Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (19 page)

CHAPTER 31

PRESS CONFERENCE

W
ell, well, well. What have we here?” said Sloane as he reached our table. “Never has there been such a disreputable contingent of political rascals meeting in this fair city since Frank Rizzo drank alone.”

“Didn’t I tell you to stay the hell out of Rosen’s?” said Stony.

“In case you haven’t heard, Mulroney, it’s a free country. But don’t worry your three chins about it, I didn’t come for you. If I need to talk to you, I can just rattle the Dumpster behind police headquarters. No, I came for your pal Victor.”

“Lucky me,” I said.

“Last time we spoke, Victor, your precise words were, and I quote, ‘I’m nobody’s bagman.’ And yet you’ve been bouncing around town with a bag stuffed with money and a god-awful hat. And now here you are, yukking it up with the rest of these ticks on the body politic.”

“Tick tock tick,” said Maud.

“So, Victor, care to change your previous denial?”

“Go to hell.”

“The atmosphere in here has turned,” said Maud, crushing out her cigarette and standing. “I need fresh air.”

“Give my regards to the mayor, Maud,” said Sloane, “and tell him that we’re looking into that courthouse deal you sold him on. Tell him it’s like a rotting goat head the way it stinks, and that the maggot crawling out of the eye has got your name on it.”

“It’s a clean deal,” said Maud.

“Sure, as clean as the rest of this foul little gathering.”

“What’s the problem?” said Miles Schimmeck, grabbing his hat and sliding around the booth after Maud made her exit. “I showered last week.”

“I’ll stop the presses on that, Schimmeck. You know our latest exposé of Traffic Court has your name in it. Better get a lawyer.”

“I got me a mouthpiece,” said Miles. “Victor here.”

“Did I ever tell you what happened to my father?” said Stony.

“Over and over,” said Miles.

“Then you know when the wretches of the press show up, it’s time to go.”

“You’re abandoning me to this?” I said.

“Indeed we are,” said Hump, grabbing his hat.

“Like rats leaving a sinking ship,” said Sloane.

“And with a song in our hearts,” said Stony. “‘Taps.’ Try to stay off the front page, Road Dog.”

I watched the three men crush out their cigarettes, grab hold of their bags, set their hats in place. They hustled out of the restaurant like they were each wearing sunglasses, and the farmer’s wife was chasing them with a knife.

Sloane watched them leave with a raised eyebrow and then slid into the banquette across from me. He cleared a space at the table for his little memo pad, leaned forward, paged forward, rubbed his teeth with a forefinger.

“You’re in the shit, Victor,” said Sloane.

“That’s what you came to tell me?”

“Truth is, I came to help you, unlike those creeps you’re drinking with, who will end up burying you if they have their way. You might not know it, but I’m the best friend you’ve still got.”

“If that’s true, I am in the shit.”

“I hear you might have something for me.”

“Is that what you heard?”

“Victor, sweetheart, it’s just you and me now. We can cut the adversarial act we put on for your friends,
capiche
? Don’t be coy, give it up to Papa.”

I knew what he was after: the photographs Stony had snapped of Bettenhauser and the blonde. It seemed the most ordinary of things to pull the envelope from my diplomatic bag and slip it across the table. After all, what came more naturally to a bagman than pulling out an envelope and slipping it across a table? And yet I wondered how he knew about the photographs. Something in me smelled a rat, though I suspected, even then, that the rat in that deal was sitting across from Sloane.

“I got nothing,” I said after a long moment of thought. “Sorry.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Where’d you hear I had something for you, anyway?”

“A little birdie. Well, not so little.”

“If something comes up, you’ll be my first call.”

“That’s wise. I am so looking forward to some new scandal to grab all of our attentions. But until then, we’re stuck with the old ones, so I wonder if I can get a comment on some scuttlebutt that’s been scuttling around police headquarters. I’m going to tell you what I heard and then I’ll take down your comments word for word.” He poked the memo pad with the point of his pen. “Ready?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“I heard you are more than a person of interest in the murder case of poor Jessica Barnes. I heard you have become suspect number one.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I have my sources. Any comment?”

“No comment,” I said.

Sloane wrote it down dutifully. “Here’s the story that’s being spread. You made a payoff to this Jessica Barnes at a bar called the Franklin, a payoff to keep her from spilling on the Congressman.”

I tried to keep my head still, tried to keep my gaze from wavering.

“You gave her an envelope filled with money and then, when she left the bar, you left right after. The story then goes that you followed her, you called out her name, caught up with her, led her into an alley. And there, you killed her through repeated and savage blows with a hammer to her face.”

