Known to Evil Read online

  So I went down to a bar called the Naked Ear on East Houston. It was once a literary bar where striving young writers came to read their poetry and prose to each other. Then for a long time it was a haven where NOLITA (that's the real estate acronym for North of Little Italy) stock traders met to flirt and brag. Since the current reversals on Wall Street the bar was floundering, looking for a new identity.

  I was told by the owner that they didn't change the name because the word "naked" seemed to bring in curious newcomers every day.

  I didn't care what they called themselves or who sat at the mahogany bar. I only went to the Ear for two reasons. One was to think, and drink, when I was in trouble; the other was to pay my respects to Gert Longman.

  I HOOKED UP WITH Gert back when I was more crooked than not. She identified criminal losers who had not yet been caught at their scams and perversions. I framed these lowlifes for crimes that other crooks needed to get out from under--all for a fee, of course.

  As is so often the case with deep passion, I didn't understand the kind of woman Gert was. Because she did work for me, I figured that she was bent, too.

  She had a great smile and a fine derriere.

  When we became lovers I neglected to tell her that I was married, not because I was ashamed but because I didn't think it mattered. How was I to know that she had dreams of two- point-five children and a picket fence?

  We broke up but still worked together from time to time. I offered to leave Katrina, but Gert told me that it was over, completely.

  And then one day the daughter of a man I'd caused to go to prison had someone kill Gert, just to see me cry.

  I toasted her loss with three cognacs at least once a month. I never liked going to cemeteries.

  LUCY, THE SKINNY BRUNETTE bartender, smiled when I mounted a stool in front of her.

  "Hello, Mr. McGill."

  "You remember my name."

  "That's a bartender's job, isn't it?" Lucy had very nice teeth.

  "It used to be that Republicans believed in less government, and people all over the world saw America as the land of opportunity. Things change."

  "I guess I'm a throwback, then. Three Hennesseys straight up?"

  "You're a relic."

  While the thirtyish bartender went to fetch the brandy I turned my mind toward yet another reason I came to that bar: whenever I find myself in serious trouble, I take a time-out and try to fill in the shady areas with reason.

  It wasn't the murder that bothered me. I didn't know the dead woman and I hadn't had anything to do with her, or her apparent killer's, death. Alphonse Rinaldo most certainly didn't know that she was dead. He might have been worried about her but he didn't kill her. And even if I gave the police the name and office address of my client they would have never even seen his face. They would get a call from the chief of police to lay off that avenue of inquiry and that would be that.

  I didn't know, for a fact, who the dead woman was, but that didn't bother me either. I had done my job.

  No, I hadn't done anything wrong as far as the deaths or my responsibility to the NYPD was concerned. Legally I was covered.

  "Here you go, Mr. McGill," Lucy said.

  She placed three amber-filled and extremely fragile cylinders of glass before me. I picked up one and tilted it at the sky beyond the ceiling.

  A siren passed by outside.

  "Was it a good friend?"

  "You are old school," I said to Lucy.

  "I don't know," she said. "I think anybody could see that you're going through a ritual with these drinks. You don't come here to meet people or to pick up girls. I pay attention, because you're the sweetest drunk I've ever had in here."

  "You're gonna make me blush, child."

  "I'm not that young."

  "Maybe not," I said. "But I sure am that old."

  Lucy gave me a very nice, almost speculative, smile and strolled off to a couple sitting a few stools away.

  LEGALLY I WAS COVERED but the job wasn't over and it had turned from seeing that the subject, Tara Lear, was all right to maybe dodging guns with silencers on them and spending long nights under the bright lights of police curiosity.

  This was a job that I couldn't walk away from. I could turn down loan sharks and godfather wannabes if they asked for my services. They could get angry and come after me if they wanted to try. I might have to do some fancy footwork but I could hold my own even against real-life mafiosi.

  But Alphonse Rinaldo was no street hood or thug. He was the real thing, the thing itself.

  At the end of my first drink I was pretty sure that Sam Strange was being up front with me. He was less likely to cross his boss than I was. He liked his job, and the protection of Rinaldo's office.

  By the end of my second brandy I was confident that even the Big Man hadn't expected the crime I stumbled across. If there was impending danger Rinaldo would have told me, not for my safety but for his own interests. Why would he drag his name, albeit unspoken, into the crime scene at all?

  No, it wasn't a setup. The situation had simply escalated faster than Alphonse had anticipated.

  I'd taken the first sip of the third brandy when my cell phone made the sound of a far-off migrating flock of geese.

  "Yes, Katrina?"

  "You hadn't called," she said.

  After so many years together a whole chapter of life can be reduced to three or four words. We could have discussed her new habit of waiting up for me since coming back and passing the half-century mark. She was no longer looking for a new man, she said. But even if she was--while she was there she was going to act like my wife.

  "I'm on the job," I told her. "It got more complicated than I thought it would."

  "Oh."

  If we were new lovers, or even just five years into the marriage, that conversation would have spanned half an hour.

  "Be careful," she said.

  "Good night."

  "I guess it's just you and me," Lucy said as I disengaged the call.

