He was a light-skinned Negro with handsome features. My height, he was ten years younger than my ex. Coleman was an investment banker and pretty well-off; the kind of man who liked owning things, or at least controlling them. I appreciated this quirk in his personality because it alienated my daughter.
The evil look she gave him was cute on a sheltered seventeen-year-old, but one day Coleman and Monica would experience the hatred seething underneath.
“Okay,” Aja said. Then she kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “Good night.”
I went through the first-floor sitting room to a smaller dining area and into the L-shaped kitchen. I sat at the small table where the family of three ate breakfast and sometimes dinner.
I was thinking of the best way to broach the serious talk that she and I needed to have. LAD meant life and death in our code system. Hearing that, she knew I meant business.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, Monica came in wearing a teal sweat suit. Coleman followed. He was clad in jeans and a black T-shirt.
“Well?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Tell him to leave,” I said to my ex.
“You don’t order me in my house,” Coleman said.
“Please, CC,” Monica said in almost a whisper.
He wanted to fight. I did too. Instead he turned away, walked through the rooms to the stairs, and stomped his way to bed like Rumpelstiltskin after a hard day making gold on his Wall Street spinning wheel.
When we were both sure that he was gone she said, “What is it?”
“You mess with me all the time, M.,” I replied. “Send me threatening letters, have lawyers send me threatening letters, and every once in a while you try and get at me through A.D. That’s cool. I take it in stride. I don’t come to you and ask why didn’t you do something to help me, your daughter’s father, when they were trying to bury me under the prison.”
“You know why,” she said like Moses on high.
“And so you do this?” I asked, running my finger along the deep scar down the right side of my face.
“I didn’t cut you.”
“But you could have stopped it from happening. You could have gotten up off our monies and made my bail.”
“I had to worry about our daughter, her future.”
“Yeah,” I somewhat agreed. “And the best way to protect her is to make sure I keep paying for what she needs to live.”
“Coleman provides.”
“But it helps to have that extra check. I mean, even his six figures would be stretched trying to fit the bill at Columbia.”
“What do you want, Joe?”
“I’d like it if you didn’t try and get me shot.”
The look on her face was that of an innocent listening to the ravings of an idiot.
“When you called Bob Acres,” I continued, “you didn’t know what the circumstances were.”
The dismissal in her gaze faded.
Monica had been a beautiful young woman. She had deep brown skin and features that spoke of western Africa. She was loving and sexy, smart and loyal. I had betrayed her, there was no excuse for that—but it was enough that she let me languish at Rikers.
“You warning a man I’m investigating could end up getting me killed. What if I decided to investigate Coleman? What kinda dirt you think I could dig up on him?”
I knew at least part of the answer to that question. I was pretty sure she did too.
“I—I never heard of a Bob Acres,” she said lamely. “Is that that congressman?”
“He sent me the number of the person who warned his aide. Your cell phone number.”
“Coleman has nothing to do with this.”
“Take me to court, report me to the authorities when I’m six days late on a support payment, tell my daughter exactly what I did to make you so mad,” I listed, “but fuck with my work again and I will make you regret it. I will torpedo this perfect life you got so bad that you won’t even be able to come up for air. Do you understand that?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I just stood up and retraced my steps to their front door, and walked out to the street.
There was a chill in the air. I liked it.
9.
One flight up from my second-floor office is the apartment where I live. It too has an eighteen-foot ceiling and two magnificent windows that look out on the gentrifying thoroughfare. I have ceiling-to-floor deep red curtains cut from a light fabric derived, somehow, from bamboo. I open them at night because the lights are on at the front of the room and no one can see in.
My entire apartment is one big room and a water closet. I have a footed, deep-basin iron bathtub, a king-size bed on a three-foot-high dais, and a mahogany desk that’s more than a hundred years old.
Leaving the rest of the room dark, I turned on the desk lamp and opened the suitcase full of records that Willa Portman brought.
Either Willa or her boss was very organized. A blue folder set atop the great pile of paper was an index that pretty much laid out the defense for A Free Man, née Leonard Compton. It contained his personal history, his political involvements, his work and military experience, and the events leading up to the night that Officers Valence and Pratt were killed.
Laid upon the table of contents page of the blue folder was a three-by-five photograph of a smiling middle-aged black woman. The smile revealed a golden upper front tooth, and the eyes told of intelligence and certainty. Etched in red along the bottom of the photograph was the name: JOHANNA MUDD. Willa Portman, I was sure, had placed that picture there because the disappearance of Ms. Mudd was the reason for the investigation.
When he was still Leonard Compton, Man served as a master sergeant in the rangers. He’d received high scores as a marksman and had won many medals, at least hinting at his bravery and nationalism. When he left the armed forces he went to City College and then became a high school teacher in Upper Manhattan, where he worked hard to keep his charges, boys and girls, out of trouble.
Leonard wrote articles for a small uptown paper called the People’s Clarion. He started out writing about his military experience, but as time passed he began to detail crimes done to young people in and around the black neighborhoods of New York City.
At some point along the way he joined, or maybe started, a group called the Blood Brothers of Broadway. This group consisted of five men and two women.
Tanya Lark had been one of Man’s success stories. She was a gangbanging killer who scared everybody she met until he showed her that anger and violence could be redirected to help the community.
Greg Lowman was a security guard for Trickster Enterprises, a toy company that had diversified (according to Braun’s sources) into various technological concerns. Lowman was a black member of the NRA and a solid believer in every American’s right to defend him-or herself.
Christopher “Kit” Carson had done six stints in jail, mostly for burglary. One of these was due to an arrest that Pratt had made.
Son Mali was an Africanist who believed that one day a revolution would tear the United States apart. His day job was that of a master plumber.
Lamont Charles was the slickest member of the Blood Brothers of Broadway. He was a suspected con man who had never been charged, a Lothario of almost mythic proportions, and a poker player so devastating that he was allowed in only certain professional games from Atlantic City to Las Vegas.
Lana Ruiz was a Dominican who had cut the throat of her pimp in his sleep but somehow managed to get a judge to call it self-defense. Her picture was that of a beautiful dark-skinned woman who seemed defiant even while smiling for the photograph.
The BBB was not a fortunate lot. Lowman, Carson, and Mali had all been murdered in the eighteen months preceding Man’s shoot-out with Pratt and Valence. Lamont Charles had been shot but he survived; a triplegic living in a nursing home on Coney Island.
Lana Ruiz had been convicted of armed assault and attempted murder, while Tanya Lark had dropped off the map completely.
That was a whole lot of mayhem even for a militant political group, even for a Saturday night in summertime in Brownsville, New York.