“And who was Stumpy working for?” I asked. “What was his name?”
“I don’t know. He never said.”
“So it could have been Brighton.”
“Maybe,” Harry said a little helplessly. “But why pretend?”
“You were pretending to talk to Zella.”
“I tried but I just didn’t have the nerve.”
“So what did you tell Stumpy?”
“The first few times I talked to him I said that she still said that she was innocent. And then, after a while, Mr. Brown just stopped calling.”
“He stopped calling and you didn’t get suspicious?”
“About what? He got Minnie a good job. I had the money he promised me. We got, we got little Zella. There was nothing to worry about.”
I sat back in the slanted chair perplexed by the muddle the maybe innocent couple sitting before me presented.
“You said that you had a friend at Rutgers,” Minnie said to her husband, “that it was just a coincidence about the robbery.”
“I was half right.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you wouldn’t have let me go see Zella, and then later, when I never went, it was already too late.”
“Why would Stumpy help you adopt Zella’s child?” I asked.
“It’s my baby too.”
“But what did Stumpy get out of that?”
“You sound like you know him,” Minnie said suspiciously.
“What do you want me to call him — Suspect X?”
Her resultant frown was, for me, like that piece of cake that Proust ate before writing his major opus.
There comes a time in the lives of ducks
When a window opens and the hatchling looks up
To see his fat mama bump and sway
Through blades and branches... That was the beginning of a poem my father used to recite to my brother and me to illustrate the power of instinct. That duck’s mama might have been a rolling wheelbarrow or a crafty crow. The duckling will imprint on anything leading forward.
“That’s what people do, boys,” my father would say. “They will follow the leader out of instinct all the while believing that they’re exerting free will.”
I had been following down the wrong trail. The path was set out there in front of me and I was just like that duck, brainwashed by instinct.
“Did Stumpy give you a way to get in touch with him?” I asked Harry.
“No.”
“Do you have an Internet connection?” I asked the executive secretary, Claudia Burns-Quick.
“Yes.”
“The crew that the police think robbed Rutgers was made up of three men,” I said, giving her the names of Bingo and his gang. “While you’re looking do a search on my name over the last few days. I think you’ll see that I’m not lying.”
While she was gone Harry and I tried to have a conversation.
“I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “I mean, did Zell have something to do with the robbery or not?”
“The courts let her go.”
“That might be on some kind of technicality.”
“Might be,” I said, “but isn’t.”
“But you think Mr. Brown did?”
“Did what?”
“Had something to do with the robbery?”
“Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. But the people he was working for most definitely did. Zella was framed and then your wife was hired by the company that got robbed. That’s just too much coincidence.”
“But it’s been years.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it has.”
Harry twisted on the lawn chair, trying to contort his body into some kind of understanding.
“What was it with you and Minnie?” I asked, if only to keep him from breaking his spine.
“What do you mean?”
“You were living with Zella. She was Zella’s friend. How long were you fooling around behind her back?”
“The day she shot me was the first time,” he said, suddenly sober and still. “We were planning to give her a surprise birthday party. Minnie came over and things just got out of hand.”
“All the way to the chapel,” I agreed.
“I know it sounds strange but getting shot like that brought Minnie and me closer. She called at the hospital every day and took me to her mother’s house when I got out. She blamed herself for what happened and I just needed somebody to care.”
There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together, my father used to say,but men and women and their needs are all the same.
Zella the Second wailed piteously. She was standing at the glass door, staring after the only mother she ever knew. Mrs. Braxton was holding the child’s arm, keeping her from running after Minnie.
At any other time the stand-in mother’s heart would have melted, I’m sure. But Minnie was on a mission at that moment. She didn’t even hear the girl’s cries.
“What is it?” Harry asked Minnie.
“All dead, right?” I said.
“A man named Durleth ‘Stumpy’ Brown was found dead this morning in his apartment in Coney Island,” she said.
The stink had finally brought the law into that laundry room.
I looked around the manicured backyard. It seemed so cookie-cutter, so anonymous. For years Minnie, Harry, and Zella’s daughter Zella had been hiding from the wrong thing in that yard. But that day they were visited by the Truth wearing an inexpensive blue suit.
“I don’t understand,” Minnie said.
“You got to get outta here,” I explained. “I don’t know what it is exactly but somebody is killing anyone who had anything to do with that robbery.”
“But we weren’t involved in that,” Harry said.
“You are now.”
49
Trauma changes the way a brain works. If Harry had never been shot by a woman who claimed to love him, he might have decided to go to the police when given the information I provided. But he knew that the law couldn’t help, that he had no proof anyone was after him. He knew that a man could be shot again and again and that no amount of logic or indignation could stop it.
“You should leave this house,” I told them. “Drive to the airport or a bus station and disappear in the night. The people that tried to kill me are professional and connected. They’ll know your license plates and credit card numbers, Teresa Lesser’s address over on Hobart Street, and all the friends that the Quicks, Lessers, Tangelos, and Burnses have ever known.”
“Why should we trust you?” Minnie Lesser asked.
“Did you look me up like I asked?”
She stared, giving a wordless response.
“Then you know that men broke into my house and tried to kill me. You know that I know what I’m talkin’ about. If I wanted to hurt you, that would already have happened.”
“We could call the police,” Minnie argued. “We should call them.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “Call them. Tell them about your changed names and Stumpy Brown, about the heist and why you’re working at Rutgers. That would be better than waiting here for the people who tried to kill me.”
I was trying to scare them.
From the looks on their faces I had succeeded.
“We don’t have any money,” Harry said to his wife.
“What do you want, Mr. McGill?” Minnie asked me.
Minnie was a pretty woman. Not as cute as her husband but sexier. Her features were petite and clear-cut. When she got older she’d seem severe, but not yet.
“I don’t want anything from you, Minnie,” I said. “My trip out here was for Zella. I got the names of the people that adopted her daughter and I was going to ask them to meet her.”
“But you found something else,” she said.