The Right Mistake (20 page)

“Niggah got to understand what he is an’ where he come from,” George would say. “Look right in the glass and say what you see. If you can do that ain’t no man can contradict you.”

In his stupor Socrates listened to the big man and his long lectures. Rain was seeping in and the chill made its way through Socrates’ damp clothes. He wasn’t awake or asleep, drunk or sober. He understood that much of what he had done and said was because of Giant George’s lectures on the yard.

“Guilty or not we all servin’ time in this life, Socco,” the big man would say. “Ain’t no reason for you to punish yourself ’cause you know there’s plenty’a people waitin’ in line to get in their licks.”

When he woke up the next morning Socrates felt dizzy, unable to rise to his feet. His breathing was labored. His chest hurt but there was no way he would make it back to the street.

He wondered if maybe he should have taken Lana up on her offer. He wondered if he should have asked Luna for her hand.
“You too quiet, Socrates,” George said. Socrates wasn’t sure if this was a memory. “Laugh a li’l bit, man, make some noise. You all serious an’ shit but you know that don’t make nuthin’ any different.”
He slept again and when he woke up he exerted all of his strength to rise. He made it out to the alley and from there to the street. It was daytime but the sun was setting. He was walking, though the feeling in his legs told him that he wouldn’t make it far.
At Central and 103rd Street he fell to the sidewalk and rolled into the street. An old woman leaned over him and peered into his face.
“Do I know you, Mister?” she asked.
He said something but neither he nor the woman understood a word.

For a long time Socrates felt as if he was in motion. Like a trunk, he felt, being moved from train to train following some traveler. He woke up at intervals that revealed strange scenes: the top of a van, maybe an ambulance, and a man taking his pulse; a dark room with cool air and colored lights pulsing in the shadows; someone moaning and people talking happily as if no one had called out in pain; someone holding his hand . . .

Socrates could only open his eyes for a second. When he did he caught a glimpse of Luna in a loose yellow dress that she wore from time to time. The strain of looking exhausted him and he nodded off for what seemed like a moment or two but when he opened his eyes again Luna was wearing a different dress, it was white with large dark blue polka dots over her belly.

“Socrates,” she said.
“Hey, baby. How you doin’?”
He took a deep breath and felt sharp pain deep in his chest. “You got pneumonia,” she said as if this was somehow an answer to his question.

“I’m sick?”
“Uh-huh.”
“An’ this is the hospital?”
“Yeah.”
“How long?”
“Three days,” she said. “They fount you on the street an’

brought you here. You had Cassie’s card in your wallet so they called her. She and Tony got me and I been here pretty much the whole time since then.”

Socrates reached out with his fingertips to touch her stretched abdomen.
There was a film over his eyes and so he kept blinking.
“You okay, honey?” she asked him.
“You look pretty, Luna.”
“Are you okay?”
“I evah tell you about Giant George?”
“Nuh-uh. Who’s he?”
“I was in prison with him. He was the strongest man I evah met. Nobody fucked with Giant George.”
Luna smiled and Socrates passed out.
When he woke up again she was still there in her polka dots.
“What about George?” she asked.
“He used to tell me that if anything ever happened to anybody that that was a good thing unless that man was killed.”
“What if somebody got his arm cut off?” Luna asked.
“Then he could learn how to live even better with just one arm.”
“But suppose he didn’t learn?”
“It don’t mattah that he didn’t. It only mattah that he could.”
Socrates closed his eyes. He felt Luna kissing his cheek.
When he awoke again she was slumped sideways in the chair next to him napping. He was strong enough now to sit up. This time she awoke to find him watching over her.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said.
“Can we get married?” he asked.
“You feelin’ like you gonna die or sumpin’?” she asked, suspicion laced through her words.
“More like I lost a arm.”
“Could we wait awhile and see?” she asked.
“You scared?”
“My mother and stepfather were married,” she said, “an’ she would shoot crack in his neck an’ watch him fuck my older sister on the couch.”
“You got a sister?”
“All I got is you.”

