Down the River unto the Sea

by Walter Mosley

The photographs of Charles showed a handsome man with almost copper-colored skin and straightened hair. He had a killer smile and eyes that somehow came up out of the photograph.

  He was a resident of the Aramaya Rest Home on Neptune Avenue in the heart of Coney Island. It was a three-story brick building not two blocks from the ocean.

  The reception area’s walls were lined with chairs and sofas on which reclined at least two dozen old men and women who had outlived their usefulness but still clung to the memories and hope of life.

  Mostly but not all white, they stared, read newspapers, talked to themselves or others. Sprawled out, leaning on canes, and trapped in wheelchairs, they napped, dozed, cried, and muttered. The room smelled strongly of urine, dead skin, alcohol, and disinfectant.

  I walked down the aisle of tortured souls, a modern-day Dante wandering through a half-hearted beach resort in hell. The inmates reached and called out to me. They watched as I went by, wishing, I believed, that they had the strength to walk away from their private damnation.

  “Can I help you?” asked a blue-haired lady in nurse-like white. She was somewhere in her sixties, which made her the second-youngest person in the room.

  “Lamont Charles,” I said.

  The short, well-preserved white woman’s face brightened and she gave a smile usually reserved for grandchildren and fond memories of the dead.

  “Mr. Charles,” she said as if the words were a mantra designed to open the gates of heaven.

  “Yes. Can he have visitors?”

  “I don’t know why he doesn’t have more. If we had a dozen like him I think we might get something accomplished.”

  I had no idea what she meant but asked, “Can I see him?”

  The small elevators at Aramaya were in constant use so I took the stairs to the third floor and followed the receptionist’s directions to the recreation room.

  It was a large area with a succession of windowed doors leading out onto a deck that looked over the ocean.

  This room was a maze of sofas, chairs, wheelchairs, and game tables. There were at least forty residents in the same sad shape as their brethren downstairs. I looked around for a somewhat younger man, three-quarters paralyzed.

  “Can I help you?”

  The question was asked by a twenty-something black man with bulging muscles and an orderly’s teal garb. He had the use of all his limbs.

  “Lamont Charles.”

  He was the only person out on the deck. It was a mild day, maybe fifty-five degrees, with a toothless breeze wafting through. Lamont was sitting in an electric wheelchair, holding a mirror in front of his face with his one good hand. He’d put down the mirror, pick up a comb, run this through his hair, and then retrieve the mirror to examine his work so far.

  “Mr. Charles?” I asked.

  Still looking at himself, he said, “Yes?”

  “My name is Oliver, Joe Oliver.”

  I moved between him and the view of the ocean.

  After a moment he looked up and said, “Cop?”

  “Used to be. A long time ago. Now I’m private.”

  He put down the mirror and smiled like he used to in the old days before being shot down.

  “You like it out here?” he asked. You could hear North Carolina in his voice.

  “A little chilly.”

  “That’s why I got me two blankets. You know the smell’a that place back there is bound to be bad for you. So I come out here every day to clean out my lungs. I don’t care how cold it gets, a red-blooded man needs fresh air.”

  A seagull swooped down and landed on the railing maybe a dozen feet from us. It gave us its sidelong glance, hoping for crumbs or maybe a discarded fish.

  “Why you here, Mr. Oliver?”

  “I’ve been asked to look into the conviction of A Free Man. There are those who believe he was set up to be killed and then, when that failed, framed.”

  “You got ID?”

  I held up my PI’s license in its leather folder.

  “Hand it here,” Lamont said.

  He took the ID and held it like he had the mirror. Then he sniffed and handed it back.

  “Manny’s on death row, brother. What you think anybody could do ’bout that?”

  “Maybe prove that Valence and Pratt were dirty and that they not only tried to kill Man, but they also killed, and in your case wounded, most of the rest of the Blood Brothers of Broadway.”

