Pleading Guilty kc-3

by Scott Turow

  Looking back, I suppose it's sort of funny that we'd all been so willing to believe Jake was a thief. That slippery side of him must be out there for everybody to see — which was why we were still hanging in doubt. Isn't that life? Seeing it, hearing it — how much is there we don't really understand? Caught in our own foxholes, we never see the battlefield scene. I had wanted to believe they were no better than me. All of them. But we think what we do for a reason. Call me a fool or the victim of my own expectations. The one guy I wasn't wrong about was me.

  'I believe him,' I said. And I did. Not because Jake was too honest to steal. God knows, he wasn't. It was the story he'd told. About Neucriss. It wouldn't come to Jake in one thousand years. Not in REM sleep. Tad had it right. Jake always took the easy way out. If Jake was going to need phony cover, he'd find some fall guy, some flunky. Somebody like me.

  'I believe him,' I said again, then added, 'assuming there's no problem getting the money back.'

  'No, no,' said Krzysinski. 'He and Mathigoris ran off an hour ago to send a fax to the bank. Mathigoris has been standing by the machine waiting for a confirmation. Wait, here he is now.'

  There he was, Mike Mathigoris, security chief, nice-looking, right-in-the-middle kind of guy, former vice-commander of the State Police, out after twenty and in a great job here, fending off future skyjackings, ticket frauds, travel agents with commission schemes. I'd worked with him a lot before Jake let my well run dry. He handed the papers he was carrying to Tad without any ceremony. Tad read them and started to fume.

  'Son of a bitch,' he said. 'Son of a bitch.'

  Brushy, in her vaguely familiar manner with Krzysinski, stood to read over his shoulder. Soon the documents were passing among the rest of us. The first page was a fax cover sheet from the International Bank of Finance NA, Pico Luan, with the following message at its foot:

  Account closed, January 30, per attached

  letter of direction.

  Best wishes,

  Salem George

  The letter I'd faxed over on Monday from the Regency was attached. When I looked at the signature, I admit I smiled. Handwriting analysts can't work with a copy. And I'd fool them anyway. Brushy, it turned out, was watching me, something solid, maybe even fatal, in her eye. She mouthed: 'Why are you having such a good time?'

  'It's ironic,' I said aloud and turned away.

  Pagnucci was reading now, looking quite smug. He made little pontifical sounds but might just as well have said, Told you so.

  'What in the hell is Jake up to?' asked Tad. He had said this already a couple of times and nobody had replied.

  'He's running,' I answered. 'He put together this story about Neucriss to buy himself time. Now he's headed for the hills. And the money.'

  'Oh Christ,' said Krzysinski. 'And I let him out of here. Oh Christ! Let's go. Let's get the police.' Krzysinski was waving at Mathigoris.

  Wash had turned to wood right in front of me. He was dead as a stump.

  'Who do we call?' Tad asked.

  'Mack has friends on the police force,' Martin volunteered at once from across the room. 'He just had one in the office before.'

  'Wrong guy,' I said immediately. 'Not for this case.'

  'Who's that?' Mike asked me.

  'A dick named Dimonte.'

  'Gino?' asked Mike. 'Tough cop. He's working Financials now. He'd be fine.'

  In desperation I looked to Brushy, but she'd turned away.

  'Don't you think the Bureau would be better with an international case?' I asked Mathigoris. He was indifferent.

  'This guy's idea of investigative technique is to scare you to death,' I told Tad.

  'That sounds like just what Jake deserves. Call him. Go,' Tad said to me. 'Quickly, please. Jake can't get away. We'll move from bad to worse.'

  Because the conference room was in use, I ended up in a little phone closet off the TN reception area, where there was a colonial print of a woman in a Dutch collar, a poor cousin of Rembrandt. This was a kind of in-house phone booth, designed for visitors, a place they could take a call from their office in privacy. There was a small bowl of potpourri that sweetened the tight air. I considered the alternatives. I had none. 'I couldn't get through' is not a credible excuse on a call to the police. 'I called him' wouldn't work, because when he didn't show up, somebody would just call him again.

