4

When I was maybe five, my father, an autodidact Communist, took me down to Chinatown. He was always trying to teach me lessons about life. That day he bought me a woven finger-trap. I pressed my fingers in from either side of the bamboo tube at his request.

"Now pull them out," he said.

I remember smiling and yanking my hands apart, only to have the fingers tugged at by the stubborn toy. Try as I might the cylinder held like glue to my fingers. My father waited till I was near tears before telling me the secret: you had to press both fingers toward each other, increasing the size of the tube, before you were able to get free of it.

The humiliating experience left me in a sour mood.

"What have you learned from this?" my father asked after buying me a ten-cent packet of toffee peanuts from a street vendor in Little Italy.

"Nuthin'," I said.

Tolstoy McGill was tall and very dark-skinned. I inherited his coloring. He laughed and said, "That's too bad because I just taught you one of the most important lessons that any man from Joe Street Sweeper to President Kennedy needs to learn."

Like all black children, I loved President Kennedy, and so my father had my interest in spite of the mortification I felt.

"What?" I asked.

"It's always easier getting into trouble than it is getting out."


I WAS REMINDED OF my father's lesson while wondering how to get away from Detective Bonilla and her investigation.

"Maybe you should come down to the precinct with me," she suggested.

"No," I said, feeling the bamboo walls closing in.

"Material witness," she said. Those were her magic words.

"So is this Laura Brown?"

"Doesn't matter," Bethann said. "She told you her name was Laura Brown."

"I've given you everything I have."

Bonilla was one of the new breed of cops who didn't see the world in black and white, so to speak. My actions in the last case she worked, the one that, no doubt, earned her the promotion, were inexplicable. On the one hand, I had beaten a much larger, much stronger man to death; on the other hand, I had saved the life of a young woman by putting myself into jeopardy.

"Come in here," she said, leading me into the bedroom.

The other cops stared at us but little Bethann was made from stern stuff. She wasn't intimidated by the men she worked with.


THE BEDROOM WAS SLOPPY the way some young women are. There were clothes everywhere. Pastel-colored thong panties and stockings and shoes were scattered across the floor. The bed itself was unmade. Open makeup containers were spread across the vanity.

"There's a standing order to bring you in if there's ever a chance to do so," Bethann said to me when we were out of earshot of the rest of New York's finest.

"If you say so."

"Why is that?"

"Haven't they told you?"

"I'm asking you."

I looked at the thirty-something officer, wondering about the possibilities for, and ramifications of, truth.


"THE TRUTH," MY IDEOLOGUE father once told me, "changes according to what point of view is beholding it."

"What does that mean?" I must have been about twelve because not too long after that Tolstoy was gone forever. My mother soon followed him the only way she could-in a casket.

"A dictator sees the truth as a matter of will," he said. "Anything he says or dreams is the absolute truth and soon the people are forced to go along with him. For the so-called democrat, the truth is the will of the people. Whatever the majority says is the law and that law becomes truth for the people.

"But for men like us," my father said, "the only truth is the truth of the tree."

"What tree?" I asked.

"All trees," Tolstoy McGill proclaimed. "Because the truth of the tree is its roots in the ground, and the wind blowing, and the rain falling. The sun is a tree's truth, and even if he's cut down his seed will scatter and those roots will once again take hold."


"DO YOU BELIEVE THAT a man can change, Lieutenant?" I asked Bethann Bonilla.

"What does that have to do with my question?"

"That order to arrest me refers to another man," I said. "The man I used to be. I can't deny my history and I won't admit to a thing. All I can tell you is that you will never catch me doing the things your department thinks I'm doing. I'm not that man anymore."

The detective felt my confession more than she understood it. She wondered about me-it wouldn't be the last time.

"Do you know anything about what happened here tonight?" she asked.

"Is the dead girl Laura Brown?"

After a moment's hesitation the policewoman said, "No. I don't think so."

"And what is her name?"

"You'll find out in the morning news anyway, I guess. It's Wanda Soa. At least we're pretty sure. A few neighbors gave us descriptions. One outstanding detail is a tiger tattoo on her left ankle."

"I don't know a thing about it, then. She might have been using the name Brown. She might have called me. The caller ID said unknown. You're welcome to check my home phone records. But I've already told you all that I know."

Often-in books and movies and TV shows-private detectives mouth off to the police. They claim civil rights or just run on bravado. But in the real world you have to lie so seamlessly that even you are unsure of the truth.

My father didn't teach me that. He was an idealist who probably died fighting the good fight. I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.

"You can go home, Leonid," Bonilla said. "But you haven't heard the last of this."

"Don't I know it. I'm still trying to figure out the finger-trap my father bought me when I was five."

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