The Long Fall lm-1

by Walter Mosley

  “I’ve met someone,” she’d said, wanting to keep the conversation going. “His name is Andre Zool.”

  “Uh-huh,” I managed to say.

  “He’s an investment banker and he loves me.”

  “I see,” I said but Katrina heard something different, a complaint.

  “You haven’t slept in our bed more than two nights in a row in half a year,” she condemned.

  “I’ve been sleeping in the office. I’ve been . . . been thinking.”

  “I need a real man in my life. Not a zombie.”

  “When are you going?” I asked, wondering about the silence in our seven rooms.

  “There’s no use in arguing,” she said.

  “I’m not arguing. I’m asking you when you’re leaving.”

  “Dimitri is going to stay with Andre and me until he finds a dormitory,” Katrina said, having a conversation in another dimension, with a different Leonid. “Shelly and Twill both want to stay with you.”

  “But I had blood tests done,” I said from my separate reality. “Dimitri is the only one that’s mine.”

  Katrina, in all her Nordic beauty and savagery, stood up from the table, knocking her chair to the walnut floor.

  “You bastard!” she said and then stormed out of our apartment.

  That was on a Wednesday, too. For six months I had been brooding over the corruption of my life. Katrina leaving meant nothing to me. We hadn’t loved each other for a very long time. We hadn’t ever lived in the same world.

  On Monday Terry Swain announced his early retirement.

  On Friday Aura Ullman put me on notice for Hyman and Schultz.

  By Sunday Aura and I were lovers and I had decided that the only thing I could do was try to make right what I had done wrong. At night Aura and I slept wrapped in each other’s arms. I begged her to come live with me but she had an adolescent daughter and thought that we should give it some time.

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER the real estate market crashed.

  Andre Zool had been instrumental in getting his company to buy up fourteen percent of Arizona’s recent mortgage debt—and there was some question of kickbacks. He lost over a billion dollars. Zool got on a plane bound for Argentina, where his family had migrated after World War II.

  The next morning I came home from work to find Katrina in our living room with our dour son Dimitri at her side.

  “Forgive me,” were her only words.

  If she had said anything else, anything, I would have been able to send her away: I would have been able to go off with Aura to start a new life.

  MY PRIVATE CELL PHONE, the legal one, rang. Actually it made the sound of a growling bear, the special tone I had given to anyone whose phone number came through as private.

  “Mr. McGill?” he said. “Ambrose Thurman here. I tried yo" we. I trur office phone but got no answer.”

  “Mr. Thurman. I was just about to call you.”

  “With good news, I hope,” the fop detective said.

  “Yes, very good news. I have located three of the four men you’re looking for.”

  “What are their real names and addresses?” he said, his voice brimming with formality.

  “There’s a question of remuneration.”

  “A question of what?”

  “You know what I’m saying—I need my money first.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Yes—remuneration,” he said, repeating the word carefully. “I will have to have all four names before I can pay you.”

  “Well, then I’ll call you later.”

  I pressed the hang-up button on my phone and sat back in the phantom’s chair.

  There was something odd about Ambrose. He was an Albany detective working for an upstate client. This client wanted definitive information on all four subjects before he would pay.

  I decided that I’d need more information before handing over what I had to the persnickety, overly formal Albanyite.

  But I appreciated his call. Moping over lost love, a loveless relationship, and other things was no good. It tended to give me bad dreams.

  In order to keep the momentum toward a healthier state of mind, I entered the code on the electronic lock that allowed entrance to my interior offices. Once I was ensconced behind my ebony desk, looking down over lower Manhattan, I logged onto a specially constructed computer using the ID $$Twillhunter@twilliam.com. This allowed me secret entrée to my favorite son’s personal domain.

  Once a week or so, as a rule, I perused Twill’s personal e-mails. I did this because Twill, for all his superior qualities, was a natural-born criminal. He didn’t hurt people physically but he was a whiz at getting in and out of locked rooms, performing Internet scams on children of his age, and putting A in touch with B to garner C. He had at least seventeen separate e-mail addresses, all of which were forwarded to Twill@twilliam.com. He had to have a pretty good hacker who helped him with all this, but I had Tiny “Bug” Bateman, and Tiny, by his own estimation, was the best in the world. Tiny had set me up so that by using the double dollar sign and the word “hunter” I could shadow Twill’s every communication.

  Most of the handsome teenager’s e-mails were innocuous enough: young men talking about sports and girls, girls offering to do things that most of the children of my generation never even imagined, and minor criminal activities that I ignored because I had my shadow on Twill to rein him in if things started going seriously wrd o seriouong.

  The bear growled in my jacket pocket but I ignored it. If it was Thurman again he could cool his heels wondering if I was going to let him walk all over me. If it was someone else they could leave a message, because for the past few days my son had been getting some worrisome communications on his private address.

