Then he saw his options: He could either explode, thereby snarling all of his relationships, or he could play along. When he convinced Janice to return to him, and the payments were eventually revealed, he would win points by appearing relaxed and accepting of this necessary fibbing. Perhaps they would all laugh about it someday, how his mother had to help Janice stay away from him, so he would wise up. Son disciplined, husband chastened. Ha. He felt like torching the den and all its papers. But instead—for he was a man in control, wasn’t he?—instead, he replaced the checkbook, got his keys from the kitchen counter, and left.
WHEN HE PULLED onto Delancey, he saw Cassandra parked in front of his house. She got out, severe and dangerous in a long black coat.
“Peter.”
She was a striking woman, and against his will, or perhaps not, he remembered her legs wrapped around his back. He shook his head, avoiding her face. “I’m in a rotten fucking mood.”
She moved toward him.
“Don’t, Cassandra. I don’t want you, goddamn it. My wife and I were about to make love. We were … together, closer than you or I could ever be, and then you and your goddamn cigarette smoke were there, fouling my life. It was totally inexcusable, totally. Immoral.”
Her words came through the chill air: “Peter, I’m still here.”
Was she insane? The thought was remotely intriguing.
“Forget it,” he snarled, cutting around her toward the door. “You’ve met a fucking stone wall.” He knew who she was and he wasn’t going to become one of them, one of the lonely shades, chasing after life, pursuing death. “Go on, get out of here.” But she stood there like a statue, waiting. “Go on, leave me. Go read trashy romances and cry your eyes out. Go masturbate with a vengeance against all the men who never loved you. Whatever it is you do, scrape yourself off me.”
INSIDE HIS HOUSE, he turned the heat up, made a couple of sandwiches. He needed something to calm him down. Cassandra had extracted the worst from him.
The phone rang, and Vinnie’s thick, bored voice announced itself. “Hey, I saw you quoted in the paper about the kid who got shot.”
“Sad.”
“Yeah, very very sad.” Vinnie didn’t give a damn.
“Hey, I owe you on that bet.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Vinnie said. “That’s not why I called.”
“What do you have on John Apple?”
There was hesitation on the other end of the line.
“That’s why I needed to speak with you, see. Peter, I think it’s going to be … ah, a little time before I have anything on this individual and I’m, ah, running into some overhead.”
“A search doesn’t cost you.”
“Well, Peter, you’re right about that. It doesn’t cost me directly, not a thing, actually. But this is, of course, a service, see.”
Peter didn’t like this.
“There’s going to be a charge, Peter. There’s going to be a big charge, because this is an extraordinary service. You right now are a very hot property in this town and so that makes it an extraordinary service. Ten thousand is all right. That’s the charge.”
“Then forget the service.”
He hung up, pissed at his own stupidity. The phone rang.
“Peter, don’t hang up again. I can’t accept disrespect from any person. Don’t ever do that again.”
“Vinnie, if you’re going to bleed me for running a search that costs three dollars of computer time, then forget it.”
“I can’t forget it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t. I want that money whether I run the search or not. Don’t get short arms and long pockets on me, neither.”
“Forget it, Vinnie. In fact, fuck off.”
“Peter, hang on a minute. I want you to hear something.” Vinnie’s voice was fainter. “Gimme that thing, Jimmy, no—the goddamn tape, give me that.” There was a click, then a rasping noise. Then: ” ‘Just get what you can get. I want it fast and quiet.’ ”
Peter’s own voice. As he had taped Robinson’s brother.
“You made your point, Vinnie. That why you had me call you at a certain number?”
“I’m tired now, Peter. This bullshit tires me. Want some advice? Don’t fuck with me. Don’t think you can talk your way out of this. Remember how dirty I used to be under the boards? I haven’t changed.”
“Look—”
“I’m gonna look at you giving me some money, that’s what I’ll look at. Meet me day after tomorrow at nine A.M. in front of the old Bellevue-Stratford. That used to be one of the greatest hotels in the world. They had to go and chop it up. I don’t even know what they call it now. Say, Peter, we haven’t seen each other for a while. I’ve gotten very fat, very big.”
