Finders Keepers (8 page)

1978

Morris sat on a steel bunk with his throbbing head lowered and his hands dangling between his orange-clad thighs, breathing in a poison atmosphere of piss, puke, and disinfectant. His stomach was a lead ball that seemed to have expanded until it filled him from crotch to Adam's apple. His eyes pulsed in their sockets. His mouth tasted like a dumpster. His gut ached and his face hurt. His sinuses were stuffed. Somewhere a hoarse and despairing voice was chanting, “I need a lover that won't drive me
cray-zee
, I need a lover that won't drive me
cray-zee
, I need a lover that won't drive me
cray-zee
 . . .”

“Shut up!” someone shouted. “You're drivin
me
crazy, asshole!”

A pause. Then:

“I need a lover that won't drive me
cray-zee
!”

The lead in Morris's belly liquefied and gurgled. He slid off the bunk, landed on his knees (provoking a fresh bolt of agony in his head), and hung his gaping mouth over the functional steel toilet. For a moment there was nothing. Then everything clenched and he ejected what looked like two gallons of yellow toothpaste. For a moment the pain in his head was so huge that he thought it would simply explode, and in that moment Morris hoped it would. Anything to end the pain.

Instead of dying, he threw up again. A pint instead of a gallon this time, but it
burned
. The next one was a dry heave. Wait, not
completely dry; thick strings of mucus hung from his lips like cobwebs, swinging back and forth. He had to brush them away.

“Somebody's
feelin
it!” a voice shouted.

Shouts and cackles of laughter greeted this sally. To Morris it sounded as if he were locked up in a zoo, and he supposed he was, only this was the kind where the cages held humans. The orange jumpsuit he was wearing proved it.

How had he gotten here?

He couldn't remember, any more than he could remember how he'd gotten into the house he'd trashed in Sugar Heights. What he
could
remember was his own house, on Sycamore Street. And the trunk, of course. Burying the trunk. There had been money in his pocket, two hundred dollars of John Rothstein's money, and he had gone down to Zoney's to get a couple of beers because his head ached and he was feeling lonely. He had talked to the clerk, he was pretty sure of that, but he couldn't remember what they had discussed. Baseball? Probably not. He had a Groundhogs cap, but that was as far as his interest went. After that, almost nothing. All he could be sure of was that something had gone horribly wrong. When you woke up wearing an orange jumpsuit, that was an easy deduction to make.

He crawled back to the bunk, pulled himself up, drew his knees to his chest, and clasped his hands around them. It was cold in the cell. He began to shiver.

I might have asked that clerk what his favorite bar was. One I could get to on the bus. And I went there, didn't I? Went there and got drunk. In spite of all I know about what it does to me. Not just a little loaded, either—standing-up, falling-down shitfaced drunk.

Oh yes, undoubtedly, in spite of all he knew. Which was bad, but he couldn't remember the crazy things afterwards, and that was worse. After the third drink (sometimes only second), he fell down
a dark hole and didn't climb back out until he woke up hung­over but sober. Blackout drinking was what they called it. And in those blackouts, he almost always got up to . . . well, call it hijinks. Hijinks was how he'd ended up in Riverview Youth Detention, and doubtless how he'd ended up here. Wherever
here
was.

Hijinks.

Fucking hijinks.

Morris hoped it had been a good old-fashioned bar fight and not more breaking and entering. Not a repeat of his Sugar Heights adventure, in other words. Because he was well past his teenage years now and it wouldn't be the reformatory this time, no sir. Still, he would do the time if he had done the crime. Just as long as the crime had nothing to do with the murder of a certain genius American writer, please God. If it did, he would not be breathing free air again for a long time. Maybe never. Because it wasn't just Rothstein, was it? And now a memory
did
arise: Curtis Rogers asking if New Hampshire had the death penalty.

Morris lay on the bunk, shivering, thinking, That can't be why I'm here. It
can't
.

Can it?

