Every Man a King

7

The Metropolitan Correctional Center is located on Park Row behind the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse on Foley Square. It’s a big building that doesn’t look much like a jail from the outside, but once they let you in, it’s a cold sweat on a hot day.

“Mr. Oliver?” a man in an awkwardly designed dark tan and light blue suit asked.

I was in the fifth-floor waiting room, sitting among lawyers, sad and disgruntled family members, and a few nondescript male individuals who were, no doubt, thugs.

“Yes,” I said, standing and holding out a hand.

“Agent Raoul Davies,” he said without returning the gesture.

We stood there a moment being watched by a dozen pairs of eyes in the locked-door antechamber. I let my hand go down and waited.

“Why don’t you come with me?” Davies suggested.

The eyes followed us until we went through a pink and gray door.

Davies guided me down a slender hall to a squat door, also pink and gray, which opened onto a small chamber about three times the size of a janitor’s hopper room. What was surprising about this room was that it was empty — there wasn’t even a chair to sit on.

Turning to me, Davies asked, “How do you know Art Tomey?”

“His daughter went missing a few years ago and he asked me to find her.”

“Did you?”

“If I hadn’t he wouldn’t have called you.”

Art Tomey was a high-profile criminal lawyer who took federal cases, mainly. He had clout and owed me. That’s the bread and butter of a private detective’s life, deep debt that comes out of shadow and pain.

The federal agent was my height with twenty extra pounds of flesh and sinew distributed evenly around the frame.

“You’re a walk-in,” he said.

“I don’t understand. Art called you, right?”

“Yes, of course. What I mean to say is that our facility’s surveillance team didn’t see you in a car anywhere around here.”

“Oh. Yeah. My office is on Montague Street over in Brooklyn. I walked across the bridge to get here.”

“I see. What’s your interest in Mr. Tesserat?”

“He’s married to my ex-wife. Didn’t your surveillance team tell you that?”

“No one likes a smartass,” he advised.

I took it. He was in charge and the MCC reminded me of Rikers.

He watched me. He was a professional watcher.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“To see Coleman. Monica, his wife, told me that he has no lawyer and that you won’t let her see him.”

“So you try to put pressure on us through Tomey?”

“Is it working?”

Davies did something with his tongue in his cheek, looking like he had a piece of food lodged in there somewhere.

“We’re debriefing Mr. Tesserat,” Davies said, giving up on the blockage. “As soon as that’s done he’ll be allowed visitors.”

“I walked all the way over here, man. At least you could let me shout at him a minute or two.”

The agent’s eyebrows went up about half an inch, making it look as if an idea had occurred.

“Do you know Tava Burkel?” he asked.

“Never heard of him. It’s a him, right?”

“Why are you here, Mr. Oliver?”

“To see Coleman Tesserat.”

“You’re not a lawyer.”

“And you’re not a snake,” I said, feeding nonsense with its kin.

The federal agent snorted and turned.

“Follow me.”

The hallway was reminiscent of an upscale mental hospital where the patients were kept behind pastel gray closed and knobless doors. The air felt cloying, but that was probably my aversion to lockups of any kind. The hall turned twice before we came to a room that had a man in a black suit slouching against the wall next to it.

This sentinel came to attention when Davies rolled up.

“He there?” Agent Raoul asked.

“Not yet,” the man in black said. He was about five eight and had the stance of a wily boxer. It was something about the way he managed both weight and balance.

“Let him in,” the boss told his minion, tossing his head in my direction.

While the sentry worked an imposing-looking key on the door, I fought down the urge to run.

The room was small and bare, tan from ceiling to floor, furnished with two folding chairs and a small table that was bolted down. There was a thick and very dark scuff mark to the right of the chair I sat in. I couldn’t imagine what had made that smudge, but it gave the impression of a violent action.

There was another door opposite the one I came through. It too had no knob.

Sitting there I was thinking of how much I didn’t like the incarceration trend I was going in. Too many locked doors and institutional settings. Too many dismissive guardians.

The door before me came open and Coleman walked through. The uniform he wore was dark blue with big yellow checks in unexpected places. His shoes seemed to be made of paper and he was bound with manacles, hands to feet.

