She went through, obviously expecting me to follow.
I did.
The first thing you noticed about Antoinette Lowry’s office was how small it was; eight feet wide and only a dozen paces from the entrance to the window wall. This window would have given the illusion of space if it didn’t look directly into another office building across the way. The street separating Rutgers from its neighbor was small and so it seemed as if the woman sitting at the desk next door could have reached out and touched Antoinette’s shoulder if she wanted to. This intimacy added to the closeness of the investigator’s work space.
Antoinette’s desk was only wide enough to have a top drawer, and there was no other furniture except for a walnut chair that she gestured at while swaying sideways to pass through the narrow space between her desk and the wall.
We both sat and took a moment to regard each other in the coffin-like booth of an office.
Antoinette was in her early thirties. Her face was handsome but hard, the kind of look that had to grow on you. In a certain light, after a good conversation (or a couple of drinks), you might suddenly come to think her fetching. She had skin nearly as dark as mine and intuitive eyes. There was the mild patina of a sneer on her lips. I wondered if this expression was normal or if she brought it out especially for people like me.
“You’re here representing Zella Grisham?” Antoinette asked.
“She called to tell me that you got her fired and tried to make her homeless.”
“She’s a criminal. She should be in prison.”
This brazen claim raised my eyebrows.
“I knew corporate America had its own private police force,” I said, “but I didn’t realize that they now have commoditized the justice system too.”
“You get that kind of talk from your Communist father,” she replied, “Tolstoy McGill.”
If she meant to impress me she succeeded.
“So it’s not only Zella you’re hounding.”
“I’m investigating the robbery of fifty-eight million dollars from my employer,” she said. “Fifty-eight million, that’s a lot of money.”
“Water under the bridge.”
“Sheikh al-Tariq gave us that money to assure the delivery of a certain portion of one of his father’s oil tankers would reach Houston,” she said. “Rutgers had to eat the loss. So if they want me searching down the river and to the sea, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And if you show up on my screen, I will use all the resources at my command to follow you.”
“Are you threatening me, Ms. Lowry?”
“Merely telling you what I’m doing and what I intend to do. If, along the way, I find that you’re involved in some chicanery or mischief, I will use that knowledge to achieve my ends.”
“Chicanery? Where in the South are you from, girl?”
“I will hound Zella Grisham until either she dies or I do. And I will do the same for you, Mr. McGill.”
“Unless?”
The sneer morphed into wan complicity.
“If the company’s money is restored, the hunt will be over.”
“This is a mighty small office to be issuing such large edicts,” I said.
“The full weight of Rutgers is behind me.”
The woman through her window was white, in her twenties, nearly bald, with dark blue or maybe even black lipstick. This image and Antoinette’s words elicited my smile.
“Zella was framed,” I said. “The judge was convinced of that; that’s why she vacated the sentence.”
“Judge Malcolm lifted the sentence because we didn’t oppose that decision.”
“And you didn’t because you felt that on the outside Zella might lead you to her confederates.”
“I’m looking at you, Mr. McGill. NYPD files have you involved with everything from embezzlement to armed robbery.”
Wow. I wondered if this private cop could succeed where Carson Kitteridge had failed.
“But,” Antoinette added, “if you help us retrieve our losses, we can offer a one and a half percent reward on all monies returned.”
“That’s a lotta money.”
“What do you say?”
I sat back and watched the bald white girl laugh at what someone was saying on the phone.
“My father told me one time that corporations have the rights of citizens but that they are not organic creatures. And so Rutgers doesn’t have the capability of feeling like it has to protect its biological appendages. That said, Ms. Lowry, do not believe that you are safe from the forces unleashed by this... campaign.”
I had to throw down that gauntlet. If somebody wants to threaten you, you have to respond in kind; I learned that lesson not from my father but by raising myself on the streets of New York.
The special investigator took it pretty well. She considered my words, weighed them. But she was tough too.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“In your investigation have you looked into Harry Tangelo and Minnie Lesser?”
“They were considered,” Antoinette said candidly, “and rejected. We believe that Zella had some connection to Clay Thorn. It’s possible that you knew him too.”
Thorn was the guard who was executed during the heist.
“Harry and Minnie are missing,” I said, “have been since before Zella went to trial. That’s strange, don’t you think?”
I could see the suspicion rising in Lowry’s eyes, also the resentment that I could tell her something she didn’t know.
“What’s your interest in them?” she asked.
“I work for the lawyer who got Zella out of hock.”
“Breland Lewis is your lawyer, Mr. McGill. He’s working for you.”
That was my cue to stand. Antoinette had come out a point or two ahead in our competition, but I had learned more about her than she had about me.
“I think I’ll be leaving now, Special Investigator Lowry. If I don’t show up downstairs in a couple of hours, send out a search party. It’s a fuckin’ rat’s nest in here.”
21
On my way uptown on the A train I was thinking about one and a half percent of fifty million. So far Twill was the only operative at my agency bringing in any cash that month.
I was standing in the middle of the crowded car, holding on to a metal pole, when I noticed the blue-and-pink-haired, much tattooed woman standing next to me. She was young and white, flipping through pictures of naked women on her iPad. The moment after I noticed what she was doing she turned her face to me and smiled.
I thought about LeRoi Jones’s play Dutchman and the bug in the carnivorous plant that I imagined while waiting for Antoinette. I smiled back at the young woman and turned away.
I had to have learned something in all my fifty-five years.
Copper-skinned Iran Shelfly was trying to hurt the heavy bag when I came upon him in Gordo’s Gym. He was whaling away on the canvas-covered bale of cotton next to the murky window that looked down on Eighth Avenue.
I watched the thirty-something ex-con throwing body shots like a real pro. I had wanted Iran to work for me as part of my growing firm but he preferred the ambiance of the gym.
I couldn’t blame him.
There were about a dozen men and one woman warming up that afternoon. The formal training sessions would start in an hour.
“Eye,” I said.
He stopped and turned to me, sweat pouring off his forehead. He was wearing a tight yellow T-shirt and red trunks. His hands were wrapped but not gloved, and his smile was infectious.
“Mr. McGill. How you doin’?”
“If I complained, somebody might shoot me.”
“And that would only make you madder.”
“There’s a new tenant at your rooming house,” I said.