The Long Fall

Breland was an odd guy. A decade older than I, he looked ten years younger. He’d once worked for a lawyer who represented a reputed crime boss and his associates. That’s how we met. When the crime boss and his lawyer were brought down, Breland needed work. I liked the guy, so I sent some fairly honest jobs his way. It turned out that he was the loyal sort, and so, even though I might have been a little slow with my payment schedule, he was always there when the chains rattled at my door.

Kitteridge had taken a seat in one of the surviving visitors’ chairs.

="1="1em" width="1em" align="justify">“Are there more questions, Detective?” Breland asked.

“Not here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m taking your client to our offices for an interrogation, a prolonged interrogation.”

“Mr. McGill needs medical attention.”

It occurred to me that the paramedics hadn’t even looked at me. Just the fact that I was under arrest meant that they didn’t care about my health.

“You want a ride to the Rikers medical facility, LT?” Kitteridge asked.

“What grounds you got to arrest me, man?”

“Have you ever heard the words ‘material witness’?”

Ê€„

24

Blood leaked slowly from the split on my temple down onto the lapel of my jacket. Now and then a droplet would splash on the pale-green Formica tabletop in the interrogation room.

“We should get you some first aid,” Carson Kitteridge said.

“It’ll wait until I get home.”

“You’re getting blood on my table,” the detective complained.

“I didn’t ask to be here.”

Carson wasn’t happy, but neither was I under arrest. He could have taken me to a prison infirmary but he wanted answers and knew from long, hard experience that I wasn’t the kind of guy that he could bully. The blood was part of our dialogue—if he wanted to have a conversation, it would be with the wounded man he wouldn’t allow to rest after a horrific beating.

“So tell me about Willie Sanderson,” Kitteridge said.

“Who?”

“Come on, LT. Don’t get me mad now.”

“I don’t know anyone named Sanderson.”

“You nearly kill a guy and you don’t even know his name?”

“He’s still alive?”

“Who is he?”

“Never met him before. Never heard of him. I doubt that he’s even human if he survived that flying chair.”

“If he dies it’s manslaughter.”

“Bullshit. That man was trying to kill me. You saw the pictures.”

The cop sat back and did that lacing-his-fingers thing. I’ve never understood what he intends to communicate with that gesture.

“We got one, maybe two men bludgeoned and strangled, and a third who almost fell in line,” he said.

“What men?” I asked.

“Your boy fits the description of the guy who went to see Roger Brown. If you take off the hat and fake whiskers he looks an awful lot like the guy who paid Frank Tork’s bail. That’s what I call suspicious.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Suspicious about your boy Sanderson. I’m just a victim here.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe you were in business with Sanderson,” he suggested. “Maybe he decided to take you down and keep the profits for himself.”

“What business? What profits? I was walking out of my door and he attacked me. He didn’t say a word, and my bankbook’s got cobwebs all over it. I was not in business with him, and I never met him.”

Kitteridge was watching my eyes. He did that often. He believed, I think, that he could tell when a man was lying by looking into his eyes. I believed that he could also.

After a moment he pulled his fingers apart and made an open-palmed plaintive gesture.

“Help me out with this, LT,” he said. “We got some white maniac from Albany killing African-Americans on the street. It has the stink of a hate crime.”

“I never even understood the idea of a hate crime,” I said, wasting time, trying to digest the fact that my would-be killer was from Albany. Was he the one who hired Fell? No. Fell didn’t recognize him when he came in for the kill. “I mean, if you kill somebody with evil intent, it’s murder and you should pay for it. That’s all, right?”

“I can sit here all night,” the cop replied.

I leaned forward and three neat little droplets splashed on the tabletop.

“I’m beat, man,” I said. “I been thumped on, handcuffed, dragged down here, and made to wait for hours while you shuffled papers and drank bad coffee. Let me go home and get cleaned up. Let me get some sleep and maybe I’ll come up with somethin’ for ya.”

“I could arrest you.”

“For self-defense?”

“This isn’t going away,” CË gont arson said. “This is murder. If Sanderson pulls through and incriminates you, all bets are off.”

“I don’t know anything.”

TWILL WAS WAITING near the front desk of the Chelsea station. He wore black trousers and a pin-striped blue-and-white dress shirt that was wanting a pair of cuff links. He was sitting there on a wooden bench next to a young blonde in gold hot pants and a blue halter. The young woman was smiling brightly, chattering away at my son. He nodded sagely now and again and spoke in a low voice.