I remembered then that she wanted to go up to the bed after the first movement of our tragic opera. It was a plan.
“They framed me, Glad.”
My friend winced and shook his head again.
“They framed me!”
“Look, Joe,” he said after a full thirty seconds of silence. “I’m not saying they didn’t. But we all know what you’re like with the ladies, and then there’s that other thing.”
“What thing?”
“If it’s a frame it’s airtight. From the video to the girl’s testimony, they’ve got you as a predator. You were pulling her by the hair, for chrissakes.”
“She asked me to,” I said, realizing what those words would sound like in front of a jury.
“No audio on the tape. It looks like she was begging you to stop.”
I wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words.
“But it’s not that that’s the problem,” Gladstone said. “The problem is you got powerful enemies who can reach in here and snuff you out.”
“I need a cigarette,” I replied.
My only friend in the world lit a Marlboro, stood up from his chair, and placed it between my lips. I took in a deep draw, held it, and then blew the smoke from my nostrils.
The smoke felt wonderful in my lungs. I nodded and inhaled again.
I will never forget the chill in that room.
“You got to be cool, Joe,” my dispatcher said. “Don’t be talking about a frame in here, or to your lawyer. I’ll look into this and I’ll talk to the chief of Ds too. I got a contact in his office. I know a couple of people here too. They’re going to take you out of gen pop and put you in solitary confinement. At least that way you’ll be safe until I can work some magic.”
It’s a terrible fall when you find yourself grateful to be put in segregation.
“What about Monica?” I asked. “Can you get her in here to see me?”
“She don’t wanna see you, King. The detective on the case, Jocelyn Bryor, showed her the tape.”
My gratitude for getting solitary didn’t last long. The room was dim and small. I had a cot, a hard-edged aluminum toilet, and two and a half paces of floor space. I could touch the metal ceiling by raising my hand six inches above my head. The food sometimes turned my stomach. But because they fed me only once a day I was always ravenous. The fare was reconstituted potatoes and corned beef jerky, boiled green beans and, once a week, a cube of Jell-O.
I wasn’t alone because of the roaches, spiders, and bedbugs. I wasn’t alone because the dozens of men around me, also in isolation, spent hours hollering and crying, sometimes singing and pounding out rhythmic exercises.
One man, who somehow knew my name, would often regale me with insults and threats.
“I’m gonna fuck you in the ass, and when I get outta here I’m’a do the same to your wife an’ little girl.”
I never gave him the satisfaction of a response. Instead I found an iron strut that had somehow come loose from the concrete floor. I worried that little crosspiece until finally, after eight meals, I got it free.
Nine inches of rusted iron with a handle torn from my threadbare blanket. Somebody was going to die behind that shard of Rikers; hopefully it would be the man who threatened my family.
Never, not once, did they take me from that cell. In there I craved a newspaper or a book…and a light to read by. Bunged up in solitary confinement, I fell in love with the written word. I wanted novels and articles, handwritten letters, and computer screens filled with the knowledge of the ages.
During those weeks I accomplished a heretofore impossible feat: I gave up smoking. I had no cigarettes and the withdrawal symptoms just blended in with the rest of my suffering.
The other prisoners’ complaints became background noise like elevator music or a song you’d heard so often but never knew the words.
I clutched my cell-made blackjack at all times. Somebody was going to die by my hand—after two weeks it didn’t much matter who.
I had eaten eighty-three nauseating meals when, while I was asleep, four riot-geared officers came into my cell and shackled me. I fumbled my blackjack because the sudden light from outside my crypt-like cell blinded and disoriented me.
I yelled at my captors, demanding they tell me where they were taking me, but no one answered. Now and then someone hit me, but those were just love taps compared to what they could have done.
They deposited me in a pretty big room, attaching my bonds to steel eyes that were anchored to the floor. I sat at the butt end of a long table. The fluorescent light burned my eyes and gave me a headache. I wondered if someone was going to come in there and kill me. I knew that this was still America and that people who worked for the law did not execute without the will of the courts, but I was no longer sure of that knowledge. They might execute me because they knew I had become an unrepentant murderer behind their prison walls.
“Mr. Oliver,” a woman said.
I looked in the direction the voice came from and was amazed to see that she had made it into the room without my notice. Behind her stood a hale black man uniformed in a blue that was new to me. I hadn’t heard them come in. Sounds had taken on new meanings in my head, and I couldn’t be sure of what I heard.
I yelled a word at her that I had never used before, or since. The man in the blue suit rushed forward and slapped me…pretty hard.
I strained every muscle trying to break my restraints, but prison chains are designed to be greater than human sinew.
“Mr. Oliver,” the woman said again.
She was fair-skinned, tall, and slender, with salt-and-pepper hair and a pants suit that was muted navy. She wore glasses. The lenses glittered, obscuring her eyes.
“What?”
“I am Underwarden Nichols and I am here to inform you that you are being released.”
