When the Thrill Is Gone (22 page)

“Yes?” I said.

Twenty feet away a black man, maybe forty, was watching us closely. This reminded me of Rainier Klaus and his ineffective bodyguard.

“I need some money to buy a, um, a ticket,” she said.

“That guy in the black pants and gray shirt put you up to this?” I asked.

“Um . . .”

“That’s all right, sugar,” I said. “I’ll do what you want, just tell me if that dude is running you.”

“Yeah. He my boyfriend.”

“Drugs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“For the both’a you?”

“Just him. Just sometimes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Seema.”

A security guard was watching the man watching us.

“So I’ll tell you what, Seema. I’ll give you some money if you want it. But I’ll also take you out of here and drop you anyplace else you want.”

Her eyes pondered over the broad field of possibility.

“Brody won’t let me go.”

“Brody can’t stop you, baby. ’Cause you know I am both a rock and a hard place.”

She must have recognized the paraphrasing from some old-time relative.

“I bettah not cause no trouble, mistah.” She turned as if to leave me.

“Hold up, girl,” I said. “I told you I’d give you money. How much you and Brody need?”

“Fi’ty.”

I reached into a back pocket and took out my thirty-year-old red-brown wallet. I teased out a fifty-dollar bill and a business card. These I handed to Seema.

“Put the card away,” I said. “If you feel sometime later that you need to get out, just call me. I will be there and I will do my best to help.”

Up until that moment there was a kind of unfocused intensity to the young woman. But something about the weight of all the promises, along with the very real money and card, caused her to look directly at me.

“Thank you. Thank you very much, mistah.”

She put the card in one pocket and the cash in another and then turned away. As I watched her approach Brody I began to understand that my profession had somehow changed into a calling.

IN THE PARKING LOT there was a bright-yellow Prius with the keys in a magnetized little box attached to the inner side of the back bumper. This was a benefit provided by a nationwide network of car rental services that delivered vehicles of all kinds to clients like me. Zephyra always had a car waiting for me, no matter where I needed it.

USING THE GPS System in my phone I entered the address and drove out from the train station’s parking lot.

The route took me through side streets and shabby avenues where business had almost stopped, filled with pedestrians looking for a way to hang on.

Baltimore has a large black population, souls who have been there for generations, and who have not yet received the notice of a postracial America.

I passed through neighborhoods that were once fancy and now slum, and areas that had started out working class and stayed that way. The route I was traveling took me past few, if any, chain stores; no fancy coffee houses or
99 Billion Served
, no grand supermarket parking lots or warehouses that sold everything the oppressed Chinese population could produce.

There were places like
Juma’s Grocery Market
and
Cosmo’s Boiled Crab and Ribs
.

Freeling was a quiet street of little matchbox houses. Most looked kept-up. My GPS told me that I had arrived at my destination so I pulled up to the curb between a lime-green pickup truck and a purple 1969 Cadillac.

The house I was aimed at was number 47. The whitewashed wooden structure was boxy, with a lawn fourteen feet wide and two feet deep. To the right there was a yellow house, to the left a gray. The front door had no porch or pathway, not even a step up.

I stopped there for a moment, William Williams’ satchel in hand, gathering my wits. My clients were a bunch of kids whose dead mother had hired me under the pretext of being the owner of this small home.

If running a fool’s errand were the key, then I had access to the kingdom.

“Excuse me,” came a man’s voice that was totally devoid of deference.

There were four of them, three men and a woman, all black, all very serious, if not angry. One of the men was carrying a small gardening spade in his left hand. I wondered if he had just stood up from landscaping or if he’d picked up that tool specifically for my detriment. I also wondered if he was left-handed.

“Yes?” I said to the mob.

“What you doin’ here?” a fortyish dark-skinned man in a loose-fitting yellow T-shirt and black trousers asked. Five eight, short by most standards.

I held up the briefcase and said, “My business.”

“What you want wit’ Miss Murphy?” the woman asked. She was taller and heavier than the first speaker. Her color was that of maple syrup in a glass jar, but in shadow.

