Every Man a King

12

Noemi Tristel lives on the top floor of a onetime tenement building on 145th a block east of Broadway. The new owners have transformed the working-class apartment house to upper-middle-class studios and one-bedroom condos. The tenants across the six floors are multiracial, middle-class, at least, and definitely transplants to a Harlem that is fast becoming something else. Maybe one day they’ll be calling it Harlow Heights or possibly Haarlem, harking back to its Dutch roots.

The new tenants were all races but mostly white. There’s nothing wrong with that. Things change in America, in the new world, the new Earth, things change all the time. And so it is especially nice when you come across something or someone that defies the relentless tide of transformation.

Carter Tristel was a pickpocket and general sleight-of-hand thief. He could have been a superior magician. He might have become a contender in whiff-whaff at the Olympics somewhere. But he used his skills to steal what he needed to take care of his daughter, Noemi, and her mother, Nimbal Orestry Tristel. When I was still a cop I had a warrant for Carter not two days after Nimbal died of complications from diabetes. I came to the house and seventeen-year-old Noemi answered the door.

“Mom died and we just came back from the mortuary,” she told me. “We got to bury her Sunday. He’s in there on the couch if you want him.”

Carter was a large man. His size made most people feel that he was slow, even lethargic. That’s why no one expected his hands to be so fast. He lay on his left side on the broken-down couch, his big brown belly hanging off the edge. Staring at the far wall, his eyes dropped a tear now and then. I don’t think he saw me.

“Daddy,” Noemi called.

I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her from introducing me.

“What?” he asked pitifully.

“Um, you want some water?”

“No, baby,” he said, choking back whatever sadness kindness caused.

Back at the front door I told Noemi about the antique silverware her father was supposed to have stolen.

“If the next officer with a search warrant doesn’t find anything, I don’t think they’ll be able to arrest him,” I told the girl.

She nodded and I left.

Two years later I was a detective third grade in an office I shared with three other officers. It was about 3:00 in the afternoon when Noemi walked in. She was wearing a lovely peacock-blue silk dress and had a pocketbook that probably cost three thousand dollars. She sat on my visitor’s chair and smiled.

Noemi was not a beautiful woman. As a matter of fact, as she aged she became rather plain. But she had eyes that held the power of old-time royalty.

“Carter?” I said.

“He died.”

“What happened?”

“He won the Lotto and then had a heart attack. The funeral is Wednesday next and he asked me to ask you to come.”

That was then.

At 10:07 in the evening after I lost my ninety-second straight game of Go to Melquarth, I rang Noemi’s bell. Through an electric eye she pressed the lock-release button and I walked through. As I headed toward the far end of the slender first-floor hall, someone hailed me.

“Excuse me,” the woman’s voice called.

I don’t know why but I took another step.

“I said excuse me,” the voice insisted.

I stopped and, after a little hesitation, turned.

The young white woman standing there was indeed very pretty. Her figure, her skin, her probably naturally blond hair that bunched on slender shoulders.

Everything about her was lovely except for the twisted expression on her lips. That was quite ugly.

“Do you belong here?” those lips asked.

“Right here?” I asked, pointing at the floor.

“I will call the police,” she threatened.

“That is your prerogative, ma’am. The police are here to serve everyone — living and dead.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“If I was threatening you, you would feel it.” Rikers Island hadn’t done me any favors.

At the end of the first-floor hall there was a two-person elevator on the right and a doorway to the stairs on the left.

I took the stairs to the sixth floor.

The day the new owners of the ex-tenement put the units up for sale, Noemi bought the entire floor with a million dollars taken from the $9,364,912 passed down from Carter’s Lotto winnings.

I knocked on door number three and she answered.

“Come on in, Mr. Oliver,” she said.

Crossing the threshold I asked, “When will you start calling me Joe?”

“My father called you that. He told me to call you Mr. Oliver.”

“Noe?” a woman called from the room beyond the one we were in.

When she came in I got a good look at her. Light brown and maybe twenty-five, she wore an emerald bodysuit that was semi-opaque.

