Down the River unto the Sea

15

I took a yellow taxi home.

Montague Street was empty. Coleman Tesserat might have been hiding in some doorway with a gun in his hand. Maybe the exposure of his crimes on Wall Street would have salted him away for twenty years — I didn’t know. I did know that I wasn’t afraid to die, that since deciding to go up against the men who took my life away, I had no fear.

“King-baby,” she said.

Turning my head to the left I saw Effy Stoller. Five three with fifteen pounds over what her physician would have called perfect weight, she had big lips and skin darker than mine. Her high, high heels might as well have been bare feet, she was so poised, and her hair had been done into the shape of a seashell that would exist in some far-flung future when humanity had devolved itself into geologic memory.

“I know I’m a little late,” I said as she walked up to me. “I thought you’d be gone.”

She kissed me full on the lips and said, “I knew you’d get here. If you e-mailed me it had to be something hard.”

Effy had been a prostitute in the old days when I had a beat. She’d was run by a pimp named Toof who came from somewhere in the Midwest. He worked her hard and beat her regularly. But she never complained or turned him in.

Then late one Wednesday night when I was on the street in Midtown, an older woman hobbled up to me and said that she’d heard a shot from a building I knew well.

On the top floor a door at the far end of the hall was ajar. There had been as many eyes on me as there were roaches in the wall, but nobody came out to tell me anything — it wasn’t that kind of building.

Inside the apartment, Toof was on the floor in his ivory-colored gabardine zoot suit; the left side of his skull and most of its contents were on the wall. Effy sat nine feet away at a dinette table in the tiny kitchen. She was drinking the good cognac from the bottleneck, something I was certain Toof would have never allowed her to do.

The gun was on the table. It was a huge six-shooter, 41 caliber. I picked up the piece and sat across from her.

“When I woke up this morning I knew he had to die,” she told the tabletop.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“He got a new girl. Pretty thing.”

“And you were jealous?”

“The first time I seen ’im hit her somethin’ changed. It was like I had died and the gatekeeper was showin’ me my life. He give me a chance to go back and fix it. All I had to do was get a good night’s sleep to figure how.”

Toof had done all kinds of bad things, and Effy had always been, more or less, easy to work with. If I busted her she took the arrest with style. She deserved better and he’d gotten exactly what was coming to him.

Toof had a back door to his tenement apartment. I helped Effy to her feet and told her where she could go for the night. Then I put the .41 at the back of my pants and called in the homicide dicks, as was my duty.

Effy was my fifth e-mail of the morning. I knew I’d be needing some comfort when it came to sleep.

She undressed and bathed me, gave me an oil massage all down my spine to the middle of the gluteus maximus. When that was through she turned me over. Her breasts and stomach glistened from the oil.

“You not hard, King-baby; don’t you like me no more?”

“I thought maybe we could try and talk for a while,” I said.

“What you need to talk about?”

“You know how one time you told me that you woke up in the morning and knew what you had to do?” We had not discussed that night before.

“Yeah,” she said with a slight nod and a steady gaze.

“I woke up a few days ago.”

She lay down beside me and put her hand to my chest. We stayed like that for long minutes.

“I stopped trickin’ six years ago,” she said.

“Then why are you here?”

“I knew what you was feelin’ after they lied on you. I knew. And when you called me I came because that’s what a woman does when a man save her life. He don’t have to love her or care about her or nothin’. But if he save her life, then she gots to take care on him. And even though I’m a professional and fully legit masseuse now — if you call, I come over.”

“I guess this is the last time I’ll call,” I said.

“We could still get drinks or sumpin’,” she offered. “Now, turn ovah.”

The new massage was softer and ranged wider. She did my earlobes and between the toes, the webbing between my fingers and the big tendons of my feet. All the while she was saying something, but I couldn’t quite make it out.

“Daddy?”

I hadn’t been in a sleep that deep for a very long time. Not since before my days in solitary had I slept well at all. A few hours here and there was the most I could hope for. But that day, with A.D. shaking my shoulder, I awoke from slumber that had been completely given over to rest.

“Yeah, baby?”

“Have you been asleep all day?”

“What time is it?”

“A little after four.”

I sat up, keeping the blanket wrapped around me.

Aja was wearing a light brown dress that came down to almost the knee, and though it revealed her figure it didn’t cling.

Looking at this mature attire I realized that she was even more alluring and looked old enough to do something about it. I chuckled to myself, realizing that I couldn’t keep my chick in the egg.

“What you lookin’ at, Daddy?”

“Fate.”

“Are you okay?”

I thought about her question and finally said, “Sit down.”

She perched at the edge of the bed and cocked her head the way she had as a child.

“What?” she asked.

“I wanted to say that watching you grow into a woman is really the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“I talked to Mama,” she said.

“Oh?”

“She told me what she did. She tried to say that it wasn’t all that bad, but I said that she couldn’t have no idea what might happen if she outed you like that. I think she understood.”

“Go on downstairs,” I said then. “Let me get dressed.”