My response was to set my satchel down on the sidewalk.

“What?” a very tall, gray-brown man said. He wore a buttoned-up, short-sleeved red shirt.

“Whatever you want,” I replied.

Threats always make me a little crazy. It’s my childhood code of survival kicking my ass—and everyone else’s in close proximity.

“Hey, man,” said a fellow who was both tall and heavy.

My smile was irrepressible.

“Excuse me.” The words this time were friendly and feminine.

A glance to my right revealed Shawna’s face—if that visage had been scrubbed of makeup and resentment in the guise of sneering sexuality. She was wearing a faded baby-blue T-shirt and loose blue exercise shorts.

“You know this man, Miss Murphy?” the woman member of the vigilantes asked.

“He’s not Melvin,” Chrystal Chambers-Tyler said.

“Ms. Murphy?” I said. “My name is Clayton Adams, from Child Services in New York. I’ve come about your sister’s—Shawna’s—children.”

This pronouncement left her no choice. She took in a breath that was half a gasp and then said, “Come in . . . come in, Mr. Adams.”

37

THE LIVING ROOM was small and filled with sunlight that fell on a pine floor and furniture that was mostly antique white. The sofa and chair were upholstered in pale ivory, and the low coffee table and bookcase, with only seven books on it, were made from unfinished ash. A real cork-stoppered bottle of red wine stood on the table, accompanied by an elegant, unused, glass.

“Have a seat, Mr. Adams,” Chrystal Chambers-Tyler, known in that neighborhood as Miss Murphy, said.

I was tired, tired of false names, of lies, of hiding in general.

I sat on the cushioned chair, placing the satchel next to my right ankle on the pine floor. Then I held up my hands, fingers splayed wide.

“My name is Leonid McGill, Mrs. Tyler,” I said, “and I’m telling you right now that I’m sick of lying and being lied to.”

Hearing her name brought on a shock of fear that quickly gave way to resignation. The look said,
If he wants to kill me, then I’m dead.

“A woman came to my office claiming to be you,” I continued. “She looked a lot like you. She told me that her husband wanted to kill her. I guess she meant that your husband wanted to kill you. Anyway . . . I went to him and he acted surprised, but not before he tried to fool me into thinking that another guy, who looked a lot like him, was the real Cyril Tyler.”

Chrystal sat with excellent posture on the white sofa. Her face had stopped communicating.

“Was there really something about Fatima and them?” she asked. “Or was that another lie?”

As she spoke these words, a solitary tremor went up her neck, moving her head just slightly.

“I went to a commune on Avenue D where Shawna, your sister, was supposed to be living. She wasn’t there, but the children were being held against their will. I got them out of there and they said something about a man putting their mother to sleep and then this guy Beria and his friends burying her.”

“She’s dead?” Chrystal could have been Fatima right then. The question was that innocent. There was the potential for pain, but she held that down, admirably.

“I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but I decided to take the kids someplace safe. I asked them what they wanted and they said that they wanted to be with you.”

I was trying very hard to stay within the realm of truth, as far as I knew it, but admitting to direct knowledge of a murder was further than I wanted to go.

“Do you think that Shawna is dead?”

“Like I said—I don’t know. But there isn’t any sign of her, and her children were alone in the commune.”

Passing sadness showed on her face like a ghost drifting between us.

“Are the . . .” she said and hesitated. “Are the police involved?”

“I thought it would be better to come to you first.”

“Why?”

“Your sister gave me a twelve-thousand-dollar retainer,” I said. “I know that your husband’s two previous wives either died or disappeared under questionable circumstances, and the kids are just kids. That’s a straight path here to you.”

“And what do you want?”

“This is as far as I could get on my own. I put the children someplace safe and came to you. The question is—what do
you
want?”

There are moments when the emotional red tape between strangers gets cut—immediately. Usually it takes many hours, lots and lots of conversation, and the presentation of indisputable proofs before people, intelligent ones at any rate, can even begin to trust each other. After all, most of what people say is lies; in church, in court, even under the threat of death. People lie when they think they’re telling the truth. It is one of the most universal human traits.

