Every Man a King

10

My midget car was parked in the garage, hiding the huge oil stain on the concrete floor. The keys were in the ignition and I had yet to spill one drop of blood over my exertions. If I walked away from the jobs Ferris and Monica had given me I’d almost definitely survive the season.

Night traffic back to Manhattan was moderately heavy. I elected not to play music because the melodies might have colored my thoughts about the steps I was either to take or to vacate.

Years ago, when they sent me to Rikers, I felt as if I’d never leave. The problem with receiving a life sentence, even if that judgment is reversed a mere three months later, is that you have been bereft of hope and freed from the fear of consequence. When there’s no more need to cower, a certain kind of personality begins to take needless chances.

If you’ve already paid the ultimate price in your mind, then resistance against superior forces is — almost — all you have left.

But even lifers have extenuating circumstances: lovers, mothers, children, and, now and again, for some, God.

The Supreme Being wasn’t in my arsenal but Aja-Denise was.

“Yeah,” I said aloud to no one in particular, answering a question no one had asked.

At that moment my phone sounded.

“Hello.”

“I was getting ready to go out on a hunting expedition for moa snakes.”

“Hey, Mel. Thanks for the endorsement.”

“How you get mixed up with Cormody and his fools?” asked the man named for Satan’s uncle.

After a few minutes of shorthand explanation I said, “I think I got it covered, though. You scared the shit outta their boss.”

“The Far Right and the Russian mob and you got it covered?”

“Maybe I might need your help up the line, but for right now I’m okay.”

“I’ll keep the phone open for you, Joe.”

Advice is best given in interrogative form. That way the work is done by the student rather than the teacher, who should already know the answers. Mel’s inquiries about my predicaments caused me to make a call.

“Daddy?” she said over a din of music, laughter, muffled conversations, and shouts.

“Where are you?”

“Pluto’s.”

“How can you stand all that noise?”

“What do you want, Daddy?” my daughter asked with loving exasperation.

“I think you were right about this case.”

“Hold on a second, I’ll go outside.”

She moved down a corridor of lessening sound until there was silence.

Then she asked, quite seriously, “What’s wrong?”

“I need you to call your grandma B and tell her that I want you and your mother to stay behind the Great Wall for a few days.”

“Why?”

“Because when you kick a hornets’ nest you’re likely to get stung.”

“Are you safe?”

“I can take care of myself in situations like this, but I got people coming at me from Roger’s case and also from the thing I’m doin’ for your mother and Coleman.”

“What thing you doin’ for Mom?”

“Coleman got in Dutch with the feds and Monica is all worried.”

“You don’t have to do anything for that fool,” Aja said indignantly.

“I’m not asking for you to take Coleman there. As a matter of fact you should tell your great-grandmother that he is definitely not invited. But your safety comes first and part of that is protecting your mom.”

“Okay. I’ll call. But do I have to go right now? Milla’s gonna have a surprise birthday cake in a couple of hours. I’d like to be here for that.”

“I can’t tell you what to do, honey. But this is really LAD.”

LAD is our family’s private acronym standing for life and death.

“Okay,” Aja said. “I’ll go now. You be careful too.”

I was home around midnight. My apartment is on the third floor of the office building. You could climb a rope ladder up through the ceiling of my office, but that night I used the stairs to get there. By 12:30 I was sitting cross-legged on the bed thinking about the cases I should drop.

Quiller was the rock and Coleman the hard place. And there I was, not nearly as frightened as I should have been.

The sun was on my face in the morning. I didn’t remember lying down, much less falling asleep.

“Hi, Daddy,” Aja said when I called. “We’re here and we’re safe.”

“Tell your mother I’ll be in touch as soon as I know something.”

“Where are you?”

“At the office.”

“You gonna get Mr. Frost or Uncle Rags there with you?”

“When and if I need them.”

Thad Longerman. I couldn’t find him anywhere. Not on the net, on the dark web, or in the phone book. He wasn’t registered on the part of the NYPD database that I could access, and the program I had to read past articles from fifty-two American newspapers had no inkling of him.

