A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  Andy gets that idea, he's liable, cut out Lennie entirely. Can't have that happening'.

  "Although my guess is it already did. The uncle made a good part his bundle selling used cars, for Christ sake. You know he had to've seen right through Lennie. Probably tickled him. No matter where the Red Sox moved their training camp Sarasota, Winter Haven, now Fort Myers Lennie always got to Clearwater, where Andy lives. "I always make it a point to spend a few days with him, long's I'm in the area." There was one stretch when the Sox trained in Arizona, Scottsdale, I think it was, so that's where Lennie took Julia on their winter trip. But they still got to Clearwater to visit his uncle. I guess Clearwater was in the Arizona area those years.

  "The rest of the year he's callin' every week at least, listenin' for wheezin', any shortness of breath, hopin' maybe to hear about a few chest pains; wishin' there's a way to take his pulse and get a urine sample by phone, fifteen hundred miles away. For years he's been doin' this, and all the time he's thinkin': "How much longer can he last?

  This must be the year I get rich."

  "Then when Andy's eighty-eight, he sends his happy tidings, not by phone, by letter. He's getting' married. He's fallen in love with this forty-year-old broad "Elaine the fair," Lennie calls her who comes in every day and does his cookin' and his cleaning. Lennie thinks she probably performs other services of a more personal nature that a lonesome old bachelor'd enjoy, "like makin' sure he gets his cookies every now and then." Lennie's still very bitter. The letter said they were gonna get married that spring, asked Lehnie to be his best man.

  That day Lennie looked like someone dropped an anvil on his head, and that's exactly how he looked today."

  The judge had stood up at 10:43 and hurriedly retreated from the bench into his office, moving clumsily but quickly, making quite a bit of noise and plainly not caring that he did so, as though he had been suddenly awakened from a sound sleep by a strong smell of smoke and discovered the building on fire around him.

  "By then it seemed like a good ten, eleven minutes've gone by after we first heard the shot," Merrion said. "I know it couldn't possibly've been that long, really, probably less'n a minute, but it seemed like a lot longer. We'd just been suspended by that sound, like a thunderclap so close the lightning had to've hit your house, right beside it anyway. It froze you. Everything just stopped, including time. My thinking did, anyway; I went into a trance; sittin' there totally stunned. Lennie came back to life first.

  "By then I was facin' the courtroom. I'd been talkin' to him when the gun went off. That made me turn around. Now I hear this second sound behind me. I turn around again. It was Lennie, jumpin' out his chair, hightailing it off the bench. They must teach you that in Judge School. "A gun goes off in your courtroom, fuck everybody else; save your own ass first. Run like hell and find yourself a place where you can hide until it's over." No hero medal for Lennie.

  "When he jumped up the chair banged on the Lucite pad it rolls around on. Everyone inna courtroom starts duckin' down. "Another shot" hadn't done that with the first bang; they didn't have the time. Lennie woke me up. "Hey, maybe I should get outta here. There could be more shooting anna next one might hit me." But I didn't; I just stood there. I was frozen.

  "Then time started up again. It was like I hadda catch up on what'd gone on right in front of me. "Let's see now I was looking at him when the gun went off so my back was to the lobby doors. I turned around and this woman came flying through them, hit the floor, ka-boom."

  Merrion clapped his hands. "Like that. She was lucky that was all the distance her husband got when he picked her up and threw her as we later find out he did after she shot him. Pissed him off somewhat, I guess. He'd gotten another foot or so on her, gone to a little more club, say, a seven iron, no question she would've banged her head on the end of one of those solid oak benches. Would've at least knocked her out, given all of us more time to figure out what she had in her hand and what we should do about it. Because as it was I didn't realize at first what it was.

  "Then I think: "My God, that woman's got a gun. That's afuckin gun, her hand. She could shoot someone. That must be the sound I just heard."