Antonio and Psalms were standing over his hospital bed. There was a wheelchair between them.
“Come on, man, get up,” Billy said.
Socrates took a deep breath, noticing that the pain in his chest was gone. He got to a sitting position with his friends’ help and then he made it to his feet.
“Sit down, Mr. Fortlow,” the ever-courteous Antonio Peron said.
“If I cain’t walk on my own, Tony, then you can lay me down in my grave.”
Socrates put a hand on Billy’s shoulder and followed them out of the partitioned area of a room he shared with three other men.
They walked along a hallway until they got to a huge elevator which they rode for a minute or two. Then they went down another hall to a blue-green door that was partly ajar.
Socrates wasn’t surprised to see Luna in the bed with a little brown baby in her arms. Tony helped the big man into the chair at the side of her bed.
“Say hi to your daddy, Bellandra,” Luna said.
“What?”
“Bellandra. I named her after your Auntie.”

Leanne Northford had Socrates and his new family come stay with her while Luna learned how to care for her newborn and Socrates recovered from his illness.

For three weeks the septuagenarian ex-social worker clucked and watched over the odd little family. Socrates learned how to change diapers and Luna got used to breastfeeding Bellandra. They both would get up in the middle of the night when the baby cried.

“When she gets over twelve pounds she’ll be sleepin’ through the night,” Leanne told them. “Before that her stomach’s too small an’ get hungry ’bout ev’ry three four hours.”

Socrates moved out of his garden home and rented a small house on Ogden from a friend of Deacon Saunders. They moved in and Socrates got Billy to give him driving lessons. He bought an old Pontiac that was lime green and on Sunday afternoons he and Luna would drive down to Santa Monica with Bellandra and sit on a blanket listening to the waves.

He didn’t miss many Thinkers meetings but he was quiet there for a few months, letting others preside over the discussions and arguments. He listened to the frustrations, fears, and fantasies of the men and women who had taken up his cause.

One day, after the meeting was over and everyone else had gone, he took Luna’s hand. In the crook of her other arm Bellandra slept with her mouth open and her arms flung wide.

“But what about if I get sick again? What if I die? How can I be sure that you taken care of?”
“Then don’t die.”
“You know what I mean, L.”
“How come you was out on that street anyway?” she asked.
“You axed me ’bout us when Tony and Cassie got married. I didn’t know what to think so I went to a bar. After that it was rainin’ and I went to the place I used to live at.”
“That hole in the wall?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It must’a been full’a rats an’ shit.”
“No. There wasn’t enough in there for a rat to eat. It was just the place I used to stay.”
“How come you went there?”
“Closest place to prison I could think of I guess.”
“Is that what you thought about when I said about gettin’ married?”
“I guess.”
“Then why you still want it?” Luna asked. “How come you ain’t happy when I don’t answer you?”
“When I was sick I had this idea in my head,” he said. “It wasn’t a dream or vision but I was asleep or unconscious.”
“What idea, baby?”
“It was that I was bein’ dragged along like a dead body off to the pyre.”
“What’s a pyre?”
“A big fire where they burn the dead,” he said. “And then it was like I pulled away and got to my feet and said I wasn’t gonna be dragged no mo’. An’ after that I was free but I was stumblin’, stumblin’ through life like all that mattered was that I wouldn’t be dragged.
“But then I fount the Big Nickel and you set your eye on me . . . I got to marry you, Luna. You the mother of my child.”
“Can we wait one year?”
“Why so long?”
“I just wanna wait and see if you still want me aftah a year in the same house with a cryin’ baby and the Big Nickel too. I want you to want me for a year and then ast me again.”
“That’s what you want?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And if I wait a year from this day an’ ax you again you gonna say yes?”
Luna smiled and then grinned.
“That’s a goddamned miracle right there,” Socrates said.
“Ain’t no miracle,” Luna replied, unable to keep the grin from her lips. “It’s just a plan, a plan and a promise.”
“No, baby. That right there will make a fool like me walk the straight and narrow.”

