Pleading Guilty Read online

  'I'm on vacation after today. I really need to reach him. Any chance of that?'

  'Just a moment.' It was a good deal longer than that, but Trilby sounded quite pleased with himself when he returned. 'Mr Malloy, you must have ESP. He's a guest in the hotel.'

  My heart stopped.

  'Kam Roberts is? You're sure?'

  He laughed. 'Well, I wouldn't say that anybody here knows him, but there's a gentleman by that name checked in to Room 622. Should I have him call you? Or can we tell him when you'll be coming by?'

  I thought. 'Can I talk to him?'

  He returned after I'd heard an extended symphonic version of 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head'.

  'There's no answer there, Mr Malloy. Why don't you stop by at the end of the day and we'll get him a message you'll be here.'

  'Sure,' I said. 'Or I'll call.'

  'Call or come by,' said Trilby. He was writing a note.

  After I put down the phone, I sat a long time looking at the river. There was one building across the way, still wearing Yuletide festoonery, lights and a skirt of holly across the roof. It didn't make much sense. Bert had reason to be laying low - his partners, the police, and maybe even whoever had stuffed that bug-eyed businessman in his refrigerator were all after him. But why hide in Kindle, where sooner or later he'd run into somebody he knew? Whatever, I had to get down there fast, before Bert got this lame-brained message in which I'd used my actual factual name, the sight of which undoubtedly would lead him to scoot once more.

  I took the elevator down and crossed the street to the health club where I play racquetball with Brushy. I jumped into my sweats and shoved my wallet in a pocket, then started jogging. It was 28 degrees so I hauled my broad Irish backside down the avenues with some dispatch, but I ran out of wind after about four blocks and went back and forth, running till my smoked-up lungs felt like I'd breathed in bleach, then stopping and letting sweat freeze up on my nose.

  I cruised out of Center City into the neighborhoods where the two-family houses roosted like hens behind the frozen lawns and the leafless trees, stark and black, loomed above the parkways. Lured by my mood, I jogged a few blocks out of my way into the edges of the ghetto, so I could pass St Bridget's School. It is a stucco building split by long cracks the shape of lightning. There, for more than thirty-one years, Elaine was the school librarian - 'feeding the starving,' as she put it. This was a person of iron convictions. With our ma, I turned myself into a sort of human tetherball, always close enough to be pounded back in another direction when she'd go off her nut and rage about one thing or another, but Elaine was smarter and held her distance. She developed, through this exercise, I suppose, a strongly contrary temperament. When everyone was sitting, Elaine was standing; she wandered around the kitchen when the family dined. She preferred her solitary self to any company, and that never seemed to change.

  She ended up one of those Catholic spinsters, a spiritual type who never quite joined the secular world, at 5:00 a.m. Mass every morning, always palling around with the nuns and identifying people, and even store locations, throughout the tri-cities by their parish. She had her worldly moments, some gentlemen friends with whom she sinned, and she was a terrific card too, one of these clever old Irish gals with a bracing wit. All Ma's sharpness was still resident in her, but where Bess took to the cudgel of spiteful words and judgments, Elaine's humor was aimed principally at herself. These little muttered cracks as you left your seat, turned your back, and always an arrow to the heart. Her only failing she came by naturally - she drank a bit. The night she left our house, goofy from plum brandies, and turned up the off ramp and headed onto US 843 was the final drunken evening of my life.

  In AA, where I've lapsed just like I have in the Church, impressed by the faith but unwilling to engage in the required daily rituals - in AA they told me to submit myself to a power outside myself. Don't count on beating the demon on your own. The help I ask for, Elaine, is yours. And sometimes as I do it, as I ran down the bleak streets toward the U Inn or sit here in the night whispering into the Dictaphone, I puzzle on what strikes me as a piece of nasty truth.

  I miss you ten times more than Nora.

  B. Bad News

  Eventually I reached the outskirts of the U, with its handsome progressive neighborhood, integrated since early in the century, its bookstores and vague bohemian air. U Inn was at the corner of Calvert and University, and I did a long tour of the parking lot, then jogged right through the front door, waving to the doorman, playing today's role as another hotel guest, a traveling business type living on snacks from the mini-bar and morning aerobics. I ran all the way to the elevator, hopped in with a fat woman who was whistling to herself, and rode up to 6.

