Pleading Guilty (15 page)

"If I didn't know better, Peter, I'd think you were offering me a job." As soon as I said it, I heard that the tone was all wrong. Ncocriss's quick eyes registered something, the possibility of corruption, which around here is always in the air, like carbon dioxide. He held on just a second before rejecting that thought.

"Not you, Malloy. You're an old
plow horse
." That's all he said. Dead or dying went unspecified, but either way, my bones in his view would soon he tromped upon, ground down by some other dray treading my row. He went back to work and I went on my way, fighting him
off
, trying not to be diminished by his estimate, but of course feeling absolutely flattened. I wasn't even worth buying oil'.

I was on the street, my overcoat open for the short walk to the Needle, buffeted by the thick pedestrian traffic on all sides, workers departing in the sullen dwindling light of winter. Overhead, the sky was dimming to the color of a burnt pot. The morning snow was now nothing but a dampness on the walks, freezing over amid the little hummocks 'of salt that rimed the concrete and would stain my shoes.

In the interval, I tried to figure what was doing. I wouldn't say I believed Peter. It was safer to bet on the Easter Bunny. But I couldn't figure why he had anything to hide. I was feeling surly, in a formerly familiar cop-mood in which everyone was a suspect. Bert. Maybe Glyndora. Even, possibly, God's emissary on earth, Martin Gold. The vague unpredictability of Martin's behavior bothered me especially: the way he'd been with Jake; the fact that Martin had called Neucriss, which he ordinarily did only when somebody was paying premium rates. I stopped on a corner where a little boy in a hooded sweatshirt was hawking papers, while a sudden wind snapped my muffler in my face. Here I stood in the city where I've lived my entire misbegotten life, the canyons I've been prowling for decades, feeling depressed and undermined, full of the convincing if momentary illusion that I didn't know where in the hell I was.

C. Somebody Else's Girl

For unexplained reasons, I always found it a shock seeing Brushy's pale meaty thighs in her athletic shorts. Her adolescent acne still flared on the parts of her body that were ordinarily concealed, high up on her arms and in the V-neck of her tennis shirt, but I found her appealingly girlish. She did not spend much time letting me look her over, though, and began to bat the ball around the racquetball court. We went through more or less the same routine each week. I moved well left and right, and had superior reach and better strokes. Brushy swung with an awkward roundhouse, elbow locked, but she scrambled all over the white-walled court like a squirrel and got to every shot; she'd run me over rather than call hinders. Each week we'd play the first two games even. I careered around, yelling oaths and curse words whenever I mishit the ball. Then Brushy, who had not hit drop shots out of deference to my knee, would dink one ball after another, until I was limping and so short of breath I could faint.

We were at the usual fateful pass between the second and third game in the little low corridor outside the court, toweling of She wanted to know what had come of my visits with Glyndora and Neucriss.

"Zero," I said. "Nobody knows nothin. Maybe you were right. Bert was just trying to phony up something to cover his tracks." She started asking me questions and I told her a little about Archie and his betting scheme, and my misadventures yesterday, in which, in my version, I had stood up heroically to my old nemesis from the Force.

Brushy took in as much as I said and with her usual cool deliberation got fast to the bottom line.

"So whose credit card is it," she asked, "Bert's or Kam's?" I had no idea.

"Where'd you find this card anyway?" she asked.

I was still keeping that part to myself. I didn't want anybody to put me near Bert's refrigerator. I invoked the magic words "Attorney-Client" and pushed Brushy back onto the court, where she shortly whipped my butt once more, 2.1-7, dropping shots to the corners and banging the ball off the ceiling like a storm of large blue hail.

"Would it kill you if I won just once?" I complained as we were leaving.

"I know you, Mack. You have a weak character. You'd want to win every week."

I denied it, but she didn't believe me. She was heading off to the ladies' locker room, and I asked about dinner, which we did now and then when we were both in the office late.

"I can't. Maybe later this week."

"Who's the lucky fella?"