“What?”
“As soon as Lieutenant Shale and I leave, the men that brought you here will remove your bonds, take you to a place where you can shower and shave, and then give you clothes and some money. From there on your life is your own.”
“What about—what about the charges?”
“They’ve been dropped.”
“What about my wife, my life?”
“I know nothing about your personal dealings, Mr. Oliver, only that you are to be released.”
I saw my face for the first time in months in the polished steel mirror next to the small shower where I cleaned up. Shaving revealed the vicious gaping scar down the right side of my face. They didn’t always offer stitches at Rikers.
When I got off the bus at the Port Authority on Forty-Second Street I stopped and looked around, realizing how hollow the word freedom really was.
2.
“Are you thinking about prison again, Daddy?”
She was standing at the door to my office. Five nine and black like the Spanish Madonna, she had my eyes. Though worried about my state of mind, she still smiled. Aja wasn’t a somber adolescent. She was an ex-cheerleader and science student, pretty enough not to need a regular boyfriend and helpful enough that other teenage girls with boyfriends knew she was the better catch.
Her black skirt was too short and the coral blouse too revealing, but I was so grateful to have her in my life again that I picked my battles with great care.
Monica, my ex-wife, spent years trying to keep us apart. She took me to court to try to get a judgment against my ever seeing Aja-Denise and then sued me for failing to pay child support when she had drained my accounts and I didn’t have two nickels to my name.
It wasn’t until she was fourteen that Aja forced her mother to let her stay with me on a regular basis. And now that she was seventeen she said that either she worked in my office or she’d tell any judge who would listen that Monica’s new husband, Coleman Tesserat, would walk in on her when she was in the shower.
“What?” I said to my child.
“When you look out the window like that you’re almost
always thinking about jail.”
“They broke me in there, darling.”
“You don’t look broke to me.” It was something I said to her one morning when she was a little girl trying to get out of going to school.
“What’s that you got?” I asked, gesturing at the bundle in her hand.
“The mail.”
“I’ll get to it tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t. You never go through it until the bills are all late. I don’t know why you won’t let me put your bank account online so I could just pay them all myself.”
She was right; I kept thinking that some false evidence would come in the mail and send me back to that roach-infested cell.
“I have to go out on that Acres job,” I explained.
“Take it with you and go through it while you wait. You said that ninety-nine percent of the time you’re just sitting in your car with nothing to do.”
She held out the bundle and stared into my eyes. There was no mistaking that Aja-Denise had fought with her mother because she knew I needed her.
I reached out for the package and she grinned.
“Uncle Glad called,” she said when I was sifting through the bills, junk mail, and various requests from clients, courts, and, of course, my ex-wife. There was also a small pink envelope addressed by an ornate hand and postmarked in Minnesota.
“Oh?” I said. “What did Gladstone have to say?”
“Him an’ Lehman, War Man, and Mr. Lo, are playin’ cards down the street tonight.”
“That’s Jesse Warren,” I said, “not War Man.”
“He told me to call him that.”
I didn’t like Gladstone’s friends very much, but he kept them away from the office most of the time. And I owed Glad; he had saved my ass more than once since the arrest.
Getting me put in solitary rescued me from becoming a murderer, and then later, when I couldn’t raise enough money for rent and child support, he came up with enough cash for me to start the King Detective Service. He even guided the first few clients my way.
But the best thing Gladstone Palmer ever did for me was to broker my severance with the NYPD. I lost my retirement and benefits except for medical insurance for Monica and my daughter. Magically, there was no blemish on my record either.
For the past week or so I’d been reading the nearly hundred-year-old novel All Quiet on the Western Front. There was a character in there who reminded me of Glad; Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky. Kat could find a banquet in a graveyard, a beautiful woman in a bombed-out building. When the rest of the German army was starving, Kat would show up to his squad with a cooked goose, ripe cheese, and a few bottles of red wine.
You couldn’t question a friend like Kat or Glad.
“I told him you were on a job,” Aja said.
“You’re my angel.”
“He said he’d try to stop by before you left.”
The letter from the heartland intrigued me, but I decided to put off reading it.
“How’s your mother?” I asked.
“Fine. She’s writing you to give money for her and Tesserat to send me to Italy for this youth physics conference they’re having in Milan.”
“That sounds nice; like an honor.”
“There’s a hundred kids and only four from the U.S., but I don’t want to go. So you could tell her you’ll help but you won’t ever have to pay.”
“Why don’t you want to go?”
“Reverend Hall is having a special school in this Bronx church where good science students teach at-risk kids how scientists do experiments.”
“You know you really have to start doing some bad things,” I said with a little too much gravitas in my tone.
“Why?” Aja asked. She was really worried.
“Because as a father I have to be able to help you at least some of the time. With great grades, a good heart, and the way you bully me over the mail I feel like I have nothing to offer.”
“But you did do something for me, Daddy.”
“What? Buy you a Happy Meal or a hot dog?”