Good-looking Coleman was my height, but unlike me he was light-skinned. Ten years my ex-wife’s junior, he usually had an arrogant sneer when seeing me. Not that day, however.

He shambled over to the chair on the other side of the table.

“Can’t shake hands” were his first words.

He managed to push the chair out and when he finally sat we looked at each other a moment or two.

“I always thought I’d be seeing you in the jailhouse.” His voice was softer than usual but the arrogance the same. “But not like this.”

“Why they got you in here, Coleman?”

“That shit doesn’t concern you.”

“Oh yes, it does. I don’t care about Monica, but she’s Aja’s mother and you have to have a bull’s-eye on your back for this here.”

I was having way too good a time lording it over Tesserat. He was a dog but I was the same breed. He’d been seeing my wife when we were still together, but I’d been seeing half a dozen women around the same time.

“They’re sayin’ I had something to do with a heating oil scheme,” Coleman said reluctantly.

“You mean buying heating oil at a deep discount and then selling it as diesel fuel?”

Coleman sat up straight and angrily.

“Come on, man,” I said. “Everybody knows that they’re just about the same. That what they say you been doin’?”

“I don’t know what they’re talkin’ ’bout.”

I was sure that we were being watched and recorded, so I couldn’t ask questions that might give the watchers fuel for their case.

“Who’s this Tava Burkel?” I asked.

Coleman’s eyes widened. “Look, asshole, just raise the money and get me outta here. Add an extra ten thousand and I know a lawyer I can retain.”

“I already got you a lawyer.”

“What? Who?”

“Art Tomey.”

“He’s, he’s one of the best criminal lawyers in New York.” For a moment Coleman forgot his predicament. “How’d you get to him?”

“Do you know Burkel?”

“No. Why you askin’?”

“I want to make a report to your wife and to Art. I mean, he’s already filed with the federal authorities. He’ll have all the dirt on you. I just need to know what to expect.”

“I told you,” he said, desperately trying to take control of the visit. “This shit is too much for you. Just do what Monica asked and stand back.”

I took a moment to be quiet. Tesserat was frightened, but I couldn’t blame him. There’s nothing in the world more terrifying than no way out. A prison door, a coffin lid — it was all the same.

“What?” he demanded.

A beat or three more and I said, “We don’t like each other, Coleman. That’s the way it should be. Monica asked me to come and I’m here. She wants you out and I’m tryin’ to help. But you, motherfucker, you will not order me around or tell me what to do. I don’t like you and you know if somebody calls to tell me you’re dead I won’t shed a goddamned tear.”

No way out. That’s a feeling that needs to be underscored now and then.

Coleman bit the inside of his left cheek and let his head come down about a quarter inch.

“I felt somethin’ on my chest last night,” he said. “And when I sat up a dyin’ rat fell off me. My cellmate is whiter than toothpaste but only speaks some kinda Middle East babble. He prays five times a day and he’s always watchin’ me. And, and... if I don’t testify against this guy I was workin’ with I get twenty-five years.”

“So talk,” I said as flippantly as I could.

Coleman raised his head to look me in the eye. If someone asked me the color of those orbs anytime before that moment I would have said brown. But looking at him across that table, breathing the same air, I saw that they were dark ocher, like ancient amber wrapped around secrets of the past.

I felt a tightening in my gut. Empathy for my enemies was not a good fit.

“Look, man,” I said. “I know they’re listenin’, but if you want my help you got to give me somethin’. Who is it they say you been workin’ with?”

He looked left and right before saying, “You right about what the feds blamin’ me for. They say I’m workin’ with a Russian mob buys heating oil with one corporation and then sells it as diesel fuel with another one. They say I been brokering the sales.”

“You been dealin’ with the Russian mob and livin’ in the house with Monica? Havin’ Aja come in there to eat with you when you doin’ something so serious as to have Raoul Davies outside vetting who you talk to?”

Coleman got my meaning. He knew he fucked up.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

“You know somethin’, Coleman?”

“What’s that?”

“You are a special human being.”

“What you mean?”

“Used to be a Black man had to be Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. to be under investigation by the feds. Back in the day, and the day before that, they just killed niggers. Shot us down. Hung us in the deep woods. But now look at you. They got you in here with suspected terrorists and dyin’ rats.”

“I need your help,” he said, and meant it.

“You got it.”