The Book of Harlan

by Bernice L. McFadden

  Chapter 101

  In hindsight, it was easy for Andrew to identify his misstep—a blunder so garishly bright, it glistened like fool’s gold.

  That morning at the A&P, as he’d stood considering packages of ground beef, a long, freckled arm reached across him.

  “’Scuse me,” the woman had said, plucking a package of lamb chops from the shelf.

  Startled, Andrew scampered away, tugging viciously at the flat cap until it nearly covered his eyes. In the cereal aisle, he waited and waited for the finger-pointing, shouting, and sirens. Minutes passed, and when nothing in the store changed, he unstuck himself and hurried toward the registers.

  He realized too late that he was standing behind the woman with the freckled arm. He tried to back out of the lane but was blocked by a young black mother pushing a cart stacked high with canned goods and soap powder. Heart knocking against his rib cage, Andrew closed his eyes and took three deep breaths.

  The freckle-armed lady set her purse on the counter. Andrew chanced a glance at the well-worn navy-blue handbag flecked with tiny lacerations and stains. It looked familiar.

  Andrew raised his eyes and saw that he was standing next to his hero, his warrior queen: Eudora Penny. His anxiety was replaced with giddy delight. Feigning interest in a rack of TV Guides, he inched closer to her six-foot frame.

  Eudora Penny collected her change from the cashier, looped the purse handles over her shoulder, and started away. Andrew, as if hypnotized, abandoned his shopping cart and followed her out of the store. When she stopped at Henry’s Vegetable and Flower Stand, Andrew remained outside, hovering over the buckets of fresh flowers like a pollinating honeybee.

  Had Andrew abandoned his pursuit of Eudora, he would have made it back home in time to thwart the watery catastrophe, so that the black superintendent wouldn’t have entered his apartment to fix the leak and then stayed when he saw the thing he could never forget.

  But Andrew continued to shadow Eudora on her morning rounds, debating how and if he should strike up a conversation with her. It had been years since he’d engaged in small talk of any kind. His interaction with people had been limited to his monthly sojourn into Manhattan to conduct business with a decrepit old man known as Abraham the Jeweler.

  Once a month Andrew took the train to visit Abraham in his tiny office at the back of his jewelry shop on West 47th Street. Before they got down to business, the two would exchange observations about current events and the weather, but little else, as Abraham fixed the loupe into his right eye to begin examining the pieces Andrew had brought him.

  When he was done, Abraham would grunt, remove the loupe, scribble an amount on a piece of paper, and slide it across the desk to Andrew. If Andrew was pleased with the figure, Abraham would place the money into an envelope, hand it over, and send him off with a “Shalom.”

  * * *

  245 fell into view, and Andrew realized that his window of opportunity was closing, so he hastened to catch up to Eudora.

  Up ahead, the singing cripple rolled toward them. Eudora bounced her head in greeting; Andrew turned his face away, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the old vet make the sign of the cross over his heart and then aim his finger at him.

  Now, Eudora was at the door of the building, silver key poised over the lock. Desperate, Andrew called out to her in German. Eudora’s head jerked mechanically around as if her mind and body were at odds with the decision to respond.

  “Um, yes?”

  He saw her eyes then. They weren’t a disappointment; in fact, they looked exactly as he had imagined—deep, ocean blue like his own. Andrew panted out a few more words of German.

  “I’m sorry,” Eudora said, raising her voice, “I don’t understand. I. Speak. English.” She tapped her chest with every word.

  Andrew raised a palm. “Kein problem, tut mir leid, Ihnen die Mühe gemacht zu haben.”

  Her mouth a thin line, Eudora pushed the door open and stepped aside. “After you.”

  Andrew scuttled past. “Danke.”

  “Have. A. Good. Day,” she squalled, heels clicking on the floor as she hurried to her apartment.

  Andrew’s feet did not touch the steps; elated as he was, he floated to the second floor. The door to his apartment was as he had left it and so he entered without any misgivings.

