Pleading Guilty Read online

  It had killed Pigeyes to let me go. He and Dewey had talked it over for about fifteen minutes and apparently decided that they had better check out my story about Bert. Gino gave me back the credit card and told me to hold on to it because I'd hear from him soon. It didn't sound like he'd be bringing a bouquet.

  Slurping up my dinner now, I wished I hadn't been so hasty with Bert's name. The problem, slowly dawning on me, was that when Pigeyes and Dewey open Bert's refrigerator, the next stop would be G & G. They'd want to know everything about Kamin. At that point - probably within the next week - it would be hard to keep the missing money out of our answers. And once this was a police matter, everybody would be posturing. Even if Krzysinski kept his cool now when Jake gave him the lowdown, there'd be no hush-hush after the cops arrived, no diplomatic solutions. It'd be sayonara, G & G. I needed to get going.

  Still, the news that there is a living breathing human named Kam Roberts has left me feeling like an astronomer who just discovered that there's a second planet in our orbit, also called Earth. If he wasn't Bert - and Bert wasn't twenty-seven, black, or losing his hair when I last saw him twelve days ago - then why is Kam Roberts using Bert's name upside down and getting his mail at Bert's house?

  I'd been carrying the note that Lena had copied off Infomode in my shirt pocket. I studied it for a second and in total desperation even showed it to Lyle. I told him it seemed like Bert had written it.

  'That dude? One who took us to a couple Trappers games? Got to be sports with him, man.'

  'Thank you, Sherlock. What sport in particular? Safecracking?'

  Lyle was blank. I might as well have asked him about Buddhism. The kid had left a pack of cigarettes on the table and I took one as a garnish.

  'Hey.' He pointed. 'Buy your own.'

  'I'm saving you,' I said. 'I'm conserving your health and future.'

  The kid didn't think I was funny. He never did. If I start counting the endeavors in this life at which I have failed, I'll burn out the batteries on this thing. But somehow Lyle and I stand on our own plateau. When I was an active drunkard, there were moments while I was crocked that my love for this child would come over me with breathtaking intensity. It was always the same image, this chubby two-year-old running to beat all hell, his laughter free as a waterfall and sweeter than music, and I loved him so dearly, with such heartsore tenderness, that I'd sit over my highball glass shameless at my tears. These were the most intimate moments I had with my kid, this kind of imaginary contact while he was fast asleep and I was in some barroom half a dozen miles from home. Practically speaking, I did him little good. Near as I can figure, that makes me the same as three-quarters of the dads I know who just sort of phone it in as fathers. But somewhere along the line Lyle recognized my vulnerability, that when it comes to him I am wholly paralysed by regret. Call it what you like, getting even or being nuts together, we both know that him pushing my buttons and me refusing to jump has the same screwed-up emotional dynamic as, say, ritual torture or some family form of S and M. Lyle by his behavior berates me, while I cry out by suffering this punishment that I love, if not him, then something he alone represents.

  With the cigarette I retreated and knocked around the living room. I had gone back to the health club to dress and to the office to pick up the file for Toots Nuccio's hearing tomorrow and I read at it a bit. Eventually I wandered upstairs, doing my nightly usual, trying to sneak up sidelong on sleep. Should I describe my bedroom, site of my night-time dictation? Hiroshima after the bomb. Books and newspapers and cigarette butts. Scattered highbrow journals and law reviews read in my brainier moods. A brass colonial lamp with a broken shade. Beside my cherry highboy, there is a rectangle of carpeting less faded than the rest, dimpled at each corner by the casters from Nora's dresser, one of the few pieces of furniture she took. With Lyle around, there is not much point in cleaning anywhere, and my little corner of the world now seems crushed and flattened on all sides.

  Next to my bed is a dropcloth and a half-finished canvas on an easel, upon whose ledge sit many tubes of paint, thumbdented and fingerprinted with the bright pigments.

