Every Man a King

23

Brownsville. It is a place that creates heroes and villains, where people cling to their dreams because they know for a fact that that’s all they’ll ever have. It’s poor and it’s angry, intoxicated and hopelessly in love. It is a place where children learn lessons that they spend the rest of their lives trying to forget. Sharper than a razor, it is the cut you never see coming.

The place we were looking for was on Rockaway Avenue. An unofficial SRO where poor people go when they need a place to lick their wounds.

The broken granite stairs led up to an oak door that, I knew, was braced by corroded, but still strong, iron bars. I pressed the doorbell button and waited a full minute. Then I bumped it again, twice.

“Who the fuck is it?” a grizzled voice inquired. If you didn’t know the speaker you wouldn’t have been able to put a gender on them.

“King Oliver.”

“King? In Brownsville? Tell me it ain’t so.” Now there was humor and maybe a woman smiling back there.

“Yeah, baby, it’s me. You can tell Loopy to put down his shotgun.”

“Loop!” the woman on the other end of the PA system called. “Let that bastard in.”

A moment passed, then another. I turned toward Oliya and saw in her eyes that she had been in places like this before — maybe she’d honed her talents on a thoroughfare like Rockaway.

Something was happening behind the oak door. After a few beats it swung inward.

The man standing there was tall and wide, high yellow in color and bald, mostly. The whites of his eyes were a deeper yellow and his face was the general shape of a butternut squash — the big side down.

“King,” he uttered. It could have been a greeting or a warning.

“Loop,” I said. “This here is Oliya.”

“Ma’am.”

“Hello,” my partner replied in the friendliest voice I’d heard her use yet.

“What you doin’ here, King?” Loopy Wright asked.

“I had a lawyer man put up a guy with you, name of Tesserat. We need to see him.”

“Coleman? He a mothahfuckah and a half. Lucky he don’t get his ass kicked in. Man runnin’ up and down the halls tellin’ folks to be quiet. Quiet? Shit. Come on in, brother.”

Loopy, the huge impediment to aggression, took two steps backward, making space for Oliya and me to enter the ghetto hotel.

Going down a hallway no more than a yard wide, we could hear Loopy’s shoulders rubbing against the walls behind. Maybe forty steps into the journey we came upon a closed door that had a strong light coming from underneath.

I knocked.

“Come on in,” she called.

I turned the knob and entered a room that hadn’t changed much since before the old woman that lived there was born. Once-thick burgundy carpeting lined the floor and an orange felt sofa sat against the far wall. To the right was a doorless doorway leading to a kitchen. To the left was a desk supporting a large lattice of cubicles from which all kinds of papers, keys, and other, less recognizable detritus sat and hung. The swivel chair at the desk was brand-new, made from some kind of space-age material. Mookie, the woman who ran and maybe owned the seven-story guesthouse, always said that you need a good chair for comfort and concentration.

She was sitting in the middle of the orange divan. Mookie was the only one allowed that perch.

“Loop.”

“Yeah, Mook.”

“Bring in some chairs for our guests.”

The big man blundered out into the kitchen. I knew from past visits that there was a toilet beyond that room and a storage closet after that.

“Who’s your friend?” the diminutive old Black woman asked me.

Mookie Hill was more than seventy but not yet ninety. She was taller than my grandmother and yet less than sixty inches in height. Her expression was daring you to contradict deep-set convictions. She could quote from the Bible, chapter and verse, and curse like a sailor from centuries past.

“Oliya,” I said, answering her question.

“Ma’am,” my bodyguard added.

“Look like she could scrap.”

Loopy came out with two metal folding chairs under his left arm. These he shook out for us.

“Wanna drink?” the hotelier offered.

“Not me, Mook.”

“No thank you, ma’am.”

“Well then, what else can I do you for?”

“I’m just here to talk to Coleman Tesserat.”

Mookie’s eyes were squarish and there looked to be a film over them. That aside, she saw everything.

“Why you gonna help a niggah like that, King? He look down on Black folk like he was a white man just off the plantation.”

“He’s married to my ex.”

“What you care ’bout her?”

“She’s the mother of our daughter.”

That put an end to the interrogation. Mookie needed to hear truth in her parlor.

“He’s on floor seven. Number five.”

Mookie’s place was lively. On the way up the carpeted stairs you could hear music and laughter, voices both threatening and with heart. Halfway past the third floor there was a young woman in a tiny red dress lounging comfortably and smoking weed. She took a hefty toke when we were ten steps down and released it when we reached her.

Dark brown skin with painted lips and impossible lashes; she reveled in the beauty of youth. The tips of her processed dark brown hair were frosted with gold.

“You guys wanna party?” she asked when I nodded hello.

“Gotta meetin’ upstairs,” I answered.

“Oh. Okay. You need anything else?”

I stopped and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Toni with a i.”

“What is it that you need, Toni?”

Toni gazed at me, speculating. I imagined that she could float a butterfly with those long lashes.

“You know Fat Cat Tom?” she asked.

“No.” But by the name I knew his kind.

“He was my protection on the street.”

“Was?”

“Then he fount out I had a bank account.”

“I see.”

“You don’t know him?”

“If I did what difference would it make?”

“I thought maybe you could talk to him... for me, you know?”

“He live around here?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know the best thing you could do is not be where he’s at.”

“I’ont know no place else.”

“You do anything stronger’n weed?”

“Nuh-uh. No.”

I took a disposable mechanical pencil from one pocket and my business card from another. On the back of the card I wrote Mimi Lord and a phone number I knew by heart.

“Call this woman and tell her that Joe O suggested you. She does business in Manhattan mainly. You get out there to her and she’ll set you up with something.”

