The Long Fall lm-1

by Walter Mosley

  My mind, I realized, was still wandering. I thought maybe I should go see a doctor soon.

  “This man pushed his way into Leonid’s office and attacked him,” Breland was shouting.

  “Then why isn’t LT dead on the floor?” Holloway bellowed.

  “Release my client!”

  “To Attica, for forty years!”

  I wondered what the number forty meant in the cop’s interpretation of justice.

  Just then the paramedics barged in. There were four of them in white and blue, two women and two men. There were now eighteen people in the antechamber of my office and spilling out into the hall. It was like a party.

  “What’s the combination to your inner office?” Holloway asked me after consulting with the head meat-wagon attendant.

  “A secret,” I replied.

  I was hoping that Holloway would slap me, not to claim police brutality but to snap me out of the malaise that exertion and a beating had brought on.

  The paramedics were turning Big Boy over onto a hydraulic gurney that had been lowered to the floor. He didn’t look good. There was a gash on the left side of his forehead and his tan skin was wending toward blue. He was breathing, though, and even my ideologue father would have to admit that breath is the only true definition of life.

  Holloway and Lewis were arguing: the bulldog and the chicklet. I was still breathing hard, and trying to think of something that would make sense in a situation like that.

  “What’s goin’ on in here?” a familiar voice commanded.

  Everyone went silent as Carson Kitteridge entered, parting the sea of blues and white.

  “Your boy tried to murder this man,” Holloway said, triumph buoying his words.

  Big Boy was being rolled from the room on the gurney. Kitteridge glanced at him and then turned back to the fat sergeant.

  “What’d he say?” Carson asked, nodding in my direction.

  “Who cares what he said? It’s obvious what happened. We caught him trying to escape. And I bet ya dollars to doughnuts that when the victim comes to, he’s gonna have that story to tell.”

  Kitteridge tried to stifle his sneer. Instead of responding, he went over to my displaced desk and climbed on top. There in the corner he pressed a panel and a section of the wall gave way. Unplugging the digital Ãng ng,camera he found there, he hopped down and returned to Holloway.

  I didn’t have to look to know what they were seeing. I once had occasion to show Carson pictures taken with the secret camera.

  I have to give Holloway credit. He knew when he was beaten.

  “Release him,” he said to a sandy-haired minion.

  After snipping the plastic tie, the young man even helped me to my feet.

  “Tell me something, Sergeant Holloway,” I said while massaging the blood back into my hands. “Why do you make suspects get down on their knees?”

  “Makes ’em easier to control,” he said.

  If I was an innocent man I might have struck him down. But the truth was, I deserved Holloway. All the years I’d pulled the plug on men who maybe weren’t angels. I was Gordo’s hammer for more than a score of men. That’s why I could be tied up and thrown down on my knees.

  That’s why someone will kill me one day.

  THEY TOOK MY CAMERA but I didn’t care. All the photos taken were transmitted to a storage device in my inner office. Even if they lost the evidence, I had two other cameras and a backup.

  Slowly the cops left my offices. Along with the camera they took the swivel chair. Holloway was the last of the uniforms to depart. Before going through the door, he pointed at me, making his thumb and forefinger like the hammer and barrel of an old-fashioned six-shooter. It wasn’t an empty gesture.

  “Did they strike you?” Breland asked me.

  “No.”

  “Did they castigate you?”

  “What?”

  “Curse you, use harsh or foul language?” he said by way of explanation.

  “I know what the word means, man. This is cops and killers here. There might have been some cursing, but damn, it would be a miracle if there wasn’t.”

  Breland was an odd guy. A decade older than I, he looked ten years younger. He’d once worked for a lawyer who represented a reputed crime boss and his associates. That’s how we met. When the crime boss and his lawyer were brought down, Breland needed work. I liked the guy, so I sent some fairly honest jobs his way. It turned out that he was the loyal sort, and so, even though I might have been a little slow with my payment schedule, he was always there when the chains rattled at my door.

  Kitteridge had taken a seat in one of the surviving visitors’ chairs.

  ="1="1em" width="1em" align="justify">“Are there more questions, Detective?” Breland asked.

  “Not here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m taking your client to our offices for an interrogation, a prolonged interrogation.”

  “Mr. McGill needs medical attention.”

  It occurred to me that the paramedics hadn’t even looked at me. Just the fact that I was under arrest meant that they didn’t care about my health.

