“I’m sorry,” he murmured.
“No blame,” I said. “Here you get arrested for something you didn’t do and then they beat you for tellin’ the truth.”
Jacob looked at me with his Quasimodo eye.
I asked, “Why did you take the money out of the cash register?”
“Sheila told me I could.”
“Who is Sheila?”
“A friend I met.”
“Met where?”
“In the park on Bowery. She said her father had a store and that he’d give us some money for dinner. She was very hungry.”
The whole thing took about three hours. I got Officer Zhao to let me see the security tape from the scene. It was obvious that someone off camera was telling Jacob what to do; probably Sheila. And it was likely that she had another friend who lured the counter clerk into a conversation in a back aisle.
The arresting officer’s report said that there was no money found on the suspect. He was only three doors down and the money had already been taken from him.
The detective in charge of the interrogation was Buddy McEnery, a contemporary of mine who took shortcuts every chance he could.
I had a rep too. I liked the ladies and I was a stickler for details. Almost all of my arrests ended up in convictions.
I convinced Buddy to access other security cameras in the area to try to get an image of Jacob leaving.
“I’m sure you’ll get a shot of a girl and a guy or maybe two girls who fooled the kid.”
“He still did the taking,” Buddy, a swarthy Irishman, said.
“Have you talked to him?”
“Sure,” he said, “with this.” He held up his left fist.
I refrained from hitting him and said, “I’m sure his high school records will say that he’s a special needs student.”
“A retard?”
“Let me take him home, Bud, before you and the department get sued.”
McEnery wore a gray suit that had gained its silvery sheen with age. He stared at me, distaste outlining his lips, and finally said, “You’re not one of us anymore, are you?”
“Jacob’s a good kid,” I said to Willa, “but I don’t think of him as a trustworthy reference.”
“Jackie was a stock boy in my father’s hardware store,” she said. “He was kind of like my friend. He told me about you, and his mother said that you were able to get him out of jail in just a few hours. When I asked her about using you, she told me that you were committed to service and truth.”
I don’t believe in the supernatural, but some people I’ve met seem to see things that are hidden from me. I don’t know if it’s intelligence or a mode of perception beyond my understanding, but there are those whom I trust beyond the borders of simple logic; Margherita Storell, though I had met her only once, was one of these people.
“So you’ll go over the papers tonight?” the untried lawyer asked.
“Give me two hundred and fifty from the cash and I’ll read it. Maybe I’ll have some advice about it, maybe not.”
“Maybe you’ll take the case if you think there’s some merit?”
I waited four heartbeats before saying, “Maybe.”
Willa departed, and for a while I was alone and at peace the way a soldier during World War I was at peace in the trenches waiting for the next attack, the final flu, or maybe mustard gas seeping over the edge of a trench that might be his grave.
I was thinking about Acres and Summers and now Man too.
To get my mind off these troubles I logged on to my IP, hoping for good news or at least a worthwhile ad.
The seventeenth e-mail in the list was from [email protected]. The only message was a phone number.
8.
After work I took Aja-Denise to a new French bistro on Montague called Le Sauvage. I had boeuf bourguignon and she coq au vin. The red wine was good and I only let her have a sip.
“Are you gonna take Willa’s case?” she asked after I refused her a second taste.
“How much did she tell you about it?”
“That guy A Free Man is innocent and she thinks you can prove it.”
“You can’t mention that to anyone,” I said.
“I won’t. I’m just talking to you.”
A man two tables away was giving us side glances now and then.
“There’s another thing,” I said.
“What?”
“Do you use the computer I gave you?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Do you ever take it home?”
“It’s a laptop, but it weighs twelve pounds. I wouldn’t take that thing anywhere.”
“So you never took it home.”
“Uh-uh,” she uttered, but there was a look of hesitation in her eye.
“What?”
“The files are on the cloud. I usually download the work to my computer once a week to catch up on things I might not have finished. Is there anything wrong with that?”
I love my daughter. If I had to spend the rest of my life in a moldy coffin buried under ten feet of concrete with only polka music to listen to, I would have done that for her.
“Is something wrong, Daddy?”
“No, honey. It’s kinda late. I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Okay. Are you going to take the Man case?” she asked as we stood.
“Please don’t ever mention that name again. Not to your mother. Not to anyone.”
“Okay.” She looked at me pleadingly to underscore the promise.
I was parked right off Montague, but before we got very far someone called to us.
“Excuse me,” he said. He approached us from the front of Le Sauvage.
I wondered if I had forgotten something.
It was the man who had been giving us glances: a white guy standing at about five nine, wearing a green-and-yellow sports jacket with black shirt and trousers.
“Excuse me,” he said again as he reached us.
His shoes looked as if they had been woven from straw.
“You don’t have to go with him,” he said to my daughter.
“Huh?” was her reply.
I didn’t know whether to give him an uppercut or a kiss on the lips.
“You got it wrong, man,” I said. “This is my daughter.”
He blinked and then took a closer look. The resemblance is there if you look past the optimism and the pain.
“Oh. I’m so sorry. Excuse me. I thought…”
“Look,” I added. “I appreciate you looking out for a young woman, but there’s no trouble here.”
“You thought he was my boyfriend?” my innocent daughter proclaimed incredulously.
“I lost my youngest to the street,” he said, addressing me.
“Next time you should take a cell phone picture and call the cops,” I suggested. “Safer all the way around.”
The ride out to Plumb Beach was fun. Aja loved listening to Sidney Bechet because “his horn sounded like somebody talking.”
I told her the story about how Bechet got involved in a duel with another musician in Paris because the guy had told him he played the wrong notes.
“Really?” she said. “Did he shoot the other guy?”
“They were better jazzmen than they were marksmen. Some bystander got shot. I think it was a woman.”
“Like me if I talk about your cases,” she said.
“Probably not, but maybe.”
Monica’s husband came to the door of their three-story whitestone. He was expecting my daughter to come alone.
“Joe,” he said.
“Coleman.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Daddy has to talk to Mom,” Aja said with authority in her tone.
“About what?” Coleman Tesserat addressed the question to me.
“Joe?” Monica called from the second-floor landing.
“Hey, Monica,” I said. “I have to talk to you about something.”
“Call me tomorrow.”
“Can’t,” I said. “It’s LAD.”
I managed not to smile at the frown that twisted into Coleman’s lips. He wanted Aja to call him Daddy and resented the fact that his wife and I had a secret abbreviation system to communicate with.
My ex-wife harrumphed and then said, “Let me put something on. I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
“I’ll keep you company till she comes,” my daughter said.
“You will go to bed,” Coleman said.