John Woman, page 27
The suit that Willie Pepperdine wore was the red-brown color of ancient brick. His shirt was white and his tie scarlet. No guard accompanied him. The door he’d come through merely closed.
John stood to shake the moneyman’s outstretched hand.
“You look very relaxed for someone who’s been in solitary confinement the last two weeks,” Willie said.
“Gives me time to think,” John replied.
“Sit,” was Willie’s riposte.
“How did you know I was in solitary?”
“The same way I knew you’d probably murdered Chapman Lorraine and that you were born Cornelius Jones.”
“The Platinum Path?”
“How do you think Carlinda, Tamala and their friends could dig up so much dirt on your fellow faculty members?” Willie asked.
John waited a moment gazing into the too-perfect face of Pepperdine.
“You’re responsible for the notes on my table,” John said.
Willie nodded.
“And all the professors you accept you investigate first to make sure that you have something over them,” John continued.
“Not all of them,” Willie admitted. “All you need is something on about a third of the faculty. But you were a special case, John.”
“Special how?”
“At any given moment we have between ten and twenty candidates who might be admissible to the Path. Special testing and certain public and private records bring them to our attention, mostly. One day we might approach them to work for us directly or for one of our subbranches.
“These are, or might one day be, our rank and file. But you, my friend, you we are grooming for a much higher purpose.”
“Grooming?”
“Yeah. Those in the upper echelon of the Path see you as material for a senior position. You’re a freethinker in a world weighed down by the chains of history. A man like you could be a leader.”
“Leading where?”
“To change the course of history,” Pepperdine announced. “The human world is on a path toward self-destruction. The leaders are filled with inner conflicts and greed. They pretend to be sophisticated and then tear at each other like rabid dogs. No matter the religion, political theory or lineage—the entire world teeters on the edge of annihilation.
“It is our intention, our destiny, to avert this eventuality. In order to do that we need people like you.”
John thought about being an element in the transformation of humanity.
“I’m just living my life, Willie. That has nothing to do with you, no matter what you think.”
Saying this John stood. He almost turned away but thought of a question.
“How did you know about Lorraine?”
“We bought the Arbuckle when you joined the university.”
“But you waited until now to let people know?”
“There was no rush. He was dead. And you weren’t ready to be tested back then.”
“What test?”
“The one you’re taking right now.”
25
I AM NOT NOW NOR HAVE I EVER BEEN Cornelius Jones, your honor, he scribbled on the pad Carlinda had given him.
No.
No, your honor, that is not my name.
Maybe.
I was born John Woman and I will die the same.
After penning twenty-three possible responses to the query, Are you the Cornelius Jones named in the state of New York’s extradition request? John decided that he’d wait until the judge had spoken, answering the question when it was freshly worded. Maybe his lawyer would answer for him.
The rest of the night John worked on writing a letter to his mother. He could fit only four or five words to a line on the small sheets. He used his fingernails to bare enough graphite lead to keep on writing. At the end he was manipulating the stub with his fingertips.
He told his mother he loved her, forgave her, and that his father loved her too; she had to do whatever she did because she was an emotional being and what better kind of mother could a son hope for?
He wrote a lot more, careful not to name Filo Manetti in case the judge or Captain Anton made Marle search his cell for evidence. He told her not to worry about him, and that he finally felt free of troubles he’d brought upon himself.
“John Woman,” Marle Josephson said just as John signed your son at the end of his eleven-page epistle.
They passed down many corridors, through seven locked doors, up three flights of stairs and then out into an alley where the marshals’ van waited.
“Good luck, John,” Marle said as he threaded a chain through the prisoner’s handcuffs securing him to a stainless steel eye attached to the floor in the backseat of the van. “See you tonight.”
The two marshals did not speak. One was white, the other black; both were men. They brought John to a room so small that it could contain only the chair he was chained to.
This was a new restriction. He could not move from the chair and, even if he could, the room was not large enough to take a single step. Tremors ran between the wrists and elbows of both his arms. This jittering frightened him. It felt as if there was some creature trying to claw its way out of his body.
To distract himself from his anxiety John slowly reconstructed Cicero’s description of the death of Caesar. His Latin was still strong. Herman had been a good teacher.
His father cried at the recitation of the last moments of the great general and tyrant written by a man who both loved and hated the self-appointed dictator.
“It was a necessary tragedy,” Herman told his son, “like every life lived.”
An hour later the cell door opened and the black and white marshals returned. John was led into the adjoining courtroom.
The judge was a white man who seemed short even though he was sitting at the high bench. He had a bristly brown-and-white mustache and, of course, black robes. John was brought to a seat at a desk where Nina Forché waited. She was wearing a red jacket. The gallery was packed with sixty or so spectators. Theron James and Colin Luckfeld were there in the row just behind the defendant’s bench. Willie Pepperdine sat behind them. Arnold Ott stood at the back of the room, staring at John through the dark rectangles of his glasses.
