The managing partner of the law firm on the eleventh floor handed a thick file to my son Andre on his first Friday, with a smile, and said, “Take this to your desk and read it over the weekend.” I am Clarence Toussaint, eighty one years old, and I saw it happen from the other end of the corridor, with my mop bucket beside me. For forty one years I had cleaned that tower in Mobile. Then, because I had quietly bought it in 1987, I had sold it to that same law firm for five point eight million dollars. The managing partner had not yet noticed that I still wore the uniform.
My son Andre, forty seven years old and newly hired as a paralegal, was a gambler. He had lost his house and his wife to the casino in Biloxi, and I had begged the managing partner, Mr. Rowan Pruett, to give him a chance. The file in his hands, I knew from my mop and my keys, was from the casino litigation department, the very department that represented the casino on the Gulf Coast to which my son owed a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. It was a trap, baited with his own weakness.
I abandoned the mop bucket and went down the back stairs to the supply room on the first floor, where the original plans of the building had been kept since 1972. It was a place only a janitor would think to look. Behind the mop sinks, taped to the inside of a locked cabinet, was a metal tube. In it lay the true deed of the building, with a covenant I had signed with my own hand and Gloria, my late wife, as witness, which Mr. Pruett had never read.
A ring of janitor keys carried through a law firm tower gave one father the weekend to bring his son back to him in Mobile.
I gave my terms the next Monday morning at nine, standing in the conference room of the eleventh floor in my gray uniform, with the tube under my arm and my son beside me. “Mr. Pruett, I am going to say something once. You gave a file to my boy knowing what it held. You wanted him to bring you a side letter, to reduce the price of this building in exchange for his debt. I am here to say that he has told me everything, and that no such letter will be signed. And I have brought the deed.”
Andre stepped forward, shaking, with the file in his hand, and laid it on the polished table. “Mr. Pruett,” he said, “I want to say it out loud. You told me that the casino would forgive the debt if I talked my father into a new price. You said it was only a formality. I came home Saturday night, and I sat with my father in the kitchen, and I could not do it.” His voice broke. “Papa, I am sorry. I have been so weak.” I laid my hand on his shoulder.
Rowan Pruett had turned the color of the table. He reached across it and snatched the side letter, the draft that he had prepared, the one thing that proved his scheme. He tore for the door of the conference room, down the long carpeted corridor toward the elevators. But the cleaning crew of the building, eleven men and women in gray uniforms whom I had trained, had spent the weekend waiting for this, and they stood in a line in the corridor with their mop handles crossed like the bars of a gate.
Mr. Pruett stopped with his shoes sliding on the carpet. One of the older cleaners, a woman named Mrs. Gaines, seventy years old, who had cleaned the executive suites for thirty years, plucked the paper out of his fingers and read it aloud, slowly, in her church voice. The entire eleventh floor had come to the doors of their offices. The associates and secretaries stood silently, listening, as she read each clause. Then she folded it neatly and handed it back to me. “Mr. Clarence,” she said, “I believe this is yours.”
The money consequences were swift. The partners of the firm, hearing the whole story that afternoon, voted Rowan Pruett out of his position, and the state bar opened an inquiry. The firm honored the covenant of the deed in full, paid me the whole five point eight million dollars, and asked me to stay on as an honorary advisor, which made me laugh. The casino released my son from the debt, since the file had been obtained improperly. Andre entered a treatment program in Mobile that evening and was well within a year.
In the name of my wife Gloria, who passed in 2012, I started the Gloria Toussaint Fund. It pays for gambling treatment, scholarships for the children of janitors and custodians and free legal help for building workers, in Mobile, Baldwin and Escambia counties. In the first year we sent nine young people to college and placed twenty eight people in treatment. One was a young man from Prichard whose mother cleaned offices at night. He wore a gray suit to his interview, and sent me a thank you note on law firm stationery.
On a bright morning in June, I stood in the lobby of the tower in my gray uniform, with my ring of keys at my belt. Andre came through the revolving door in a pressed shirt, fourteen months clean, carrying a briefcase. He stopped beside me, and without a word he took one of the old brass keys from my ring and slid it into his pocket. “Papa,” he said, “I will bring it back tonight.” I watched him walk toward the elevators, and the whole tower seemed to hum. Mrs. Gaines waved from the cleaning cart, and the morning sun came down through the tall glass, and for the first time in my life I did not feel like a guest in my own building.
