Pleading Guilty (2 page)

"Wash," I said, "he has five and a half million reasons to say no. And a little problem about going to jail."

"Not if we don't tell," said Wash. He swallowed again. His sallow face was wan with hope above his bow tie.

"You wouldn't tell TN?"

"If they didn't ask, no. And why should they? Really, if this works out, what is there to tell them? There was almost a problem? No, no," said Wash, "I don't believe that's required."

"And what would you do with Bert? Just kiss and make up?" Pagnucci answered. "It's a negotiation," he said simply, a deal maker who believes that willing parties always find a way. I pondered, slowly recognizing how artfully this could be engineered. The usual false faces of the workplace, only inure so. They'd let Bert come back here and say it was all a bad dream. Or withdraw from the practice for a while and pay him--severance, purchase of equity, call it what you'd like. A person feeling either frightened or remorseful might find these offers attractive. But I wasn't sure Bert would see this as much of a deal. In fact, for three smart guys they seemed to have little idea of what had happened. They'd been flipped the bird and were still acting as if it was sign language for the deaf.

Wash had gotten out his pipe, one of his many props, and was waving it around.

"Either we find some way to solve this problem--privately --or the doors here will be shut in a year. Six months. That's my firm prediction." Wash's sense of peril no doubt was greatest for himself, since he had been the billing partner for TN for nearly three decades, his only client worth mentioning and the linchpin of what would otherwise have been a career as mediocre as mine. He has been an ex officio member of TN's board for twenty-two years now and is so closely attuned to the vibrations of the company that he can tell you when someone on TN's -Executive Level," seven floors above, has broken wind. "I still don't understand how you think you'll find Bert." Pagnucci touched the checks. I didn't understand at first. He was tapping the endorsement.

-Pico?"

"Have you ever been down there?"

I'd first been to Pico when I was assigned to Financial Crimes more than twenty years ago--sky of blue, round and perfect as a cereal bowl above the Mayan Mountains; vast beaches long and lovely as a suntanned flank. Most of the folks around here are down there often. TN was one of the first to despoil the coast, erecting three spectacular resorts. But I hadn't taken the trip in years. I told Carl that.

"You think that's where Bert is?"

"That's where his money is," Pagnucci said.

"No, sir. That's where it went. Where it is now is anybody's guess. The beauty of bank secrecy is that it ends the trail. You can send the money anywhere from Pico. It could be back here, frankly. If it was in the right municipal bonds, he wouldn't even have to pay taxes."

"Right," Pagnucci quickly said. He took this setback, like most things, in silence, but his precise, mannerly good looks clouded with vexation.

"And who's going to do the looking?" I asked. "I don't know many private investigators I'd trust with this one."

"No, no," said Wash. "No one outside the family. We weren't thinking of a private investigator." He was looking somewhat hopefully at me. I actually laughed when I finally got it.

"Wash, I know more about writing traffic tickets than how to find Bert. Call Missing Persons."

"He trusts you, Mack," Wash told me. "You're his friend." "Bert has no friends."

"He'd respect your opinion. Especially about his prospects of escaping without prosecution. Bert's childish. We all know that. And peculiar. With a familiar face, he'd consider this in a new light."

Anybody who's survived for more than two decades in a law firm or a police department knows better than to say no to the boss. Around here it's team play--yes, sir, and salute smartly. No way I could refuse. But there was a reason I was going to law school at night while I was on the street. I was never one of these lamebrains who thought cop work was glamorous. Kicking doors in, running down dark alleys--that stuff. tended to terrify me, especially afterwards when I got to thinking about what I'd done.

"I have a hearing Wednesday," I said. This took them all back for a moment. No one, apparently, had considered the prospect that I might be working. "Bar Admissions and Discipline still wants to punch Toots Nuccio's ticket."

There was a moment's byplay as Wash proposed alternatives--a continuance, perhaps, or allowing another G &G lawyer to handle the case; there were, after all, 530 attorneys here. Martin, the head of litigation, eventually suggested I find another partner to join me at the hearing, someone who could take over down the road if need be. Even with that settled, I was still resisting.

