Part 4 (1/2)

We got four people facedown on the floor. Pigeyes did his usual raging, sticking his service revolver in their ears and saying various terrible things until somebody whimpered or literally s.h.i.+t their trousers, then he turned his attention to a little card table in the corner of the living room which was covered with money, I mean a lot, lying there in heaps like it was just paper. Pigeyes had radioed for the narcs to come help us with the arrest, but without skipping a beat he counted out two piles of bills, three or four grand each, and handed me one. I took it but handed the money back in the car, after Narcotics had shown up.

'What's this?' he asked.

'I'm goin to law school.' I'd been accepted by then. 'So?'

'So I shouldn't be doin this s.h.i.+t.'

'Hey, get real.' He read me out then. He beat me up with the truth. Did I think the narc guys wouldn't take a nibble out of this? What were we supposed to do, leave it in a nice pile so that the s.h.i.+tface beaners could have it all back when Judge Nowinski decided we weren't in hot pursuit? Were we gonna wait around and hope that the mopes in the Forfeiture Unit actually took some time off from the golf course to try to get a writ, in which case the cash'd get lost in the clerk's office or maybe in some judge's chambers? Did I think the beaners were gonna say something? Every one of them didn't know nothin, man. They were wet and waitin for a trip across the river. 'Or do you just want to be able to go tell Momma?' he asked.

'Hey, give me a break.' We'd sort of been down this pa.s.s before. What he did, he did, I figured, he wasn't the only one and he made some effort not to involve me. Now he wanted me aboard. 'You do what you wanna, I'll do what I wanna. I got a rest-of-my-life to think about. That's all.'

He sat there watching me, a nasty-looking fellow normally, with a sullen face going to jowls and those little whiteless eyes, his expression now slackened and mistrustful. This was what they call a delicate situation. Like being with the Yakuza. You got to cut off a finger to prove you're in. What was he up to? I think, in retrospect, he had a point to make, that before I departed for the world I ought to know that there's no judging, that everybody has their moments. So I brought the money home and showed it to my wife and, after leaving it in my sock drawer for three weeks, gave it to my sister for St Bridget's. Yeah, Elaine, that's where it came from, it wasn't, like I said, a stationhouse collection. I got a note back from the eighth-grade cla.s.s president which I've kept for all these years, a pointless thing to do, since I wasn't going to tell anyone the real story, inasmuch as I was a policeman who was supposed to arrest Pigeyes's unlawful a.s.s right on the spot, not sing 'Que Sera, Sera', or make a charitable donation of what was, in law, money I'd stolen.

Two months later I started law school and a few weeks after that I was Form 6o'd to Financial. Pigeyes threw a nice bash when I left. Everything for the best.

The police, any city you go to, are kind of a sneak fraternity. The Force. Close-knit. Trust each other first and most and n.o.body very much. There are lots of reasons, maybe the most important being that no one really likes the police. Who should? All these types looking sidewise and waiting for you to slip. I was a cop myself, but when I see a black-and-white just sitting on the corner, the first thing I think is, Why's this b.a.s.t.a.r.d got his eye on me?

Also, cops are really by themselves. This retinue of lawyers, prosecutors, judges, wardens, that whole world of rules, they're as far away as Pago Pago when you're in that bas.e.m.e.nt looking for the robbery suspect Mrs Was.h.i.+ngton saw running. You go through the bas.e.m.e.nt door and wait there on the threshold, come out five minutes later shaking your head in disappointment, just can't find him, that whole crew, lawyers, wardens, so on and so forth, they have n.o.body to chew on. It's only you - not just your life on the line, but you're the only reason this guy is going to get caught. There's no system. That's why it's so easy to whack the mouthy b.a.s.t.a.r.d when he's cuffed in the back of the black-and-white and is still talking about your mother or the violation of his const.i.tutional f.u.c.king rights, never mind the seventy-seven-year-old guy he just hit in the head with a paving stone the better to steal his T-check. Because it was only you. And he's yours. And only other cops really understand that.

