“Someone like me?” I said, my umbrage antennae bristling. “And what exactly is that?”
“A fool with a bag,” said Maud.
“I tell you, he’s okay,” said Stony.
“He’s a lunkhead,” said Miles. “I know a lunkhead when I see one and he’s a lunkhead. No offense.”
“Offense taken,” I said.
“Let me get this right, just so we’re clear,” said Maud. “Out of nowhere, you show up with some overpriced bag and a single client, and you think you’re a member of the club. But already after only a week on the job, one of your payoffs is dead, you’re in the middle of a murder investigation, your picture’s on the front page of the paper, and then you get your home invaded and your apartment trashed and your salad eaten and your own numbskull knocked unconscious.”
“How do you know about that?”
“I cover the Roundhouse,” said Stony.
“You called the police,” said Miles, shaking his head.
“I didn’t,” I said. “A neighbor or somebody did.”
“Does it matter?” said Maud. “There’s always a fed trying to make his bones by making an example of us, and here you come, waltzing down our street, whistling like an idiot. You don’t know our rules, you don’t know our game. You’re just a fool with a bag.”
“We’re better off with you not around,” said Hump.
“Consider this a polite warning,” said Maud.
“You call this polite?” I said.
“Just know that next time we won’t be so well mannered,” said Miles.
“So that’s that,” I said.
“That’s that,” said Maud. “From here on in, know that it will be safer for all of us—”
“Especially for you,” said Miles.
“—if you leave the bags to those who know how to carry them.”
Hump spun the knife in his fingers until it flipped down and stuck straight through the tablecloth into the wood with a solid thwack.
“Sayonara, lunkhead,” said Miles Schimmeck. “It was a pleasure not knowing you.”
So much for brotherhood.
“You don’t look upset,” said Maud, an interested tilt to her head. “You don’t even look surprised.”
“What did Stony call you? The Order of the Sazerac? The Club of Kings? The Brotherhood?”
Hump pulled the knife out of the table, slapped it closed, slipped it back into his jacket. “Briggs always liked his fancy names.”
“So you’re rejecting me. Big stinking deal.” I looked around at the four of them. “I’ve been rejected by better, though I don’t think I’ve ever been rejected by worse, and I’m counting here the chess club in high school. I came here because Stony invited me. I thought I’d get a little companionship, a little advice, maybe a chance to learn from your experience. But when I look around, I figure I’d be better off getting advice from the hookers on Spring Garden. At least they smile when they screw you.”
“Anyone want another drink?” said Stony.
“Can’t,” said Miles Schimmeck. He looked at his watch, snatched up the last of his Sazerac, grabbed his hat, a large-brimmed checkered thing. “I’m due in Municipal Court.”
“And we have that thing,” said Maud to Hump.
“That’s right,” said Hump, snapping down the rest of his drink, grabbing his own hat, short-rimmed and black. “That thing.”
“Another drink for you, Victor?” said Stony.
“I think I’ve had enough.”
“Stinking lightweights, all of you,” said Stony. “When my father was around, we would close this place, and head out to the street roaring.” Stony downed the rest of his drink, lifted his hand, snapped for the barkeep’s attention, raised one finger.
“Don’t take it so hard, Victor,” said Maud. “We’re not much on companionship, and our experience is too hard earned to give it away on a piss and a string. But you want some advice?”
“Not anymore.”
“Here it is anyway. Duck.”
After the others had laughed and left, I moved to sit across the table from Stony as he finished his drink.
“They’ll come around,” he said.
“Fuck ’em.”
“They just get so damn territorial. But my father always told me, he said, ‘Son, you keep reaching out a hand, no telling whose pecker you’ll end up grabbing hold of.’ I spoke to Schimmeck about them tickets in the bag you gave me. Four thousand.”
“That’s pretty steep.”
“Stop the presses: greedy judges.”
“Does the figure include your cut?”
“Let me tell you how it’s played down here, Victor. No one wants to know the details. Thanks, Aubrey,” he said when the barman brought over his next drink. Stony waited for him to leave before lowering his voice. “If there’s a deal to be made, you just give the price. Flat. Your cut’s part of that price, and you don’t never tell a soul what it is. Now Schimmeck, he talked it over with his boys at Traffic Court and gave me a price. He doesn’t even know it’s for you. I’m taking that price and giving you a different price. That’s all you get. What you do with that is your choice, take it or leave it—I don’t give a crap.” Stony lit a cigarette. “Word is you’re taking a hard look at Bettenhauser.”
“Is that the word?”
“The political world may be a sewer, but it’s our sewer. I’m just saying, if you’re looking at a guy, I do that.”
“You do that?”
“Among other things. You need to remodel your bathroom, give me a call. You need business cards, I can get you a thousand for twenty bucks. You need a cop in your pocket, I got a pocketful. And, yeah, I can follow a husband and take pictures of him ramming his secretary in the Alimony Arms Motel. I took a course. Private investigations for fun and profit. Saw the ad for it on the inside of a matchbook. My daddy always said, ‘Don’t put all your eggs up one chicken’s ass.’ ”
“How much for the full whammy?”
