Down the River unto the Sea

8

After work I took Aja-Denise to a new French bistro on Montague called Le Sauvage. I had boeuf bourguignon and she coq au vin. The red wine was good and I only let her have a sip.

“Are you gonna take Willa’s case?” she asked after I refused her a second taste.

“How much did she tell you about it?”

“That guy A Free Man is innocent and she thinks you can prove it.”

“You can’t mention that to anyone,” I said.

“I won’t. I’m just talking to you.”

A man two tables away was giving us side glances now and then.

“There’s another thing,” I said.

“What?”

“Do you use the computer I gave you?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Do you ever take it home?”

“It’s a laptop, but it weighs twelve pounds. I wouldn’t take that thing anywhere.”

“So you never took it home.”

“Uh-uh,” she uttered, but there was a look of hesitation in her eye.

“What?”

“The files are on the cloud. I usually download the work to my computer once a week to catch up on things I might not have finished. Is there anything wrong with that?”

I love my daughter. If I had to spend the rest of my life in a moldy coffin buried under ten feet of concrete with only polka music to listen to, I would have done that for her.

“Is something wrong, Daddy?”

“No, honey. It’s kinda late. I’ll give you a ride home.”

“Okay. Are you going to take the Man case?” she asked as we stood.

“Please don’t ever mention that name again. Not to your mother. Not to anyone.”

“Okay.” She looked at me pleadingly to underscore the promise.

I was parked right off Montague, but before we got very far someone called to us.

“Excuse me,” he said. He approached us from the front of Le Sauvage.

I wondered if I had forgotten something.

It was the man who had been giving us glances: a white guy standing at about five nine, wearing a green-and-yellow sports jacket with black shirt and trousers.

“Excuse me,” he said again as he reached us.

His shoes looked as if they had been woven from straw.

“You don’t have to go with him,” he said to my daughter.

“Huh?” was her reply.

I didn’t know whether to give him an uppercut or a kiss on the lips.

“You got it wrong, man,” I said. “This is my daughter.”

He blinked and then took a closer look. The resemblance is there if you look past the optimism and the pain.

“Oh. I’m so sorry. Excuse me. I thought...”

“Look,” I added. “I appreciate you looking out for a young woman, but there’s no trouble here.”

“You thought he was my boyfriend?” my innocent daughter proclaimed incredulously.

“I lost my youngest to the street,” he said, addressing me.

“Next time you should take a cell phone picture and call the cops,” I suggested. “Safer all the way around.”

The ride out to Plumb Beach was fun. Aja loved listening to Sidney Bechet because “his horn sounded like somebody talking.”

I told her the story about how Bechet got involved in a duel with another musician in Paris because the guy had told him he played the wrong notes.

“Really?” she said. “Did he shoot the other guy?”

“They were better jazzmen than they were marksmen. Some bystander got shot. I think it was a woman.”

“Like me if I talk about your cases,” she said.

“Probably not, but maybe.”

Monica’s husband came to the door of their three-story whitestone. He was expecting my daughter to come alone.

“Joe,” he said.

“Coleman.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Daddy has to talk to Mom,” Aja said with authority in her tone.

“About what?” Coleman Tesserat addressed the question to me.

“Joe?” Monica called from the second-floor landing.

“Hey, Monica,” I said. “I have to talk to you about something.”

“Call me tomorrow.”

“Can’t,” I said. “It’s LAD.”

I managed not to smile at the frown that twisted into Coleman’s lips. He wanted Aja to call him Daddy and resented the fact that his wife and I had a secret abbreviation system to communicate with.

My ex-wife harrumphed and then said, “Let me put something on. I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”

“I’ll keep you company till she comes,” my daughter said.

“You will go to bed,” Coleman said.

He was a light-skinned Negro with handsome features. My height, he was ten years younger than my ex. Coleman was an investment banker and pretty well-off; the kind of man who liked owning things, or at least controlling them. I appreciated this quirk in his personality because it alienated my daughter.

The evil look she gave him was cute on a sheltered seventeen-year-old, but one day Coleman and Monica would experience the hatred seething underneath.

“Okay,” Aja said. Then she kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “Good night.”

I went through the first-floor sitting room to a smaller dining area and into the L-shaped kitchen. I sat at the small table where the family of three ate breakfast and sometimes dinner.

I was thinking of the best way to broach the serious talk that she and I needed to have. LAD meant life and death in our code system. Hearing that, she knew I meant business.

Maybe fifteen minutes later, Monica came in wearing a teal sweat suit. Coleman followed. He was clad in jeans and a black T-shirt.

“Well?” he asked. “What is it?”

“Tell him to leave,” I said to my ex.

“You don’t order me in my house,” Coleman said.

“Please, CC,” Monica said in almost a whisper.

He wanted to fight. I did too. Instead he turned away, walked through the rooms to the stairs, and stomped his way to bed like Rumpelstiltskin after a hard day making gold on his Wall Street spinning wheel.

When we were both sure that he was gone she said, “What is it?”

“You mess with me all the time, M.,” I replied. “Send me threatening letters, have lawyers send me threatening letters, and every once in a while you try and get at me through A.D. That’s cool. I take it in stride. I don’t come to you and ask why didn’t you do something to help me, your daughter’s father, when they were trying to bury me under the prison.”

“You know why,” she said like Moses on high.

“And so you do this?” I asked, running my finger along the deep scar down the right side of my face.

“I didn’t cut you.”

“But you could have stopped it from happening. You could have gotten up off our monies and made my bail.”

“I had to worry about our daughter, her future.”

“Yeah,” I somewhat agreed. “And the best way to protect her is to make sure I keep paying for what she needs to live.”

“Coleman provides.”

“But it helps to have that extra check. I mean, even his six figures would be stretched trying to fit the bill at Columbia.”

“What do you want, Joe?”

“I’d like it if you didn’t try and get me shot.”

The look on her face was that of an innocent listening to the ravings of an idiot.

“When you called Bob Acres,” I continued, “you didn’t know what the circumstances were.”

The dismissal in her gaze faded.

Monica had been a beautiful young woman. She had deep brown skin and features that spoke of western Africa. She was loving and sexy, smart and loyal. I had betrayed her, there was no excuse for that — but it was enough that she let me languish at Rikers.

“You warning a man I’m investigating could end up getting me killed. What if I decided to investigate Coleman? What kinda dirt you think I could dig up on him?”

I knew at least part of the answer to that question. I was pretty sure she did too.

“I... I never heard of a Bob Acres,” she said lamely. “Is that that congressman?”

“He sent me the number of the person who warned his aide. Your cell phone number.”

“Coleman has nothing to do with this.”

“Take me to court, report me to the authorities when I’m six days late on a support payment, tell my daughter exactly what I did to make you so mad,” I listed, “but fuck with my work again and I will make you regret it. I will torpedo this perfect life you got so bad that you won’t even be able to come up for air. Do you understand that?”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I just stood up and retraced my steps to their front door, and walked out to the street.

There was a chill in the air. I liked it.