Put a Lid on It (12 page)

And here, stretched across the trail between big maples, was a golden rope, from which dangled a small metal sign: PRIVATE. And over to the right, seated on a folding chair, big arms folded across big chest, was a guy whose red-white-blue costume did not at all disguise the fact he was a rent-a-cop. He was also looking at Meehan and Woody.

“Let's mosey on back,” Meehan said, and so they did.

“—the protection of the American family against the purveyors of smut and—”

Yup; When the Saints Go Marching In. Leaning closer to Woody, Meehan said, “I wanna see more of this road.”

“And less of that band,” Woody said.

They made a wide arc away from the house and back toward the food, picking up another hot dog and beer before angling toward the trail again.

“—our sons and daughters in uniform—”

More mixed pine and maple forest, out of which the Trail came a-winding, and across which was another golden rope bearing another go-to-hell sign. “Crowd control,” Meehan said.

“Maybe we've seen enough,” Woody suggested.

“I know I ate enough,” Meehan said, and they headed back toward the house.

“—the sacred Stars and Stripes!”

At the beginning, the speaker had been up against people who were already involved in other things, their own conversations, their food, their families, but by sheer doggedness he'd gotten more and more of the crowd to shut up and pay attention—a splinter group was around the corner, paying attention to the band—and even to applaud now and again. Also, more people kept on arriving, so that when Meehan and Woody made their way through they were slowed by quite a crowd between themselves and the route out of here. They quartered slowly through the mob, stitching against the grain.

“We must build more and better prisons!”

That got a
big
hand, and even a shout from somebody: “What's a better prison?”

With horror, Meehan realized the shout had come from Woody.

“One that keeps them longer!”

Which got both applause and laughter, and another response. As Meehan looked on, aghast, Woody called out, “Don't you believe in rehabilitation?” He was no longer moving toward the dirt path out of here, but toward the speaker on the porch.

Error. Meehan faded back into the crowd, never quite stopping but not giving in to panic either. Woody was in the process over there of breaking about a dozen of the ten thousand rules. Maybe more.

“We're talking about hardened criminals here.”

“But isn't it prison that hardened them?”

There was the path, just a little farther ahead, just beyond the outermost cluster of listeners. Three or four of the golf carts waited there, with their drivers, but Meehan thought it would be more discreet to walk away at this moment, particularly since everybody, including the golf cart drivers, was enthralled by the debate between Woody and the guy with the microphone.

“If they weren't criminals, they wouldn't be in prison in the first place.”

“You mean they were criminals when they were born?”

Amazing how Woody's voice carried, even past the golf carts, which Meehan passed now, galloping on the inside but strolling on the outside. Since he well knew that Woody's most usual fashion accessory was the outstanding warrant—don't leave home without one—there was no way that scene could end other than badly.

“They became criminals when they committed a crime!”

“Isn't that when they could be wised up, taught how to live right?”

The dirt path angled gently downslope through the trees, the nearest parked cars already visible. Woody hadn't locked the station wagon, but he had the keys with him. It would not be a good idea to go ask for the keys.

“Don't waste sympathy on those animals! We've got to be tough on them!”

“Tough? You think you're tough? The joints I've been in, you wouldn't last five minutes! You talk tough out here with all these soft civilians, but—What? What do you people want?”

Meehan was in among the parked cars now, and by golly some of them still had the keys in the ignition. The staff people were all down at the far end, waiting for late arrivals. Meehan wasn't being closely observed, but he was certainly being seen, so he couldn't backtrack or stop to study different cars or do anything but just keep walking, throwing quick glances through car windows along the way.

Here. A nice black Infiniti, a black leather key-holder dangling from the ignition. Without breaking his pace, Meehan opened the driver's door, slid behind the wheel, started the engine.

What a lovely purr this engine made. And when Meehan put it in gear and moved slowly forward, how like a really good powerboat it was, rolling gracefully over the uneven field.

Meehan grinned and waved to the red-white-blues, and they grinned and waved back. At moderate speed, he headed back down Spring Road.

And it didn't smell of dog, either.

