by Parnell Hall
“There you go,” I said. “Back in service.”
“What about the other phones?” he said.
“They’ll all be working,” I told him. “It was the main feed.”
He didn’t want to take my word for it. I supposed it would be his head if I were wrong. On the way out he detoured into the living room to pick up the phone. It worked. He glanced in the direction of the study, but I could see he was as reluctant to disturb the conference as I was. Weighing the two evils, he found it better to let it go.
He let me out the front door, closing it behind me. Nice. No one had noticed the absence of the repair truck, unless Tony was mentioning it to Pluto now. I doubted it. It was not the sort of thing that would come up in conversation regarding the sale of a small fortune in coke.
I wondered what they were talking about. I would have loved to have tuned in on it, but it was just too risky. I got in the car and sped back to McDonald’s. I changed in the restroom for the fourth time and emerged a civilian once again.
I threw the costume in the trunk and drove back to my parking spot, half a block from the house. The guys in the store had assured me that would be close enough. I got out and opened the trunk of the car. I set up the two tape recorders in the trunk. The first one was tuned into the phone bugs. When I switched it on, nothing happened, since no one was using the phone. The second one, however, was tuned to the bug in the study, and when I switched it on, the tape, being voice-activated, started rolling. I plugged in the headphones.
Pluto was laughing. “So how’s your girlfriend,” he was saying. “She know about that little escapade with Marsha?”
“No way,” Tony said. “You think I’m crazy?”
I didn’t care about Tony’s little escapade with Marsha, and I didn’t care if Pluto thought he was crazy. All of that would keep for me on tape. Right now, I was at high risk and needed to get the hell out of there.
I thought about taking the package with the costume along with me, but in the end I left it in the trunk. Hell, if they found the bugs on the phone, they wouldn’t need the suit to connect them with the telephone repairman. I locked the recorders and the suit in the trunk, and started walking. I moved right along. I wanted to get out of there fast, and I knew that in a neighborhood like this it would be miles before I could get a cab.
23.
WHEN YOU COME RIGHT DOWN to it, in my regular job, my job for Richard, I’m not so much a private detective as I am a salesman. In a way, I’m not unlike the real estate salesmen in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glenn Ross.” I get the “premium leads,” that is, the names of people who have called in in response to the TV ads, and I call them, and make appointments, and go and talk to them, and try to close the deal. What I’m selling isn’t land, it’s an attorney but, the principle is the same. The only difference is, I don’t get commissions.
With one exception.
I’d been working for Richard for nearly two months before I found out what IB’s were. He’d neglected to tell me, and I probably still wouldn’t know if I hadn’t happened to overhear a couple of the paralegals talking about them one day when I was up to the office to turn in my cases. Unfortunately, however, when I asked them what IB stood for, one of them said “Incentive Bonus” and the other said “Initiative Bonus,” which touched off a huge argument, which to the best of my knowledge has never been resolved, and which did little to enlighten me.
Eventually I found out that while no one was quite sure what the letters stood for, everyone in the office knew what they meant, and were surprised to find out that I didn’t. And eventually someone, I think Susan, took time out of the argument to fill me in.
Basically, what it came down to was this. Richard wanted cases. And he wanted lots of cases, as many as he could get. He was much more concerned with quantity than with quality. That’s not to say that he wanted cases that couldn’t be settled or cases he would lose. He just wanted simple, straightforward accident cases, that could be settled expeditiously for a profit.
What Richard didn’t want were the spectacular cases, the kind you read about in the newspapers, the kind where you’re suing for hundreds of millions of dollars and the defendants are hiring teams of lawyers, and fighting like crazy, and everything takes a whole lot of time and effort and lasts forever. Because Richard wasn’t interested in the notoriety, or publicity, that went along with getting involved in any big splashy case. All he cared about was volume, turning over as many simple, straightforward settlements as possible. When you came right down to it, what Richard wanted to be, basically, was the McDonald’s of the legal profession.
