It was a good question.
4.
In my line of work you need a car; to follow people, yes, but also to get from place to place without having to wait for, and pay for, taxis and limos, Ubers and gypsy cabs. That is unless you like climbing down into subway tunnels like a rat or roach passing through some forgotten prisoner’s cell.
New York is not a car-friendly city and so I decided to buy the Italian-made Bianchina—a microcar that’s so small it almost brings its own parking place with it. It looks like a full-grown sedan that got shrunk down until almost a toy. I had mine painted dull brown to make it a little less likely to be noticed.
At 6:16 I parked down the block from the Montana Crest apartment building near Ninety-First Street and Third Avenue. While waiting for my quarry I intended to sift through the mail that Aja-Denise gave me.
Before I tore open the first envelope I thought of what life might be with no winter and a job as a cop again. I’d be so far away that no one would know my story. Maybe that was all I needed to break out of my ten-year funk.
That got me thinking about my daughter again.
Aja was not my daughter’s given name. When she was still small she learned how to spell the word for the continent in school and then saw the letters A-J-A graffiti-scrawled on a wall somewhere. The idea that two differently spelled words sounded exactly the same tickled the little girl and she took on the name because, she said, “Sometimes I’m happy and sometimes I’m sad but I’m still the same person anyway.”
I started with the package that Gladstone had dropped off.
Therein I found four NYPD-generated documents that followed the path of a file-based investigation.
These records told me that the fingerprints lifted from the discarded water bottle of the woman identifying herself as Cindy Acres actually belonged to someone named Alana Pollander. Ms. Pollander had been born Janine Overmeyer but changed her name after being convicted for check kiting in her home state—Ohio. Armed with this new name, she went to work for a man named Ossa James, a political “researcher” from Maryland.
With the use of the iPad my daughter made me buy I was able to see that Ossa James had recently signed an exclusive contract with Albert Stoneman—candidate for the congressional office in the same district where I was waiting for Representative Bob Acres. Bob Acres who was married to a Cynthia I’d never met.
Representative Acres, when he was in New York, was extremely punctual. He usually returned home between 6:30 and 7:05. So at 6:25 I put away the records and iPad and turned on my boom box because the Bianchina radio doesn’t have the best speakers.
That day I played a CD I’d burned featuring my favorite musician since getting out of Rikers—Thelonious Monk. Before my arrest I loved old jazz: Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong among many others. My father, Chief Oliver, wanted to name me King so that no one could denigrate me by using my first name as if I was some kind of servant or something. He also loved Louis Armstrong’s mentor, King Oliver, and wanted to make a memorial to him with my naming. But my poor, luckless mother, Tonya Falter, was raised in Chicago and thought the other schoolkids would make fun of a fancy name like King. Chief respected Tonya’s opinion and named me Joseph, King Oliver’s given name, and used King as the middle appellation.
My christening being so close to jazz, I naturally leaned in that direction. But once I got out of jail I no longer felt the smooth riffs of the earlier musicians. Monk always had a good group of talented musicians with him, but while they played deep melodies, he was the madman in the corner pounding out the truth between the fabrications of rhythm and blues.
“Round Midnight” was playing when Bob Acres got out of a cab in front of the Montana Crest. He was wearing a light brown suit, dark shoes, and no hat. He didn’t wear a tie either, his political career being based on brotherhood rather than superiority. He liked talking with his constituents and, if I was to believe the press, he represented their concerns as closely as any politician could.
For two hundred and fifteen dollars a day I shadowed Acres’s nighttime activities as the woman calling herself his wife had asked. She told me that she was sure he was having an affair and wanted proof so that she could force him into an amicable settlement for the divorce.
On the surface all this made sense. The New York Times had printed a small article on the separation of Cynthia and Robert Acres. She’d moved back to her home state, Tennessee. The one blurry picture of her looked enough like the woman who’d come to my office—if that woman had lost some weight and dyed her hair blond.
Before my frame and arrest I would have believed the woman calling herself Cindy Acres, but after my downfall I always questioned what I was told. Therefore I took the fingerprints from a water bottle she’d used and got Glad to run them.
This was only the second week that Bob was in town. He’d spent most of his time down in D.C. working on legislation and political strategies.
The first week I followed Bob he’d gone out three times: once to dinner with a young man who might have been his son; once to a fund-raiser at the Harvard Club; and lastly to what appeared to be an illegal card game on West Twenty-Seventh. But this last week all that changed. He came home every evening by 7:00, went to his fourth-floor apartment, and turned on the light. Then, each night, the light went off at 10:17 and came on again at 6:56 the next morning.
Four days in a row Bob’s light went on and off with military precision. I wondered who had tipped him off that he was being watched and where he was going that he needed an automatic system on his lights.
The night before, I waited in the alley near a doorway alcove at the side of the Montana. At 8:34 Bob Acres, dressed in a sweat suit, came out. He walked two blocks west, where he was met by a black Lincoln Town Car.
Twenty-four hours later I was ready.