He had to admit that it was possible, and not just because the police might have put him together with the dead men in the rest area. He could see himself in a bar or a stripjoint somewhere, Morris Bellamy, the college dropout and self-proclaimed American lit scholar, tossing back bourbon and having an out-of-body experience. Someone starts talking about the murder of John Rothstein, the great writer, the reclusive American
genius
, and Morris Bellamy—drunk off his tits and full of that huge anger he usually kept locked in a cage, that black beast with the yellow eyes—turning to the speaker and saying, He didn't look much like a genius when I blew his head off.

“I would
never
,” he whispered. His head was aching worse than ever, and there was something wrong on the left side of his face, too. It
burned
. “I would
never
.”

Only how did he know that? When he drank, any day was Anything Can Happen Day. The black beast came out. As a teenager the beast had rampaged through that house in Sugar Heights, tearing the motherfucker pretty much to shreds, and when the cops responded to the silent alarm he had fought them until one belted him unconscious with his nightstick, and when they searched him they found a shitload of jewelry in his pockets, much of it of the costume variety but some, carelessly left out of madame's safe, extraordinarily valuable, and howdy-do, off we go to Riverview, where we will get our tender young buttsky reamed and make exciting new friends.

He thought, The person who put on a shit-show like that is perfectly capable of boasting while drunk about murdering Jimmy Gold's creator, and you know it.

Although it could have been the cops, too. If they had ID'd him and put out an APB. That was just as likely.

“I need a lover who won't drive me
cray-zee
!”

“Shut up!” This time it was Morris himself, and he tried to yell it, but what came out was nothing but a puke-clotted croak. Oh, his head hurt. And his
face
, yow. He ran a hand up his left cheek and stared stupidly at the flakes of dried blood in his palm. He explored again and felt scratches there, at least three of them. Fingernail scratches, and deep. What does that tell us, class? Well, ordinarily—although there are exceptions to every rule—men punch and women scratch. The ladies do it with their nails because more often than not they have nice long ones to scratch with.

Did I try to slap the make on some twist, and she refused me with her nails?

Morris tried to remember and couldn't. He remembered the rain, the poncho, and the flashlight shining on the roots. He remembered the pick. He
sort
of remembered wanting to hear fast loud music and talking to the clerk at Zoney's Go-Mart. After that? Just darkness.

He thought, Maybe it was the car. That damn Biscayne. Maybe somebody saw it coming out of the rest area on Route 92 with the front end all bloody on the right, and maybe I left something in the glove compartment. Something with my name on it.

But that didn't seem likely. Freddy had purchased the Chevy from a half-drunk bar-bitch in a Lynn taproom, paying with money the three of them had pooled. She had signed over the pink to Harold Fineman, which happened to be the name of Jimmy Gold's best friend in
The Runner
. She had never seen Morris Bellamy, who knew enough to stay out of sight while that particular deal went down. Besides, Morris had done everything but soap PLEASE STEAL ME on the windshield when he left it at the mall. No, the Biscayne was now sitting in a vacant lot somewhere, either in Lowtown or down by the lake, stripped to the axles.

So how did I wind up here? Back to that, like a rat running on a wheel. If some woman marked my face with her nails, did I haul off on her? Maybe break her jaw?

That rang a faint bell behind the blackout curtains. If it were so, then he was probably going to be charged with assault, and he might go up to Waynesville for it; a ride in the big green bus with the wire mesh on the windows. Waynesville would be bad, but he could do a few years for assault if he had to. Assault was not murder.

Please
don't let it be Rothstein, he thought. I've got a lot of reading to do, it's stashed away all safe and waiting. The beauty part is I've got money to support myself with while I do it, more
than twenty thousand dollars in unmarked twenties and fifties. That will last quite awhile, if I live small. So please don't let it be murder.

“I need a lover who won't drive me
cray-zee
!”

“One more time, motherfucker!” someone shouted. “One more time and I'll pull your asshole right out through your mouth!”

Morris closed his eyes.

•••

Although he was feeling better by noon, he refused the slop that passed for lunch: noodles floating in what appeared to be blood sauce. Then, around two o'clock, a quartet of guards came down the aisle between the cells. One had a clipboard and was shouting names.

“Bellamy! Holloway! McGiver! Riley! Roosevelt! Titgarden! Step forward!”

“That's
Tea
garden, sir,” said the large black man in the box next to Morris's.

