“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.
“Damn, man. All I got is the twenty dollars you payin’ me.”
“See you.”
“... WHY JUMPER WANT you to find me?” Roger asked, admitting that he was the man I was looking for.
“His lawyer, Matrice Johnson, is a friend of mine. Professional. She asked me to find somebody who could be a good character witness for Frankie, said that it might make a difference between three and seven years in the sentencing.”
“I haven’t seen Frankie in sixteen years, man. How’m I gonna be a character witness for somebody I don’t even know no more?”
“Well,” I said, “if you’re not willing to help a brother out . . .”
“He’s not my brother. And how the hell you even know how to find me?”
“Some girl,” I said.
“What girl?”
“A friend of Jumper’s—Georgiana Pineyman. She saw you come into Berg, Lewis & Takayama a few months ago but when she tried to get to you they turned her away at the front desk.”
“Well, you found me but I can’t give Jumper a reference. I can’t. I don’t even know him anymore.” Roger was feeling some relief. His language drifted back toward the semi-sophistication of an investment advisor.
“Okay. My job was to find you and ask for your help. That’s all.”
“So we finished?”
“Goodbye, Roger.”
Ê€„
6
Just a year and a half before I wouldn’t have had the slightest compunction at turning Roger’s name over to Ambrose Thurman. Even that day, if Roger was a hood like hi/di„s old friends, I wouldn’t have been bothered.
But as things stood I had misgivings.
On the one hand Roger sounded scared, on the other the rent was due and there were no new jobs on the horizon. Aura liked me, maybe she even loved me, but she was going to do her job. I’d be on the street by the end of the month if I didn’t pay the landlord’s fee.
“Money is a chain that the worker willingly wraps around his own neck,” my father had said many a time. “It chokes him and weighs him down until finally, one day, he would kill his own brother for just a few minutes’ relief.”
Maybe if my father, Tolstoy McGill, hadn’t gone off to South America to fight the fascists or the capitalists or whoever, maybe if he’d come back and been a parent to me, I would have tried to live by the vision of his perfect world. Maybe if my mother, once she knew the love of her life was never coming back, hadn’t gone to her bed and lay there until the doctors came and took her off to the hospital to die, maybe then I would have taken a different path.
But as it was I had to make my own way in a world of chains and choking, imperfect choices and the fools who made them.
“HELLO?” AMBROSE THURMAN said, answering his phone on the first ring.
“I got all four names.”
“What are they?”
“You want ’em over the phone?”
“Yes, indeed. Time is of the essence.”
“You see, you and me got something in common there, Mr. Thurman.”
“What’s that, Mr. McGill?”
“I want my money.”
“I can’t give you your, your remuneration on the phone.” He used the word as if trying to learn it, to integrate it into his vocabulary.
“And so I can’t give you what I got.”
“I can send it to you via overnight mail.”
“I have a better idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Why don’t you come down here this evening and we’ll trade information and money across a table, face-to-face.”
I wasn’t my father or my mother. I wouldn’t run away or lie down and give up.
“Meet me at the Crenshaw tonight at nine forty-five,” Thurman said in angrily clipped wordsizeclipped.
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”