Trouble Is What I Do Read online

  That night I locked and barricaded the door to my bedroom and cried. I wept and threw tantrums, sulked, and slowly came to the decision to take my own life. I have no doubt that I would have committed this mortal sin if there hadn’t come a knocking on the door leading to the private patio that overlooks the summer garden. Catfish had somehow dragged himself from the alley and climbed up the trellis. He was bruised, battered, and bleeding. His left eye was severely damaged. It never healed. When I saw him, I knew that God was telling me not to commit a crime but to rectify one. While I washed his wounds and gave him what succor I could, my father came to the door and pounded on it, probably with the same cane that he almost killed my teacher, my lover, with. I yelled that I would not let him in and furthermore I would be leaving for London to stay with my aunt, Alice Heath. The words came from my mouth like Athena from Zeus’s brow—wisdom born of pain.

  Catfish had fever for five days. I only accepted food from our young maid, Minerette, Archer’s daughter. Through her I got bandages and other medical supplies and solidified plans to leave the country. Using monies left in trust for me by my suffragette grandmother, I paid for our passage and left the house through the same window Catfish used to come to me.

  My love for Philip Worry only grew stronger over that period. He spoke no word against my father because he preferred to suffer that beating rather than to kill the father of the woman who carried his child.

  He was married. He loved his wife, Ernestine, with a passion that only comes once in a lifetime. He wrote her saying that he’d fallen ill and that his employer brought him to England for medical treatment. He stayed for the birth so that he could take our child home to Mississippi. He knew how difficult it would be for a colored child to stay in my world.

  When Charles Augustus was born, he had white skin. I was overjoyed, but Catfish told me that Negro children often get their color in the weeks after their birth. But our son had blue eyes like so many of my kin and his skin darkened but a little. I convinced Catfish that a child that looked like ours would fare better in my world. He didn’t agree but told me that he would never take a child from its mother. I named our son Sternman after our family and looked forward to keeping something of the man I loved in his progeny.

  And so, my female heir, I write this letter in case I don’t make it to your birth. It is the women who carry the bloodline. It is the women who hold the family secrets. And so I say to you, Granddaughter, you are the descendant of the men and women who shed blood, sweat, and tears on this land, all of those people. As you know, I have written this note on the back sheet of Susana Allan’s journal. This document is unknown to the general public and therefore proof of my claims. I give you the truth and only ask that you look into your heart and know who you are.

  Lucinda Pitts-Sternman

  I reread the letter six times. The paper’s color, once cream, now tended toward brown, but still it was quite durable. I assumed it was made from rag and not wood, probably linen. It had been cut along the side, lending credibility to the claim that it came from some ancient journal. The language that the honored ancestor used was definitely English, but with the exception of a few words, it was not immediately clear what she’d been writing about. At some other time, I would have spent the day at the Forty-Second Street library explicating the content. But I had orders straight from Ernie Eckles, and so the luxury of intellectual curiosity would have to wait.

  My phone browser told me that Lucinda Pitts-Sternman died in a car accident on Long Island in 1969. Her blue-eyed son was raised by his grandfather, Norferd Joseph Sternman—the man who blinded Catfish’s left eye.

  The child grew into an industrialist who didn’t seem to care much about his unknown origins. Charles and his wife, Elizabeth Falsworth, had a daughter named Justine. Elizabeth had died of a heart attack not long after her daughter’s birth.

  Twill and Lamont were sitting at Twill’s station in the hall of desks. Lamont was dark-skinned, but my son was nearly black—being the offspring of a Malian diplomat whom my blond-haired, blue-eyed wife had fancied. I knew from my own experience that Lucinda Sternman’s claim of having a white son from an interracial coupling could well be true.

  “Where’s Mr. Worry?” I asked the young men.

  “Up in front with Mardi,” Twill said.

  “Yeah, up front,” Lamont added.

