Every Man a King

8

It used to be that pedestrians walking across the Brooklyn Bridge had to share their lanes with bicyclers. It was an uncomfortable fit with a lot of jostling and abridged (excuse the pun) rights. But then the city pushed the bicycle lane out to share with cars. Suddenly it was an easy and comfortable stroll to the other side.

I liked it. Parents with their kids, people jogging, lovers walking side by side. It almost felt normal, like there was no such thing as prison and racists, ex-wives and gouged-out eyes.

Midway across the span I stopped to gaze over the side toward Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The water had the look of creped pea-green fabric and the sky was a washed-out blue.

My phone chirped. The little screen told me that the caller was unknown.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Oliver?” Minta Kraft asked.

“Ms. Kraft. How are you?”

“I’m calling to tell you that I have time to meet with you this afternoon if you can get here by three.”

“We could just talk on the phone,” I suggested.

“No. I never discuss my employer’s business electronically.”

“What’s the address?”

When I got to the office, Aja was at her post amid dozens of crumpled slips of paper, a ledger, and, of course, the computer screen.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said.

“I got to go out to Long Island.”

“How come?”

“To speak to Quiller’s wife’s assistant. She won’t talk on the phone.”

“Is it safe?”

“Is anything?”

“Daddy, you need to change jobs.”

“I thought you wanted to be my partner. Now you say I should change professions?”

“Not professions. I’ve been reading up on all the jobs that private investigators do. You could work for some corporation making sure their properties are safe or keep people from stealing. The kind of work you’re doing is just too stressful.”

“I don’t feel stressed.”

“You should. I was reading more about that man Quiller. He has meetings with the Klan and Nazis and all kinds of bad people. They love him.”

“That sounds like a good learning curve.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, they love him and I might very well be trying to save him from getting railroaded by the government. By connection they should love me.”

“I don’t think it works like that.”

“Well, anyway, I love you, shorty.”

Southampton is a long ride from Brooklyn. Lots of cars and a countryside that is flat and fertile. For some reason I wasn’t worried about Quiller and Russian mobsters there in my car listening to Keith Jarrett live at Köln. The concert was at once rousing and calming.

I was half the way through a second hearing when my GPS spokesperson told me that I was in Southampton and to turn right.

There I was driving down long blocks where most of the hedges were so high you rarely saw a house. And when a dwelling was visible you knew better than to call it a house. It would have been like calling a saber-toothed tiger a calico kitten.

I followed the grand boulevard until finally getting to a block before the ocean. There the nice GPS lady told me to turn left and that I had reached my destination: a rambling mansion the back end of which stood on stilts above quiet waters. The front of the three-story house was even with the ground and I was able to drive up to within a few feet of the front door.

Exiting my tiny car, I wondered why there wasn’t some kind of security there to assess my level of threat.

I pressed the doorbell but didn’t hear anything. It was a big house.

A man opened the door maybe thirty seconds after I rang; a white man. He wore comfortable and yet presentable clothes — dark trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt that wanted to be blue. He didn’t like me but held any outsize antipathy in check.

I waited for some kind of greeting.

“Hello. Mr. Oliver?” a woman’s voice came from behind the man.

Popping around the side of the sentry, she appeared. A healthy specimen in a one-piece teal-green dress that partially muted a powerful figure.

“Ms. Kraft?”

“Minta,” she said.

Behind her were two more white-man guards, also dressed presentably down. Thirty or forty feet farther on was a floor-to-ceiling set of windows that looked out on the sea.

“Come,” she bade me. “Let’s go sit where we can see the water.”

The three guardians moved aside for me and the private secretary.

On our walk toward the windows I wondered if I should have heeded my daughter’s warning.

“We don’t get visitors very often around here,” Minta Kraft told me. “Sometimes a representative from the town council comes asking for support. This morning there was a Girl Scout selling cookies.”

“Did you buy any?”

Minta stopped to smile at me. She was fair-skinned with raven hair and eyes that shifted around the blue-green range. She was certainly a white woman, around thirty, but somewhere in her genetic lineage there had been a few lingering strands of Mongolian DNA.

