Down the River unto the Sea
Page 9
He stood up when I approached the table. I got the impression that this was a show of great deference. We shook hands. His powerful paw felt like a winter glove filled with concrete.
“Mr. Frost.”
“King—I got your text. Did they let you in like I said?”
“They sure did.”
We sat and appreciated each other a moment. He wore a lemon-colored suit that was loose but hung well. The shirt was lapis replete with errant silver and golden threads weaving through. I wore a felt-lined brown trench coat, black trousers, and black leather shoes with rubber soles.
I had thirteen years on the force, six of those as a detective, and Frost was the most dangerous criminal I had ever come across. Our few meetings had convinced me that he felt in my debt, though we had never discussed this obligation after his first visit to my office.
We might have been about to start speaking, when a mid-height, slump-shouldered man wearing a white jacket and black pants walked up to the small round table.
“Mel,” the man said in a voice that was hard and clear.
“Ork.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Nobody for you to worry about.”
“A guy up at the bar told me that he looks like a cop he used to know.”
“Go back to him,” Mel said, “and say that he should mind his own business.”
Mel and Ork peered at each other maybe a quarter of a minute. The latter’s nostrils flared, then he walked away.
“Friendly place,” I commented.
“Crooks are a skittish lot,” Mel countered.
“I thought you gave all that up.”
“I just like the atmosphere. Sometimes you get the need to talk to people who have the right language behind their eyes.”
I nodded.
“What can I do for you, King?”
“Tell me why you came to my office that day,” I said simply.
“I told you already.”
“Maybe pad it with some details.”
“Why?”
“Because I might want to ask you for something and you’re named after Satan.”
Melquarth Frost grinned.
“I saw a red bird in Prospect Park two days before you busted me,” he said.
“A red bird.”
“Pure scarlet,” he assented with a vigorous nod. “At first it was just a flash up in the trees, in between the leaves. But then it landed on a branch maybe forty feet away. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I found myself hoping that it would get closer so I could get a better look. I was sitting on a park bench getting my head together for the job. The thing took wing and landed on the lawn in front’a me. It was big, almost the size of a crow, and there was a single black feather on the crown of its head.”
There was what I can only call a beatific look on the ex–heist man’s face.
“And?” I said.
“He looked at me and I knew that that meant something. Here some completely wild animal comes right up to you and looks you in the eye. That means something.”
He had me.
“What?” I asked.
“I wasn’t sure about the exact message, but a bird means freedom and the color red means pay attention. And I thought that a bird like that, a bird that stood out like a flare in the night, was something like me.
“And then, when the prosecutor asked you to say something about me that would throw me under the bus, you refused. You were the better man when I was running and again when I was helpless.
“Don’t get me wrong. I could have done my time. I wasn’t afraid, but you weren’t either. You were like that red bird in the tree and then you came down. That was the sign—as clear as the nose on Ork’s ugly face.
“I was committed to one more job and, like I told you, my partner shot me in the back. That right there was the final straw—the business was finished with me.”
I was convinced that Mel was crazy. But his psychopath’s vision of the world seemed cohesive and certain; something I could trust to be what it was.
“I’m involved in a couple of cases,” I said after an appreciative pause. “I’m gonna need some help and I thought maybe I could hire you. I got a small budget and could hire a man. It’s not heist money, but you’re not a heist man anymore.”
“You got it.”
“Don’t you wanna hear what it is?”
“Sure. You got to tell me, but, Mr. Oliver, if that red bird asked me to follow him I would have said yes too.”
“How much will you charge?”
“A dollar now and a dollar when it’s through.”
I took a dollar bill from my wallet and handed it to him.
“You want to take a walk with me?” I asked Melquarth Frost.
He put the dollar in his breast pocket and stood.
I followed him up the stairs and out into a fate filled with madmen and red birds, nameless cops and women who fooled you again and again.
14.
Walking across from the East Village to the West was a pivotal, even a transitional journey in my life.
My father was a criminal and therefore I had become a cop. I was framed and threatened and so stopped being official and did the work as a private dick. Every step I had taken was an equal and opposite reaction to my father—you might say that it had nothing to do with free will at all.
But me walking down those chilly autumn streets with a man so evil that no crime deterred him meant that I had taken the first steps on a different path, a path that was mine and mine alone.
“I know there’s no way for me to make up for what I was,” Mel was saying as we made our way north on Hudson. The dark brick of the old buildings imparted their gloom onto his lecture and our destination. “I mean, I did it all and it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe if I felt it, I would want to make amends…”
He kept talking, but I wasn’t listening too closely. I knew somewhere that this was new for him too, that he wasn’t the kind of guy who told you anything unless it was either absolutely necessary or a lie. Melquarth, maybe for the first time, was thinking out loud, while I remembered my cell in solitary and how my enemies had broken me, made me cower like a dog.