  "They never could fool you, Amby," Hilliard said, digging into a large mound of chicken salad on a bed of lettuce, flanked by three small bunches of fat tawny grapes. Merrion had sent his steak back as over-cooked and was waiting for a plate of chicken salad.

  "Not a chance," Merrion said. "I know what's go in' on, 'specially when I've got my eyes open and it's happening right in front of me. So I grab the phone on the desk and punch in 0, and, wonder of wonders, someone was actually there, and picked up, on the other end of the line.

  "Inna courthouse, this is astonishing, much more unusal'n having someone shoot a gun off. But there she was; Corinne was on the case. I could hear her breathing. I couldn't believe it. She must've also been in a state of suspended animation. That's the only way, account for her being there and picking up and breathing loud enough for me to hear her. The switchboard's right there inna cubicle right off the main foyer; shot must've been even louder — she may even've seen the shot fired. But I'm givin' her the news just the same, I am makin' it official; I say "Corinne, calla cops up in here quick, annie EMTs too.

  Got a shootin on our hands here."

  "And she said: "Huh7. Who is this?" Like she's gonna hafta think about this; decide whether she oughta do it. Not someone in authority, she wont. I say: "Never mind who it is, Kreen, this's Amby." I'm not making any more sense'n absolutely necessary either. "Calla fuckin' cops annie EMTs, for Christ sake. You wanna just do that for me?" And I guess she decides I am okay. She said, "All right, I'll do that right now."

  "Then I put the phone down and it dawns on me we gotta whole buncha cops right inna courtroom. I see one of the locals, some case onna list, is usin' his handheld radio. It's not close to lunch yet, so I assume he's not orderin' pizza from Domino's; he's callinah station to tell 'em what happened. So I didn't need to get Corinne involved in this at all. That's when I realized I'd been in some kind of funk.

  Just standin' there, lookin' stupid, and the woman on the floor with the gun starts rollin' over now, on her right side. She's checking to see if she's hurt. Had all the wind knocked out of her, most likely, but now she's startin' to think about possibly getting up on her feet.

  Still got the gun in her hand, so if getting' off another shot or two is something she'd like to do now, that is a viable option. Assuming it's still got some bullets in it, but one shot's all we've heard so the chances are it has all the equipment she needs.

  "At this point I notice two Statics who're also most likely also in for cases have come to their senses. Prolly only a few seconds've gone by since Sheila came flyin' in the courtroom, just seemed like a year or two. The two Statics're sittin' onna left inna row ah chairs just inside the railing. Now they're outta their chairs, bustin' their way through the people inna room. And they land on her like a big pair of bears and take the gun away from her. Those guys knew what they were doing. One of them held his gun on her, stomped on her right wrist on the floor so she couldn't move it, and the other one bent over and pried the gun out of it.

  "You can see that I am finding it very hard to do serious thinking at this point, even though as a general rule I'm not bad at it. But I'm gradually getting' the hang of it back. I first see her start scrabblin' around onna floor, I don't like the looks of it. I know there is some reason why I do not want this woman getting up from off the floor with that pistol in her hand. Now I'm figuring it out. She may be a perfectly nice lady, neighbors all speak well of her; but she also may decide to shoot me, and I don't want that to happen. I am now very clear on that.

  "What I'm not clear on yet is what I should do so that wont happen. And I know that if you're not an expert, trained to handle the kind of dangerous situation you're in, you shouldn't do anything. Otherwise you're liable to do more harm'n good. Everybody knows that. Moving an accident victim: they've been tellin' us since gra
de school that unless you're an expert, never move an injured person 'less you gotta: if you don't he'll burn to death, or there'll be an explosion that'll blow him all to bits. You move him when you don't hafta and you paralyze his back. He will sue your sorry ass to Jerusalem, and you'll wish you'd stood back and watched the fucking bastard die. Maybe tossed a match or something. So, knowing that, I just stood there, deer-in-the-headlights."

  The waiter, an unfamiliar elderly man, delivered Merrion's chicken salad. Hilliard ordered a second glass of the house red. Merrion said: "No, make that a bottle. I'll need at least two glasses to go with this." The waiter nodded gravely and departed.

