's taking care of her sister and she needs a job. She's eighteen and on her own, you know."

"So?"

"You're always sayin' how much you want a receptionist. I figured this would be a good time for you to have one. You know, Mardi's real organized like. She'd tear that shit up."

Twill was a born criminal but he had a good heart.

"I guess we could try it out," I said.

"Cool. I told her to be at your office in the morning."

"Without asking?"

"Sure, Pops. I knew you'd say yes."

3

I
grabbed a cab at Ninety-first and Broadway and told him to take me to an address on Sixtieth near Central Park West. The driver's last name was Singh. I couldn't see his face through the scratched-up plastic barrier.

It didn't make much sense, me taking Katrina back. After twenty years of unfaithfulness on both sides of the bed you would have thought I'd've had enough. I should have turned her away after her banker had run down to Argentina. But she'd asked me to forgive her. How could I seek redemption for all my sins if I couldn't forgive her comparatively minor indiscretions?

And now Katrina wanted to talk--about us. Maybe it was over--now that I had waited too long.

"You sure this is where you want to go?" Mr. Singh asked me.

I looked up to see at least half a dozen police cars, their red lights flashing up and down the block--like Mardi Gras in hell.

If it was any other client I would have turned around.

One police unit showing up at a crime scene was a domestic disturbance; three was a robbery gone bad; but six or more cop cars on the scene meant multiple murder, with the perpetrators still at large.

A goodly number of people were standing along the opposite side of the street looking up and pointing, asking what had happened and giving their opinions on what must have gone down.

"Two of 'em," one older man was saying. He wore slippers, pajamas, and a battered gray parka to keep out the mid-November chill. "Marla Traceman says that it was a black man and a white woman."

I walked up to the front door of the building where there stood a tall policeman with a stomach like a sagging sack of grain, barring anyone from coming into the twelve- story brick structure.

"Move along," the hazel-eyed white man told me. He was maybe fifty, a few years my junior.

"What happened here?" I asked.

His reply was to raise his graying eyebrows a quarter inch. Men who lived their lives by intimidating others often developed such subtleties with age.

"Stackman or Bonilla?" I asked. "Or maybe it's Burnham this far north."

The question was designed to short-circuit a needless confrontation. I knew most of the homicide detectives in Manhattan.

"Who're you?" the six-foot cop asked.

I pay a lot of attention to how tall people are. That's because even though I'm a natural light heavyweight I don't quite make five-six.

"Leonid McGill."

"Oh." The cop's face was doughy and so his sneer seemed to catch in that position like a Claymation character.

"Who's the detective?"

"Lieutenant Bonilla."

"Lieutenant? Guess she got a promotion."

"This is a crime scene."

"Apartment 6H?"

The sneer wasn't going anywhere soon. He brought a phone to his jaw, pressed a button, and muttered a few words.

"Excuse me," a man said from behind me. "I have to get by."

I took half a step to the right and turned. There stood another fifty-year-old white man--maybe five-nine. This one was wearing a camel coat, pink shirt, and too-tight dark-brown leather pants. At his side stood a thin blond child. Possibly twenty, she could have been seventeen. All she had on was a red dress made from paper. The hem barely covered her groin and only her youth held up the neckline.

It was no more than forty-five that night.

The man made the mistake of trying to push past the officer. He was met with a stiff, one-handed shove that nearly knocked him down.

"Hey!" Camel's hair said. "I live here."

"This is a crime scene," the cop replied. His tone promised all kinds of pain. "Go and take your daughter to a coffee shop, or a hotel."

"Who the hell do you think you are?" the outraged john shouted.

The girl grabbed his arm and whispered something in his ear.

"But I live here."

She murmured something else.

"No. No, I want to be with you."

She touched his cheek.

"Mr. McGill?"

A black woman in her late twenties, wearing a neat black uniform, had come out from behind her sadistic senior. She had some kind of rank but wasn't yet a sergeant. We stood eye-to-eye.

"Yes?"

"Lieutenant Bonilla asked me to come and get you."

There was something in the woman's gaze that was . . . curious.

"Thank you."

She turned. I followed.

"Where the hell is he going?" the angry resident hollered. "How can he go in and you keep us out here in the street?"

"Listen, mister," the big-bellied cop said. "You'll have to--"

The glass door shut behind us and I couldn't hear any more of what transpired. But even though I was cut off from the dialogue I knew its beginning--and its end.

The man had met the woman in some quasi-legal club, probably in an outer borough. They'd done a few lines of coke and come to an agreement on a price; he probably had to pay part or all of that sum before she got into the car service that brought them to the crime-scene apartment building. But she'd leave soon because the hard-on in the john's pants was also pressing on his good judgment. Pretty soon the cop on the door would lose his temper and use the phone to call for backup. The girl would fade into the night and the man would go to jail for interfering with a police investigation.