Down the River unto the Sea

by Walter Mosley

  I discussed my job with certain people who had nothing to do with law enforcement. But when it came to my new cases I couldn’t be quiet enough.

  “I had this public figure liked to do threesomes with T-girls,” I said.

  “What’s that mean? Tiger girl?”

  “I think the street term is chicks with dicks.”

  The bell to the door behind me sounded. In the mirror I saw a young man wearing a suit designed for an older, and probably more successful, banker. The young man—he was somewhere in his mid-twenties—looked at us for a few moments, then walked over to stand at the cash register.

  “Oh!” Dinah had rosy cheeks and a mouth that could become a perfect circle. “There was one of those lived in the apartment across the hall from me and Dan. Miss Figueroa we used to call her. She was the cleanest creature I ever knew. Dan was the one had to tell me she was a he. I swear I couldn’t tell at all.”

  “How is Dan?” I asked.

  Dinah beamed at me. “Thank you for askin’, Mr. Oliver. Him and me take a walk every evening along the Hudson. He tells me the same stories over and over and I love him more every time he does.”

  “Excuse me,” the young/old white banker-boy said.

  “He always remembers you,” Dinah continued, ignoring the young man. “He says, ‘How’s that nice colored boy helped Arnold?’ I know he shouldn’t say it that way, but he can’t remember to learn.”

  “Excuse me,” said the banker.

  “What do you want?” Dinah snapped.

  “Two coffees with milk and sugar to go.”

  “For the takeaway window you make a left out the door and then left again.” She looked at me, raising her eyebrows.

  “But I’m late,” he said. “Just do this now and I’ll use the window after.”

  “You’ll use the window now. There’s a big sign and I don’t like doin’ the takeaway.”

  “That’s not a very people-oriented business practice,” he judged.

  “Neither is knockin’ you upside the head, but I will do just that if you don’t move yer privileged ass.”

  A flash of anger passed over the young man’s face. He glanced at me and I shook my head—ever so slightly. I’m pretty big and almost as strong as Dinah, so he took the hint and left, muttering wordless complaints.

  “You didn’t have to bother yourself, Mr. Oliver,” Dinah said when he was gone. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I wasn’t worried about you, girl. I just didn’t want to have to be a witness after you broke his nose and he called the police.” This was true.

  Dinah laughed and we took a breath to find the thread of our conversation again.

  “Have you seen my grandmother lately, D.?”

  “She comes over for a smoke most afternoons unless it’s rainin’ or too cold. We go out back while Moira serves the late crowd.”

  “How does she seem?”

  “Wise as a prophet and crafty as a fox. She wishes that your uncle would come by.”

  “He’s always working,” I said.

  Uncle Rudolph was in Attica, imprisoned there for an insurance scam so complex that the prosecutors were never able to pin down the exact amount he’d embezzled.

  “Oh well,” Dinah opined. “At least Brenda has you.”

  “May I help you?” a good-figured blonde asked. She was standing behind the reception counter of the upscale retirement residence. I was liking her style.

  In her forties and proud, she wore a green-and-pink-speckled silk blouse to accent a tight black skirt.

  Some women just don’t get old.

  “Joe Oliver,” I said. “I’m here to see my grandmother.”

  “Does she work for one of the patients?” Blondie asked, as easy as if she were talking about the weather.

  “No.” I was losing the edge of my attraction.

  “Um…” She was really confused. “Does she work for the facility?”

  “She’s a resident,” I said. “Brenda Naples. Room twenty-seven oh nine.”

  For a moment the receptionist, whose name tag read THALIA, doubted me. But then she worked a little magic on the iPad registry.

  “She is here,” Thalia said.

  “Has been since before you,” I said, “and will be long after you have moved back to New Jersey.”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Oliver.”

  “Me too,” I concurred. “But maybe not for the same reason.”

  “Baby,” my grandmother said. I had knocked on the open door and then entered her room.

  She stood up from a chair that was set at a height halfway between a regular seat and a barstool. Her dress was bright yellow and her skin the blackness of a night sky.

  I kissed her lips because that’s what we’d always done.

  “Sit on the bed, darlin’,” she said, waving toward the single-mattress cot that was the main purpose for her room.

  She fell back into her carpeted wood chair, then momentarily raised her shoulders to prove how happy she was to see me.

  “How’ve you been, Grandma?”

  “Fine,” she said with a sneer. “That white man Roger Ferris keep askin’ me to go hear some music at Lincoln Center. I tell him every time that I will not go out on a date with a white man. I mean, if it was a double date and he had a white girlfriend and I had a black boy, then that would be okay.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “That we didn’t have to kiss good night.” There was the hint of a smile in her scowl.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “He says that if there’s no kiss, then it wasn’t a real date. And that if I knew before we went that there wasn’t gonna be no lip action, then I wouldn’t have to think we were on a date.”

  “That’s a pretty good argument, if you ask my opinion,” I said.

  “No one askin’ you.”

