As Merrion had foreseen, once Mercy decided to act she came on like a locomotive. Urged on by Diane Fox, she convinced herself that even though she had collaborated in her own deception and assisted at her own resulting martyrdom, the humiliating pain her husband had caused her warranted retribution along with divorce.
For some reason of random malevolence, those days for Hilliard were also a season of especially fierce battles on the Hill. Hilliard summarized it as a period of 'hand-to-hand politics, but I was grateful for it. The war in the House was child's play, comic relief, compared to the one that was going on in my private life."
At last angry enough to file Hilliard was impressed, describing her admiringly to Merrion as 'madder than a hornet' Mercy categorically refused sound advice from her lawyer, Geoffrey Cohen, to cite 'cruel and abusive treatment' as her seemly choice of grounds for seeking the divorce. "No, Mister Cohen," she said, deferring acceptance of his invitation to address him as "Geoff until she was certain that he fully understood whose wishes were to govern their dealings, "I've already spent far too many years of my life living in the land of make-believe.
I'm going to spend the rest in the real world, calling things by their right names. Adultery's the reason I told him to get out. Separation hasn't changed it. Adultery's the reason that I'm going to give the judge."
Geoffrey Cohen liked to describe the four-lawyer practice that he ran from the second floor of the restored two-story white-shuttered brick building he owned on North Main Street in South Hadley as 'just an ordinary, quiet little country law firm with a rather boring probate practice' leaving it to clients and their chastened former spouses to promote his reputation as one of the most relentless advocates anyone could ever hope to find to extract money and exact revenge, 'which in most cases where you represent the wife amounts to the same thing."
He deliberately did not look the part. He kept his chestnut-brown beard carefully trimmed van Dyke style, and with studied nonchalance subtly adapted the New England college-town uniform: good tweeds (lapels rolled, not pressed) and flannels (never baggy, rumpled or frayed, always sharply creased), with lightly starched (custom) shirts, striped or neatly patterned ties woven of heavy gauge silk, and highly polished leathers. This made it possible for him to commute with faultless ease among his appearances in the courthouses; his regular engagements as adjunct professor and guest lecturer on regional colonial history at the several colleges in the area; and his performance as the cellist of the Sebastian Quartet of Amherst, giving evening concerts of music of the Renaissance in the tidy small Congregational and Unitarian-Universalist churches of Western Massachusetts. "It really would be more discreet, you know, if you did it the way I'm suggesting," he demurred, not giving up, when Mercy first wearily rejected his suggested neutral phrasing of the divorce libel.
"I'm sure it would be," she said. "But I still want to do it my way. I don't have much appetite for discretion these days. Dan's discretion's what enabled him to make a plain fool out of me all these years, and my sense of propriety, along with my cowardice, enabled me to help him do it. It was supposed to make me feel good, but it hasn't, so now I've reached the point where I want to try something else. I want to go ahead and tell the actual truth, see how that makes me feel."
"Yes, but this would be judicious discretion," Cohen murmured. "In court you can gain valuable brownie-points for it. Voluntary self-restraint. When you have this kind of case: parties well-known; the name is familiar, prominent, even; judges get nervous. They get jittery before anyone utters a word in court. They see potential for big trouble in a case like this. So some obvious self-restraint can pay big dividends. If they see you're doing everything you can to make it as quick and painless as possible for everyone else who doesn't necessarily want to be involved but has to be, they appreciate it."
"Cruel and abusive' was the customary summarizing euphemism collusively employed in those days, before 'irretrievable breakdown' or 'irreconcilable differences' were officially recognized as serviceably sufficient grounds for legal, collusive termination of marriage. It indicated that each of the parties had become completely fed up with the other one, usually with more than adequate reason on both sides.
"C and A-T' meant there would be minimal public indignity. In fifteen minutes or less the wife and a relative or friend could provide all of the evidence needed. The wife would be sworn to tell the truth. She would duly falsely say that her husband had once thrown an ashtray at her, missing her by several feet but frightening her and causing her to become sad, so that she had cried. The corroborating witness would testify that while she had not observed the actual trajectory of the ashtray, the wife had called her immediately after the incident and between sobs told her that the husband had thrown an ashtray at her.
The defense would waive cross-examination. The court would accept the plaintiffs evidence as prima facie proof that the marriage should be dissolved. The defense would not offer any evidence. The prima facie proof would become conclusive.
To insure that everything would go smoothly and the bland but arrant falsehoods would go uncontradicted by the husband, his counsel would have strongly advised him that since his presence would add little to the charade, everyone would be more comfortable if he did not attend it. Consequently he would be nowhere near the courthouse the day the case was heard, thus avoiding even the possibility that he would become noisily incensed upon hearing practical lies told about him in a good cause which he supported when calm and throw some kind of a fit, disrupting arrangements.
"So, why do that, drag it all out in the open?" Cohen said soothingly to Mercy. "The sentiment's already solidly in your favor. Everyone already knows why you're making it official now, why you threw the guy out. It's not as though you really need to spread the dirty linen on the public record for everyone to know how he's mistreated you.
"The judges feel ever so much more comfortable when you leave that stuff out, so they don't have to see themselves as somehow getting involved in the messy business. It's almost as though they seem to think that when sexual misconduct's alleged, their fingers get sticky, too, handling the case. They're kindlier toward plaintiffs who spare the sexual details. Especially when they can imagine very well indeed, as you can bet they do in your case, all the juicy things you could've said, but didn't. How thoughtful and discreet you are. It makes you look good."
"Mister Cohen," Mercy said. "As my dear husband likes to say: "Spare me all that stuff," only stuffs not what he calls it. What you're telling me is that if I downplay to my judge why I put him out, you'll make brownie-points with all the judges because they're scared of my big bad husband. They think he'll bury their next pay-increase bill if any one of them does anything that makes him mad. But here you come now, looking out for them: You persuaded his wife to be good.
"Danny's always said you're one slick little bugger." When he heard the adjective slick Cohen wrongly jumped to the conclusion that Mercy was sanitizing Hilliard's characterization for his benefit, and that bugger had not been the noun that Hilliard had used. Cohen began to feel a bit of bloodlust for the fray. "That's the reason I'm hiring you. But so you'll be slick for me, not on me. So, forget it. I wont play nice. If they're too dainty to read the word adultery on a piece of paper, they should try being the innocent victim. Try living with the reality of it for a while. See how it makes them feel, having people pity them; laughing at them behind their backs when they go down the street. Or else find another line of work.
"No, now it's Danny's turn. Let's see how he runs for reelection with his behavior out in public. If this doesn't get him at least a Republican opponent, if not a primary challenge, then we'll know the opportunists must've become extinct. "How can you believe this guy?
He's an adulterer. He didn't keep his promises to his own wife. She found out she couldn't trust him. Finally she reached the point where she went to court and proved she couldn't trust him. What makes you think you can?"
"The man I was married to made a fool of me. Let's see how he likes hearing that on the late news, what he did to me."
Therefore the libel in Hilliard vs. Hilliard alleged 'open and gross adultery." Most of the male reporters who covered the State House, having made compassionate sounds within earshot of Hilliard, once out of his hearing licked their chops and hoped cooler heads would not prevail before the case came to trial. Like Mercy, they had a beef with him. It had festered all the years it had taken Mercy to overcome her disinclination to believe that Dan away from home had trouble remembering his marriage vows. Long before she reached full boil, most of the reporters had known he was playing road games; many of them disapproved.
Their motives were professional, not moral. Soon after Hilliard's meanderings had commenced around Labor Day in 1971, green-eyed, blonde-haired, petite Stacy Hawkes of Channel 3, then twenty-six, coming up with time-dishonored but mutually pleasurable ways to celebrate Hilliard's ascent in the House hierarchy her professional rivals on the State House beat had begun to get heavy pressure from their editorial desks. The incidental time she and Hilliard spent with their clothes on, before and after the time they spent in her bed in her Beacon Street apartment, gave her many more quiet opportunities than her competitors enjoyed to talk informatively with him about newsworthy developments in Massachusetts politics. Stacy's reports from the Hill therefore regularly scooped those that her competition filed, and they did not like it. Several whose sexual advances she'd coolly rebuffed one of them another woman were also fiercely jealous of Hilliard, correctly perceiving the reason she granted him privileges denied to them. They alternated between smouldering anger and bitter laughter, calling her a whore behind her back and coming close to it face-to-face by curling their lips and sneering "Yeah, and how'd you get that little tidbit?" when she goaded them delightedly with allusions to developments that she'd predicted on the air two nights before.
Their subtle inflation of Hilliard's public importance reflected their impotent envy. Unable to publish what they knew to be the actual reason why she would fuck him, and not one of them, they employed the word powerful as code for their perception that Hilliard's legislative authority unjustly comported a droit de seigneur to bed the fairest female among them. Wishing to see him rebuked, they exaggerated the extent and rancor of his opposition on the Hill, hoping each new challenger would manage to stymie him, casting so much doubt upon his abilities and fitness for authority that his steady progress toward becoming Speaker would be impeded if not halted. And if that happened it might do more than just rebuke what they perceived as his excessive ambition; it might prompt Stacy to reappraise his value to her and stop fucking him.
Long after Stacy Hawkes had departed for New York, their envy and resentment persisted, kept alive in part by their observation of Hilliard's effortlessly insulting ease in replacing her repeatedly.
Without really having fully thought it out, they continued to enlarge his public image in order to magnify the story of his ignominious demolition later. They had not necessarily contemplated the collapse of his marriage in their wistful projections of potential causes of his eventual downfall, but when it occurred they hoped it would serve the purpose. They would see to it, in fact, if Mercy would be good enough to make the details of his sexual shenanigans publishable by proving them to make her divorce case. They sat poised at their keyboards wearing the happy expressions of dogs hearing the grinding sound of the electric can-opener; even those who liked Hilliard had to agree that life in the news business now and then could be good.
Banished from his home; under seige where he worked, Hilliard was under orders also not to seek the kind of solace that had gotten him in trouble, the kind he had reasonably come to expect to find without much difficulty evenings after work in Boston. His lawyer, Sam Evans, had forbidden it. The joke in Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden County Probate Courts was that any divorce involving a well-known person or marriage property in excess of one hundred thousand dollars was not valid unless Sam Evans, the Butler, Corey partner specializing in divorce, had represented one of the unhappy parties.
Evans had assessed Mercy's allegation of adultery as true and accurate, but flimsy, perfectly fine and entirely understandable as an expression of rage but wildly out of proportion to the little circumstantial evidence she had to prove it.
"Gossip," Evans told Hilliard, 'as I'm sure you learned in law school, isn't evidence. Not unless what you propose to prove is that people gossip. Which if that's their purpose, we will stipulate: "Indeed people do," will be our reply, and a lot of it's been about you. But sheer quantity of rumor does not make it into proof. Innuendo and insinuation don't amount to evidence.
"Now, that doesn't mean I doubt for one moment that you've been a bounder, a cad and a tosspot, and treated your good wife very badly.
The judge isn't going to doubt it either, because when Geoff Cohen takes your deposition, he's going to ask you if you misbehaved, and since perjury isn't a tactic that prudent men use, you're going to admit that you did. And then if he makes you take the stand you're going to repeat it, and say that you're sorry, and try as hard as you possibly can to look like you really mean it. Be contrite, and confess you're a bastard, and give him no names at alV "Can I do that," Hilliard said, 'refuse to tell him the names of my girlfriends?"
"Yup," Evans said. "Judge Hadavas's a bit of a prude. If I know him he's already displeased with Geoff for letting your wife charge adultery. He's also not the brightest flame in the candelabra. He probably shouldn't be on any bench, but if he has to be some kind of judge, he certainly ought not to be in probate. He doesn't belong there. He's not really in favor of divorce. He'd much rather married couples tried a little harder to get along with each other, like he and Vera always have, instead of coming into his court all the time on what he sees as the slightest provocation, whining and complaining how unhappy they all are. Those of us who've seen how Vera treats him when they're out and can imagine what a royal pain she must be at home, well, we're inclined to think James must try very hard indeed, if he gets along with her.
"I was in his session one day, waiting to argue a motion, and this poor woman was on the stand. She'd brought a motion for an order to increase her alimony and child-support payments. Apparently this'd become something of a hobby of hers it wasn't the first time she done it. So she was being cross-examined, and her husband's lawyer was showing her no mercy, really bearing down on her. Finally he came right out and challenged her, dared her to admit that she was doing this again because she'd found out her ex-husband and his new girlfriend were going to get married, and she was bound and determined to do everything she possibly could to stick a wrench in the gears, disrupt their plans as much as she could and if possible of course get all his money. He said: "This's fun for you, isn't it, Mrs. So-and-so.
This isn't a matter of need we've got here; this is a case of revenge.
You enjoy doing this to my client, don't you you're having one whale of a time."
"And she just wailed at him; I thought sure she was going to break down and bawl: "No, I am not. I'm not having fun. I'm unhappy all of the time." And Judge Hadavas said: "Huh, so's everyone else who comes in here. What makes you think you're so special? Think maybe you can tell me that? Spend all your time thinking up ways, come in here and call attention to yourself. What you ought to's go out and find yourself a steady job, support your self. Get something on your mind besides yourself. That's all you ever think about, of course you're going to be miserable; just stands to reason. Deserve it, too, you ask me." Then she really did cry."
"Did he give her the money that she wanted?" Hilliard said.
"I don't know," Evans said. "He took it under advisement. That's another thing James likes to do: keep everybody in suspense a while.
Never decide a motion the same day it's heard. Always says he'll render his decision in writing in a week. That means: when he gets around to it. James's week's longer than yours and mine are; his runs about ten or twelve days. I think it's so the party he decides against wont be in the courtroom to holler at him when he finds out he got screwed.
"Point is, your wife's charged you with adultery. From the instant James Hadavas laid his eyes on the libel, which would've been about a minute after it was filed, he's been very uneasy. People will be watching this case, following it very closely. There'll be interest in how it comes out. There would've been some no matter what the grounds were, just because of who you are. But "adultery" gets everybody's interest. Judge Hadavas doesn't like being watched. So we know he's already anxious. The only reason he's got to be pleased at all with Geoff is that apparently he was able to persuade your wife at least not to name a co-respondent. If she had, Judge Hadavas'd then have a genuine circus on his hands. A circus he does not want.
"So, once you've admitted that you were unfaithful, I think he'll say that that's enough. There's no reason to identify your partner or partners, as the case may be, and declare Hadavas Day in the media. If Geoff tries to make you do that, which I doubt he will, I'm going to advise you not to answer and then if Geoff still insists, he'll have to go before Hadavas and see if he can get an order compelling you to answer. I doubt he'll want to do that, but if he does he'll just compound what I'm sure is already Hadavas's private disapproval of his choice of grounds. I don't think he'll get his order.
"Now this's important, Dan," Evans said, 'and not just because I assume you feel the same way as I do about publicly naming everyone who for whatever reason agreed to go to bed with you."
"Well," Hilliard said, "I like to think my natural charm and boyish good looks were at least part of the reason."
"Yes," Evans said, 'no doubt. All of us have our illusions. But still, if we can present you to Judge Hadavas as an honest penitent who regrets his sins and wicked deeds and the sorrow that he's caused his wife, instead of allowing Geoff to portray you as the unrepentant Casanova and lascivious rascal that we both know you really are…"
"Hey, take it easy," Hilliard said, "I've got a sense of humor, Sam, but I've never been that bad. All I ever did was take advantage of some situations I got into when my wife wasn't with me; that's all. It wasn't like I was ever on some kind of a campaign or something, see how many women I could go to bed with if I tried."
"I'm not joking," Evans said. "I'm trying to get you to see how Judge Hadavas will look at you, if we give Geoff half a chance to paint that kind of portrait. Because if Casanova is the portrait Judge Hadavas sees of you, it will cost you dearly, my friend. And by the way here, another thing I should ask you: Your wife's health and well-being were also involved here, along with her pride and dignity. When you were running around on her, did you always use a condom?"
"Yeah, that much I did do," Hilliard said. "It wasn't like I thought I was the first one that any of my ladies ever took a liking to. I didn't know what they might've gotten from someone they'd been with before. They probably didn't know either, as far as that goes, that AIDS stuff takes as long to develop as they're now saying it does."
"Every time?" Evans said. "Invariably?"
"What?" Hilliard said. "Yeah, I just told you that. For sure I didn't wanna bring anything home, give Mercy VD. I always used condoms, religiously. Even though I must say, I still don't like 'em."
"Yes," Evans said. "That's what prompts my next question. That matter of your religion. Did you actually have a condom available the very first time you found yourself in one of those sexual situations you mentioned? Good Catholic guy like you are? That would have been keen foresight on your part admirable or deplorable depending on your point of view. Either that or else finding yourself in that set of tempting circumstances wasn't entirely accidental. Mind telling me which one it was? Not to mention the practical aspect of where you could have kept your condom supply? Certainly not in your wallet, or at your apartment."
Hilliard sighed. "Look," he said, 'the first time I stepped off the reservation, it was with this woman who's in television news. She was young, still in her twenties, but she'd been around. And I had my eyes open too; the reason she came on to me was only partly because she had hot pants for me it was also partly, maybe even mostly, because she thought if she put out for me I'd tell her things the other reps who knew about them wouldn't tell to the other reporters. We fell in lust.
It wasn't ever love. It was sex, for both of us, along with ambition, on her part, and it was extremely good sex. And thrills, very good thrills, not cheap ones: this was a fine-looking woman who really liked being in bed with a man and would've found a man to do it with even if it wouldn't help her career. I had a good time with Stacy. I was with her for over three years."
"So?" Evans said. "Why're you telling me this?"
"Well," Hilliard said, 'because it seems to me that you've let yourself get a little behind the times about the dating game these days. I didn't have to go against my religion buying condoms before I went against it to have sex with Stacy the first time. Stacy had the condoms. Like I said, she was experienced. She got laid a lot, and she was prepared. She had a supply at her place."
"And I take it that you don't claim," Evans said, 'that your liaison with this woman, or any of the other women, however many there may have been…"
"So far, only eighteen," Hilliard said.
'"Only eighteen," Evans said. "You're quite sure of that."
"Oh yeah," Hilhard said. "I know most of us always say that there haven't been very many, or "one or two," something like that, so that we don't look like we're bragging. But we all know exactly how many and the women keep track, same as we do. If you count Mercy, I've fucked nineteen women."
"Really," Evans said drily.
"I realize that's not much of a total," Hilhard said. "I plan to add to it as soon as possible. Put my best efforts forward, you know? I've always had this tendency to fall in love, where I only have one woman at a time besides my wife, I mean. I know it's held me back. There've been times when I've actually walked away from a chance to go to bed with a woman I was strongly attracted to, because I didn't think it would be fair to my girlfriend if I did. Not because most people'd look at it as being that I would've been cheating on Mercy with both of them, then; because the way I looked at it I'd've been cheating on the woman I was cheating with on Mercy. I've been doing my best to overcome that."
"I can see where it's been complicated for you," Evans said, laughing.
"Keeping nineteen women straight. Must be quite a challenge."
"Well, but not all at once," Hilhard said. "And Mercy was sort of a constant, you know. It was her plus somebody else. So it was eighteen besides her, but usually only one of them at a time." He paused. "I'd have to say also, she was as good as most of them were, better'n several I had."
"That was what I was getting at," Evans said, 'as delicately as possible; not very. You didn't start compiling a fairly impressive life-list of sexual partners because of deprivation at home, I take it?"
"Nope," Hilhard said. "Mercy was always willing, God love her. She was a virgin when we got engaged that was a big reason why we got engaged; it was the only way I could get her pants off. But after that she was as ready as I was. Sometimes in fact, she was readier. More'n once I drove home early Friday after having nooners with Stacy, wasn't feeling all that eager, but an hour or so later, there I am, having to get it up again to give Mercy a dash in the bloomers 'fore the kids came home from school."
He chuckled. "I was younger then. Good thing for me, I guess kind of tough to explain to your wife she'll have to wait 'til bedtime 'cause you're not up to it; just finished banging your girlfriend in Boston."
Evans furrowed his brow. "And I can take it all of these eighteen women were unmarried?"
"Four of them had husbands," Hilhard said. "One of them was separated, in the process of getting divorced, so I'm not sure she really counted as married. But the other three married ones were cheating, same as I was."
"Oh, wonderful," Evans said. "That means one of the imponderables we'll have to think about here is the possibility that one of their spouses will decide to divorce them, and name you."
Hilhard shrugged. "I realize it wasn't smart," he said. "But at the time I was not engaged in being smart. I was letting my dick do the thinking. Here I've got this good-looking woman practically throwing herself at me, and I know she's married, and she knows I'm married, and this obviously makes no difference to her, so then why should it to me?
"Well, it shouldn't," says my cock, and therefore it doesn't, and the next thing I know, we're in bed. I don't know whether you've ever had that happen to you."
"Can't say as I have," Evans said. "Probably wouldn't let it anyway, even if I had the chance."
"Well, I have," Hilhard said, 'and I am here to tell you: you missed something. It's exhilarating when that happens to you. When you've just been introduced to someone that you didn't even know an hour ago, and she looks like a movie star, and you can tell right off that she's so hot to trot you could probably fuck her right there on the rug, in front of all the people, if you wanted to. All you have to do is say the word and take her by the elbow, and she'll go anywhere you want, up on the roof, if that's what you want, and help you get her clothes off and then give you the ride of your life.