  'Gino,' I said. I tried to be upbeat and bright. 'When you hear this one, you're gonna love me.'

  'In another life,' he answered at once.

  I told him the story. If he ran quick, he could get Jake at home. I gave him the address. Jake of course would be sitting there. Like some beaten hound. Right by the phone, as he promised. Maybe he'd called a lawyer. Or his dad. But he'd be there. I'd have paid some money to see the look on his face when Pigeyes grabbed him. God, I thought. God, I hated Jake.

  'You won't need another collar before you retire,' I told Pigeyes.

  'I just want you to know,' Gino said when I finished, 'I didn't buy one word of that.' I had no idea what to say.

  'Not one fucking word. I don't want you going home and laughing in your beer tonight, or whatever you drink now. Postum. I knew that whole routine was a crock.

  About these three guys all doing the bunny hop.' He was talking about what I'd said when he'd come to the office, the tale I told about Bert and Archie and the could-be-Kam from the U. This was mano a mano, him to me. He wanted me to know I hadn't gotten the best of him after all.

  'It's all wrong,' Pigeyes told me. 'How?'

  'Archie ain't bent, for one thing.'

  'You're the one who told me, Pigeyes. About Archie. Rocket up his ass? Remember?'

  'No. You told me. I said, What if. I said, Give, and you said, Has this guy got an elastic asshole? and I said, What if. This mutt Archie, I know the story of his life and his mother's life. He's straight. He don't got nothing but dingleberries back there, same as you and me. So it's a crock. That whole routine. Just so you know.'

  Just so I knew. The other one, his young bootlicker, Dewey, he was taken in. Not Gino.

  'I'm not following.'

  'What else is new?'

  'Are we done here or what?' I asked.

  'Are we done, you and me done, is that what we're asking?'

  'I mean Bert.'

  'Fuck 'em.'

  Nothing but fuzz on my screen. I did not understand. Which was just what he wanted.

  'So what is this? Favor done, favor owed?' I thought maybe with the big collar on Jake, he was calling the score even.

  He laughed, he roared. There was a phenomenal clanking wallop in my ear when he banged the phone on something hard.

  'You done me enough favors. When you're miserable in hell, suffering your sins and thinking it can't get no worse, you look behind you and I'll be there. Payback time with me and you ain't gonna end, Malloy. Just so you know. I'm telling you, you're dirty somewhere. I said that from the git-go and I still say so. You're covering your ass, same as you were doing with Goodlookin. So stay tuned. Same time. Same fuckin station.' He slammed the phone again and this time it went dead. Maybe he'd hung up. Maybe he'd broken it.

  But he'd done what he wanted. I sat in that tight little space and broke a sweat. This time I was really scared.

  B. Closing the Circle

  In the elevator, on the way down, Martin announced his resignation. I suppose he was forewarning Wash and Pagnucci. He seemed to regard his statement as dramatic, but it fell flat. This group had already been through too much, and as Martin had acknowledged before, there was not much left now to resign from. Brushy, a good kid to the last, started to talk to him anyway about changing his mind.

  When the elevator doors parted, back on 37, Bert was standing there. He was dressed in supposed formal wear — a leather coat as a dinner jacket and four days' growth. He looked like a rock star. I guess Orleans was picking his clothes. He remained in the elevator doorway confronting us all in an auspicious posture, sneaking a glance to see who was inside. A lot had
gone on since we'd last seen him here, and there was an instant so still it could have been suspended animation.

  Martin, in particular, seemed undone by the sight of Bert, finally bereft of all his survivor's aplomb, that intense belief in his own powers which ordinarily sustains him. He stared a bit, then shook his head. Finally, he took note of the last diamond stud, still in his fingers. He seemed to weigh it. I think he had some impulse to throw it again, but in the end he simply paused to insert it in his shirt.

  'Well,' he said presently, 'some of us have an appointment at the Club Belvedere.' It was time to worry about the future. For the person of importance, the moment never waits. Martin was going to read the firm its epitaph. He was good at that kind of thing. When we'd buried Leotis Griswell last year, Martin had made the eulogy, the usual funeral folderol, stuff he did not fully believe about how Leotis was a lawyer's lawyer who knew that the law in the end is not a business but is about values, about the kinds of judgments that were not meant to be bought and sold. The law, as Leotis saw it, said Martin, is a reflection of our common will, meant to regulate society and commerce, and not vice versa. God knows what Martin would tell the partners tonight. Maybe just goodbye.

