Put a Lid on It (8 page)

Only one Buster drove this time, Jeffords up front with him. Now that the deal was set, Jeffords was calmer, more easygoing. “You've been an interesting guy to know, Francis,” he said, as they drove north, and to Elaine Goldfarb he said, “Have him tell you how he saw through me right away, right from the very first second, at the MCC, when I said I was his new lawyer and he said no, you're not. No, he didn't say it, he
wrote it down
. Have him tell you about it on the plane.”

“I will,” she said.

At the terminal, it turned out Jeffords was physically incapable of even
seeing
heavy pieces of luggage, so what it came down to was, the remaining Buster carried one of the monster suitcases and Meehan hauled the other, along with his own modest ditty bag.

At security, Jeffords slipped a thick legal-size envelope into Meehan's hand, which Meehan slipped under his shirt, and Jeffords said, “If we have the package in hand by Thursday, all well and good. If not, you become an escaped prisoner, a fugitive, probably armed and dangerous, shoot on sight.”

“Thanks,” Meehan said, and Jeffords and the Buster marched off.

Meehan turned to see Elaine Goldfarb giving him a mildly surprised look: “You're still here.”

“Well, sure,” he said.

“I bet myself, two-to-one odds, you'd take off the second those guys were out of sight. Or is it the New York flight you want, get back on home turf?”

“Ms. Goldfarb, I'm not running away,” Meehan said. “Why would I run away? All I do is get this little package for these people and my legal problems go right out the window.”

“The preschool window.”

“Whatever window works,” Meehan said.

She was dissatisfied. “I've read your history,” she said. “Why would you stick around if there's no profit in it for you?”

He knew how to look guiltless when necessary: meeting her gaze eye for eye, he said, “Getting a clean slate is profit enough for me.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Since you're actually coming along, let's get on the plane.”

Traveling north, over the battlefields of Pennsylvania, she gave him her home address and phone number, saying, “I work out of my apartment,” which is another way to say she didn't have an office. She seemed to him pretty sharp, so he wondered what she was doing in this bottom-feeder job. Some of them did it because they were dedicated to truth, justice, and the American way, and those were the ones you had trouble meeting their eyes. Some had the bottom-feeder jobs because they were bottom-feeders. But some, in Meehan's experience, drifted into these positions because they were contrarians; sooner or later, they stopped getting along with everybody. He wondered if Elaine Goldfarb was one of those.

While he was wondering, she was talking: “When I get to my place, I'll start making the calls. According to Bruce B, the transfer to juvenile court should be taking place this morning, so I just have to find the right venue and the right judge.”

“What right venue?”

“Well, the judge we want might not be in Manhattan,” she explained. “In fact, it might be easier all around to move the case to another borough.”

That was one of the great things about the law; they couldn't help but make it too complicated, so that in the nooks and crannies an actual person might live.

She was going on: “Once I make an appointment, I'll give you a call. Where do I reach you?”

“Well, I don't know,” he said. “Where I was staying before was just temporary, and I been gone awhile, and the cops came there after my arrest to pick up my stuff, so I think maybe I don't live there any more. I'll have to find a place.”

She gave him a funny look. “You mean the stuff in that little carry-on bag of yours is everything you own in the world?”

“Sure,” he said. He didn't see any point mentioning the little cash stashes he had salted away here and there, figuring everybody has such things so she'd take it for granted. And come to think of it, a couple of those older stashes he ought to deal with, now that the goddam government was changing all the money.

Government; everywhere you turn.

She couldn't get over the skimpiness of his worldly goods. “Maybe you ought to rethink crime as a career path,” she said.

“I do, all the time,” he said, “but nothing else gives me the same job satisfaction.”

She decided to let that go, saying, “All right. When you get settled, call me. If I'm not there, leave a number where I can reach you.”

“Sure,” he said. “Listen, did Jeffords tell you about the deadline on this thing?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Deadline? I know they don't have much time, if they're trying to avoid an October Surprise.”

“Next Thursday,” he told her. “Either I get them the package by then, or it goes public I'm an escaped prisoner, armed and dangerous, every cop in the world memorizing my mug shot.”