"When that happens you don't think about how smart or stupid or risky it is, or how you've got a wife and kids at home, or anything else in the world; all you think about is that all you have to do is ask and you can have her. It'd be a crime not to do it. So the decision's easy: you do it.
"At least that's the way I saw it. I was never that good an athlete. I wasn't an A student either. I had no talent for music. I wasn't especially funny. My father wasn't a major-league ballplayer. My mother was a housewife. Girls never paid much attention to me. I was who they went to the prom with when they'd begun to think no one was going to ask them. They were not on the cheerleading squad. I wasn't especially attracted to them. They weren't attracted to me. We were both involved in fulfilling a ritual. It was sort of like valet-parking. We both had to Go to The Dance or Be Weird; that was all. We didn't have very much fun.
"I was astonished when Mercy came on to me, very first time that I saw her. Absolutely knocked off of my feet. Here was this really cute girl who liked me, was all over me; didn't let me feel her up, made me.
And could not keep her hands off of me. It was truly extraordinary.
The first night I met her we both came in our pants, rubbing up against each other. I knew then we were going to get married. We had to we had no choice."
"Mutual hormone storm," Evans said.
"Uh uh," Hilliard said. "I'd had those before and I've had them since.
It was a lot more'n that. This was beyond horny, this was mating."
"Well then," Evans said, 'if that was the way that you felt about her, how could you do what you did? Did the feeling you had for her change?"
"No, it didn't," Hilliard said. "I still feel about her the same way today that I did back when we got engaged, and finally we could do what a man and woman're supposed to do when they're by themselves with their clothes off. When it was finally okay. Well, not okay, really, but close enough; the Church didn't allow it, but she did. If she called me up tonight and asked me to come over and put it to her, no promises to drop this case, nothing, I would do it. I'd be over there like a shot. She wont, of course, because "What would Diane say," and of course I'm now kind of pissed-off at her so I'd probably try to make her beg for it. But if she did call and ask me, I know I would do it.
I always liked screwing my own wife. In fact thinking about it, I will go further: she may be the best lay I've ever had."
"Then why all the others?" Evans said. "The other eighteen: I don't see the logic to it."
"That's because there isn't any logic to it," Hilliard said. "Or else it's because it's the same. I didn't go into politics because I wanted to be a politician any more than I went to law school because I wanted to be a lawyer. All I knew when I ran for alderman the first time and lost and then the second time and won was that even though I was a pretty good high-school teacher and I kind of liked it, and saw that if I stayed with it I'd do all right, it was not going to be enough, ever.
There'd never be enough excitement for me. Never enough thrills and chills. I certainly didn't want the life my father had; fingers in other peoples' mouths all the time, smelling their terrible breath, looking over what's still left of what they had for dinner the past couple weeks. That's why I'd gone into teaching. I guess you could say I was restless. The only thing I could see being still left open to me was politics, running for office.
"It turned out to be the right answer. I really liked politics. I liked running for office a lot. I didn't like getting my brains beaten out, but I liked what I'd seen the first time out well enough to risk having it happen again. And then I got help, from the Carneses and Amby, and the second time I didn't get beat."
"It wasn't because you had some idea that if you put yourself into that milieu you might be able to pattern your life on what you saw the Kennedys doing," Evans said.
Hilliard snorted. "Back then almost nobody knew how much ass those guys were getting. No, I didn't run for office because I thought if I won, I'd get laid a lot. I ran for office because I Wl thought I could be better as a politician, make better use of my intelligence and my skills doing that than I'd ever be able to if I stayed a teacher. I looked at the people I saw ten or twenty years older than I was who were running for office and having a high old time for themselves, showing off and making lots of noise and so forth, and then I looked at the future that I'd probably have if I kept on doing the same thing that I'd been doing. By the time I was forty-five or so I'd have a pretty good chance of being a superintendent, or else fairly high up either in the Mass. Teachers' Association or the NEA. Not a bad life at all.
"But if I was going to do what amounted to getting out of teaching in order to boss teachers, or get them to elect me to help run their union for them, then why not make a run in honest politics? See if I was any good at that, and then if it turned out I was, then get out of teaching and go at that full-bore. So that was what I did.
"I didn't find out about the pussy until later."
To preserve what meagre strength Evans saw in Hilliard's case, he had 'strongly recommended' that his client suspend his efforts to add to the number of women he'd bedded and 'avoid being seen in public unofficially with any attractive woman, pendente lite." "Meaning," as Hilliard ruefully translated it to Merrion, 'that I'm not to get laid, except very discreetly, until the divorce case is over. This's all Diane Fox's fault, I have to go through this at my age, beating my meat by myself. Once I get this divorce shit out of the way I may have a law passed against her. Have her declared a toxic-waste dump and appropriate funds to dispose of her.
"It's surprising how hard it is to do that, get laid without anyone seeing. I never would've guessed. I'm not really sure I can do it.
You say to a grown-up woman, would she like to have some dinner, maybe relax, have a few drinks, listen to some music. She's in the mood, agreeable, she's liable to say Yes, and come along with you, good time to be had by all. Of course anyone who sees you and knows you, knows that you're not married to each other, so they also now know what it is you're leading up to. The two of you're planning to get laid. So for me, for now, that's out. I've always been discreet, which's why Mercy hasn't really got any concrete evidence she can use to bean me, but now I've got to be discreetly discreet.
"I don't know how to do that. What do I do, I see a lady I might like to jump? Slip her a note that says that I'm in room two-ten, and would she like to join me there and have some food sent up, maybe have a glass of wine and watch the ballgame on TV? Oh, very smooth. She's not gonna go for that. She's gonna laugh in my face. The best you can hope for, you pull that stunt, you don't get a kick in the balls.
"Sam says the way to look at it is that I'm being punished. The punishment for getting laid with too many women is not getting laid with any women at all for a while. He's got that part right. This getting' separated and divorced is no day at the beach. Makes it lots harder to get laid'n it is when you're still all safely married, got the wife at home and all, like all the other guys I know are who're always getting' laid all around me, left and right. I don't recommend it at all."
Merrion suspected that Hilliard had eased his loneliness by making it his business to become somewhat better acquainted with Mary Pat Sweeney, but never made any effort to find out if he was right. He did make it a point to hang around for what Hilliard had come to call the apres-golf dinners at Grey Hills on Sunday evenings; as far as Merrion could tell, they were about the only interludes of peace and relaxation 'fun," Danny called it that his best friend had all week.
But Merrion would not have chosen that word. Hilliard gave the meals an air of almost frantic desperation, trying to wring more happiness out of the hours than Merrion believed they actually contained, extending the evening with booze and then talking too loudly, too much.
"Those new buildings going up in Canterbury there? I'm the guy that built those, got the money for them. Almost seven million dollars. And what thanks I get for that? "That was two, three years ago. Whatchou doin' now?" I tell you, you get no thanks in this business."
The chief of police in Canterbury in those days was Salvatore Paradisio, the formidable uncle of self-effacing Samuel Paradisio, the federal probation officer who had come to mistrust Lowell Chappelle's intentions toward Janet LeClerc. For Salvatore Paradisio life was a serious business, always to be soberly conducted.
To his ex-officio service as a member of the police station building committee named by the selectmen, he brought strong views tenaciously held on the subject of the proper design of police stations in general and what specific modifications would be appropriate for the one to be built in Canterbury by the F.D. Barrows Construction Co." the contract having been awarded as expected as soon as the tedious business of inviting, receiving, opening and considering competitive sealed bids had been gotten out of the way.
Merrion was a member of the five-person Building Committee. By then Deputy Clerk of Court, he had been appointed without his prior knowledge or permission and when he was informed, against his wishes at the suggestion of Richard Hammond, Clerk of Courts. Hammond knew Chief Paradisio just as well as anyone else outside his family did, and therefore while he agreed with the selectmen that someone from the courthouse ought to serve on the committee, he did not agree that he should be the one.
"After all," Hammond told them, "I've got a growing family. Demands on my time. Responsibilities. I've been planning to see as much as I can of my children in the next eight or ten years the two youngest've got left before they get all grown up. If I let you talk me into serving on a committee with Sal Paradise, I wont be able to do that. They'll be planning their weddings by the time I get home from the first meeting. I'll be tied up every night until I'm sixty-five.
"No, Amby Merrion's your choice. Bachelor like he is, he's got lots of time. Besides, he's pals with Hilliard. These're Hilliard's buildings, right? Way he tells it, anyway, he's the guy that got the money. So put his sidekick on the panel. Pretty soon the chief 11 start to drive him 'round the bend, like he does everybody else who has to listen to him, and then Amby'll go to Hilliard and say: "Hey, for the luv va Christ, help me out here a little bit, willya? Get me some more State dough for Canterbury make yourself look good and at the same time, help me make the chief shut up." And Hilliard'll do it for him, contradict alia mean things that his wife's sayin' about him, 'cause he still wants to look good, 'case he decides to run again."
Chief Paradisio grounded his views of police station design, as he did his many other views, on his painstakingly careful and extensive study of human nature. "Basically what I am is a professional scientist. My field is the continuing study of human nature," he would say. "All law enforcement officers are engaged in such studies. Or we ought to be at least: it's the essence of our work." Because he habitually delivered his observations and findings in detail and at length whenever he believed that he had been invited to state and then defend any given premise 'and has such stamina," Dan Hilliard said, 'guy's a one-man filibuster; he can stay awake for days' he generally prevailed against all who initially opposed any premise he happened to advance.
"It's a universal tendency," Chief Paradisio said, 'to want to get away." He was describing without having been asked how people reacted when placed under arrest, believing he saw the inquiry implied in a statement made by someone else at an early meeting of the Building Committee.
"I think it was, Diane, Diane Fox who was to blame," Merrion told Hilliard over drinks at Henry's Grist Mill two or three nights later.
Diane's practice as a Licensed Social Worker counseling troubled young people in Hampton Pond was established and thriving. She was on the building committee as an ex-officio member of the board of selectmen, having been elected to serve out the unexpired three-year portion of her late husband's term after Walter's sudden death at the age of forty-two. He had had a heart attack while jogging.
"I got to the library and went into the trustees' room," where the police station building committee had agreed to meet, 'and I was hanging up my coat. The rest of them the chief, Diane, Maurice Belding and Gerry Porter they'd already gotten there ahead of me, and so they all were sitting down, and Diane, while they're waiting for me to join them at the table just by way of no harm sort of threw it out that she'd been afraid she was going to be late because the cat'd gotten out. And she'd thought at least 'til she found it sleeping on the hood, her car, which I guess was nice and warm, this being a cold night, because she'd just gotten home to feed the cat and let it out, expecting it'd come right back in; that was the reason she'd stopped off there that it'd run away.
"And that was what set Sal off about how come people run away. I pity people who have to deal with him every day. The guy is unbelievable."
The chief said the desire to run away was the reason behind his desire for an internal receiving area for prisoners in the new police station.
"It's just a normal human thing, I guess," the chief said, 'that when someone has you restrained; you're under his cojatrol; he's bigger, stronger, younger'n you are, most likely, and he's armed, to boot; plus there may be more'n one of him so that you're outnumbered too, and all of them're authorized to use deadly force, on you; well, it's naturally upsetting. You're probably not used to this, in all likelihood, and so it would be perfectly natural then that you would feel confined. Being as you are. And since you have been brought up in this country of ours here, as most of us have been, you have always had the notion that you are well, what else? free And you are used to that. So now this guy in uniform, or maybe it's two guys, or one or two guys in plainclothes, could be that as well, whatever, but what you know is that they're cops, he has you in custody, and you are not free to go. And why would this be, then? Well, unless someone made a mistake which we don't make a habit of doing and I want to assure everybody here of that right now on that point normally it's going to be because you did something.
"It don't matter, really, does it, though, what it was. Because the overall effect's always the same. If you're drunk or operating under, you had a fight or something, or you're beating up the wife. Or you're breaking in a building. Or maybe you had drugs in your possession that you're selling someone, right? And you know you're not supposed to do that. But you're always on the lookout, aren'tcha, for the easy buck, and now it turns out, joke's on you, guy you're selling to's a cop, badge and everything. And he placed you under arrest. So here you are now; you've been arrested. Now you're going to the lock-up.
"Now at the present time if you would like to come down to the station as it is configured, the one on Lannan Street there, any night you care to come, although there'll generally be more to see on a weekend night as Mister Mernon can tell you, having been there setting bail a good many weekend nights for people we've arrested, Friday or a Saturday.
Unless it's one of those three-day holidays it seems like we're always getting now, at least one a month, in which case Sunday night as well we will have a lot of traffic usually, that is. And the first thing you will see down there, and I will show you this myself or have a sergeant escort you, because sometimes one of these guys that we've got arrested will decide, you know, because he's drunk, he'll decide he wants to fight.
"This is also very common. A big part of our job as law enforcement officers involves fighting with drunks. If you want to be a police officer, you have to face that. It's reality. And when we arrest a guy for that, he's quite often going to get unruly with us, and we have to subdue him there, show him what the Mace is like, blast of that stuff in the face, get his mind off fighting us. And what you will then see is that when the cruisers pull up at the back door of the station, right on Lannan Street, with everybody passing by, you will have both your pedestrian and your vehicular traffic there as well. And this is where my men have to come to discharge their passengers, and not only the officers of the police department but also the State Police if this happens to be one of their arrests that they have made and they are bringing him to us. Or her, could be a woman; we do have to arrest the women sometimes too, although nowhere near as many. To be secured in our lock-up until someone can come and get this man or woman out.
"And the very first thing that you will instantly observe in virtually every single case, and virtually without exception, is that every suspect who gets out, he's got his hands behind his back account of how he's cuffed and all, the first thing that he always does, and I don't care he's drunk or sober, or he's on some controlled substance and he's higher'n a kite, but the first thing he does before he does another thing is: He takes a look around. And we all know what he is thinkin', every single time, no matter who it is. He's thinkin': "How can I get out of here?" How can he escape?"
The chief always stressed the sibilance of the initial syllable of the verb, relentlessly telling officers who mispronounced the word that 'when people hear you sayin' ex-cape like there was an X in it, which there is not, and which you just did, they think you are stupid or else ignorant, which you do not want. So therefore don't let me hear you doing it around here."
"Now of course this makes no sense at all, no question about that.
Usually the charge that we have got against you, when we bring you in, well, the fact is that you may've gotten everybody good and mad at you, doing what you did, may've even hurt someone, but the fact is still that usually it's a fairly minor charge.
"Now when I say that I don't mean you think that it's minor, that it's a minor thing. That if it's operatin' under for example, so you stand to lose your license, sixty, ninety days, a year, whatever it may be; or this time you're gonna have to take that course they give you if you've been caught for doing this, and it's therefore gonna cost you.
You not only have to go to all those lecture-sessions that they have so there goes your evenings free and you are gonna have to sit now with a bunch ah drunks that you now belong with; which you don't like thinkin' either, but you haven't got no choice now; you have proved it, you belong and look at all those awful bloody pictures that they show. As many nights as that takes, and you're gonna have to pay for them, the cost of going to them, and that's no small amount, you find. Four, five hundred bucks I guess, is what they're getting for it now. You don't like that at all.
"And we don't blame you. But just the same, it isn't like this has to be the end of the whole world for you now. You're embarrassed, sure you are, and you ought to be, whatever it is you've done. But you're not the first one, done it. You're not gonna be the last. So what you want to do is take your medicine and learn from it, learn something from this bad event. Then put it all behind you and act like a normal person, and see that from now on you behave yourself so that you don't have no more trouble, which of course is what you want. That's what we all want, all of us, just to be left alone. And if you do like you're supposed to, chances are, that's how this will all turn out.
"But if you actually do it, if you actually try to escape, get away from the officers there that've gone to all the trouble of arresting you and don't think they like doin' that, all the paperwork that that entails, and the court appearances and everything like that; they're not gonna do this unless they think they have to but now they've done all that and brought you in, and now you're gonna try to escape7. Well now if you do that, you're gonna be in one big peck of… well, a lot of trouble, anyway, and I trust you all know what it is that I'm talkin' about here.
"Big trouble. Resistin' arrest. A and B on an officer. Attempted escape, and on and on. No jokes here now. These're all felonies, and we're not gonna show you any mercy. We're just gonna multiply charges up on you; cut you no slack; give you no breaks: that's what we're gonna do. Because you went and acted stupid, and you made us take a chance of where somebody could've gotten really hurt, and we hadda go and stop you, and this always involves risk. That we do not want to have to be taking. If it turns out that nobody got hurt bad, well then, everybody was lucky, that's all. It wasn't no fault of yours.
And so now we're gonna throw the book at you and you are goin' to jail.
You didn't want that to happen and we didn't want it to happen. Nobody wanted it to happen, but you went and did what you did, and we can't have you doing that, so now you go to jail.
"You see what I'm getting at here. What I'm telling you is that now that we have got the opportunity here to design this new facility to meet the needs that we have got in a growing, modern community police department here. "Cause that is what we've got now: a community that's growing, and it's getting bigger all the time, whether we like it or not. And with all the problems that all growing towns everywhere've all got these days, people movin' to the suburbs and it's only gonna just get worse, matter what we do because that's the way it is. And I don't care where you look, we've all got the same kind of problems.
We're all doin' our best, lookin' for some way to get out of them. And that's why we need to look very carefully at this thing that we're doin' here and make absolutely sure we know exactly what we're doin'.
And one thing I am tellin' you is that from my point of view as a professional law enforcement officer, lookin' at this thing here, one thing we absolutely positively have to build into this new police facility from the start is an internal reception area for receiving prisoners and any other people that we may be bringing in who're in custody. That we have found it necessary to take into custody, danger of harm to themselves or to others, whatever the reason may be. So that the cruiser car or the wagon, whatever it is there, it just arrives from the scene and what it does then is it pulls right in, right inside the building, and the door shuts, boom, down behind it, just like that." He clapped his hands once.
"And then we open up the car doors there and we get them unloaded, and march 'em right into the bookin' desk-area there, and advise 'em and mug 'em and print 'em. And from there they go right into the cell.
Then there they have been at all times since we pulled them out the cruiser: inside of the building, in the lock-up. So they haven't had another look at being outdoors again since they got arrested, because they've never been outdoors again once they got put in the car, the official vehicle there. And they wont be outside again until they've been bailed and discharged and allowed to go free, on their way, with the date set for them to be in court. So once you've done that, see, put the reception area physically inside of the building like I said, you have now just practically eliminated here that completely human tendency and temptation they all always have now, to try to get away and escape, and with all that that entails there, and that's a completely essential thing, I think here, myself."
Shortly after 9:30 that Saturday evening in August Merrion's beeper went off while he sat cramped in a wicker chair too small for him in the now-glass-enclosed sunporch of the house in Canterbury where he had grown up, watching a taped rerun of final night of a big dog-show that had taken place six months or so earlier in Madison Square Garden in New York, trying idly once more to think of some way he could have a dog again without complicating his life beyond endurance, knowing that there was none. The number that came up on the beeper screen in faint light-emitting-diode grey was for the administrative line at the Canterbury police station. He lifted the wireless remote telephone handset from the wicker table next to his chair and punched the number in, and when he recognized the answering voice he said: "Hiya, Everett, what we got?" He listened and then he said: "My, my, that's unusual.
How many involved here?"
Once more he listened and then said: "Okay, I guess I'd better come down then. Gimme fifteen minutes. Oh, and better give Social Services a call. They may wanna take a hand in this. On second thought, no, make it half an hour. I've got the Westchester Kennel Club show on and we're judging the collies here now. I wanna wait and see who's gets the Best Bitch." He laughed. "Yeah, if it was the courthouse, it'd be no contest at all. Biggest Bitch, anyway-Joanie in Probation, win that one hands-down. Anyway, just tell 'em I'm putting my pants on and they keep their shirts on and I'm on my way; I'll be there, half an hour.
Have 'em get their money ready, and if they haven't got any, tell 'em they better either use their call to get someone who's got cash to spare, or else make friends fast with somebody else in the cell-block who's got some. "Cause this clerk makes no exceptions; otherwise it's Sunday in the slammer." He paused. "Yeah, see you at Sal's motor entrance in about a half an hour."
He hung up grateful for the call. He had hoped for it. He intended to be generous when he rotated the weekend bail-setting watch (required when the court would not sit the next day because by law no one could be held more than twenty-four hours without bail having been set) among his three assistant clerks. He told them he meant it when he said that it was only because he was being a nice guy that he was offering them the option. He said that if they chose to tie themselves down one or two weekend nights in order to augment their statutory salaries with the magistrate's bail-setting fee of $25 in each case, that would be fine with him. On the other hand, any time that it happened that all three of them preferred to have both weekend evenings free, and forgo the extra money, that would also be all right.
