Pleading Guilty (28 page)

"Bert, it's not like the traffic reports, they don't explain. I've been putting little bits together here and there. My guess is that they think your buddy Orleans there has been shading games. For bookies."

He took this badly. He brought his long fingers to his mouth to ponder. The refs' room, as I'd remembered it, was strictly low-rent. On the other side of the court, where the Hands changed, the boosters had provided carpet and whirlpools, weight rooms, a country-club air. But there was nothing similar here. In the center of the room, there was an old backless bench of varnished oak splintered at a corner, and against the wall facing the door three crummy-looking lockers listed. They were rusted in places and one of them was pretty much staved in from a foot or fist hurled by some ref who'd heard those remarks from the crowd about his mother, his eyesight, the size of his penis a little more clearly than he'd allowed out on the floor.

"Bert, there's a lot of screwy stuff going on. There's a body in the refrigerator in your apartment. At least, there was. I think it's another pal of yours. Did you know that?"

He glanced up barely, grimly preoccupied, and nodded a bit. "That's jail, right?" he asked.

He couldn't have meant murder.

"Fixing basketball games? I'd say that one's pen time, yeah." He swore. He took a step to the door and then stopped.

"I gotta get him out of here."

"Bert, wait a minute. Why was this guy in your refrigerator?"

"How'd they find out, you think? The cops? About Orleans?"

Talking to Bert is always the same thing, his subject is more important than yours. You have to follow him around like a puppy or a three-year-old child.

"I have no idea, Bert. Frankly, they seemed to have known about Orleans before they knew about you. Actually, they're looking for somebody named Kam Roberts. Is that him?"

He answered me this time. "It's complicated." Then he pounded a fist on his thigh. "Shit," he said. "I don't understand. How'd they find Archie? Nobody knew he was in there."

Nobody knew Archie was in there and Bert liked it that way. A brief qualm of something, a feathery spooky feeling like being touched by a moth, passed over me. I scrutinized Bert's vacant manner for signs as I explained to him how it was, that I, not the cops, had seen the body.

"By the time they got there, somebody'd adiosed the corpse. Maybe you know who."

He had the nerve to draw back and look at me as if I'd lost it, then he reverted to his calculations. If the cops hadn't seen Archie, he asked, what brought them to Orleans?

"Bert, how am I supposed to know? They were down at the Russian Bath asking questions. Would they have heard about Kam Roberts there?"

"Oh right," said Bert. "Right, right, right." He snapped his fingers a number of times and did a few paces. "God, me and my mouth, man. My fucking mouth." He held still, in considerable pain. When he opened his eyes, he looked right at me. "If anything happens to me, Mack, can you make sure he gets a lawyer? Will you promise me, man?"

"I promise you, Bert, but give me a hint here. What's gonna happen to you? What are you afraid of?"

With that, there was the first sign of the old Bert, the sometime madman, always on the brink of falling into his own volcano. Red fury mobilized his expression.

"Come on, Mack! You said you saw what they did to Archie." "Who we talking here? Outfit?"

I got that much from him, a nod.

"And they want what? Money?" That was my first thought, that they were demanding to be made whole for the losses Archie had palmed off on them.

He looked at me.

"Orleans," Bert said.

"Come again."

"They want Orleans. You know, man. How to find him. Who he is. I mean, that's what they wanted from Archie."

"Did he tell them?"

"How could he? He didn't have any idea where I was getting this stuff. I had a guy I called Kam. That's all he knew." Bert was bouncing around pretty good now, twitchy, scrambling all over the little refs' room like a hamster in a cage. But I thought I was following him. Bert was giving Archie advance word on game outcomes. "Kam's Special." Archie knew only that.

"Did Archie tell them about you?"

