Pleading Guilty Page 4

  She is, in her own way, alone here, a fact which I suppose has drawn us together. Our one misfiring encounter is never a topic. After Nora, my volcano seems more or less extinct, and we both know that afternoon belongs to my wackiest period - right after my sister, Elaine, had died and I had stopped drinking, just when the recognition that my wife was busy with other sexual pursuits was beginning to assume the form of what we might call an idea, sort of the way all that swirling gas and dust in the remote regions of the cosmos starts to zero in on being a planet. For Brush and me our interlude served its purpose, nonetheless. In the aftermath, we became good pals, schmoozing, smoking, and playing racquetball once a week. On court, she is as vicious as a mink.

  'How's the Loathsome Child?' Brushy asked. She eyed me in strict warning. We both knew she'd changed the subject.

  'Living up to his name,' I assured her. Lyle was Nora's and my only kid, and his insular ways as a little boy had led me to refer to him with what I thought was tenderness as the Lonesome Child. When adolescence set in, however, the consonants migrated.

  'What's the latest?'

  'Oh, please. Let me count the ways. I find muddy footprints on the sofa. Dried soda pop on the kitchen floor. He comes home at 4:00 a.m. and rings the doorbell because he forgot the keys. The PDR doesn't list half the drugs he takes. Nineteen years old. And he doesn't flush the toilet.'

  At that last item, Brushy made a face. 'Isn't it time for him to grow up? Doesn't that happen with children?'

  'Not so as you'd notice with Lyle. I'll tell you, whatever you saved me on alimony, Brushy, she got even with that shrink. All that crap about how an adolescent male was too vulnerable to be without his father in these circumstances.'

  Brushy said what she always said: the first custody fight she'd seen where the dispute was over who had to take the child.

  'Well, she got even,' I repeated. 'What did she have to get even for?' 'Jesus Christ,' I said, 'you really haven't been married, have you? The world went to hell and I went with it. I don't know.'

  'You stopped drinking.'

  I shrugged. I am seldom as impressed by this feat as other people, who like to think it shows I have something, some element which if not unique is still special to the human condition. Courage. I don't know. But I was aware of the secret and it never left me. I'm still hooked. Now I depend on the pain of not drinking, on the craving, on the denial. Especially the denial. I get up in the morning and it strikes me that I'm not going to drink and I actually wonder why I have to do this to myself, same as I used to think waking from a bender. And inside there's the same little harpy telling me that I deserve it.

  I had taken another cigarette and wandered to the big windows. The trail of headlamps and brake lights stippled the strip of highway, and an occasional building window was lit up by the isolated sparks of somebody else's life being squandered in evening toil. Stepping back, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection decaled over the night: the weary warrior, hair gone gray and so much ruddy flesh beneath my chin that I can never button my collar.

  'You know,' I said, 'you get divorced, it's like being hit by a truck. You walk around in a fucking fog. You're not even sure you're alive. Maybe the last year, I've realized when I stopped drinking was probably what pushed her out the door.'

  Brushy had removed her pumps and crossed her feet on the desktop. With my remark she stopped wiggling her short toes against the orange mesh of her pantyhose and asked what I was talking about.

  'Nora liked me better when I drank. She didn't like me much, but she liked me better. I left her alone. She could conduct her international experiment in living. The last thing she wanted was my attention. They have a word for this now. What is it?'

  '"Co-dependent".'

  'There you go.' I smiled, but we were both rendered silent. It hadn't taken Brushy many guesses. As usual, the mess in my life was its own dead end.

  I sat down on her sofa, black leather trimmed with metal rails. It was twenty-first-century decorating in here, 'high-tech', so that the place had the warmth of a hospital operating room. Every partner furnishes as he or she likes, inasmuch as our offices are otherwise the same, three walls of union Sheetrock and a glamour view, all plate glass framed by piers of stressed concrete. We have been here in the TN Needle, a forty-four-story stiletto looming prominently against Center City and the prairie landscape, since it opened six years ago, keeping cozy with our biggest client. Our phones and electronic mail intersect with TN's; half our lawyers have stationery of the General Counsel, Jake Eiger, so they can dash off letters in his name. Visitors to the building often say they cannot tell where TN ends and Gage & Griswell starts, which is just how we like it.