  Wash, Carl, Brushy all followed him, going off to get their coats. I tarried with Bert but gave Brushy a palsy little wink as she departed. She responded with a blistering look over her bare shoulder, the motive for which eluded me entirely. Here we go again. Fuck did I do? She said, coolly, that she had a call to make and would wait in her office to walk over with me.

  Standing with Bert, I could tell he was shook up to be back. He was near the windows behind the receptionist's desk, facing the glass where his reflection loomed, vague and incomplete, like an image on water. He looked bleak.

  'I wish I'd done it,' he said to me, out of nowhere.

  'Done what?'

  'Stolen the money.'

  I recoiled a bit and gripped his arm to quiet him. But I could see his problem. He had a future again suddenly. His high times and adventures were over. He'd been out there on the edge, mad with love, crazy from danger. Now, if he liked, he could go right down to his office and answer interrogatories. He had lived for a while with all those neat shows playing in his head. Gangsters and athletes — his honey and him doing weird stuff in the moonlit artichoke fields, being covered and chilled by fog in the perfect still nights. Never mind that it was mad. It was his. Poor him. Poor us. Dragged to sea in our little boats by the tide of these irresistible private scenes and crashing come daylight on the rocks. But who can turn back?

  'Somebody beat you to it,' I told him. He laughed at that. Eventually, he asked if I was coming to the Belvedere, but I sent him along on his own.

  XXX

  THE END AND WHO'S HAPPY?

  A. Brushy Isn't

  I went home. A man in a tuxedo boarding a plane would grab too much attention. And although I distrusted the sentiment, I wanted a word with my boy. It was time for the get-tough speech: Hey, I know you think your life is grim. But so is everyone else's. We're all grinning in spite of the pain. Some do better than others. And most do better than I have. I hope in time you grow up to join that majority.

  For Lyle, this talk figured to be largely beside the point, but I could feel I'd made a final effort. Upstairs at home, I found him asleep, knocked cold by some intoxicant.

  'Hey, Lyle.' I touched his shoulder, sharp-boned and bitten by ugly acne marks. I shook him some time before he seemed to come to.

  'Dad?' He couldn't see straight.

  'Yes, son,' I said quietly, 'it's me.'

  He froze there on his back, trying to focus something, his eyes or his mind or his spirit. He gave up quickly.

  'Shit,' he said distinctly and rolled back so that his face went down into the pillow with the lost despairing weight of a felled tree. I understood Lyle's problems. As he saw it, his parents owed him apologies. His old man was a souse. His mother pretended all his young life to be something she only later told him she wasn't. Having found no adults to admire, he'd decided not to become a grown-up at all. In strict privacy, I couldn't even quarrel with his logic. But what's the further agenda? Granted, all of it, guilty as accused, but you tell me how to repay the debts of history. I touched the tangles of his long dirty hair but quickly thought better of that and went off to pack.

  I had been at it about twenty minutes when the front door chimes jingled. I was feeling cautious and glanced down through the bedroom window that overlooked the stoop. Brushy was there in her sequins, no coat, stomping one patent-leather pump on the concrete and casting occasional foggy breaths behind her as she looked to the taxi which waited in the street. Once I hadn't shown in her office, she must have checked at the Belvedere, then called a hasty search party of one.

  I opened the various locks and bolts I've mounted on the front door to shield me from the Bogey Man and his captain in arms, Mr S/D. We stood with the glass of the storm door between us. Brushy's long white gloves were wrapped about her, and the flesh of her upper arms, where the daily workouts had never quite slackened the softness, was mottled and goose-bumped from the cold.

  'We need to talk,' she said.

  'Attorney-client, right?' I'm afraid I was smirking.

  She turned to wave off the taxi, then snatched the door open in her own decided way and, as she stepped up on the threshold, smacked my face. She struck me open-palmed, but she's a strong little person and very nearly put me on my seat. We stood in the doorway in the midst of a nasty silence, with the rugged breath of winter flowing around us and invading the household.