He had a reason. Richie Hammond had hogged the detail, seldom permitting Merrion or the second and third assistant clerks, Bobby Cooke and Jeanne Flagg, to share the extra money. That had led to some resentment and hard feelings which in turn explained why it was Richie had so much trouble finding anyone who'd pinch-hit for him when he wanted to spend an occasional weekend away. Merrion wanted no such dissension. "And besides," as he told Hilliard, "I'm single, and with what Larry left me, I don't need the fuckin' money. I just put it in my pocket until I get to the bank, put it into my account I'm saving up for when I have to buy my next car. Keep a record every dime, fuckin'
IRS thinks they're gonna grab me puttin' cash into my pocket without payin' taxes on it, they can go and think again. That's the first place that the bastards look. I'd be stupid if I did that, and I'd be just as stupid, too, I didn't, let the kids take what they want."
The weekend totals varied with the seasons. There were almost always at least four or five unlucky drivers whose dead headlights, faulty brake-lights or imperfect recognition of passing zones or stop signs justified a roving cop's decision to pull them over and require them to show their licenses and registrations, leading to arrests for suspended or missing documents, or operating under the influence of alcohol or narcotics. Documentation of their releases on personal recognizance in the amount of $100, promises of payment that would come due if they failed to appear the next day court was open to be processed and enter pleas, would yield a total of at least a hundred bucks a night. More often than not a Friday evening would produce an angrily baffled male whose frustrating week at work or out of it had convinced him that the only cure for his malaise was more beer than his ordinarily peaceful disposition could tolerate without becoming profane and noisy, frightening his wife into believing that violence would be next and causing her to call the cops. That would add another twenty-five dollars to the magistrate's net pay. Sometimes around graduation time or during the football season the State cops would break up an off-campus keg-party at a summer cottage on one of the lakes or a skinny-dipping outing at the reservoir, bagging a small herd of underage drinkers and public urinators whose releases from the lock-up in Hampton Pond would bring two or three hundred dollars. In the late Eighties the increasing traffic in crack cocaine had spawned an increase as well in the number of magistrate's fees, arrests for dealing it adding fifty to a hundred dollars a night.
It seemed to Merrion that that kind of money ought to be hard for a young parent to turn down, but surprisingly more often than he would have thought, both of the two young fathers and the young wife on his staff as well regularly passed it up, saying they wanted time with their families. And during the summer the absences of vacationing assistants usually put him on duty at least one night every week.
This night he was glad of it. On the way home from visiting his mother he had perceived himself to be in a familiar, dangerously barren mood.
Polly had not recognized him, gazing into space and glancing at him only when it registered on her that there was something else alive and breathing in her room, the evidence being bright and cheerful sounds he made when he tried to talk to her. At least she hadn't mistaken him for Chris, which still occasionally happened 'and never fails to piss me off," as he told Hilliard. "Puts me right into a fuckin' rage, even though of course I know she's got no idea what she's saying. I dunno what I want from her, expect her to do, where that no-good bastard's concerned. Fifty, sixty miles away, maybe an hour's drive? If it's even that, and he hasn't been to see her since I can't remember when.
Before she got really sick, I know, the bastard, been at least that long.
"I can't figure the little shit out. It's almost as though he holds me and her responsible for Dad dying like he did when he was still so young. Like he got gypped out of something or something, and we helped whoever did it. When he had much more of Dad's tim en I ever did because by the time he came along Dad'd made sales manager and didn't have to work so many hours had more time to take Chris to ballgames and places by then I was too old to go with them. And who the hell does he think helped Ma pay his tuition, he went to Cathedral? Helped out with his living expenses or he couldn't've gone to BU like he did, even if with his scholarship. That all seems to've slipped his mind now. She still remembers his name, though. It's my name she always forgets.
"Jesus, though, doesn't he know? You got to take care of your own. All you and I've been trynah do, all these years, the things we ever done, it's always come down to steppin' in and takin' care of other people when their own people either didn't care about them enough so they would do it, or were so totally messed-up themselves they couldn't do it, but the need was still there. Somebody had top take care of it.
And that was the way that we always saw it; that was the way we looked at it. Our job was to make sure the government picked up the slack.
That's why the damned jobs exist; that's what they're for. You always take care of your own. Like I always looked out for your best interest, and you always looked out for mine. And we're not even related. We always took care of our own.
"Chris's never done that at all. It's like he's oblivious to the fact that he should; like the shit doesn't see his obligation. He doesn't take care of his own. But it's his name she still remembers."
She seldom understood anything he said to her any more, but on good days she seemed to be pleasantly diverted by the noise he made, and liked it, the way she seemed to like the radio that the nuns had set to play soft-rock music at low volume on the table beside her bed, smiling absently and briefly from the distant world nearby where she had gone to live, if living was still what she did. He thought perhaps she had found his father, Pat, and perhaps her mother, Rose, there for company, and that maybe Rose was being nice, happier with them in that new world than she had ever been with them in the one where the three of them had lived before. He surmised that when she was off in that place she liked the sounds he made, not for their content, or the effort the producer of them made, but for what they were themselves, as a kitten likes and is amused by squeaking sounds emitted by a rubber mouse.
On not-so-good days, perhaps when she and Pat had quarreled, as they sometimes had when he had still been present where she used to live, and physically remained, or Rose was being cranky, the sounds that Ambrose made seemed to vex her, and when she verged on lucidity as she generally did, once or twice an hour, regardless of her inner state she would irritably make small, tidy brushing motions. He was fairly certain that she meant them to dismiss the noise-maker. On those days he subsided, and sat silently with her for as long as he could stand it, half an hour more or so, departing with the excuse in his head that the length of his stay no longer mattered, and the fact of it might not, either, except to the good nuns who observed in passing with approval his filial devotions.
This Saturday had been an in-between day. She hadn't really taken any notice of him or what he said. Her entertainment offering to him had been to look over vacantly and then pick tremulously at her third meal of the day sections of pink grapefruit and a small dish of canned beef soup, accompanied by a half-pint container of skimmed milk and a slice of whole wheat bread with a pat of margarine, a dixie cup of peppermint-stick ice cream, served to her on the narrow telescoping bed-table, usable when she was in the wheelchair, as she had been that afternoon. Then she had placidly looked on while it was taken away, mostly undisturbed, and a short while after that he had gone away himself.
He thought that on Monday he might call her doctor again, for no good reason except his own need to feel that he had at least tried to do something, even though he knew before he made the effort that there was nothing to be done and it would do no good to try.
The doctor he prefaced his answer to every question with "As your mother's primary-care physician' was a large slow-moving red-haired man named Carlson, in his early forties. He seemed always to be working out a complicated mathematical problem in his head. Most likely it was always the same one, Merrion believed, relating to the possibility of obtaining additional money for his services from the family estates or the insurers of the patients, without any additional or more effective effort on his part; endless, useless calculations of no possible use to anyone except him, conducted visibly so that it would always be clear to everyone that he did not and would not ever wish to be interrupted, and would regard any attempt to do so as an imposition, punishable by neglect of the patient.
That evident desire of his cut no ice with Merrion. He received regular quarterly statements from the Hightower Mutual Life Assurance Society in Fort Recovery, Ohio, reporting benefits it had paid to James N. Carlson, M.D. under Pauline Merrion's Medicare Supplement Extended Benefits Policy. If each of the forty-one other patients occupying all but three of the extended-care beds available at St. Mary's on the Hilltop had a policy or other resource remitting to Dr. Carlson, attending house physician, the same amount that he was getting from Hightower for Polly, that stolid man was pulling down $2,730 every week, $141,960 every year, for what appeared to Merrion to consist chiefly of saying over and over again that just as Merrion had thought 'there's been no change in the past um week, um um, no change that I see, at least. But her heart still seems to be very strong. Doesn't seem to be much more we can do that we're not doing already. She's, yes, she's still holding her own."
On the television screen the beautifully silky, streaming tawny and white long-haired regal dogs trotted beautifully in turn around the ring on the leashes that their nondescriptly dressed diligently trotting handlers pretended that they did not need, and Ambrose Merrion on Saturday night sat depleted by his caring, watching them compete without ever knowing why, except that they existed, and that was what they had been bred to do.
Sergeant Everett Whalen emerged from the lockup into the ivory-painted cinderblock-walled corridor outside the lieutenant's office before Merrion finished removing his supply of bail forms from his beaten-up tan leather briefcase and getting himself settled at the bare old wooden desk against the wall. "Amby, how they hangin'," he said. It was not an inquiry; Whalen walked soundlessly in his crepe-soled black uniform shoes and spoke as a courtesy, so that Merrion would not be startled to turn and find him standing there.
"Ah, two inna bunch, Ev, same as always," Merrion said absently, without looking at him, flopping the sheaf of multi copy bail forms onto the desk, the top copy, white, blocked off and printed in rust-colored ink. He snapped the briefcase shut and tossed it onto the top of the desk against the wall, turning to face Whalen and resting his buttocks on the edge of the desk so that his left foot touched the floor and his right foot dangled above it. "Our happy campers ready?"
Thompson'll start bringin' 'em out to see you in a couple minutes,"
Whalen said. He stood slumped with his hands in his pockets. In his late forties he had prematurely acquired the sallow skin, the shameful little paunch and the doleful, dismayed look of a careless man nearing sixty and discovering that the penalties of failure to eat properly, get sufficient exercise and moderate his intake of alcohol plenty of cheap beer, generic six-packs, in Ev's case are just about as disagreeable as medically predicted. He looked as though he had realized some time ago what was going to happen to him, sooner than it should, and had resigned himself to it. The dismissive scuttlebutt that Merrion indifferently remembered from a casual courthouse conversation was that Ev Whalen never had any good luck at all.
Apparently well before he'd been close to old enough to have learned very much about women or know anything at all about marriage, he'd made the bad mistake of marrying a somewhat older woman who'd had her heart set on having a husband and had pretty much settled for him as the best she was going to get. She had borne him two children, but then after those experiences and some further consideration decided that on the whole she wished she hadn't married him. While she still believed he had probably been the best she could ever have done, he didn't make much money; he bored her, and she didn't like him very much.
One night with four rum-and-Cokes in her she had disconsolately given him that news, confessing her realization that she would have been better off alone. Staggered, he said he wished she were. In his bleak grief he told her since she felt that way to get out of his house and he would raise the kids himself. She said she would like to do that and appreciated his offer, but they both knew he couldn't do it alone, not the way things had become. They were stuck with each other, fused by a bad event that wouldn't've happened if she hadn't grown impatient and they hadn't gotten together.
Merrion wasn't exactly sure what it had been. One of the children had some kind of serious disability, caused either by a birth defect that she could have prevented with better prenatal care or more prudent behavior, or else by a very bad accident during infancy. The calamity had occurred while Everett and his wife were still fairly young, ruining whatever slim chance they, with little else to hope for, had ever had of at least moving up a notch or two in the world on a policeman's pay.
When no-end-in-sight expenses threatened to destroy them, some of their friends and neighbors organized a ten-kilometer fund-raising walk around the Cumberland Reservoir. Disc jockeys at WMAS in Chicopee exhorted listeners to volunteer and sell sponsorships of themselves to relatives and friends for contributions of a buck per kilometer to 'this very worthy cause." The week before the 10K walk, volunteers impeded shoppers leaving stores and markets at the local strip-malls by stepping into their paths and shaking white cardboard metal-bottomed canisters containing coins in their faces, demanding that they "Please Help the Whalen Family." Friends and neighbors staged a couple of dinner-dances at the VFW Hall in Hampton Pond, "Benefit of the Whalen Fund." They charged couples $25 per ticket for access to a cash bar and Music By The Muscle-Tones, a four-piece amateur Sixties Oldies band formed by two firemen, a high-school teacher and a lab technician who worked out together at the Canterbury Spa and Health Club, playing and singing together for the bright-eyed pleasure that it gave them.
Too indolent to change the local-access channel after the conclusion of an entertainingly contentious budget-meeting of the Canterbury selectmen, Merrion had watched the climax of one of those dances on television. The Whalens were standing awkwardly side-by-side like 4H livestock, a team of farm animals being auctioned off at the Big E Eastern States Exposition. Obviously not used to his clothing, Whalen wore a white shirt and narrow dark-red tie with a dark suit. His wife, whose name Merrion did not remember, wore a black dress with a high collar and long sleeves. They were standing on a low stage next to the "MAS morning disc jockey, a laboriously jovial, heavyset young man with a microphone, doing their best to look humble and grateful while the fat kid boastfully announced that a measly 'three or four thousand dollars have been collected, from hundreds and hundreds of people throughout the Pioneer Valley, reaching out to help the Whalen Family."
He did not say that ninety percent of it had been five and ten-dollar bills donated by people who knew the Whalens only slightly but really did feel sorry for them, or else had been asked by one of Whalen's fellow cops to make a donation and thought it might be provident to do so. The DJ did not say the rest was small change badgered out of contemptuous strangers who didn't know a thing or give one good shit about the Whalens and resented being forced to use their pocket change for once glad to have pennies to ransom themselves from the can-rattling solicitors they deemed fucking goddamned nuisances.
"Wonderful, wonderful people, every one of you," the DJ declaimed, extending his arms in symbolic embrace of people sitting at tables and standing in groups on the dance-floor under the balloons and crepe-paper festoons decorating the dimly lighted hall, staring in curiously some blearily at the Whalens. Because he knew Ev, Merrion had avidly watched the mortification, ashamed that he felt such fascination.
Then it had been time for Everett to grovel. He had taken the microphone and held it clumsily too close to his mouth so that it muffled his words, abjectly whinnying mandatory thanks to all the wonderful people who had worked on the great events and given money and helped out in any way at all; promising them that he and his wife he grasped her hand desperately, as though reasonably apprehensive she might come to her senses and bolt, try to get away while he was occupied and their healthy child, as well as the one being helped, would never forget their wonderful kindness and generosity. He did not quite promise to reciprocate on demand by donating one of his kidneys or a lung, his heart or liver, for that matter to any fundraiser who might ever need one and match his tissues, but he came pretty close.
As Merrion watched the event he'd begun to feel astonishment and wonder. He did not recall having given to the fund drive. He was reasonably sure that he had somehow inadvertently escaped every dragnet bagging all those niggardly donors. To the best of his recollection, it was the only such shakedown he had managed to elude since he'd first gotten into politics, forty years and more before. This amazed him. He calculated that in the course of his twenty-two-year career he had solicited campaign contributions for Dan Hilliard and other Democratic candidates and causes at least sixty times. The people on his trusty donor-list remembered him, with vengeance, when it came time for them to raise money for their candidates, colleges, church schools, drum-and-bugle corps, their children's teams and their favorite diseases, knowing he could not refuse. But somehow he'd escaped the posses of the Whalen Fund. He could not for the life of him explain how he'd done it, imagine what on earth he'd done or failed to do that had delivered him. Thereafter each time he saw Whalen at the station, he marveled silently once more.
"We got a couple more guests in since I called you," Whalen said. He leaned his right shoulder against the corridor wall and folded his arms. "Lady barkeep, good-lookin' head, from up Cannonball's, and we assume it's her gentleman friend that was with her. Routine coke buy.
He was scoutin' up the customers; she was keepin' the stash under the service bar.
"Statics got a new choirboy for undercover narc. He's the one who popped 'em. Looks like he's about sixteen. I guess he's actually twenny-three or four. They're workin' him out around here day and night this weekend without stoppin', seems like. Showin' him around like a new movie; anywhere you go you got a chance to see him. Hittin' every place they can. Settin' guys up left and right. Marijuana, cocaine, you-name-it; sellin' booze without asking' ID; solicitin' him for blow jobs; firearms; anything they can.
"Corporal Baker told me you can never tell what the hell is gonna happen, you drop a new young pretty boy into a hard guys' bar. Baker told me they got one guy down in Blackstone last week, had their Little Boy Blue workin' down the Worcester area, guy sold him a fuckin' recurve-crossbow. Looked like the antlers of a goddamned Texas Longhorn, mounted onna fuckin'-gorgeous, inlaid, checkered, big-game rifle stock. Fuckin' thing had to've been custom-made, some guy, most likely, use it to kill silent with. "Magine havin' that around, fuckin' thing like that? Someone must've stolen it somewhere from someone else down in Texas, prolly. Some rich oil man killer weapon, kind ah guy he must've been, and still some guy has got the balls go in and steal it from him.
"You beat that, fuckin' luxury crossbow? Whole buncha those bolts had for it, too, stubby iron arrows they use inna thing there; don't make any noise 'cept this sort of whoosh you let 'em go, but the guy says ah fuckin' thing'll go right through an engine block; right through a Ford engine block. What's this country comin' to, you wanna try an' tell me that! Guys sellin' things like that, people they don't even know, total strangers, even? Someone could wind up getting' killed, that kind of shit goin' on.
"Anyway, they've got him going non-stop, the fake teenager, I mean.
Just as fast as he can move, 'fore his cases start comin' up in court next week and some shyster-lawyer finally gets smart, asks for a hearin' on probable cause; kid hast ah come in, testify.
Everyone gets to see what he looks like, he is no good anymore. Party's over.
"But inna meantime they're sure getting' their money's worth. Corporal Baker, down the Monson station, used to be up in Northampton, brought in the last two the kid bagged. He told me kid made seven buys in nine bars down in Chicopee and Springfield just last night alone, three or four more in Holyoke tonight 'fore they hustle him up here.
"Grabbed one guy, parkin' lot at Donatello's, sellin' crack outta his car. Fuckin' two-year-old Isuzu, whadda they call it, Rodeo, Trooper, something. Trooper, I think it is. Anyway, it looks brand-new. They bust him, he's got two-and-a-half kilos. Run him and they find out that he's also got a couple priors. So they cuff him and they seize his fuckin' truck, all right? On top of charging him. Baker said they thought they could've had another guy that was there, too, in this blue Bronco." Julian, Merrion thought. "Forfeit his fuckin' car too. But before they could get him, they're so busy the guy with the Trooper, guy inna Bronco sees what's goin' down, and peels off. Outta there.
Didn't even get a plate on him. They're pissed; fact he ran, you know he's dirty could've taken his ride too.
"What the hell, huh? I suppose they figure as long's they're already out there, why the hell not? Not gonna do any harm; might just as well go ahead, do it. "Oh, nice car you got there. Sellin' contraband out of it? Sellin' illegal drugs, is that what it's gonna be?
Naughty-naughty." Take his car. He's a big boy, isn't he? Shouldah known better.
"I guess that's the way they look at it, anyway. You want my opinion, though, I would say the guy's been fucked. Serves the bastard right, I guess, peddlin' that shit. He don't care then why should I? Guy he picked to sell's a cop. People sell this guy anything. Then the next thing they know, they're up to their ears in the shit. Well, that's the chance that they took.
'1 don't know, though, you come down to it, what difference it really makes, they do find out he looks like. This's the young trooper I mean. Half these people that're sellin', either so stoned themselves alia time, or else they're always loaded, out of their minds; they dunno the fuck they're doin' anyway. Or else they're just naturally fuckin' stupid. You know what I bet you could do? Could go right up to them and tell 'em, face to face, every single other person inna fuckin' gin-mill with them is an undercover cop, and have it be the fuckin' truth, and you know something'? It wouldn't make any difference; wouldn't make any difference at all. They'd still be there, sellin' stuff an' lettin' the people buy it from them, whether they know them or not, got any idea who it is. It's as simple as that.
"They think it's all a fuckin' joke; a laugh, is what they think. They think that that's all it is. You know, no big deal, they get caught sellin' coke. Year in the can, mandatory? Yeah, sure; tell me another one, willya? Half the time their lawyer's even got a fuckin' clue what he's doin' alia time, he's gonna get a deal, put 'em right back onna street. They get so they know the routine there, you know? You do this; you do that; you get busted; so what? That's what it is. You should know that.
"So, good, they get so they're part of it there. They get into the system, they fin'ly become part of it themselves. "Till their faces start getting' to where they're becomin' familiar, you know? To the people down at Probation; start to get so sick of seeing these bums they can't stand it anymore. "What's this? You back here again, you asshole?" "Till it gets to the point someone goes to the DA and says:
"Hey, get this jerk some time, willya, Christ sake for a change? Sick of lookin' at him every week." And then maybe they go away. Then maybe they do do some time. But then again, maybe they don't. It all sort of just depends, you know? It always all depends." He shrugged.
"Okay with me, I guess."
He snuffled. "So, but what's been goin' on with you, then, huh Amby?
Last time we see you, I mean. That new black kid, Tyrone, he was in here last night with us, you no doubt probably know."
Whalen had continued to practice the nosiness that had made him a good beat-cop after he had his chevrons sewn on and gone indoors to work. It was what he had been trained to do, and therefore what he did. "He can't help himself," he told Hilliard, telling him about Whalen's latest probe. "I don't know what it is he thinks he's doing.
"Investigating," I guess. Keeping an eye out. That's what kept him alive when he was out on the street. Now he can't help doing it. I don't know what he's investigating or who he's investigating for doing it, and neither does he. But that doesn't make any difference. He's interested. He pigeon-holes people for ready reference "there's Bob the fireman, front of the firehouse, right where he oughta be; check" like he did keeping order on his beat. Even though there's no reason for it anymore.
"It isn't that he doesn't like Tyrone or that he treats him badly when Tyrone goes down there. The fact Tyrone's been a clerk here now for over six years probably means he's not "a new black kid" any more, but that's Ev's label for him. When he calls Tyrone "the new black kid" he means that Tyrone is black and still relatively young, and the rest of us clerks are not. He says "new" and "black" when he means "different." It sounds like something's wrong but there isn't.