"He said he wouldn't. At first. And then the last time I talked to him, he told me-- You know, he was pretty emotional. He said they'd kill him if he didn't let them know where it was coming from. They wanted Kam. They gave him like twenty-four hours to bring them Kam. You know, he was beggin'." Bert dared a little look my way, just to see how I handled that thought, some guy pleading with you for a secret to save his life. Which Bert didn't reveal. That's why he was only peeking at me. "I knew he'd give me up. I already figured I'd have to run. I was edge-city, I kind of snuck home, and I like open the fridge, and I'm so flicking freaked out, I'm like out of my mind, for Godsake what they did to him--" His voice cracked, it broke, big bad Bert Kamin. He squeezed his hands to his eyes. The sight was so strangely out of keeping with what I knew and expected of Bert that a little inky blot of suspicion again darkened my heart. This might all be showtime. Bert after all was a trial lawyer, which meant he was part hambone. But Bert's long dark face appeared earnestly tortured and weak. "What they fuckin
g d
id to him. And I'm next. I knew that. They're not kidding around, these guys."

My days as a copper sort of deprived me of any respect for the mob. Mind you, there are policemen who fall in with them, who gamble, particularly, and end up on the vig, with their asses owned in a city minute. And there is even an Italian son or two who I always was told had come on the Force because the uncle was some big something who wanted a toehold in the department. But as guys, who are they? Just a bunch of dark Mediterraneans who didn't finish high school really. If you've seen a guy selling fruit down at the market you've seen your basic mobster--some dese dems and dosers with a lot of jewelry who couldn't find something better to do. Accepting the fact that human beings are pretty mean, who but some guy who feels like a pygmy gets his jollies out of making everybody crap in their boots? And they are also the most overpublicized group in history. A city this size has maybe fifty, seventy-five guys max who are really inside, and a bunch of little rats running beside them hoping to gobble up crumbs. That's the mob. They live out in these bungalows on the South End because they don't want the IRS asking where they got the dollars for anything else; they drink coffee and Amaretto and tell each other that they're tough and worry over which of them's wearing electronic underwear, FBI issue. Bad dudes, no doubt about that, not folks you want to get crosswise of or even have to dinner, but their business these days is shrinking. The gangs control drugs. Hooking, that's mostly for oddball stuff now, golden showers, Greek, not straight sex; pornography's the same. The only place they can really still turn a buck is gambling.

"And what do they want to do with Orleans? Kill him?" "Maybe. I mean, who knows. Do you know? They say not. That's what Archie said, they won't hurt him."

"So what do they want?" I asked, but I caught up at that moment. Orleans was a golden goose and golden geese are not slain. They would want him to give them what he'd given Archie.

Points. Fixes. Games. I said that to Bert. "They want him to perform, right?"

"He'll never do it. It's not him. Even if he wanted to, he'd mess it up somehow. They'll kill him. Sooner or later."

"And that's why you're running? Here's what I don't get, Bert. What's that to you? In the end."

He didn't answer, but it was there for a second, just a sudden stricken look, his dark face riven by feeling. And I'm slow, Elaine, lumbering, like the coach said in high school, but I get there eventually. Bert was in love with him. With Orleans. There's no real etiquette for this. It's still not the thing to do, to tell your gay friend that you knew all along. So we said nothing. "Anyway," I said eventually. "You're protecting him."

"Right. I've got to."

"Sure," I said.

He was back by the desk, haunted, caught up in the vastness of all these troubles. He said it aloud a couple of times--"God, what am I going to do?"--and then without any real warning or connection he focused on me.

"And what's with you?" he asked. "I don't get why you're here, man. Who sent you?"

"Our partners, basically, Bert."

He drew back again. He closed one eye. "For what?" "They want the money back, Bert. No questions asked."

I'd caught him, surprised him. He hung there, mouth vaguely parted as he sought the right words. Taking a step closer to him, I was startled by my own impulse. I was actually halfway to some sly remark, some ingenious quip about splitting the dough. It was as if I'd stuck a hand inside myself, trying to find out what was there. But it was just the same awful mess and I said nothing.

