Hush Money

by Peter Israel

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  “Try to get a hold of myself!” she started in. “Oh and wouldn’t you like to know, my darlin’ man? Wouldn’t you like to know? You and how many others? Everybody wants what Sister Robin’s got, didn’t I tell you? Like Brother Pablo wanted it so I gave him some of it, but then I took it back, and Brother Andy wanted it so I gave him some of it, but then I took it back, and Brother Tito …”

  I could hear her suck air, hesitate, then let it out again.

  “… but he couldn’t have it, could he? And you want it too, sweet baby, and I’d give it all to you, honest to Jesus I would, only you’d give it away, wouldn’t you? So how could I take it back? ’Cause Brother Pablo wants it again, and now Brother Fitz wants it, Brother Phil, Brother Pete wants it,” and she started laughing and rattling the names off so fast like the disc jockey back home who used to end up his request list saying, “and-for-all-the - gang-down-at-Eddie’s - All-Night-Esso Station.” Then she started to croon about somebody called Brother Pablo, it was a torch song like the first only cornier, it took me back too, years back, when I used to overhear my sister talking on the phone to some other number, comparing the swordsmen in their class at school, those endless conversations that went nowhere, and I tried to get across to her that I wasn’t working for Twink Beydon any more, that I wasn’t working for anybody, but by then she’d started yelling into the phone that nobody was going to get it, nobody except her Sweet Lord Jesus, she was saving it for Him, and I was thinking doubletime that the equation had changed, that all my equations had changed in a hurry, and trying so hard to break the parentheses out of the parentheses that I all but missed what came next.

  She was yelling. She was yelling at me all right, yelling her crazy fool head off.

  “I saw it, Cage!” she shouted. “Like I was there! Sweet Jesus God, I was there! I watched her go! Nobody pushed her! She went out on her own, an’ I was too zonked to stop her!”

  There was more of it, more before and more after till the cackle took over again, that godawful sound that started out a giggle and ended up like all the old crones of the world listening to Flip Wilson, with the crows and the geese and the banshees joining in. But maybe there’s something like a telephone high, else I was listening too hard, because my brains started spilling over in every direction.

  Like:

  Nobody had seen her fall, and it might have taken a couple of minutes for them to find her, and at that the law would have taken at least five to get there, more like fifteen—plenty of time anyway for somebody to ride the elevator down and walk out, somebody so familiar that nobody would have noticed, somebody so zonked that all she knew to do was run. But the law had her alibi, didn’t they? Wasn’t it established that she’d been nowhere around? And they’d checked it out, hadn’t they, down to the last comma, with a bunch of depositions behind it thick enough to send Sister Robin all the way to the finals of Miss Clean America? Well, but the law’s been known to fuck up before, and to cover up where they’ve fucked up. Suppose Robin Fletcher had baked a cake for the law and suppose the law had swallowed it whole? Because the law had been all over 708, hadn’t they, and come up with nothing more interesting than a drawerful of pantyhose to add to their collection? Nothing, say, like the two spiral university notebooks which happened to be staring back at me right then from my coffee table? Nothing like whatever it was Sister Robin had been lending out and taking back?

  And beyond that: suppose Sister Robin hadn’t been zonked at all, suppose the zonked one had been Sister Karen?

  And suppose that what Sister Karen had was what Sister Robin never had had and never would, starting with money and ending somewhere around Andy Ford?

  And suppose her telling me Karen went out on her own and she was too zonked to stop her was only as close as she could get to the truth?

  Then all my maybes and supposes and could-have-beens and what-have-yous began to circle around like homing bees bringing in the honey, while inside the hive it was cliché time. Holey Moley, I was thinking, how did we get so fucked up, how in a million years? And where were we headed if our kids were already driving around with enough dope in their heaps to keep half a dozen generations jumping out of windows, or being pushed out? And Christ on a Bicycle, where was it going to end in a lot less years than a million when the sun showed up for the last morning?