“So, Detective Brand,” the state prosecutor asked, “what, in your own words, did you find when you entered the building called the Big Nickel?”

The gray haired, brown eyed, olive skinned white man in the witness chair pondered the question for a moment, pretending that he hadn’t studied his answer for days.

“The two officers that had been watching the house . . .” Lucius Brand began.
“There were detectives watching the house?” Marlene Quest, the prosecuting attorney, asked.
“Objection, your honor,” Mason Tinheart, Socrates’ lawyer, complained. “What the police were doing outside the house is not relevant to the case at hand.”
“I disagree, Mr. Tinheart,” Judge Irene Tanaka said. “It will give the court some understanding of why the police felt that a crime may have been committed. Continue, Detective.”
“Thank you, your honor,” Brand said. “We have been watching the house called the Big Nickel for over a year.”
“And why is that, Detective?” Marlene Quest prodded.
“We monitor the coming and going of many gang-related individuals at this house. We have long suspected that illegal activities have been planned and condoned by Mr. Fortlow.” “Your honor,” Mason Tinheart whined.
“The jury will ignore the comment about police suspicions,” Tanaka said to the twelve men and women to her left.
This jury was comprised of young and old, black and brown and white, men and women. But as Socrates looked upon them he didn’t see his peers. They were from different places across a variety of borders that most of his people could never cross. It wasn’t a question of hierarchy, of quality or even comparison. It was simply that they weren’t colleagues at work or war. These people, Socrates thought, could judge him but they could never understand who he was.
“And so,” Quest continued, “what did you find at the house?”
“Mr. Fortlow was sitting on the stairs that led to the second floor. He told us that we would find the victim in the second floor hallway.”
“And did you?” the prosecutor asked.
Marlene Quest was a beautiful, Germanic woman, her short blonde hair set like seashells around her heart-shaped face. The red of her lips was a memory of some much brighter color and her figure, in the gray-green dress suit, was a promise made by fashion magazines and entertainment TV shows from San Diego to Krakow.
“Yes,” Brand replied.
Most people looking at the forty-something police detective would have thought him handsome and athletic. Socrates, however, saw only a petulant boy; a frowning white version of Kelly Beardsley.
“I found Detective Beardsley bludgeoned to death in the upper hall. His jaw had been crushed and his neck broken. His service revolver was on the floor at the other end of the hallway.”
“And what was your first reaction to this tableau?”
“Say what?” the cop asked.
“What was your professional assessment of the situation you came upon?”
“That a murder had been committed.”
“Not self-defense as Mr. Tinheart claims?”
“Definitely not. Beardsley was a trained police officer. There’s no way that Fortlow’s version of the altercation could have happened. The only way that Detective Beardsley could have been killed like that was if is he was taken unawares.”
“Objection, your honor,” Mason Tinheart said again. “The witness, no matter his expertise, was not in the hall where this tragedy occurred. He cannot testify to events that he did not see with his own eyes.”
“Detective Brand is a trained policeman, your honor,” the beautiful prosecutor claimed. “Who better to decipher the events as they occurred?”
Irene Tanaka was in her late fifties. Her black hair was going gray but her eyes seemed to Socrates like those of a much older, either wise or deeply disillusioned, woman.
“I must agree with the defense,” she said. “The jury is directed not to take Detective Brand’s rendition of the events necessarily as fact. His reading of the physical evidence is only one possibility.”
“What did Mr. Fortlow do after you found the body of Detective Kelly Beardsley?” Marlene Quest asked.
“He held out his hands.”
“For what reason?”
“To be cuffed. We made him put his hands behind his back though.”
“So he admitted his guilt?” the prosecutor deduced.
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
“No more questions.”
“So, Mr. Brand,” Mason Tinheart said, “tell us why you entered the Big Nickel.”
“An anonymous tip,” the policeman said in a terse manner.
“Somebody called you?”
“911.”
“What were the exact words in the message?” the lawyer asked, smiling as he did so.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve never heard the message?”
“No. It was deleted from the system.”
“Deleted? I thought there was always a permanent record of all emergency calls. So that later, when and if there is a trial, the call can be brought in as evidence, maybe even testimony.”
“The system went down that day,” Brand said, looking down at his hands. “All calls for a forty-seven minute period were lost.”
“How convenient for the prosecution.”
“Objection, your honor,” Marlene Quest intoned.
“Watch the sarcasm, Mr. Tinheart,” Tanaka reminded the barrister.
“You are aware that Mr. Fortlow says that he is the one who placed the 911 call are you not, Detective?” Tinheart continued.
“He says so but it’s not true. The operator who took the call remembers that it was a woman’s voice.”
“If only we had the recording to corroborate that memory,” Tinheart opined.
“Badgering the witness, your honor.”
“Mr. Tinheart.”
“Did anyone have a gun in hand when you and the two officers entered Mr. Fortlow’s place of work?” Tinheart asked.
“Yes.”
“One gun?”
“We all had our weapons out.”
“And, after finding the body did you holster your pistols?” “No.”
“So Mr. Fortlow might have felt threatened by armed gunmen roaming around him.”
“We are the police not thugs,” Brand said.
“Bearing arms though. Maybe Mr. Fortlow held out his hands because he was afraid of being shot.”
Brand had no retort.
“Tell me, Detective, did you find a woman in the house?”
“No.”
“Was there a window in the hall that would have allowed someone from the outside to witness the alleged crime?”
“No.”
“Has anyone else come forth as a witness admitting that they made the emergency call?”
“I’m not aware of anyone who has done so.”
“Did you or the officers you had watching my client see a woman run from the house?”
Turning abruptly from the policeman Tinheart faced the jury. “We do have, as exhibit 12-B, phone records from the Big Nickel proving that a 911 call was made from the office phone at the time this supposed woman was alerting the police.
“No more questions.”

