The Long Fall lm-1

by Walter Mosley

  It wasn’t 2008 everywhere in America. Some people still lived in the sixties, and others might as well have been veterans of the Civil War. In many establishments I was considered a Black Man; other folks, in more genteel joints, used the term “African-American,” but at Oddfellows I was a nigger where there were no niggers allowed.

  As I said, I knew the right move was behind me but instead I walked into the dark room and up to the Formica bar, just a tourist stopping for a quick beer. The pale bartender was bald like I am, but taller. He wore a shirt with thick red stripes on white, strapped over by dark-green suspenders. There was an old Pabst Blue Ribbon name tag pinned to one strap. The tattered badge read, “Hi, I’m Jake.”

  Jake didn’t like me.

  “Whatever you got on tap,” I said.

  The bartender, who was about my age too, smirked and turned his back. As he moved away down the soggy corridor behind the bar I decided that, even if he did serve me, I would not drink.

  But I didn’t have to worry. I wasn’t going to receive service in 1953 Albany. Jake moved down the bar, stopping at a customer who was sitting at the far end. They shared a few words, glanced in my direction, and then laughed.

  In some ways the objective of the private detective is similar to that of the beat cop. You have an aim—the end of your shift—but there are many distractions along the way. You have to live completely in every moment, because if you get beyond yourself something will certainly blindside you and leave you face down in the street.

  I wanted to save Roger Brown, which meant locating, and maybe dislocating something on, Ambrose Thurman. But before I could do any of that I had to get through Oddfellows. I considered walking around the room, asking if anyone had seen the face on the fake business card. But I rejected that approach. A room full of half-drunk men who wouldn’t like you in the best of circumstances could easily ramp themselves up into a frenzy.

  I decided that this was a dead end and that I should move on.

  I had been in the pub for no more than three minutes.

  Just as I was about to turn a tall and hale redhead stood up from a table in the corner. He was young, maybe twenty-five, and had the look of a kid who had just taken a dare. He smiled broadly and walked in my direction, so I put off my exit for one minute more.

  “Hey,” the young man said, grinning and friendly. He was handsome like a fifties TV child star who had grown up losing nothing of the boyish charm that got him through.

  “S’hap {izet gpenin’?” I replied, deciding to be who he thought I was.

  “What you doin’ here?” he said, still showing teeth. It was almost as if there was no threat in the room at all. Almost.

  “S’posed to meet a guy.”

  “What guy?”

  I took Ambrose Thurman’s card from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. His fingers were pale and thick. The nails had some dirt under them, which made me like the person he might have been.

  He studied the photo and name.

  “Know him?” I asked.

  He handed the card back to me.

  “What’s yer name?” was his reply.

  “Bill. What’s yours?”

  “Jonah.”

  “Like with the whale?”

  The kid smiled. We might have gotten along in other circumstances . . . on some far-flung planet. He glanced around, as if the eyes on us were about him.

  “Maybe we should talk outside,” he suggested.

  I nodded and turned toward the door.

  “Out back,” he said. “Come on, this way.”

  Jonah moved toward a short hallway at the far end of the bar. After a moment’s hesitation I followed.

  Being a boxer, even just an amateur like me, can make a man reckless. I’ve stood in the ring, sparring with heavyweights, and held my own. But that was many years before, and there was more rust than iron in my joints of late. Still, I had the confidence of a man Jonah’s age.

  When I caught up to him he was opening the back door. He went through first and I paused to make sure there was no one coming up behind us. As I passed the threshold Jonah sucker-punched me with a right hook that had some smarts to it. The blow sent me crashing into a herd of aluminum trash cans. I was down, but the only thing that hurt was my sense of smell. Garbage had been festering on that dark alley floor for decades.

  Jonah was wearing serious motorcycle boots. I could see the steel-shod heel of one as he tried to stomp my face with it.

  A good thing about being a boxer is that you have reason to be confident. My reflexes were twice what they should have been. I grabbed Jonah’s foot and rolled with it until he was down on the ground with me. Then I scrambled to my feet, slammed the back door shut, and wedged the edge of a metal trash can under the doorknob so that we wouldn’t be dis {oulmy turbed.

  Jonah rose to his feet effortlessly and grinned. I could see then that he was one of those adorable sociopaths that can love you or kill you with the same friendly smile on his lips.

  My mind was a calculating machine right then. There were ten men behind a flimsy wooden door who would most likely be on the kid’s side, and there was Jonah, who felt that he could make short shrift of me with three well-placed blows.

