“Are you threatening me?”
“If I was threatening you, you would feel it.” Rikers Island hadn’t done me any favors.
At the end of the first-floor hall there was a two-person elevator on the right and a doorway to the stairs on the left.
I took the stairs to the sixth floor.
The day the new owners of the ex-tenement put the units up for sale, Noemi bought the entire floor with a million dollars taken from the $9,364,912 passed down from Carter’s Lotto winnings.
I knocked on door number three and she answered.
“Come on in, Mr. Oliver,” she said.
Crossing the threshold I asked, “When will you start calling me Joe?”
“My father called you that. He told me to call you Mr. Oliver.”
“Noe?” a woman called from the room beyond the one we were in.
When she came in I got a good look at her. Light brown and maybe twenty-five, she wore an emerald bodysuit that was semi-opaque.
“Oh!” she said, covering herself and backing away to the room from whence she had come. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“It’s okay, Stash,” Noemi said. “This is an old friend. I told you about him — Joe Oliver.”
“Hi,” the now bodiless woman called from around a corner.
“Hey,” I called back.
“We’re going across the hall,” Noemi said to the doorway. “I’ll be back later.”
“You want me to bring anything?”
Noemi looked at me and I shook my head.
“No, honey, we’ll be okay.”
Noemi and I hadn’t gotten to sit down when there was a knock on the door. Surprised, my host called out, “Stash?”
“Police, ma’am.”
“I forgot to tell you that a white lady downstairs thought I might not belong here,” I said.
Noemi sighed and frowned.
“Just a minute,” she told the door.
She took the full sixty seconds to suppress the anger, then opened the door on two NYPD uniforms. Both white. Both young.
“We’ve had a complaint about an intruder,” the taller officer said to her while looking at me.
“Oh?” Noemi replied. “No intruder has been up here.”
“What about him?” the other cop asked.
“Mr. Oliver is an old friend of the family. He rang the bell and I buzzed him in.”
“And you know him?” Cop number 1 asked.
“I know all my good family friends.”
“No need to sound off.”
“No need for Miss La Fina downstairs to question every Black man that comes to visit this building.”
“Are your neighbors at home?” the shorter cop wanted to know.
“I own the entire floor, Officer. Will that be enough for you or do you need me to call Captain Brown? He’s on duty tonight, I think.”
The young officers knew when it was time to retreat.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the taller cop said. “You two have a good night.”
“It sounds like you should be taking a vacation,” Noemi Tristel was saying an hour or two later. “I mean, I know what it’s like to live under threat, when someone might break down the door any minute, but when they’d arrest Daddy back in the day I could always see him in jail, find someone to pay his bail. Your problem sounds like a fresh body dropped in the bay.”
“Fish food for sure,” I agreed. “But it hasn’t gotten that bad yet.”
“That man tried to choke you to death.”
“That was a miscalculation. But I was ready for it.”
We were sitting on a long couch in a living room only used for visitors like me, and I was pretty sure that I was the only one like me. Noemi, wearing a plush baby blue robe and no shoes, leaned back against the opposite side of the sofa, tucking her feet under her thighs.
“Daddy broke laws every day except Sunday his whole life,” she said. “There was always some cop or angry mark after him. But I swear he was like a nun shacked up in some convent compared to you.”
I’d brought a bottle of peach schnapps and it was almost gone by that time.
Once, when I was having trouble with my ex — brothers in blue I dropped by Miss Tristel’s place.
“You think I could stay here a couple of hours until I work out some things?” I’d asked her.
“You could spend the night if you want,” she said. “The couch turns into a bed and I can put a little food in the fridge.”
I had a key to the front door of the building and that apartment, but I always rang out of deference.
On this evening I said, “Thanks for takin’ me in, girl. You know you usually need to be family for somethin’ like this here.”
“I don’t mind. It reminds me of when I was a kid and Daddy needed to hide. He was what he was and I loved him anyway.”
“That Stash seems like a good catch,” I said to take some of the shine off me.
“Oh no,” Noemi said with maybe a hint of regret. “She’s just a girl who needs a place to stay where they don’t shove fentanyl in your pudding.”
“So you’re not lovers?”
“Oh yeah, we are. We’re together until we aren’t anymore.”
It was pretty late when my host left for the company of her temporary girlfriend. I didn’t unfold the bed or disrobe, just took off my shoes, lay back, and considered the options.
I wasn’t going to walk out on Ferris or Monica. When I was a cop I always wanted to be a detective solving crimes and maybe making things a little bit better. I wasn’t so much into enforcement and more about resolution.
Quiller and his Black wife intrigued me. How did they end up where they were, and how did that meeting impact the crazy, self-destructive racism of the Far Right? Ms. Prim was an enigma, but Monica was easy to figure. My ex would be rudderless without her fool of a man.
13
I arrived by taxi at the front gates of Silbrig Haus at 7:17 the next morning. There was no one at the front, no button to push — but, like the world in general, there was always somebody watching.
“State your business,” a discorporate woman’s voice commanded.
“Joe Oliver,” I said. “I’m here to see Ferris, but you can ask Forthright to let me in.”
There’s almost always a moment of silence when you mention a worker’s boss. Most laborers want to avoid notice by their superiors. All of us do something wrong; that’s the nature of the workaday world.
The gates began to part maybe four minutes after I mentioned the number two on the list.
Halfway to the gate I saw my grandmother coming around from the far side of the house.
“Hi, baby,” she called, the grin all over her words.
We smiled and kissed, laced hands and walked toward the fanciful front doors of the manor.
“This mighty early for you, ain’t it, Joe?”
“Make hay while the sun shines. Isn’t that what they told your grandmother on the old-time plantation?”
“Not only that; they used to tell all us sharecroppers that hard work brought us closer to God,” she added. “That’s why so many of us went the other way.”
The front doors opened before we got there.
“Two of my favorite people,” Roger Ferris hailed.
“Hell with that,” Grandma Naples growled. “Why you got my favorite grandson up in here when he should be safe in his bed?”
“Come on now, honey, I only have Joe gathering information. Isn’t that right, Joe?”
“Yeah,” I said, knowing that my grandmother could read even between the letters of a single word.
“Don’t fuck with my blood, Roger,” Brenda warned.
I think he heard her.
“So you’re saying that he’s sticking to the story that he was kidnapped?” Roger asked. We were in his stripped-down serious business office cube.