The most likely Curt Holiday ran a company called Personalized Services. His partner in that business was a buxom redhead named Tex Bradford. A weight lifter, Tex had a seventy-five-inch chest with hands the size of medium shovels. The company he and Curt ran was small but laid claim to elegance. Headquartered in Culver City, California, they did no work in that state, nor on the West Coast at all. They had a presence on the dark web as well as the WWW. Among their dozens of digital testimonials, one individual named was d’Artagnan Aramois — a self-defined free-wheeling capitalist. D’Artagnan ran a small export business out of Manhattan called Safe Haven. His product was a brand of casket built from a cheap synthetic material that promised to keep its passenger whole for centuries. Personalized Services worked with d’Artagnan doing a hands-on service. A few testimonials talked about working with Curt or Tex soon after making a deal with Safe Haven. Taking that information and a few other tidbits, I set out to do some honest-to-God investigating.

D’Artagnan Aramois’s Safe Haven was housed on the seventy-third floor of the Empire State Building. There was a light on behind the frosted window that took up the upper half of the door.

When I knocked a man’s voice called out, “Come on in.”

The office was small and notably without character. The LED lights from the desk lamp and ceiling fixture shone but didn’t really illuminate. The window gazed upon New Jersey but it was a misty day, making the Garden State look like a half-formed idea. The only serious furniture was a big oak desk that sat rather high and unevenly, reminding me of a bull intent on a tuft of tasty grass and at the same time wondering if it should gore someone.

D’Artagnan Aramois stood between the front door and the desk. He was short and sturdily built, wearing a blue-and-white-checkered suit that was probably made from cotton. Shod in brown leather shoes, he was white, clean-shaven, and wary.

“Can I help you?”

I smiled broadly and held out a hand.

“Philip Wrog,” I said, “from East Saint Louis.”

We shook with abandon.

“How do you spell that last name?”

“Double-u, are, oh, gee,” I articulated. “It comes from the Polish. Means something not so good, I think.”

“You think?” The man named after the fourth Musketeer had an engaging sneer.

“I’m originally from Pittsburgh. My parents died before I knew ’em and I was fostered by a Polish family for a while there. They were named Wrog. I like it that the name’s unusual.”

“Have a seat, Mr. Wrog,” Mr. Aramois offered.

There were two chairs set out for visitors. They probably came from one of the big, cheap stores but I doubted if Aramois bought them. The office gave the impression that everything, except for the big brooding desk, had been leased.

The little man gave me a wary sneer and asked, “How can I help you, Mr. Wrog?”

“I’m sure you’ve read about the political unrest in Haiti,” I said.

D’Artagnan nodded slowly.

“You’re aware that there’s a large community of Haitians in Brooklyn and down in Miami.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, then you may also know that there’s a strong connection between these families and their relatives back home.”

“Not, um, specifically but I can see where that might be the case.”

We were performing a lawbreakers dance. Tentative and hopeful, maybe our gyrations would lead to a pot of gold.

“There’s a lot of poverty back home. People who don’t have and cannot afford the basic necessities.”

“It’s a shame how some people have to live,” d’Artagnan said, his head swaying from side to side.

“Their families here are burdened with providing their people with the means of survival. They send appliances, money, and other necessities. They need everything down there, from straight razors to... to coffins.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Yes,” I said with a smile. “That’s what I’ve been told. I come here to you today because I represent a consortium of Haitian nationals that wish to purchase sturdy but affordable caskets for families that are sending their departed loved ones back home.”

“That’s why I went into this business,” Aramois said devoutly.

“I’m told that while being inexpensive, your caskets are extremely durable. So much so that they resist even X-ray examination.”

“That’s true.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I’m not some smuggler or terrorist, but it is a custom among these people to place memorabilia with their loved ones. My clients wouldn’t want misguided authorities to disturb their dead.”

Aramois studied me then. His aspect was less human and more coyote or rat; some creature that had the natural ability and inclination to gauge threat.

“Tell me something, Mr. Wrog.”

“What’s that?”

“How do you know to come to me? I mean, this is a business that doesn’t advertise.”

“An acquaintance gave me your name.”

“What acquaintance?”

“A fellow named Thad Longerman.”

That was the gambit. I knew a few names and came to a conclusion or two about their businesses and how they were run. Being a private detective was less about pinpoint accuracy and more about gambling. In poker I always lost a few hands before coming up with my opponent’s tells.

D’Artagnan thought a moment and then nodded.

“My fee is twenty-five hundred dollars. You pay me that and I send you on to a contact I have in the Bronx. There you will be provided however many caskets you might require. Any additional items you wish to send to the grave with them can be added at the docks before they are sent on their way.”

