Free Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01 by The Long Fall

has it.”
     
     
     
    WALKING USUALLY HELPS me work out difficult problems, but that day nothing came. I was in my office by 8:45, but Frankie Tork was still dead and Roger Brown unaccounted for. Ambrose Thurman had vanished, as had my new leaf.
    I gave it another hour, searching the Internet for Ambrose Thurman, Albany detective, while calling Roger’s office twice more. Once I tried to disguise my voice but I think Bobby, his assistant, knew it was me.
    Finally I called Zephyra Ximenez on my dedicated “800” line. Zephyra was an exotic young woman—Dominican mother, Moroccan father—who lived somewhere in Queens. I met her one night at the Naked Ear. She was at the bar, waiting for her girlfriends. Zephyra was tall and coal-colored. Her face wasn’t exactly beautiful but it certainly put pretty to shame. I’d had a few drinks and tried to convince her to ditch her friends and have dinner with me. She said no but kept talking.
    Zephyra told me that she was a TCPA, a telephonic and computer personal assistant.
    “What’s that?”
    “I try to maintain ten to twelve clients,” she said, “who need services I can provide pretty much exclusively over the phone and Internet. I make reservations, answer calls, order anything from takeout to a new washer-dryer, or take care of bookkeeping and data-file maintenance. I charge fifteen hundred a month, plus expenses, and I’m available on a twenty-four hour basis in case of emergencies.”
    “What if somebody were to call you right now?” I asked.
    “I have a cell phone and an OQO minicomputer in my purse,” she said. “It’s my office away from the office.”
    “Wow.”
    “What do you do?”
    I told the young woman a little about my services.
    “I never had a private dick before,” she said. I think I might have blushed a little. “Do you need someone like me?”
     
     
     
    “ZEPHYRA,” SHE ANSWERED on the third ring. “Leonid Mr. McGill’s office.”
    “Hey, Z.”
    “Oh, hi, Mr. McGill. What can I do for you?”
    “I need a flight to Albany by mid-afternoon. Sooner if you can do it.”
    “Only puddle jumpers this time of day,” she said in a friendly tone. “You told me you had claustrophobia issues.”
    “You haven’t heard from issues.”
    “I see.” There was a pause, and then she said. “I can get you on a flight from LaGuardia at three sixteen.”
    “Book it,” I said.
    “You have some voice mail on the machine here,” she said before I could hang up.
    For her other clients Zephyra listened to the messages, typed them up, and delivered them as a kind of running narrative of their phone life. We decided rather early on that she should probably leave my messages alone, that she shouldn’t even listen unless I asked her to.
    “I’ll get to ’em later.”
    “Do you need a limo to the airport?” she asked.
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    “Your usual?”
    “No. I don’t need Hush for something so simple. Anybody cheap’ll do.”
    “Answer your phone while you’re gone?”
    “Might as well.” When people spoke to an actual person they were less likely to say something incriminating. “I’ll forward the calls from the office and the cell.”
    Getting off the phone, I felt like I needed another cold shower. Hell, I needed a dip in the Arctic Ocean.

13
    A dinged-up dark-green Lincoln limo met me in front of the Tesla Building at 1:47. As the young Russian driver wound his way slowly toward the Midtown Tunnel, I stared through my reflection, wondering why I couldn’t do right. This was not wallowing in self-pity. I didn’t feel guilty—not exactly. I felt bad that Tork had died, and to some degree I felt responsible, but mostly I had the sensation of slipping further down into the sandpit of my own sins.
    While I sat there in the long queue, waiting to get into the tunnel, Katrina and the kids entered my reverie. Not for the first time I thought that if it wasn’t for them I could cut all ties and move to Hawaii with Aura. There she