"So D and this Tatyana are together now?"
"Oh yeah. All night, every night. He thinks they're in love."
"Are they?"
"He is."
"Twill, if you suspect that this girl is playin' your brother, why help?"
"Tatyana's okay. She in trouble, and she a ho' through no fault of her own. Somebody got to break D's cherry, an' you know he will remember that girl till the day his grandchildren die."
"Hyperbole," I said.
"Poetic exaggeration," he corrected.
"What am I going to do with you, Twill?"
"Me? It's D in trouble, Pops."
"Without meeting you she would never even be with him. You're the one that convinced her something could be done."
"Oh, come on, man. Don't put that shit on me. Bulldog's my brother. He asked me to help him. I couldn't say no."
"No," I admitted, "you couldn't."
"So what do you want me to do?" Twill asked.
"Tell Dimitri that two men from Gustav were laying for him out in front of his mother's house. His mother's house. They saw me in the dark and thought it was him. They attacked me, threatened me, pulled a knife on me. You tell him that and then say I figured out what was going on. Then you tell Tatyana that I intend to do something, but she has to come meet with me first."
Twill nodded, a wry twist to his mouth.
"Convince her, Twill," I added. "I can't do this neatly without talking to her."
His assent was in his eyes, even more subtle than the shifting of a shoulder.
When we got up to leave he put a ten and a five on the table. He never ate and rarely drank at Takahashi's, but he always left a tip.
We separated on the street. Him, a boy walking off into a man's life, and me wondering, What if the Gordian knot was someone you loved?
35
I was already taxiing my way toward the federal detention center when Breland called and said that I had been granted permission to visit the prisoner.
The so-called holding facility was on the seventh floor of a building that had once been a warehouse. Instead of bars there was thick metal grating over every door and window-laced with razor wire along the seams.
The first person I met was a brown woman with a skinny body and a huge round face. She was standing on the opposite side of a small, iron-latticed window that was set toward the left side of a large wall. The waiting room, where I was standing, was nearly empty. The only other applicant was an Arab woman, surrounded by three small children. She was slumped in a chair. The feeling she radiated was that of intense hopelessness.
"Can I help you?" the bureaucrat asked through the haze of crisscrossed metal.
"Leonid McGill for Ron Sharkey."
"Purpose of visit?"
"His lawyer sent me."
Name? Occupation? Relationship to inmate? Citizenship? Weapons? Other contraband? (This was followed by a long list of everything from cash to chewing gum.)
"Any and all actions, comments, and utterances may be recorded while you are here," she said when the list was through.
Utterances?
"But I represent his lawyer," I said.
"If you do not wish to continue we can stop the process here."
"No," I said. "You can knock yourselves out recording me. Just remember my left profile is my good side."
The brown woman-who had short, straightened hair-almost smiled.
"Have a seat, Mr. McGill," she said. "You'll be called in the order this application has been filed."
The morose Arab woman didn't seem to want to commiserate, so I sat five metal chairs away from her and her oppressed children-waiting my place in a line of two.
Seventeen minutes later a man's voice said, "McGill."
The woman had yet to be called.
I looked around and saw that a door-sized panel to my right had slid open. After a moment that might have seemed like hesitation I stood up and went through the makeshift doorway.
The hall was short, ending at a larger-than-normal metal door replete with a metal screen window.
A man stood on the other side of that door.
"I'm Agent Galsworthy. How can I help you?" a tall white man in a gray-green suit asked me. His eyes were the color of lemons and pecans, giving the impression of small, dusky oranges. He was slender and should have been tall except for the fact that he was a little stooped over, which was odd because he wasn't a day over forty.
"McGill for Sharkey," I said.
"How did you know he was here?" the official asked through the grating. He was my own personal antagonist-confessor.
"His lawyer."
"Who's that?"
"Breland Lewis."
"What's your relationship with the prisoner?"
"His lawyer-Breland Lewis."
It was then that I detected a strong smell of human sweat on the air.
"What is your connection to the prisoner?"
"Can I just say ditto, or is there some reason I got to say the same words over and over?" I asked.
Galsworthy was like the cop in front of Wanda Soa's building; he thought that an evil stare would break me down to jelly. But he was just another bean counter. The only difference was that he counted skulls instead of legumes.
I smiled politely.
"What do you do for Sharkey's lawyer?"
I have learned over the years that you never give a lawman or a bureaucrat any more information than they ask for. If you do, they get confused, and then they get angry.
"You aren't on the visitors list," the pen-pusher told me.
"Lewis said that he called."
"The call has to be followed by a fax."
"You're telling me that he didn't send the fax?"
"We check the machine every three hours."
"And so I have to wait until that time is up and someone looks?"
"That will be after visiting hours are over."
"So what are you telling me?"
"Procedure," Galsworthy said, as if I were a dog trying to understand the true intentions of the man who called himself my master.
"Thomas," another voice said.
Through the haze of metal crosshatching came a broad man in a slate suit with the jacket open, his shirted belly hanging out. This man was in law enforcement. I could only hope that he had more power than the hunched-over inquisitor.
"Yes?" Galsworthy said to the new arrival.
"Let Mr. McGill in."
"We haven't received the fax yet."
The slightly disheveled man took a key from his pocket and approached the door that separated us.
"I have to finish the paperwork before you can allow him to enter," Galsworthy complained.
"You go do that, Tom. Mr. McGill and me will be in my office."
While speaking, the cop, whatever kind of cop he was, unlocked the door and swung it inward.
"Stop!" Galsworthy shouted.
Heads shot up at desks in the small office behind the two men. Two uniformed federal officers came in through a door with hands on their holstered pistols.
I stepped across the threshold as the pudgy cop held up his hands for the guards.
"No problem," he said to everybody but Thomas Galsworthy. "Just a question of jurisdiction."
The uniforms sighed and went back to their office. The heads went back down, and the cop offered me a welcoming hand.
"Jake Plumb," he said. "I'm in charge of the Sharkey case. Don't pay any attention to Tom here. It's his job to make sure that nobody ever gets in to visit their clients and loved ones. He's kept one poor woman and her kids outside for the past three weeks. Her husband isn't even here anymore, but the rules are we can't say that he's been shuttled down to the deportation detention center in Miami. Ain't that right, Tom?"
Agent Galsworthy sneered in silence.
"What do you do, Mr. McGill?" Plumb asked me.
Jake was three inches taller than I but his loose girth made him seem a bit shorter.
"PI," I said, "here to see, as you already seem to know, Ron Sharkey."