“You taught me to love reading.”
“But you never read except for homework, and you complain about that.”
“But I remember spending those weekends with you when I was little. Sometimes you’d read to me all morning, and I just know that I’ll do that when I have a little girl.”
“There you go again,” I said, mostly covering the tears in my voice. “Being so good that it makes me feel useless. Maybe I should start punishing you every time you get something right.”
Aja knew when the conversation was over. She shook her head at me and turned. She walked from the room and I was, for a brief moment, relieved of the fall from grace foisted upon me by somebody in the NYPD.
Before I could turn to the pink envelope from the Midwest, Aja returned with a big brown envelope in her hands.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “Uncle Glad left this for you.”
She handed me the package and turned away before I could tease her more about her perfections.
3.
After Aja returned to the outer office desk, I was at sea there for a while. My life since those ninety-odd days in Rikers had been what I can only call vacant. I didn’t feel comfortable in the company of most people, and the momentary connection with my daughter, or the few friends I had, left an aftermath of isolation. Human connection only reminded me of what I could lose.
Being an investigative private detective worked out perfectly because my interactions with people were mostly through listening devices and long-distance camera lenses. The few times I had to actually talk with people I was either playing a role or asking cut-and-dried questions like “Was so-and-so here on Friday night after nine?” or “How long has Mr. Smith worked for you?”
The buzzer sounded.
Half a minute later Aja-Denise said, over the intercom, “It’s Uncle Glad, Daddy.”
“Send him in.”
The door opened and the tall, athletic, eternal sergeant walked in. He was wearing a straw-colored sports jacket and trousers so dark green that they might have passed for black. The white shirt and blue tie were his mainstay, and that smile lived equally in his eyes and on his lips.
“Mr. Oliver,” he hailed.
“Glad.”
I rose to shake his hand and then he lowered into the seat across from me.
“This office smells like a prison cell,” he said.
“I got a cleaning lady come in and lay down that scent every other week.”
“What you need is an open window and less time moldering behind that desk.”
“Aja told me about the poker game tonight. I’d like to join you, but I got a man needs following.”
Glad’s eyes were cornflower blue. Those orbs shone on me, accompanying his that’s too bad smile.
“Come on, Joe. You know you got to get outta this funk. It’s been a decade. My son is off to college. My little girl is working on a second grandchild.”
“I’m doing fine, Sergeant Palmer. Detective work suits me. That’s the way I roll.”
I had always been envious of Gladstone, even before my life hit the rocks. Just the way he sat in a chair made you think that he had a handle on a life that was both a joy and deeply meaningful.
“Maybe you could roll your way into better circumstances,” he suggested.
“Like what?”
“I know a guy who might be of some help. You remember Charles Boudin?”
“That crazy undercover cop? The one that got into his cover so much that he bit an arresting officer to get in good with the Alonzo gang?”
“And which one are you?” Glad replied. “The pot or the kettle?”
“What about Charlie?”
“I was gonna get you drunk on this new seven-hundred-dollar bottle of cognac I got,” Glad said. “You know…win all your money and get you singing. Then I was gonna tell you that C.B. is now a lieutenant in the Waikiki PD. He says he could get you
in there in a wink.”
That was the first inkling of the great transition before me. Glad had been angry that I was treated with disrespect by our brothers in blue. He wanted every cop to have the best. He really was my only close friend, with maybe one exception, who wasn’t also blood.
“Hawaii? That’s five thousand miles from here. I can’t leave Aja like that.”
“After a year you’d be a resident, and the university at Manoa has an excellent physics department. A.D. could get a BS there and move on, or she could stay and get a PhD. It’s a real good school and the cost is almost nothing.”
He’d done his homework.
“Are you trying to get rid of me, Glad?”
“You need to get back up on the horse, Joe. There’s no charges pending against you and the department is legally prohibited from saying what you were suspected of. I know three captains would give you glowing references.”
“And Charlie already said he’d get me in?”
“They need experience like yours out there on the island, Joe. You were one of the best investigative cops New York ever had.”
“Aja might not want to go so far away.”
“She would if you were there. That girl idolizes you. And she’d do it just so that you stop brooding in here like some kind of lovesick walrus.”
“What if it came out?” I said. “You know…what they say I did? What if I upended my life and then the whole thing falls apart under my feet? I’d have moved Aja, with no money and no way to come home.”
Without missing a beat Glad said, “You remember that time Rebozo was shot up in East Harlem?”
“Yeah?”
“Two gunmen with semiautomatics and Officer R. on the asphalt hemorrhaging like a motherfucker. You take them on with just your sidearm, wound them both, cinch Paulo’s wounds, and make it home in time for supper.”
“And still they set me up like a goddamned tenpin.”
“Fuck them,” Glad said with barely a smile. “If you could stand up to armed gunmen, then why would you be afraid of five thousand miles?”
Down the River unto the Sea Page 2
