Down the River unto the Sea

34

It took an hour and a half to get to Pleasant Plains, Staten Island. I called on the walk over from the train station. Melquarth met me at the gate of his unholy home.

“How ya doin’?” he asked while shaking my hand.

It was a rhetorical question. My host expected a nod or maybe some noncommittal phrase, but instead I stood still, considering his words.

“What?” he asked.

“Tell me something, Mel.”

“What’s that?”

“I know why I’m here at your door. My world went crazy a dozen years ago and you are the only one crazy enough to help me through.”

“Okay.”

“You say that I was the only one ever, like that red bird you saw, to do what was right by you, but that feels like, I don’t know, a little weak.”

“For you it is, Joe.” It was the first time I could remember that he used my first name. “I mean, you weren’t raised as the demon inside a house of piety. You never had a rapist father and a mother who hated you for it. But take my word... You didn’t shoot me and then you didn’t lie; and those few years where we played chess you just sat there like the brother I never had, the friendship I could take for granted, or the father who led me by the hand.

“In my world, in my mind, that was the treasure I longed for.”

“What about that watchmaker?”

Melquarth smiled sadly and then nodded. “One day I’ll tell you about him.”

I’d hit a nerve in a man who didn’t seem to have nerves.

“Okay,” I acceded. “Let’s go.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“How’m I doin’?”

A friendlier smile with the same nod.

“Got cold stone instead of a brain and a hornets’ nest in place of a heart.”

“Then we’re ready to begin.”

On the other side of the unbreakable glass wall stood a tall man in a light tan three-piece suit. On the floor next to him lay a metal folding chair that Melquarth had set in the otherwise bare white cell. I figured that the man was William James Marmot and that he had used the chair to test the unbreakability of the opaque glass wall. Now he was pacing nervously, looking everywhere for a way out.

The blood from Porker’s torture had been cleaned away.

“How’d it go?” I asked my self-assigned friend.

“I used a partner, nobody you have to worry about. William James had two bodyguards, so I needed a hand. He came along peacefully when they went down.”

“Anybody see your face?” I asked.

“Naw.”

“How should we do this?”

“You say that Antrobus knows you,” Mel offered. “That means if we let this guy live that he shouldn’t see your face, or your skin color for that matter.”

“Why didn’t you grab Antrobus?”

“I asked around about him. He’s a dangerous man, a very dangerous man. I wouldn’t mind going up against him, but first I figured we could play with Jimmy here.”

Mel was wearing blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, and the white mask of a Greek god. In his left hand he carried a long-barreled .22 pistol.

Prisoner was on the other side of the cell when the bad man walked in. Marmot was a shade taller than Mel. He listed forward before Mel raised the pistol. This gesture set the security expert back a step and a half.

“What do you want?” Marmot asked Frost.

“I need for you to tell me where Chrissie Braun is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“An eye for an eye,” Mel explained.

Marmot’s lips parted.

“I told you that I don’t know—”

Mel lowered the pistol and shot the upright man in the left foot. Marmot yelled, fell, and at the same time threw himself at Mel. For a moment I feared for my cohort, but Mel sidestepped the attack, pistol-whipping Marmot on the side of his head as he passed by.

On the ground the man turned into a child crying as he held his bloody and shod left foot.

Mel reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a cloth bandage roll and two thick wads of cotton. These he threw at his victim.

“Take off your shoe and sock and wrap yourself up before you get blood all over my floor.”

Marmot did as he was told, blubbering the whole time.

When he was through, Mel said, “I got another bandage in my other pocket. I hope you don’t need to use that too because the next bullet goes in your left hand and you know it’s a bitch to tie on a bandage with just one hand.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

“Where’s Johanna Mudd’s body buried, and where are you holding a living Chrissie Braun?”

“If-if-if you don’t let me go, my people will kill her.”

Mel lifted the barrel of the gun so that it was leveled at Marmot’s face. The man cowered.

“If that’s true you’re as good as dead.”

