Trouble Is What I Do Page 2

  “Patty,” he called, his eyes still on me.

  The pretty boy came to our table and sat.

  “You say you don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Underman?” True asked his minion.

  “No,” Patrice answered. “I never even heard the name before today.”

  The fat man glanced at Patrice, then glared at me.

  “Anyone else on Eckles’s list?”

  “Patrice is the only name I’m concerned with.” It wasn’t a great answer, but it was the best I had.

  “And how do you plan to protect him?”

  “Protect me from what?” Patrice wanted to know.

  “I think it would be better to keep my plans on the need-to-know,” I said. “That way if something goes wrong, I won’t have to come looking for you.”

  True paused again, trying to figure out if I had somehow insulted him. Then he said, “Patty.”

  “Yeah, True?”

  “I think you should go with this guy.”

  “Go with him? I don’t even know him.”

  True leveled his dark eyes at Patrice’s pale orbs.

  “His name is Leonid McGill and he’s a fixer. Works for people like my boss’s boss. And if Eckles is really after you, he’s the only long shot you got.”

  That was quite a while ago. Back then, I relied on my reputation. I was surprised, however, that my name had made it all the way out to Coney Island.

  The affable young man and I went to the counter, where I handed Sheila Normandy a ten-dollar bill. She smiled and handed it back along with a slip of paper that bore a phone number. That phone number got me a night of bliss, a broken wrist, and, in the end, it cost a man his life. But that’s another story.

  I got Patrice Sandoval to the Alonzo at about 4:00. It was a cheap dive that had rooms by the day or the hour. I went in first and was given the key to 2D. I found the room, put my empty suitcase down, and then went to the Glacier Bar across the street. Maybe twenty minutes later, as instructed, Patrice came into the joint and joined me at a table near the jukebox.

  He put a key down and said, “Four-A. I left the bag you gave me up there.”

  I slid my door key across to him.

  “Call your mother and True,” I said. “Tell them both that you’re staying at the Alonzo. Tell ’em both that it’s no secret you’re there. Make sure they know you’re in room 4A.”

  “But I thought I was gonna take your room.”

  “You are.”

  I don’t think he understood what I was planning, but he promised to make the calls and give the right room number—that was all I needed.

  We had drinks, over which I explained to him my plan. He was going to go downstairs and tell the man at the front desk that he would be out but to tell his friends that he’d be back by midnight.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “What’s to get?”

  “All somebody has to do is tell somebody my name, and then they send someone to kill me?”

  “If you have to ask that question, you should probably consider a new line of work.”

  Soon after that, we retired to our switched rooms.

  If Eckles was as good as they said, he’d show up before long.

  I was sitting in the dark at a few minutes past nine when there came the slightest rustle and click at the door. I really shouldn’t have been in the room at all. It would have been better to wait in 4C, across the hall, keeping vigil until my quarry arrived. But I was young, not yet fifty, and overconfident. Still, I was smart enough to wait in the dark and to the side. So when the door came open and the shadow figure passed through, I lunged forward, throwing a beautifully timed left hook. But Mr. Eckles had preternatural reflexes. As fast as I was, he pulled away so that my fist barely glanced his shoulder. He grunted and allowed his weight to bear him away from me. I stayed on him, though, unloading a right, a left, and another right in his direction. And damn if he didn’t slip every blow. When he fired back, I felt it in my jaw, shoulder, and gut. If I wasn’t in shape from regular workouts at Gordo’s boxing gym, that would have been the end for me. As it was, I had to push through the pain and disorientation. He was too good for me to rely on my pugilism skills, so I heaved my 182 pounds in the middleweight’s direction. He fell beneath the weight, and I rained down blows at his head. Of the first five punches, only two connected, but the last one stunned him. I hit him five more times, enough to kill a regular guy, and even then I was prepared for him to come back at me.

