and in the meanwhile Velvet found the dead man’s stash. She used this to blunt the trauma of near death and murder.
With the child (I knew from Breland that she’d just turned twenty) on my lap I fished the cell phone out of my blue jacket pocket and pressed three digits.
“Leonid,” Breland said before I heard a ring.
I explained the situation, and asked, “So what is it exactly that you want from me?”
“I want you to fix it.”
“You know I’m straight now, man. And even when I was bent I didn’t take on jobs like this.”
“Come on, LT. This is for a very important client of mine. And you told me yourself that it looks like self-defense.”
“Then why not call the cops and defend her yourself?”
“It’s complicated.”
I could have pressed him, maybe even talked him out of what he was asking for. But Breland was not only my lawyer, he was a friend. He had been there for me when any other sane man would have walked away.
“I’ll call you back.”
SITTING AT the hickory table, listening to Katrina’s snoring in the distance, I thought about the ugly apartment with the dead man and the ravaged young woman. I had been in many rooms like that over the years. That tableau could have been a painting representing my whole previous life when I still hated my father and believed that dealing in darkness was the only way I could survive.
“YEAH?” Hush said on the second ring. It was past three on that Thursday morning. Velvet was still asleep and the nameless corpse was still dead.
“I got a situation here.”
“ Where?”
“YEAH, LEONID?” Breland said.
“You got two choices,” I told my lawyer. “Either I call the cops for nothing or you come up with fifty thousand, cash.”
“I can double that and have it in your hands by noon.”
What could I say? I needed that much to get Zella out of hock. I’d lose ten thousand points on my bid for redemption, but no boxer ever won a match without getting hit—except maybe Willie Pep.
“I got somebody on the way,” I said. “It’ll all be cleaned up in an hour.”
IT WAS a sour memory, even more so when I thought of Zella’s response to my offer of help.
That’s when I remembered my advice to Dimitri—
It’s a gift, not an investment . . .
I smiled at my own blind insight, and at just that moment my cell phone sang.
10
IT WAS CLOSE to midnight, and the caller registered as unknown.
“Hello?” The only reason I answered is because I believed any distraction would be better than the memories threading through my brain.
“Mr. McGill?”
“Zella?”
“Yes. Can you talk?”
“Sure. Talk.”
“I mean, in person.”
“Okay. Come to my office tomorrow at ten. That’s in the Tesla—”
“I meant now.”
“It’s eleven fifty-seven.”
“You don’t sound asleep.”
Recently released convicts don’t live in the workaday world, not at first. They’ve been locked up in a box, and the shock of freedom breaks all rules. Zella had a problem and a phone, so why not call the only man she knew?
“There’s a place in the East Village called Leviathan . . .” I said.
I gave her the address and a few special instructions. She made me repeat the directions and agreed to meet there in an hour’s time.
I took a three-minute cold shower, donned a blue suit identical to the one I wore that day, and checked to see that Katrina was still on her belly. After all that I skipped down the ten flights to the street, feeling like a kid having received a reprieve from summer school.
LEVIATHAN WAS one of the most secret late-night bars in Manhattan. Three floors underground, it was reputed to be a Mafia bomb shelter in the mid-fifties. The bartender/owner was named Leviticus Bowles, though his mother had christened him Eugene.
Leviticus was a born-again ex-con who acquired the deed and keys from a cell mate, Jimmy Teppi, at Attica before that prison was world-renowned. Legend has it that
Stop in the Name of Pants!