“I asked that he be released into my custody while we do the paperwork,” he said. “This isn’t a high-profile case. None of it has made the news. Why not release him?”
“He’s a convicted felon,” I pointed out.
“An innocent convicted felon,” Tempest insisted.
Noble smiled. There was something about that smile that reminded me of…Tempest.
A muffled knock came on the stone door.
“Come in,” Stuart Noble said.
The raven-haired aide came through, leading state prosecutor Darryl Cruickshank and sitting judge Jasmine Beam into the room.
Noble leapt up and moved chairs for the two state officials to join our circle. He pushed the stone chairs along with remarkable ease. Maybe, I thought, they had wheels or some kind of sliding mechanism underneath.
After a few bland pleasantries Noble said, “Now that we’re all here we can see to justice.”
Seated in an arc around the settee, the representatives of the legal system smiled and nodded.
Noble began the dialogue.
“Let me begin by saying that we are all in agreement that Mr. Walcott did not kill F. Anthony Chambers.”
The judge and prosecutor made small head motions that might have been assent.
“And,” Noble continued, “that the only reason he fled was to avoid a punishment unearned.”
“But he did flee,” Judge Beam, a smallish woman, said.
“Certainly,” the lawyer I’d hired said with a nod, “and he has paid enough, I would say. One night in prison for an innocent man is like an eternity in hell. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Cruickshank?”
“I suppose that we might have been a bit overzealous in demanding the maximum sentence for a man driven by desperation,” the tall and darkly handsome state representative admitted.
“And if that is the case,” Noble said slyly, “then the court might agree to reconsider this thirteen-year sentence that the otherwise innocent Mr. Walcott has received.”
Instead of answering, Judge Beam frowned and stood up to her full four-foot-eleven height.
“The papers have already been signed and submitted, counselor,” she said. “We have only come here to put the imprimatur on the judgment.”
“So we agree?” Noble asked, holding out a hand for the judge to shake.
She did not return the gesture and only said, “Yes,” after she had turned her back and was heading for the exit.
Cruickshank did shake Tempest’s lawyer’s hand. He also handed him a large brown envelope.
“In the decree, Mr. Walcott remains a convicted felon and he will be considered to be on parole for the next four years,” Cruickshank said. And then he turned to Tempest. “You are to have weekly visits with your parole officer and will be expected to maintain a regular job. If you fail the requisites of the state, you will be returned to prison.”
“But I’ma be free?” was all Tempest had to ask.
“Yes.”
—
Only after the representatives from the state were gone did I understand what had happened.
“So I’m free?” Tempest asked Noble.
“Yes, Mr. Landry, you are free—on parole.”
“I know that one, man,” Tempest said. “I been there before in work release.”
If he had heard the lawyer using the name he went by before he died, he didn’t let on.
“Bob?” I said to the lawyer.
He turned to me and smiled. His teeth were extraordinarily white.
“Nothing so exalted, Accounting Angel. My name, before I was murdered, was Lime, Harvey Lime. I was a Boston attorney who represented a lower class of clientele. I made the error of sleeping with one of those client’s girlfriends for services rendered. I suppose she forgot to tell him about the arrangement.”
“But you’re from hell?” Tempest asked.
Again Noble shrugged. “Bob, as you call him, has certain agents that he has freed upon the world. Heaven is not the only one to chum the mortal waters with its refuse.”
“What do you want with him?” I asked the man from Hades.
“You came to me, Joshua. You paid Billings the blood money to free your charge. I have simply done what you have asked me to do.”
For the first time in an eternity of existence I felt the urge to violence. I shivered and Stuart Noble smiled.
“Temper, temper now, Accounting Angel. You’re already walking the razor’s edge.”
“I thought Bob was afraid of what I could do to him?” Tempest asked as he took up the space between Noble and me.
“I am not privy to Satan’s inner thoughts.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” Tempest asked, taking a step closer.
“You can’t harm me, Tempest. I’m just a man doing his job. A brother just like you.”
“You paid off the court?”
“Most certainly. All things human can be reduced to commerce and commodity. You just have to shop in the right places.”
“You took the money I gave Billings and spent it on bribes?” I asked.
“Billings took the money. He made the deal. I just sat in a room breathing the cool air of earth.”
—
On the street I felt light-headed and oddly betrayed, though I could not say by whom. Tempest stood next to me, a look of wonder on his face.
“Damn, Angel,” he said, “you got to watch yourself, brother, or we just might end up cell mates in hell.”
Just Another Word
Freedom
My first meeting with Tempest after his release from prison was at a small coffee shop on East 27th called the Silver Spout. This was across the street from the fourth-floor office of his parole officer. We were to meet at 9:30, two hours after his morning meeting was to begin, but Tempest didn’t show up at the coffee shop until 11:48.
He came in wearing the same dark green slacks and yellow sports shirt that Assistant Warden Lumpin had provided him with for the impromptu trial that freed him.
I stood to shake his hand when he approached my table but he wasn’t in a welcoming mood.
“Damn fool want me to jump through hoops like a trained seal,” Tempest said as he sat down.
