The Further Tales of Tempest Landry (3 page)

It took seven months to get a hearing set for Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott). I had discovered from my talks with Fredda Lane that Dominique Hart, Ezzard's side girlfriend, had been with him on the night that Ezzard was supposed to have beaten and killed F. Anthony Chambers, a part-time security guard at World Emporium in the Bronx.

Dominique and Ezzard had gone to a motel in New Jersey to spend the night together while Ezzard's regular girlfriend was looking after her mother who had complications stemming from her asthma.

Dominique had not been called by the public defender because he felt that the court would see her testimony as an attempt to use Ezzard's friend to provide an unbelievable alibi.

I hired a lawyer and together we found the motel records proving that Ezzard was where he said at the time of the crime. I thought that all we had to do was present the papers to the court and Tempest would be freed but this was not the case.

“The system of American justice is byzantine, Mr. Angel,” the lawyer, Myron Ball, told me. “It's more about bureaucracy than justice. Once the alleged crime has been transformed into a sentence, it is the ruling that must be disproved, not the facts on which that verdict is based.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “Ezzard did not beat and kill Chambers. He could not have.”

“But he is guilty,” the lawyer responded. “The State of New York has so proclaimed.”

The courtroom was filled with many people who were there for various indecipherable reasons. The sitting judge, Jasmine Beam, an olive-skinned woman of Scottish and Sicilian descent, was hearing a dozen cases that day. Tempest's hearing was set for 11:30 a.m., but it was after 3:00 p.m. when his case was finally brought to the dock.

Tempest had been waiting in an anteroom this whole time. He was led in in chains that were removed only when he was seated next to Myron Ball and myself.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said.

He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, black canvas shoes and no socks. There were no new bruises on his face that afternoon and he had been allowed to shave.

The case was announced and the clerk handed the judge a folder, which she glanced at, turning a few pages before nodding. The lawyers stood to address the court.

She looked up and said, “Yes, counselors, what do you have to say?”

“My client is innocent, Your Honor,” Myron Ball said. “We have presented irrefutable proof that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime that he was convicted of. I ask for his immediate release and remuneration for the time he has spent wrongfully sentenced to a prison cell.”

The prosecutor, Darryl Cruickshank, was a tall black man in an elegant off-white suit. His shirt was dark, drab, and green. The knot of his ochre tie was off-center but this only added to the effect of the appearance of careless sophistication. His wisp of a smile and hard brown eyes gave the impression of a greater knowledge. I had seen the same gaze in the eyes of the archangels as they walked purposefully through the corridors of Infinity.

“We don't question the evidence you present, Mr. Ball,” Cruickshank said in a velvet baritone. “It seems that Mr. Walcott's previous lawyer failed to follow up on a trail of evidence provided by his client.”

“So you agree that the defendant should be released?” Judge Beam asked.

“Oh, no, Your Honor. Mr. Walcott is a hardened criminal who should be locked up for his crimes and who should serve the time given.”

At that moment I turned to look at Tempest. I don't know what I expected. Maybe I feared that he would break down under this attack, that he would in a moment of despair, bring down the walls of heaven from sheer frustration.

But Tempest showed no emotion. He watched the handsome Cruickshank as if a child looking out across a vast distance.

“But you agree that he is innocent of the crime he was convicted for,” Myron Ball said.

“Mr. Walcott is guilty of many crimes,” Cruickshank said.

“But, Your Honor,” Ball said to the bench. “There is only one crime that we are considering here.”

The hard-faced judge turned her questioning gaze upon the prosecutor. He seemed to glow under her questioning visage.

“At his resentencing, Your Honor, the presiding judge, Magda Arnold, gave Mr. Walcott an eighty-two-year sentence. She clearly states in the transcript that she was adding twelve years onto the original seventy because of Walcott jumping bail and evading the police. While he has been in prison he has been reprimanded for having been in a dozen altercations—one of which led to the partial blinding of a fellow inmate.

“Your Honor, if we felt that Mr. Walcott had been a blameless prisoner we might seek to overlook his attempt at evading justice but he has proven to us by his actions after conviction and incarceration that he deserves the maximum sentence that the court allows.”

To his favor Myron Ball spoke up.

“Your Honor,” he said. “My client was arrested for a crime he did not commit. His witnesses were dismissed by a lawyer provided by the court. Evidence was manipulated by the prosecutor's office to make it seem that no other man could have committed the crime. Then Mr. Walcott was thrown into prison with hardened criminals where he strove to survive. Now the state wants to say that he should be held accountable for knowing that he was innocent and fighting to stay alive in a hostile environment.”

Darryl Cruickshank put a finger to his lips to hide his satisfied smile.

The judge squinted at Myron Ball and then turned her gaze upon Tempest.

“Tell me something, Mr. Walcott,” she said.

Tempest rose to his feet and spoke.

“What's that, Judge?”

“Did you know when you didn't show up for sentencing that you were committing a crime?”

