That was eight years ago. The divorce was dragging, and Monica’s lawyer had threatened to have my new accounts attached if I didn’t pay her initial fee.
I needed a job, any job.
Tom Storell told me that his son had been arrested for robbery. He’d gone into a stationery store also in the East Village and emptied the cash register while the clerk was with a customer somewhere in a back aisle. The police were called and happened to be only seconds away. They arrested Jacob before he had made it to the corner.
“He needs a lawyer,” I advised, “not a detective.”
“The police have a videotape,” Tom said with hopeless conviction.
“But we are sure that he would never do such a thing,” Margherita added. “He’s so good-hearted that ever since he was a child the other children would get him into trouble. Go see him. Look at the evidence. It would be a service.”
So, for a down payment of eighty dollars on four hundred, I went to the precinct in the East Village and asked to see my client.
“You the one they got for misconduct, right?” the desk sergeant asked.
“Falsely accused,” I replied.
The fifty-something cop was beefy but pale. There were errant hairs on his otherwise clean-shaven jowls, and his eyes had almost given up on color altogether. I was standing three feet away from him but imagined a rank scent and took half a step back.
“Interrogation room nine,” the sergeant told me. I never got his name. He handed me a clear plastic badge with a red card in it. The card identified me as V9.
Walking down the corridor toward the interrogation room area, I was struck by sudden claustrophobia. The walls seemed to want to move in on me. The floor felt uneven, and the imagined smell of the unnamed sergeant was pungent in my nostrils.
I stumbled and righted myself with my left hand against the encroaching wall.
“Whoa, brother,” a man said, putting a hand under my left arm. “You okay?”
He was Asian, probably Chinese, wearing a patrolman’s uniform and black-rimmed round-lensed glasses. His eyes were friendly and he didn’t smell at all.
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess the days kinda add up.”
“And count down,” he added. “Aren’t you Joe Oliver?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, they fucked you. If I had been the detective on that investigation, nobody would have ever seen a tape. I mean, you didn’t hit her or nuthin’.”
Back then this was new fodder for my discontent. Of course a brother in blue would “lose” evidence like that. And the police were always the first eyes on the scene.
“Thanks,” I said, standing up straight. “What’s your name?”
“Archie, Archie Zhao.”
“Interrogation room nine up ahead, Archie?”
“Just around the corner.”
The IRs were no more than broom closets in that precinct. When I opened the self-locking door, the solitary occupant flinched in his chair and put his hands up as far as the restraints would allow.
He was a short, pudgy young man in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. He’d been beaten pretty badly by the look of his face. The left eye was completely closed and his lower lip had been busted up. There was a lump the size of a golf ball on his right cheekbone.
“I’ll confess if you want me to,” he said.
That was all he needed to say. I had been him not long before. There were moments when I would have said anything to stop the fear of what might happen next.
“Your mother sent me, Jacob.”
“She did?” One eye opened wide while the other strained for sight.
“You okay?”
“They hit me. They hit me hard.”
“Did you steal that money?”
“Are you going to take me home?”
From the looks of him I would have said he was mid-twenties, but he spoke like and had the manner of a child.
“Not right this minute, but if you answer my questions truthfully, I’ll do my best to prove you innocent.”
That’s when he started crying. He put his head in his chained hands and blubbered. I took the seat across from his side of the detainment table and waited. After a while the crying became fearful and louder. He started yelling and trying to pull himself free from the cuffs that were attached by a chain, threaded through a hole in the table, to a steel eye anchored in the concrete floor.
I remained silent, allowing him to vent. I knew the feeling.
After a while he calmed down and sat up, after a fashion.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured.
“No blame,” I said. “Here you get arrested for something you didn’t do and then they beat you for tellin’ the truth.”
Jacob looked at me with his Quasimodo eye.
I asked, “Why did you take the money out of the cash register?”
“Sheila told me I could.”
“Who is Sheila?”
“A friend I met.”
“Met where?”
“In the park on Bowery. She said her father had a store and that he’d give us some money for dinner. She was very hungry.”
The whole thing took about three hours. I got Officer Zhao to let me see the security tape from the scene. It was obvious that someone off camera was telling Jacob what to do; probably Sheila. And it was likely that she had another friend who lured the counter clerk into a conversation in a back aisle.
The arresting officer’s report said that there was no money found on the suspect. He was only three doors down and the money had already been taken from him.
The detective in charge of the interrogation was Buddy McEnery, a contemporary of mine who took shortcuts every chance he could.
I had a rep too. I liked the ladies and I was a stickler for details. Almost all of my arrests ended up in convictions.
I convinced Buddy to access other security cameras in the area to try to get an image of Jacob leaving.
“I’m sure you’ll get a shot of a girl and a guy or maybe two girls who fooled the kid.”
“He still did the taking,” Buddy, a swarthy Irishman, said.