“There it is,” I said after six long blocks.
The Liberté Café was on the east side of Hudson, having big windows and outside tables that only a few people used. It was mainly an overpriced pastry shop that made complex coffees and little sandwiches that pretended to be French.
“Can I help you?” a young caramel-colored woman asked. She had big freckles flanking her broad nose and a space between her front teeth.
“How about that table there?” I suggested.
“Sure. I’ll get Juan to bring your menus.”
I could see that Mel would have preferred a table tucked away behind the counter, but I knew that such seating would make us look suspicious.
Juan was a smallish bronze-skinned man with a debonair mustache and eyes that had somewhere else to be.
“I’ll have the prosciutto on a baguette and a green tea latte,” I told the young man when he asked the floor for my order.
“Coffee, black, with some bread,” Mel said.
When Juan went away Mel asked, “So what do you want with this guy?” referring to Stuart Braun.
“Have you ever met him?”
“No, but I knew a dude in Q that Braun got out from under a murder one charge.”
“Braun was in California?”
“No. But the guy had killed somebody in New York and then another man in Sacramento. California extradited and convicted him after Braun did his magic out here.”
“I don’t want to say why I’m looking into him quite yet,” I said.
“It’s your dollar.”
I was beginning to like my satanic sidekick.
“So what’s your story, Mel? I mean the real deal.”
He looked at me. His eyes were truly dead, but regardless of that there was gratitude in his stare.
“That sounds crazy.”
“Don’t it? I asked the woman, if I was that far gone why was I in prison and not in some mental facility?”
“What did she say?” I asked, looking up to see a trio of unlikely customers walk through the glass door. The big men all wore jeans, cotton sports jackets, and patterned shirts of various styles.
“That modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil,” Mel said, answering my question. “She said in the modern world a man who beats his own head against the wall is crazy but the guy slams somebody else’s head is criminal.”
“Three guys walked in,” I said.
“I see ’em in the mirror.”
They were talking to the sweet-skinned freckled girl.
“The fat one in the light jacket is a guy named Porker,” Mel added. “I don’t think he knows me. I was supposed to kill him this one time, but his girlfriend decided that she felt sorry for his wife and gave me my fifty percent kill fee.”
The men were looking around. Finally they decided on the partially concealed table that Mel coveted.
When they were settled, shy-eyed Juan went over to take their orders.
“So your story is a prison psych putting a textbook diagnosis on your actions?” I asked, telling Mel that we were just going to watch and wait.
“No. I was just giving you the official answer. You know that’s how most people know everybody else. They read it in a newspaper ad or maybe a letter from home.”
“So what’s the real answer?”
“My mother was a Catholic girl. From the age of three she went with her mother to church every Wednesday and Sunday. When she was nine she pledged her life to Jesus Christ and each and every word in a single book.
“Then one night, when she thought she was alone in the cathedral, a man dragged her into the confession box and raped her. She was barely a teenager and right there in the church too. That shit warped her brain.
“Her mother and father ordered her to get an abortion, but she told them that that would be against God. They kicked her out the house and she lived in a Catholic dormitory, where she gave birth, named me after the demon, and never, ever showed me any love.
“I was a duty like Job’s trial for her. She housed me and fed me and told me every day that I was the son of evil.”
I looked into Mel’s dead eyes, thinking that my life might not have been as bad as I thought.
“You know Porker’s real name?” I asked.
“I forget, but I know where to get it.”
After that we dallied over our drinks and food. Mel had a vast range of knowledge that had nothing to do with crime. He knew quite a bit about evolution. He told me that his greatest wish, when he was a child, was to change into something different; like wolves had become dogs or dinosaurs birds.
When my watch said 10:37 the three thugs paid their bill, got up, and left. They hadn’t seen a man with a red flower in his lapel. Stuart Braun wasn’t there either.
“I guess we can go too,” I said maybe half an hour after Porker and his crew were gone.
Outside the restaurant Mel said, “I killed the motherfucker.”
The old me would have been on the alert for a confession, but I had already crossed over that line in the East Village.
“Who?”
“My father. I asked around until I heard about a guy from my mother’s old neighborhood who had gone down for rape a few times. I met him in a bar and, after a whole lotta rye, he told me about a thirteen-year-old girl he raped in a confession box. He said that was the sweetest nut he ever had.
“A little later on I made some excuse to get mad and hit him in the teeth. I wiped some’a the blood up with a handkerchief and left him on the street.
“The DNA lab identified him as my father and I met up with him again. He’d been so drunk that he didn’t remember gettin’ knocked out. I took him to this abandoned house in the Bronx and put all kinds of pain to his ass. When he was dead I poured seventeen gallons of sulfuric acid into a big ole bathtub and that motherfucker was gone from the world. It was like he never even existed.”
