The Long Fall

Ambrose asked me if I could do what he could not.

That’s where Randolph Peel came in. Randy had been a detective in the NYPD until they found him trading favors for sex at a posh midtown hotel. At one time he was the partner of a cop named Carson Kitteridge. Kitteridge was an honest cop, and it had been speculated that he was the cause of Peel’s downfall.

Randy was out of a job but he still had a few friends in the department. For three hundred dollars a head, the former policeman broke the seals of justice and delivered the identities to me; three of them, at least. Jumper, Big Jim, and Toolie had gone on to commit adult crimes, but B-Brain was clean. I had a name, Roger Brown, but there was no practical information, like a current address. There were no adult records on him and the details of his adolescence were all cold as far as an investigation was concerned. His father was nowhere to be found, and his mother, Myra Brown, as far as I could tell, had died in 1993.

THE SEAGULL CRIED three times before I answered the phone again.

“Hello?”

“Who hired you?”

“It’s not polite to hang up on a brother, Roger.”

“I’m not your brother.”

“You still hung up on me.”

“Excuse me,” he said, maybe even meant it. “I’m not used to private detectives calling me on the phone.”

“You called me,” I reminded him.

“You came to my office.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said, “being sought by a PI. Nobody said you did anything wrong.”

“Who hired you?”

“Are you the Roger Brown who was once known as B-Brain?” I asked again.

The silence was long and painful. Roger didn’t want to hang up a second time. He didn’t want to answer my question either. There was music playing in the background of whatever room he was in; thuggish hip-hop with an insistent beat.

“How much they payin’ you, man?” a slightly different Roger Brown asked. This young man didn’t wear a suit and tie or collect a salary that had taxes taken out.

“My regular fee.”

“I’ll double it.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“I’ll pay you a thousand to forget me.”

“Are you in trouble, Roger?”

“Naw, man. I ain’t in no kinda trouble.” His descent from Madison Avenue to the Lower East Side continued.

“Because,” I said, “I only ever charge my standard fee. I never take more. That way I keep my nose clean.”

“Why you up in my grill, man?”

“All I need to know from you is if you are the Roger Brown known as B-Brain.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you what, Roger,” I offered. “I’ll come over right now and meet you at that little espresso place across the street from your office or anywhere else you say. We could talk.”

“Uh-uh. No way, man. I ain’t meetin’ you nowhere, no kinda way.”

I had already been to his office. He didn’t know what I looked like. Even if Juliet had described me, he didn’t have my picture in his head. But Roger wasn’t being rational. He was afraid of something, and I wanted to know what that something was.

I made a few sounds that were meant to express hesitation.

“I’m not used to giving out information on my clients,” I said. “That kind of breach in confidentiality is not looked upon kindly in my profession. But maybe if we got together you might convince me.”

“I already told you, man. No.”

Roger wasn’t going to trust me even though I was telling him the truth. I wanted to meet him face-to-face so that I could judge for myself if he was in some kind of fix that Ambrose had not informed me about.

“Frankie Tork,” I said and the line went so silent that for a moment I thought the connection had gone dead.

“S-say what?”

“Frank Tork. He’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E. They caught him trying to burglarize a pawnshop on Second Avenue.”

“Frankie hired you?”

“I AIN’T SEEN B-Brain in years, brother,” Frankie Tork had told me through a Plexiglas window in the visitor’s area of the New York City jail. “His moms and them moved somewhere out in Brooklyn right before his last year in high school. She said that we was a bad influence.”

Jumper was small and wiry, brown like a walnut is brown, with tar-stained teeth and bloodshot eyes. He had the kind of smile that frightened children—and their mothers.

“What was his mother’s name?” I asked, trying to corroborate the sketchy information I’d gotten from ex-officer Peel. Roger, aka B-Brain, and the others had been arrested for trespassing in 1991.

“Mrs. Brown,” Frankie said.

“You don’t know her first name?”

“You still gonna gimme that twenty dollars, right?”

There was an account I could credit. I would have given him the money even if he wasn’t any help.

“What was B-Brain’s first name again?” I asked.

“Roger.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

“Maybe I could ask aro="1could aund, about his mom’s name, I mean.”

“No thanks, Jumper.” I made to rise.

“Hey, hey, man.”

“What?”

“They say around here that you the kinda dude get a brother out of a jam.”

“I used to do that. Not anymore.”

“How much?” Jumper asked, ignoring my claim of retirement.

“Twenty thousand was my lowest fee.” That was a lie. No one had ever paid me that much. But I didn’t want to give Jumper false hope.