Karma Page 3

  He called Gert again, but she still wasn’t answering.

  IT WAS A small office on the third floor above a two-story Japanese restaurant called Gai. There was no elevator, so Leonid took the stairs. Just those twenty-eight steps winded him. If Norman had fought back at all, Leonid realized, he would be broken and broke.

  The receptionist weighed less than ninety-eight pounds fully dressed, and she was nowhere near fully dressed. All she had on was a black slip trying to pass for a dress and flat paper sandals. Her arms had no muscle. Everything about the girl was preadolescent except her eyes, which regarded the bulky PI with deep suspicion.

  “Richard Mallory,” Leonid said to the brunette.

  “And you are?”

  “Looking for Richard Mallory,” Leonid stated.

  “What business do you have with Mr. Mallory?”

  “No business of yours, honey. It’s man-talk.”

  The young woman’s four-ounce jaw hardened as she stared at Leonid.

  He didn’t mind. He didn’t like the girl; dressed so sexy and talking to him as if they were peers.

  She picked up a phone and whispered a few angry words, then walked away from her post into a doorway behind her chair, leaving Leonid to stand there at the waist-high barrier-desk. In the mirror on the wall Leonid could see through the window behind his back and out onto Madison Avenue. He could also see the swelling on the right side of his head where Norman had hit him.

  A few moments later the tall man with a sparse mustache strode out. He wore black trousers and a tan linen jacket and the same uncomfortable expression he had in the photograph in Leonid’s pocket.

  Leonid hated him, too.

  “Yes?” Richard Mallory said to Leonid.

  “I’m looking for Richard Mallory,” Leonid said.

  “That’s me.”

  The PI took a deep breath through his nostrils. He knew that he had to calm down if he wanted to do his job right. He took another, deeper, breath.

  “What happened to your jaw?” the handsome young man asked the amateur boxer.

  “Edema,” Leonid said easily. “Runs on my father’s side of the family.”

  Richard Mallory was stymied by this. Leonid thought that he probably didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  “I want to talk business with you, Mr. Mallory. Something we can both make money on.”

  “I don’t see what you mean,” Mallory said with the blandest of bland expressions on his face.

  Leonid produced a card from his breast pocket. It read:

  VAN DER ZEE DOMESTICS AND IN-HOME SERVICE AIDES

  Arnold DuBois, Agent

  “I don’t understand, Mr. DuBois,” Mallory said, using the French pronunciation of McGill’s alias.

  “Du-boys,” Leonid said. “I represent the Van Der Zee firm. We’re just establishing ourselves here in New York. We’re from Cleveland originally. What we want is to get our people in as domestics, care for the aged, dog walkers, and nannies in the upper-crust buildings. All of our people are highly presentable and professional. They’re bonded, too.”

  “And you want me to help you get in?” Mallory asked, still a little leery.

  “We’ll pay fifteen hundred dollars for every exclusive presentation you get us in for,” Leonid said. By now he had forgotten his dislike of the receptionist and Mallory. He wasn’t even mad at Norman anymore.

  The mention of fifteen hundred per presentation (whatever that meant) moved Dick Mallory to action.

  “Come with me, Mr. DuBois,” he said, pronouncing the name the way Leonid preferred.

  The real estate agent led the fake employment agent down a hall of cubicles inhabited by various other agents.

  Mallory took Leonid to a small conference room and closed the door behind them. There was a round pine table that had three matching chairs. Mallory gestured and they both sat down.

  “Now, what is it exactly that you’re saying, Mr. DuBois?”

  “We have a young girl,” Leonid said. “A pretty thing. She sets up a small table in the entry hall of any building you say. She talks to the tenants about all the various types of in-home labor they might need. Somebody might want an assistant twice a week to help with filing and shopping. Or they might already have an assistant but still need somebody to walk their pets when they’re away. Once somebody hires one of our people, we’re confident they will hire others as needs arise. All we need is your okay to install the young lady and we pay you fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “For every building I get you into?”

