Run.
“You’re not what I expected,” I said.
“What did you expect?”
“Someone harder, someone proud of her own slick cleverness.”
“I’m not proud of myself for this, Mr. Herbert.”
“Okay.”
“This is not anything that I ever wanted to be doing,” she said, twisting one rough red hand in the other. “But when the agency called and gave me the number, and then I found out whose number it was, the idea just came. Desperation, it does things to a person. It’s like a disease. It spins you around until you can’t tell right from wrong, and even if you could, you don’t much care.”
“And here we are.”
“Yes.” She looked around nervously and spotted the waitress bringing her drink, bright and fruity and totally out of place in that hard joint. When it was placed before her, she spun it on its coaster before she took a sip. She tried to fight a smile and failed. She hadn’t had enough mai tais in her life, that was clear.
“Tell me about yourself,” I said.
“Is this part of it? Is this the way it works?”
“It’s the way it works with me.”
Everyone has a lesson to teach if you just listen, and Jessica Barnes was trying to teach me the last lesson of her life. But as usual, I was too wrapped up in my own damn self to catch it full. And what was I thinking about, just then, as she hesitated and meandered before getting to the spoiled meat of her sad story? What emotion had suddenly wrapped itself around my shriveled little heart? A strange and perverse sense of possibility.
“It wasn’t pancakes and roses even before Matthew lost his job,” she said, eyes focused on her drink, “but at least we could keep her fed and pay for the medicine. But when they closed out Matthew’s shop, the unemployment wasn’t enough to make a go of it, and when that ran out, what with them cutting back on my factory job, we were good as dead.”
“What kind of medicine are we talking about?”
“My daughter has a liver thing, something about too much copper. Dr. Patusan says she can’t eat mushrooms or dried fruit, chocolate, shrimp. She’s covered by the state, but the insurance only pays for a piece of the medicine even when we cut back. I don’t get benefits, and the COBRA for Matthew was too high.”
“Has your husband found any work?” I asked.
“It’s not like he hasn’t tried. They just aren’t hiring men who can do what he can do.”
“Has he tried retraining? Has he looked into programs at the community college?”
“Matthew is a good man, Mr. Herbert, and he wants to do right. But it gets hard even getting up every day with that knot in your gut. And then you drink to ease it just for a bit, until the only thing that gets you out of bed is the easing you’re going to get with that first drink. So you can ask the questions everyone asks and blame him if you want, but I don’t. I see the hurt in him. It’s these times. It drives us to things. Which is why we’re here, I suppose.”
“Yes, it’s why we are here,” I said.
“I brought the proof like I said I would.” She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a sealed dull-brown envelope the size of a greeting card. She looked both ways, like a kid about to cross a street, before she handed it to me. It was light but not empty; there was something thin inside, a photograph maybe. I could imagine all the twisting of phallus and limbs that the picture would show. It hurt her to pass it on, and I decided I didn’t need to look.
“Does anyone else have a copy?” I said.
“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Herbert.”
“An honest blackmailer.”
“Please don’t.”
“Okay. You’re right.”
“I don’t really want to say anything.”
“I can tell that.”
“And I’ve got nothing against him. You can let him know that, the Congressman. He gave me a gift and I’m ever grateful. But the times, they force you to do what you need to do. Maybe you’re too lucky to ever know about that, Mr. Herbert, and then good for you. But here I am, trading on the one thing I have left, feeling ashamed and relieved at the same time. I guess I’ll learn the price of it after all’s said and done.”
I tapped the envelope on the tabletop. “How much do you want, Mrs. Barnes, to keep your secret?”
“It’s hard to say. Just enough to get by.” Her mouth tightened, her jaw jutted slightly. “Ten. Ten for now, maybe.”
This was the moment I had trained for, in school and in my practice. You can sense weakness in a person, sense the way a tiny bit of pressure here or there can change the contours of an entire deal. One thing lawyers can spot a mile away, in addition to an ambulance or a hundred-dollar bill on the ground, is weakness. I had the proof in my hand and the money in my bag. This was my moment, why the Congressman had called on my talents in the first place. Jump the weakness, win the day.
“Ten?” I said.
“Ten would get us through to the next year.”
“And after that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you’d be coming back for more, I assume.”
“I don’t want to, Mr. Herbert. Maybe things will turn around.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but that’s a hard word to use when planning the future. Maybe the lottery will hit, or maybe a meteor, or maybe life will just go on like it’s been going on. Let me ask you, Jessica, and think carefully now. Would twenty be better than ten?”
Her head tilted in confusion. “I guess.”
“Then maybe you should ask for thirty. How long would thirty last you and your family?”
“I don’t know. I do earn some. And we could take out another loan if property values rise.”
“And maybe with thirty, your husband could find it in himself to get to a school. Learn something technical.”
“He’s always talking about HVAC.”
“He could find a place to get a certificate in HVAC. Use some for tuition and take out a loan for the rest. One thing we always need is air-conditioning.”
“I don’t know.”
“If he can wake up in the morning with possibilities, he might be able to do something more than drink.”