“You talking bathroom or investigation?”
“Investigation.”
“Whatever I’d charge, it won’t be enough.” He lifted the drink, downed it like it was a lowball of iced tea, and slammed the glass back on the table. “But I can’t do anything without the okay from the rest of ’em. And they’re not wrong. I mean, what do you know about the business? Nothing. You don’t even know the most basic of my father’s rules, the Briggs Mulroney Rules for Aspiring Bagmen. Sometime I’ll elucidate them for you, but not right now. Right now I’ve got me an appointment.” He gave his bag a pat. “Someone’s got to keep this damn city running.”
I didn’t watch him go, I just sat and stared at my glass as I swirled the remaining liquor, the twist of lemon peel floundering at the bottom. I had fallen into something, whether rich or deadly I couldn’t quite figure, but something all right. And for good or for ill, it looked like Stony Mulroney was all I had to serve as my Virgil. And every level was proving more venal than the next, which was just the way I liked it.
I looked up and there was the barman in his plaid vest, Aubrey, bringing me something on a tray. At first I thought I would have to wave off another drink, but there was no glass on the tray, only a small leather folder.
Those sons of bitches, first they cut me and then they stuck me with the check. Somehow it only made me smile.
CHAPTER 22
BOOTY CALL
There was a cop car sitting outside Rosen’s when I hiked out the entrance with my bag. The cruiser was idling at the curb, and the sirens rose within me even before the car’s front door opened and a uniform stepped out calling my name.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You cannot be serious.”
“Serious as scabies, Mr. Carl,” said my old friend Officer Boot, as short and squat as an artichoke.
“What did I do n
ow?”
“Knowing that is above my pay grade.”
“McDeiss again?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you have something more important to do, Boot, than ferrying me to some overweight, undersexed detective?”
“I wouldn’t call Detective McDeiss overweight,” she said, “at least not to his face.”
“Tell him I’m busy.”
“No, sir.”
“Tell him I have an important meeting that I simply cannot miss.”
“No, sir.”
“You’re more afraid of him than I am.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how the hell did he know I was here?”
“You’ll have to ask him that yourself.” Boot leaned over and opened the rear door of the car.
“Don’t you have to cuff me or something?” I said.
“If you insist.”
“And you’d like that, too, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d prefer a muzzle.”
“I ought to sue someone.”
“How about whoever sold you that tie?”
Boot drove me down to the Roundhouse, kindly escorted me to a bathroom, where I peed while she stood guard outside, and then brought me to a sickly green interrogation room, where she locked me inside. I put my bag on the table and started pacing. This was a violation of some sort of constitutional protection, I was sure, but just then I was fretting too much to figure out which. Something had gone wrong, something had gone kaboom, and I needed to know what it was so that I could duck away before a wide chunk of hurtling cement took off my face.
I waited for a bit, and a bit longer, and when I grew tired of waiting, I stepped to the mirror and starting picking my teeth with a fingernail. Such a lovely sight, it even made me sick to see it. It was but a moment later that McDeiss and Armbruster walked into the room.
“Did you have me followed?”
“No,” said Detective Armbruster, who crossed his arms and leaned against the wall beside the door.
“If I’m not being followed, then how did you know I was at Rosen’s?”
“Maybe you’re not the one we were following,” said Armbruster. “Can we look in your bag?”
“Not on your life.”
“Then maybe we’ll just have to get a warrant.”
“On what grounds?”
“On your refusal to let us search your bag.”
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The Fourth Amendment weeping.”
McDeiss tossed a file onto the table, pulled out one of the hard metal chairs, and scraped it loudly on the floor before sitting, clasping his hands together, and leaning forward. This was his sincere pose; I had seen it before. McDeiss doing sincere looked like a constipated car salesman on the pot.
“Sit down,” said McDeiss.
“I’m fine.”
“Sit the hell down.”
I sat down.
“I brought you here, Carl, to give you an opportunity to climb out from under the muck.”
“Out of the goodness of your heart.”
“I advise you to take advantage of it.”
“We received a report of a violent home invasion in Center City, called in anonymously from a pay phone,” said Armbruster. “And imagine our shock when we saw the home that was violently invaded was yours. What happened?”
“They took money and crapped up the place.”
“And knocked you cold while doing it.”
“Are you okay?” said McDeiss.
“Are you concerned for my health and welfare?”
“No.”
“Then I’m okay.”
“You need to be careful here, Carl.”
“I’m trying.”
Armbruster pushed himself off the wall, stepped to the table, leaned forward, and placed his knuckles on the tabletop. “Not if you’re suddenly palling around with one Mulwood Mulroney.”
“Mulwood?”
“The fat tub of lard who prowls the alleys behind our divisions with a bag of treats for dirty cops provided by bookies and drug dealers and corrupt pols. There isn’t a soul he wouldn’t sell out for a nickel and a half, and yet there you are, swapping drinks with him and his pals at a dump like Rosen’s.”