  "I hope he can get back to us by midnight," Hilliard said.

  "He's in the same condition I was in this morning," Merrion said. "The way I felt after the gun went off."

  "Yeah, but yours was apparently temporary," Hilliard said. "His looks permanent."

  "It's a very strange feeling," Merrion said. "Out-of-the-body experience. Other people're waking up. Running around all over the place, whooping an' hollering, bloody murder, which for at least a while it looked like. Murder was certainly what the crazy bitch had in mind when she took the pistol out and let her husband have one in the brisket in the lobby.

  "We're not used to this kind of event. On a Monday in the courthouse the routine is: we do the best we can, knowing it wont be enough. See if we can maybe make some sense out of what is basically an impossible situation every day, come right down to it, but especially impossible on Mondays. It looks like business as usual, and it is, but nothing actually makes any sense. The reason that it looks like it's making sense is that by now we're all so used to it being that way, chaos doesn't scare us anymore. We oughta be beside ourselves, frantic, but we're not; we're used to it. What wed all been doing there was coping, same as always, when she opened fire.

  '"We never hear that sound here, that we've all just heard." This's what I told the investigating cop. And this's an example, what I mean, about things not making any sense in that place. We had all kinds of cops, State and local both, right there in the courtroom with us when we heard the shot. But for some reason I'm not clear on it seems this disqualifies them from taking charge of the investigation. Being there makes them witnesses, apparently an entirely different kind of being.

  "It's like the cops've got union rules for this kind of situation.

  Jurisdictional rules like the unions at the light company and the gas company and the phone company and the water department guys've got, who can open manholes, climb up poles, work on pipes and cables. Every crime's a new manhole to be opened. In this case, now I think of it, the crime that was committed was trying to open a hole in a man."

  "Jesus," Hilliard said.

  "Aw come on, I hadda hard day," Merrion said. "Apparently the rule is that nobody can have more'n one job on any given crime. Either you can be there, so you see it and hear it, in which case you are a witness; or else when the crime took place, you were not there; you got called to the scene. Then you respond, and investigate.

  Take statements; collect evidence; put it into nice little plastic baggies with dainty little white labels you put your initials on. Make arrests and tidy up. So that then when this particular crime comes up to be replayed in court, you will be a cop, okay? Have to get all of this straight.

  "It's kind of confusing until everybody finally gets their parts assigned. By now there's quite a few more people've come to join those of us who attended the shooting. It's becoming sort of a weird party-atmosphere now. People're all milling around all over the place, shoving each other, uttering warlike cries "Get outta the way; I tole you to move' so as you can imagine this takes a while. Have to make absolutely sure everybody's happy, no one's nose is out of joint, before we can get to work on this. "Now, now, Billy, play nice. Can't have any pouting. I promise if you do real good as a policeman this time, you can be a witness in the next one, okay Billy?"

  "The strange thing is that if no woman'd come flying through the air through the swinging doors backwards with a pistol in her hand, I don't think any one of us in that room who heard the noise when the gun went off would've been able to say: "Well, that was a shot that I just heard. Someone just shot a gun off." It didn't sound like what we think of as a gunshot.

  "I was thinking about that," Merrion said. "After the EMTs'd come and the doors're open now, I could see them out there in the foyer, attending to the victim. I recognize him from the jacket he had on. It was like a short white Eisenhower jacket, had his name on it in red over the pocket, "Ellie." Like the one John Casey made me wear at Valley Ford, I was a kid. He was this Ellsworth Ryan guy I just met, the way my office. Talked to him maybe two-three minutes, no more'n that. I think at this point I am practically the only guy in the courthouse who has met him at all, and knows who he is. Except for his loving wife Sheila, of course, his devoted wife, Sheila, who's just finished shootin' at him. That is what made him really mad at her, made him pick her up off her feet and fling her like a shot put bass-ackwards through the doors.

