“Joe?” she asked again.
“I’m fine.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on? Did my call really bring all this down?”
“Not completely. I mean, I could’a become a plumber,” I said. I just didn’t want her angry with me. There was no need to torture her, no matter how deep my pain.
“Why are you calling?” she asked.
“Because my little girl’s voice is like penicillin for my wounds.” I felt a little eddy of giddiness twist through my mind. The alcohol was increasing its hold.
“We’re fine,” Monica said. “Coleman is protecting us.”
I sent two texts after saying good night to Aja. Twelve minutes later my temporary phone rang.
“Hey, Effy.”
“Joe?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s this phone?”
“I’m in a little trouble.”
“You need me?”
There was something in the tenor of her question that sent a chill through me. It was something beyond love all the way back to when humanity was a group animal connected by experience deeper than any memory.
“I been thinkin’ about you,” the cognac in me said.
“What?”
“You don’t owe me anything, Ef.”
“Only my life, baby.”
I stood up from the small table and walked toward the front door of the coffee emporium. People, I felt, were staring at me. I think I was able to walk in a fairly sober fashion but the liquor was getting stronger.
“Maybe so,” I said into the tiny receiver. “But you kept me from crash and burn whenever I called. I needed a woman to be there and there you were.”
She was silent for a moment or two, and I was trying my best to walk a straight line up Eighth. People were moving in sober gaits all around me. I was worried that some cop might see me and bring me down.
“Where are you?” Effy asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Do you need me to come there with you?”
“I love you, Effy” was all I could say.
She gasped over the airwaves and into my soul.
Damn, I was drunk.
It took four blocks to explain that I wanted a new relationship; that I loved her and maybe we could be friends. She told me that at first I saved her from prosecution and then, when I let her in when I was down, she was able to use me like a life raft through her own troubles. Together we had navigated into safer waters.
We disconnected when I got to the front door of my hideaway.
Ensconced in the apartment, I poured another glass of cognac and drank it at the sink. Then I served up another and went to sit on the single-mattress cot that passed for a bed.
The ceiling of the underground room was low. I could feel it pressing down on my head. The room was spinning, but that wasn’t too serious a problem; I could ride that whirlwind too. But there was a certainty in my mind that I was going to die in the morning or maybe the day after. Someone was going to kill me.
I remember feeling nauseous. I thought I was going to throw up and tried to lurch from the bed. But instead I fell sideways into an unconsciousness that contained entire scenarios of me shot, killed, drained of blood, and bunged into a coffin.
The ringer on the temp phone started at a note in the lower register and then climbed higher and higher for sixteen tones. The last, and longest, chime was a little piercing. I know the musical scheme so well because it rang three times somewhere after 4:00 a.m.
The first series of notes reminded me of a stream making its way across the floor of my underground cave. There were fish in there and a mountain lion somewhere above looking to take me down if I tried to drink water.
The second call was a shimmering wall of lights that resonated with the tinkling sounds.
Halfway through the third attempt I sat up straight, snagged the phone from the floor, and cried, “Who the fuck is it?”
“How’s it comin’, King?” Melquarth Frost murmured in my ear.
“Mel.”
“You okay?”
“That might be a little optimistic. But I’m not dead.”
“How’s the room?”
“I expect a big red devil to bang the door down and take my soul any minute. Why are you calling me?”
“You the one texted me your number.”
“It couldn’t wait till the sun came up?”
“I was working on this spring-driven wooden clock from the seventeen hundreds when it hit me.”
“The clock hit you?” I was just talking, trying to keep from throwing up.
“If you crossed the line and the cops are after you I got a plan.”
“Plan for what?”
“For you.”
I thought about standing, realized I couldn’t, then leaned back against the cold brick wall behind the bed. The chill went some way toward rejuvenating me.
“Talk on,” I said.
“Man is dead no matter what way you look at it. And the police department is never gonna admit to cops as bad as Valence and Pratt. Neither will they admit to framing you. You’re a bug to them, and we all know what happens to a bug when he get between a rock and the hard place.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a plan, Mel.”
“I know a dude down in Panama could make a whole baseball team disappear. All I need is a plane and that’s just some money.”
We talked longer, but I don’t remember what was said. I hadn’t been that drunk in a very long time. And I hope never to go that far again.
32.
Languishing in the darkness of semiconsciousness, creeping danger, and certain death, I felt the splash of a drop of water on my forehead. If I were the Wicked Witch, that would be the sign of my undoing. I would die and the war of flying monkeys would be over.
My gut felt like a flagging dirigible and the pain in my head was a brick wall: solid and everlasting.
Another tiny splash.
That was one of the tears on my neck when Aja hugged me after I’d been let out of Rikers. I cried too because I was so happy to be loved.
“Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked. It felt as if she were in that room with me and we were crying together.
The next drop brought to mind the rainstorm I was caught in, in the third grade walking home from school. It had been gray all day, but no one had told me it might rain. I gave up protecting my homework and my books. The spring rain soaked through my clothes. It was cold and set me to shivering on the cot where I lay.
I remembered slogging through the downpour toward my grandparents’ house. There was no other choice. When I got there my grandmother put my clothes in the dryer so that when I put them on again I’d be warm and toasty.
There must be a leak above the bed; that’s what I thought. I didn’t want to get up in the middle of the night to fix it, so I turned on my side and moved closer to the wall. All I wanted was unconciousness.
The next drop landed in my left ear. I shot up straight voicing a wordless complaint.
When I opened my eyes I saw that the lights had been turned on and that the leak was actually a man with an eyedropper torturing me like some minor demon from Dante’s hell.
“Glad!” I cried. “What the fuck, man?”
He’d pulled a chair up next to me and used one of the blue plastic juice glasses for his store of torture drops.
“At first I thought you were dead, brother,” my oldest cop friend claimed. “Then I smelled the XO.”
“How’d you find me?” I noticed that he was wearing all black.
“I put out the question on my Facebook and got a message from Lauren Bachnell that you had just left Bedford on Ray Ray’s commuter line. All I had to do was set up across the street and wait for you.”
The hangover that I thought would never leave drained out of me in less than sixty seconds. It was a matter of life and death in that room with Gladstone—mostly death. It all came clear to me right then. I understood what happened to
me and why. I knew what the verdict was too.
I looked at my brother in black and asked, “Are you here to take me out?”
“That’s what they said. Not for the first time either.”
I considered attacking him but knew better. He could have put a bullet in my skull rather than those drops on my head.
“You were in league with Little Exeter and his crew?”
“Not me. They just called me up and said that you were a dead man.”
“Why call you?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“Nowadays I’m kind of a clearinghouse under the new mayor and chief. They wanna clean up the past and start the future with a blank slate. But back then there was a kind of a club that shared all that money swirling around. My nephew was in law school, and I bought my wife a house in Miami. I had told my friends back then what you were up to and they decided to make you die.”
“But you gave them a better choice,” I said.
“I knew you and the ladies, Joe. I knew we could put a frame around you with a cute young white girl. Worked beautiful. But Convert is a pervert. He made it so Jocelyn Bryor got the case and turned Monica against you. I had it so you’d make bail and then I’d talk you into accepting what had happened. But after you got slashed I just put you in a hole and let the powers that be do what they did.”
“So you destroyed my life,” I said. “Just like that.”
“I saved your life, Joe. Don’t you ever believe anything else.”
“But now you’re gonna come in here and kill me.”
“When I saw you come in this building, I knew you had taken Mr. Thurman’s hideaway,” he said. “We’ve known about this place for a while. How’d you know about it, anyway?”
“Are you gonna kill me, Glad?”
“Do I have to?”
“I’m a cop, man. I saw something bad and I took steps. Your people wrecked everything.”
“You’re an ex-cop, Joe. And who knows? Maybe if you stayed on the job you’d’a gotten shot down in a firefight or somethin’. It could be I saved your life twice.”
“It was wrong what you did.”
“Maybe,” Gladstone Palmer admitted. “Maybe. But you have to understand, Joe, the brass now is all new. The people I worked with are off the force.”
“Paul Convert’s still around.”
“He’s not gonna be a problem long. After he messed up in Queens he’s in more hot water than you.”
“You knew about Queens?”
“After the fact.” Glad’s smile was friendly if sad. “The force can’t afford a scandal, Joe. The people dealing on the docks are either retired, dead, or reformed. Not even the mayor would stand in the way of your demise.”
Gladstone had a way of revealing the truth. I could see that I’d never be exonerated, much less reinstated.
“And there’s another thing,” my friend said.
“What’s that?” I asked. A wave of exhaustion passed through me.
“This thing with Free Man, Leonard Compton.”
“How you know about him?”
“I’m lookin’ for you, and in a whole other precinct you’re kickin’ up dust over a cop killer. You know the left hand speaks to the right even on the dark side of the force.”
“Valence and Pratt killed over a dozen people, Glad.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Everybody knew about Valence and Pratt. But nobody kills a cop unless it’s the last resort. And you know those boys made a lotta money. They could grease the wheels of machines half the way to Albany.”
“That’s wrong, man.”
“Yes, it is, but that’s not the question.”
“Then what is?”
“Do you need me to kill you right now?”
There was no smile on my old friend’s lips. I couldn’t remember him ever without at least the hint of a grin somewhere on his face. I took the question seriously, and from somewhere in the depths of my mind an answer rose to the surface like the carcass of some long-dead deep-sea creature.
