Walter Mosley - The Long Fall

I don’t know what he planned to do next but it didn’t matter because I let go of my son and slapped Leslie hard enough to knock him on his ass. He was sitting on the curb, shaking his head to clear out the stars and cobwebs.

“Hey!” the white man who had pushed me down said.

He was coming right at me.

With my slap-hand I brought together his dark-blue shirt collar and pulled his face close to mine.

“I got a gun in my pocket and nothing to keep me from shooting you dead right here, right now.”

I don’t know if it was the words or the tone of my voice that convinced the guy but he fell back and melted away into the mass of unsuspecting humanity.

Ê€„

52

Itook Twill by his right wrist and dragged him away from the street fair like an angry nanny might do with a naughty five-year-old. We didn’t stop moving for six blocks.

“Dad. Dad!”

I realized that my mind had been racing ahead without me.

“What?”

“What’s wrong with your foot?”

“My what?”

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“You’re limping.”

His words, it seemed, brought the pain back into my ankle.

We were standing on the western sidewalk of the Natural History Museum. Twill led me to a bench there.

Willie Sanderson was on my mind. Where was he?

Who would the monster kill next?

“Dad?”

“You don’t have to worry about Mardi’s father anymore,” I said. “I know what he did to her and I’ll take care of him. But you should have come to me, son. You should always come to me when you have a problem.”

“Mardi didn’t want anybody to know.”

“There’s no secrets between us, Twill. I would no more betray that girl than you would. Don’t you know that?”

“I guess.”

“And what kind of fool are you, planning to walk up to somebody and shoot him in broad daylight in front of a thousand people?”

“How’d you know I planned to shoot him?”

“Don’t you think I know your hiding places, boy? And I’d have to be blind not to see what was goin’ on with that girl. What I couldn’t see was how making yourself a martyr in front of a street full of people was going to help.”

“No, man,” he said to me as if I were one of his school friends. “I had this.” He pulled the fabric hat from his head. In his hand the woolen skullcap opened into a ski mask. “That way nobody could see my face and . . .”

Twill stood up and pulled the sweatshirt-hoodie up over his head. Underneath he was wearing an ugly but bright orange-red Hawaiian shirt festooned with images of pelicans and pineapples.

My irrepressible son grinned.

“I woulda walked away with the gun at my side and then pulled off the hoodie in an alley two blocks away. Then I’da made it into Central Park, where there’s a rock I’d put the gun under.”

It wasn’t a half-bad plan. You’d have to be focused to pull it off, but Twill never had an attention deficit.

“Listen, son,” I said in spite of how impressed I was. “You’re smart and fearless. But you don’t know everything. That man deserves anything he gets but not by you taking the law in your own hands. Killing is wrong and I don’t want you involved with anything like that.” Sometimes I marvel at the simplicity of communication between people who share closeness. I was raised on the Hegelian dialectic, but there is no love in that language.

“That’s why you ran out there after me?” Twill asked, but I felt that there was another question on his mind.

“I’d die to protect you,” I replied to the unspoken interrogative.

Twill sat there on the public bench, staring into my eyes. I have rarely felt closer to another human being.

After a moment he nodded.

“I’m sorry, Pops,” he said.

I held out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Grab a cab home and put the pistol in my office, in the desk.”

“All right. But put that away. I got my own money.”

It was going to be a long haul making sure that my son survived his own dark brilliance.

AFTER TWILL WAS GONE I caught a taxi of my own. I gave the Jamaican driver an address near Gracie Mansion and sat back. Now that Sanderson was free I thought I might be able to leverage some information out of BH. I closed my eyes and drifted for a minute or two. My telephone let out a loud bleep, telling me that it was nearing the end of its power.

I nodded a bit more and the hyenas began to yip.

“What?” I said into the invisible mouthpiece.

“We can’t find Sanderson,” Kitteridge said.

“What were the guards doing while he was escaping?”

“Knocked both of them out before they ever even knew he was there. Hit ’em in the head with some kind of bludgeon. I’m impressed that you laid him low when he was at full power.”

“I’m just glad he didn’t kill me.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Willie anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because once we catch him, and I promise you we will catch him, we’ve got all we need to send him to prison for life—or death.”

“What do you have?”

My phone made another bleeping sound, telling me that the juice was almost gone.

“That’s police business, LT.”

“Come on, man. Yesterday you were telling me I was going to prison over Sanderson.”

“Somebody had his lawyer call and tell us that Sanderson was trying to shake down hi«€€1ems wife. Said that Sanderson had admitted to killing Brown and Tork. He also said that he’d called in a debt to make a hit on a Theodore Nilson in prison and that he murdered a guy named Norman Fell in Albany. This guy Fell is the one who said he was Ambrose Thurman.”

Once again my heart was racing. Once again the phone bleeped.

“Was the guy who the lawyer was calling for Bryant Hull?” I asked.

