The Long Fall lm-1

by Walter Mosley

  The building was twenty-eight stories high and dominant among its peers.

  “What can I do for you?” the blue-jacketed doorman asked.

  “Richard Siles,” I said, holding out a hand. “I’m the electrical contractor they called about.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the chubby, pink-skinned guardian replied, “Joseph said you might be around.”

  He was a big man, in his sixties. When he was young he must have been ready with his fists. You could see the pale ghosts of scars on his face and knuckles.

  “Peter Green,” he said, introducing himself. “What’s this all about, Dick?”

  “Layoffs on Wall Street. City revenues are down this year,” I said. “At least they’re worried they might be. They’re checking all the big Manhattan buildings for violations. Wanna make up some of their losses on fines. So a couple’a guys are doing some early checks to maybe save you guys some fines and get us some work on the side.”

  I asked Peter if I could hang my coat in his doorman’s closet and he pointed to a hopper room behind the desk. After that he showed me to a door that led to the basement and I went down to pretend for a while.

  I found the nexus for the phone and fiber-optic lines and connected a little box that Bug had sold me for a previous job. Then I wandered, looking for doors that I might use if I needed, for any reason, to make a late-night entry.

  I had hung up the coat because I wanted to get behind the desk to see what video monitors the doorman had. They only covered the front door, entrances from the outside, and the interior of the elevators.

  So I took in a deep breath and made my way up one of the stairwells to apartment G on the twenty-first floor. I didn’t have to make the climb but you pick up exercise where you can in my line of work.

  Breathing harder than I would have liked, I knocked and buzzed and knocked again. Three minutes later I pulled out the appropriate master key from the keychain in my toolbox.

  Ë€font sizPeople rarely burglarize doorman apartment buildings in Manhattan, so the locks are usually old, and often there’s only one.

  I KNEW FROM Bug’s report that Leslie Bitterman was at work every day. He had no wife. Mardi was taking afternoon summer-school classes and her sister was in day camp. It’s amazing what you can find online if you know what you’re doing.

  The place was like a dollhouse for adults. In the small entrance there was a maple stand with a vase containing two dozen silk roses. The flowers had never been dusted. This was the only sign of faulty housekeeping.

  The rest of the apartment was immaculate. There was no mess in the dining room, kitchen, or living room. The girls’ bedrooms were also spotless. Leslie’s sleeping quarters were definitely masculine, but not too much so. Woolen blankets and one pillow. The window shades, all through the house, were pulled down.

  The office was the most amazing of all the rooms. It was almost as bare as Christian’s office downtown. The only concession Mr. Bitterman had made to comfort was to put a worn and stained red rug under his desk and chair. He had a desktop computer and a phone line that he used for his archaic Internet connection.

  I turned on the computer but couldn’t gain access because it was password protected. I connected a specially designed transmitter to a USB port and called Tiny “the Bug” Bateman.

  “I see you got a setup for me,” the ultra-geek said upon answering. “Gimme a minute.”

  The screen went black and then a stream of data, all in green characters, began to scroll down. This went on for about sixty seconds and then Bug said, “You’re in. Call me if you have any problem.”

  “Is he online?”

  “He is now.”

  “Much activity?”

  “No. He doesn’t have much of a footprint. Looks like a couple of online newspapers and his office e-mail account.”

  “Can you download what he’s got on here?”

  “He’s an old-fashioned kind of guy. Did you connect my cross-box on the phone lines and fiber-optic cable?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’ll take a while but no problem,” he said and then he hung up.

  PERUSING HIS ELECTRONIC folders, I saw nothing unusual. He had downloaded files from his work but this seemed to be legitimate. It just looked like he worked from home sometimes. There were plenty of documents in his word-processor files: letters to a few relatives and complaints to businesses that he believed had not made good on their promises. There were hundreds of Ë€e hundreword-processor files. One of these was named JOURNAL01. I hoped that this would give me some inkling about why my son and his daughter were plotting his murder. But it didn’t. I’ve never read such a boring rendition of life. He wrote about the breakfast he’d just had, and about some work-related issues—in excruciating detail. The only thing odd about his children is that he never mentioned them.

  After an hour of browsing through his computer I had found absolutely nothing. His only pastime, it seemed, was taking color-drenched photographs of zoo animals. He had zebras, monkeys, tigers, and fanciful sea horses in literally hundreds of files.

  I scrolled through all the documents and came upon one thing odd. Every file name that he had was a full word or two describing the contents. One file, however, was merely named TI. I tried to read it but only got machine-language garbage. I switched over to his program files and found a program with the same name.

