A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  You're asking me how they plan to do the damage, there I can't help you. I just hope it's not jail they've got in mind. I go into jails in the course of my employment. I don't like 'em. I'm always glad to get out.

  "Best I can figure, what Pooler said, it all goes back all the way to Chassy and Larry Lane, Fiddle Barrow and the Carneses; how those guys were doing business around here, thirty, forty years ago, you and me're just getting' started. I don't really see how they can do this, considering that every statute of limitations I ever heard of expires after five or six years. If they haven't bagged you by then, they can't. Except for murder and treason; and I don't think they got us on that.

  "But according to what Pooler says, they got a way says they can get around it. I don't trust him but I guess I believe him. Still think the bastard'll bear watching, though. He's a shifty mother-fucker and I think he's twenty-to-forty-percent on the side of the enemy here. He told me he hates to lose. Said he goes into every case fully expecting to win. "When I can't expect that, I refuse it." But this time I think if his client loses, he'll be able to take it in his stride."

  Pooler seemed dwarfed by his own lustrous brown leather desk chair. He sat far down in it so that hunched behind the desk he looked like a frog sitting on a rock, partially obscured behind a bigger rock in front that hid his body except for his shoulders and the part of his torso above the base of his sternum. Once he had Merrion seated in the barrel chair he studied him, working his mouth while he used his left index finger to rub his left nostril, hard. Then he picked up large black-framed eye-glasses with visible bifocal lines and used both hands to put them on, spreading the bows and fitting them over his ears as carefully as though he had been preparing to cut a diamond. When he looked up the upper and lower lenses enlarged Merrion's view of his brown irises differently, so that their upper and lower hemispheres did not quite seem to match. Pooler swallowed and said "Yes."

  Merrion did not say anything. "I felt like some kind of specimen," he told Hilliard. "Something helpless in a lab that this guy was now going to cut up and see if he could learn something. Hard on me, maybe, but useful to him."

  Pooler rested his chin on his left hand and extended his index finger up alongside the corner of his mouth. He licked his lips.

  "The gist of it's the club memberships," he said. "From all we've been able to gather naturally not wanting to appear to be too interested but from what we can piece together that's essentially the direction they seem to be taking." His teeth were even and white.

  "Grey Hills?" Merrion said. To Hilliard later he said: "I wasn't saying that to give the guy a hard time. Playing Mickey-the-dunce with him there. If we're really involved in something here, it isn't all just smoke and mirrors, how the hell could Grey Hills have anything to do with it? Almost twenny-five years after we joined it? It was a legitimate question.

  "He thought I was jerkin' his chain. For Pooler that question was all it took. My asking that really creased it."

  "Yeah," Pooler said, glowering at him, "Grey Hills. I know, it's a long time ago, but that's the way it is with over-reaching. You may get what you want at the time, but what you have to do to get it, well, those things have a way of coming back to haunt you.

  "You probably never heard what I had to say at the time you and Hilliard applied for membership. I knew you by then from meeting you in Sixty-eight, and I didn't like you. And I said then to them, my father and grand ad I didn't like it and I thought it was a rotten idea for you and Dan to become members. Quite candidly said so. And not just to them, either; to the membership committee; totally open and aboveboard. I would've said it to you and Dan, if the opportunity'd occurred, said it right to your faces.

  "I said it was a very bad idea. That no matter how nice and friendly it might look as though wed all become, dealing in party and legislative matters, the two of you did not belong at Grey Hills.

  "My father and the Chief said their concerns were political. They were sorry circumstances had been such that the membership rolls had to be reopened, and very much regretted that had made it possible for people like you and Dan to aspire to membership and apply. They said when they voted to reopen, they assumed that the high price of initiation and membership would be enough to prevent your kind from even trying to get in. If they had ever dreamed that people like you might somehow find the money, they would've blocked the proposal at the outset.