  When he saw Harlan sitting in the darkness with the riding crop resting in his lap, Andrew didn’t try to run or scream for help because he had suspected for some time that his stolen life was steadily inching to a close. Perhaps that’s why he’d finally had his up-close-and-personal with Eudora Penny? God wanted him to know that He was as benevolent as the religions claimed.

  The years pressed down on Andrew’s shoulders, and his spine bent with the weight. He swiped the cap from his head, clumsily rounded the side table, and sat down on the couch across from the black man. The plastic covering crackled faintly beneath his thighs. Outside on the sidewalk, the singing veteran rolled his wheelchair to the building, leaned over, tightened the laces of his brown shoes, then stood up and walked away.

  PART XII

  Emancipation Day

  Chapter 102

  For the first time since his mother died, Harlan was glad she was gone. Had she been alive, saved and reborn in Christ’s holy blood, what he’d done would have stopped her heart cold.

  His father, also deceased, would not have fallen so quickly out of this life; instead, he would have bestowed upon his son a look so thoroughly soaked with disappointment and shame, Harlan would have been smothered to death beneath his gaze.

  Either way, death would have been an inevitable outcome.

  Harlan supposed it still loomed, even though capital punishment in New York State went out of style with the electrocution of Eddie Lee Mays in ’63. But he was more than sure that the state wouldn’t hesitate to resurrect old sparky for a black miscreant like himself.

  Even with that possibility, Harlan still chose not to run.

  * * *

  He exited 245 Sullivan Place and glanced at the empty wheelchair. He might have wondered about the whereabouts of its owner if he hadn’t had his own pressing issues. But he did, and so Harlan set off to enjoy his last hours of freedom.

  He stopped first at the playground next door to 245. Sitting on a wooden bench, he removed a flask from his pocket and turned it up to his lips. The expensive Scotch, a Christmas gift from his employer, slipped down his throat as smooth and silky as sin.

  Sun warming his face, Harlan remained in the park for an hour observing young mothers pushing their children in the metal swings and coaxing them down the slides.

  With the liquor pulsing through his veins, he eventually left the playground and walked the block to Henry’s Vegetable and Flower Stand. There, he fingered the talcum-soft petals of black-eyed Susans which Andrew had lingered over earlier that morning.

  “Hey, what you doing?”

  Harlan looked up to see Henry standing in the doorway of the store.

  Henry waved a meaty pink hand at him. “You gonna buy or you gonna sniff the scent away?”

  By the time Harlan reached the busy intersection of Empire Boulevard and Nostrand Avenue, he felt as light as a balloon. He stood on the corner near the Chemical Bank and for fifteen full minutes he admired the sky.

  A few pedestrians stopped to look, and those motorists waiting for the stoplight to turn green hung their heads out of their windows, straining to catch a glimpse of what Harlan found so wondrous in that summer sky. But they couldn’t find anything exceptional about the peach-colored sun or the smattering of white clouds. So they dismissed the man with a shake of their heads and hurried on to their destinations.

  Harlan moved along, strolling leisurely down the remaining few blocks that separated the now from what was to come. At the Carvel Ice Cream stand, located just feet away from the police station, he purchased a cup of vanilla ice cream with a double portion of rainbow sprinkles and sat down on a nearby bench to enjoy it.

&n
bsp; As Harlan ate, a band of Hasidic boys came running up the street. One kid, a length ahead of the others, bumped against Harlan’s knee as he streaked past. Harlan closed his hand protectively over his cup of ice cream and monitored the horseplay until the group—tzitzit and payot fluttering—rounded the corner and vanished.

  Chapter 103

  Having finished the last of the melted ice cream, Harlan smacked his lips and tossed the pink plastic spoon and paper cup into a nearby garbage can.

  He had in his vision the 71st Precinct—a handsome three-story, sand-colored building that straddled the corner of the residential New York Avenue and the commercial thoroughfare of Empire Boulevard.

  The building had not always been a police station; in its former life it had once been the grand residence of some wealthy banker, and then later a private school for boys. Now it was more often than not the first checkpoint on a short journey to the penitentiary.

