The Long Fall

33

On the drive back home I called Christian and asked him to tell his boss to put out the word to protect Toolie.

“Tell him that it might come in handy somewhere soon,” I added.

Christian hung up when I said these last few words and the phone vibrated in my hand. TTS, standing for Tony the Suit, appeared on the display. I thought about it for two full throbs before pressing the ignore button. I then entered my own number at Zephyra Ximenez’s office.

“Hello, Mr. McGill,” my telephonic and computer personal assistant answered cheerily. “How are you?”

“I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat.”

“How can I help you?”

“Albany,” I said, “and this time make me a reservation in a good hotel.”

“The Minerva’s the best,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“One of my clients is a plastic surgeon who works there two days a week. He always stays at the Minerva.”

I WAS GETTING USED to the flight. I just brought along my MP3 pŽ€…layer and a blindfold. Norah Jones sang to me in darkness. I think I might have even fallen asleep for a moment there.

THE MINERVA WAS an old-fashioned place with a real desk where you sat down to check in. The young woman receptionist didn’t frown at my shoes or knuckles.

There was a wide stairway covered with red-and-blue carpeting that led to the first stage of the upper floors. It was so inviting that I shunned the elevator for the climb.

The room was large, much like a room that an upstate relative might keep for guests. I intended to take a bath but the tub was very close to the design of the one that I found Norman Fell in, so I stripped down and washed at the sink before taking my rental down to Tinker’s Bar and Grill in the South End.

It was a pretty empty block in a part of town that might once have had an identity, expressed by old-fashioned dark-brownstone architecture. But now the neighborhood had gotten old and forgetful. Many of the buildings were abandoned. The only life was in the broad and gaudy bar-restaurant. It took up almost half the block, and the whole front was glass so you could see in at the tables filled with people from every race and element of society. There was a long bar at the back of Tinker’s and a stage on the north side of the big room.

A group of young black men dressed in bulky suits loitered around the entrance. One of them was making rhymes extolling his fearlessness and sexual prowess. He kicked that bitch and flipped that shit, sent out a something, and then broke it down. His fellows seemed to approve of the words and their brooding execution.

As I approached the front door the largest of these men stood up to block my way. He was wearing a double-breasted cream-colored cashmere suit with a hot-pink dress shirt and at least the chain of a pocket watch. His coloring was a greenish medium brown and he had a round scar on his right cheekbone that might have been made by a small-caliber bullet. There was something wrong with one of his eyes but I tried not to stare.

“How you doin’?” the gangster-child said to me.

As he spoke, his friends moved toward him as if in the pull of a certain kind of magnetism, the kind that draws gawkers to the site of a bloody demise.

I couldn’t have fought my way past them. Even if I had a gun, they were probably all armed, too.

“Here to see Big Mouth,” I said, smiling falsely.

“So what?” the one-eyed man-child replied.

“Is he here?”

“Are you?” the kid answered, making me wonder if he was an existentialist or a rapping fool.

I’m told that hard exercise keeps up the testosterone levels in men my age. I could feel it right then. The rage growing in my shoulder“€in my shs was in response to this kid’s belief that he might be my better. I took a deep breath in through my nostrils.

“My friend Seraphina told me to drop by if I wanted to talk to Jones.”

One of the posse, a youngster in a loose-fitting iridescent green suit, broke off from the group and wandered into the restaurant.

“How you know Seraphine?” the kid asked.

“Does it matter?”

“You got a smart mouf, you know that, man?”

“Yeah. That’s what they tell me.”

“I could stomp yo’ ass right here in the street,” he promised.

“If I had six dudes backin’ me up I wouldn’t be scared neither,” I responded.

“Say what?”

“You heard me.”

“Leave him alone, John-John,” a familiar female voice said.

Seraphina, wearing a pink slip, walked into the group of Scar-face pretenders.

She came to my side and even took my hand.

“Come on wit’ me, Mr. Carter,” my slender and dark-skinned savior said.

“YOU SURE DO KNOW how to get in trouble, don’t you, Mr. Carter?” Seraphina chided as we came into the bustling establishment.

“I just wanted to see Big Mouth.”

“You got to be polite to people like John-John,” she said as if she were the elder and I the child.

“I like you, girl.”

“You a fool.”

“You know many men who aren’t?”

The hardest thing I might have done that month was getting Seraphina to grin.

“Why did they give me trouble?” I asked. “I mean, there’s all kindsa people here.”

“John-John an’ them out there to make sure it’s safe for the people,” she said.

“I’m a people.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “But you look like trouble. When you meet Big Mouth, don’t call him Big Mouth. He don’t like that name. His real nam“€. His ree is Eddie Jones, but he don’t like people callin’ him that neither.”

“What do you call him?”

“Eddie.”

“I see.”

She brought me to a table fit for six behind a half-wall to the left of the crowded bar. There were eight or nine men gathered there but the only one I was interested in was the dolphin-faced black man sitting against the back wall. That, I was sure, was Big Mouth Jones.

“Hi, Eddie,” Seraphina said to Jones. “This here is Mr. Carter. He said he wanted to aks you sumpin’.”

“He your friend or customer?” Big Mouth Jones asked, ignoring me.

“Friend.”