John looked for Carlinda but didn’t see her.
“Please be seated,” said a man in a gray suit standing next to the judge’s high bench.
When Nina touched John’s arm he settled in the hard ash chair provided.
At the plaintiff’s bench, across the aisle from John and Nina, sat Colette and a man wearing a maroon suit.
“Professor John Woman,” the judge rumbled.
John was trying to catch Colette’s eye.
“Professor John Woman.”
“Are you speaking to me?” John asked after failing to catch the detective’s eye.
The judge said, “This is my courtroom, young man. I ask the questions.”
“It might be your courtroom but that’s not my name.”
“Please stand.”
John complied.
“What is your name?” the judge asked.
“Cornelius Jones, son of Herman Jones and Lucia Napoli-Jones.”
“The same Cornelius Jones that the state of New York is petitioning to extradite?”
“The very same.”
“Do you dispute New York’s request to extradite you?”
“No, sir, I do not.”
26
JOHN WAS TRANSFERRED into the custody of Lieutenant Colette Van Dyne and her partner, Sergeant Leo Abruzzi.
When Marshal Tomas Christo handed over the keys to John’s chains the prisoner said, “If you go back to the jail please tell Marle Josephson I’m sorry I didn’t make it back there and that I’m confident he’ll do well on his exam.”
“Why didn’t you fight extradition?” Colette asked John after the M80 airbus had taken off from Sky Harbor International Airport. He occupied seat 27a, Colette’s was 27b. The aisle seat was vacant.
“Where’s your partner?”
“Up toward the middle of the plane, in the exit row,” she said. “He’s kinda big and that’ll be more comfortable for him.”
“I thought you two were supposed to flank me,” John said. “Isn’t that protocol?”
“What do you know about protocol?”
“I read a great deal and my memory is pretty good.”
“I asked him to move because I thought I’d do better interrogating you alone.”
“Oh.”
“Why didn’t you fight the extradition?” she asked again. “You had every chance of beating it.”
“I was lying to myself.”
“What does that mean?”
“It was time for me to come home.”
John noticed that they were speaking in the same hushed tones they used in the police pied-à-terre years before.
“How do you feel about me now?” he asked. He would have touched her but his wrists and ankles were chained together preventing him from raising his hands more than a few inches above his lap.
“I don’t feel anything about you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I was the senior officer on the Lorraine case.”
“That’s not it,” he said using his most professorial tone. “You could have passed your notes on, let a junior cop come out here.”
“Did you waive extradition because of me?”
“Not you sitting here but it was time to come home and you’re part of home.”
“There’s nothing between us,” she said.
John smiled at the attempt.
“I think about you,” he confessed. “You taught me about physical love. Sex, sure, but love too. A man’s first love never leaves him.”
“Are you going to talk about that at your trial?”
“No,” he said, thinking that this was very much like Carlinda’s worry, “never.”
“It was just a fling anyway,” she said, tossing her hair as she used to do. “I mean I was wrong because you were underage but you were so sweet …”
John swiveled his head to see her profile as she talked.
“… You were doing your father’s job and going to school,” Colette went on. “You didn’t have a mother around to look after you …”
She turned to look at him.
“… I guess I loved you a little.”
“Yeah,” he said feeling like that sixteen-year-old boy again, the boy who cried because he needed her so much.
“But I knew we couldn’t stay together.”
“Why not?” young Cornelius Jones asked.
“You were just a boy and I was with Harry … we were engaged.”
John winced.
“What happened with Lorraine?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“The judge and the prosecutor are going to ask. Your defense attorney too.”
“The last thing you told me was that you were going to a fertility clinic. Did you have a baby?”
Colette’s expression changed from caring to something nervous, vulnerable.
“Yes,” she said.
“Boy?”
“Christian.” The name called up a smile to her lips. “He’s just now seventeen.”
“You remember the day we met? You were with your partner. What was his name?”
“Tom Pena.”
“Yeah. I was scared and you were beautiful.”
“Did I tell you I was pregnant with Chris?”
“Just that you went to the fertility clinic. It was the day you helped me get dad out of the hospital.”
“I didn’t even think you paid attention to me back then. I mean all you wanted was sex all the time.”
“You too.”
“Why didn’t you fight the extradition? You could have beat it.”
“My mother found out where I was and came to live with me. While she was there I was her son and your lover, my father’s student and caretaker. It was like I had turned it all off but everything was still there inside me.”
She put a hand on his arm, saying, “When they ask you if you killed Lorraine say no.”
“I understand,” he said.
“I thought I had rid myself of you, CC. I thought when I broke it off that I could be with Harry.”
“Don’t you love him?”
“Yes. Of course I do. But I never forgot you. There was something so sweet about the way you surrendered but you were, still are, the strongest man I ever met.”