25

M
EEHAN GOT BACK
to room 318 a little after nine the next morning to find, yet again, the message light blinking on the telephone. This time, he let it go on blinking while he showered and shaved and brushed teeth. Then, wrapped in a towel, he listened to the message, which was Goldfarb: “Call me.”

Well, that was succinct. Meehan hadn't had to memorize Goldfarb's number, since it was okay within the ten thousand rules for him to know it, but it did mean he had to remember where he'd put the piece of paper with the number and address.

In the bedside table drawer, is where, next to the Gideon Bible. He dialed it.

She picked up on the first ring, sounding paranoid: “Who's this?”

“Meehan. You said call.”

“Where were you?”

Tricky question. “What do you mean?”

“I left that message four o'clock yesterday.”

“I was working,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

Which was at least partly true. Up to the point he'd driven away from Burnstone Trail in that clean black Infiniti, he'd been working. After that, the thirty-five miles to the nearest New York City commuter line at Dover Plains, New York, where he'd abandoned the Infiniti without a fingerprint on it, he'd been fleeing. But when he started to chat with the angry woman on the platform, the only other person beside himself headed toward the city on a Saturday afternoon (because she'd broken up with her controlling boyfriend yet again, whose house the country house was, as it turned out), he was on his own time, about which Goldfarb need not concern herself, although in fact the angry woman's—Rosalie, less angry later—apartment was in Goldfarb's general neighborhood.

These irrelevancies, the ten thousand rules suggested, could be left out of the official record; thus: “I was working. You know what I mean.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly hushed. “Is it done?”

“No no,” he assured her, “that was just to have a looksee. What's up?”

“I need you to come here,” she said. “Can you come up here now?”

Lawyer-work on a Sunday? What the hell; stay on her good side. “Sure,” he said.

“Okay, listen,” she said.

He listened, but she didn't say anything else, so finally he said, “Yeah?”

“Just come up,” she said, and broke the connection.

She looked worried. She wore black jeans and a black cashmere sweater and the same monster black-rimmed glasses. She held the door open to say, “Wait, let me get my key,” then shut the door in his face and he cooled his heels in the hall a minute till she came back, clutching her keys. She stepped into the hall, pulling the door shut, and he moved toward the elevator, saying, “Where we going?”

“Nowhere. Just stand there.”

He looked at her. “In the hall?”

Looking at the key ring in her hand, she said, “The button to unlock the door doesn't work. It's stuck.”

“I know.”

She leaned toward him, eyes wide behind the big specs: “Did you listen? On the phone?”

He didn't get it. “What do you mean?”

“When I told you listen, did you listen?”

“Yeah, and you didn't say anything.”

“The
crackles
,” she said.

“The crackles,” he repeated. Was there maybe a screw loose in there somewhere?

She leaned even closer, and hissed the next sentence: “They're tapping my phone!”

“Oh, for Christ's sake.” Yehudi and Mostafa, had to be.

“I think they probably bugged the apartment, too.”

“Let's find a phone booth,” Meehan said, “and make Jeffords' morning.”

“I knew it was you,” Jeffords said, not sounding happy. “On a Sunday morning.”

“They're bugging Goldfarb's phone,” Meehan said.

“What?”

“And probably the apartment.”

“Oh, Jesus,
why
don't they get wise to themselves?”

“Idle hands,” Meehan explained, “are the devil's workshop.” Which was in the addendum to the ten thousand rules.

“Well, that explains it, anyway,” Jeffords said.

Meehan hated non sequiturs. He said, “I'm glad it does.”

“You wouldn't know about this,” Jeffords told him, “but a known criminal was nabbed up at, uh, the place you're going.”

“Yeah?”

“A known criminal,” Jeffords repeated. “At a political rally there. Alfonso Gorman, he's got a record as long as your arm, there were arrest warrants out for him all over.”

Alfonso; so that was Woody's civilian name. Meehan said, “They nabbed him at a political rally?”

“That's right.”

“Then how come he was the only one they nabbed?”

There was a brief silence until Jeffords got it; then he said, “Very funny. But you see what this means. One of you two must have mentioned it. The name of the place.”