  I looked around and saw that the bar was empty.

  "Business is bad, huh?"

  "It's a lull."

  "Before the storm?"

  Lucy was looking right at me. It had been a long time but I still remembered that look.

  A bear growled restlessly.

  "Hello?" I said into the cell phone.

  Lucy was walking away. She was skinny but she had nice hips.

  "Have you spoken to the woman in question?" Sam Strange asked.

  "No."

  "And?"

  "There was a complication."

  "What kind of complication?"

  "Murder."

  "Tara?"

  "Maybe."

  "This is no time to be coy, Mr. McGill. He's called me three times for an update."

  I was watching Lucy clean up at the bar sink, remembering the lyric Where did our love go?

  "The dead girl was named Wanda Soa, I'm told. Somebody shot her in the face. The probable killer was six feet away, stabbed in the chest. No gun was found."

  "Do the police know?"

  "Indeed they do."

  "Did they, did they speak to you?"

  "At length."

  "And why haven't you called in to report?"

  Giving no answer worked better than words on that question.

  "I'll report to him and get back to you if there's anything else," Sam Strange said.

  He hung up and I turned off my phone, preferring the slightly addled silence that three shots of good liquor provided.

  "Walk me home," Lucy said. She wasn't giving me a choice.

  6

  Lucy took my arm half a block from the bar and we walked in silence. I made no comment when we passed Gert's building. Four blocks later, on a quiet, not to say desolate, block, she stopped.

  "This is me," she said, nodding her head toward the door.

  Extricating herself from the crook of my arm, she took out a single, imposing-looking key. This she used on the lock.

/>   "You're very quiet," she said, building on the unspoken intimacy between us.

  "Just thinking."

  "Yes?"

  "When I was a younger man I would have thrown a fine young thing like you over my shoulder and carried you up those stairs."

  "I don't know about that. I live on the fifth floor."

  I shrugged. It was the same dismissal I had for those who had threatened me with violence over the decades.

  "If you can carry me to my door you can do whatever else you want."

  I was already breathing hard. Lucy yelped and giggled when I slung her over my shoulder and started walking, two steps at a time. When I got to the third floor I felt her rise up to look at me.

  When I was half a flight from her floor she said, "You're really going to do it."

  THE APARTMENT WAS SMALL and neat, nothing like Wanda Soa's place. There was a window that looked out on a brick wall, and vintage furniture with dark-green coverings.

  "I don't have any liquor in the house," she said.

  Her coffee table was an old wooden trunk.

  "Bartenders shouldn't drink," I said.

  She smiled and asked, "What are you going to do with me now?"

  She sat down on the short sofa and gestured for me to sit next to her.

  "When I first meet a woman I like to talk a little bit."

  She nodded, leaned over, and then kissed me like she meant it. We went at that for a very long time, at least an hour and a half. Our hands explored a little bit but mostly we just massaged each other's tonsils with our tongues. Now and then she reached down to squeeze my erection. Once or twice I ran my fingers between her thighs. But for the most part it was the kissing that mattered.

  That was the first time that I'd been frisky so soon after seeing a death. I realized that I needed someone to hold me and kiss me, to tease me with a little squeeze now and then.

  "Let's go to bed," she whispered after sticking her tongue in my ear.

  We kissed for a few minutes more.

  "I'm married," I said, a timid bookkeeper on holiday in Atlantic City.

  "So? I am, too."

  "Where's your husband?"

  "Not here."

  The kissing got passionate there for a bit and then I leaned away.

  "I don't want to do this," I said. "Not right now."

  In a brazen gesture she laid a hand on my pants where the erection strained.

  "It sure feels like you want to."

  I stared into her eyes and she increased the pressure.

  I barely moved.

  "You know, I never bring men home from work."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I like you."

  "I like you, too. I just need a little while to get over a couple'a things. Can you give me that?"

  The question made her smile. She lifted the hand from my pants and caressed the side of my neck.

  "I like it when a big strong man asks so sweetly," she said. "But I need some more of those lips before you can go."

  I DIDN'T GET HOME until two-thirty in the morning, my virtue still pretty much intact.

  By then Katrina should have been in bed, lulled by the chatter on one of her favorite TV channels. At that hour there would probably be some kind of health or exercise infomercial playing, but Katrina wouldn't know; she just needed the background noise to comfort her natural restlessness.

  My wife was not in bed, however. She was sitting at the dining room table in her pink pajamas and turquoise robe.

  "Where have you been?" she asked when I walked into the room. There was no friendliness in her voice.

  "I told you. The job got more involved than I thought."

  "I tried calling you twelve times."

  "I was being sly, honey," I said. "I had to turn the cell off."

  I was trying to figure out what was wrong. Katrina hadn't been jealous of me in twenty years. Both of us were having multiple affairs in the heyday of our marriage. The term "jealousy" wasn't one of our ten thousand words.

  She fell against the backrest of her chair and began to cry.

  "What's wrong?" I asked, wondering about the smell of Lucy's perfume on my clothes.