I wondered if it was the tip or the fact that I didn’t want sex that made Seraphina like me. Maybe it was just because I made her almost laugh. My father, for all his left-wing idealism, had often told me, Leonid, you’ll find as you get older that some women are attracted to trouble. Whatever it was, Jones rapped his knuckles against the shoulder of a skinny walnut-colored man next to him. This fellow, who looked to be about half my age, stood up without a word and moved off. I pressed my way toward the back of the table, taking the vacant position.

“You heavy?” Jones asked when I was seated.

“No.” I looked around to see Seraphina walking away.

“How you know Seraphine?”

“We talk from time to time.”

Jones’s face was ageless and unfathomable. He could have been mistaken for thirty-five but he was closer to fifty-nine. He smelled of a little too much good cologne and stale cigarette smoke.

I was about to start in on my line of questioning when the houselights went down and a spotlight hit the stage.

“Frank,” Jones said to a blocky man on the other side of the table.

“Yeah?”

“Walk around with some guys and make sure the people quiet down.”

The man nodded and departed into the gloom.

I turned to ask Eddie my question but his attention was glued to the stage.

A brown woman made an entrance. She wore a tight-fitting dress of golden sequins. Her hair was perfect and the body looked as if it had been designed for just that night, just that stage. Without preamble, recorded music came up and she started to sing. It was perfectly good singing, “€good sinon key, strong, deeply felt. She was singing about a man she’d die for—from the look in his eye, I could tell that Eddie thought that man was him.

“Can I get you something to drink, sir?” a voice whispered from behind my right shoulder.

It was a small white man with a Jimmy Durante nose.

“You got a good brandy?”

“Yes sir. We have a wonderful Armagnac.”

“Bring me a triple shot.”

THE SINGER BELTED out four love songs before taking her bows; the dress was cut so low that I almost looked away. The whole restaurant broke out in applause. I couldn’t help wondering if Big Mouth had anything to do with that.

The lights went up and the woman, who was no more than thirty, came to our table. She moved past me and gave the impresario a deep soul kiss.

“That was beautiful, baby,” Jones said.

She beamed in reply.

“This is my girl, the next Whitney Houston,” Jones said to me, “Brenda Flash.”

I smiled and lied to her. She smiled in my general direction, never asking my name.

Another one of the men left and Ms. Flash settled on the other side of the boss. The table was abuzz for a while about the potential for her career. I listened and sipped.

The waiter was right about the liquor.

“SO WHAT IS IT you wanted to ask me?” Big Mouth said, nearly an hour later.

Brenda had departed, promising to see her man upstairs somewhere when he was through with his business. The restaurant was in full swing.

“I was wondering if you knew a man named Willie Sanderson.”

Jones’s deceivingly benign features took on a sharp, dangerous aspect, bringing to my mind a knife being drawn from its sheath.

“Why?” he asked.

The other seven men at the table were staring at me.

“He tried to murder me.”

“Tried?” Jones asked.

“Yeah. I broke his head for him and so he gave up.”

“Would you like me to show you?” I asked the frowning goon.

This man stood up, making a sound that maybe made sense in the hinterlands of Albany. The most memorable things about him were his Caucasian features and coal-black skin.

“Sit down, Sammy,” Jones ordered. And then, “I said sit yo ass down.”

When Sammy did as Sammy was told, Jones turned his attention back to me.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know Willie. White dude likes the darker things in life. He used to hang out here. Even sat at this table once or twice. They say he got a wicked temper, but he was calm around black peoples. What you wanna know about him?”

“Anything I can,” I said. “I mean, this Willie tried to slaughter me an’ I ain’t nevah even met the boy.”

Jones looked at me—hard. His smiling dolphin lips seemed to be frowning also.

“Why come to me?”

“You the man.”

I could have died at that table never knowing what happened to my father after he went down to Chile. No one had notified us of his death and I’d made a promise to my mother before she died.

While I was having these final thoughts, Eddie Jones came to a decision.

“Willie killed a bus driver that disrespected him,” the gangster informed me. “But when they brought him to trial the judge said he was what they call chemically insane. His aunt worked for these rich white people and they send him off to the Sunset Sanatorium. Doctors give him some pills an’ say he’s cured and can go home, only he likes it there so takes a job as a orderly. It was a good gig until they figured out that he was sellin’ prescription drugs from their medicine cabinet and buyin’ recreational drugs for the wealthy clients they had.”

At the end of this speech he shrugged and gazed into my eyes.

I silently nixed the thought of asking about Fell because, as far as I knew, the body hadn’t been discovered yet.

“Thank you, Mr. Jones,” I said.

This response surprised him.

“You don’t wanna know nuthin’ else?”

“No. Why?”

“I’on’t know. I thought maybe you heard that Willie was workin’ for me when he was up at the loony bin.”

“Did you send him down to New York to kill me?” I asked.

“No.”

“I just wanted to hear a little about the man tried to kill me. If you don’t have anything to do with that, then I don’t have any more questions.”

Big Mouth’s stare was interminable. He was the master of his world because he paid attention to every detail.

“What you thinka Brenda?” he asked at last. “You know, I’m gonna get her a recordin’ contract.”

“She’s a beautiful woman but . . .”

“But what?”

I stood up.

“But,” I said, “you got a soul singer on your center stage and all the young muscle outside studyin’ how to throw rhymes. And you know the only dis worse than disrespect is the disconnect.”

Big Mouth frowned at me, but I was already moving away.

Ê€„