Down the River unto the Sea

by Walter Mosley

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “All I care about is Chrissie, Mr. Boll.”

  “I understand. I have a daughter too. I can’t even imagine how you must feel. But you stay true to me and you two will be eating ice cream sundaes by Wednesday night.”

  The outside bench was getting chilly so I walked over to Grand Central just to warm up. I went upstairs there to the steak house and ordered a porterhouse steak, medium well, with thick fries and French beans.

  “Hello?” a jaunty voice answered on the other end of my third and final phone call.

  “Was that you last night or just a dream?” I asked.

  “Was I handsome and witty?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then that was me. What can I do for you, Joe?”

  “What do you know about Augustine Antrobus and William James Marmot?”

  “This is that Free Man thing, right?” Gladstone Palmer surmised. “Joe, you cannot exonorate a man who killed two cops. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t do shit like that.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I accept it. But you know I stepped on a few toes before you enlightened me, and now I have to do some housekeeping.”

  “You’ll stop trying to get Man exonerated?”

  “If Convert stays off my ass.”

  “I’ll send you what files we have by e-mail. But, Joe.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t save your ass every time you step out of line.”

  The files came before my steak. I couldn’t read them on my cheap phone, but that didn’t matter. I forwarded them to Mel with a note and started on my steak.

  They seated me next to the outer wall of the dining area. From there I could look down on the rotunda as thousands of commuters, civilians, cops, and some crooks passed through. There rose a senseless, very human hubbub from below while I ate my red meat and plotted against the state.

  “Ferris,” he answered on the third ring.

  “Hello, Mr. Ferris. Joe Oliver here.”

  “Hello, my boy. How are you?”

  “It’s the fifteenth round of an old-time boxing match,” I said. “I’ve lost every minute of every round up till now, but I think I finally see a way to get my hook past his defense.”

  “It’s hard to find the torque to hurt a man that late in the fight,” the world-wise multibillionaire opined.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “What can I do for you, son?”

  “Is there some music event going on tonight that you’d like to see with my grandmother?”

  “There’s an invitation I have to hear three of Mozart’s four-handed sonatas in the upstairs chamber at Carnegie Hall.”

  “If you want I’d be happy to go with you and bring my grandmother along.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “Then it’s done,” I said.

  “And what can I do for you?”

  “A huge favor for me,” I said. “I hope not so much for you.”

  We discussed an impossible task for all of four minutes, at the end of which Roger Ferris said, “I’ve been a crook all my life, Joe. It’s nice to know I could use that talent to do something right.”

  “Can I come casual to the event?” I asked. “I have a chore or two before the performance and I might not be able to make it back to Brooklyn in time to change.” While I was saying this I heard three tiny beeps in the receiver.

  “Do what you can.”

  After disconnecting I saw that the beeping was a text from Mel.

  Set!

  “I suppose this means that he’s doin’ somethin’ for you?” my onetime sharecropper grandmother said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know if I go to this thing I got to get my hair done.”

  “And I know how much you love sittin’ in Lulu’s chair.”

  “Roger called over to her after he talked to you, and she’s comin’ here.”

  “I guess he really wants this date.”

  She harrumphed and then said, “I guess. Are you bein’ careful, Joey?”

  “Better than that, Grandma…I’m doing what’s right.”

  34.

  It took an hour and a half to get to Pleasant Plains, Staten Island. I called on the walk over from the train station. Melquarth met me at the gate of his unholy home.

  “How ya doin’?” he asked while shaking my hand.

  It was a rhetorical question. My host expected a nod or maybe some noncommittal phrase, but instead I stood still, considering his words.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Tell me something, Mel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I know why I’m here at your door. My world went crazy a dozen years ago and you are the only one crazy enough to help me through.”

  “Okay.”

  “You say that I was the only one ever, like that red bird you saw, to do what was right by you, but that feels like, I don’t know, a little weak.”

  “For you it is, Joe.” It was the first time I could remember that he used my first name. “I mean, you weren’t raised as the demon inside a house of piety. You never had a rapist father and a mother who hated you for it. But take my word…You didn’t shoot me and then you didn’t lie; and those few years where we played chess you just sat there like the brother I never had, the friendship I could take for granted, or the father who led me by the hand.

  “In my world, in my mind, that was the treasure I longed for.”

  “What about that watchmaker?”

  Melquarth smiled sadly and then nodded. “One day I’ll tell you about him.”

  I’d hit a nerve in a man who didn’t seem to have nerves.

  “Okay,” I acceded. “Let’s go.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “How’m I doin’?”

  A friendlier smile with the same nod.

  “Got cold stone instead of a brain and a hornets’ nest in place of a heart.”

  “Then we’re ready to begin.”

  On the other side of the unbreakable glass wall stood a tall man in a light tan three-piece suit. On the floor next to him lay a metal folding chair that Melquarth had set in the otherwise bare white cell. I figured that the man was William James Marmot and that he had used the chair to test the unbreakability of the opaque glass wall. Now he was pacing nervously, looking everywhere for a way out.