  “You want a ride to the Rikers medical facility, LT?” Kitteridge asked.

  “What grounds you got to arrest me, man?”

  “Have you ever heard the words ‘material witness’?”

  Ê€„

  24

  Blood leaked slowly from the split on my temple down onto the lapel of my jacket. Now and then a droplet would splash on the pale-green Formica tabletop in the interrogation room.

  “We should get you some first aid,” Carson Kitteridge said.

  “It’ll wait until I get home.”

  “You’re getting blood on my table,” the detective complained.

  “I didn’t ask to be here.”

  Carson wasn’t happy, but neither was I under arrest. He could have taken me to a prison infirmary but he wanted answers and knew from long, hard experience that I wasn’t the kind of guy that he could bully. The blood was part of our dialogue—if he wanted to have a conversation, it would be with the wounded man he wouldn’t allow to rest after a horrific beating.

  “So tell me about Willie Sanderson,” Kitteridge said.

  “Who?”

  “Come on, LT. Don’t get me mad now.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Sanderson.”

  “You nearly kill a guy and you don’t even know his name?”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Who is he?”

  “Never met him before. Never heard of him. I doubt that he’s even human if he survived that flying chair.”

  “If he dies it’s manslaughter.”

  “Bullshit. That man was trying to kill me. You saw the pictures.”

  The cop sat back and did that lacing-his-fingers thing. I’ve never understood what he intends to communicate with that gesture.

  “We got one, maybe two men bludgeoned and strangled, and a third who almost fell in line,” he said.

  “What men?” I asked.

  “Your boy fits the description of the guy who went to see Roger Brown. If you take off the hat and fake whiskers he looks an awful lot like the guy who paid Frank Tork’s bail. That’s what I call suspicious.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Suspicious about your boy Sanderson. I’m just a victim here.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Maybe you were in business with Sanderson,” he suggested. “Maybe he decided to take you down and keep the profits for himself.”

  “What business? What profits? I was walking out of my door and he attacked me. He didn’t say a word, and my bankbook’s got cobwebs all over it. I was not in business with him, and I never met him.”

  Kitteridge was watching my eyes. He did that often. He believed, I think, that he could tell when a man was lying by looking into his eyes. I believed that he could also.

  After a moment he pul
led his fingers apart and made an open-palmed plaintive gesture.

  “Help me out with this, LT,” he said. “We got some white maniac from Albany killing African-Americans on the street. It has the stink of a hate crime.”

  “I never even understood the idea of a hate crime,” I said, wasting time, trying to digest the fact that my would-be killer was from Albany. Was he the one who hired Fell? No. Fell didn’t recognize him when he came in for the kill. “I mean, if you kill somebody with evil intent, it’s murder and you should pay for it. That’s all, right?”

  “I can sit here all night,” the cop replied.

  I leaned forward and three neat little droplets splashed on the tabletop.

  “I’m beat, man,” I said. “I been thumped on, handcuffed, dragged down here, and made to wait for hours while you shuffled papers and drank bad coffee. Let me go home and get cleaned up. Let me get some sleep and maybe I’ll come up with somethin’ for ya.”

  “I could arrest you.”

  “For self-defense?”

  “This isn’t going away,” CË gont arson said. “This is murder. If Sanderson pulls through and incriminates you, all bets are off.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  TWILL WAS WAITING near the front desk of the Chelsea station. He wore black trousers and a pin-striped blue-and-white dress shirt that was wanting a pair of cuff links. He was sitting there on a wooden bench next to a young blonde in gold hot pants and a blue halter. The young woman was smiling brightly, chattering away at my son. He nodded sagely now and again and spoke in a low voice.

  When he saw me Twill stood up, but we didn’t embrace. Twill is too cool for kneejerk expressions of fondness; I guess I am, too.

  “Hey, boy,” I said. “What you doin’ here? It’s nearly two in the morning.”

  “Mr. Lewis called,” he said. “He told me that you’d been arrested and so I called up to find out what precinct Detective Kitteridge was working out of.”

  If anyone was an example of having too much on the ball it was my son. He would track down Satan and then try to brace him for a bad debt.

  “This is Lonnie,” Twill said. “She’s waiting for her boyfriend, Juman. They got him in here on a seventy-two-hour thing. I gave her Mr. Lewis’s number. I hope that’s okay.”

  Lonnie had the lovely, and somewhat awkward, physical contradiction of skinny legs and big breasts. She stood up and shook my hand like her mother had taught her when she was five.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. McGill. Your son is great.”