"I know because I asked Tyrone, came right out and asked him. Made a big fool of myself doing it, too. At first I'm going to be, you know, diplomatic; I'm gonna be suave. Try to dance around it there, like I'm not after anything. I'm just making small' talk Monday morning, after his first night down there by himself: "So, how was it down there?
Everything go okay?" Like it'd been his first date. "Well, ah, you didn't try to feel her up did you, son?" Very casual and everything, that's what I am; store the extra butter in my mouth, I am so cool.
Mister fucking Smooth.
"He thought I was asking him if he had any trouble makin' out the forms and stuff, and of course he thought that must mean that secretly I really think that he's kind of stupid. Because a moderately smart house cat could fill out those forms if it could figure out how to hold a ballpoint pen in one of its front paws and press down good and hard because it's making several copies.
"Tyrone tries to keep his face straight. "Oh, fine-fine, no problem, fine." Like: "What the hell is the matter with you?"
"So that made me get right to the point. I haven't got any choice now.
I have to come right out and ask him.
"Cause I don't want that happening, any racial shit, which these cops, some of them I know are capable of that. Even though some of the other cops they work with and get along with perfectly fine, no problems at all, they also happen to be black; makes absolutely no difference at all, they still are capable of this shit and there's no use pretending otherwise, and… and I just don't want any of it happening, any way at all. And if it is I want to know about it, and I'll do something about it. We got enough problems in this line of work without havin' any that shit goin' down.
And we're not gonna have it, as long's I'm around in charge of things, and that's all there fuckin' is to it."
"Tyrone," I said, "here is what it is: the guy is not a bigot. Ev Whalen's not a bigot and he's not a racist either. But if he said something, or did something, maybe acted a certain way that made you feel like he is, all you've got to do is tell me what it was that made you uncomfortable, and I'll put an end to it. Once I talk to him, he'll be just as upset as I am, you took it that way. Because he isn't that way. He's not that type of guy."
"And Tyrone, Tyrone he just look at me and shake his head, and he be laffin' at me? He do, and then he say to me: "You really something', Amby, yes, you really, truly are." Then he clapped me on the back and said: "But you can put your mind at ease here, because everything is cool. Nothin' to concern yourself, not a thing at all. Everyone was very nice. Everything is cool."
"I am never sure whether Tyrone's playin' straight with me or givin' me the leg, and I will admit that. He's been workin' for me in the same office with me for several years and they have been happy years. I think we like each other fine. But every now and then I get the feeling that my friend Tyrone may be funnin' with me some, you know?
Just a little bit; keep his hand in and all, givin' me the leg when I think he's bein' straight."
Tyrone Thomas, thirty-eight, formerly of Cambridge, had become the third assistant clerk of the Canterbury District Court when Merrion had plucked him out of the lower third of the civil service list and appointed him in 1989 at the suggestion of State Sen. William Gallagher of Hingham, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight. Merrion did not know or have any occasion to speak to Gallagher. Gallagher had never laid eyes on Thomas. Gallagher's suggestion had been relayed to Merrion by Dan Hilliard, president of Hampton Pond Community College.
Hilliard's request for a special supplemental appropriation of $3.9 million to finance construction of a new HPCC building incorporating a student union and computer center along with 'much-needed faculty offices and expanded vocational counseling facilities' was short one vote for inclusion in the consensus budget under review by the Senate Committee on Ways and Means. Sen. Tobias Green of Boston controlled that vote.
"I can't budge him, Dan," Gallagher told Hilhard. "You know I love you dearly and I want you to have your game room and your bar-and-grill and pool hall, jai-alai court and rumpus room. Everything you say you've got to have or else the students starved for knowledge'll burn down the entire campus and put you out of work. But Green's the swing-vote, and he's not gonna budge until he gets what he wants, which is a court clerkship for this Thomas kid. Not later; right now. Green has checked and he knows there's one open out at your end of the world, in Canterbury. If it's promised to someone else and you can't pry it loose, that's all right. At least it's all right with me. It wont be all right with Tobias; he'll call you a racist and say now he knows you're in the Klan. He thinks that, you don't get your building."
Hilhard said he'd make the call and get back to Gallagher. Mernon said to Hilhard: "Good. Send that darky out here on the next stage. This's the best news I've had since my no-good fucking brother Chris swore to me for I think it was the fourth time that he'll never speak to me again. This time I think he means it. Now you come along and tell me that this means that fucking vacancy more like an open sore is finally going to be filled.
"My Christian heart is filled with joy. Now I know Larry was telling the truth when he said he was happy when I got the job. He told me when Chassy Spring he was appointing me, 'cause you had hammered Chassy, he'd never been so damned relieved in all of his born days.
"You getting it meant I was free. Free of all the nagging bastards who been after that damned job. "Sorry," I could then tell them, "Dan Hilhard's man's the winner. You gotta beef, it's with him. I can't help you one bit."
"I didn't believe him then, but now I do, I do. It's the exact same thing with me. Now I can finally tell the late Richie Hammond's favorite nephew and also the late Larry Lane's grandson that the fucking job is filled and they are out of fucking luck, "So stop pestering me and beat it."
"The Lane grandson especially. His mother came from miles away she was in Japan, the time to help boot Grampa Larry out of his own house and make him go somewhere else to die. But her kid is delicate; he told me he suffers from chronic depression and can't leave his bedroom about ninety-eight days a year. I told him this makes it hard for me and Lennie Cavanaugh to see how he could possibly hold down a job in the courthouse. I told him having to go to the courthouse every day makes even perfectly normal and stable people like me, haven't got a thing wrong with them, feel pretty depressed quite a lot.
"He thinks that shouldn't matter. He thinks the fact his gallant unsung dad singlehandedly resolved some trade dispute with Taiwan should make everything all right for him, always, in perpetuity. In other words, what I think doesn't matter. He wants the job and therefore I should give it to him.
"Now I can tell him he's probably right, but I can't do it for him.
And: "If you're down in Hell hstenin', Larry, understand that this one's for you." I can tell the same thing to the Hammond kid, too, who obviously doesn't know his late Uncle Richie hated me and did everything he could think of to fuck me over, or what warm feelings I still have for the bastard. "And Larry, if you're still kstenin', if you should run into Richie down there, tell him this one's also for me."
"I will say to those two fresh kids: "Hate to tell you this, guys, but the both of you seem to've lost out. To a nigger, can you beat it?
Hey, it's Affirmative Action what can I tell you? I've been neutered, made to sing soprano and rendered powerless, also my hands have been tied. But I want you to know, I'll always have you in my heart."
"Same for the other four hundred and thirty-two people who've also let it be known that they'd like the job. Not a bunch of fireballs; most of them look to me like they need their rest and generally manage to get it. I will tell them you got me in a hammerlock, ignored my piteous cries, and ordered me like the Nazi you are to give it to this fine young gentleman of color. So now they can stop calling me and start calling you day and night to threaten you with death for giving it to Amos. Or was it Andy you just said? Whichever, doesn't matter;
I can't wait 'til he gets here."
Senator Green until his entry into politics in 1981 had for several years taught social studies and coached the jay vee football and basketball teams at Cambridge Ridge and Latin High School, where he had encountered Tyrone Thomas. Thomas had been the youngest son of a single mother whose two elder boys, by different footloose fathers, had both been in trouble with the law before apparently getting themselves straightened out as US Army volunteers. Tyrone had not been a standout as student or athlete, but he was a genuinely nice kid, and he had become one of Green's favorites, using his average intelligence as diligently in the classroom as he did his body and his average skills when playing sports, cheerfully doing what Green, his mentor and after a while his surrogate father told him to do. He earned a B+ average and varsity letters as a second-stringer in football, basketball and track, and received a need-based scholarship from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.
Correctly assessing as poor his prospects of even a brief career in professional sports, and believing that the practices and games took too much time away from his studies, Thomas dropped football midway through his first season and basketball after his sophomore year at the Cross, slightly disappointing one of the basketball coaches who had hoped he might develop into a capable substitute small forward, but gratifying Green. Green said Thomas's decision was a mature judgment, confirmed by his subsequent graduation with a 2.7 grade-point low B average in sociology, and his subsequent admission to the New England School of Law in Boston.
Thomas earned his J.D. while partially supporting himself and two children his wife, Carol, also worked, as a $17,000-a-year clerk-typist in the State Department of Revenue as a $24,000-a-year assistant manager of the Great American Inn motel on Fresh Pond Parkway in Arlington. When he graduated he had firm assurances from GAI upper management that his record in Arlington coupled with his college and law degrees put him on the fast track for early promotion to the national executive offices in Alexandria. He was flattered and inclined to stay with the company.
Senator Green told him not to do it. He said: "If you do that, Tyrone, if you sell yourself to them, you will be a big fool. Because that is how they do it now. They don't sell us in the markets any more to white planters who will own us 'til they decide it's time to sell us again. What they show us now is this tinhorn fantasy of a great career so that we will sell ourself on it; do it to ourselves. What they will do with you is they will take you down there to Virginia, and give you some hocus-pocus about how grand you're going to be, if you stay with Good Kind Massa Company.
"What that grandness will be, Tyrone, when you finally achieve it and your head has cleared enough so that you can see what you have got, will be a desk and a chair outside of the office where the white boys go inside and shut the door to run the store, and that is where you'll always be, no matter where they send you. And send you they will. They will make you move and move, and then they'll make you move again, all around this great big country, anywhere they need to put a black man's face where folks can see it. No matter what they call it, that will be your purpose. That's what you'll be for. A mannequin, store-window dummy, nothing more 'n that; and you and Carol and your kids will have one lousy life. You wont ever be, anywhere, son.
"You'll always be where you happen to be now, on the way to someplace else. Not where you were before and not where you're going next, never anywhere. And then one day you'll get old and be retired, and you wont know where you want to be, or even where you've been. That's what they've always done to us, kept us on the move. "Noplace" will be your home. And that's no way to live.
"No, you listen to me, Tyrone. I've never let you down. I will find something for you. I will find you a good place."
"What was the other one's name there again now?" Whalen said. "The woman, I mean, not the new black kid. Jeannie, Jeannie Flagg there, 'm I right? Now there is a very nice broad. All of us like her a lot.
Not much to look at, I grant you that, she should lose a few pounds, but still, a very nice broad. Very businesslike woman. Knows what her job is and does it. Very professional person. Last week there we had her in here both nights. Didn't see you at all.
"Anyway, it's been a while we seen you in here. Nice to have you back.
Got something goin' on, have you, getting' too good for us here? You been very busy or something?"
"Not particularly, no," Merrion said, feeling easy and relaxed and in command. "No busier'n usual, for the summer months, at least. I hadda have a woman we've got under more or less loose supervision come and see me in the office this morning. We've been hearin' some things that we didn't like, kind of thing she might be doin'. Kind of a sad case, really. Isn't what you'd call too sharp. Doesn't have a steady job; lost the one she had. No one to watch out for her, take care of her.
Not much you can really do. So I made her come in today. Give her another talkin'-to, see if maybe that'll do a little good, get her straightened out again. Though of course it's hard to say. You know how it is, you guys: want to help the people that you come in contact with, but whether what you do does help, you never really know."
Whalen showed no sign of interest in the woman's problem or identity.
That indicated either that he already knew all he felt he needed to know about Janet LeClerc, or else that he knew nothing and was relying on his good and well-informed friend Ambrose Merrion to bring him up to speed if there was anything about her that he ought to know. All right, then, nothing to be concerned about; it was always hard to know what detail in any offering would capture Whalen's magpie attention as the jewel to be seized, and often necessary to offer several choices.
"Got in a round of golf with Danny after lunch this afternoon. Went down to West Springfield, saw my mother in the home. Geez, those nuns're awful good. They really do good work. All those poor people in there half-gaga, two-thirds of them out of their gourds, no idea which end is up, and those nuns're with them all the time. Don't get any relief. It must be an awful strain on them, hard life to hoe.
Makes you kinda think twice, all this stuff we keep hearin' all the time, cutting' back on Medicare. Nuns look to me as though they're getting' pretty old themselves, getting' right up there. And no young ones comin' up, young girls goin' inna convents, you believe what you read inna paper. Makes you wonder a little, you know? "Well, what's gonna happen, we get old and so forth, take care of us?" Kind of makes you stop and think: "Whoa, what we doin' to ourselves here?"
"Danny's still do in' good, is he?" Merrion wasn't sure but Whalen seemed to be showing more interest.
"Oh yeah, Danny's always doin' great," Merrion said, dialing up his alertness a notch or two. "Doin' very well, he is. Extremely well, in fact. Kicked the shit out of me again out on the course today, for one example cost me the usual twenny bucks. So yeah, I'd say he's doin' all right. Danny's lookin' good."
This'd be out at Grey Hills there, wouldn't it?" Whalen said, slightly disconcerting Merrion by seeming to act as though he, not Merrion, had been the fisherman feeling the soft tenative strike and Merrion, not he, was going to be the fish. "You and him, Danny Hilliard: this'd be the spot there where you two guys always play?"
"Well, ah, yeah," Merrion said, thrilling slightly, finding himself either playing or being played in a game he didn't fully understand but which seemed as though it could be dangerous, 'that's where we belong.
So that's where we generally play. Pay all that money, you know, to belong, get so you know the course pretty good -doesn't hardly seem to make much sense, really, you then go and play somewhere else."
"I heard that's a pretty hard place to get into," Whalen said, musing.
"Heard it costs a lot of money, too. Arm and your other fuckin' leg to go with it, as the fella likes to say. "Course Danny and you, you can prolly afford it. Danny really must've done awful good in that job, what I hear, when he was bein' a rep. House in Bell Woods anna one onna Cape, Martha's Vineyard, wherever it was."
"Well," Merrion said, 'he doesn't…"
"You know I never been on Martha's Vineyard?" Whalen said it with a note of surprise. "Never went there in my life. Always thought I'd like to some day. People say it's so nice." He paused and considered.
"Lots of things I haven't done," he said, and frowned. Then he shook his head once, as though clearing it.
"An' thenna divorce; he had that too, did dun he, few years ago?"
Whalen said. Merrion nodded. "Sure, that's what I thought," Whalen said. "And they can be very expensive. Have to figure that cost him some dough. So I wouldn't know how much he's got left, probably not very much. But still, like I say, must've done awful good, for a guy that was just a state rep. You, you been single, all of your life, so prolly you could afford it." He paused again, as though expecting a comment, but Mernon's mouth had become dry and he did not know what to say. He said nothing.
"But I never could, alia rich guys; I could never belong to no club like that. I know that without even askm'. Hell, I never even been m one. Only golf course I ever even been to was the Veterans', anyone can get in down in Springfield. I went there once with Billy, my wife's kid brother, Billy. He always used to play a lot there, back when he was still alive. He was on total disability, the full one-hundred fuckin' percent. So he always had plenty of time. Money, too. Plenty of time and plenty of money. Guess it ought be that way, though, you got hit with something means you're gonna die that young.
He got sprayed with Agent Orange, Vietnam. So there wasn't any question it was honest; he was sick. You couldn't really begrudge him.
He was always onna lookout for company, someone to go with him when he played. He played every chance he got, every day the weather let him.
I was workin' mostly nights then, so he asked me once did I think I'd like to try it, maybe even take it up.
"I said: "Shit, I dunno. How'd I know? I did dun know the first thing about it." And he said: "Well, that's how you find out. Otherwise you never know. You should come with me, some time, and find out how you like it." Well, I didn't really wanna, but his sister, who's my wife, she was always after me, be nice to Billy. "He is dyin' and we have to treat him nice." So we made a date and the next time he was going he came over and he picked me up and I went with him. To the Veterans', like I said; that was where he always played.
"I didn't actually play, myself. What I did was, I just walked around with him. But I didn't think I'd like it. It seemed like it was awful complicated, before you even got so you were learnin' how to go about it. And you hadda have an awful lot of stuff there, that equipment, which I then had to figure… well, Billy, he said you could rent it if you didn't have it yourself and you weren't sure that you wanted to go out and buy it. Special shoes and everything, which I guess you have to wear. Not that I did, just had sneakers, but of course I wasn't playin'.
"I figured even that it'd have to cost a lot of money, and Christina and me, we sure didn't have much of that stuff lying around loose at that time or any other time I can recall, the kid and all. I never came right out and told him that I wasn't gonna do it. We just sort of left it hanging up in the air there, the way you'll do when you don't really want to decide about something but you sort of know you have.
"Then he died. I never did find out what happened to his clubs. They were nice. He told me that they cost four hundred dollars. I don't think I ever saw them after that, when he was dead. Maybe one his buddies must've took 'em. Had to've been that he didn't have no kids to take 'em so it wouldn't've been them. Friend of his must've come and took 'em.
"You two, though, I guess you and Hilhard there, you've belonged up Grey Hills there a pretty long time, right? So you two must've played a lot."
"Over twenty years," Merrion said. "Joined there back in the Seventies. "Way back, turn of the century, it was a big private estate. Belonged to a guy named Jesse Grey. Big mill-owner, Holyoke.
Went to hell in the Depression. Then the bishop bought it, diocese of Springfield. After the war a group of wealthy people from around here got together and bought it from him, from the diocese: Warren Corey, all his pals. They thought they were aristocrats, elite. Very snobby and selective. Had to know who your grandparents were and more'n that, had to've liked 'em; didn't count if they'd been the servants 'fore they'd let your ass in the front door. Not all that keen on Catholics, either, unless they're from 'way out of town hadda be New York, London or Paris. Or Nazareth, maybe; that might've done it."
He hesitated but Whalen's face showed no sign of amusement. "Anyway, hadda be famous places like that. Very picky, back in those days, about who they'd let in. But then after a while, the snobs reached the point where they were beginning to run out of money. Gave them a whole different attitude, new outlook on the Great Unwashed. They decided they needed new blood, or at least new bank accounts. So they announced that they were expanding; that was when me and Danny joined up."
"Pretty expensive, I suppose?" Whalen said.
"Well, it certainly wasn't cheap," Merrion said. "Not by my standards, at least. It's been so long ago I forget what it was, but I know it sure wasn't cheap.
"We thought long and hard about it 'fore we did it, Dan and I did,"
Merrion said, feeling he was talking too much and too nervously, giving away more information than he wanted to, but hoping to create some harmless tangent that would divert Whalen from the topic of Dan Hilliard's finances. "We talked it over quite a bit, thought about it a hell of a lot. Our feeling then was that Yeah, it was too expensive, but this might be the only opening wed ever get. And even if it wasn't, we knew wed never see a better price. Financially, no, it wasn't the best time in the world for us, either one of us, no, but the way we looked at it, we had to move. The chance probably wouldn't come along again. They got enough other new members to get them over the hump, they'd close the membership again. So we said: "What the hell, only go around once," and went ahead and signed up."
"How much did it cost you, don't mind me asking," Whalen said.
"Hell no, I don't mind," Merrion said, minding a great deal indeed and silently cursing the man. "I'd tell you if I knew, but that was a long time ago. It was no small amount, I can tell you that much, but exactly, I don't remember."
"Tell me about, then," Whalen said, 'about how much do you think it was? A thousand or two thousand bucks?"
"Oh no," Merrion said, thinking Fuck, hoping he was still speaking calmly, "I know it was more'n that. I remember saying to Danny back then: "I must be nuts. I could trade in my car on a new one for this, get a brand new Olds for myself." So it must've been two or three grand." Whalen's eyes widened and he looked like he might be going to say something, so Merrion hurried on. "But we went through with it anyway. One way or the other we scraped up the dough. I ended up driving the same car for about nine years, I think it was, and the cars they built then didn't last as long as the ones they're building today.
It was always breaking down on me, really a pain in the ass.
"But now I'm glad I did it. Now I think it was worth it. You need something like that to stay sane."
"Maybe that's why the wife's always saying that I'm nuts," Whalen said mildly, his voice carrying no hint of sarcasm. "I never had nothing like that at all. No way to stay sane. Couldn't afford one. Not if it cost as much as a new Oldsmobile. Heck, I never even had a new Studebaker or something; I never had a new car."
"We always have a good time," Merrion said, beginning to feel some hope that if he could just keep talking, scattering shiny conversational chaff in the air between them until the prisoners started to come out, he would be safe. "Well, Danny usually has a better tim en I do, 'cause he usually beats me. I have fun, he wins the bets. Always gets me on the back nine. We come into the turn, I'm usually doin' all right, you don't know what always happens next. I usually got at least a couple, maybe three or four strokes onna guy. This time comin' outta the turn, I'm up four.
"Okay then, boys and girls, here we go, then, into the vicious back nine. Both of us double-bogey the tenth, as usual. The booby trap. I can never play that hole, but Dan can't play it either. Over twenny years we've been playin' that damned hole, and for alia those years it's been beatin' us silly, poundin' the shit out of us. I dunno why it is. It looks so goddamned easy. Deceptive, is what it is. Looks like you could get your par you played it half-asleep.
"Straightaway, par four, little over four hundred yards, four-oh-five's what the book says: Nothin' tricky, piece of cake. Nice wide fairway, all you gotta do's hit it straight and you'll be havin' candy.
