The Long Fall

17

You got a screwdriver?” I called into Jimmy’s clear cage.

“Supposed to stay here in case the porter has to use it,” he replied, not bothering to rise from the swivel stool.

“You have a porter?”

“I’m the porter,” he said.

“I just wanna borrow it. Twenty bucks?”

He turned his profile to me, opened a short door in the wall, and rummaged around until he came out with a screwdriver that had a translucent yellow plastic handle. It was eighteen inches long with a blue metal shaft that was a good eighth of an inch thick.

We traded cash for tool and I went out into the Albany night.

That was a standard round after eleven.

DECKER AVENUE WAS a drab block of old-fashioned brick office buildings. There were six streetlamps but only two of them worked. The traffic was sporadic and not one pedestrian passed by in the seventeen minutes I sat there.

The label with Norman Fell’s buzzer next to it said that he was on the third floor: 3E.

I went around back, down a slender concrete pathway between Fell’s building and the one next to it. The lock on the back door was reinforced with a thick metal guard but the entrance to the basement, five steps down, might have been blown open by a strong wind. I jimmied the lock and made my way up the back utility stairs.

Norman Fell’s door was next to the exit. There was no light shining under the crack. I checked the rest of the offices down the hall. They were all lifeless and dark.

A knock on Fell’s door brought no answer.

His lock gave me more trouble than the one downstairs, but nothing challenging.

His rooms were at the back of the building, so I chanced turning on the light.

It was a big room with a pine desk set in the exact center. There were bookcases behind and to the right of the blond desk, and a solitary green metal file cabinet to the left, next to a broad oak door. The door opened onto a huge white tile bathroom that had a big, footed iron bathtub standing upon what could only be called a dais, ten inches or so above the floor. It was an odd design. The building had always been for offices but maybe, I thought, the man who drew up the plans for this suite also had lived here.

I gave up my architectural conjectures and got down to the business at hand.

I was already wearing cotton gloves, had been since before I got out of my car.

There were two deep file drawers. But they were useless. Not in any kind of order, there were mostly printed forms, manuals, and things like tools and wires in the hanging folders. I went through everything, looking for some reference to the names I knew. No Frank Tork or Roger Brown, no Leonid Trotter McGill for that matter; nothing about the case, or any other job, that I could see.

The desk revealed little more than a pair of small shoes that sat under it. Norman Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman) didn’t keep information written down. There was no computer, or even a typewriter, in evidence. The only thing he had was a recent phone bill on the desk and a handwritten bookkeeping ledger in a locked bottom drawer. I tore out ledger sheets as far back as a month before Fell had gotten in touch with me, then pocketed them along with the phone bill.

“A MAN’S BOOKCASE will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him,” my father had told me more than once. “A business-man has business books and a dreamer has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”

I don’t know where my father got all that stuff. He was raised just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, born to parents who could neither read nor write. He said that he became a revolutionary at the age of thirteen when his parents were being evicted from their sharecropper’s hovel and one of the white marshals spit on his mother. Soon after that he changed his name from Clarence to Tolstoy.

For all his humble beginnings my father was smart. But I think that even he would have been amazed at what Fell’s library had to say.

There were volumes in Greek and Spanish, English and French; old books of poetry shoved up right next to modern popular novels. Many had been shelved upside down and they covered every obscure subject under the sun. There was a Chinese tome that, from the illustrations, I assumed was about sewing machine repair. There were other manuals and textbooks along with sultry potboilers and children’s fairy tales.

In the end I “">Iultdecided that Fell must be functionally illiterate, though he loved the idea of reading and wanted to be seen as smart. That’s why there was no casework in his files, no computer, not one sentence anywhere written by his hand. I guess he knew his numbers well enough to write them down along with codes and simple names that he probably transcribed or worked out phonetically.

I’d have to come after Fell in a more straightforward fashion.

I would either wait in my car outside or stay where I was, seated behind his desk, to greet him when he showed up in the morning.

He wouldn’t want to call the police any more than I did. The problem was that he might be armed and shoot me where I sat. It was always better to come up behind your enemy. My father never told me that, but I learned it early.

Deciding on discretion over comfort, I went to the toilet to relieve myself before going back to the red SUV. I could sleep in the backseat and wake up with the sun. It had been a while since I had done anything like that.

Standing at the high commode, I sniffed at a sour tickle way back in my nasal passage.

I knew that tickle.

The man who had introduced himself to me as Ambrose Thurman was crushed into the bottom of the deep iron tub, eyes wide and lips drawn back over the small rounded teeth. The fingers of his left hand had all been broken—probably by a single blow. I couldn’t tell if he died from strangulation or the broken neck, but there was no question that he had died violently. He was wearing a dark-green suit with a checkered black-and-red vest. His socks bore holes at the big toe of either foot. I considered searching him but thought better of it.

I gazed into his face for a good long time before deciding he had nothing to say.

JIMMY WAS STILL on his stool when I got back to the Gray Wolf a few minutes before two. I returned the screwdriver and he set the elevator to take me to the fourth floor of the landlocked cruise ship.

I didn’t sleep that night, knowing for certain there’d be plenty time enough for rest when I was dead.

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