“To keep from gettin’ any more like this,” I said.
“When they told me where you were I was actually happy,” she admitted. “A man, a policeman using his authority to rape a woman the way everyone said you did; that man deserved to suffer.”
“Who said?”
“That woman who blamed you, my superior, Prosecutor Hines,” Jocelyn listed. “There was that video and papers waiting for you at the station.
“And then one day I heard that you’d been released. That the charges had been dropped and you were off the force.
“I went to the files and everything was gone. No tape, no statement, not even the report of your arrest. I tried to find Nathali Malcolm, but there was no record of her either.
“I went to every person I knew connected with the arrest, but no one told me anything. My old supervisor said to forget about it. She said that you had been fired with no pension and even the union was hands-off.
“That’s when I knew that you’d been set up. There was something you were into that made you a danger. They used me to go after you because they knew how I felt about cops and sexual misconduct. They knew I’d go after you with all my ability.
“I quit the force ten months later. When the precinct captain asked me why, I told him that I just couldn’t take the shit anymore.”
I believed her. I knew what she said was true. They had given my friend Gladstone the assignment. They had set up Beatrice so she couldn’t say no.
“Prosecutor Hines must have known something,” I said. “He might have pressed charges based on a lie, but when they asked him to drop the case…he must have known something.”
“Ben died seven years ago,” she said. “He’d moved back down to North Carolina and had a stroke.”
“And you were too ashamed to call me and tell me what they’d done?” I accused.
“No. No, Joe. I was sure that you knew who did it and why. I thought you kept quiet either because they paid you off or that they’d kill you if you said anything else.”
“Kill me?”
“I figured they put you in jail to let them finish you in there,” she agreed. “If you died there, nobody would ask questions. After all, you abused that woman hiding behind your shield. I thought you had made some kind of deal with whoever framed you and they let you slide with a dismissal.”
Her words sat me back on the backless couch. I put my left fist down on the leather cushion to keep from falling sideways.
“So you really think they were going to kill me and then they changed their minds?”
“That’s the only way it made sense,” she reasoned. “I mean, they had you, but obviously they didn’t want you in court. One reason I never came to you about it was that I thought that you had been made part of the deal, whatever that was. If I got involved they might have come after me.”
I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees. They were trying to kill me at first but then changed their minds. This rendition of my experience actually made sense. With a decent lawyer I had a good shot at getting the charges dismissed.
“Why are you here, Joe?” Jocelyn asked.
“I came to blame you for framing me,” I said. “That and to get the names of the people you worked with.”
“Why now? I mean, it’s over, right?”
“My daughter’s all grown up. Nobody needs me now.”
“So you’re just gonna get yourself killed?”
I hadn’t put it in those words, but she was right. Whoever set me up like that wouldn’t hesitate at murder.
“Have you ever heard of Adamo Cortez or Hugo Cumberland?” I asked the corporate security analyst.
There were three jets in the sky over New Jersey, circling Newark Airport. Next to them was Jocelyn Bryor’s beautiful face wondering about my question.
“What is this, Joe?” she asked.
“I need to find out who set me up.”
“Sounds like you already know.”
“Not so it makes any sense.”
We sat a minute more.
“My girls are eight and thirteen,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to do anything, to testify to anything. I just need to find out who did this to me. I got to know.”
Jocelyn took a deep breath and then said, “It was a man calling himself Adamo Cortez who brought Nathali Malcolm to me. He said that she’d been forced to have sex by you and was afraid for her life. He showed me the video.
“Five months later I was down at headquarters to meet with a psychiatrist over my increasing lack of interest in the job. I saw Cortez and approached him. He put me off and left. When I asked the woman he was talking to about where he went, she said he left the building but that his name wasn’t Cortez; it was Hugo Cumberland—a private specialist sometimes used by the department.”
“What kind of specialist?” I asked.
“Are you here to yoke me, Joe?”
“No. What kind of specialist?”
“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask.”
The air between me and Jocelyn was thick and soundless. She didn’t want to be talking to me but still felt a sense of duty. I didn’t want to know what I’d learned, but I couldn’t wipe it away.
“The woman didn’t tell you anything else?” I asked.
“No. But Adamo wasn’t at her office. He was sitting with a captain named Holder. I asked Holder’s assistant for Cumberland’s number, but she said that Cumberland was just a name he used and that his real name was Paul Convert.”
“Why she tell you that?”
“Girls can be chatty, Joe. And most of the time we don’t take men’s secrets so seriously.”
“He was a short guy with a mustache?” I asked. “Looked Puerto Rican?”
“That’s him.”
Walking north half a block on Broadway, I turned right on Exchange Place and had just crossed New Street on the way to Broad when two official-looking SUVs cut me off—back and front.
Four doors slid open and men in dark uniforms disgorged from the vehicles.
I considered going for my pistol, but when two more men jumped out, I gave up on that mode of self-defense. Instead I stood still with my hands a few inches from my sides. The men tackled me like I was a football dummy, took my gun, and clapped on restraints, hand and foot.
I saw a couple of shocked pedestrians before a black bag was put over my head.
The next thing I knew I was in the back of one of the SUVs. It was moving and I was not.
22.
The drive was a bit more than an hour, I figured. We went through the Battery Tunnel and into Brooklyn—I was pretty sure about that. We drove long enough to make it somewhere out in Queens but not much farther. Whoever had grabbed me wanted to stay in the city.
That alone told me a lot.
When the car parked I was getting ready to yell as soon as the door slid open. They might kill me, but I’d leave a marker that maybe Mel or Gladstone would find.
But my captors had thought of that. Someone shoved a rag filled with sweet-smelling chloroform over my nose and mouth.
I had to breathe.
Coming to on a basement floor, I was aware of being cold; chilled to the bone, as my father used to say. The air was dank, filled with fungal spores, bringing to mind the heavy atmosphere of graveyards and dungeons. My hands were cuffed behind me, but my legs were unfettered. I made it to my feet, trying to keep down the deep-seated anxieties of a man terrified by dark containment.
There was a low-watt bulb imparting its tame glow from the low ceiling. A pretty long and steep stairway led up through a hole-like corridor to an upper door. I put one foot on the bottom stair and a deep gong sounded.
I took no more steps and within seconds the door above opened.
“Stay off the stairs,” a man silhouetted by light called down.
“Why am I here?”
His reply was to slam the door shut.
There was a stool and a worktable in the cramped cellar. No exit except for the steep stairway. There were no tools to be seen, no weapons or objects that could be turned into weapons. The men who accosted me were young and well trained. I certainly couldn’t hope to defeat even one of them with both hands shackled behind my back.