Socrates watched his lawyer come back to sit by his side. The white man had been a constant support since even before the charges were brought. He didn’t like Mason Tinheart but he had no criticism of him either.

Socrates noticed Lucius Brand glaring as he walked between the prosecution and the defense. Following the detective with his eyes he found himself looking at the gallery. His friends were assembled there. Darryl, Chaim, Billy Psalms, and Cassie Wheaton. There were others too. Every day at least a dozen folks from the Big Nickel came to support him. He didn’t mind their presence any more than he cared about Mason Tinheart. The only people in the room that mattered to him were Luna, his one day wife-to-be, and Bellandra, their baby.

It was late in the afternoon and so the judge ended the proceedings for the day. Socrates was taken to a van and driven to a small jail in Redondo Beach. He had no windows but when he was escorted from the van to the prison each afternoon or early evening he caught the scent of the ocean from between ten seconds and half a minute, depending on how long it took for internal security to notice the guards and open the electronic lock.

Socrates had a cell to himself. This was a luxury. Billy Psalms had even managed to get him a small entertainment unit that had a TV, radio, DVD player, and even an MP3 unit. Socrates didn’t understand the MP3 player nor did he listen to the radio or watch TV or movies. He only used the clock to test himself on how aware of time he was.

Keeping the face of the unit against the wall he’d turn it around from time to time to see if he knew the hour. He was right most of the time. Every convict kept a clock running in their mind. Time was the only thing a prisoner had; and time was always running out.

