Walter Mosley - The Long Fall

“What you grinnin’ at?” a man said derisively. “Life is hard out there. You see me smilin’? I ain’t got time to be silly. I got to pay the rent an’ put shoes on your feet. Life is serious, not no playtime.”

This voice came from across the aisle. The speaker was the male head of a young black family, which included a mother and child. The boy was no more than four years old and could have been younger. His father hadn’t been in his twenties very long. The mother, a gentle and plain-looking woman, glanced in my direction and smiled apologetically. The boy’s head was bowed under the heavy criticism of his father.

They were all the same dark-brown color.

“Are you listenin’ to me?” the father asked his son.

I picked up my newspaper, looking for an article to distract me. The main story was about some midwestern governor arrested by the FBI for paying prostitutes to cross state lines. It was hard for me to concentrate on the article, partly because it reminded me so much of the kind of work I had once done to bring down otherwise good men, and partly due to the fact that a nearby article said that the Left was claiming that the death toll in Iraq was nearing a million while, by some calculations, we would end up spending a trillion dollars on the effort. That meant, by the end of our Middle Eastern folly, that we would have spent a million dollars for each death. The front page was a kind of triple obscenity . . .

The boy mumbled something to his mother.

“Why you askin’ her for water?” the father said. “Does she look like she have water for you? Sometimes you just got to be thirsty. I’m thirsty. Do you see me goin’ around askin’ people for water?”

I gathered my things together and stood up. The man’s idea of pedagogy was too much for me to bear.

I guess my body language betrayed my feelings.

“Where you think you goin’?” the young father asked me as I lugged my bag toward the door between cars.

“I need quiet in order to think.”

“What’s so important you got to think about?”

I should have just moved on.

“I think about a lot of things,” I said. “Just now I was thinking that a child needs to laugh and have mother-love in his life, otherwise he’ll turn out to be a little man pushin’ children around to make himself feel like he knows somethin’ smart.”

That said, I went through the door and into the next car.

THERE WAS NOTHING to distract me in that section. One guy was yak-king on his cell phone, but I wasn’t bothered by that.

The release of anger had put me into a free-floating state of mind. I stopped obsessing about the girl’s unbidden, unconscious forgiveness and started wondering about the connection between the Hulls, Willie Sanderson, and the murders that I was implicated in. Certainly there was some connection. And beyond that I had Tony the Suit to answer to, and Twill to save from his own dark heroism.

Everything was flowing together and so I began coming up with ideas that might fit anything. I considered talking to Twill, telling him that I knew what he was up to and offering another way out. I seriously entertained the idea of telling Tony where A Mann lived. The guy was dead anyway. Was that what Harris Vartan was asking me to do?

I had just begun wondering about the Hulls’ cleaning lady when a voice sounded at the other end of the car.

“Hey, you!” the young father from another lifetime shouted.

For a brief moment everything had made perfect sense: I wasn’t confused or worried at all. It was the kind of moment that never lasts, but it feels permanent for the few seconds it’s there.

I stood up as the young father rushed down the aisle. I could see in his face that he’d been stewing over my words.

The guy on his cell phone said, “I’ll have to call you back.”

My nemesis was in no mood for talking, either. As soon as he came within range he threw a punch. I caught it like a seasoned coach catching a Little Leaguer’s first toss, pushing the fist back at its pitcher. He wasn’t daunted by my obvious superiority and threw another. This time I backed away to let the punch go wild. A woman yelped and I pushed against the man’s chest with both hands. He fell on his butt. I could see by the look on his face that he had finally understood my strength.

The young father jumped to his feet, but he was no longer sure what to do. I had already blocked one blow, slipped a punch, and dropped him on his ass. He knew that the next response would be even stronger.

He hated me, wanted to beat me down into submission, but that was not to be and we both knew it.

“Fuck you!” he yelled, clenching his fists and hopping an inch or so off the floor.

When I didn’t flinch he turned around and stormed back to his poor, unsuspecting family.

I felt bad about humiliating the father. He couldn’t help what he was, and I hadn’t helped, either. At least his son wasn’t there to witness his defeat. At least that.

I gathered my things again and moved down a few cars more. That way if he found more courage, or a weapon, I’d be somewhere else and he’d have a few extra moments to think about consequences.

In my new seat I wondered about what kind of father Fritz would make. Then I thought about my own father, who indoctrinated and then abandoned me. It seemed that there was a whole world of wounded, half-conscious sires picking fights and losing them.

Ê€„

40

When you have no answers, ask different questions,” my father once said to me. He was quoting a man who had been a minor official on the fringe of Joseph Stalin’s inner circle toward the end of the madman’s reign.

I had rejected all of my father’s ideology, but his logic remained with me. So about fifteen miles out from Manhattan I called a man I knew in the electricians’ union. His name was Duffy and he’d had a hard time of it for a while there when one of his rivals wanted to unseat him from a plum position. I balanced the scales, so to speak. I did such a good job that Duffy and his rival became good friends.

“HELLO,” A YOUNG woman answered.

“Let me talk to Duffy.”

“He’s in a meeting.”

“He’s always in a meeting. Tell him it’s Leonid McGill.”

He was on the line ten seconds later.

“What’s up, mutt?” He gave the same line to everyone, so it was no insult.

I explained that I needed to root around a building. I didn’t say why.

“Sure,” Duffy said. “What name you usin’?”

“Richard Siles.”

“You need keys?”

“No. I got my own.”

He gave me a line to give the super and I committed it to memory.

“What time?” Duffy asked.

“One today.”

“Done.”

“See ya later,” I said.

“Not if I see you first.”

