The Long Fall

There were plenty of clues: the four men I had searched out, Norman Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman), and the as-yet-nameless person who hired him. The client’s initials, VM or BH, was something—but not much. Even at the moment of his death, when he was confessing to me, Fell had been cagey. The illiterate had made sure not to put a gender on the employer that he was supposedly betraying. I didn’t know if it was a man or woman who’d hired him.

There was also Willie Sanderson, and maybe a kid who died named Thom “Smiles” Paxton.

Someone wanted these low-rent young men killed, and then, to cover their tracks, Norman Fell was destined to die. I didn’t know if I had always been on the hit list or if maybe Sanderson had heard him talking to me and then had been sent to shut my mouth, too.

Sanderson had to be a hired killer—of that much I was almost certain.

But who would want four low-life young men killed? Who’d pay a man’s bail to murder him? The scenario was simple, it just didn’t make sense, like a live cat sealed in a glass globe, or the United States declaring peace.

I WENT TO the den and got online, looking for some event that would hold the four targets together at the time Fell’s client’s son last saw them. That was Óthe>I in early September 1991.

That fall was a very interesting moment in modern American history. The dictatorship of the proletariat was disintegrating in Russia. Gorbachev and Yeltsin made their move to take power from the Soviet congress. The Baltic nations gained their independence and the CIA was looking for a new way to justify its existence.

Out of a thousand executions over the previous fifty years, for the first time a white man was executed for murdering a black man. The Republicans and Democrats were battling over Clarence Thomas’s bid for a seat on the Supreme Court. President de Klerk was having a hard time trying to democratize South Africa while holding back power for his white brothers.

Frank Capra died.

The country was in the midst of a recession, and the political and social world was spinning off its axis, though no one knew in what direction it would go.

A lot was happening but nothing about the four teenagers that I had found for Fell.

Thom Paxton had died that year. I found the entry on the ninety-seventh page delivered by my Bug-designed search engine. It was an article in Newsday when Newsday was a city paper. The young man had died of a broken neck incurred when he fell from a high girder. He and some unnamed friends were trespassing on the site and there was some evidence that the victim was intoxicated.

It was a solid clue, only it would have been better if his last name started with an M or an H as did Fell’s client’s. I tried to find out more about young Thom, who, the article said, was seventeen, but there was nothing more to fetch.

AS LONG AS I was online I looked through my e-mails. I got offers to enhance my penis size and to get rich off of diamonds in South Africa, a holler from a girl named Shirl who swore she could get me out of the funk men my age experience, and a missive, replete with attachments, from Tiny “Bug” Bateman.

Mardi Bitterman had published a story in an online teen magazine about a suicide pact between two sisters who lived in Iraq. The fictionalized children were being tortured for some reason, and the only way they could defend themselves was to die. This wouldn’t have been so bad if Mardi hadn’t also spent many hours browsing sites that claimed to have information on exotic poisons derived from household ingredients.

The father, Leslie, didn’t have anything nearly so dramatic in his digital background, but there was a shadow there. He received a regular certified package that was arranged through a website, which he accessed through his office account, some outfit called Phil’s Olde Tyme Almanack. Bug couldn’t find any other reference to the business, nor could he identify any other customers.

He was sure about the Bitterman address. Which was maybe fifteen blocks from our place.

“I’m drawing a blank on this one, LT,” Bug wrote.

Óe.

<

I turned off the machine and left the apartment before anyone else was up.

AURA WAS WAITING in the antechamber of my office, a much lovelier sight than Carson Kitteridge or The Suit.

“Hey, babe,” I said as nonchalant as I could with a cockroach-sized bump on my left temple.

She put her arms around me and I relented, feeling the air fill my lungs and the full weight of my body evenly distributed on the soles of my feet.

“I wanted to call you,” she whispered in my ear.

“I know.”

“You’ve got to take better care of yourself.”

“I didn’t hit myself in the head.”

She leaned back and stared into my face. There was no plan in her heart, no goal she was reaching for. Aura liked being in my presence. She filled my life with a knowledge and a confidence that I’d never known before. And that was because I tried my best not to lie her, and to never misrepresent who I was.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.