Outraged, she said, “That should have been part of the negotiation! They can't speak to my principal behind my back!”

“Well, they did,” Meehan said. “Jeffords did. And they got a legit time problem, I can't argue that. So if you could stall this court thing, it would be better. I'm gonna be busy the next few days.”

“No details,” she said.

18

N
O GREAT DISTANCE
from New York City's Port Authority bus terminal on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan (which the locals call the “port of authority”), there are a number of blocky, six-to-eight-story hotel-motels that don't at all mind customers who pay cash and don't have a lot of luggage and didn't arrive in their own automobile. In a fourth-floor room of one of these, Meehan unpacked his ditty bag, ignored his view out through several lumpy grimy factory buildings and warehouses in the general direction of the Hudson River and New Jersey, neither of which was quite visible from here, and sat cross-legged on the bed with the phone between his shins and a sheet of the motel's stationery atop a Yellow Pages by his right knee. Holding the motel's ballpoint pen in his right hand, he squinted at the opposite wall and his own history, looking for a crew. From time to time, he wrote a set of initials on the stationery. Initials was as far as he was prepared to commit these people to writing, and also the initials were reversed.

Forty minutes of cogitation produced eleven sets of initials, which with luck might render down to the three guys he felt he'd probably need to come along on this trip. One guy to drive, one guy to do the heavy lifting—the older the firearm, he suspected, the heavier—and one guy to romance the locks. Meehan himself was the general, the mastermind, the guy who pulled it all together. Sort of like a movie producer. So now was the time to start trying to make contact with these guys.

Working within the strictures of the ten thousand rules, there were a number of taboos concerning the telephone. You had to use it, because you couldn't physically travel to every place where everybody was, but on the other hand you couldn't really say anything on it. So the phone was necessary in order to make contact, but useless for communication.

However, within the general rule that you never write anything down, you
certainly
never write down any phone numbers, so in addition to the telephone having this severely limited usefulness it was also necessary to memorize all these phone numbers, in which at any moment the first three digits might change, due to seismic upheavals in the ether-world of area codes.

Sometimes Meehan found himself thinking that, if the Pony Express was still up and running, he'd be a customer.

So here's the drill. First he looks at a set of initials, then he reverses them, then he remembers who he had in mind when he put the initials down, then he racks his brain for that guy's last known phone number, and then he dials it.

“The number you have dialed is no longer in service. The num—”

Cross off a set of initials, repeat process for next set.

“Hom yang.”

“Uhh, is Mikey there?”

“Fring mititako hoolak?”

“Mikey. I'm looking for Mikey.”

“Fleetferop! Miggle kaba fucking pibblesak? Fuck no!”

“Sorry.”

And repeat.

“Hello.” Tired female voice.

Meehan took another look at the initials, reversed them, said, “Hi, I'm looking for Bert.”

“So am I, brother,” she said.

“Oh.”

“You got any other places to try?”

“No, this is the only number I—”

“You cocksuckers all cover up for him, don'tcha? All stick together. Let me tell you—”

Even after he'd hung up, the phone seemed to continue to vibrate for another few seconds. Meehan gave it a reproachful look.

Three out of eleven, gone already. It was true that the kind of people he tended to know did not make a habit of staying in one place very long, but this was getting ridiculous. He was almost afraid of the next set of initials. Who knew what might have happened to Woody in the last four months?

Then it occurred to him he was supposed to call whatser-name. Ms. Goldfarb, the lawyer. Here was her phone number, completely written out with her name and address and everything, on a piece of paper in his shirt pocket. So probably the thing to do was take a break from calling up old chums, even though he was feeling the pressure of next Thursday's deadline, and call Goldfarb instead, give her the phone number at the motel here.

So Meehan dialed the number on the piece of paper, and on the third ring it was answered by a very gruff male voice, saying, “Goldfarb residence.”

“Elaine Goldfarb, please.” Who was this guy? Was Goldfarb married?