  “Roger Ferris. Isn’t he that guy who owns most of the silver in the ground in the world?”

  “I wouldn’t know. The only ground people up in here have is in the cemetery, waitin’ for the little we got left on our bones.”

  “How’s our other friends?” I asked.

  “Stop it, King. You and I both know that you not here at no eight thirty in the mornin’ to make small talk.”

  I do love my grandmother. The milestone of ninety years was well behind her, but she read the Daily News every morning and did all my sewing. She was a shade under five feet tall and hadn’t brought the scale up past a hundred pounds in years, but she was a power to reckon with.

  Stonemason’s was one of the most exclusive retirement/nursing homes in the world, but something about my grandfather’s career as a fireman got him and her put in a benefits clause that I had never seen.

  Brenda Naples still walked, smoked, and talked back. It’s an even bet that she’ll outlive me.

  “What is it, King?” she asked.

  I told her about the letter from Beatrice Summers and the danger of me following down that evidence.

  She concentrated with her eyes and ears, and maybe even by scent.

  “You got to do it, baby,” she said when I was through. “All a man got is his sense of what’s right and what’s not. If you know you been done wrong and you know how to make it right, then you don’t have no other choice.” Her dialect veered back toward its Mississippi roots when she was being serious.

  “I’ve always known,” I argued.

  “But no one else ever gave you hope or a name,” Grandma countered. “And before you had more important work to do.”

  “Detective work?”

  “No, fool.” She snorted. “Aja-Denise. You had to see her become a young woman before you could take care of yourself. That’s just mother wit.”

  I didn’t say anything because she had said it all.

  “You wanna come have breakfast with me in the commissary?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  11.

  Roger Ferris joined me and my grandmother for breakf
ast. He was a year or two younger than she, and six feet even at that great age. He was lanky and crowned with a mane of silver hair, a reminder, no doubt, of his nearly limitless wealth.

  Grandma Brenda seemed to enjoy his company. I guess the breakfast table was exempt from date status.

  Roger was a gun enthusiast and a pacifist too.

  “Any person who learns a deadly art,” he told me over chicken sausage and egg-white herbal omelets, “whether it be competitive boxing or sharpshooting, must be held to a higher standard. I mean, a man with a semiautomatic can kill a dozen people faster than he can utter their names. That’s a crime against God.”

  “That’s why it’s so hard being a cop,” I said with a nod and a sip of decaffeinated coffee.

  “How do you mean?” the man worth eight hundred seventy-nine billion dollars asked.

  “There you are,” I said, “out on the street with your piece and people who might be armed. They’re afraid of you, mad at you, wantin’ revenge for something one of your other brothers in blue might have done. But still you got to keep your pistola holstered because you have the power and the responsibility.”

  Roger smiled at me and nodded. I could see that guns for him were a symbol for the power of his wealth, and for that brief moment he saw us, even if not exactly as equals, somehow as the same.

  “Your grandmother is a wonderful woman,” Roger said to me at the elevator door. He had wanted to walk me there, and my grandmother seemed to approve.

  “Has been for a very long time.”

  “She says that you had to quit being a cop because you got into some kind of trouble.”

  “Trouble ambushed me with my pants down and my nose open.” I didn’t know why I was so candid with Ferris at that time. Now I understand that he radiated a kind of confidence and the feeling that he could be trusted.

  “Brenda said as much,” he said, nodding. “She’s amazing. Very intuitive and completely free of guile or greed.”

  “She says that you want to take her to a concert.”

  “She told me, not unless I can get a better tan.”

  “She wants to go, Mr. Ferris. You keep up the pressure and she will, sooner or later.”

  Ferris smiled and gave me a clear view of his pale blue eyes. They were sad eyes. I imagined that soon he and my grandmother would be sitting side by side at some fancy concert.

  “When you went to the can, your grandmother told me that you might have some trouble coming up.”

  “You know grandmothers,” I said. “Sometimes they get overprotective.”

  “Well,” the billionaire replied, placing a hand on my shoulder. “If she’s right, you just give me a call. You’ll find that there’s not much in this world that scares me”

  He handed me a business card and gave me a nod.

  Late November still had its warm days that year. I stood out on the street composing five e-mails on my smartphone. I’m a little obsessive about electronic communication. I reread each communiqué at least three times and then put each one through a spell-check. After finishing I went to the C train, riding it downtown back to Brooklyn Heights.

  I dabbled around on the Internet for a while looking for keywords that included Adamo Cortez, arrest, police officer, and testimony.

  It was 10:07 when I finally dialed the number.

  “Hello,” a man said.

  “Mr. Summers?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Joe Oliver. I believe that you know about me.”

  “Hold on.”

  The phone’s receiver clattered and then came the sounds of children expressing happiness and complaints. I heard her voice before she got to the phone. It sounded nothing like the woman I remembered begging me to pull her hair.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Summers? It’s Joe Oliver.”

