The Weight of Living

by Michael Daigle

“His name was on one of those foreclosure letters that got sent to Lauren’s mother,” Nagler smiled. “He’s going to help us on that, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

  Dawson shook his head as he stared to walk away. Then he turned back.

  “How many balls are you juggling, Frank?”

  “Too many.”

  “Need another?” And handed he Nagler a slip of folded paper.

  “What do you know about Calista?” it read.

  Nagler folded the paper and put in his shirt pocket. “Thanks Jimmy, I’ll check.” But why?

  ****

  The shuffling ceased.

  Whatever Calista had done to his foot eased the throbbing, and Nagler folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.

  A bell ringing somewhere.

  Then a voice. Leonard.

  “Frank, your phone.”

  Nagler sat erect. “What?”

  “Your phone rang. Just once. Maybe a message.”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

  It was a message.

  Hapworth.

  “How?”

  ****

  “Nag-laar.”

  The whisper hissed through the empty cement-walled space like a bat careening through the darkness; water dripped, plink, pause, plink, pause, plink-plink.

  Frank Nagler lit a narrow slice of darkness with a tiny flashlight. He had agreed not to bring a powerful light to satisfy Hapworth’s paranoia about being followed.

  The pin-prick of light caught the corner of Hapworth’s face showing an eye and a piece of his ear.

  “You weren’t followed?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Nagler said as he carefully walked heel-to-toe avoiding splashing in the shallow puddles that showed in an oily sheen. “Didn’t drive, walked here the long way. Not much traffic anyway. Sound carries. Would have been easy to spot.”

  Bruno Hapworth looked like hell. His thin hair had thinned even more, leaving not even enough for a poor comb-over. His face was gaunt, unshaven cheeks sunken, and his frame, which had never supported clothes stylishly, had apparently shrunken to pole thinness. His hands were quaking.

  “Man, Bruno. You are in bad shape.”

  Hapworth’s head shook as he spoke. “I have to get out of this town, Frank.”

  Nagler leaned again the damp wall and cupped the flashlight in his hands.

  “Tell me what’s going on, I’ll tell you what I need, and then we’ll talk about what I can do for you.”

  Hapworth filled the air with short, scratchy breaths.

  “There’s these guys who work for a company I took on as a client about a year ago,” he began. “At first it was some real estate transfers, just paperwork. Seemed a little sketchy, but I didn’t think anything of it. Then one night they came to my apartment and told me the rules had changed. Honestly, Frank, this stuff seemed like basic real estate transfers, like ones I had filled out thousands of times in my career. But then they said they didn’t actually own the properties, but were using a law that allowed third-parties to claim properties that were tax delinquent or in foreclosure. I told them to go away or I’d report them to the police.”

  “Does that law exist?” Nagler asked.

  “Well, in the past I have tried to claim a property or two because the owner failed to pay a tax bill.”

  “So these guys knew your reputation. Christ, Bruno.” Nagler wanted to leave, instead he shook his head and leaned again against the wall. “Your whole legal practice was about walking that ledge, wasn’t it? Some people do that and create good, but you just made...” and the thought trailed off. “This time was one step too far, right?”

  Hapworth coughed, and then glanced nervously around.

  “They just laughed, Frank.”

  “Were these guys from an organization called the Mine Hill Foundation, by any chance?”

  Hapworth shrugged slowly, shoulders sagging, the infinite gesture of his broken life.

  “Guess so. I recall that name, but there were others.”

  “So what happened?” Nagler asked. “Why did they laugh?”

  “They,” Hapworth started to speak, then paused, then spoke with a whimper. “They showed me a video, Frank.”

  “A video?” Oh, crap.

  Hapworth looked up and the dim light showed his eyes as pebble hard and small. “I’m not proud of this. I like teen-aged boys... um, sexually.” His voice receded to a whisper. “I ...”

  Nagler expelled a harsh, rattling breath. “Oh, fuck me.” His voice echoed like a chain off the hard walls. Nagler felt his skin crawl and he wanted to leave. “Damn it, Bruno. They’ve been blackmailing you. They got you cold?”

