Pleading Guilty (11 page)

He meant afternoon, not morning. I checked the clock: 7:48 p
. M
. Lyle was just rising. He pretty much lives backward. He and his pals consider it uncool to get started anytime this sid
e o
f midnight. Nora, of course, attributes Lyle's libertine existence to the poor example his drunken father set when he was growing up.

"You should try reading St. Augustine. He has much cautionary advice about a life of excess."

"Oh, shut up, Dad."

Maybe if there were just a trace of humor in this I wouldn't have been so hot to smack him. As it was, I had to contain myself with the thought that if I hit him he would tell his mother, who'd tell her lawyer, who'd tell the judge. If I believed they'd take the kid away I'd have knocked him cold, but it would only end in more restraining orders and restrictions on me.

According to that splendid education I received out at the U., it was Rousseau who began in Western culture the worship of the child, innocent and perfect in nature. Anyone who has raised a human from scratch knows this is a lie. Children are savages --egocentric little brutes who by the age of three master every form of human misconduct, including violence, fraud, and bribery, in order to get what they want. The one who lived in my house never improved. Last fall it turned out that the community college, for which I'd dutifully given him a tuition check at the beginning of each quarter, did not have the bastard registered. A month ago I took him out to dinner and caught him trying to pocket the waitress's tip.

About three times a week I threaten to throw him out, but his mother has told him the divorce decree provides that I will support him until he's twenty-one--Brushy and I had assumed that meant paying for college--and Nora, who thinks the boy needs understanding, especially since she doesn't have to provide much, would doubtless find this an occasion for yet another principled disagreement and probably seek an order requiring Lyle and me to get some counseling--another five hundred bucks a month. Thus, the thought often stabs me with the ugly starkness of a rusty knife: I am afraid of him now too.

Believe me, I am not as cheerful as I sound.

Rising for another bowl of cereal, my son asked where I had been.

"I was dealing with uncomfortable aspects of my past," I told him.

"Like Mom, you mean?" He thought he was funny. "I ran into a cop I used to know. Over at U Inn."

"Really?" Lyle thinks it's neat that I was a policeman, but he couldn't pass up the opportunity for role reversal. "You aren't in trouble are you, Dad?"

"If I ever need to be bailed out, chum, I know where I can find an expert." I gave him a meaningful look, which sent Lyle at once across the kitchen.

It had killed Pigeyes to let me go. He and Dewey had talked it over for about fifteen minutes and apparently decided that they had better check out my story about Bert. Gino gave me back the credit card and told me to hold on to it because I'd hear from him soon. It didn't sound like he'd be bringing a bouquet.

Slurping up my dinner now, I wished I hadn't been so hasty with Bert's name. The problem, slowly dawning on me, was that when Pigeyes and Dewey open Bert's refrigerator, the next stop would be G &G. They'd want to know everything about Kamin. At that point--probably within the next week--it would be hard to keep the missing money out of our answers. And once this was a police matter, everybody would be posturing. Even if Krzysinski kept his cool now when Jake gave him the lowdown, there'd be no hush-hush after the cops arrived, no diplomatic solutions. It'd be sayonara, G &G. I needed to get going. Still, the news that there is a living breathing human named Kam Roberts has left one feeling like an astronomer who just discovered that there's a second planet in our orbit, also called Earth. If he wasn't Bert--and Bert wasn't twenty-seven, black, or losing his hair when I last saw him twelve days ago--then why is Kam Roberts using Bert's name upside down and getting his mail at Bert's house?

I'd been carrying the note that Lena had copied off Infomode in my shirt pocket. I studied it for a second and in total desperation even showed it to Lyle. I told him it seemed like Bert had written it.

"That dude? One who took us to a couple Trappers games? Got to be sports with him, man."

"Thank you, Sherlock. What sport in particular? Safecracking?"

Lyle was blank. I might as well have asked him about Buddhism. The kid had left a pack of cigarettes on the table and I took one as a garnish.

"Hey." He pointed. "Buy your own."

"I'm saving you," I said. "I'm conserving your health and future."

The kid didn't think I was funny. He never did. If I start counting the endeavors in this life at which I have failed, I'll burn out the batteries on this thing. But somehow Lyle and I stand on our own plateau. When I was an active drunkard, there were moments while I was crocked that my love for this child would come over me with breathtaking intensity. It was always the same image, this chubby two-year-old running to beat all hell, his laughter free as a waterfall and sweeter than music, and I loved him so dearly, with such heartsore tenderness, that I'd sit over my highball glass shameless at my tears. These were the most intimate moments I had with my kid, this kind of imaginary contact while he was fast asleep and I was in some barroom half a dozen miles from home. Practically speaking, I did him little good. Near as I can figure, that makes me the same as three-quarters of the dads I know who just sort of phone it in as fathers. But somewhere along the line Lyle recognized my vulnerability, that when it comes to him I am wholly paralyzed by regret. Call it what you like, getting even or being nuts together, we both know that him pushing my buttons and me refusing to jump has the same screwed-up emotional dynami
c a
s, say, ritual torture or some family form of S and M. Lyle by his behavior berates me, while I cry out by suffering this punishment that I love, if not him, then something he alone represents.

With the cigarette I retreated and knocked around the living room. I had gone back to the health club to dress and to the office to pick up the file for Toots Nuccio's hearing tomorrow and I read at it a bit. Eventually I wandered upstairs, doing my nightly usual, trying to sneak up sidelong on sleep. Should I describe my bedroom, site of my nighttime dictation? Hiroshima after the bomb. Books and newspapers and cigarette butts. Scattered highbrow journals and law reviews read in my brainier moods. A brass colonial lamp with a broken shade. Beside my cherry highboy, there is a rectangle of carpeting less faded than the rest, dimpled at each corner by the casters from Nora's dresser, one of the few pieces of furniture she took. With Lyle around, there is not much point in cleaning anywhere, and my little corner of the world now seems crushed and flattened on all sides.

