I drove home, parked the car in the small underground lot that Kristoff Hale has for his tenants, and then once again walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.
That was midday and so there was a good deal of foot traffic. The path is divided—on one side pedestrians ruled and on the other bicycles whizzed past. There isn’t enough room for both and even if there was, tourists don’t really understand. They’re often standing in the bike path, posing for pictures or taking in the sights. And then there are those privileged individuals who feel that they have just as much right to be in the bicycle lanes as the bikes do.
I stick to the side of the path marked for pedestrians, refusing to move out of the way of couples and groups who don’t get or respect the rules. I like the rules; following them proves to me that I’m a civilized man.
I turned left on Broadway and hoofed it down into the heart of the Financial District, what they call Wall Street. I came upon a huge steel, glass, and blue marble building owned by Citizens Bank of Eastern Europe, whoever they might be.
It was a bustling building populated by a broad swath of cultures sporting everything from twig-littered dreadlocks to pinstripe blue silk. There were eleven banks of elevators. Number nine was dedicated to Suliman Investments between floors forty-four and fifty-eight.
“May I help you?” a tall black guard in a brass-colored uniform asked me.
Behind him stood two other guards, one white and the other descended from Asia. I wondered if they sent out guards the same color of people they might have to refuse entrée.
“Joe Oliver for Jocelyn Bryor,” I announced.
“Do you have an appointment?”
He was a young man who it seemed was prone to jump to conclusions. He had already decided that I would be turned away and asked the question to cut to that eventuality.
“Joe Oliver for Jocelyn Bryor,” I repeated.
“I asked you a question,” the hall guard—his name tag read FORTHMAN—said.
“I didn’t come here to answer your questions, son. I came here to see Ms. Bryor. It’s your job to call her assistant and announce me.”
“I’m not your son.”
“But you are their bitch.” I was ready for a fight. Those residents of Aramaya had made me mad at God and all his, or her, creation.
“What?” Forthman said in a threatening tone.
The Asian sentry, an older man, read Forthman’s shoulders and hurried toward us.
“What’s the problem here?” he asked. He had a slight English accent. At least this surprised me.
“I asked him if he had an appointment,” the young black man blamed.
“I’m here to see Jocelyn Bryor,” I said to the new player.
“But he don’t have no appointment.”
The Asian man looked at me, into my eyes, and asked, “What is your name, sir?”
“Joe Oliver. Some people call me King.”
“Wait here, sir,” the older sentinel asserted gently.
“But, Chin—,” Forthman managed to say.
“I’ll take care of this, Robert” was Chin’s reply.
Chin went to a standup desk anchored to the wall and pulled a phone from behind the plain facade.
Robert Forthman was staring daggers at me so I made a gesture with both hands, welcoming him to make manifest his anger.
He clenched his fists and I smiled. He took a step forward and the white guard moved up behind Forthman and uttered something. Forthman hesitated and the white man said something else. With a violent turn, the tall black uniform did a complete one-eighty and walked down the aisle of elevators to and through a doorway on the opposite end.
“Ms. Bryor will see you,” Chin said before Forthman was gone.
The white guard gestured for me and I went to stand next to a lift door.
He pushed a button and said, “That kid’s a light heavyweight.”
“That all? I thought he might’a had a gun.”
The elevator door opened and I went through.
The white guy leaned in after me, held a card in front of a sensor plate, and pressed the button for floor fifty-seven.
The car floated up at a respectable speed. I wondered about my reception. Gladstone told me about Bryor quitting the force and moving to the private sector. I had reason to hate that woman. This was why I was willing to pick a fight with a boxer.
The doors to the onyx-and-gold elevator car opened onto what looked like a foyer to some grand East Hampton mansion.
A beautiful black girl in a very tasteful dress greeted me.
“Mr. Oliver?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She was tall and thin, probably athletic. Her dress was the pink of the inside of a deep-sea clamshell. The necklace she wore was beaded with light-blue sapphires and her shoes were the pale and red-brown of the fur that some forest creatures produce.
“Miss Bryor will see you now.”
“And your name is?”
The question caught her off guard but the smile didn’t falter.
“Excuse me,” she said. “My name is Norris, Lydia Norris.”
“Lead on, Ms. Norris.”
She took me down long wide halls that were carpeted and quiet. There were office doors that were mostly closed and very little foot traffic.
At the end of a cream-carpeted passage was a double doorway. Lydia pushed open the eight-foot-high, four-foot-wide doors and stood aside, gesturing for me to enter.
The office was wide and deep, with a curved window for the wall overlooking Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The carpet was dark brown and the oval desk was chiseled from a stone much like white slate.
There was a dark blue sofa with no back to the left. Jocelyn was sitting there wearing an emerald ensemble that might have been either a full-length dress or a pants suit—though it was most reminiscent of the new gliding suits that modern daredevils used to fly from precipitous mountainsides.
She stood from the sofa to greet me. Like many a woman cop, she was pretty short. Her facial features were boxy, but even still she had the unexpected beauty of Isabella Rossellini.
“Joe,” she said with a guilty smile.
“Jocelyn.”
“Come sit with me.”
I approached her and we shook hands. We were ex-cops, so hugging was pretty much out of the question.
“It’s good to see you,” she said when we were seated.
“I’m actually surprised that you let me up here.”
“Why would you say that?”
“The way you handled my investigation I figured you had me for some kinda masher deserved to be thrown under the jail.”
Her squarish, delicate face expressed pain. She looked away at her stone desk and then out into the sky.
“I am very sorry for what I did to you, Joe,” she said, bringing those wandering, lustrous brown eyes back to me. “The only reason I never called was because I didn’t think I deserved asking your forgiveness.”
“Uh…” I was at a loss for words to say the least, stupefied by the claim and its apparent honesty.
I had hated this woman for showing my wife the video of me and Nathali/Beatrice. I came here to confront her for participating in my frame. I was willing to fight the guy downstairs because I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, strike her.
“What?” she asked. “You thought I had something to do with what they did to you?”
“You—you showed that video to my wife,” I said. “She left me in Rikers when we had money for bail.”
Jocelyn was near my age, and I was slowly being convinced of her beauty. It was like the dawn of a morning after the death of a beloved king. Everything was beautiful but salted with the sorrow of his passing.
“I’m sorry for that too,” she said. “I believed that you’d raped that woman at the time. But even if it was true, there was no reason to show Monica that tape. Everything I did concerning your case was wrong.”
“Did you set me up?”
Jocelyn gave no assent. She just gazed at me like a land-bound midwestern farmer seeing the sea for the first time.
“You’ve thought that for the last ten years?” she asked.
“And more.”
“I heard they had you in solitary for three months.”
I brushed two fingertips across my scar.