Down the River unto the Sea

21

I drove home, parked the car in the small underground lot that Kristoff Hale has for his tenants, and then once again walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

That was midday and so there was a good deal of foot traffic. The path is divided — on one side pedestrians ruled and on the other bicycles whizzed past. There isn’t enough room for both and even if there was, tourists don’t really understand. They’re often standing in the bike path, posing for pictures or taking in the sights. And then there are those privileged individuals who feel that they have just as much right to be in the bicycle lanes as the bikes do.

I stick to the side of the path marked for pedestrians, refusing to move out of the way of couples and groups who don’t get or respect the rules. I like the rules; following them proves to me that I’m a civilized man.

I turned left on Broadway and hoofed it down into the heart of the Financial District, what they call Wall Street. I came upon a huge steel, glass, and blue marble building owned by Citizens Bank of Eastern Europe, whoever they might be.

It was a bustling building populated by a broad swath of cultures sporting everything from twig-littered dreadlocks to pinstripe blue silk. There were eleven banks of elevators. Number nine was dedicated to Suliman Investments between floors forty-four and fifty-eight.

“May I help you?” a tall black guard in a brass-colored uniform asked me.

Behind him stood two other guards, one white and the other descended from Asia. I wondered if they sent out guards the same color of people they might have to refuse entrée.

“Joe Oliver for Jocelyn Bryor,” I announced.

“Do you have an appointment?”

He was a young man who it seemed was prone to jump to conclusions. He had already decided that I would be turned away and asked the question to cut to that eventuality.

“Joe Oliver for Jocelyn Bryor,” I repeated.

“I asked you a question,” the hall guard — his name tag read FORTHMAN — said.

“I didn’t come here to answer your questions, son. I came here to see Ms. Bryor. It’s your job to call her assistant and announce me.”

“I’m not your son.”

“But you are their bitch.” I was ready for a fight. Those residents of Aramaya had made me mad at God and all his, or her, creation.

“What?” Forthman said in a threatening tone.

The Asian sentry, an older man, read Forthman’s shoulders and hurried toward us.

“What’s the problem here?” he asked. He had a slight English accent. At least this surprised me.

“I asked him if he had an appointment,” the young black man blamed.

“I’m here to see Jocelyn Bryor,” I said to the new player.

“But he don’t have no appointment.”

The Asian man looked at me, into my eyes, and asked, “What is your name, sir?”

“Joe Oliver. Some people call me King.”

“Wait here, sir,” the older sentinel asserted gently.

“But, Chin—,” Forthman managed to say.

“I’ll take care of this, Robert” was Chin’s reply.

Chin went to a standup desk anchored to the wall and pulled a phone from behind the plain facade.

Robert Forthman was staring daggers at me so I made a gesture with both hands, welcoming him to make manifest his anger.

He clenched his fists and I smiled. He took a step forward and the white guard moved up behind Forthman and uttered something. Forthman hesitated and the white man said something else. With a violent turn, the tall black uniform did a complete one-eighty and walked down the aisle of elevators to and through a doorway on the opposite end.

“Ms. Bryor will see you,” Chin said before Forthman was gone.

The white guard gestured for me and I went to stand next to a lift door.

He pushed a button and said, “That kid’s a light heavyweight.”

“That all? I thought he might’a had a gun.”

The elevator door opened and I went through.

The white guy leaned in after me, held a card in front of a sensor plate, and pressed the button for floor fifty-seven.

The car floated up at a respectable speed. I wondered about my reception. Gladstone told me about Bryor quitting the force and moving to the private sector. I had reason to hate that woman. This was why I was willing to pick a fight with a boxer.

The doors to the onyx-and-gold elevator car opened onto what looked like a foyer to some grand East Hampton mansion.

A beautiful black girl in a very tasteful dress greeted me.

“Mr. Oliver?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She was tall and thin, probably athletic. Her dress was the pink of the inside of a deep-sea clamshell. The necklace she wore was beaded with light-blue sapphires and her shoes were the pale and red-brown of the fur that some forest creatures produce.

