Down the River unto the Sea

by Walter Mosley

  “I was up worryin’ about you,” she explained. “You have never called me askin’ for friendship before now.”

  “Thank you, honey, but I’m fine. I lost it there for a minute and I needed someone who understood to hear me out. So you can go to sleep now and I will call you for coffee one day soon.”

  “Joe?”

  “What?”

  “Nuthin’,” she said.

  Sitting there in the early hours before the sunrise I was grateful for Effy’s call. There was nowhere to go with Adam or Hugo right then, so I decided to pay attention to some other aspect of my humiliation and demolition.

  I had turned off the burner phone Stuart Braun knew. I did this just in case he had resources that could locate an active number.

  There were two people who knew the number and two messages.

  The first was from Braun.

  “Mr. Boll,” he said. “I went to the Liberté Café and you never showed. This is a very serious situation and I really need to speak to you and your clients. If you were to go public with your suspicions, many people would suffer.”

  Especially you, I thought.

  “Please call me and let me know when we can meet,” Braun said. Before disconnecting the call he paused a long minute, hoping I’d been listening and was just about to pick up.

  The second message was from the devil.

  “Hey, King,” Melquarth Frost said. “Just thought I’d call and tell you that I’m closing in on the name you asked me to get. I’ll tell you when I have something.”

  I like detective novels. The dick is either smarter, braver, or just luckier than his nemeses. He, or even she, works pretty much alone, sticking out his jaw whenever there’s a blow coming. If he gets arrested that’s okay. If some pretty young thing needs sex, it’s probably not the right time for him, or her, just then.

  The literary PI usually takes on one case at a time and he stays on the trail until it is solved, whether or not justice is done.

  Sometimes I liked to pretend that I was a detective out of a book.

  With this thought in mind I went back over the things I knew, details that might open an unexpected door. What might Tecumseh Fox think about Willa Portman? If I were Watson peering over Sherlock’s shoulder, what odd detail might he be considering?

  Outside the window it was still dark, but the workers were on the street tramping off to jobs that would never earn enough to pay their bills.

  And as I watched, the name Chester Murray floated to the surface.

  Henri Tourneau’s access code revealed Chester’s long record with the NYPD. He’d been arrested for theft, pimping, assault, and even rape. He was on-again, off-again as a CI with various officers I didn’t know. I copied down the names in case they came up later.

  The interesting thing about Chester’s file was that the arrest record ended about three weeks before my bust. Since then he’d been a witness in a variety of drug and prostitution cases.

  He was a black man, what my daughter’s teachers would call African American, six three, and my age. He’d gone to public school until the age of fifteen and he was considered a predator by most of the detectives who had investigated or worked with him.

  There was an open file on him about a woman, Henrietta Miller, who had gone missing nearly twenty years before.

  If I wanted his address or number I’d have to come up with higher clearance than Henri had.

  That was no problem.

  I went upstairs to my apartment and spent another hour or so making notes on pink and blue sheets of paper. These I sorted into a leather folder that I put into a shoulder bag along with a silver flask of sour mash whiskey and a loaded .45 with an extra box of shells.

  At 6:45 I boarded the first car of an uptown A train. It was already crowded with people from all classes commuting into Manhattan. Next to me sat a young black woman reading Journey to the East by Hesse. She was rapt in the language of the long-dead Nobel laureate.

  In her early twenties, she was dressed for office work but not sleekly like a manager or VP. I figured she was a college student working as a receptionist or data entry clerk. Her profile was what I could only call friendly, so I said, “I tried The Glass Bead Game but couldn’t get through it.”

  She looked up at me as if expecting to see someone else.

  “What?”

  “Magister Ludi,” I said.

  “You read Hesse?”

  “Journey to the East and an early one called Knulp.” I could see the question in her eyes so I added, “There was an accident this one time and I couldn’t read for months. I never really read very much before that, but once I could do it again it was like I couldn’t stop for the next five years. I still read but just not so much as before.”

  “How did you end up reading somebody like Hesse?”

  “Worked my way sideways from the existentialists.”

  The look on her face was trying to deny my claims but unable to find a reason why.

  “What?” I asked. “Don’t I look like I can read?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, an authenticity in her tone. “You’re dressed like a janitor except for that leather bag. I guess you could be a professor.”

  “Retired cop.”

  “I expect cops to read Tom Clancy or something.”

  “What got you reading Hesse?”

  “I’m majoring in comp lit at Hunter. Our senior year we have to write, like, a thesis.”

  I stuck out a hand and said, “Joe Oliver.”

  “Kenya. Kenya Norman,” she said, reaching out too. “Are you trying to pick me up, Mr. Oliver?”

  “No,” I said. And that was mostly true.

  18.

  I got a phone number before getting off at Port Authority. Kenya Norman, the young scholar, was headed for Brinkman/Stern, an investment company in the Sixties that specialized in new technologies.

  “I figure I won’t be distracted from my work if I’m not interested in what my day job is,” she told me.

