“All I care about is Chrissie, Mr. Boll.”
“I understand. I have a daughter too. I can’t even imagine how you must feel. But you stay true to me and you two will be eating ice cream sundaes by Wednesday night.”
The outside bench was getting chilly so I walked over to Grand Central just to warm up. I went upstairs there to the steak house and ordered a porterhouse steak, medium well, with thick fries and French beans.
“Hello?” a jaunty voice answered on the other end of my third and final phone call.
“Was that you last night or just a dream?” I asked.
“Was I handsome and witty?”
“I guess.”
“Then that was me. What can I do for you, Joe?”
“What do you know about Augustine Antrobus and William James Marmot?”
“This is that Free Man thing, right?” Gladstone Palmer surmised. “Joe, you cannot exonorate a man who killed two cops. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t do shit like that.”
“I know,” I said. “And I accept it. But you know I stepped on a few toes before you enlightened me, and now I have to do some housekeeping.”
“You’ll stop trying to get Man exonerated?”
“If Convert stays off my ass.”
“I’ll send you what files we have by e-mail. But, Joe.”
“What?”
“I can’t save your ass every time you step out of line.”
The files came before my steak. I couldn’t read them on my cheap phone, but that didn’t matter. I forwarded them to Mel with a note and started on my steak.
They seated me next to the outer wall of the dining area. From there I could look down on the rotunda as thousands of commuters, civilians, cops, and some crooks passed through. There rose a senseless, very human hubbub from below while I ate my red meat and plotted against the state.
“Ferris,” he answered on the third ring.
“Hello, Mr. Ferris. Joe Oliver here.”
“Hello, my boy. How are you?”
“It’s the fifteenth round of an old-time boxing match,” I said. “I’ve lost every minute of every round up till now, but I think I finally see a way to get my hook past his defense.”
“It’s hard to find the torque to hurt a man that late in the fight,” the world-wise multibillionaire opined.
“Don’t I know it.”
“What can I do for you, son?”
“Is there some music event going on tonight that you’d like to see with my grandmother?”
“There’s an invitation I have to hear three of Mozart’s four-handed sonatas in the upstairs chamber at Carnegie Hall.”
“If you want I’d be happy to go with you and bring my grandmother along.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“Then it’s done,” I said.
“And what can I do for you?”
“A huge favor for me,” I said. “I hope not so much for you.”
We discussed an impossible task for all of four minutes, at the end of which Roger Ferris said, “I’ve been a crook all my life, Joe. It’s nice to know I could use that talent to do something right.”
“Can I come casual to the event?” I asked. “I have a chore or two before the performance and I might not be able to make it back to Brooklyn in time to change.” While I was saying this I heard three tiny beeps in the receiver.
“Do what you can.”
After disconnecting I saw that the beeping was a text from Mel.
Set!
“I suppose this means that he’s doin’ somethin’ for you?” my onetime sharecropper grandmother said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You know if I go to this thing I got to get my hair done.”
“And I know how much you love sittin’ in Lulu’s chair.”
“Roger called over to her after he talked to you, and she’s comin’ here.”
“I guess he really wants this date.”
She harrumphed and then said, “I guess. Are you bein’ careful, Joey?”
“Better than that, Grandma…I’m doing what’s right.”
34.
It took an hour and a half to get to Pleasant Plains, Staten Island. I called on the walk over from the train station. Melquarth met me at the gate of his unholy home.
“How ya doin’?” he asked while shaking my hand.
It was a rhetorical question. My host expected a nod or maybe some noncommittal phrase, but instead I stood still, considering his words.
“What?” he asked.
“Tell me something, Mel.”
“What’s that?”
“I know why I’m here at your door. My world went crazy a dozen years ago and you are the only one crazy enough to help me through.”
“Okay.”
“You say that I was the only one ever, like that red bird you saw, to do what was right by you, but that feels like, I don’t know, a little weak.”
“For you it is, Joe.” It was the first time I could remember that he used my first name. “I mean, you weren’t raised as the demon inside a house of piety. You never had a rapist father and a mother who hated you for it. But take my word…You didn’t shoot me and then you didn’t lie; and those few years where we played chess you just sat there like the brother I never had, the friendship I could take for granted, or the father who led me by the hand.
“In my world, in my mind, that was the treasure I longed for.”
“What about that watchmaker?”
Melquarth smiled sadly and then nodded. “One day I’ll tell you about him.”
I’d hit a nerve in a man who didn’t seem to have nerves.
“Okay,” I acceded. “Let’s go.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“How’m I doin’?”
A friendlier smile with the same nod.
“Got cold stone instead of a brain and a hornets’ nest in place of a heart.”
“Then we’re ready to begin.”
On the other side of the unbreakable glass wall stood a tall man in a light tan three-piece suit. On the floor next to him lay a metal folding chair that Melquarth had set in the otherwise bare white cell. I figured that the man was William James Marmot and that he had used the chair to test the unbreakability of the opaque glass wall. Now he was pacing nervously, looking everywhere for a way out.
The blood from Porker’s torture had been cleaned away.
“How’d it go?” I asked my self-assigned friend.
“I used a partner, nobody you have to worry about. William James had two bodyguards, so I needed a hand. He came along peacefully when they went down.”
“Anybody see your face?” I asked.
“Naw.”
“How should we do this?”
“You say that Antrobus knows you,” Mel offered. “That means if we let this guy live that he shouldn’t see your face, or your skin color for that matter.”
“Why didn’t you grab Antrobus?”
“I asked around about him. He’s a dangerous man, a very dangerous man. I wouldn’t mind going up against him, but first I figured we could play with Jimmy here.”
Mel was wearing blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, and the white mask of a Greek god. In his left hand he carried a long-barreled .22 pistol.
Prisoner was on the other side of the cell when the bad man walked in. Marmot was a shade taller than Mel. He listed forward before Mel raised the pistol. This gesture set the security expert back a step and a half.
“What do you want?” Marmot asked Frost.
“I need for you to tell me where Chrissie Braun is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“An eye for an eye,” Mel explained.
Marmot’s lips parted.
“I told you that I don’t know—”
Mel lowered the pistol and shot the upright man in the left foot. Marmot yelled, fell, and at the same time threw himself at Mel. For a moment I feared for my cohort, but Mel sidestepped the attack, pistol-whipping Marmot on the side of his head as he passed by.
On the ground the man turned into a child crying as he held his bloody and shod left foot.
Mel reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a cloth bandage roll and two thick wads of cotton. These he threw at his victim.
“Take off your shoe and sock and wrap yourself up before you get blood all over my floor.”
Marmot did as he was told, blubbering the whole time.
When he was through, Mel said, “I got another bandage in my other pocket. I hope you don’t need to use that too because the next bullet goes in your left hand and you know it’s a bitch to tie on a bandage with just one hand.”