  Harlan climbed the marble steps, and pulled back the heavy door. Inside, ceiling fans whirled and creaked. The clickety-click of typewriter keys, the hushed conversations, and the intermittent static blasts of walkie-talkie exchanges bounced off the cream-colored walls and echoed in Harlan’s ears.

  He made his way toward the officer seated behind the receiving desk. Harlan could feel curious eyes crawling over him, picking him apart, attempting to detect if he was friend or foe. Reaching the desk, he reverently removed the tattered gray cap from his head and offered a soft “Good afternoon, sir.”

  Twenty-six-year-old Daniel McCollum had rolled his eyes when he spotted Harlan coming through the door. He was not fond of Negroes. So it was to his great dismay that upon graduating from the police academy he was promptly assigned to the 71st Precinct in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn—a neighborhood teeming with Negroes and, almost as bad, Jews.

  McCollum was a proud Irish Catholic boy, a third-generation American who wore a gold crucifix around his neck and sported a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on his right bicep and the American flag on his left.

  He surveyed Harlan’s faded denim overalls stained with blotches of paint and oil that no amount of soap and water would ever clean away. Beneath the overalls, Harlan wore a blue-and-white-striped collared dress shirt, the front of which was speckled with rainbow sprinkles. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows revealing dark, sinewy arms. Harlan was slim-framed and of average height. His woolly hair was cut close to his skull, calling attention to the triangle of gray extending out in a widow’s peak. His bushy mustache was streaked silver as were his eyebrows and eyelashes. His face was deeply lined.

  “Yeah?” McCollum grunted disinterestedly.

  “I’m here to turn myself in.”

  A stinking cloud of liquor wafted from Harlan’s mouth. McCollum frowned, waved the pungent odor away, and asked, “For what?”

  “Murder.”

  Eyebrows arched, McCollum leaned forward. “Murder? Is that so.”

  “Yes sir.”

  McCollum closed the newspaper he’d been reading and folded his arms. “And when did this murder take place?”

  “’Round nine thirty or ten.”

  “Last night?”

  “No. This morning.”

  McCollum glanced at his watch; it was nearly eleven thirty a.m.

  “Uh-huh. And where did this murder take place?”

  “245 Sullivan Place. Apartment 3C.”

  Old drunk, McCollum thought. The old, the drunkards, or a combination of both were always wandering into the police station making ludicrous claims about murders, alien abductions, and government conspiracies. McCollum had seen and heard it all. He smirked. “So, um, who exactly was killed?”

  “Andrew Mailer.”

  “And who killed this Andrew Mailer?”

  “I did,” Harlan stated calmly.

  A few days earlier, McCollum had been out on foot patrol when an old woman—a black old woman—walked up to him and declared that she had murdered her husband of forty years.

  “How’d you kill him?” McCollum had asked.

  “I stabbed him with my knitting needle,” she said.

  He had accompanied her back to her apartment where the old woman’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter—LaCoconut, LaBanana, La-something, McCollum couldn’t quite remember—was sprawled on the couch watching television. McCollum had hastily scanned the small apartment before turning to the wide-eyed teenager and asking, “Where’s your grandfather?”

  The girl frowned, pointed to a framed photograph hanging on the wall, and said, “Him? He’s dead. Died before I was born. I think he’s buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery.”

  McCollum shook his head at the memory and gave Harlan a stern look. “You say you did it, huh?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How?”

  Harlan presented his hands. “With these.”

  “I see,” McCollum said. “And why did you kill him?”

  Harlan thought for a moment. “I suppose because it needed to be done,” he said sullenly.

  McCollum rolled his eyes. “It needed to be done?”

  “Yes sir.”

  McCollum dropped his hands onto the desk. “What’s your name?”

  “Harlan. Harlan Elliott, sir.”

  “How many drinks have you had today, Harlan?”

  Harlan shrugged his shoulders. “One or two, I guess.”

  “Or five of six?” McCollum said.

  Harlan remained quiet.