  “Whoever you are,” I concurred, “you have to love what you do or you end up hating yourself.”

  She gave me an odd look and I felt for a moment that I was looking into a mirror.

  Taking my cue from Henri Tourneau, I went to a pay phone on the third floor of the interstate-run travel hub.

  The phone rang only twice before he answered, “Braun.”

  “Mr. Braun, Tom Boll here.”

  “Where were you?”

  “There was another case I had to take care of. I’m sorry if I put you out.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the street. I like to use pay phones when I can. Feels anonymous. Know what I mean?”

  “We need to meet.”

  “Not really.”

  “No? I thought you were looking into Johanna Mudd’s disappearance.”

  “I told my clients about you and they decided to take what they had to the police.”

  “That’s a mistake…”

  He said more but I hung up in the middle of his protest. I wanted him a little nervous.

  “Ecstasies,” a young woman said.

  “Mimi, please.”

  “And who may I say is calling?”

  “Joe.”

  “Just Joe?”

  “That’s not what my mother would say, but you can tell Mimi that it’s Joe and he needs some ruby slippers.”

  “It’s not even eight in the morning,” the lovely voice argued.

  “If you look up the code words you’ll see that it doesn’t matter what time it is.”

  Even her harrumph was fetching. I wondered what the operator looked like.

  Minutes passed and then: “Joe?”

  “Hey, Mimi.”

  “You in trouble?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Then why am I awake?”

  “Did a guy call you with a reference from me?”

  “Federal man,” she averred. “Is that what this is about?”

&nbs
p; “No. I need to get a line on a man you might have some business with. A Chester Murray.”

  “That piece’a-shit traitor? I’ll give you his information if you promise to kill him.”

  “I can assure you that I’ll do worse than that.”

  “You still AOL?”

  “I am.”

  “A dinosaur. I’ll get somebody to send you what you need.”

  I bought three maple-glazed doughnuts and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee from a cart on the first floor. Then I made another call.

  “Watching the watchers watch the watched,” he said.

  I grinned. “Hey, Mel.”

  “You’re up early.”

  “I heard a worm turn and went out lookin’. You got anything?”

  “Not quite yet, but I will soon enough.”

  I hadn’t had a cigarette since solitary. I went to a little kiosk right outside the bus station and bought a pack of filterless Camels. I coughed a little on the first drag but after that it was a fine memory.

  I smoked the cigarette halfway down and then crushed it under the toe of my right shoe.

  My real phone beeped and I saw the e-mail that Mimi Lord promised.

  “Excuse me,” a woman said.

  She was probably thirty but looked like she was closing in on sixty. She wasn’t white or black, but that’s the closest I could come to defining her race. Her hands were very dirty and the violet-and-black dress she wore looked like it might unravel at any moment.

  “Yes?”

  “You got a cigarette?”

  I handed her the nearly virgin pack.

  I found him at the address Mimi’s e-mail provided, in a storefront on a stretch of Flatbush that had not yet been kissed by the gentrification bug. The entire space was no more than a few hundred square feet and the only furniture was a desk and four chairs.

  Chester was sitting behind the desk with a size-fourteen-shod foot resting upon it. Two other men, one white and one not, were seated in chairs that flanked him. They were all smoking and drinking from small paper cups.

  There was a good deal of laughter among them.

  I’d driven past the big-windowed storefront private club and parked the car in a garage six blocks away. My shoulder bag was in the trunk, under the spare, but the .45 was in my pocket—I was carrying a pretty mean pocketknife too.

  “Can I help you?” a man’s voice asked from behind me.

  I was standing across the street and four doorways down from Chester’s hole in the wall.

  Turning, I saw a small man with grayish skin looking up from about half a foot below my height. His sports jacket was shapeless enough to be a sweater and the waistline of his pants rode a little higher than where his navel should have been. Maybe seventy, he had a full thatch of gray hair and old-fashioned spectacles glazing auburn eyes.

  The sign on the display window of the store behind him read, NILES AQUARIUMS AND FISHES. I didn’t know if Niles was a name or some poetic reference to an ancient river filled with fish.

  I looked down into the man’s eyes and said, “Tom Boll. I was, uh, well, I was, um, thinking if I should come in and ask for a, you know, a job.”

  This declaration surprised the old man.

  “I like fish,” I said. “I mean I like to watch ’em. I like to eat ’em too, but I know you people don’t sell that kinda fish.”

  “I’m not hiring any staff right now,” he said.

  “I know that. I mean, if you was, there’d probably be a sign in the window or somethin’, right? But I was wonderin’ if maybe you had some kinda work that you always meant to be doin’ but never get around to it. You know, somethin’ heavy or dirty. I don’t mind gettin’ my hands dirty. And I could really use a few dollars.”

  The old man gauged me. I was just talking to blend in while watching Chester and his cohorts drink and guffaw. What I expected was that the fish merchant would send me away, but if asked later, he’d remember some poorly educated, nearly homeless man looking for work.