“Maybe, Mr. Herbert, maybe. Thirty would do it, yes.”
I told you she was pretty, and young, and I admit to being a sucker for the young and the pretty. And there was something about that dress, the primness of it, and those shoes, that struck a chord, like she had dressed for church. And, yes, there was an attractive weakness in her, a softness at the core, that made me want to take raw advantage. But not advantage of her.
“Then let’s say fifty,” I said. “Will that do it?”
“Mr. Herbert?”
“Fifty it is.”
I opened the bag, tossed in the proof, and then reached an arm into the bag’s now-gaping jaw. Within the protection of the leather, I picked up one, two, five stacks of hundreds and put them one by one into a plain manila envelope. I folded the envelope around the stacks, pulled off the strip, and sealed the envelope into one sharp, compact package that I placed gently on the marble tabletop.
She leaned back, her arms crossed now, her wary eyes ever warier. “And what do I have to do to get all this, Mr. Herbert? What are you going to demand of me?”
“Only this,” I said, leaning forward, smiling like a shark as I pushed the envelope toward her. “Go home and take care of your family. Buy your daughter her medicine, get your husband back to school, find yourself a job with benefits.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“And the Congressman?”
“Don’t call him again, and don’t spill the beans you were about to spill. Not even to me. This blackmail thing is not the racket for you, Jessica. What would happen to your family if I was wearing a wire? What would happen
to your daughter if you ended up in jail? This time you ran into me; next time who knows. I’ll keep the proof to keep you safe. You take the money and go home and make your life better. You’re too damn good for this.”
“Mr. Herbert, I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything, to anybody,” I said. “Ever.”
She reached out one of those worked-to-the-bone hands and placed it atop mine, and for a moment there was something in her eye other than wariness. Then the envelope disappeared into her own big brown bag and she was gone. And I sipped my Scotch in satisfaction.
And that was what the sense of possibility I had felt before was all about. Here I was taking cash from a perverted old biddy who thought the world owed her its adulation because she had married some loaded bastard who liked his stuff rough. And here I was giving it to pretty Jessica Barnes, with the scaly red hands and the sick daughter. This wasn’t any longer a blackmailing payoff to save DeMathis’s career; this was a simple redistribution of wealth from the rich to the needy, and I was Robin Hood. Here I was, finally on the side of the angels. Who could ever have imagined such an improbable thing?
With a bag full of money, what couldn’t I achieve?
The satisfaction was destined to drown in my throat a few hours later, but it lived in that young moment. I finished my drink, and left a tip, and left the bar, and took a shower, and put on the tuxedo Timothy had sold me a few days before, and slipped on my patent-leather slippers. And with a whistle on my lips and a song in my heart I headed out to find my rightful place in the political world at the Governor’s Ball.
And all the while Jessica Barnes was headed for . . . Yeah, right. So much for my pallid dreams of Robin Hood. “What exactly are you?” Sloane would ask me at Jessica’s murder scene that very night. I could imagine myself a hundred ways of noble, but the answer was there for anyone willing to see it plain.
You know what a bagman is. He’s the scurvy errand boy for some corrupt fat-faced pol. Quiet as a cat, he lugs his bag full of black cash and dirty tricks through the city night, bringing in teetering stacks of crisp bills from those lusting to do business with power, and later passing out those same crisp bills as street money to grease the electoral wheel. He is a dark, malevolent figure in a shady fedora and long leather jacket, and when he whispers in your ear you shiver, because he holds the shiv of his boss’s clout at your throat.
I was a bareheaded lawyer, a credentialed member of the bar, lank and weedy and as threatening as a chipmunk. I was nothing like I imagined a bagman to be. But hadn’t I become an errand boy for some power-mad congressman? And hadn’t I agreed to get the goods on that congressman’s next opponent? And hadn’t I indeed carried illicit cash through the city streets in a brown leather satchel? I could frame it any way I chose, pretty it up with flowers and bows, deny it to an army of reporters, but that didn’t change the truth of things. I had fallen face-first into the worst of all rackets.
Call me bagman.
CHAPTER 15
COVER BOY
The morning after the trauma of the Governor’s Ball, still shaken from the blood and the death, I emerged from my office stairwell to find my waiting room stuffed full as a Thanksgiving turkey. It is hard to express the strangeness of such an occurrence. In the last year, physics students from Drexel University had taken to using my waiting room to examine the peculiar properties of a vacuum. And yet there they were, filling my chairs and leaning against my walls, the washed and unwashed alike, men in suits, women with scraggly teeth, young and old, the haggard, as well as slicks in Haggar slacks, all waiting for a chance to speak to . . . to . . .
“Mr. Carl, do you have a moment to . . . ?”
“Mr. Carl? Can I perhaps . . . ?”
“Before you go, Mr. Carl . . .”