“Miss Bryor will see you now.”

“And your name is?”

The question caught her off guard but the smile didn’t falter.

“Excuse me,” she said. “My name is Norris, Lydia Norris.”

“Lead on, Ms. Norris.”

She took me down long wide halls that were carpeted and quiet. There were office doors that were mostly closed and very little foot traffic.

At the end of a cream-carpeted passage was a double doorway. Lydia pushed open the eight-foot-high, four-foot-wide doors and stood aside, gesturing for me to enter.

The office was wide and deep, with a curved window for the wall overlooking Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The carpet was dark brown and the oval desk was chiseled from a stone much like white slate.

There was a dark blue sofa with no back to the left. Jocelyn was sitting there wearing an emerald ensemble that might have been either a full-length dress or a pants suit — though it was most reminiscent of the new gliding suits that modern daredevils used to fly from precipitous mountainsides.

She stood from the sofa to greet me. Like many a woman cop, she was pretty short. Her facial features were boxy, but even still she had the unexpected beauty of Isabella Rossellini.

“Joe,” she said with a guilty smile.

“Jocelyn.”

“Come sit with me.”

I approached her and we shook hands. We were ex-cops, so hugging was pretty much out of the question.

“It’s good to see you,” she said when we were seated.

“I’m actually surprised that you let me up here.”

“Why would you say that?”

“The way you handled my investigation I figured you had me for some kinda masher deserved to be thrown under the jail.”

Her squarish, delicate face expressed pain. She looked away at her stone desk and then out into the sky.

“I am very sorry for what I did to you, Joe,” she said, bringing those wandering, lustrous brown eyes back to me. “The only reason I never called was because I didn’t think I deserved asking your forgiveness.”

“Uh...” I was at a loss for words to say the least, stupefied by the claim and its apparent honesty.

I had hated this woman for showing my wife the video of me and Nathali/Beatrice. I came here to confront her for participating in my frame. I was willing to fight the guy downstairs because I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, strike her.

“What?” she asked. “You thought I had something to do with what they did to you?”

“You... you showed that video to my wife,” I said. “She left me in Rikers when we had money for bail.”

Jocelyn was near my age, and I was slowly being convinced of her beauty. It was like the dawn of a morning after the death of a beloved king. Everything was beautiful but salted with the sorrow of his passing.

“I’m sorry for that too,” she said. “I believed that you’d raped that woman at the time. But even if it was true, there was no reason to show Monica that tape. Everything I did concerning your case was wrong.”

“Did you set me up?”

Jocelyn gave no assent. She just gazed at me like a land-bound midwestern farmer seeing the sea for the first time.

“You’ve thought that for the last ten years?” she asked.

“And more.”

“I heard they had you in solitary for three months.”

I brushed two fingertips across my scar.

“To keep from gettin’ any more like this,” I said.

“When they told me where you were I was actually happy,” she admitted. “A man, a policeman using his authority to rape a woman the way everyone said you did; that man deserved to suffer.”

“Who said?”

“That woman who blamed you, my superior, Prosecutor Hines,” Jocelyn listed. “There was that video and papers waiting for you at the station.

“And then one day I heard that you’d been released. That the charges had been dropped and you were off the force.

“I went to the files and everything was gone. No tape, no statement, not even the report of your arrest. I tried to find Nathali Malcolm, but there was no record of her either.

“I went to every person I knew connected with the arrest, but no one told me anything. My old supervisor said to forget about it. She said that you had been fired with no pension and even the union was hands-off.

“That’s when I knew that you’d been set up. There was something you were into that made you a danger. They used me to go after you because they knew how I felt about cops and sexual misconduct. They knew I’d go after you with all my ability.

“I quit the force ten months later. When the precinct captain asked me why, I told him that I just couldn’t take the shit anymore.”

I believed her. I knew what she said was true. They had given my friend Gladstone the assignment. They had set up Beatrice so she couldn’t say no.