  "Dimitri," she said, "and, and Twill. They went out and haven't come back. I tried to call but both their phones are off, too."

  Every now and then young Twilliam took pity on his shy, morose brother and introduced him to a particular kind of girl or woman he came upon in his barely legal activities. I'd seen a few e-mails between them when Twill had come across someone he thought D might like. It's supposed to be the other way around--the older brother is supposed to teach his younger sibling the ropes, but that wasn't the case in our home. Twill was the reincarnation of an old soul that had spent one lifetime after another in prison or on the run.

  Lately my youngest, and favorite, son had been running an online fence. He never saw or spoke to anyone, just had his e-wallet fat with transfers from a dozen different buyers and providers.

  I was looking into how to short-circuit his illegal enterprise but thus far the weak link eluded me.

  I couldn't see how that particular endeavor would get both kids in trouble.

  "It's okay, baby," I said to my wife.

  She sniffed and I wondered if she got a whiff of my make-out session.

  "I'm worried, Leonid."

  "You know Twill. He probably met some girl wants a college man for a night or two. That's the one thing would keep Dimitri away from here."

  "You think so?"

  "I'm sure of it. They'll call in the morning. Probably call me, 'cause they're so afraid of you."

  I could see the tension release in her shoulders and face.

  "Why're you so worried?" I asked.

  "I don't know. Maybe I just feel guilty."

  "Guilty about what?"

  "Not taking care of our children."

  "Children? Dimitri's twenty-two, and you know Twill was never a child."

  Katrina smiled then, letting go the last of her fear.

  "Go on to bed, honey," I said. "Go to bed and we'll hear from the boys in the morning."

  7

  There are three important furnishings in my den (which sometimes serves as a second office). One is a big black desk where I read and, now and then, brood over my life. Across from the desk, hanging in the center of an otherwise empty white wall, is a small oil painting, Alienated Man, done by the genius Paul Klee. I'd been given the painting, quite recently, by a young woman who taught me, better than my Communist father ever could, that wealth was mostly just a trick of the mind.

  Under the window sits a daybed that can also be used as a couch. I sat there for a while, looking over a dark swath that I knew was the mighty Hudson River.

  Sitting in darkness, I experienced a re-revelation: I didn't want the life I was living; I never had. Home-schooled on Hegel, Marx, and Bakunin until the age of twelve, I--from then on a ward of the state--had gone, continuously, downhill.

  I spent no more than three minutes feeling sorry for my lot. One hundred eighty seconds isn't bad in the wee hours when no one can see you, or hear.

  I thought for a while about the women who populated my night: Katrina, who believed that adult love was either beauty and wealth or else an act of will; Lucy, who was more willing than I had ever been; Wanda Soa was dead; and a woman named Tara wasn't there--or maybe she was Wanda and dead two times. That should be enough for any man. But I wasn't interested in them. All I cared about was Aura Ullman with her Aryan eyes and Ethiopian skin, her natural and deep understanding of what it meant to live under a lawless star.

  I DIDN'T REMEMBER LYING down on the daybed, much less falling asleep. But I was up before the sun. The boys hadn't come in--I would have heard Dimitri's racket if they had.

  I was still clad in the dull-yellow suit.

  I disrobed, hanging the ugly clothes on a standing rack near the door. Then I put on a checkered robe that was older than Dimitri and went down to take a cold-water shower.

  I
start out each case with a cold shower. I find that it modulates my depressive mood and makes up for the sleep I miss almost every night. It hurts down to the bone, but I rarely yell. I just shiver like a wet dog and clench my teeth hard enough to bite through a circus strongman's thumb. After that, nothing seems so bad or insurmountable.

  As Gordo used to tell me, "Life is pain . . . unless you beat it to the punch."

  WE LIVE ON WEST Ninety-first Street. My office is a few miles south, on Thirty-ninth between Sixth and Seventh avenues. I walk to work more days than not--to get out of the house before the false domesticity drowns me. I find that thinking comes easily while moving through the city streets where I had come to manhood.

  The November sun was just threatening to rise when I, once again wearing that yellow suit, turned south on Broadway. The homeless night people were still out, going through the detritus of the night before: searching paper bags and collecting bottles, hording unfinished cigarettes and the odd coin.

  "Hey, brothah," a hale black man dressed all in gray rags said in greeting on Sixty-third and Amsterdam. The street had tempered his body--and cooked his brain.

  I nodded in passing.

  "You know they comin', right?" he said.

  "Who's that?" I asked, slowing.

  "Gubment men with their guns an' fake black skins. You know they take white men and use needle dyes to make 'em look like us and then they loose 'em all up and down here wit' guns an' say we doin' it to ourselves."

  "Yeah," I said. "Sometimes they don't even need the needles and dyes."

  The street messiah smiled at me. His teeth were all there and healthy, yellowed ivory in color and strong. I passed him a twenty-dollar bill and moved along, on my own misguided way.

  MY FATHER'S LESSONS, as long as he stayed around, were good ones. He was a sophisticated man, even though he'd been born in an Alabama sharecropper's shack. Self-taught as he was, he had an outsider's take on knowledge.