“She's not available right now,” said the gruff voice, clearly trying to make itself less gruff, more telephone-friendly. “Could I take a message?”

“Yeah, I'm supposed to give her a contact phone number,” Meehan said. “How to reach me.”

“Sure, I'll take that.”

“Okay, my name's Meehan, my—”

“Oh, Meehan!” the guy said, very pleased. “Yeah, she wants to talk to you!”

“I thought she wasn't available.”

“She isn't here right this
second
, but she wants to see you. I think she said it was urgent.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You got the address here, don't you?”

On the same slip of paper. Meehan looked at it, squinting, thinking. “Yeah, I got it. Two-seventy-nine West End, apartment eight-H.”

“That's the place,” the guy said. “Come straight over here, she wants to see you urgent. Okay? Come right now.”

“Right,” Meehan said, and hung up, and sniffed the air.

What is wrong with this picture?

19

T
WO-HUNDRED-SEVENTY-NINE
West End was a big old stone apartment building in the Eighties, half a block wide, with an awning above the front door and a doorman inside it. Meehan had walked up from his new residence, maybe a mile and a half, pausing at a hardware store along the way to make a few innocent purchases that fit nicely in his pockets. He walked by the facade of 279 with hardly a glance at the doorman, who stood in his uniform of navy blue trimmed with gold behind the glass of the entryway, gazing outward, hands folded at his crotch, waiting for somebody to arrive in or want a taxicab.

At the corner, Meehan turned left, to walk next to the side of the building and to see that the service entrance was an eight-foot-high iron gate, shut tight, with a garbage-can-lined alleyway running ten feet deep behind it, burrowing into the building, with a closed metal door at the far end. Ahead of him was Riverside Drive, and beyond that the Hudson River and America.

Meehan circled the block, thinking. The only way in was past the doorman, but he didn't want to be announced. Coming back around to West End, he crossed it and continued on to Broadway, turning south there until he found the second hardware store of the day. In this one, he bought a four-foot metal ladder and a smoke detector, then walked back to 279 with the ladder's next-to-last rung resting on his right shoulder, smoke detector in his left hand. This time, he walked straight to the building, where the doorman, faintly surprised, opened the door and said, “Yeah?”

“Smoke detector,” Meehan told him, showing it.

The doorman looked at the box. “For what?”

“Elevator.”

“The elevator? Nobody told
me
.”

“Well, they told me, replace the smoke detector.”

“Which elevator?” the doorman demanded.

“In the back.”

Sounding dubious, the doorman said, “Go ahead. They didn't tell me a thing about it.”

“Thanks, pal,” Meehan said, and carried the ladder past the elevator at the front end of the lobby because he was operating from the assumption that they would number the apartments from the front, which would put H at the back.

The elevator was already here. Meehan boarded, didn't look back to see if the doorman was watching him, opened the ladder, started up it, and the elevator door closed. He immediately pushed 8.

Having no further need for the ladder, he closed it and left it leaning in the elevator. In the short hall here, he looked at the apartment doors, and found H first on the right. He approached it, reaching into his pockets for some of his recent purchases, but there was something weird about the door. A length of shiny electrician's tape was stretched over the striker plate, from the outside of the jamb inward, so that when the door was closed the bolt wouldn't snap into place. The door would close, but it wouldn't lock.

Who would do a thing like that? Who would put a piece of tape over a doorlock that you could see from outside? Nobody Meehan knew.

Very cautiously, he pushed open the door. What he looked in at was a small square vestibule with heavy woodwork around the door frames, painted thirty times the last hundred years. A Utrillo print hung on the wall to the left, over a rickety little table with an empty cut-glass vase on it. To the right was a closed door, probably a closet. Ahead was a doorless entryway to a living room furnished out of the Salvation Army; heavy old pieces, kind of shabby but more or less kept up.

Meehan slid through the doorway and let the door slowly close behind him, having to hold it because there was a very strong spring in the hinges. Maybe that's why the tape was on there; the unlocking button was stuck, as they often were in these old buildings because nobody ever used them, and the door simply wouldn't stay open by itself. But why would anybody want it to stay open?