Sinister Shorts

The Long Walk

At eleven the phone buzzed. Fleck had been dreaming, gazing out the window at the busy Atlanta street scene four floors below. He punched the conference button and heard the loud tinny voice of Franklin Bell calling from California. "Hey, John," Bell said. "You are a hard man to track down."

"You found me now," Fleck said. He had been relaxed; now he was uneasy. He straightened his back and the action down there snapped into sharp focus.

A woman pushing a stroller paused to extricate an angry child while Bell talked through the speakerphone.

"I got a job for you," he was saying. "The firm has a problem."

"I'm listening." His eyes stayed with the mother on the sidewalk. The child struggled out of her arms, made a break for the street.

"Just how tied up are you in Atlanta?"

"Depends," Fleck said. "What have you got?" By now he was standing, watching the woman tear after her kid.

A roaring semi blasted through Fleck's sight line. The woman launched herself into a tackle, arms out. When the truck had passed, his eyes searched for her again and found her dragging her child across the sidewalk. She picked him up, smacked his butt, and tethered him back into the stroller, tears streaming down her cheeks. Fleck sat down, turning to face the wall.

Bell said, "Pete was talking about you the other day. He liked your work on the Ibanez fraud case. I told him you were in Atlanta. He said call you. Confidentially, of course."

Law firms were like that. Discretion was the big virtue, even bigger than turning misery into money. Fleck didn't like Franklin Bell, but he liked Pete Altschuler, Bell's boss, a senior partner at Stevenson Safik & Morris, Berkeley's best-known law firm. Pete had represented him in the divorce and taken his middle-of-the-night calls, calls he was ashamed of now.

So he waited while Bell moseyed through the Berkeley weather report--hot and sunny--and talked about the fraud case, and Pete's mild heart attack, and the latest craziness on Telegraph Avenue, a shoot-out at one of the college bars, until he got back around to the reason for his call, which was to ask Fleck to catch the Delta red-eye Sunday night and meet him and Pete Monday morning to look into something important.

"I've got four more weeks on contract here," Fleck said.

He was working a temporary security job at one of the Peachtree Plaza skyscrapers. He had been in Atlanta for several months, and he liked it, the jazz, the bars, the style. In fact, he was thinking about moving here. In Atlanta, people of color could feel comfortable, could forget the race issue much of the time. In Berkeley, his hometown in California, it would always be black folks in the flats and white folks in the hills, white guilt and condescension, black rage. His ex-wife had been white. She still lived in their house on the old Grove Street, on the borderline.

"Interrupt it for a couple weeks," Bell said. He kept talking, wheedling, persuasing.