By Walter Mosley

I decided to kill Johnny Fry on a Wednesday, but it was a week before that I was given the reason. I’m almost embarrassed about my decision to take a life. It was so pedestrian really.

It all started on the day I had lunch with Lucy Carmichael at the Petit Pain Café on Amsterdam near 80th Street. Lucy wanted to show me her portfolio because she hoped that I could get her connected with Brad Mettleman, an art gallery agent who loved to take advantage of straw-haired, blue-eyed young women.

I had met Lucy at a conference of commercial French translators. She was there with her mother. Mrs. Helen Carmichael was a textile importer who needed someone to help her read correspondence from Francophone African nations. She couldn’t pay even my low rates, but her daughter was beautiful, so I talked to her about university alternatives, taking sidelong glances at the lovely young woman.

After a while it came out that Lucy, the daughter, was just back from Darfur, where she had taken photographs of starving children. I let it drop that I had done work for Brad Mettleman.

“The photographers’ agent?” Lucy said. “I met him one time. He visited my Art-as-a-Business class at NYU. I’d love to get in touch with him. You know it’s important for an American audience to see what’s happening to these people.”

“I’d be happy to introduce you,” I said.

I didn’t mean it, but Lucy took my number and invited me to come with her and her parents to a gallery opening that night.

When we parted, Lucy kissed me on the cheek, right at the border of the corner of my mouth.

I knew that Brad would love her. She was slight but well formed, with blond hair that reminded you of a sunny day. Her blue eyes were severe and her face was stern, which, on a beautiful girl like her, gave the impression of passionate intensity.

I say that Brad took advantage of young women, but the women I’m thinking of never complained. Certainly I was having lunch with Lucy because she was fair-haired and quite lovely. She had a habit of putting her hand on your forearm and looking you in the eye whenever she talked to you.

While I was going through the photographs of young children of the Sudan, I was thinking about the kiss she’d leave me with as I put her in a cab to take her back home to the East Village or Dumbo or whatever artists’ community she was living in.

“Politics and art are inseparable,” the young woman was saying as I thumbed my way through the stiff sheets of suffering and death.

The large-eyed children looked to be at the end of their recuperative powers. I wondered how many of the Sudanese orphans were still alive. I wondered also why I didn’t seem to care about their fates. It was, of course, awful what was happening in Darfur. Children were dying from being deprived of the most basic necessities. They were being displaced, slaughtered, enslaved, raped. But what got my heart going was the expectation of Lucy Carmichael’s moist peck on the corner of my mouth.

“It’s powerful work,” I remember saying. “I’m sure Brad would be very excited about it.”

I was also sure that he’d want more than a provocative kiss for representing her to one of the dozen galleries he worked with around Midtown.

“Do you think so?” Lucy asked, putting a hand on my bare wrist.

I looked down at the almost porcelain-white fingertips pressing against my dark brown skin. When I think back on it, it was that touch, as much as anything else, that brought on Johnny Fry’s death sentence. My tongue went completely dry, and no matter how much bottled mineral water I drank, I was still thirsty. That thirst and what I did to slake it were the first two nails in Mr. Fry’s coffin.