  I found my moral anchor and Catfish sitting at the small round table Mardi bought at a street flea market. She said it was something to put water on if a client got thirsty while waiting for me. She’d made coffee and brought out chairs for them to sit on.

  When I came through the door, Mardi stood and said, “Would you like coffee, Mr. McGill?”

  She served me and then left us to discuss the case.

  “You read it?” Catfish asked when we were alone.

  “You knew Justine’s grandmother as a young man?”

  “Lamont nor nobody else don’t know nuthin’ ’bout it. I mean, he knows I got a letter from a rich white lady to give to her granddaughter, but that’s all.”

  “Because of Ernestine?”

  Catfish looked down and shook his head.

  “I loved Ernestine somethin’ fierce,” he said. “And she did me. We stayed together till she died six years past. But still, I had never known a white woman like Lucinda. She could play blues and drank whiskey, laugh like a lark sangin’ and she didn’t care one whit about color. I knew better than to mess wit’ her, but what we know an’ what we do ain’t always the same thing.”

  “How old are you, Mr. Worry?”

  “Ninety-four last November.”

  “And when did you meet Lucinda?”

  “Nineteen and forty-nine in the early summer.”

  “After all this time, why do you feel that you need to deliver this letter to your granddaughter?”

  “I’m agin it,” the old man said with emphasis.

  “Then why do it? I mean, I didn’t see anything in there that would benefit her, her father, her fiancé, or their children.”

  “I believe you, Mr. McGill. You right. But I promised Lu that if our son had a daughter, I’d deliver that there note before she had a child of her own.”

  “But you don’t even know what she says.”

  “An’ I don’t wanna know. A woman got the right to pass on whatever wisdom she want to her girl-chirren. A man got the same right with his sons.”

  The coffee was good. It went well with the ancient bootleg liquor still flitting around my taste buds.

  “But Mr. Worry—”

  “Call me Catfish.”

  “Catfish. Why do you feel that you had to ask me to pass along this letter? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll do it, if only because I owe Ernie a debt, but, you know, a man doesn’t want to walk into something that might not be what it seems.”

  Strains of guitar music came through the door to the office proper.

  Catfish Worry looked me in the eye, and I was glad to have asked the question. I was reminded that you didn’t need to know how to read to be smart enough to engage in subterfuge.

  “I should’a done what Lu aksed me to do,” the bluesman admitted. “Just followed Justine around until I could get her alone somewhere an’ give her what her grandmother wrote. But on the way, I got the desire to see my son. I mean, you see, Mr. McGill, I been all ’round this world. I played blues on the beach of the Pacific Ocean and in a club in Berlin not a mile from where Adolf Hitler kilt his wife an’ his dog.… Somewhere along the way, I realized that skin color or jest the idea of some kinda race is a sickness comin’ from the guilt and the fear of white men an’ women. They know they wrong, but they jest cain’t change up.”

  “And that has to do with your son?” I asked.

  “My son think he a white man. He went to Harvard for a education and flew to China on his own supersonic plane. They say he hate black peoples, but I know that that’s because I left him an’ his mama. I left him ignorant of who he is, an’ now he hate hisself an�
�� don’t even know it.”

  “So you went to tell him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “He my son, my flesh and blood.”

  A strong male voice accompanied the blues guitar that reverberated through the inner office door. The voice sang a few words and then cut off.

  “What did he say?” I asked. “Your son?”

  Catfish regarded me with sincere regret in his eye. He shook his head again, made as if he was going to stand up and walk out rather than to confess his stupidity.

  “He threatened to have me killed.” There was a note of incredulity in Worry’s voice.

  “Killed?” The concept was a surprise and it wasn’t.

  “I think he might’a done it right there, but we were in the public space down on the first floor of his buildin’. I came up to him and told him my name. Then I said, ‘You might not believe this, but you and me share blood, we related.’ He told me if I ever said that again that he’d have me killed. Then he told his two bodyguards to grab me, but Lamont come up behind an’ laid them low.”

