Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right

Book 3: King Oliver

by Walter Mosley

Genres: African American Mystery & Detective; Mystery

Synopsis

In the latest from “mystery master” Walter Mosley, a family member’s terminal illness leads P.I. Joe King Oliver to the investigation of his life: tracking down his long-lost father, and meanwhile, a new case pits King’s professional responsibility against his own moral code. (TheWashington Post)

Joe King Oliver’s beloved Grandma B has found a tumor, and at her age, treatment is high-risk. She’s lived life fully and without regrets, and now has only a single, dying wish: to see her long-lost son. King has been estranged from his father, Chief Odin Oliver, since he was a young boy. He swore to never speak to the man again when he was taken away in handcuffs. But now, Grandma B’s pure ask has opened King’s heart, and through his hunt, he gains a deeper understanding of his father as a complicated, righteous man—a man defined by women, a man protected by women, a man he wants to know. Although Chief was released from prison years ago, he’s been living underground ever since. Now, King must not only find his father, but prove his innocence, and protect the future of his entire family.

Simultaneously, King finds himself in a moral bind. Marigold Hart, the wife of a powerful Californian billionaire, has gone missing, along with their seven-year-old daughter. Orr is brutish and dangerous, and King realizes after locating her that it’s in her best interest to stay hidden. But are his motives pure? There is something magnetic about Marigold; he can’t help but want her near.  

In the latest installment in the Joe King Oliver series, no good deed goes unpunished. Emotionally stirring, pulse-pounding, and undeniably sexy, Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right shows Walter Mosley at his best.

Release date: January 28, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

MARLEIGH MIRABEL MANN, that was the name she gave. She was somewhere around thirty-four years of age and well schooled in the arts and graces of civilized decorum.

“What do you do for fun, George?” she asked me.

We were sitting across from each other at the Versailles, a French restaurant housed within the Cordon Bleu Hotel on the northern border of midtown Manhattan. I was wearing a tapered blue suit with an off-white dress shirt and a maroon tie.

“Didn’t they tell you about my job?” I asked, even though I understood her question quite well.

“Yes,” she said, “of course. But…”

The woman calling herself Marleigh Mann wore a one-piece frock that was a slightly darker blue than my ensemble. The dress was made from the kind of silk that relaxes on the body, making her seem upscale and yet informal. Her skin was the tone of rich blond ivory, her eyes gray like mildly tarnished silver. Those eyes opened wide, almost glittered.

“… I don’t know,” she mused. “I just wondered about whatever you do that makes you feel happy.”

“I have a daughter.”

Those gray orbs darkened ever so slightly.

“What’s her name?” the lady asked.

Improvising, I said, “Magdala.”

“That’s a very interesting name. Where’s it from?”

“It was an ancient Middle Eastern city. My ex-wife, her mother, named her.”

Marleigh knew when to stay quiet. After all she was a very special class of escort, one of social, not carnal, service.

“When Lena, my wife, left me,” I said, “I kind of fell apart. She wanted Magdala to go with her to California, but Maggie decided to stay with me. She was still in high school then. Since we both needed, I guess, um, continuity, in a way we were able to save each other. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Marleigh Mann said.

I could tell by the tone of her voice that she’d found a way to feel good about our… transaction.

We were having lunch that day for both of us to see if we were going to be a good fit.

The name I’d given her agency was George Westerly, a vice president at a large New York investment bank. That bank was starting a specialized sub-branch that would cater to what they were calling the African American middle class. Marleigh had been told that I was a wealthy businessman who needed a lovely, age-appropriate woman on my arm at various social gatherings around an upcoming banking conference.

“Magdala is the center of my life. My North Star, I guess you’d say. But, um, I’m a…”

What I wanted to say was that I was a high-level loan coordinator and then roll out the rest of the lie concocted to get this woman, my prey, where I wanted her. But the words wouldn’t come.

My client was a man named Anthony Orr. I’d never met or even talked to the man, who lived in Santa Barbara, where his wife, Marigold Hart, had walked out on him, taking with her their seven-year-old daughter, Antoinette. Marigold had been spotted by a family friend, the art dealer Jason Manheim, somewhere in New York, but she was gone before he could get to her. Acting as a representative of Tony Orr, Jason got in touch with a contact he had in the mayor’s office; this contact (I never knew their name or gender) put Jason together with Gladstone Palmer, an NYPD dispatch sergeant and jack-of-all-trades, asking him if he could help find Marigold without setting off an official police investigation.

Sergeant Palmer called me.

“Listen, Joe,” Glad said over the phone. “They’re willing to pay twenty-five thousand to get her in their sights.”

“Not gunsights, I hope.”

“No, not at all. The man just wants his daughter back.”

“And what do you want, Glad?”

“Ten percent and a good bottle of hooch.”