Socrates was reading a biography that Chaim Zetel had brought him. It was a thick tome about Albert Einstein.
“You’ll like the book,” Chaim had said. “It’s about a man whose life was just as important as what he did. And what he did was very big.”
Socrates did like the book. It was friendly and inviting. It was told in a loving manner, the way a relative who knows your flaws, but cares for you anyway, would talk.
When the lock to his door slid open Socrates looked up. This motion seemed to bring him from one world into another. Just the movement of his head felt like a long journey that was immediate and at the same time far behind him.

Standing in the doorway stood the first undercover cop that had infiltrated the Big Nickel’s Thursday Night Meeting. He was acorn-brown with eyes that never seemed to meet the person he was talking to. His clothes were green and dark blue but otherwise unremarkable.

Socrates could see that Martin Truman, aka Maxie Fadiman, had always been a spy, a mole in his own life as well as in the lives of his victims.

“Hey, Socco,” the ex-cop said. He moved to the chair across from the cot where the ex-con, soon to be con-again, sat.
“What’s up?”
“I went to your lawyer and said that I was proof that the police were hounding you. He took me to the judge,” Maxie said. “The prosecutor was there and they told me that I couldn’t testify. Tanaka claimed it would be prejudicial.”
“She’s somethin’ else,” Socrates said without anger. “It’s like she wants to help me but then she gets all worried that she’s gonna break the law and so she ends up gettin’ on me harder than if she was my enemy.”
“What happened in there, Socrates?”
“The courtroom?”
“No, at the Nickel. I knew Kelly. We worked a couple’a jobs together.”
Fortlow’s attention withdrew from the judge that he had studied so closely in the last weeks. Now he was completely intrigued by his visitor.
“What you doin’ down here, man?” he asked the one-time snitch.
“Tryin’ to help.”
“But who are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you Maxie the spy, Martin the cop, or the guy that came to us and said he was sorry?”
“The last one.”
Socrates’ whole life, it seemed then, had been getting him ready for
this time
when he was on trial for murder. And it wasn’t just the courtroom where he was being tested. It was in his windowless cell and with strangers like Maxie who came in and out asking questions. Brigitta Brownlevy, Mason Tinheart’s girlfriend, offered him sex in his cell. Luna brought Bellandra every day that they would let her visit. The prosecutor, through Tinheart, made him offers of reduced sentences. Reporters asked for interviews. There was even a biographer named Nell Hardwick, who wanted to tell “. . . a true story about a real man, not some trumped up celebrity with nothing to them.”
He told Brigitta no, realizing that he might well regret it one day. Luna was his strength. She sat with him for as long as possible talking about Big Nickel business and his opinions about the judge and jury members.
“There’s a old black woman on the upper left look like I just insulted her,” he said. “And then there’s this white girl who keep shakin’ her head.”
“I know that one,” Luna said. “I cain’t tell if she for ya or against ya.”
“Ain’t that life in a dark alley,” Socrates said and they laced fingers.
Socrates had rejected the prosecutor’s offers because no matter what they found him guilty for he would spend the rest of his life in prison since he’d already gone down for murder once.
He’d refused any interviews with reporters. Socrates had been reading newspapers for years and he had not been impressed with their ability to understand men like him. Whether they were on his side or not he was sure that they’d get it wrong.
But he agreed to meet with Nell Hardwick, the biographer.
When she came into the visitor’s room and sat across the table from him he raised his manacled hands, asking her without words to stay silent. The graying white woman was tall and thin. She wore a boy’s dress shirt and a red skirt. She had a notepad, papers, and a tape recorder all visible in a clear plastic purse.
“Don’t take no notes and don’t record me,” Socrates said. “I just wanna say some things to you and then you can go. If what I say gives you somethin’ then you can write your book, or not.
“I want you to know that I don’t mind bein’ in here, in jail. That’s where I been most’a my adult life. A long time ago I murdered two people and just recently I killed a man in my place. I’m on trial because I killed him and they don’t like me and they don’t believe it was self-defense. In some other neighborhood they might’a believed what I said but down where I live if you kill one’a them then you got to go down. That’s why I got my Big Nickel and my friends—because down where we live the law is like a mugger and a thief, down where we live at you got to concentrate real hard to know just how to walk out the door with pride and common sense too.
“I killed a man who was stealin’ from me and who wanted to kill me and now I’m on trial. That’s all there is to it, Miss Hardwick. Who I am, what I am, don’t mean a thing. It just come down to me and him and then me and them. So go on and write your book or don’t, it’s all the same to me.”

