The Long Fall

24

Blood leaked slowly from the split on my temple down onto the lapel of my jacket. Now and then a droplet would splash on the pale-green Formica tabletop in the interrogation room.

“We should get you some first aid,” Carson Kitteridge said.

“It’ll wait until I get home.”

“You’re getting blood on my table,” the detective complained.

“I didn’t ask to be here.”

Carson wasn’t happy, but neither was I under arrest. He could have taken me to a prison infirmary but he wanted answers and knew from long, hard experience that I wasn’t the kind of guy that he could bully. The blood was part of our dialogue—if he wanted to have a conversation, it would be with the wounded man he wouldn’t allow to rest after a horrific beating.

“So tell me about Willie Sanderson,” Kitteridge said.

“Who?”

“Come on, LT. Don’t get me mad now.”

“I don’t know anyone named Sanderson.”

“You nearly kill a guy and you don’t even know his name?”

“He’s still alive?”

“Who is he?”

“Never met him before. Never heard of him. I doubt that he’s even human if he survived that flying chair.”

“If he dies it’s manslaughter.”

“Bullshit. That man was trying to kill me. You saw the pictures.”

The cop sat back and did that lacing-his-fingers thing. I’ve never understood what he intends to communicate with that gesture.

“We got one, maybe two men bludgeoned and strangled, and a third who almost fell in line,” he said.

“What men?” I asked.

“Your boy fits the description of the guy who went to see Roger Brown. If you take off the hat and fake whiskers he looks an awful lot like the guy who paid Frank Tork’s bail. That’s what I call suspicious.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Suspicious about your boy Sanderson. I’m just a victim here.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe you were in business with Sanderson,” he suggested. “Maybe he decided to take you down and keep the profits for himself.”

“What business? What profits? I was walking out of my door and he attacked me. He didn’t say a word, and my bankbook’s got cobwebs all over it. I was not in business with him, and I never met him.”

Kitteridge was watching my eyes. He did that often. He believed, I think, that he could tell when a man was lying by looking into his eyes. I believed that he could also.

After a moment he pulled his fingers apart and made an open-palmed plaintive gesture.

“Help me out with this, LT,” he said. “We got some white maniac from Albany killing African-Americans on the street. It has the stink of a hate crime.”

“I never even understood the idea of a hate crime,” I said, wasting time, trying to digest the fact that my would-be killer was from Albany. Was he the one who hired Fell? No. Fell didn’t recognize him when he came in for the kill. “I mean, if you kill somebody with evil intent, it’s murder and you should pay for it. That’s all, right?”

“I can sit here all night,” the cop replied.

I leaned forward and three neat little droplets splashed on the tabletop.

“I’m beat, man,” I said. “I been thumped on, handcuffed, dragged down here, and made to wait for hours while you shuffled papers and drank bad coffee. Let me go home and get cleaned up. Let me get some sleep and maybe I’ll come up with somethin’ for ya.”

“I could arrest you.”

“For self-defense?”

“This isn’t going away,” CË gont arson said. “This is murder. If Sanderson pulls through and incriminates you, all bets are off.”

“I don’t know anything.”

TWILL WAS WAITING near the front desk of the Chelsea station. He wore black trousers and a pin-striped blue-and-white dress shirt that was wanting a pair of cuff links. He was sitting there on a wooden bench next to a young blonde in gold hot pants and a blue halter. The young woman was smiling brightly, chattering away at my son. He nodded sagely now and again and spoke in a low voice.

When he saw me Twill stood up, but we didn’t embrace. Twill is too cool for kneejerk expressions of fondness; I guess I am, too.

“Hey, boy,” I said. “What you doin’ here? It’s nearly two in the morning.”

“Mr. Lewis called,” he said. “He told me that you’d been arrested and so I called up to find out what precinct Detective Kitteridge was working out of.”

If anyone was an example of having too much on the ball it was my son. He would track down Satan and then try to brace him for a bad debt.

“This is Lonnie,” Twill said. “She’s waiting for her boyfriend, Juman. They got him in here on a seventy-two-hour thing. I gave her Mr. Lewis’s number. I hope that’s okay.”

Lonnie had the lovely, and somewhat awkward, physical contradiction of skinny legs and big breasts. She stood up and shook my hand like her mother had taught her when she was five.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. McGill. Your son is great.”

“Tell Breland to call me,” I said. “If it’s just a simple thing, I’ll cover the charge.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “He’s really not a bad guy at all.”

Before we left, Lonnie kissed my son on the cheek and whispered something to him.

“WHAT DID LONNIE say?” I asked Twill. We were walking down the ramp that led to the garage where he had parked my classic car.

“She wants me to call her. Says that Juman is on the way out and she’d like to buy me a coffee or something.”

I gave him a doubting stare.

“Don’t worry, Pop. She was just thankful to have somebody help her out in there.”

He didn’t say whether he was going to call her or not.

ON THE WAY home Twill asked me about the interrogation. I told him what happened, then tried to get deeper into him.

“So you didn’t really say if you had a steady girl,” I ventured.

“Don’t worry, Dad. Lonnie’s not my type.”

“I’m not worried about her. I just wanted to know if you had something going on. You know, a steady, like.”

He laughed. I think he might have been a little embarrassed.

“What’s funny?” I asked him.

“Here some man you never even met tries to beat you to death and you’re asking me about if I have a girlfriend or not?”

“Near-death experience makes a man want to pay attention to the little things. Is it so hard to answer a simple question?”

“I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You know, son, you’re better than I was in that interrogation room.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something’s going on with you, Twill. I want you to trust me.”

“I trust you fine.”

“Then talk to me.”

“I’m okay, Dad. You don’t have to worry about me.”

Most parents of teenagers could identify with that banter. There I was, the dedicated fisherman, and he was like a lively trout slipping between my fingers in an icy-cold stream.

The difference between Twill and other young men was that he was planning a hit in New York City with no more trepidation than a teenage girl fixing her lipstick between kisses.

“Tell me somethin’, Pop.”

“What’s that, son?”

“Why’d they let you go? I mean, Mr. Lewis said that he thought they’d keep you all night at least.”

“I think they just got tired,” I said. Then I yawned.

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