Theoretically you want your second shot to be up onto the green, but for most of us ordinary mortals that's gonna be your third shot you'll be tryin' to lay up there nice and soft. But be reasonable here: I'll take a bogey-five on a four-hundred-yarder any day. Eighteen bogeys and what've I done? I've shot a ninety, is what; I never did that in my life.
"Well, a couple times, yeah, I did, but that was a long time ago. My hand-eye thing was much better then. Bound to slip some, you get older. I didn't think about things so much then; I just went ahead and I did them, and that's always the way to play golf. You get old, you get so you start thinkin' too much."
Whalen evidently wasn't interested in discussing the ravages of age; he said nothing. "But anyway, the green's uphill, and not only that but it's tiered, and the upshot of it anyway's we both take fuckin' sevens.
The tenth hole's beat us again.
"But that's all right. I'm still okay, still up by the four. But not for long. We're swappin' strokes alia way to fifteen. Wolf River runs along the left there; you got a hook like I do, you got that to think about. Which I of course do, think about it, and like I said, that's not a good thing to do. So as usual Danny tucks it to me. Par four, three-fifty-nine, and what do I take? A nine, a big fat nine. Splashed one, of course, so busy tryin' not to do that that I naturally do it two strokes right there. And then got inna bunker; for good measure; dub my wedge 'fore I can get out. And then after I'm out, what do I do? Over the green and into the opposite sand trap One beach is nice, try the other.
"And what's Danny doing, I am having all this fun? He's parring the thing, naturally, like he pretty nearly always does. He's got the Indian sign, some kind of hex thing on that fifteen hole. He owns it.
I don't know why that should be; it just is. Always been that way, too."
Whalen shifted his weight from his right foot to his left and moved his upper body away from the wall. Merrion hoped that indicated he was growing restless. "But then anyway, there we both are, playin' sixteen, even again like we started. We got three holes left.
Theoretically I should be able, get a stroke or two of my lead back.
Right. Both of us bogey the sixteenth, which I have had days, I could play that. This just didn't happen to be one of them. But then it all becomes academic, because I double-bogey the seventeenth and he comes away with a bogey. Danny's the one who picks up the stroke, and that'll be it for the day. The last one, the eighteenth we both take a seven. He ends up, he beats me by one. So it's me payin' him twenty bucks."
Whalen stood and looked at Merrion as though he had been led to expect that Merrion had an act that would entertain him, and while he had enjoyed what he had seen up to that point, he wasn't sure whether there might still be some more to come. Not wishing to offend Merrion by seeming to presume the performance was over, he would therefore wait quietly until he got some kind of signal. He did not say anything.
"So I would say: Yeah, Danny looked all right to me," Merrion said, moistening his lips. "Looked okay to me there, at least, he was taking my money. Of course his busy season's comin' up here pretty soon, all the kids come back and so forth. So he's got that on his mind. Gettin' ready for the fall. But he's used to that, of course. That's a normal thing for him; happens every year."
"Because I did hear," Whalen said, now apparently satisfied Merrion had finished his presentation, "I heard things maybe might not be, you know, goin' so good for him. And I figured if that was the case, well, you know him. You would know. But you didn't hear nothin', I guess?
You didn't hear nothin' like that?"
"I don't, ah, follow," Merrion said, feeling sudden tightness cramp his chest and thinking if it was a heart attack it would just have to wait; the business at hand was not to panic. He decided it would get him time and seem appropriate to frown and look mildly concerned. "What kind of things, exactly?"
Whalen dropped his hands, hunched his shoulders, shrugged, purged his face of expression, refolded his arms and leaned his right shoulder back against the cinderblock. "I dunno," he said. "I dunno what it was. You know how it is, you hear something. Don't always pay that good attention, when somebody's sayin' it. Then later on you see someone, maybe see somebody else, and that reminds you of it, you know?"
Merrion cleared his throat and said "Gee," but to his enormous relief Whalen seemed to believe they had had enough conversation and to expect no answer. He turned his head slightly away from the wall and turned it back over his left shoulder, contorting his face so that when he raised his voice instead of actually yelling down the hall behind him he was hollering at the pocked surface of the opposite wall. "Hey Thompson, for Christ sake, hell's holdin' you up? Got Mister Merrion sittin' around here like he's got nothin' better to do. I got him down here 'cause you told me you got work for him. Now you got him coolin' his heels. Get the lead out, willya Christ sakes? Move things along for a change." Then he looked at Merrion and grinned.
Shortly after 1:30 A.M." Memon emerged into the parking lot behind the Canterbury Police Station, richer by $350 in bail fees but feeling no satisfaction. He was burdened in his spirit by grim inferences he drew from Whalen's ominous inquiries. The night air was pleasantly cool on his face. The mosquitoes had all gone to bed. This'd be a nice time to sit out. He had to sidle between the pair of black-and-white police-model Chevy Blazers parked too close together at the back door of the station. Ah yes, the celebrated Blazers The most expensive Blazers in the history of the world Sixty-eight-thousand bucks, and only the beginning A cop on lifetime disability, a career-ending criminal conviction, a million-dollar lawsuit; the lengths we go to in this town to support our local police chef.
The four-wheel-drive vehicles had been added to the fleet the previous year after the selectmen, their skepticism worn down by three years of relentless lobbying by Chief Paradisio, had included an item appropriating funds for their purchase in the warrant for town meeting, at last accepting his strenuous argument that the two specially equipped vehicles were needed to pursue and capture what he foresaw as a growing host of similarly outfitted law-breakers seeking to escape detection and arrest 'merely by going in the woods to commit their crimes, or else committing them where they always have, and then getting away by driving off into the woods, where we can't go after them." There was some opposition but the item passed by voice vote.
Ins Blanchard, thirty-two, was a member of the ad hoc Canterbury School Citizens Advisory Committee. Petite but muscularly athletic at sixteen she had been a state champion gymnast; later she had graduated from Springfield College with a degree in phys ed and a certificate to teach it she was the fierce single mother of four daughters, all enrolled in Canterbury public schools Their father, Dave, a heavy equipment operator, had found winter work in Louisiana two years before but failed to return from it in the spring as promised, or remit any money for support. His whereabouts remained unknown. Unable to secure a position as a gym teacher, she kept the mortgage current on the house resentfully using money she'd inherited from a grandmother and earmarked for the girls' education, supporting them meagerly with her earnings as an instructor in aerobics in the Canterbury Spa and Health Club. Earlier that evening she had angrily expressed her considerable fury at rejection of a school budget item of $113,000 earmarked to restore art, music and drama to the curricula in all grades and establish a full varsity athletic program, including gymnastics, for girls at Canterbury High. When Sal's Blazer item passed she came to her feet enraged and shouting: "Oh you filthy rotten bastards."
Ruled out of order by the moderator, Mason Turner, the forbidding grey-haired senior loan officer at the Pioneer Trust Co." she ignored repeated blows of the gavel and refused to sit down. She called the selectmen 'nothing but a bunch of lowdown dirty cop-suckers," bringing some startled laughter and scattered applause, 'approving extravagant new toys for the Paradise gestapo instead of doing what's right by the kids."
Scattered cheering broke out, countered at once by booing and shouts of'Ah sid down ya big-mouth bitch." When she again failed to heed the gavel declaring "I'll talk as much as I want, assholes' and the moderator's fourth order to be silent, calling him 'a damned lickspittle for that gang of spineless clowns," Turner ordered the policeman on duty, Ptl. Greg Morrison, to escort her from the building.
She at first ignored Morrison's purposive approach and his gently regretful statement, "Fraid I'll have to ask you to come along now, Ma'am," instead yelling: "Oh sure, Turner, pompous old fart, calling Sal's goons to the rescue." Then she turned and snarled at Morrison:
"Get away from me, you jerk."
He extended his left hand toward her. "Intending," as he testified before Judge Cavanaugh a month later in Commonwealth v. Blanchard, 'since she had indicated that she would not come with me voluntarily, to place it firmly on her right shoulder, in order to lead her away."
She grabbed his wrist with both hands and bit him on the joint of the thumb and the fold of flesh between it and the forefinger, chomping down so that she broke the skin, tore the flesh and drew blood. After Morrison had subdued her with the help of an off-duty policewoman, Ptl.
Connie Foley, a recreational boxer, who piston-punched Blanchard hard three times in the solar plexus and placed her under arrest to be transported to the station and locked up, he was driven to the emergency room at Holyoke Hospital for nine stitches and a painful series of precautionary shots to guard against blood poisoning and infection.
"Not that we think she's rabid," the nurse with the big needle told him, 'but human bites're the worst kind, when it comes to infection."
"I've heard that," the cop said, 'heard that many times. I don't need to be convinced JesusmotherfuckingChrist! you hit the goddamn bone again. Is this your first time doing this or is it you don't like my looks?"
At trial, Officer Morrison further testified that doctors had told him he would have to wear the white plastic prosthetic device specially moulded to immobilize his left hand for at least six more weeks, in order to allow damaged cartilage to heal and see whether a torn tendon would mend without surgery. If x-rays showed that the tendon had mended, he could expect to spend between one and two months in rehabilitation. If the x-rays showed the tendon had not repaired itself, he would require surgery and rehabilitation and about a year to recover full use of his left hand.
Officer Morrison testified that since he was left-handed, the prosthesis prevented him from gripping his sidearm or baton, writing incident reports or using the two-way radio in his patrol car while underway, since to do so would require him to depend upon his unusable left hand to steer while operating the radio with his right. He said that as a result he had been on total disability ever since the incident and expected to remain off-duty for at least three more months.
After the trial, jury-waived, on a pretty afternoon in April, Iris Blanchard was found guilty by Judge Leonard Cavanaugh on charges of disrupting a public meeting; disorderly conduct; making an affray; assault on a police officer; assault and battery with a deadly weapon to wit: teeth; resisting arrest; and mayhem.
"These are very serious charges, Mrs. Blanchard," the judge said, Merrion having briefed him about what the cops were saying at the station and around the courthouse about noisy female politicians who bit cops to dramatize their advocacy of children's issues and their own obvious interest in creating new teaching jobs. "If you think there's something funny or endearing in what your lawyer's tried to minimize as this "feistiness" of yours, I assure you I do not. And if you should appeal this verdict, as you certainly have every right to do, my guess is any judge and jury you may get in the superior court will agree with me not you. Or your lawyer, either. Same when it comes to sentencing:
You've given any judge deciding what to do with you several excellent reasons to do as the police prosecutor here's suggested: send you down to Framingham for a year or so, to reflect on what you did.
"And in fact I am going to sentence you to the women's correctional institution," the judge said, 'not for a year and a day, as the prosecutor's recommended, but for five full years." Iris Blanchard had been striving to hide signs of secret amusement, trying to appear contrite; now she flinched visibly and gasped. Her lawyer, Maxine Golden from the Mass. Defenders, moved closer beside her and put a reassuring hand on her arm.
"What you did wasn't funny. And I've been very much concerned by your debonair demeanor, the way you've behaved in this court. Also by some rather light-hearted statements that your lawyer's made in questioning the witness," Golden's eyebrows lifted, 'suggesting to me that deep down inside you believe it was mischief you did, some sort of amusing prank.
"It was not. This was a bad and serious thing that you did. It was also extremely dangerous. For someone serving on a school committee, supposedly concerned with the education and development of children, you set one lousy example. You have to (I pay for your actions. Not literally, of course: there isn't any point in fining you a substantial amount, say several thousand dollars, as the statues would allow me; that would only be another way of sending you to jail, because you clearly couldn't pay."
Blanchard gasped again and then began to sob, putting her hands to her face. Golden put her arm around her. "So I'm in a dilemma, Mrs.
Blanchard, which I do not like, and I blame you for putting me in it. I think you need a severe lesson, but at the same time I'm aware you have young children and appear to be their only source of parental support.
So I know you've been under a lot of pressure, and I'm willing to take that into account.
"You have to understand that you've put someone else now under pressure, terrible pressure. Officer Morrison's also a young parent.
He and his wife have a new baby, who of course they both love very much. Just as much as you do your kids. And after what you did to him, to Officer Morrison, breaking the skin and causing him to bleed as you did, they both have to be very concerned of the possibility of very serious consequences.
"I'm talking about the HIV virus, the possibility that you may have given him AIDS."
Now thoroughly alarmed, Golden stared at the judge, then she looked at her client and mouthed the words: "Do you know if you have AIDS?"
Blanchard sobbed and shook her head, moaning: "No, of course I don't.
How could he say that to me? How could I have AIDS?"
Golden wheeled to face the judge. "I have to object most strongly to the court making that statement," she said loudly and as gruffly as she could. "Without any grounds whatever to make that allegation? That's an awful thing to do, in a public forum, absolutely shocking. My client doesn't have AIDS. How could you even suggest such a thing."
"Contain yourself, counsellor," the judge said. "Taking your client at her word, the most she can possibly say is that she doesn't think she has AIDS. As I understand it, when her no-good husband went to Louisiana and deserted her and their children two years ago, once and for all, it wasn't his first defection, just his last. He'd wandered off repeatedly before that, picking up women in bars. There'd been several previous separations, each followed by another unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation, during which she said he was always loving and tender. I assume that means they had sex.
"She doesn't know whether those other women, however many there may have been, were free of AIDS. Or whether one or more of those "women" might've been a man. All she knows is what her rotten ex-husband told her, and as we all know now, he was not to be trusted.
"So unless she's been tested, she doesn't really know whether he contracted the disease and passed it on to her during one of their lovey-dovey reconciliations, before he left her the last time and vanished into the mist. Therefore, Ms Golden, my question to you is:
Has your client been tested since her husband lit out for the territories, and if so what were the results?"
Golden conferred urgently with Blanchard, pulling her loose to whisper and cupping her hand over the side of her face otherwise visible from the bench. Blanchard shook her head and said audibly: "No, I never have been."
Golden sighed. She lowered her hand and faced the bench. "She says she's never been tested, your Honor."
The judge sighed and shook his head. "Oh dear," he said, "I was afraid of that.
"Well, no help for it; this is what I'm going to do here. Having in mind the very real anxiety that Officer Morrison and his wife have to feel here, Mrs. Blanchard, and also the fact that as I'm sure Attorney Golden can tell you I have no power to order you to do this; there's a law against it and anyway, as I see it, you could invoke the Fifth Amendment: I am going to put over for one week formal imposition of the sentence in this case. During that time I want you to consult with your attorney and decide, of your own free will, whether you should have a blood test to determine whether you carry the virus that causes AIDS. If you do that you'll be able to say whether you would have tested positive when you attacked Officer Morrison last month. And, if you instruct the testing lab to deliver a copy of the results to Mister Merrion, my clerk, for the court's information and that of Officer Morrison, we will then know that too.
"Now, if all that should take place, this is what I will do here when I review the case next week:
"I'll suspend imposition of the sentence to MCI Framingham for a period of two years, provided you agree to resign immediately from the School Advisory Committee, making a public statement you now understand that your conduct at the town meeting was an outrageous, shameful, reckless, and dangerous act for which you are deeply, deeply sorry. And ashamed.
And that even though you have expressed your deep regret to Officer Morrison and are keeping him in your prayers for his full recovery of the use of his left hand, you agree your actions mean that you're unfit to serve on the committee. And so you must step down.
"Assuming you decide that it's in everyone's best interest for you to do that, and the test results turn out to be negative as I'm sure you hope they do as fervently as everyone else involved you will further agree that at the end of that two-year period you will voluntarily submit to testing again. And if those results also prove to be negative for the HIV virus, and you have not been in any other trouble between now and then, I will reconsider, revise and revoke the jail sentence and you will be free to go."
Blanchard's first blood test had been negative. In the fourteen months since then the x-rays had shown that Morrison's tendon had failed to repair itself. Surgery had been performed. The doctors had found greater damage to the thumb joint than the x-rays had led them to expect, and now believed the operation should have been performed the night of the attack. They predicted Morrison would never regain more than sixty percent use of his left hand probably less, around forty.
Morrison two days later received a letter from Sidney Ferris, P.C." A Legal Corporation, doing business at 16 Amherst St. in Hampton Falls, expressing his belief that the officer had grounds for a medical malpractice suit which could be brought on a contingent' fee basis at absolutely no cost or expense to him unless the suit was successful, in which case the fee would be one-third of the damages collected.
Morrison had retained Ferris as his lawyer, authorizing him to file suit against Holyoke Hospital and the attending physician on duty in the emergency room town-meeting night, claiming actual damages for lost career earnings of $625,000 and an additional $600,000 for mental anguish, pain and suffering.
Ferris also handled Morrison's case before the Board of Workmen's Compensation, which awarded a tax-exempt permanent disability pension equal to fifty percent of his patrolman's pay. Ferris on behalf of Morrison had filed an appeal, saying that, as a matter of law, since Morrison had been injured in the line of duty, he was entitled either to a pension equal to one hundred percent of his pay, or else a fifty-percent pension calculated on the basis of the wages that he would have earned, given his likely prospects of rapid promotion to higher ranks during the additional thirty-three years he had expected to serve on the force.
Purely for amusement one night in the bar at Grey Hills, Merrion one night while having drinks with Hilliard had used drink-napkins to estimate the probable total cost of Iris Blanchard's tantrum, not only to the taxpayers of the town of Canterbury but also to the hospital and the doctor and their insurance carriers as well. Hilliard worked the figures faster in his head than Merrion could write them down on the napkins.
"With interest compounded at six percent, by the time they get the malpractice case tried, and figuring Morrison lives another fifty years, which at twenty-eight he should, collecting his pension all that time, I figure a little over seven million bucks. Seven million, seventy-thousand, you throw in the cost of Sally's two Blazers, the most expensive trucks built since the world began. And a good thing for all involved old Iris wasn't bred for the work, like a pit bull or something, take a man's arm off at the elbow; have to deed the cop the town if she had been."
When Merrion got to his car, alert for sounds of stealthy scuffling in the dark as he always was such nights, even though he was at the police station, lest some disgruntled defendant after being released had waited in the shadows to conk him when he came out and swipe his wallet and his car. Hearing nothing, he unlocked the Caddy quickly, tossing the portfolio in the back seat, sliding in and closing up all in one swift motion, re-locking the doors as he turned on the engine, the earphone keypad glowing green and chirping readiness on the center console.
At the next corner he had made up his mind and said loudly and roundly:
"Call… Danny." As he took the turn the voice-activated dialer started hooping digits to reach Hilliard at his condo at the Wisdom House in Hampton Pond (to call Hilliard at his office Merrion would have said: "Call… Hilliard'; in his Mercedes "Call… Daniel').
Moving north on Truman Boulevard under the blacker shadows cast by the oaks along the edges, he listened to the phone ring eleven times before Hilliard answered thickly through the phlegm of sleep: This'd better be important." Then he coughed.
"It is," Merrion said. "Put some coffee on for yourself and pour me a serious drink. No traffic, this hour. I'll be there in ten or twelve minutes."
"Minutes?" Hilliard said, 'what minutes. Whaddaya talkin'. You muss be drunk or you're nuts. You got any idea what time…"
"Yeah, one-forty-one," Merrion said, glancing at the digital clock on the dash. "I'm coming from the Canterbury cop house and I'm not drunk although I must be about the only one who's still awake in town and isn't. Very drunk out tonight. Every time I thought we must be finished, they'd bring in another indi gene tanked to the gills, singin' and talkin', all kinds of ragtime. Disgusting how they carry on."
During the late Seventies, Sal Paradisio had returned from a convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Montreal smitten by the lingo in a lecture given by an Indiana University criminologist from Bloomington. He had started referring to locally resident groups as 'the indigenous population' and to individual residents as indi genes The usage had become a Canterbury PD inside joke. Richie Hammond and Merrion when Richie for some reason wasn't hogging the bail fees as usual had gotten used to being summoned by solemn cops on busy weekends to 'come down and handle a whole herd' ah misbehavin' indi genes Two decades later Merrion still heard older officers say 'the fuckin' indi genes getting' outta hand again."
"I was asleep," Hilliard said.
"Figured you would be," Merrion said. "Most people are at this hour."
The big car went through the night like a luxury liner on the surface of a calm sea, the moon blinking on and off among the branches of the trees like the dot-dash of a signalman's light.
"So why're you bothering me like this then?" Hilliard said, whining,
"I never did nothing to you."
"I'm lonesome," Merrion said. "I've been working all night like a very good boy. Now I'm tired; I want to relax. Want to be with a friend, talk about the old days, when I sang in my chains like the sea."
"Huh?" Hilliard said. "What the hell does that mean?"
"I dunno," Merrion said. "I heard you say it a long time ago. I'm not sure but I think you said it to a woman. I meant to ask you what the hell you meant, besides wantin' to get her pants off. But then I decided you probably didn't know either. It just sounded good at the time."
"Look, Amby," Hilliard said, "I'm waking up. You can't come up here right now. It's the middle the night and I got sleep to get and I'm going to go back to bed."
"Don't hang up on me, Dan," Merrion said. "You'll just be wasting your time. I need to talk to you, and I need to talk to you tonight, and so that's what I'm going to do. I'll put you on auto re-dial if you hang up, which'll mean that you'll have to leave your phone off the hook, and it'll hum at you all night. So you still wont be able to get any sleep, or emergency calls from anyone else, and I know how you hate both those things. Now throw some clothes on and go out inna kitchen and put coffee on, and make me a Jack Daniel's and water, some ice.