"Guys, this doesn't make sense. I'm never going to find Bert.

And you'll only make them angrier at TN once they realize we waited to tell them."

"Not so," said Wash. "Not so. We needed time to gather facts so that we could advise them. You'll prepare a report, Mack," he said, "something we can hand them. Dictate it as you go along. After all, this is a significant matter. Something that can badly embarrass them, as well as us. They'll understand. We'll say you'll take no more than two weeks." He looked to Martin and Carl for verification.

I repeated that there was no place to look.

"Why don't you ask those thugs down at the steam bath where Ile likes to hang out?" Pagnucci asked. Talking to Carl is often even less satisfying than his silence. He is stubbornly, subtly, but inalterably contrary. Pagnucci regards agreement as a failure of his solemn obligation to exercise critical intelligence. There is always a probing question, a sly jest, a suggested alternative, always a way for him to put an ax to your tree. The guy is more than half a foot shorter than me and makes me feel no bigger than a flea.

"Mack, you would be the savior of this firm," said Wash. "Imagine if it did work out. Our gratitude would be"--Wash waved--"unspeakable."

It all looked perfect from their side. I'm a burnt-out case. No big clients. Gun-shy about trials since I stopped drinking. A fucked-up wreck with the chance to secure my position. And all of this coming up at the most opportune time. The firm was in its annual hysteria with the approaching conclusion of our fiscal year on January 31. All the partners were busy choking overdue fees out of our clients and positioning themselves for February 2, a week and a half from now, when the profits would be divided.

I considered Wash, wondering how I ever ended up working for anybody in a bow tie.

"I say the same thing to you I've said to Martin and Carl," Wash told me. "It's ours, this place, our lives as lawyers ar
e h
ere. What do we lose if we take a couple of weeks trying to save it?"

With that, the three were silent. If nothing else, I had their attention. In high school I used to play baseball. I'm big--six three--and never a lightweight. I have good eye-hand, I could hit the ball a long way, but I'm slow, what people call lumbering when they're trying to be polite, and the coaches had to find someplace to play 'Tie, which turned out to be the outfield. I've never been the guy you'd want on your team. If I wasn't batting, I wasn't really in the game. Three hundred feet away from home plate you can forget. The wind comes up; you smell the grass, the perfume from some girl in the stands. A wrapper kicks across the field, followed by a ghost of dust. You check the sun, falling, even with all the yelling to keep you awake, into a kind of trance state, a piece of meditation or dreams. And then, somehow, you feel the eyes of everybody in the park suddenly shifted toward you--the pitcher looking back, the batter, the people in the stands, somebody someplace has yelled your name. It's all co
m
ing to you, this dark circle
m
oving through the sky, changing size, just the way you've seen it at night when you're asleep. I had that feeling now, of having been betrayed by my dreams. Fear, as usual, was my only real excuse.

"Listen, guys. This was carefully planned. By Mr. Litiplex or Kamin or whoever. Bert's three sheets to the wind with his sails nowhere in sight. And even if I do find him, by some miracle, what do you think happens when he opens the door and sees that he's been tracked down by one of his partners, who undoubtedly is going to speak to him about going to prison? What do you think he'll do?"

"Hell talk to you, Mack."

"Hell shoot me, Wash. If he's got any sense."

Bereft of a response, Wash looked on with limpid blue eyes and a guttering soul--an aging white man. Martin, a step ahead as ever, smiled in his subtle way because he knew I'd agreed. Pagnucci as usual said nothing.

Chapter
II. MY REACTION

Privately, my partners would tell you I'm a troubled individual. Wash and Martin are polite enough to murmur some fainthearted denial as they read this, but, guys, we all know the truth. I am, I admit, kind of a wreck from all directions--overweight even by the standards of big men who seem to get some latitude, gimpy on rainy days because I ruined my knee while I was a copper, jumping off a fence to chase some bum who never was worth catching. My skin, from two decades of drinking hard, has got that reddened look, as if someone took a Brillo pad to my forehead and my cheeks. Worse is what goes on inside. I have a sad heart, stomped on, fevered and corrupted, and a brain that boils at night in a ferment of awful dreams. I hear like far-off music the harsh voices of my mother and my former wife, both of them tough Irishwomen who knew that the tongue, for the right occasion, can be made an instrument of pain. But now I was excited. After the Committee broke, I lit out from the Needle for the Russian Bath, eager and actually somewhat jealous of Bert. Imagine! I thought as I bounced along in the taxi taking me west. Just imagine. A guy who worked down the hall. A foul ball. Now he was off roistering with a stolen
fortune
while I was still landlocked in my squalid little life.

