Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01

by The Long Fall

  When I pulled up next to the booth a black man in a powder-blue uniform and a dark-blue, black-brimmed cap came out to brace me.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  I handed him a business card that said I was Ben Trotter, a private detective working out of Newark.

  “Looking for information on a Willie Sanderson,” I said while he read.

  “Willie doesn’t work here anymore,” the middle-aged, dark-brown man informed me.

  He was short and slight, built for the long haul—the kind of man who could carry half his weight in tobacco or cotton from way out in the fields.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. They got him in a hospital after he tried to kill a man. My client wants to know why.”

  The guard had descended, like me and many of our brethren, from a long line of suspicion. He pinched a corner of my card, regarding it with unconscious intensity. I believed that I could read that stare. He was thinking that there was something wrong with my brief explanation. But he was looking beyond the lie, to see if I posed a problem or if I was okay. After a moment he came to the conclusion that I was okay enough.

  “Make a left at the end of this road,” he said. “The second building on your right is number four. That’s the human resources office. I don’t know what they can tell you, though.”

  “Thanks,” I said and drove on.

  I PARKED IN the lot that the guard directed me to but didn’t go into the HR offices. Instead I walked around the other side of the building into a large quad where a couple dozen patients and their handlers were taking the sun.

  It was like no other mental institution I’d seen. The staff wore gray-and-white clothes that were uniforms only because of their similarity of color, while the patients dressed for leisure. It might have been a Florida retirement community, except many of the residents were middle-aged, and even young.

  I walked around, getting a feel for the place, trying to understand something, anything, about the environment that Willie Sanderson had been immersed in. He was my only living link to the murderous conspiracy.

  “Hello, young man,” a white woman said.

  She was older, maybe seventy-five, wrapped in a summer frock of swirling emerald and turquoise and holding a pink parasol up against the sun. She was seated on a violet-pink wrought-iron bench.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Are you a visitor?”

  “I guess so,” I answered, sitting down.

  “You don’t know?” She was small with big eyes and lots of red rubbed into her thin lips.

  “Well,” I said lightly, “I’m not a patient, and I don’t work here, so what’s left?”

  The older woman smiled and then grinned. Her teeth weren’t well maintained but the mirth outshone her bad hygiene.

  “Do you know somebody here?” she asked.

  “I know somebody who used to be here.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A guy named Willie Sanderson.”

  “Willie,” she said with wistfulness and wonder in her frail voice. “Yes. He didn’t want to help me with everything, but he brought me dreams when I needed them. But he’s not here anymore. They sent him away. They send all of the good ones away.

  “Do you think that an old woman is sick if she wants to be with men?” she asked, changing the subject as if it were a summer’s breeze and she Mother Nature.

  “Not at all,” I replied, tacking my sail to her whim. “A woman is a woman until the day she dies.”

  “My family doesn’t agree with you,” she said. “There I was, sixty-seven with a husband limp as a popped party balloon—and I was still young in my heart. And not only there.”

  Her tone was both suggestive and engaging. I liked her.

  “Do you want to get out?” I asked seriously. She seemed sane to me and I was always looking for work, no matter how bad things got.

  This question grabbed the old girl’s attention. She heard the earnestness in my tone, just as the guard at the front gate had heard the lie.

  “No,” she said. “I’m getting older, and I find it easier to get what I need right here.”

  This reply seemed to punctuate the end of something. I took the opportunity of this lull to ask my question.

  “Did you know Willie very well?”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No. But he is in the hospital.”

  “Oh my. What happened?”

  “He got into a fight.”

  “He liked to fight,” she said, nodding. “He was a nice boy but he had a bad temper. No, I didn’t know him very well. We weren’t the kind of friends that I would have liked. But he was close with Bunny. She and Willie were friends even before he came here. He brought her love. Not in the carnal way, mind you. Willie kind of worshipped Bunny.”

  “Is Bunny around here somewhere?”

  “Oh no. She only stays for a little while. I think she was in for a long time once, but that was years ago. Since then, every once in a while she has a little kind of nervous breakdown. They bring her in, but she can leave whenever she wants to.”

  “What’s this Bunny’s last name?”

  “Hey, you!” a definitely masculine voice commanded.

  The tone frightened my new friend.

  I turned to see two well-proportioned staff men coming toward me. One was brown, the other a darker brown. They both had me, and only me, in their sights.

  I stood up and, through the miracle of peripheral vision, saw the old pagan woman scuttle off under the portable shadow of her semitransparent pink parasol.

  “What you doin’ here?” the darker attendant asked.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I replied as if that were a perfectly acceptable answer.

  For a moment the two men were stymied by my easy demeanor.

  “This is private property,” the other male nurse/enforcer informed me.

  “And I’m a private detective,” I said, “here trying to get a line on a guy name of Willie Sanderson.”

  The men looked at each other and then back at me.

