A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  All the other weeks except for flu and his vacations, Merrion had gone to see Larry. Every time he'd gone there, he'd said the same thing.

  "Just dropped by, see how you're do in'."

  "Checkin' up on me," you mean," Larry had replied every time, wheezing it out and then coughing deeply, moaning as he dredged another shallow air-passage through the viscous tide collecting in his lungs. "See what progress I'm makin'." Igniting another Lucky Strike; gradually devouring and dissolving himself from the inside out, the brown whiskey yellowing his skin; even using two reagents, the process still took its luxurious time.

  "You got to be patient," Larry had said. "After all, it stands to reason, am I right? Takes seven years to make the stuff, age it — isn't that what they claim it takes? Bound to take it a while to work. But I don't mind. I'm in no real hurry here to clear out. But I got no desire to hang around, either. Either way, perfectly all right with me."

  Over the course of the twenty-one months the building had become etched in clear detail in Merrion's mind, the three-story, eighteen-unit rectangle squatting cramped on a mingy acre-and-an-eighth shelf of land ('being approximately 49,005 square feet, more or less," the deed to the trust recited) filled and levelled with the wreckage of buildings demolished in Urban Renewal projects in Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee, putting a questionably buildable site in place of the nine-percent grade of the natural ravine cut by Ransom's Brook. The fill pulverized brick, thick greyish clay, mulched fibreboard, chunks of cement glittered with shards of window-glass and china; bent steel spikes and rough zinced rods stuck up between dead blades of grass browned and

  flattened by the early frosts. Larry Lane and the other four men in the Fourmen's Realty Trust had gotten the fill free for their investment. "Must've been damned near two hundred loads," Larry said, confirming what Merrion's eyes told him. The place had been built on debris.

  "Crap built on crap," Larry said, laughing. "Just like the people who live in it now more stuff that nobody wanted. We got it for the cartage, for taking it away. Fiddle Barrow gave his drivers all the hours they could stand. When they finished his contract work for the day, had them go and get it, bring it over here. Eight, ten tons at a time, dumped it right down the slope of that ravine there, right to the edge of the cement trench. Lot of it didn't stop at the edge, went right along into the brook. But what the hell did we care, huh? Wasn't costing us anything. No one saw it go in. There was always plenty more."

  Number 14, Janet's unit, was at the front, on the third floor of the six-unit stack to the left of the entrance on the westerly end of the building. The other twelve, Numbers 2 through 19, skipping 13, were stacked on the easterly side of the door, four units on each of the floors. Janet knew the habits of others in the building, people whose names she didn't know; she'd deduced their business by watching them.

  "From my fucking picture window," she'd said once, matter-of-factly, mildly startling Merrion. "Some fucking dumb pictures I get from it.

  Better stuff on stupid TV. OJ: I was watching that. More innaresting stuff n people in my building've got going, onna TV there." She attended the lives of the other tenants as though they had been staged for her, like the athletic events and movies she watched avidly. She preferred professional hockey, she told Merrion, "specially when they have the fights," seldom missing any game broadcast, no matter which teams were playing. Like the other people in her building they were features of the video in her life, silent players passing through it, their purposes unstated, their function as far as she was concerned being to entertain her. She thought that few of them tried hard enough, no matter what resentments she expressed by grumbling at them.

  She did that a lot. She had plenty of time. Far too much of it, in Merrion's estimation; it allowed her the leisure to overheat her imagination, already running on more mood elevators than Merrion believed could possibly be good for her. Xanax, he thought it was, that Sammy Paradise'd said, assuming his own source was telling the truth. But that was not a safe assumption; Lowell Chappelle was the source, the probationer snooping around in his girlfriend's apartment for damaging information about her, who had heedlessly taken him in.

  Chappelle was assuming Janet hadn't substituted something else for what'd come in the Xanax-labelled bottle that he'd seen when he browsed her bathroom medicine cabinet. She'd mentioned Elavil at least once to Merrion. Janet knew her drugs.