“Tom got people all ovah round here. I wouldn’t even make it to the train.”

“I’ll ask Loopy to give you a ride.”

“He scary,” Toni said on a sneer.

“I know for a fact that he don’t bite.”

That got Toni to grin. She stole a look at Oliya and then asked me, “What I do for you?”

“Nothin’ right yet.”

With that my minder and I continued our journey upward.

No one answered the first or second knock on the seventh floor, number five.

“Not here?” Oliya suggested.

“Naw, he there.”

I knocked again, a little harder, and shouted, “Open up, Tesserat. It’s Joe.”

It took him maybe thirty seconds to screw up the courage to let us in.

He was a darker shadow of the investment banker he’d been a week before.

There was the beginning of a beard along the jawline and his hair was disheveled. He wore a strapped T-shirt and a pair of dark suit slacks. His feet were bare.

A small revolver was nestled in his left hand, finger on the trigger.

After Oliya and I had hustled in, I tugged the piece out of Coleman’s hand.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

“A guy down the hall.”

“How much?”

“I gave him my watch.”

“Your Rolex for this piece’a shit?”

“I got to protect myself.”

I had to hold back from slapping that little pistol across Coleman’s face. Instead I turned a chair he had for looking out the window and sat, heavily.

“You wanna sit?” I asked Oliya.

She looked around, saw the ruffled bed and a short dresser, then went to the stack of drawers and leaned back against it.

Coleman sat on the bed.

“Tema Popov, Yuri Fleganoff, or Yevgeny Gobulev?” I said to Coleman, repeating names Augustine Antrobus had given me.

His eyes registered a whole new kind of concern.

“What?”

“Come on, man,” I said. “You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

Coleman’s hands clenched into fists, released, and then clenched again.

“The second one,” he said.

“Fleganoff. So that’s the one you called Alain Freeman?”

“How you find out his name?”

“It’s my job to know the players in the games I’m playin’. Monica asked me to look into it and that’s what I’m doin’. Was Fleganoff the only dude you worked with?”

“Pretty much. I mean sometimes, back when we started out, he’d bring some muscle, but they didn’t talk. Why?”

“They were keeping their vulnerability down to you and him,” I said.

“So the fuck what? Only thing I need is for Tomey to get the government off my ass.”

“Yeah. Right. How’d it work with Fleganoff?”

It was a rare event in Coleman’s life to have his ideas summarily dismissed. He wanted to curse me out, but thinking better of it he said, “I set up companies for him and worked them myself. I distributed cash and took care of taxes at year-end.”

“How much you make?”

“What business that of yours?”

I just stared.

“Hundred fifty thousand a month. It’s gone, though. Feds sittin’ on it like a hatching hen.”

“How long?”

“Two and a half years.”

I stood up and turned to Olo.

“Let’s get outta here.”

“Look, man,” Coleman said. “Look. He really used the name Freeman. I thought if you found him under that name then he couldn’t blame me for it.”

“This ain’t sixth grade, brother. This is serious.”

There were tears in the cheater’s eyes. I couldn’t blame him but, then again, I had nothing else to say.

When I turned toward the door he blurted, “What about my gun?”

“Loopy bringing you food and drink, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Stay in here. Look out the window. If you need muscle, just ring downstairs. Loopy or one’a his people be here in a short sixty.”

Mookie owned a garage two blocks away. She hadn’t been there in decades but Loopy spent every night there — working on his cars. When I asked if we could borrow one of his fleet he walked us over.

“I been workin’ on this beauty for six years now.” Loop was talking about a dark blue 1987 Mark VII Lincoln Continental. It was showcased at the middle of the garage. “This is my baby.”

“We don’t wanna take your best car, man,” I said. “Any old clunker’ll do.”

“I don’t have no beaters here, King. When I work on cars they all get a shine.”

Loop turned to Oliya, held out the car keys, and said, “You take it.”

Somehow my temporary partner was able to effect humility with a regal bearing. She took the keys saying, “Thank you, my friend.”

Since she had the keys Oliya drove us out of that double-gated garage.

“Where to?” she asked me.

“Upper West Side,” I said while entering a phone number.

After I finished the call Oliya asked, “How do you know all these people?”

“It’s my city.”

“No,” she said. “Most New Yorkers are completely lost twenty blocks from home.”

“I was a cop.”

“Cops have beats and precincts.”

“They bounced me and I had to make contacts if I wanted to make a living at this trade.”

“You’re alone?”

“Lone, maybe, but I have people like Loopy and Mookie all over.”

My words seemed to have a big impact on the coldblooded killer.

We made it all the way to the Museum of Natural History. Somewhere deep in the bowels of that place is a fiberglass replica of a blue whale — scaled to actual size. It hovered dozens of feet above the floor, arched like the real thing, master of the ocean.

“It’s amazing,” Oliya said.

“You never seen it before?”

“In my job there’s rarely time for sightseeing.”

“The guy we need to help us could meet anywhere,” I said. “Why not here?”

The question seemed novel in her furrowed brow. Yeah. Why not?

“Joe,” came a familiar voice.

“Mel.”

He emerged from the throng of museumgoers. His ocean-blue suit was loose-fitting on a lithe frame.

“Hey, brother,” he said, extending a hand.

We shook and I said, “I’d like to intro—”

“Oliya Ruez,” Melquarth said with a big smile on his face.

“Have we met?” she asked him.

“I hired you four times in the last six years. The Int-Op Agency is the best there is.”

“Maybe was,” Olo speculated.

A disturbed shadow passed across my friend’s face. Then he smiled and asked me, “Where to?”

“We take a jaunt out to Queens.”