Shadow of a Thief Page 5

  “Eshu,” the Babalao said. “The messenger spirit. He loves tobacco, and the cigar was really just a polite way of asking for his help. You think you can stand up, if I help you?”

  “Yeah,” Corey said. “If I take it nice and slow.” He leaned forward, levered himself up onto one knee. “Why did I pass out?”

  “Well, from the Western perspective,” the Babalao said, “it’s late, you’re tired, you’re under a lot of stress. And maybe your brain don’t care for cheap cigar smoke.”

  Corey got the rest of the way to his feet, held on to the Babalao’s shoulder with one hand, brushed the little pebbles off his butt with the other. “Yeah, okay. But what really happened?”

  “Eshu came, and he brought someone with him. Oshun, who, I gotta say, would not have been my first choice, if it was up to me.”

  “Why not? Who is . . .”

  “Oshun. The cardinal female, you might say. Divine, but unstable. And she’s got some temper. I don’t think she liked you.”

  “Great. Are you kidding me?”

  “Don’t take it personal. She threw out her first husband because he drank the wrong kind of beer. Listen, I gotta say, this might be unprofessional and shit, but you are in some kinda shape, my brother. You an athlete?”

  “College boxing team,” Corey said. “Oshun, you said. A goddess? Do you really buy that?”

  The Babalao shrugged. “ ‘Goddess’ is your word, not mine. Think of it this way: The fifth fundamental force can express itself in whatever form it chooses. Questions like why and how are not really relevant to you and me, because we ain’t got the software to understand the answers. Eshu, Oshun, and the rest are just part of a metaphor the ancients used to try to understand something they could feel but never see. Let’s get you dressed, my brother, ’cause you got things to do before the sun rises. You still having trouble with this? Sometimes you just gotta roll with it. Know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Tell you something a priest said, long time ago. ‘The eye with which you see God is the same eye with which he sees you.’ Aniri, give a brother some help, will ya? Make him put his pants on . . .”

  Chapter Three

  The sun always seems brighter in Manhattan, voices are louder, the women are thinner, tougher, and have longer hair, even the taxis are painted a harsher shade of yellow. The midtown streets are a carnival ride, a freak show, a living episode of Survivor, a glittering, roiling stew of consumers and all the shit they chase. And everything that you own, owns you, believe it, my brother, but try selling that one around this town.

  I missed the Batshitmobile . . .

  I felt like a hermit crab without his borrowed shelter. The commuters flooding through the doors of the Port Authority bus terminal ignored me with practiced scorn. I was not one of them. I don’t know if that mattered, because I think they would have still pretended not to see me even if I wore the right uniform, the right scowl, the right air of resigned fatalism. Suits, ties, umbrellas, briefcases, iPhones, newspapers, those were the marks of the real native here. I had only a knapsack, and I was appalled at how uncomfortable that made me. I had grown too used to my portable refuge, I felt incomplete without a place to hide. I’d shed most of what I’d accumulated up north, all the stuff that had grown on me like barnacles on a ship. I was now without most of my hair, my Jeep, a home of sorts, not to mention the loss of that fleeting touch of serenity that had seemed just beyond my reach for all those months, and I’d given it all up for the promise of material profit. Seemed like a lousy bargain. We predators, we need our dark inner rooms, too. I was comforted somewhat, as I looked around, because I was pretty sure my fellow travelers had made similar bargains. They had exchanged the most precious commodity they had, their time, for stuff they probably didn’t even care about all that much, like an Italian suit, a German car, or a South American girlfriend.

  A wino sat in a corner and watched us flow past with thinly disguised amusement.

  Yeah, who’s the schmuck now?

  I was pretty close to broke. The tin can burned through a lot of gas on her voyage south, and Porter had to get his, too. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, what a lousy businessman I was. Any prostitute will tell you how important it is to get the money first. I had Mac’s ATM card in my pocket, and nothing but his word that it was worth anything at all.