  “Had you ever been in touch with him before?” I asked.

  “No. That was the only time.”

  “Did Lucinda tell him something?”

  “I don’t believe so. I mean, maybe, but I doubt it. She went through so much shit when she got back from England. A unwed mother. No, I’m sure she didn’t tell.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “She wrote me. I got seven letters ovah the years before she died.”

  “But you said you can’t read.” I’m a detective, and a good detective knows that the first person he’s got to investigate is his client.

  “I don’t know how to read. But Pinky do.”

  “Ernie’s mother?”

  “Yeah. She read the letters to me. Lu was careful. She talked about Chuck without sayin’ he was ourn. But now that I think about it, she one time said that she told Chuck that his father was a man different from all the other men he ever known. An’ when he tried to get more, she said that one day, if he had a daughter, she’d be able to tell him the truth on her wedding day.”

  “Damn,” I said. “He’s been waiting for you. He had no idea, but it had to be something that even his mother kept from him.”

  “Now him an’ his girl have dropped outta sight. She stopped goin’ to work at her architecture job, and he haven’t gone to his office at all.”

  “And he probably has a dozen men looking for you and Lamont with pictures from video cameras.”

  “I messed up, Mr. McGill.”

  “And that’s why you need me to deliver the letter to Justine before she says I do.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “The internet says the wedding is in two weeks. On the one hand, it’s just passing a note. On the other, it means negotiating a wall of fire without getting burned.” I stopped there to consider the depth of the job. Then: “Tell me one thing, Catfish.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you planned to do this all on your own, then why would you even need to bring along Ernie’s whiskey?”

  “Pinky made me take it. She knew ’bout the letter. She knew they was rich. And one thing a poor sharecropper understands is that messin’ with rich white people is like tipplin’ poison. She gimme the whiskey and told me what to say jest in case we got in trouble.”

  “Well,” I said. “If I want to survive to drink my whiskey, I guess I’ll have to do my best.”

  “Is your best good enough?”

  “Usually it is.”

  “I’m gone after that rabbit,” Lamont sang behind a driving blues progression on his guitar, “but she don’t wan’ none’a me.”

  He played a few chords.

  “I’m gone after that rabbit,” Twill continued. I had no idea that my favorite son had such a pure voice in him. “She don’t want none’a me.”

  Lamont grinned and strummed a while.

  “They wanna pull my long hair,” Mardi added in a voice that was from another day, another time, “drag me down in infamy.”

  Then the young people broke out in laughter. Catfish walked in among them, slapping his hands together.

  It was at that moment I became committed to Catfish’s cause. It felt as if they’d set music free in the world and, like some invisible alien god, that music was moving us, men and women, to a higher plane.

  “Twill.”

  “Yeah, Pops?”

  “Why don’t you take Catfish and Lamont over to Gordo’s.”

  Mardi pouted and gave a cute grunt to tell anyone who was interested that she was having fun and didn’t want to lose her newfound friends so soon.

  “Tell Gordo,” I continued, “that I would appreciate it very much if he would put our friends up for the next two weeks.”

  “You got it,” Twill said with authority. He was a throwback to a time when young people became adults before the law allowed them to drink.

  “We got our things in a little hotel up in East Harlem,” Catfish insisted.

  “Anything you really need?” I asked.

  “Everything I own.”

  “You could call and have them put it all in storage,” I suggested.

  “That’s my private property, Mr. McGill.”

  “So’s your life, Catfish.”

  “How they gonna know we up in some fleabag in Harlem? No, man, we’ll go to the new place after we get our stuff.”

  I nodded out a few beats to my own internal blues, then said, “Okay. You’d be better not going back there, but all right. Go with Twill and pick up your stuff. But you got to remember—if a man as rich as Sternman is looking for you, you have to make your footprint as small as possible.”

  Catfish squinted in my direction and bobbed his head in understanding.

  “I was after this buck one time in the fall down Mississippi,” he said. “I swear at times it felt like that deer must’a sprouted wings to get away.”