  “I have a storeroom in the back,” he said. “Junk’s been piling up in there the past thirty-seven years.”

  It was the perfect job for a mendicant like I was pretending to be.

  The store wasn’t much larger than Chester’s place, but it was crowded with aisles of shelving that supported at least fifty tanks for fish. There were no saltwater tanks or exotic, big, or expensive fish. His aquariums were filled with schools of tiny catfish, zebras, tetras with bright orange spotting, big-bellied hatchetfish, and enough goldfish to populate a small pond.

  Past the store proper was a little office where the old man, Mr. Arthur Bono, had a desk sitting under a corkboard decorated with dozens of pictures of good-looking young men—all dressed quite nicely. I figured that he cut these out of fashion magazines like GQ and Esquire.

  From the office there was a door to a storage room that was stacked almost to the ceiling with debris of all kinds. There were broken-down cardboard boxes, broken tanks, empty cylinders of fish food, big plastic garbage bags filled with pizza boxes, dozens of empty wine bottles, and other transitory food containers.

  The smell in there was pungent, but I didn’t mind.

  “You gotta pair of work gloves?” I asked the elderly shop owner.

  He was a little guy, but his hands were larger than mine.

  I went to work binding and then carrying the refuse through a back door, down an alley that ran along the side of his store, and out to the curb.

  The next four hours were occupied with the removal of at least two tons of rubbish.

  At the curb I could easily watch Chester and his men. They mostly smoked and drank. There was a pizza delivery that occurred when I was binding trash in the storage room. And then there was a larger drop.

  A fair-size U-Haul truck drove up and two Hispanic-looking young men started unloading smallish boxes with the help of Chester’s minions.

  I had done a fairly poor job of stacking the trash and so used that opportunity to straighten out the mess.

  There were maybe thirty boxes moved by the men into Chester’s make-believe office. They stacked them quickly and haphazardly; men in a hurry. The truck drove off and Chester and his men went back to sitting and laughing, drinking and making smoke.

  I’d been working on the trash pile for forty-five minutes or so when one of the men, the white one, came across the street. He was walking toward me.

  I considered shooting him.

  It was one thing to have the urge to kill Little Exeter. After all, he might have been part of the scheme to destroy my life. But this guy walking across Flatbush, with his hands hanging empty at his sides, was no threat and I had no reason to harbor him any ill will.

  I had been thrown back into the creature formed by my imprisonment. I was a rabid dog with hardly a scrap of civility to hide the shame.

  The man passed near me, nodded a friendly greeting, and went on to a black Ford parked a few doors down. He drove the car to the storefront and then, with the help of Chester and the other man, loaded the boxes into the trunk and backseat of the automobile.

  Nobody could ever say that criminals were at the top of their class in public school.

  “Mr. Boll,” Arthur Bono said to my back.

  “Yes, sir.” I turned away from my prey.

  “Here you go.” He handed me three crisp new twenties.

  “Damn,” I said. “I only figured to get about half this.”

  “You made a deep dent in the room,” he told me. “And paying off the books costs a lot less. I’m going home now. You know, I don’t feel right being out at night.”

  “Uh-huh.” I wanted to see what Chester et al. were up to behind me, but it made sense to maintain my subterfuge.

  “You should buy you some new clothes,” Arthur advised. “You know clothes make the man. If you come back tomorrow morning you could finish the job and maybe make enough to buy a new shirt or even a jacket.”

  I thought of the young men pinned to the corkboar
d in his office. He was trying to compliment me.

  “I’ll be here at nine,” I lied.

  The old man smiled, shook my hand, and turned away.

  Chester was standing on the curb watching as his henchmen drove off in the dark Ford. He kept an eye on them until they had driven out of sight and then went back into his empty space.

  I was right behind him.

  19.

  His left foot crossed the threshold, and mine did too. He felt my presence, but before he could respond I hit him in the back of the head with my .45. He went down on one knee and I hit him again—hard.

  While he floundered on the green-and-black linoleum I did a cursory body search, coming up with a small-caliber pistol. Then I pulled the ceiling-to-floor curtains across the picture window and flipped the wall switch for the overhead fluorescent lighting.

  Chester was holding the back of his head with one hand while trying to push himself up with the other. He was moving his lower jaw around as though he’d been hit there.

  “Stay down,” I told him.

  He stopped moving, and looked up to see me straddling one of the metal folding chairs. The .45 was in my hand, pointed at his forehead.

  He was up on one elbow and confused, but when he shrugged, maybe a preparation to rise, I pulled back the hammer on the gun.

  The fear factor of a cocking hammer is the real advantage of a six-shooter.

  He stopped moving, but his eyes were hard at work.

  He was long, strong, and considering his chances of turning the tables from a prone position.

  “You do and I’ll shoot you in the knee,” I said, “still ask my questions, then walk out the back door, leaving you a cripple for life.”

  “What you want, man?”

  “You ran a woman named Nathali Malcolm some years back.”