Read Online All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online

again.

    KATRINA WAS on her back in the bed, fully clothed. Her eyes might have been open.

    “You up?” I asked.

    “ What happened?” She tried to rise on her left arm, but the elbow slipped out from under her and she fell back on the pillow.

    I turned to her and held out my hands.

    Pulling her to an upright position, I smiled at the similarities between us that morning.

    “ Well?” she said.

    “Dimitri moved to his new place and you passed out.”

    “Did I make a fool of myself?” She covered her face with her hands.

    “Mothers get a dispensation when it comes to seeing their firstborn go out into the world.”

    She put down her hands and gazed right through me. At that moment she looked every one of her fifty-three years.

    “That woman is no good for him,” she said.

    “She’s a piece’a work,” I agreed, “that’s for sure. But D’s got to find it out on his own. He’s never had a woman before. And you know how men are.”

    “Don’t you care?”

    “ What do you want me to do, Katrina? Try and break his spirit? Make him into a child rather than letting him become a man?”

    “She could get him killed. You know that.”

    “He knows it too.”

    She let go of my hands and turned away.

    I waited a moment and then went to take my cold shower.

    An hour later I was leaving the house. Katrina didn’t come out to say goodbye.

    13

    IT WAS SEVEN-THIRTY exactly when I got to my offices on the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building. There was light coming from under the door so I pressed the buzzer instead of taking out my keys.

    The lock clicked and I pushed my way into the reception area.

    Mardi stood as I came in. She was wearing a pearl gray dress under a thin white sweater.

    “Good morning, Mr. McGill. How are you today?”

    “ What time did you get in?”

    “Seven.”

    “Any particular reason?”

    “I like to get in early in case there were messages from the night before. You get a lot of late-night calls sometimes.”

    “Did I last night?”

    “Mr. Lewis has called you four times since five-fifteen. He says that it’s urgent you call him.”

    I took out my cell phone and noticed that the battery was dead. Breland could have been calling all night. He knew the home number but was aware of my prohibition about business calls on that line.

    The only thing in life that truly frightens me is the anticipation of talking to a lawyer. Even good news from my own lawyer brings up bad feelings and insipient dread.

    “If he calls again tell him that you don’t expect me until ten,” I said.

    “Okay. Anything else?”

    “How’d the rest of the move go?”

    “Dimitri was fine after we left your place. Twill took us all to pizza and over to this avant-garde theater in the East Village. They performed a Renaissance play that they modernized some.”

    “Twill took you to the theater?”

    “I think he’s dating one of the actresses.”

    “Did Shelly go too?”

    “Uh-uh. She said she was going to meet someone.”

    There was more to that story, but I wouldn’t be getting it from Mardi.

    “So,” I said, “ what do you think about D and Taty?”

    She looked up above my head and considered for a moment.

    “She loves him,” Mardi said at last. “She really does.”

    “You sound surprised. I mean, they’ve been together for a while.”

    “At first I think it was just a convenience for her. Don’t get me wrong, she was just using him, Tatyana has had a hard life and she doesn’t have a lot of trust in men. But in the last few months something has changed in her. You can tell by the way she looks at D.”

    “Love,” I said.

    “You make it sound like a curse.”

    “You know about Tatyana, right?”

    “She’s had a hard life,” Mardi argued mildly.

    “She’s dealt one too.”

    “She can’t help what she had to do.”

    Mardi had once planned to murder her child-molester father. She knew how to cut the deck as well as my son’s