  Room 622 was quiet. I stuck my ear to the door and rattled the knob. As I figured, there were not going to be any of Pigeyes's tricks in a mid-city hotel. The doors were reinforced and the locks had been replaced with those solid-state electronic gizmos, little brass boxes with lights that required sliding in some plastic card they give you these days instead of a key. I knocked hard. Nothing doing. A suspect fellow in a lizard-skin jacket came by and I kept my eye on him until he got some ice and disappeared under the exit sign at the other end of the dim hall. The hotel corridor was quiet, except for the whine of a vacuum inside one of the rooms.

  I'd planned the next move. The guy on the phone had told me nobody here knew Kam on sight. I had some second thoughts, but I had to count on sliding by. That was the point of leading a perilous life. I needed to find what in the hell Bert'd been up to. And I'd be a lot better off sneaking up on him than announcing myself. I took the Kam Roberts credit card out of my wallet.

  At the reception desk in the lobby, I talked to a cute blonde, a student, I imagined, like many of the employees.

  'I'm Mr Roberts in 622. I went out for a little trot and like a fool I grabbed my credit card when I left instead of my room pass.' I showed her the credit card casually, tapping an edge on the counter. 'If you could just get me another.'

  She disappeared in back. This was frankly a pretty rummy place, especially after the big-bucks life where you get used to going first class. The shabbiness of course was excused by a convenient location - there wasn't another hotel within a mile of the university - and an atmosphere of self-conscious boosterism. The U Inn, as you would expect, is pretty rah-rah. Everything was roped in U colors, vermilion and white, and near the desk there were pennants and pom-poms and U sweatshirts tacked to the walls. The Hands basketball schedule, a cardboard poster featuring a color photo of Bobby Adair, this year's wannabe star, was pinned up on either side of the desk, and as I studied it I realized that a Hands basketball game probably would have brought Bert back to town no matter what.

  But there was none today. Not even last night. Or tomorrow. In fact, a lot of things didn't fit. The home games were set on the schedule in vermilion, the away games in black. I didn't have Kam's bank card bill with me, but I'd been staring holes in it for eighteen hours and I was pretty sure that I had committed most of the entries to memory. What bothered me was that the days didn't match. December 18, the last time Kam was here, the Hands were at home. But according to the schedule, they'd been in Bloomington and Lafayette and Kalamazoo since then, and on different dates than the ones when Kam had rung up charges in the same towns.

  'Mr Roberts?' The blonde had returned. 'Can I see your credit card again for a moment?' I'd kept it out and she removed it from my hand. I had some instinct to start running, but the girl looked like she'd rolled in off a haywagon, with those sweet eyes the color of cornflowers. One of America's twenty million blondes with looks too standard to conceal any scam. She disappeared again into the office, but was gone just a second.

  'Mr Roberts,' she said when she returned, 'Mr Trilby would like to see you for one minute in back.' She opened a door for me and pointed to the small rear office, but I hung on the threshold, heart fluttering like a moth.

  'Is there a problem?'

  'I
think he said he had a message.'

  Ah yes. Me old bud Mack Malloy had called. A perceptive fellow, Trilby probably wanted to tell me that Mack sounded like a phony. There were three men in back, a black man behind a desk who I took to be Trilby and the wormy-looking guy I'd seen upstairs in the hall. The third one turned to face me last.

  Pigeyes.

  I was in deep.

  C. Would You Care If Your Partners Did This to You?

  This is not an especially pretty story, Elaine. Pigeyes and I worked tac nearly two years, life and death and plenty of whiskey, lots of laughs, I'm the former college-boy art student, wet behind the ears, he's the guy who's been street-smart since he was seven. I'm talking out loud about Edward Hopper and Edvard Munch when we drive down city streets at night and he's feeling up every hooker. Some team.

  Working with this guy was always an adventure. Pigeyes was one of those cops in the old style, who think parents take care of kids, you go to church and pray to God to save your soul, and everything after that sort of depends on where you stand, how you look at it, right and wrong, you know, sometimes you have to squint. I'd been riding with him about eighteen months when we hit a dope house, just a small packaging factory in a dismal apartment building. We had followed some little shitbum off the street, pretty sure we'd seen him swapping packages, and then, afraid we'd got made, decided to go through the door in the name of hot pursuit before any backup arrived. Pigeyes was always that kind of cowboy - he thought he was in the movies, strung out on the rush of danger as bad as if he were sticking a spike in his arm.

