Walter Mosley - The Long Fall

“Mr. Brown isn’t in at the moment, Mr. DuBois. Would you like his answering machine?”

“Um . . . wow. He’s not in?”

“No, sir.”

“Roger told me that he always got in to work early.” He hadn’t told me any such thing but it was possible that a kid from the hood worked harder to make sure that he kept up with the rest.

“That’s right. He’s usually here by seven-thirty, but not today. I guess he had a meeting or something.”

“Really?” I said putting feeling into my voice. “Did he have a meeting scheduled? I mean, I’m not trying to get into his business but I had a morning phone conference set up with him from last night.”

“I don’t have anything written down,” the helpful boy said. “Maybe he forgot.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Have him call me, will you?”

“What’s the number?”

“He has it.”

WALKING USUALLY HELPS me work out difficult problems, but that day nothing came. I was in my office by 8:45, but Frankie Tork was still dead and Roger Brown unaccounted for. Ambrose Thurman had vanished, k ha I as had my new leaf.

I gave it another hour, searching the Internet for Ambrose Thurman, Albany detective, while calling Roger’s office twice more. Once I tried to disguise my voice but I think Bobby, his assistant, knew it was me.

Finally I called Zephyra Ximenez on my dedicated “800” line. Zephyra was an exotic young woman—Dominican mother, Moroccan father—who lived somewhere in Queens. I met her one night at the Naked Ear. She was at the bar, waiting for her girlfriends. Zephyra was tall and coal-colored. Her face wasn’t exactly beautiful but it certainly put pretty to shame. I’d had a few drinks and tried to convince her to ditch her friends and have dinner with me. She said no but kept talking.

Zephyra told me that she was a TCPA, a telephonic and computer personal assistant.

“What’s that?”

“I try to maintain ten to twelve clients,” she said, “who need services I can provide pretty much exclusively over the phone and Internet. I make reservations, answer calls, order anything from takeout to a new washer-dryer, or take care of bookkeeping and data-file maintenance. I charge fifteen hundred a month, plus expenses, and I’m available on a twenty-four hour basis in case of emergencies.”

“What if somebody were to call you right now?” I asked.

“I have a cell phone and an OQO minicomputer in my purse,” she said. “It’s my office away from the office.”

“Wow.”

“What do you do?”

I told the young woman a little about my services.

“I never had a private dick before,” she said. I think I might have blushed a little. “Do you need someone like me?”

“ZEPHYRA,” SHE ANSWERED on the third ring. “Leonid Mr. McGill’s office.”

“Hey, Z.”

“Oh, hi, Mr. McGill. What can I do for you?”

“I need a flight to Albany by mid-afternoon. Sooner if you can do it.”

“Only puddle jumpers this time of day,” she said in a friendly tone. “You told me you had claustrophobia issues.”

“You haven’t heard from issues.”

“I see.” There was a pause, and then she said. “I can get you on a flight from LaGuardia at three sixteen.”

“Book it,” I said.

“You have some voice mail on the machine here,” kach="1she said before I could hang up.

For her other clients Zephyra listened to the messages, typed them up, and delivered them as a kind of running narrative of their phone life. We decided rather early on that she should probably leave my messages alone, that she shouldn’t even listen unless I asked her to.

“I’ll get to ’em later.”

“Do you need a limo to the airport?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Your usual?”

“No. I don’t need Hush for something so simple. Anybody cheap’ll do.”

“Answer your phone while you’re gone?”

“Might as well.” When people spoke to an actual person they were less likely to say something incriminating. “I’ll forward the calls from the office and the cell.”

Getting off the phone, I felt like I needed another cold shower. Hell, I needed a dip in the Arctic Ocean.

Ê€„

13

Adinged-up dark-green Lincoln limo met me in front of the Tesla Building at 1:47. As the young Russian driver wound his way slowly toward the Midtown Tunnel, I stared through my reflection, wondering why I couldn’t do right. This was not wallowing in self-pity. I didn’t feel guilty—not exactly. I felt bad that Tork had died, and to some degree I felt responsible, but mostly I had the sensation of slipping further down into the sandpit of my own sins.

While I sat there in the long queue, waiting to get into the tunnel, Katrina and the kids entered my reverie. Not for the first time I thought that if it wasn’t for them I could cut all ties and move to Hawaii with Aura. There she would get into real estate, and I might find a job selling surfboards, or training young amateur boxers.

The reason I kept veering off course was New York and the people who knew me there. Tony the Suit and dozens of others like him had my name and number. For a hundred-dollar bill or a chit or to pay off some minor favor they’d pass that number to a man like Thurman. And then that man would come to me, and what could I do? I had to make a living. I couldn’t blame the kids for their parentage. I couldn’t even blame Katrina for her desire to be loved in a way I didn’t, I couldn’t, understand.

And, anyway, there was the question of Roger Brown. Roger had climbed out of the sandpit. His mother had stuck with him and given him a chance. In her last dying months she propelled him to safety. The fear in his voice should have made me keep his whereabouts a secret. There was a chance that he was still alive, and even though I would have been better served to keep my head down I had to go to Albany because Albany and a match-book were the only clues I had.

I WAS SE n/diLECTED for extra security measures at the airport checkpoint and studied by a series of dogs, machines, and Homeland Security experts with six weeks’ training. They sniffed me for bombs and scanned for metals, they even frisked me; probably because of something in my attitude. Maybe they could sense the rage in me. I don’t know.

DISTRACTED AS I WAS by the security search I didn’t worry about the plane until they walked us out on the tarmac and I had to duck my head to enter the cabin. My seat was a single on the left side of the aisle and my butt was wider than the armrests designed to contain it. The arcing wall felt like it was closing in and there seemed to be too many people in the small compartment. I counted seventeen.

There were propellers on the wings.

The pilot slid the plastic partition open and turned his handsome gray head to address us.

“It’s a short flight today, folks,” he said. “I’m going to have Marie, your flight attendant, strap herself in because it’s gonna be choppy for a hundred and seven out of the eighty-two minutes we’ll be in the air.”

The stew, a forty-something bottle blonde with a penchant for exercise but not for dinner, smiled at us in a nauseated sort of way. I reached to undo the buckle of my seat belt but Marie closed the hatchlike door and folded her seat down. As she attached her safety belt, crossing her heart with thick nylon straps, I took in a deep breath and forgot how to let it out. I was no longer concerned with Frank Tork or Roger Brown, Ambrose Thurman or Tony the Suit. While the plane was taxiing out toward the runway I forgot about my conviction that Death would not come at me from someplace I expected.

I closed my eyes and sought a place of calm in my soul. I found it for a moment telling myself that it couldn’t be so bad, that this flight was a commonplace event that passed without incident thousands of times around the world every day.