  Artist at work. When I was eighteen, I was going to be Monet. As a child in my mother's house, as a victim of her shrill tirades, I took a certain comfort in concentrating on what did not change, on the permanence of a line and the silence of the page. I don't know how many times, in how many schoolrooms, I drew the people from the funnies, Batman, Superman, Dagwood. I was good too. Teachers praised my work, and nights when I was sitting around The Black Rose with my old man I'd amuse his cronies by faultlessly rendering a photo from the paper. 'Boy's great, Tim.' He took the usual bar-time pleasure from this, man among men, letting others boast about his son, but at home he would not cross my ma, who took a dim view of this vocation. 'Drawin flippin pictures,' she'd mutter whenever the subject was raised. It was not until I got a D in a drawing class in my first year at the U that I began to see she had a point.

  Here's the problem: I see well only in two dimensions. I don't know if it's depth perception or something in the brain. I envision the picture but not the figure it is drawn from. If counterfeiting were a legitimate profession, I would be its Pablo Fucking Picasso. I can reproduce anything on paper as if it were traced. But real life somehow defeats me. Foreshortened, distorted - it never comes out right. My career as an artist, I had realized shortly before I joined the Force, would be a sort of secondhand hell in which I'd never do anything original. So I became a lawyer. Another of those jokes, though when I make it, my partners flinch.

  At home, in private, I like to pretend. Normally, when I jolt awake at 3:00 a.m., it's not Wash's report or the Dictaphone that occupies me. Instead, I repaint Vermeer and imagine the thrill of being the man who so saucily transfigured reality. I am here often in the middle of the night, the light intense, the glare from the shiny art book page and the wet acrylics somehow dazzling, as I try to avoid thinking too much about the image that leapt up from the flames to wake me.

  And what image is that? you ask. It's a man, actually. I see him stepping out of the blaze, and when I start awake, heart banging and mouth dry, I am looking for him, this guy who's got my number. He's around the corner, always behind me. Wearing a hat. Carrying a blade. In dreams sometimes I catch the gleam winking as he treads through the path of blue light from a streetlamp. This is an always thing, all my life, me and this guy, Mr Stranger Danger, as the coppers put it, the guy who's out there and gonna do you bad. He's the one that mothers warn their daughters to watch out for on a deserted street. He's the mugger in the park, the home invader who strikes at 3:00 a.m. I became a copper, maybe, because I thought I'd catch him, but it turns out he still gets the drop on me at night.

  Jesus, what is it I have to be so scared of? Five years on the streets and still with all my fingers and toes, a job that I'm busy trying to make secure, and skills of one kind or another. But I am looking at the big 5-0, and the numbers still stir something in me, as if they were the caliber of a gun that is pointed at my head. It gets a body down. I lie here in the bed in which I screwed several thousand times a woman who I figure now never really cared much about what I was doing; I listen to the phlegmy report from the rotted muffler of what I used to call my car and desolately hold to the departing sounds of that roaming creature who was once a tender child. What is there to be so scared of, Elaine, except this, my one and only life?

  Tonight I woke only once. It was not as bad as sometimes. No dreams. No knives or flames. Just a single thought, and the horror of it for a change was not too large to name.

  Bert Kamin is probably dead.

  TAPE 3

  Dictated January 26, 9:00 p.m.

  Wednesday, January 25

  VIII.

  MEN OF THE CITY

  A. Archie Was a Cool Operator

  When I got to the office on Wednesday morning, Lena was waiting for me.

  'Is this guy a gambler?' You could see she already knew the answer was yes.

&nbs
p; 'Show me.' I followed her toward the library.

  When I interviewed Lena on campus at the U last year, I noticed there was a hole in her resume - seven years to finish college. I asked if she'd been working.

  'Not really.' She had grasped her briefcase, a little redhead with a worldly eye. 'I went through a rough spell.'

  'How rough?'

  'Rough.' We scrutinized one another in the interview room, a soundproofed spot no bigger than a closet; it would have done well for torture. ‘I thought I was in love with a guy,' she said. 'But I was in love with the dope. I'm NarcAnon. That whole thing. Once a week.' She awaited my reaction. There were a half dozen other good firms in the city and we were interviewing early. If candor didn't work, she could lie to the next bunch, or hope she'd make it through someplace before anybody asked. She'd had A's. Somebody would take a chance. You could read all these calculations in her strong features.