Next to my bed is a
drop cloth
and a half-finished canvas on an easel, upon whose ledge sit many tubes of paint, thumb-dented and fingerprinted with the bright pigments. Artist at work. When I was eighteen, I was going to be Monet. As a child in my mother's house, as a victim of her shrill tirades, I took a certain comfort in concentrating on what did not change, on the permanence of a line and the silence of the page. I don't know how many times, in how many schoolrooms, I drew the people from the funnies, Batman, Superman, Dagwood. I was good too. Teachers praised my work, and nights when I was sitting around The Black Rose with my old man I'd amuse his cronies by faultlessly rendering a photo from the paper. 'Boy's great, Tim.' He took the usual bar-time pleasure from this, man among men, letting others boast about his son, but at home he would not cross my ma, who took a dim view of this vocation. `Drawi
n f
lippin pictures,' she'd mutter whenever the subject was raised. It was not until I got a D in a drawing class in my first year at the U. that I began to see she had a point.

Here's the problem: I see well only in two dimensions. I don't know if it's depth perception or something in the brain. I envision the picture but not the figure it is drawn from. If counterfeiting were a legitimate profession, I would be its Pablo Fucking Picasso. I can reproduce anything on paper as if it were traced. But real life somehow defeats me. Foreshortened, distorted--it never comes out right. My career as an artist, I had realized shortly before I joined the Force, would be a sort of secondhand hell in which I'd never do anything original. So I became a lawyer. Another of those jokes, though when I make it, my partners flinch.

At home, in private, I like to pretend. Normally, when I jolt awake at 3
:00
a
. M
., it's not Wash's report or the Dictaphone that occupies me. Instead, I repaint Vermeer and imagine the thrill of being the man who so saucily transfigured reality. I am here often in the middle of the night, the light intense, the glare from the shiny art book page and the wet acrylics somehow dazzling, as I try to avoid thinking too much about the image that leapt up from the flames to wake me.

And what image is that? you ask. It's a man, actually. I see him stepping out of the blaze, and when I start awake, heart banging and mouth dry, I am looking for him, this guy who's got my number. He's around the corner, always behind me. Wearing a hat. Carrying a blade. In dreams sometimes I catch the gleam winking as he treads through the path of blue light from a streetlamp. This is an always thing, all my life, me and this guy, Mr. Stranger Danger, as the coppers put it, the guy who's out there and gonna do you bad. He's the one that mothers warn their daughters to watch out for on a deserted street. He's the mugger in the park, the home invader who strikes at 3
:00
a
. M
. I became a copper, maybe, because I thought I'd catch him, but it turns out he still gets the drop on me at night.

Jesus, what is it I have to be so scared of? Five years on the streets and still with all my fingers and toes, a job that I'm busy trying to snake secure, and skills of one kind or another. But I am looking at the big 5--o, and the numbers still stir something in me, as if they were the caliber of a gun that is pointed at my head. It gets a body down. I lie here in the bed in which I screwed several thousand times a woman who I figure now never really cared much about what I was doing; I listen to the phlegmy report from the rotted muffler of what I used to call my car and desolately hold to the departing sounds of that roaming creature who was once a tender child. What is there to be so scared of, Elaine, except this, my one and only life?

Tonight I woke only once. It was not as bad as sometimes. No dreams. No knives or flames. Just a single thought, and the horror of it for a change was not too large to name.

Bert Kamin is probably dead.

*

TAPE 3

Dictated January 26, 9:00 p
. M
.

Wednesday, January 25

Chapter
VIII. MEN OF THE CITY A. Archie Was a Cool Operator

When I got to the office on Wednesday morning, Lena was waiting for me.

"Is this guy a gambler?" You could see she already knew the answer was yes.

"Show me." I followed her toward the library.

When I interviewed Lena on campus at the U. last year, I noticed there was a hole in her resume--seven years to finish college. I asked if she'd been working.

'Not really.' She had grasped her briefcase, a little redhead with a worldly eye. 'I went through a rough spell.'

'How rough?'

'Rough.' We scrutinized one another in the interview room, a soundproofed spot no bigger than a closet; it would have done well for torture. 'I thought I was in love with a guy,' she said. 'But I was in love with the dope. I'm NarcAnon. That whole thing. Once a week.' She awaited my reaction. There were a half dozen other good firms in the city and we were interviewing early. If candor didn't work, she could lie to the next bunch, or hope she'd make it through someplace before anybody asked.

Chapter
96

She'd had A's. Somebody would take a chance. You could read all these calculations in her strong features.

`AA,' I said and shook her hand. She'd done well here. Brilliantly. She had taken control of her life with an athlete's determination, which, whenever I witnessed it, colored me from the same palette of murky feelings--envy, admiration, the ever-present conviction that I am a phony and she the real thing. In the library she stationed me by a p
. C
. and went through the codes to bring Bert's message up on the screen. I stared at it again:

Hey Arch--

Kam' s Special 1.12--U. five, five Cleveland. 1.3--Seton five, three Franklin.

1.2--S
. F
. eleven, five Grant.

"See," she said, "I looked in Sportsline. It's not only scores. They also have a sports book. From Las Vegas? It shows the odds and spreads. Here." The list went on for pages: basketball, college and pro, and hockey, with a point spread for every game, each one listed on a separate line. "Then I asked myself," she said, "do any of these sports have anything to do with Springfield or New Brunswick?"

There was some kind of basketball shrine in Springfield, Massachusetts, but I drew a blank on New Jersey.

"Football," she said, "that's where they played the first college football game. In New Brunswick. And the first basketball game was in Springfield."