Down the River unto the Sea

30

I know I slept because all night long I heard that unnamed prisoner threaten to rape and murder my wife and child. I felt the dank coldness and the crawling, hairy legs of insects over my skin. Men cried out in pain and madness, and there was the continual sound of tramping feet: men pacing in cells only two and a half steps in length.

None of this could have been real because, even though I was in an underground cell, I was not anywhere near the sounds of suffering. There were no rats keening for love or blood, or footsteps destined for nowhere.

I would have done better staying awake and planning my next move.

I woke up exhausted, with no appetite and little hope. But I knew what I had to do next. I knew where to go and how to get there.

My first destination was Ray Ray Wanamaker and Company on the south side of Central Park at 11:45 a.m.

Ray Ray’s brother, Brill Wanamaker, was a bus driver for the city of New York. He worked hard and had many commendations from the city, his union, and private commuter organizations that judge public transportation and those who deliver it.

Brill was a bastion of good, but his brother, Ray Ray, was just bad. His first stint in prison was for drug dealing. His second conviction was for attempted murder, and his final period of incarceration was for stealing an ambulance; no one, not even Ray Ray, it seemed, could figure out why he stole that emergency vehicle. When he was in for the third time, Brill decided to save him. He bought a fleet of five defunct buses and worked diligently rebuilding them while Ray Ray languished in Attica.

Upon the career criminal’s release, his brother presented him with a ready-made business that would ferry family and loved ones directly to the prisons where their blood, kinfolk, and friends were interned.

Love is a powerful tool. I believe that Ray Ray rehabilitated not because he had a good-paying business but because of the idea that his brother worked all those years just for him.

Ray Ray got a license to drive a bus, hired a staff of mainly ex-cons, and worked seven days a week transporting spouses, family members, and other lovers to see their unlucky kinsmen for a minimal price.

I took off my fake facial hair, donned a yellow hoodie, and made my way to the makeshift bus stop that the NYPD had been ordered to let operate so as not to incur political rancor from proponents for prisoner rights.

Most of Ray Ray’s clients, to most prisons, were women and children, mothers and now and then a brother or father. But Bedford Hills Correctional Facility was the only maximum-security female prison in the New York penal system. So there were a good number of husbands and boyfriends sprinkled in among mothers, grandmothers, grown daughters, and children. When I climbed up into the entry well of the old-time bus I had my $17.50 in hand, ready to pay and ride in relative anonymity.

“Joe?” the driver said.

“Lenny.”

“You got somebody at Bedford?”

“Private now. There’s someone I need to talk to.”

“You lucky Ray Ray don’t drive this run,” Lenny the Lookout said. He was a skinny white guy with dirty blond hair and skin something like an albino crocodile hide.

“Why’s that?”

“ ’Cause you busted his ass more than any other cop. He told me that you could never get on this bus.”

“And?”

“I won’t tell if you won’t. That’ll be seventeen-fifty.”

“You goin’ ta see ya wife?” a plump black woman with a beautiful face asked me. She had the window seat and I the aisle.

“A friend of a friend. He can’t be seen up there and so I deliver the message.”

“Conjugal visit?”

“I don’t think my friend would appreciate that.”

“He don’t have to know,” the brown-faced Aphrodite explained. “I mean if her man can’t come up and give her what she needs he should be happy he got a friend that’a do that for him.”

“If he could be happy about that, then he wouldn’t be in so much trouble that he can’t be seen.”

“He don’t have to know,” she said again.

“Leonard Pillar,” I said, extending a hand.

“Zenobia Price,” she replied, accepting the proffered hand. “I been up to see my sister’s husband in Ossining five times. She in jail for the same robbery up here.”

“What would you do if your man came up to service your sister?”

She thought a moment and then grinned. The gap-toothed smile reminded me that the letter from Minnesota had re-sexualized me.

“I’d cut off his dick, take Athena’s kids, and move to Lake Tahoe — the Nevada side, where I could deal cards for a livin’.”

