Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“I stopped trickin’ six years ago,” she said.

“Then why are you here?”

“I knew what you was feelin’ after they lied on you. I knew. And when you called me I came because that’s what a woman does when a man save her life. He don’t have to love her or care about her or nothin’. But if he save her life, then she gots to take care on him. And even though I’m a professional and fully legit masseuse now — if you call, I come over.”

“I guess this is the last time I’ll call,” I said.

“We could still get drinks or sumpin’,” she offered. “Now, turn ovah.”

The new massage was softer and ranged wider. She did my earlobes and between the toes, the webbing between my fingers and the big tendons of my feet. All the while she was saying something, but I couldn’t quite make it out.

“Daddy?”

I hadn’t been in a sleep that deep for a very long time. Not since before my days in solitary had I slept well at all. A few hours here and there was the most I could hope for. But that day, with A.D. shaking my shoulder, I awoke from slumber that had been completely given over to rest.

“Yeah, baby?”

“Have you been asleep all day?”

“What time is it?”

“A little after four.”

I sat up, keeping the blanket wrapped around me.

Aja was wearing a light brown dress that came down to almost the knee, and though it revealed her figure it didn’t cling.

Looking at this mature attire I realized that she was even more alluring and looked old enough to do something about it. I chuckled to myself, realizing that I couldn’t keep my chick in the egg.

“What you lookin’ at, Daddy?”

“Fate.”

“Are you okay?”

I thought about her question and finally said, “Sit down.”

She perched at the edge of the bed and cocked her head the way she had as a child.

“What?” she asked.

“I wanted to say that watching you grow into a woman is really the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“I talked to Mama,” she said.

“Oh?”

“She told me what she did. She tried to say that it wasn’t all that bad, but I said that she couldn’t have no idea what might happen if she outed you like that. I think she understood.”

“Go on downstairs,” I said then. “Let me get dressed.”

Even with waking up that late in the day, the afternoon was almost normal. Aja made phone calls and filled out checks for me to sign after she was gone. I looked down on Montague Street, thinking about Effy pretending that she was a hooker in order to give me what I needed and Mel flying out of hell in the guise of a scarlet bird to be my guardian angel.

I intended to use Willa’s money to pay for a full investigation into Stuart Braun’s case on A Free Man. But first I had to make a little headway on the frame certain elements in the NYPD had hung around my neck.

“Angles and Dangles,” a woman with a deep and raspy voice answered on the fourth ring. It was six thirty and Aja was packing up to go.

“Let me talk to Marty Moreland,” I said.

“Who?”

“My friend Marty said he’d be at the bar and I could call... at six sharp.”

“To begin with,” the woman said, peeved, “it’s six thirty. And even if whoever you said was here, you got to call the pay phone you want to talk to a customer.”

She hung up and I smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

Aja was standing there looking at me from the doorway.

“I like my job,” I said.

“You working on that thing for Miss Portman?”

“I surely am.”

“You scared Coleman the other night.”

“Oh really?”

“Him and Mama been talkin’ about it every night after they think I’m sleep. She’s wondering what he did that you could catch him on.”

“What does he say?”

“I can’t really hear what he says. He whispers mostly and she shouts. But you know what, Daddy?”

“What’s that?”

“I think you should find out what he did and turn him in.”

I looked closely at my daughter, at the dark place in the light of my life. She turned her head in a pose of absolute seriousness and came in to take one of the ash clients’ chairs.

She wanted me to know that she wasn’t kidding.

Something about the gravity of her gaze lightened my mood by half.

“I can’t do that, baby.”

“Why not? You know Mama get all mad about you and that woman, but she was seein’ Coleman when you were still married. I saw a letter from him to her that was written a year before they put you in jail.”

“She had good reason,” I said, admitting my own sins without naming them.

“But it was him who told her to leave you in jail.”

“How do you know that?”

“One time when she said that she felt sorry for the time you were in jail, he said that they had talked about that when it happened and she made the right decision to cut the cord.”

That almost got me. I might have done something if I didn’t know that Monica needed no help abandoning me.

“Are you spying on your mother, A.D.?”

“She did it to my computer. She go through my stuff all the time.”

“Well... I don’t want you to do that anymore,” I said, managing to put some weight into the words. “And I would never send a man to prison. Not unless it was my job.”

“But what if he deserves it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why?”

“Because I been there. I know what it’s like and I’m just not that evil.”

She sniffed and looked at me, learning as she did so what her father valued and what she might be.

“I’m goin’ to Melanie’s house tonight,” she said after a long lag in the conversation.

“Studyin’?”

“Just to get away from that house.”

“Your mother knows?”

“She mad too. She mad at you and now at Coleman. All she ever wanted was a life like they live on the TV. And all she ever got was the front page of the Post. ”

It was something I said from time to time. I laughed and she snickered. We got up at the same moment to hug each other good-bye.

Angles and Dangles was a dilapidated bar about eight blocks from the old navy yard. There were a few small neon signs in the dirt-caked windows provided by defunct beer companies. Inside, nautical knickknacks like life preservers and big oak ship wheels hung, leaned, and sat on shelves here and there.

Some of the men who drank at the bar and the few tables along the walls might have been seamen at one time or another; the rest had been dockworkers. The woman behind the bar, Cress Mahoney, was the heavy voice that had hung up on me. She was faded but still lovely at almost fifty. Her graying hair had been brown. Her blue eyes had a spark to them.

Everybody was white in there and they all noted my skin color.

“You still make that grog with lemon juice and water?” I asked Cress when I bellied up to the bar.

“Do I know you?” she asked with a sandpaper larynx.

“I only ever ordered from Pop Miller before today.”

“You knew Pop?” She was doubtful.

“Knew? Is he dead?”

The question hurt Cress. She loved the old guy.

I liked him myself and hadn’t heard of his passing. The only reason I called the bar was to make sure that it was still there after so many years.

“Heart attack fishin’ out on his rowboat,” she said. “They didn’t find him for three days. He’d floated half the way to Delaware.”

“He left you the bar,” I stated.

“What do you know?”

“That ‘Cress Mahoney is the finest woman on the Eastern Seaboard. She could gut a fish or spear a shark better than most’a yer so-called seamen.’” I approximated his accent well enough to convince her of my half-truth.