“Prosecutor Hines must have known something,” I said. “He might have pressed charges based on a lie, but when they asked him to drop the case... he must have known something.”

“Ben died seven years ago,” she said. “He’d moved back down to North Carolina and had a stroke.”

“And you were too ashamed to call me and tell me what they’d done?” I accused.

“No. No, Joe. I was sure that you knew who did it and why. I thought you kept quiet either because they paid you off or that they’d kill you if you said anything else.”

“Kill me?”

“I figured they put you in jail to let them finish you in there,” she agreed. “If you died there, nobody would ask questions. After all, you abused that woman hiding behind your shield. I thought you had made some kind of deal with whoever framed you and they let you slide with a dismissal.”

Her words sat me back on the backless couch. I put my left fist down on the leather cushion to keep from falling sideways.

“So you really think they were going to kill me and then they changed their minds?”

“That’s the only way it made sense,” she reasoned. “I mean, they had you, but obviously they didn’t want you in court. One reason I never came to you about it was that I thought that you had been made part of the deal, whatever that was. If I got involved they might have come after me.”

I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees. They were trying to kill me at first but then changed their minds. This rendition of my experience actually made sense. With a decent lawyer I had a good shot at getting the charges dismissed.

“Why are you here, Joe?” Jocelyn asked.

“I came to blame you for framing me,” I said. “That and to get the names of the people you worked with.”

“Why now? I mean, it’s over, right?”

“My daughter’s all grown up. Nobody needs me now.”

“So you’re just gonna get yourself killed?”

I hadn’t put it in those words, but she was right. Whoever set me up like that wouldn’t hesitate at murder.

“Have you ever heard of Adamo Cortez or Hugo Cumberland?” I asked the corporate security analyst.

There were three jets in the sky over New Jersey, circling Newark Airport. Next to them was Jocelyn Bryor’s beautiful face wondering about my question.

“What is this, Joe?” she asked.

“I need to find out who set me up.”

“Sounds like you already know.”

“Not so it makes any sense.”

We sat a minute more.

“My girls are eight and thirteen,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to do anything, to testify to anything. I just need to find out who did this to me. I got to know.”

Jocelyn took a deep breath and then said, “It was a man calling himself Adamo Cortez who brought Nathali Malcolm to me. He said that she’d been forced to have sex by you and was afraid for her life. He showed me the video.

“Five months later I was down at headquarters to meet with a psychiatrist over my increasing lack of interest in the job. I saw Cortez and approached him. He put me off and left. When I asked the woman he was talking to about where he went, she said he left the building but that his name wasn’t Cortez; it was Hugo Cumberland — a private specialist sometimes used by the department.”

“What kind of specialist?” I asked.

“Are you here to yoke me, Joe?”

“No. What kind of specialist?”

“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask.”

The air between me and Jocelyn was thick and soundless. She didn’t want to be talking to me but still felt a sense of duty. I didn’t want to know what I’d learned, but I couldn’t wipe it away.

“The woman didn’t tell you anything else?” I asked.

“No. But Adamo wasn’t at her office. He was sitting with a captain named Holder. I asked Holder’s assistant for Cumberland’s number, but she said that Cumberland was just a name he used and that his real name was Paul Convert.”

“Why she tell you that?”

“Girls can be chatty, Joe. And most of the time we don’t take men’s secrets so seriously.”

“He was a short guy with a mustache?” I asked. “Looked Puerto Rican?”

“That’s him.”

Walking north half a block on Broadway, I turned right on Exchange Place and had just crossed New Street on the way to Broad when two official-looking SUVs cut me off — back and front.

Four doors slid open and men in dark uniforms disgorged from the vehicles.

I considered going for my pistol, but when two more men jumped out, I gave up on that mode of self-defense. Instead I stood still with my hands a few inches from my sides. The men tackled me like I was a football dummy, took my gun, and clapped on restraints, hand and foot.

I saw a couple of shocked pedestrians before a black bag was put over my head.

The next thing I knew I was in the back of one of the SUVs. It was moving and I was not.