  AFTER TEN MINUTES of paging through the digital photographs I wanted to go out and find the angry father on that southbound train. I wanted to apologize to him. He at least loved his son, even if he was overzealous in the expression of that love. But what Leslie Bitterman had done was unforgivable.

  There were well over a thousand photographs of a naked man and child in the most depraved positions. The girl in the photographs ranged in age from eight to about twelve, before puberty began to rear its hormones. Sometimes she was smiling, sometimes she cried, openmouthed and in despair. The man had a stern look and was always erect. She was a pale-haired, gray-eyed girl. When she wasn’t in despair her expression was resigned, as unreadable as that of Leslie Bitterman.

  I knew that it was Bitterman because the photographs had been taken in that very room. He had raped and molested that child on the selfsame red rug.

  I made it through maybe thirty percent of the pictures; after that I lost heart. If I hadn’t incriminated myself by calling Duffy I probably would have waited and killed Bitterman myself. But the feeling passed and I went into the hall and down the stairs. I retrieved Bug’s cross-box from the basement and then came up to thank Peter. I told the doorman that everything looked good.

  “You sure you’re an electrician?” he asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Peter said, leavening his tone. “I never known one’a you guys not to come up with some kinda five-thousand-dollar job.”

  “Duffy likes Joe,” I said. “He told me to go easy.”

  I don’t even remember how I got back to the Tesla Building.

  Ê€„

  41

  Twill, I thought while unlocking the many bolts on my outer office door, was a perfect person. Maybe not a model citizen or a particularly΀… productive member of society, not a law-abiding churchgoer with God always on his mind; but in spite of all his social failings, Twill was capable of making flawless decisions about what he would do and why. His resolution to kill Leslie Bitterman was one of absolute sensibleness. I wanted to kill the man myself, but I wasn’t perfect like my son. I worried about consequences even if I knew the act in front of me was correct.

  Whether you killed the finance expert for past acts or to stem future threats, there were few people who would condemn or even question the act itself. The problem was that those few worked for the state of New York and wore black robes.

  But Twill’s perfection didn’t matter. Once I was in possession of the facts, making a plan to save my son would be easy. I had resolved that problem and so was feeling good. There w
ere other knots in the cord of my life, but they would unravel, too—I was pretty sure.

  I was sitting in the new chair behind my receptionist’s desk, something I often did while reading the mail.

  I was hardly even worried when there came a jiggle on the doorknob followed by the sound of the buzzer. I considered going back to my office to consult the monitors, but then I said to myself that I couldn’t live my life worrying about what awaited me every time I heard a knock or ring. That path led to madness.

  HE WAS ON the short side and smelled of a thin layer of lilac spread over an acre of sour sweat. In his left hand he held a battered black briefcase. My visitor was dressed in a well-cut dark-blue suit, but his wiry frame undermined the effect. Who knows what genetic background stamped out his oddly long but, then again, flat white face?

  “Mr. McGill?” he asked, his lips approximating a smile.

  “Who are you?”

  “Timothy Moore.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Leonid McGill?”

  I hesitated. So many things were going on that I wasn’t even certain about answering this simplest of questions. I didn’t like the way Moore smelled but maybe he had some kind of glandular problem. I was busy but no one was paying me, except if I set up a constitutionally innocent man for a mob hit.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “Come on in, Mr. Moore. Have a seat.”

  I backed away, letting him into the front office. I decided to meet with him out there. That way I didn’t have to turn my back to enter the codes for the inner sanctum.

  I sat down behind the desk and gave Tim Moore my blandest expression.

  “Nice office,” he said, lowering tentatively across from me. “Great building.”

  He was nervous but that didn’t necessarily portend anything sinister. Unfaithful wives made men uncomfortable; thieving employees sometimes did, too.

  “What’s your business, Mr. Moore?”

  “I’m an office manager,” he said. “I work for Crow and Williams.”

  “I mean, what is your business with me?”

  A smile flitted across the little man’s sensuous mouth. This wan grin soon became a grimace.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m not used to these things.”

  “You’re here now,” I said. “Just say it—one word after the other.”

  “I’m being blackmailed,” he said at half-capacity.

  He took out a cigarette.

  “No smoking in here,” I informed him. After all, I hadn’t had one since visiting Toolie in the prison infirmary.

  He looked at the white paper roll in his hand and then returned it to the pack, put the pack in his jacket pocket, and inhaled deeply as if he were smoking anyway.

