The lights went up and the woman, who was no more than thirty, came to our table. She moved past me and gave the impresario a deep soul kiss.
“That was beautiful, baby,” Jones said.
She beamed in reply.
“This is my girl, the next Whitney Houston,” Jones said to me, “Brenda Flash.”
I smiled and lied to her. She smiled in my general direction, never asking my name.
Another one of the men left and Ms. Flash settled on the other side of the boss. The table was abuzz for a while about the potential for her career. I listened and sipped.
The waiter was right about the liquor.
“SO WHAT IS IT you wanted to ask me?” Big Mouth said, nearly an hour later.
Brenda had departed, promising to see her man upstairs somewhere when he was through with his business. The restaurant was in full swing.
“I was wondering if you knew a man named Willie Sanderson.”
Jones’s deceivingly benign features took on a sharp, dangerous aspect, bringing to my mind a knife being drawn from its sheath.
“Why?” he asked.
The other seven men at the table were staring at me.
“He tried to murder me.”
“Tried?” Jones asked.
“Yeah. I broke his head for him and so he gave up.”
“Would you like me to show you?” I asked the frowning goon.
This man stood up, making a sound that maybe made sense in the hinterlands of Albany. The most memorable things about him were his Caucasian features and coal-black skin.
“Sit down, Sammy,” Jones ordered. And then, “I said sit yo ass down.”
When Sammy did as Sammy was told, Jones turned his attention back to me.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know Willie. White dude likes the darker things in life. He used to hang out here. Even sat at this table once or twice. They say he got a wicked temper, but he was calm around black peoples. What you wanna know about him?”
“Anything I can,” I said. “I mean, this Willie tried to slaughter me an’ I ain’t nevah even met the boy.”
Jones looked at me—hard. His smiling dolphin lips seemed to be frowning also.
“Why come to me?”
“You the man.”
I could have died at that table never knowing what happened to my father after he went down to Chile. No one had notified us of his death and I’d made a promise to my mother before she died.
While I was having these final thoughts, Eddie Jones came to a decision.
“Willie killed a bus driver that disrespected him,” the gangster informed me. “But when they brought him to trial the judge said he was what they call chemically insane. His aunt worked for these rich white people and they send him off to the Sunset Sanatorium. Doctors give him some pills an’ say he’s cured and can go home, only he likes it there so takes a job as a orderly. It was a good gig until they figured out that he was sellin’ prescription drugs from their medicine cabinet and buyin’ recreational drugs for the wealthy clients they had.”
At the end of this speech he shrugged and gazed into my eyes.
I silently nixed the thought of asking about Fell because, as far as I knew, the body hadn’t been discovered yet.
“Thank you, Mr. Jones,” I said.
This response surprised him.
“You don’t wanna know nuthin’ else?”
“No. Why?”
“I’on’t know. I thought maybe you heard that Willie was workin’ for me when he was up at the loony bin.”
“Did you send him down to New York to kill me?” I asked.
“No.”
“I just wanted to hear a little about the man tried to kill me. If you don’t have anything to do with that, then I don’t have any more questions.”
Big Mouth’s stare was interminable. He was the master of his world because he paid attention to every detail.
“What you thinka Brenda?” he asked at last. “You know, I’m gonna get her a recordin’ contract.”
“She’s a beautiful woman but . . .”
“But what?”
I stood up.
“But,” I said, “you got a soul singer on your center stage and all the young muscle outside studyin’ how to throw rhymes. And you know the only dis worse than disrespect is the disconnect.”
Big Mouth frowned at me, but I was already moving away.
Ê€„
34
I called Katrina on my way back to the Minerva.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“Fine. I’m just up here in Albany looking into a few things.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
When I got off the phone I realized that my ire at Katrina was based on events from long ago, events that no longer mattered. I wasn’t mad at her, and she was genuinely concerned about my well-being. But like with Baum’s Tin Man, the only thing missing was a heart.