I'll be there in eight minutes and you'll let me in or I'll sit on the stoop and I'll cry. And when all the neighbors wake up and say what's the matter, I'll say I'm an orphan got left on your doorstep and you're too mean to take me in, and can someone take me to the rectory."
"Tell me onna phone, Amby," Hilliard said. "Turn around and go back to your own house and bed, and tell me on the phone on the way. It's almost two in the morning for Christ sake. There's nothing that can't wait 'til morning."
"Yes there is," Merrion said, 'me."
Hilliard groaned. "Amby," he said, "I can't let you come up here tonight. I got someone here with me and, well, I just can't. I can't let you in if you come here. Tell me what it is on the phone."
"Danny," Merrion said, 'listen up now, friend of my youth: You have got to let me come in. Tell her to stay in the bedroom and sleep. Or him, if you now go both ways. You can say I insist if you want, 'cause I do. I don't want him or her to hear what I'm saying to you. This is strictly between you and me. That's why I've got to come up. This isn't something I'd say on a phone, anyway, but especially not on a car-phone. They don't need a wireman to sit in on car-phones; they don't even have to be cops anyone with an eighty-buck scanner can pick up what you say, just by purest accident. That give you any inkling of why I am coming?"
There was an extended silence. The Cadillac rushed quietly up the boulevard under the bright moon and dark trees. "I'll wake her up and send her home and make the coffee," Hilliard said. "Jack Daniel's, you said you wanted?"
"You got it, pal," Merrion said. "And don't bother sending her home.
Just tell her to stay inna bedroom and sleep. This's not something we want to share."
In a tee-shirt and grey drawstring sweatpants, clumps of his hair standing up and a look of deep concern on his face, Hilliard with a cup of tea in his hand met Merrion at the door and said: "Will you tell me what the…?"
Merrion shook his head and put his right forefinger to his lips. Then he pointed at the kitchen softly lit by one ceiling fixture over the sliding glass door leading outdoors and nodded. "That my drink I see on the counter there? That's what I need. Let's you and me go and get it." With his drink in hand Merrion took Hilliard's right elbow, steering him toward the door opening onto the townhouse patio. "Mawn now," he said, 'nice out tonight. Let's you and me go outside and chat." He slid the glass door open.
"I think you're getting' paranoid," Hilliard said, hanging back.
"That could be," Merrion said, "I got every reason to be. Anyway, there's no question I'm spooked. I prefer to talk out of doors."
Hilliard grabbed a dish-towel from the rack over the sink and led the way, Merrion sliding the glass door shut quietly behind them, Hilliard mopping the dew off the puffy green and yellow cushions of the lawn chairs. Seated so that he faced Hilliard and the glass door, Merrion said: "The first thing to keep in mind when you deal with fuckin' cops is that you want to keep them friendly if you can at almost any cost.
So that when you have to tell them No, you can't do what they want like on a warrant application, when they just don't have enough PC to let you let them go in and make a search some place they understand you really can't give them one. They don't think you're a prick who's just giving them a hard time, just to be a prick, because they think of you as a friend of theirs, and they know you would give them the paper if you could. And that way they don't get mad at you so they all start giving you all kinds of fuckin' grief alia time. Which as you know, that group can do."
Hilliard was still shaking off the dullness of sleep. "Absolutely," he said, 'because the last thing you want to have on your mind, and especially in a job like the one you've got, dealing with cops every day, you don't want to get them pissed off. But in any job, really, that'll always hold true: you don't want to get a cop mad at you. You get one cop mad at you, before you even know it, all the cops're mad at you. Because all the cops talk to each other, and they can make life miserable for you."
"Right," Merrion said. "Now the reason why I woke you up to talk is Sergeant Whalen. Where Ev Whalen is concerned, and he is the one concerns me, the stakes're even higher. The guy's a human vacuum cleaner, a rug-beatin', shampooin', Hooverin' machine with a bright white light onna front when it comes to diggin' up dirt. He knows stuff nobody knows. Half the time he doesn't know himself he knows it, the dirt that nobody else knows. But that changes nothing; it's still vintage dirt, and all you've got to do to get it out of him is two basic things.
"The first thing's to make sure you stay friends with him. This isn't hard because he wants to be friends with you, even more than you do with him. He's very insecure, I think. He's always afraid that nobody will like him. So he's got enough motivation for both of you. He thinks you're the one who's being nice. By talking to him now and then, sure, but even more by listening to him, spillin' his guts out to you.
"So that's the second thing you do: You make it very clear to him that not only are you always glad to see him but you really appreciate the things he has to tell you. You aren't just humoring him; you're interested.
"That's the only two things you hafta do. He likes you; he'll talk.
You say: "Hey Ev, how's it goin', huh, kid? What's goin' on; whaddaya hear?" And woof-woof; here it comes, you got it. Immediately the guy is telling you every damned thing he knows. Without even knowing, most of the time, what the hell most of it means, the significance of what he's sayin'. It's like you struck up a friendship at the track with a talking horse who tells you which one of his friends is gonna win that day because he likes you. And when you mention one day you're startin' to feel guilty, you've been getting' rich on him and you feel like you oughta share your winnings, he just shrugs it off and says: "Hey, great; I'm happy for you. But what good is money to me? I'm a horse.
Bring me an apple sometime."
"Ev Whalen's info is that good and he's got no idea how valuable it can be to you. He would've made a hell of a newspaperman. He works a lot harder'n most of them do, and he finds out a whole lot more stuff. But he doesn't know what news is. He thinks if he recognizes the subject everyone else must already know it. He thinks he's always the last kid onna block to find something out. Oh, and he doesn't question anything. He assumes whatever he knows must be the Gospel truth.
"He doesn't interpret anything, either, tell you what to think about it. He tells you what he thinks but he's not real confident about it, so you can overlook it. And so those're the things I'm trying to remember all the time tonight when he comes outta left field and absolutely stuns me, we're out there inna back waitin' for the prisoners to come out.
"I forget how it came up, but it seemed like before I knew it we're talking how he's sort of vaguely heard you're in some sort of trouble, and do I have any idea what it is. At first I figured maybe he was just fishing around, but every time I tried to change the subject, which I must've, three or four times, he came right back to it. The gist of it seemed to be the Grey Hills memberships. He suspects they were fairly expensive, and he knows it costs a lot to play golf on the public courses so it must take one shitload of money at Grey Hills. He knows we've been playing there a long time, so we must've paid a lot of money, and he's really curious about where we got it. And also where you got the money for the Bell Woods house and the summer house, as well, which for all he knows is onna Cape but he did throw in that it might be onna Vineyard. He didn't mention under-the-table campaign funds or kickbacks, or maybe bribes, but I felt pretty sure if I asked him how it was he thought you got it, that is what he would've said.
"He had me close to panic. He kept pushing me on how much it cost to join Grey Hills and of course I didn't wanna tell him, so I keep saying I forget and trynah get him interested in something else, almost anything. I start tellin' him, what golfs about, and how you're always beatin' me and he wouldn't buy it. It was like he had a bone in his teeth: he kept comin' back to how much it costs for Grey Hills. So finally I just gave up and fell back on the standard strategy of what to do when you're trapped: I made something up."
"In other words, you lied," Hilliard said, 'and hoped that he'd believe it."
"You could put it that way, yeah," Merrion said. "I didn't actually come right out and say it cost between two and three grand. I said I remembered when we were doing it saying to you that if I put the price of the membership with what my car was worth, I could've had a brand-new Oldsmobile, which was true. And that as I recall it now, the amount of money that it would've taken me to make a deal trading my car on a new Eighty-eight then would've been two or three grand. Which is also the truth, or very close to it, but not close to the truth he was after."
"Did he buy it?" Hilliard said. "First, though, you tell me now, because now I don't remember. What was it, about double that? Six grand or so, apiece?"
"It was eighty-four hundred," Merrion said, 'which I was not about to tell Whalen. I could ah had three Oldsmobiles, six if I'd spent your piece of the action. Four thousand for the equity share, three thousand initiation. Fourteen hundred down-payment on the annual dues.
You're the math genius but I could do that one: times two, sixteen-thousand-eight-hundred American dollars. Not cheap.
"Did he buy what I tried to make him think it was? Probably. Two or three grand's still big money to Ev Whalen today. In fact I think if I'd told him the truth, and said sixteen-eight, he probably would not have believed me. That price to play golf would've boggled his mind, would've made him faint dead away. I doubt Whalen's house cost him that if he owns one now, after his kid. One of his kids, I think he's got two, had something terrible happen. So as a result the kid's helpless. Ev has not had a good time in this world; I try to cut him some slack."
"Sixteen-thousand, eight-hundred dollars," Hilliard said musingly.
"Jesus, that was expensive. Seven percent compound interest, more than twenty years: fifty grand, about, by now, if you'd left it in the bank."
"Yeah, right," Merrion said, 'if you don't deduct the taxes that you hadda pay every April on the interest that it earned from year to year.
Which you would've, of course, so that you'd now have a lot less. With inflation, you'd have nothin'. Less'n nothing, actually. Plus which the last time they talked about maybe re-opening membership, so they could put a dome over the pool and people could swim inna winter? They ended up not dotn' it, of course, but before that the talk was they'd be asking thirty-five K for the equity ante alone. Which I think was most likely what killed it: not the prospect of the course getting' too crowded, but the fact that the only people who would've had that kind of loose change to spend on playin' golf d be pro athletes and major drug-dealers, and havin' them as members scared the power elite.
"So you could say that we got a bargain. I think it's been a damned good investment. It's hard to play golf and have drinks inna bank, and anyway, over the years I've dropped a lot of dollars doing stuff and buying things that weren't worth what I paid, and I've had my regrets.
But I never regretted Grey Hills. That was a damned smart investment.
I've been having a wonderful time for over twenty years now with my high-priced toy, and I'm not even close to bein' through havin' fun with it yet.
"But tonight I was not havin' fun. Tonight I am a worried man. Whalen has heard something about you and me, and that means it's out on the street. What it is specifically I could not get out of him. I suspect he doesn't know either, exactly what the feds're doing. But they're doing something, he knows, and that means this will not go away. So that's why I hadda see you tonight. I was hoping that maybe you could make me feel better. At least tell me what's going on, which you did not this afternoon; what they're after you for, and therefore why they're after me."
Hilliard's face was grey in the moonlight. He licked his lips. He shook his head. "I want to say I know, and of course I'll tell you, but I can't because I don't," he said miserably, looking down and studying his hands. He stopped and shook his head. "Pooler isn't sure either. Or he wasn't when he called me, late Friday afternoon." His voice trailed away and stopped. He coughed a couple of times and changed his position, as though that would help to dislodge some foreign substance that had accumulated in his throat. He covered his mouth and coughed several times.
Over his right shoulder Merrion saw a robed figure come out of the shadows into the dim light at the front of the kitchen. It was a woman. He could not make out her features but could see that her hair was blonde and that the robe was too big for her. She went to the refrigerator and opened it, taking out a quart carton of milk. She put it on the counter and opened the cupboard above it, removing a glass.
She poured the glass half full. She put the carton back into the refrigerator and closed it. She picked up the glass and turned toward the glass door, advancing into the soft light so he could see her clearly, looking straight into his eyes. Then Mercy Hilliard smiled comp licitly at her ex-husband's best friend, so that he could not help but smile back. Then she raised her milk in a silent toast before giving him a small fluttery wave and disappearing back into the shadows.
Hilliard, still looking down on his hands folded in his lap, said: "All Bob knew on Friday was that he couldn't see how the heck they could do anything to either of us on campaign funds or anything else. I haven't run now for over ten years. The federal statute of limitations is five. So I said: "Well, then there's nothing to get, and they've got their heads up their asses. I have to be in the clear."
"And he said, "Well, that's what you'd like to think, naturally, and not knowing exactly what their approach is, that is of course what you would think. But this's no ghost-image we're looking at here, something that will just go away. It's too substantial to be a mirage; the rumbling's just too distinct. It must be that they think they've found a way, to get around the time problem. Now our job's to find out just what that way is, and find a way to block them if we can. I'm on the case; I am actively on it. By Monday I should know what it is that they're after. Have Merrion come in to see me then, late in the afternoon. Then I'll be back to you."
Hilliard looked up. "And that's really all that I know, Amby," he said earnestly. "I know you don't like Bob, but at least after you see him, you'll probably know what it is we have to contend with. And that will be before I do." Then he registered Merrion's expression of beguiled surprise. He spun in his chair and looked back into the kitchen, now unoccupied once more. He turned back and looked at Merrion. "What's with you?" he said. "Are you all right?"
Realizing he'd been holding his breath, Merrion exhaled heavily and smiled at Hilliard. "I think I am," he said. "I'm still worried, of course, but for now that's secondary. You said something about ghosts just then: I could swear I just saw one right there in your kitchen.
Has to be since it was the spitting image of your ex-wife, and I know she's on Martha's Vineyard so that couldn't be." Hilliard's face reddened. "Barged in on reunion night, did I?" Merrion said, grinning now. "Little duet of "Auld Lang Sync," I take it?"
Hilliard squirmed in the chair. He found his practiced sheepish grin and turned it on. "I've discovered that I may be getting old, Amby," he said. "And this world isn't getting any warmer. I find I still need all the friends I can get, even if only occasionally."
Merrion finished his drink and stood up. "Can't argue with you there, pal," he said. "Can't argue with you there at all."
Leaving his house late in the morning of the third Sunday in August, Merrion was mildly pleased to register another day of sunshine. He began to feel actual cheer. The change surprised him; he'd been resigned to plodding through the day as best he could, resisting anxiety. He went to the grey and white house with the pale yellow front door on Pynchon Hill where Diane Fox had lived with Walter amid much laughter and not just when they had friends over for dinner, either, although there had been a lot of that.
Merrion had always liked Walter Fox, 'always' having commenced in 1972 when he had first begun to get to know the red-haired ruddy-faced man with the bristling red handlebar mustache. Succeeding to the seat Larry Lane had occupied and left to him along with his ownership interest in the Fourmen's Realty Trust he found he had inherited Walter Fox along with the wealth. Fox's place had belonged io his late grandfather, Phil, who had died in '68.
The trust had been set up in September of 1956. The original investors were Charles Spring, Roy Carnes, Larry Lane and Finnis D.L. "Fiddle'
Barrow. Spring did the legal work, drawing up the declaration of trust, originally making his son, Edmund, practicing law in Boston, the nominal administrator, unpaid, omitting the names of the beneficiaries who were the actual trustees. The document made each interest in the trust indivisible in itself, inseparable from the remainder of the corpus, and non-transferable by conveyance or special mention in a will, except by express statement, oral or in writing, addressed to the other trustees, of testamentary intent to make a gift, or by testamentary deed of trust, to take effect in the event of disabling incompetence or death of the beneficiary.
At the initial meeting of the trustees, held on the second Sunday in November at the headquarters of the Barrows Construction Co. at the sand pits in Hampton Falls, Spring had described the trust agreement to the others as a cordon sanitaire. "Discretion is important to us. If one of us dies, as all of us someday surely will, we do not want estate appraisers rummaging around in this operation, asking awkward questions. That's why we're making it a lock-box: very hard to get into; you had to be there. Almost impossible to get out of by yourself unless you're literally willing to die in the attempt."
The instrument provided that in such event, or upon application by a beneficiary or his attorney-in-fact for liquidation of his interest, the value of the interest would be determined by appraisal, and the surviving beneficiaries at their sole option and discretion choose either to admit the decedent's designee to his vacant place, or if for reasons of uncertainty or reservations about his suitability they chose not to, thereupon either by additional capital infusion or by sale of trust assets redeem the interest of the late beneficiary by payment to his successor in interest an amount equal to the value of his prorata share.
The original arrangement soon proved to be geographically unwieldy. For that and other reasons, including perceived risk, in 1961, five years before the statute of limitations would bar state prosecution of any criminal offense possibly committed in connection with construction of the courthouse, Spring had thought it best to suggest to Edmund that he draw up the document substituting Philip Fox of Hampton Pond as the managing trustee of record.
Fox owned and operated the Fox Agency, Real Estate amp; Insurance. Fox's firm had handled the bonds underwriting the courthouse construction, so he had followed the project attentively and was keenly aware of its many ramifications. His agreement to serve as trustee specified that at the end of his first year he would be credited with a management fee of a ten percent ownership of the Fourmen's Trust fund, subject to divestment should he fail for any reason to serve for a total of at least five years. For the next four years thereafter he would annually receive a further interest amounting to two-and-one-half percent of the value of the fund that year, also subject to divestment if he failed to complete the specified term of five years. Thereafter he would participate in gains and losses on equal terms with the original four holders. While his duties as managing trustee would continue, he would cease to receive any additional compensation. Everyone involved in his admission to membership understood the interest he received to be hush money, although Lane was the only one who called it by that name at meetings, causing the others to wince.
Lane though blunt was right. Fox's addition to the trust served prudence as well as managerial efficiency. From his bonding work he knew that the original monies constituting the corpus of the trust consisted entirely of kickbacks from rigged-bid contracts and subcontracts for materials involved in the project, completed in 1957.
The total came to about $135,000, slightly over eleven percent of the total cost of the building and grounds.
Spring conservatively oversaw its enlargement in the bond market. Nine years later he had more than doubled it, to approximately $315,000. On his advice the trustees then voted to begin gradual diversification of their holdings, transferring some of the profits from the bond accounts into common stocks and investing the rest in real estate, both by purchasing undeveloped land and by buying up mortgages insured by the government. In 1970, Barrows had commenced construction of the trust's first cautious venture in long-term ownership of residential real estate, the sixteen-unit apartment building at 1692 Eisenhower Boulevard, at a rock-bottom cost of $7,100 per unit $113,600. The trustees also accepted Spring's recommendation that the trust become more aggressive in the stock market, using about seventy percent of their remaining capital to purchase common stocks issued by companies among the 500 indexed by Standard amp; Poor.
At the close of the 1968 spring meeting, Philip Fox had reported having been badly frightened by a premonition, and to be on the safe side wished to vouch for his grandson's bona fides and ability to keep his mouth shut; in the event of his death, he said, it would be his wish that the surviving original trustees/beneficiaries allow Walter to succeed him as both trustee and beneficiary. The other trustees dutifully scoffed at his superstitious ness but agreed. In November they carried out his wishes, voting to admit Walter, not so incidentally carrying out their preference not to disturb the corpus of the trust as would have been necessary if they had chosen to buy him out.
In 1972, the members convened for the regular spring meeting on the second Sunday in May at Larry Lane's apartment at 1692 Eisenhower Boulevard, he having become too infirm to travel to the Fox Agency offices in Hampton Pond, for more than ten years the customary venue for the semi-annual gatherings. With great difficulty Larry had made a statement. He had written it out on six sheets of paper. Interrupted by coughing, wheezing, choking and gagging, he had needed nearly eleven minutes to deliver it. To his old henchmen it seemed like eleven hours.
"It's no more obvious to you guys now than it's been to me for a long time that this'll be the last meeting I'll attend, and I thank you for coming here so I could do it. When November rolls around, I'll be gone, and damned glad of it, too. I hope I wont have to, but if I do, the pain gets so bad I can't stand it, I'll see to the end of it myself. I've been on the brink of that many times as it is, and I can see myself making that choice. And if I'm too far gone to do what needs doing, I've got a friend I can count on to help me. My family would too, in a jiffy, you bet, if I ever asked them, but I'd never let the bastards have the satisfaction.
"I recommend, if the Man gives you a choice, take the heart attack, or the stroke. Either one's got to be better'n this. The drawback of going that way is it's too sudden to make any plans; tell your friends how you want things done. Way I'm going, I do have some time. "S the only good thing about it. I can tell you I'd like my place to go to Amby Merrion. I realize he's a good deal younger than everyone but you, Walter, but you'll all get along fine with him, I promise you.
"I recall being in the same position with all of you except Walter in April, Sixty-eight, when Phil Fox told us he'd had some kind of waking-dream or something, terrible premonition. He said he'd never put much stock in them before, but he'd never had one this powerful, and it'd really rattled him. He said he hoped, naturally, it'd turn out to be dead wrong, and that come November wed be making fun of him, laughing how foolish he'd been. But if it turned out this one was right, and he did pass away before then that was how he said it; he said "passed away," and then he gave a little shudder, like he'd had a sudden chill; I can see him, plain as day his wish would be that we let Walter take his place. And then he spoke very highly of you, Walter, and so when it turned out that Phil's awful hunch'd been right, we naturally honored his wishes. And we've found out that his judgment was correct.
"Now since I'm having all this trouble talking to you, I'm going to cut it a little short here. I'd like it if you'd all consider that I've now said about Amby all the same good things that Phil had to say about Walter. He's a good guy. You can trust him. He keeps his word. He's gone out of his way to be a friend to me, faithful as could be, making sure I'm as comfortable as possible, doing everything he can. And he did it almost a year before he had any idea that there might be something pretty good in it for him. He's a decent man. He's got good character: by that I mean he's loyal, and if you tell him something's confidential, he keeps it that way. And that's about all that I've got to say. Except to say, Fiddle, that this's probably the last time I'll piss you off at a meeting, by calling our little arrangement 'the Foreskin fucking Trust' as I've tried to do at least once, each time we've met, to see how mad you always get. Oh, and ask you all to join me for a few drinks -farewell drinks I guess they'd be. And thank you for how you've always treated me, for being my good friends."