Tempest glanced at me and winked. Then he turned back to Judge Beam.

“I knew that I was innocent of the crime that the sentence was for….” he said. And for the first time since leaving heaven time stood still for me.

I understood, suddenly, the argument that Tempest had with the divine. There, under St. Peter's review, Tempest knew that he was innocent. It was this innocence that caused the insolence to refuse the judgment against him. At that moment I realized that a separate justice resided outside of other concerns.

This knowledge shook me to my now mortal core.

“…and because I was innocent I ran,” Tempest was saying.

Because he was innocent in his own mind he had challenged the On High. What could I say against that? What could anyone say?

I looked up at the judge as she considered Tempest's brash but honest words.

“This court overturns the conviction for manslaughter but not the twelve-year sentence for avoiding your sentence. I'm sorry, Mr. Walcott, but you broke the law and that act must be punished.”

After the ruling Tempest was allowed a short meeting with Myron Ball. I was introduced as Ball's associate and therefore given entrée to the small room where we were expected to review the case.

At one point during the debriefing Myron had to go to the toilet.

After he left I said, “I'm so sorry, Tempest. I never expected this.”

“Why not, Angel? Didn't the place you was in before work the same way?”

I had no answer.

“Hey, man,” Tempest said then, “don't look so sad. I'm happy with today.”

“Happy? You're going back to prison.”

“Now I only got twelve years. That's a victory for a convicted felon.”

“But you're not a felon.”

“I am if I'm convicted,” he said as he watched me for a response.

“Okay,” I said after a brief span of silence. “Yes. In my opinion you don't deserve hell. But I am not your judge.”

The grin on Tempest's face was his old smile, resplendent.

“That's two victories in one day. Man, you know I'm on a roll. If I was a free man and had a dollar, I'd play the lotto tonight.”

Myron Ball came back at that moment.

“Anything else, Ezzard?” he asked Tempest.

“You know, Angel,” Tempest said, ignoring his lawyer's question. “I heard this story about a guy down south. He killed a man and was sentenced to death. It was back when they had the electric chair and the man's brother was the state executioner. These brothers was close and so the executioner didn't want to kill his own kin. But the convicted brother told him that he'd be a fool not to do it. You see, executioners got extra pay and this man had four kids.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The one brother killed the other and when he had another child, a son, he named him after the brother he'd slaughtered.”

“That's, that's awful,” I said.

“That's life,” Tempest replied and the guards came in and clapped him back into chains and carried him back to prison.

I was sitting at my desk going over Christian Manor's tax returns. They had come in in a grease-stained cardboard box that was refuse from a grocery delivery service. The box was filled to overflowing with hundreds of slips of paper, most of which were scrawled upon with nearly illegible notes attempting to explain each expenditure. This was the kind of work that I'd come to love. Unraveling the details of Mr. Manor's tax records was the penance I paid for being so arrogant when I blithely passed judgment on mortals' sins. Since being essentially abandoned on earth by the powers of heaven I had learned that an accountant was also an advocate. So I sifted through every soiled scrap looking for excuses, reasons, and a way out of debt.

“Mr. Angel,” an electronic voice said from the speaker on my phone.

“Yes, Roxanne?”

“There's a man,” she said and then hesitated, searching for a better word to describe the visitor, “a, a Mr. Landry out here to see you. He says that he's your friend.”

“Um, send him in.”

My new office at Rintrist and Lowe was at the far corner of the sixty-fourth-floor suite. I was a valued junior partner in the firm and was given a work space with a door and two windows. My visitor had to be led down a long warren of hallways and so it would take him a few minutes to reach me.

My wait brought to mind an irony considering the nature of time. The wait for Tempest, now I assumed an escaped criminal, seemed to take forever. All sorts of mortal and celestial trepidations passed through my mind while I waited for the Errant Soul to appear.

It was my duty to the State of New York to turn him over to the authorities.

It was my mission from the lips of Archangel Gabriel himself to sunder Tempest's soul and damn him to an eternity of suffering in hell.

But Tempest had saved my lover's life before I ever met her. He had made it possible for me to experience the transitory sweetness of love and parenthood. In a very real way he had given me my soul and yet I was still his enemy.

These thoughts and many more passed through my mind as I waited. In heaven, where there was no such thing as the passage of time, I would not have considered so much in an hour, a day, a lifetime of celestial bliss. It occurred to me then that the total absence of sin is also the abandonment of thought. I wondered if all sin could be reduced to men thinking about what they might lose….

“Hey, Angel, why the serious face?”

He was wearing the orange jumpsuit of a convict but without the little red crosses printed all over. I noticed a leather belt cinched around his middle and heavy brown boots on his feet. These things, I knew, he must have stolen.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You gonna ask me in, man? Or do I got to stand at the do' wit' my hat in my hand?”

“You don't have a hat.”

“It's just a saying, Angel.”

“Yes, of course, come in. Close the door behind you,” I said distractedly, still wondering at the nature of time passing.