Reading this, my partners probably are squinting. What kind of jealous? they say. What envy? Fellas, let's not kid ourselves, especially at 4
:00
a
. M
. It is the hour of the wolf, quiet as doom, and I, the usual insomniac mess, am murmuring into my Di
c
taphone, whispering in fact, in case my nosy teenaged son actually returns from his night of reprobate activity. When I finish, I'll hide the tape in the strongbox beneath my bed. That way, in the event of second thoughts, I can drop the cassette into the trash.

Before I began dictating the cover memo, I actually figured I would do it just as Wash requested. A report. Something anesthetized and lawyerly, prose in a straitjacket, and many footnotes. But you know me--as the song goes, I've done it my way. Say what you like, this is quite a role. I talk, you listen. I know. You don't. I tell you what I want--when I want. I discuss you like the furniture, or address you now and then by name. Martin, you are smiling in spite of yourself. Wash, you are wondering how Martin will react. Carl, you'd like it all in no more than three sentences and are bristling already.

The bottom line, then: I didn't find Bert this afternoon. I tried. The cab got me to the right place and I stood outside the Bath, looking over the run-down commercial street, one of DuSable's many played-out neighborhoods, with the gritty restaurants and taverns, storefronts and tenements, windows dulled by dust. The brick buildings are permanently darkened from the years when this city burned coal. The masonry seemed to gather weight against the sky, which had been galvanized by winter, heavy-bellied clouds, gray and lusterless as zinc. I actually grew up not far from here on the West End of the city, near the Callison Street Bridge, a phenomenal structure of enormous brownish stones and concrete filigree, designed, I believe, by H. H. Richardson himself. A mighty thing, it cast a shadow for blocks over our gloomy little Irish village, a neighborhood really, but a place as closed off as if there were a drawbridge and walls. The dads were all firemen, like my father, o
r p
olicemen or public-payroll hacks or guys who worked in factories. A tavern on every corner and two lovely large churches, St. Joe's and St. Viator's, where the parish, to my ma's constant regret, was half Italian. Lace curtains. Rosary beads. Until I was twelve, I did not know a kid who went to public school. My mother named me for John McCormack, the famous Irish tenor, whose sad ballads and perfect diction left her trembling over the sadness of life and the forlorn hope of love.

"Seedy" is not the word for the Russian Bath; better "prehistoric." Inside, the place was vintage Joe McCarthy--exposed pipes overhead, with the greenish lacquered walls darkened by oil and soot, and split by an old mahogany chair rail. The motif here was Land That Time Forgot, where was and would-be were the same, an Ur region of male voices, intense heat, and swinging dicks. Time would wear it down but ne'er destroy it: the sort of atmosphere that the Irish perpetuate in every bar. I paid fourteen dollars to an immigrant Russian behind a cage, who gave me a towel, a sheet, a locker key, and a pair of rubber shoes I purchased as an afterthought to shield my tootsies. The narrow corridor back was lined with photos in cheap black frames, all the great ones--sports stars, opera singers, politicians, and gangsters, a few of whom fit in more than one of these categories. In the locker room where I undressed, the carpet was the gray of dead fish and smelled of chlorine and mildew.

This Russian Bath is a notorious spot in Kindle County. I'd never set foot inside before, but when I was working Financial Crimes, the FBI always had somebody sitting on a surveillance here. Pols, union types, various heavy-browed heavyweights like to take a meet in this place to talk their dirty business, because even the Feebies can't hide a transmitter under a wet sheet. Bert is down here, relishing the unsavory atmosphere, whenever he can break free--lunchtime, after work, even for an hour after court when he's in trial.