Walter Mosley: The Long Fall

A solitary seagull cried. That was the sound I had Tiny program into the stolen cell phone he sold me.

“Hello?”

“Who the hell is this?” an angry voice demanded.

“You called me, young man,” I said trying to sound pleasant.

“Are you Arnold DuBois?” he asked, pronouncing the last name in French fashion.

“Du Boys,” I said, correcting him on the pronunciation of my alias.

“Why are you trying to get in touch with me, Mr. Du Boys?” Roger said, maybe hearing some of the iron in my jaw and moderating his tone appropriately.

“Are you the Roger Brown that they used to call B-Brain back in the day?”

“Who are you, man?”

“My real name is Ambrose Thurman,” I said. “I’m a private detective. And I have been retained to get in touch with you.”

Three tiny blips sounded and I knew that Roger had hung up on me. It didn’t matter. I had a hook into him now.

WHEN AMBROSE THURMAN came to me all he had was a short list of street names—Jumper, B-Brain, Big Jim, and Toolie—along with a few descriptive details. The last time his client had seen them they were kids, not much older than Twill. He needed their real names and current whereabouts. They all had had records as juvenile offenders but the bureaucracy of New York’s judicial system wouldn’t allow him to invade the privacy of minors.

Ambrose asked me if I could do what he could not.

That’s where Randolph Peel came in. Randy had been a detective in the NYPD until they found him trading favors for sex at a posh midtown hotel. At one time he was the partner of a cop named Carson Kitteridge. Kitteridge was an honest cop, and it had been speculated that he was the cause of Peel’s downfall.

Randy was out of a job but he still had a few friends in the department. For three hundred dollars a head, the former policeman broke the seals of justice and delivered the identities to me; three of them, at least. Jumper, Big Jim, and Toolie had gone on to commit adult crimes, but B-Brain was clean. I had a name, Roger Brown, but there was no practical information, like a current address. There were no adult records on him and the details of his adolescence were all cold as far as an investigation was concerned. His father was nowhere to be found, and his mother, Myra Brown, as far as I could tell, had died in 1993.

THE SEAGULL CRIED three times before I answered the phone again.

“Hello?”

“Who hired you?”

“It’s not polite to hang up on a brother, Roger.”

“I’m not your brother.”

“You still hung up on me.”

“Excuse me,” he said, maybe even meant it. “I’m not used to private detectives calling me on the phone.”

“You called me,” I reminded him.

“You came to my office.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said, “being sought by a PI. Nobody said you did anything wrong.”

“Who hired you?”

“Are you the Roger Brown who was once known as B-Brain?” I asked again.

The silence was long and painful. Roger didn’t want to hang up a second time. He didn’t want to answer my question either. There was music playing in the background of whatever room he was in; thuggish hip-hop with an insistent beat.

“How much they payin’ you, man?” a slightly different Roger Brown asked. This young man didn’t wear a suit and tie or collect a salary that had taxes taken out.

“My regular fee.”

“I’ll double it.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“I’ll pay you a thousand to forget me.”

“Are you in trouble, Roger?”

“Naw, man. I ain’t in no kinda trouble.” His descent from Madison Avenue to the Lower East Side continued.

“Because,” I said, “I only ever charge my standard fee. I never take more. That way I keep my nose clean.”

“Why you up in my grill, man?”

“All I need to know from you is if you are the Roger Brown known as B-Brain.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you what, Roger,” I offered. “I’ll come over right now and meet you at that little espresso place across the street from your office or anywhere else you say. We could talk.”

“Uh-uh. No way, man. I ain’t meetin’ you nowhere, no kinda way.”

I had already been to his office. He didn’t know what I looked like. Even if Juliet had described me, he didn’t have my picture in his head. But Roger wasn’t being rational. He was afraid of something, and I wanted to know what that something was.

I made a few sounds that were meant to express hesitation.

“I’m not used to giving out information on my clients,” I said. “That kind of breach in confidentiality is not looked upon kindly in my profession. But maybe if we got together you might convince me.”

“I already told you, man. No.”

Roger wasn’t going to trust me even though I was telling him the truth. I wanted to meet him face-to-face so that I could judge for myself if he was in some kind of fix that Ambrose had not informed me about.

“Frankie Tork,” I said and the line went so silent that for a moment I thought the connection had gone dead.

“S-say what?”

“Frank Tork. He’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E. They caught him trying to burglarize a pawnshop on Second Avenue.”

“Frankie hired you?”

“I AIN’T SEEN B-Brain in years, brother,” Frankie Tork had told me through a Plexiglas window in the visitor’s area of the New York City jail. “His moms and them moved somewhere out in Brooklyn right before his last year in high school. She said that we was a bad influence.”

Jumper was small and wiry, brown like a walnut is brown, with tar-stained teeth and bloodshot eyes. He had the kind of smile that frightened children—and their mothers.

“What was his mother’s name?” I asked, trying to corroborate the sketchy information I’d gotten from ex-officer Peel. Roger, aka B-Brain, and the others had been arrested for trespassing in 1991.

“Mrs. Brown,” Frankie said.

“You don’t know her first name?”

“You still gonna gimme that twenty dollars, right?”

There was an account I could credit. I would have given him the money even if he wasn’t any help.

“What was B-Brain’s first name again?” I asked.

“Roger.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

“Maybe I could ask aro="1could aund, about his mom’s name, I mean.”

“No thanks, Jumper.” I made to rise.

“Hey, hey, man.”

“What?”

“They say around here that you the kinda dude get a brother out of a jam.”

“I used to do that. Not anymore.”

“How much?” Jumper asked, ignoring my claim of retirement.

“Twenty thousand was my lowest fee.” That was a lie. No one had ever paid me that much. But I didn’t want to give Jumper false hope.

“Damn, man. All I got is the twenty dollars you payin’ me.”

“See you.”

“... WHY JUMPER WANT you to find me?” Roger asked, admitting that he was the man I was looking for.

“His lawyer, Matrice Johnson, is a friend of mine. Professional. She asked me to find somebody who could be a good character witness for Frankie, said that it might make a difference between three and seven years in the sentencing.”

“I haven’t seen Frankie in sixteen years, man. How’m I gonna be a character witness for somebody I don’t even know no more?”

“Well,” I said, “if you’re not willing to help a brother out . . .”

“He’s not my brother. And how the hell you even know how to find me?”

“Some girl,” I said.

“What girl?”

“A friend of Jumper’s—Georgiana Pineyman. She saw you come into Berg, Lewis & Takayama a few months ago but when she tried to get to you they turned her away at the front desk.”