  It would've never made it out of the executive committee, much less been approved by the board of governors or voted on by the entire membership. In hindsight they fully agreed it would have been far better if they'd bitten the bullet and submitted to a hefty extraordinary one-time assessment on the membership to meet the club's financial needs.

  "But now it was too late. They were afraid that if they kept you out, Dan might retaliate, prevail upon his pals on Beacon Hill to refuse to grant racing days for that damned racetrack the Chief was so obsessed about. They were obsessed by that damned track. They virtually ordered me not to use my blackball.

  "I didn't, but I warned them. I told them no good would ever come out of letting the pair of you in. I said nothing but trouble would ever come out of it. I told my dad that, and I told the Chief, too, it was an awful idea.

  "I couldn't know then exactly what form the trouble would take, what repercussions there'd be. I must confess it didn't cross my mind that somehow your joining some day might form the basis for a tax evasion case, which seems to be the way they're heading. But there was no doubt in my mind that some day, sooner or later, something bad was certain to happen. Now my ugly premonition seems to be coming true.

  "I want to emphasize that none of this was personal. It was not that I had a thing against you. Even though wed had that confrontation over the Humphrey candidacy, that was irrelevant. Nor had I anything against Dan Hilliard, or anyone who'd gotten where he is today by means of his own good hard work. More power to him, I say. I just knew that trouble was bound to come out of it some day, if your applications went through. My father and the Chief knew it too. I suspect you both knew, regardless of whether you admitted it to yourselves, that the two of you did not belong at Grey Hills. You didn't have the stuff.

  "By rights you didn't have the means, the resources, to be members. How you came by them, I don't know, and I don't want to. I do know some kind of shady business was involved. Had to be; you had no other way, no honest way, to have laid your hands on that amount of money that fast. Sixteen or seventeen thousand dollars? An assistant clerk of courts and a state rep on the lower rungs of power? I'll give you your due: you were cute. No one's ever found out what you did or how you did it. But cleverness purifies nothing: the dirty politician's still like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight: so brilliant, and yet so corrupt, he shines, and stinks."

  Merrion glared at him. "You piece of yellow shit," he said, 'getting me in here to say that to me. The next time we meet where some of my friends're around, so I'll have witnesses, I'm gonna call you out, dare you to repeat that. If you don't I'm gonna call you a fuckin' coward, and spit on you. And if you do, you'd better have a friend with you to hold your fancy bridgework or you're gonna swallow it."

  Pooler smiled. "Sorry, Amby, but there's no other way of putting it, wasn't then and isn't now, and your reaction to the statement of that fact just proves it: you're not Grey Hills material and you never were.

  Neither of you ought to've been allowed to place yourselves in the position where you'd have to do whatever it is you've done to meet the obligations membership entailed. As the fix you're now in proves conclusively. But back then, no one would listen to me."

  He nodded, pouching his cheeks with air like an industrious squirrel with a cargo of acorns. "And now the day of reckoning has come, just as I predicted. But now it's too late for my cautions to do any good."

  Merrion said to Hilliard: "I considered getting up and winding up and letting him have it, popping him one in the chops. Pasting him six or eight good ones, glasses and all, right in his smug littl
e, fat little, face. Hair on the walls and blood on the floor; teeth in the nap of the rug. Change his nose from convex to concave. But I restrained myself. For one thing I don't want his yard-man to wind up behind the wheel of my car, using my house as an equipment shed. Particularly since I'd most likely still be in jail when he won the civil suit turning all of my goods over to him. Besides, my impression is that at least until one of us belts him, he's at least got to pretend he's on our side."

  "Hell, if you think about it," Hilliard said, 'he may actually manage to get us to agree with him about Grey Hills. He's a third generation member. He's never seemed to use his membership much; I've seldom seen him there. But up 'til now I've always assumed it was because he was working all the time. Or else he just didn't like golf. There are people like that, you know. But now you've got me wondering: Maybe it's fear of rubbing elbows with riffraff like us, using showers that we've used, that's made him scarce up there. Is he really that petty?

