For Merrion it was like being compelled to attend a delayed broadcast of a sadistic procedure, knowing in advance what had already been done to the victim to degrade him, unable to do anything about it. It was as though he could communicate in his mind with evil men he had never seen and would not recognize on sight, but would know them for what they were, by instinct, if he ever saw them, and know beyond a reasonable doubt the nature, not the details, of what they had done. He understood them. You did it even though there was nobody else around to see what you were doing; you still had to do it. It was your moral obligation. So in case it did turn out that there had been someone looking, you wouldn't look like you'd been taking him seriously. And the perfect cruelty of it was that you hoped he hadn't gotten it, and wouldn't ever get it.
Because if Sam ever had allowed himself to catch on to what they were doing to him, meanly making fun of him, making a fool of him, that would triple or quadruple the pain they had inflicted on him just for fun. He still would've had to act as though he still didn't know it was going on, made himself act as though it never really happened.
Because after he got through talking with them and forming his impressions, it was going to be his job to write factual, unbiased reports about them. As he construed it that required never letting his personal feelings influence his judgement of a man, have any bearing, one way or the other, on what he recommended.
"That's my job, part of my job that I'm supposed to do. What I might think of some one particular guy personally; whether I like him or not: never letting that interfere or get in the way, in any way, of what I write down in my reports. What goes in there is what I think of him as a man who's on parole or on probation he's given his word, after all; he's on a trial; he's not free; he's just been let loose to see if he can, and will, behave, if and when he is fully released. What kind of use I think he's making of this second chance he's getting or this third or fourth or fifth chance, if that's what it is. If we're all gonna get another chance, after we die, to earn our way in Purgatory up into heaven, like it says in the Bible, then it seems to me that we oughta have something like that for down here. If there's gonna be redemption for us after we're dead, for what we may've done while we were down here, then by rights there oughta be some kind of redemption available on earth.
"And if there's going to be that, well then, getting it shouldn't depend on if I like you or not. What it should depend on is whether I think you've earned it, and deserve it, even if I do think you're not a guy I'd like to see a ballgame with: whether I like you's got nothing to do with whether I think you're doing OK. That's what I'm supposed to write down, whether you're doing OK And that's all that I therefore write down." Because he was a US Department of Justice Probation Services Officer, and that had to mean something, didn't it? Or else what did anything mean?
He had told Merrion enough about the genesis of the nickname to enable him to deduce the rest himself. Soon after the beginning of his thirty-four years with the Service, his clients (Merrion seldom heard him refer to them as 'cases') had begun to call him "Sammy Paradise."
When they reported by phone or came to the office, they asked for him by that name.
"I assumed it must've seemed just as unsuitable for him as a younger man as it did when I ran into him and he was middle-aged," Merrion told Cavanaugh. "So naturally it therefore wasn't very long before the filing clerks and secretaries in the office where he worked, and then all other people that he worked with, his colleagues and superiors, began using it as well. It was a joke. When someone pins a nickname on a person that's so completely inappropriate for him you can't help but kind of laugh a little, snicker, every time you hear it laugh at him, I mean, not with him, just out of general high spirits it's guaranteed to stick. I think most of us must be cruel, enjoy hurting other people. Most human beings are generously cruel.
"Sammy being Sam, though, he doesn't seem to mind. I mean, as far as anyone could tell. I've never called him that myself, Sammy Paradise, when he was around, but the other guys I've met him with not his clients, now, his hoods; these're people in his office they use it around him all the time. Apparently he's never objected. They treat him like shit, do they? It's okay; he doesn't mind.
"One day when he didn't show for lunch I called there, find out where he was. That's when the whole thing first struck me, the way they treat the guy. He'd called in sick, the flu. But the asshole secretary that he talked to, someone that he works with, every day, he asked her specifically to call me? She never bothered.
"I was curious, you know? I asked her why. "Well then, if he asked you to do this, and you work for him, why didn't you do it then? Save me a useless trip to the place where he's supposed to be, like he wanted you to do, knowing he was sick and wasn't gonna make it." And she said: "I dunno. I had something else I hadda do, I guess. I must've forgot."
"I get this stupid broad any time I call up over there and ask for him by name, "Samuel Paradisic" She's the receptionist and she's also assigned to him, to type up his reports. She's the Sammy secretary.
When you ask for him she acts like she met him once a few months ago and he didn't impress her much. I say I want to talk to him and she always says to me: "Oh you must mean Sammy Paradise. I'm not sure he's in today." When I know he's in, because I just had to tell him I'd call him back after he called me and I had someone in my office.
"One day it got to me, this broad's attitude, and I asked to talk to Sammy's boss. Guy named Anglin, think his name was, seemed like a nice-enough guy. I told him how this typist of theirs acts when I call, and said if she treats me that way she's most likely rude to everybody else. How when I ask for Sam she refers to him as "Sammy Paradise," not "Mister Paradisio," which, I said, can't cause his clients to respect him a lot, much less the general public. And I asked Anglin did he think that was right. He told me Sam'd never objected which kind of surprised me; it seemed so completely out of keeping with everything else about him. Disrespectful of his dignity or something. And unless he complained about it, Anglin said he didn't see any need to do anything about it. I got the impression I'm the only one who ever griped about that lazy broad, who wont even look around for a guy she works for when someone calls and asks for him. In fact, from the reaction I got to the question over there, it was pretty obvious his boss thought maybe I was some kind of a nut. Either that or out of line."
