Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“I see you,” she said. “I like that suit.”

John reached into a pocket he knew contained exactly two hundred dollars. Palming the cash he reached out placing the money in her hand.

“Two hundred,” he said. “Maybe if you see me around here sometime again you’ll give me another smile.”

John got to his feet and left her there at the table.

Back at the Mott Street apartment he went through the bags sent from his Arizona home. He found the beaded belt with its belt-buckle knife and resolved to wear it every day. The young woman might have been just a working girl but he could no longer trust in his anonymity.

The next afternoon John took a taxi downtown to the dstrict attorney’s office. Matthew Lars, Assistant DA, sat across a conference table deposing him while Nina Forché sat by his side.

“So, Mr. Woman,” said ADA Lars. He was a broad-faced white man with white-blond hair. “In your own words tell me what happened that night.”

John almost asked what other than his own words did he have to say anything, but he remembered that he was no longer a professor and ADA Lars was certainly no student.

He described the events of that night, even Dirty Nymphs and masturbating on the mattress that had been sealed in the wall with the makeshift coffin.

“And so you’re claiming that it was self-defense for the first two blows?” Lars asked.

“I was scared and he was hurting my arm.”

“But you didn’t have to hit him the third time.”

“No. I was still scared but he had fallen down to his knees.”

“He was a child,” Forché said. “He was afraid. It could very well be that he didn’t think that his attacker was helpless until after he had time to consider it later. His feelings of guilt might have made him believe it was murder.”

“But he hid the body,” Lars replied, “like a professional hit man.”

“He was a smart kid,” Nina rejoined.

“Why was Lorraine at the projectionist’s room?” Lars asked.

“I don’t know,” John said.

“Did you call him?”

“No.”

“Then why would he show up there? Did he do that sometimes?”

“Never.”

“And why did you have that heavy wrench close at hand?”

“I used it to move the projectors up and down.”

“And you murdered him.”

“With the third blow... yes.”

Tall and wide, possibly forty-five years old, Matthew Lars smoothed his pale hair with big slug-like blunt fingers. He seemed frustrated by John’s confession.

John wanted to ask, “What more can I say? I’m telling you everything.” But he did not voice his confusion.

“I can offer second-degree manslaughter,” Lars said to Forché. “That’s the best I can do. Fifteen to twenty.”

“There are extenuating circumstances,” she said.

“There’s also the concealment of a body and flight.”

“He didn’t know he was being sought.”

“He called Lieutenant Van Dyne from Florida. He taunted her.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“You want to leave it up to the jury? In court it’ll be a murder charge.”

“Let me speak to my client.”

“I’ll take whatever he’s offering,” John told Nina once they were alone.

“We might win this in court,” she argued.

“I killed him and I’m guilty,” John said. “I will not allow my chance at repentance to become legal sophistry.”

“Prison is no picnic, John.”

“Neither is a lifetime of guilt.”

John accepted Lars’s offer.

“We will go in front of a judge tomorrow,” the prosecutor told the lawyer and accused.

“That’s a record,” Nina said.

“Judge Halloran would like to clear his docket. His daughter is getting married in California next week and with a confession this case is open-and-shut.”

“What time should we be there?” Forché asked.

“Early. Eight in the morning. If Professor Woman is lucky he’ll be on his way to prison before dinnertime.”

John started awake early the next morning. Bright blue digits on a clock next to the bed read 3:03. He could recall no dream, just a sudden shock of fear. After a minute or so he remembered the appointment with the judge later that morning. The image of Andre with the side of his face cut open came to mind. This was to be John’s future. He would be raped, slashed, beaten and locked away. He’d have to resist becoming either a victim or a predator in the process.

This constant flutter of fear is what woke him: a pulsating moth, the size of a kitten, trying to break free from the cage of ribs.

He’d admitted his guilt to ADA Lars because he wanted to answer for his crime. But now he worried that if he went to prison he might do it all over again, and again. He knew he was a killer when Pete Tackie barged in, when Andre declared John’s body and soul his property, like Columbus in the New World or Hitler and his endless annexations. He would, like any true patriot, kill the would-be conqueror trying to colonize him.

Naked, he climbed out of bed and walked down the short hall to the kitchen. Lucia had left him a jar of chunky peanut butter, cherry preserves and cinnamon-swirl raisin bread — his favorites when he was a child. He bit into the sandwich thinking about twenty-four-hour lockdown; the smell of disinfectants; and the gaping, almost bloodless, six-inch wound down the side of Andre’s face.

John realized in the early morning, standing naked in his mother’s kitchen, that going to prison was tantamount to sealing himself in the wall with Chapman Lorraine. Maybe he should run. There was still time. Filo Manetti told Lucia that he didn’t care about the bail money. John had the gangster’s friend’s number. He could leave the country. He spoke Spanish and French; he’d been to Martinique.

Maybe Cuba.

John went to the red wall phone he’d used as a child to tell his father good night those evenings he stayed with Lucia.

He put his hand on the receiver. That’s when the phone rang.

His recoil from the strident sound was so violent that John felt a muscle tear in his right shoulder blade. He gasped and choked — a convict caught in the middle of an ill-considered escape attempt.

The phone kept ringing, wave after wave of clanging alarm. Danger! Danger! There was no voice mail service and the caller would not give up.

Before answering John counted seventeen rings but there had been more.

“Hello?”

“John?” a familiar voice asked softly.

“Who is this?”

“Am I speaking with John Woman?”

“Yes. Now who is this?”

“Service Tellman.”

John came suddenly to consciousness. The convulsive fear, the retreat to his mother’s kitchen, even the making of his favorite childhood sandwich — all this occurred in the stupor at the tag end of a fearful sleep. But now his awareness was crystalline.

“Service Tellman is dead,” John said, the option of flight still bright in his mind.

“That’s what the world thinks.”

“And you’re saying he’s not?”

“I’m not.”

“Playing possum?”

The phantom chuckled in John’s ear.

“Only the dead are beyond reproach,” he said.

“Oh,” the once and future professor mused. “So you’re saying that you martyred yourself and yet survived; the cake-and-eat-it-too school of philosophy.”

“People need something to aspire to and, as Lear tells us, there is a stench to all things mortal.”

“Sainthood?”

“Human potential, as you know, far outstrips human nature,” the caller said by way of agreement.

“I’ve never heard it said quite like that,” John replied. “But you’re right of course. Parishioners close their eyes and imagine standing side by side with the Deity. But when the prayer is done they find themselves barefoot in pig shit up to their knees.”