Dangerous Women

Leonid McGill had powerful hands and strong breath. His eyes were suspicious and he would always appear to be a decade over his actual age.

“What can I do for you, Carson?” the detective asked the cop.

“Joe Haller,” Carson Kitteridge said.

“Come again?” Leonid let his face wrinkle up, feigning ignorance if not i

“Joe Haller.”

“Never heard that name before. Who is he?”

“He’s a gigolo and a batterer. Now they’re trying to tell me he’s a thief.”

“You wa

“No,” the cop said. “No. He’s in the Tombs right now. We caught him red-handed. He had thirty thousand right there in his closet. In the briefcase that he carried to work every day.”

“That makes it easy,” Leonid said. He concentrated on his breathing, something he had learned to do whenever he was being questioned by the law.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Carson asked.

“Is there a problem with the case?”

“You were seen speaking to Nestor Bendix on January four.”

“I was?”

“Yeah. I know that because Nestor’s name came up in the robbery of a company called Amberson’s Financials two months ago.”

“Really?” Leonid said. “What does all that have to do with Joe whatever?”

“Haller,” Lieutenant Kitteridge said. “Joe Haller. The money he had in the bag was from the armored car that had just made a drop at Amberson’s.”

“An armored car dropped thirty thousand dollars at the place?”

“More like three hundred thousand,” Kitteridge said. “It was for their ATM machines. Seems like Amberson’s had got heavy into the ATM business in that neighborhood. They run sixty machines around midtown.”

“I’ll be damned. And you think Joe Haller and Nestor Bendix robbed them?”

Lieutenant Carson Kitteridge stayed silent for a moment, his gray eyes taking in the rough-hewn detective.

“What did you and Nestor have to say to each other?” the cop asked.

“Nothing,” Leonid said, giving a one-shoulder shrug. “It was a pizza place down near the Seaport, if I remember right. I ducked in there for a calzone and saw Nestor. We used to be friends back when Hell’s Kitchen was still Hell’s Kitchen.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Not a thing. Really. It was just a chance meeting. I sat down long enough to eat too much and find out that he’s got two kids in college and two in jail.”

“You talk about the heist?”

“I never even heard about it until you just said.”

“This Joe Haller,” the policeman said. “He practices what you call an alternative lifestyle. He likes married women. It’s what you might call his thing. He finds straight ladies and bends them. They say he’s hung like a horse.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. What he does is gets the ladies to meet him at hotels near where he works and goes in to teach them about how the other eight inches live.”

“You’ve lost me, Lieutenant,” Leonid said. “I mean unless one of the she-guards at Amberson’s is Haller’s chicken.”

The elegant policeman shook his head slightly.

“No. No. This is how I see it, Leon,” the policeman said. He sat forward in his chair and laced his fingers. “Nestor pulled off the robbery but somebody let it slip and me and my crew got on his ass. So he calls on you to find him a pigeon and you give him Haller. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. But you set up the Romeo and now he’s looking at twenty years in Attica.”

“Me?” Leonid said, pressing all ten fingers against his breast. “How the hell you think I could do something like that?”

“You could pluck an egg out from under a nesting eagle and she’d never even know it was gone,” Kitteridge said. “I got a man in jail and his alibi girlfriend saying that she never even heard his name. I got an armed robber laughing at me and a P.I. more crooked than any crook I ever arrested lyin’ in my face.”

“ Carson,” Leonid said. “Brother, you got me wrong. I did see Nestor for a few minutes. But that’s all, man. I’ve never been to this Amberson’s place and I never heard of Joe Haller or his girlfriend.”

“Chris,” Kitteridge said. “Chris Small. Her husband has already left her. That’s what our investigation has accomplished so far.”

“I wish I could help you, man, but you got me wrong. I wouldn’t even know how to set up some patsy for a crime after it was committed.”

Carson Kitteridge stared mildly at the detective and the darkening neighbor state. He smiled and said, “You can’t get away with it, Leon. You can’t break the law like that and win.”

“I don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’, Lieutenant. Maybe the man you caught really is the thief.”

Katrina McGill was a beauty in her day. Svelte and raven-haired, from Latvia or Lithuania-Leonid was never sure which one. They had three kids, of which at least two were not Leonid’s. He’d never had them tested. Why bother? The east European beauty had left him early on for a finance lion. But she got fat and the sugar daddy went broke so now the whole crowd (minus the sugar daddy) lived on Leonid’s dime.

“What’s for di

“Mr. Barch called,” she answered. “He said that either you pay up by Friday or he’s going to start eviction.”

It was the square shape of her face and the heaviness around her eyes that made her ugly. When she was young gravity was in suspense but he should have seen the curtain coming down.

The kids were in the living room. The TV was on but no one was watching. The oldest boy, the red-headed Dimitri, was reading a book. He had ochre skin and green eyes. But he had Leonid’s mouth. Shelly, the girl, looked more Chinese than anything else. They used to have a Chinese neighbor when they lived on Staten Island. He worked at an Indian jewelers’ center in Queens. Shelly was sewing one of Leonid’s jackets. She loved her father and never questioned her mother or the face in the mirror.

Shelly and Dimitri were eighteen and nineteen. They went to City College and lived at home. Katrina would not hear of them moving out. And Leonid liked having them around. He felt that they were keeping him anchored to something, keeping him from floating away down Forty-second Street and into the Hudson.

Twill was the youngest boy. Sixteen and self-named. He’d just come home after a three-month stay at a youth detention center near Wingdale, New York. The only reason he was still in high school was that that was part of his release agreement.

Twill was the only one who smiled when Leonid entered the room.

“Hey, pop,” he said. “Guess what? Mr. Tortolli wants to hire me at his store.”

“Hey. Good.” Leonid would have to call the hardware man and tell him that Twill would open his back door and empty out the storeroom in three weeks’ time.

Leonid loved him but Twill was a thief.

“What about Mr. Barch?” Katrina said.

“What about my di

Katrina knew how to cook. She served chicken with white wine sauce and the flakiest dumplings he had ever eaten. There was also broccoli and almond bread, grilled pineapples, and a dark fish sauce that you could eat with a spoon.

Cooking was difficult for Katrina since her left hand had become partially paralyzed. The specialist said that it was probably due to a slight stroke. She worried all the time. Her boyfriends had stopped calling years before.

But Leonid took care of her and her kids. He even asked to have sex with her now and then because he knew how much she hated it.

“Did anybody else call?” he asked when the college kids were in their rooms and Twill was back out in the street.

“A man called Arman.”

“What he say?”

“There’s a little French diner on Tenth and Seventeenth. He wants to see you there at ten. I told him I didn’t know if you could make it.”