Pleading Guilty (39 page)

"So what problem did Glyndora come to him with?" I asked. "I still don't understand why he got involved."

Bert didn't answer. By now I knew what that meant. Go gently. We were on that subject.

"She was upset about you getting to know Orleans?" "Right," said Bert. He took his time. "He was in the middle at first. A mediator, I don't know what you'd say. She was just out of control. You know her. She's pretty nuts on this subject." He glanced up bleakly, a one-eyed peekaboo. In the meantime, with that remark, I got a load of the family dynamic. Orleans had grabbed Mom's attention big-time. Not just 'This is how I am,' but 'I am--with your boss. Your world.' I knew Bert would never recognize these intentions. He was like somebody with a perceptual disorder. His own emotions so dominated him that he had little perspective on anyone else.

"Then Martin found out about this, the betting. Man, it was Mount Saint Helens. He was more ticked than Glyndora. He told me straight up we were in way too deep. You know, he learned all about these guys growing up. He said the best thing was for me just to clear out. Disappear.

"And it started to actually sound okay, you know?" Bert said. "New life. That whole thing. Just drop out of sight. For a while anyway. Get out of the firm. You ever hear of Pigeon Point?"

"No."

"It's in California. North. On the coast. I found this ad. For an artichoke farm. I've been out there now. You know it's foggy. Amazing, man. The fog comes in over the artichokes twice a day. You barely have to water them. Great crops. And it's a phenomenal food." He started on the fucking vitamin count, more information in five seconds than a label on a can, and I let him go on, struck again by that notion. The new life. The new world. God, the mere thought still made my heart sing. Then, unexpectedly, I recalled that I had nearly six million dollars in my name in two foreign bank accounts and was gripped by an urgent question I could just as well have asked myself.

"So why aren't you gone?"

"He won't leave." Bert threw his big hands in my direction, the fingers crippled by desperation. "The dumbfuck won't go. I've begged him. I beg him three times a week." He stared at me, unhinged by the thought, and then turned away rather than confront what he could tell I was seeing--that Bert had given up his life to protect Orleans, and Orleans, when push came to shove, lacked the same dedication. Maybe Orleans couldn't honk off his mother sufficiently from two thousand miles away. Maybe, in the end, he didn't really have it for Bert. However it went, Bert's crusade was a one-way thing. I saw something else then, that this romance, Bert and Orleans, wasn't the high-flown love of the poets. There was something bad in it, it was tethered to pain; there was a reason Bert was so long telling himself the truth he did not want to know.

And even so, I envied him for a minute. Had I ever loved anybody like that? My feelings for Brushy seemed flimsy in the intense heat. But what about time? I thought. Maybe with time. Life has these two poles, it seems. You go one way or the other. We're always choosing: passion or despair.

"I've told him about the police," Bert said. "He doesn't believe it."

"They'll be pretty convincing if they catch him."

Can you talk to them?" he asked finally. "The cops? Are they friends of yours?"

"Hardly," I said, but I sat there smiling. It was terrible really, the joy I took at the notion of skunking Pigeyes. I already had a few ideas.

The heat and the hour were gradually making me faint. I turned on the water and poured a cold bucket for myself, but didn't have the stamina or the courage to dump it over my head. I stood there before Bert, dabbing the water on my face and my chest, while I tried a moment to figure out what all this meant for me. There was a whisper about of the oven and the rocks barely sizzling.

"You don't know a thing about what's been going on at the firm, do you? The money? That whole thing?"

The sweat ran into his eyes and Bert blinked. He had his impenetrable black look: he doesn't understand you and never will.

I asked if the name Litiplex rang any bells.

"Jake?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Didn't Jake send me some memo? And I wrote him a bunch of checks on the 397 account? Yeah," Bert let his long body bob. He was remembering. "Something was very touchy. It was a mix-up with the plaintiffs. Jake was afraid Krzysinski would roast his hind end when he heard Jake had to pay these expenses. Big, big goddamn secret. Jake was very uptight on this thing." Bert reflected. "Something's fucked-up, huh?" he asked.

"You might say."