Silence.

“Carson!”

“What do you know about this, LT?”

“Did you tell Sanderson about the charges?”

“Why do you care?”

That was the moment my battery chose to die. There was a clicking sound and then deadness.

I was thinking about Hannah’s mother. If Sanderson thought that his Bunny had betrayed him he’d go straight for her.

“Driver.”

“Yeah, mon?”

“I need to use your phone.”

“The driver’s phone is not for public use,” he said. He probably said the same words a dozen times a day.

“This is an emergency.”

“It always is.”

“But this is a case of life and death.”

“There’s a phone booth on the corner. I can stop if you want me to.”

There was no time for the pay phone, and if I got in a fight with the driver I would lose precious minutes. The only thing I could do was to keep on moving.

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars, and you can make the call yourself.”

“Keep your money, brothah. We’ll be where you’re goin’ in a minute.”

My father would have applauded such an upstanding working-class individual. I wonder what he would have thought of me.

THE FRONT GATE’S BUZZER was going when I got there. I found out later that when the home-emergency button is pushed, the gate stays open for the cops to come in.

My adrenaline supply was plentiful that day. I made it up the stone stairway with no difficulty. The door was connected to the security system, too.

«€€nti

Two of the maids were unconscious on the floor. A big black man in a dark cranberry suit looked like he was dead at the foot of the bouquet table. And Willie Sanderson was leaning over a woman’s body, choking her, halfway up to the second floor.

Once again I was in motion. After three staggery bounds I leaped upon the killer’s back and rained down fists upon his head and shoulders.

At first it felt as if I’d jumped on the back of one of Rodin’s bronze masterpieces. Willie’s body didn’t even sag under the weight. But the accumulation of blows finally got to him. He stood up, throwing me off with the motion. I thought that he was going to come after me but instead he wobbled and then sat down, his back against the railing.

He was staring at me with disbelief on his face. I agreed with him. It made no sense that I could have beaten him even one time.

Sanderson closed his eyes as a thick trickle of blood snaked out from his left nostril.

I looked over at the body of Hannah Hull and made a sound that I didn’t know lived inside me.

An overpowering exhaustion spread out from my chest all the way to my fingers and toes. The yellow bird fluttered up and landed between Hannah’s lifeless form and her killer. My last conscious thought was that if Willie got up I was a dead man.

Ê€„

53

Idon’t remember the journey to the dimly lit and gray interrogation room. I just opened my eyes and found myself sitting there with elbows on the table and pain coming awake at various points in my body. My left foot felt tight in its shoe, and I had pulled an upper-back muscle somewhere along the way.

Willie Sanderson came into my mind and I had the fear of a boxer who connects with his best punches but his opponent keeps on coming, round after round. But the fright didn’t last long. Sanderson was a reminder of the girl-child who had offered me a treasure. She was rich, but she had suffered, too. I was too late to save her. I caused less damage when I’d done piecework for killers and thieves.

I don’t know how long I sat there or if those thoughts came quickly or slow.

The door to the room opened, allowing Bethann Bonilla and Carson Kitteridge to enter. She was wearing a buff-colored dress suit and he was clad in a shabby green, single-button two-piece that he had owned for at least the last five years.

The homicide sergeant’s face was mostly impassive. She seemed distant and maybe just a touch confused. Carson’s attempt at a poker face, on the other hand, could not mask the fact that he expected to win the pot.

They pulled up chairs opposite me and settled in.

I wondered if I could walk.

“Lana Hull,” Kitteridge said. “Her first name is Veronica but I guess she prefers her middle name.”

“That supposed to mean something to me?”

“Her maiden name was Maxwell, but she lived with a guy named Paxton for a while. Her son was Thom Paxton.”

I didn’t care. My face, I was sure, revealed that fact.

“We know that she hired a detective named Norman Fell to find the men who she blamed for her son’s death.” Carson could not repress the smile.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“Why do you say that, Mr. McGill?” Bonilla asked.

“Kid died seventeen years ago. How come all of a sudden outta nowhere she’s gonna start looking for those men?”

“She didn’t know until recently,” Carson said. “When Thom was young, just a boy, she was committed to a mental institution by her parents and the father of her child. They say she’s a schizophrenic. Her boyfriend, Lloyd, moved away and kept the boy. Later on, when Thom died, the father, through Lana’s mother, let her know that he’d succumbed to pneumonia. But when the father died, six months ago, he left a letter for Lana. In the letter he told her what he remembered about the boy’s death. There was a letter of explanation from the detective in charge of the investigation.

“It wasn’t much. But I guess it was enough for you to find them after Fell fed you the nicknames. How did you manage to get into sealed records, anyway?”

I wasn’t going to incriminate his disgraced partner but I’m sure he suspected.

“Fell gave the names to Lana Hull and she told Willie,” Carson continued. “They had become very close when she was at the nut-house after a relapse.