The vestibule at the bottom of the stairs presented a bright green door that opened immediately.
I was assailed by Sinatra and cigarette smoke, careless laughter and bright lights.
“Mr. McGill,” Tyrell Moss said in greeting.
Tyrell was a tall multi-racial man. Hispanic and black, Asian and some form of Caucasian — he was powerfully built and forever young. He was maybe forty, maybe older, but his smile was that of the God of Youth on some faraway island that had yet to hear of either electricity or clinical depression.
“Moss, man,” I said.
Behind him was a large room with ceilings at least twenty-five feet high. There were small pale yellow tables everywhere and at least eighty patrons. At Leviathan you could smoke cigarettes or cigars, drink absinthe, and it was even rumored that there was an opium den in a back room somewhere.
It was like stepping into an earlier day that never existed.
“I got her set up against the back wall,” Tyrell was saying. “You did invite her, right?”
“Zella?”
“That’s her.”
Walking across the dazzling expanse of Leviathan, I saw many notables. There were no politicians, but their handlers came there to meet and relax; there was a pop star or two; and there were half a dozen bad men with whom I’d done business in the old days.
Zella was wearing the same rayon suit, so I supposed she wouldn’t insult my threads again. She was drinking an amber-colored fluid out of a shot glass. That must have given her great solace after eight years of locked doors and stale water.
“Hey,” I said as I pulled out the chair across from her at the crescent-shaped table.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she replied.
“It means that you’re out of prison, Miss Grisham, and that people don’t use codes or special greetings. It means hello.”
“Then why don’t you say hello?”
I stood up again.
“The drinks are on me, lady. Be my guest. But don’t call again.” I was ready to leave. No use in wasting time on someone who didn’t know how to act on the street, or under it.
“Wait,” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t know you, Mr. McGill, but Breland Lewis says that I should trust you. The problem is that I don’t know him either... but I need, I need to talk to somebody.”
It was a start.
I sat down again.
“What can I do to allay your suspicions?” I asked.
“Do you think I had anything to do with the Rutgers heist?”
“No.”
“What about Lewis?”
“What about him?”
“Is he after that money?”
“I can’t say for sure, but I imagine that someone who knew about framing you had a change of heart and paid him to set you out.”
“Who?”
“I have no idea,” I mouthed.
Zella suspected that I was lying but what could she do? She stared for a dozen seconds or so, and said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you think or him either. It doesn’t because I don’t know anything about any money.”
“Is that why you wanted to meet? To tell me that?”
Distrust and doubt are the first lessons you learn in lockdown. Smiles and kind words mean nothing. Promises and even love are less substantial than toilet paper. Zella couldn’t bring herself to confide in me even though that’s why she’d come to that underground club.
“Hey, Leonid,” a man said.
“Leviticus,” I hailed.
He was maybe five-eight, with the shoulders of a much taller man. His bald head was a pale dome over a shelf-like brow and deep dark eyes. His features were angry, but I’d never seen the bar owner lose his temper.
“Haven’t seen you in years,” he said, looking at me but taking Zella in too.
“It’s a big city and I got commitments in every borough.”
Bowles was wearing an expensive midnight blue silk suit. He looked like a butcher wearing clothes a young mistress bought for him. From his breast pocket he drew out a pack of cigarettes. Before taking one he offered one to Zella. She took the filterless Camel greedily. He waved the pack at me but I shook my head. Then Bowles took one and lit up both himself and my reluctant client.
He took in a deep, grateful breath.
“You’re not here to cause trouble, now are you, LT?” he said before exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“No, sir.”
He smiled and nodded to Zella. Then he walked away, having delivered his message.
“Trouble?” she asked.
“I’m known as a rough-and-tumble kind of guy,” I said. “People like Leviticus try to keep the breakage down to a minimum.”
“Then why let you in in the first place?”
“The kind of trouble I cause can’t be kept out with a locked door.”
“Are you going to be trouble for me?”
“Depends on what you have to ask.”
11
Dean Martin was singing “Amore” and there was laughter from a table of young black gangster wannabes. Zella was halfway through her cigarette and working on a second shot of whiskey. We hadn’t gotten to anything pertinent yet but we’d cleared a few hurdles.
I wasn’t trying to be her friend. It was enough to seem like I wasn’t an enemy. Her cigarette and whiskey helped toward that end. And the fact that I was willing to walk away meant that I had hard feelings of my own. Putting that all together, Zella almost felt almost comfortable enough to speak.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Always. You know I haven’t had a decent meal in almost ten years.”
“Leviathan has great steaks.”
“You know what I thought about every day since they sent me up to Bedford Hills?”
I shook my head, wishing that I could have a cigarette too.
“Two things,” she said. “The most important is that I regret giving up my baby. I delivered her and relinquished all my rights because I thought that I’d be in prison until she grew to be a woman and I didn’t want her to spend her whole childhood waiting for a mother who would never come. I was wrong, and now I want to see her more than anything.
“Can you find my daughter for me, Mr. McGill?”
“Why?” I asked, serious as a judge at the Inquisition.
“I just told you.”
“Wherever this child is now, she’s with the only parents she’s ever known. I can find her, but not if you want to rush in without a meeting with the people who took her in after you gave her up.”
“Yes. Yes, I understand that.”
Zella’s previous beauty was returning. There was color in her face, and the beginning of a certain poise that prison wouldn’t have allowed.
“What’s the second thing?” I asked.
“Harry.”
“Tangelo?”
She nodded, lowering her head as she did so.
“What? You sorry you didn’t kill him?”
“I don’t even remember shooting him in the first place,” she said, raising her head defiantly. “The doctors call it selective amnesia. The trauma of shooting him wiped the memory from my head. The first thing I knew, I was in the police station being questioned by a woman named Ana Craig. She told me what happened.”
“But you must’ve been mad at what he’d done.”
“He didn’t deserve being shot and scared like that. Harry’s a weak man. I can only imagine how he felt when I kept on shooting at him. I’m actually glad that Minnie hit me... stopped me from killing him.”
“That’s not what you said at the bus station this morning.”
“All I meant was that I was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing. If somebody hadn’t framed me for that heist, the DA would have let me out on diminished capacity.”
“So what do you want to do about Harry Tangelo?”