But every once in a while the need to trust causes us to ignore the implacable crush of lies. I could see in Chrystal’s eyes that she needed to trust me.

“I could call the kids for you right now,” I offered. “You could talk to Fatima on the phone.”

She didn’t say the word but everything about her demeanor said
yes
.

I entered Aura’s number and on the fourth ring Theda answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey, girl.”

“Uncle L, hi.”

“How’s it goin’?”

“We’re building a fort out of cardboard boxes. Fatima and Boaz are the Indian scouts and the rest of us are waiting for the attack.”

“Put Big Chief Fatima on, will ya?”

The phone made some muffled noises and then a timid voice said, “Yes?”

“I got somebody here wants to talk to you, Fatima,” I said before handing the little cell over to the real Chrystal.

“Fatima?”

The smile that blossomed across Chrystal’s face was something I had hankered for in a long life of solitude. It was the love of a relative who felt a connection with a child who needed that emotional touch.

I wanted that contact more than anything.

They talked about Fatima’s brothers and sisters, about the house they were staying in and what the child thought about me. There was no mention, at least on Chrystal’s part, of Shawna’s possible death.

“Of course you can all come live with me,” the grateful woman said. “But we have to make sure that it’s okay with your mom.”

This last phrase was very important. The children, the older ones at least, were pretty sure that their mother was dead. But knowledge for children is a different thing than it is for adults. Finality is slow in coming for those whose bones have not yet stopped growing. Shawna would be with them for a very long time. She’d be with Chrystal forever.

They talked for at least fifteen minutes before the child was drawn back into the immediacy of her life.

When Chrystal handed the phone back to me there was a shy look in her eyes. I had seen something of her that very few ever had. She was open and vulnerable and fully expressive of love.

Our fingers touched when I took the phone.

“Satisfied?” I asked.

“If that’s what you call it,” she said. “Thank you for taking care of the kids. I’m always worried about them. Shawna lives such a dangerous life.”

“Did you sell a necklace called Indian Christmas to a woman named Nunn?”

“Yes,” she said, a little startled.

“And did you give some of that money to your sister?”

“For her and my brother.”

“Are you afraid that Cyril is planning to have you murdered?”

There’s a limit to honesty with strangers. I had come right up to that border.

Chrystal turned her head away from me. She crossed her bare legs, and I experienced a moment of excitation that passed quickly.

“I know a guy,” I said, “a driver for a limo company, who’d be happy to drive the kids down here. Getting custody might be difficult if you’re not in state, and I don’t think you want them in the foster-care system.”

“No,” she said.

It was like we were old friends or family. I wanted to press her, to find out about her domestic situation, which was so vague. But there was an unspoken prohibition that kept me silent.

I stood up.

“I’ll get back to New York and have the kids brought down here. If you need anything, here’s my card.”

She stood to take the card but caressed my fingers instead.

“Would you like to stay for some wine?” she asked.

She brought out another glass and poured more than one round.

I remember the first kiss.

38

THERE WAS THE SMELL of French roast coffee in the air.

Sunlight gathered in the chiffon-yellow curtains, spraying its cool brilliance on the white bed. There were no paintings on the walls anywhere in the artist’s home. My watch, the only thing I wore, said 7:17.

I tapped the crystal face and smiled.

When I sat up I remembered the first bottle of wine. It was very good stuff.

My clothes were neatly folded on a straight-back ash chair two paces away. I stood up, fell back on the bed, stood up again, conquering the dizziness, and then got my pants and shirt on with hardly a wobble.

CHRYSTAL’S KITCHEN WAS predominantly yellow. The sink was paved with slightly uneven lemon tiles and the floors were grapefruit linoleum with a smudge of green here and there. The walls and cabinets, the ceiling and table and chairs, were all painted the color of deep-yellow roses. The old-fashioned stove was yellow enamel with little blue gas jets cooking our breakfast.