Before we got off the bus Zenobia gave me her phone number and I gave her one that might seem like it was connected to me.

Bedford Hills Correctional Facility was a group of old brick buildings separated from the world by high wire fences and enough razor wire to protect Fort Knox.

I let Zenobia enter before me because I didn’t want her to hear my real name. I lied about who I was going to see and my name because I wanted to linger someplace with Zenobia Price. I wanted to smell her sweat, but I knew that I had to hold back some or soon I’d be in some deconsecrated crypt, stacked with strangers and eaten by rats.

“Name?” the front-gate lookout asked. Even though she was sitting, I could see that she was tall; her skin, white like aged ivory. The sentry did not smile within the confines of the prison, but she didn’t seem dour.

“Joe Oliver.”

“Inmate you’re coming to see including her number and the number we gave allowing your visit.”

“Lauren Bachnell.”

The officer, who had not been looking at me, raised her head.

“There is no inmate here with that name.”

“Not an inmate,” I said. “The assistant warden.”

“And who are you?”

“I already told you that.”

The sentry was confused. The words I gave her didn’t have a corollary in her rule book.

“Step to the side,” she said to me. “Mary! This man needs assistance,” she called to another woman sitting behind a metal desk maybe fifteen feet away.

Mary had broad shoulders, and when she stood up I had the feeling of being faced by a man. She was very upset to have to deal with hoi polloi like me. I imagined she was once the custodian on duty for visitation and now she had risen to a more supervisorial rank.

“Yes?” she said to me. Rather than calling her a black woman, I would have used the descriptor caramel-buttercream. Together her fists would have been the size of my head, and I had no doubt she was close to using those hams on my jaw.

“My name is Joe Oliver and I’m here to see Lauren Bachnell.”

“Assistant Warden Bachnell has a secretary and a phone.”

“And yet here I stand, talking to you.”

“I can’t help you.”

“I’ll tell Lauren that when I call from the phone booth outside.”

Mary didn’t like me. Most people don’t. I push them and then make them do things that insult their sense of independence. Since my own stint in prison I especially enjoyed making prison guards into pretzels.

“What’s your name again?” the woman named after our savior’s mother asked.

I told her.

“Wait over there,” she ordered, waving at a battered pine bench made for no more than two.

Sitting there I wondered about my life up until that moment. Those many years I had progressed steadily but always on the wrong path. As a lone-wolf cop and a resentful PI I was spry of step but blindered.

It occurred to me that my whole life had been organized around the guiding principle of being completely in charge of whatever I did. Gladstone understood this; that’s why he helped me become a PI.

The problem was that no man is an island; no man can control his fate. No woman either, or gnat or redwood tree.

There I was at a women’s prison, looking for answers I didn’t want, propelled by forces I could not control. For some reason this revelation made me smile. It was as if a great weight had been taken from me. The question was no longer if I might fail but when.

“Mr. Oliver?”

I looked up to see Mary and a smaller woman who had bronze-red skin. Mary’s uniform was dark blue and imposing, where the smaller guard’s costume consisted of a tan blouse and black trousers. She wore a belt that had a truncheon and pepper spray hanging from one side and a walkie-talkie attached to the other.

“Yes, Mary?” I said.

She frowned, then glowered, then said, “The assistant warden will see you. Riatta will show you the way.”

The short guard walked me to an iron gate, opened the door with a keypad combination, and then led me down a long brick hallway that had no doors. We came to another door that needed deciphering and then crossed a grassy courtyard where three prisoners were doing gardening work.

The inmates wore gray uniforms that, for the most part, hid their figures. They looked at me with interests that ranged from come hither to stay away.

The guard named Riatta did not speak to me or anyone else on our journey. We passed maybe eighteen prisoners, three women guards, and two men. Finally we came to a door that had both a sentinel and an electronic lock. Riatta passed both tests and then shepherded me through and to a gray-green elevator door.

When we got there the door opened, revealing a chamber that no more than three bodies might inhabit.

“Get in,” were Riatta’s first and last words to me.

