Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“How’ve you been, Grandma?”

“Fine,” she said with a sneer. “That white man Roger Ferris keep askin’ me to go hear some music at Lincoln Center. I tell him every time that I will not go out on a date with a white man. I mean, if it was a double date and he had a white girlfriend and I had a black boy, then that would be okay.”

“What did he say to that?”

“That we didn’t have to kiss good night.” There was the hint of a smile in her scowl.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“He says that if there’s no kiss, then it wasn’t a real date. And that if I knew before we went that there wasn’t gonna be no lip action, then I wouldn’t have to think we were on a date.”

“That’s a pretty good argument, if you ask my opinion,” I said.

“No one askin’ you.”

“Roger Ferris. Isn’t he that guy who owns most of the silver in the ground in the world?”

“I wouldn’t know. The only ground people up in here have is in the cemetery, waitin’ for the little we got left on our bones.”

“How’s our other friends?” I asked.

“Stop it, King. You and I both know that you not here at no eight thirty in the mornin’ to make small talk.”

I do love my grandmother. The milestone of ninety years was well behind her, but she read the Daily News every morning and did all my sewing. She was a shade under five feet tall and hadn’t brought the scale up past a hundred pounds in years, but she was a power to reckon with.

Stonemason’s was one of the most exclusive retirement/nursing homes in the world, but something about my grandfather’s career as a fireman got him and her put in a benefits clause that I had never seen.

Brenda Naples still walked, smoked, and talked back. It’s an even bet that she’ll outlive me.

“What is it, King?” she asked.

I told her about the letter from Beatrice Summers and the danger of me following down that evidence.

She concentrated with her eyes and ears, and maybe even by scent.

“You got to do it, baby,” she said when I was through. “All a man got is his sense of what’s right and what’s not. If you know you been done wrong and you know how to make it right, then you don’t have no other choice.” Her dialect veered back toward its Mississippi roots when she was being serious.

“I’ve always known,” I argued.

“But no one else ever gave you hope or a name,” Grandma countered. “And before you had more important work to do.”

“Detective work?”

“No, fool.” She snorted. “Aja-Denise. You had to see her become a young woman before you could take care of yourself. That’s just mother wit.”

I didn’t say anything because she had said it all.

“You wanna come have breakfast with me in the commissary?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Roger Ferris joined me and my grandmother for breakfast. He was a year or two younger than she, and six feet even at that great age. He was lanky and crowned with a mane of silver hair, a reminder, no doubt, of his nearly limitless wealth.

Grandma Brenda seemed to enjoy his company. I guess the breakfast table was exempt from date status.

Roger was a gun enthusiast and a pacifist too.

“Any person who learns a deadly art,” he told me over chicken sausage and egg-white herbal omelets, “whether it be competitive boxing or sharpshooting, must be held to a higher standard. I mean, a man with a semiautomatic can kill a dozen people faster than he can utter their names. That’s a crime against God.”

“That’s why it’s so hard being a cop,” I said with a nod and a sip of decaffeinated coffee.

“How do you mean?” the man worth eight hundred seventy-nine billion dollars asked.

“There you are,” I said, “out on the street with your piece and people who might be armed. They’re afraid of you, mad at you, wantin’ revenge for something one of your other brothers in blue might have done. But still you got to keep your pistola holstered because you have the power and the responsibility.”

Roger smiled at me and nodded. I could see that guns for him were a symbol for the power of his wealth, and for that brief moment he saw us, even if not exactly as equals, somehow as the same.

“Your grandmother is a wonderful woman,” Roger said to me at the elevator door. He had wanted to walk me there, and my grandmother seemed to approve.

“Has been for a very long time.”

“She says that you had to quit being a cop because you got into some kind of trouble.”

“Trouble ambushed me with my pants down and my nose open.” I didn’t know why I was so candid with Ferris at that time. Now I understand that he radiated a kind of confidence and the feeling that he could be trusted.

“Brenda said as much,” he said, nodding. “She’s amazing. Very intuitive and completely free of guile or greed.”

“She says that you want to take her to a concert.”

“She told me, not unless I can get a better tan.”

“She wants to go, Mr. Ferris. You keep up the pressure and she will, sooner or later.”

Ferris smiled and gave me a clear view of his pale blue eyes. They were sad eyes. I imagined that soon he and my grandmother would be sitting side by side at some fancy concert.

“When you went to the can, your grandmother told me that you might have some trouble coming up.”

“You know grandmothers,” I said. “Sometimes they get overprotective.”

“Well,” the billionaire replied, placing a hand on my shoulder. “If she’s right, you just give me a call. You’ll find that there’s not much in this world that scares me”

He handed me a business card and gave me a nod.

Late November still had its warm days that year. I stood out on the street composing five e-mails on my smartphone. I’m a little obsessive about electronic communication. I reread each communiqué at least three times and then put each one through a spell-check. After finishing I went to the C train, riding it downtown back to Brooklyn Heights.

I dabbled around on the Internet for a while looking for keywords that included Adamo Cortez, arrest, police officer, and testimony.

It was 10:07 when I finally dialed the number.

“Hello,” a man said.

“Mr. Summers?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“This is Joe Oliver. I believe that you know about me.”

“Hold on.”

The phone’s receiver clattered and then came the sounds of children expressing happiness and complaints. I heard her voice before she got to the phone. It sounded nothing like the woman I remembered begging me to pull her hair.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Summers? It’s Joe Oliver.”

“Yes. I was expecting your call.”

Somewhere on the other end of the line a door slammed and the noises of midwestern early-morning domesticity ceased.

“To begin with,” I said, “I want you to know that I appreciate your letter and what it means. I know you didn’t have to reach out.”

“Thank you, but you’re wrong there, Mr. Oliver. Since I came back to the church I have thought about all the bad things I’ve done. Some of them there’s no coming back from, but... but in your case speaking the truth is the least I can do. When would you like me to come to New York?”

“Let’s talk about that a little later,” I said. “First I want to ask you some questions.”

“Okay,” she said on a sigh.

“You said in the letter that you had been arrested and then coerced into pressing charges against me by a man named Adamo Cortez.”

“Yes.”

“This man said that he was a policeman?”

“He was a policeman,” she corrected, “a detective.”