Which was where EB’s came in. Richard was bringing in a lot of cases through his advertising, but he wanted more. So he offered a $150 finder’s fee to anyone in the office who brought in a new case that he accepted.
When I heard that I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t somebody tell me about this? I mean, my average case is three hours, or thirty bucks. And here he’s paying $150 for a single signup. It was too good to be true.
After that, I took extra retainer kits with me wherever I went, and I kept my eyes open. And sure enough, two days later there I was in the pediatrics ward in Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx signing up an eight-year-old boy who’d fallen off the swing in the school playground, and looking covetously at the boy in the next bed with his leg in traction whose mother had just come to see him, and wondering how I could make a move on them without appearing to be too seedy. The best plan I could think of was to talk very loud, hoping the mother would overhear and approach me.
It happened that the mother of the kid I was signing up was Hispanic and didn’t speak any English and had brought along another woman to interpret. So I was relaying messages back and forth from the interpreter to the mother to the kid, who spoke some English, and occasionally answered directly back to me. At the same time I was keeping an eye on the other bed to see if the other mother was picking up on the conversation. So I almost missed it when the interpreter said to me, during a lull in the translation, “You know, my daughter was hit by a car last week.” I did a double-take, and then looked at her to see if what I thought was happening was happening, and sure enough, what she was trying to find out was whether I could help her daughter too.
I certainly could.
The woman’s name was Maria Alvarez. She was about 30, bright, and intelligent, and I would have loved to have talked to her about her daughter’s case, but while we were still signing the papers for the kid in the hospital my beeper went off, and when I called in Richard had an “emergency” signup in Brooklyn and I had to run. I took her telephone number, called her that night, made an appointment, and drove out there first thing the next morning.
Maria Alvarez lived in the Melrose Houses, a huge project in the South Bronx running between Courtlandt and Morris Avenues from East 153rd to East 156th Street. It’s one of those projects made up of a whole series of separate buildings, where the street address is a main gate that lets you into the complex and then you wander around a huge courtyard looking for your particular building.
When I found mine, there were a couple of six-foot-four teenagers hanging out in the lobby. Maria Alvarez lived in 6D but, to tell you the truth, I find teenagers even more scary than adults, and I wasn’t too keen on having those guys in the elevator with me if they chose to come, so I took the stairs, and I was breathing a little hard when Maria Alvarez answered the door and let me in.
So now I’m sitting on a couch in the living room of her apartment, and Maria is sitting in a chair, and there’s a four-year-old girl playing on the floor, and I’m filling out the fact sheet and dollar signs are flashing in my head. And Maria’s just as intelligent as she’d seemed to be, and she has all the right information, and is giving me all the right answers: yes, it was a hit-and-run at the corner of Willis Avenue and East 140th Street; yes, the police came, from the 40th precinct; yes, they caught the driver; yes, the ambulance came and took her to Lincoln Hospital. And Mari
a’s smiling and talking, and the kid’s playing on the floor, and I’m writing down the information, and everything’s going great, and at the same time I can’t help feeling that something is wrong. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. And I go on with the information about the hospital, and I get to, “What were her injuries?” and Maria points to the girl on the floor and says, “Well, there’s a bruise on her leg, and there’s a scratch on her cheek, it’s faded now, but right there, you see it?” And I look at the kid on the floor and suddenly I realize what’s been bothering me. No cast. No scars. Nothing. Just a happy kid playing on the floor. No injury!
And I’m furious. I don’t let it show, but I’m furious. Here’s a hundred and fifty bucks out the window. I mean, Richard’s really gonna file suit for a bruise and a scratch. No injury, no case. And I won’t even get paid for my time and mileage, ’cause I wasn’t assigned it, I did it on my own. A whole morning wasted driving up to the Bronx, and for what? A bruise and a scratch! I mean, come on lady, you got me up here to listen to your goddamn case, there’s got to be something more than this!