Something rolled into my eye and started it to stinging. I tried to blink the stinging away, but my efforts failed. I blinked harder.

“You killed her for the money, so they’re saying, and you killed her to keep her quiet, and you left her to bleed to death in that stinking alley. And after you killed her, you put the cash in your pocket, ditched the hammer and her shoes, and went home to put on your tuxedo so you could party with the governor.”

I tried to stay still, still as a statue, but my hands tightened, one in the other, until the knuckles cracked, and my face twitched like an electrified monkey.

“Any comment?” said Sloane.

“No comment,” I said.

“No gasps of disbelief?”

“Gasp,” I said.

“No protestations of innocence?”

“I’m Jewish,” I said.

Sloane smiled as he wrote it all down.

“Can we go off the record?”

“Sure, pal,” he said before closing his pad. “Off the record.”

“You told me once you wanted to get it right, so I’m telling you, off the record, that this is all the purest of bullshit. Jessica Barnes and I might have shared a drink at the Franklin, but after that it’s a lie, all of it. And if I find out who is spreading this goddamn lie, I’m going to wring his stinking neck. And if you do the spreading, the chicken neck I’ll be wringing will be yours. They say when the head pops off and falls to the ground, the chicken keeps running around in circles while the blood spurts.
Capiche
?”

“So you’re denying it.”

“On the record now?”

“Yeah, sure.” He opened his notebook. “On the record.”

“No comment.”

He stared at me and then closed his notebook again.

“I’ve spent enough time on your front page,” I said. “I know how the headline will read if I start responding to all these lies:
B
AGMAN
D
ENIES
S
TEALING
F
OOTWEAR
O
FF
C
ORPSE OF
S
HOELESS
J
OAN
. So I’m not going to give you a denial, I’m not going to give you anything you can run with other than the off-the-record knowledge that it’s all bullshit.”

“Fair enough,” said Sloane. “Are you sure you don’t have anything else you want to give to me off the record?”

“I’m sure.”

“Pity,” he said, stuffing his memo pad in his jacket and standing. “If you could give me something splashy to put on the front page, anything at all, I could take the heat off of you. And Victor, trust me when I say you could use the cooling off.”

As he walked away, I turned my attention back to the empty glasses and butt-strewn ashtray and tried to gauge my exact position. It was as if the ashtray were a giant rock, the empty glasses were hard places, and I was caught in between. The game was trying to figure out how to keep the whole thing going long enough to collect a few more paydays before I got ground to dust.

“Oh, by the way, Victor,” said Sloane, who had stopped his egress to get in one last shot. “Just so you know, the police found the murder weapon.”

“Good,” I said, without surprise and without looking up at him. “They’ll do their tests and know I had nothing to do with it.”

“They did their tests,” said Sloane. “It was a hammer, and the bloody handle is lousy with your prints.”

My chin rose suddenly as if jerked by a rein. Sloane was staring at me with a sly smile on his ugly face.

“Any comment now?” he said.

“Fuck off.”

“The funny thing is,” he said, “you finally gave me something to print.”

And then I was left alone at the table, stewing in a toxic mix of fear and anger and disgust as I tried to figure how my fingerprints could have ended up on the bloody goddamn hammer. After enough stewing and figuring, I reached into my bag, took out my prepaid phone registered to Jack Herbert, and sent a text to Duddleman:

NEED TO TALK, IMMEDIATELY!

I had just pressed “send” when someone approached. I tossed the phone into my bag as if I had been caught at something, looked up, and saw him standing there, tall and imperious, Aubrey the barman, with his circular tray.

Those sons of bitches, once again they had stuck me with the check.

CHAPTER 32

TEXTUS INTERRUPTUS

W
hen you’re up against it, and the ground beneath your feet is avalanching away, sometimes the only thing to do is dance.

I raise her bare leg and nibble at the arch of her foot, nuzzle the hollow behind her knee, leave a trail of kisses down the inside of her soft white thigh. She tastes of soured candy corn and kaleidoscopes.

I wasn’t sure I liked Ossana DeMathis—there was something distant and dark in her manner, something defiant, even if it was unclear what she was defiant about, and she had treated me like a British manservant in her brother’s hotel suite, and that had pissed off the raw American in me—but I sure did like dancing with her, horizontal and naked as a mole rat. When she showed up at my apartment in a long diaphanous skirt, with spiky heels and a hesitant twitch of her painted lips, as she apologized for her sharp words, I didn’t hesitate. Having sex with Ossana, I felt like a serf drinking the nectar from some royal fruit banned from the common folk; it was sweet, yes, with just the right amount of electric tang, but, even better, it was ecstatically forbidden. She was connected and aristocratic and haughty, she was a delicious prize of this political world that I had fallen into, and, famished for success as I had been, I couldn’t get enough of her.