  “Cash.”

  “Cash?”

  Leonid nodded.

  The young man actually licked his lips.

  “If you can guarantee us a lobby in an upscale building, I can pay you as early as tonight,” Leonid said.

  “Does it have to be that soon?”

  “I’m an agent on commission for Van Der Zee Enterprises, Mr. Mallory. In order to make a profit I have to produce. I’m not the only one out here trying to make contacts. I mean, you can call me whenever you want, but if you can’t promise me a lobby by the end of today, then I will have to go further down my list of contacts.”

  “But—”

  “Listen,” Leonid said, cutting off any logic that Richard Mallory might have brought to bear. He reached into his pocket and brought out three one-hundred-dollar bills. These he placed on the table between them. “That’s one-fifth up front. Three hundred dollars against you finding me one lobby that I can send Arlene to tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow—”

  “That’s right, Richard. Van Der Zee Enterprises will give me control over the whole Manhattan operation if I’m the first one to bring in a lobby.”

  “So I get to keep the money?”

  “With twelve hundred more coming to you at eight this evening if you have a lobby set for me.”

  “Eight? Why eight?”

  “You think you’re the only guy I’m talking to, Richard? I have four other meetings set up this afternoon. Whoever gets to me when it’s all done, at eight o’clock, will get at least part of the prize. Maybe he’ll get the whole thing.”

  “But I have a date tonight—”

  “Just call me on the phone, Richard. Tell me where you are and I’ll bring you the money and the letter confirming to the super that Arlene can set up her table.”

  “What letter?”

  “I hope you don’t think I’m going to be handing you fifteen hundred dollars a week in cash without getting a letter to the super to show my boss,” Leonid said blandly. “Don’t worry, we won’t mention the money, just that Van Der Zee can set up in the lobby, offering our services.”

  “But what if somebody complains?”

  “You can always tell your bosses that you were thinking on your own, trying to offer a service. They won’t know about the money changing hands. At the very worst we’ll be thrown out, but that’ll take a couple’a days, and Arlene is very good at handing out those brochures.”

  “That’s fifteen hundred in cash a week?”

  “Twice that if we can find another Arlene and you can hook us up like I been told.”

  “But I’m going to be out tonight,” Mallory complained.

  “So? Just call me. Give me the address. And I’ll drop by with the form. We’re talkin’ ten minutes for twelve hundred dollars.”

  Richard fingered the money. Then he tentatively picked it up.

  “I can just take this?”

  “Take it. And take the rest tonight, and then that much again once a week for the next four or five months.” Leonid grinned.

  Richard folded the money and put it in his pocket.

  “What’s your phone number, Mr. DuBois?”

  LEONID CALLED HIS WIFE and told her to have his brown suit ready and pressed by the time he got home.

  “Am I your maid now?” she asked.

  “I got the rent and the expenses here in my pocket,” Leonid growled. “All I’m asking from you is a little cooperation
.”

  The private eye then called his cell phone service. When the voice on the line said to record a new message, Leonid said, “Hello. This is Arnold DuBois, employment manager for Van Der Zee Enterprises. At the tone leave me what you got.”

  WHEN HE GOT HOME he found the suit folded on the bed and Katrina gone. Alone in the house, he drew a bath and poured himself a glass of ice water. He wanted a cigarette but the doctors had told him his lungs could barely take New York air.

  He sat back in the old-fashioned tub, turning the hot water on and off with his toes. His jaw ached and he was almost broke again. But still, he had a line on Richard Mallory, and that made the detective happy.

  “At least I’m good at what I do,” he said to no one. “At least that.”

  AFTER THE BATH Leonid called Gert again. This time the phone rang and rang with no interruption. That was very odd. Gert had it set up so that her service picked up when she was on the line.

  Sometimes he didn’t talk to Gert for months at a time. She had made it clear that they could never be intimate again. But he still felt something for her. And he wanted to make sure that she was okay.

