All I Did Was Shoot My Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

to our apartment was ajar. I had installed one of the world’s most sophisticated locking systems on the titanium-reinforced portal. The lock was both mechanical and electronic. When the door closed a metal rod was anchored in a slot in the floor below. Only the signal from the family’s keys, or turning the inside knob, would release that bolt.

    But what use was it if the door was left open?

    I entered the small foyer, closing the door behind me. There were half a dozen boxes stacked in the corner, with a pile of rumpled dirty clothes dumped on top.

    The clothes belonged to Dimitri. The fact that they were unwashed and not folded spoke volumes about the drama that I could hear playing out all over the large prewar apartment.

    From down the hallway where the bedrooms were I could hear the deep bark of Dimitri’s voice. He was talking to someone; you could tell that by the silences between his rants. He was angry, shouting. This was odd because the only time my blood son ever raised his voice was against me, usually in defense of his mother.

    Not that I ever attacked Katrina. It’s just that there was a tight bond between the young man and his mother—a bond much stronger than she and I ever had.

    From the dining room came the sounds of argument and shushing. I recognized the contestants by their voices and was about to intrude when Mardi Bitterman came out of the bedroom hallway. She was wearing a dress whose hem came down to her ankles; a faded violet shmata, loose and threadbare—the young woman’s version of Twill’s T-shirt and jeans.

    Mardi was five-seven, with pale hair, skin, and eyes. She was slight but had a will tougher than most. There was a midsized cardboard box cradled in her arms.

    “Hi, Mr. McGill.” The wan smile she gave me represented greater hilarity than I had guffawing down on Tenth Avenue.

    “Mardi. What’s goin’ on?”

    My office receptionist and general passe-partout put down the box and sighed. You couldn’t hear the exhalation, only see it in her expression.

    “Mrs. McGill is upset that Dimitri’s moving out. I don’t think she likes Tatyana. And Dimitri is mad at his mother, saying all kinds of terrible things down in his room. Twill and I have been doing most of the packing but that’s okay.”

    For Mardi, whose parents sold her to a child molester before she even had the defense of language, the war between mother and son must have seemed like happiness.

    “ What about Shelly?” I asked.

    “She’s spent most of her time trying to calm Mrs. McGill down.”

    “Really? What kinda miracle is that?”

    Mardi smiled. She never spoke unless she had something to say—a rare quality among Americans of any age.

    I headed for the dining room as Mardi made her way back toward the ruckus my eldest child was making.

    I stopped at the doorway and listened before entering.

    Old habits die hard.

    “THAT BITCH has stolen my son’s soul,” Katrina wailed.

    “Don’t say that, Mom,” Shelly, ever the middle child, said. “D’s twenty-three years old. It’s time for him to move out.”

    “My whole life is shit. Dimitri is, and you are too. Sluts and bastards, is all you are.”

    “Mom,” Shelly pleaded. “You just had too much to drink, that’s all. Dimitri loves you. I do too.”

    I never thought I’d hear Michelle say those words to her mother again. When Katrina left me for an Austrian/Argentinian banker Shelly wrote her off. Things had to be really bad for her to find forgiveness now.

    “Bullshit,” Katrina was saying. “Bullshit. You’re just like your father. He sent that monster to help so nobody could stop my baby from leaving.”

    “Twill called Mr. Arnold, not Daddy.”

    Arnold was not Hush’s real name but one of his many aliases. What’s in a name anyway?

    “He’s a piece-of-shit killer, and your father is too.”

    “Daddy didn’t do anything, Mom.”

    I walked in then. Regardless of the rancor between Katrina and me I didn’t