When Merrion succeeded to Larry's place in the fall of 1972, the value of the trust had more than doubled again. Walter Fox, having inherited not only his grandfather's interest but also his managerial responsibilities, conservatively estimated that each of the five shares was worth about $143,000. The corpus then consisted of the apartment building, each month grossing $6,160 in rental income Larry had insisted that his share of trust income be debited $308.00 each month he lived in number 11, eighty percent of the rent anyone else would have had to pay.
By then Big Roy Carnes was dead. His son, Roy Junior, Milliard's predecessor in the House, had retired from the State Senate as chairman of the Committee on Post Audit and Oversight to become chief executive officer for financial operations of The Buehler Corporation, a New England textile company then completing its changeover from manufacturing to importing fabrics, mostly from the Far East, and beginning its relocation to Anderson, South Carolina. Two of the original trustee/beneficiaries, Chassy Spring and Fiddle Barrow, still survived, but Spring was in ill health in a rest home in Gloucester, near his son's home in Marblehead. Spring did not attend Merrion's inaugural, and would die within the year.
There had been three purposes for that meeting, held in Fox's main office in the white six-room bungalow with green shutters and a white picket fence that the Fox Agency occupied in the center of Hampton Pond (in Canterbury, Hampton Falls and Cumberland, the Fox Agency operated storefront satellite offices providing coverage extending into Holyoke, Springfield, Chicopee and Amherst and Northampton). Carnes, citing the demands his new position made on his time and energies, and the imminence of his permanent departure from New England, had invoked the buy-out clause. Stating in his letter to Walter Fox his confidence that Fox and the others would give him 'honest weight," he had waived his right to demand appointment of a disinterested appraiser, noting in passing that he had 'often wondered why the hell Chassy ever thought it would ever be a good idea to give an outsider access to the books; what if he got curious and decided he wanted to know where the dough'd originally come from?"
Fiddle Barrow offered two proposals, prompted in part by his own increasing frailty but precipitated by Spring's incapacitation. The first had been to convert the securities into shares of a moderately aggressive mutual fund, Spring no longer being able to supervise the trust's investments and no one else among the trustee-beneficiaries appearing to have either the time to assume his oversight of market investments or the acumen to do it with confidence. The second had been to cede the management of the property at 1692 Eisenhower Boulevard to Valley Better Residences, Inc." so that thereafter the only task remaining to the trustees would be negotiation and deposit of the checks representing their profits.
Merrion, Fox and Barrow voted unanimously to convert the stock into shares of the Dreyfus Fund. Conformably to Edmund Spring's written statement of his father's wishes 'he said to have him vote the same way as everyone else does, whatever they want to do' Barrow cast Spring's vote as his proxy. They further voted to direct the Dreyfus Fund to transfer shares in the account to be established in the name of the trust in the amount of $143,000 to Roy Carnes, Jr." and to put the apartment building under Valley Better management.
Neither Merrion nor Fox then or later had perceived any need to divulge their common interest to outsiders. But each time Merrion after that went into any kind of community meeting or social occasion not knowing in advance exactly what he was in for, and found that Walter Fox was also involved, he was glad. Because they had that one financial thing in common, and treated it as clandestine, to Merrion it seemed they had a bond of secret knowledge. Fox seemed to share that belief. Each of them knew that the other possessed a reserve capability Tuck you' money hidden from the world, and hoarded the knowledge along with his own treasure.
As Merrion's business to the casual observer would have seemed to consist principally if not entirely of his job at the courthouse, so Walter's had appeared to be the Fox Agency, the insurance and real estate brokerage he'd inherited at the age of twenty-nine from his grandfather, Philip, in 1968.
On July 18th, 1968, the day of Philip Fox's funeral in the Episcopal Church of St. John in Hampton Pond, government offices and small businesses there and in Hampton Falls, Canterbury, Cumberland and neighboring sections of Holyoke, Chicopee, Northampton and Springfield displayed hand-lettered signs in their windows and on their doors:
"Closed 11-1, in Memory of Phil Fox." Or just: "Philip Fox. 1882-1968." A columnist for the Springfield Union wrote: "Phil Fox died having spent a lifetime demonstrating, not declaiming, to all who knew him his unshakable belief that faith without good works is useless."
Even Fred Dillinger eulogized him. In his Transcript column he described Fox as 'the man who singled himself out if he was not first recruited, as he usually was to lead the area when it was time to solicit donations. It didn't seem to matter to him what the cause was.
To renew hope for a family burned-out of its home or a shop owner out of his business; to rally support for a fund-raising drive to send the Canterbury All Stars to Williamsport, Pa." for the Little League World Series; the Hampton Pond High School band to Washington for the Cherry Blossom Festival, or to New York for the St. Paddy's Day Parade. And when someone said to him, "Phil, you're not a Catholic, and you're not Irish, either," he said, "You're mistaken, my friend. On Saint Patrick's Day I'm Irish everybody is." He acted on his own each year to see to it that every hard-luck family had a turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and a ham for Easter, too. Phil Fox may not have been a saint in Heaven's eyes, but to those of us on earth, he looked a lot like one. Phil Fox will be missed."
That column ran the day before the funeral. Reporting 'the enormous turnout to bid good-bye to Phil," the Transcript story said: "He did not confine his good works to his home town of Hampton Pond. He considered himself a local resident of every community where the Fox Agency did business. Whenever Canterbury or 'the Falls' or Cumberland had a question whether there'd be cash enough to help the poor or the unfortunate, or achieve a common civic goal, Canterbury and the other towns always knew they really had no question Canterbury had Phil Fox.
His grandson, Walter, will have giant shoes to fill, and as we express our sympathy, all of us will wish him well."
Walter was the successor because his father, Andy, had been among Marines killed at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean Conflict.
Phil's other son, Walter's Uncle Cameron, was an episcopal priest, vicar of a well-to-do parish in Litchfield, Connecticut; he had never had any interest in the family business, 'anything involving actual work," Phil sometimes mildly said.
The consensus of the business community at the time of Phil's death was that Walter was a mere untested kid, too callow to take on the enterprise. His alternative was to sell the agency; there were aggressive bidders. He was aware of the consensus and it made him timid, but the operation of the agency was the only work he knew. At twenty-nine he felt too old to start a new career. Since he was the sole heir, it was his call to make. Nagged and hindered by his fear that the elders were right and he would make a disastrous mistake, he decided nonetheless to proceed.
The agency had rewarded his cautious management, perking along nicely and continuing to return decent profits, growing at a steady rate of two to three percent a year, just about keeping pace with inflation or staying a bit ahead of it. At first that gave him quiet satisfaction.
Then after a few more years he became somewhat more assertive. He began to think his instincts might in fact be fairly good, well worth relying on.
His first wife, Jacqueline, was the first to discover he had changed.
Having become 'terminally bored' in Canterbury, she had decided to unload her life with him there for a more stimulating career in TV production at station WTIC in Hartford. She was perfectly astonished when he hired Sam Evans to counter her libel for divorce with a vigorous one of his own. First he alleged desertion, claiming that her twelve-hour daily absence commuting to a ten-hour workday at Independence Plaza constructively amounted to desertion of his bed and board. Then he flabbergasted her by seeking custody of their child, and undisputed ownership and occupation of the marital domicile in Hampton Pond alleging she had proved herself an unfit mother by constructively leaving him to raise their daughter by himself.
Then he really stunned her: he won, on both prayers for relief (Jacqueline had made the right career choice for herself, though; in the three years she spent in Hartford, she displayed an affinity for her new work that made her professional catnip to the people building CNN in Atlanta; lured to Peach tree Plaza, she vanished into Georgia, never to be seen again north of Washington, D.C.).
Apparently emboldened by results, Walter as Merrion saw it began to act 'like a guy who's discovered that he doesn't really have to give a shit." He developed the confidence to admit freely he'd not only started out but remained 'wishy-washy, scared to death of making some dumb-ass greenhorn mistake that'll wreck the business' and that 'about the biggest change' he'd 'ever dared to make was adding on the logo," the red brush-stroke profile of a fox that now adorned the agency's For Sale signs and stationery While he freely confessed his opinion that its modest improvement in prosperity under his direction probably had more to do with regional population increases and his grandfather's reputation than with anything he had done, he began to think and soon after that to say that still he must deserve at least some credit for having been smart enough to leave a good thing alone.
One night at the house on Pynchon Hill, after everyone else had gone home and Diane was in the pantry cleaning up, he had poured 'one last nightcap' of Old Smuggler for himself and a Jack Daniel's for Mernon – "Meaning this'll make the third, for each of you," Diane said, from the kitchen and said that 'of course the thing that no one ever seems to notice, when they talk about your business and how it doesn't seem to've gotten much bigger, sort of sneering at you, is at least that little business that you got is still there, still chugging along, going strong, just like it always has been.
"It may've been a little engine, when you took control of it, and that may still be all it is, but when you got your grubby little paws on it, back then, it was the little engine that could, and by Jesus it still can. A lot of others like it, owners had the big ambitious plans: well, where're they today? Not around any more where could they've all gone? Gone belly-up, is where, not in business anymore. I think survival counts for something. I'll take it any day."
When Walter died, at the age of forty-two, Diane knew there was more to his estate than the house and the insurance agency, but she wasn't sure what it was or how much it was worth. He had told her something about a twenty-percent interest in some sort of a real estate and stock investment partnership, not itemized but left to her under the residuary clause of his will, along with the house on Pynchon Hill and two-thirds of the value of the Fox Agency. She had realized her understanding was imperfect, but left it that way because she hadn't wanted to seem to be too interested in what her prospects were if her robust husband died young. It seemed so very unlikely. Therefore about all she knew about the trust was that some time ago his grandfather had somehow acquired an interest in an investment consortium that continued to yield steady income, and that Merrion was in it too.
Once or twice when she had rebuked Walter for regularly having more to drink than was good for him, whenever Merrion was among the people they'd had over for the evening, he had tried to excuse it by telling her that he and Merrion were 'more'n just ordinary business associates.
We're also pals, we get a kick outta each other. A man should have pals; a man's gotta have pals. And even though I know you don't care much for Amby, pals're what we're gonna stay."
She said she knew he needed to have friends and if he wanted to consider Amby one of them, that was fine by her. She said whether she liked Amby or not had nothing to do with what she was talking about, which was his 'habit of getting absolutely sloshed every time Amby comes here to dinner. Every single time he comes, you two wind up getting plastered. Don't you worry about him driving home when you've gotten yourselves in that condition, you say you're such friends.
Aren't you afraid something'll happen to him? That he'll get hurt or maybe arrested?"
Walter had laughed. "How many cops around here you think're gonna go and arrest the clerk of court? They know him too well. They'd never do that to him, never charge him with drunk driving. They did pull him over, they wouldn't arrest him. All they'd do's make him move over and let one of them drive him home, and the other one follow, the cruiser."
"He still could get hurt, though," she said. "Or he could hurt somebody else. He shouldn't be driving that way. If you think I don't want him around, well, I'm telling you, that's the reason. It's because of the drinking you two seem to do whenever you get together. I get so I don't want to invite him, even though you like him, he's your friend. "Cause I know what'll happen: You'll both get rip-roaring drunk."
Walter refused to concede her point. He said. "Amby and I have a good time together. That's what friends're for. Having fun with them, the short time we're all on the earth. One of the things, anyway. If anything ever happened to me, even though I'm sure he knows you don't like him all that much, if something ever happened to me, other guys we know'd forget all about you, but Amby'd take care of you."
Walter seemed very certain when he said that and it stuck in her mind.
So after Walter died, even though she believed his long uproarious evenings with Merrion had hastened his death, she went to Mernon and asked him what he knew.
He told her she would most likely be surprised when she fully understood what Walter had been up to, as in fact she was. She'd been startled to begin with when an appraiser pegged the market value of the Fox Agency at $830,000, about $200,000 more than Walter several years before had casually guessed it might be worth, but the price had been duly and unhesitatingly paid by the real estate subsidiary of a nationally advertised real estate conglomerate making it the western Massachusetts satellite in its linkage coast' to-coast. Her share of that sale was a little over $556,000, good for an annual income of slightly over $50,000. To her that was a lot of money and it made her feel a little guilty for having yelled at Walter what she now recalled as 'a few times' when he'd gotten on her nerves.
When she learned that those mixed stock and realty trust investments Walter had airily described amounted to just under another $192,000, she was mortified. Combined with the interest from investment of her two-thirds share of the proceeds from the sale of the agency, it would give her an income of nearly $73,000 a year before she brought home any pay from her practice. She had lived with Walter only for about eleven years and she was beginning to fear that soon people would find out she really hadn't known him very well at all. But then, as Merrton had reminded her, they couldn't very well say she'd married Walter for his money; she'd never dreamed he had it.
"Or his cockeyed politics, either," she said.
Merrion laughed and told her Walter's conservative politics had been 'irrelevant. Walter always made me laugh." He said that Dan Hilhard really had hated Walter's views and meant it when he sometimes said he couldn't stand the man. "Some of the things that Walter said absolutely infuriated him. If he was pissed off when he left your house Saturday night, he'd still be pissed off when I saw him on Monday. Took me days to calm him down."
He said that if Diane 'hadn't become such a wonderful cook you never would've seen Dan. Never would've laid eyes on the man. And he would never've put up with Walter. Of course Dan can be a major toothache too, he gets started on something. There were lots of times I thought that if Walter didn't finally say something that'd make Danny haul off and hit him, then what'd happen'd be Danny'd do it, say something that'd get Walter so mad he'd hit Danny in the mouth."
He said he had told Hilliard many times that he habitually carried his insistence on political orthodoxy too far, especially when the cost of it would have been good times and laughs. Merrion told her Hilhard said this attitude proved Merrion lacked principle. "Politically speaking, Danny says, I'm an easy lay. He's probably right. Compared to him, at least. But when he let Walter get on his nerves, Walter took it as a challenge. They deserved each other."
Walter often said he had voted five times 'enthusiastically' for Richard M. Nixon, three of them as president of the United States. One night he said Nixon had been one of the two best American presidents to serve in the 20th century. Hilliard said he assumed Walter's other favorite was Herbert Hoover. Walter had blinked and said, actually, no, his other nominee was FDR. "The litmus isn't which party the guy belongs to; it's how he reacts to the problems that the country faces while he's president. The third best may've been Gerry Ford. He gave us rest when we needed it."
"That happened at your house," Merrion said to Diane. "You were feeding us this gorgeous fillet of beef. I forgot what the wine was Walter opened. It was red and I had a lot of it; that much I know.
When Walter said that, Danny was astounded. The idea that Walter might actually have something serious and reasonable to say about politics astonished him."
Walter also knew lots of local gossip and had a fund of dirty, racial, ethnic and religious jokes that he told with practiced elan. He followed and discussed professional and collegiate sports with discernment; ate and drank hospitably; and was as ready to denounce a blowhard on his own side as he was to ridicule a fake on the other.
Those assets, together with his regular and unabashed reports of fresh misfortunes and new humiliations he had suffered on the golf course, had twice inspired Merrion to suggest that he allow Merrion to sponsor him to fill a vacancy left at Grey Hills by the death of a member (Hilhard, getting wind of Memon's first offer, said he'd blackball Fox if it came to that, and Merrion had been concerned enough to remind Hilliard how he'd gotten into Grey Hills, and tell him if he did spike Fox, "I'll get even with you'). But each time Walter after giving the invitation some thought had declined, citing the comfort-level of his second-generation old-shoe status at the Holyoke Country Club, and his 'pagan's apprehension that taking a dead man's place could be dangerous,
just asking for trouble. Might tempt the ever-present faraway fellow in the bright nightgown, you know? "Goddamnit, if Fd've wanted that slot occupied, I wouldn't've snuffed Harold now, would I?"
So Merrion had been genuinely saddened when he heard of Walter's death, and had meant it when he told Diane that he was sorry. She had patted his hand and said she knew he had been one of Walter's favorite bad companions, and expressed her opinion 'that if he only hadn't had quite so many friends like you, or enjoyed them quite so much, he might still be alive today." But she said she didn't bear Merrion any grudge: "He was a big boy, after all. He knew what he was doing."
In her reconfiguration of herself after Walter's death, Diane became convinced the house provided spiritual strength. That was definitely something new for her. Walter at her urging had acquired it, a Fox Agency exclusive listing, as their wedding present to each other. He was quite aware its splendid kitchen was not the only reason why she preferred it to the house in Hampton Pond he had inherited from Phil.
The other was the fact that that house had been tainted by his first wife's occupancy. He did not say that to Diane (he told Merrion once with some rueful nostalgia that he thought the principal reason he'd 'married Jaquie was she had these big dreamy bedroom eyes." When Merrion said that was probably as good a reason as any for a first marriage, Walter said it probably was not, 'but it was as good a one as I needed at the time. Then I found out that what I thought was sexiness was just astigmatism, very easily corrected. As soon as she got her glasses and saw what I was up to, she turned on me, got mean').
As Diane had come to see it, the two of them by having raised in the new house his daughter, Rachel, by his first marriage along with their two sons, with no more numerous losses of temper and exchanges of sharp remarks, soon regretted, than most hard-working, reasonably fortunate families manage to survive without permanent harm had in the process made a kind of emotional investment in the building, and so had acquired spiritual equity in the very lumber, lathing, plaster and cement of it.
She had needed time to steady herself after Walter's inconsiderately sudden departure (Dan Hilhard, putting aside her part in the disruption of his personal life and therefore his political career, cheered her a little at the wake by muttering that while of course he was sorry,
"Republicans're like that, you know; always afraid if they hang around too long they'll get stuck with the check; so they duck out of everything early'). To go with the time she had required as well a good deal of help and support from longtime friends.
In that gathering of wits she had found herself to her surprise depending upon Ambrose Merrion emotionally. Walter had had many more secrets than she had suspected, and Amby was the only man she knew herself who also knew the secrets. "It was insidious," she said, when she realized later what had happened to her while she was engaged in doing something else. Coming over time to believe gratefully that the history she had in the house on Pynchon Hill would be a major source of strength, as long as she stayed put, she had also gotten used to seeing Merrion around in it a lot. When she had finished remaking her life to accommodate Walter's abrupt withdrawal from it, a little over a year later, she found Merrion had worked his way into it ('wormed," she said once, to him, but he looked a little hurt so she didn't use that term again). Not into the place in her life that had been Walter's, not by any means she had closed that off- but still in it, just the same, with a new place of his own.
"Animism, I know," she said of her new attitude toward the house, preferring to keep conversations light until she had become sure enough of what she thought of Memon's new importance to want to talk about it.
"Early symptom of the onset of feeblemindedness. Or reversion to the primitive state. Next thing you know, I'll be painting myself blue and running around out in the woods with no clothes on, worshiping resonant trees, talismanic squirrels and sacred rocks. But a good house or any other place does have power to comfort, the solace of familiarity. It doesn't have to have a real soul of its own to do that, but it has to have some special something most houses don't seem to have character.
Most of them're just buildings, frames with walls and roof sections hung on them. When you get one that's more than that, you shouldn't part with it. It would be a sin against the Great Spirit."
Merrion during the same period had been getting used to being around Diane a lot. In the course of helping her to master the financial matters that Walter had covertly managed out of her sight (as he had prudently kept them from Jaquie's view as well, thus saving more than a few dollars in the divorce settlement, obeying Larry Lane's rule against confiding financial data to possibly treacherous kinfolk with no honest need to know it), he grew accustomed to spending time with her, several hours during the weekend or an evening or two during the week. He enjoyed his new habit of her company, and saw no reason to discontinue seeing her after they had rearranged her assets under her control.
By then he had long since recovered very nicely and completely from the real but transient sorrow he had felt at Walter's death. He had not become happy that Walter had died, but he admitted to himself that he would have been seriously inconvenienced if Walter, as much fun as he'd always been in life, had somehow managed to come back. Life goes on, Merrion reminded himself firmly, when he felt his first and only feathery twinge of guilt after an evening of enjoying the company of Walter's widow. Walter knew that and he left it just the same, and it went on without him. Poor judgment on his part; probably wishes now he hadn't done it. Tough shit for him.
Once a week, most often Thursdays because he seldom could be absolutely sure until late Friday afternoon that he wouldn't have to be available Friday and Saturday evenings for bail hearings, he invited Diane to join him after work for drinks and dinner, usually at the Old Post Road Tavern his established familiarity there had bred superior service and access to special dishes off the menu.
When she resumed entertaining two years after Walter's death, it was assumed Merrion would act as host. From time to time she cooked for him on winter weekend evenings. Once or twice each summer, as he was going to do on that third Sunday in August, he drove her out to Tanglewood to hear the concerts her stepdaughter had selected as her birthday gift each March, and she made dinner reservations for them afterwards at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge.
