The Long Fall

52

I took Twill by his right wrist and dragged him away from the street fair like an angry nanny might do with a naughty five-year-old. We didn’t stop moving for six blocks.

“Dad. Dad!”

I realized that my mind had been racing ahead without me.

“What?”

“What’s wrong with your foot?”

“My what?”

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“You’re limping.”

His words, it seemed, brought the pain back into my ankle.

We were standing on the western sidewalk of the Natural History Museum. Twill led me to a bench there.

Willie Sanderson was on my mind. Where was he?

Who would the monster kill next?

“Dad?”

“You don’t have to worry about Mardi’s father anymore,” I said. “I know what he did to her and I’ll take care of him. But you should have come to me, son. You should always come to me when you have a problem.”

“Mardi didn’t want anybody to know.”

“There’s no secrets between us, Twill. I would no more betray that girl than you would. Don’t you know that?”

“I guess.”

“And what kind of fool are you, planning to walk up to somebody and shoot him in broad daylight in front of a thousand people?”

“How’d you know I planned to shoot him?”

“Don’t you think I know your hiding places, boy? And I’d have to be blind not to see what was goin’ on with that girl. What I couldn’t see was how making yourself a martyr in front of a street full of people was going to help.”

“No, man,” he said to me as if I were one of his school friends. “I had this.” He pulled the fabric hat from his head. In his hand the woolen skullcap opened into a ski mask. “That way nobody could see my face and . . .”

Twill stood up and pulled the sweatshirt-hoodie up over his head. Underneath he was wearing an ugly but bright orange-red Hawaiian shirt festooned with images of pelicans and pineapples.

My irrepressible son grinned.

“I woulda walked away with the gun at my side and then pulled off the hoodie in an alley two blocks away. Then I’da made it into Central Park, where there’s a rock I’d put the gun under.”

It wasn’t a half-bad plan. You’d have to be focused to pull it off, but Twill never had an attention deficit.

“Listen, son,” I said in spite of how impressed I was. “You’re smart and fearless. But you don’t know everything. That man deserves anything he gets but not by you taking the law in your own hands. Killing is wrong and I don’t want you involved with anything like that.” Sometimes I marvel at the simplicity of communication between people who share closeness. I was raised on the Hegelian dialectic, but there is no love in that language.

“That’s why you ran out there after me?” Twill asked, but I felt that there was another question on his mind.

“I’d die to protect you,” I replied to the unspoken interrogative.

Twill sat there on the public bench, staring into my eyes. I have rarely felt closer to another human being.

After a moment he nodded.

“I’m sorry, Pops,” he said.

I held out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Grab a cab home and put the pistol in my office, in the desk.”

“All right. But put that away. I got my own money.”

It was going to be a long haul making sure that my son survived his own dark brilliance.

AFTER TWILL WAS GONE I caught a taxi of my own. I gave the Jamaican driver an address near Gracie Mansion and sat back. Now that Sanderson was free I thought I might be able to leverage some information out of BH. I closed my eyes and drifted for a minute or two. My telephone let out a loud bleep, telling me that it was nearing the end of its power.

I nodded a bit more and the hyenas began to yip.

“What?” I said into the invisible mouthpiece.

“We can’t find Sanderson,” Kitteridge said.

“What were the guards doing while he was escaping?”

“Knocked both of them out before they ever even knew he was there. Hit ’em in the head with some kind of bludgeon. I’m impressed that you laid him low when he was at full power.”

“I’m just glad he didn’t kill me.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Willie anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because once we catch him, and I promise you we will catch him, we’ve got all we need to send him to prison for life—or death.”

“What do you have?”

My phone made another bleeping sound, telling me that the juice was almost gone.

“That’s police business, LT.”

“Come on, man. Yesterday you were telling me I was going to prison over Sanderson.”

“Somebody had his lawyer call and tell us that Sanderson was trying to shake down hi«€€1ems wife. Said that Sanderson had admitted to killing Brown and Tork. He also said that he’d called in a debt to make a hit on a Theodore Nilson in prison and that he murdered a guy named Norman Fell in Albany. This guy Fell is the one who said he was Ambrose Thurman.”

Once again my heart was racing. Once again the phone bleeped.

“Was the guy who the lawyer was calling for Bryant Hull?” I asked.

Silence.

“Carson!”

“What do you know about this, LT?”

“Did you tell Sanderson about the charges?”

“Why do you care?”

That was the moment my battery chose to die. There was a clicking sound and then deadness.

I was thinking about Hannah’s mother. If Sanderson thought that his Bunny had betrayed him he’d go straight for her.

“Driver.”

“Yeah, mon?”

“I need to use your phone.”

“The driver’s phone is not for public use,” he said. He probably said the same words a dozen times a day.

“This is an emergency.”

“It always is.”

“But this is a case of life and death.”

“There’s a phone booth on the corner. I can stop if you want me to.”

There was no time for the pay phone, and if I got in a fight with the driver I would lose precious minutes. The only thing I could do was to keep on moving.

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars, and you can make the call yourself.”

“Keep your money, brothah. We’ll be where you’re goin’ in a minute.”

My father would have applauded such an upstanding working-class individual. I wonder what he would have thought of me.

THE FRONT GATE’S BUZZER was going when I got there. I found out later that when the home-emergency button is pushed, the gate stays open for the cops to come in.

My adrenaline supply was plentiful that day. I made it up the stone stairway with no difficulty. The door was connected to the security system, too.

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Two of the maids were unconscious on the floor. A big black man in a dark cranberry suit looked like he was dead at the foot of the bouquet table. And Willie Sanderson was leaning over a woman’s body, choking her, halfway up to the second floor.

Once again I was in motion. After three staggery bounds I leaped upon the killer’s back and rained down fists upon his head and shoulders.

At first it felt as if I’d jumped on the back of one of Rodin’s bronze masterpieces. Willie’s body didn’t even sag under the weight. But the accumulation of blows finally got to him. He stood up, throwing me off with the motion. I thought that he was going to come after me but instead he wobbled and then sat down, his back against the railing.

He was staring at me with disbelief on his face. I agreed with him. It made no sense that I could have beaten him even one time.

Sanderson closed his eyes as a thick trickle of blood snaked out from his left nostril.

I looked over at the body of Hannah Hull and made a sound that I didn’t know lived inside me.

An overpowering exhaustion spread out from my chest all the way to my fingers and toes. The yellow bird fluttered up and landed between Hannah’s lifeless form and her killer. My last conscious thought was that if Willie got up I was a dead man.

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