Brushy frowned. "Tad, if you must. I'm meeting him for a drink." Brushy's occasional rendezvous for lunch or cocktails or dinner with Krzysinski had been going on for some time, and nobody at G &G knew what to make of their'. Tad had been on the job at TN no more than a month when he was personally named in a securities fraud case which Brushy had handled and won, filing a successful motion to dismiss. Purportedly, Krzysinski was just staying in touch, but everybody at the firm alternately suspected or hoped that he was getting the usual from Brushy, since any direct line to the top was valued, given the precariousness of our relationship with TN. The part that didn't fit was that Krzysinski had the rep of a serious family man, nine kids, and had been known to fly back from Fiji so he could be around for family Mass late afternoon on Saturday. On the other hand, as my mother would say, the devil finds a way into the safest home.

I greeted Brushy's news with a lascivious wag of my brow. "Ooo la la," I said. Between us, Brushy generally took this kind of joshing pretty well, but today she called the foul.

"I resent that," she answered, and her eyes heated up. Brush
y w
anted to be thought of as a counselor to titans, a hotshot who'd be a logical drinking partner for a Fortune 50o King. Instead, here was her are partner and pal assuming that she'd have one hand on her martini and the other on Tad's privates. I stood there in the hallway, a foot taller, sweating, and felt myself vulnerable for the lack of any smart remark.

"You happen to be wrong," she went on, "and you're getting to be worse than anybody else. Why do you suddenly think my sex life is your business?"

"Because I don't have one of ins own?"

She remained in a huff.

"Maybe you should work on that," she told me, and marched off down the narrow white hall that led to the locker rooms. The door was too heavy to slam but she gave it a try.

It was rare, but there were instants like this when between Brushy and me there was the throb of something, maybe lost opportunity. Especially in her early days, Brushy let a guy know she was available not long after you said how do you do, and for ten years or so we'd had this running thing about the great fun I was missing. I smiled but kept my distance. Not, by the way, that I was a man of perfect virtue. But it was bad enough being known around the office as a lush, and something about Brushy seemed to make her a daunting proposition, maybe just the well-worn story of a college student who worked in the mailroom and let it be known after one magic summer night that Brushy had so inspired him that they'd had, count them, nine separate encounters between 7:3o p
. M
. and the following dawn, an achievement that led the young man to be known thereafter solely as Nueve and cast such a pall over every man in the place that there was a palpable atmosphere of celebration the day the kid finally left to go back to school.

Anyway, during that period when my life seemed to be demonstrating some law of thermodynamics or entropy, all to the effect that if things could fuck up they would, with my sister dying and Nora wandering and Lyle in his teenaged funk an
d m
e sworn off the bottle, I finally spent an afternoon with her at the Dulcimer House, a class place around the corner. Sex with Brushy was, well, brief. I did not completely fad, but various thoughts of home and spouse, a staid life, and even social disease had suddenly crowded within me, leaving one weak as water and quick as mercury.

`So what?' Brushy had said, and I welcomed her kindness. For Brushy it was all conquest anyway. No doubt she felt better finding that she hadn't missed much.

As for me, I probably expected it. The only good sex I've had was when I was drunk, which must tell you something about me, I wish I knew what. Still, something was easier when I could blame each mishap on the bottle. I was so gassed, et cetera--that's why I spent two sawbucks on the hooker who sucked me off in the back of that taxi; that's why I plugged that girl, even after she puked. A lot of guys lose the capacity that far along, but now and then after half a bottle of Seagram's 7, I lit up like a firecracker.

Without it, there is not a lot left to
be said
. Every now and then some fancy still strikes me, the oddest things--some gal in a cosmetics ad or some ordinary-looking female whose skirt hikes up in a provocative way as she is crossing the street--and I find myself engaged in Man's Oldest Amusement. I know this is revolting to imagine, a grown man, a big one, with a hand on his own throttle, but we're not really talking about much. Afterwards I am full of Catholic shame, but also curiosity. What's wrong with me? I wonder. Am I just half-dead in that region, or is it that no woman can be as good as what I dream up myself? And what is it I dream? you ask. People. Couples, frankly. I admit it, I like to look. X-rated movies, but in my own theater. The man is never me.