  Fortunately for me, the Barbadian bank where McClendon had hidden his seed money had a branch on Lexington Avenue, so I shouldered my bag and headed in that direction. It seemed half a lifetime ago that I lived in this city, and most of that time I lived in Brooklyn, which always felt warmer to me, friendlier. But it’s the people you remember, not the geography. I’d been lucky in Brooklyn, back in the day. Met the right people. If I’d run into the wrong ones instead, things could have gone the other way just as easily.

  I walked into the bank with some trepidation. Knowing Mac, I didn’t expect things to be straightforward; with him there always seemed to be some English on the ball, but when I sat down with a bank officer, it turned out to be exactly that easy. The money was, indeed, on deposit and available to me. Yes, all of it. I considered putting it all into a new account, one that didn’t have McClendon’s name on it, but in the end, after making some financial arrangements with the bank, I left most of it where it was.

  On my way out of the bank I thought I saw a reflection in the glass door; one of the tellers was looking at me with that same odd look on her face, that same crooked mix of leer and knowing smile that Frank Porter’s mother had used, but when I looked around, she turned away.

  Must have been my imagination. Get a grip, will you, I told myself. Nobody’s paying any attention to you . . .

  I wandered downtown, stopped at a sidewalk café, and sat down. I took out the prepaid cell I’d picked up at the truck stop, punched in the number that McClendon had given me for his baby mama. A woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”

  She was an old-fashioned woman, apparently, one who didn’t make you leave a message, didn’t leave you hanging while she decided whether or not you were worth a return call. “I’m looking for Annabel Wing,” I said.

  She was silent for a moment. “And, now that you’ve found her?”

  “Ms. Wing, my name is Saul Fowler. I know that name doesn’t mean anything to you, but . . .” The lie stuck in my throat, but there was no help for it. “My father’s name is McClendon.”

  Another moment’s pause. “How is the good reverend doing these days?”

  “I ah, I don’t know. I really don’t know him all that well. I never knew about you, for example, until a couple of days ago. I found out about your daughter at the same time. My half sister, Melanie.”

  Again she took her time responding. “What can I do for you, Mr. Fowler?”

  “I don’t mean to upset you, Ms. Wing, or complicate your life in any way. I’d just like to meet somewhere. Talk a little bit. That’s all.”

  She exhaled into the phone, one drawn-out sigh. “I suppose. I can meet you tomorrow before I go to work. Can you be in Flushing, in the morning? Corner of Roosevelt and Union. Six a.m.”

  “Seriously? Six in the morning?”

  “Take it or leave it, Mr. Fowler.”

  I heard the warning in her voice. “I’ll be there.”

  My next stop was an office building in the East Thirties. Both the neighborhood and the building were unremarkable, but you couldn’t say that about the pneumatic young receptionist behind the front desk at Whelen and Ives, the PI firm McClendon had hired to look into Melanie’s death. The woman was beautiful. Her only visible shortcoming was that her green eyes were set just a little bit too close together, which gave her a general air of befuddlement. That could have been a flaw or an asset, I suppose, depending on how you looked at it. I watched her from behind one of their dog-eared copies of Sports Illustrated. I decided, after a while, that an unkind person might conclude that she was as dumb as she looked.

  They had a coffee machine in
the waiting room, one of the modern ones where the coffee came in a little plastic cartridge. You loaded the cartridge of your choice in the machine, pressed the button, and the machine spit your coffee into a paper cup. The resulting product tasted all right, and since I needed the caffeine I was grateful for it, but the lack of ritual bothered me. I liked ritual, it could teach you the correct way to do a thing, how to do it for yourself instead of settling for how the designer of some machine decided it ought to be done. We are no longer either hunters or gatherers. We push buttons and accept what the machine gives us. Soon enough we won’t even venture outside at all.

  I laid my SI aside and walked across the ratty green carpeting to look out the window. Whelen and Ives was not what I expected. Dingy little office, beat-up couches, magazines from two years ago. They had, apparently, spent all their money on the coffee machine and the receptionist. It didn’t speak of the kind of firm I thought McClendon would be drawn to; he was the kind of guy liked to have a show to go with his dinner.

