I returned to my office, pushed the little bit of paper that was on my desk, made phone calls using a voice that sounded like mine, then returned to the hotel at the end of the day. From there I called Judith's attorney and left my new work number.
Here, now, is where I begin to equivocate, to confess I told no one anything, to squirm my way free. A lawyer can be disbarred in ten minutes for being party to illegal activities, so naturally I considered going to the police, telling all that I knew and letting them sort everything out. But I didn't, really, know what might come of it, except trouble for myself. Poppy had been killed by Lamont, whom I might have shot. Gabriel and Denny, I suspected, were dead, given how violently they'd reacted to Ha's lovely pieces of sushi. Of course, these men had families somewhere. People would want to know what happened to them. But nothing I could say was bringing them back. Moreover, the matter with Marceno and the land was still unresolved. Poppy was dead, and whatever had been scrawled on the HAVANA ROOM napkin was with Jay Rainey. Don't tell nobody, don't tell the police for freaking sake, don't do nothing. This, I reflected, was good advice. Illegal, immoral, unethical, unlawyerly, selfish, cowardly, flat-out wrong, and utterly reprehensible. But excellent advice nonetheless, and I quietly reported for work each morning, eager to lose myself in the business at hand, waiting each hour for the time that Timothy would arrive in the city. Timothy, my boy, my own lost child.
The following Saturday, I saw a small item in the metro section of the Times about one Harold Jones, a New York City rap club owner found next to a Dumpster behind a McDonald's in Camden, New Jersey. This was H.J. He'd last been seen alive in his limousine in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia late the previous Tuesday. Some boys had stolen the limo and joy-ridden it around for several days, H.J. apparently dead in the back, and they were wanted for questioning. I bought the Daily News and the Post to get the whole story. They played it smaller than I expected, probably because he had died out of town and there were no good photos and H.J. wasn't well known, anyway, except among certain black kids who went to his club. He wasn't a musician, didn't produce records. So went the cultural logic. Just a small-time businessman, in fact. Just another fat black guy with a gold watch pretending to be richer than he was. I ended up walking to the newspaper shop at Grand Central Station and buying the Philadelphia papers. The reporting was more detailed, and between all four papers, I could get a lot of the story. But I read that his driver didn't remember him taking any drugs. The paper said toxicology reports were inconclusive. Who knew what he had in his bloodstream at any given time? He'd gotten in his limo after a meeting in midtown, carrying a leather bag, hollered something, and been driven to Philly. Fell asleep in the car, said the driver. The driver got stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike, finally reached Philly, the black neighborhood of Overbrook. Big house, big party. The driver said he'd opened the limo door, swore he saw H.J. sitting in the limo. Soon people were in the back with him. Talking, partying. The limo driver admitted he ended up in a back room for the rest of the night. The limousine itself was found parked on the football field of a high school in Chester, Pennsylvania, a dying industrial town hanging off the underbelly of Philadelphia. How Harold Jones ended up in Camden, New Jersey, and his car twenty miles away in Chester, Pennsylvania, was unknown. The police found "drug paraphernalia" in the backseat of the car as well as "an undisclosed amount of cash." This would have been whatever was left of the extra purchase money I had negotiated for Jay, money originally earned, when you thought about it, by Chilean vineyard laborers thousands of miles to the south. I was surprised any remained at all. One could picture the scene, people finding H.J., a fat bag of cash, loud music outside a house, confusion, hours passing, rumors of a dead man, move the car, yo, not on my property, gimme them keys, move his dead ass someplace else. Which they did.
I studied the papers, feeling odd, sickened all over again. You could say H.J. had brought all this on himself, but then again, he hadn't, for his original motivations were honorable; his grieving aunt had asked him to secure a death settlement for their family. I didn't expect to feel bad about H.J., yet I did.
On the next Monday I reached Allison at work.
"Bill?" she answered warily. "Where are you?"
"You know we have to talk, Allison."
She insisted we not meet at the restaurant, so instead we found each other at the southeast corner of Central Park, across from the Plaza Hotel, and walked down the path to the pond ringed with green benches with IN MEMORY OF plaques on them. She looked good, Allison, fingernails manicured, one black pump in front of the other as she walked, put together, not a care in the world- just as I expected.
"You saw about H.J.?"
Colin Harrison
The Havana Room
She nodded.
"Probably the fish."
"I don't know," she said.
"What happened to Poppy? To his body?"
"I don't know."
"What happened to Denny and Gabriel?"
"Don't know."
"Did I shoot Lamont? I did, didn't I?"
"I couldn't tell. Honestly. I wasn't watching that. You might have just injured him."
"There was a second shot, I think. All that noise…"
"No one heard," she said. "Because of the vacuuming upstairs."
"Who took the second shot?"
"You didn't kill Lamont," she admitted. "He was just injured. He was waving his gun around."
"Someone else shot him? Who?"
She shrugged. I got a feeling.
" You shot him?"
She didn't answer.
"Jesus, Allison."
"It was horrible, that's all I'm going to say."
"Ha? What happened to him?"
"He's gone. Totally gone."
"Moved?"
"Disappeared. His little room at the top of the restaurant is cleaned out. He could be anywhere."
"If they come looking, then he draws the suspicion towards himself."
"Yes, I suppose so. He would think of that."
"What about all the videotapes of people going in and out of the steakhouse? You have all those cameras. Did Ha take the tapes with him?"
"No."
"So there's a record of everyone going into the place last Monday afternoon?"
Allison shook her head. She was composed. She had no worries. "The tapes get automatically erased with a magnet and reused every forty-eight hours. The machine does it by itself unless told not to."
"Days and days past. Erased three times over since then."
She nodded. "Has Jay called you?"
"No."
"I thought he might have."
"Did he leave after I passed out?"
"Yes," she said. "He left."
"I sort of remember him coughing."
"He was coughing."
"Did he say anything, about his daughter, before he left?"
"Not to me," she said, voice tight.
"He just left."
"Yes."
"He got up and walked out?"
"Yes."
"You saw this."
"Ha told me."
"What about H.J.?"
"He climbed the stairs and got out. The staff didn't see him go. Only a few people had showed up and they were in the kitchen. I think he had that limo waiting."
"What about Lamont? He was shot."
But she wasn't saying anything.
"What did you do, lock all the bodies in the Havana Room, open the restaurant like normal, then get rid of everybody after you closed?" I pictured the clientele arriving, the coat check girl collecting her tips, the waiters and cooks, the whole show, Allison coolly running the evening, while down in the Havana Room there were bodies on the floor, including mine.