Every Man a King

6

“Hey, Monica,” I said on the exhalation of a breath that felt as if it had been drawn almost two decades before.

“Hi, King,” she said.

The utterance of the word King was a relic of our long and tumultuous relationship. When we were still married she would sometimes call me King when I’d come home from a long day of being a cop. Back then my middle name meant that I was going to get lucky if I could keep my eyes open.

“So, uh, what’s up?” I asked.

“I was reading the Daily News today about Lillian Lawler. I don’t know why but I didn’t know that you were involved with that case.”

I was trying to get a bead on the topic of our discussion. Monica did not like me, much less care about what I did. When I went to Rikers the first time, she refused to pay my bail. That because an overzealous investigator showed her a picture of me and a woman in flagrante delicto. Now that we were divorced and she was married to a very successful investment banker, she still bled me for whatever she was legally entitled to. She once even tried to botch a case I was on by warning the man I had been hired to follow.

“I just had a small part in the investigation,” I said. “Ms. Lawler hired me when the prosecutor and the police said that there were no other suspects being considered.”

“That’s not what it looks like to me. There was a picture of you standing behind her and the article said that a private detective uncovered the evidence that... what did it say? That a private detective came up with the evidence that torpedoed the state’s case.”

Lawler was a New York blueblood who married a nouveau riche nobody named Constantine Psomas — aka the can man. Psomas had made it rich selling canned goods online to individuals and groups throughout South America and Africa. Lillian’s family owned supermarkets all over the United States and so the two met and, sadly for both of them, married.

Constantine was a dog, though not in the Darwinian sense. He played fast and loose with other women and Lillian’s inherited fortune. When she filed divorce papers he penned a tell-all memoir about the sleazy secrets of the Lawler clan. When she hired another detective to scrutinize his business and tax history, that man, John Merrill, was murdered in the supposed commission of a mugging.

Six weeks later, Lillian says that she came downstairs in their Sutton Place mansion to find a bloody Constantine lying within the vestibule between the outside door and the entrance to the house. His throat was cut and his eyes were gouged out.

The prosecutor, a lovely woman named Paloma Alvarez, had a bug up her ass for Lillian. I think the prosecutor’s antipathy was due to the fact that Lawler made no secret of the fact that she considered herself superior to the hoi polloi that crowded the streets of our fair city. Alvarez felt that she and her brethren were treated as less than and therefore Lillian must have murdered her Greek husband.

I gave the socialite a pass because I was pretty sure that she thought everyone — white, Black, or brown — was beneath her. And, to be clear, Lillian Lawler would have never been found guilty of her husband’s murder. She had a whole raft of lawyers to protect her and it just wasn’t possible for her to inflict Constantine’s wounds on her own.

The problem was open court. If Ms. Alvarez could bring Lillian to trial she could produce the unpublished memoir as damning evidence. That would have caused great embarrassment for Lillian and her kin. My job was to prove that there were others in the world that might have wanted the can man gone.

So, I compiled a sixty-eight-page document showing that Constantine had cheated and stolen from so many people, including some affiliated with organized crime, that the prosecutor’s office was forced to quell the case against his wife.

“I didn’t prove that she was innocent,” I said to my ex. “All I did was show that the police and the prosecutor hadn’t done a good enough job looking for other suspects.”

“Well, at least you stood up for a woman in a legal system dominated by men.”

When she said that I knew that she was going to ask for a favor — a big one. I knew this because she saw me not only as her enemy but also as the nemesis of all womankind.

I sighed.

“What?” she asked.

“Yes,” I agreed, “what?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You called me King, you complimented my work, and you haven’t even blamed me for not siding with you over Aja’s refusal to accept Harvard’s offer of that physics scholarship.”

“A degree from Harvard would make her career,” Monica said, trying hard to hold back her anger at our daughter’s choices and my part in them.

“We’ll see.”

“Yes, we will.”

“Okay. You’ve been civil and even-tempered. Now... what do you want?”

After a long pause Monica said, “Coleman’s been arrested.”

Coleman Tesserat. Just the mention of his name has been known to cause me to rattle off a whole dissertation of spite and bad wishes. The banker and my ex-wife lived in a bougie neighborhood and ate exclusively at the fanciest restaurants. When he deigned to suffer the company of other Black people Coleman only associated with the talented tenth and Jacks and Jills of the American Black social order. Coleman still used the word Negro and was having an extramarital affair with at least one woman.

“Arrested? What for?” I asked, trying not to let my grin bend the shape of the words.

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing,” I lied.

“He was arrested on some kind of made-up charges, something about heating oil.”

“Okay. Have you seen him?”

“No.”

“Why not? Somebody show you a picture of him naked in some other woman’s house?”

“Be civil or I’ll hang up.”

“It’s your nickel, Mon. I don’t care if you never call me again.”

I wasn’t kind because Monica had nearly gotten me killed not bailing me out of Rikers and, I learned later, Coleman had advised her to let me languish in there for three months.

