Down the River unto the Sea

10

It wasn’t yet 7:00 a.m. when I climbed the concrete stairs to the raised pedestrian walkway across the Brooklyn Bridge.

There was a chill in the morning air, but I had my windbreaker on, a sweater beneath that. Pedestrian traffic was still pretty light at that time of day and the breezes can get a little stiff. The combination of solitude and cold somehow imparted the feeling of freedom; so much so that I was on the brink of laughter. I knew these emotions indicated an instability of mind, but I didn’t care. A man can live his whole life following the rules set down by happenstance and the cash-coated bait of security-cosseted morality; an entire lifetime and in the end he wouldn’t have done one thing to be proud of.

It was a forty-nine-minute walk from Montague Street to Manhattan. Once in the rich man’s borough I went past city hall all the way to the West Side, where I turned left on Hudson.

Three blocks down, there was a diner called Dinah’s across the street from Stonemason’s Rest Home.

“Mr. Oliver,” Dinah Hawkins said in greeting when I sat down at the counter. “I haven’t seen you in three months.”

“I usually go straight over, D. But today I wanted to stretch my legs and think.”

“You didn’t walk here all the way from Brooklyn, did you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s not good for your health to overdo, Mr. Oliver.”

Dinah was a good-size woman who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Well past sixty, she had biceps bigger than mine, and I was sure that she could work alongside most longshoremen with no great strain.

“It’s the only exercise I get,” I lied.

“You’re looking good enough without it.” Her Irish-green eyes sparkled, and I knew that she was what her father would have called a hellion when she was younger.

“Got any interesting cases?” she asked, putting a mug of black coffee at my station.

I discussed my job with certain people who had nothing to do with law enforcement. But when it came to my new cases I couldn’t be quiet enough.

“I had this public figure liked to do threesomes with T-girls,” I said.

“What’s that mean? Tiger girl?”

“I think the street term is chicks with dicks.”

The bell to the door behind me sounded. In the mirror I saw a young man wearing a suit designed for an older, and probably more successful, banker. The young man — he was somewhere in his mid-twenties — looked at us for a few moments, then walked over to stand at the cash register.

“Oh!” Dinah had rosy cheeks and a mouth that could become a perfect circle. “There was one of those lived in the apartment across the hall from me and Dan. Miss Figueroa we used to call her. She was the cleanest creature I ever knew. Dan was the one had to tell me she was a he. I swear I couldn’t tell at all.”

“How is Dan?” I asked.

Dinah beamed at me. “Thank you for askin’, Mr. Oliver. Him and me take a walk every evening along the Hudson. He tells me the same stories over and over and I love him more every time he does.”

“Excuse me,” the young/old white banker-boy said.

“He always remembers you,” Dinah continued, ignoring the young man. “He says, ‘How’s that nice colored boy helped Arnold?’ I know he shouldn’t say it that way, but he can’t remember to learn.”

“Excuse me,” said the banker.

“What do you want?” Dinah snapped.

“Two coffees with milk and sugar to go.”

“For the takeaway window you make a left out the door and then left again.” She looked at me, raising her eyebrows.

“But I’m late,” he said. “Just do this now and I’ll use the window after.”

“You’ll use the window now. There’s a big sign and I don’t like doin’ the takeaway.”

“That’s not a very people-oriented business practice,” he judged.

“Neither is knockin’ you upside the head, but I will do just that if you don’t move yer privileged ass.”

A flash of anger passed over the young man’s face. He glanced at me and I shook my head — ever so slightly. I’m pretty big and almost as strong as Dinah, so he took the hint and left, muttering wordless complaints.

“You didn’t have to bother yourself, Mr. Oliver,” Dinah said when he was gone. “I can take care of myself.”

“I wasn’t worried about you, girl. I just didn’t want to have to be a witness after you broke his nose and he called the police.” This was true.

Dinah laughed and we took a breath to find the thread of our conversation again.

“Have you seen my grandmother lately, D.?”

“She comes over for a smoke most afternoons unless it’s rainin’ or too cold. We go out back while Moira serves the late crowd.”