I WENT TO my office, changed into a pair of coveralls I kept in a closet, and loaded up my toolbox with a few gadgets, a jumbo ring of master keys, and some electrician’s tools. I also grabbed a coat in spite of the fact that it was eighty-five degrees outside. Then I took a cab up to a big gray apartment building about fifteen blocks from my apartment, a block off Broadway.

The building was twenty-eight stories high and dominant among its peers.

“What can I do for you?” the blue-jacketed doorman asked.

“Richard Siles,” I said, holding out a hand. “I’m the electrical contractor they called about.”

“Oh, yeah,” the chubby, pink-skinned guardian replied, “Joseph said you might be around.”

He was a big man, in his sixties. When he was young he must have been ready with his fists. You could see the pale ghosts of scars on his face and knuckles.

“Peter Green,” he said, introducing himself. “What’s this all about, Dick?”

“Layoffs on Wall Street. City revenues are down this year,” I said. “At least they’re worried they might be. They’re checking all the big Manhattan buildings for violations. Wanna make up some of their losses on fines. So a couple’a guys are doing some early checks to maybe save you guys some fines and get us some work on the side.”

I asked Peter if I could hang my coat in his doorman’s closet and he pointed to a hopper room behind the desk. After that he showed me to a door that led to the basement and I went down to pretend for a while.

I found the nexus for the phone and fiber-optic lines and connected a little box that Bug had sold me for a previous job. Then I wandered, looking for doors that I might use if I needed, for any reason, to make a late-night entry.

I had hung up the coat because I wanted to get behind the desk to see what video monitors the doorman had. They only covered the front door, entrances from the outside, and the interior of the elevators.

So I took in a deep breath and made my way up one of the stairwells to apartment G on the twenty-first floor. I didn’t have to make the climb but you pick up exercise where you can in my line of work.

Breathing harder than I would have liked, I knocked and buzzed and knocked again. Three minutes later I pulled out the appropriate master key from the keychain in my toolbox.

Ë€font sizPeople rarely burglarize doorman apartment buildings in Manhattan, so the locks are usually old, and often there’s only one.

I KNEW FROM Bug’s report that Leslie Bitterman was at work every day. He had no wife. Mardi was taking afternoon summer-school classes and her sister was in day camp. It’s amazing what you can find online if you know what you’re doing.

The place was like a dollhouse for adults. In the small entrance there was a maple stand with a vase containing two dozen silk roses. The flowers had never been dusted. This was the only sign of faulty housekeeping.

The rest of the apartment was immaculate. There was no mess in the dining room, kitchen, or living room. The girls’ bedrooms were also spotless. Leslie’s sleeping quarters were definitely masculine, but not too much so. Woolen blankets and one pillow. The window shades, all through the house, were pulled down.

The office was the most amazing of all the rooms. It was almost as bare as Christian’s office downtown. The only concession Mr. Bitterman had made to comfort was to put a worn and stained red rug under his desk and chair. He had a desktop computer and a phone line that he used for his archaic Internet connection.

I turned on the computer but couldn’t gain access because it was password protected. I connected a specially designed transmitter to a USB port and called Tiny “the Bug” Bateman.

“I see you got a setup for me,” the ultra-geek said upon answering. “Gimme a minute.”

The screen went black and then a stream of data, all in green characters, began to scroll down. This went on for about sixty seconds and then Bug said, “You’re in. Call me if you have any problem.”

“Is he online?”

“He is now.”

“Much activity?”

“No. He doesn’t have much of a footprint. Looks like a couple of online newspapers and his office e-mail account.”

“Can you download what he’s got on here?”

“He’s an old-fashioned kind of guy. Did you connect my cross-box on the phone lines and fiber-optic cable?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’ll take a while but no problem,” he said and then he hung up.

PERUSING HIS ELECTRONIC folders, I saw nothing unusual. He had downloaded files from his work but this seemed to be legitimate. It just looked like he worked from home sometimes. There were plenty of documents in his word-processor files: letters to a few relatives and complaints to businesses that he believed had not made good on their promises. There were hundreds of Ë€e hundreword-processor files. One of these was named JOURNAL01. I hoped that this would give me some inkling about why my son and his daughter were plotting his murder. But it didn’t. I’ve never read such a boring rendition of life. He wrote about the breakfast he’d just had, and about some work-related issues—in excruciating detail. The only thing odd about his children is that he never mentioned them.

After an hour of browsing through his computer I had found absolutely nothing. His only pastime, it seemed, was taking color-drenched photographs of zoo animals. He had zebras, monkeys, tigers, and fanciful sea horses in literally hundreds of files.

I scrolled through all the documents and came upon one thing odd. Every file name that he had was a full word or two describing the contents. One file, however, was merely named TI. I tried to read it but only got machine-language garbage. I switched over to his program files and found a program with the same name.

AFTER TEN MINUTES of paging through the digital photographs I wanted to go out and find the angry father on that southbound train. I wanted to apologize to him. He at least loved his son, even if he was overzealous in the expression of that love. But what Leslie Bitterman had done was unforgivable.

There were well over a thousand photographs of a naked man and child in the most depraved positions. The girl in the photographs ranged in age from eight to about twelve, before puberty began to rear its hormones. Sometimes she was smiling, sometimes she cried, openmouthed and in despair. The man had a stern look and was always erect. She was a pale-haired, gray-eyed girl. When she wasn’t in despair her expression was resigned, as unreadable as that of Leslie Bitterman.

I knew that it was Bitterman because the photographs had been taken in that very room. He had raped and molested that child on the selfsame red rug.

I made it through maybe thirty percent of the pictures; after that I lost heart. If I hadn’t incriminated myself by calling Duffy I probably would have waited and killed Bitterman myself. But the feeling passed and I went into the hall and down the stairs. I retrieved Bug’s cross-box from the basement and then came up to thank Peter. I told the doorman that everything looked good.