  “Yeah, well, Harlan, the New York City Police Department does not have time for jokes.”

  “But sir, I ain’t joking. Andrew Mailer is dead, and I killed—” He stopped short and gave his head a hard shake. “Wait,” he stammered, “the thing is, sir, Andrew Mailer ain’t his real name. It’s a long story.” Harlan’s eyes glazed over. “It’s a very long story. You see, back in Germany—”

  McCollum raised his hand. “Germany?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What were you doing in Germany?”

  Harlan swallowed. “Well, during the war—”

  Again McCollum raised his hand, halting the black man’s words. The cop thought he understood now. He had two uncles who’d served during World War II. One drink too many and they started to hallucinate that their living rooms were the front lines. “You having a flashback of some kind? You have them often?” McCollum asked, and then answered, “I suppose you do. Do you got any pills for that sorta thing?”

  “Sir, I am not having a flashback. If you just let me explain—”

  “Can I call someone to come and get you?” McCollum reached for the black phone on his desk. “A wife, kid—”

  “No sir, I’m not married. If you just let me—”

  “You live alone? Who comes to check on you? A neighbor, nephew—”

  “Sir, please!” Harlan bellowed.

  The police station fell silent, and Harlan became supremely aware of the rotating ceiling fans slicing through the June heat.

  The color drained from McCollum’s face; his warm green eyes turned to ice. “You watch your tone, you hear me, old-timer?”

  “I-I’m sorry, sir,” Harlan whispered.

  McCollum glanced over at the two detectives who had abandoned their paperwork in favor of what was happening at the receiving desk. He nodded assuredly at them before turning his attention back to Harlan. “You better be sorry,” he growled under his breath.

  The sound of hurried footsteps echoed from the corridor behind the receiving desk. Within seconds, a tall, stately looking man with a handlebar mustache appeared. He glanced briefly at Harlan before fixing questioning eyes on McCollum. “Is there a problem, officer?”

  McCollum straightened his spine. “No, sergeant. No problem. It’s just that this man is claiming he killed someone.”

  The sergeant’s eyes darted between McCollum and Harlan. “Have you confirmed his claim, Officer McCollum?”

  “Well, um, no sir. I figured he was lying,” he said, and then lowered his voice and leaned toward t
he sergeant. “For God’s sake, he smells like a distillery.”

  The sergeant remained unflappable. “He give you an address?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well then, dispatch a cruiser over there to check it out.”

  “Yes sir,” McCollum said, reaching for his walkie-talkie.

  The sergeant stepped toward Harlan. “What’s your name?”

  “Harlan Elliott.”

  The sergeant pointed at a chair alongside a desk piled high with folders. “You sit there until we confirm your claim,” he said, and walked away.

  Eyeing Harlan ominously, McCollum barked the address into his walkie-talkie.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, a black-and-white police cruiser stopped in front of 245 Sullivan Place. They pressed six of the thirty bells. A woman’s voice blared through the intercom system, “Yes?”

  “It’s the police, buzz us in.”

  “Who?”

  “The police!”

  There was a long silence and then the door buzzed open.

  The two police officers climbed the stairway to the third floor. Their sudden appearance startled an old man dressed in a blue bathrobe who was shuffling from the incinerator back to his apartment. He stood staring at them with his mouth agape until one of the officers snapped, “This has nothing to do with you, pops. Go on back into your apartment.”

  The door leading into apartment 3C at 245 Sullivan Place was indeed unlocked. Guns drawn, the officers moved cautiously into the apartment. Meow hissed at them from the shadows.

  On the couch was a man in repose. Tan slacks and white shirt buttoned clear to the neck. Black leather shoes. His hands were folded majestically across his chest.

  One of the officers banged loudly on the wall and yelled, “Hello!”

  At the sound, Meow scurried into view, jumped onto Andrew’s stomach as if confirming the obvious, and leveled her yellow eyes with those of the officers.

  One cop pressed his fingers against Andrew’s neck, checking for a pulse. He looked at his partner and shook his head.