“It’s good to see you,” she said when we were seated.
“I’m actually surprised that you let me up here.”
“Why would you say that?”
“The way you handled my investigation I figured you had me for some kinda masher deserved to be thrown under the jail.”
Her squarish, delicate face expressed pain. She looked away at her stone desk and then out into the sky.
“I am very sorry for what I did to you, Joe,” she said, bringing those wandering, lustrous brown eyes back to me. “The only reason I never called was because I didn’t think I deserved asking your forgiveness.”
“Uh…” I was at a loss for words to say the least, stupefied by the claim and its apparent honesty.
I had hated this woman for showing my wife the video of me and Nathali/Beatrice. I came here to confront her for participating in my frame. I was willing to fight the guy downstairs because I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, strike her.
“What?” she asked. “You thought I had something to do with what they did to you?”
“You—you showed that video to my wife,” I said. “She left me in Rikers when we had money for bail.”
Jocelyn was near my age, and I was slowly being convinced of her beauty. It was like the dawn of a morning after the death of a beloved king. Everything was beautiful but salted with the sorrow of his passing.
“I’m sorry for that too,” she said. “I believed that you’d raped that woman at the time. But even if it was true, there was no reason to show Monica that tape. Everything I did concerning your case was wrong.”
“Did you set me up?”
Jocelyn gave no assent. She just gazed at me like a land-bound midwestern farmer seeing the sea for the first time.
“You’ve thought that for the last ten years?” she asked.
“And more.”
“I heard they had you in solitary for three months.”
I brushed two fingertips across my scar.
“To keep from gettin’ any more like this,” I said.
“When they told me where you were I was actually happy,” she admitted. “A man, a policeman using his authority to rape a woman the way everyone said you did; that man deserved to suffer.”
“Who said?”
“That woman who blamed you, my superior, Prosecutor Hines,” Jocelyn listed. “There was that video and papers waiting for you at the station.
“And then one day I heard that you’d been released. That the charges had been dropped and you were off the force.
“I went to the files and everything was gone. No tape, no statement, not even the report of your arrest. I tried to find Nathali Malcolm, but there was no record of her either.
“I went to every person I knew connected with the arrest, but no one told me anything. My old supervisor said to forget about it. She said that you had been fired with no pension and even the union was hands-off.
“That’s when I knew that you’d been set up. There was something you were into that made you a danger. They used me to go after you because they knew how I felt about cops and sexual misconduct. They knew I’d go after you with all my ability.
“I quit the force ten months later. When the precinct captain asked me why, I told him that I just couldn’t take the shit anymore.”
I believed her. I knew what she said was true. They had given my friend Gladstone the assignment. They had set up Beatrice so she couldn’t say no.
“Prosecutor Hines must have known something,” I said. “He might have pressed charges based on a lie, but when they asked him to drop the case…he must have known something.”
“Ben died seven years ago,” she said. “He’d moved back down to North Carolina and had a stroke.”
“And you were too ashamed to call me and tell me what they’d done?” I accused.
“No. No, Joe. I was sure that you knew who did it and why. I thought you kept quiet either because they paid you off or that they’d kill you if you said anything else.”
“Kill me?”
“I figured they put you in jail to let them finish you in there,” she agreed. “If you died there, nobody would ask questions. After all, you abused that woman hiding behind your shield. I thought you had made some kind of deal with whoever framed you and they let you slide with a dismissal.”
Her words sat me back on the backless couch. I put my left fist down on the leather cushion to keep from falling sideways.
“So you really think they were going to kill me and then they changed their minds?”
“That’s the only way it made sense,” she reasoned. “I mean, they had you, but obviously they didn’t want you in court. One reason I never came to you about it was that I thought that you had been made part of the deal, whatever that was. If I got involved they might have come after me.”
I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees. They were trying to kill me at first but then changed their minds. This rendition of my experience actually made sense. With a decent lawyer I had a good shot at getting the charges dismissed.
“Why are you here, Joe?” Jocelyn asked.
“I came to blame you for framing me,” I said. “That and to get the names of the people you worked with.”
“Why now? I mean, it’s over, right?”
“My daughter’s all grown up. Nobody needs me now.”
“So you’re just gonna get yourself killed?”
I hadn’t put it in those words, but she was right. Whoever set me up like that wouldn’t hesitate at murder.
“Have you ever heard of Adamo Cortez or Hugo Cumberland?” I asked the corporate security analyst.
There were three jets in the sky over New Jersey, circling Newark Airport. Next to them was Jocelyn Bryor’s beautiful face wondering about my question.
“What is this, Joe?” she asked.
“I need to find out who set me up.”
“Sounds like you already know.”
“Not so it makes any sense.”
We sat a minute more.
“My girls are eight and thirteen,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to do anything, to testify to anything. I just need to find out who did this to me. I got to know.”