So that's what I was thinking as I came out of the locker room into the reception area of Dr. Goodbody's Health Club. There were a couple of chairs with a little table between them where most of the papers for the week were piled up, as well as th
e u
sual health and fitness magazines, and feeling somewhat morose anyway, I plopped myself down there, having half a mind to look for something in the newspaper, although at the moment I could not quite recollect what. The sports page was full of hype about the Super Bowl on Sunday and the high point of local interest, Friday night's Hands game with UW-Milwaukee. The season records of the Hands and the Meisters were in a box on the inside pages, and I noted, in passing, that Bert or Kam, whoever, had won the $5,000 wager he'd called Kam's Special on
Infomode
, the U. over Cleveland State. I diddled around with that thought. The card statement had a $9,000 credit for December. II'd
been winning, Kam or Bert, which meant nobody had a reason to steal to pay Archie.

I remembered then, suddenly, why I'd wanted to see the paper--to check what Glyndora'd torn out. I went through the day's Tribune twice with no luck, and was ready to quit when I found it at last in the late edition, an item from the City section: WEST BANK EXEC MISSING. The wife of prominent insurance industry executive Vernon "Archie" Koechell confirmed that her husband had not appeared at home or work for the last two weeks. Koechell's disappearance had been reported to the Kindle Unified Police, who were investigating a possible connection to an undisclosed financial crime. On the jump page, there was a picture of Archie, a noble-looking business type with a round mug and a widow's peak. The photo was old, twenty years, but I recognized him, no doubt of that. We'd met face to face, so to speak, and I'd be a long time anyway forgetting the man I'd seen in
. B
ert's refrigerator.

Chapter
X. YOUR INVESTIGATOR RESUMES SOME OLD BAD HABITS A. Your Investigator Is Misled

Glyndora lives in a triplex in one of these resurrected areas in the shadow of the projects. I swear to God, when I come back from the dead I want to be a real estate developer. Sell people a three-room apartment for two hundred grand and when they go out in the morning their car has no hubcaps. Two blocks away you could see the kids, in tattered coats in this season, playing basketball and looking through the chain-link with their devastated dead expressions. But here the construction was reminiscent of a Hollywood set, perfection in every visible detail, and the feel that you could put your hand right through it. The effect was Williamsburg. Little wooden doodads at the roofline and wrought-iron rails; starving saplings, bare sticks in January, were planted in little squares removed from the pavement. One could not help thinking of a theme park.

"Glyndora, it's Mack." I had found her address in the firm personnel directory, and I wasn't expected. I made my apologies for bothering her at home through the buzzer intercom. "I need to talk to you and I don't have a lot of time."

"Okay." Silence. "Talk, man."

"Come on, Glyndora. You don't need to he so entertaining. Let me in.-

Nothing.

"Glyndora, cut the crap."

"Call you tomorrow."

"Like you did today? Listen, I'm gonna stand down here freezing my chestnuts and pressing on this buzzer and shouting your name. I'm gonna make a big goddamn scene, so that your neighbors wonder about the company ?
. You
keep. And in the morning, I'm going straight to the Committee to tell them how you've been horsing me around." Something here might pass for a credible threat. Especially the Committee. I stomped around on the stoop another minute in the dark, breathing smoke beneath the brass colonial lamp, with my chin nuzzled into my muffler. Finally I heard the buzz.

She waited for me at the top of the stairs, backlit by her own home and barring the way to her door. She was wearing a simple housedress and no makeup, and her stiff hair had been released from barrettes and looked somewhat shapeless. I more or less moved her across her own threshold, waving my hands to show I wouldn't take no for an answer. Inside, I seated myself at once on her sofa and opened my overcoat. I did my best to look heavyset and immobile.