“I hope I didn’t embarrass Officer Palmer.”
“She said that after all she heard about you she thought your johnson would be bigger.”
“Tell her that the air conditioner was on.”
I left the precinct with half a pack of Kit’s cigarettes at about seven a.m. Before that I filled out three forms, explaining what happened, and then Kit recorded my statement on a little digital recorder. He made copies of my gun license and my PI’s ticket. The whole deposition took about three hours. I didn’t mind. While speaking and writing I was going over every detail for my own investigation.
I arrived at the third-floor breakfast joint a little after eight. It was right at the East River and looked up at the Brooklyn Bridge.
I was met by an offbeat waiter. He had olive skin and a few years on me. He was dressed completely in white, even his shoes, and he was ugly. There’s no other way to describe his countenance. His people hailed from some part of Europe that had been conquered and raped again and again over millennia. His ears were too big and his eyes the wrong color. The index and point fingers of his right hand were huge, as if they had been cut off some giant and grafted on him. All of his teeth were edged in jagged, mangled gold.
“We don’t open until nine,” he said in a gruff tone. There was an accent but I couldn’t place it.
“I’m here to see Clarence Lethford,” I said.
Hearing this, he turned and started walking across the broad room, with its dozen or so tables. He came to a door and opened it.
I had not moved from the entryway.
When he saw this he waved impatiently.
I approached and saw that this was a small private dining room with three empty tables.
“Sit here,” the ugly man said. “Lethford will come.”
I stepped in and the waiter closed the door behind me.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were cut from the same dirty and reddish brown unfinished wood. The room could have been a hundred years old, cleaned daily by the man in white and his ugly ancestors.
I sat next to a small window that allowed a view of the bridge and river. It was pleasant in there. I considered resting my head against the splintery wall and taking a nap.
But instead I made a call.
“Sorkin Securities,” a bright young voice answered.
“LT McGill,” I said. “NY-two-six-four-four-jay.”
“Just a moment.”
The phone made some clicking noises and then a man’s voice said, “Ron Welton, security analyst. With whom am I speaking?”
“Leonid Trotter McGill.”
“Yes, Mr. McGill. What can I do for you?”
“Somebody broke through my door last night.”
“There’s no record on our files of your shell being broken.”
“They used an electromagnet and specially made crowbars.”
“That must have taken a while.”
“They were in in under ten seconds.”
Silence.
“Mr. Welton?”
“We will have a crew out to your house by noon today, Mr. McGill. They will replace and upgrade the system.”
“I thought every configuration you had was unique.”
“We will also launch an internal investigation... Are you and your family all right?”
“No thanks to you.”
Shelly was at the house when I called. Twill, she said, was having tea in the little front room with Katrina. Dimitri and Tatyana had moved into D’s room. There were cops down on the street, watching the front door.
“One of them comes up every couple of hours or so to check on us,” my earnest daughter reported.
“Put your brother on the line,” I said. I didn’t have to tell her which brother.
I told Twill about the security company. Told him that I needed any extra keys left downstairs in our mailbox.
“Something’s wrong with Mom,” Twill said.
“Of course there is. Armed men broke into our home.”
“No, Pops, it’s more than that. I don’t know how to describe it but there’s definitely something wrong.”
“I’ll sit down with her when I get home. Is there anything else?”
“One thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You said that you wanted me to work for you so I could be safe, right?”
“You wanna quit?”
“No, sir.”
Sitting there in the dowdy but private dining room, listening to traffic from the street and the clinking clanging of the restaurant workers getting ready for their clientele, I wondered about Velvet, crouching over her spent works.
Maybe I was being punished for breaking my oath and covering up yet another crime... Try as I might I could not muster up any faith in superstition. I laughed and looked up.
At just that moment big, brutal Clarence Lethford banged into the room.
37
“What you laughin’ at?” he asked, a lion addressing an unruly hyena.
“You wanna go back out that door and start over? Or should I just leave now?”
“You better watch out, son. I’m not the kinda man you can fuck with.” Lethford took three steps and was standing over me.
“I already killed two men today,” I replied easily, “and it’s still only morning. So bring it on, mothahfuckah, bring it on.”
The huge cop stared down at me. I was ready for the fight, actually welcomed the chance.
But instead he pulled back an ancient spindly chair and lowered his bulk onto it.
“You don’t want me for an enemy, McGill.”
“Kit said you wanted a meet,” I replied. “Here I am.”
Rage was a regular part of the policeman’s makeup. But he was disciplined.
“Zella Grisham had nothing to do with that Rutgers heist,” he told me.
“I know that.”
“How do you know?”
“What does the color red look like?” I replied.
“Huh?”
“Go on, man. What else you want from me?”
“Where is Grisham?”
“Safe.”
“Safe where?”
“You know I’m not gonna tell you that.”
“I could throw your ass in jail.”
“Throw all you want. I bounce.”
That brought the wisp of a smile to the rough customer’s lips.
“Let me tell you something, Captain Lethford.”
“What?”
“After this meeting you’re going to write a note, saying what we said and what your impressions were.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Five minutes after you file that note I could get it delivered on the fax machine of my choosing.” If looks could kill... “So,” I continued, “if I tell you where Zella is, I know that she will be dead in the time it takes for one phone to talk to another. I don’t know you. I can’t trust you. But I will say that Zella is safe and she’ll stay that way.”
After swallowing a little more wrath he said, “There’s only two reasons that I’m not sweating you in an interrogation room right now. The least is that word came down from on high to lay off Leonid Trotter McGill...”
This wasn’t the first time I’d been told that officialdom in the NYPD had put a shield around me.
“... the greater,” he continued, “is that the most respected man on the force, Carson Kitteridge, says that if anybody will find an answer to these killings, it’s you.”
“Kit said that?”
“Question is, what do you have to say?”
“I know you think I’m seven kinds of guilty, Captain. That I either stole millions or that I’m trying to get at the money now. I’m innocent of your suspicions regardless of how much you doubt me. But now you’re here, talking about killings, and last night two men tried to murder me and my family — real professionals. That said, I’m listening to you.”
I took out a cigarette and lit it. The policeman didn’t try to enforce the smoking ban.