THE FOURTH WATCH (26 page)

Carolyn had her hands folded on the table in
front of her. Her eyes seemed to have lost their focus.

We sat.

''I'm going to Seattle," I said after a time,
"Taiwan, too. I'm going to see what happens if I start poking
around in the middle of this thing, and start asking uncomfortable
questions. You folks have a customs clearance operation in Seattle
and buyers running around all over the Far East. Jed Archer thinks
this is the area your father was looking at just before he
died."

Her voice came as if from far away. "I'll send
you some more money."

It's funny what people will think about when
they don't know what to do.

"There's plenty of money left, from what you
gave me already," I told her. "But there is something you can do
for me. I want you to go up into the apartment and get me that
glass. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it with Teddy, but I
want that glass, can you do that?"

''I guess so."

"Good. Don't touch it though. Pick it up by the
rim with a cloth or something and put it in a paper bag. I'll get
it from you at some point, alright?"

"Okay. But, Mike, you have to be careful. If
what you say is right ... about what they did to Daddy ... " Her
voice trailed off.

I'd thought of that, but I said, "Listen, I
don't think anyone thinks I know enough at this point to worry
about me. But enough people, including the cops, know that I'm
looking around, and if anything were to suddenly happen to me, a
full fledged investigation might start up and uncover what they
were trying to hide. The cops aren't involved yet, and I'm sure
whoever these people are, they want to keep it that way. But just
the same, lets not mention any of this to anyone, okay? No one
knows I'm going except Archer, and I think I can trust him. I think
if I can figure out what the hell is going on at Loading Dock
overseas ... " I shrugged, "then we'll see."

Our waiter, a dark skinned Arab with black eyes
and a pencil thin mustache, cleared our plates and left us a dish
of Greek cheese and olives, and a basket of fresh bread. Carolyn
reached across and put a hand on top of mine. "Thank you for
helping me, Mike," she said.

I didn't know what to say. I mumbled something
like "it's alright.” I looked away and watched the band come back
up on the stage to start the next set. I closed my other hand on
top of hers and squeezed it gently. I could feel the electricity
arcing between us. I could feel her grief in the landscape of my
own. I turned back to her and looked into her eyes, through her
tears. Suddenly I felt a stab of guilt go through me. I saw Annie
in a million fragmented images. I felt the emptiness of my life
without her. I could feel Carolyn's magnetic pull and the memory of
Annie merging. I could feel it all surging through me, as if our
joined hands had closed a circuit. The mingling of guilt and pain
and longing was so tangible in me that I couldn't draw a breath. I
pulled my hands away involuntarily, as if I had suddenly been
shocked. Carolyn's eyes never left mine. They drifted slowly back
and forth, as if seeing deep into me to where the guilt worked like
a fork turning.

And then suddenly, somehow, we were talking
about Annie, or I was talking about her and Carolyn was listening.
I told her how she died, and how it still tore at me, and about the
emptiness that her death had cored in the middle of me. Carolyn
drew it all out of me with her soft eyes. I hadn't spoken about it
with anyone, even Jack, in a long time, couldn't even think about
it for any length of time, but I told her all of it and the telling
felt right.

*****

LATER THAT NIGHT I
drove Carolyn's car back to my house. She came
around from the passenger side to get behind the wheel. As I
stepped out of the car she leaned into me and brushed her lips
against mine. A million stars lit the sky. I closed my arms around
her and she pressed against me. I could feel all the contours of
her body, feel my own physical hunger burning at the center of me,
feel my blood racing to the end of every nerve under the thunder of
my heart. "Carolyn," I whispered.

She put a soft finger to my lips. "Its okay,"
she said.

"I need time," I told her.

"I know," she said, and then she smiled and
kissed me again, a quick peck, and said, “I've got some time,
Mike."

She climbed into the car and put the window
down. I stood in the driveway with my hands in my
pockets.

"I want to see you again before you go on your
... umm, vacation." she said out the window of the car, her eyes
dancing like flames. "You can't refuse you know, you work for
me."

"I don't want to refuse," I told
her.