  Cage’s Moral Awakening, you could call it.

  “There is no local drug scene,” my friendly sheriff had said, and the hip sheets’ll tell you that drugs have gone the way of revolutions in the counter-culture. Like Outsville.

  She’d caught up with herself, wherever that was. Her voice had dropped, and she was onto how I had to come get her again. She said she thought she’d better tell me where. Then she said she couldn’t. Then she said she’d tell me, only she was too scared to tell me. Then she said if I was any good, I could find out. If I really cared, she said, I’d find out.

  Then her voice fell all the way down to a whisper.

  “It’s cold, Cage,” she said. “Sweet Jesus God, I’m so fuckin’ cold.”

  I guess at that I could feel her shivering over the phone.

  The hymn-singing was over, and it must have been sermon time because way off I could hear a male voice talking.

  “Robin,” I heard myself say, “why don’t you bust out yourself?”

  There was a pause, a long one. The preacher too had stopped. I thought I could hear her breathing, and then not that any more.

  The line was dead.

  12

  He must have done more digging on me than any man has a right to do on another. Either that or a pretty damn smart psychologist was making his moves for him, who understood that the way to get at some guys isn’t with racks or blinking lights or catheters, but just by doing nothing.

  I guess I’m that kind. At least that’s the track record. I mean, you can turn me wrongside up and tie my nards to a twenty-pound lead weight and chances are I’ll still tell you to go fuck yourself when I come around. But if you want Cage to say uncle or sing any song you’d like to hear backwards, you just let him know you’re there every so often, and waiting. You do it, say, about every five minutes for a month, and then you let up … for about a year.

  That next week I had plenty of silent company, all except Twink himself, and his Indians didn’t even try to hide. They were right out in the open. So for that matter was I. There was my little friend in the black Firebird, and another in a gunmetal Ford, and another with an elephant’s nose and ears to match. Those were the ones I spotted, but even at today’s prices he could have bought an army of shadows. They worked me in shifts. They were there when I went downtown to the newspaper morgue and struck out, and waiting when I came out. And when I went back to school that one last pointless time. And when I got my hair trimmed. And when I went downtown the second time and struck gold.

  Sure I could have done them plenty of damage, and there were times when I could have given the Mustang a chance to redeem herself. But for the first, I figured nobody was more replaceable than a tail behind the wheel, and I was saving the second for when I really needed it.

  So I let it work on me, and it did. I was a sitting duck. No matter that nobody took a shot at me, it got so I couldn’t open my front door without the bomb going off in my mind. I searched the apartment every time I went in; I began to hear clicks on the telephone. And to top it off the dreams started coming back.

  The Drummer dreams.

  Funny thing about the Drummer dreams. It was only after I’d gotten back that they started, but then they were a long time going away. I guess they never did entirely.

  Oh, you could say it worked on me all right.

  Before I sent it off to a safer place, I spent more time with Karen’s journal. The more I read, the more I got the feeling everything was locked up inside if I could only figure out the combinations. I found the one reference to “Nancy’s letter.” I’d seen it the first time through—you coul
d hardly miss it—but it had made little impression, probably because the notebooks were full of letters written and imagined but also because, unless the time sequence was all screwed up, Nancy Beydon would already have been over two years underground.

  “Nancy’s letter,” it read. Then: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY KAREN” in multicolored block letters that took up the rest of the page. But no more, because then she was off into some crazy fantasy about Bryce Diehl, the grandfather who’d had the nerve to die on her before she was born, and soon enough back to the father who hadn’t.

  I tried to see if it made any change afterward. Maybe a computer could have found something, but I didn’t. It was all Karen, and if her voice got any shriller near the end, it had been shrill at the beginning too. I guess the difference between shrill and shriller is a pretty fine line.