  Charles’s right eye started fluttering. His smile turned, momentarily, into a sneer.

  “Hurts like a mothahfuckah, you know, man?” he said.

  “What does?”

  “This pain in my back. They prescribed oxycodone, but I only take it on the weekends. I only take it then ’cause everybody deserves a li’l peace sometimes.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt bad for lamenting a few months in solitary confinement compared to what Lamont and all the other residents of Aramaya were experiencing.

  “Who hired you?” Lamont asked.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Manny know you on the job?”

  “Not yet.”

  The smile came back to the gambler’s lips.

  “You know once the state sentences a man to death you got to have DNA evidence or Jesus himself got to climb up out the ground.”

  “DNA won’t help here,” I said.

  “And J.C. busy,” Lamont agreed.

  He looked past me over the water and I leaned back to perch on the weatherworn wood rail.

  “What happened to you, Mr. Charles?”

  That was the right question. He wasn’t going to worry about anybody but the man in his mirror.

  “They shot me in the back,” he said. “Shot me five times and ran. They didn’t know how lucky I was, must’a thought I cheated at cards.”

  “Gamblers shot you?”

  “Fuck no. A gambler would give me a head shot. Any gambler know me knows my luck. Shit. I win when I wanna be losin’.”

  “Was it Valence and Pratt?”

  “Or somebody they worked with,” Lamont said. “They killed all the rest’a my friends, Lana’s in prison, and Tanya’s missin’—prob’ly dead. I say a prayer to Manny every night for gettin’ us some justice. You know them cops was bad, from drugs to hos. And you better believe they didn’t give a damn.”

  “What did they do?”

  “Sold drugs to kids and kids to child molesters. Then they blackmailed the child molesters. They took over private business like gamblin’ and killed anybody aksed why. Manny was a war hero and schoolteacher. How a mothahfuckah like that gonna turn his head an’ forget?”

  “Sometimes people like that work with people like those cops,” I suggested.

  I was trying to get Lamont angry, out of his game. But he just grinned.

  “You think he decided to make a clubhouse for the triple B and invite kids to play snooker and do their homework because he wanna turn ’em out? That’s a white man’s game, man. When seven brothers and sisters get together to help po’ kids that’s just what they doin’. An’ you was a cop so you know it’s true.”

  I had my doubts, but what stumped me was Lamont seemed to be telling the truth.

  “If you people were so poor and so innocent, then how do you pay for this rest home?” I put to him. “This shit cost maybe a thousand dollars a week.”

  “Thirteen hundred sixty-fi’e dollars,” he corrected.

  “You win that at bingo?”

  “I’m a gambler but I’m no fool, Mr. Oliver. I had me lifetime-care health insurance since my brother Andrew died in my house from lung cancer. Took him seventeen months to pass on. Me and him and his wife, Yvette, lived in my one room. Make this place look like Disneyland.”

  “If you and the other Blood Brothers weren’t competing with the cops, then why they come down on you like that?”

  “Why any American go to war?” he said. “We was fuckin’ with they business. We talked to the girls and boys they prostituted and organized marches in fro
nt of stores they protected. Manny hired a lawyer to sue the city. He thought that that would keep us safe from reprisals.” Lamont grunted a laugh. “Mr. Man was a optimist…no, no, he was a idealist. He believed in what he was doin’ and he got you to believe it too.”

  “Who was the lawyer?” I asked.

  “Rose Hooper.”

  “Manhattan practice?”

  “Used to be. Bein’ a lawyer I suppose that she now sits court in hell.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Mugging, they say.” He looked up at me. “What do you say?”

  Being a cop, I didn’t want to believe Lamont. He was the kind of guy I rousted and arrested, questioned, and, if the need arose, threatened. But I had lots of experience with seasoned liars. He didn’t seem to be one of them.

  “Mr. Charles?” a woman said.