And suddenly I realize, Jesus Christ, here I am, sitting here, furious because a four-year-old girl isn’t hurt. Wanting her to be hurt. Wanting her to have a broken arm or leg, or at least an ugly facial scar. Wanting her to have gone through pain and suffering. Wanting her to have a serious, and perhaps permanent, debilitating injury. Furious to find out she’s all right.
I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of my stomach. Again, I didn’t let it show, which was harder this time. I just went on and, as calmly and as quickly as possible, filled out the rest of the fact sheet, had Maria sign all the papers, took pictures of the kid, and got out of there.
I turned in the case to Richard, knowing he’d reject it, and, of course, he did. And I never, ever, attempted to chase down an IB case again.
Until now.
See, the thing is, I was really strapped. What with paying off Rosa and renting the car and the bugging equipment, Albrect’s grand was long gone, and I’d dipped heavily into the cash machine again. I was up against it, and I needed some fast cash to keep the operation going. And so, in desperation, I did what in the holy names of wife and family I had never been able to bring myself to do. I stooped to the lowest form of ambulance chasing—open solicitation.
I had an appointment with a patient in Harlem Hospital at nine in the morning. Visiting hours aren’t till 2:00, but I can always get in by showing my I.D. and saying I’m from the lawyer’s office. I got a pass at the desk, went in, and signed up George Grant.
And then I stayed. With the Visitor’s Pass protruding prominently from my clipboard, the room number, of course, carefully obscured, I wandered the halls of the hospital, dodging orderlies and interns, playing hide and seek with doctors and nurses, poking my head into people’s rooms, and looking for broken arms and legs.
The responses varied from “No shit? You a lawyer?” to “Get the fuck out of here.” Like Babe Ruth, I struck out a lot, but also like the Babe, I hit a lot of home runs. Four hours later I left the hospital with six signups under my belt.
I rushed them down to Richard’s, bullied my way past Kathy into his office, and threw ’em on his desk.
Richard was surprised. He cocked his head at me, narrowed his eyes, and said, “It isn’t like you to chase ambulances. Is everything all right?”
I had to suppress a smile. Richard isn’t used to dealing with people on a personal level, at least he never has been with me, and I would assume that would apply to others as well. Richard is at his best when he’s in an adversarial position, going for someone’s throat, and he’s perfectly at home in any business situation, but I have a feeling personal relationships make him uneasy, perhaps because there’s no right or wrong answer and thus no real guideline to him as to how he should act. At any rate, he always comes off clumsy and forced when he tries it. Now it was as if I could see him thinking to himself, “How do I show benevolent concern?”
I waved away his inquiry. “Fine,” I told him. “Just fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, sure. I just got a little behind on my bills.”
Richard nodded, and clearly happy to be back on familiar ground, began looking over the cases. He wound up taking four of the six. Whatever Richard’s other failings might be, he was certainly a man of his word. He wrote me a check on the spot—$600.
It was a quarter of three when I got out of there. I beat it down to the bank, got in just under the wire, and cashed the check. Stanley Hastings, detective, was back in business.
I got in my car, which I’d left at a meter on 14th Street, and drove out to Pluto’s to check my tapes. I changed the tapes on both machines and got out of there fast. I beat it back to the office to listen to them. On the way back I stopped at one of the hole-in-the-wall appliance stores on 42nd Street and bought a reel-to-reel tape deck for $149, and a pair of stereo earphones for $30. Then I went back to the office to listen to Pluto’s Top 40.
There were no interesting phone calls, but I had managed to get the tail-end of Pluto’s meeting with Tony. I missed the part about Tony’s fling with Marsha, but what I did get was great. Two separate pieces of information, each telling me I was making all the right moves.
The first came up when Tony asked Pluto if he had a hit of coke. Pluto came down on him, saying Tony ought to know he always kept his house clean, that when he made a deal he always brought the stuff in from where he had it stashed minutes before it was going out, and that the police could search his house any time and they’d find nothing. So my idea of framing Pluto with Albrect’s kilo wasn’t that farfetched, after all.
The second was that Tony had been unable to line up another courier, but by boosting the ante, he had managed to talk Forrester into going again.