I suck the diamond hanging from the lobe of her ear, hard and cold, just like she, and then run my tongue down from her neck, circling each nipple, where I can’t help but linger, and then down into the soft pillow of her belly, and then down again. She tastes of fire, she smells of pure wanting, my wanting. I bury myself in her, and her legs rise this time on their own, as if on a string, and her thighs press against my skull so that I can hear the pulsing of my own blood.

I was following JFK’s lead, asking not what my country could do for me, but whom I could do for my county. The “whom” was Ossana, red-haired Ossana, pale-skinned Ossana, green-eyed, thin-legged, and small-wristed Ossana, with nipples like soft red berries that released their juice to tongue and tooth, Ossana, yes, Ossana, that Ossana, cold, aloof, and all-too-willing Ossana.

I pull myself forward, kiss her hard, feel her fighting not to respond even as I can feel the tremble of her jaw.

This was how she liked it, Ossana, hard and active from above, Ossana, even as she lay passive beneath. Again, at the start, she had taken the lead and raised the pitch, but in the middle she took off my hat and tossed it aside and then became lost to herself, Ossana.

I remain propped above her pale, thin body with my arms outstretched, kissing her lightly, massaging her still mouth with my lips and tongue and teeth as I dip with the relentless rhythm of a bassist, feeling the vibration of her body as if my desire were a string within her plucked over and again.

That hat depersonalized me. With it I was just a political tool, a sharp shard of her brother’s power. She could respond to power, make cruel love to power, even if it was power twice removed. But without the hat I was someone real and distinct and for some sad reason that drove her to the vanishing point. What I had learned of Ossana was that in the middle of sex with someone real, she dissolved into the moment and became less than herself. Sex for her was like a drug or a long skein of drinks, a place to hide. And when I asked if she was okay, she languidly placed her arms around my neck, and when I asked if she wanted me to stop, she pulled me close and breathed her soft exhortations in my ear.

I turn her over, approach her from the side like a wrestler, lift her with one hand as I sweep her legs beneath her with the other. Like this I can only see the shapes of her, the arched torso, the thin arms reaching forward, the thin wrist turned, the slivers of neck beneath the brilliant swirl of copper, the line of her calf. She is all the more alluring in parts. We are equal now, both symbols to each other, and I rise above her, working hard, sweating hard, working it hard, as if with her laid out like that before me I can somehow screw myself tighter and ever tighter into consequence.

And the buzzing I hear has to be the buzzing of my blood, the buzzing of my desire, as regular as the pounding pulse in my brain. On and off, on and off like a . . .

Oh, crap.

“I have to get that,” I said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“You’re taunting me now.”

“I will if that’s what you want,” I said. “But I have to answer this.”

It wasn’t my regular phone; my regular phone was an emissary from the regular world, a place of struggle and travail, which I could happily exile far beyond the fertile walls of this moment. But the other phone, the Jack Herbert phone, was a lifeline I couldn’t ignore. I left the bed with a grunt and made my way to the bag. I glanced back to see the expression on Ossana’s face. She was no longer a bunch of disparate parts, she was a whole and she was appalled, as if in the middle of sex I had pulled out a corned beef sandwich.

At least it wasn’t a complete loss.

I grabbed the phone and found the text.

YOU WONT BELVE WHT I FOUND!! UNION TRANSFER, 2ND FLR TIL MIDNIGHT.

It was already after eleven. I sent Duddleman a quick reply and dropped the phone back into my bag. When I returned to the bed, Ossana was on her back, the pale lovely length of her covered with a sheet. I sat beside her and leaned down to kiss her. She turned her head and so I kissed her neck.

“I have to go.”

“I feel like I should be insulted.”

“This is business. Your business.”

“What kind of business?”

“I can’t tell you, but I have to go. You wouldn’t want me to slack when it comes to your brother.”

“No, I wouldn’t want that.”

In the bathroom I slipped off my condom and showered the sex off my skin. As she watched languidly from my bed, I dressed quickly, putting on a suit.

“Will you be here when I come back?” I said into the mirror as I tied tight a narrow black tie.

“Do you want me to be?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “There are terrible things I still intend to do to you.”

That twitch of her lips. “Don’t be full of empty threats, Victor.”

Before leaving the apartment I put on my coat and my hat. Then I stopped in the kitchen, opened a drawer, and pulled out the envelope Jessica Barnes had given me. My next lead for the intrepid Amanda Duddleman.