  I wasn’t worried about Jonah. What had me sweating was the clock back in the bar. In three minutes guys would be banging on the door, in five they’d either break through or come around the outside.

  The first rule in the streetfighter’s handbook is—when in doubt, attack.

  I crouched down and moved forward, delivering a one-two combination to the kid’s middle. He threw a punch that landed on the side of my head but I was ready this time and paid him back in duplicate. I hit him in the gut again and he felt it. His hands came down and I was able to get in two uppercuts before he moved backwards. My short legs have always been strong, and even at my advanced age I had a spring in my left. I leaped and connected with a straight right, got my balance, and delivered two left jabs and then another right.

  Jonah was bleeding pretty good from a rupture on his left cheekbone. He was breathing hard, and I was, too. I stood back to catch my breath, counting off the seconds in the back of my mind. Jonah took a staggery step forward and then fell face down into a puddle of glistening gray glop.

  My legs were ready to run but I stopped long enough to turn the kid over. It would have probably been saving some innocent’s life to let Jonah die in that alley, but I had my new leaf to consider, and I was feeling some largesse after having won the test of arms.

  Ê€„

  15

  I got way too much pleasure out of beating on Jonah. Running down the alleyway behind the bar, I felt giddy over my performance. I still had it. I was still in the game.

  Still a fool, was more like it.

  I was in my red SUV speeding away in less than the five minutes it would have taken for the Oddfellows to be after me. My knuckles hurt and I was breathing hard to work off the adrenaline that the fight set loose. When the blood pressure began to fall I became aware of the fact that I’d messed up the one clear chance I had of getting to Thurman. My contacts in the city and state police departments of Albany were pretty much useless at that juncture. One man had been murdered and another was missing. I couldn’t make my connection to them public record. The police had to be kept out until I knew more.

  The summer sun was still in the sky at six. I made my way to the South End. That part of town looked a bit seedier but was more to my sensibilities. There were black and brown peoples in among the whites, and so nobody would single me out for special treatment.

  On Standard I passed a glass-and-plaster hotel named Gray Wolf Inn. It was a modern structure hemmed in by older, nondescript buildings that were neither offices nor warehouses, commercial spaces nor living lofts. These buildings had once been factories where Americans worked to feed their families and pay their bills. My father had spent his life organizing unions in places like this. They broke his bones and sent him to jail more than once
, but he kept on organizing. Now the factories were all shut down and the unions reduced to rusty old buttons and yellowing membership cards in forgotten trunks. My father was long gone, as were the vestiges of his blood and hard work.

  Gray Wolf had a glass door that opened onto a short hallway ending at a gunmetal elevator. On the right was a clear plastic cage where there sat an emaciated and sallow-skinned white lad whose eyes had seen more years than he had actually lived.

  The young man didn’t have a proper desk. He was seated on a swivel stool at a turquoise ledge that jutted from the ochre wall. When I cleared my throat he stood up and approached the plastic barricade that sealed him away from danger. I was thankful for the barrier, certain that if he got a whiff of the sour odor of garbage on my clothes he wouldn’t have given me a room.

  “How many nights?” the old-young man asked. He was wearing a blue shirt and blue pants but still the colors managed to clash—with each other and with the dirty yellow walls.

  “Let’s start with one,” I said.

  “Thirty-six ninety-six a night, including tax,” the impossibly skinny and long-faced kid announced. “Two-night minimum. The second night is a deposit against damages. That’s seventy-three ninety-two. Cash, no check.”

  “What if I gave you a credit card?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  “There’s an extra fee of ten dollars,” the kid droned on, getting back into the groove of his spiel, “if you have guests.”

  “No guests for me,” I said.

  Some feeling must have escaped with those words because the kid gave me a closer look then. He seemed to be gauging me, but I wasn’t concerned.

  He opened a sliding panel in front of him and placed a pen and registration form down on the plastic top, closed the panel, pressed a button, and then gestured for me to lift the panel on my side. I filled out the sheet, using the name Carter, with an address in Newark, New Jersey. I placed four twenty-dollar bills on the sheet and slid the panel closed (it locked shut immediately).

  “Keep the change,” I told the kid.

  He didn’t crack a smile or even nod in thanks, but I didn’t mind.

  ƒ

  I’VE BEEN IN third-class cruise-ship cabins that were larger than that room. Just one big bed that ended a few inches from a sliding, hollow pine door that opened onto the toilet. Standing at the sink, my butt was in the shower stall. To look out the window I had to get on my knees on the bed.

  On the bright side, Jonah’s two blows hadn’t even caused my jaw to swell. It really didn’t even hurt all that badly. I took two aspirin and a shower, lay down on the mattress, which felt hard like rolled canvas, and fell into a light doze.