  Louella Daggett was no help. She wouldn't tell Merrion what elixirs Janet was on, beyond confirming she'd been given something that would make the world spin nice and slow and even, no bumps. Louella cited rules of confidentiality Merrion did not believe existed, or should not if they did.

  Janet had nothing in her life but raw time. When she sat in her best chair to watch her shows all day on TV, and her hockey games at night Boston and Providence Bruins; Hartford Whalers; Springfield Indians, Kings, Falcons; New York Islanders; Rangers; or New Jersey Devils; God only knows which teams or how many after she got back from Dineen's convenience store each morning, that was all she had: time, nothing but time. She was waiting to die.

  Sam Paradisio thought Chapelle could make it happen for her. He thought Chappelle had done it to others, committed murder. "Just because nobody ever caught him at it, that doesn't mean the bastard hasn't done it. There was this one bank that got robbed, 'way the hell out in western New York State, Olean, during the time that he was out before he went in this last time that he got caught. All the earmarks of a Big Sid Charpinsky job that was his neck of the woods, out that way, part of the world he come from. He was in the Rockingham County Jail up in New Hampshire, there, Exeter, same time Chappelle was in for an armored car thing he did. The two of them became asshole buddies.

  "Bastards do not stay put any more. They refuse to just stay in one place nowadays, where a man can keep an eye on them. They're all over the place now like horse shit. Well, I saw the surveillance photos on that one, the New York job. The US Attorney showed them to me, and they showed this one poor bastard getting' mowed down. Just getting' fuckin' riddled he was. And the guy that was doin' it looked an awful lot to me like my friend Lowell, guy who's usin' the Mac Ten. Wearin' a mask, but even so, more than a passin' resemblance. The same build, and the same way he's got of movin', way he carries himself. We know what Chappelle is capable of.

  Army trained him too good. He could be anyone's killer. Available, formal occasions. Weddings and funerals, bar mitzvahs. Bastard'd have to get his own eight-hundred number, there'd be so much demand for his work."

  Merrion rejected that notion at once. It alarmed him. He didn't like being alarmed. Larry'd said one day to him when he was still feeling really good, which usually meant savage and mean: "I've reached that magic age where I only have to do the fuckin' things I want to do, and only think about the things I fuckin' like to think about. So, if I don't like to do it, it's a thing that I don't like, or I don't like to think it, well then, my friend, then I don't." Merrion had agreed with Larry at the time, and now, approaching the same age, agreed with Larry even more, even though he was dead and had been dead for more than twenty years. Another legacy from Larry: words to be dead by.

  Still the thought lingered, skulking around in the back of his head, bothering him with its shadow. "I'm never gonna leave this place,"

  Larry Lane'd said to him. "Well, I go out now and then, time to time, right now. And I'm gonna leave, of course some day I'm gonna have to.

  But the only way I'm gonna do it is when the six guys bring the long black car around. Then, well, I'll have to leave."

  Somehow or other about a year or so into Larry's last mission Richie Hammond'd found out that Merrion had been going to visit him. "Every week, is it?" Richie'd said to him. "Every week you go up there, and stay about two hours! What the hell you do up there with him, up there in that place with that shrivelled-up old bastard he is, all that time alone with him? Guy's fuckin' dyin' isn't he? That's what I hear, every place I go. Everyone says it, all over town. "Larry Lane isn
't long for this world," 's what I hear. "Larry Lane's on his way out, this time." That's what everyone's sayin'." Then he had paused and looked hopeful, waiting for confirmation.

  Merrion had not said anything. He had shrugged, throwing in the eyebrow-raising. He did that whenever Richie started irritating him, which was fairly often. It wasn't insubordinate not that Richie as a practical matter could harm him in any way at all. Even if he did start keeping a log and writing it up whenever Merrion yanked his chain; as long as Danny Hilliard had access to a telephone that worked and a friend alive on Beacon Hill, it would take St. Michael the Archangel to lay a bad hand on Ambrose Merrion.