“The peanut butter sandwiches,” she said. “I love how tiny they are.”

We had reached the far window overlooking the deck, which hovered above a calm sea.

“Don’t you love them?” Minta asked.

“Love what?”

“Girl Scout cookies.”

“No.” My tone was abrupt, brusque even. It had already been a rough road.

“Oh. Excuse me. Have a seat?”

The lanky chairs were cast iron. Strength behind apparent weakness has always attracted me.

“Tea?” she asked once we were seated.

“Coffee’d be good.”

“Rudolph?” she said.

One of the guardsmen ambled over.

“Mr. Oliver would like coffee,” she said to him. And then to me: “Milk?”

“Black,” I said, looking Rudolph in his dead eyes.

He went away and I found myself hankering for a peanut butter cookie.

“I never get tired of the ocean,” Minta was saying. “I was born and raised in Cleveland, but the first time I saw the Pacific I knew my place was at the shore.”

“This is the Atlantic.”

“As long as I can look out and not see the other side,” she assured me. “That’s all that matters.”

“What you do in California?”

“L.A. I went to USC for economics.”

“That prepared you to be a rich woman’s assistant?” On edge, I wanted company.

“Here you go.” The guard placed a steaming blue mug down before me.

“Thank you.” I was full of dishonesties and deceits.

Minta, who was no longer smiling, waited for Rudolph to get beyond earshot.

“Ms. Prim told me that she was ready to answer your questions,” she said.

“So how does it work? You write down what I need to know and then pass it on to her?”

“Um, well, first I need to know what you’re planning to do. I mean for Mr. Quiller.”

“I don’t know yet. But when I find out I’ll be telling him.”

“What does Mr. Quiller say?”

“That in order to get to his wife I have to talk to you.”

Kraft wasn’t easily thrown off. She sniffed at the air and continued. “He’s very worried about Ms. Prim being exposed to stress. She loves him and wants to get him out of that place.”

“I imagine she does.”

“Do you want the same thing?”

“I have a very particular job.”

“And what is that?”

“To find out the government’s involvement in Mr. Quiller’s arrest and to see if the charges hold water.”

“And how do you plan to do all that?”

“Ms. Kraft. Minta, I’m not here to answer your questions. I’m here to investigate the circumstances that brought Quiller to Rikers,” I said and then took a breath. “Quiller pays your salary, doesn’t he?”

“I can’t see where that’s any of your business.”

Many thoughts, retorts, and curses sprang to mind, but I decided that standing would be my best reply. When I turned to leave, two of the mercenary-like guards were standing there — maybe eight feet away. Belatedly I appreciated how brilliant my grandmother was. She and Aja too.

The two men stood in such a way as to block my passage.

I was unarmed and pretty sure that they had backup somewhere.

Now and then Death rears her head in everyone’s life. That was my first true peekaboo of her elegant manifestation in what I came to call the Quiller Case.

“Mr. King Oliver,” a woman’s voice sounded from off to my right.

The words held more than mere content. They also conveyed musicality, depth. But as much information as it held, the voice also hid meaning.

When I turned my head I did not expect to see a gorgeous Black woman. Tall, she was maybe thirty-three looking twenty-six, dark-skinned with a face that was the shape of an inverted egg. Mathilda Prim’s figure was reminiscent of a Playboy bunny of the late sixties — opulent, impossible.

“Ms. Prim?”

“You and Adam can leave, Rudolph,” she said, looking me in the eye.

“Yes, ma’am,” Rudolph replied.

His words contained real civility. That was a surprise.

The muscle left. When I turned back I saw that Minta had also gone.

“Joe would be fine, ma’am,” I said to the lady.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

She glided over to the chair that Minta had abandoned and sat. It was all so terribly elegant.

“Won’t you join me?” she offered.

Back in my chair, I took my first sip of coffee. It was pretty good.

“I was told your given name but I prefer King Oliver, the cornetist who mentored Louis Armstrong.”