  Softly Hapworth said, “Yes. They had a video, several in fact, of me at the Boundary Motel with teen-aged boys. After the win in court on the college case, I got sloppy. I had more money than I ever made before and I felt invincible. I...”

  “You could have, no, should have, come in, Bruno.”

  “And what?” Hapworth bitterly asked, “Admit I was fucking boys so I could trade information that I was also was robbing people of their homes? There’s no way out.”

  Nagler closed his eyes and shook his head. Standing in the dark wreck of the stoveworks with an admitted pedophile who happened to be Bruno Hapworth, the classic case-for-a-buck lawyer, was maybe the creepiest thing he had ever done. Jesus Ka-rist. But I need the creep. “Wouldn’t be the first time the prosecutor has stepped into the deep end to close a bigger case.”

  Hapworth voice was watery and weak. “But I’d be humiliated, Frank.”

  There was no mercy in Nagler’s voice.

  “Well, yeah. But would that be worse than going to jail for real estate fraud, with a side order of child sex for hire? Jail for pedophiles is not a happy place, Bruno. You know that from your celebrated client list. You’re not ready for that.”

  “No one would have to know?”

  “Not promising anything,” Nagler said coldly. He wanted to kick the wall in frustration, but knew how much that would hurt, so he slapped it hard with an open palm, a sound that snapped open the deep silence.

  The dim flashlight showed Hapworth squeezing his face together and clutching his forehead. Then he dropped his hands. “Okay, Frank.”

  Nagler watched as Hapworth’s body released what had clearly been months of terror; his face was calm and his eyes soft and he collapsed against the wall and deeply exhaled.

  “Good, what do these guys look like? Seen ’em before?” Nagler asked.

  “No,” Hapworth said. “One was a tall guy, well built, thick, dark beard, always wore shades, and a tweed hat, which I thought was just odd. The other was a kid, punky, ball cap, leather coat.”

  “How long as this been going on?” Nagler asked coldly.

  “The heavy stuff? More than a year. They’d send me a list of court dates with docket numbers and I’d go to tax court and file the paperwork to claim the property.”

  “You do know that all that property is actually being stolen?” Nagler asked.

  “I... um, yes.”

  “And you probably knew it all along, right?”

  A sigh. A soft, “Yes.”

  “Okay, here’s what going to happen. On the fifteenth there’s a foreclosure case for an Adrienne Fox. Look it up. She will be there with an attorney to dispute the foreclosure. And you will be there ready to admit to the fraud.”

  Hapworth shuffled against the wall. “No, Frank, I can’t. They’ll be there.”

  “You have no choice, Bruno. If you don’t show and do what we ask, I’ll charge you with child sexual abuse and based on your admission tonight, doesn’t sound like it would be hard to prove.”

  “Frank...I...”

  “Look. I’ll be there, a sheriff’s officer will be there, and someone from the state Attorney General’s office. You’ll say your piece, and we all will leave together. They won’t get you.”

  Nagler could see Hapworth’s head point toward the floor; his strangled breath the o
nly sound, the terror again evident.

  “I don’t know what to do. They follow me, threaten me. I have to do what they say.”

  “Well, we’re gonna put an end to that.”

  “There’s someone on the inside at the county, you know. How else would they get the property records?”

  “One step at a time, Bruno. Remember, you came to me looking for help. Well, this is help, not pleasant for you, but help just the same.”

  Hapworth knelt and cradled his head.

  “Everything is just wrong, isn’t it, Frank? Maybe it has always been wrong. How do you do it? Everything right, I mean. I used to watch you all the time. The beautiful wife, and now the wonderful girlfriend. Always on the right side of everything. And I’m just a bum, really. Those boys didn’t like me, but for fifty bucks they would say the nicest things.” He stood and leaned against the wall. “You’re probably the only honest man I know, Frank, and I admire you for it. I’ve seen all the things that men do to one another, the evil of their actions, and know my part in it. And now it comes to the end, the fitting end.”