"Yeah," he said, "you know, now that I'm thinking, maybe a month ago Martin asked me about this. This Litiplex. But he was like, no problem, no big deal."

That would have been when Martin saw the memo and the checks. Glyndora, of course, would have come to him first when she noticed.

"So what's the story?" Bert asked.

I laid it out briefly: No Litiplex. The numbered account in Pico Luan. Bert seemed to regard it as remotely amusing until I got to the part where Martin and Glyndora manipulated appearances to make it look like the money was his.

"Me? Those fuck-ers! Me? I don't believe it." He'd jumped to his feet. I was abruptly reminded of trying cases with Bert, his sudden courtroom rages, objecting to a leading question like it was the landing of foreign troops on our soil. I waited for him to cool off.

"Just answer me straight, Bert. There's no deal between you and Martin for you to take the blame for this? The money?" "Are you kidding? Fuck no, man."

"Nothing? No wink, no nod?"

"No. NFW. That's scumbag stuff." This was Bert, who had deceived millions of Americans about the outcome of sporting events, who had thought with his dick and made a profit besides, but he was on his high horse. He -had the same lunatic look as when he talked about the secret poisons some faceless "they" put in his foods. He got back up on one of the moisture-blackened benches and poured the bucket over his head, and came out of the flood glaring. I had an odd thought at that moment of how much he reminded me of Glyndora.

We went upstairs to dress then, both turned pretty sulky and without much to say. Bert had a bag in his locker with deodorant and whatnot and let me use his stuff

"Who is it?" he asked me suddenly. "With the money?" "Doesn't matter."

"Yeah, but--" He shrugged.

I'd spent the last few days delving into the depths of the mind of Martin Gold. It was like walking downward in some endless cave. From the start Martin must have figured that if he hung this on Bert no one would ever contradict him. Not Jake, of course. Not Bert, who was on permanent leave, hiding from hit men among the artichokes. Not clueless old me. Not even the

TN board, which, if informed of the loss, had nothing to gain by making a public fuss that would only attract attention to what was left of the 397 surplus. By blaming Bert, Martin would keep everything tidy.

And I could have gone along with that, Martin's scheme to save the world as I knew it. Unless Pigeyes caught him, Bert wasn't going to surface. Any day now Jake would discover that he'd developed a hole in his pocket down in Pico Luan, but so what? Self-preservation would prevent Jake from making an international scene. He couldn't start hollering, Where's all that money I stole? Trumped and taken, Jake would probably blame Bert too. It could work out for me Martin's way. In a couple months I could retire from the firm, vacationing when need be in Pico Loan.

But when I'd steamed out the shellacked doors of the Club Belvedere on Saturday and sat up all night hatching plans, I was gripped by ornery impulses. I'd developed the fixed intention to smite Martin and the whole smarmy scheme. Since then I'd hoped against hope at moments. I came here wanting Bert to tell me there was a galaxy of good intentions involved, some aspect that was wholesome, or at least excusable, which I hadn't seen. But he couldn't. Because that wasn't the case. And recognizing that, I found myself under the same internal momentum. Maybe I was still a cop on the street, committed to my own kind of rough justice. God knows, I never have played well for the team. But I was going to do it my way. Brushy hung there somehow in the balance, an indeterminate weight. Yet there was no reason, really, I couldn't make that work out. I kept telling myself that.

"Jake," I answered at last. "Jake's got the money.- That's where this was going. I was gonna be mean. Even so, the details were daunting.

"Jake! Whoa." Bert brought his long hand to his jaw and rubbed it as if he had taken a blow. He was sitting there on the

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bench in the dim locker room, holding his socks, the only light borrowed from a single bulb burning in the john.

"Martin's covering for him, protecting the firm."

"Jake," Bert said again.

It struck me with an exactness that had completely eluded me before that if I was going to carry through with this, undermine Martin and pass out just deserts, I'd have to figure some way for Bert to return. Without that, it might come down to finger pointing. Martin and Jake could still call Bert the bad guy somehow. Why else was he running? Mystery Thief on the Loose. To make my version fully convincing, Bert had to be here to tell his story: he got the memo from Jake, gave the checks to Jake, listened when Jake told him it was all hush-hush. I couldn't imagine, though, how that could be engineered. Amid the dank atmosphere of the locker room, we sat in silence. One of the steam pipes eventually emitted a distinct clank.