  “You get him?”

  “Not that year. But three seasons later, I come up on ’im in a clearin’. I knew it was him because he had this big black patch on his left haunch. I raised my rifle from behind these bushes. He lifted up his head, but he was only suspicious. I had my finger on the trigger, but I couldn’t shoot. I jest stood there an’ watched him till he finally wandered off.”

  “I doubt if your son will give you the same consideration.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Mardi said to Twill. “Maybe I can help.”

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, I was on the fourteenth floor of a brick office building near Seventy-Second and Broadway. Halfway down the hall, I was assailed by the concussions of a relentless hip-hop beat emanating from the door to my destination. The stenciled words on the oak door read STICKS AND STONES SECURITY SERVICES (SSSS). I pressed a pink button to the right of the door, and the music instantly cut off. A few seconds later, the door swung inward, revealing the short and extremely well-formed Foxy Donk.

  The black-skinned, cherry-red-headed young woman most often maintained a perpetual sneer, daring anyone to challenge her. But when she saw me, she grinned like she must have when she was a child and her father had just come home from work.

  “Hey, Mr. McGill,” she said, and then she hugged me.

  A sweet smell arose from those bright red extensions, and the warmth her body exuded was enough to make a less focused man forget his purpose.

  “Hey, Foxy,” I said. “How you doin’?”

  “Kissin’ frogs and dodgin’ bullets,” she said, letting go and taking half a step backward.

  I laughed, and her smile deepened.

  “Wolfman here?” I inquired.

  “Wolfie!” she shouted to nonexistent bleachers.

  From a long hallway behind her desk, a deep voice bellowed, “What?”

  “Don’t you ‘What?’ me! Mr. McGill out here.”

  The heavy steps down the long hallway were familiar, like a giant’s progress in a child’s nightmare. When he emerged,
I was impressed, as always, at Wolfman Chord’s dimensions and strength. Six six, he weighed just south of 350 pounds. And if any of that was fat, only his lovers would know it. Wolfman’s skin was a deep brass brown, and his face was that of an intelligent, inquisitive child. His biceps were round and hard under a bright blue sports jacket, and the diamond embedded in his left earlobe weighed at least four carats.

  A few years earlier, Chord’s accountant, Lothario Moran, a bespectacled black man from Baltimore, had somehow fixed the security expert’s books so that it looked like he was stealing from his own company. Mr. Chord had come to me to find the fancified accountant so that he could kill him. I explained that even if he managed to kill Moran without getting caught, he’d still be in deep trouble over the embezzlement charges. I got my own CPA, Ernst Kahn, once a Geneva banker, to untangle the fabrications of Lothario. Ernst did a magnificent job. I turned this information over to Carson Kittridge, the most honest cop in New York, and now Lothario is serving between a nickel and a dime at Attica.

  “Leo-nid!” Wolfman shouted.

  “Wolfman.”

  He pumped my hand and slapped my shoulder with such pure force that I automatically began to plan how I would fight him if we were ever to meet in the ring, or some back-alley brawl.

  “What can I do for you, brother?” he announced.

  “Take it back to your playroom and hear me out.”

  The big baby face took on a canny expression and then smiled like a benevolent, deified moon. He turned and I made to follow, but before I could, Ms. Donk touched my arm.

  “Drop by and say hello before you go, baby,” she said.

  I nodded, then took half a dozen quick steps to catch up to her boss.

  The passageway leading from Foxy’s receptionist’s area was unadorned and narrow, topped off by a low ceiling. It was more like a tunnel in a coal mine than a foyer on the fourteenth floor of a Manhattan office building. We had to walk single file, also like miners. Behind me, Foxy’s hip-hop cranked up again. After maybe a dozen steps, that sound began to morph into something that sounded like Bach. Another dozen steps and we had made it to Wolfman’s den, what someone might have called an office if they didn’t mind using the term loosely.