  Nagler flashed the light at Hapworth, alarmed by the doomsday tone of his little speech. “You’re not carrying a weapon are you, Bruno? You’re not gonna kill yourself after I leave?”

  Hapworth chuckled. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Just a little self-pity for a life wasted.” He stood straight and brushed back the strands of his thin hair. “I’m with you on this. Let’s end it, Nag-laar.” He laughed and Frank Nagler smiled.

  Hapworth shuffled his feet and looked up at Nagler. “I feel better about this. I’ll be in touch. I move around a lot, different towns, different counties. Trying to avoid them except when I’m at the office.”

  “Sounds like a plan, Bruno. Be safe until the fifteenth and we’ll take care of the rest.”

  As they parted, Hapworth turned back and called Nagler’s name. “That little girl? They are after her, too. I heard the big man speaking on the phone. Watch out for her.”

  And then he was gone, stepping away in the dark. Frank Nagler tried to follow, but didn’t want to call out. The girl? Why the girl? But Sister Katherine had said something similar. Who were these people? How secure is the Catholic Sisters Home?

  ****

  Nagler took the long way home through the shadowed, dripping wreck of the stoveworks complex, deep rubble-filled corners, torn metal catching a flash of a frantically broken streetlight, walking slowly as the pain in his left foot awoke again, forced to life by the uneven asphalt, scattered rock-filled potholes and sudden drops where curbs had been removed.

  He wondered which direction Hapworth had taken. Probably across the railroad tracks, the open field and through the waterworks; Nagler had not heard a car engine start. Then this: How did they get the video tapes at the Boundary Motel? Do they have something on the owner as well?

  These are the streets I know, these alleys, the backyards and fences. All the places I ran as a child, all the routes our games took us, the cliffs, the rocks as forts, the broken trucks under which we stashed the beer; the shadowed corners that Martha and I made our own, skin soft, quickened breath, lavender left in the air.

  And what does it all matter? It’s just everyday lives being ground into dust by the schemers. How many of these houses were lost as Bruno Hapworth did the bidding of the person who had power over him, how many lives ruined to satisfy the power-lust of some self-deluded pretend gangster? Yet the damage is real. How many of these For Sale signs are Bruno’s handiwork? What would Lauren’s mother do if her daughter had not been aware enough to know what doing wrong looks like?

  I want to be angry. I want to grab Bruno Hapworth by his shoulders and shake him, bounce him off the broken walls until he sees the damage he has done. And yet I have to give him a break because there is larger evil out there.

  Finally, in the silence and dim light of his kitchen, the shiver that had gathered at the base of his spine, waiting, crawled up his back and rattled his shoulders.

  It wasn’t just Hapworth and the far-too-casual recitation of his pursuit of teen-aged boys, it was the self-pity. Oh, my terrible life. I am so bad, and you are so good. But you know right from wrong, and you chose wrong, Bruno. The shiver dissolved. Don’t expect any pity from me.

  ****

  Nagler knew he would find Lauren asleep, the sheet wrapped at her waist and her bare back exposed.

  She slept naked, not to show off, but from habit.

  “My parents’ house was a thousand degrees,” she had said. “Tightly insulated, no leaks, thanks to my father’s obsessive efforts, and my mother was still always cold. She won the fight. The temperature would be set at eighty or so. With my room on the second floor, it was an airless oven. I’d crack open windows and pull off the blankets, sleep in thin nighties or just shorts. But it was still too hot. So, I stared sleeping naked under a thin sheet. Never changed.”

  She had leaned over and playfully tapped his face. “And you, mister, better just get used to it.”

  And so he had. At first almost uncomfortably.

  “I’m not used to having anyone here,” he had told her softly one night.

  She had reached over to him and rubbed his chest and he replied with an awkward touch of her cheek, then embarrassed, reached back to her and tried to rub her back, then said, “Sorry.”

  After a moment’s silence, he had said. “After so long, you get used to not being touched.”

  She turned to face him and propped her head up with a bent arm. She settled the sheet at her waist.

  “I know,” she said softly. “You think that’s how it’s supposed to be. Then you think that no one wants to touch you and it must be your fault. You want so much to be touched, to have someone... but it burns, stings. So you don’t.” She looked away and stared at the ceiling. “That is the curse of loneliness, Frank.”

