Known to Evil - Softcover

Walter Mosley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753828057 ISBN 13: 9780753828052

Publisher: Phoenix, 2011

Synopsis

A mystery caller sends Leonid McGill to an uptown address 'just to check a girl's OK'. There's no explanation -- just a name, Angelique -- a reward, and the chilling knowledge that he's working for Rinaldo Alphonse, the most feared man in New York. What LT finds is a crime scene. A girl lies with her face blown off, her assassin felled by a knife. But the dead girl isn't the one LT was sent to find, and her killer's injuries don't make sense. The next day Alphonse comes calling: LT must find Angelique before the assassin's assassin tracks her down. Alphonse isn't the only one who wants a bit of LT's time -- the NYPD, finding his appearance too convenient, think they can finally put away the thorn in their side. But why do so many people want a piece of the apparently normal, clean-living Angelique? And why is the mafia coming after McGill, linking his sons -- shy Dmitri and streetwise Twill -- to the escape of a sex-trafficked Belarussian girl? As both plots career towards a thrilling finale, McGill must put his street know-how and book of lethal contacts to the test, while haunted by the reappearance of a face from his crooked past and his wife Katrina's continued infidelities.

About this title

About the Author:

Walter Mosley, recipient of the PEN USA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD, is the author of twenty-five books, among them the bestselling EASY RAWLINS mystery series. Born in Los Angeles, he currently lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Don’t you like the food?” Katrina, my wife of twenty- three years, asked.

“It’s delicious,” I said. “Whatever you make is always great.” In the corner there sat a walnut cabinet that used to contain our first stereo record player. Now it held Katrina’s cherished Blue Danube china collection, which she inherited from her favorite aunt, Bergit. On top of the chest was an old quart pickle jar— the makeshift vase for an arrangement of tiny wildflowers of every color from scarlet to cornflower blue to white.

“But you’re frowning,” my beautiful Scandinavian wife said. “What were you thinking about?”

I looked up from the filet mignon and Gorgonzola blue cheese salad to gaze at the flowers. My thoughts were not the kind of dinner conversation one had with one’s wife and family.

I have a boyfriend now, Aura Ullman had told me that morning. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t want to feel like I’m hiding anything from you.

“Where’d you get those flowers, Mom?” Shelly asked.

His name is George, Aura told me, the sad empathy in the words making its way to her face.

I had no reason to be jealous. Aura and I had been lovers over the eight months Katrina abandoned me for the investment banker Andre Zool. I loved Aura but gave her up because when Katrina came back, after Andre was indicted for fraud, I felt that she, Katrina, was my sentence for the wrong I had done in a long life of crime.

“I saw them at the deli and thought they might brighten up our dinner,” Katrina told her daughter.

Shelly had been trying to forgive her mother for leaving me. She was a sophomore at CCNY and another man’s daughter, though she didn’t know it. Two of my children were fathered out of wedlock; only the eldest, sour and taciturn Dimitri, who always sat as far away from me as possible, was of my blood.

Do you love him? I hadn’t meant to ask Aura that. I didn’t want to know the answer or to show vulnerability.

He’s very good company . . . and I get lonely.

“Well?” Katrina asked.

Something about those flowers and the echo of Aura’s voice in my mind made me want to curse, or maybe to slam my fist down on the plate.

“Hey, everybody,” Twill said. He was standing in the doorway to the dining room; dark and slender, handsome and flawless except for a small crescent scar on his chin.

“You’re late,” Katrina scolded my favorite.

“You know it, Moms,” the seventeen- year- old man replied. “I’m lucky to get home at all with everything I got to do. My PO got me workin’ this after- school job at the supermarket. Says it’ll keep me outta trouble.”

“He’s not a parole officer. He’s a juvenile offender social worker,” I said.

Just seeing Twill brought levity into the room.

“It’s not a he,” Twill said as he slid into the chair next to me.

“Ms. Melinda Tarris says that she wants me workin’ three afternoons a week.”

“And she’s right, too,” I added. “You need something to occupy your mind and keep you out of trouble.”

“It’s not people like me that get in trouble, Pops,” Twill sang. “I talk so much and know so many people that I can’t get away with nuthin’ somebody don’t see it. It’s the quiet ones that get in the most trouble. Ain’t that right, Bulldog?”