“No,” I said. “No.”
Sleep came with my last negation. I don’t remember whatever else Glad might have said. I don’t remember him leaving my subterranean cell. I just passed out, unable to defend or save myself.
But in that deep repose the answer to my quest remained in light.
I couldn’t repair my career. I couldn’t achieve a reprieve for A Free Man. All I had was the truth and the certainty that I had to do something about that truth. If that meant breaking the law, I was ready. If it meant missing my child’s graduation, that would have to be.
33.
The hangover returned with consciousness, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. The only aftereffects were jitters in my extremities.
I got out of bed, used the water-closet toilet, and sat in the chair that my old friend and near assassin sat in to sprinkle water on me.
It all started with a letter from the Midwest. My life was in shambles, but sometimes you had to break things down to see what was wrong.
I knew what to do and half the way to do it. It wasn’t so much a plan as it was a suicide mission aimed at the heart of enemy territory. I was now an enlightened terrorist planning to show the all-powerful enemy that I could hurt them, that I could take away their shiny baubles and false judgments.
“Mel?” I said when he answered the phone.
“My liege.”
It was 10:16 a.m. and I was at the coffee emporium again. This time I drank what I bought.
“Am I right that you sit around workin’ on timepieces all day; that and thinking about stickin’ it to the law?”
“Every hour of every day,” he said. “Rain or shine. Sound asleep or wide-awake.”
“I like your plan about that baseball team escaping to Panama. But I need to add a little to it.”
We talked for more than an hour, during the first thirty minutes of which my new best friend was quite leery. But by the end I had brought him around to my way of thinking. Around 11:30 he expressed an excitement that could only mean that something bad was bound to happen.
It was chilly that morning, but I still had my heavy disguise coat so I wandered down until I came to a Times Square street that the previous mayor had blocked off so that touristical pedestrians could stroll freely and sit on benches placed here and there.
He answered the call on the first ring.
“Hello?” His tone was anything but confident.
“Mr. Braun,” I said. “Tom Boll here.”
“Boll?” he whined. “What do you want now?”
“I misled you in the beginning, Mr. Braun. I wasn’t hired to find Johanna Mudd but to prove your case that A Free Man was innocent. My clients had heard that you were backing off and they wanted to keep that engine running.”
“Man?”
“Yeah. I found Johanna too. She’s dead on top of a heap of dead bodies provided by the cops your client killed.”
“I had nothing to do with any of that.”
“You sent men to kill me.”
“Marmot told me he was going to threaten you, that’s all.”
“And you believed him?”
“You don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“No, sir, I do understand. You might not like it that I passed the black mark back to you by telling Marmot’s boss that you hired me to indict him—but that doesn’t make me ignorant. All I did was turn the focus on you.”
“Not me, you idiot, my daughter.”
“What about your daughter?”
“The reason I backed off the Man case was because they took my daughter. They have her somewhere and they said unless I do as they instructed that she’d be hurt and then killed.”
“Marmot said this?”
“Yes.”
“And Antrobus?”
“I don’t know that name. But now that you told them you’re looking into Marmot for me, they say they’re going to kil
l my little girl.”
The bane of police work is innocent bystanders. You try your best, but unseen events, ricochet bullets, and false arrest are a part of the job.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Braun. I mean, all I knew was that you were about to wreck Man’s case and then you set me up to meet two assassins. If I knew about your child I would have done something else.”
He was quiet on the line.
“I have some questions,” I said in a mild tone.
“Why should I answer?”
“Because I’m probably the only hope you have of getting your daughter back.”
He took in and released three breaths, then said, “What do you want to know?”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Seven,” he said, and then he cried some.
“I will get her back for you if you set up a hearing for Man in Manhattan. It’ll have to be sometime next week.”
“How can you get my daughter?”
“How did I get to you?”
“I’ll do as you say if you agree to free my daughter first.”
“No, Mr. Braun. This is the deal—you set up a meeting between a group of people of my choosing and Man. After that we will bring your daughter to you.”
“Who are you working with?”
“Deep talent, Mr. Braun, deep talent.”
“I can get a court date set,” he admitted, “but I’ve been told, by people who know, that it will be impossible to change the verdict unless I prove that he didn’t pull the trigger. And I don’t care how much you investigate, Mr. Boll, you will not prove that. I grieve over Ms. Mudd, but you cannot save her either.”
“I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Braun. If I’m about to partner up with somebody, I expect honor. But don’t worry, sir. All we need is A Free Man in a downtown holding cell. You won’t be required to prove the impossible or raise the dead.”
“I’ll try to set the hearing for Monday. I know a judge who owes me a thing or two.”
Down the River unto the Sea Page 21
