Down the River unto the Sea

35

I left Staten Island, headed for Carnegie Hall. Mel had promised to leave the unconscious crook in a place where the cops would find him first.

“And I’ll pin the confession to his vest,” he added. “They’ll get the girl and find that graveyard too.”

“He won’t go to prison, though,” I said.

“If everything I hear about Antrobus is true, you won’t have to worry about our boy living till spring.”

The concert was lovely. My grandmother wore a red gown that sparkled from glitter and clear plastic scales.

“I didn’t know you even owned a dress like that,” I told her.

“Roger thinks his fancy gifts will get him in my pants,” she replied with not a hint of shame.

After the event was over we went to a private gathering in an oval room that had a heavily patterned picture window for its roof. When my grandmother excused herself for the toilet, Ferris took me aside and said, “The item is on hold for you starting Monday morning. You got someone who can handle it?”

“Yeah. I have a friend who has a friend.”

Despite her protests, my grandmother was swayed by the rich white man’s attentions. But I don’t think it had anything to do with his money. Be it a red gown or a red ribbon, at some point the expressions of love are all the same.

“Hey, babe,” I said on the phone to my daughter the next morning.

“Hi, Daddy. How are you? Are you okay?”

“I think maybe I might be the best I have ever been in my life.”

“Really? Is the trouble over?”

“For you it is. For me it’s just beginning.”

“Are you gonna be okay?”

“Like I said... the best. Tell your mother and Coleman that I say the coast is clear for them to come home whenever they want.”

“But what about you, Daddy?”

“I’m gonna be fine, girl. I have figured what to do so that I don’t stare out that window anymore, whining in my mind about jail.”

“Did you prove them wrong?” she asked. Aja-Denise refused to accept that I could be guilty of anything.

“That will never happen. But I know now how to turn my back on all that.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you on the day you graduate from college.”

“That’s too long.”

“After all I’ve been through, it’s just the blink of an eye.”

“Can I come to work Monday?” she asked.

“A week from Monday.”

“Why till then?”

“I have work to do.”

“Can I see you?”

“I’ll call as soon as I can. How’s that?”

“I guess.”

“I love you, Aja-Denise.”

“I love you too, Daddy.”

“Good-bye.”

I was lying on my back with no blankets on the bed of my third-floor Montague Street apartment. In my life I’d been slashed, stabbed, and shot. I’d broken bones and had bruises that went so deep they never fully went away. But I was feeling as young and hopeful as my grandmother in her red gown.

The next call rang eight times before she answered.

“Hello?”

“Willa.”

“Mr. Oliver? Is everything okay?”

“Perfect.”

“Do you have any news?”

“I need you to come to my office at one this afternoon.”

“Does it have to do with what happened to Mr. Braun?”

“Tangentially.”

“Okay, I guess. Is it good news?”

“More like a challenge that might bring the news.”

“I’ll be there.”

I’d already talked to Mel so the next call would be the trickiest.

“Hello.” An old persistent bluster was already back in the lawyer’s tone.

“Mr. Braun.”

“Mr. Boll.”

“I did that.”

I was referring to the headlines of most of the papers, all except the New York Times. The discovery of the unconscious body of William James Marmot on the downtown doorstep of the NYPD was too tawdry for top billing in “all the news that’s fit to print,” but it did make the lower right corner of the front page.

“They brought my daughter back last night. She’s unharmed if a little scared.”

“I know. They found your friend Marmot with a note pinned to his chest that led them to the house of two women in Yonkers. Did you do as I asked?”

“First I’d like to know what your plans are for Mr. Man.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“The police know that Marmot was trying to pressure you, but they don’t have evidence that you were actually abandoning your client. They don’t know about Johanna Mudd.”

“I had no idea what they were planning to do,” he claimed. “When I realized what had happened I got sick.”

“She got dead.”

That put a cork in the lawyer’s whining.

“I have enough evidence to put you in deep shit, but that’s not why you’re going to do as I ask.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Tell me.”

“Marmot was a minnow in the waters around Valence and Pratt. If I suggest to the man who employed him that you know his name, the tables will be turned and Chrissie will be missing an old man.”

“I do not bend to threats,” he said with a certainty he did not have.

“Make sure he’s in downtown holding and make plans for five visitors Monday in the morning and afternoon.”

“What visitors?”

I listed the people I had in mind. One or two of them surprised him. He asked about them, but I gave him no answers.

“You do what I ask,” I told him, “and Chrissie will grow up believing she was visiting with her cousins in Yonkers and that you are the greatest man in the world.”

I went down the rope ladder to my office after bathing in the big iron tub. I had slept eleven hours and the world had moved ever so slightly off its axis. People were milling down the avenue unaware of the mad machinations I was hatching over their heads.

My time in the prison cell, Gladstone Palmer’s betrayals, even the loss of my shield no longer had a hold on my soul.

I picked up All Quiet on the Western Front and read without a break until the buzzer of my office door sounded.