“How does she seem?”

“Wise as a prophet and crafty as a fox. She wishes that your uncle would come by.”

“He’s always working,” I said.

Uncle Rudolph was in Attica, imprisoned there for an insurance scam so complex that the prosecutors were never able to pin down the exact amount he’d embezzled.

“Oh well,” Dinah opined. “At least Brenda has you.”

“May I help you?” a good-figured blonde asked. She was standing behind the reception counter of the upscale retirement residence. I was liking her style.

In her forties and proud, she wore a green-and-pink-speckled silk blouse to accent a tight black skirt.

Some women just don’t get old.

“Joe Oliver,” I said. “I’m here to see my grandmother.”

“Does she work for one of the patients?” Blondie asked, as easy as if she were talking about the weather.

“No.” I was losing the edge of my attraction.

“Um...” She was really confused. “Does she work for the facility?”

“She’s a resident,” I said. “Brenda Naples. Room twenty-seven oh nine.”

For a moment the receptionist, whose name tag read THALIA, doubted me. But then she worked a little magic on the iPad registry.

“She is here,” Thalia said.

“Has been since before you,” I said, “and will be long after you have moved back to New Jersey.”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Oliver.”

“Me too,” I concurred. “But maybe not for the same reason.”

“Baby,” my grandmother said. I had knocked on the open door and then entered her room.

She stood up from a chair that was set at a height halfway between a regular seat and a barstool. Her dress was bright yellow and her skin the blackness of a night sky.

I kissed her lips because that’s what we’d always done.

“Sit on the bed, darlin’,” she said, waving toward the single-mattress cot that was the main purpose for her room.

She fell back into her carpeted wood chair, then momentarily raised her shoulders to prove how happy she was to see me.

“How’ve you been, Grandma?”

“Fine,” she said with a sneer. “That white man Roger Ferris keep askin’ me to go hear some music at Lincoln Center. I tell him every time that I will not go out on a date with a white man. I mean, if it was a double date and he had a white girlfriend and I had a black boy, then that would be okay.”

“What did he say to that?”

“That we didn’t have to kiss good night.” There was the hint of a smile in her scowl.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“He says that if there’s no kiss, then it wasn’t a real date. And that if I knew before we went that there wasn’t gonna be no lip action, then I wouldn’t have to think we were on a date.”

“That’s a pretty good argument, if you ask my opinion,” I said.

“No one askin’ you.”

“Roger Ferris. Isn’t he that guy who owns most of the silver in the ground in the world?”

“I wouldn’t know. The only ground people up in here have is in the cemetery, waitin’ for the little we got left on our bones.”

“How’s our other friends?” I asked.

“Stop it, King. You and I both know that you not here at no eight thirty in the mornin’ to make small talk.”

I do love my grandmother. The milestone of ninety years was well behind her, but she read the Daily News every morning and did all my sewing. She was a shade under five feet tall and hadn’t brought the scale up past a hundred pounds in years, but she was a power to reckon with.

Stonemason’s was one of the most exclusive retirement/nursing homes in the world, but something about my grandfather’s career as a fireman got him and her put in a benefits clause that I had never seen.

Brenda Naples still walked, smoked, and talked back. It’s an even bet that she’ll outlive me.

“What is it, King?” she asked.

I told her about the letter from Beatrice Summers and the danger of me following down that evidence.

She concentrated with her eyes and ears, and maybe even by scent.

“You got to do it, baby,” she said when I was through. “All a man got is his sense of what’s right and what’s not. If you know you been done wrong and you know how to make it right, then you don’t have no other choice.” Her dialect veered back toward its Mississippi roots when she was being serious.

“I’ve always known,” I argued.

“But no one else ever gave you hope or a name,” Grandma countered. “And before you had more important work to do.”

“Detective work?”

“No, fool.” She snorted. “Aja-Denise. You had to see her become a young woman before you could take care of yourself. That’s just mother wit.”

I didn’t say anything because she had said it all.

“You wanna come have breakfast with me in the commissary?” she asked.

“Sure.”