“Can’t you be quiet sometimes?” dour Dimitri said.

Twill’s pet name for his older brother was an apt one. Like me Dimitri was short and big- boned, powerful even though he rarely exercised. His skin was not quite as dark brown as mine but you could see me in every part of him. I wondered why he was so angry at his brother’s chiding. Even though Dimitri never liked me much he loved his siblings. And he had a special bond with Twill, who was so outgoing all he had to do was sit down in a room for five minutes and a party was likely to break out.

“Leonid.”

“Yes, Katrina?”

“Are you all right?”

Even though we’d drifted apart like the continents had— long ago— Katrina could still read my moods. We had a kind of subterranean connection that allowed my wife to see, at least partly, into my state of mind. It wasn’t just Aura’s decision to move on that bothered me. It was my life at that table, Dimitri’s uncharacteristic anger at his brother, and even those delicate flowers sitting where I had never seen a bouquet before.

There was a feeling at the back of my mind, something that was burgeoning into consciousness like a vibrating moth pressing out from its cocoon.

The phone rang and Katrina started. When I looked into her gray- blue eyes some kind of wordless knowledge seemed to pass between us.

“I’ll get it,” Shelly shouted. She hurried from the room into the hall, where the cordless unit sat on its ledge.

Katrina smiled at me. Even this made me wonder. She’d been back home for nearly a year. In that time her smile had been tentative, contrite. She wanted me to know that she was there for the long run, that she was sorry for her transgressions and wanted to make our life together work. But that evening her smile was confident. Even the way she sat was regal and self- assured.

“Dad, it’s for you.”

Standing up from my chair and moving into the hallway, I felt as if I were displaced, another man, or maybe the same man in a similar but vastly different world: the working- poor lottery winner who suddenly one day realizes that riches have turned his blood to vinegar.

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

I was expecting an acquaintance or maybe a credit- card company asking about a suspect charge. No one who I did business with had my home number. The kind of business I was in couldn’t be addressed by an innocent.

“Leonid,” a man’s voice said, “this is Sam Strange.”

“Why are you calling me at my home?” I asked, because though Strange was the legman for Alphonse Rinaldo, one of the secret pillars of New York’s political and economic systems, I couldn’t allow even him to infringe on my domestic life, such as it was.

“The Big Man called and said it was an emergency,” Strange said.

Sam worked for the seemingly self- appointed Special Assistant to the City of New York. I say seemingly, because even though Alphonse Rinaldo was definitely attached to City Hall, no one knew his job description or the extent of his power.

I had done a few questionable jobs for the man before I decided to go straight. And while I was no longer engaging in criminal activities I couldn’t afford to turn him down without a hearing.

“What is it you want?” I asked.

“There’s a young woman named Tara Lear that he wants you to make contact with.”

Sam rarely, if ever, spoke Rinaldo’s name. He had an internal censor like those of old- time printers who replaced “God” with “ G- d” in books.

“Why?”

“He just wants you to speak to her and to make sure everything’s all right. He told me to tell you that he would consider this a great favor.”

Being able to do a favor for Special Assistant Rinaldo was like winning six lotteries rolled into one. My blood might turn into high- octane rocket fuel if I wasn’t careful.

Not for the first time I wondered if I would ever get out from under my iniquitous past.

“Leonid,” Sam Strange said.

“When am I supposed to find this young woman?”

“Now . . . tonight. And you don’t have to find her, I can tell you exactly where she is.”

“If you know where she is why don’t you just tell him and he can go talk to her himself?”

“This is the way he wants it.”

“Why don’t you go?” I asked.

“He wants you, Leonid.”

I heard Twill say something in the dining room but couldn’t make out the words. His mother and Shelly laughed.

“Leonid,” Sam Strange said again.

“Right now?”

“Immediately.”

“You know I’m trying to be aboveboard nowadays, Sam.”

“He’s just asking you to go and speak to this Lear woman. To make sure that she’s all right. There’s nothing illegal about that.”

“And I’m ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Phoenix
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0753828057
• ISBN 13: 9780753828052
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336