Down the River unto the Sea

6

I was back in the office at a few minutes past three. My good mood had subsided in equal proportion to the memory of solitary confinement and the ramifications of Beatrice Summers’s letter.

A letter.

Who sent letters anymore? The unlined paper was tinged pink and the ink was peacock blue. The writing was even and without blobs or cross-outs. There were no misspellings, and the written lines were straight and parallel to the top and bottom of the machine-cut sheet.

All these details said something. There was intention behind that letter. One or more rough drafts were written down somewhere else and then copied onto the good stationery with a sheet of bold lines beneath it to make the lines even; onward, Christian soldiers.

The NYPD database system, which I had access to because of Patrolman Henri Tourneau, had no Adamo Cortez working anywhere in the department. The Private Investigator’s Database, which I paid eighteen hundred dollars a year for, told me that for the past nine years Beatrice Summers had lived in Odumville Township, outside of Saint Paul.

I wondered what the former Nathali imagined when she thought of God or what the deity might have envisioned when considering his sinful, repentant acolyte.

For my part, whenever I closed my eyes I was in that lightless cell again. It smelled of piss and sweat. Fluttering insects flew through the darkness. Men groaned and complained beyond the sweating metal door of my detention.

A silver bell sounded.

Opening my eyes, I was looking out the second-floor window onto Montague Street again. It was November, but the cold hadn’t set in yet. The sun was shining brightly. A woman stopped across the street and, looking up, saw me.

The silver bell sounded again and I roused myself, turning away from the glare of the happenstance pedestrian. I ambled into the receptionist’s room, which my daughter occupied every day after school.

The front door to the office was locked, of course. I only ever felt secure behind locked doors.

The electronic eye above the hall-side doorsill transmitted an image to the small monitor panel on the wall. It was a slender young white woman, dressed in blues and whites. Her dress was only vaguely businesslike. She was carrying a brown leather briefcase and pulling a carry-on gray fabric travel bag.

Looking up at the lens, she had the beauty of youth... and the sorrow too.

“Who is it?” I said into the speaker system.

“Willa Portman. Is this the detective Joe Oliver?”

I pulled the door open and she gasped as if something shocking had happened.

“We had a four o’clock, right?” I said.

“Y-yes. I’m a few minutes early.”

“I have a friend who always tells me that whenever he gets there he’s right on time.”

She smiled and, pulling the wheeled travel bag, walked into the office.

“Right this way,” I said, gesturing toward my private door.

“Where’s Aja?” my prospective client asked.

“She’s a high school student, should be in any minute.”

Willa gave me a worried look but then went through the door to my office.

My workplace is a fairly small room with a high white plaster ceiling and one huge floor-to-ceiling window. The walls are brick and the floor dark wood. My desk is an ash table with no drawers. I don’t keep supplies or records in my office; Aja’s much larger room is the repository for files and office materials.

“Have a seat,” I said to the nervous girl.

She considered the request a moment, then sat on one of the ash chairs set out for visitors.

“It’s an unusual office,” she said, her head moving from side to side.

“Why are you so jumpy?”

“Um. I don’t know, I mean, I guess being here means that I’m really going to do this. You know when you just think about doing something it still isn’t quite real.”

“I know what you mean,” I said with more feeling than I intended.

Willa, I believe, heard the honesty in my tone, and this seemed to relax her.

“My name is Willa Portman.”

“You said that already.”

“I’m an intern doing research work for Stuart Braun.”

“Stuart Braun. Now, that’s a big deal.”

“Yeah,” she said through a sneer. “He is a big deal, a very important lawyer for those people no one else cares about.”

Stuart Braun was the radical lawyer-celeb who was representing A Free Man, a black militant journalist who had been arrested for the killing of two police officers three years earlier. Born Leonard Compton, Man was found seriously wounded a few blocks from the shoot-out, in the Far West Village. The gun he had on him was the one used in killing the officers. The bullets had passed clean through his body, so the guns that shot him could not be identified.

Man refused to implicate anyone else who might have been with him that night and denied having anything to do with any murders. He was facing the death penalty, which New York State provides for cop killers. He showed no remorse and, in general, refused to cooperate with the police or prosecutors.