I experienced a sudden pang of fear. I was no longer in New York City, but for all I knew there was a warrant out on me for murder, and here I was in a state prison.

The door closed and a motor hummed. The chamber moved at a pace that was so slow I didn’t feel it. Two minutes later the door slid open and there before me stood a familiar face.

“Hello, your majesty,” she said.

Lauren Bachnell had been a green recruit in the halcyon days of my police career. Her hair could be called either red or blond, and her gait was graceful if not quite feminine. She was tall for a woman, her face was broad, and her skin as pale as any Scandinavian’s.

Her body, in a uniform-like dark blue pants suit, was a bit wider than when I last saw her, but I was not fooled. I had seen her lay low an angel-dusted six-foot man with one punch.

“I’m just a civilian now,” I said.

She turned with military precision and I followed.

We went into an office that had large barred windows set within three of its walls. The desk was pale green, constructed from plastic of some sort. There was a computer on a side table and a blue blotter with not even a pencil in sight. Laur — that’s what I called iher when we worked together — had always been inordinately neat, maybe even a little obsessive.

She sat behind the desk and I took the hot seat across from her.

She gave me a big smile.

“What brings you out here, civilian?” she asked.

“Looking for a woman.”

“You always were.”

“Work,” I said.

Lauren liked me. I never saved her life or even taught her very much, but I treated her like a partner, and not all men did that on the force in our day — today either.

“Name?” she said.

“Lana Ruiz.”

Lauren cocked her head to the side like she used to when we were partners and my voice modulated when talking on the phone to a lover or at least a potential lover.

“No,” I said to her unspoken question. “She has information about something that I need for a job.”

“What?”

“Believe me, darling, you don’t want to know.”

Lauren let a beat or two pass and then reached into a drawer, from which she extracted a phone receiver. Beyond my line of sight she entered a few digits and then said, “Have Lana Ruiz brought to my meeting cell.”

She put the phone away and considered me.

I honestly had no idea what she was thinking. Even though I love the company of women, I can’t claim to understand them very well.

“My husband left me over you,” she said after quite some time of silence.

“Say what?”

“He said that every time I came off a shift with you I was all sexy and did things that I never had before. He said he didn’t realize it at the time, but after you and I were reassigned to new partners he said I hardly even touched him and when I did there was no feeling to it.”

“Is that true?” I asked.

“You made me realize something about myself, Joe.”

“What’s that, Laur?”

“Well.” She hesitated. “It’s like this. I’m definitely a heterosexual woman. I like men’s parts and how they use them. But the world that men imagine themselves living in has nothing to do with the world I know. Their football games and physical violence are just stupid to me. And even though you were one of those men, when we were together in that cruiser I could imagine a life in a world maybe a hundred years from now where my ideas and some man’s might be the same.”

Our eyes met and the phone sounded. Lauren picked up the receiver, listened, and then put the phone away.

“Get in the elevator and it will take you to Lana. When you’re through, knock on the door and the guards will take you back to clearance.”

“What about what you were telling me?” I asked.

“That was then,” she explained.

“And this is now,” I argued.

“My new husband has given me a daughter,” she said with a friendly look on her wide features. “And as many times as I imagined you when I was with George, I’d never upset Cynthia’s applecart.”

I nodded and stood.

“No one will be watching or listening in on you and Lana,” Lauren assured me.

Moving as slowly as it did, I couldn’t tell if the lift was taking me up or down. But when the door opened I found myself facing a riveted metal portal guarded by two women, both of whom were equipped with sidearms and batons. One was brown and the other near black.

“You here for Ruiz?” the darker-skinned guard asked.

“Yes.”

The questioner’s partner unlocked the metal door and pulled it open. I walked through into a room similar to Lauren’s “meeting cell.” The only furniture was a solitary table and two chairs.

A young woman in a gray uniform was looking out the barred window, over the tops of trees.

She turned, saw me, and frowned.

“What is this?” she asked.

“My name is Joe Oliver,” I said. “I’m a private detective investigating the conviction of A Free Man.”