“And how much will this final transaction cost me?” Philip Wrog asked.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars for a twelve-count, shipping is extra.”

I raised my eyebrows convincingly.

“The people I work with can almost guarantee that the coffin will pass unmolested through customs in both countries,” Aramois assured Wrog. “There will be a government seal on each unit that you will attach after your own inspection.”

“I will be the last one to examine the unit?”

“Certainly so.”

I looked closely at the little blue-checkered coffin salesman.

There are certain species of cuttlefish in the ocean that can change color as quickly and as effortlessly as a man might take steps on a path. But there was no order of beasts on Earth that could feign innocence like we could. It’s a gift, I thought.

“The people I’m working with,” I said, “have their own ways of sending their loved ones home.”

“That’s not the usual approach,” the Frenchman said. “But I’m sure you can work something out.”

“So how does it work from here?”

“I send you off to a man named Tex. You tell him what it is you want and come to some kind of payment arrangement. After that he will deliver the sarcophagi to the address you say.”

“Along with the government seals?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“And you guarantee that these sacred properties will not be molested?”

“Only God and the devil can make absolute guarantees, Mr. Wrog. All I can tell you is that we haven’t had a dissatisfied client yet.”

I froze up there for a few moments, a cuttlefish that had taken on such a complex range of hues and textures that he, I, needed a moment to reset.

“I get paid now,” d’Artagnan said, filling in the moment of silence. “After that you can work out with Tex how to pay him.”

“What if you’re trying to cheat me?”

“You know my address. And, just to be clear, I can’t promise that you will be able to finalize a deal up the line. My job is merely to make the connection.”

I hemmed and hawed a little so as not to make the little man suspicious. But he had me at the word Tex.

Personalized Services was down the block from the old Grand Concourse Plaza Hotel. I parked my little Bianchina on the street about two blocks away and then ensconced myself on a bus bench across from the closed exporter.

PerSer (as I named it in my iPad notes) was bracketed by Tomas Jewelers and a dentist’s office. The two side businesses were open when I got there, around 1:15, but Tex’s concern remained shuttered.

Waiting wasn’t a problem for me. Wearing dark blue cotton slacks, a tan T, and a many-pocketed army jacket, I perused my iPad with no feeling of urgency or expectation. Melquarth sent me a short missive about Cormody, the MoA, and other organizations mixed up with them. Mel had met many white supremacists at the various prisons he’d been sentenced to.

“It was a matter of survival, not philosophy,” he said to me the first, and last, time we discussed the subject.

His information was nonconsequential to the case, but the fact that he took the time to compile the data told me that he thought I might need his help sooner rather than later.

At 2:00 I inserted earbuds and made a call.

“Art Tomey’s line,” a woman’s voice answered.

“Hey, Amy, it’s Joe.”

“Well, hello. Art told me you might be calling.”

Amethyst “Amy” Banks was the most overqualified assistant in all of New York. She’d been a high-powered defense attorney for a couple of decades when she fell for a client, Nina Morseton. Nina had been charged with killing a man she’d partnered with to defraud a Swedish insurance company. Amy had never before realized her affinity for women.

“I really don’t think I’m a lesbian,” Amy once said to me about Nina. “I just believe that she is my soulmate.”

She, Amy, falsified a few documents and some evidence to prove her client’s innocence, honestly believing she was. When it came out that Nina was definitely guilty, she turned on Amy, trying to get a better deal. It didn’t work.

Both lawyer and client were convicted. Because of previous felony convictions Nina is doing life without possibility, and Amethyst did a very enlightening three years. Disbarred, disgraced, and displaced in her own heart, Amy went to prison, a mastermind of the law with a broken heart that no felon could challenge.

When she came out again Art Tomey hired her at 3K a week just to answer the phones and talk to him now and again about interpretation and approach.

Once a month Amethyst goes to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women to visit Nina. You know love is true when it survives the devastation it causes.

“What can I do for you, Joe?” Amy asked.

“I was wondering how Art’s doing with the Tesserat thing.”

“I had a case like this one time,” she said dreamily. “It was a suspected terrorist all bundled up and ready to be dropped into a black site. The evidence was circumstantial at best and the government refused even to let the judge in on their investigation. They demanded the full amount for bail in that case too. I know the right people and got them to countermand the issue. Come up with the ten percent and they’ll have to let him go.”

“Do I even need to talk to Art?”

“No, darling, it’s all taken care of.”