  “Mr. Felder?”

  It was the receptionist, and she meant me.

  She was a vision, standing there holding open the door to the inner offices. Maybe that’s her purpose, I thought, maybe her real job is to divert some of the blood flow from your brain, get you off your game. “Right this way,” she said, smiling mechanically, and she preceded me down an inner hallway. Maybe it’s not her, I thought, maybe it’s me, maybe I’ve deprived myself for so long that I don’t react normally anymore. She stopped to knock on a door, then opened it and stood aside. I had to squeeze past her.

  Get over it, I told myself. You’re supposed to be a bereaved relative, and she seems totally uninterested in you.

  “Hello, Mr. Fowler.” Josh Whelen stood up behind his desk and held out a hand. He looked like a short, fat ex-cop who was trying hard to lose the short, fat, ex-cop look. He sported a stubbly beard on his round cheeks and his monogrammed white shirt pinched him at the neck so that the knot in his tie was mostly hidden by a layer of excess chin. To me, he looked like the kind of guy who’d let you out of a moving violation for fifty bucks, or maybe plant a bag of weed in your car if you pissed him off.

  “Mr. Whelen,” I said. “Thank you for taking the time to see me.”

  “No problem,” he said. “You wanted to talk about Melanie Wing.”

  “If you don’t mind. I saw the reports you gave to McClendon. I’m just curious to know if you might recall anything that didn’t make it into print.”

  Whelen re-assed his chair with a grunt, motioning to his client chair. “You’re putting me in a tough spot, Mr. Fowler. Technically, that’s privileged information. Can I ask you what your interest in this case is? Did McClendon hire you to stir the ashes?”

  “Melanie Wing was my sister.”

  “You speak pretty good English for a Chinese guy.”

  “Okay, half sister. McClendon was her father, and mine.”

  “Got it. McClendon was one of those, which ain’t a surprise. My old man got around a little bit, too. I heard my uncles talking, after he died, found out I had relatives I’d never met, but I never pushed it. You know what I’m saying? What am I supposed to do, have ’em over the house? I don’t even wanna talk to my real brothers all that much.”

  “I hear you. But suppose one of your brothers got hit.” Whelen stuck out his lower lip and looked wounded. “Just saying. And suppose whoever did it took an ear, first, just for fun. And a couple of teeth. Wouldn’t you be just a little bit curious?”

  He rubbed the bristles on his chin. “Yeah. Yeah. You’d wanna see somebody bleed for it. That’s only natural.” He stared at me. “You weren’t on the job, were you, Fowler? You were a cop somewhere once. Am I right?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” He obviously didn’t believe me. “Okay. Make me find out for myself. Irregardless, Mr. Fowler. Let’s say you were the hitter. You, personally. You take reasonable precautions, right, you don’t get no blood on your car, you don’t leave no prints, you wear a hoodie so nobody can make a firm ID, okay, you’re probably gonna skate. You know what I’m saying? You got a good chance of walking away clean. Exspecially if you make it through the first week. I mean, once in a blue moon something comes along that might trip you up, but that’s not the general rule. So from where I sit, okay, going after whoever did this, it ain’t a good use of your resources going after the guy. I mean, it’s only human, and I do understand. But after all this time, nobody remembers much of anything, and if they do, they only remember what they think they saw, not what really happened. My advice to you, for what it’s worth, let it go. Nothing good is gonna come from you poking around. Let’s face it, Mr. Fowler, and if you’re a cop you already know this, the guy is gonna get his. You know what I’m talking about. People are fucked up, pardon my English. They kill once, they get away with it, they like the rush, sooner or later they’re gonna do it again. Second time, third time, fourth time, their luck runs out, someone drops a net over them. Either that or they pick on the wrong broad and she shanks ’em. That’s just the way it works.”

  I’m not getting anything out of this guy, I thought, and I wondered why. There was an oil portrait on the wall behind Josh Whelen. “Karma,” I said, and Whelen nodded.

  “Everyone gets what they got coming,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

  The portrait was of an older man, gray hair, gray suit, gray tie, thin patrician face, looked back out at me. “Your father?”