Willa was wearing a blue dress reminding me of the femme fatale of one of my favorite novels. Her hair was up, and seeing her red lips, I realized that she hadn’t worn makeup at our first meetings.

“Mr. Oliver.”

“You look gorgeous.”

“Thank you.”

“Come on in.”

I sat at Aja’s desk and Willa took the seat across. She was looking very good and I wondered why. Was this an attempt to make sure that I helped her one-night lover?

“I read the in-depth article about Mr. Braun in the paper this morning,” she said. “I had no idea that his daughter had been taken.”

“That’s why he was backing off.”

“He called and said that he wanted me to meet with Manny on Monday at noon.”

“That’s what I want. He was just the mouthpiece.”

Willa got the joke and smiled.

“I’m going to ask you to go off the reservation,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“In a little while a man will come here and he’s going to give you a note that we want you to bring to Man. There’s an item in the note that is vital to his case.”

“Vital in what sense?”

“I can’t answer because of... what do you lawyers call it? Oh yeah, plausible deniability. Just bring him what my friend gives you.”

“They search you too closely for something like that.”

“My friend has been smuggling contraband for his entire life.”

“In prison?”

I nodded and a hint of concern entered her eyes.

“I love him,” she said, connecting the fear with this revelation. “I don’t want him hurt.”

I smiled.

“You find that funny?” she asked, the woman she’d become echoing in her tone.

“You got a man with his comrades mostly slaughtered and him sitting on death row for the murder of two cops. His lawyer has betrayed him. Judges in the high court are whispering that he will most certainly die. And here you think I might be the one to bring him pain.”

“What... what about his wife and child?”

“What about them?”

“Shouldn’t they be made aware of your plans?”

“I will not share my plans with you or anyone else, but if everything works out, Mr. Man will be able to make his own decisions.”

I could see that she was about to ask another question and many more after that, but then the buzzer sounded.

I didn’t even look through the peephole.

Mel was standing there wearing a corn-colored suit with a black shirt underneath.

We didn’t speak. I walked him over to the desk and Willa stood. She was both fascinated by and afraid of this man. He looked at her like an evolved tiger might, through self-imposed bars.

Mel pulled up a chair.

After her usual hesitation, Willa sat too.

Those few days held the most potent experiences in my life up until that point. It was as if every nerve had the volume turned up and every perception had a dozen meanings — all of which I understood and profited from.

“This is going to be a short meeting,” I said. Then, turning to Willa: “My friend here is going to give you something and you will take it into that room for private meetings with lawyers. You will give him the packet and say that you got it from a friend. Don’t tell him any names. Do not indicate anything about us, including gender, knowledge we might have, or about any investigation. He will take the item and make up his own mind.”

“What will the note say?” Willa asked.

“That has to be between us and him,” Mel said in a surprisingly soothing voice. “That way everyone is protected.”

“They search you down to your underwear when you go in to visit a death row inmate.”

Mel reached into his pocket and came out with a small box with the name A Summer’s Day printed over a field of windblown grasses. It was a popular feminine hygiene product — a packet of three tampons. He handed the box to the young lawyer and she took it.

“The seals are intact and the price is stamped on the bottom,” he said.

“But I won’t be having my period Monday.”

“Then it must be coming on,” he said with an irrepressible wolfish tone.

“Just give him the packet,” I said. “The note is inside.”

“Tell him to keep it hidden and tear it open when he’s back in his cell,” Mel added. “If you follow these instructions to the letter, he will have a fifty-fifty chance of being saved.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, looking directly into my friend’s dead eyes.

“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

Her nostrils flared and I wondered if she was turned on by the power pulsating behind those words.

“Okay,” Willa said to me. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

After she was gone I took out a very old port and served.

“You think she’ll do what we said?” Mel asked.

“I’m pretty sure. He’s a man she loves and we’re the only show in town.”

“The only one,” Mel agreed. “Now, how about this place?”

“It’s called Treacher Admitting on Maiden Lane just a couple of blocks east of Broadway.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“It doesn’t advertise. They mostly serve rich patients from Wall Street, but they have a deal with law enforcement; free medical attention for certain protections.” I paused and then asked, “What about the powder?”

“It’s what they call a derivation of the shigella bacteria,” Mel explained. “Targets the appendix but has a short life span, just long enough for our purposes.”

“Not that I’m complaining,” I said. “But how does a self-educated heist man turned watchmaker get his hands on something like that?”

“Whenever I get put away I try for the sentence to be carried out in a prison where there’s a lotta Russians. They always have the most organized gangs and they’re connected to people from the old country and Eastern Europe in general; those people often have ties to intelligence. This little poison comes straight from the defunct laboratories of the KGB.”

“Damn.” I was impressed. “I’ll give you the plans to the clinic. Their security is not so strong seeing that they rely on the cops and the fact that nobody knows they’re there. Because there’s so many cops I need to stay away as long as I can.”

“I got that covered.”

We finished our wines and then poured two more.