  'So you're really going to do this, look for Bert?'

  'The Big Three didn't think I had a choice. We all know my story. I'm too old to learn to do something else, too greedy to give up the money I make, and too burnt out to deserve it. So I take on Mission Impossible and buy myself a job.'

  'That sounds like the kind of deal somebody could forget about. Have you thought of that?'

  I had, but it was humiliating as hell to think it was so obvious. I just shrugged.

  'Besides,' I said, 'the cops'll probably find Bert before me.'

  She became rigid at the mention of the police. I took some time to tell her the rest of the story, about Jorge, the lightweight, and his three mean friends.

  'Are you telling me the cops know about this? The money?'

  'No chance. It's gone out of our escrow account and we haven't heard word one from them. It's not that.' 'Then what?'

  I shook my head sadly. I didn't have a clue. 'Actually,' I said, 'from the drift I got, I think they've been asking about Kam Roberts.' 'I'm lost,' she said. 'Me too.'

  'Well, I don't understand why you're willing to do this,' Brushy told me. 'Didn't you say he'd shoot you?'

  'I was negotiating. I'll fend him off. I'll tell him I didn't believe it, I took it on to defend his honor.'

  'Do you believe it?'

  I raised my hands: who knows? Who ever knows? I spent a moment with the wonder of it all. What is it really, this life? You're shoulder to shoulder with a guy eight hours a day, try cases with him, go to lunch, sit in the back row and make wisecracks at partners' meetings, stand beside him in the men's room and watch him shake his thing, and what the hell do you know? Zippity-do. You haven't got a clue about the inner regions. You don't know what he regards as dirty thoughts or the place he dreams of as a haven. You don't know if he constantly feels close to the Great Spirit or if anxiety is always nibbling inside him like some famished rat. Really - what is this? You never know with people, I thought, another phrase I picked up on the street and have been repeating to myself for twenty years. I repeated it to Brushy now.

  'I can't accept it,' she said. 'This is so calculating. And Bert's impulsive. If you told me he'd signed up to be an astronaut last week and was already halfway to the moon, that would sound more like him.'

  'We'll see. I figure if I actually track him down, I'll always have a great alternative to turning him in or bringing him back.'

  She stared, green eyes hopped up with all her wily curiosity. 'And what alternative is that?'

  'Bert and I can split the money right down the middle.' I put out the cigarette and winked. I said to her again, 'Attorney-client.'

  IV. BERT AT HOME

  A. His Apartment

  My partner Bert Kamin is not an everyday-type guy. Angular and swarthy, with a substantial athletic build and long dark hair, he looks good enough, but there is something wild in his eye. Until she passed away, five or six years ago, Bert - former combat ace, trial shark, hotshot gambler and hoodlum hanger-on - lived with his mother, a demanding old witch by the name of Mabel. He didn't have a shortcoming she failed to mention. Slothful. Irresponsible. Ungrateful. Mean. She'd let him have it, and Bert, with his macho jaw set, tough talk, and chewing gum, just sat there.

  The man left after this thirty-five-year mortar assault is a
sort of heaping dark mystery, one of those vague paranoiacs who defends his odd habits in the name of individuality. Food's one of his specialties. He is sure America is out to poison him. He subscribes to a dozen obscure health newsletters - 'Vitamin B Update' and 'The Soluble Fiber Wellness Letter' - and he is regularly reading books by goofballs just like him which convince him that something new should not be ingested. I have unwillingly absorbed his opinions over many meals. He lives in mortal fear of tap water, which he figures has everything deadly in it -fluoride, chlorine, and lead - and will drink nothing from the city pipes; over the protests of the Committee, he's even had one of those big green bottled water coolers installed in his office. He won't eat cheese ('junk food'), sausage ('nitrites'), chicken ('DES'), or milk (he still worries about strontium 90). On the other hand, he believes that cholesterol is an AMA-sponsored fiction and has no brief against red meat. And he never ate green vegetables. He will tell you they are overrated, but in fact, he just never got to like them as a kid.