Which is how come, even forgetting everything else -that you're a sneak fraternity, that n.o.body likes you -even forgetting all that, coppers don't do it to coppers. When you're there, when it's only you, you do your best. And if some days you're not up to your best, then you're no worse than anybody else, are you? Tomorrow you can try again. Who's to judge? You start that game, I saw you be bad, s.h.i.+t, it's the whole Force tellin tales.

s.h.i.+ft scene: Two years later I'm coming out of Const.i.tutional Law II, here's two Feebies, real types, drawls and polyester suits and white shoes, who want to talk to me -did I work with Gino Dimonte, la-di-da, a few warm-up pitches, then the hard stuff - was I on a dope bust three years ago April? I do the arithmetic real fast. One of the dopers has finally gotten cracked federally rather than stateside and has found some Ivy League A USA happy to cut him a few months in summer camp if he'll talk about Kindle coppers with their hands on dirty money, and the doper naturally doesn't give him everybody he has on the pad who he might need again, he gives him Pigeyes, who used self-help. I know all this at once, I see just where they're going, and I'm like Yeah, okay, yeah, I think I remember that one, oh yeah, that one, there was money on the table.' A bubble in the brain. What am I thinking? It was the weirdest G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing. Five seconds in the law school hallway and I've changed my freaking life. There was not a cop who heard about this - and believe me, they all heard about it before the ink was dry on the 302s, the FBI agents' reports - who didn't think I'd done it because I felt with law school I was now a cut above. Coppers are very sensitive about cla.s.s and have always got it on the brain, they just can't get over the fact that they make forty grand to keep the world safe for millionaires, eat a bullet for Daddy Warbucks, who'll use your corpse to wipe his shoes. But it wasn't that, I wasn't trying to make new friends, and in point of fact, I never much liked snitches. And it wasn't my sterling character for the truth. Who am I kidding? I've fibbed for worse reasons than to help a pal. It's just that, at that moment, I was standing there in the law school, with its wainscoted walls, and something came over me, that thing going back to when I was a kid when I'd realize I didn't belong, that feeling that the world was objects. That's where I was, I guess, the smarta.s.s fourth-grader looking at his life as Something in This Picture Does Not Fit and always thinking the Something was me.

Anyway, I got about three-quarters through the story when it hit me like a bolt that this would not work out. The agents had come on with the usual street immunity, just be straight and you're okay, you won't even get lint on your new suit, but I realized suddenly that the feds were not my only problem. I would have to explain this to Bar Admissions and Discipline, to BAD, and they were pretty tough on the new recruits. Immunity. Felonies. Breach of trust. I was not going to make a good impression with this story of stolen dope money in my sock drawer. So the tale ended with me and Pigeyes in the car and me telling him to inventory my end and his end too, handing the money back so he could turn it all in to the evidence room.

Things sort of went in natural sequence after that. I testified in the grand jury, just what I'd said in my statement to the agents, nothing more. The last six months I was a policeman, I was a.s.signed behind a file cabinet, I didn't get near the street, and even the khaki crew, the unsworn personnel, would spit in my coffee when I turned my back. Then Pigeyes got indicted and I went to court and testified against him. He had paid about thirty grand to Sandy Stern, who a few years ago I would have described as a Jew defense lawyer, and Sandy made it look like the government did not have much of a case. They had a couple of the s.h.i.+tb.u.m dopers who had to admit they'd had their faces planted on the floor; a narcotics officer's inventory of two grand in cash on the table when the beaners said there had been forty; and they had me. Of course, I was up there only sort of telling the truth, with my old pal Pigeyes giving me the death look, and something uneasy came to the surface, like bones bubbling up in tar. Stern asked if I was jealous of Pigeyes, felt he was a better cop than me, and I said yes to that, and I agreed that I never checked with Evidence to see what Pigeyes had inventoried. I allowed as how there were beaners who didn't know one Anglo cop from another, and I even said yes when Stern asked if Yours Truly was in fact the only police officer who admitted having received money removed from that table. The AUSA got this look like he needed Preparation H and the jury came back not guilty in two hours. When I walked out of the courtroom I had really lit the scoreboard: I don't think there was a soul there, not the judge, not even the toothless buffs out in the peanut gallery, who didn't think I was lower than pond slime. Nora, never one to miss a point of vulnerability, put it nicely: 'So, Mack, now do you think you got what you want?'