  Someone, a teenage girl calling herself “M,” had been sending Twill distressed and depressed messages. She’d even mentioned suicide. Twill was very good with her. He told her that she was a good person in bad circumstances and that he would be there for her anytime she needed. They never discussed the exact nature of her troubles but it had something to do with her family.

  The problem was that Twill was more like a man than a sixteen-year-old boy and was apt to take on more than he could accomplish. So I had been signing on as his shadow once a day for the past week.

  There was a message from M and a reply that day.

  Hey T, Thanks for your note. I really appreciate it but things are getting worse around here. Much worse. I really do think it would be better if I stopped him myself. I know that you have connections with people and if you could just give me a name of somebody who could sell me a gun that’s all I need. Please do this for me. I have to do something.

  M

  If that wasn’t bad enough, Twill had an answer that set my teeth on edge.

  M. I hear you girl. But you can’t do something like that. You’ll probably just hurt yourself. The street fair is just two weeks from this Saturday. You hold on till then and I’ll take care of it for you. No one will know.

  T

  One of the many good qualities Twill had was that he never made idle promises. If he said he’d do something, he always tried his best. And I was absolutely sure that his best in this case was the death of someone. I had more than two weeks to defuse the situation. Looking on the good side—at least it gave me something positive to do.

  Ê€„

  5

  Gazing at the gap in the skyline left by the World Trade Center, I thought about Twill. Not of my blood, he was tall and lithe, handsome and quick to smile. The only thing we had somewhat in common was our dark coloring but even there our skins were different hues. I had more brown to my blackness.

  But blood relations are overrated. Twill had a way of making you feel good. His greeting—morning or night, being picked up at the police station or after a schoill„ol function—was always friendly and sincere. His head was cool and his heart warm. Twilliam was one of the finest people I had ever met. And so it was my self-appointed duty to make sure that he was
n’t pulled down in the wake of his own superiority.

  A solitary seagull cried. That was the sound I had Tiny program into the stolen cell phone he sold me.

  “Hello?”

  “Who the hell is this?” an angry voice demanded.

  “You called me, young man,” I said trying to sound pleasant.

  “Are you Arnold DuBois?” he asked, pronouncing the last name in French fashion.

  “Du Boys,” I said, correcting him on the pronunciation of my alias.

  “Why are you trying to get in touch with me, Mr. Du Boys?” Roger said, maybe hearing some of the iron in my jaw and moderating his tone appropriately.

  “Are you the Roger Brown that they used to call B-Brain back in the day?”

  “Who are you, man?”

  “My real name is Ambrose Thurman,” I said. “I’m a private detective. And I have been retained to get in touch with you.”

  Three tiny blips sounded and I knew that Roger had hung up on me. It didn’t matter. I had a hook into him now.

  WHEN AMBROSE THURMAN came to me all he had was a short list of street names—Jumper, B-Brain, Big Jim, and Toolie—along with a few descriptive details. The last time his client had seen them they were kids, not much older than Twill. He needed their real names and current whereabouts. They all had had records as juvenile offenders but the bureaucracy of New York’s judicial system wouldn’t allow him to invade the privacy of minors.

  Ambrose asked me if I could do what he could not.

  That’s where Randolph Peel came in. Randy had been a detective in the NYPD until they found him trading favors for sex at a posh midtown hotel. At one time he was the partner of a cop named Carson Kitteridge. Kitteridge was an honest cop, and it had been speculated that he was the cause of Peel’s downfall.

  Randy was out of a job but he still had a few friends in the department. For three hundred dollars a head, the former policeman broke the seals of justice and delivered the identities to me; three of them, at least. Jumper, Big Jim, and Toolie had gone on to commit adult crimes, but B-Brain was clean. I had a name, Roger Brown, but there was no practical information, like a current address. There were no adult records on him and the details of his adolescence were all cold as far as an investigation was concerned. His father was nowhere to be found, and his mother, Myra Brown, as far as I could tell, had died in 1993.

  THE SEAGULL CRIED three times before I answered the phone again.

  “Hello?”

  “Who hired you?”

  “It’s not polite to hang up on a brother, Roger.”

  “I’m not your brother.”

  “You still hung up on me.”

  “Excuse me,” he said, maybe even meant it. “I’m not used to private detectives calling me on the phone.”

  “You called me,” I reminded him.

  “You came to my office.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, “being sought by a PI. Nobody said you did anything wrong.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Are you the Roger Brown who was once known as B-Brain?” I asked again.

  The silence was long and painful. Roger didn’t want to hang up a second time. He didn’t want to answer my question either. There was music playing in the background of whatever room he was in; thuggish hip-hop with an insistent beat.

