Regardless of these facial expressions, the only life left in Roman’s body was in his eyes. They were a standard brown with a feral, hateful light burning brightly from behind. If I was a superstitious man I’d have thought I was in the presence of Beelzebub’s consigliere.
“Timothy Moore,” I answered, now standing over him. “My name is Leonid McGill.”
I expected at least a little fear behind those satanic eyes. But Roman wasn’t going to crumple that easily.
“Rosa, Margarita,” he said while staring up at me, “give me and Mr. McGill a few minutes alone.”
The women moved without hesitation or complaint. Fifteen seconds after his request they were gone, leaving the menfolk behind to play their ridiculous games.
“Sit, Mr. McGill,” Roman said, gesturing toward the chair that Margarita had vacated. “That was the right word, right?”
“Sit?”
“Negro. You people still call yourselves that sometimes, don’t you?”
“I’m here about your interest in my well-being,” I said, “not terminology.”
“Oh? Educated, are you? No pullin’ the wool over your woolly eyes.”
If we were in Missouri sometime before 1980 he might have riled me some.
I smiled.
“Why did you ask Timothy to kill me?”
“I used to know a man named Timmy but not any Moore, Moor,” he said›€€div and then laughed.
“It’s not funny, Roman. It’s not funny and it takes more than bad puns to make me angry. What makes me mad is a man trying to kill me and I don’t even know why.”
The octogenarian shook his head and smiled.
“I can’t help you, Moor,” he said. “I never leave this floor.”
I understood then. Roman was dying and he knew it. His life had been limited to that room, with strangers looking after him. His own granddaughter wouldn’t come to visit him even when she lived under the same roof. My presence there represented a lifeline.
I shrugged and stood up.
“Where you going?” he asked.
I turned my back to him and took a couple of steps toward the door.
“Don’t you want to know about Timothy Moore?” he called after me.
“You don’t know anything,” I said, not turning. “It must’ve been Bryant who made the call.”
“Bryant doesn’t have the balls to kill a man,” Roman said in his strongest, most masculine voice. “I’m the one who gave him the thirty thousand to give you, and promised him a hundred more if he did the deed.”
That bought him half a turn.
“Why?” I asked.
“Come back over here and sit your nigger ass down,” was his reply.
I knew the cautionary rhyme of sticks and stones, but Roman was getting under my skin. I found myself wondering what my most excellent son Twill would have done in this situation.
Thinking of Twill brought a smile to my face. The anger dissipated and I returned to the servant’s chair.
“Why do you want me dead, Mr. Hull? I never did anything to you.”
“It was just business.”
“What business?”
“The most important kind,” he said. “Family business.”
“Do I represent a danger to someone in your family?”
He was just about to tell me; I was finally going to get an answer to the reason for the murders my investigation had made possible.
“It—” Roman managed to say before the door to the room slammed opened.
“Dad,” a man called.
Looking toward the light, I saw him coming. He wore a gray suit with a burgundy tie and hard-soled, oxblood shoes.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I stood up to meet the visitor because his demeanor was less than friendly.
He was taller than I, and white the way old paintings of American presidents are white. His hair was black and gray and his eyes tended toward brown. Behind him stood Rosa, behind her Margarita—Hannah brought up the rear. Her “never,” I supposed, became “hardly ever” when her father preceded her into her grandfather’s room.
“Leonid McGill,” I said, holding out a friendly hand. “I was just asking your father a couple of questions, Mr. Hull.”
“Get out of here,” he said, not taking up my offer of greeting.
The women behind him were silent.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
Roman was sniggering behind me. The piano music played like razor blades chipping away at my spine.
“No,” Bryant Hull said.
I looked up at him, thinking that everybody I met seemed to be taller than I.
“It might be worth your while to hear me out.”
“Leave my house or I will call the police.”
I didn’t have the time to go to jail right then, so I nodded and held my hands open at shoulder level in a sign of surrender. I was playing for time. Maybe he would ask a question in anger that would allow me the verbal foothold of a reply.
“Bryant,” a familiar voice said. “Bryant, what’s wrong? You sound angry.”
Coming into the dark and masculine room was the impossibly feminine form of Hannah’s mother. She glided up next to her husband.
They didn’t seem to fit together—he a prefabricated manikin dressed and groomed to look like a billionaire, and she the Nordic interpretation of a Mediterranean goddess.
She placed her fingers on the back of his hand.
“Hannah,” Bryant said.
“Yes, Dad?”
“Take your mother back to her room.”
“But, Bryant,” his wife said.
“Bunny, please just go with Hannah.”
Bunny.
Roman had begun a rolling, heavy cough.
Margarita went to him.
Bryant turned to me and I was feeling as if Willie Sanderson had just unloaded one of his haymakers on the back of my head.
“Are you leaving?” the rich man asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.”
Ê€„
51
I once read a monograph, written by a man named Harlan Victorious Lowe, called Creativity and Quirks of the Mind. The author claimed, among other things, that creative thought often happens in the mind’s peripheral vision, when that metaphorical sight is jogged by obvious mainstream thinking. In other words—when one thing comes to light, the illumination often floods the dark corners with brightness.
Bunny was a blazing sun in the rabbit warren of my mind.
I jumped into a taxi two blocks from the Hull mansion and sat in the backseat, almost catatonic from the realizations as they bombarded me.
On the street in front of the Tesla Building I called Tiny the Bug.
“Yes, LT?”
“I want you to create me a website in somebody else’s name,” I said. “How many minutes will that take?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“That’s money, not minutes.”
“Thousand dollars an hour starting twenty seconds ago.”
“Sold.”
I gave him the details. He grunted twice, asked four questions, and then disconnected the line.