  'I just predicted to our partners that all the money was going to be returned by tomorrow at 5:00 p.m.,' Brushy said.

  'Did anyone ever tell you that you're too smart for your own fucking good, Brushy?' 'Lots of people,' she answered, 'but they've only been men.'

  Brushy smiled then, but the look in her quick eyes would have fit well on Hercules. She was not taking any crap. Not that she'd never forgive me. But she wouldn't back off. Those were her terms. I rolled my jaw to make sure I was all right, and she stepped in beside me.

  'You've misjudged your man,' I said.

  'No, I haven't.' When I didn't respond she approached me. She put her sly little hands on my hips, then slipped her chilly fingertips into the expandable waistband of the tuxedo pants I was still wearing. She shook her wind-draggled hair out of her face so she could see me squarely. 'I don't think so. My man is attractively nuts. Impulsive. A practical joker. But he's in touch. Really. In the end.'

  'Wrong guy,' I said. I touched my cheek one more time. 'What's going to happen to you when the money doesn't come back? Huh?'

  She kept watching me with the same intent light, but I could see her beginning to melt down inside. Her bravery was fading.

  'Answer me,' I said.

  'I'm in big trouble. Everybody will ask what I knew. And when.'

  I put my arms around her. 'Brushy, how could you have been such a chump?'

  'Don't talk to me like that,' she said. She laid her head on the silly frills of my shirt. 'It makes me sad when you pretend you're mean.'

  I was going to tell her again she had the wrong guy, but went instead to the front closet and groped in the gummy pocket of Lyle's leather police jacket where he hid his cigarettes. I brought the pack back for us both. I asked her what she had in mind.

  'What about the truth?' she asked. 'Isn't that an alternative? Telling the truth?'

  'Sure, I'll just give Gino a jingle: "Pardon me, Pigeyes, you got the wrong guy behind bars. I'd like to swap places with Jake." Gino's already hoping for that.'

  'But doesn't somebody have to file a complaint? I mean, what if it's all right with TN? I can explain this to Tad. Mack, I know Tad. Give me twenty minutes with him. He'll love you for scaring Jake this way. He'll think it was just what Jake deserved, having someone turn the tables on him for a while.'

  'Twenty minutes, huh?'

  Her face fell. 'Go to hell,' she said. She sat on Nora's
old rose-printed sofa and scrutinized the spotted meal-colored rug, caught between anger and some scandalized sense of her life.

  'What's your deal with this guy?'

  'Not what you think.'

  'So what is it? Pals? Sodality meetings?'

  She went through a retinue of reluctant gestures — evasive looks, nervous fretting with her cigarette — always committed to protecting her secrets. Finally, she sighed.

  'Tad's asked me to be the new General Counsel at TN. I've been thinking about it for months.'

  'You replace Jake?'

  'Right. He wants somebody whose independence he trusts. And who'll spread TN's business around a lot more over time.'

  Tad of course had not arrived at the top by accident. He knew corporate politics, too, and this move was slick. Wash and his coterie on the TN board wouldn't have stood in his way if Jake's replacement came from G amp; G.

  'Martin doesn't think the firm can survive without a big share of TN's work,' I told her.

  'Neither do I. Not in the long run. That's why I was reluctant.'

  Jake was gone now, though. Tad would make the change anyway. Brushy's course was clear. I saw the future.

  'And what happens to Mack under the Brushy plan for the world, with Emilia as General Counsel of TN and G amp; G a wreck at sea?'

  'You're a lawyer. A good one. You'll find work. Or' — she smiled somewhat, the shy-sly routine — 'you can be kept.' She got up and put her arms around me again.

  I still had my cigarette in my mouth and I drew back with the smoke in my eyes.

  'Wrong guy,' I told her. I broke away and headed upstairs. She followed to the bedroom eventually. She considered my canvas, the Vermeer mounted on the easel, before turning to watch me pack.

  'Where are you going?'

  'To the train. Which will take me to the plane. Which will take me far away.' 'Mack.'