Down the River unto the Sea

7

Jacob was the son of Thomas and Margherita Storell. The father owned and ran a small hardware store on the Lower East Side and the mother was the director of a private women’s club called Dryads. Tom sold hammers and nails while Rita and her friends prayed to the spirits of trees.

The wife called me after reading the top line of my ad in the Yellow Pages — KING DETECTIVE SERVICE — because of the word service. She felt that there was duty and dignity in the use of such a word.

That was eight years ago. The divorce was dragging, and Monica’s lawyer had threatened to have my new accounts attached if I didn’t pay her initial fee.

I needed a job, any job.

Tom Storell told me that his son had been arrested for robbery. He’d gone into a stationery store also in the East Village and emptied the cash register while the clerk was with a customer somewhere in a back aisle. The police were called and happened to be only seconds away. They arrested Jacob before he had made it to the corner.

“He needs a lawyer,” I advised, “not a detective.”

“The police have a videotape,” Tom said with hopeless conviction.

“But we are sure that he would never do such a thing,” Margherita added. “He’s so good-hearted that ever since he was a child the other children would get him into trouble. Go see him. Look at the evidence. It would be a service.”

So, for a down payment of eighty dollars on four hundred, I went to the precinct in the East Village and asked to see my client.

“You the one they got for misconduct, right?” the desk sergeant asked.

“Falsely accused,” I replied.

The fifty-something cop was beefy but pale. There were errant hairs on his otherwise clean-shaven jowls, and his eyes had almost given up on color altogether. I was standing three feet away from him but imagined a rank scent and took half a step back.

“Interrogation room nine,” the sergeant told me. I never got his name. He handed me a clear plastic badge with a red card in it. The card identified me as V9.

Walking down the corridor toward the interrogation room area, I was struck by sudden claustrophobia. The walls seemed to want to move in on me. The floor felt uneven, and the imagined smell of the unnamed sergeant was pungent in my nostrils.

I stumbled and righted myself with my left hand against the encroaching wall.

“Whoa, brother,” a man said, putting a hand under my left arm. “You okay?”

He was Asian, probably Chinese, wearing a patrolman’s uniform and black-rimmed round-lensed glasses. His eyes were friendly and he didn’t smell at all.

“Thanks,” I said. “I guess the days kinda add up.”

“And count down,” he added. “Aren’t you Joe Oliver?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, they fucked you. If I had been the detective on that investigation, nobody would have ever seen a tape. I mean, you didn’t hit her or nuthin’.”

Back then this was new fodder for my discontent. Of course a brother in blue would “lose” evidence like that. And the police were always the first eyes on the scene.

“Thanks,” I said, standing up straight. “What’s your name?”

“Archie, Archie Zhao.”

“Interrogation room nine up ahead, Archie?”

“Just around the corner.”

The IRs were no more than broom closets in that precinct. When I opened the self-locking door, the solitary occupant flinched in his chair and put his hands up as far as the restraints would allow.

He was a short, pudgy young man in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. He’d been beaten pretty badly by the look of his face. The left eye was completely closed and his lower lip had been busted up. There was a lump the size of a golf ball on his right cheekbone.

“I’ll confess if you want me to,” he said.

That was all he needed to say. I had been him not long before. There were moments when I would have said anything to stop the fear of what might happen next.

“Your mother sent me, Jacob.”

“She did?” One eye opened wide while the other strained for sight.

“You okay?”

“They hit me. They hit me hard.”

“Did you steal that money?”

“Are you going to take me home?”

From the looks of him I would have said he was mid-twenties, but he spoke like and had the manner of a child.

“Not right this minute, but if you answer my questions truthfully, I’ll do my best to prove you innocent.”

That’s when he started crying. He put his head in his chained hands and blubbered. I took the seat across from his side of the detainment table and waited. After a while the crying became fearful and louder. He started yelling and trying to pull himself free from the cuffs that were attached by a chain, threaded through a hole in the table, to a steel eye anchored in the concrete floor.

I remained silent, allowing him to vent. I knew the feeling.

After a while he calmed down and sat up, after a fashion.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

“No blame,” I said. “Here you get arrested for something you didn’t do and then they beat you for tellin’ the truth.”

Jacob looked at me with his Quasimodo eye.

I asked, “Why did you take the money out of the cash register?”

“Sheila told me I could.”

“Who is Sheila?”

“A friend I met.”

“Met where?”

“In the park on Bowery. She said her father had a store and that he’d give us some money for dinner. She was very hungry.”

The whole thing took about three hours. I got Officer Zhao to let me see the security tape from the scene. It was obvious that someone off camera was telling Jacob what to do; probably Sheila. And it was likely that she had another friend who lured the counter clerk into a conversation in a back aisle.

The arresting officer’s report said that there was no money found on the suspect. He was only three doors down and the money had already been taken from him.

The detective in charge of the interrogation was Buddy McEnery, a contemporary of mine who took shortcuts every chance he could.

I had a rep too. I liked the ladies and I was a stickler for details. Almost all of my arrests ended up in convictions.

I convinced Buddy to access other security cameras in the area to try to get an image of Jacob leaving.

“I’m sure you’ll get a shot of a girl and a guy or maybe two girls who fooled the kid.”

“He still did the taking,” Buddy, a swarthy Irishman, said.

“Have you talked to him?”

“Sure,” he said, “with this.” He held up his left fist.

I refrained from hitting him and said, “I’m sure his high school records will say that he’s a special needs student.”

“A retard?”

“Let me take him home, Bud, before you and the department get sued.”

McEnery wore a gray suit that had gained its silvery sheen with age. He stared at me, distaste outlining his lips, and finally said, “You’re not one of us anymore, are you?”

“Jacob’s a good kid,” I said to Willa, “but I don’t think of him as a trustworthy reference.”

“Jackie was a stock boy in my father’s hardware store,” she said. “He was kind of like my friend. He told me about you, and his mother said that you were able to get him out of jail in just a few hours. When I asked her about using you, she told me that you were committed to service and truth.”

I don’t believe in the supernatural, but some people I’ve met seem to see things that are hidden from me. I don’t know if it’s intelligence or a mode of perception beyond my understanding, but there are those whom I trust beyond the borders of simple logic; Margherita Storell, though I had met her only once, was one of these people.

“So you’ll go over the papers tonight?” the untried lawyer asked.

“Give me two hundred and fifty from the cash and I’ll read it. Maybe I’ll have some advice about it, maybe not.”

“Maybe you’ll take the case if you think there’s some merit?”

I waited four heartbeats before saying, “Maybe.”

Willa departed, and for a while I was alone and at peace the way a soldier during World War I was at peace in the trenches waiting for the next attack, the final flu, or maybe mustard gas seeping over the edge of a trench that might be his grave.

I was thinking about Acres and Summers and now Man too.

To get my mind off these troubles I logged on to my IP, hoping for good news or at least a worthwhile ad.

The seventeenth e-mail in the list was from bacres1119@repbacres.com. The only message was a phone number.