The Long Fall

“Doin’ okay, sir. My boy got into technical college, and Mary’s expecting.”

Warren was Jamaican by birth. His mother was a black woman and his father a Chinese descendant of a long line of indentured servants. Warren had a beautiful face and loyal eyes. Every time I saw him I thought that he would make a great con man. You almost had to trust him.

“Ms. Ullman is looking for you, sir,” the copper-colored guard said.

“Oh?”

“Said to ask you to come by her office.”

“She just said to ask me?”

Warren shrugged and I smiled.

MY OFFICE SUITE in the Tesla Building was the apex of my professional life.

The old real estate manager, Terry Swain, had been siphoning money out of the maintenance fund for years. He never took much at any one time but it added up to quite a sum over twenty-six years. When my lease in the Empire State Building was about to lapse, I asked around and found out that Swain was being investigated by the Tesla’s new owners for having stolen one hundred seventy-one thousand dollars. So I did a little research and went to his office on the eighty-first floor.

Terry was tall and thin, sandy-haired even at the age of sixty-one. At fifty-three I’m already three-quarters bald and half the way gray.

“Hello, Mr. Swain, I hear you got some problems,” were my first words to him.

“Not me,” he said with an unconvincing smile.

“No? That’s too bad, because I’m the guy to go to when the hammer is comin’ down and you need to get out of the way.”

My words brought moisture to the man’s eyes, if not hope.

“Who are you?” he managed to ask.

“Peter Cooly used to work in here with you, right?” I replied, gesturing to an empty desk in the corner.

“Peter’s dead.”

“Yep. Died just this last March. His second heart attack in two months. Last day he worked was February nine.”

“So?”

“Did he have access to the books, bank accounts?”

Terry Swain had gray eyes that were very expressive. They widened as if seeing the rope that could save him just inches t h just iout of reach.

“Pete was honest.”

“He was that. But he was a loner, too. No parents or wife, not even a girlfriend.”

“So?”

“You got any money, Terry?”

“What’s your name?”

“Leonid McGill is my name. Jimmy Pine sent me.”

Jimmy was a bookie. Terry was one of his best customers.

“Leonid? What kind of name is that for a black man?”

“My father was a Communist. He tried to cut me from the same red cloth. He believed in living with everybody but his family. McGill is my slave name. That’s why I got to do business with fools like you.”

“What kind of business?”

“You ever hear of Big Bank?”

“On Forty-ninth?”

“Peter Cooly had a savings account there. I got a guy, a business associate owes me a favor, who works with a guy who works there. The guy in the bank can make it look like Pete deposited an extra twenty-four thousand in his account over the last six years.”

“He can?” Terry passed gas then. He was a very worried man. “How?”

“My friend and his friend need six thousand apiece and then there’s the twenty-four.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.” Terry was so upset that he rose to his feet. “They’re gonna prosecute me, Mr. McGill. They’re gonna send me to prison.”

“Say the word and I’ll throw just enough suspicion on Pete so that any half-decent lawyer could keep the new owners from dragging you into court. Hell, they won’t even be able to take your pension.”

“Where am I gonna get thirty-six thousand dollars?”

“Forty-six,” I said, correcting his perfect math. “You need ten for the lawyer.”

“And what about you? What do you get out of this?”

“You got a jeweler vacating a suite of offices down on the seventy-second floor. Six rooms with views south and west. I like having a big office with a good view. People look at you differently when they think you’re livin’ large.”

“So?”

“You’re still the building manager. Give me a twenaggive me ty-year lease at eighteen hundred a month and I’ll pull the trigger on Pete.”

“The Melmans are paying eleven thousand,” Terry said.

I shrugged.

“I don’t have the money,” the sandy-haired fraudster complained.

“Jimmy Pine said that he’d advance it to you. I mean, you’ll have to get another job to pay him back, but I bet you’d rather run a hot dog stand than spend your sunset years in prison.”

We haggled for over an hour but in the end I got everything I wanted. Hyman-Schultz, real estate developers, dropped the charges when Breland Lewis, attorney-at-law, brought evidence to their attention that Peter Cooly was just as likely a candidate for the crime, even more so because Terry was always broke.

Swain retired early and bought a hot dog cart. Whenever I see him he gives me a hot sausage on the house.

Some people, when they see my office, think that I’m putting on airs. They want to know what I pay for rent but I never say. Others are quietly impressed, believing that there’s more to me than they at first thought. The reaction to my posh workspace could be anything but whatever it is I’m left with an edge.