Did I? There were a few strange turns, I admit. One of the strangest was that BAD publicly embraced me. They thought ratting out your friend was a mark of character and gave me a job, since I'd demonstrated such fidelity to the rules of upstanding conduct in another calling. As for Pigeyes, he was ruined. For the jury it's always opening night, but the cops had all seen Stern's act before and they didn't need a trial to know that Pigeyes was dirty. All his buddies in the department, and there are a million, they'll do him favors day to day, get him twice as much for uniform allowance, but as far as going higher, he smelled bad, to the bra.s.s he was wearing lead boots. He's been on his unhappy trail down the hill ever since, getting the kind of discipline they practice out of Rome, sending the pederast priest to dwell at a convent. Pigeyes's punishment is Financial Crimes. Personally, I'd always liked the intricacy of Financial, the fact that there was more to investigating a case than finding the perp's girlfriend and sitting on her house until he came by for a cha-cha, but for Pigeyes, a proof mark will never take the place of drawing his gun.

From what I hear he has a sad life now. These days the rare dope bust he horns in on, he's picking powder off the table, not money. Behind his back, guys call him G-Nose or Snowman, and it's not cause he likes winter weather. He was always a copper's copper, full of twitches and complexes, sort of hated everyone, so there never was a Mrs Pig, just the usual copperbar girls and chickies on the edge of trouble who thought it was a good idea to give a cop a screw. He did not have much. Until now. Now he had me.

D. Pigeyes and I Renew Acquaintances 'Didn't I tell you this guy was gonna turn up? Didn't I f.u.c.king tell you?' Pigeyes was so happy, gloating like some c.o.c.k who'd gotten every hen in the coop, that I thought he was going to fall over and give himself a hug. I had, I admit, some glum thoughts about my partners who had set me off blind on a path that led straight to my life's greatest enemy - even counting my former wife - a man who, judging by his comments, was clearly expecting me.

'Refresh me,' he said, 'memory serves, this ain't you.' He was holding the credit card.

'I'm sorry, Officer?'

'Detective, s.h.i.+tface.'

'Detective s.h.i.+tface, I'm sorry.' Personally, I didn't believe I'd done it. But there you have it. Chasing Bert and teasing myself with the notion of another life, I was becoming a new man. By the door, the younger cop in lizard, in his long hairdo with s.h.i.+ny sidewalls, grimaced and turned a full pirouette. I was looking for it. But he didn't know the history. If Pigeyes kicked the bejesus out of me, he could never fit a story good enough. He stared at me with those little black eyes without any visible whites, while this reality crowded in on both of us. Then he extended one finger, thick as a stake, and gave me his own unique look, a laser right to the heart. 'Not again,' he said.

Trilby spoke up at that point, a pudgy black man of middle years, sitting behind his desk. He and his sidekick out front had done a nice job of setting me up. The coppers obviously had been here long ago looking for Kam and had left instructions to get in touch if anybody connected with him ever reappeared. While I was on hold, Trilby was probably on the line with Pigeyes, who gleefully thanked whatever idol he wors.h.i.+pped as soon as he heard my name. To this point, Trilby had watched our exchange out of one eye, face sort of averted, so he could claim he hadn't seen it, if anything bad happened. Now he stuck up his courage to ask who I was.

'A drunk,' said Pigeyes.

It's always strange how that shot can reach me. 'I'm a lawyer, Mr Trilby.'

'Quiet,' said Pigeyes. He wasn't that tall, probably lying when he said he was five ten, but he was built like your freezer, no neck, no waist, a lot of slack flesh on a real solid structure. His anger gave him a kind of aura, an impression of heat. You knew he was there. He was dressed in a sport jacket and a knit s.h.i.+rt, beneath which his unders.h.i.+rt showed. He was wearing cowboy boots.