  “How much they payin’ you, man?” a slightly different Roger Brown asked. This young man didn’t wear a suit and tie or collect a salary that had taxes taken out.

  “My regular fee.”

  “I’ll double it.”

  “You don’t know what it is.”

  “I’ll pay you a thousand to forget me.”

  “Are you in trouble, Roger?”

  “Naw, man. I ain’t in no kinda trouble.” His descent from Madison Avenue to the Lower East Side continued.

  “Because,” I said, “I only ever charge my standard fee. I never take more. That way I keep my nose clean.”

  “Why you up in my grill, man?”

  “All I need to know from you is if you are the Roger Brown known as B-Brain.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you what, Roger,” I offered. “I’ll come over right now and meet you at that little espresso place across the street from your office or anywhere else you say. We could talk.”

  “Uh-uh. No way, man. I ain’t meetin’ you nowhere, no kinda way.”

  I had already been to his office. He didn’t know what I looked like. Even if Juliet had described me, he didn’t have my picture in his head. But Roger wasn’t being rational. He was afraid of something, and I wanted to know what that something was.

  I made a few sounds that were meant to express hesitation.

  “I’m not used to giving out information on my clients,” I said. “That kind of breach in confidentiality is not looked upon kindly in my profession. But maybe if we got together you might convince me.”

  “I already told you, man. No.”

  Roger wasn’t going to trust me even though I was telling him the truth. I wanted to meet him face-to-face so that I could judge for myself if he was in some kind of fix that Ambrose had not informed me about.

  “Frankie Tork,” I said and the line went so silent that for a moment I thought the connection had gone dead.

  “S-say what?”

  “Frank Tork. He’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E. They caught him trying to burglarize a pawnshop on Second Avenue.”

  “Frankie hired you?”

  “I AIN’T SEEN B-Brain in years, brother,” Frankie Tork had told me through a Plexiglas window in the visitor’s area of the New York City jail. “His moms and them moved somewhere out in Brooklyn right before his last year in high school. She said that we was a bad influence.”

  Jumper was small and wiry, brown like a walnut is brown, with tar-stained teeth and bloodshot eyes. He had the kind of smile that frightened children—and their mothers.

  “What was his mother’s name?” I asked, trying to corroborate the sketchy information I’d gotten from ex-officer Peel. Roger, aka B-Brain, and the others had been arrested for trespassing in 1991.

  “Mrs. Brown,” Frankie said.

  “You don’t know her first name?”

  “You still gonna gimme that twenty dollars, right?”

  There was an account I could credit. I would have given him the money even if he wasn’t any help.

  “What was B-Brain’s first name again?” I asked.

  “Roger.”

  “Yeah, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

  “Maybe I could ask aro="1could aund, about his mom’s name, I mean.”

  “No thanks, Jumper.” I made to rise.

  “Hey, hey, man.”

  “What?”

  “They say around here that you the kinda dude get a brother out of a jam.”

  “I used to do that. Not anymore.”

  “How much?” Jumper asked, ignoring my claim of retirement.

  “Twenty thousand was my lowest fee.” That was a lie. No one had ever paid me that much. But I didn’t want to give Jumper false hope.

  “Damn, man. All I got is the twenty dollars you payin’ me.”

  “See you.”

  “... WHY JUMPER WANT you to find me?” Roger asked, admitting that he was the man I was looking for.

  “His lawyer, Matrice Johnson, is a friend of mine. Professional. She asked me to find somebody who could be a good character witness for Frankie, said that it might make a difference between three and seven years in the sentencing.”

  “I haven’t seen Frankie in sixteen years, man. How’m I gonna be a character witness for somebody I don’t even know no more?”

  “Well,” I said, “if you’re not willing to help a brother out . . .”

  “He’s not my brother. And how the hell you even know how to find me?”

  “Some girl,” I said.

  “What girl?”

  “A friend of Jumper’s—Georgiana Pineyman. She saw you come into Be
rg, Lewis & Takayama a few months ago but when she tried to get to you they turned her away at the front desk.”

  “Well, you found me but I can’t give Jumper a reference. I can’t. I don’t even know him anymore.” Roger was feeling some relief. His language drifted back toward the semi-sophistication of an investment advisor.

  “Okay. My job was to find you and ask for your help. That’s all.”

  “So we finished?”

  “Goodbye, Roger.”

  Ê€„

  6

  Just a year and a half before I wouldn’t have had the slightest compunction at turning Roger’s name over to Ambrose Thurman. Even that day, if Roger was a hood like hi/di„s old friends, I wouldn’t have been bothered.

  But as things stood I had misgivings.

  On the one hand Roger sounded scared, on the other the rent was due and there were no new jobs on the horizon. Aura liked me, maybe she even loved me, but she was going to do her job. I’d be on the street by the end of the month if I didn’t pay the landlord’s fee.