Tempest came in and sat in one of my three walnut visitor's chairs. Immediately he reached for a framed photograph on my desk. It was a picture of my beautiful Branwyn.

“You know she would have been my woman if it wasn't for you, Angel,” he said with no detectable acrimony or condemnation.

“I wouldn't have been here to take her if not for you.”

He put the frame down, placed his elbows on my ash desk, and clasped his hands as if in anguished prayer.

“Is that a sin?”

“What?”

“Bringing mortal love into the life of an angel.”

“Are you trying to bring me down with you, Tempest?”

He smiled his old friendly grin and sat back comfortably.

“What you sayin', man?” he asked.

I expected the police to break down the door any minute, looking for the escaped convict and his accomplice. Maybe, I thought, this was my due. Heaven had given Tempest that body, had made it so that he would be clapped into prison. I represented heaven and so had that sin on my head—day and night.

“I have a family, Tempest.”

“I used to, before I died.”

“That was not my fault,” I said.

“No, no it wasn't. But here I am and there you are—knowing I'm innocent and tryin' your damndest to push me down into hell. And you know they don't love me down there.”

“You represent the greatest threat in the history of existence, Tempest Landry. Until you accept the judgment of heaven nothing that is sacred is safe.”

“But if a man is innocent and heaven is in the balance then shouldn't heaven accept its fate and fall for what it has lived by?”

The question seemed silly to me.

“There's this dude up in prison,” Tempest said then, “that says people used to think that the sun circled the earth instead'a the other way round. He said that if a scientist questioned that lie that the church would put him in prison, torture him, even kill him. That true, Angel?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” I looked up at the door wondering if they would break it down or knock civilly.

“Was them bishops and priests sent to hell for killin' poor men for tellin' the truth?”

“Not always.”

“Will Judge Beam and Darryl Cruickshank be given black marks for sending Ezzard Walcott back to prison even though they knew he was innocent of the crime he was sentenced for?”

“Probably not. The overall scheme of their actions is to provide justice, not deny it. Heaven makes allowances for lapses in judgment.”

“Lapses in judgment? You know they got me put up wit' men fightin' and killin' an' rapin' over the way people walk. It's blacks against the whites against the browns every day, Angel. You know old Basil Bob would fit in there like Jack Horner's thumb.”

“Are the police after you now, Tempest?”

An expression of surprise crossed the convict's face. He gauged me as he often did. A two-bit hustler and adulterer before he died, Tempest tried to turn every situation to his favor though he was not what I would call the classic definition of evil.

“If the cops was to find a runaway convict sittin' in your office they might be inclined to arrest you, wouldn't they, Josh?”

“Yes. Especially since I knew you.”

“You could tell them that you intended to call them as soon as you could.”

“I suppose.”

“Is that what you plannin' to do?”

“No,” I uttered.

“I didn't catch that, Angel.”

“I said, ‘No, I will not turn you in.' ”

“And you wouldn't lie and say that you would have?”

“No.”

“So you could go up to prison with me. We could talk about sin all day long. I'm sure I could convince you once we were nose to nose with some truly evil men.”

“Mr. Angel,” the intercom said.

“Yes, Roxanne?”

“There are three other gentlemen out here. They say that they're looking for an Ezzard Walcott.”

“Have them wait a minute.”

Tempest was smiling at me.

“I will go with you to the front, Tempest. If they want to arrest me, I'll tell them that I know of your innocence, that the State of New York knows it too. I will join you in prison rather than break the rules by which I am bound.”

“Or,” Tempest suggested, “you could get the On High to move me to another body, change the status of this one, or, even better, to commute their verdict an' let me in on one'a the lower rungs of heaven. You know I prefer Harlem to the Pearly Gates but I'd rather heaven than hell.”

“I cannot.”

Tempest grinned at my consternation.

The door behind him flew open and three men came in followed by my young secretarial assistant, Roxanne Riles.

“Ezzard, we all gotta be back at work in six minutes or they gonna cancel our work pass, man.”

The man, a brown-skinned, straight-haired gentleman, wore an orange suit too. They all did.

“Okay, Garcia,” Tempest said. He got to his feet and stretched like a lazy cat. “Angel, me and the boys downstairs an' two blocks down cleaning up litter in Central Park. It's what you call work release. They got us in a special holding facility here in Manhattan an' every day they let us out to strut and strain as a reward for good behavior—and other things.”

“But you were in so many fights,” I said.

“Judge Beam didn't feel good about my sentence but she knew that Cruickshank wouldn't let it go so she told the warden to put me on this unit.”

“So you haven't escaped?”

“Never said I did. I just wondered what you would'a done if I had. Come on, gentlemen, let's get back to work.”

Tempest was the last one out of the door. Before following them down the hall he turned and asked, “Could you send us down some coffee and doughnuts sometimes, brother? You know somethin' like that is a godsend for wretches like us.”

“I'll bring it myself,” I said.

And I have been doing so every morning for the past six weeks.