  His silence pissed Richie off. That was another thing Richie didn't know how to do right, get pissed off properly. And usefully, so's to set a precedent, one that people would shudder to remember and try not to do again whatever it was that had set him off. He just got plaintive and made himself look ridiculous. "Well answer me, for Christ sake, Amby. I asked you a fuckin' question." That was why Merrion did it. "What the hell do you do up there with him, for Christ sake? The man's a dyin, fuckin', man."

  Merrion had shrugged again, but this time as Riche'd begun to work up another pisspot eruption, he'd given him words to go with it. "We tell each other stories," he'd said blandly. "Well, Larry tells me the stories, how things used to be. What went on, and what it all meant.

  History lessons of this place. I mostly just listen, nod now and then.

  Sometimes I ask him a question. But you know, there're days, when we had something' happen. Something's gone wrong down here. And as he knows and you know and I know myself, most days something generally has. And those weeks I have something to say. Stories to tell him, put some fun in his life."

  That had enraged Richie. He'd come out of his chair. He slammed both his fists knuckles-down on the top of the very desk Merrion now occupied, so hard that it had to've hurt, and then braced himself on his stiffened, locked arms. His face had gone crimson immediately, right up to the roots of his brown greying hair. His voice'd gone up along with the blood pressure. "You son of a bitch you; you son of a bitch; you son of a goddamn-damned bitch. You're tellin' Larry Lane what we're doin' in here? You getting' his input on stuff? You're getting' his clearance on stuff? He hasn't got no more power in here.

  That bastard is retired, even if he isn't dyin' like everyone else knows he is and they are glad. Once you are retired from here, that is the end of your power. Then you have got no more power in here and you might as well be dead, like you are gonna be. You cut that stuff out now, right now."

  FOUR

  According to Sam Paradisio's very best hearsay, Janet's most dangerous conduct was her smoking habit. "And this is not because I think everyone should quit today and then if they wont do it on their own, the government should make them. I'm the only person whose smoking ever bothered me, and I am in favor of letting people kill themselves any way they like. What I am not in favor of is other people killing them, for any reason whatsoever, and this lady's smoking habit, about two packs a day, could be something that will do that, make that happen. For her this is high-risk behavior.

  "What makes me say this is that's what my violent hardened felon tells me. He's pretty specific. When he was in jail, they put in that No Smoking rule, and he hadda cold-turkey the habit. He said it was a real bitch.

  '"Way worsen going off cocaine, or the booze or the pills. You can still get the butts, sure, but when you do you can't smoke 'em. Well, there're ways, but they're hard. How can you smoke without making smoke, which all the damned screws can then smell? If they don't actually see it. Pills and the other stuff: those you can do without anyone seeing you do it. But havin' a smoke: that's really hard. When they said you couldn't have any more of that, you really couldn't, just about, so that one's a real motherfucker."

  Sammy Paradise had reported his conversation with Chappelle to Merrion over lunch on Friday of the previous week, the second in August. They had occupied their usual dark-brown oak booth in The Tavern on the northerly side of the green opposite the Strand Theater in the center of Canterbury, a block from the courthouse. Also as usual they could talk about confidential matters because they had the place pretty much to themselves; the restaurant workers paid no attention to their conversation and because they met at 1:15 when the court was in recess, there were no other customers.

  Merrion was having a good sixteen-ounce strip sirloin steak broiled medium rare, a baked potato with sour cream and chives and a salad glistening with oil and vinegar dressing. He had nearly finished a pint of Lowenbrau dark beer and he planned to order another 'for dessert." Paradisio was eating a chicken salad sandwich on dark bread and as customary nursing a twelve-ounce glass of Miller Lite that he did not intend to finish.

  Paradisio said Chappelle told him Janet's smoking was 'the only thing about her he's got strong feelings about. He really doesn't like it.

  Because when she does it, it makes him want to smoke. And it was real hard for him to quit. He told her that and she said she can't stop.

  She used to smoke even more, she told him, but then a while back she cut down. And she's got it down now to the point where she can actually ration them.

  "He tells me that drives him nuts. "I could never do that. And I am a guy that they made quit completely. I know what I'm talking about.