  Which left me back where I’d started from, with Robin Fletcher. It was on account of her that I made that wasted pilgrimage back to the seat of knowledge and erudition. My Vice Chancellor was there all right but not to me, and even old Pindick the Birdraper, the poet laureate Gainsterne, was less than cordial. The flags were back up to the top of the masts, the state of California as well as Old Glory, and the kids I ran into had the kind of information investigators must dream about, like: “Robin Fletcher? Naw, I haven’t seen her around lately,” or: “Yeah she’s gotta be around somewhere, why don’t you try the Fish Net?” or: “Like I told you, brother … Hey man, what the hell!”—this last from Andy Ford’s old spear-carrier Chris, who didn’t know where Robin was, or where Andy was, or even where he was once I’d turned him around a couple of times. She wasn’t up in 708 either, it looked like nobody had been, and that’s where the campus law found me, who escorted me from the premises.

  I guess I just wasn’t cut out for college life.

  The local newspapers? Zero.

  The friendly sheriff? He wasn’t in, but the deputy he sent out to tell me got the message across loud and clear:

  “Nah, you can’t look at the files again, bud. The Beydon case is closed, locked up tighter than a nun’s pussy. An’ that’s straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t in,” I said to him.

  “He ain’t, bud. An’ you ain’t neither.”

  Zero zero zero and …

  At that it must’ve been the sight of the deputy’s uniform that put the idea to percolating. I mean, it may be simple once you’ve thought of it, but who in a century of leap years would think of asking the law for help?

  Unless, that is, he had a pocketful of coin to distribute?

  Which I had had from time to time in the past, and no matter that it had been someone else’s coin, the IOUs were made out to me.

  So the next morning I decided to cash one of them in, just on the off-chance.

  The law’s intelligence division downtown is one impressive setup, believe you me. They’ve got enough computers going to keep IBM whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again” till the year 2000, and the manpower to match. The only trouble is that if they can lay out what happened last week pretty well, next week’s a big blank and even this week’s pretty slapdash. Which means that the next time your house is ripped off and you wonder what’s keeping the cops, you can bet your ass they’re downtown punching it out on cards so’s the F.B.I. can have it in time for the annual crime statistics.

  What I was looking for came under S for Slapdash. “You can poke around all you want,” my IOU told me, “but beyond that we can’t be much help” Or, the way the clerk put it who brought me out the files: “We don’t want to get mixed up with any legitimate worship.”

  S for Slapdash contained just about everything you’d want to know about religion here in godfearing Greater Los Angeles, in no particular order. There were leaflets, posters, photos, fact sheets, pamphlets, newspaper clippings. There were copies of I.R.S. tax returns. There were transcripts of sermons from the late, late shows. Rex Humbard was there, so was Kathie Kuhlmann, the Maharaj Ji, Garner Ted Armstrong, the Ramakrishna Society, the Mormon Tabernacle, the Verdugo Hills Sunrise Circle, the original cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, the Masonic Temple, and some Jewish Defense League items thrown in for the ecumenically minded. Well, like everybody knows, Greater Los Angeles has always been freaked out for God, but God’ll have to give the computers a hand when they get around to that collection else they’ll blow all the fuses from here to the Pearly Gates and back.

  In any case it was there, poking around in that holy stew, that I finally came up with the Society of the Fairest Lord.

  To judge, it had had a pretty checkered history. There were no dates to help me out, but you could guess a chronology of sorts from the yellowing of the handbills. In the end I’d found about twenty of these, and I laid them out side by side on the desk I was working at, and I played solitaire with them till I got them into a more-or-less order.

  The headings were all the same—! JESUS SAVES !, with the double exclamation point and the same happy-go-lucky stick-figure Christ hanging on the cross—but underneath there’d been some changes, mostly in the addresses. They were all Los Angeles, which helped explain why I’d come up empty-handed south of the county line, but up until lately they’d done a good deal of moving around. Two steps ahead of the law maybe, but more likely two steps ahead of the rent-collector. The most recent ones, though, were identical. There were meetings every Wednesday and Sunday evenings, “Bring Faith Bring Money” they said, and the address was down off South San Pedro in what I knew to be one of the less savory neighborhoods of our Fairest Lord’s metropolis.