“This is a threat?”
“No. If I really wanted to threaten you, I would, you punk asshole lawyer. I’d tell you things, you know? I’d tell you that you should have picked up the fucking peanut-butter sandwich on the floor next to that dead boy.”
This fact had not been released to the media.
“I’m not giving you a damn cent, you fucker.”
“Think, Peter. Think.” Vinnie hung up.
He lay down on the sofa, sick with anxiety and suddenly overwhelmingly exhausted, yet knowing he had to analyze the problem. Maybe Vinnie was a bluffing small-time nobody, but then again, maybe not. The corruption in the city was like a pervasive organic slime; crooked careers sometimes flourished overnight or grew steadily with little notice. Because Peter had never done anything like this, and because his prosecution specialty wasn’t organized crime and unions, he didn’t know the latest arrangements. Vinnie could be working under the aegis of somebody genuinely powerful. Structures shifted, friendships occurred, disputes realigned enemies. This was how the system went bad. How could he afford to pay Vinnie’s blackmail? His money situation was a mess. He was locked into a huge mortgage. The interest payments were like a heartworm, wriggling into one’s financial system, unnoticed at first, then causing slight discomfort, then panic, finally choking one to death. The only way to get money out of the house without selling it was through a home-equity loan, which took weeks and which would require a signature from Janice. But even if she somehow allowed him to get the money out of the house, he’d never get her back.
The mail had piled up and he took all of it to the computer and slipped in the financial spreadsheet disk. There had been previous times when he feared he lacked control, and through diligence he’d found a solution. He flipped through the mail for bills while the computer creaked as the magnetic head searched for the boot-up program. In the last few months his bookkeeping had been nearly nonexistent. But perhaps he could scare up a thousand dollars and get Vinnie off his back for a little while. He opened his bills and made a neat stack of indebtedness before him. And here it was: He owed Mastrude a $750 payment. The monthly mortgage was overdue by two months: two payments totaling $3,113.56. Soon the bank would start hassling him, threatening to foreclose. Some of that was tax-deductible, but he wouldn’t get that money back until spring of next year. The MasterCard and Visa totaled $1,785.34. He could pay the minimum amounts, but that was lost in interest immediately, almost as if he hadn’t paid anything. He owed American Express $423.86. Where the hell had that come from? He looked over the bill. A microwave for Janice’s apartment and automatic quarterly billing at the health club. Luckily, the telephone bill was reasonable, $63.39. The car, life, and home-owners’ insurance were due. There was a notice that his personal liability insurance was overdue, now in the grace period. He’d gotten something in the mail recently, detailing a liability insurance rider. Took you up to $2.5 million in liability for only a couple of hundred bucks a year. It seemed like a good idea then, a way to feel safe. People would buy anything to feel safe.
But it was the heating bill that broke his spirit: $389.34. How could that have happened? He had been so careful. All the windows had their storms—he had done it at hal
ftime of an Eagles game on TV last fall. According to his bank statement—luckily it had arrived only two days before and was therefore fairly current—he was down to about three hundred dollars in his account. And—thanks in part to his mother—Janice hadn’t even written out any checks. Anyway, he was running thousands behind the pace, as best as he could determine, with another mortgage payment due in three weeks. Vinnie could ruin him, easily and forever. A leak to the right reporter, anything. What was money compared to what Vinnie could do? His paycheck would arrive at the end of the month, but it was already spent. Insanity! He had not recorded his checks or the frequent money-machine withdrawals he was making.
