Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“You know about her?”

“Sure. That girl can climb.”

“That’s all?”

“Now and then a student named Arnold Ott parks across the street looking at the gate.”

“Did you question him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know his name?”

“Student vehicles are registered with the administration. I looked up his license on the database.”

John decided to expand his search for his anonymous pen pal. Only his mother and France Bickman came to mind. He failed to find Lucia but, after a week of searches, he located France Bickman, who had moved to Cavaliers Retirement Home in Portland, Oregon. At ninety-seven years old he was the editor of a weekly blog dedicated to spreading knowledge about quirks in the social welfare system. The blog page led to a social network website called The Graying Alliance. This was an Internet site devoted to the dissemination of information for and about the well-being of people who have achieved elder status. France’s webpage contained a picture album of him and his daughters (all three of whom were divorced and living in Portland), their children and one great-grandson — Herbert Manville.

On his Facebook page France gave tips on cooking, physical exercise for those over eighty years old, reviews of books he liked and a rambling autobiography that was broken up into chapters identified by month and year.

John spent many hours reading through France Bickman’s online memoir. The ex-ticket-taker had served as an ensign in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and married his wife, Matilda Hadfield, in 1964. He’d done things that he’d regretted all through his years but there were good moments also.

John liked the historical approach to memorializing a life. The truth of the document, he thought, was its honest attempt to impose order on memory.

There was an entry especially interesting to John in the section titled 1993.

July 16, 1993. It was on that day in my long life that I was disabused of all the thoughts, ideas and notions I had lived by. That was the day I took the job of ticket-taker at Arbuckle Cinema House in New York’s East Village. A soft-spoken black man named Herman Jones took me under his wing. He showed me how to do my job but beyond that taught me that there is no love of self without understanding, that if you didn’t know and care about who you are then you’d never be able to love another. For me love was always duty. If you were faithful and paid the bills that was all you had to do. But I was wrong. Herman knew that your history in all of its parts created you. He believed that this history made you who you were but the way he lived said even more. Herman had a son named CC. He loved that boy and respected him in a way that I couldn’t have imagined. CC would read to Herman and Herman would then explain to the child what he had read. It was like they were teaching each other, as if Herman was passing the mantle of his manhood on to his son. What he gave that boy was greater than any monetary fortune or set of rules. He taught CC how to love and in doing so he trained me...

Cornelius was rereading the entry when the doorbell rang. It was late on a Friday afternoon and he resented the intrusion.

“Who is it?” John said into the intercom.

“Police, Mr. Woman. Can we come in?”

France Bickman and his digital musings vanished. The police were at the front door and there was no back exit, no window he could creep through. Why hadn’t he run when he heard about the discovery of the body? Why had he conjured up his mother and used her apparition as an excuse to stay?

“Mr. Woman,” the policeman said.

John took his finger from the intercom panel.

His cell phone sounded. The glass panel read, Front Gate.

“Yes?”

“Professor, it’s Hototo. The police are coming to your door.”

“They’re already here.”

John disconnected the call and pressed the intercom button again.

“Yes?” he said.

“Is this Mr. John Woman?”

“Professor John Woman.”

“I’m Officer Hernandez of the Granville police, sir. Can we come in and ask you a few questions?”

John tried to think of options. What if he said no? Maybe he could keep them off long enough to call Carlinda; she might be able to talk him through jumping over the fence.

“What’s this about?” he shouted at the microphone holes.

“Just a few questions, sir.”

A few questions. Years of work, mountains of duplicity and now a faceless cop threatened to take it away with some words and punctuation.

“Questions about what?” he asked.

“Can we come in and talk to you, sir?”

John took a step back. He tried to remember what he had been thinking before the doorbell rang but could not.

The bell sounded again — three short rings and then a longer, more insistent tone. Like Beethoven’s Fifth in the throat of a small child tonelessly humming.

John smiled at this thought and pressed the lock-release.

He opened his front door listening to them tramping up the stairs. A moment later they were there before him on the third-floor landing. Two men, one tan and the other bronze, both in mostly black uniform and armed with pistols in holsters.

It surprised John when the darker man spoke first.

“Professor Woman?”

“Yes.”

“Can we come in?”

John considered making them stand in the hall.

“Okay,” he said, stepping back. “Come have a seat.”

There were only two chairs but the table was placed next to the deep-set window and so he took his seat on that ledge.

The uniforms looked around the room. The white officer noted the stairs and asked, “Someone upstairs?”

“No. I live alone.”

The policemen then sat down looking pleasant enough. John wondered why they weren’t reading him his rights, putting him in restraints as they did on TV.

“I’m Officer Hernandez,” the bronze cop said. “This is Officer Mulligan.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Do you know why we’re here, sir?” Hernandez asked.

John’s throat caught before the word could come out. “No.”

The young men — they looked to be in their mid-twenties — glanced at each other.

“Did you give a lecture at the main hall of Deck Recreation Center?”

John wondered what had happened at the presentation. Had someone recognized him there? Mulligan, he noted, had had stitches on an old wound at the left corner of his mouth. The small scar was crosshatched where it had been sewn.

“Professor,” Hernandez said.

“Yes?”

“Did you speak at the main hall of Deck?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Did you,” the Hispanic cop asked, taking out a small notepad, which he read from, “present a bloody rag, the photograph of a possible victim of violence and a small bag of heroin at that presentation?”

John wondered when the questions would get to Chapman Lorraine.

“Professor?”

“Yes?”

“Did you?”

“That was last semester,” John said, treading water in an underground lake filled with giant blind-eyed fish.

“Did you present evidence of one or more crimes?”

“I don’t, I don’t think so.”

“Do you have those items here?”

“No. Is that why you’re here, because of my talk?”

“Are they at your office?” Hernandez would not be sidetracked.

“No.”

“Where then?”

“After the lecture was over I threw the trunk away. Everything was in there. I treated the event in the spirit of the Yoruba mask; that is, it was only alive as the spirit of the talk. After that it was simple detritus.”

Hernandez’s frown reflected John’s.

“You threw the evidence away?”

“I found everything in a trash can,” John said. “I just put it back there. Was it Annette Eubanks that informed on me? No... no, it would have been Gregory Tracer. He’s her creature.”