  I was feeling Bert's presence pretty strongly now, all his screwball intensity, as I stood outside his place. It was about eleven and I'd decided to check out his digs on my way home. Last time I looked, break and enter was still a crime and I figured I'd just keep this visit to myself.

  Bert lives - or lived - in a little freestanding two-flat in a rehabbed area near Center City. As I recalled the story, he'd wanted to stay in his ma's house in the South End, but he got into one of those coffin-side spats with his sister and had to sell to make her happy. Here, he was pretty much at loose ends. I arrived with my briefcase, which had nothing in it but two coat hangers, a screwdriver which I'd borrowed from the maintenance closet on my way out of the office, and the Dictaphone, which I took on the bet that my dreams would wake me, as they have, and leave me grateful for something to do in these awful, still hours.

  Twenty-some years ago, before they shipped me off to Financial Crimes to give me time to finish law school, I worked in the tactical unit with a good street cop name of Gino Dimonte, who everybody called Pigeyes. Tac guys are plainclothes, the sort of roving linebackers of the Force who'll do further investigation on what the beat cop reports - stake out an arrest, round up a suspect. I learned a lot from Pigeyes, which is one of the things that ticked him off when I testified about him before a federal grand jury; these days he's backwatered in Financial Crimes and, as the legend goes, always looking for me, the same way Captain Hook had an eye out for the crocodile and Ahab for the whale. Anyway, Pigeyes taught me a million tricks.

  How to sneak the cruiser down an alley, headlights out, using the emergency brake to stop so that your suspect doesn't even see the red glow of the rear lamps. I watched him get into apartments without a warrant by making calls, saying he was UPS and had left a package downstairs, or that he lived across the street and thought there was a fire on the roof, so that our man would come rushing out and leave his door wide open. I even heard him phone and say there were suspicious guys around, and have a high old time when the dip stuck his mug out with an unregistered pistol in his hand and got his ass arrested and his front room tossed incident to arrest.

  This was another of Gino's little bits, just a makeup mirror that a lady would carry in her purse or keep in the drawer in her office, as Brushy had. In most old buildings, the front door on an apartment has been trimmed at the foot to fit the carpeting, and with the mirror, if you get used to looking upside down, you can see a lot. I knelt there in the vestibule, putting my ear to the door to the upstairs apartment now and then to make sure the neighbor wasn't shaking around. As I remembered it, she was a flight attendant. I figured on trying her sometime, after I'd seen what was what in Bert's apartment.

  It sure looked like Bert was gone. In the mirror I could see the mail piled up on the floor in heaps - Sports Illustrated and health and muscle magazines and flyers, and of course a bunch of bills. I rumbled around a little bit against the door, enough noise so that if there was anyone inside I'd get them moving, then after a while I used the coat hangers. I straightened them out, all but the hook, and joined them at the crimps. Using the mirror, I could see the chain lock hanging open. I must have spent five minutes trying to get a decent purchase on the knob of the dead bolt, and then it turned out the damn thing wasn't set. The old skeleton-keyed door lock and knob came off with the screwdriver in twenty seconds. I always told Nora: If they want to get in, they're coming in.

  Maybe it was that thought of Nora, but as soon as the door swung open, I was attacked by the loneliness of it all, Bert's life. I felt like I'd gone hollow, unfilled space aching with the absence. It scares me to see the way single guys live. When Nora bolted for the great outdoors, she left most everything behind. A lot of the furniture is broken and torn, what with the Loathsome Child, but it's there, it's still a house. Bert's living room didn't even have a rug on the floor. He had a sofa, a 30-inch TV, and a huge green plant that I bet somebody sent him as a gift. In one corner, housed on its packing box, was an entire computer setup - box, keyboard, monitor, printer - with a folding chair in front of it. I had a sudden vision of goofy old Bert lost inside the machine, spending the dead hours of the night with his mind tracing the circuits of a chip, whizzing from one bulletin board to the next or playing complex computer war games, wiping out little green people with a death ray from space. Crazy guy.