  When I was sure that he was out, I searched his clothes for a gun, found it, then went to close the door and turn the switch.… The overhead light revealed the Mississippi Assassin risen to one knee and pulling a hunting knife from a sheath on his leg. I rushed over and hit him with his own gun butt—repeatedly.

  An hour or so later, Ernie Eckles opened his eyes. He was chained by handcuffs and ankle bracelets to the strongest chair in the room. The chair was itself chained to the cast-iron radiator. There was half a pillowcase stuffed in his mouth with electrician’s tape holding the gag in place.

  I say that he opened his eyes an hour later because I had the feeling he’d regained consciousness sometime before that.

  “Mr. Eckles?”

  Those dark eyes scanned the room, photographed my face, and then they hardened.

  “I want to take the gag out and I don’t want to slap you upside the head with this gun again,” I said, showing him the pistol.

  He considered the offer, waited a moment, and then nodded.

  I pulled off the tape as gently as I could.

  “You can work the gag out with your tongue. I wouldn’t wanna get bit or some shit like that.”

  It was hard to make out, but I think the crack about him biting me elicited a smile. He spat out the rag, then took in a deep breath through his mouth. The left side of Ernie’s jaw was slightly swollen.

  His eyes went out of focus, communicating that he would wait for me to start. Instead I went to the house phone near the bed and dialed a 9 and then a phone number.

  “Hello?” a scared voice asked.

  “Come on up,” I said.

  No more than ten minutes later, there came a knock. Patrice Sandoval wore black cotton trousers, a coral shirt, and a forest-green sports jacket. I remember thinking that he’d make a good-looking corpse.

  The young man was visibly shaken when he saw Ernie staring at him.

  “He’s still alive?”

  “I was asked to save your life—not take his,” I told him. Then I turned to my prisoner. “Mr. Eckles, I’d like to introduce you to your target—Patrice Sandoval.”

  The way Ernie glared at him reminded me that a caged tiger was still a tiger.

  “What you want?” Ernie’s voice was a surprisingly pleasant tenor. I would have bet that he exercised it in a Sunday choir down home.

  “You have to understand, Mr. Eckles,” I explained. “I don’t usually mess with a man’s destination. As a matter of fact I never do, unless one of the tires is soft and he’s on a treacherous road.”

  “If that there is Sandoval, and I know it is, then all my tires is hard and aligned.”

  “You would think so,” I replied, “but this is not the man that stole Mr. Underman’s weed.”

  “I don’t care about ‘he said, she said,’” Eckles preached. “I got a job to do.”

  “And that’s where I believe there might be room for negotiation.”

  “Are you gonna kill him or what?” Patrice wanted to know.

  “What’s your name?” Eckles asked me.

  “It is an exhibition of deepest respect that I do not answer that question, Mr. Eckles.”

  He smirked and asked, “What’s the negotiation?”

  “Rexford Brothers by way of Shorty Reeves.”

  “Shorty?” Patrice piped. “What’s Shorty got to do with this?”

  Keeping my eye on Eckles, I said, “Brothers is Underman’s number two. He decided to rip off his boss by telling the said Shorty Reeves about a
six-ton delivery coming up through North Carolina. Shorty took down the truck, gave Brothers his cut and the name of Patrice here. I’m quite sure that Mr. Underman would like his seven thousand seven hundred forty-eight dollars doing the right work.”

  The Mississippi Assassin remained silent, but I could see that my words had made an impression on him. I knew too much about the heist and the hit.

  For a minute or two more, Ernie glared and Patrice fidgeted. Then I took a small amber bottle and another piece of pillowcase from a pocket.

  While pouring the right amount of ether on the cloth, I said, “I’m putting you to sleep now, Ernie. Once again, this is a show of respect. When you wake up, I hope you think on what I said.”

  I draped the cloth over his nose and mouth, careful to hold the lower part below his chin—so that he didn’t turn tiger and bite off a finger. After the killer had passed out, I took off the shackles and the unconscious body slumped to the floor.

  “We should kill him,” Patrice said.