  The blood from Porker’s torture had been cleaned away.

  “How’d it go?” I asked my self-assigned friend.

  “I used a partner, nobody you have to worry about. William James had two bodyguards, so I needed a hand. He came along peacefully when they went down.”

  “Anybody see your face?” I asked.

  “Naw.”

  “How should we do this?”

  “You say that Antrobus knows you,” Mel offered. “That means if we let this guy live that he shouldn’t see your face, or your skin color for that matter.”

  “Why didn’t you grab Antrobus?”

  “I asked around about him. He’s a dangerous man, a very dangerous man. I wouldn’t mind going up against him, but first I figured we could play with Jimmy here.”

  Mel was wearing blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, and the white mask of a Greek god. In his left hand he carried a long-barreled .22 pistol.

  Prisoner was on the other side of the cell when the bad man walked in. Marmot was a shade taller than Mel. He listed forward before Mel raised the pistol. This gesture set the security expert back a step and a half.

  “What do you want?” Marmot asked Frost.

  “I need for you to tell me where Chrissie Braun is.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “An eye for an eye,” Mel explained.

  Marmot’s lips parted.

  “I told you that I don’t know—”

  Mel lowered the pistol and shot the upright man in the left foot. Marmot yelled, fell, and at the same time threw himself at Mel. For a moment I feared for my
cohort, but Mel sidestepped the attack, pistol-whipping Marmot on the side of his head as he passed by.

  On the ground the man turned into a child crying as he held his bloody and shod left foot.

  Mel reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a cloth bandage roll and two thick wads of cotton. These he threw at his victim.

  “Take off your shoe and sock and wrap yourself up before you get blood all over my floor.”

  Marmot did as he was told, blubbering the whole time.

  When he was through, Mel said, “I got another bandage in my other pocket. I hope you don’t need to use that too because the next bullet goes in your left hand and you know it’s a bitch to tie on a bandage with just one hand.”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Where’s Johanna Mudd’s body buried, and where are you holding a living Chrissie Braun?”

  “If-if-if you don’t let me go, my people will kill her.”

  Mel lifted the barrel of the gun so that it was leveled at Marmot’s face. The man cowered.

  “If that’s true you’re as good as dead.”

  “Mudd is buried in a church down in the West Village. It’s a—it’s abandoned and the cops I worked with used it to hide the bodies they made.”

  That proved Marmot’s collusion. I reasoned that Porker and his friends planned to bury me in that rat-infested pit.

  “What about the child?”

  “How do I know you won’t kill me after I tell?”

  “First,” Mel said, gesturing carelessly with the pistol, “I can’t kill you right off because you might be lying, or maybe the girl got moved while you were crying like a baby on my floor. Second, I’ve been employed to find a dead woman and a live girl. You don’t mean enough for me to kill.”

  “I don’t believe you,” the conniving child who lived in Marmot’s heart said.

  “Believe this,” Mel replied, now aiming the pistol at our prisoner. “If I don’t have the address and situation of the child in the next three minutes, I will start putting holes in you until either you give me what I want or bleed to death.”

  It was an address in Yonkers. If we were to believe Marmot, the girl was guarded by two women he knew. When he’d finished the confession Mel thanked him and walked out of the cell.

  “Are we gonna kill this one?” he asked.

  “Not unless the girl’s dead or he lied about where she is.”

  “You see? If I stay working with you long enough, I might work off nine, ten percent of my sins. I’ll be right back.”

  Mel left the room while I stood sentry. After maybe five minutes Marmot made it to his feet, picked up the folding chair, and limped to the door. There he stood waiting to ambush Melquarth.

  I hated the man for what he’d done, but still I identified with him. Just days before I was in a similar situation, desperately struggling to survive.

  “At least he’s still kickin’,” Mel said from behind me. I was so concentrated on Marmot’s silent monologue of survival that I didn’t hear my friend come in.

  He was carrying a small beat-up oak table, resembling a nineteenth-century child’s writing desk; that and a paper folder.

  “You need some help?”

  “Nah,” Mel said with a shrug. “I like to use my words when I can.”

  With that Mel entered and then closed the outer door. Marmot heard something because he raised the metal bludgeon-chair.

  “Back away from the door and put down that seat,” Mel’s slightly altered voice said.

  Marmot hesitated.

  “You got sixty seconds and then I’m’a shoot you through a hole in this door.”

  I fingered the scar on my cheek.

  Marmot threw down the chair and backed away from the door.

  Mel walked in, put the desk down so that it faced the window, and said, “Now pick up that goddamned chair and sit down at this table.”

  When our prisoner did as he was told, Mel placed the paper folder on the tabletop and flipped it open. There was a small stack of white paper with a yellow plastic mechanical pencil hooked at the spine.