“You think they could kill him two times?”

“I’m trying to prove that Detectives Valence and Pratt had targeted the Blood Brothers of Broadway and finally got killed trying to bushwhack Mr. Man.”

Lana was five five with dark brown skin and hair that was straight and coarse due to hard water and substandard hair products. She was handsome the way beautiful women get after they pass the age of forty. But she was a young woman, in her late twenties, aged by prison and a life that charged more than it gave back.

“Come have a seat,” I offered.

She sneered and then wondered, finally taking one of the battered wood chairs at the sad and slender table.

Sitting down across from her, I noticed that she’d bitten her nails. She saw what I did and put her hands in her lap.

“Manny,” she said. It might have been a mantra. “How did you get here to me?”

“I got your name from a court document,” I said. “But before I came here I met with Lamont Charles. He sent me to see Miranda Goya and she pointed the way to a guy named Theodore.”

“Who?”

“Burns.”

“Oh.” A twinge of sadness crossed her features. “That kid was a sad case. How is he?”

“So high he could peek into heaven.”

The phrase brought a smile to her face. She sat back in the chair and assessed me.

“What you want?”

“Can you give me anything that might put a bright light on what Valence and Pratt were up to?”

“Not if I evah wanna see my little girl again.”

“Um...”

“Cecilia,” Lana said in a rolling Spanish lilt. “She’s four now and with my mother. Yollo Valence told Billy Makepeace that if I stayed quiet I’d get outta here before she gets to high school.”

“Valence is dead.”

“Yeah, but him an’ Anton had connections that want all that shit they did kept quiet.”

“Can you tell me who?”

“I don’t know no names, but even if I did I wouldn’t be sayin’ ’em.”

“Who’s this Billy Makepeace?”

“A cop I was bangin’.”

“He was your lover?”

Lana smiled at me.

“If it was nothing, then why would he help you with a dangerous man like Valence?”

“He couldn’t come with a condom on and sometimes we’d get a little high so maybe I’d let him.”

“And then came Cecilia.”

“Manny didn’t want me seein’ no cop, but I needed things that Billy wanted to give me. He paid my rent half the time and fooled himself to think he was in love with me. After I had the baby he had the test done and he didn’t want his daughter’s mother killed.”

“He knew about what Valence and Pratt were doing?”

“Everybody knew,” she said, as disgusted with the human race as Laur had been with men.

“You think he’d consider making some kind of testimony about that?”

“Would you?” she sneered.

It was such a good question that I fell out of my role as investigator for a moment or two. In order to be a cop, a good cop, you have to be ready to put your life on the line at any moment. Most cops had families and futures to think about. They acted as if those who broke the law had put themselves in jeopardy. But that wasn’t the case with me. Melquarth could tell that; so could my daughter.

“They don’t have no cameras in here,” Lana said.

“The assistant warden told me.”

“You wanna do it sittin’ in that chair?”

The question on my face made her smile. She stood up, sat on the table, and spread her trousered legs.

“We could do it like this if you want?”

“I’m old enough to be your father,” I argued in spite of the sweat at the back of my neck.

“You could be my baby daddy too.”

“What about Billy?”

“He ain’t here.”

“I don’t have a condom.”

“They got this thing called the Family Centered Program at Bedford Hills. If I get pregnant I get nine months’ care and then get to spend at least a year with my baby. Cecilia need a little brother or sister. After that I be out in less than two years.

“Billy’s marriage went dry,” Lana coaxed. “He cain’t say nuthin’ ’bout me gettin’ laid. Shit. Do you know what it’s like up in here?”

I certainly did. My breath came funny and I was certainly aroused. But the thought of Aja kept my zipper up. I was old enough to be Lana’s father — and I would act the part. I took seven hundred dollars of Augustine Antrobus’s money and handed it to the young woman.

“I have a daughter,” I said in answer to the confused frown on the Blood Sister’s face. “I love her more than this life or the next.”

“We could do somethin’ else if you want.”

“How about telling me how to get to Billy Makepeace.”