"Look, Bert, I'm going to try to help you. I want to see you get out of all this, but I really have to put my thinking cap on. Just stay in touch. Make sure you call every day."

The guy saw right through me. Not what was wrong. But something. That I had some stake. And he couldn't have cared less.

"Please," he said quietly. He watched me there, his face buried in shadow but still rimmed by some eager hope.

When we were dressed, he took me to the back door and unlocked the bolt, the grate.

"Where you going?" I asked.

"Oh, you know.- His eyes floated away from me. "Orleans is in town."

God, he was lost. Even in the dark you could see him, swarthy and lean, in the grip of his sad hopeless love. He was being tortured and teased. Moth and flame. I thought to myself again, What is this? A character like Bert, you figure his gyroscope's wacky. But the head, the heart--who am I kidding? One man'
s r
ationality is another fella's madness. Nothing ever really adds up. Either the premises are faulty or the reasoning sucks. We're all of us pincushions, lanced by feelings, full of wounds and pains. Reason is the lie, the balm we apply, pretending that if we were just smart enough we'd make some sense of what hurts.

I'd already stuck my nose into the cold when I realized one question remained. I barred the door with the arm of my overcoat.

"So who moved the body, Bert? Who took Archie? Did Orleans?"

-Fuck, never," said Bert. "He'd freak." Bert shook his head violently at the thought and repeated that Orleans wasn't up to something like that.

"So who?"

We stood on the threshold, eyeing each other, surrounded by the deep alley darkness and the harsh touch of winter, hovering with the unspoken improbabilities of our futures, everything that was simply unknown.

Thursday, February 2

Chapter
XXVI. MACK MALLOY ' S

FIFTEENTH

A. Step One

So. It was midnight. I was the only white man for a mile, a guy in an overcoat with a briefcase and a prominent urge to begin making plans. I stalked through the tough old neighborhood, headed in the direction of Center City, an exercise in fifty-year-old daring, striding from the rescuing glow of one streetlight to the next. A bus came along presently and I boarded gratefully and bucketed down the avenues with the winos and the workers returning from late-night stints. A few blocks from the Needle, I jumped off. Kindle County at night is not lively. The lights are on but the streets are empty; it has its own spectral air, like a deserted building, a place even the ghosts have fled.

I entered the lobby of the Travel Tepee, where Brush and I had agreed to meet. The big lobby was quiet; even the Muzak had been turned off for the night. I sat in an ugly easy chair with a horrible bold print and considered the future. Finally the lone registration clerk asked from behind the front counter if he could help me. From his tone, I thought he was pretty sure I was just a better-dressed derelict whom security would have to give the heave-ho. I went over to make peace, told him he ha
d a
Ms. Bruccia registered, and picked up my key, then I sat down again, counting out the steps in my plan. I thought of waiting until morning to begin putting this together, but I was feeling edgy, compulsive, call it what you want. I was wide-awake anyway and a little reluctant to be with Brushy, now that I actually knew what I was going to do.

About two blocks down there was an all-night pharmacy, another Brown Wall's, built near the exit ramp of the Interstate, a place with a bus station air, a lot of downtown creeps hanging around near the doors, and a cop car parked right at the curb. I bought two pens--one ballpoint, one felt tip--and some glue and a pair of scissors. I asked at the counter if they had a coin-operated copying machine, but the answer was no, so I walked back to the hotel, waved to the desk clerk, and found a little phone alcove which had a laminate surface I could use for a desk. I already had the rest of what I needed in my briefcase--the signature form I'd received at International Bank of Finance, the letter of Jake's I'd used as a model to forge his signature to the fax I sent from the Regency, and the copies of TN's annual report that I'd toted down to Pico. The report contains pictures of all the corporate officers, including Jake Eiger, and I'd brought copies along thinking Jake's photo might come in handy if I had to do any of a number of things I was then considering to get at the money, such as phonying up a passbook or some form of U
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