Jocelyn took a deep breath and then said, “It was a man calling himself Adamo Cortez who brought Nathali Malcolm to me. He said that she’d been forced to have sex by you and was afraid for her life. He showed me the video.
“Five months later I was down at headquarters to meet with a psychiatrist over my increasing lack of interest in the job. I saw Cortez and approached him. He put me off and left. When I asked the woman he was talking to about where he went, she said he left the building but that his name wasn’t Cortez; it was Hugo Cumberland—a private specialist sometimes used by the department.”
“What kind of specialist?” I asked.
“Are you here to yoke me, Joe?”
“No. What kind of specialist?”
“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask.”
The air between me and Jocelyn was thick and soundless. She didn’t want to be talking to me but still felt a sense of duty. I didn’t want to know what I’d learned, but I couldn’t wipe it away.
“The woman didn’t tell you anything else?” I asked.
“No. But Adamo wasn’t at her office. He was sitting with a captain named Holder. I asked Holder’s assistant for Cumberland’s number, but she said that Cumberland was just a name he used and that his real name was Paul Convert.”
“Why she tell you that?”
“Girls can be chatty, Joe. And most of the time we don’t take men’s secrets so seriously.”
“He was a short guy with a mustache?” I asked. “Looked Puerto Rican?”
“That’s him.”
Walking north half a block on Broadway, I turned right on Exchange Place and had just crossed New Street on the way to Broad when two official-looking SUVs cut me off—back and front.
Four doors slid open and men in dark
uniforms disgorged from the vehicles.
I considered going for my pistol, but when two more men jumped out, I gave up on that mode of self-defense. Instead I stood still with my hands a few inches from my sides. The men tackled me like I was a football dummy, took my gun, and clapped on restraints, hand and foot.
I saw a couple of shocked pedestrians before a black bag was put over my head.
The next thing I knew I was in the back of one of the SUVs. It was moving and I was not.
22.
The drive was a bit more than an hour, I figured. We went through the Battery Tunnel and into Brooklyn—I was pretty sure about that. We drove long enough to make it somewhere out in Queens but not much farther. Whoever had grabbed me wanted to stay in the city.
That alone told me a lot.
When the car parked I was getting ready to yell as soon as the door slid open. They might kill me, but I’d leave a marker that maybe Mel or Gladstone would find.
But my captors had thought of that. Someone shoved a rag filled with sweet-smelling chloroform over my nose and mouth.
I had to breathe.
Coming to on a basement floor, I was aware of being cold; chilled to the bone, as my father used to say. The air was dank, filled with fungal spores, bringing to mind the heavy atmosphere of graveyards and dungeons. My hands were cuffed behind me, but my legs were unfettered. I made it to my feet, trying to keep down the deep-seated anxieties of a man terrified by dark containment.
There was a low-watt bulb imparting its tame glow from the low ceiling. A pretty long and steep stairway led up through a hole-like corridor to an upper door. I put one foot on the bottom stair and a deep gong sounded.
I took no more steps and within seconds the door above opened.
“Stay off the stairs,” a man silhouetted by light called down.
“Why am I here?”
His reply was to slam the door shut.
There was a stool and a worktable in the cramped cellar. No exit except for the steep stairway. There were no tools to be seen, no weapons or objects that could be turned into weapons. The men who accosted me were young and well trained. I certainly couldn’t hope to defeat even one of them with both hands shackled behind my back.
I walked around for maybe an hour, looking to see if there was anything I could turn to my advantage; there wasn’t.
And so I decided to sit on the stool and lean back against the edge of the worktable—awaiting my fate.
Waiting is the detective’s stock-in-trade. We wait for the right hour, a certain phone call, or something different from what has gone before. It’s not a profession that’s a natural fit for my nature, but the great thing about human beings is that they can and do adapt.
The natural boon of spending most of my time quiescent and inactive opened the trapdoor of deep thought. I fell right into it.
Sitting on that stool I decided that my captors were after me over the frame and not A Free Man. Not that it made much difference. In both cases I was the pariah and they the judgment if not actually the law.
Something slammed down and I realized that I had fallen asleep on the stool. Two men stood in front of me in the flimsy light. One of them had an automatic pointed in my general direction. The other man, I figured, had put down the tray loud enough to wake me up.
The armed man, dressed all in black, was tall and masked. His disguise was like a ski mask but it was designed expressly for the purpose of concealing his identity. The second guy wore a simple brown suit, no mask, and exhibited no weapon. He was on the short side, with skin darker than most white men.
“Stand up and turn around,” the unmasked man commanded. “I’m going to unlock the cuffs while you eat.”
I did as he said and he as he promised.
There were three fried eggs, four strips of bacon, a glass of grapefruit juice, and a cup of coffee on the brown resin tray.
My stomach was upset from the chloroform, but I ate and drank, as I had learned to do in prison. You never knew when the next meal was coming.