  'AA,' I said and shook her hand. She'd done well here. Brilliantly. She had taken control of her life with an athlete's determination, which, whenever I witnessed it, colored me from the same palette of murky feelings - envy, admiration, the everpresent conviction that I am a phony and she the real thing.

  In the library she stationed me by a PC and went through the codes to bring Bert's message up on the screen. I stared at it again:

  Hey Arch--

  SPRINGFIELD Kam's Special 1.12 -- U. five, five Cleveland.

  1. 3-- Seton five, three Franklin.

  1. 5-- SJ five, three Grant.

  NEW BRUNSWICK 1.2--S.E. eleven, five Grant.

  'See,' she said, 'I looked in Sportsline. It's not only scores. They also have a sports book. From Las Vegas? It shows the odds and spreads. Here.' The list went on for pages: basketball, college and pro, and hockey, with a point spread for every game, each one listed on a separate line. 'Then I asked myself,' she said, 'do any of these sports have anything to do with Springfield or New Brunswick?'

  There was some kind of basketball shrine in Springfield, Massachusetts, but I drew a blank on New Jersey.

  'Football,' she said, 'that's where they played the first college football game. In New Brunswick. And the first basketball game was in Springfield.'

  I made her flip the screen back so I could look again at Bert's message. Three weeks ago, the NFL playoffs had laid waste to my weekend.

  'These are games,' she said. 'I think he's betting one side of the spread or the other.' She looked at me to see how she was doing, which was fine. 'It makes sense,' she told me. 'Franklin and Grant - they're on money, right? I mean bills. I don't quite get Cleveland.'

  'Grover Cleveland's on the thousand.'

  'He is betting,' she said. 'Heavy too. How's he covering his losses?' An addict, Lena had an ingrained view: For sin you pay sometime.

  I considered her question. Betting between five and ten grand a day, Bert had the look of a man likely to steal.

  'I can't figure what this means,' she said, 'Kam's Special?'

  I had no idea.

  'And who's Arch?' she asked.

  That one was more obvious to me.

  'A bookie.' Actuaries, of course, are oddsmakers in white shirts. Archie, I guess, couldn't resist plotting probabilities on something more amusing than mortality tables. It was a funny thought, some buttoned-down type making book in one of these steel towers.

  'Look,' I said to Lena, 'if this character Archie had my guy's account number and the name Kam Roberts, he could call in and take bets out of the mailbox. Right? And he could do that with dozens of other people too, if he had the same kind of arrangement with them.'

  'Why would he want to?'

  'Because bookmaking is illegal and it's a better business if he doesn't get caught.' Even when I was on the street, before wiretapping got so big, guys kept a book on the run. Somebody with no nose would knock on a door in a poor neighborhood and offer to rent an apartment for a month, three grand, no questions asked. They'd use the place for four weeks, then go somewhere else, hoping to stay ahead of the feds. But these days, no matter how they do it, when they're taking bets over the phone there's the chance the G is listening. Archie took calls from no one. You could scout out the Sportsline and leave your bets for Archie in your Infomode mailbox. Archie was an electronic tout, man of his times.

  Which also explained the reference to Arch Enterprises on the Kam Roberts bank card statement. Archie had solved the bookie's age-old dilemma - how do I collect without giving the legbreakers a call to knock 6 for 5 out of you by Friday? This was clean, professional. It was all charged to the credit card. Wins and losses. Probably once a month a debit or credit memo went through. For a winner, it was as good as cash - you could wash your airline tickets, dinners out, a suit, a tie, everything you charged. If you lost, Arch got paid by the bank. No doubt everybody employed intermediate devices. In all likelihood Arch Enterprises was the subsidiary of some holding company owned in turn by a trust. Maybe created in Pico Luan?

  'What's this case about?' Lena asked. 'Can I work on it?' Better than bond indentures and coverage claims.