  The dream was oddly altered in that cubicle room. Fire blazed all around me but I wasn’t frantic. My flesh was burning but that was of no consequence. When I got to the smoky glass I just pushed it out, effortlessly. On the other side, standing in blue sky, was the kid from downstairs. He gave me a calculating look and I waited for his request. He opened his mouth but the sound that came out was not in words; it wasn’t even human. It was a kind of electronic static. This sound slowly transformed into an insect-like buzzing. I wondered if the alarm clock was going off, if it was morning and I had slept through the night. But I hadn’t set the alarm. When I sat up I realized that the noise was coming from a telephone that had been left on the window ledge next to my head.

  The buzzing stopped and I wondered who could be calling. It started again and I answered, “Hello?”

  “Mr. Carter?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Jimmy from downstairs, sir.”

  Sir?

  “What do you want, Jimmy?”

  “I was just wondering if you needed some company.”

  “What kind of company?”

  “You know,” he continued, “a girl.”

  A girl. Jimmy had called to offer me a girl. I realized that I had moved from a light nap into deep sleep. I was confused about the material world but quite lucid in my mind.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Hundred bucks a half hour,” he said. “Five hundred for the night.”

  “Who pays the ten bucks for the visitor?”

  “The girl covers that fee.”

  I was quiet for a moment or two, wondering about Jimmy being in the dream and at the same time on the phone interrupting tƒ inm" he dream.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “They’re all clean,” he protested. “I don’t let no junkies up in here.”

  I could have asked how he knew if a girl didn’t have tracks between her toes but I didn’t. I didn’t care.

  “Okay. All right. But I want someone young and black,” I said. “Pretty if it’s possible, but with a sharp tongue. And she has to be black.”

  “I can do that, Mr. Carter,” Jimmy said eagerly. “Gimme twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

  “Take your time, son.”

  “You need anything else?”

  “Yeah. You got an Albany phone book down there?”

  “I think so. It might be from a couple’a years ago.”

  “Send it up with the girl.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The thought of Jimmy made me smile. He was an old, corrupt soul bunged into a young, inept body. The only thing that got his motor running was commerce. He didn’t even care about the money, only the method by which he got it. The tip was an insult, but providing me with female companionship made him feel like he was getting something accomplished. I liked that. It had the stink of humanity about it, something akin to the bouquet of Gorgonzola cheese.

  I opened my duffel and took out a rolled-up navy-blue suit that was an exact replica of the one that got soiled in the alley. I liked Jimmy’s predictability, and anything else I could count on.

  Ê€„

  16

  The room was barely large enough to accommodate the queen-size bed. I was sitting at the edge, still a little groggy, when a tapping came on the door. I didn’t have to stand up to open it but I did.

  The child was young, and even darker-skinned than I. She wore a yellow party dress but no smile. Slender, she was wider below the waistline than above it. She was hugging a well-worn phone book against her chest.

  “Come on in,” I said, moving to the side because the bed blocked a courteous retreat.

  She walked in, leaving the door open.

  “One hundred dollars up front,” were her first words.

  I took a fold of four fifties from my shirt pocket and handed them to her. She traded the tattered phone book for the money.

  “Two hundred fo†trar one hour,” I said.

  She counted the bills twice, closed the door, then turned to look at me. Her gaze was clear but not innocent. Those big eyes weren’t worldly but neither were they inexperienced.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Seraphina,” she said.

  “S-a-r-a-f ... ?” I asked.

  “S-e-r-a-p-h-i-n-a,” she said like a third-grade teacher who had lost patience before her current crop of students were ever born.

  “Beautiful name,” I said. “Beautiful dress, beautiful skin, beautiful girl. Have a seat.”

  I sat on the south side of the bed while Seraphina took the east. If anything she was wary now. Compliments are often camouflage for hidden resentment, and I had just given out four tributes in quick order.

  “What you want?” she asked.

  “Talk.”

  “You could go to a bar an’ buy a girl a drink if you just wanted to talk to somebody.”

  “Not with my luck.”

  “You unlucky?” she asked, allowing a little gruff friendliness to show.

  I grunted a laugh and nodded.

  “I’m from Newark,” I said. “And I came here looking for a guy.”

  I handed her the business card and she studied it.

  “That’s a white man,” she said, handing it back to me. “I cain’t tell
’em apart. Sometimes, if they ask for me more than once, I could tell you about how they smell. But that’s about it.”

  She was looking around the room, sneering at what she saw.