  WHEN LEONID GOT to Gert’s, near four, he found the downstairs door had been wedged open.

  Her front door was crisscrossed with yellow police ribbon.

  “You know her?” a voice asked.

  It was a small woman standing at a doorway down the hall. She was old and gray and wore gray clothes. She had watery eyes and mismatched slippers. There was a low-grade emerald ring on the index finger of her right hand, and the left side of her mouth lagged just a bit.

  Leonid noticed all of this in a vain attempt to work away from the fear growing in his stomach.

  “What happened?”

  “They say he must’a come in last night,” the woman said. “It was past midnight, the super says. He just killed her. Didn’t steal anything. Just shot her with a gun no louder than a cap pistol, that’s what they said. You know, you’re not safe in your own bed anymore. People out here just get some crazy idea in their head and you find yourself dead with no rhyme or reason.”

  Leonid’s tongue went dry. He stared at the woman so intensely that she stopped rambling, backed into her apartment, and closed the door. He leaned against the doorjamb, dry-eyed but stunned.

  Leonid had never cried. Not when his father left home for the revolution. Not when his mother went to bed and never came out again. Never.

  THERE WAS A different bartender serving drinks at Barney’s Clover that afternoon. A woman with faded blue-green tattoos on her wrists. She was thin and brown-eyed, white, and past forty.

  “What you have, mister?”

  “Rye whiskey. Keep ’em comin’.”

  HE WAS ON the sixth shot when his cell phone sounded. The ring had been programmed by his son Twill. It started with the sound of a lion’s roar.

  “’lo?”

  “Mr. DuBois? Is that you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Richard Mallory. Are you sick, Mr. DuBois?”

  “Hey, Dick. Sorry I didn’t recognize you. I got some bad news today. An old friend of mine died.”

  “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

  “It was a long illness,” Leonid said, finishing the shot and gesturing for another.

  “Should I call you later?”

  “You got me a lobby, Dick?”

  “Um, well, yes. A fairly large building on Sutton Place South. The super is a friend of mine and I promised him five hundred.”

  “That’s the way to do business, Dick. Share the wealth. That’s what I’ve always done. Where are you?”

  “It’s a Brazilian place on West Twenty-six. Umberto’s. On the second floor, between Sixth and Broadway. I don’t know the exact address.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll get it from information. See you about nine. Looks like we’re gonna be doing some business, you and me.”

  “Okay, um, all right. I’m sorry about your loss, Mr. DuBois. But please don’t call me Dick. I hate that name.”

  UMBERTO’S WAS an upscale restaurant on a street filled with wholesalers of Indian trinkets, foods, and clothing. Leonid sat across the street in his 1963 Peugeot.

  It was after ten and Leonid was drinking from a pint bottle of bourbon in the front seat. He was thinking about when he had first met Gert, about how she knew just what to say.

  “You’re not such a bad man,” the sultry New Yorker had said. “It’s just that you been making your own rules for so long that you got a little confused.”

  They spent that night together. He really didn’t know that she’d be upset about Katrina. Katrina was his wife, but there was no juice there. He remembered the hurt look on Gert’s face when she finally found out. After that came the cold anger she treated him with from then on.

  They’d remained friends, but she would never kiss him again. She would never let him into her heart.

  But they worked well together. Gert had been in private security for a dozen years before they met. She enjoyed his shady cases, as she called them. Gert didn’t believe that the law was fair, and she didn’t mind getting around the system if that was the right thing to do.

  Maybe Joe Haller didn’t rob Amberson’s, but he’d beaten and humiliated both men and women pursuing his perverse sexual appetites.

  Leonid wondered if Nestor Bendix could have had something to do with Gert’s killing. But he’d never told anyone her name. Maybe Haller got out and somehow traced his problem back to her. Maybe.

  A lion roared in his pocket.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. McGill? This is Karma.”