"Well," Paradisio said, getting to know Cavanaugh by allowing Cavanaugh to learn what he was like, enabling the judge to evaluate him as though tacitly conceding that the judge outranked him and had a right to size him up, at the same time ate his Italian sub, talking while he chewed.
"Bad enough, when my clients try to do that, get on my good side, as though some day that might get them a break when they really don't deserve one. Wishful thinking but that I can understand.
"But every so often, just now and then, I get one that goes beyond that, acting like we're pals. I'm now his big brother, or sometimes maybe even his father. Finds out when my birthday is, sends me cards and shit.
"None of them've got any imagination. It's like they're followin' a cookbook. You can almost see 'em, movin' their lips. Here's this repeat-offender, career criminal, moanin' and groanin': he's all alone in the world. He was inside so long he hasn't got nobody left and no place to go. Nobody cares about him. The boo and the hoo and "poor me." So maybe this year you could ask your wife if she would make a little extra stuffing and set one more platen usual for Thanksgiving?
He'd like to spend the day with you, you're the closest thing to family he's got left, and he's not supposed to see his old friends any more, he used to hang around with, who got him in trouble. As you know; you're the boss now and you're the one who told him that. And you know he wants to do everything exactly how you say, 'cause he's reformed now and he's going to be good.
"He's working on you. Gradually it's all becoming your fault, you're to blame, that the holidays're comin' and he's all alone. He didn't have nothin' to do with it, or pretty so
on he wont've, by the time that he gets through rewriting history around you. This's the pattern with almost all of them. All the bad things you thought he did were somebody else's doing. He'll get so he believes the shit while he's slingin' it; just give him some time and he will. It wont be anything he did that explains why his family disowned him, and he was inside for so long no one remembers his name or that he lost track of all of his respectable friends. Always what someone else did. That's his way of dealing with the emptiness: fill it up with lies.
"That's what all of that rigamarole is all about. When I wasn't looking, didn't know anything was going on, I adopted the guy. God or Fate brought us together. Instead of just having him assigned to me, because I was first in line to get the next bad actor, the day they let him out.
"Well, I can deal with that stuff. I know how to do it. You learn all that early; older guys teach you. What to do when the cons start working on you, trying to muscle in on your life. Let 'em go far enough and pretty soon they'll be in your spare bedroom. He'll take over your personal life on you, be everywhere you look and underfoot.
Hoggin' the bathroom, the morning, you're tryin' to shave and get dressed. Askin' you if you'd mind already asked her and she said it sounds fine to her if he slept with your wife now and then.
'"Just one night a week now, not asking' too much. Maybe, say, Tuesday, or Thursday night, when you're out bowlin' with the boys, give the old lady something to look forward to. Not like I wanna spoil any your weekend plans." Pretty soon he's fucking your wife and you're inna guest room. And these're bad guys that're pullin' this mealy-mouth shit, or you never would've even got to know them.
"So I think by now, well, I'm pretty well seasoned. I been around quite a while. I must've seen, or at least heard about, most of the flavors of bullshit there are. But now this new guy comes onto my list. Never had one like this one before, Mister Lowell Chappelle. He makes all the others look tame, and I've hadda buncha lulus in my time, believe me. This is one very bad guy, and he not only thinks that he's my adopted son; he thinks I've adopted his whole family. So he tells me anyway.
"I'm not sure this is the honor that Lowell seems to think it is, or that I want it, if it is. Lowell's family doesn't seem to've exactly flourished, deprived as they've been of his affection and fatherly direction while he was unavoidably detained elsewhere, in one prison or another, doing time for all the exciting things he did.
"He believes he has two sons. He believes they both may still be alive, but he's not sure. He hasn't always tried to keep close tabs on the children he's begotten, but if I could locate them he'd like to make amends. Because I have access to sources of information that are closed to him. As usual when it's some nice thing that Lowell would like to see occur, it will require quite a lot of work from someone else, not him. He's helpless. Lowell's careful to be helpless puts a lot of effort into it; make sure he stays that way. He'd like me to use "that computer that you're always using there that can do anything, and see if you can find out something about my kids, on it. See where they are these days, what they're doing. That'd be good to know."
"Using information that he's volunteered and that I've obtained by questioning him, like a fool I've tried without success to do this. I have been unable to check or verify any family history that he's given me that's not in his own personal record. He of course is not the sole source of the information in that jacket about him; that came from law enforcement officers and public records. That's why it's pretty reliable. And there's a lot of it; he's had a long and eventful career. But that data's only about his military and criminal career; it isn't a complete picture of his background. It doesn't enable us to say with any sort of assurance who his family includes, much less list their current addresses, because he was the source of the entries about them and he's a habitual liar.