“You are the cause of great concern,” the man without the mask or gun said. The words were sophisticated, but the accent was deep Brooklyn. “People all over New York are asking why you don’t leave well enough alone.”
“Who are you?” I replied.
“My name is Adamo Cortez. I think you had your friend the Haitian cop ask about me.”
“Your name came up,” I said in a relaxed, informal tone, “and I decided to see what you know…Detective.”
“Where’d my name come up?”
“In a dream.”
The liar didn’t like my lie.
“Stand up and turn around,” he said, a little less friendly than before.
“I still got a piece’a bacon on my plate.”
“Lean over and eat it like a dog.”
On one hand I wanted to hit him, but on the other I didn’t want to be shot. So I stood and turned and allowed the chains to be snapped back into place.
When I was seated again, the masked man with the automatic went back up the stairs and closed the door.
When the gunsel was gone, my true captor leaned up against the table next to me.
“You’ve been talking to people,” he said. “Making noise, brandishing guns. You went to see Jocelyn Bryor and Little Exeter Barret. You’re asking questions about me. I don’t like that.”
“I haven’t asked a thing about you…Mr. Paul Convert.”
The fairly genteel look on my inquisitor’s face evaporated. His brows furrowed as if maybe he was the heavy in some silent film from the Golden Age. He stared at me, stood away from the table, maybe considered hitting, stabbing, or shooting me, and then went up the stairs.
I shouldn’t have used the name I’d learned. I should have asked forgiveness and buried my anger in other cases—A Free Man, for instance. But there comes a time when a man has to stand up and be heard, a time when their threats do not outweigh his freedom.
The time for waiting was over. Now that I knew the players, I also knew the play. They were going to kill me, and soon.
I’m a pretty supple guy. Once a week for six years I took yoga classes at a studio on Montague until the rent pushed out the young lesbian couple who taught there. They moved only about a mile away, but I didn’t have the time for that commute.
Still, my hips and knees were pretty limber, and with real concentration I was able to get the big toe of my left foot over the chain between my wrists. The right foot was easier, and my hands, though not free, were at least in a position to do one thing or another.
I shattered the stool, making one of the legs a good club. Then I searched around the cellar one more time, looking for either an exit or a better weapon. I found neither.
Then I examined the stairs.
Only the first three steps seemed wired for the alarm. This gave me a slight edge. I took the round seat of the stool and the leg turned club in hand and leaped up to the fourth step, teetered a bit, and then found the inner balance the yoga instructors always talked about. I climbed the rest of the way, stood as far to the side as I could, and then carefully let the seat roll down. It did as I wished, and when it hit the last three steps, the gong went off.
I pressed back against the wall, the door flung open, and a foot crossed the threshold. I hit his ankle for all I was worth. He tumbled forward, and I hit him across the nose with a swing that Babe Ruth would have been proud of. He tumbled down the stairs and I raced after.
I was able to retrieve his automatic and aim just as another mercenary appeared at the top of the stair.
I shot only twice. I didn’t know then that these were the only two men left to guard me.
I could see the sole of my second victim’s shoe from where I crouched. The man I’d battered into unconsciousness was still breathing. I searched him for more weapons but found none. After maybe thirty seconds, I began to make my way back up.
The man was dead. One shot had made a hole just above the right ey
e. There were a few items of value left on his clay: the key to my cuffs, a telephone number scrawled on a neatly folded sheet of paper, and a cell phone that looked like it had just been cut from its plastic wrapper.
In his wallet was an identity card for Security Managers Inc., a worldwide prison, prisoner transport, and mercenary provider. His name had been Tom Eliot.
On the third floor of the suburban Queens house I found a briefcase chock-full of fifty-dollar bills. Payment for my demise, no doubt.
I handcuffed the unconscious soldier to the worktable in the basement, then used his keys to drive one of the SUVs out of the driveway.
23.
It didn’t take long to become a fugitive, just a few days of pretty good police work.
“Hello?” Aja-Denise said on the seventh ring. “Who’s this?”
“It’s me.”
“Hi, Daddy.” There was a smile in her words.
I was driving across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge.
“Honey, I got to talk fast so listen close.”
“Okay.” She got serious.
I told her the general outline of my situation in no more than four sentences.
“What you need me to do?” she asked.
“Tell your mother and her fool of a husband that you all need to be out of town in the hour. Tell her that it’s cops’ rules.”
“Cops’ rules,” she repeated.
“That’s right.”
“How can I talk to you if I have to?”
“I will text the next number I get to Tesserat’s phone using that code we made up.”
“Okay,” she said, and we both disconnected.
“Hullo,” he answered, a dreamy note to his voice, sounding almost like a real watchmaker-repairman from another era.
“Somebody connected to the cops grabbed me with pay soldiers. I think they were planning to kill me.”
“You all right?”
“Free and not wounded. I got one’a their cars and phones.”
“Ditch ’em both and get over to me.”
Down the River unto the Sea Page 14