Put a Lid on It

by Donald E. Westlake

Benjamin gestured to Elaine Goldfarb. “I defer to you.”

  “Well,” she said, “if they brought in a lawyer from Washington on this, he'd certainly charge three hundred dollars an hour, probably more.”

  “Agreed,” Benjamin said. “Shall we say a retainer for twenty hours?”

  “Sounds good,” she said.

  “Give me your Social Security number and so on when we finish here,” Benjamin told her, “and I'll have a check cut for you. Now, if we could sit and get to the topic at hand.”

  So they sat, where they'd had breakfast, and Jeffords said to Benjamin, “We don't have to worry about any antiques here, just what we want from Francis.”

  “Understood,” Benjamin said.

  Elaine Goldfarb looked brightly around at everybody. Meehan told her, “Don't worry about it, it's nothing.”

  “Fine,” she said. She had her yellow pad and ballpoint pen out of her leather bag; holding both, she said to Benjamin, “From what Meehan told me on the way down, you have a certain sensitive object you want him to retrieve for you, in return for which you propose to make his current legal problems go away.”

  “Exactly,” Benjamin said.

  “How?”

  Benjamin nodded. “Fair question. We can do it one of three ways. The records can simply disappear—”

  “Too many,” she said, shaking her head, making a note, “in too many places.”

  “You may be right. Option two is to proceed to trial, making the evidence disappear and guaranteeing dismissal. This would of course require a return to custody.”

  “The MCC,” Meehan said.

  “Afraid so.”

  Elaine Goldfarb said, “And number three?”

  “Witness protection program, new identity, transfer to Arizona or some such.”

  Meehan said, “Out of the MCC and into the frying pan. I'm a New Yorker.”

  Elaine Goldfarb said, “It doesn't seem to me you have an adequate procedure to make good on your representations to my client.”

  “Make a suggestion,” Benjamin offered.

  “A presidential pardon.”

  Jeffords began to bob around, saying, “No no no, that would raise far too many questions.”

  “I'm afraid Pat's right,” Benjamin said, looking sad.

  “Then a governor's pardon, State of New York.”

  “Similar problem.”

  Everybody was stuck. Meehan saw it and heard the silence and, remembering a stunt he'd heard about, a friend of a friend, in a different context, used it to get out from under a falling safe, said, “Switch it to juvenile court.”

  They all looked at him. Jeffords said, “For one thing, your voice has changed.”

  “I bet you could do it,” Meehan said. “It's all in the bureaucracy, right? Switch me to juvenile court, closed session, I plead guilty, time served.”

  Elaine Goldfarb said, “Which is how long?”

  “If we count today,” Meehan said, “twelve days.”

  Jeffords said, “Why would we count today?”

  Meehan looked at him. “What am I, free to go?”

  Elaine Goldfarb said to Benjamin, “What have you done about the paperwork at this point, his whereabouts?”

  “Pat knows that,” Benjamin said, and Jeffords said, “The MCC thinks he's in Otisville, and Otisville thinks he's in the MCC.”

  “So he's still serving time,” she said. “And if you could transfer his case to juvenile court, to a judge who wouldn't make difficulties, he could first release Meehan into my custody, I undertake to assure his presence at a hearing in chambers, probably early next week, he pleads guilty, he's remanded into my custody again in lieu of parole, and we could very easily make the paperwork look kosher.” Smiling at Meehan, she said, “Good thinking.”

  “Already,” Meehan said, “I feel like a kid again.”

  17

  MEEHAN AWOKE WITH a smile on his lips. He didn't even mind the bzzt-bzzt of the phone, nor the chirpy voice telling him it was oh eight hundred hours. Life, which only two days ago had looked like a horror story, in which the MCC had only been the preview to someplace even worse, like Leavenworth, now seemed sweet.

  Elaine Goldfarb had come through like a champ. She was going to get him out from under that lousy federal hijacking rap, she was making it possible for him to return to the world a free man, and she'd even managed to negotiate him a thousand bucks in walking-around money, which he was to receive in cash this very morning, when they would leave for the flight back from Norfolk to LaGuardia, in New York City. All he'd have to do then, other than keep an appointment some time soon in juvenile court, was put together a string of guys he knew—he was already thinking of some likely possibilities—and go visit an antique firearms collection. Jeffords had given him phone numbers so he could arrange to drop off the incriminating package once he got hold of it, and then he was completely and totally out from under. Not bad.

  Humming, which he did badly because he had very little practice at it, Meehan got out of bed and went over to raise the venetian blind and look out at a sunny day. Of course it was a sunny day, they were all going to be sunny days from now on. Soon he would shower and have his breakfast and be on his way, loose as a goose.

  Gazing out at the clipped lawns of this Park Service enclave, little people in olive drab uniforms moving this way and that like an animated model for the real thing, Meehan made himself slow down, slow down, and forced himself to think. Didn't one of the ten thousand rules cover this situation?

  Yeah; don't count your chickens.

  After breakfast in the cafeteria, Jeffords took Meehan away for what he called a “briefing,” telling Elaine Goldfarb, “We'll just be a few minutes, and then we'll head for the airport.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I'll have another coffee.”

  Bruce Benjamin wasn't around today, so it was just Jeffords and Meehan in the seating segment of the big office, where Jeffords produced a road map of Massachusetts, a small notepad, and a pen. Giving all these of Meehan, he said, “You should write it down, so it's just your handwriting.”

  “Right.”

  “The man's name is Burnstone.”

  “I knew that,” Meehan said.

  “You don't know his first name, or his address.”

  “Fine.” Meehan poised pen over pad.

  Jeffords said, “His name is Clendon Burnstone the Fourth.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The address is Burnstone Trail, Ashley Falls.”

  Meehan looked at, but didn't unfold the map. “Where's Ashley Falls?”

  “Southwest corner of the state, near both Connecticut and New York. Burnstone doesn't actually live in Ashley Falls, but on an estate near it.” Taking a folded slip of paper from his shirt pocket, he read, “Route Seven-A north, left on Spring Road, left on Burnstone Trail.”

  Meehan wrote, then stopped. “That's it? No pictures of the house, floor layouts?”

  “We're leaving that to the professional,” Jeffords said.

  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 dangero
us, 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

  NO 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 whats
er-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

  TWO-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.