  If he is, he's right saying we're not fit to be members. What kind of asshole'd pay money to hang out with him? The very idea's disgusting.

  Fine mess you got us into, Ollie, you and your grandiose ideas."

  "Hey," Merrion said, 'my intentions were good. I'd had an unexpected bit of good fortune. Shared it with a friend."

  "Yeah," Hilliard said, 'well, so whaddaya think? Myself I think I'd have to say the two of us by working hard've paved the road to Hell damned well."

  TWENTY-FOUR

  "I think the bastard actually liked explaining it all to me," Merrion told Hilliard after dinner in the dim dark-panelled bar at Grey Hills.

  "Listening to him… I sat there and he talked and I heard what he was saying and it was like I'd stepped outside myself, and what I wanted to do more'n anything in the whole world was stand up and whack him one.

  It was the same feeling that I had the day I went back with my mother to see the specialist, the "geriatricist" sounds like a circus act, guy who rides a bike naked onna high-wire, something. Her regular doctor sent us to him, see if he could figure out what was going on with her.

  "Have him run a few tests." Duck when they say "a few tests"; they're warmin' up to tell you you're doomed.

  "The idea was to find out why she was forgetting things, who she was or where she lived; why she mattered in the world and who she mattered to.

  Naturally my dear brother Chris's nowhere to be seen; that's a family tradition. I can tell when the fat's inna fire: Chris's long-gone an' hard to find.

  "She went outdoors one cold morning, late November, in her nightgown, barefoot. Went for a stroll down the street. Eight-thirty or so. Lots of people must've seen her, going off to work in their cars, coats on and the heaters going, barefoot lady in her nightgown walking down the street, but nobody stopped and tried to help her, or called the cops, their car-phone. They didn't care if something happened to her, nobody they knew; just ignored her and drove right on by. She got about a mile before someone who knew her from the bakery stopped her car and hollered at her, snapped her out of it, thank God; drove her home and called me. She'd only done it that once, but even once gets you worried. Next time she might not be that lucky, wander off and freeze to death, do something else and get hurt.

  "And both of us already… it wasn't like we didn't have an inkling what was going on. We didn't know the details but we had a pretty good idea. She was gradually losing her buttons. We'd seen it happen to other people. Her mother, Rose; then they called it "hardening of the arteries." "Her brain isn't getting enough blood she's getting old, and simple, too." Before wed heard of senile dementia and Alzheimer's.

  When she was lucid, which she was most of the time she had a pretty good idea that when she wasn't quite right, that was probably the explanation.

  "But we didn't want to have that pretty good idea, you know? We didn't like having it. And her doctor, Paul Marsh, dead himself now: the reason that he sent us to this baby-faced specialist — looked like he was about fourteen was because he didn't want it to be what we all knew it was. He was the family doctor. He'd been treating her for years,

  "taking care of all of you," was what he said. She was as much a friend of his as a patient. He didn't want her to have what she had, and for damned sure he didn't want to be the one to tell her. This new guy would do that. Wouldn't bother him; he didn't know Polly from a load of goats. We were seeing him to spare Paul. I suppose it was in a good cause.

  "So they did those few tests they had in mind to do on her, and that took quite a while. "A few tests" is quite a lot, you find, when you start taking them. And then they told us to go home until they could "just get all the results back here, take a look at them so we can see what they mean." Give us a few more days or so to make-believe and hope that what we knew was going on was not. Then they had us back again and this time he sees us in his nice office, about sixteen diplomas on his wall and the kind of smooth white face you'd expect to see on your executioner. The vet we took our last dog to, have him put to sleep: he had a kinder face, I swear he at least pretended he felt sorry it hadda be done. But this assassin sits us down and quite pleasantly informs my mother and me that one by one, a few here, few there, she's begun to lose her marbles. And there's nothing he can do.