“I want to help you, Socrates,” Maxie said.
“Help me how?”
“First tell me what happened in that house?”
“How me tellin’ you that gonna help me?”
“I need to know,” the ex-cop, ex-snitch, ex-patriot said. Socrates could see the pain in Maxie and he wondered if it

was real or conjured in order to fool him.
“I killed him, Maxie,” Socrates said after some time. “I saw him
breaking into my personal file cabinet, I called to him, he pulled
his pistol and before he could shoot I hit him and he died.” It was the truth in the world of bodies in motion but it was
also a lie. Maxie sniffed the air almost aware of the subtlety of
the well constructed fabrication but then he pulled back. “I can get you outta here, Socco,” he said.
“How you gonna do that?”
“I got all the keys. I can walk in here at midnight and walk you
out the back door. I could do that tonight and by the time they
know you gone you’ll be in Toronto at a house up there that’s
ready for you and Luna and the baby too.”
Socrates stared at the evasive face of the man before him, remembering that when Martin was Maxie at the Big Nickel he
looked you right in the eye because he was playing a role that he
could hide behind. But the real man, the one sitting before him,
was ashamed of who he was and shifty and vague in his appearance.
Socrates was wondering not about the possibility of freedom
but at the offer. He’d spent more than a quarter-century in prison and no one offered to break him out like a chick from its
shell; no one held out a hand and said, “Come on let’s go.” The gift was in the offer—like money in the bank or somebody loving you from far away. It was like the smell of your
brood on the wind from the west or a nod from another black
man in the street.
Socrates liked his cell with its featureless lime-colored walls
and a book about the rebel physicist. He liked the courtroom
and the ambivalent judge and the men and women sitting judgment on him; blind as Justice. He liked the prosecutor’s figure
and his own attorney’s girlfriend. He had no need for freedom.
The Japanese judge and the jury and even the cop who testified
against him weren’t free; at least he wouldn’t trade places with
any of them.
“If I was free I could fly to that mountain ovah there,” Billy
Psalms had once said on a clear Los Angeles day. “I could rise up
in the air an’ go there like a bird. But the ground got its chains on
me. It say, ‘you stayin’ right here,’ an’ here I be.”
No, Socrates didn’t need freedom. He liked his cell, missed his
prison life. And even when he exulted in the liberty of walking
down the streets without a guard, or sleeping behind a locked
door when he held the key, he was still thinking about not being
locked up.
No, Socrates thought again, I don’t need freedom but my
child needs me; her lock and chain, her mean daddy who won’t
let her cross the street by herself.
“Socrates,” Maxie said. “You wanna get outta here or not?” “You like it up in Toronto, Maxie?”
“Better than this here jail.”
“Your baby like it?”
“She’s a baby, she don’t even know where she is.”
“I really appreciate the offer, Max. I know how hard this must be for you. It’s a big step to do what’s right when the big boss is wrong. ’Cause you know loyalty is a chain too. So’s your job and
your house an’ even yo’ dick.”
Maxie laughed. “I miss the Thursday nights, Socco.” “They don’t have nuthin’ like that up in Canada?” “They don’t have nobody like you anywhere, Brother,” Maxie
said, forcing himself to look Socrates in the eye for a brief
moment.
For five minutes or more the men sat looking at each other’s
hands. After that Maxie stood up and turned away. It was awhile
before Socrates felt alone again, as if the informer had left his
shadow to make sure the test was over.