If only he could freeze the chaos in his life and untangle each piece one by one. He looked at the figures of income and expenditure, and decided to root out the cause of his $389.34 heating bill. The basement was the first place to look, and past the old bicycles and moldy boxes of papers he found, to his horror, that the door leading to the old coal chute was wide open. He had been heating an unsealed airspace, for the chute also opened to the street via a pair of loose-fitting steel ground doors. He couldn’t remember having gone down there recently. The typical winter month bill should be two hundred dollars. He knew positively that he hadn’t been down in the basement for over a week. He looked at the bill. The meter read date was three days prior, on Friday. Because the door was still open, that meant two things: One, he would have to pay for three days of open-door heating on his next bill, and two, that it was at least five or six days ago that the door had been opened. What was happening then?
He put on his coat and walked outside to inspect the ground doors of the cellar, thinking he could tell Vinnie to go screw himself if he and Janice could get together. He could string Vinnie along for a little while longer, then duck out and deal with him as a private citizen.
Peter brushed back the winter-dead forsythia bushes and found the fat padlock that locked the chain fed through the loops of the doors. It appeared untouched. He gave it a yank.
The chain came flying off the doors. Someone had cut the narrow links of chain, then arranged them carefully to look unchanged. Nothing had been stolen, that he knew of. Had someone been in the house and left quickly when he arrived home? Who? The elder Robinson and his evil, drunken henchmen, “me and the boys”? Someone else?
When he returned inside, his answering machine was blinking.
“Listen, Scattergood, listen very carefully.” It was Stein, Carothers’s lawyer. “My client Mr. Carothers two hours ago was attacked by two other prisoners who are complete strangers to him. He was very lucky, very lucky indeed for the guards broke it up immediately. Nobody was even scratched—it was over in fifteen seconds. These men are well-known drug dealers and they appeared ready to kill him. There is no motive for this, do you understand? I’m appealing to you because of your reputation. This was a setup. There was no altercation, no grudge already there. My client hasn’t been in prison long enough to make enemies, and whatever my client’s shortcomings, he’s not a dealer. There are no old scores being settled. I’m going to put it to you straight. Somebody’s trying to get to my client before he tells his story. I don’t know who or why, but I demand action or I go to the papers.”
Berger had been right, and now Peter could squeeze Carothers, force him to talk. The pressure was on, and soon Peter would have to decide if he was going to play against Hoskins or with him. The same could be said of Vinnie, and Peter headed back to his study to figure out when, if ever, he could pay his former basketball teammate. On the screen, DISK ERROR flashed at him. He tried to open the file again. The disk drive spun and clicked and screeched, trying repeatedly. He pulled out his manual, searched through it. He hadn’t cleaned the disk drive in a long time and the disk contained a year’s worth of financial information. DISK ERROR flashed rhythmically at him, producing a sense of crisis. He hit one of the keys and saw $ Z $ $ $ $ Z $ ˆ ˆ ˆ * * * * WHA ? ? ? ? ? ? ˆ ˆ ˆ # HAOOH @ @ @ @ ! ! !hhkWHA ? ? ? ? snjtRR ˜ ˜ ˜ }{%%2 qflZ$UUUUUˆ—strings of thousands of senseless characters confronted him.
“Fuck! Fuck this machine!”
He yanked the disk out and flung it across the room.
That night, sprawled feverishly on the tangled sheets, he dreamed he had rewritten the entire Pennsylvania civic and penal codes, thousands of pages encompassing all the state’s laws, bound in leather. He could open any of the fat volumes anywhere, and inside before his eyes was the law, written to perfection. In his dream he breezed through these books, reading sections that in waking life he didn’t remember. Each word was his, heartbreakingly beautiful. When he woke, there was the lingering sensation that something great and miraculous had happened, that for a brief instant his brain had been engorged to its fullest power, making the regular operations of the conscious hours seem pale flickerings of the smallest wattage.
