Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“I put out the question on my Facebook and got a message from Lauren Bachnell that you had just left Bedford on Ray Ray’s commuter line. All I had to do was set up across the street and wait for you.”

The hangover that I thought would never leave drained out of me in less than sixty seconds. It was a matter of life and death in that room with Gladstone — mostly death. It all came clear to me right then. I understood what happened to me and why. I knew what the verdict was too.

I looked at my brother in black and asked, “Are you here to take me out?”

“That’s what they said. Not for the first time either.”

I considered attacking him but knew better. He could have put a bullet in my skull rather than those drops on my head.

“You were in league with Little Exeter and his crew?”

“Not me. They just called me up and said that you were a dead man.”

“Why call you?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“Nowadays I’m kind of a clearinghouse under the new mayor and chief. They wanna clean up the past and start the future with a blank slate. But back then there was a kind of a club that shared all that money swirling around. My nephew was in law school, and I bought my wife a house in Miami. I had told my friends back then what you were up to and they decided to make you die.”

“But you gave them a better choice,” I said.

“I knew you and the ladies, Joe. I knew we could put a frame around you with a cute young white girl. Worked beautiful. But Convert is a pervert. He made it so Jocelyn Bryor got the case and turned Monica against you. I had it so you’d make bail and then I’d talk you into accepting what had happened. But after you got slashed I just put you in a hole and let the powers that be do what they did.”

“So you destroyed my life,” I said. “Just like that.”

“I saved your life, Joe. Don’t you ever believe anything else.”

“But now you’re gonna come in here and kill me.”

“When I saw you come in this building, I knew you had taken Mr. Thurman’s hideaway,” he said. “We’ve known about this place for a while. How’d you know about it, anyway?”

“Are you gonna kill me, Glad?”

“Do I have to?”

“I’m a cop, man. I saw something bad and I took steps. Your people wrecked everything.”

“You’re an ex-cop, Joe. And who knows? Maybe if you stayed on the job you’d’a gotten shot down in a firefight or somethin’. It could be I saved your life twice.”

“It was wrong what you did.”

“Maybe,” Gladstone Palmer admitted. “Maybe. But you have to understand, Joe, the brass now is all new. The people I worked with are off the force.”

“Paul Convert’s still around.”

“He’s not gonna be a problem long. After he messed up in Queens he’s in more hot water than you.”

“You knew about Queens?”

“After the fact.” Glad’s smile was friendly if sad. “The force can’t afford a scandal, Joe. The people dealing on the docks are either retired, dead, or reformed. Not even the mayor would stand in the way of your demise.”

Gladstone had a way of revealing the truth. I could see that I’d never be exonerated, much less reinstated.

“And there’s another thing,” my friend said.

“What’s that?” I asked. A wave of exhaustion passed through me.

“This thing with Free Man, Leonard Compton.”

“How you know about him?”

“I’m lookin’ for you, and in a whole other precinct you’re kickin’ up dust over a cop killer. You know the left hand speaks to the right even on the dark side of the force.”

“Valence and Pratt killed over a dozen people, Glad.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Everybody knew about Valence and Pratt. But nobody kills a cop unless it’s the last resort. And you know those boys made a lotta money. They could grease the wheels of machines half the way to Albany.”

“That’s wrong, man.”

“Yes, it is, but that’s not the question.”

“Then what is?”

“Do you need me to kill you right now?”

There was no smile on my old friend’s lips. I couldn’t remember him ever without at least the hint of a grin somewhere on his face. I took the question seriously, and from somewhere in the depths of my mind an answer rose to the surface like the carcass of some long-dead deep-sea creature.

“No,” I said. “No.”

Sleep came with my last negation. I don’t remember whatever else Glad might have said. I don’t remember him leaving my subterranean cell. I just passed out, unable to defend or save myself.

But in that deep repose the answer to my quest remained in light.

I couldn’t repair my career. I couldn’t achieve a reprieve for A Free Man. All I had was the truth and the certainty that I had to do something about that truth. If that meant breaking the law, I was ready. If it meant missing my child’s graduation, that would have to be.

The hangover returned with consciousness, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. The only aftereffects were jitters in my extremities.

I got out of bed, used the water-closet toilet, and sat in the chair that my old friend and near assassin sat in to sprinkle water on me.

It all started with a letter from the Midwest. My life was in shambles, but sometimes you had to break things down to see what was wrong.

I knew what to do and half the way to do it. It wasn’t so much a plan as it was a suicide mission aimed at the heart of enemy territory. I was now an enlightened terrorist planning to show the all-powerful enemy that I could hurt them, that I could take away their shiny baubles and false judgments.

“Mel?” I said when he answered the phone.

“My liege.”

It was 10:16 a.m. and I was at the coffee emporium again. This time I drank what I bought.

“Am I right that you sit around workin’ on timepieces all day; that and thinking about stickin’ it to the law?”

“Every hour of every day,” he said. “Rain or shine. Sound asleep or wide-awake.”

“I like your plan about that baseball team escaping to Panama. But I need to add a little to it.”

We talked for more than an hour, during the first thirty minutes of which my new best friend was quite leery. But by the end I had brought him around to my way of thinking. Around 11:30 he expressed an excitement that could only mean that something bad was bound to happen.

It was chilly that morning, but I still had my heavy disguise coat so I wandered down until I came to a Times Square street that the previous mayor had blocked off so that touristical pedestrians could stroll freely and sit on benches placed here and there.

He answered the call on the first ring.

“Hello?” His tone was anything but confident.

“Mr. Braun,” I said. “Tom Boll here.”

“Boll?” he whined. “What do you want now?”

“I misled you in the beginning, Mr. Braun. I wasn’t hired to find Johanna Mudd but to prove your case that A Free Man was innocent. My clients had heard that you were backing off and they wanted to keep that engine running.”

“Man?”

“Yeah. I found Johanna too. She’s dead on top of a heap of dead bodies provided by the cops your client killed.”

“I had nothing to do with any of that.”

“You sent men to kill me.”

“Marmot told me he was going to threaten you, that’s all.”

“And you believed him?”

“You don’t understand what you’re doing.”

“No, sir, I do understand. You might not like it that I passed the black mark back to you by telling Marmot’s boss that you hired me to indict him — but that doesn’t make me ignorant. All I did was turn the focus on you.”