The moment he walked through the front door of the Montana I drove to the block where he’d met the black car. There was another limo parked at the far corner.
There I waited.
Thelonious had moved on to “Bright Mississippi.” While he played that fairly traditional number I took out the pink envelope from Minnesota, sniffed its mild scent, and tore it open.
Dear Mr. Joseph K. Oliver,
Pardon my intrusion into your life but my name is Beatrice Summers and I believe that I have very important information for you. We are not unknown to each other. When you met me I was going by the name Nathali Malcolm. I fooled you into believing that I was the victim of a cruel man, seduced you, and then blamed you for sexual assault. You have always been in my mind since that time. I was forced to entrap you by a policeman named Adamo Cortez. He came to me after I’d been arrested with a large amount of cocaine and I was facing a long prison sentence. But since then I moved to Saint Paul, got off drugs and into a Christian community that knew my sins and forgave them. I am now married with two beautiful children and a wonderful husband from whom I hide nothing. We, Darryl and I, discussed what I had done to you and we agreed that I should write and offer to come back to New York and testify on your behalf. We were both sinners, Mr. Oliver, but I believe that you have paid for your transgressions while I have not. Below you will find my home phone number. I am a stay-at-home mother and housewife these days and there’s an answering machine. I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours in Christ,
Beatrice Summers
Reading that letter I felt both numb and jittery. I knew, of course, that there had been a conspiracy behind my arrest, but it was so well done and I had come so close to being locked in a cell forever that I let that truth fade until it was almost completely hidden behind the memory of those prison walls.
But here was an answer to a question that I was afraid to ask; afraid because I didn’t want to go back into that cell. I didn’t want to, but there was the evidence right there in my hand…right there.
The unstable mixture of rage and fear caused me to raise my head just as Representative Bob Acres was opening the ba
ck door of the hired transport.
I am a lifelong Democrat, as my father and his father had been. Bob Acres was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, but I would have cast my ballot for him right then. His appearance purged the past for a moment, allowing me to concentrate.
The limo made its way to the West Side Highway and then through to the Holland Tunnel. We crossed the state line somewhere under the Hudson River, but it was a short trip.
Exiting in Jersey City, New Jersey, the limo took the first right and pulled into the parking lot of the Champagne Hour Motel on Clarkson. I stopped across the street and snapped pictures with my high-resolution digital camera. The first-floor rooms’ doors opened onto the parking lot. Through the high-powered lens I saw Acres entering room number thirty-nine.
The limo drove off.
I waited seven minutes, then drove into the lot, parked, and went to the glass-encased office, which had a high pink desk, turquoise walls, and a ceiling paved with glittering red tiles. Behind the high counter stood a lovely young black woman with thick braids of dark brown and cherry red. Her face was broad, but there was no smile attending her beauty.
I had my go bag at my side. It might have been a travel bag.
“Good evening,” I said.
“Hello,” she replied without a hint of welcome.
I was glad to see her despondence. Happiness rarely wants to do business with a man in my trade.
I put a hundred-dollar bill down on the desk and said, “I have fond memories of rooms thirty-seven and forty-one.”
“That ain’t enough,” she said, sneering at the bill. “It’s a hundred eighteen dollars a night.”
“That’s for you,” I said, putting two more C-notes next to the one I’d already dropped. “This is for the room.”
She smiled, said “Forty-one is free,” and I secretly cheered for my country, where, over and over again, the almighty dollar proves its superiority.
There were a few sounds coming through the wall from thirty-nine. I opened my bag and took out a small hand drill with a one-eighth-inch bit. The device was almost silent, and when I just tapped the diamond-crusted bit every second or so against the locked door that connected the two rooms, there was hardly even a whine.
My room was dark, and when the light of thirty-nine shone through I took the surgical fiber-optic lens from my bag, connected it to the all-purpose digital camera, and then attached the camera to my iPad. I threaded the laser-wire lens through the hole and an image of what can only be called matchless debauchery filled the screen.
The pair of transgender prostitutes must have been waiting for him. The three of them were already naked and erect. I watched the play closely, mostly to avoid thinking about the intelligence that Beatrice Summers had bestowed.
The T-girls were good at their job. They played feminine very well.
Bob, for his part, was passionate and very, very happy.
I got about three and a half hours of video before the alcohol- and drug-induced mini-orgy was over. I waited until everyone from room thirty-nine had showered, dressed, and departed; then I went to bed with the most important item in my detective’s bag of tricks—a small silver flask filled with twenty-year-old hundred-proof bourbon.
My dreams were of solitary confinement and the iron rod I dropped while being dragged from that cell. In the nightmare I was beating Mink’s face in with the most powerful, the most satisfying blows I had ever delivered.
5.
I woke up at 11:07 by the digital clock next to the bed. The hangover was mild considering what it might have been. The room wasn’t spinning; it merely shook. And my head ached only if I moved it too quickly or looked directly into the light.