Chapter Nine
PHILADELPHIA WAS ABOUT TO GET HIT, about to be dumped on as a snow front two hundred miles wide blew across the Great Lakes, Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and east. Specks of storm swirled around the stained bronze cheeks of the impassive five-foot face of William Penn atop City Hall, the whole tower lost within a low gray ceiling of unnatural darkness. Time to gather in and protect oneself from natural elements, and, doing just that, Peter had on his thick-soled hiking boots, long, one hundred percent wool black Brooks Brothers coat, black leather gloves, two scarves stuffed around his neck, and an L. L. Bean’s Irish Tweed “Thatch” Hat, with tapered “Bucket” crown with two-layer brim, size 7 5/8. It was time, he had decided, to take care of himself.
He stepped into the hunting goods store. A small electronic bell chimed as he crossed the threshold. Displayed in locked glass cabinets was an arsenal of deer knives, pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Gazing into this case stood a large man dressed in camouflage survivalist gear and command boots. On his arm was a patch that read OUTLAW GUNS AND ONLY OUTLAWS WILL CARRY THEM. Peter moved to another case. A short balding man in wire-rim glasses looked up from a gun he was rubbing with a cloth.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m from the Philadelphia D.A.’s office.”
“Everything’s in order here,” the salesman replied. “Every gun’s registered, and we don’t sell to questionable customers. We’ll turn down the scale, in fact. Sometimes have to do it.”
“Good,” Peter smiled. “I’m here on personal business. Somebody broke into my house. They cut a heavy-duty chain that went to my cellar. My wife’s pretty upset. I’ve also gotten threatening calls from relatives of felons I’ve convicted.”
The salesman nodded sympathetically, pursed his lips with avid concentration.
“I see your problem. You’d be surprised how often this less-than-optimal thing happens. You don’t know who is out there, walking around. I had an insurance investigator in here yesterday. Nice guy, mild tempered. Checks burned buildings for arson. Gets all kinds of calls. Many less-than-optimal calls.” The man rubbed the muzzle of the gun energetically. “People like you and me and this other guy, we get backed to the wall. We can’t have a world like this—now, sir, that’s a fact. Look at what happened to that mailman that was on the news, that got shot. Those young nobodies just came into the train and shot him. Didn’t know him. Thought it was fun. You try and mind your own business and … No, sir, sometimes you just gotta—”
“I have fired a pistol, once or twice, but not much more,” Peter interrupted, having heard this speech many times in the past from cops, legislators, and well-intentioned madmen who thought they could tell the good guys from the bad and that gun control was a mistake.
“Know what you want?”
“I don’t care what kind of gun it is, as long as it won’t misfire or jam. I want something I can put in a drawer in the bedroom and forget about until the moment some asshole is messing around downstairs or trying to get in.”
“Yes, I see it that way myself.” The salesman nodded vigorously. “I’ve got ki
ds and a wife, too. It makes you see things differently, when you’re threatened. You get worried.”
The man unlocked the glass case and drew out several pistols, placing them reverently on a thick felt pad.
“Basically, what I think you want—if I may suggest it—is a firearm that is light enough to handle easily—say, for you and your wife.” The man looked up, it being understood between them in an unspoken male language that in Peter’s absence the wife would have only seconds to blow away the big bad motherfucker set on raping her in the bedroom, set on stealing that which belonged to Peter, and Peter alone. He thought momentarily of John Apple, who, though not an intruder in the usual sense, certainly had taken something from him.
“Something,” the man was saying, “something with little maintenance. And adequate at short range. Very important it be comfortable. Something comfortable in the hand. Okay, there’re basically two theories at work here. The snubbie short-range revolver”—he pulled an ugly black short-barreled gun from the case—“keeps it simple. Anybody can understand how it works—you don’t need to practice with it to use it. You pull it out, point it, and pull the trigger again and again until the problem is gone.” He pulled out a square-barreled semi-automatic pistol. “But then again, maybe you want some security features, like a safety, which you flip this way, or a magazine disconnector. This is a .380 pistol, eight shot. Plenty of stopping power. Takes about four seconds to load a clip. About twenty-eight ounces—less than two pounds. Runs about two hundred. You remove this … and it won’t fire. Also you got a slide-mounted safety that locks the firing pin like this. The firing pin can’t strike the cartridge primer.”
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