Meehan looked at Goldfarb, standing next to him here on Broadway at the phone-on-a-stick, looking as though the half of the conversation she was in on wasn't really nourishing somehow. He said to Jeffords, “Goldfarb doesn't know that name, and I haven't said it.”

“Well,
somehow
,” Jeffords insisted, “somebody knows
something
, and they sent
somebody
, just the way”—his voice lowered—“just the way we're sending you.”

“I'll worry about that,” Meehan said, finding no need to bring Jeffords up to date on his own relationship with Woody “Alfonso” Gorman. “You worry about getting those bugs out of Goldfarb's apartment.”

“Damn right,” Goldfarb said.

“I don't know what I can do on a weekend,” Jeffords complained.

“Oh,” Meehan said. “Law enforcement's on a five-day week? I wish I'd known that years ago.”

“I'll see what I can do,” Jeffords promised. “Call me in an hour.”

“Goldfarb will.”

“Not from the apartment!”

“No, not from the apartment.”

“Of course not,” Goldfarb said.

Jeffords said, “In the meantime, she should just hang tight, not say anything important to anybody.”

“I'll tell her,” Meehan said, and hung up, and told Goldfarb, “Call him in an hour. From here, I guess. In the meantime, don't say anything important to anybody.”

“Well, it's Sunday,” she said.

“Sure.”

“I know what,” she said. “My mother always says I don't call her enough. I'll call her.”

“Let Yehudi and Mostafa listen to an hour of your mother.”

“You got it,” Goldfarb said.

“Revenge is sweet,” Meehan agreed.

26

B
ACK IN ROOM
318, Meehan looked at his shrunken list of initials. Seven left. He hoped the next guy he found had more staying power than Woody.

He felt he needed one more preliminary look at Burnstone Trail, when it wasn't the setting for a Breughel villagers-partying genre picture. He didn't want to go back today, because today would be when the staff was doing cleanup—the part they leave out of the genre pictures—but maybe tomorrow the party staff would be gone and the owner wouldn't yet be back from wherever he'd fled to avoid the hoi polloi, so maybe the job could be done just like that, lickety-split. But first another reconnoiter. With at least one partner, preferably one without an argumentative nature.

Meehan sat on the bed with the phone and the remaining sets of initials, and started his calls.

“Hello?” Tough-guy voice, wary.

“Hi, is Eddie there?”

“This is Eddie. Who's this?”

It was not Eddie; Meehan quietly hung up.

“Bismark residence.” Female voice this time, brisk, in a hurry.

“Hi, is Lou there?”

“I don't expect to see Lou for five to fifteen years.”

“Oh. Then I'll try again later.”

“Hello?” Female voice, motherly.

“Hi, is Bernie there?”

“Oh, you just missed him, I think he's already—Hold on!”

“Sure,” he said, hearing shoes run away over a linoleum floor, hearing the woman's receding voice yell, “Bernie! Bernie!” Then silence. Then heavy breathing, out of breath: “No, he's already gone. In the car. He went bowling.”

“Bowling.”

“He's in a Sunday afternoon league. You know, he has to keep his evenings free.”

“Sure.”

“He'll be back at six, but that's when we eat supper.”

“You don't want me to call at six.”

“I could have him call you.”

“Nah, that's okay.” Very casual: “Where's he bowl?”

“Who's this?” Suddenly not the motherly voice any more.

“It's okay,” he assured her. “I'm an old evening pal of Bernie's, my name's Meehan, he may have mentioned me.”

“Bernie doesn't mention people,” she said, still sounding suspicious, “unless he bowls with them.”

“Well, he never bowled with me,” Meehan said. “Just tell me, when can I call?”

“Sometimes he—Oh, wait a minute!”

“What?”

But she was off again, cloppety-clop, “Bernie! Bernie!”

Meehan listened to indistinct talk, some of it definitely a male voice, and then what was recognizably Bernie suddenly said in his ear, “Meehan?”

“Yeah. Bernie, hi, how are you?”

“I forgot the ball,” Bernie said confidentially. “Can you believe it?”

“Happens,” Meehan said.

“I'd forget my head, it wasn't screwed on.”

“It isn't!” sallied the woman from away.