  Only smoke so many a day? Guarantee you, that'd drive me nuts."

  "He acts like he's got her on surveillance. This's obviously become an obsession with the guy, keepin' track how much she smokes. "When she goes to bed at night she's got about four or five, maybe half a dozen of them left. Just enough to get her through the morning, just 'til she goes out again. Sittin' onnie edge the bed, there, 'fore the shower an' shampoo. Then: after she gets dressed and puts the coffee-maker on, dries herself off, an' brushes her hair. To dry it in the air, before she uses the hair-dryer. "Not as many split-ends," she tells me," this's him, now, tellin' me, '"when you do it this way you don't get so many split-ends." '"She says. Maybe that takes two butts. Mark down two for that, brings us up to three. Coffee's ready, ahh, then sugar, milk, have another one or two while she's drinkin' that. Now it's time to get dressed and go out the store, get ahold of a paper. Don't hafta actually go and buy it; just look up the page there where they print last night's number and see right there if you won. Scratch-ticket, large coffee. Use ten dollars' worth of food stamps, something costs about five bucks 'nd change. Leaves her enough to get change back to use for more smokes. Two more new fresh decks of butts. Something to look forward to, may turn out to be the only thing all day. Scratch the ticket. Have another one while you're doing that, or maybe on the way back. Six, I think, that makes it. Maybe seven, you lose count.

  Not that it really matters."

  "That's how I get it from Lowell. "Smokin's the principal thing in her life, when she's all by herself. What she does when she's doin' everything else, or not doin' a damned thing at all. She's a real junkie on those things." For him, this is an obsession.

  "Lowell with an obsession's an idea that bothers me," Paradise said.

  "It bothers me because I think he's tellin' me the truth when he says her smokin' gets to him. It makes him worry she might be the cause of him going back to smoking again. He's aware that it's possible he might get unlucky again, doing something that he knows he shouldn't do like robbing another bank or something. And if he gets caught doing it, which he knows's always a risk in that line of work, that would mean that he'd end up going back inside again. If he ever gets lugged again and almost anything'd do it, record like he's got; parking overtime'd be enough that'll be all it'll take. Put him right back in the can, and this time it'll be for all day, the entire rest of his natural. Habitual criminal, multiple loser like he is, the new law could be "Ten strikes and you're out" he would still qualify, easy.

  "So, say he hasn't got anything in mind right now, any special thing he's got in mind to get a large amount of money fast. That's good, but with him it's always been
kind of a temporary condition; he's always in it 'til he spots something that looks like prime pickings. "Candy," is what he calls it; a job that's too good to resist. Well, he's older now, lost a yard or two off his fastball, and he swears he's reformed.

  But in the back of his mind he still has to think it could happen again. Some big opportunity might turn up any day, and Lowell just wouldn't be able to pass it up. He knows himself pretty well by this time, what his limitations are. He gets hot pants when he sees a job he thinks he can knock over easy. Major temptations're hard for him to resist.

  "This's a big country. When he's been able to, Lowell's always been footloose, but he's spent a lot of years inside and he hasn't seen all of it yet. He knows somewhere he hasn't been yet there's bound to be another temptation he couldn't bear to turn down. The only reason he hasn't gone for it yet is that he hasn't seen it. If he sees it, he knows he'll say Yes.

  "So he might get caught again. If does, he's back inside. They're not going to let him smoke. He'll have to quit again. Lowell ain't sure he could do that. He's dead sure he doesn't want to.

  "That's why I think he's tellin' the truth, that he's pokin' her all the time and he likes that all right, but it bugs him that she smokes.

  I don't think this's good news for this boneheaded broad that you've got on your hands here, wasn't too bright to begin with. This is a dangerous man.

  "He's proven it, many times. The videos of him in banks when he's been robbing them show a very scary man in a state of cold homicidal rage, capable of doing anything. You would not want to've been in one of them, getting cash on your MasterCard, when Lowell and some friends stopped by to make a withdrawal. The people who've attended his robberies in person 've testified that he's frightening to behold.