  "For us this was kind of upsetting news, you know? But for him it was all in a day's work, like he's conducting an experiment. "Okay, let's see how these two take it when I hand the sentence down, tell them there's no hope." I suppose in his line of work, has to do this every day, gets to be routine. But my God, it hurts like hell when you're the people it's bein' done to then it's not routine at all.

  "I got the same feeling listening to Pooler. I think he was making it sound worsen it is. I realize this isn't gonna be fun, something we'll really enjoy, fucking romp in a meadow or something, but he sure didn't go out of his way to make it sound better.

  "He said they call it the Public Corruption Unit," Merrion said. "Said it didn't exist when he was in the US Attorney's office, twenty-odd years ago. I guess this's some new drill they dreamed up recently.

  Almost smacking his lips, the son of a bitch; I think he envies the bastards. "Gee, that looks like fun; wish wed thought of it." Guys like him're like dogs that've killed once and had that first taste of blood: they never get over it. You know they'll kill again."

  "But then, of course," Pooler said to Merrion, 'then there were only a dozen or so of us assistants; now there's about seven times that many.

  And there wasn't any western division of the District of Massachusetts, no federal court or satellite US Attorney's office out here. So things do change. There're more of them now with time on their hands, looking for something to do. They're bound to be more aggressive. To us older hands some of the things they propose to do seem a little far-fetched at first blush, but they've been making them stick.

  "Essentially the unit operates on the same principle as the old Organized Crime Strike Forces: target prosecution. They identify subjects they think're corrupt, state and local officials, and then they study their official acts to see if they can find a way to apply federal criminal statutes. They've used the racketeering statutes, which were enacted to go after the Mafia, to go after people paying and accepting kickbacks on state contracts. They've charged mail fraud against people falsely claiming they can't work in order to get state and municipal disability pensions. Hard to argue with; they mail in the false statements of injury and get their checks by mail. The wire fraud statutes've been used to get people who picked up a phone to promise a bribe to a local plumbing inspector, just across town, and nailed the inspector for taking the call and taking the money. And of course they've been using the criminal tax-evasion statutes ever since the Thirties, when some frustrated genius said: "Well damnit all, if we can't prove Capone had people murdered, as he did, let's get him for tax evasion."

  "That looks like the approach they're going to take with our friend Hilliard," Pooler said, his expression a mixture of amusement and contempt. To Hilliard, Merrion
said: "I dunno whether he was sneering at the federal fuckers or at us."

  Pooler shrugged. "Not that Danny's quite as big a trophy as Al Capone was, but he had a lot of power in his day, and he made himself conspicuous with his not-so-private life, so a lot of people know him.

  They still recognize his name. Get a grand jury to indict him and you're guaranteed a headline. Drop enough broad hints around before you go for the indictment, which is what they're doing now, you build up suspense; anticipation fed by rumor makes the headlines even bigger."

  "Danny's always paid his taxes," Merrion said. "So've I; we both have.

  Danny never took a bribe. Once when something I said made him think that I might do that, he as much as told me that if I had goin' on-the-take in mind, he wouldn't put me in a job. I eased his mind on that.

  "Now, have I ever done a favor for a guy, given breaks to people who'd done things they shouldn't do? Sure, of course I have, and so has Danny: many favors. And gotten many in return. Sometimes a guy's bought me a drink after I've helped him out. Once or twice I've been out somewhere having dinner with a lady friend, and when it's come time for the check I find out I'm not getting one — someone I know but didn't see spotted us when we came in; on his way out told the maitre d', give our check to him. That's happened to Danny too, more times'n me. Not because he's crooked; because he knows more people. Friends of his picking up a check or giving him tickets to the ballgame? Sure, small stuff like that, of course we've done it.

  "But never have we taken money, not once. That was always out of the question. Now are you telling me we're guilty of something? A federal offense? I don't believe it."

  Pooler sighed. "Amby," he said, 'you and I've always had trouble talking. We just can't seem to communicate. You refuse to hear what I'm trying to tell you, and what you say to me's unresponsive.