“I don't give a shit if it's John Q. Motherfucker. If you want to talk to your court-appointed, step forward. If you don't, sit there and stack more time.”

The half dozen named prisoners stepped forward. They were the last ones left, at least in this corridor. The others brought in the previous night (mercifully including the fellow who had been butchering John Mellencamp) had either been released or taken to court for the morning arraignment. They were the small fry. Afternoon arraignments, Morris knew, were for more serious shit. He had been arraigned in the afternoon after his little adventure in Sugar Heights. Judge Bukowski, that cunt.

Morris prayed to a God he did not believe in as the door of his holding cell snapped back. Assault, God, okay? Simple, not ag.
Just not murder. God, let them know nothing about what went down in New Hampshire, or at a certain rest area in upstate New York, okay? That okay with you?

“Step out, boys,” the guard with the clipboard said. “Step out and face right. Arm's length from the upstanding American in front of you. No wedgies and no reach-arounds. Don't fuck with us and we will return the favor.”

•••

They went down in an elevator big enough to hold a small herd of cattle, then along another corridor, and then—God knew why, they were wearing sandals and the jumpsuits had no pockets—through a metal detector. Beyond that was a visitor's room with eight walled booths like library carrels. The guard with the clipboard directed Morris to number 3. Morris sat down and faced his court-appointed through Plexiglas that had been smeared often and wiped seldom. The guy on the freedom side was a nerd with a bad haircut and a dandruff problem. He had a coldsore below one nostril and a scuffed briefcase sitting on his lap. He looked like he might be all of nineteen.

This is what I get, Morris thought. Oh Jesus, this is what I get.

The lawyer pointed to the phone on the wall of Morris's booth, and opened his briefcase. From it he removed a single sheet of paper and the inevitable yellow legal pad. Once these were on the counter in front of him, he put his briefcase on the floor and picked up his own phone. He spoke not in the tentative tenor of your usual adolescent, but in a confident, husky baritone that seemed far too big for the chicken chest lurking behind the purple rag of his tie.

“You're in deep shit, Mr.”—he looked at the sheet lying on top of his legal pad—“Bellamy. You must prepare for a very long stay
in the state penitentiary, I think. Unless you have something to trade, that is.”

Morris thought, He's talking about trading the notebooks.

Coldness went marching up his arms like the feet of evil fairies. If they had him for Rothstein, they had him for Curtis and Freddy. That meant life with no possibility of parole. He would never be able to retrieve the trunk, never find out Jimmy Gold's ultimate fate.

“Speak,” the lawyer said, as if talking to a dog.

“Then tell me who I'm speaking to.”

“Elmer Cafferty, temporarily at your service. You're going to be arraigned in . . .” He looked at his watch, a Timex even cheaper than his suit. “Thirty minutes. Judge Bukowski is very prompt.”

A bolt of pain that had nothing to do with his hangover went through Morris's head. “No! Not her! It can't be! That bitch came over on the Ark!”

Cafferty smiled. “I deduce you've had doings with the Great Bukowski before.”

“Check your file,” Morris said dully. Although it probably wasn't there. The Sugar Heights thing would be under seal, as he had told Andy.

Fucking Andy Halliday. This is more his fault than mine.

“Homo.”

Cafferty frowned. “
What
did you say?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“My
file
consists of last night's arrest report. The good news is that your fate will be in some other judge's hands when you come to trial. The better news, for me, at least, is that by that point, someone else will be representing you. My wife and I are moving to Denver and you, Mr. Bellamy, will be just a memory.”

Denver or hell, it made no difference to Morris. “Tell me what I'm charged with.”

“You don't remember?”

“I was in a blackout.”

“Is that so.”

“It actually is,” Morris said.

Maybe he
could
trade the notebooks, although it hurt him to even consider it. But even if he made the offer—or if Cafferty made it—would a prosecutor grasp the importance of what was in them? It didn't seem likely. Lawyers weren't scholars. A prosecutor's idea of great literature would probably be Erle Stanley Gardner. Even if the notebooks—all those beautiful Moleskines—did matter to the state's legal rep, what would he, Morris, gain by turning them over? One life sentence instead of three? Whoopee-ding.