“Have a seat,” I said to the nervous girl.
She considered the request a moment, then sat on one of the ash chairs set out for visitors.
“It’s an unusual office,” she said, her head moving from side to side.
“Why are you so jumpy?”
“Um. I don’t know, I mean, I guess being here means that I’m really going to do this. You know when you just think about doing something it still isn’t quite real.”
“I know what you mean,” I said with more feeling than I intended.
Willa, I believe, heard the honesty in my tone, and this seemed to relax her.
“My name is Willa Portman.”
“You said that already.”
“I’m an intern doing research work for Stuart Braun.”
“Stuart Braun. Now, that’s a big deal.”
“Yeah,” she said through a sneer. “He is a big deal, a very important lawyer for those people no one else cares about.”
Stuart Braun was the radical lawyer-celeb who was representing A Free Man, a black militant journalist who had been arrested for the killing of two police officers three years earlier. Born Leonard Compton, Man was found seriously wounded a few blocks from the shoot-out, in the Far West Village. The gun he had on him was the one used in killing the officers. The bullets had passed clean through his body, so the guns that shot him could not be identified.
Man refused to implicate anyone else who might have been with him that night and denied having anything to do with any murders. He was facing the death penalty, which New York State provides for cop killers. He showed no remorse and, in general, refused to cooperate with the police or prosecutors.
Before Braun got involved it seemed pretty clear that New York was going to have its first execution in a very long time.
The Braun Machine, as it was known, took the case to a new level. An appeal was granted after Braun showed that much of the evidence against his client had been circumstantial and his publicly assigned lawyers were incompetent. Newspapers suggested that a self-defense plea was in the making. Protests proclaiming “Free Man” were being held from coast to coast.
I wasn’t a fan. When it came to cops as victims I was just another brick in the Blue Wall. Few civilians understood how hard it is to be a policeman when almost everybody is afraid of you and suspicious too. The mayor, the city council, and half the civilian population were willing to believe the worst of us when we put our lives on the line 24/7.
Us.
I still considered myself a cop. In my days on the force I’d been sucker-punched, stabbed, spit on, shot at, and singled out by a thousand videophones. Every time I’d make an arrest the community seemed to come out against me. They had no idea how much we cared about them, their lives.
“So are you a lawyer, Ms. Portman?”
“I passed the bar this past June,” she said. “But I’m working for Braun because he does the kind of work I want to do.”
“And what does Stuart Braun want from me?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m here because Mr. Man is innocent and Stuart Braun is about to sell him down the stream,” the young woman replied.
“River,” I said.
“What?”
“The saying is ‘sell him down the river.’ ”
“Oh.” Willa looked at me with both desperation and anger in her eyes.
“I thought Braun had committed himself to saving Man,” I said.
“He had,” she said, “at first. He gathered all kinds of evidence against the cops that Manny shot—”
“He’s admitted to the murders?”
“N-no,” Willa Portman stuttered. “I mean, yes, but not the way you’re saying. They were trying to kill him. They were stalking him. They’d already murdered three of his blood brothers and paralyzed the other one. They were after him and he just protected himself.”
She’d been looking around while making these claims but ended the sentence by looking into my eyes.
“So,” I prompted, “Braun was gathering evidence…”
“He had days and times, ballistics reports, and testimony from reliable witnesses who could be vetted.”
“Sounds like a case.”
“It was. It is. But then, two weeks ago, Stuart, I don’t know…he turned cold. There really isn’t any other way to say it. We were supposed to go see a church lady named Johanna Mudd. Ms. Mudd had agreed to testify that Officer Valence received payments from Deacon Mordechai to provide access to young homeless people for the purpose of forced prostitution.”
“Run out of a church?”
“The Last Rite of Christ Baptist Church ran a charity that was supposed to help runaway and orphaned girls and boys. Mordechai and some of his friends had the access. Valence, Officer Pratt, and others ran the business.”
“So that’s the defense?” I asked. “That Man and his crew were fighting a prostitution ring?”
“Not just that,” she said. “Not just that. Manny says that the cops were involved in all kinds of criminal activities. There was stolen merchandise, drugs, and murders. People were being killed if they tried to stand up to them.”
“But then one morning the Honorable Mr. Braun went cold, you say.”
“I asked him when we were going to leave to see Ms. Mudd, and he said that we weren’t. I asked why, and he told me that everything A Free Man had told us was a lie; that he was the one who had killed his blood brothers because they were going to turn in Valence and Pratt.”
Eugene “Yollo” Valence and Anton Pratt were the cops Man had been convicted of killing. They were decorated uniforms who often worked as bodyguards for the mayor and visiting dignitaries.
“Maybe Braun’s telling the truth,” I suggested. I knew too many innocent cops who had been blamed for crimes they didn’t commit. I was one of them.
“Ms. Mudd has disappeared,” Willa said. “I went to talk to her a few days later, after failing to get her on the phone. Her son Rondrew told me that she was missing. He said that she went to meet Stuart and never returned.”
I sighed. It was an unexpected exhalation. This I knew was due to the fact that the prospective client had caught my interest.
She clasped her hands and looked down at the hardwood floor.
“Hi.” Aja was standing at the door. She was smiling, her short hair standing up at various angles like a field of spiky wild grasses. Her blue jeans might as well have been painted on, and her blouse didn’t come anywhere near the waistline.
I wanted to ask if this was within the boundaries of the school dress code, but then Willa looked up, tears streaming from her eyes.
“Oh, baby,” my daughter exclaimed. She rushed to the lawyer’s side, kneeled down, and hugged her.
Between my sudden breath and Aja’s concern I knew that I’d spend at least a day or two investigating Portman’s case.
“Come on with me.” Aja was helping the sad young woman rise from the chair. After lift-off they made their way to the washroom annexed to the outer office.
In their absence I tried to see a connection between Beatrice’s letter and the case of A Free Man. I knew that there was no direct link, but the similarities might be a way for me to solve a case close enough to my own so that I might feel some sense of closure without returning to Rikers.
If Man was innocent and I freed him, then it would be, in some way, like freeing myself.
I was looking out the window again.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Oliver,” Willa Portman said to my back.
“You want me to take notes, Daddy?”
“I want you to go down to the drugstore,” I said, “and pick me up a pack of those little notebooks I use.”
“But I could take notes here.”
“Go on.” I stood up to underscore my directive.
The words between familiars often mean a lot less than tones and looks. Aja saw that I needed her gone from the office and she obeyed.
Through the open door I could see A.D. collecting her bag and going out the front. I waited maybe ten seconds and then sat down again facing the dewy-eyed girl.
“You see how much trouble there is in this,” I said.
“Is that why you asked Aja to leave?”
“She’s my daughter and you’re twelve miles of bad road.”