The Long Fall

23

Some upstanding citizen heard the ruckus and called the cops. That citizen should have been me. Don’t get me wrong, I did call the police, but only as my second act of consciousness. That was five minutes later. It took three minutes to get to the phone and two more to call Breland Lewis, my long-time lawyer and sometime friend.

Way before Breland got there I was on my knees, with a plastic tie holding my wrists behind my back. There were eleven cops in the twelve-by-fourteen room, where a good deal of the floor space was taken up by the body of the most powerful man I ever fought.

“This guy’s alive,” one of the boys in blue shouted.

Alive? A blow like he received could have killed a real bear.

There’s a small squad of policemen assigned to the Tesla Building. With so many businesses—and possible crimes—there are always a few cops in the vicinity. Each and every one of them has my name and statistics committed to memory. I was a person of interest to the NYPD. No amount of redemption was going to change that fact.

Sergeant Kenneth Holloway was the officer in charge. He had told me, more than once, always in the exact same words, that “I will see you locked up for forty years, McGill.”

He said it to me again when I was on my knees, but I didn’t have the strength to care.

“Why did you attack him?” Holloway asked.

I looked up and saw skinny, diminutive Breland Lewis shoulder his way past cops twice his size.

“Out of my way,” he peeped like an angry chick. “Mr. McGill is my client and I have every right to see him. Leonid, are you okay?”

“We got your client on attempted murder, Counselor,” Holloway said, grinning ugly.

Looking at those two, I had to wonder about the American idea of a white race. Holloway was tall and beefy, pink-skinned with stingy porcine eyes and ears. Lewis, on the other hand, was a flyweight with fine features carved from the ivory of a recent kill. As far as that went, the white man on the floor had brownish-white skin. He was a Caucasian, too, by American standards, but in ancient Europe those th¾t kree would all have been considered different races.

My mind, I realized, was still wandering. I thought maybe I should go see a doctor soon.

“This man pushed his way into Leonid’s office and attacked him,” Breland was shouting.

“Then why isn’t LT dead on the floor?” Holloway bellowed.

“Release my client!”

“To Attica, for forty years!”

I wondered what the number forty meant in the cop’s interpretation of justice.

Just then the paramedics barged in. There were four of them in white and blue, two women and two men. There were now eighteen people in the antechamber of my office and spilling out into the hall. It was like a party.

“What’s the combination to your inner office?” Holloway asked me after consulting with the head meat-wagon attendant.

“A secret,” I replied.

I was hoping that Holloway would slap me, not to claim police brutality but to snap me out of the malaise that exertion and a beating had brought on.

The paramedics were turning Big Boy over onto a hydraulic gurney that had been lowered to the floor. He didn’t look good. There was a gash on the left side of his forehead and his tan skin was wending toward blue. He was breathing, though, and even my ideologue father would have to admit that breath is the only true definition of life.

Holloway and Lewis were arguing: the bulldog and the chicklet. I was still breathing hard, and trying to think of something that would make sense in a situation like that.

“What’s goin’ on in here?” a familiar voice commanded.

Everyone went silent as Carson Kitteridge entered, parting the sea of blues and white.

“Your boy tried to murder this man,” Holloway said, triumph buoying his words.

Big Boy was being rolled from the room on the gurney. Kitteridge glanced at him and then turned back to the fat sergeant.

“What’d he say?” Carson asked, nodding in my direction.

“Who cares what he said? It’s obvious what happened. We caught him trying to escape. And I bet ya dollars to doughnuts that when the victim comes to, he’s gonna have that story to tell.”

Kitteridge tried to stifle his sneer. Instead of responding, he went over to my displaced desk and climbed on top. There in the corner he pressed a panel and a section of the wall gave way. Unplugging the digital Ãng ng,camera he found there, he hopped down and returned to Holloway.

I didn’t have to look to know what they were seeing. I once had occasion to show Carson pictures taken with the secret camera.

I have to give Holloway credit. He knew when he was beaten.

“Release him,” he said to a sandy-haired minion.

After snipping the plastic tie, the young man even helped me to my feet.

“Tell me something, Sergeant Holloway,” I said while massaging the blood back into my hands. “Why do you make suspects get down on their knees?”

“Makes ’em easier to control,” he said.

If I was an innocent man I might have struck him down. But the truth was, I deserved Holloway. All the years I’d pulled the plug on men who maybe weren’t angels. I was Gordo’s hammer for more than a score of men. That’s why I could be tied up and thrown down on my knees.

That’s why someone will kill me one day.

THEY TOOK MY CAMERA but I didn’t care. All the photos taken were transmitted to a storage device in my inner office. Even if they lost the evidence, I had two other cameras and a backup.

Slowly the cops left my offices. Along with the camera they took the swivel chair. Holloway was the last of the uniforms to depart. Before going through the door, he pointed at me, making his thumb and forefinger like the hammer and barrel of an old-fashioned six-shooter. It wasn’t an empty gesture.

“Did they strike you?” Breland asked me.

“No.”

“Did they castigate you?”

“What?”

“Curse you, use harsh or foul language?” he said by way of explanation.

“I know what the word means, man. This is cops and killers here. There might have been some cursing, but damn, it would be a miracle if there wasn’t.”

Breland was an odd guy. A decade older than I, he looked ten years younger. He’d once worked for a lawyer who represented a reputed crime boss and his associates. That’s how we met. When the crime boss and his lawyer were brought down, Breland needed work. I liked the guy, so I sent some fairly honest jobs his way. It turned out that he was the loyal sort, and so, even though I might have been a little slow with my payment schedule, he was always there when the chains rattled at my door.

Kitteridge had taken a seat in one of the surviving visitors’ chairs.

="1="1em" width="1em" align="justify">“Are there more questions, Detective?” Breland asked.

“Not here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m taking your client to our offices for an interrogation, a prolonged interrogation.”

“Mr. McGill needs medical attention.”

It occurred to me that the paramedics hadn’t even looked at me. Just the fact that I was under arrest meant that they didn’t care about my health.

“You want a ride to the Rikers medical facility, LT?” Kitteridge asked.

“What grounds you got to arrest me, man?”

“Have you ever heard the words ‘material witness’?”

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