  On the exhale he said, “I’m married to a wonderful woman, Mr. McGill. I’ve been in love with her for sixteen years.”

  I almost believed him.

  “You got a photograph?”

  He leaned over on one buttock, lifting the other in the armless ash chair. He could have been going for a gun, but since my debacle with Willie Sanderson I had moved a pistol to the outer-office desk; it was in my hand at that very moment.

  But all he came out with was a wallet. He flipped it open to the picture of a mousy-looking brunette with big eyes and a painted-on smile. She was in her thirties when the picture was taken. I didn’t believe that he would have gone this far to prepare a lie.

  I nodded and he put the wallet away.

  “Eighteen months ago I strayed with a little Asian girl named Annie,” Tim said. “It didn’t last long. It was like a forty-eight-hour bug. I was in Atlantic City for a seminar and she was staying in the hotel.

  “She came up to see me in the city a few times but I was over her by then and looking for a way to cut it off. Finally I just told her that I loved my wife and that was it.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Pretty good.” He nodded. “Pretty okay. She looked sad but said that she understood. She had a serious boyfriend and was feeling guilty herselfÓ€guilty h.”

  “Is this Annie the one blackmailing you?”

  “It’s a man that called. But she might be putting him up to it. He says that he’s got pictures. He knows where we stayed and specific details about things we, we did.” Moore hesitated a moment, remembering. “You see, I got this rich aunt that died—Mona Lester. I got a little cash out of it.”

  “Did Annie know about the aunt?”

  Tim squinted the way some inexperienced boxers do when you hit them with a solid body shot.

  “In that first couple’a days I told her almost everything. I thought it was love. I didn’t know.”

  “How much they want?”

  “Twenty-five thousand.”

  “How much you inherit?”

  “Two hundred eighty-six thousand, but I thought it was gonna be closer to a million.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Seems like they should have asked for more.”

  “I don’t know,” Timothy Moore replied. “The guy on the phone said that he just needed enough to settle a debt he had. He wants me to bring the money to this condemned building on West Twenty-fourth tomorrow night.”

  “Why don’t you go to the police? They could grab this guy, twist his arm, and go after the girl. That would be easy and legal.”

  “Yeah.” He looked up at me with miserable eyes. “But then there might be an investigation and a trial. Margot would find out. All she’d care about was the affair. I don’t wanna lose my wife, brother.”

  It’s always odd when a white man calls me brother, makes me wonder if he’s trying to put one over on me.

  But he sounded honestly upset. There was pain there, but still . . . that stench of lilac and sweat.

  “So what do want from me, Mr. Moore?”

  “I’ll give you five thousand dollars,” he said, as if that was an answer to my question.

  “For what?”

  “You go to the meeting and get the lowdown on this guy. You tell him that you’re a witness and if he ever shows his face again you’ll go to the cops. Then give him some of the money, and you, you keep the rest. That way I’ll have paid for what I did wrong and, and I can go back to my life with Margot.”

  He was near tears.

  “How’d you hear about me?”Ó€ut me?”<

  “Luke Nye,” he said. “Luke Nye said that you might agree to do a job like this.”

  “How you know him?”

  “Prescott Mimer. I used to tend bar for a friend of Prescott’s on the weekends—for some extra cash.”

  “Who’s the friend?”

  “What does all this have to do with what I’m asking for, Mr. McGill?”

  “Answer my questions, all of my questions,” I said, “or walk out the same way you came in.”

  “Karl Zebriski,” he said. “His bar used to be at Fortieth and Second, but now he has a place in the Lamont Towers near Columbus Circle.”

  I was nervous listening to the poorly put-together man. On the one hand, he seemed to have real feelings, but on the other someone had tried to kill me once already that week.

  Everything he said was reasonable. It could have well been the truth.

  My life was on the line, more than one line, but that wasn’t going to give me a break on the rent; only prison did that, because even in death your plot is only leased.

  “Give me a number where I can reach you,” I said, pushing a notepad across the desk. “I’ll call you in a few hours.”

  “But I’ve got the money right here,” he said, holding up the briefcase.

  “Keep it. I’ll call you later and we will see what we shall see at that time.”

  There was an argument in his eyes but he could see that there was a brick wall behind mine. He scribbled down a number, nodded, and rose to his feet.

  “I really need the help, brother,” he said.

  “And I really will call you,” I replied.

  Ê€„

&nbs
p; 42

  Crow and Williams,” a young man answered. “How can I help you?”