The dispatch sergeant and I had a rocky history. Once, back when I was still a police detective, he betrayed me in order, he said, to save my life. It was the flip of a coin how I felt about him at any given moment, but that ambivalence went into abeyance when there was twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars on the table.

“Have your guy Manheim get a one-page description of everything pertinent about the wife: what she likes to eat, what kind of schools her daughter is used to, the clothes she wears, her education and expectations of life. Get me all that and a five-thousand-dollar retainer and I’ll give it the old high school try.”

“Okay, boyo,” my best frenemy said. “Expectations of life might be over the top, but I’ll tell Jason to get all he can from Orr.”

“Have him get me pictures too.”

So I got my sometime foot soldier, Oliya Ruez, to take the picture of seven-year-old Antoinette and her mother and hang out around the various upscale private schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

It worked.

“I saw the child at Bennett Academy on the Upper East,” Oliya told me at my office on Montague Street, Brooklyn. “Her mother came to drop her off. I followed Mom home and managed to get her name off the doorman.”

“How’d you do that?”

“His name tag said William, but his accent was Portuguese. When I called him Guilherme he started liking me. After that all I had to do was pretend to remember a woman from the building who had a kid at Bennett, where I had been a janitor.”

“Are you from Portugal?” I asked her. Oliya was a fairly new acquaintance and about as tight-lipped as the sphinx.

“I spent some time in Equatorial Guinea.”

She’s on the short side, maybe 145 pounds without an ounce of fat. I’d once seen her knife and kill two merc-level men in less than half a dozen seconds. Olo, as I call her, is not a pretty girl, but she’s a striking woman.

“What do you want with her?” Olo asked.

“Why?”

“She just seems kinda nice,” the killer said. “I mean… are you sure the husband isn’t some crazy?”

It was a good question, but after a few highly moral, yet fiscally irresponsible, decisions, I found myself needing the cash this job promised.

Looking for Marleigh Mann through the various search engines available to me, I’d found her face on the Maximillian Escort site. They took pains to explain that their escorts were not for any lascivious purposes and that they were very expensive. Their sole purpose was to make the client look good.

The client, George Westerly, explained that all he needed was arm candy. From there we set up a lunch meeting, which I’d have to pay for, plus five hundred dollars for Marleigh’s time.

All that and I came up short when it was time to seal the deal.

Oliya’s question came back to me while we talked at that French restaurant. I had no firsthand knowledge of Anthony Orr, and Gladstone wouldn’t have concerned himself with the subtler nuances of sanity.

I could have given Glad Marleigh Mann’s address and collected my fee without ever thinking about the lady again. I might have done so if, at one time, I hadn’t been dropped into Rikers Island on charges of crimes I hadn’t committed.

The well-mannered escort could see my hesitation. Her smile was the soul of empathy.

“They told me that you needed someone to come with you to a few social gatherings having to do with your job,” she said.

“Uh-huh, yeah,” I answered, trying to get back into the groove. “Cocktail parties and a couple of dinners.”

“I was wondering why you didn’t ask for a Black woman to come with. Considering the job and, and you…”

It was this kindness, this innate level of understanding, even through my lies, that derailed the setting up of Marigold Hart, aka Marleigh Mirabel Mann.

I gazed into her eyes wondering if anyone could ever truly understand another human being. But Oliya was right. Why hadn’t Orr wanted to go through official channels? What was this woman’s reason for running away with her daughter, working as a chaste escort under a false name?

My thinking took more time than I wanted.

“What is it?” she asked.

The new challenge was to change the course of our interaction without causing her to run screaming from the restaurant.

“I know why you’re doing this kind of work,” I said.

Her eyes tightened but didn’t exhibit any real fear. She was probably thinking that I simply wasn’t the right fit for her kind of service.

“Oh?” she said easily.

“Bennett Academy costs just south of a hundred thousand a year.”

This unexpected intelligence brought out a bit more concern in those gray eyes.

“How do you…” she said and stopped. “How do you know about Bennett, George?”

“My real name is Joe Oliver,” I revealed as a kind of offering. “I was hired by Anthony Orr to locate you.”

She reached for her purse.

“I can understand you wanting to get outta here,” I said. “But don’t you think you should hear me out before you go?”

“I will never go back to that man.” Her voice was steely.

“I know. That’s why you and Antoinette left Santa Barbara.”

This last piece of intelligence set up a slight tremor in the stalk of her neck.

“How much does Tony know?” she asked.

“Nothing from me. He gave me a retainer and your picture. So far, I haven’t given him a thing.”

“And what is it you want from me?” She was no longer friendly or engaging.

“I want to understand why.”

“Why what?” Her sneer pleased me, made her seem more like a fellow mortal.

“Why you left. Why Anthony is after you. Why he didn’t want the police to know, officially, about this investigation.”