There was a tremendous commotion outside about then. Footsteps, pounding, lots of voices. My first thought was that the ball had rolled down the tunnel and they were playing the game right there. Someone began hammering on the door so that it seemed ready to jump out of the frame. But that happened onl
y a
fter Bert had looked me square in the eye, blinked, and swallowed so his large Adam's apple wobbled in his long throat where the hair grew coarse and unshaven. His face was utterly empty of guile.

He asked me, "What money?"

Chapter
XVIII. RUNNING MAN

"Okay, pissface, open up." I recognized Pigeyes's voice. "Come on, Malloy. Give it up. Come on," he kept saying. He'd had me again. The guy gets a surveillance van to watch me gambol down the avenues and I don't wonder. I was a dangerous fool. I had been followed.

Bert started to speak and I lifted a finger in warning. When I mouthed the word "Police," Bert circled his jaw and did a brief swoon.

Pigeyes was still pounding, while I waited. The tail could not have been that good because I'd have heard somebody behind me in the gangway. So they were guessing. It was a good guess, but there was always the chance they'd go away.

I found my datebook in my pocket and wrote Bert a note: "If I can get rid of these guys, grab your pal as soon as the game is over and scram." We both started hopping around, trying to figure out where he should hide, while Pigeyes went on walloping the door and calling me names. Finally we noticed the shower and I helped Bert chimney up so that his back was braced against one tile wall and his feet were parallel. I drew the blue curtain slowly; none of the rusty hooks gave even the slightest tinkle. It looked okay.

By now somebody was working on the door hinges. I heard the tapping of a hammer and a screwdriver.

"Who is it?" I called sweetly.

"It's Wilt Chamberlain. Open up so we can play one on one." Pigeyes was dressed the same as yesterday. With him, he had his reptile-skin sidekick, Dewey, who was holding the screwdriver and hammer, and the two security guys I'd seen at the top of the runway up to the court, who were along for the ride. -VW-fucking-la," Gino said. He pointed a finger at me and said, "Back." He was awfully pleased. He'd got the drop on me twice now, counting U Inn. You'd never take this out of Pigeyes. He loved hunting some scumbag down, the whole pure adventure. Plenty of squirts come on the Force like that, adventure their watchword, it's all in their head, car chases, street scenes, kicking doors in, girls in the cop bars who can't wait to see them get hard. But the biggest adventure most of the time turns out to be department politics, seeing who gets back-stabbed in the latest downtown deal. Oh, plenty of excitement in the abstract. Every day you go to work and know in some fraction of your heart you might not come home. But usually, everyone does. Instead, there are hours of paperwork; there are nights of lame jokes and burning your tongue on bad coffee; the same old same-old on the street. Lots of folks, and I'm one, they get their fill and move on, knowing that life's life and can only be so much of an adventure. The guys who want adventure and stayPigeyes--they're the ones who seem to go wrong. Being a smartass, a wise guy, a rogue on your own--that's an adventure too. That's how they figure. That's one of the reasons he is like he is.

The two security types followed Pigeyes in, both of them looking around, deeply chagrined. As Bert said, no one was supposed to be in here. Dewey stayed at the door. I talked to the security men, one white guy, one black, with matching potbellies, and the same vermilion sport jackets with the university crest on the breast pocket, both with polyester trouser
s a
nd cheap shoes. This was too good a gig, getting paid to watch basketball games, for me even to have to guess what these fellas did for a day job. Coppers off duty, or my ma wasn't named Bess.

"You didn't let him get away with that old thing that he was looking for someone, did you?" I asked. "I've seen him badge his way into Sinatra. He'll say anything to get in for free." Pigeyes cast me a dirty look as he wandered around. He flipped the doors on the three banged-up lockers against the far wall, not really expecting to see anything inside.

"What gives, Malloy?"

"I'm hiding."

"Funny place."

I told him about representing the U., getting the tour, learning about all the out-of-the-way places in here. "Billy Birken from Alumni Relations took me around." The name, I could tell, bought me a little something with Security.