  She was in her thirties but carried herself in a younger pose. She wore a green dress and a frilly white sweater. Her black shoes had respectable heels and her makeup had been applied with care. There were little gold flashes at the corners of her eyes.

  New York white, she had no discomfort standing alone on a deck with two black men.

  “Miss Gorman,” Lamont said. “Meet Mr. Joe Oliver. He used to be a cop.”

  Also being New York white, she wasn’t necessarily fond of people in my profession.

  “What do you want with Mr. Charles?”

  “I…”

  “He came here to aks if me and Manny weren’t fingered, Loretta.”

  “Are you investigating Lamont’s case?” she asked me.

  “Not directly,” I admitted. “I’m trying to see if Mr. Man’s conviction might be an injustice.”

  I was used to the disbelief in her gaze.

  “Me and Miss Gorman are goin’ out for hot dogs, Mr. Oliver. We do that at least once a week.”

  “You guys friends?”

  “I used to volunteer here before I got a job at Mercy Hospital,” she said. “We started our hot dog lunches then.”

  It was no surprise that a young woman would be smitten with Lamont. Women didn’t necessarily need good men to excite them. What they needed, and most men needed too, was somebody who understood their desires and their fears—not necessarily in that order.

  “Well,” I said, pushing up from the splintery railing, “I guess I’ll let you guys get to it.”

  I’d reached the door when Lamont called out, “Oliver.”

  I turned to see him scribbling something down on a little tray that the wheelchair offered.

  When I got back to him and his date, he said, “I believe you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Lotsa cops and lawyers and other thugs have been up here talkin’ to me about Manny. They wanna know if he did anything wrong that they could pin on him. You know, like if he shoplifted a can of stewed tomatoes once, that proves he’s a murderer. I haven’t told them word one. But you ask the right questions and even if you don’t like me you still got natural respect.”

  This compliment reminded me of Mel.

  “Here.” He held up the slip of paper. On this he had printed an address and a phone number.

  “Miranda Goya. She the one girl we saved who I know where she at. You don’t have to call her. I’ll do that. But you could go there anytime tomorrow afternoon or after that. Manny put his life on the line to save that girl. She will stand up for him.”

  I considered the address for a few seconds, felt my brow furrow, and wondered whether I had convinced Lamont of my intentions or he was setting me up.

  “Naw, man,” the gambler said. “Even if I thought you was dirty I’d just say I didn’t know nuthin’. I ain’t about to put my one good hand in cuffs over some ex-cop I don’t know.”

  “You read minds, Mr. Charles?”

  “Better. I read men.”

  21.

  I drove home, parked the car in the small underground lot that Kristoff Hale has for his tenants, and then once again walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  That was midday and so there was a good deal of foot traffic. The path is divided—on one side pedestrians ruled and on the other bicycles whizzed past. There isn’t enough room for both and even if there was, tourists don’t really understand. They’re often standing in the bike path, posing for pictures or taking in the sights. And then there are those privileged individuals who feel that they have just as much right to be in the bicycle lanes as the bikes do.

  I stick to the side of the path marked for pedestrians, refusing to move out of the way of couples and groups who don’t get or respect the rules. I like the rules; following them proves to me that I’m a civilized man.

  I turned left on Broadway and hoofed it down into the heart of the Financial District, what they call Wall Street. I came upon a huge steel, glass, and blue marble building owned by Citizens Bank of Eastern Europe, whoever they might be.

  It was a bustling building populated by a broad swath of cultures sporting everything from twig-littered dreadlocks to pinstripe blue silk. There were eleven banks of elevators. Number nine was dedicated to Suliman Investments between floors forty-four and fifty-eight.

  “May I help you?” a tall black guard in a brass-colored uniform asked me.

  Behind him stood two other guards, one white and the other descended from Asia. I wondered if they sent out guards the same color of people they might have to refuse entrée.