It was at least ten minutes before I even remembered Beatrice/Nathali’s letter. But there was no time to think about that. I got up so late I had to hurry if I wanted to get to the Gucci Diner in time.
My cell phone sounded halfway through the Holland Tunnel. I put it on speaker and said, “Yes?”
“Daddy?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school, A.D.?”
“It’s passing period and I wanted to tell you that I made an appointment for you and a woman named Willa Portman for four o’clock today. I sent you a text, but sometimes you don’t read them.”
“What’s the meeting about?”
“She wants to hire you to do some investigative work.”
“What kind?”
“She didn’t say, but she seemed nice.”
“On the phone?”
“Uh-uh. She walked in.”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
“See you then. I love you, Daddy.”
Between the headache, midday Manhattan traffic, and trying to compose the speech I had to deliver, there wasn’t much time to consider Beatrice Summers and the danger her confession might pose.
The Gucci Diner was pretty far over on the east side of Fifty-Ninth Street. It was a family-owned restaurant that had been there for decades. I knew the place because my father liked going there when he and my mother were still a couple. The patriarch, Lamberto Orelli, had the foresight to buy the three-story building, and so far no big-time real estate offer could buy them out. I parked my car in a lot and went to a bus-stop bench across the street—there to sit and wait. I wondered if I could somehow forget the letter, Beatrice, and Adamo Cortez (whoever he was). Maybe if I waited long enough, the rage and fear would subside again, leaving me to help raise my daughter and follow upstanding perverts back and forth across state lines.
There was aspirin in the go bag, bottled water too, but I preferred to feel the discomfort. It seemed an appropriate response to who and what I was.
Bob Acres showed up at exactly a quarter past one. He went to his usual table and sat down with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Daily News.
I allowed him to order and be served before jaywalking to the front door of Gucci’s and through to the politician’s table. I sat without invitation and looked into my quarry’s eyes.
“Yes?” he said.
“Who told you that you were being followed?”
Acres opened his mouth but did not speak.
“I mean,” I said, “that’s the only reason you’d put your lights on a timer just this week.”
I liked Bob. He was a deviant and a Republican to boot, but we all had our dark sides. I would have been a murderer if I hadn’t fumbled that iron rod.
“Who hired you?” Bob asked.
Instead of answering I took out the iPad, played around a bit, and handed him a screen showing a full page of thumbnail stills that I’d sorted out while he got fucked.
He worked his way through the photographs, studying each one. There was no expression I could read. This made me think that he’d probably won at that poker game he attended.
“Who hired you to take these?” he asked, looking up.
I liked the guy.
“She said her name was Cynthia Acres,” I replied.
That made his eyelids tighten.
“Cindy?” He might have been a child registering his mother’s first betrayal.
“That’s what she said, but when I looked into it I found out she was a ringer sent in through a third party to gather dirt on you for Albert Stoneman.”
“So it wasn’t my wife?”
“No. Not love, but politics as usual.”
“So Stoneman hired you.”
“Probably hired me. A man named Ossa James employs the woman posing as your wife. Ossa is a paid political adviser to Stoneman.”
Acres put his right hand up with the palm confronting his face; then he rubbed the center of the palm with the fingers of his left hand.
“I don’t understand,” the congressman said. “Why would they have you bring the evidence to me instead of making it public? Why would they allow you to identify them?”
“The dollar is my master, but I ain’t no slave,” I replied. It was something my father used to say. “When I realized that the wo
man who hired me wasn’t your wife I got kinda mad. I once had a woman lie about me and I didn’t like it one bit.”
Acres put both his palms flat on the table.
“Is this man bothering you?” a burly man asked Bob. By his white uniform I thought that maybe he was a cook. The authoritative way he asked the question meant that he was either a thug or a member of the Orelli clan.
“No, Chris, this is an aide of another member of Congress come to deliver a message.”
Chris turned his grizzled gaze upon me. He had more muscle but I probably had better training. I had a license to carry too, but I usually left the hardware at home, or in the trunk of my Bianchina; this because of the memory of that iron rod in my calloused hand.
After the self-appointed bodyguard left, Acres asked, “So what do you want? And what’s your name?”
“Whoever told you about me didn’t give a name?”
“No. She just said that there was a detective following me.”
She.
“I don’t need a name for this talk, Congressman Acres. And what I want is not a physical thing.”
“I will not resign,” he said.
“Look, man, I’m a Democrat and an ex-cop. Three people in a motel room in New Jersey don’t mean a thing to a cop, and you bein’ a right-winger doesn’t mean much either. I’m here because a halfway-decent detective could watch you, follow you, and get pictures like those without even having to work hard at finding a way in.
“I figure it like this—either you want to get caught or you’re just so hungry for it you kind of lose your mind sometimes. If it’s the first I know a good therapist. If it’s the second I know a woman named Mimi Lord. For a competitive rate she will set up rendezvous that Sherlock Holmes could not pierce.”
“That’s it?” Bob asked when I didn’t continue.
Down the River unto the Sea Page 3