“Have you talked to him?”
“Sure,” he said, “with this.” He held up his left fist.
I refrained from hitting him and said, “I’m sure his high school records will say that he’s a special needs student.”
“A retard?”
“Let me take him home, Bud, before you and the department get sued.”
McEnery wore a gray suit that had gained its silvery sheen with age. He stared at me, distaste outlining his lips, and finally said, “You’re not one of us anymore, are you?”
“Jacob’s a good kid,” I said to Willa, “but I don’t think of him as a trustworthy reference.”
“Jackie was a stock boy in my father’s hardware store,” she said. “He was kind of like my friend. He told me about you, and his mother said that you were able to get him out of jail in just a few hours. When I asked her about using you, she told me that you were committed to service and truth.”
I don’t believe in the supernatural, but some people I’ve met seem to see things that are hidden from me. I don’t know if it’s intelligence or a mode of perception beyond my understanding, but there are those whom I trust beyond the borders of simple logic; Margherita Storell, though I had met her only once, was one of these people.
“So you’ll go over the papers tonight?” the untried lawyer asked.
“Give me two hundred and fifty from the cash and I’ll read it. Maybe I’ll have some advice about it, maybe not.”
“Maybe you’ll take the case if you think there’s some merit?”
I waited four heartbeats before saying, “Maybe.”
Willa departed, and for a while I was alone and at peace the way a soldier during World War I was at peace in the trenches waiting for the next attack, the final flu, or maybe mustard gas seeping over the edge of a trench that might be his grave.
I was thinking about A
cres and Summers and now Man too.
To get my mind off these troubles I logged on to my IP, hoping for good news or at least a worthwhile ad.
The seventeenth e-mail in the list was from [email protected]. The only message was a phone number.
8.
After work I took Aja-Denise to a new French bistro on Montague called Le Sauvage. I had boeuf bourguignon and she coq au vin. The red wine was good and I only let her have a sip.
“Are you gonna take Willa’s case?” she asked after I refused her a second taste.
“How much did she tell you about it?”
“That guy A Free Man is innocent and she thinks you can prove it.”
“You can’t mention that to anyone,” I said.
“I won’t. I’m just talking to you.”
A man two tables away was giving us side glances now and then.
“There’s another thing,” I said.
“What?”
“Do you use the computer I gave you?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Do you ever take it home?”
“It’s a laptop, but it weighs twelve pounds. I wouldn’t take that thing anywhere.”
“So you never took it home.”
“Uh-uh,” she uttered, but there was a look of hesitation in her eye.
“What?”
“The files are on the cloud. I usually download the work to my computer once a week to catch up on things I might not have finished. Is there anything wrong with that?”
I love my daughter. If I had to spend the rest of my life in a moldy coffin buried under ten feet of concrete with only polka music to listen to, I would have done that for her.
“Is something wrong, Daddy?”
“No, honey. It’s kinda late. I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Okay. Are you going to take the Man case?” she asked as we stood.
“Please don’t ever mention that name again. Not to your mother. Not to anyone.”
“Okay.” She looked at me pleadingly to underscore the promise.
I was parked right off Montague, but before we got very far someone called to us.
“Excuse me,” he said. He approached us from the front of Le Sauvage.
I wondered if I had forgotten something.
It was the man who had been giving us glances: a white guy standing at about five nine, wearing a green-and-yellow sports jacket with black shirt and trousers.
“Excuse me,” he said again as he reached us.
His shoes looked as if they had been woven from straw.
“You don’t have to go with him,” he said to my daughter.
“Huh?” was her reply.
I didn’t know whether to give him an uppercut or a kiss on the lips.
“You got it wrong, man,” I said. “This is my daughter.”
He blinked and then took a closer look. The resemblance is there if you look past the optimism and the pain.
“Oh. I’m so sorry. Excuse me. I thought…”
“Look,” I added. “I appreciate you looking out for a young woman, but there’s no trouble here.”
“You thought he was my boyfriend?” my innocent daughter proclaimed incredulously.
“I lost my youngest to the street,” he said, addressing me.
“Next time you should take a cell phone picture and call the cops,” I suggested. “Safer all the way around.”
The ride out to Plumb Beach was fun. Aja loved listening to Sidney Bechet because “his horn sounded like somebody talking.”
I told her the story about how Bechet got involved in a duel with another musician in Paris because the guy had told him he played the wrong notes.
“Really?” she said. “Did he shoot the other guy?”
“They were better jazzmen than they were marksmen. Some bystander got shot. I think it was a woman.”
“Like me if I talk about your cases,” she said.
“Probably not, but maybe.”
Monica’s husband came to the door of their three-story whitestone. He was expecting my daughter to come alone.
“Joe,” he said.
“Coleman.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Daddy has to talk to Mom,” Aja said with authority in her tone.