  “Joe Oliver for Jocelyn Bryor,” I announced.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  He was a young man who it seemed was prone to jump to conclusions. He had already decided that I would be turned away and asked the question to cut to that eventuality.

  “Joe Oliver for Jocelyn Bryor,” I repeated.

  “I asked you a question,” the hall guard—his name tag read FORTHMAN—said.

  “I didn’t come here to answer your questions, son. I came here to see Ms. Bryor. It’s your job to call her assistant and announce me.”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “But you are their bitch.” I was ready for a fight. Those residents of Aramaya had made me mad at God and all his, or her, creation.

  “What?” Forthman said in a threatening tone.

  The Asian sentry, an older man, read Forthman’s shoulders and hurried toward us.

  “What’s the problem here?” he asked. He had a slight English accent. At least this surprised me.

  “I asked him if he had an appointment,” the young black man blamed.

  “I’m here to see Jocelyn Bryor,” I said to the new player.

  “But he don’t have no appointment.”

  The Asian man looked at me, into my eyes, and asked, “What is your name, sir?”

  “Joe Oliver. Some people call me King.”

  “Wait here, sir,” the older sentinel asserted gently.

  “But, Chin—,” Forthman managed to say.

  “I’ll take care of this, Robert” was Chin’s reply.

  Chin went to a standup desk anchored to the wall and pulled a phone from behind the plain facade.

  Robert Forthman was staring daggers at me so I made a gesture with both hands, welcoming him to make manifest his anger.

  He clenched his fists and I smiled. He took a step forward and the white guard moved up behind Forthman and uttered something. Forthman hesitated and the white man said something else. With a violent turn, the tall black uniform did a complete one-eighty and walked down the aisle of elevators to and through a doorway on the opposite end.

  “Ms. Bryor will see you,” Chin said before Forthman was gone.

  The white guard gestured for me and I went to stand next to a lift door.

  He pushed a button and said, “That kid’s a light heavyweight.”

  “That all? I thought he might’a had a gun.”

  The elevator door opened and I went through.

  The white guy leaned in after me, held a card in front of a sensor plate, and pressed the button for floor fifty-seven.

  The car floated
up at a respectable speed. I wondered about my reception. Gladstone told me about Bryor quitting the force and moving to the private sector. I had reason to hate that woman. This was why I was willing to pick a fight with a boxer.

  The doors to the onyx-and-gold elevator car opened onto what looked like a foyer to some grand East Hampton mansion.

  A beautiful black girl in a very tasteful dress greeted me.

  “Mr. Oliver?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She was tall and thin, probably athletic. Her dress was the pink of the inside of a deep-sea clamshell. The necklace she wore was beaded with light-blue sapphires and her shoes were the pale and red-brown of the fur that some forest creatures produce.

  “Miss Bryor will see you now.”

  “And your name is?”

  The question caught her off guard but the smile didn’t falter.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “My name is Norris, Lydia Norris.”

  “Lead on, Ms. Norris.”

  She took me down long wide halls that were carpeted and quiet. There were office doors that were mostly closed and very little foot traffic.

  At the end of a cream-carpeted passage was a double doorway. Lydia pushed open the eight-foot-high, four-foot-wide doors and stood aside, gesturing for me to enter.

  The office was wide and deep, with a curved window for the wall overlooking Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The carpet was dark brown and the oval desk was chiseled from a stone much like white slate.

  There was a dark blue sofa with no back to the left. Jocelyn was sitting there wearing an emerald ensemble that might have been either a full-length dress or a pants suit—though it was most reminiscent of the new gliding suits that modern daredevils used to fly from precipitous mountainsides.

  She stood from the sofa to greet me. Like many a woman cop, she was pretty short. Her facial features were boxy, but even still she had the unexpected beauty of Isabella Rossellini.

  “Joe,” she said with a guilty smile.

  “Jocelyn.”

  “Come sit with me.”

  I approached her and we shook hands. We were ex-cops, so hugging was pretty much out of the question.