I SLEPT LONG and hard in the old bed. It was one of the few times I could remember that I didn’t dream about fire or falling. Opaque drapes kept out the summer sunlight, so I didn’t rouse until almost seven. I washed, shaved, and dressed in a different suit that looked just like the one I wore the night before. I ate scrambled eggs and bacon while scouring the Albany Times Union for any word on Norman Fell. He was yet to be discovered.
After breakfast I got directions from the concierge and drove my rental southeast of the city about twenty-five miles.
The Sunset Sanatorium was set off from the highway behind a forest of maples. The thirty-foot wrought-iron gate was painted violet-pink, and the road leading to the guard’s kiosk was paved in real cobblestone. The buildings beyond the sentry’s station were made of brick and covered in ivy. It looked more like an Ivy League college campus than a mental institution.
When I pulled up next to the booth a black man in a powder-blue uniform and a dark-blue, black-brimmed cap came out to brace me.
“Can I help you?” he said.
I handed him a business card that said I was Ben Trotter, a private detective working out of Newark.
“Looking for information on a Willie Sanderson,” I said while he read.
“Willie doesn’t work here anymore,” the middle-aged, dark-brown man informed me.
He was short and slight, built for the long haul—the kind of man who could carry half his weight in tobacco or cotton from way out in the fields.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. They got him in a hospital after he tried to kill a man. My client wants to know why.”
The guard had descended, like me and many of our brethren, from a long line of suspicion. He pinched a corner of my card, regarding it with unconscious intensity. I believed that I could read that stare. He was thinking that there was something wrong with my brief explanation. But he was looking beyond the lie, to see if I posed a problem or if I was okay. After a moment he came to the conclusion that I was okay enough.
“Make a left at the end of this road,” he said. “The second building on your right is number four. That’s the human resources office. I don’t know what they can tell you, though.”
“Thanks,” I said and drove on.
I PARKED IN the lot that the guard directed me to but didn’t go into the HR offices. Instead I walked around the other side of the building into a large quad where a couple dozen patients and their handlers were taking the sun.
It was like no other mental institution I’d seen. The staff wore gray-and-white clothes that were uniforms only because of their similarity of color, while the patients dressed for leisure. It might have been a Florida retirement community, except many of the residents were middle-aged, and even young.
I walked around, getting a feel for the place, trying to understand something, anything, about the environment that Willie Sanderson had been immersed in. He was my only living link to the murderous conspiracy.
“Hello, young man,” a white woman said.
She was older, maybe seventy-five, wrapped in a summer frock of swirling emerald and turquoise and holding a pink parasol up against the sun. She was seated on a violet-pink wrought-iron bench.
“Hello,” I said.
“Are you a visitor?”
“I guess so,” I answered, sitting down.
“You don’t know?” She was small with big eyes and lots of red rubbed into her thin lips.
“Well,” I said lightly, “I’m not a patient, and I don’t work here, so what’s left?”
The older woman smiled and then grinned. Her teeth weren’t well maintained but the mirth outshone her bad hygiene.
“Do you know somebody here?” she asked.
“I know somebody who used to be here.”
“Who’s that?”
“A guy named Willie Sanderson.”
“Willie,” she said with wistfulness and wonder in her frail voice. “Yes. He didn’t want to help me with everything, but he brought me dreams when I needed them. But he’s not here anymore. They sent him away. They send all of the good ones away.
“Do you think that an old woman is sick if she wants to be with men?” she asked, changing the subject as if it were a summer’s breeze and she Mother Nature.
“Not at all,” I replied, tacking my sail to her whim. “A woman is a woman until the day she dies.”
“My family doesn’t agree with you,” she said. “There I was, sixty-seven with a husband limp as a popped party balloon—and I was still young in my heart. And not only there.”
Her tone was both suggestive and engaging. I liked her.
“Do you want to get out?” I asked seriously. She seemed sane to me and I was always looking for work, no matter how bad things got.
