Upon entering the dark apartment I heard her ragged breath. Flipping the light switch revealed the young woman, naked and on her haunches, in the corner. There was a hypodermic needle, with a red rubber bulb at the end, lying on the floor between her thighs. She was swaying from side to side, mumbling to herself and breathing like a Greco-Roman wrestler.
In the center of the floor, on a stained white sheet, lay the body of a white man who carried an extra thirty pounds. I knew he was dead by the permanent crease in his left temple; that and the white ceramic box stained with his blood on the sheet next to him. He was on his back. His only article of clothing was a dark green condom.
The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe. I got on my knees next to her and she looked up suddenly.
“Velvet?” I said.
Her fright turned to hazy curiosity.
“Did he attack you?”
“My throat,” she whispered.
She lifted her head and I could see the bluish bruises that told of the fingers strangling her.
“And you hit him with that box?” I asked.
She looked at the body and nodded. This motion pushed her off balance. I moved into half lotus and let her fall into my lap. There she put her arms around my head, as Katrina was wont to do in our rare moments of intimacy.
Just that quickly Velvet was asleep. I wondered if she would die too. That would have made things much easier.
I didn’t need to talk to Velvet Reyes. I had already been informed about her situation — more or less.
“Leonid?” Breland Lewis said on the phone an hour or so earlier.
“Late for you, isn’t it, Bre?” I said lightly, knowing that the weight would soon be coming down.
He explained that a wealthy client of his had a live-in maid who had a daughter with a drug problem. This young woman, Velvet, had called her mother a while before — hysterical. She told about a man inviting her to his apartment and then trying to kill her. She fought him off but now she didn’t know what to do.
Velvet didn’t have to say that the invitation included a monetary transaction or that the john promised some good aitch to sweeten the pot — so to speak.
The facts pretty much spoke for themselves. Maybe he was really going to kill Velvet, maybe not. But he probably said that that was his intention. The bruises proved that he was squeezing hard enough to kill. She grabbed for anything to fight him off with and found the porcelain box. He fell over and she called her mother. Her mother told the rich man, he called Breland, Breland called me, and in the meanwhile Velvet found the dead man’s stash. She used this to blunt the trauma of near death and murder.
With the child (I knew from Breland that she’d just turned twenty) on my lap I fished the cell phone out of my blue jacket pocket and pressed three digits.
“Leonid,” Breland said before I heard a ring.
I explained the situation, and asked, “So what is it exactly that you want from me?”
“I want you to fix it.”
“You know I’m straight now, man. And even when I was bent I didn’t take on jobs like this.”
“Come on, LT. This is for a very important client of mine. And you told me yourself that it looks like self-defense.”
“Then why not call the cops and defend her yourself?”
“It’s complicated.”
I could have pressed him, maybe even talked him out of what he was asking for. But Breland was not only my lawyer, he was a friend. He had been there for me when any other sane man would have walked away.
“I’ll call you back.”
Sitting at the hickory table, listening to Katrina’s snoring in the distance, I thought about the ugly apartment with the dead man and the ravaged young woman. I had been in many rooms like that over the years. That tableau could have been a painting representing my whole previous life when I still hated my father and believed that dealing in darkness was the only way I could survive.
“Yeah?” Hush said on the second ring. It was past three on that Thursday morning. Velvet was still asleep and the nameless corpse was still dead.
“I got a situation here.”
“Where?”
“Yeah, Leonid?” Breland said.
“You got two choices,” I told my lawyer. “Either I call the cops for nothing or you come up with fifty thousand, cash.”
“I can double that and have it in your hands by noon.”
What could I say? I needed that much to get Zella out of hock. I’d lose ten thousand points on my bid for redemption, but no boxer ever won a match without getting hit — except maybe Willie Pep.
“I got somebody on the way,” I said. “It’ll all be cleaned up in an hour.”
It was a sour memory, even more so when I thought of Zella’s response to my offer of help.
That’s when I remembered my advice to Dimitri — It’s a gift, not an investment... I smiled at my own blind insight, and at just that moment my cell phone sang.
10
It was close to midnight, and the caller registered as unknown.
“Hello?” The only reason I answered is because I believed any distraction would be better than the memories threading through my brain.
“Mr. McGill?”
“Zella?”
“Yes. Can you talk?”
“Sure. Talk.”
“I mean, in person.”
“Okay. Come to my office tomorrow at ten. That’s in the Tesla—”
“I meant now.”
“It’s eleven fifty-seven.”
“You don’t sound asleep.”
Recently released convicts don’t live in the workaday world, not at first. They’ve been locked up in a box, and the shock of freedom breaks all rules. Zella had a problem and a phone, so why not call the only man she knew?
“There’s a place in the East Village called Leviathan...” I said.
I gave her the address and a few special instructions. She made me repeat the directions and agreed to meet there in an hour’s time.
I took a three-minute cold shower, donned a blue suit identical to the one I wore that day, and checked to see that Katrina was still on her belly. After all that I skipped down the ten flights to the street, feeling like a kid having received a reprieve from summer school.
Leviathan was one of the most secret late-night bars in Manhattan. Three floors underground, it was reputed to be a Mafia bomb shelter in the mid-fifties. The bartender/owner was named Leviticus Bowles, though his mother had christened him Eugene.
Leviticus was a born-again ex-con who acquired the deed and keys from a cell mate, Jimmy Teppi, at Attica before that prison was world-renowned. Legend has it that young Leviticus had had Jimmy’s back during some hard times and the mobster was grateful.
Jimmy died not long after the uprising. Mr. Bowles took this as a sign to make a life that kept him away from wardens and prison yards, rancid breath and unrestrained manhood.
Leviathan was beneath a Chinese restaurant equipment store on Bowery. The upper floors of the building were apartments. There was a locked door, with various buttons for the residents. One of these buttons had the name L. Bowles scrawled next to it.
I pressed the button and few moments later a voice said, “Yes?”
“Jimmy T,” I said clearly.
The lock clicked open, and I walked down a narrow hallway, past the stairs that led to the upper-floor apartments, to a doorway that had an electric eye above it.
I looked up at the lens, and the door came open. Three steps in and I found myself at the precipice of one hundred and seventy-two stairs that coiled down into darkness. This spiral was dank and ominous. You knew that you were leaving the world of city-granted licenses and state-enforced regulations.