She put the car in reverse and backed out, her
eyes crinkling at the corners, the ghost of a smile soft on her
lips. "I'll call you," she said out the window as she pulled
away.

*****

I LAY AWAKE
long into the night, waiting for sleep to come. I could hear
the wind whispering in the leaves and moaning in the eaves. I could
hear tree branches clattering and owls calling and prowling in the
dark. I was surprised when I realized that I was crying. Surprised
that the emotions I had held in check so steadfastly for so long,
had crept out of their place when I wasn't watching, and surrounded
me.

Annie came to me in that milky
place between the layers of sleep. She sat at the end of the bed,
lit by moonlight, her tan legs crossed, her foot bobbing a sandal
hooked on one toe. Her smile was luminescent. She giggled at me.
"Oh, Mike. You are so silly, being guilty like that, " she toyed
with the lobe of her ear. "I love you so much. Never, ever forget
that. I miss you, but
I'm
so happy here. I'm spirit, Mike, and light. I'm
love, your love. I'm with you always, in you always. Don't shame me
with guilt. "

"Annie, " I whispered hoarsely in
my thought voice, immobile in the quicksand of my dream, unable to
reach her. "Annie!"

She was smoky, wavering in the
incandescent bars of moonlight that the window threw across the
bed. "I want you to be happy, Mike. Please be happy. I am my soul,
and only your happiness can fill me. Fill me up Mike. Fill me up.
"

17

MISSY MOUNDS' NIPPLES
looked like pencil erasers at the ends of her
enormous breasts. They were sticking through the front of a fishnet
pullover that left nothing to the imagination. She was sprawling
lazily in her cell at the courthouse lockup, waiting for
arraignment on yet another 'sex for a fee' charge. Her skirt was
the size of a wool hat. She had obviously been busted at work, and
spent whatever remained of last night in jail, before being
transported to court this morning. The Court Officers had not felt
compelled to give her a cover up. Her real name was Agnes Shelly. I
had represented her on four previous occasions. 'Missy Mounds' was
her, umm, stage name. She stripped at the Titty Canoe out on Rt.
146, made low budget, black market hump films for local perverts
and hooked for a mean pimp who slapped her around and often sampled
the merchandise uninvited. During the day she spiked as much heroin
as she could lay her hands on and slept.

Agnes is a multi-cultural concoction. Her
mother was an African-American, Latino, Asian mix and her father
was Irish and white. The physical results of this union were
stunning. Even strung out in a jail cell, dressed in her whore
uniform, her beauty was undeniable. Her skin was a wheat and honey
color, her hair straight, light brown and cut shoulder-length. Her
face was narrow and high cheek-boned; her lips full and sensual,
her eye's sloe shaped and green-gold, like a cat's, her body hard
and very sexy.

The rest of the genetic pool, however, was
shallow. Her mother, like her mother before her, was a whore, and
her father, as is so often the case, was her mothers pimp. Agnes
once told me that the only thing her Father had ever given her was
her first name - unless you counted his Johnson. She said that her
mother was on the down side of her career when she became pregnant
with Agnes. After 25 years in the saddle, and countless abortions,
her mother's maternal instincts had told her that this was her last
chance to have a child, and she had insisted on carrying to term.
She knew that her pimp was the father. He was the only one still
bopping her. At 42 she'd been pretty well used up, reduced to
giving hand jobs to adolescents in the front seats of pick up
trucks. The pimp/father, a big red-faced monster, beat the crap out
of her when she refused to have an abortion. But when it became
clear that he couldn't break her resolve, and he was faced with
letting her have her way or killing her, he decided she wasn't
worth the trouble, and let it go. As it turned out, maybe he should
have reconsidered.

“If it's a bitch," he told her, "name it Agnes,
that was my mother's name."

When Agnes was in her thirteenth year, her
father came by the house when her mother wasn't home. He beat and
raped his daughter, and left her for her mother to find bleeding on
the kitchen floor. Two days later her mother emptied the contents
of a .38 caliber Saturday Night Special into him in broad daylight
in front of three witnesses. Despite the fact that the entire story
was aired at trial, the mother was convicted of second-degree
murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Agnes became a ward
of the state and began a five-year journey through reform schools
and foster homes. On her eighteenth birthday her mother was knifed
to death in a jailhouse cat fight. Without any other opportunities
available, Agnes went into the family business as soon as she was
turned out from under the watchful eye of the state. She found her
pimp and he got her going on the spike. Now, at the ripe old age of
twenty-three, she lolled in a jail cell, strung out from ear to ear
on the down side of a skag high.