His partner could see he was hot and edged past him; Gino sunk back toward the door. With the second cop, we started again.

'Dewey Phelan.' He pulled his badge from his pocket and we actually shook hands. Good cop, bad cop. Mutt and Jeff. f.u.c.k, I invented this game, but still I was relieved to be talking to skinny young Dewey here, maybe he's twenty-three, with pale skin, a lumped-up complexion like custard, and that greasy black hair falling into his eyes.

'Now the question, Mr Malloy, you understand what it is, is we kind of think you were trying to go into a hotel room that isn't yours. See? So maybe you could explain that.' Dewey wasn't really great at this yet. He s.h.i.+fted between feet like a five-year-old who had to go tinkle. Pigeyes was back near the door, arm on a filing cabinet, just taking this in with a sour expression.

Im looking for a partner of mine, Officer.' Better the truth. There was only so much I could bluff, and right now everything was concentrated on looking chipper.

'Uh-huh,' said Dewey. He nodded and tried to think of what to ask next. 'Your partner, what's his name? What kind of partner is he?'

I spelled Kamin. Dewey wrote in his little pocket spiral, which he rested on his thigh.

'False personation,' said Pigeyes. Back at the filing cabinets he gestured at the credit card which Dewey was now holding. Pigeyes was going to charge me with the crime of pretending to be someone else.' I had forgotten up to now that the state claimed any interest in who I was or wanted to be.

I looked to Dewey almost as if he were a friend. 'You know, Gino and me,' I said, 'there's some history. But you can explain this to him. It's not false personation when you use somebody's name with their permission. That credit card belongs to Kamin. See?'

Dewey didn't. 'You got this card from him, is that what you're saying? From Kamin?' He looked back to Pigeyes for a second, maybe to check how he was doing. I had the sense, though, I had told them something. There was a little of that light-bulb look in both faces. Bert was Kam, or vice versa. They hadn't known that. 'It's Kamin's card?' Dewey asked. 'Right.'

'And he gave it to you?'

'It's Kamin's card, I came here to look for him, as far as I know it's Kamin's hotel room. I'm sure he'll tell you I had his permission.'

'Well, we'll have to ask him.'

'Natch,' I said.

'So what's his address?'

I'd raised him one too many. I saw that, but not quick enough. Sooner or later, when Bert didn't answer their phone calls, they'd turn up at his place. And the s.h.i.+t would fly when they opened the refrigerator. I tried momentarily to figure how many days it would be until we got to that point and what would happen then.

Dewey, in the meantime, had written down Bert's address and stepped away to chew things over with Pigeyes. Dewey, no doubt, was telling Gino they didn't have any real good reason to hold me and Pigeyes was saying, Like h.e.l.l, he had me in sweatpants using someone else's name. But even Pigeyes would realize that, given our colorful past, if he pinched me and it didn't hold up, the civil suit I'd file for retaliatory arrest would lead to his immediate retirement.

All in all, I was beginning to figure I'd come out okay, when I heard Gino say, 'I'm gonna get her.' He was back in a blink with the sweet-looking student who'd been at the front desk. I imagined he wanted to review my antics out there with the card, see if maybe she'd give him some handhold on me he had missed. I was wrong.

'This isn't the guy, right?' he asked her.

This office was small and getting crowded, five of us now and most of the s.p.a.ce to begin with occupied by Trilby's desk, which was clean but for pictures of his children, all grown, and his wife. There was a U pennant on the paneled walls and a clock. The girl looked around.

'No, of course not,' she said.

'Describe him.'

'Well, for one thing he was black.' 'Who's that?' I asked.

Dewey gave me a warning look, a minute shake of the head: Don't interrupt. Pigeyes told the girl to go on.

'Late twenties, I'd say. Twenty-seven. Kind of receding hair. Athletic build. Nice-looking,' she added, and shrugged, maybe by way of apology for the frank observations of a white girl.

'And how many times have you seen him?'

'Six times. Seven. He's been here a lot.'