  He had popped up to sit and pulled her to him, resting her head on his chest.

  “I didn’t know... hadn’t thought...”

  “What, that I was lonely?” She smiled and kissed his arm. “Always was. I hide it well, the activity, the bright smile, the big hello. Another part of the curse. I thought I was in love after college. Me and the boy ran everywhere, did everything, experimented, played, told the world ‘look at us,’ how cool we are as we fucked in the back seat of a movie theater, drooled on one another in public and wagged our fingers back at the scolds. But it was just noise, empty noise. One day I realized it had been all about taking. Taking all that was offered. I realized that I could have taken all that boy had and more and still the emptiness, the loneliness would remain.”

  Nagler folded his slacks and placed them over the top rail of the chair, cupped his shirt over the spokes and sat in his boxer shorts and rubbed his aching left foot. He pushed out a cramp and then sat in the silence.

  If you are the lonely one, he thought, then what am I?

  And what of our battered little girl with no name? We cannot even use the simplest tool of language to reach you.

  Can I reach you before you disappear so deeply inside yourself there would be no hope of finding you?

  Then his mood changed, as it always had changed. He felt the coldness of his profession rise, the analytics of reason settle in and he thought, we will get Bruno’s thugs. They will not get you.

  He slipped into the bed and ruffled the sheet higher on Lauren’s back and she wiggled her shoulders before settling back to sleep. He softly stroked her hair and then kissed her back along the center of her spine. Then he kissed her shoulder.

  One eye opened briefly and a little smile crossed her lips, before fading. “Hey,” she mumbled and curled back again to sleep.

  Yes, he thought.

  Yes.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  All I could do was stroke his hair, the pain was so bad

  “Think Bruno will make that hearing?”

  Jimmy Dawson leaned over the table to get his voice below the chatter from the counter at Barry’s.

 
Something about the election... Democrats this...Republicans that, and the Yankees... they all suck, trade ’em all to San Diego... the Mets... oughta ship out one of them pitching studs for a bat... Hey, Tony, I said over easy...those eggs have been on the grill for an hour... Hey, jerk-off, those ain’t even yours...these are yours...

  Nagler grinned. “I’d be half way to Australia about now. No way it ends well for him.”

  Dawson chuckled softly. “Well, they’d probably find him there. This Mine Hill Foundation, if that is its real name, is quite a beast. I was at the county records room all day and there must be more than a couple dozen d/b/as — doing business as — associated with it, from around the country. It could be a shell company or a holding company for lots of smaller ventures, but if it was legit, it would be listed on a stock exchange somewhere. It would have offices and probably stockholders, even if they were just the officers. But this company showed none of that. Just lists of associated names, some in Jersey, but many out of state and some in other countries.”

  “Australia?” Nagler asked lightly. “Then Bruno can help them there.”

  Dawson swallowed some coffee. “Nothing adds up. All the other companies had P.O. addresses. Not street addresses. That’s fishy. Also, remember that company that used to own the stoveworks complex? They were registered in Delaware because that state doesn’t tax corporations. Lots of big companies incorporate there to avoid state taxes. This outfit wasn’t registered there. If this place was legitimately big enough I would have bet it would be a Delaware corporation, not some outfit with a Morristown post office box.”

  “How do we find out?”

  “Tax records, maybe.” Dawson tipped his head to the side. “Or call Delaware,” he smiled. “Why?”

  Nagler scratched his chin and then pulled a pad and pen from his jacket pocket. “Bruno said one of the thugs said something about the little girl.” He looked up. “Maybe this is a way to find out her name.”

  Dawson looked at the glint in Nagler’s eyes. “You’ve got something else in mind.”

  Nagler offered a thin smile. “Wonder if they owe any taxes on the old theater?”

  Outside the street was cluttered with construction equipment as the job to install the new city hall parking lot lights had begun. Nagler laughed when he saw Dawson’s old Nissan jammed curbside between two oversized pick-up trucks.