  This was a Thursday. My first impulse was to rush right over there on my white horse and save Sister Robin from the fairy dragon. But then the vizor fell down and I decided to cool it. For one thing, if she’d lasted four days another three wouldn’t kill her. For another, when I went to get her I wanted to be sure of finding her, and I didn’t want an escort. So I settled for Sunday, O.K. and amen, put the handbills back into the mess and returned the boxes of files to the clerk. He asked me if I’d found what I was looking for. “Nah,” I said, “I guess it’s pretty hopeless,” and I left him shaking his head and went back out into the world to spread the good tidings to …

  To no one.

  Because meanwhile it had gotten very quiet again. Quiet enough, you could say, to hear the clicks in a telephone. I spoke to Freddy Schwartz a couple of times—by public phone—but it was more for his company, such as it was, because he had nothing to add to what had already been printed in his sheet. Back at the beginning of the week the Times had been full of that kind of gossipy innuendo-y emptiness which builds circulation and generally titillates the reading public. Like on Monday the columnist Freddy Schwartz hustled for published an item: “What bereaved father-about-town is about to close the biggest deal (no pun intended) of his superdeal life?” and back on the financial page was one of those superindignant pieces reporters file when they can’t get near the real story, all about how the public had the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect it against the wheelings and dealings of publicly held corporations, but how about the private ones, some of which could swallow the others without so much as chewing? The message being simply that the Diehl Corporations of this world ought to watch their step, or at least be a little more gracious toward the working press. By Tuesday the insiders were stirring around on the Pacific Exchange, and out of sheer coincidence the Wednesday Times ran an “indepth” story on the city of Diehl, the problems confronting it, political, financial, ecological, sociological and you-name-it-ogical, and all about as edifying as you might expect except for the “informed” supposition that, even given the great resources of the Diehl Corporation, the inflationary trend might force outside financing if the timetable was to be kept.

  Or advanced?

  But as to whatever the Diehl brothers might have been doing in the meantime, not a word, and by Thursday, nothing at all.

  The same on Friday.

  And nobody asking me abo
ut any-and-all property in my possession either, even though I no longer had it.

  Very quiet, like I say. Too quiet. I felt it all around, the prickle on my skin, the nerves jumping in my stomach, like Twink’s Indians had moved inside and set up shop. Oh yes, he got to me all right, and if it’s too much to imagine the whole city of L.A. stopping in its tracks and holding its breath, still you got the funny feeling somebody was waiting for somebody else to drop the other shoe.

  And so on Saturday, being me, I dropped it.

  13

  I woke up drenched in sweat and I was cold, bone shivering cold. My goddam teeth were chattering. The pillow was wadded into a ball where I’d been hugging it, the covers had tied themselves into knots down around my ankles and the California sun shining in my windows looked about a million light-years off and then some. I’d been dreaming the Drummer dream all right, but this time Twink Beydon was mixed up in it, sitting back of that same desk, the one the Chinks of Camp Number 5 must have swiped off the Russians because it was big and old, anomalous as hell, and you could picture Napoleon signing a peace treaty at it, and his goddam daughter—I mean, you try sleeping with a corpse sometime and see what it does for your night life, and …

  I forget the rest. Or put it this way: I don’t forget the rest. It’s another story, for another day. The part that fits here is what I felt when I woke up with my teeth double timing in place: the panic, that godawful longing in the pit of your stomach for something that wasn’t any more and probably never was, and at the bottom of it all that rage which made you the colder the hotter it got, like an igloo with a fire roaring inside and no way to put it out, no way Brother. Revenge, call it. The only difference was that when I used to wake up that way, the Drummer was some eight thousand miles long gone, beyond my reach, and I could eat my revenge for breakfast with milk and sugar on top. But this time he wasn’t that far, no sir, not that far at all.