All I Did Was Shoot My Man Read Free Page A

her—not really. I just never thought to mention my circumstances. I mean, Katrina and I hadn’t been intimate or jealous of each other’s lives in years. We had three children but two of them had nothing to do with my DNA. Katrina said they were mine and I went along with the sham because they were in my house and Katrina maintained that house. She also made the best food I ever ate in my life.

    But Gert didn’t see things the way I did. She had been hearing wedding bells on those long nights in her SoHo studio.

    She cut off our physical relationship but kept contact for the sake of our business.

    That enterprise was the perfect blend of our talents and resources.

    When I first met her Gert was an office worker in the downtown parole office in Manhattan. That post gave her access to files all over the city. I worked for organized crime and other professional bad men finding patsies for those that felt law enforcement closing in.

    Gert would find the right fit and I’d plant false evidence, alter phone records, and forge documents to prove that some other poor slob at least might have been the perpetrator. Sometimes the men I framed went to prison, but, more often than not, there was just enough doubt cast for the District Attorney to call off proceedings against my client.

    I kept working with Gert because she was a great resource and because I hoped that one day she would forgive me.

    It was only after she kicked me out of her bed that I realized that I felt something akin to love for her.

    Gert was my partner in crime but she was also the reason I went straight. That’s because the daughter of one of the men whose life I destroyed grew up. Her name was Karmen Brown and she was as single-minded as any wartime general, child molester, or great film director. She discovered my perfidy, had Gert killed to hurt me, and then, after seducing me, had a man come into her house and choke her to death, intending to frame me for her rape and murder.

    I managed to get out from under it, but after that I went straight; at least as straight as a man can get after a lifetime of being bent.

    I USUALLY BROUGHT work to Gert, but after a while working with me she developed contacts of her own.

    Nine years before, a man named Stumpy Brown, a gambler by trade, came to her with a proposition. Someone had robbed the vault of Rutgers Assurance Corporation, a unique organization that took in capital to insure short-term transactions conducted outside the borders of the country. Rutgers held anything of value—paintings, jewelry, or cash. They then used these resources to float short-term loans and investments at outrageous interest rates.

    Back then they had been holding a sum of fifty-eight million dollars to assure that an oilman in Galveston received a certain portion of a Saudi Arabian tanker’s load when it landed in port.

    It was an illegal deal, and the parties were later censured and fined, but the money was stolen, one of the five guards protecting the vault was murdered execution style, and no one knew who had gotten away with the money.

    It was assumed that the guard, Clay Thorn, was the inside man, but he was dead and left no leads.

    Stumpy had gotten his hands on fifty thousand dollars from the heist. He wanted Gert to use her magic to further implicate some hapless criminal who no doubt deserved the attention.

    It was Zella’s bad luck as much as anything else that made her Gert’s target.

    Six days before the robbery Zella Grisham had a serious bout of nausea just before lunch. She was working for real estate lawyers whose offices were down the block from the Rutgers compound. Her kindly boss sent her home, where she found her lover, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend Minnie Lesser.

    Zella told the police, and later the courts, that she didn’t remember what happened after that. She didn’t remember going to the dresser, pulling out her daddy’s .32 caliber pistol, or shooting the errant boyfriend in