  “This is private property,” the lighter of the two repeated.

  “Let me speak to your boss,” I said.

  Six magic words that roil deep in the bowels of anyone collecting a paycheck on a biweekly basis. It’s like winking at a leprechaun: he has to give up his pot of gold, and yet no one knows why.

  35

  The two brutes brought me to an office that seemed oddly utilitarian for such an affluent institution. It was at the far corner of the main hall of what I thought must have been the administration building. We walked into the shotgun office without a knock or pardon-me. A middle-aged man in a too-green suit was sitting behind a gray metal desk at the bottom of the long room. Behind him was a big window looking out on the idyllic quad.

  The man was leaning over a long and wide ledger page, making small marks here and there, giving me the impression that he was checking details and changing them to fit his needs.

  When the man raised his head I was startled. Director Theodore Gorling (which is what his nameplate read) was the only man I ever met who had more throat than he did face. His neck was a great bulging stalk of a thing while his head was like a seedpod that had not yet reached maturity.

  “Yes?” he asked the darker guard.

  “This guy was hangin’ out in the yard. Says he’s a detective.” The guard handed over the false card that I had given to prove my half lie.

  Gorling moved his small head from side to side, taking the few simply printed words in from differing angles. Then he put the card down in the center of the neat desk. His movements were both mechanical and fleshy. He seemed somehow dangerous, like a priest one might find on the wrong side of redemption.

  “I’m looking for information on Willie Sanderson,” I said when it became obvious that Gorling had no intention of asking why I was there.

  “Why?”

  “He’s been killing people, seemingly at random. He murdered a young man name of Brown
in Manhattan and the parents want me to find out why.”

  “This says that you’re from Newark,” Gorling said, tapping the card with the middle finger of his left hand.

  “So are my clients,” I said. “But their son lived on the Upper West Side. He was trying to make it as an actor while working as a model. Was your man Willie Sanderson gay?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “The son was making his living as an underwear model,” I said, sticking out my lower lip in a knowing way. “I thought maybe the murder could have been a sex thing.”

  I find in my profession that it behooves one to appear ignorant, or, better yet, stupid, to the people you interrogate. It gives them a feeling of superiority, of having a mental leg up on you, so to speak.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Trotter,” Gorling said. Then to the men in gray and white, “Wait for us outside.”

  When the underlings had done his bidding, Gorling turned his throat to me.

  “I have no idea what Mr. Sanderson’s sexual preferences are,” he said of his own volition.

  I grimaced. “No? You see, these people hired me to find a reason for their son’s death. The cops don’t care because they got him on evidence. I thought maybe you guys up here would know something.”

  Gorling had small hands. He raised them to indicate his helplessness.

  “Willie was an employee, not a patient,” he lied.

  “But the lady outside told me that he had been a patient before he got his job.”

  “What lady?”

  “The one with the pink parasol.”

  I should have said “umbrella.” Better yet, I should have left the sheltering apparatus out completely. Using accurate language always puts people like Gorling on alert. I don’t even know if he realized it but his attitude toward me changed. His little face got rigid.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I had almost forgotten. That was so long ago, before my time.”

  “What was his problem?”

  “That’s a medical matter, Mr. Trotter. We are prohibited by law from giving out that kind of information.”

  “You can’t even tell me if he was here because of the threat of violence?”

  “I look at this institution less as a hospital and more like a university for the besotted and bemused,” he said with something like a smile. “The people here are learning their various lessons over and over, one step at a time. We coddle them and care for them, and never betray their trust.”

  The alien hospital administrator blinked at me with smug satisfaction.

  “So if I was to go to the Browns and tell them that their son was murdered by a man who had been put in here for manslaughter and then let out without the proper supervision, you wouldn’t open up your records like a dirty old man exposing himself to little kids on a crosstown bus?”

  That pushed Gorling back into his chair.

  “It’s not our responsibility to make a man take his medication,” he said.

  “That, my friend, is for the lawyers to decide.”

  This aggressive tactic was my second misstep. Gorling looked soft and corrupt but he had the reflexes and instincts of a club fighter. He wasn’t going to go down just because I showed him something. He was made from sterner stuff.

  “Cedric!” he called out.

  The two orderlies came immediately back into the room. They seemed ready to take physical action.

  “I think it’s time that you leave these premises, Mr. Trotter,” Gorling said.

  He stood up and, after a moment’s hesitation, I followed suit.

  I didn’t like it but I had lost that particular bout. I had a few grains of knowledge, but without help I couldn’t make any sense of them.

  GORLING AND HIS HENCHMEN walked me through the hall toward the front of the administration building. There were no patients and few employees there.

  “You’ll find that threats don’t work on us out here, Mr. Trotter,” Gorling instructed as we went through the double doors out into the beautiful summer’s day. “This is a place where we help people. That given, we aren’t responsible for them after they leave our care.

  “By the way, how did you get in here?”

