Down the River unto the Sea

2

“Are you thinking about prison again, Daddy?”

She was standing at the door to my office. Five nine and black like the Spanish Madonna, she had my eyes. Though worried about my state of mind, she still smiled. Aja wasn’t a somber adolescent. She was an ex-cheerleader and science student, pretty enough not to need a regular boyfriend and helpful enough that other teenage girls with boyfriends knew she was the better catch.

Her black skirt was too short and the coral blouse too revealing, but I was so grateful to have her in my life again that I picked my battles with great care.

Monica, my ex-wife, spent years trying to keep us apart. She took me to court to try to get a judgment against my ever seeing Aja-Denise and then sued me for failing to pay child support when she had drained my accounts and I didn’t have two nickels to my name.

It wasn’t until she was fourteen that Aja forced her mother to let her stay with me on a regular basis. And now that she was seventeen she said that either she worked in my office or she’d tell any judge who would listen that Monica’s new husband, Coleman Tesserat, would walk in on her when she was in the shower.

“What?” I said to my child.

“When you look out the window like that you’re almost always thinking about jail.”

“They broke me in there, darling.”

“You don’t look broke to me.” It was something I said to her one morning when she was a little girl trying to get out of going to school.

“What’s that you got?” I asked, gesturing at the bundle in her hand.

“The mail.”

“I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t. You never go through it until the bills are all late. I don’t know why you won’t let me put your bank account online so I could just pay them all myself.”

She was right; I kept thinking that some false evidence would come in the mail and send me back to that roach-infested cell.

“I have to go out on that Acres job,” I explained.

“Take it with you and go through it while you wait. You said that ninety-nine percent of the time you’re just sitting in your car with nothing to do.”

She held out the bundle and stared into my eyes. There was no mistaking that Aja-Denise had fought with her mother because she knew I needed her.

I reached out for the package and she grinned.

“Uncle Glad called,” she said when I was sifting through the bills, junk mail, and various requests from clients, courts, and, of course, my ex-wife. There was also a small pink envelope addressed by an ornate hand and postmarked in Minnesota.

“Oh?” I said. “What did Gladstone have to say?”

“Him an’ Lehman, War Man, and Mr. Lo, are playin’ cards down the street tonight.”

“That’s Jesse Warren,” I said, “not War Man.”

“He told me to call him that.”

I didn’t like Gladstone’s friends very much, but he kept them away from the office most of the time. And I owed Glad; he had saved my ass more than once since the arrest.

Getting me put in solitary rescued me from becoming a murderer, and then later, when I couldn’t raise enough money for rent and child support, he came up with enough cash for me to start the King Detective Service. He even guided the first few clients my way.

But the best thing Gladstone Palmer ever did for me was to broker my severance with the NYPD. I lost my retirement and benefits except for medical insurance for Monica and my daughter. Magically, there was no blemish on my record either.

For the past week or so I’d been reading the nearly hundred-year-old novel All Quiet on the Western Front. There was a character in there who reminded me of Glad; Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky. Kat could find a banquet in a graveyard, a beautiful woman in a bombed-out building. When the rest of the German army was starving, Kat would show up to his squad with a cooked goose, ripe cheese, and a few bottles of red wine.

You couldn’t question a friend like Kat or Glad.

“I told him you were on a job,” Aja said.

“You’re my angel.”

“He said he’d try to stop by before you left.”

The letter from the heartland intrigued me, but I decided to put off reading it.

“How’s your mother?” I asked.

“Fine. She’s writing you to give money for her and Tesserat to send me to Italy for this youth physics conference they’re having in Milan.”

“That sounds nice; like an honor.”

“There’s a hundred kids and only four from the U.S., but I don’t want to go. So you could tell her you’ll help but you won’t ever have to pay.”

“Why don’t you want to go?”

“Reverend Hall is having a special school in this Bronx church where good science students teach at-risk kids how scientists do experiments.”

“You know you really have to start doing some bad things,” I said with a little too much gravitas in my tone.

“Why?” Aja asked. She was really worried.

“Because as a father I have to be able to help you at least some of the time. With great grades, a good heart, and the way you bully me over the mail I feel like I have nothing to offer.”

“But you did do something for me, Daddy.”

“What? Buy you a Happy Meal or a hot dog?”

“You taught me to love reading.”

“But you never read except for homework, and you complain about that.”

“But I remember spending those weekends with you when I was little. Sometimes you’d read to me all morning, and I just know that I’ll do that when I have a little girl.”

“There you go again,” I said, mostly covering the tears in my voice. “Being so good that it makes me feel useless. Maybe I should start punishing you every time you get something right.”

Aja knew when the conversation was over. She shook her head at me and turned. She walked from the room and I was, for a brief moment, relieved of the fall from grace foisted upon me by somebody in the NYPD.

Before I could turn to the pink envelope from the Midwest, Aja returned with a big brown envelope in her hands.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “Uncle Glad left this for you.”

She handed me the package and turned away before I could tease her more about her perfections.