“About what?” Coleman Tesserat addressed the question to me.
“Joe?” Monica called from the second-floor landing.
“Hey, Monica,” I said. “I have to talk to you about something.”
“Call me tomorrow.”
“Can’t,” I said. “It’s LAD.”
I managed not to smile at the frown that twisted into Coleman’s lips. He wanted Aja to call him Daddy and resented the fact that his wife and I had a secret abbreviation system to communicate with.
My ex-wife harrumphed and then said, “Let me put something on. I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
“I’ll keep you company till she comes,” my daughter said.
“You will go to bed,” Coleman said.
He was a light-skinned Negro with handsome features. My height, he was ten years younger than my ex. Coleman was an investment banker and pretty well-off; the kind of man who liked owning things, or at least controlling them. I appreciated this quirk in his personality because it alienated my daughter.
The evil look she gave him was cute on a sheltered seventeen-year-old, but one day Coleman and Monica would experience the hatred seething underneath.
“Okay,” Aja said. Then she kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “Good night.”
I went through the first-floor sitting room to a smaller dining area and into the L-shaped kitchen. I sat at the small table where the family of three ate breakfast and sometimes dinner.
I was thinking of the best way to broach the serious talk that she and I needed to have. LAD meant life and death in our code system. Hearing that, she knew I meant business.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, Monica came in wearing a teal sweat suit. Coleman followed. He was clad in jeans and a black T-shirt.
“Well?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Tell him to leave,” I said to my ex.
“You don’t order me in my house,” Coleman said.
“Please, CC,” Monica said in almost a whisper.
He wanted to fight. I did too. Instead he turned away, walked through the rooms to the stairs, and stomped his way to bed like Rumpelstiltskin after a hard day making gold on his Wall Street spinning wheel.
When we were both sure that he was gone she said, “What is it?”
“You mess with me all the time, M.,” I replied. “Send me threatening letters, have lawyers send me threatening letters, and every once in a while you try and get at me through A.D. That’s cool. I take it in stride. I don’t come to you and ask why didn’t you do something to help me, your daughter’s father, when they were trying to bury me under the prison.”
“You know why,” she said like Moses on high.
“And so you do this?” I asked, running my finger along the deep scar down the right side of my face.
“I didn’t cut you.”
“But you could have stopped it from happening. You could have gotten up off our monies and made my bail.”
“I had to worry about our daughter, her future.”
“Yeah,” I somewhat agreed. “And the best way to protect her is to make sure I keep paying for what she needs to live.”
“Coleman provides.”
“But it helps to have that extra check. I mean, even his six figures would be stretched trying to fit the bill at Columbia.”
“What do you want, Joe?”
“I’d like it if you didn’t try and get me shot.”
The look on her face was that of an innocent listening to the ravings of an idiot.
“When you called Bob Acres,” I continued, “you didn’t know what the circumstances were.”
The dismissal in her gaze faded.
Monica had been a beautiful young woman. She had deep
brown skin and features that spoke of western Africa. She was loving and sexy, smart and loyal. I had betrayed her, there was no excuse for that—but it was enough that she let me languish at Rikers.
“You warning a man I’m investigating could end up getting me killed. What if I decided to investigate Coleman? What kinda dirt you think I could dig up on him?”
I knew at least part of the answer to that question. I was pretty sure she did too.
“I—I never heard of a Bob Acres,” she said lamely. “Is that that congressman?”
“He sent me the number of the person who warned his aide. Your cell phone number.”
“Coleman has nothing to do with this.”
“Take me to court, report me to the authorities when I’m six days late on a support payment, tell my daughter exactly what I did to make you so mad,” I listed, “but fuck with my work again and I will make you regret it. I will torpedo this perfect life you got so bad that you won’t even be able to come up for air. Do you understand that?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I just stood up and retraced my steps to their front door, and walked out to the street.
There was a chill in the air. I liked it.
9.
One flight up from my second-floor office is the apartment where I live. It too has an eighteen-foot ceiling and two magnificent windows that look out on the gentrifying thoroughfare. I have ceiling-to-floor deep red curtains cut from a light fabric derived, somehow, from bamboo. I open them at night because the lights are on at the front of the room and no one can see in.
My entire apartment is one big room and a water closet. I have a footed, deep-basin iron bathtub, a king-size bed on a three-foot-high dais, and a mahogany desk that’s more than a hundred years old.
Leaving the rest of the room dark, I turned on the desk lamp and opened the suitcase full of records that Willa Portman brought.
Either Willa or her boss was very organized. A blue folder set atop the great pile of paper was an index that pretty much laid out the defense for A Free Man, née Leonard Compton. It contained his personal history, his political involvements, his work and military experience, and the events leading up to the night that Officers Valence and Pratt were killed.
Down the River unto the Sea Page 5