  He shook his head. “Bought the painting at auction, thought it might make the firm look more, you know, refined and shit. Are you gonna let this go, Mr. Fowler?”

  “I never met Melanie,” I told him. “Can you tell me anything about her? What kind of person she was?”

  He frowned, rubbed his chin again, and grimaced. “This is secondhand, okay? And nobody said so in plain English, but the impression I got from the people I talked to was that she was a good person, your sister, but she was a little bit like a girl from parochial school once she gets away to camp. You want it, she wants it. Not tryina be crude or nothing here, but you asked . . .”

  “Yeah, I did. Nothing else you can tell me about her?”

  He shrugged. “Grew up in Queens. Mother probably kept her inside too long. Girls that are too sheltered, you know what I’m saying, sometimes they never catch on. They never really get what the world is like. They never know who to trust.”

  Someone rapped on Whelen’s door. “Come,” he said. A woman entered carrying a stack of paperwork. She looked Italian or maybe Greek; she was older than the receptionist, a bit heavier, decidedly less perfect, much more interesting. She glanced at me as she placed the papers she carried down on Whelen’s desk.

  “Expenditures,” she said. “Sorry to interrupt . . .”

  “Ahh, Fowler, we done here? Okay if Maria shows you out? What I’ll do, I’ll pull my notes from your sister’s case, and if anything jumps out at me, I’ll call you. You got my word.”

  “Thank you for all your trouble.”

  “No trouble,” he said, not looking at me. “No trouble.”

  Maria followed me down the hallway. Just outside the door to the waiting room she touched my shoulder and leaned in close. “Hotel Los Paraíso,” she whispered. “Tenth Street.”

  “Thank you,” I told her, and one corner of her mouth lifted in what might have been amusement, for a fraction of a second she looked like your best friend’s older sister who knew more about it than you did, and then it was gone. Same look I’d gotten from Frank Porter’s mother, and then that bank teller.

  What the hell, I thought, but by then she’d steered me into the waiting room and closed the door behind me.

  Union Street, near Roosevelt and Main in Flushing, New York, at six in the morning. Very early for me but it was what she wanted, what she insisted upon, so there I was. The streets looked like two armies of garbage bags had fought a war there the night before, leaving the sidewalks and gutters strewn with the bodies and guts of their
fallen. And the whole neighborhood smelled like death.

  Or very old fish.

  “You don’t look at all like him,” a woman’s voice over my shoulder said.

  I tried hard not to look like she’d just scared the shit out of me. “No. Ms. Wing?” She was about five-foot-six, and her long black hair was shot through with gray. I could not guess her age. She was a handsome woman, but thin and frail, like if you bumped into her she’d break apart.

  She nodded in answer to my question. “That’s me,” she said. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  The restaurants on the block displayed pictures of their offerings in their windows, none of which seemed appealing. I didn’t know what bubble tea was, and I didn’t wanna find out. I saw one sign in English, presumably the name of the establishment. Four Choise and a Soup. Thankfully, it appeared to be closed.

  Annabel Wing watched my face, amused. “This way,” she said. “There’s a McDonald’s up the block.”

  She did not seem all that interested in her coffee. The place hummed with activity, even at that ungodly hour, people grabbing their breakfast before hurrying outside to line up for the bus. Ms. Wing appeared more interested in asking questions than answering them. “Where are you from?” she said.

  “Have you ever noticed,” I asked her, “with some people how you can never really get a straight answer to a question like that?”

  She pursed her lips, waiting.

  “The East Coast,” I told her. “My mother moved around a lot. As far south as Baltimore, as far north as Bangor.”

  “Did you ever know him? Your father, McClendon.”

  The son of a bitch was not my father, I thought, he couldn’t have been . . . I let it pass. I wondered how closely I needed to stick to my cover story. “After my mother got sent away, I found his name on her marriage certificate. No one is safe from Google, so I did find him, and he told me a few things. He talked mostly about Melanie. I can’t seem to get past her death. I don’t have any other siblings.”