Through an act of sheer will Marigold Hart calmed her racing mind and concentrated on me and my invasion of her life.

“Why would any of that matter to you?” she asked, almost civilly.

“Because someone I trust has told me that you seem to be a good person.”

“Who’s that?”

“You’ve never met her.”

“How many people know about me?”

“Right now, just me and my friend.”

“How much is Tony paying you?”

“Five thousand down and twenty more when I give him your location.”

“And how much do you want from me?”

I considered this question. Mr. Smith from the Maximillian Escort Service told me that it would cost eight thousand dollars, plus expenses, to obtain Marleigh’s services over an extended weekend. She’d been gone from California for more than a year. If she had two jobs a week, she might have cleared more than half a million dollars…

But no. By milking her I would have committed a betrayal of myself worse than Gladstone Palmer ever had.

“I don’t need your money, Mrs. Orr.”

“That is not my name,” she said stiffly. “If you want to call me anything, it can be Hart.”

“I don’t need your money, Miss Hart.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. If you don’t want the money, then why are we here?”

“I’m here because this is my job. I find missing people or, at least, those that others have trouble locating. I’m a detective. I like the job. But every now and then I get the feeling that I might be being used. I don’t like being used.”

Marigold calmed down a bit more, realizing, I think, that I wasn’t an immediate threat.

“No one knows about my daughter’s school?”

“Not at the moment.”

The woman whose life I had come so close to destroying took a few moments to compose herself. During this time the waiter, a squat Caucasian in woolen trousers and a dressy purple vest, brought her a fancy Niçoise salad and me an oval platter of frog legs Provençal alongside green beans almondine.

“Bon appétit,” the waitperson wished us.

“I can’t prove it,” the upscale escort said after the waiter departed. “But I’m pretty sure that Tony killed his first wife.”

“How’d you get there?”

“He’s a brute, Tony is. Not physically, at least not with me or Annie. Not until the end, anyway. But psychologically, you know?”

I nodded, taking my first bite of amphibian.

“One day I realized that I just couldn’t take it anymore. I got a lawyer and told Tony that I was leaving.”

“What’d he say?”

“Nothing that day. He just grunted and walked out of the tearoom.”

“Tearoom? You had a tearoom in your house?”

“Tony’s rich. He’s into construction all over Southern California. When he built the house, he wanted a tearoom with a big window that looked out on an English garden.”

“I already hate the guy.”

Smiling, she went on. “The night after I told him I was leaving he broke into my bedroom. I’d locked the door, but he kicked it in. He dragged me out of bed by my hair and told me that no woman was ever going to take either his money or his children. That’s all he said. Then he threw me to the floor and walked out.

“That night I looked up his previous wife on the Internet—Natalia Henly. I knew that she had been murdered during what Tony called a botched burglary, but after he broke into my room I began to wonder, and to worry. An article in the LA Times reported that she’d been strangled in her bed while her husband was away on a business trip to Mobile, Alabama.

“That didn’t prove anything, but the next day Annie and I were on a train headed east.”

“Huh,” I said. “Wow.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

We ate for a few minutes in silence, each of us looking up now and then.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I got to say somethin’ to your husband. But I can wait a couple’a days. I’ll tell him about Bennett Academy but not your apartment. You can pull Annie outta there and then come up with another name, another place.”

Her gray eyes had widened.

“This is a lot to take in,” she said after a minute or so.

“I can see that,” I agreed, “but not nearly as much as if Tony had found a less considerate PI.”

She smiled again and gave me a side nod.

“Do you have any advice?” she asked.

“How much money you got?”

“Enough for a year or so.”

I gazed at my prey-cum-client, feeling good about who I was.

“You have two days to think about what you want and what you might need,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get on another train and pick a city that your husband won’t guess. And if it seems too hard, I’ll give you my number and we can talk again.”

I’D MADE IT back to Brooklyn, to my Montague Street office, by midafternoon.

Aja was there at the reception desk visiting with an unexpected guest, a diminutive, black-skinned, and very old woman.

“Grandma B,” I said as the woman rose from the visitor’s chair set before my daughter’s worktable.

“Well, well, well,” aged Brenda Naples tsked. “There you is comin’ into work when most decent people gettin’ ready t’go home.”

I bent over to kiss her lips, as was our custom.

“I—I didn’t know you were comin’, Grandma. I’d’a been here otherwise.”

“That’s okay, Joe. Aja got me a Dr Pepper out the icebox and been tellin’ me what you and her been doin’.”

I pulled up another chair to join my familial generations.

Grandma B took half a step back, reaching behind to right herself against the arms of her chair before slowly lowering into the seat. This caution was not unusual for a ninety-four-year-old woman. But Brenda Naples and her boyfriend, billionaire silver magnate Roger Ferris, had been in the habit of nearly daily ballroom dancing for the past few years. That kind of regular exercise, along with their morning constitutional around the grounds of Roger’s Manhattan mansion, had given Brenda renewed strength. So it was noteworthy that she needed extra time to sit.