  “You know you don’t go to somebody’s house and throw their furniture around,” Mel said. “Now, I want you to write a confession for the murder of Johanna Mudd, the kidnapping of Chrissie Braun, and the subsequent extortion of her father. In there I want you to name everyone you worked for and all those that worked for you. And you better include your boss and those bad cops.”

  Marmot began to shiver.

  “What are you waiting for?” Mel inquired.

  “I can tell about the cops and my men, but I can’t say who I worked for.”

  “Even if I kill you if you don’t?”

  “I’ll be dead anyway.”

  “Not if they put your boss away.”

  “That will never happen.”

  Mel couldn’t get the name Antrobus out of Marmot. The dark-side security expert gave the details and the whereabouts of the kidnapped child. And he named everyone else. Porker and his friends, Valence and Pratt. Marmot facilitated the drugs and the sex slaves distributed and afforded by the cops. He threw a wrench in Man’s appeal just to keep all that quiet. His men murdered Mudd and took the child. Marmot was willing to implicate everyone but his boss. He knew that a coerced confession would never make it to open court. But if he even breathed the name of Antrobus, that would be the end of the line for him.

  After the confession was written, Mel had Marmot handcuff himself to the chair. Then he got behind the man and pulled his hair until his neck was exposed. He injected Marmot just like he’d done to the thug who worked for him.

  “What was that?” Marmot said.

  “Just a little cyanide to help you sleep.”

  Just as the dread entered Marmot’s eyes he passed out.

  “You didn’t really kill him, did you, Mel?”

  “Nah. I just like seein’ how scared a man gets when he thinks he’s about to die.”

  35.

  I left Staten Island, headed for Carnegie Hall. Mel had promised to leave the unconscious crook in a place where the cops would find him first.

  “And I’ll pin the confession to his vest,” he added. “They’ll get the girl and find that graveyard too.”

  “He won’t go to prison, though,” I said.

  “If everything I hear about Antrobus is true, you won’t have to worry about our boy living till spring.”

  The concert was lovely. My grandmother wore a red gown that sparkled from glitter and clear plastic scales.

  “I didn’t know you even owned a dress like that,” I told her.

  “Roger thinks his fancy gifts will get him in my pants,” she replied with not a hint of shame.

  After the event was over we went to a private gathering in an oval room that had a heavily patterned picture window for its roof. When my grandmother excused herself for the toilet, Ferris took me aside and said, “The item is on hold for you starting Monday morning. You got someone who can handle it?”

  “Yeah. I have a friend who has a friend.”

  Despite her protests, my grandmother was swayed by the rich white man’s attentions. But I don’t think it had anything to do with his money. Be it a red gown or a red ribbon, at some point the expressions of love are all the same.

  “Hey, babe,” I said on the phone to my daughter the next morning.

  “Hi, Daddy. How are you? Are you okay?”

  “I think maybe I might be the best I have ever been in my life.”

  “Really? Is the trouble over?”

  “For you it is. For me it’s just beginning.”

  “Are you gonna be okay?”

  “Like I said…the best. Tell your mother and Coleman that I say the coast is clear for them to come home whenever they want.”

  “But what about you, Daddy?”

  “I’m gonna be fine, girl. I have figured what to do so that I don’t stare out that window anymore, whining in my mind about jail.”

  “Did you prove t
hem wrong?” she asked. Aja-Denise refused to accept that I could be guilty of anything.

  “That will never happen. But I know now how to turn my back on all that.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll tell you on the day you graduate from college.”

  “That’s too long.”

  “After all I’ve been through, it’s just the blink of an eye.”

  “Can I come to work Monday?” she asked.

  “A week from Monday.”

  “Why till then?”

  “I have work to do.”

  “Can I see you?”

  “I’ll call as soon as I can. How’s that?”

  “I guess.”

  “I love you, Aja-Denise.”

  “I love you too, Daddy.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I was lying on my back with no blankets on the bed of my third-floor Montague Street apartment. In my life I’d been slashed, stabbed, and shot. I’d broken bones and had bruises that went so deep they never fully went away. But I was feeling as young and hopeful as my grandmother in her red gown.

  The next call rang eight times before she answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Willa.”

  “Mr. Oliver? Is everything okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Do you have any news?”

  “I need you to come to my office at one this afternoon.”

  “Does it have to do with what happened to Mr. Braun?”

  “Tangentially.”

  “Okay, I guess. Is it good news?”

  “More like a challenge that might bring the news.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I’d already talked to Mel so the next call would be the trickiest.

  “Hello.” An old persistent bluster was already back in the lawyer’s tone.

  “Mr. Braun.”

  “Mr. Boll.”

  “I did that.”

  I was referring to the headlines of most of the papers, all except the New York Times. The discovery of the unconscious body of William James Marmot on the downtown doorstep of the NYPD was too tawdry for top billing in “all the news that’s fit to print,” but it did make the lower right corner of the front page.