I lifted a hand to quiet the calls as I edged my way through the throng. My secretary, Ellie, sitting at the desk that guarded the route to my office, stopped her typing, looked up, and gave me a happy smile. Pretty and young, with a wide freckled face, my secretary normally read romance novels to while away the hours when I didn’t have enough work to keep her busy, which was most of the time. But she was sitting tall at her desk when I came into the office that morning, tap-tapping on the computer keyboard, giving the fraudulent appearance to those in the waiting room that my practice was thriving. She was a gem, that Ellie.
“What are they doing here?” I said softly.
“They came for you, Mr. Carl.”
“Me? Why?”
“Because of the paper.”
“Paper?”
“I tried to call you.”
“It was a tough night,” I said. “I turned off my phone.”
“Then you didn’t see the Daily News?”
“No.”
She reached into a drawer, pulled out the tabloid, dropped it onto the desk. Staring up at me from the front page was a smarmy man in a tux stooping beneath yellow police tape. His face, washed pale by the flash, looked up with an expression of unadulterated guilt. SHOELESS JOAN blared the headline, and then, beneath the pale, guilty face, the subheading BAGMAN SNAGGED IN MURDER WEB. When I realized the smarm staring up with a face full of guilt was me, I quickly turned the paper over.
“What do they all want? Are they here in protest?”
“No, Mr. Carl, they’re here to hire you.”
“Hire me?”
“I’ve made a list of the order they arrived and gave them client intake forms. I’m creating file folders for each of them.”
“Thank you, Ellie,” I said. “Just give me a minute before you send anyone in.”
I snatched the newspaper off the desk, fled to my office, shut the door behind me. The article was short—the Daily News is not known for its in-depth reporting. Under the byline of Harvey Sloane, it offered some fuzzy facts about the murder, relayed a statement from McDeiss that described the victim’s condition and the missing shoes without giving a name, and then got to the meat of it, as far as I was concerned.
Victor Carl, an attorney and reputed bagman for a powerful local politician, was brought to the scene by a detective and two uniformed officers to aid in the identification of the victim. Carl made no statement other than threatening this reporter’s life and limb. He did leave, however, the contents of his stomach at the crime scene. McDeiss stated only that Carl was a person of interest in the investigation.
I snapped the paper closed, rolled it tight, stuck it in a drawer. How nice of Sloane to include that bit about my weak stomach, and how nice of McDeiss to rope me in as a person of interest. We all know what a person of interest is: he’s the guy they intend to arrest right after their appointment at the nail salon.
Could I be in a finer mess?
Just then, with my stomach still roiled from the sight of poor Jessica Barnes, I wasn’t in any state to deal with all these people in my waiting room. I would have to send them away; I needed time to plan things out. I put my head in my hands and drew a deep breath to settle my nerves when there was a knock.
“What?” I said.
The man who came through the door was in his thirties, quite short, squat, and poorly shaven, carrying a paper lunch bag and a blue file. He swung around with surprising grace as he closed the door.
“The lady at the desk—pretty damn cute, I might add, well done—she said I should give this to you.”
He tossed the blue file onto my desk before he hopped into one of the client chairs.
I opened the file. Inside was one of our client intake forms, filled out with a name, Anthony Pelozzo, a South Philly address, two phone numbers, and a work location listed as Pelozzo Meats. Under “referral attorney” he had simply written “The Daily News.”
“So, Mr. Pelozzo is it?”
“Call me Guy.”
“Guy, then. How can I help you today, Guy? You left the space for your
legal issue blank.”
“Oh, I got an issue. Issues, actually. First, can I get personal for a moment? Your secretary . . . She’s kind of . . . I was wondering . . .”
“No,” I said.
“Okay, good. No offense meant. I’m just recently divorced and it’s been a long time since I been looking and, I got to tell you, it’s like a Golden Corral out there. You know how it is.”
“I know how it is. So, your issue, is it matrimonial?”
“What, the divorce? Nah, that was easy. Her attorney took care of it for us both. Saved a hell of a lot in legal fees. She got everything and I got out, so in the end we both got what we wanted. Now my best friend is stuck with her, the sap. This is like a different thing. I saw your picture in the paper and I suddenly thought that maybe you could help me out here.”
“Go ahead.”
He took the lunch bag off his lap and placed it on the desk. This was not a new and shiny bag, this was old and wrinkled and well stained, like it had been carrying ham-and-cheese for six months straight. He shoved it toward me; I backed away as if it held a ripe piece of Limburger.
“What’s the matter?” said Pelozzo.
“Is that your lunch?”
“Are you trying to be funny? It’s my issue. Look inside.”
“Do I have to?”
“What kind of operation you running here?”
“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “Courage above all.”
I took hold of the bag, opened it slightly, peeked inside. No moldy lunch, just stacks of paper slips. I pulled one out. A parking ticket for a Chevy Impala. I took out another, and then another.
“To be truthful,” he said, “I don’t got no explanation or excuse, they just keep piling up.”
“That happens when you park illegally.”
“How the hell can you not in this town? The only legal place anymore is the middle of Broad Street and they’ll be ticketing that next. And the meter maids they got working, my God, what a bunch of vultures.”
“How much are we talking about?”
“Including late fees and penalties?”
“The whole ball of wax.”
Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) Page 9