Down the River unto the Sea

17

When Aja was a baby I’d watch her sleep, sometimes for an hour or more. Her face changed expressions with whatever dream she was having or with anything shifting in the room or inside her. She made errant noises and reached out now and again.

Sleeping, it seemed to me, was an act of innocence. That’s why I stayed awake after almost murdering Exeter Barret. I knew that peaceful slumber was for babies, whereas only nightmares awaited a man like me.

Little X had provided corroboration of the intelligence Henri gleaned from his superiors. Not only was there a man in my downfall named Cumberland, but he dealt with heroin and his first name was Hugo.

If the name was an alias it was well chosen. It sounded like a real name, but then again it had a fancy quality that might be a shield.

I used Henri Tourneau’s passwords to get into the police and informant files of the NYPD. There was no Hugo Cumberland anywhere.

Google told me that there was a man of that name who had died more than twenty years before. He was a carpenter who had four children, one wife, and a house in Nyack. At the time of his death he had lived sixty-one years and his youngest child, a son who was twenty-three at the time of Hugo’s death, was named Adam.

Adamo Cortez and Hugo Cumberland. Albeit thin, it was the only shred I had to hold on to at 4:19 in the morning.

There were no CIs or cops with Adam’s name, but there was the record of an incident, fifteen years earlier; a shoot-out in East Harlem, a falling-out among dope dealers, and a man named Adam Cumberland was grazed on his left biceps. The investigating officers believed that Cumberland was an innocent bystander.

He filled out a witness report but disappeared before the inquest. If he was a police plant there was no record of him in the system.

It wouldn’t have been a lot of information even if I was still a police detective. I could go to the hospital or to the false address he put down in his statement. But all of that was over twenty years ago.

I stared at the screen and scrawled down the names. The last initial for both false names was C. Maybe it was the original Hugo Cumberland’s son.

My cell phone sounded after maybe an hour of searching for the scion of the dead carpenter.

“Hello?”

“Joe?”

“Hey, Effy. It’s five thirty. Don’t you sleep?”

“Don’t you?”

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked this to stop thinking about the tumble of names in my head.

“I thought you were never gonna ask me questions like that.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, “when I thought you were a working girl.”

“I still took your money.”

“At the old rate.”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. Don’t I sound it?”

“I was up worryin’ about you,” she explained. “You have never called me askin’ for friendship before now.”

“Thank you, honey, but I’m fine. I lost it there for a minute and I needed someone who understood to hear me out. So you can go to sleep now and I will call you for coffee one day soon.”

“Joe?”

“What?”

“Nuthin’,” she said.

Sitting there in the early hours before the sunrise I was grateful for Effy’s call. There was nowhere to go with Adam or Hugo right then, so I decided to pay attention to some other aspect of my humiliation and demolition.

I had turned off the burner phone Stuart Braun knew. I did this just in case he had resources that could locate an active number.

There were two people who knew the number and two messages.

The first was from Braun.

“Mr. Boll,” he said. “I went to the Liberté Café and you never showed. This is a very serious situation and I really need to speak to you and your clients. If you were to go public with your suspicions, many people would suffer.”

Especially you, I thought.

“Please call me and let me know when we can meet,” Braun said. Before disconnecting the call he paused a long minute, hoping I’d been listening and was just about to pick up.

The second message was from the devil.

“Hey, King,” Melquarth Frost said. “Just thought I’d call and tell you that I’m closing in on the name you asked me to get. I’ll tell you when I have something.”

I like detective novels. The dick is either smarter, braver, or just luckier than his nemeses. He, or even she, works pretty much alone, sticking out his jaw whenever there’s a blow coming. If he gets arrested that’s okay. If some pretty young thing needs sex, it’s probably not the right time for him, or her, just then.

The literary PI usually takes on one case at a time and he stays on the trail until it is solved, whether or not justice is done.

Sometimes I liked to pretend that I was a detective out of a book.

With this thought in mind I went back over the things I knew, details that might open an unexpected door. What might Tecumseh Fox think about Willa Portman? If I were Watson peering over Sherlock’s shoulder, what odd detail might he be considering?

Outside the window it was still dark, but the workers were on the street tramping off to jobs that would never earn enough to pay their bills.

And as I watched, the name Chester Murray floated to the surface.

Henri Tourneau’s access code revealed Chester’s long record with the NYPD. He’d been arrested for theft, pimping, assault, and even rape. He was on-again, off-again as a CI with various officers I didn’t know. I copied down the names in case they came up later.

The interesting thing about Chester’s file was that the arrest record ended about three weeks before my bust. Since then he’d been a witness in a variety of drug and prostitution cases.

He was a black man, what my daughter’s teachers would call African American, six three, and my age. He’d gone to public school until the age of fifteen and he was considered a predator by most of the detectives who had investigated or worked with him.

There was an open file on him about a woman, Henrietta Miller, who had gone missing nearly twenty years before.

If I wanted his address or number I’d have to come up with higher clearance than Henri had.

That was no problem.

I went upstairs to my apartment and spent another hour or so making notes on pink and blue sheets of paper. These I sorted into a leather folder that I put into a shoulder bag along with a silver flask of sour mash whiskey and a loaded .45 with an extra box of shells.

At 6:45 I boarded the first car of an uptown A train. It was already crowded with people from all classes commuting into Manhattan. Next to me sat a young black woman reading Journey to the East by Hesse. She was rapt in the language of the long-dead Nobel laureate.

In her early twenties, she was dressed for office work but not sleekly like a manager or VP. I figured she was a college student working as a receptionist or data entry clerk. Her profile was what I could only call friendly, so I said, “I tried The Glass Bead Game but couldn’t get through it.”

She looked up at me as if expecting to see someone else.

“What?”

“Magister Ludi,” I said.

“You read Hesse?”

“Journey to the East and an early one called Knulp.” I could see the question in her eyes so I added, “There was an accident this one time and I couldn’t read for months. I never really read very much before that, but once I could do it again it was like I couldn’t stop for the next five years. I still read but just not so much as before.”

“How did you end up reading somebody like Hesse?”

“Worked my way sideways from the existentialists.”

The look on her face was trying to deny my claims but unable to find a reason why.

“What?” I asked. “Don’t I look like I can read?”

“I don’t know,” she said, an authenticity in her tone. “You’re dressed like a janitor except for that leather bag. I guess you could be a professor.”

“Retired cop.”

“I expect cops to read Tom Clancy or something.”

“What got you reading Hesse?”

“I’m majoring in comp lit at Hunter. Our senior year we have to write, like, a thesis.”

I stuck out a hand and said, “Joe Oliver.”

“Kenya. Kenya Norman,” she said, reaching out too. “Are you trying to pick me up, Mr. Oliver?”

“No,” I said. And that was mostly true.