  "He is one strong dude, this guy. Just been shot in the right side of his tummy, it looks like, and he can still do something like that. Pick up a hundred-and-fifty, hundred-and-sixty-pound woman and pitch her about nine-ten feet through a pair ah swingin' doors. Of course the reason that he could was that he was strong and he was not disabled. It was a popgun twenny-two, not a grown-up gun like a forty-five or a nine millimeter, lot of stopping power. One them hits you, I don't care how strong you are, you would not feel like picking anybody up and flinging them through the air. You'd be feeling like somebody threw a bowling ball into your guts at couple hundred miles an hour."

  "And then also there was the fact that the slug didn't actually hit his stomach. What it hit was his call-book, and that took the impact, or a lot of it at least. Cops told me later when emergency room people got his shirt entirely off him, they confirmed what the EMTs'd told them to expect: the bullet never penetrated. Never broke the skin. Just an enormous bruise, I guess, so he's a lucky bastard, too, addition to being a strong one."

  The waiter reappeared soundlessly with a bottle of red wine, already opened, and two more glasses. He set the glasses down and poured the wine. Hilliard said "Thank you." The waiter nodded. Then he drifted away.

  "I don't like it when they bring the bottle already open," Merrion said. "I always suspect it isn't a fresh bottle; that they're refilling old Cotes du Rhone bottles over and over out in the kitchen from a vat of cheap jug-wine from Outer Mongolia, someplace like that.

  Wine made from yak fat; there's a tank of the stuff in the basement."

  "I doubt it," Hilliard said. "I think in this case the explanation is the waiter's too feeble to get the cork out at the table, so he has some muscular pot-walloper out back use the corkscrew for him." '1 think I saw the guy in a movie once," Merrion said, 'a small supporting part. I forget the name of it. Boris Karloff was the star."

  "Now this would be your victim," Hilliard said, 'or is it our waiter we're still talking about?"

  "Could be either one, I suppose," Merrion said. "Except I don't think Karloff was also in the movie where I might've seen the victim. In that one I think the star was Peter Boyle.

  "Anyway, today he was being an appliance repairman: refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, and when he came into the courthouse he forgot to leave his call-book in his truck. Good thing for him. It's one of those thick black leather ledger-things they make out of punched forms, two hard covers and a couple of || steel bolts. He carries it hooked over his belt, back cover inside his pants.

  "His adoring wife, Sheila, thinks when he keeps those appointments he meets lots of horny young housewives that he's bangin' all the time.

  For all I know, he is. So she gave him the idea first chance she gets she's gonna stick a blade in him. He got sick of it and told her he was comin' in today to file a complaint against her, for saying that, and ask for a restraining order, and so she decided it'd be fun if she also
came in today and plugged him. Dovetailed very nicely.

  "If he hadn't had that book in his pants he would've had a hole in a bad place, lower abdomen. You gotta take a bullet, you do not want it there. The bullet mushroomed in the book instead of in his bowels.

  EMTs told me later alia time he's inna hospital, they're making sure there's no traumatic internal damage, his beeper's goin' off like there's a prison break in progress. His office is goin' nuts, all these housewives callin': "Where the hell is Ellsworth? He's supposed to be here now. I can't get my washing done, he fixes my machine."

  "The gun was a Jennings J-22, chrome-plated pistol. I never heard that particular make, and by now I thought I'd had, most of them. Dave Fisher, State Police lieutenant, first responded when the call went out for someone to take charge at the scene, he says it's a six-shot, throwaway, fifty-buck cheapie. I am fascinated.

  "Sunny said to me one night after we finished going at it, I got up to get a beer or something, must've turned the ballgame on, my way back to bed, and she got annoyed. There we were, wed just made love, and now I went to get a beer and turned the ballgame on. She said: "Men do not know what to do with women, really. That's where all the problems start. You like us for the sex part, like that fine. But after you've gotten laid, immediately, you start getting bored.