  “Told the guard that I was applyin’ for a job where I get to wear a gray T-shirt and cotton pants.”

  “I’ll have to instruct him to keep a stack of application forms at the gate. Is your car in the lot next to the personnel building?”

  “Sure is. Should I give one of your boys here my key so he can run and get it for me?”

  I hated myself for underestimating Gorling. Sometimes being a New Yorker brought on a feeling of false superiority that made me slip up badly.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Gorling said. “They will escort you to your car.”

  I took a step down to the path, turned, and held out a hand like a good sport. Gorling didn’t want to touch me but that didn’t matter. When I looked up into his Adam’s apple I saw the dedication chiseled into the wall over the door: BRYANT HULL HALL.

  36

  On the way to the car my lighter-skinned brother put his hand on my shoulder. I stopped walking and he took a step to the side.

  “Keep on movin’,” his partner commanded.

  “Let’s get this straight, friends,” I said. “I’m leavin’ just like you want me to. But you don’t put your hands on me, understand? If you want me arrested, then call the cops. If you wanna throw down we can do it here and now. I might not beat the both of you but I swear that you’ll feel it for months.”

  Maybe I sounded a little crazy, but this was damage control. I didn’t want them to get pushy with me, forcing a fight. Because I would have fought them, but what I really wanted was to make a beeline for the person who could help me decipher the clue.

  SHE WAS A septuagenarian named Poppy Pollis who had once been the head of the whole library system but who now volunteered her time going through rare volumes and collections that were inherited from or donated by wealthy patrons.

  I didn’t know Poppy’s name when I drove away from the sanatorium but a quick call to the information line of the local public library was all I needed. I identified myself, with the deft elocution of a university professor, as Jonah Rhinehart of Manhattan, explaining that I needed to speak with someone who had worked for many years in the system and who knew its history. The helpful librarian I spoke with said that there were three such individuals, though my best chance was with Ms. Pollis, who was working at the main branch on Washington Avenue.

  Librarians are wonderful people, partly because they are, on the whole, unaware of how dangerous knowledge is. Karl Marx upended the political landscape of the twentieth century sitting at a library table. Still, modern librarians are more afraid of ignorance than they are of the potential devastation that knowledge can bring.

  I went to the information desk on the first floor of the downtown branch and came upon a young black man wearing big round-lensed glasses and reading a small blue-gray book entitled Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? written by someone named Leszek Kolakowski.

  “Good book?” I asked.

  “Very good,” the young man replied, nodding sagely. “Very good.”

  “I’m looking for Poppy Pollis,” I said, now that the quality of the philosophical monograph had been decided.

  “Third floor,” he said.

  I thanked him and went to look for the stairs.

  POPPY WAS SEATED at a huge table piled high with musty old books. She was thin, probably tall, sporting short silvery hair and wearing a blue sweater that was buttoned to the throat. The air-conditioning was up too high.

  “Are you Ms. Pollis?” I asked.

  “Yes I am, young man.”

  “Hi,” I said, taking the seat across from her. “My name is Peter Lomax. I’m a graduate student from New York and I’m doing a project, a master’s thesis at Brooklyn College on philanthropy.”

  “How very interesting.” She didn’t question the fact that I was rather long
in the tooth to be a graduate student. In 2008 the baby boomers, both black and white, were looking for an edge.

  “Thank you. I think so, too. You know, our cities’ most valuable institutions are so dependent upon donations and yet there is so little work done understanding this infrastructure, this very personal, what should I call it . . . webbing of relationships.”

  “Exactly so,” the elder exclaimed in a soft voice modulated by decades spent in silent reflection and examination. “Without entrepreneurship the libraries and other cultural institutions, such as museums and opera houses, would be lost.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said, matching her enthusiasm with my own. “I know that every relationship developed in a system such as this one is personal, but I wanted to look at the different kinds of giving.”

  Poppy took off her glasses to underscore her interest.

  “Like you, for example,” I said. “You must have had to develop all kinds of relationships in order to keep the doors of this system open.”

  She nodded, maybe even misted up a little.

  “It was hard work but I loved every moment of it.”

  “Yes. I know it must have been both difficult and rewarding. I’m also aware that you can’t reduce a lifetime of experience into some equation to be passed on but . . . I was thinking of approaching the problem by looking at philanthropy and separating what they call old money from the nouveau riche.” I figured that my target was most likely the former.

  “How interesting,” Poppy Pollis said. “That really is the major concern, you know. People just coming into their wealth are looking for a place among the wealthy, for recognition, whereas the old families have a traditional format that allows them to maintain their names, as it were . . .”

  She went on to tell me that there were twelve important families in Albany’s history. Really there were only eleven but the society page had added the Sampson clan. Poppy considered the Sampsons a Johnny-come-lately bunch of car salesmen, but the newspaper people liked the idea of an even dozen so the Sampsons were included.