"Hello, Agnes," I said.

It was Tuesday, my duty day, which meant I was
one of the court appointed lawyers whose services the judge would
dole out to any indigent person charged with a crime that had jail
time as a possible penalty. Agnes fit the bill.

She rolled herself up on one elbow and tried
valiantly to find my face in the small square opening cut into the
middle of her cell door. It was unusual for anyone to be alone in a
cell. But it must have been a slow night because Agnes was the only
female brought in with the overnight arrests. When the van from the
Women's Prison in Framingham rolled in later, she'd have plenty of
company.

"It's Mike Knight," I told her helpfully.
"Agnes, you're killing me over here."

She nodded her head twice and then laid it back
down on her arms, flattening her breasts onto her wooden bench.
''I'm glad to get you, Mr. Mike," she said into the hollow between
her arms, "but no lectures today, okay? I ain't up to
it."

"No lectures, Agnes," I promised.

When I first started in this business, I used
to try to talk my clients out of their life-styles. It took a while
for me to find out that it was a waste of time. Most of them had
had little to say about what they'd become. They knew no other
life. There was no shame in coming to court. Everyone they knew
lived on the fringes of the law, and going to court, getting a
court appointed lawyer and doing what you had to do to get back out
on the street was just the way that it was. They didn't want to
hear a lot of horseshit from a white boy in a suit that couldn't
possibly know what their lives were like. My young life hadn't been
what anyone would describe as a model existence. Still, with luck,
and through the compassion of a good man in a white collar, I'd had
a chance. The majority of these folks had no chance. They were the
hopeless products of the dreary ancestors that went before them.
Once I asked Agnes why she was wasting her life. I told her how I
found it impossible to believe that a beautiful girl like her
couldn't find her way out of the degrading profession she'd
chosen.

''Degrading profession my ass, Mr. Lawyer," she
had told me then. ''I figure I copped me about two mile of joint
over my time. At fit'tee dollars on the half-foot? That ain't
beans, sugar. Now you go about mindin' you own fuckin' bidness and
you leave me to mine."

And that's the way it was.

''I'm going to come back, Agnes," I said into
her cell chamber. "I'm going to give you a chance to get yourself
together, then we have to talk because we have to get out there and
do the arraignment. But I got some other folks to talk to and I'll
come back to you, alright?"

She rubbed her forehead up and down on her
folded arms.

*****

THE MALE CAGES
were full to bursting. I worked mine methodically. You have
to, and you can't listen to every tale of innocence and injustice
and police brutality or you'll never get anything done. I usually
get everything straight up front when I sit down at the cell
window. My schtick goes something like this:

"Hello, Gentlemen, listen up. My name is
Michael Knight and I'm a lawyer. If you are entitled to a court
appointed attorney today; the court will most likely appoint me to
represent you. Today the issue is not going to be 'did you do it'.
Today the question is going to be bail. In other words, are they
going to release you until we come back in about 30 days to talk
about whether or not you 'did it'. Now I'm sure that you are all
innocent, and even if you're not, I'm going to plead you not
guilty, so we don't have to get into that at this time. I'm also
sure that the police didn't read you your rights, and that they
illegally searched you and/or your property without the benefit of
a valid search warrant, and we will explore that all at another
time. Right now, I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions, in
order to familiarize myself with you, so that when we get out there
I can argue that you are a good citizen, that you are no danger to
yourself, or the witnesses in this case or anyone else and that you
are not a flight risk - in other words, that you'll show back up
for court if they release you. I'm going to go through this with
each one of you. If you all start babbling while I'm trying to get
this done its going to take twice as long as it should and you are
going to be sitting in here all day. So keep quiet while I'm
talking to the person in front of me and this will go a hell of a
lot faster."