Read Online Known to Evil by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Walter Mosley
Tags: Fiction, General, detective, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, Suspense fiction, Mystery, Private Investigators, Domestic Fiction, Fiction - Mystery, Mystery & Detective - General, New York, New York (State), New York (N.Y.), Mystery And Suspense Fiction, Political corruption
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become a drug addict and petty thief. The police arrested him on a dozen different occasions, and every time Breland was there with bail money and representation before the court.
"What's he into now?" I asked.
"It's kind of complex. Maybe we better sit down and talk."
"Yeah," I said, "okay. Listen, I got a lot on my plate right now. Can you give me a day or so?"
"Sure. It'll hold for a day or two. But it can't wait a week."
BRELAND LEWIS'S PHONE CALL was the beginning of one long headache. It blossomed behind my left eye, a bright-red rose of pain. It wasn't Sharkey in particular, or even my oblivious client, Angie. It was more like everything, all at once.
"When you hit your fifties life starts comin' up on ya fast," Gordo Tallman said to me on the occasion of my forty-ninth birthday. "Before that time life is pretty much a straight climb. Wife looks up to you and the young kids are small enough, and the older kids smart enough, not to weigh you down. But then, just when you start puttin' on the pounds an' losin' your wind, the kids're expectin' you to fulfill your promises and the wife all of a sudden sees every single one of your flaws. Your parents, if you still got any, are gettin' old and turnin' back into kids themselves. For the first time you realize that the sky does have a limit. You comin' to a rise, but when you hit the top there's another life up ahead of you and here you are--just about spent."
The time for sitting on my butt on the seventy-second floor, playing like I could avoid my responsibilities, was over.
I hit the street at a good pace, moving north toward my home. On the way I thought about my duties to an unknowing world.
MY INTUITION WAS THAT the thing with Angie and Alphonse was not about sex. The details and photographs had intimacy but no heat to them. It seemed to me that Angie was like a family member, maybe even a daughter, who had somehow become estranged from the Big Man--after which she got into trouble. Or maybe the rift between them caused the trouble in some way.
I wasn't flat-out rejecting the notion that they were lovers. And even if they were related, he might still have had bad intentions toward her.
The problem was that I knew so little about Rinaldo. He was an honest-to-goodness twenty- first-century enigma. No one knew what he did or where his entry was on the chain of command. I'd only met a few people who'd ever heard of him.
"Rinaldo?" Hush, the retired assassin, had said when I'd asked him. "Yeah. I did work for him a couple'a times."
From the age of fifteen until his retirement, the only work Hush had ever done involved homicide.
"Funny thing, though," the serial-killer-for-hire opined. "I never met him in person. He was one of the few clients I ever had who I didn't look in the eye."
"Why's that?" I asked. We were in my office late one Tuesday evening. I was guzzling Wild Turkey while Hush sipped on a glass of room-temperature tap water.
"You can piss on a cardinal in his Easter suit but if the bush starts burning you have to lower your head and pray."
Remembering those words, rendered in Hush's deep voice, I stopped there in the middle of Broadway foot traffic. I was fool enough to be a friend to the killer-for-hire--but now to even consider investigating a man that Hush feared . . . that just had to make me stop and laugh.
"What the fuck's wrong with you, man?" someone said.
He was standing behind me, a young black man whose attire I could only call modern-day Isaac Hayes: light-brown leather from head to toe, his hat and shoes, pants and vest, and of course the open jacket. The only thing on that young man that wasn't bovine in origin was the golden medallion that spelled out something. The lettering was so ornate that I couldn't make out the word.
"Say what, brah?" I asked him in the accepted dialect of the street.
He was taller than me, of course, and skin--not so dark. The brown in his eyes was light, unnaturally so. I guessed that they might have
"What's he into now?" I asked.
"It's kind of complex. Maybe we better sit down and talk."
"Yeah," I said, "okay. Listen, I got a lot on my plate right now. Can you give me a day or so?"
"Sure. It'll hold for a day or two. But it can't wait a week."
BRELAND LEWIS'S PHONE CALL was the beginning of one long headache. It blossomed behind my left eye, a bright-red rose of pain. It wasn't Sharkey in particular, or even my oblivious client, Angie. It was more like everything, all at once.
"When you hit your fifties life starts comin' up on ya fast," Gordo Tallman said to me on the occasion of my forty-ninth birthday. "Before that time life is pretty much a straight climb. Wife looks up to you and the young kids are small enough, and the older kids smart enough, not to weigh you down. But then, just when you start puttin' on the pounds an' losin' your wind, the kids're expectin' you to fulfill your promises and the wife all of a sudden sees every single one of your flaws. Your parents, if you still got any, are gettin' old and turnin' back into kids themselves. For the first time you realize that the sky does have a limit. You comin' to a rise, but when you hit the top there's another life up ahead of you and here you are--just about spent."
The time for sitting on my butt on the seventy-second floor, playing like I could avoid my responsibilities, was over.
I hit the street at a good pace, moving north toward my home. On the way I thought about my duties to an unknowing world.
MY INTUITION WAS THAT the thing with Angie and Alphonse was not about sex. The details and photographs had intimacy but no heat to them. It seemed to me that Angie was like a family member, maybe even a daughter, who had somehow become estranged from the Big Man--after which she got into trouble. Or maybe the rift between them caused the trouble in some way.
I wasn't flat-out rejecting the notion that they were lovers. And even if they were related, he might still have had bad intentions toward her.
The problem was that I knew so little about Rinaldo. He was an honest-to-goodness twenty- first-century enigma. No one knew what he did or where his entry was on the chain of command. I'd only met a few people who'd ever heard of him.
"Rinaldo?" Hush, the retired assassin, had said when I'd asked him. "Yeah. I did work for him a couple'a times."
From the age of fifteen until his retirement, the only work Hush had ever done involved homicide.
"Funny thing, though," the serial-killer-for-hire opined. "I never met him in person. He was one of the few clients I ever had who I didn't look in the eye."
"Why's that?" I asked. We were in my office late one Tuesday evening. I was guzzling Wild Turkey while Hush sipped on a glass of room-temperature tap water.
"You can piss on a cardinal in his Easter suit but if the bush starts burning you have to lower your head and pray."
Remembering those words, rendered in Hush's deep voice, I stopped there in the middle of Broadway foot traffic. I was fool enough to be a friend to the killer-for-hire--but now to even consider investigating a man that Hush feared . . . that just had to make me stop and laugh.
"What the fuck's wrong with you, man?" someone said.
He was standing behind me, a young black man whose attire I could only call modern-day Isaac Hayes: light-brown leather from head to toe, his hat and shoes, pants and vest, and of course the open jacket. The only thing on that young man that wasn't bovine in origin was the golden medallion that spelled out something. The lettering was so ornate that I couldn't make out the word.
"Say what, brah?" I asked him in the accepted dialect of the street.
He was taller than me, of course, and skin--not so dark. The brown in his eyes was light, unnaturally so. I guessed that they might have
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