  “Tell Breland to call me,” I said. “If it’s just a simple thing, I’ll cover the charge.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “He’s really not a bad guy at all.”

  Before we left, Lonnie kissed my son on the cheek and whispered something to him.

  “WHAT DID LONNIE say?” I asked Twill. We were walking down the ramp that led to the garage where he had parked my classic car.

  “She wants me to call her. Says that Juman is on the way out and she’d like to buy me a coffee or something.”

  I gave him a doubting stare.

  “Don’t worry, Pop. She was just thankful to have somebody help her out in there.”

  He didn’t say whether he was going to call her or not.

  ON THE WAY home Twill asked me about the interrogation. I told him what happened, then tried to get deeper into him.

  “So you didn’t really say if you had a steady girl,” I ventured.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. Lonnie’s not my type.”

  “I’m not worried about her. I just wanted to know if you had something going on. You know, a steady, like.”

  He laughed. I think he might have been a little embarrassed.

  “What’s funny?” I asked him.

  “Here some man you never even met tries to beat you to death and you’re asking me about if I have a girlfriend or not?”

  “Near-death experience makes a man want to pay attention to the little things. Is it so hard to answer a simple question?”

  “I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You know, son, you’re better than I was in that interrogation room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something’s going on with you, Twill. I want you to trust me.”

  “I trust you fine.”

  “Then talk to me.”

  “I’m okay, Dad. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  Most parents of teenagers could identify with that banter. There I was, the dedicated fisherman, and he was like a lively trout slipping between my fingers in an icy-cold stream.

  The difference between Twill and other young men was that he was planning a hit in New York City with no more trepidation than a teenage girl fixing her lipstick between kisses.

  “Tell me somethin’, Pop.”

  “What’s that, son?”

  “Why’d they let you go? I mean, Mr. Lewis said that he thought they’d keep you all night at least.”

  “I think they just got tired,” I said. Then I yawned.

  Ê€„

  25

  Oh my God. Oh my God,” Katrina chanted again and again, daubing my head with a damp towel. “It’s so terrible. Why would a man hit you like that? How could someone be like this?”

  It’s a disheartening feeling when you can’t stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away. There hadn’t been love between Katrina and me for a dozen years at least, and before that the passion was sporadic at best.

  It would have been impossible to explain in a court of law, or in a marriage counselor’s office, how I believed that every gesture she made, every comment that came from her lips, was considered before its fabrication. Katrina had made herself into the image of a loving wife because she had tried her best to leave and the ground had fallen out from underneath her.

  Sometimes I wondered how my life ended up in that sad configuration. How could I be the father to other men’s children, the life-partner of a woman who believed that wealth and beauty somehow combined to make up love?

  I was like a man, shovel in hand, finding himself standing in a freshly dug grave but with no memory of having dug it. I stayed there because at least if you’ve hit bottom you had no farther to fall.

  “Leonid?” Katrina said in a tone that made me think she’d called to me more than once.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you insured?”

  Every now and then even my wife could say something to make me laugh.

  I AWOKE AT five the next morning, as usual. I’ve always been a nervous sleeper, an early riser, and prone to naps.

  After two cups of extra-strong press-pot French roast I honed my thoughts down to the trouble I was facing. I needed to extricate myself, but before I could do that I had to understand the nature of the mess that I was in.

  There were plenty of clues: the four men I had searched out, Norman Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman), and the as-yet-nameless person who hired him. The client’s initials, VM or BH, was something—but not much. Even at the moment of his death, when he was confessing to me, Fell had been cagey. The illiterate had made sure not to put a gender on the employer that he was supposedly betraying. I didn’t know if it was a man or woman who’d hired him.

  There was also Willie Sanderson, and maybe a kid who died named Thom “Smiles” Paxton.

  Someone wanted these low-rent young men killed, and then, to cover their tracks, Norman Fell was destined to die. I didn’t know if I had always been on the hit list or if maybe Sanderson had heard him talking to me and then had been sent to shut my mouth, too.

  Sanderson had to be a hired killer—of that much I was almost certain.

  But who would want four low-life young men killed? Who’d pay a man’s bail to murder him? The scenario was simple, it just didn’t make sense, like a live cat sealed in a glass globe, or the United States declaring peace.

  I WENT TO the den and got online, looking for some event that would hold the four
targets together at the time Fell’s client’s son last saw them. That was Óthe>