“What brings you out here to Brooklyn, B?” I asked.

“I was sittin’ in the windah room lookin’ out at the Hudson and it come to me that I haven’t been to see you in years. Years! So I said to myself that I better gather these old bones up and make it out here before another day has passed.”

“Grandma B’s been telling me about your uncles and cousins all over Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee,” Aja said with great pleasure.

“Ain’t she talk nice, King?” Brenda said, the smile on her face reminiscent of some celestial being, deeply satisfied with its hand in creation.

“She’s the best of both sides of the family,” I agreed.

“Oh my God,” Aja complained. “I want you guys to remember that when you meet my new boyfriend.”

“You got a beau?” Brenda asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think he might give me some great-great-grandbabies?”

“Grandma!” Aja’s eyes went wide, her mouth forming a perfect O.

“It’s only nature, child,” Brenda explained. “Where you think you be if your daddy didn’t get your mama with you?”

Putting up her hands and shaking her head in denial, Aja said, “I have work to do.”

This tickled my grandmother to no end. She laughed, slapped her chest, and shook her head in approval.

“Girl, you are, blood and bone, a Naples child,” Brenda blessed. Then she turned to me and said, “Why don’t we go to your office, King, and let somebody out here do somethin’ productive?”

My office is a quarter the size of Aja’s. She needs more room because it’s her job to maintain the printer, computers, office supplies, and file cabinets, and also to manage my clients and guests when I’m busy in the inner sanctum.

I have two visitors’ chairs. Brenda took one and I the other.

Once seated, she craned her neck to look out the picture window onto Montague Street. That artery, once the mainstay of working-class Brooklyn, was now the center for gentrification. Workingmen and -women had been pushed to the outer limits of the city, struggling to pay rent and buy boxes of cornflakes without going into debt.

“It’s such a nice place you got here, King,” Brenda blessed.

My middle name is King. My father named me that as an honor to both me and my namesake, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong’s mentor. Dad loved jazz, thought that it was what distinguished Black identity in America and the world.

“Jazz is the distillation of all the music of the world,” Chief Oliver would tell me when he still lived with us, before they trundled him off to prison.

“It’s so nice that you got your own office,” Brenda confided. “It belongs to you. No white man can come in here and fire you and send you away with your tail between your legs. That’s the only way to live like a human bein’.”

Even as she said these words, I could tell that she had something else on her mind. It was how she wasn’t looking directly at me that was the giveaway.

I stayed silent, waiting.

When Brenda realized what I was doing she regarded me.

“I got a tumor,” she said behind that steady gaze.

I’ve been shot twice in my life, and neither time was near the trauma I experienced hearing those four words. I couldn’t speak. I tried to keep the pain off my face but probably failed at that too.

Brenda smiled ever so gently, seeing the love in me, I believe.

“It’s a cancer,” she said. “Prob’ly anyway. The doctors say it’s between the heart and lungs and because’a that it’s gonna be a bitch to operate on.”

“Roger will get you the best surgeons in the world.”

“I ain’t told Roger.”

“Why not?”

“Baby, this is my load to bear. I got a very good doctor and she’s handlin’ it.”

I felt lightheaded and helpless. Brenda Naples was the backbone of our entire line. She and my grandfather had always been there for everybody. Everybody, no matter how far they strayed or what they did wrong. When I was sent to Rikers Island, she and Granddad were there every visitors’ day.

“What did the doctor say?” I asked.

“It don’t look too good. The operation would be tough for anybody, and my body is a helluva lot older than that.”

“So—so what are you gonna do?”

“They runnin’ tests now. Doctor got a whole hospital full’a specialists been pokin’ me all ovah an’ wirin’ me up to machines bigger’n your car. I told ’em that I won’t do chemo. No, no. Too many people I seen done been cut low by them poisons.” Brenda leaned back in the chair, set her jaw to granite, and gave me a curt nod as if daring me to try to gainsay her decision.

“Is there anything I can do to help, or… something?”

I expected dismissal. Whenever I wanted to do something, anything, for my grandmother she’d tell me, often brutally, that she could take care of her own damn self.

But instead, she whispered, “Yes, child, there is.”

“Wh-what?” I stammered.

“I want you to find my son, your father, and bring either me to him or him to me.”

Where hearing that my most important elder was maybe dying had caused me pain, just the mention of my father brought about numbness in my heart and mind.

“Chief’s in prison,” I said. “All you got to do is go see him on visitors’ day.”

“No, baby. He got out nine years ago. They—what you call it—they appealed his conviction and sprung him outta Attica.”

“Out? Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“I didn’t . . .