  I slapped the handsome young man hard enough that he stumbled backward, all the way to the far wall.

  Then I said, “Let’s go.”

  I drove Patrice to his mother’s house in Queens, on the way explaining that he should disappear, preferably somewhere out of state, until such a time that I made sure Underman was off his ass.

  “How will I know that?”

  “I’ll get word to True.”

  The fallout was pretty quick. Four days after I left Patrice with his mom, I read in the online version of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Rexford Brothers was found dead in his own mother’s home. He had been shot three times.

  The New York Post announced Shorty Reeves’s demise. Phil Thomas and Minda Myles had eloped and were on their honeymoon in Jamaica. I told Bea that it might be good for them to extend their vacation for a while.

  Three weeks later, I was going to my cubbyhole of an office, which was, at the time, on the ninth floor of the Joseph T. Banner Building on West Thirty-First Street. It was thirteen past seven in the evening when I used the four keys on six locks, in the proper order, and walked in.

  By then, it was already too late.

  I closed the door and said aloud, “You see why I didn’t want to tell you my name?”

  I couldn’t see him, but he was there.

  “Just keep your hands away from your sides,” the Mississippi Assassin warned.

  It took a while, but finally I was seated behind my desk. Ernie reclined in my speckled green-and-white client’s chair, pistol in hand. He had on a well-worn army jacket, brown pants and shoes.

  “You the first one ever caught me off guard,” he said. “An’ that’s sayin’ sumpin’. ’Specially cause’a where I was an’ what I was doin’. You taught me a real lesson there, Leonid McGill.”

  I wondered what kind of education he had in store for me.

  “You a drinkin’ man?” Ernie asked.

  “I like the good stuff. All except scotch. I can’t stand scotch.”

  With his free hand, he brought a clear glass jar from a deep pocket. The jar was filled with amber liquid and secured with a screw-on lid.

  He said, “This here is one-hundred-forty-seven-year-old corn liquor aged in a charred-oak cask. You know what that means?”

  The moonshine had an inner light that danced like laughter.

  “Bourbon,” I said.

  “You got glasses?”

  “You must know. I don’t think you’d have me sitting here if you hadn’t checked out the drawers.”

  I pulled out two bowled glasses.

  He pushed the jar toward me and said, “Pour us two stiff ones.”

  I entertained the idea of splashing the whiskey in his eyes or ducking down and flipping my pine desk at him. But if Eckles was dangerous in the dark with his back turned, then he’d be death sitting before me, straight on, in the light, and with a gun in his hand.

  So I poured our drinks, then took a sip. It was, hands down, the best liquor I had ever tasted. My expression said this, and Ernie Eckles cracked a smile.

  “My great-great-grandfather bunged it in twenty-three barrels. There’s still seven left. I take a jar every Christmas and sip at it all year.”

  I took another taste. It was so smooth that I imagined a green snake slithering across an emerald lawn.

  “Underman didn’t like what I had to say, but he listened,” Ernie recounted. “You owe me for that. But the job is over. Kid is safe.”

  “It’s over?”

  “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

  “No more bodies?”

  He studied my question and then nodded like he did the evening I offered him his life. Then he finished his drink, rose from the chair, and secreted the gun somewhere under his jacket.

  Seeing him walk out the door was the deepest relief I have ever experienced.

  Eleven years later, I was sitting with Catfish Worry and Lamont Richards, still breathing and still afraid of just the name Eckles.

  “So what is it you want from me, Mr. Worry?”

  The old man grinned. He had a full complement of big yellow choppers. Nodding as if to the music of his own guitar, he laid the briefcase flat on the desk, popped the latches, flipped it open, and turned the contents to me.

  The body of the attaché held a mason jar nestled in bunched-up burlap. The hanging file above carried a large manila folder.

  “Is that Eckles’s bourbon?” I asked.

  “One hunnert an’ fifty-eight year old. It’s yours if you could get this envelope into the right hands.”

  When I reached for the folder, Catfish stiffened and held up a hand.