This question grabbed the old girl’s attention. She heard the earnestness in my tone, just as the guard at the front gate had heard the lie.
“No,” she said. “I’m getting older, and I find it easier to get what I need right here.”
This reply seemed to punctuate the end of something. I took the opportunity of this lull to ask my question.
“Did you know Willie very well?”
“Is he dead?”
“No. But he is in the hospital.”
“Oh my. What happened?”
“He got into a fight.”
“He liked to fight,” she said, nodding. “He was a nice boy but he had a bad temper. No, I didn’t know him very well. We weren’t the kind of friends that I›€friends would have liked. But he was close with Bunny. She and Willie were friends even before he came here. He brought her love. Not in the carnal way, mind you. Willie kind of worshipped Bunny.”
“Is Bunny around here somewhere?”
“Oh no. She only stays for a little while. I think she was in for a long time once, but that was years ago. Since then, every once in a while she has a little kind of nervous breakdown. They bring her in, but she can leave whenever she wants to.”
“What’s this Bunny’s last name?”
“Hey, you!” a definitely masculine voice commanded.
The tone frightened my new friend.
I turned to see two well-proportioned staff men coming toward me. One was brown, the other a darker brown. They both had me, and only me, in their sights.
I stood up and, through the miracle of peripheral vision, saw the old pagan woman scuttle off under the portable shadow of her semitransparent pink parasol.
“What you doin’ here?” the darker attendant asked.
“It’s a beautiful day,” I replied as if that were a perfectly acceptable answer.
For a moment the two men were stymied by my easy demeanor.
“This is private property,” the other male nurse/enforcer informed me.
“And I’m a private detective,” I said, “here trying to get a line on a guy name of Willie Sanderson.”
The men looked at each other and then back at me.
“This is private property,” the lighter of the two repeated.
“Let me speak to your boss,” I said.
Six magic words that roil deep in the bowels of anyone collecting a paycheck on a biweekly basis. It’s like winking at a leprechaun: he has to give up his pot of gold, and yet no one knows why.
Ê€„
35
The two brutes brought me to an office that seemed oddly utilitarian for such an affluent institution. It was at the far corner of the main hall of what I thought must have been the administration building. We walked into the shotgun office without a knock or pardon-me. A middle-aged man in a too-green suit was sitting behind a gray metal desk at the bottom of the long room. Behind him was a big window looking out on the idyllic quad.
The man was leaning over a long and wide ledger page, making small marks here and there, giving me the impression that he was checking details and changing ž€…them to fit his needs.
When the man raised his head I was startled. Director Theodore Gorling (which is what his nameplate read) was the only man I ever met who had more throat than he did face. His neck was a great bulging stalk of a thing while his head was like a seedpod that had not yet reached maturity.
“Yes?” he asked the darker guard.
“This guy was hangin’ out in the yard. Says he’s a detective.” The guard handed over the false card that I had given to prove my half lie.
Gorling moved his small head from side to side, taking the few simply printed words in from differing angles. Then he put the card down in the center of the neat desk. His movements were both mechanical and fleshy. He seemed somehow dangerous, like a priest one might find on the wrong side of redemption.
“I’m looking for information on Willie Sanderson,” I said when it became obvious that Gorling had no intention of asking why I was there.
“Why?”
“He’s been killing people, seemingly at random. He murdered a young man name of Brown in Manhattan and the parents want me to find out why.”
“This says that you’re from Newark,” Gorling said, tapping the card with the middle finger of his left hand.
“So are my clients,” I said. “But their son lived on the Upper West Side. He was trying to make it as an actor while working as a model. Was your man Willie Sanderson gay?”
“Why do you ask?”
“The son was making his living as an underwear model,” I said, sticking out my lower lip in a knowing way. “I thought maybe the murder could have been a sex thing.”
I find in my profession that it behooves one to appear ignorant, or, better yet, stupid, to the people you interrogate. It gives them a feeling of superiority, of having a mental leg up on you, so to speak.