Before Braun got involved it seemed pretty clear that New York was going to have its first execution in a very long time.

The Braun Machine, as it was known, took the case to a new level. An appeal was granted after Braun showed that much of the evidence against his client had been circumstantial and his publicly assigned lawyers were incompetent. Newspapers suggested that a self-defense plea was in the making. Protests proclaiming “Free Man” were being held from coast to coast.

I wasn’t a fan. When it came to cops as victims I was just another brick in the Blue Wall. Few civilians understood how hard it is to be a policeman when almost everybody is afraid of you and suspicious too. The mayor, the city council, and half the civilian population were willing to believe the worst of us when we put our lives on the line 24/7.

Us.

I still considered myself a cop. In my days on the force I’d been sucker-punched, stabbed, spit on, shot at, and singled out by a thousand videophones. Every time I’d make an arrest the community seemed to come out against me. They had no idea how much we cared about them, their lives.

“So are you a lawyer, Ms. Portman?”

“I passed the bar this past June,” she said. “But I’m working for Braun because he does the kind of work I want to do.”

“And what does Stuart Braun want from me?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m here because Mr. Man is innocent and Stuart Braun is about to sell him down the stream,” the young woman replied.

“River,” I said.

“What?”

“The saying is ‘sell him down the river.’ ”

“Oh.” Willa looked at me with both desperation and anger in her eyes.

“I thought Braun had committed himself to saving Man,” I said.

“He had,” she said, “at first. He gathered all kinds of evidence against the cops that Manny shot—”

“He’s admitted to the murders?”

“N-no,” Willa Portman stuttered. “I mean, yes, but not the way you’re saying. They were trying to kill him. They were stalking him. They’d already murdered three of his blood brothers and paralyzed the other one. They were after him and he just protected himself.”

She’d been looking around while making these claims but ended the sentence by looking into my eyes.

“So,” I prompted, “Braun was gathering evidence...”

“He had days and times, ballistics reports, and testimony from reliable witnesses who could be vetted.”

“Sounds like a case.”

“It was. It is. But then, two weeks ago, Stuart, I don’t know... he turned cold. There really isn’t any other way to say it. We were supposed to go see a church lady named Johanna Mudd. Ms. Mudd had agreed to testify that Officer Valence received payments from Deacon Mordechai to provide access to young homeless people for the purpose of forced prostitution.”

“Run out of a church?”

“The Last Rite of Christ Baptist Church ran a charity that was supposed to help runaway and orphaned girls and boys. Mordechai and some of his friends had the access. Valence, Officer Pratt, and others ran the business.”

“So that’s the defense?” I asked. “That Man and his crew were fighting a prostitution ring?”

“Not just that,” she said. “Not just that. Manny says that the cops were involved in all kinds of criminal activities. There was stolen merchandise, drugs, and murders. People were being killed if they tried to stand up to them.”

“But then one morning the Honorable Mr. Braun went cold, you say.”

“I asked him when we were going to leave to see Ms. Mudd, and he said that we weren’t. I asked why, and he told me that everything A Free Man had told us was a lie; that he was the one who had killed his blood brothers because they were going to turn in Valence and Pratt.”

Eugene “Yollo” Valence and Anton Pratt were the cops Man had been convicted of killing. They were decorated uniforms who often worked as bodyguards for the mayor and visiting dignitaries.

“Maybe Braun’s telling the truth,” I suggested. I knew too many innocent cops who had been blamed for crimes they didn’t commit. I was one of them.

“Ms. Mudd has disappeared,” Willa said. “I went to talk to her a few days later, after failing to get her on the phone. Her son Rondrew told me that she was missing. He said that she went to meet Stuart and never returned.”

I sighed. It was an unexpected exhalation. This I knew was due to the fact that the prospective client had caught my interest.

She clasped her hands and looked down at the hardwood floor.

“Hi.” Aja was standing at the door. She was smiling, her short hair standing up at various angles like a field of spiky wild grasses. Her blue jeans might as well have been painted on, and her blouse didn’t come anywhere near the waistline.