“Who?” I asked.
“Bring me a menu,” he snapped at the waitress, who was startled and jumped to comply.
“What’s wrong, Tempest?”
All my concern got me was a glower and a grunt.
He opened the menu but wasn’t actually reading it. The brunette waitress was maybe twenty, white, and most certainly afraid of Tempest. I didn’t blame her. Violence was pulsating around the newly released ex-con like the raised quills of a porcupine.
“You got eggs?” he asked her.
“We stop serving breakfast at noon.”
“Damn!”
“You still have ten minutes.”
“Gimme five eggs and some bacon,” he said.
“How do you want that?”
“The bacon?”
“The eggs,” she said apologetically.
“You got real eggs or powdered?” he asked.
“Real.”
“Four scrambled and one hard-boiled.”
“That’s more than one order,” she said.
“Fine. He’s payin’ anyway.”
The frightened young woman looked to me and I nodded. She went off to make the orders and Tempest turned his head to look out of the window.
“What’s wrong, Tempest?” I asked again.
“You know what’s wrong, man. You know. I got to tell you about how they shot me down? How your people want me in hell? Or, when I just stood up for what I believed, how I was put in a body on the run from conviction for manslaughter? I got to tell you I’m on parole and I been in that office across the street for almost five hours waitin’ for a eight-minute meetin’?”
“No.”
“Then why you ask?”
“I’m concerned with your feelings.”
“You want to send me
to hell is what you want,” Tempest said in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of other patrons.
“Tempest.”
“You mean Ezzard,” he said. “Killer, thief, and ex-con—Ezzard Walcott. Puppet of angels and hounded by hell. Now I’m an ex-con with a record and a clock tickin’ away like a time bomb strapped to my back.”
The timid waitress came up and slid the breakfast toward the angry man.
As she backed away I asked, “How did the meeting go?”
Tempest looked at me and for a moment I thought he might throw a punch. It was a wonder that we had never come to blows in the years that we’d known each other. He was an angry man and violent to the degree of protecting his territory. He’d just come out of prison but still he held his rage in check.
“They give me a envelope wit’ sixty-two dollars in it,” he said when the tension abated. “I got a bed in a rooming house in East Harlem and a whole page full’a deadlines that if I don’t meet ’em they put me back in prison.”
“Who did you speak to?” I asked to soften the words and their meanings.
“Aldo Trieste is his name. White guy look like he exercise three times a week but tells people he work out like some kinda athlete. Got a college degree on his dirty wall and a picture of a woman look like a stripper on his desk. Picture probably came with the frame and the degree came in the mail—I bet.”
“What did Mr. Trieste say?”
“Sixty-two dollars a week and a room with two keys. One of the keys is his. I got to try for at least twelve jobs a week and I have to get a job before the month is out, or I get sent back. He needs to know who hires me and he might visit my employer if he thinks that’s justified. I can’t be in proximity of any criminals and, even if I don’t know about their records, I could be sent back to the joint for any what he calls ‘fraternization infractions.’ I need to be in my place by eight thirty every night unless I have a night job and then I have to be back home forty-five minutes after work.
“I can have a girlfriend if she doesn’t have a record but she can’t be a prostitute and he can come in on us at any time and tell her to leave. He can arrest me for any or no reason at all and I can never deny him, disagree with him, or complain about him to his supervisors.
“I belong to him—that’s what he said. He used those words. He said that I was his for the next four years and if he finds any infraction, illegal substance, criminal activity no matter how small—he will send me back upstate to serve my thirteen years with no further chance for parole.”
All the while Tempest talked he was eating. He put the boiled egg in his pants pocket, slathered catsup on the rest, and gobbled the bacon down as if someone might steal it. He didn’t order coffee but drank what was left of mine.
“And you know what’s worst of all, Angel?”
“No. What?”
“When it was all over he put out his hand for me to shake.”
“That seems like a gesture of friendliness.”
“Friendly?” Tempest said. “What if a man come to your house, tell you move out, say that he’s keepin’ all your money ’cept sixty-two dollars, and he wants your wife and oldest daughter too? He do all that and then smile an’ say—friends?”
“Did you shake his hand?”
“When you on parole you got to lick the bossman’s feet and then say that you like it. If you don’t say you like it, then they put you back in a cage.”
The food was gone.
The waitress stood as far away as she could when she handed me the check.
“You must be very angry,” I said after handing the waitress a few bills and indicating with a hand gesture that she could keep the change.
I noticed that the cook had come to his order window and was staring at Tempest.
“You got computers up in heaven, Angel?” Tempest asked.
“No need for them.”
“When I apply for a job they gonna want my numbers and I’ma have to say if I evah been convicted of a felony. Now…it don’t mattah that the felony I committed was runnin’ away from a sentence that I was innocent of. All that matters is that a computer somewhere say that Ezzard Walcott has a felony conviction. That means nine outta ten places will put my application in the paper shredder. Nine out of ten of the places that would hire me got money problems and can’t hire their own family. Nine outta ten of the places left ain’t lookin’ for nobody right now. That means one place out of a thousand might hire me…and that’s just if I’m the only ex-con out there lookin’ for a job.”