  “Hey. I’m on the case. He is on a date but I haven’t seen her yet. I’ll have the pictures for you by tomorrow afternoon. By the way, I had to lay out three hundred to get this address.”

  “That’s all right, I guess,” she said. “I’ll pay for it if you can bring me proof about his girlfriend.”

  “All right. Let me off now. I’ll call you when I have something for sure.”

  As soon as Leonid folded his phone shut, a colony of monkeys began chattering.

  “Yeah?”

  “You knew Gert Longman, didn’t you?” Carson Kitteridge asked.

  Ice water filled Leonid’s lower intestine. His rectum clenched.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You asked me if I knew someone and I told you. Yeah. We were close there for a while.”

  “She’s dead.”

  Leonid remained silent for a quarter face-sweep of his Timex’s second hand. That was long enough to seem as if he was shocked by the news.

  “How did it happen?”

  “Shot.”

  “By who?”

  “A man wielding a long-barreled .22 pistol.”

  “Do you have a suspect?”

  “That’s the kinda pistol you like to use, isn’t it, Leon?”

  For a moment Leonid thought that the lieutenant was just blowing smoke, trying to get under his skin. But then he remembered a gun that he’d lost. It was seventeen years before. Nora Parsons had come to him scared to death that her husband, who was out on bail before sentencing in his embezzlement trial, was going to come kill her. Leonid had given her his pistol, and after her husband, Anton, was sentenced, she’d told him that she was afraid to have the pistol in the house, so she threw it into a lake.

  It was a cold piece. Nothing to it.

  “Well?” Detective Kitteridge asked.

  “I haven’t owned a gun in twenty years, man. And even you can’t think that I’d use my own piece if I wanted to kill somebody.”

  But still he thought he might give Nora Parsons a call. Maybe.

  “I’d like you to come in for voluntary questioning, Leon.”

  “I’m busy right now. Call me later,” Leonid said and then he disconnected the call.

  He didn’t want to be so rude to a member of New York’s finest but Richard was coming out of the front door
of Umberto’s Brazilian Food. He was accompanied by the haughty receptionist from the real estate company. Now she was wearing a red slip and black pumps with a gossamer pink shawl around her bare shoulders. Her hair was up.

  Richard glanced around the street, probably looking for Mr. DuBois, then hailed a cab.

  Leonid turned over the engine. He watched as a cab swooped down to pick them up. The driver wore a Sikh turban.

  They went up to Thirty-second Street, headed east over to Park and then up to the seventies.

  They got out at a building with a glass door and two uniformed guards.

  Almost if they were posing, the two stopped on the street and entwined in a long soul kiss. Leonid had been taking photographs since he’d hung up on the cop. He had shots of the taxi’s numbers, the driver, the front of the building, and the couple talking, holding hands, dueling tongues, and grasping at skin.

  They reminded Leonid of Gert, of how much he wanted her. And now she was dead. He put down his camera and bowed his head for a moment. When he raised up again Richard Mallory and the receptionist were gone.

  “YOU AWAKE?” Leonid whispered in bed next to Katrina.

  It was early for him, only one-thirty. But she had been asleep for hours. He knew that.

  In the old days she was always out past three and four. Sometimes she wouldn’t come in till the sun was up—smelling like vodka, cigarettes, and men.

  Maybe if he had left her and gone to Gert. Maybe Gert would still be alive.

  “What?” Katrina said.

  “You wanna talk?”

  “It’s almost two.”

  “Somebody I been working with the last fifteen years died tonight,” Leonid said.

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I’m sad.”

  For a few moments Leonid listened to her hard breath.

  “Will you hold hands with me?” the detective asked his wife.

  “My hands hurt,” she said.

  For a long time after that he lay on his back, staring at the darkness before the ceiling. There was nothing he could think that did not damn him. There was nothing he had done that he could remember with pride.

  Maybe an hour later Katrina said, “Are you still up?”