Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

Eugene “Yollo” Valence and Anton Pratt were the cops Man had been convicted of killing. They were decorated uniforms who often worked as bodyguards for the mayor and visiting dignitaries.

“Maybe Braun’s telling the truth,” I suggested. I knew too many innocent cops who had been blamed for crimes they didn’t commit. I was one of them.

“Ms. Mudd has disappeared,” Willa said. “I went to talk to her a few days later, after failing to get her on the phone. Her son Rondrew told me that she was missing. He said that she went to meet Stuart and never returned.”

I sighed. It was an unexpected exhalation. This I knew was due to the fact that the prospective client had caught my interest.

She clasped her hands and looked down at the hardwood floor.

“Hi.” Aja was standing at the door. She was smiling, her short hair standing up at various angles like a field of spiky wild grasses. Her blue jeans might as well have been painted on, and her blouse didn’t come anywhere near the waistline.

I wanted to ask if this was within the boundaries of the school dress code, but then Willa looked up, tears streaming from her eyes.

“Oh, baby,” my daughter exclaimed. She rushed to the lawyer’s side, kneeled down, and hugged her.

Between my sudden breath and Aja’s concern I knew that I’d spend at least a day or two investigating Portman’s case.

“Come on with me.” Aja was helping the sad young woman rise from the chair. After lift-off they made their way to the washroom annexed to the outer office.

In their absence I tried to see a connection between Beatrice’s letter and the case of A Free Man. I knew that there was no direct link, but the similarities might be a way for me to solve a case close enough to my own so that I might feel some sense of closure without returning to Rikers.

If Man was innocent and I freed him, then it would be, in some way, like freeing myself.

I was looking out the window again.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Oliver,” Willa Portman said to my back.

“You want me to take notes, Daddy?”

“I want you to go down to the drugstore,” I said, “and pick me up a pack of those little notebooks I use.”

“But I could take notes here.”

“Go on.” I stood up to underscore my directive.

The words between familiars often mean a lot less than tones and looks. Aja saw that I needed her gone from the office and she obeyed.

Through the open door I could see A.D. collecting her bag and going out the front. I waited maybe ten seconds and then sat down again facing the dewy-eyed girl.

“You see how much trouble there is in this,” I said.

“Is that why you asked Aja to leave?”

“She’s my daughter and you’re twelve miles of bad road.”

Willa winced.

“If even one thing you told me is true,” I said, “then there’s bad news and murder to go all the way round.”

“But Manny’s innocent,” she cried.

“I thought he was married.”

“Huh?”

“The way you talk about him. It sounds like you’re his girlfriend.”

“No.”

“Really?”

The way she looked up at me almost made me grin. The magnetism between young lovers (even when they’re old) is the gravity of the soul; undeniable, unquestionable, and, sooner or later, unwanted.

“Only once,” she said. “When Stuart had another case to attend to and I was recording Manny’s deposition. I... I respect Marin. She’s the mother of their child, but because they aren’t legally married they won’t even let her visit except behind a Plexiglas barrier... He needed somebody.”

“Johanna Mudd has really disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“And Braun has pulled back on the case?”

“He shredded the files,” she claimed. “He said that they were all lies.”

“So the evidence is gone?”

She reached over, putting her hand on the roller bag.

“When I got the job working for Mr. Braun, my college adviser, Sharon Mittleman, told me that I should always make copies in case something went missing. Mr. Braun didn’t want the files stored electronically. He said that hackers could get into any memory device. So I’d come in at night to use the copy machine.”

“How much do you have?” I asked, my respect for the prospective client rising with each word.

“Thirty-three hundred and seventeen two-sided sheets.”

“Six thousand pages?”

“Closer to seven.”

Seven thousand pages. Suddenly I was scared. Any evidence is a detective’s friend, but I imagined reading through the pages while some shadow crept up behind me with a loaded pistol in its all-too-solid hand.

“You know I can’t do work pro bono like Braun,” I said, flailing around for an exit strategy.

She put the briefcase on the table and opened it, revealing stacks and stacks of paper-slip-bound fifty-dollar bills.

“Almost nineteen thousand dollars,” she said. “It’s half of an inheritance I got from my grandmother. I know we can’t go to the police and also we can’t have any connection between us. I’ve been taking money out of the account a thousand dollars at a time. I want you to prove Manny innocent and get him released from prison.”

“What if he wants to go back to Marin?” I asked.

“If you love someone you set them free,” she said with all the force of the pop song.

Looking at the pretty young woman with the sad, sad face I thought about the last twenty-four hours and how much I had changed. Between Congressman Acres and Beatrice Summers I was on the verge of becoming someone, something new.

On the verge but not quite across the line.

“Hold on to that money for another day,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m going to look over these papers and make up my mind then.”

“Everything I’m saying is true.”

“That may be, but still, I have to convince myself.”

“But you’re my only hope, Manny’s only hope.”

“Why do you even think you can trust me?” I asked, the divine words leaping from my lips like Athena from Zeus’s brow.

“Jacob Storell.”

Jacob was the son of Thomas and Margherita Storell. The father owned and ran a small hardware store on the Lower East Side and the mother was the director of a private women’s club called Dryads. Tom sold hammers and nails while Rita and her friends prayed to the spirits of trees.

The wife called me after reading the top line of my ad in the Yellow Pages — KING DETECTIVE SERVICE — because of the word service. She felt that there was duty and dignity in the use of such a word.

That was eight years ago. The divorce was dragging, and Monica’s lawyer had threatened to have my new accounts attached if I didn’t pay her initial fee.

I needed a job, any job.

Tom Storell told me that his son had been arrested for robbery. He’d gone into a stationery store also in the East Village and emptied the cash register while the clerk was with a customer somewhere in a back aisle. The police were called and happened to be only seconds away. They arrested Jacob before he had made it to the corner.

“He needs a lawyer,” I advised, “not a detective.”

“The police have a videotape,” Tom said with hopeless conviction.

“But we are sure that he would never do such a thing,” Margherita added. “He’s so good-hearted that ever since he was a child the other children would get him into trouble. Go see him. Look at the evidence. It would be a service.”

So, for a down payment of eighty dollars on four hundred, I went to the precinct in the East Village and asked to see my client.

“You the one they got for misconduct, right?” the desk sergeant asked.

“Falsely accused,” I replied.