Aja called me in the morning. They were back from Florida and she wanted to ditch school to meet me for lunch. I was her father and should have said no, but instead I agreed and called the school, telling them that I was keeping her out for the day.
We met at noon at our favorite pizza place across the avenue from Lincoln Center. There they made simple pizzas on the thinnest crust imaginable.
“What happened to your hair?” was the first thing she said.
“I thought I’d take up track,” I joked. “Cutting off my hair makes me aerodynamic.”
She wasn’t amused.
“Are you okay now, Daddy?”
Instead of answering, I hugged and kissed her; then we sat at a window table.
“Almost.”
“Why only almost?”
“The best thing I can ever teach you, honey, is that the truth will kick you in the ass.”
She giggled; then the waitress came to take our order.
“Are you getting kicked at by the truth?” Aja asked me when the server departed.
“Yeah.”
“Can I help?”
“You know how I was gettin’ on you about how you were dressed?”
“Yeah?”
“Whenever I do something like that you should listen to what I say but do what you want.”
“I usually do,” she said.
“Don’t I know it?”
“But you’re almost always right, Daddy.”
The concern on her face made her look older and, in my opinion, even more beautiful.
“I was real worried about you when we went away,” she added. “I hardly slept at all. One night I woke up and found Mom sitting on the couch in our suite.”
“You had a suite?”
“Coleman said that we should have it so that we were together. He was pretty scared.”
“What about your mother?”
“I told her how worried I was about you and she said that she was too.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. You know what she said?”
“I couldn’t even imagine.”
“She said that she shouldn’t have abandoned you all those years ago when that policewoman showed her the tapes of you with another woman.”
“She told you about that?”
“Just about that she saw you with somebody. But she said that you were a good man and she knew it, but she was just so mad that it was like somebody else was there making her turn her back on you. She said that she was still mad, but now she knows that that shouldn’t have mattered and she should have had your back. She said that you guys should have worked it out and maybe you wouldn’t be in so much trouble today. I told her she should tell you all that when we got back, but she said that she never could, that it would be wrong for a married woman to say something like that to another man.”
“Whoa. Then why are you telling me?”
“Because usually when Mom doesn’t want you to know something she says not to tell. That’s how I knew she wanted you to know how she felt.”
The waitress brought our pizzas and salads, giving me a respite in which to think.
“So?” Aja asked when our server, whose chipped blue name tag read MARYANNE, had gone again.
“So what?”
“Are you gonna ask Mom to get back together?”
That was the perfect moment for me to do what I had come there for. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and came out with a small brown envelope made from tough plastic. The letter was sealed, and I handed it over to the person I loved the most in the world.
“What’s this?”
“If I am ever hurt or in big trouble I want you to open this and do what it says. Put it away somewhere safe, somewhere where neither your mother nor Coleman will find it.”
“I know a place,” Aja said with convincing certainty. “But what does it say?”
“You will probably never have to find out.”
I didn’t want her worrying, but three hundred thousand dollars of my bribe money would be in a safe-deposit box where only she and I were signatories.
“What about you and Mom?” she asked, putting the envelope in her purse.
“Aja-Denise, do you really want me and your mother under the same roof after all these years of fighting?”
I could see her imagining what that union would be like. After a moment her eyes opened wide and then she smiled.
“Never mind.”
38.
I met Mel at a diner called Clown’s Carnival four blocks away from the semisecret clinic. It was a few minutes past eight. I had on my fake facial hair just in case there was some errant CCTV feed lurking above.
Mel was all in black. I was too, under my bulky umber overcoat.
“Your layout of the place is a little out of date,” he told me after we’d greeted and I ordered coffee.
“Yeah? How’d you find that out?”
“Building permits. City has a website for all construction work. They weren’t hiding because the cops keep it on the down low like you said. They installed all kinds of security to keep people out up front, but the back of the building is the same as it always was.”
“There is no back of the building,” I said. “Treacher’s shares a back wall with Kershaw and Associates.”
“Au contraire,” the sophisticated demon argued. “There’s a two-foot space between the clinic and Kershaw, after the sixth floor. And most of the fancy security updates are on the ninth floor. There’s only one hospital bed up on that level. All we have to do is make it up there now, break into the floor, and then wait nearby until they bring our guy in. Once that happens, and we see how the guards are placed, we decide on how to get him out. Only thing I wanna know is if you’re willing to use deadly force.”
“You mean kill a cop?”
Mel didn’t even nod.
“No, man. This is about not murdering.”
“Okay. I got ya. I know how to spin it. But considering on how things might go, it could make it that much more difficult to get through.”
There was a side door to Kershaw and Associates. Mel had been in and out of the building over the past few days and had put together a plan for us to enter unnoticed. That particular side door had no camera on it, and he had fixed the lock so that it only appeared to work properly.
We made our way in and up to the eighth floor. There we jimmied the locks of the offices of Myer, Myer, and Goldfarb. I couldn’t tell by their walls or desks what business MM&G were in, but it didn’t much matter. The eighth stage of the Kershaw building was halfway between the eighth and ninth floors of the building that housed Treacher Admitting.
I had brought a go bag with all the tools a burglar might need. We had to completely remove the unused window that looked out onto the slender divide between the two buildings. I had two crowbars for that job. We wedged a metal chair between our window and Treacher’s wall. From there, one after another, we crawled up high enough to make it through the hospital room window. We had to break the lock, but Mel put it back together well enough that it looked okay if you didn’t inspect it too closely.
Then we used a half-chewed piece of gum to attach a tiny transmitter under the hospital bed and made our way back down to MM&G.
That was our time to wait.
We had a tiny speaker receiving a continuous feed from the transmitter in the room. When something happened there, we would hear it.
So for the next three hours we sat in darkness and silence.
It was a fairly simple plan. The note hidden in the tampon, printed in block letters culled from the Internet, told A Free Man that if he wanted to be free he should take the powder folded in a small cellophane envelope that accompanied the note, at any time between 11:00 at night and 2:00 in the morning. This would give him abdominal pains and a fever. He should call a guard at the first signs of these symptoms and that’s all he had to do.
We waited. I don’t believe either of us uttered a word in that time.