“I’ll have you know Rosen’s happens to be quite the venerable institution.”
“You’re up to your neck, Carl,” said Armbruster. “You’re mixing with foul company, and you’re obstructing a murder investigation.”
“I guess I’m on a roll,” I said. “Is that all?” I looked at one and then the other. “Am I free to go?”
McDeiss stared at me for a moment, something unkind in his eyes, and then opened the file in front of him. “We know that Jessica Barnes was blackmailing Congressman DeMathis,” he said. “And we know you paid her off with money you personally picked up from one Connie Devereaux out in Devon.”
Like I had been slapped. All the secrets I had been trying to keep from McDeiss had just poured out of his mouth like a half-digested hot dog from a drunken frat boy. Someone had spilled the beans on my lucrative and underhanded political enterprise. I riffled through all the possibilities like a deck of cards, until I came up with an answer that clenched my teeth in hate.
Reginald, that mealymouthed fake-Brit son of a bitch.
“What we need from you,” said Armbruster, “is the what. What was she blackmailing the Congressman with?”
“The way we see it,” said McDeiss, “there are two possible motives for the Jessica Barnes murder. One is that this was a simple robbery, which is still the most likely. Someone saw you give her the money, followed her from the rendezvous, and cashed her in. But see, that’s a hard thing to pin down. We can’t check the pawnshops for specific merchandise as if it were diamonds that were stolen, or a luxury watch.”
“And the other motive?”
“Something to do with the secret this Jessica Barnes was holding,” said Armbruster. “Blackmail is a tough game; there is always the urge just to end the threat. If we knew what she was threatening to expose, we could figure who might have determined it was safer to kill her than to keep on paying.”
“And you’re looking there because the light’s better.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m not saying who or what was involved, or even if your blackmail theory is correct, but if I told you I didn’t know her secret, would you believe me?”
“No.”
“Well, there we are.”
“How much cash did you give her?” said McDeiss.
I didn’t say anything.
“We’re talking to Congressman DeMathis next week,” said Armbruster. “He’ll be lawyered to the max, out to protect his hide at any cost. If he tells us something that you know and that is not privileged, we’re going to pick you up on obstruction. It’s tough to run a law business from a jail cell.”
“Isn’t one of you supposed to be the good cop?”
“How much did you give her?” said McDeiss.
“Enough to get her killed twice over,” I said.
“It must have been a hell of a secret she was carrying.”
I thought about the card and the dark swath of maroon that could only be blood. McDeiss was right; there must have been a hell of a secret in that blood to incite a murder, but I still had no idea what the secret was or to whom it so mattered.
“If there is a secret,” I said, “I don’t know it. I gave her what I gave her because she needed the money.”
“I bet that made you feel good.”
“Until I saw her corpse.”
“And what did she give you?” said McDeiss.
Another slap. “What makes you think she gave me anything?”
“Because we’re not blind,�
�� said Armbruster. “Our murder victim’s body had been searched, as if the killer was looking for something beyond the cash. And you’re too low-rent for anyone to want to rob you for your money, so we figure they came to your apartment to find the very same thing. They take anything not in the police report?”
“No.”
McDeiss slipped a sheet of paper from the file and offered up a pen. “Do us a favor and write your phone number.”
“You know my phone number.”
“Just write it.”
As McDeiss stared and Armbruster leaned his face in closer to mine, I wrote.
“I’d say you’re smarter than you’re acting, but then again you’d have to be,” said McDeiss as he put the paper with my handwritten number back in the file. “You asked before how we knew to call you in for an identification of our murder victim. It wasn’t too hard because your phone number was scrawled on the envelope we found at the scene, the envelope that held the cash they stole.”
I lowered my jaw, letting my face go slack. It’s a courtroom lawyer’s trick. In the course of every trial, something will go desperately wrong. The crucial trick, when every gesture is scrutinized by that omnivorous creature with twenty-four eyes, is to make it seem as if nothing untoward had happened at all. As if that devastating piece of evidence that skewered your case were no more devastating than a fruit fly. So when McDeiss told me about my number being scrawled on the envelope they had found on the dead Jessica Barnes, I didn’t react with surprise or fear. Instead, my face went slack as old meat.
And I would have pulled it off, too, if not for an involuntary twitch of the eye.
“That’s right,” said McDeiss. “Now you see it.”
CHAPTER 23
HAMMER TIME
I tried to keep myself under control for as long as they might be watching from their upper-floor window. I tried to walk away from police headquarters with a calm and confident step. But there is only so much acting a man can do when he is falling into a pit.
From the very first, I had been chained to the Jessica Barnes crime scene; her blood had not even stopped flowing when they started setting me up for her murder. That it wasn’t my handwriting on the envelope wouldn’t mean a jot, the link itself was enough to wrap the crime around my neck. I wasn’t just a bagman, I was a fall guy too. That crowd at Rosen’s had been right to cut me off at the knees. I was nothing but a fool with a bag.
Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) Page 13