“My company won’t hire ex-cons,” I said. “I asked them as soon as you were released.”
That was when Tempest laughed. It was a hearty, deeply felt guffaw. The cook looked nervous and the waitress exited through a side door.
“Is that supposed to be a joke, Angel?” he said with tears of mirth gleaming from his eyes. “ ’Cause you know if it was, it sure did hit the spot.”
“What are you talking about, Tempest?”
“Your bosses upstairs already said that I’m not welcome in your place and now the accounting firm says the same thing. Damn, Angel, you don’t give a brother a chance. You got me comin’ and goin’.”
I grinned and shook my head.
“You could end it all by accepting Peter’s judgment and taking your place in hell,” I said halfheartedly.
“I could get some satisfaction by denyin’ heaven and bringing down the walls of eternity.”
“There’s that,” I said.
“You a cold mothahfuckah, Angel. Man point a pistol at your head and you just smile.”
I stood up and said, “Come on, Tempest. Let’s go see if we can find you a job.”
Human Labor Lost
“So then I went to that supermarket in the West Village,” Tempest was saying. “You know the one, on Washington Street, the one where Branwyn used to work at….”
“Yes,” I said, looking up from my menu and glancing out over Central Park from our thirty-fifth-floor perch.
“But they said no too.”
The waiter, who was of slight build, walked up to our window table. He had a black mustache which seemed to belong on a bigger man, or at least on a larger head.
“Have you decided?” he asked with a practiced smile.
Since I had been on earth I noticed things like facial hair and smiles. When I was an accounting angel for the Infinite I had never paid attention to such trivialities unless they had something to do with sin.
“What’s this here sound like a dance?” Tempest asked, pointing at his menu.
“That would be tuna sashimi coated with wasabi and served with a tangy shallot vinaigrette sauce,” the waiter replied with a sneer.
“Raw fish,” I said to Tempest.
“Raw? No. How about this here Japanese steak?”
“Yes, sir,” the diminutive, mustachioed waiter said, “that’s Kobe beef, the best in the world.”
“You sell it by the ounce?”
“It’s very expensive…imported.”
“Well, Mr. Angel here is payin’, so gimme a pound’a that, medium, some’a that sticky rice, and whatever green you got hangin’ around.”
I then ordered a vegetarian combination and a bottle of good Bordeaux to go with Tempest’s steak.
“So?” I asked when the waiter had finally gone.
“So what?” Tempest said. He was wearing a dark blue and pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit that Branwyn had given him from my closet.
You already got twelve suits hangin’ in the closet that you hardly ever wear, Brownie had chastised when I complained about her giving away my clothes. And Tempest needs to look good if he want them woman managers to overlook his record.
“Did the supermarket turn you down because of your felony conviction?”
“They didn’t even get that far.”
“No?”
“They asked if I had a high school diploma and I had to say, ‘Not that I know of.’ ”
“But yo
u did graduate high school.”
“As far as I can tell, Ezzard Walcott did not.”
The complexity of Tempest’s plight struck me in that opulent upper-floor restaurant. When I had asked him how we could celebrate his freedom he said that he wanted dinner there because It’s the closest I’ma ever get to heaven.
“I’m sorry, Tempest,” I said.
“That’s okay, Angel….”
A busboy came up and put miniature baguettes on our bread plates.
“You know,” Tempest continued, “back in the old days, before them cops shot me down, I could pick up a dishwashin’ gig in two, three days. Now the city, state, and federal government have said no. The post office, supermarkets, docks, and doorman positions have all been dead ends. I tried for a taxi drivin’ job but they turned me down. I wanted to work for this chauffeur company but they had so many ex-cons up in there that I would’a been arrested just for goin’ to work.
“The best offer I got was a dishwashin’ job at a Wall Street restaurant. The kitchen manager was this white dude, name of John Green. Johnny G they calls him.”
“What happened there?” I asked as our complimentary salads arrived.
“Johnny walked me around the basement where the kitchen workers prepped and did the heavy liftin’. They had eighteen men workin’ each of three shifts a day—with some overlappin’ in the heavy hours. I knew the machines and routines and told Johnny so. He had my application in his hand. Right there in black-and-white he could see that I was a felon.
“But he brought me in his little office and closed the door. Got situated behind his desk, touched his hairdo like it was some kinda sculpture, and put his feet up on his desk. I just sat down and looked at him, wonderin’ how he was gonna tell me no.”
“And how did he?” I asked.
“You know this salad is great,” Tempest replied. “I like all the little chunks in the dressing.”
“How did he?” I asked again.
“Make the salad?”
“Refuse to hire you,” I said.
“Who?”
“The kitchen manager at the restaurant.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, right. Johnny G, the man.”
“What did Johnny G say?”
“He said that it was fine with him if I took the job. Sometimes I might have to do double shifts even if he called at the last minute. I’d get a meal for every shift I worked.”
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Page 7