“Mudd is buried in a church down in the West Village. It’s a — it’s abandoned and the cops I worked with used it to hide the bodies they made.”

That proved Marmot’s collusion. I reasoned that Porker and his friends planned to bury me in that rat-infested pit.

“What about the child?”

“How do I know you won’t kill me after I tell?”

“First,” Mel said, gesturing carelessly with the pistol, “I can’t kill you right off because you might be lying, or maybe the girl got moved while you were crying like a baby on my floor. Second, I’ve been employed to find a dead woman and a live girl. You don’t mean enough for me to kill.”

“I don’t believe you,” the conniving child who lived in Marmot’s heart said.

“Believe this,” Mel replied, now aiming the pistol at our prisoner. “If I don’t have the address and situation of the child in the next three minutes, I will start putting holes in you until either you give me what I want or bleed to death.”

It was an address in Yonkers. If we were to believe Marmot, the girl was guarded by two women he knew. When he’d finished the confession Mel thanked him and walked out of the cell.

“Are we gonna kill this one?” he asked.

“Not unless the girl’s dead or he lied about where she is.”

“You see? If I stay working with you long enough, I might work off nine, ten percent of my sins. I’ll be right back.”

Mel left the room while I stood sentry. After maybe five minutes Marmot made it to his feet, picked up the folding chair, and limped to the door. There he stood waiting to ambush Melquarth.

I hated the man for what he’d done, but still I identified with him. Just days before I was in a similar situation, desperately struggling to survive.

“At least he’s still kickin’,” Mel said from behind me. I was so concentrated on Marmot’s silent monologue of survival that I didn’t hear my friend come in.

He was carrying a small beat-up oak table, resembling a nineteenth-century child’s writing desk; that and a paper folder.

“You need some help?”

“Nah,” Mel said with a shrug. “I like to use my words when I can.”

With that Mel entered and then closed the outer door. Marmot heard something because he raised the metal bludgeon-chair.

“Back away from the door and put down that seat,” Mel’s slightly altered voice said.

Marmot hesitated.

“You got sixty seconds and then I’m’a shoot you through a hole in this door.”

I fingered the scar on my cheek.

Marmot threw down the chair and backed away from the door.

Mel walked in, put the desk down so that it faced the window, and said, “Now pick up that goddamned chair and sit down at this table.”

When our prisoner did as he was told, Mel placed the paper folder on the tabletop and flipped it open. There was a small stack of white paper with a yellow plastic mechanical pencil hooked at the spine.

“You know you don’t go to somebody’s house and throw their furniture around,” Mel said. “Now, I want you to write a confession for the murder of Johanna Mudd, the kidnapping of Chrissie Braun, and the subsequent extortion of her father. In there I want you to name everyone you worked for and all those that worked for you. And you better include your boss and those bad cops.”

Marmot began to shiver.

“What are you waiting for?” Mel inquired.

“I can tell about the cops and my men, but I can’t say who I worked for.”

“Even if I kill you if you don’t?”

“I’ll be dead anyway.”

“Not if they put your boss away.”

“That will never happen.”

Mel couldn’t get the name Antrobus out of Marmot. The dark-side security expert gave the details and the whereabouts of the kidnapped child. And he named everyone else. Porker and his friends, Valence and Pratt. Marmot facilitated the drugs and the sex slaves distributed and afforded by the cops. He threw a wrench in Man’s appeal just to keep all that quiet. His men murdered Mudd and took the child. Marmot was willing to implicate everyone but his boss. He knew that a coerced confession would never make it to open court. But if he even breathed the name of Antrobus, that would be the end of the line for him.

After the confession was written, Mel had Marmot handcuff himself to the chair. Then he got behind the man and pulled his hair until his neck was exposed. He injected Marmot just like he’d done to the thug who worked for him.

“What was that?” Marmot said.

“Just a little cyanide to help you sleep.”

Just as the dread entered Marmot’s eyes he passed out.

“You didn’t really kill him, did you, Mel?”

“Nah. I just like seein’ how scared a man gets when he thinks he’s about to die.”