  Anyway, you've seen the next scene at the Odeon: We come through with guns drawn, a lot of yelling and carrying on in two or three different languages, people jumping out the windows and onto the fire escapes, and some poor bastard running first one way, then the other with a seal-a-meal under one arm and a scale under the other. I kick in the door of the John and there's a gal sitting on the can with her print skirt around her belly, holding a baby in one hand, using the other to push a baggy full of powder up herself.

  We got four people facedown on the floor. Pigeyes did his usual raging, sticking his service revolver in their ears and saying various terrible things until somebody whimpered or literally shit their trousers, then he turned his attention to a little card table in the corner of the living room which was covered with money, I mean a lot, lying there in heaps like it was just paper. Pigeyes had radioed for the narcs to come help us with the arrest, but without skipping a beat he counted out two piles of bills, three or four grand each, and handed me one. I took it but handed the money back in the car, after Narcotics had shown up.

  'What's this?' he asked.

  'I'm goin to law school.' I'd been accepted by then. 'So?'

  'So I shouldn't be doin this shit.'

  'Hey, get real.' He read me out then. He beat me up with the truth. Did I think the narc guys wouldn't take a nibble out of this? What were we supposed to do, leave it in a nice pile so that the shitface beaners could have it all back when Judge Nowinski decided we weren't in hot pursuit? Were we gonna wait around and hope that the mopes in the Forfeiture Unit actually took some time off from the golf course to try to get a writ, in which case the cash'd get lost in the clerk's office or maybe in some judge's chambers? Did I think the beaners were gonna say something? Every one of them didn't know nothin, man. They were wet and waitin for a trip across the river. 'Or do you just want to be able to go tell Momma?' he asked.

  'Hey, give me a break.' We'd sort of been down this pass before. What he did, he did, I figured, he wasn't the only one and he made some effort not to involve me. Now he wanted me aboard. 'You do what you wanna, I'll do what I wanna. I got a rest-of-my-life to think about. That's all.'

  He sat there watching me, a nasty-looking fellow normally, with a sullen face going to jowls and those little whiteless eyes, his expression now slackened and mistrustful. This was what they call a delicate situation. Like being with the Yakuza. You got to cut off a finger to prove you're in. What was he up to? I think, in retrospect, he had a point to make, that before I departed for the world I ought to know that there's no judging, that everybody has their moments. So I brought the money home and showed it to my wife and, after leaving it in my sock drawer for three weeks, gave it to my sister for St Bridget's. Yeah, Elaine, that's where it came from, it wasn't, like I said, a stationhouse collection. I got a note back from the eighth-grade class president which I've kept for all these years, a pointless thing to do, since I wasn't going to tell anyone the real story, inasmuch as I was a policeman who was supposed to arrest Pigeyes's unlawful ass right on the spot, not sing 'Que Sera, Sera', or make a charitable donation of what was, in law, money I'd stolen.

  Two months later I started law school and a few weeks after that I was Form 6o'd to Financial. Pigeyes threw a nice bash when I left. Everything for the best.

  The police, any city you go to, are kind of a sneak fraternity. The Force. Close-knit. Trust each other first and most and nobody very much. There are lots of reasons, maybe the most important being that no one really likes the police. Who should? All these types looking sidewise and waiting for you to slip. I was a cop myself, but when I see a black-and-white just sitting on the corner, the first thing I think is, Why's this bastard got his eye on me?

  Also, cops are really by themselves. This retinue of lawyers, prosecutors, judges, wardens, that whole world of rules, they're as far away as Pago Pago when you're in that basement looking for the robbery suspect Mrs Washington saw running. You go through the basement door and wait there on the threshold, come out five minutes later shaking your head in disappointment, just can't find him, that whole crew, lawyers, wardens, so on and so forth, they have nobody to chew on. It's only you - not just your life on the line, but you're the only reason this guy is going to get caught. There's no system. That's why it's so easy to whack the mouthy bastard when he's cuffed in the back of the black-and-white and is still talking about your mother or the violation of his constitutional fucking rights, never mind the seventy-seven-year-old guy he just hit in the head with a paving stone the better to steal his T-check. Because it was only you. And he's yours. And only other cops really understand that.