"So what I am saying is that the information he's given me about his family members may be true. But I haven't been able to substantiate or verify it. I'm not sure whether he deliberately falsified the data that he's given me; or the information that he's given me's the best he has, but simply wrong; or because both his sons, and his wife and the woman who bore his second son, have somehow managed, deliberately or otherwise, to disappear from all the data banks that we have access to.
It wouldn't be unusual if they did, just decided that Lowell's never going to make their lives better; may in fact cause them more trouble and pain, so they've decided that the safest thing to do is to disappear. The dependents of repeat offenders often do that; the very best they can to divorce themselves from ever having anything to do with their bad boys again. It often works, and I have to say it often seems to me that they're right: it's by far the smartest thing for them to do.
"My guess is some of each factor's probably at work here, not that it matters. Tracking all these people down and making sense out of Lowell Chappelle's family tree would cost a lot more time and money than it could possibly be worth. So, going on the data that Lowell furnished:
"One of his sons, the eldest, is named September. "His mother liked that for a name. She had him in the wintertime but she didn't like February." Lowell always called him "Shadow" but he's not sure whether anybody else ever did. He last saw the boy, then two or three, before he went into the service in Nineteen-flfty-nine. That would make "this kid" thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Lowell forgets but he thinks that would be about right. From something he heard on the grapevine before he was released the time before this, Lowell believes that he was in maximum security somewhere in the sovereign state of Texas. He isn't sure exactly where, or what for. He thinks the sentence might have been the outgrowth of something to do with a riot that happened at another correctional institution in Texas where he was previously doing time. "For drugs or something, something to do with drugs. Or maybe it was a border thing." He hasn't seen him for many years.
"Lowell lost track of his wife, Norma this would be September's mother "years and years ago." He says he didn't go looking for her when he came out of the service and "I guess if she ever went lookin' for me she couldn't've looked too hard, because if she did I never heard nothin' about it and she never found me." He righteously assumes that she and the boy received the allotment checks that he knows were deducted from his army pay, but he doesn't know that.
"The VA computer records consist of entries manually copied onto magnetic tape from card-files during the changeover from the keypunch system that took place years and years ago. They indicate that allotment checks made out to forty-four military dependents named Chappelle went to a total of seventy-one addresses in the US, Canada and the Dominican Republic during the years that our boy was in the army fighting for his country and the democratic way of life. The only one that seems to have any connection with him at all was a Gloria Chappelle at an address in Atlantic Beach, Florida. "Gloria" was his mother's name, but he has no recollection either of her ever having lived in Atlantic Beach or of himself ever having directed that she be sent any allotment from his pay at that address. Or any other one. He said he hadn't seen her since he was about six years old, and that was in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands. So: our first dead end in the pursuit of the history of Lowell Chappelle.
"The last he heard of his wife, Norma, she was living somewhere in Illinois and she was working in a factory "that made things." What things he doesn't know. "Could've been pumps." He believes that was about "twenty, thirty years ago," but he's not sure. He thinks she may be dead. He says she had asthma, or maybe it was TB, and it gave her a lot of trouble, so it was hard for her to keep a job.
"The other son's named Rutherford. He'd be about sixteen or seventeen by now. He lived with his mother in the Santurce section of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Lowell's information about him's very old and comes entirely from letters he received some time ago, while he was in prison, first from a social worker and then from a parish priest in Puerto Rico. They seemed to be under the impression Lowell was a wealthy man who owned several restaurants and clubs in New York, and
hoped he would see fit to contribute financially to the support of his son and his son's mother.
"This was before the States all started enacting those long-arm Dead-beat-Dad statutes that've become so popular in recent years and just about drive us nuts in the federal system, trying to keep track of all the warrants that're issued under them that we're supposed to enforce. Not that I don't think they're a good idea, but that's a different matter. It seems to me as though the States ought have their own people to do all the work it entails. We're already understaffed and overworked, before they started this.
"Anyway, Lowell concedes the possibility that the social worker may've gotten this impression, that he was a wealthy fella, from the boy's mother, who may very well have gotten it from him, during his only visit to the island shortly after the four-hundred' thirty-thousand-dollar bank job back in Seventy-eight that was alleged to have been his most recent effort at least so far as anyone's proven so far. The one that landed him in jail out at FCI McNeil Island before he got out and came here, destined for my attention.
"Lowell of course continues to maintain his innocence of that charge.
He does admit that during his visit to Puerto Rico when he knocked up the lady in Santurce he had quite a lot of currency with him, much of which he lost playing blackjack in the casino at the El San Juan Hotel.
"Now, this woman that your Park Rangers surfaced in the woods back on Saturday night, this Linda Shepard: as I understand it, she claims to be Chappelle's daughter. It's possible she is but that detail slipped his mind. Details have a way of slipping where Lowell's mind's concerned. Or perhaps he just kept that fact from me, chose not to tell me for some reason of his own or for no reason at all. I couldn't find Lowell today after you called so I could ask him that. Got no idea where the hell he is, and neither does anybody else I know who knows him. Janet LeClerc's was one of the numbers I called, that you give to me there, Amby. Got no answer from her."
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