“Because he raped your mother?” I had to ask.
“Because he made me and made me what I am and didn’t even know it. And on top of that he wouldn’t have given a damn even if I told him.”
15.
I took a yellow taxi home.
Montague Street was empty. Coleman Tesserat might have been hiding in some doorway with a gun in his hand. Maybe the exposure of his crimes on Wall Street would have salted him away for twenty years—I didn’t know. I did know that I wasn’t afraid to die, that since deciding to go up against the men who took my life away, I had no fear.
“King-baby,” she said.
Turning my head to the left I saw Effy Stoller. Five three with fifteen pounds over what her physician would have called perfect weight, she had big lips and skin darker than mine. Her high, high heels might as well have been bare feet, she was so poised, and her hair had been done into the shape of a seashell that would exist in some far-flung future when humanity had devolved itself into geologic memory.
“I know I’m a little late,” I said as she walked up to me. “I thought you’d be gone.”
She kissed me full on the lips and said, “I knew you’d get here. If you e-mailed me it had to be something hard.”
Effy had been a prostitute in the old days when I had a beat. She’d was run by a pimp named Toof who came from somewhere in the Midwest. He worked her hard and beat her regularly. But she never complained or turned him in.
Then late one Wednesday night when I was on the street in Midtown, an older woman hobbled up to me and said that she’d heard a shot from a building I knew well.
On the top floor a door at the far end of the hall was ajar. There had been as many eyes on me as there were roaches in the wall, but nobody came out to tell me anything—it wasn’t that kind of building.
Inside the apartment, Toof was on the floor in his ivory-colored gabardine zoot suit; the left side of his skull and most of its contents were on the wall. Effy sat nine feet away at a dinette table in the tiny kitchen. She was drinking the good cognac from the bottleneck, something I was certain Toof would have never allowed her to do.
The gun was on the table. It was a huge six-shooter, .41 caliber. I picked up the piece and sat across from her.
“When I woke up this morning I knew he had to die,” she told the tabletop.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“He got a new girl. Pretty thing.”
“And you were jealous?”
“The first time I seen ’im hit her somethin’ changed. It was like I had died and the gatekeeper was showin’ me my life. He give me a chance to go back and fix it. All I had to do was get a good night’s sleep to figure how.”
Toof had done all kinds of bad things, and Effy had always been, more or less, easy to work with. If I busted her she took the arrest with style. She deserved better and he’d gotten exactly what was coming to him.
Toof had a back door to his tenement apartment. I helped Effy to her feet and told her where she could go for the night. Then I put the .41 at the back of my pants and called in the homicide dicks, as was my duty.
Effy was my fifth e-mail of the morning. I knew I’d be needing some comfort when it came to sleep.
She undressed and bathed me, gave me an oil massage all down my spine to the middle of the gluteus maximus. When that was through she turned me over. Her breasts and stomach glistened from the oil.
“You not hard, King-baby; don’t you like me no more?”
“I thought maybe we could try and talk for a while,” I said.
“What you need to talk about?”
“You know how one time you told me
that you woke up in the morning and knew what you had to do?” We had not discussed that night before.
“Yeah,” she said with a slight nod and a steady gaze.
“I woke up a few days ago.”
She lay down beside me and put her hand to my chest. We stayed like that for long minutes.
“I stopped trickin’ six years ago,” she said.
“Then why are you here?”
“I knew what you was feelin’ after they lied on you. I knew. And when you called me I came because that’s what a woman does when a man save her life. He don’t have to love her or care about her or nothin’. But if he save her life, then she gots to take care on him. And even though I’m a professional and fully legit masseuse now—if you call, I come over.”
“I guess this is the last time I’ll call,” I said.
“We could still get drinks or sumpin’,” she offered. “Now, turn ovah.”
The new massage was softer and ranged wider. She did my earlobes and between the toes, the webbing between my fingers and the big tendons of my feet. All the while she was saying something, but I couldn’t quite make it out.
“Daddy?”
I hadn’t been in a sleep that deep for a very long time. Not since before my days in solitary had I slept well at all. A few hours here and there was the most I could hope for. But that day, with A.D. shaking my shoulder, I awoke from slumber that had been completely given over to rest.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Have you been asleep all day?”
“What time is it?”
“A little after four.”
I sat up, keeping the blanket wrapped around me.
Aja was wearing a light brown dress that came down to almost the knee, and though it revealed her figure it didn’t cling.
Looking at this mature attire I realized that she was even more alluring and looked old enough to do something about it. I chuckled to myself, realizing that I couldn’t keep my chick in the egg.