  “Hold up, brother,” he said. “Ain’t nobody seen what’s in here for sixty-six years.”

  “You’ve seen it.”

  “I cain’t read. Never could.”

  “But you held on to it for all this time?”

  “Made a promise to a lady.”

  Catfish Worry was a good-looking man even at his great age. There was character in his deeply lined face and something profound emanating from his one good eye. I imagined that he’d known many dozens of women but not so many that he’d forget a promise. This made me think of my own father; of how he had failed me and my brother, our mother, and even his own cause.

  “What promise?”

  “That if she died and when the time came, if it came, that there was a girl-child born outta her heirs, that I would give that child the letter in here when she’d need it.”

  “I don’t see where I fit into that,” I said. “I mean, if all you need to do is hand a folder to someone, then why don’t you just ring their doorbell?”

  “The young lady we talkin’ ’bout is Justine Penelope Sternman.” Catfish’s stare was almost as serious as the name he’d uttered.

  Justine Penelope Sternman was daughter to Charles Augustus Sternman. The family business was a private bank that held assets greater than most large banks in America. Charles had been an adviser to three presidents, and he was granted honorary citizenship in South Africa when apartheid was all the rage. In an interview, he’d called Nigeria a shithole and its president a nigger in a hat. When there were protests, he simply stated, “In America we believe in free speech.”

  The Sternmans’ long-ago ancestress Georgina Soule started a private club called the Sisterhood of the Mayflower: an exclusive group of women descended from that select crowd of Puritan Pilgrims. Justine was the next in line for the leadership of that organization. She was also slated to wed Andrew Printer, a South Carolinian whom Charles intended to take over the Sternman empire when he was through with it.

  “I see,” I said. “That’s some name. It might make sense, you coming to me.”

  “Will you do it?” the man named for a freshwater bottom-feeder asked.

  “I have to know what’s in any letter I deliver. I mean, you seem like a good guy and all, but this might be blackmail, or worse.”

  Catfish squinted, understanding my words.


  “May I?” I asked, gesturing at the folder in his briefcase.

  Hesitating, he said, “I know. You don’t wanna buy a pig in a poke. Okay. Lamont and me’ll wait outside while you read what it has to say.”

  He stood up, and Lamont followed suit. Mardi waited a moment, and then she rose too.

  “I’ll go with them,” she said, “in case they need something.”

  Before she pulled the door closed, I was taking a glass from my bottom drawer. It was one of the same glasses I’d used with the Mississippi Assassin years before.

  I knew from the aroma that it was the same batch. Ernie was reaching out to tell me that Catfish was the debt I owed.

  To my Granddaughter,

  My name is Lucinda Pitts-Sternman, descended from the Puritans that came over on the Mayflower, daughter of Norferd Sternman and Edwina Marlene Pitts. I was born of what my father’s line calls the best blood. We were the kernel of everything this nation has become—both right and wrong. Victims of religious oppression, my ancestors laid the foundation for what they called the greatest democracy ever to exist. I believed them until the day I met Philip Worry, called Catfish by his friends. Mr. Worry was a traveling musician down on his luck along the Grand Concourse near my parents’ home in the Bronx. He’d known my father’s butler, Archer Mandell, from a club in Manhattan. Archer convinced my father to hire Mr. Worry as our summer gardener. Archer and Mr. Worry, Catfish, are both Negroes.

  One night I came across Catfish playing guitar in the garden house where he lived. He was kind enough to teach me how to play a few chords on his guitar. It was a music I’d never heard before. Every afternoon when I was at home, and my parents were not, Catfish taught me how to play that most exhilarating music. We became quite intimate. And then one day my father found us. Luckily we were just playing our guitars. Catfish was showing me the fingering of a complex chord progression.

  Father took up one of his walking canes and beat my friend until I thought he was dead. When I tried to intervene, my father struck me with the back of his hand, knocking me to the floor. After that, he had Archer throw Catfish in the alley that ran behind our house.