“Do you have a picture of Christian?”
Colette gave him a look both contemplative and worried. She took a cell phone from her purse, turned it on and flipped around until she’d found something.
It was the photograph of a teenage boy from the waist up. His caramel-colored face resisting the camera, a space between his front teeth, a skateboard hugged to his chest. He smiled, being forbearing about yet another photograph.
“He looks a lot like my father,” John said, “only with our skin.”
“His father doesn’t know. The doctor told me the test showed that Harry was unable to have kids. He gave me the report to show him but I never did.
“I’ve never forgotten you, CC. I see you every morning.”
27
THINKING ABOUT HIS SON John lost track of the rest of the journey. Colette spoke to him in the same hushed tones. He answered her but his mind was orbiting the idea of an heir. Before now, Cornelius and then John had been an only son lamenting the loss of his parents. But now there was a child of his own blood that came from Naples, Italy, and backwoods Mississippi to the Lower East Side via Jimmy Grimaldi.
For the first time the death of Chapman Lorraine took on meaning other than guilt. The landlord’s death brought Cornelius and Colette together. His blood consecrated the life of his son Christian.
At Kennedy Airport Colette and Sergeant Christo turned John over to court officers who were tasked with transferring him to Rikers Island.
Colette whispered, “Be strong in there, CC. I’ll make sure they look after you.”
He was moved from airport to van, van to prison intake. At Rikers he was photographed and fingerprinted, searched for weapons, provided with a dark yellow uniform and then brought to one of the smaller holding cells.
“Lieutenant Van Dyne don’t want your hair messed,” one guard said. “She says she don’t want the judge to feel sorry for your sorry ass.”
John’s cellmates were three men—one white, another black and a small umber-colored man who looked to be Puerto Rican.
The big black man had a smile that was both friendly and hungry.
Blocking John’s view of the other two inmates he asked, “What’s your name?”
“John … um, Cornelius.”
“Hello, John Cornelius. My name is Andre.” The big man held out a hand. When John reached out, Andre gripped hard and pulled him close.
“There’s a set of rules we live by in here, JC.” Andre’s breath was hot on the side of the ex-professor’s face. “You’re gonna be my friend and I will protect you from these other motherfuckers here. And you see over there?” Andre gestured toward an empty corner of the cell.
“That’s gonna be our private place,” the big man continued. “Whenever we’re over there you will do whatever I tell you to do. When we’re over there we will be alone, just you and me. Nobody’s gonna hear you and ain’t nobody gonna come.”
John glanced over at the other two men. The white man turned his head away. The shorter, broad-shouldered Puerto Rican watched dispassionately as if Andre and John were two competing creatures in the wild.
Andre took John’s chin with powerful fingers applying pressure until the young man’s eyes were again on him.
“Don’t look at them.” He shoved John toward the private corner. “They ain’t gonna help you. They cain’t. Now lemme see some dick.”
John wondered at what moment he would take Andre’s life. He might get beaten, even raped before the chance offered itself but the time would come … soon.
“I ain’t got all day, John Cornelius.”
“Hey, Andre,” a voice with a Spanish lilt said. “Leave him alone, man. He my homey.”
“This ain’t none’a your business, Velázquez,” Andre complained.
The much shorter Puerto Rican stood up from his cot. “I said leave him alone. I ain’t tellin’ you again.”
“Not till I get me some. You can have him then.”
“I will break your head open like a melon.”
Andre hesitated a second, two … then pushed John away. He went to the cot that the Puerto Rican had vacated and sat down heavily.
“Get your ass up from there,” Velázquez told the giant. “That’s my bed.”
Again Andre hesitated. Again he did as he was told.
“Come on, man,” Velázquez said to John. “Let’s have a seat.”
“They got me in here on murder,” the man identifying himself as Jose Velázquez said to John Woman/Cornelius Jones. “The cops say I killed this Cuban who didn’t pay his debt but I didn’t do it.”
The two were sitting side by side on one of three cots provided for the four men. Andre was grumbling to himself trying to come up with the courage to go against Jose. The white man was leaning against the cell wall looking at nothing in particular.
“They have me for a murder that happened when I was sixteen,” John said. “I did it.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be sayin’ that,” Jose suggested.
“I don’t care. I plan to confess.”
John’s savior frowned, creating creases radiating from his eyes. He said, “You shouldn’t be so serious, John. You got to remember that it’s just a game, bro. Just a game. You don’t wanna make them think you think they doin’ justice. If it was justice they’d be down here tryin’ to figure out how a kid ended up doin’ a man’s job and how that fat fuck got his ass up there to get killed. They don’t care. They want you like Andre does, on a dinner plate with your ass up in the air.”
“How do you know about my case?” John asked.
“They give us newspapers. You was in the headlines a whole week and then again when you let ‘em extradite your ass.”
“That’s why you were going to fight Andre?”
