I pressed the doorbell but didn’t hear anything. It was a big house.
A man opened the door maybe thirty seconds after I rang; a white man. He wore comfortable and yet presentable clothes — dark trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt that wanted to be blue. He didn’t like me but held any outsize antipathy in check.
I waited for some kind of greeting.
“Hello. Mr. Oliver?” a woman’s voice came from behind the man.
Popping around the side of the sentry, she appeared. A healthy specimen in a one-piece teal-green dress that partially muted a powerful figure.
“Ms. Kraft?”
“Minta,” she said.
Behind her were two more white-man guards, also dressed presentably down. Thirty or forty feet farther on was a floor-to-ceiling set of windows that looked out on the sea.
“Come,” she bade me. “Let’s go sit where we can see the water.”
The three guardians moved aside for me and the private secretary.
On our walk toward the windows I wondered if I should have heeded my daughter’s warning.
“We don’t get visitors very often around here,” Minta Kraft told me. “Sometimes a representative from the town council comes asking for support. This morning there was a Girl Scout selling cookies.”
“Did you buy any?”
Minta stopped to smile at me. She was fair-skinned with raven hair and eyes that shifted around the blue-green range. She was certainly a white woman, around thirty, but somewhere in her genetic lineage there had been a few lingering strands of Mongolian DNA.
“The peanut butter sandwiches,” she said. “I love how tiny they are.”
We had reached the far window overlooking the deck, which hovered above a calm sea.
“Don’t you love them?” Minta asked.
“Love what?”
“Girl Scout cookies.”
“No.” My tone was abrupt, brusque even. It had already been a rough road.
“Oh. Excuse me. Have a seat?”
The lanky chairs were cast iron. Strength behind apparent weakness has always attracted me.
“Tea?” she asked once we were seated.
“Coffee’d be good.”
“Rudolph?” she said.
One of the guardsmen ambled over.
“Mr. Oliver would like coffee,” she said to him. And then to me: “Milk?”
“Black,” I said, looking Rudolph in his dead eyes.
He went away and I found myself hankering for a peanut butter cookie.
“I never get tired of the ocean,” Minta was saying. “I was born and raised in Cleveland, but the first time I saw the Pacific I knew my place was at the shore.”
“This is the Atlantic.”
“As long as I can look out and not see the other side,” she assured me. “That’s all that matters.”
“What you do in California?”
“L.A. I went to USC for economics.”
“That prepared you to be a rich woman’s assistant?” On edge, I wanted company.
“Here you go.” The guard placed a steaming blue mug down before me.
“Thank you.” I was full of dishonesties and deceits.
Minta, who was no longer smiling, waited for Rudolph to get beyond earshot.
“Ms. Prim told me that she was ready to answer your questions,” she said.
“So how does it work? You write down what I need to know and then pass it on to her?”
“Um, well, first I need to know what you’re planning to do. I mean for Mr. Quiller.”
“I don’t know yet. But when I find out I’ll be telling him.”
“What does Mr. Quiller say?”
“That in order to get to his wife I have to talk to you.”
Kraft wasn’t easily thrown off. She sniffed at the air and continued. “He’s very worried about Ms. Prim being exposed to stress. She loves him and wants to get him out of that place.”
“I imagine she does.”
“Do you want the same thing?”
“I have a very particular job.”
“And what is that?”
“To find out the government’s involvement in Mr. Quiller’s arrest and to see if the charges hold water.”
“And how do you plan to do all that?”
“Ms. Kraft. Minta, I’m not here to answer your questions. I’m here to investigate the circumstances that brought Quiller to Rikers,” I said and then took a breath. “Quiller pays your salary, doesn’t he?”
“I can’t see where that’s any of your business.”
Many thoughts, retorts, and curses sprang to mind, but I decided that standing would be my best reply. When I turned to leave, two of the mercenary-like guards were standing there — maybe eight feet away. Belatedly I appreciated how brilliant my grandmother was. She and Aja too.
The two men stood in such a way as to block my passage.
I was unarmed and pretty sure that they had backup somewhere.
Now and then Death rears her head in everyone’s life. That was my first true peekaboo of her elegant manifestation in what I came to call the Quiller Case.
“Mr. King Oliver,” a woman’s voice sounded from off to my right.
The words held more than mere content. They also conveyed musicality, depth. But as much information as it held, the voice also hid meaning.
When I turned my head I did not expect to see a gorgeous Black woman. Tall, she was maybe thirty-three looking twenty-six, dark-skinned with a face that was the shape of an inverted egg. Mathilda Prim’s figure was reminiscent of a Playboy bunny of the late sixties — opulent, impossible.
“Ms. Prim?”
“You and Adam can leave, Rudolph,” she said, looking me in the eye.
“Yes, ma’am,” Rudolph replied.
His words contained real civility. That was a surprise.
The muscle left. When I turned back I saw that Minta had also gone.
“Joe would be fine, ma’am,” I said to the lady.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
She glided over to the chair that Minta had abandoned and sat. It was all so terribly elegant.
“Won’t you join me?” she offered.
Back in my chair, I took my first sip of coffee. It was pretty good.
“I was told your given name but I prefer King Oliver, the cornetist who mentored Louis Armstrong.”
She didn’t smile, but there was no tension or hostility to her expression either. She was the mistress of what she surveyed — the deep blue sea and me.
“It’s our true history,” I said after a scant lull.
“What is?”
“Jazz.”
There was the hint of a smile on just her lips.
“Yes,” she agreed. “People here, in this country I mean, give short shrift to the contents of their hearts.”
“Unknown loves that guide their every step.” It felt like I was completing a quote that had never been uttered.
“That’s why they hate themselves,” she continued, gazing toward the interior of the house.
“Are you foreign-born?”
“No, but... it feels like that sometimes.”
For some reason that made me look out on the water. There was a solitary black-sailed boat out there — drifting.
“Do you drink, Mr. King Oliver?”
“I’d take bourbon if you got it.”
I’m not sure what you would have called the room we were in. It was very large and mostly unfurnished, with the exception of the two cast-iron chairs, a small cherrywood card table, and a squat maple cabinet flush against the wall behind me.
Mathilda Prim went to the wall-hugging breakfront cabinet and threw open its curved doors, revealing that it was a bar of sorts. She took out a ceramic decanter with two glasses and poured.
“You don’t take ice, do you?” she asked when placing the two double shots down.
“That little bar of yours doesn’t seem to belong in a big fancy house like this. You’d think there’d be a whole alcove dedicated to hooch.”
“That’s right,” she averred. “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”