She didn’t smile, but there was no tension or hostility to her expression either. She was the mistress of what she surveyed — the deep blue sea and me.

“It’s our true history,” I said after a scant lull.

“What is?”

“Jazz.”

There was the hint of a smile on just her lips.

“Yes,” she agreed. “People here, in this country I mean, give short shrift to the contents of their hearts.”

“Unknown loves that guide their every step.” It felt like I was completing a quote that had never been uttered.

“That’s why they hate themselves,” she continued, gazing toward the interior of the house.

“Are you foreign-born?”

“No, but... it feels like that sometimes.”

For some reason that made me look out on the water. There was a solitary black-sailed boat out there — drifting.

“Do you drink, Mr. King Oliver?”

“I’d take bourbon if you got it.”

I’m not sure what you would have called the room we were in. It was very large and mostly unfurnished, with the exception of the two cast-iron chairs, a small cherrywood card table, and a squat maple cabinet flush against the wall behind me.

Mathilda Prim went to the wall-hugging breakfront cabinet and threw open its curved doors, revealing that it was a bar of sorts. She took out a ceramic decanter with two glasses and poured.

“You don’t take ice, do you?” she asked when placing the two double shots down.

“That little bar of yours doesn’t seem to belong in a big fancy house like this. You’d think there’d be a whole alcove dedicated to hooch.”

“That’s right,” she averred. “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

I took a drink.

“So what information can I give you, Mr. King Oliver?”

A simple question, and the right one to ask, but it made me hesitate. The black sail was still on the water. Minta Kraft was probably on some upper floor practicing yoga.

“I’m here trying to find a reason, an excuse, to want to help your husband. I mean, you are his wife, right?”

That reply was the cause for her first full smile, actually a grin.

“How can I help?” she asked.

“Explain to me how his stance in the world jibes with you... being here.”

Ms. Prim performed a one-shoulder shrug that seemed to render my question meaningless.

“He hates Black people,” I pressed.

“He doesn’t hate me.”

“Do you love him?” I asked, knowing that the question had nothing to do with my job.

She paused, considered, looked into my eyes, and said, “Yes, yes, I do.”

“Do you hate your mother, your children, yourself?”

My question didn’t seem to disturb her. She put away the smile and watched me for a moment, two. Then she rose and went to the door in the window-wall and walked out on the deck.

At first I thought that in this way she was ending the interview. But because she left the door ajar I finally decided to follow.

The deck was at least forty feet wide. I caught up with Quiller’s wife at the four-foot-high weathered pine fence at the far end.

I stood there next to her waiting for some retort to my accusations.

After a long while she said, “When I met Alfie he was all up in his head. He was giving a talk at Syracuse University and the Black Students Union was there giving him shit.” She smiled at the memory. “I didn’t say anything. Al held his own and all the kids got mad.

“Later that night I was working my job as a cocktail waitress at the Copper Hen in DeWitt. He came in and recognized me. When I asked him if he wanted a drink, he asked me why I didn’t have anything to say at the talk. I told him that he and the students were just flexing and not in any way trying to work the arguments through. While we were talking, this big white guy walked up and asked Al if I was bothering him. He said no and when the big guy walked away Al asked me what I would have asked.”

“What did you say?” I wanted to know.

“I asked him if he believed in a pure white race, a bloodline that contained no other racial identifiers. I don’t know what it was, what that question sparked in him, but we had a talk after that, that lasted for three days.”

“You think it might have been because you’re so attractive?”

“Maybe,” she said with a flip of her hand. “On the second day he asked me to marry him. I told him, ‘Hell no.’ On the third day I said yes.”

Water was lapping against the pylons that held up the outer deck and half the house. It sounded like alien whispers about things I will never understand.

“So,” I asked, “did he change?”

“He... learned something, I think. Something about so-called equality.”

“What?”

“I had his child. He played with Claxton Akim all the time. His blood in a Black boy made him, I don’t know, understand.”

“That’s pretty hard to swallow,” I admitted. “I mean, he’s still associated with some pretty awful folks.”

“Look deeper, Mr. King Oliver. See what you find.”