“What the fuck do you want?”
“Where’s Johanna Mudd’s body buried, and where are you holding a living Chrissie Braun?”
“If-if-if you don’t let me go, my people will kill her.”
Mel lifted the barrel of the gun so that it was leveled at Marmot’s face. The man cowered.
“If that’s true you’re as good as dead.”
“Mudd is buried in a church down in the West Village. It’s a—it’s abandoned and the cops I worked with used it to hide the bodies they made.”
That proved Marmot’s collusion. I reasoned that Porker and his friends planned to bury me in that rat-infested pit.
“What about the child?”
“How do I know you won’t kill me after I tell?”
“First,” Mel said, gesturing carelessly with the pistol, “I can’t kill you right off because you might be lying, or maybe the girl got moved while you were crying like a baby on my floor. Second, I’ve been employed to find a dead woman and a live girl. You don’t mean enough for me to kill.”
“I don’t believe you,” the conniving child who lived in Marmot’s heart said.
“Believe this,” Mel replied, now aiming the pistol at our prisoner. “If I don’t have the address and situation of the child in the next three minutes, I will start putting holes in you until either you give me what I want or bleed to death.”
It was an address in Yonkers. If we were to believe Marmot, the girl was guarded by two women he knew. When he’d finished the confession Mel thanked him and walked out of the cell.
“Are we gonna kill this one?” he asked.
“Not unless the girl’s dead or he lied about where she is.”
“You see? If I stay working with you long enough, I might work off nine, ten percent of my sins. I’ll be right back.”
Mel left the room while I stood sentry. After maybe five minutes Marmot made it to his feet, picked up the folding chair, and limped to the door. There he stood waiting to ambush Melquarth.
I hated the man for what he’d done, but still I identified with him. Just days before I was in a similar situation, desperately struggling to survive.
“At least he’s still kickin’,” Mel said from behind me. I was so concentrated on Marmot’s silent monologue of survival that I didn’t hear my friend come in.
He was carrying a small beat-up oak table, resembling a nineteenth-century child’s writing desk; that and a paper folder.
“You need some help?”
“Nah,” Mel said with a shrug. “I like to use my words when I can.”
With that Mel entered and then closed the outer door. Marmot heard something because he raised the metal bludgeon-chair.
“Back away from the door and put down that seat,” Mel’s slightly altered voice said.
Marmot hesitated.
“You got sixty seconds and then I’m’a shoot you through a hole in this door.”
I fingered the scar on my cheek.
Marmot threw down the chair and backed away from the door.
Mel walked in, put the desk down so that it faced the window, and said, “Now pick up that goddamned chair and sit down at this table.”
When our prisoner did as he was told, Mel placed the paper folder on the tabletop and flipped it open. There was a small stack of white paper with a yellow plastic mechanical pencil hooked at the spine.
“You know you don’t go to somebody’s house and throw their furniture around,” Mel said. “Now, I want you to write a confession for the murder of Johanna Mudd, the kidnapping of Chrissie Braun, and the subsequent extortion of her father. In there I want you to name everyone you worked for and all those that worked for you. And you better include your boss and those bad cops.”
Marmot began to shiver.
“What are you waiting for?” Mel inquired.
“I can tell about the cops and my men, but I can’t say who I worked for.”
“Even if I kill you if you don’t?”
“I’ll be dead anyway.”
“Not if they put your boss away.”
“That will never happen.”
Mel couldn’t get the name Antrobus out of Marmot. The dark-side security expert gave the details and the whereabouts of the kidnapped child. And he named everyone else. Porker and his friends, Valence and Pratt. Marmot facilitated the drugs and the sex slaves distributed and afforded by the cops. He threw a wrench in Man’s appeal just to keep all that quiet. His men murdered Mudd and took the child. Marmot was willing to implicate everyone but his boss. He knew that a coerced confession would never make it to open court. But if he even breathed the name of Antrobus, that would be the end of the line for him.
After the confession was written, Mel had Marmot handcuff himself to the chair. Then he got behind the man and pulled his hair until his neck was exposed. He injected Marmot just like he’d done to the thug who worked for him.
“What was that?” Marmot said.
“Just a little cyanide to help you sleep.”
Just as the dread entered Marmot’s eyes he passed out.
“You didn’t really kill him, did you, Mel?”
“Nah. I just like seein’ how scared a man gets when he thinks he’s about to die.”
35.
I left Staten Island, headed for Carnegie Hall. Mel had promised to leave the unconscious crook in a place where the cops would find him first.
“And I’ll pin the confession to his vest,” he added. “They’ll get the girl and find that graveyard too.”
“He won’t go to prison, though,” I said.
“If everything I hear about Antrobus is true, you won’t have to worry about our boy living till spring.”
The concert was lovely. My grandmother wore a red gown that sparkled from glitter and clear plastic scales.
“I didn’t know you even owned a dress like that,” I told her.
“Roger thinks his fancy gifts will get him in my pants,” she replied with not a hint of shame.
After the event was over we went to a private gathering in an oval room that had a heavily patterned picture window for its roof. When my grandmother excused herself for the toilet, Ferris took me aside and said, “The item is on hold for you starting Monday morning. You got someone who can handle it?”
“Yeah. I have a friend who has a friend.”
Despite her protests, my grandmother was swayed by the rich white man’s attentions. But I don’t think it had anything to do with his money. Be it a red gown or a red ribbon, at some point the expressions of love are all the same.
“Hey, babe,” I said on the phone to my daughter the next morning.
“Hi, Daddy. How are you? Are you okay?”
“I think maybe I might be the best I have ever been in my life.”
“Really? Is the trouble over?”
“For you it is. For me it’s just beginning.”
“Are you gonna be okay?”
“Like I said…the best. Tell your mother and Coleman that I say the coast is clear for them to come home whenever they want.”
“But what about you, Daddy?”
“I’m gonna be fine, girl. I have figured what to do so that I don’t stare out that window anymore, whining in my mind about jail.”
“Did you prove them wrong?” she asked. Aja-Denise refused to accept that I could be guilty of anything.
“That will never happen. But I know now how to turn my back on all that.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you on the day you graduate from college.”
“That’s too long.”
“After all I’ve been through, it’s just the blink of an eye.”
“Can I come to work Monday?” she asked.
“A week from Monday.”
“Why till then?”
“I have work to do.”
“Can I see you?”
“I’ll call as soon as I can. How’s that?”
“I guess.”
“I love you, Aja-Denise.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
“Good-bye.”
I was lying on my back with no blankets on the bed of my third-floor Montague Street apartment. In my life I’d been slashed, stabbed, and shot. I’d broken bones and had bruises that went so deep they never fully went away. But I was feeling as young and hopeful as my grandmother in her red gown.
The next call rang eight times before she answered.
“Hello?”
“Willa.”
“Mr. Oliver? Is everything okay?”
“Perfect.”
“Do you have any news?”