“The government,” Monica said and stalled. “They aren’t letting anyone see him.”

“Not even his lawyer?”

“He doesn’t have one.”

“Why not?” It was the day for me to care about people I’d rather see dead.

“We’re broke.”

“Broke? I thought he had millions.”

“The government has frozen all our assets. Everything.”

“The federal government?”

“Yes.”

“They gotta offer him bail. You could put up your house.”

“It’s mostly mortgage debt.” You could hear in her voice the humiliation she felt.

“He’s sequestered and you’re broke. That’s some bad acid there.”

“I don’t know what to do, Joe. I called the bank. They wouldn’t even put me through to his boss.”

“Damn.”

Monica might have thought that I was making a comment on the severity of the problems she was having. But that was not the case. What disturbed me was that I was actually concerned. I cared about my ex-wife’s distress over a man who helped her nearly kill me.

What was wrong with me?

“And why are you calling me?” I asked.

“We need help.”

“How much is his bail?”

“One point five million.”

“One... point... five.”

“Yes.”

For nearly fifteen years I’d been a cop. I made a decent living, bought a house, and paid the bills. Monica never worked much and it felt good taking care of her and Aja. I was proud of my salary, but just hearing “one point five million” made me the quarterback target of the whole defensive line.

“Joe?”

“Yeah?”

“We need help.”

“I could recommend a lawyer. I know a congressman or two.”

“I have to get him out of jail. He’ll go crazy in there.”

“I don’t have anywhere near a hundred and fifty thousand.”

“They told me that he has to come up with the full amount.”

“Why?”

“He’s a flight risk, that’s what they said. Isn’t there some way you could borrow it?”

“From who? J.P. Morgan?”

“That man your grandmother’s been seeing.”

That was the first inkling I had of just how much Monica loved her dog of a husband.

“Damn,” I said again.

“Stop saying that.”

“Monica, are you really asking me to put myself into a lifetime of debt over Coleman?”

“I’m not asking for him. I’m asking for me.”

“When I tried to call you from Rikers you wouldn’t answer.”

“I was wrong.”

Three words. I was wrong. She was wrong and so I should tie myself up in knots and jump off the nearest skyscraper.

“Yes, you were,” I said.

“I need this, Joe.”

“You’re not calling me King anymore,” I pointed out. She knew what I meant.

“I can do that.”

I wasn’t trying to get together with her. Her humiliation and broken heart made me almost feel bad. I asked her about my middle name to make sure I was right about the extent of her bald conviction.

“You know that if Coleman ran he’d never pay me back. I’d spend the rest of my life paying his debt.”

Her silence told me that if Coleman got out and asked her to run — she would have done it.

“This is crazy, Monica. Insane. Look, I’ll try to see what’s going on with your man. If I can help him, I will. But I’m not going to borrow a dime.”

“Okay,” she said in a voice so mild she might have been a child.

“Where are they holding him?”

“Somewhere in Manhattan. A place they call the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Something like that.”

“Okay. I’ll call back when I’ve done a little research on my own.”

After we got off the phone I sat at my desk suffering psychological symptoms that could best be described as a fugue state. There were thoughts in my head but I couldn’t grab on to them. The ideas were... fugitive in my mind, furtively trying to keep away from close scrutiny. I didn’t love my ex-wife anymore but... but something.

The intercom buzzed and I hit the answer button.

“Yeah, Aje?”

“What did she want?”

“Are you ever gonna get married, honey?” was my reply.

“What?”

“Your mother said that Harvard would have made your career.”

“What career?”

“Exactly.”

“Hello?” She answered on the third ring.

“I looked up the number for Gloriana Q so I guess you must be Minta Kraft.”

“And to whom am I speaking?”

“My name is Joe Oliver. I’m a private detective.”

“I haven’t asked for the services of a detective, Mr. Oliver.”

“Someone else has hired me.”

“Who is that?”

“I can’t say, but what he asked me to do is to look into the case of Alfred Xavier Quiller.”

“What has that got to do with me?”

“I went to see Mr. Quiller on Rikers Island and he suggested that if I had any questions for his wife that I might pose them to you.”

Ms. Kraft sat on that for a moment, then asked, “Did Mr. Quiller have anything you were to say to me?”

“That he wanted me to tell his wife to be strong.”

After a beat she asked, “Anything else?”

“That I was the eclipse.”

Another hesitation and then: “I’m going to put you on hold for a moment.”

I loved my daughter. Just when I thought I was about to lose my mind she called me back to bedrock. Now I was doing my job, working for a living and momentarily safe from harm.

Seven minutes later the fog had cleared and Minta Kraft’s voice came back on the line.

“I’ll have to reach out to Ms. Prim before I can answer any questions, Mr. Oliver,” she said in a friendly enough tone.

“Ms. Prim?”

“Mathilda Prim — Mr. Quiller’s wife.”

“Does she know Lillian Lawler?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“I don’t know. The name, I guess. You want my number?”

“Is it the one you’re calling me from?”

“No,” I said and proceeded to give her my current cell number.