  Which is how come, even forgetting everything else -that you're a sneak fraternity, that nobody likes you -even forgetting all that, coppers don't do it to coppers. When you're there, when it's only you, you do your best. And if some days you're not up to your best, then you're no worse than anybody else, are you? Tomorrow you can try again. Who's to judge? You start that game, I saw you be bad, shit, it's the whole Force tellin tales.

  Shift scene: Two years later I'm coming out of Constitutional Law II, here's two Feebies, real types, drawls and polyester suits and white shoes, who want to talk to me -did I work with Gino Dimonte, la-di-da, a few warm-up pitches, then the hard stuff - was I on a dope bust three years ago April? I do the arithmetic real fast. One of the dopers has finally gotten cracked federally rather than stateside and has found some Ivy League A USA happy to cut him a few months in summer camp if he'll talk about Kindle coppers with their hands on dirty money, and the doper naturally doesn't give him everybody he has on the pad who he might need again, he gives him Pigeyes, who used self-help. I know all this at once, I see just where they're going, and I'm like Yeah, okay, yeah, I think I remember that one, oh yeah, that one, there was money on the table.' A bubble in the brain. What am I thinking? It was the weirdest goddamned thing. Five seconds in the law school hallway and I've changed my freaking life. There was not a cop who heard about this - and believe me, they all heard about it before the ink was dry on the 302s, the FBI agents' reports - who didn't think I'd done it because I felt with law school I was now a cut above. Coppers are very sensitive about class and have always got it on the brain, they just can't get over the fact that they make forty grand to keep the world safe for millionaires, eat a bullet for Daddy Warbucks, who'll use your corpse to wipe his shoes. But it wasn't that, I wasn't trying to make new fr
iends, and in point of fact, I never much liked snitches. And it wasn't my sterling character for the truth. Who am I kidding? I've fibbed for worse reasons than to help a pal. It's just that, at that moment, I was standing there in the law school, with its wainscoted walls, and something came over me, that thing going back to when I was a kid when I'd realize I didn't belong, that feeling that the world was objects. That's where I was, I guess, the smartass fourth-grader looking at his life as Something in This Picture Does Not Fit and always thinking the Something was me.

  Anyway, I got about three-quarters through the story when it hit me like a bolt that this would not work out. The agents had come on with the usual street immunity, just be straight and you're okay, you won't even get lint on your new suit, but I realized suddenly that the feds were not my only problem. I would have to explain this to Bar Admissions and Discipline, to BAD, and they were pretty tough on the new recruits. Immunity. Felonies. Breach of trust. I was not going to make a good impression with this story of stolen dope money in my sock drawer. So the tale ended with me and Pigeyes in the car and me telling him to inventory my end and his end too, handing the money back so he could turn it all in to the evidence room.

  Things sort of went in natural sequence after that. I testified in the grand jury, just what I'd said in my statement to the agents, nothing more. The last six months I was a policeman, I was assigned behind a file cabinet, I didn't get near the street, and even the khaki crew, the unsworn personnel, would spit in my coffee when I turned my back. Then Pigeyes got indicted and I went to court and testified against him. He had paid about thirty grand to Sandy Stern, who a few years ago I would have described as a Jew defense lawyer, and Sandy made it look like the government did not have much of a case. They had a couple of the shitbum dopers who had to admit they'd had their faces planted on the floor; a narcotics officer's inventory of two grand in cash on the table when the beaners said there had been forty; and they had me. Of course, I was up there only sort of telling the truth, with my old pal Pigeyes giving me the death look, and something uneasy came to the surface, like bones bubbling up in tar. Stern asked if I was jealous of Pigeyes, felt he was a better cop than me, and I said yes to that, and I agreed that I never checked with Evidence to see what Pigeyes had inventoried. I allowed as how there were beaners who didn't know one Anglo cop from another, and I even said yes when Stern asked if Yours Truly was in fact the only police officer who admitted having received money removed from that table. The AUSA got this look like he needed Preparation H and the jury came back not guilty in two hours. When I walked out of the courtroom I had really lit the scoreboard: I don't think there was a soul there, not the judge, not even the toothless buffs out in the peanut gallery, who didn't think I was lower than pond slime. Nora, never one to miss a point of vulnerability, put it nicely: 'So, Mack, now do you think you got what you want?'