  “Yes. I was expecting your call.”

  Somewhere on the other end of the line a door slammed and the noises of midwestern early-morning domesticity ceased.

  “To begin with,” I said, “I want you to know that I appreciate your letter and what it means. I know you didn’t have to reach out.”

  “Thank you, but you’re wrong there, Mr. Oliver. Since I came back to the church I have thought about all the bad things I’ve done. Some of them there’s no coming back from, but…but in your case speaking the truth is the least I can do. When would you like me to come to New York?”

  “Let’s talk about that a little later,” I said. “First I want to ask you some questions.”

  “Okay,” she said on a sigh.

  “You said in the letter that you had been arrested and then coerced into pressing charges against me by a man named Adamo Cortez.”

  “Yes.”

  “This man said that he was a policeman?”

  “He was a policeman,” she corrected, “a detective.”

  “And he was the one who arrested you?”

  “No. I was picked up with my, with my, um, boyfriend at that time, Chester Murray. They brought me to the station house on One Thirty-Fifth.”

  “The thirty-second precinct?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But it was on One Thirty-Fifth. I remember that it smelled like disinfectant.”

  “They all do at some time or other.”

  “I guess they must,” she said, trying to let my poor attempt at levity in. “I don’t remember the names of the officers that arrested me. Chester was driving, but I had leased the car. There was twenty pounds of cocaine in the trunk. They took me to this room and wouldn’t let me talk to Chester or call a lawyer or anything. They didn’t even let me go to the toilet…”

  Beatrice went silent there for a minute or more. I knew what she was thinking. If a cop wants to turn an arrest into an agent, he puts a scare into him, or in this case, her. Hunger, humiliation, and hurt are the tools. Not all worked on every perp. You had to create a specific cocktail for the personality. For Beatrice it was fear of isolation, maybe a little withdrawal, and a bladder so full that she had to relieve herself without benefit of the facilities.

  “I was there for at least a full day before Detective Cortez came to see me.” She was once again defeated by the illegal methods. This reminded me of Rikers and the burn on my face when I was slashed by the jagged edge of a number ten tomato can lid.

  After another long pause she continued. “He said that they could hold me for two days more without pressing charges and by then Chester would have turned on me.”

  “You think he would have?” I asked. I don’t know why.

  “Yeah. Chester once gave evidence on his cousin just so they wouldn’t put another mark on his record. He wouldn’t have even gone to jail, but he turned Jerry in anyway.”

  “What did Adamo look like?”

  “Short for a man. Black hair with a pretty thick mustache. His skin was brown like a brown egg if it was shellacked.”

  “Did he have an accent?”

  “I—I don’t remember.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That I’d get a year in prison for every pound in the trunk.” A sob escaped her reserve. “That I’d never have children or even a chance at a decent life.”

  “And,” I deduced, “I was the price to get you out of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he tell you exactly what he wanted you to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “What to do in the living room, what you should tell me to do, everything?”

  “Yes.” That time the word hurt.

  “And did you really go so far as to press charges?” I asked, wondering why I wasn’t angry.

  “He had me transferred to another station. There he gave me some papers to sign.”

  “What then?”

  “He took me to a house in Queens and kept me there for a week. I was in restraints most of the time. He—he raped me.”

  “And then he let you go?”

  I could almost hear her nodding. “Yes.”

  Beatr
ice and I shared the next spate of silence. I could hear her breathing—over a thousand miles away.

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Are you planning to press charges against Detective Cortez?”

  “I hadn’t even thought about that. Isn’t it—isn’t it too late?”

  “Yeah. But you could fuck up his retirement pretty good.”

  “I know you’re upset, Mr. Oliver, but could you not use that kind of language, please?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why do you want to know if I want to press charges?”

  “The guy you were arrested with was named Chester Murray?” I asked instead of answering.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see him again?”

  “Never.”

  “Was he your pimp?”

  “That was another time, Mr. Oliver. When do you want me to come to New York?”

  “What makes you think I want you to come out here?”

  “To testify. To prove that you didn’t do what they said you did.”

  “I don’t think I need you for that, Mrs. Summers. You gave me a name and a trail. That’s enough.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “Unless you remember something else.”

  “The thing you asked about Detective Cortez.”

  “What thing?”

  “He had an accent. It was a very New York kind of talking. You know what I mean?”

  “I certainly do. Thank your husband for me, Beatrice,” I said, and then I hung up.

  12.

  I was deep into the cases and not even a day had passed.

  I cleared off the desktop in my apartment and on a pink sheet of paper I wrote—Someone in the department was definitely involved in the false accusations against me. At the 32nd a man named Adamo Cortez, posing as a detective, coerced Nathali Malcolm into pressing charges against me for rape. Correct spellings and her testimony are attached below.

  After taping Beatrice’s letter at the bottom of the page I placed the pink sheet in the center of the green blotter on the empty desk. This simple act sent a thrill through my scalp and shoulders. Finally it had begun.