“Oh!” she said, covering herself and backing away to the room from whence she had come. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“It’s okay, Stash,” Noemi said. “This is an old friend. I told you about him — Joe Oliver.”

“Hi,” the now bodiless woman called from around a corner.

“Hey,” I called back.

“We’re going across the hall,” Noemi said to the doorway. “I’ll be back later.”

“You want me to bring anything?”

Noemi looked at me and I shook my head.

“No, honey, we’ll be okay.”

Noemi and I hadn’t gotten to sit down when there was a knock on the door. Surprised, my host called out, “Stash?”

“Police, ma’am.”

“I forgot to tell you that a white lady downstairs thought I might not belong here,” I said.

Noemi sighed and frowned.

“Just a minute,” she told the door.

She took the full sixty seconds to suppress the anger, then opened the door on two NYPD uniforms. Both white. Both young.

“We’ve had a complaint about an intruder,” the taller officer said to her while looking at me.

“Oh?” Noemi replied. “No intruder has been up here.”

“What about him?” the other cop asked.

“Mr. Oliver is an old friend of the family. He rang the bell and I buzzed him in.”

“And you know him?” Cop number 1 asked.

“I know all my good family friends.”

“No need to sound off.”

“No need for Miss La Fina downstairs to question every Black man that comes to visit this building.”

“Are your neighbors at home?” the shorter cop wanted to know.

“I own the entire floor, Officer. Will that be enough for you or do you need me to call Captain Brown? He’s on duty tonight, I think.”

The young officers knew when it was time to retreat.

“Sorry, ma’am,” the taller cop said. “You two have a good night.”

“It sounds like you should be taking a vacation,” Noemi Tristel was saying an hour or two later. “I mean, I know what it’s like to live under threat, when someone might break down the door any minute, but when they’d arrest Daddy back in the day I could always see him in jail, find someone to pay his bail. Your problem sounds like a fresh body dropped in the bay.”

“Fish food for sure,” I agreed. “But it hasn’t gotten that bad yet.”

“That man tried to choke you to death.”

“That was a miscalculation. But I was ready for it.”

We were sitting on a long couch in a living room only used for visitors like me, and I was pretty sure that I was the only one like me. Noemi, wearing a plush baby blue robe and no shoes, leaned back against the opposite side of the sofa, tucking her feet under her thighs.

“Daddy broke laws every day except Sunday his whole life,” she said. “There was always some cop or angry mark after him. But I swear he was like a nun shacked up in some convent compared to you.”

I’d brought a bottle of peach schnapps and it was almost gone by that time.

Once, when I was having trouble with my ex — brothers in blue I dropped by Miss Tristel’s place.

“You think I could stay here a couple of hours until I work out some things?” I’d asked her.

“You could spend the night if you want,” she said. “The couch turns into a bed and I can put a little food in the fridge.”

I had a key to the front door of the building and that apartment, but I always rang out of deference.

On this evening I said, “Thanks for takin’ me in, girl. You know you usually need to be family for somethin’ like this here.”

“I don’t mind. It reminds me of when I was a kid and Daddy needed to hide. He was what he was and I loved him anyway.”

“That Stash seems like a good catch,” I said to take some of the shine off me.

“Oh no,” Noemi said with maybe a hint of regret. “She’s just a girl who needs a place to stay where they don’t shove fentanyl in your pudding.”

“So you’re not lovers?”

“Oh yeah, we are. We’re together until we aren’t anymore.”

It was pretty late when my host left for the company of her temporary girlfriend. I didn’t unfold the bed or disrobe, just took off my shoes, lay back, and considered the options.

I wasn’t going to walk out on Ferris or Monica. When I was a cop I always wanted to be a detective solving crimes and maybe making things a little bit better. I wasn’t so much into enforcement and more about resolution.

Quiller and his Black wife intrigued me. How did they end up where they were, and how did that meeting impact the crazy, self-destructive racism of the Far Right? Ms. Prim was an enigma, but Monica was easy to figure. My ex would be rudderless without her fool of a man.