So I’d been right to leave the tracking device in place. Red was making one more run.
24.
I TRACKED RED AS HE came through New York headed for Miami. I picked him up just west of Patchogue, Long Island, and tracked him till he went out of range, somewhere north of Camden, New Jersey.
I wasn’t sure why I was tracking Red. It was just something to do. That and the fact that eventually I wanted to get my transmitter back. But as far as helping me along with my problem, it really didn’t. I mean, I knew Red was on his way to buy drugs, and I’d know when he was coming back. If I wanted, I could pass the information on to the cops and get Pluto and the boys busted for drug trafficking. But I didn’t want to get them for drugs. I wanted to get them for murder.
Red had gone down over the weekend, so I had some free time on my hands while I waited for him to get back. That should have been great, considering the double duty I had been pulling lately (the Albrect thing and Richard’s cases had kept me going around the clock) but it wasn’t. Just the opposite. At least while I was racing around like a madman, I was occupied, I was doing something. Now I had nothing to do but think, and that’s never good. Because the first thought that came to mind was, what the hell did I think I was doing? In the first place, I was neglecting my family. What I’d told Richard about being behind on the bills was absolutely true, and what was I doing about it? Nothing. If anything, I was avoiding work. And for what? Because somehow or other I’d gotten myself obsessed with some neurotic need to prove myself useful? Great. Good goal. The best way to accomplish it, I’m sure, is to let your wife and kid starve. And justify it all because you’re caught up in some farfetched, glamorous, storybook crusade to avenge the death of dear old Martin Albrect. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so futile. I mean, when you came right down to it, what was I really doing in the Albrect affair, besides withholding evidence, compounding a felony, and conspiring to conceal a crime? Instead of going to the police, I was attempting to solve the whole thing singlehanded. Great. Who the fuck did I think I was, Sam Spade? What did I expect to accomplish?
At least, if I went to the police, maybe they could do something ab
out it. I couldn’t give them any proof, but I could tell them who did it, and surely they could take it from there. And if they couldn’t, wouldn’t that mean that it couldn’t be done, that it had been impossible to begin with, that I’d taken it as far as it could go and done everything I could?
The reason these thoughts taunted me so much was, basically, I had done everything I could. I’d managed to plant a transmitter on a car, tap some phones, and confiscate a kilo of contraband, but that was it. I’d shot my wad. I was tapped out, drained, fresh out of ideas. If something helpful came in on Pluto’s phone tap, it might at least point me in the right direction, but barring that, my basic problem was I simply didn’t know what the hell to do.
It was beautiful on Saturday, so I took Tommie to the Bronx Zoo. We’re family members. I figure if you have to be a member of something, the Bronx Zoo is a good thing to be a member of. As members, we have a book of tickets to get into the parking lot free. We also have a membership card that gets us in the main gate, and tickets for the rides. The ride tickets are great at the Children’s Zoo, which is always mobbed on weekends. We skip the long ticket line and go straight through the gate with our passes.
We did the Children’s Zoo first. We sat in birds’ nests. Then we crawled into tunnels and stuck our heads out of the plastic tops and pretended we were prairie dogs. Then Tommie climbed a giant spider web made of rope. I would have liked to climb it too, but I’m too big.
We pressed on to the slide, which is two stories high, and spirals around inside of what is made to look like the trunk of a large tree. I went down it once. Tommie went ten more times, while I waited at the bottom.
On our way to the petting area where you can feed the animals, we stopped at the men’s room beside the path. I tricked Tommie into going by saying I had to go—a trick that usually works.
I had to lift him up to the urinal. The urinals at the main restroom go all the way to the ground, and Tommie can use them himself. The ones in this restroom were attached to the wall at a height just a bit more than he could reach. The man next to me was holding up his son, who must have been 3 or 4. Tommie and the other boy finished together, and I learned a universal truth. When you pee, you shake your penis to get the last drops off. When you hold up your son to pee, you shake the whole child.