I wanted to ask if this was within the boundaries of the school dress code, but then Willa looked up, tears streaming from her eyes.

“Oh, baby,” my daughter exclaimed. She rushed to the lawyer’s side, kneeled down, and hugged her.

Between my sudden breath and Aja’s concern I knew that I’d spend at least a day or two investigating Portman’s case.

“Come on with me.” Aja was helping the sad young woman rise from the chair. After lift-off they made their way to the washroom annexed to the outer office.

In their absence I tried to see a connection between Beatrice’s letter and the case of A Free Man. I knew that there was no direct link, but the similarities might be a way for me to solve a case close enough to my own so that I might feel some sense of closure without returning to Rikers.

If Man was innocent and I freed him, then it would be, in some way, like freeing myself.

I was looking out the window again.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Oliver,” Willa Portman said to my back.

“You want me to take notes, Daddy?”

“I want you to go down to the drugstore,” I said, “and pick me up a pack of those little notebooks I use.”

“But I could take notes here.”

“Go on.” I stood up to underscore my directive.

The words between familiars often mean a lot less than tones and looks. Aja saw that I needed her gone from the office and she obeyed.

Through the open door I could see A.D. collecting her bag and going out the front. I waited maybe ten seconds and then sat down again facing the dewy-eyed girl.

“You see how much trouble there is in this,” I said.

“Is that why you asked Aja to leave?”

“She’s my daughter and you’re twelve miles of bad road.”

Willa winced.

“If even one thing you told me is true,” I said, “then there’s bad news and murder to go all the way round.”

“But Manny’s innocent,” she cried.

“I thought he was married.”

“Huh?”

“The way you talk about him. It sounds like you’re his girlfriend.”

“No.”

“Really?”

The way she looked up at me almost made me grin. The magnetism between young lovers (even when they’re old) is the gravity of the soul; undeniable, unquestionable, and, sooner or later, unwanted.

“Only once,” she said. “When Stuart had another case to attend to and I was recording Manny’s deposition. I... I respect Marin. She’s the mother of their child, but because they aren’t legally married they won’t even let her visit except behind a Plexiglas barrier... He needed somebody.”

“Johanna Mudd has really disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“And Braun has pulled back on the case?”

“He shredded the files,” she claimed. “He said that they were all lies.”

“So the evidence is gone?”

She reached over, putting her hand on the roller bag.

“When I got the job working for Mr. Braun, my college adviser, Sharon Mittleman, told me that I should always make copies in case something went missing. Mr. Braun didn’t want the files stored electronically. He said that hackers could get into any memory device. So I’d come in at night to use the copy machine.”

“How much do you have?” I asked, my respect for the prospective client rising with each word.

“Thirty-three hundred and seventeen two-sided sheets.”

“Six thousand pages?”

“Closer to seven.”

Seven thousand pages. Suddenly I was scared. Any evidence is a detective’s friend, but I imagined reading through the pages while some shadow crept up behind me with a loaded pistol in its all-too-solid hand.

“You know I can’t do work pro bono like Braun,” I said, flailing around for an exit strategy.

She put the briefcase on the table and opened it, revealing stacks and stacks of paper-slip-bound fifty-dollar bills.

“Almost nineteen thousand dollars,” she said. “It’s half of an inheritance I got from my grandmother. I know we can’t go to the police and also we can’t have any connection between us. I’ve been taking money out of the account a thousand dollars at a time. I want you to prove Manny innocent and get him released from prison.”

“What if he wants to go back to Marin?” I asked.

“If you love someone you set them free,” she said with all the force of the pop song.

Looking at the pretty young woman with the sad, sad face I thought about the last twenty-four hours and how much I had changed. Between Congressman Acres and Beatrice Summers I was on the verge of becoming someone, something new.

On the verge but not quite across the line.

“Hold on to that money for another day,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m going to look over these papers and make up my mind then.”

“Everything I’m saying is true.”

“That may be, but still, I have to convince myself.”

“But you’re my only hope, Manny’s only hope.”

“Why do you even think you can trust me?” I asked, the divine words leaping from my lips like Athena from Zeus’s brow.

“Jacob Storell.”