  I walked right through the mail as I came in, then thought better of it and plunked myself down on the hardwood floor among the gathered dustballs. The oldest items were postmarked about ten days ago, which seemed to fit Bert's suspected date of departure. One envelope had a footprint on it, maybe mine, or someone else's, or Bert's when he took off. The last thought seemed to make the most sense, since I found another envelope which had been opened. Inside was a bank card - one only - tucked into the little two-sided cardboard holder used to send out new cards annually. Maybe Bert had taken the other card to travel? The one that was there was embossed with the name Kam Roberts.

  In the scattered mail I found another envelope addressed to Kam Roberts. I held it up to the light, then just ripped it open. A monthly statement for the bank card. It was pretty much what you'd expect with Bert during basketball season, charges run up in every town in the Mid-Ten. Bert thought nothing of flashing to the airport at five and getting in one of those flying buckets so he could arrive in some Midwestern college town in time to witness the walloping of the Us team, the Bargehands, known for generations as the Hands. There were a number of local charges, too, but I stashed all of it, the card and the bill, in my inside suit pocket, figuring I'd study the details later.

  The only other item in Bert's mail that struck me was The Advisor, Kindle County's gay newspaper, with its sizzling personals section and some pretty embarrassing ads for underwear. Was he or wasn't he? Bert might tell me that he subscribed for the classifieds or film criticism, but to me it figured that Bert was in the closet. He's of my place in history, when sex was dirty and desire a hidden misery that each of us kept steeled within our own Pandora's Box and released only in clandestine darkness where we were promptly enslaved. Bert's inclinations are a deep-dark secret. He isn't telling anybody, maybe even himself. That's where Kam Roberts comes in; it's his drag. If he's meeting boys in the men's room of the Kindle County Public Library or visiting leather bars in another city where he's supposedly gone to watch the Hands, Kam is his name. All of this is surely what the TN engineers refer to as a WAG - a wildassed guess. Yet standing in the apartment, I thought it made sense. No, he never put his hand on my knee or cast lascivious glances at the Loathsome Child either. But I'd bet the farm anyway that all Bert's twitches and costumes and lonely moods came out of which way his pecker was pointing. Which is his business, not mine. I really mean it. Frankly, I've always admired people with secrets worth keeping, having, of course, one or two of my own.

  Which is not to pretend on the other hand that scoping all this out did not give me a combo of the creeps and some little thrill of kinky curiosity. So talk t
o me about my tendencies. But don't you wonder sometimes, really, what these guys are up to? I mean, who does what to whom. You know, tab A, slot B. They've got this weird secret thing, like the Masons or the Mormons.

  I wondered if it was problems in his life as Kam that had the coppers looking for Bert. When I was on the street, there were always the sorriest scams with these fellows - a prisoner in the Rudyard penitentiary who somehow got a bunch of guys he'd found through the personals to pay him fifty bucks apiece with a letter promising he was 'going to put a liplock on your love-muscle' as soon as he was released. There was one restaurant owner who installed a hidden camera behind one of the urinals and had a private photo gallery of Kindle County's most prominent penises. And you'd hear of plenty of outright extortion, boy-toys who threatened to tell the wife or the employer. There were a billion ways Bert could have gotten himself in trouble, and tossing all this around, big bluff old Mack felt pretty sorry for Bert, who wasn't trying to hurt a soul.

  I made a tour of the apartment. Bert's bedroom wasn't much better than the living room - a cheap dresser set, his bed unmade. There wasn't a picture in the entire place. His suits hung neatly in his closet but his other stuff was thrown around the room in the familiar fashion of Lyle.