Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“It was a necessary tragedy,” Herman told his son, “like every life lived.”

An hour later the cell door opened and the black and white marshals returned. John was led into the adjoining courtroom.

The judge was a white man who seemed short even though he was sitting at the high bench. He had a bristly brown-and-white mustache and, of course, black robes. John was brought to a seat at a desk where Nina Forché waited. She was wearing a red jacket. The gallery was packed with sixty or so spectators. Theron James and Colin Luckfeld were there in the row just behind the defendant’s bench. Willie Pepperdine sat behind them. Arnold Ott stood at the back of the room, staring at John through the dark rectangles of his glasses.

John looked for Carlinda but didn’t see her.

“Please be seated,” said a man in a gray suit standing next to the judge’s high bench.

When Nina touched John’s arm he settled in the hard ash chair provided.

At the plaintiff’s bench, across the aisle from John and Nina, sat Colette and a man wearing a maroon suit.

“Professor John Woman,” the judge rumbled.

John was trying to catch Colette’s eye.

“Professor John Woman.”

“Are you speaking to me?” John asked after failing to catch the detective’s eye.

The judge said, “This is my courtroom, young man. I ask the questions.”

“It might be your courtroom but that’s not my name.”

“Please stand.”

John complied.

“What is your name?” the judge asked.

“Cornelius Jones, son of Herman Jones and Lucia Napoli-Jones.”

“The same Cornelius Jones that the state of New York is petitioning to extradite?”

“The very same.”

“Do you dispute New York’s request to extradite you?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

John was transferred into the custody of Lieutenant Colette Van Dyne and her partner, Sergeant Leo Abruzzi.

When Marshal Tomas Christo handed over the keys to John’s chains the prisoner said, “If you go back to the jail please tell Marle Josephson I’m sorry I didn’t make it back there and that I’m confident he’ll do well on his exam.”

“Why didn’t you fight extradition?” Colette asked John after the M80 airbus had taken off from Sky Harbor International Airport. He occupied seat 27a, Colette’s was 27b. The aisle seat was vacant.

“Where’s your partner?”

“Up toward the middle of the plane, in the exit row,” she said. “He’s kinda big and that’ll be more comfortable for him.”

“I thought you two were supposed to flank me,” John said. “Isn’t that protocol?”

“What do you know about protocol?”

“I read a great deal and my memory is pretty good.”

“I asked him to move because I thought I’d do better interrogating you alone.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you fight the extradition?” she asked again. “You had every chance of beating it.”

“I was lying to myself.”

“What does that mean?”

“It was time for me to come home.”

John noticed that they were speaking in the same hushed tones they used in the police pied-à-terre years before.

“How do you feel about me now?” he asked. He would have touched her but his wrists and ankles were chained together preventing him from raising his hands more than a few inches above his lap.

“I don’t feel anything about you.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I was the senior officer on the Lorraine case.”

“That’s not it,” he said using his most professorial tone. “You could have passed your notes on, let a junior cop come out here.”

“Did you waive extradition because of me?”

“Not you sitting here but it was time to come home and you’re part of home.”

“There’s nothing between us,” she said.

John smiled at the attempt.

“I think about you,” he confessed. “You taught me about physical love. Sex, sure, but love too. A man’s first love never leaves him.”

“Are you going to talk about that at your trial?”

“No,” he said, thinking that this was very much like Carlinda’s worry, “never.”

“It was just a fling anyway,” she said, tossing her hair as she used to do. “I mean I was wrong because you were underage but you were so sweet...”

John swiveled his head to see her profile as she talked.

“... You were doing your father’s job and going to school,” Colette went on. “You didn’t have a mother around to look after you...”

She turned to look at him.

“... I guess I loved you a little.”

“Yeah,” he said feeling like that sixteen-year-old boy again, the boy who cried because he needed her so much.

“But I knew we couldn’t stay together.”

“Why not?” young Cornelius Jones asked.

“You were just a boy and I was with Harry... we were engaged.”

John winced.

“What happened with Lorraine?” she asked.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“The judge and the prosecutor are going to ask. Your defense attorney too.”

“The last thing you told me was that you were going to a fertility clinic. Did you have a baby?”

Colette’s expression changed from caring to something nervous, vulnerable.

“Yes,” she said.

“Boy?”

“Christian.” The name called up a smile to her lips. “He’s just now seventeen.”

“You remember the day we met? You were with your partner. What was his name?”

“Tom Pena.”

“Yeah. I was scared and you were beautiful.”

“Did I tell you I was pregnant with Chris?”

“Just that you went to the fertility clinic. It was the day you helped me get dad out of the hospital.”

“I didn’t even think you paid attention to me back then. I mean all you wanted was sex all the time.”

“You too.”

“Why didn’t you fight the extradition? You could have beat it.”

“My mother found out where I was and came to live with me. While she was there I was her son and your lover, my father’s student and caretaker. It was like I had turned it all off but everything was still there inside me.”

She put a hand on his arm, saying, “When they ask you if you killed Lorraine say no.”

“I understand,” he said.

“I thought I had rid myself of you, CC. I thought when I broke it off that I could be with Harry.”

“Don’t you love him?”

“Yes. Of course I do. But I never forgot you. There was something so sweet about the way you surrendered but you were, still are, the strongest man I ever met.”

“Do you have a picture of Christian?”

Colette gave him a look both contemplative and worried. She took a cell phone from her purse, turned it on and flipped around until she’d found something.

It was the photograph of a teenage boy from the waist up. His caramel-colored face resisting the camera, a space between his front teeth, a skateboard hugged to his chest. He smiled, being forbearing about yet another photograph.

“He looks a lot like my father,” John said, “only with our skin.”

“His father doesn’t know. The doctor told me the test showed that Harry was unable to have kids. He gave me the report to show him but I never did.

“I’ve never forgotten you, CC. I see you every morning.”

Thinking about his son John lost track of the rest of the journey. Colette spoke to him in the same hushed tones. He answered her but his mind was orbiting the idea of an heir. Before now, Cornelius and then John had been an only son lamenting the loss of his parents. But now there was a child of his own blood that came from Naples, Italy, and backwoods Mississippi to the Lower East Side via Jimmy Grimaldi.