  I thanked her at length, then took the bill back to my office, somewhat saddened by myself. As usual, I had let my lurid imagination get the better of me. Archie was not Bert's lover. He was a bookie. Even so, there was a lot of this that didn't fit. I still didn't know what Bert had to do with Kam, and I couldn't figure why Pigeyes and his pals were chasing him. It wasn't for gambling, which would be a vice investigation. Pigeyes and Dewey were working this out of Financial Crimes. But this information did do one thing. It made my wee-hours theory look even better, and I said it to myself again out loud, if quietly: 'Bert's dead.'

  Icicles of steely light drifted out on the river. You had to consider Bert's situation with what I call cop logic. Look for the simple explanation. The gentleman in the Amana had not tied a fishing line around his neck by himself. Bad People had a point to make. And given the location of the body, it seemed that point had something to do with Bert. And now Bert had disappeared, and I find out, to boot, that he was in the middle of some off-the-wall gambling scheme, just the kind of scene where people end up sore over money and who shorted who, subterranean disputes that get settled with bloodshed, since you can't file a lawsuit. I wondered if Bert had another fridge in his basement.

  One thing for sure, I wasn't going back to check, especially now that I'd sent Pigeyes in that direction. It would have been enlightening to take a peek at what was on the computer I'd seen in Bert's living room, to see if there were more references to Kam, his specials and his life. Settling for second best, I visited Bert's office down the hall. The door was locked - that was Bert, manic and jealous of his clients' secrets, not to mention his own. They'd moved his secretary to another station while her boss was AWOL, but I knew where she kept the key and I let myself in.

  Bert's home had that fly-about look, but fitting his compulsions, the office was crazy clean. Every object dusted and in its place. Lawyers' furnishings are pretty standard: diplomas on the walls, pictures of the family, and a few discreet mementos that nod toward the high points of their legal career and are likely to impress clients. Wash, for example, keeps the reminders of certain big deals in one bookcase - announcements from the Journal reserved in little Lucite blocks; deal 'bibles' in which the thousands of closing documents, all on foolscap, are bound in leather with the name and date of the transaction etched in gold on the binding. Even I have a framed sketch, done by one of the local TV station's artists, of me arguing a big jury case for TN concerning their firing of a pilot who'd been hired as John and later took on the name and genitalia of Juanita.

  Looking around Bert's office, all you'd know is this guy's sports-crazy - game memorabilia were wall-to-wall: autographed baseballs, a Hands jersey, signed in indelible marker by every member of the '84 championship team, which was framed and hung from one of the concrete pilasters. Nothing else was visible he cared about, except the huge goofy water cooler in the corner.

  Working on 397, I learned
all Bert's passwords on the network, and I popped on the computer and cruised through the directories, pressing the buttons to glimpse different documents in the hope that there'd be more signs here of what was doing with Kam Roberts and Archie. But there was nothing. Instead, I started looking over Bert's endless correspondence, sort of idly poking for clues but also, I admit, enjoying some of the twisted thrill of the snoop, surveying old Bert's life as a lawyer.

  His odd ways have held Bert back with clients and he's brought in few of his own. He is what they call a 'service lawyer', like me, somebody who does the work that one of our hotshot partners has been hired for. But with that limit, the Committee loves him. Bert clocks a good twenty-five hundred hours every year, and with his own fierce methods gets great results in court. Every case is a full-bore commitment. Got a client with a small problem, say, falsely representing that night is day, Bert will defend him without blinking. He is one of those lawyers who agrees with the other side about nothing. Everything leads to correspondence. Move the dep from two to one, Bert will send you a letter. Which bears no resemblance, by the way, to the conversation it claims to record. I say my client's having open-heart and Bert's letter says the guy can't appear because he scheduled a doctor's appointment. With stunts like that, Bert's made enemies of half the trial lawyers in town. In fact, that's why I started working on 397 in the first place, because Jake can't be bothered with 150 plaintiffs' attorneys, and most of those guys want to turn on a tape recorder before they're willing to say so much as good morning to Bert.

  Out in the hallway I heard my name being repeated on the paging system, asked to dial Lucinda's extension. That meant it was time to go to Toots's hearing. I was about to turn off the PC when I saw a name in Bert's letter directory that struck sparks off my heart: Litiplex.