Merrion more or less assumed that she would be available for any outings, the regular Thursday dinners or movies on the spur-of-the-moment. He would have been disappointed if she had said she had another commitment, but she never did. She would have been at least irked had he pleaded a prior social engagement made it impossible for him to bring over a bottle of red wine and share a pheasant she had bought on a whim and just finished roasting, but every time she had an impulse and called to invite him to do some such thing, he was always ready to do it. "We do pretty well for each other, don't we, Amby?" she said to him very early one morning, kissing him safe-home just inside the half-opened door. "Not badly at all," he replied.
Hilliard, meddling in his business as usual, asked him one evening idly in the bar at Grey Hills showing off for other people standing around within earshot having drinks after a budget committee meeting if he was 'still at it, keeping company with the Widow Fox," knowing the answer.
When Merrion said that he was, adding that Hilliard damned right well knew it, he was vexed to feel his ears and cheeks getting hot. Thus rewarded, Hilliard prying further had asked him why he kept on seeing her. "An excellent cook," Hilliard said, 'but she can be a controlling woman."
Merrion said irritably that he guessed it was something that he did, not something he had thought about doing, so therefore he supposed the reason that he did it was because he wanted to. Hilliard had nodded and said grandly that his many years of extensive experience and close personal observation enabled him to state unequivocally and without fear of contradiction that that was indisputably the very best reason, bar none, that Amby Merrion had ever given for going out with a woman.
That brought a little polite applause and a 'hear, hear' or two.
Merrion thought about it for a moment and said that the reason he had tolerated Hilliard for so many years was that from time to time not very often, but still, now and then he showed absolutely brilliant insight into human nature, and this was one of those times.
Merrion in the course of helping Diane through her sorrow had found her opinions to be based upon good instincts, and he got into the habit of seeking them when confronting important decisions of his own. It was natural enough, he supposed; after all, she was used to considering other people's situations and giving her advice, that being the way she'd made her living and career for a good many years. And she was obviously pleased, quietly flattered, when he consulted her. Once, more or less in obedience to some shabby impulse learned in politics, he supposed no point in having an advantage if you're not going to try to use it he tried to subvert her good will and affection. One evening late in 1992, over dinner at the Tavern, he had asked her advice about what he ought to do with Polly's house.
By then eleven years had passed since Walter's death, so there had been no question that Diane had recovered from the loss. The shattering decline into silence that would necessitate Polly's admission to St.
Mary's on the Hilltop had set in, rendering progressively more irrelevant his extreme reluctance 'to put her in the home'; he had reached a sort of marker in his life. But depressing as it was, the event had nonetheless been predictable for a long time; he had seen it coming much as Dan and Mercy Hilliard had known despairingly long before the day arrived that sooner or later they would have to put their daughter Donna in an institution providing long-term care. So he did not have the excuse that he had been dazed in shock that evening when he said what he should not have, asking Diane what he should do.
"You should move right back into it," Diane said immediately. "That's a good house, just like my house is a good house. That place you're living in right now," a large garden court apartment in the Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, 'may be where the swells all want to go when they retire, half the year playing golf and shuffleboard in Florida, the other half back here playing golf and lying about their grandchildren. But you'll never be one of those silly men in colored pants with white belts and shoes. Besides, you're not old enough."
"Well," he said, 'the golf I could handle with pleasure, but it looks like I probably wont have the grandchildren."
"Looking for sympathy?" she said. "Won't get it from me. Rachel's always apologizing for not bringing her two back here more often, "so they can get to know you." Uh huh. "Perfectly all right," I always say. "Time enough for us to become dear friends when they go to Harvard. Then they can drive out and see me."
"Nothing wrong with where you live now, it's a very stylish place. But no matter what you have somebody do to it, it'll never be a good house, the kind of place you hang onto and go back to, because it's where you live, and belong. What you need's the sort of place that hangs onto you; that's what I really mean. It keeps you, not you, it, and that's what keeps you going strong."
"And you think I'm going to need one of those of my own," he said. He had been ashamed of himself even as he said it. It was arguably excusable 'never any harm in asking' but just the same it had also been a cheap dodge to take advantage of her compassionate mood in order to wheedle something out of her, something that she didn't want to give him.
She'd raised both eyebrows and gazed at him over the big white plate of veal scallops in cream sauce, and then after a brief but unmistakably reproving silence, she had snickered. "Amby," she had said, 'really now, of course you will. Of course you'll need your place to live. Of course you need a house."
So the terms of their non-aggression pact, 'our treaty," she called it, after that little stutter had resumed evolution along the lines they had begun to take, arriving at it fairly soon after Walter's death.
"Look, Amby," she had said to him she was a practical woman making coffee in her kitchen, using her foot to steer her possessive grey-and-black striped tiger-cat along the mopboard under the sink so that she wouldn't step on it; she had called Merrion Saturday morning and asked him to come over two days after they had gone to bed together the first time because that seemed to her what should be done next.
"This sex business: we've got to talk about it. Come to some kind of agreement we both understand. Or else it's going to get out of control and cause all kinds of problems, maybe end up ruining us. I don't want that to happen. I don't think you do, either. Tell me you don't either, all right? Humor me, at least, and say it, even if you're not really sure yet. This is important to me. I'm surprised how important it is."
"It's important to me, too," he had said, sitting down at her kitchen table, and it was. Having left her very early Friday morning in the still darkness so as to spare her attentive early-rising neighbors the effort they surely would have made to deduce the implications of the presence of what she called his 'flashy car' in her driveway in the sunrise on his way home he had gradually begun to understand that he didn't know what he ought to do next, how to act or what to say the next time he saw her; arrive with an armload of roses or act as though nothing remarkable had taken place. He was slightly flustered to find that mattered to him. As it hadn't mattered, he realized, in the aftermath of what had become a fair number of other sexual friendships he had enjoyed over the course of what he was now somewhat startled to notice had somehow turned into quite a number of years.
"Thirty of 'em, in fact, give or take," he said to Hilliard. "And I have to say it's been quite a while since I can remember being actually concerned the next day about how the lady actually felt about the fun we had last night. Not since Sunny went and died on me, I guess. What was there to get all concerned about? All it was was just getting laid now and then. That's how the grown-ups have fun. And if we should run into each other again, or maybe call up and make sure we did that, well, maybe wed fuck again. Or then again, maybe not. If the time ever came then when we hadda new chance, wed see how we felt. "Inna meantime, many thanks, I hadda good time. Appreciate you lookin' out for me like that."
"That was the way that it worked. There was this one woman I got so I knew pretty well at the New England Regional Meetings one year, and she was just real hot to trot. So we connected, and for the whole three days of that conference there up at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, that is what we did: we fucked our brains out.
She had her regular steady boyfriend back home in Portland. He was a lawyer and she had no complaints at all; he took as good care of her as he possibly could good swift dash inna bloomers two or three times a week. Regular as he could be, but that hadda be his limit. He was married, and either his wife wasn't dumb enough so she would actually let him pack a change of clothes and get out of her sight for an overnight trip for fear he might not come back at all or else he didn't feel he could neglect his practice for three days at a stretch, I'm not really sure. Whatever it was, I wasn't complaining. She wanted her cookies and I wanted mine and we found we could make a deal. A loose woman at loose ends: I take her as a gift from God.
"She was back the next year, and the year after that, and so was I, naturally, and both times we picked up like wed never left off. The year in-between conferences, there's been nothin', no phone calls, no letters, no nothing; it's like for each other we don't exist except up in New Hampshire in June. But that once a year when we came back for the meetings, we came back all of the way. It was just the goddamnedest thing.
"The fourth year she didn't come back. I don't know what happened to her. Maybe the lawyer's wife finally found out and shot her or something like that. Or he divorced the bride and they got together. I was kind of afraid to start asking' around; thought it might look funny, you know? But it seems kind of strange, when you think about it: During those three years inna course of nine days I prolly fucked her thirty times. We were young; we did it like there was no tomorrow.
And today I don't know if she's alive or dead, and she's the same way about me, and I bet she's no more upset than I am. It was straight sex, no more'n that.
"Well except for Sunny, that's how all of them were for me; that's how I looked at it, and I've been happy. I've been a contented man. Now it seems like I'm not looking at it that way any more. Something here seems to've changed."
"See, I don't belong here, like you do," Diane said. "In this town. In this valley. Even though I've been here, more'n quite a while, it's not like I belong here. Or I didn't belong here, at least, when I first came. I just sort of settled in for a while, and at some point after that discovered I had stayed. As though I'd gone to sleep and when I woke up, here's where I was. Where else would I open my practice? And after that Walter was here. So when I decided that I was with Walter, I also realized that I'd probably be here for the rest of my life. I was at rest; where I belong became irrelevant.
"Now I'm not at rest anymore. I'm not saying I don't like it, not that, but I am confused. When I started thinking Friday morning about what we did Thursday night, I had kind of a hard time keeping my mind on my patients' problems which is what they're paying me for."
"Wait a minute," Merrion said. "What is this you "don't belong here"?"
Merrion said. "Sure you do. You've been here for a long time. Close to thirty years by now, or so, pretty close to it. If you and Walter weren't together when I first came to the court here, I know he was, and you must've gotten here pretty soon after that. Because I've been in that courthouse now for about thirty years, and, I'm not saying that you're old, now, but you've been here a long time."
She laughed. "It's just dawned on you, hasn't it?" she said. "Just hitting you now. I can see you thinking it. "My God, what the hell've I done? I've been to bed with an older woman. She's practically old enough to be my mother."
"Oh boy," he said. "Diane, I hate to tell you this, but the fact of the matter is: you're wrong, very wrong. Women that I've always hung around with've generally been about my age, within three or four years of how old I am. Don't get me mixed up with my friend. I haven't hung around the schoolyard since I got out of school. I'm actually a very nice guy."
She said "Oh." She sat down at the table in the kitchen opposite him and gazed at him for a while and then she frowned and looked at her hands and said: "No, I know that. Or else I don't know that. Oh, I don't know what I know." She looked up at him again. "I didn't mean for this to happen," she said.
"But you just said…" he said.
"I know what I said," she said.
"Well, now I'm confused," he said. "First you said it was important to you and that now we've slept together, we have to get things straight and have some rules, and that was fine with me. And now you're telling me instead it's something else. A mistake or something."
"Amby," she said, 'before Walter died, I'd seen you a lot but I didn't really know you very well. I'd never really thought about you as my friend; whether you were someone I knew and trusted, and wanted to have as my friend; only about you as one of Walter's friends. When Walter died; after the shock wore off and I'd started to get my bearings and so forth, well, I certainly hoped sex would be a part of my life again I'm a normal, healthy, adult woman -but I didn't really expect… I didn't know, I didn't have anyone in mind. I didn't have any idea, who it would be with. That I'd be with in this new part of my life.
"But I have to be honest with you: I didn't think it would be you. Now don't be hurt; I didn't think it wouldn't be you, either. You were never; it was never part of my plan, not that I had any plan, really, but… I don't know what I mean here. To get involved with you. As lovers, I mean."
"Why not?" he said.
"Now you are hurt," she said, 'and I didn't mean that to happen either.
It's just that you and the people you know and the life you've always led, you were someone who was completely different from Walter. Whether you knew it or not, you were sort of a romantic hero to Walter. Do you understand what I'm saying? Walter was exactly what he looked like: a small-town, small-business, family man. His whole world was family, and the business that his family'd started, and the small towns where the family lived and knew the people, ran the business. His whole life was in the Four Towns; it always had been he liked it that way.
"It was how I liked it, too. I'd grown up in a settled environment in Minneapolis, a very conventional family. But once I went to Madison to go to college that phase for me was over. I became rootless. I had adventures, I guess you could say, and I enjoyed them. But after some years I began to worry. I didn't have any base of my own. So Walter's Four Towns were nice for me to come back to, an orderly world where people stayed in the same place and you could depend on them. Not the same world but the kind of world I'd grown up in. I don't think I'd ever been really afraid before that, uneasy, maybe, but with Walter I felt safe again. He was an utterly settled man. When I was with him I knew everything was going to be all right. I never dreamed he'd die so soon.
"He admired you. You, and as much as he fought with him all the time, Danny. When Mercy kicked him out last year, he was the only person I know, man or woman except, I'm assuming, you who was on Danny's side.
The two of us had some sharp words over that. In a way you two were Walter's imaginary friends. You and Danny lived around here just like he did; you moved in the same world and you acted like everyone else, but you were also different. You were pirates. He liked his life all right, but it was quiet; there was action in the lives you two were living they were exciting: You were in politics.
"In a way he wanted to be like you, or thought he did anyway, and because you let him be friends with you, he could feel he was like you, a little bit. He thought you brought a touch of glamor to his life. He was absolutely fascinated by the people that you know, all the rogues and rascals you and Dan did battle with, in your daily life. He envied you. I didn't mind that, as long as he didn't actually try to be like you; he couldn't've done it. He wasn't cut out for the rough and tumble, and deep down inside he knew it. But when he had too much to drink and started talking big; that pose he liked to put on, pretending he was part of your life, the turmoil, and the drama, and the thrills, well, he just loved doing that. For a while he forgot who he really was."
"But you didn't," Merrion said, 'you didn't love having him do it."
"I didn't encourage it, no," she said. "But I didn't try to discourage it, either. I don't think I could've, if I'd tried, but I didn't really try. He had a great time, a wonderful time, pretending he was one of you. But then you all went home. The next day he was back here with me, hung-over but with me, the solid Walter I'd liked the minute that I met him, and grew to love, and married. Of course I was glad he'd had fun. But I hoped he'd never change.
"And so when he died, well, I had no idea of winding up with you. When I felt it starting to happen, felt myself getting attached to you, I hoped I was getting it wrong. But I wasn't. I did become attached to you. Wanting to or not. And so now I have to deal with it, that's all. We have to deal with it now."
"Yes," he said.
"Be patient with me, Amby," she said. "I do have a good heart, you know."
The young man she had met and started living with during her second year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the spring of 1963 had been a graduate assistant in the department of economics assigned to teach a basic survey course to freshmen, 'very bright and very intense, and very Marxist, too." She said his name was "Tommy."
In February of that year he learned that he had won a fellowship to study for a year at the London School of Economics, 'which sort of disappointed him, because he'd wanted Cambridge. But I thought it was wonderful, and I thought he was wonderful and we were wonderful, and when it was time for him to go I went right along with him. Maybe I was right who knows? Maybe the two of us actually were wonderful, just like I thought, and therefore when we lived in Saint John's Wood, flat broke, it wasn't really cold and dreary, like it began to seem half an hour or so after we got there. Maybe it was magical, whee, just like I pretended.
"Tommy couldn't pull it off, believing it was magic. I suppose it's just possible he was right, and I was silly. That fellowship was for one, not two, and my stuffy, settled Three-M parents my father was a scientist for Three-M back home in strait-laced old Minneapolis had cut off my allowance when I dropped out of school.
"They really took a very narrow view of things. They said they didn't recall seeing anything in the Wisconsin catalogue that described a year of shacking up in London as the third year of what they'd agreed to pay for me to get, a four-year, liberal arts education.
"They'd thought of that as their biggest present to me, the foundation of the rest of my life. After I graduated if I still really wanted to apply to Juilliard and see if I was a good enough oboeist to become a professional musician, I could do that. And if I didn't want to do that, or did but didn't get in, then I'd be able to teach music in high school somewhere, because I'd have that solid college education. I'd be able to make a living for myself like a responsible adult. But I'd only completed half of the bargain. Now I was living in sin and being free in London. So therefore no more money.
"I don't know or maybe I just don't remember what it was exactly that I was going to do after that, after Tommy's year in London. Live happily ever after, maybe. But it was okay, just the same. We had a year like every girl and boy should have, one of wretched, grinding poverty, but unlike a lot of traveling scholars, he actually did study, and he did get his master's degree. And then we came back to Amerika with a K instead of a C and were against the war and stuff, and Tommy taught at MIT and got his Ph.D. You had to give that boy credit. He looked like a dope-smokin' hippie; he talked like a refusenik draft-resister, and he really didn't have a single stinkin' capitalist-running-dog bone in his whole body. But he loved his economics and he worked his butt off, and whatever you thought about how he looked or how he talked, you had to admit he knew his stuff. The kid was good, clearly headed for stardom.
"So I dumped him, naturally," she said. "Couldn't have that now, could we, being married to a star? Absolutely not. I think I dumped him, anyway; it's possible he may've dumped me. Probably depends on who's telling the story. But that was all after a while, not right off.
First he got a job teaching at UMass." and something studious and academic began stirring around again, deep down inside my fevered brain."
She held her hands aloft as though to indicate she was having a vision.
"I perceive that I am getting on in years. By this time I am almost twenty-four, ancient, and I suppose I am beginning at long last to grow up. As the hot-shot young professor's, ah, demure young wife, I was able to get free tuition. Then I was able to talk the proper authorities first into accepting the credits I'd sort of left behind at Wisconsin, and also some I'd sort of picked up while I wasn't doing much of anything else besides sleeping with Tommy in England, kind of studying at the University of London. After that, talking very fast, into letting me switch my major to psychology."
"Wow," Merrion said, "I'm impressed. They always made me give them money."
She smiled. "You probably weren't demure," she said. "I was, I was very demure. And academics're suckers for that. As a teacher's wife I was entitled to the undergrad free tuition anyway, and when they let me transfer credits like that, they were being maybe more than just a little bit crafty. They wanted Tommy to stay at UMass. Didn't want him flying off to some other place, better-known for its economics. So I'm sure it was at the back of their minds to use me to tie him down a little more securely, get his wife involved with a UMass. program of her own.
"So they let me study psych for free, being as how by then I was more interested in that than I was in music. I got so I enjoyed it. I was having fun. So naturally since fun isn't supposed to last very long, it seemed to go fast. It was kind of surprising how fast; what with summer-school and all, and no horsing around, everything fell into place. In just over a year I had enough credits to graduate.
"I'd barely started the grad program for master's in psychiatric social work when Tommy's comet ignited in the heavens of economics and he got precisely what everyone'd been expecting him to get all along: an invitation to join the faculty at the University of Chicago. Muslims have always had Mecca; Tommy in those days had Chicago.
'"I don't think I want to come with you," I told him. "I think I found out where it was that I've always been going. It was here. I want to stay here. You go if you want. I think you should." "So do I," Tommy said, and he did.
"When he left, me and UMass. both, I think they felt a little guilty, too, somehow responsible. After all, they'd lured my young husband to Amherst and what'd he done but go off and leave me there all by myself.
Like it was partly their fault. I didn't discourage that. Whatever they wanted to think that helped me was perfectly all right with me.
I'd finally begun to come down to earth and realize I was never going to be the first-chair oboe in the Cleveland Orchestra and have a torrid affair with George Szell. He was getting a little old for me by then anyway, and since I didn't have a husband anymore I decided the first thing I'd better do was find a way to make a living. And that's why I stayed.
"You see what I mean?" Diane said. "I don't really belong here? This is just where I washed ashore? You and everybody else I've met and gotten to know well here all seem to have some kind of inner gyro that controls you, determines how you rotate. It may be a little out of kilter, so sometimes you spin off-center; quite a few of you're like that. But I've never seen you go completely out of whack. You may teeter and wobble around, but generally you regain control and keep on spinning. And it looks to me as though you can do this without having to think about what you're doing.
"I'm not like that. If something's important to me, I have to have a program, how I'm going to handle it so it doesn't handle me. You're important to me now; we're important to me, so I have to have a program on how I'm going to handle us."
"Why not just make it up as we go along?" Merrion said. "That's what we've been doing up 'til now, isn't it? Worked out okay up to this point, or so I'd say anyway."
"Because up 'til now it didn't involve sex," she said. "For you that apparently doesn't amount to a major change, but to me it does. I don't mean I'm a retroactive virgin here now. That's not what I'm trying to say. Sex is important to me and I've missed it since Walter died, and I have to tell you honestly that if you hadn't been around here the other night to do what you did so nicely; or if you'd made some excuse that made me think sex wasn't going to be a part of our nice friendship, pretty soon I would've had to start looking around for some other man who might be willing to devote some of his time and energy to keeping a refined lady comfortable.
"I've had the project in the back of my mind ever since a few days after Walter's funeral. Not that there was any emergency involved; I didn't have to restrain myself around the funeral director or anything like that. I just had it in my mind that sooner or later I'd have to start thinking about reaching an understanding with a discreet gentleman.
"And now that I've apparently done that, well, now I have to get everything all orderly and tidy, and settled in my mind.
Because I have to warn you, Amby, I've always been the kind of girl who's reasonably easy, but I tend to get attached to someone I'm having sex with. One-night stands're not my bag. So you have to be on your guard about that. I'm really asking quite a lot of you, I know. You have to provide me with sex and you have to be discreet and you have to be a gentleman about it. You may not want this job."
"Lemme think," Merrion said. "The gentleman-part I think I can handle.
I've had experience with that. The attachment part, too. I was attached to someone once, and I liked it, but that was before I found out I was lots more attached to her than she was to me. When I found out I didn't like it, but it didn't matter much by then because she'd done what Walter did, only a lot sooner. Inna meantime someone else got attached to me, and a very nice someone else she was, and still is, but I didn't get attached to her. She didn't like that a whole lot.
But in this case, if you're telling me it's mutual, as you seem to be, then that shouldn't be that much of a problem.
"The discretion I may have some trouble with. The women I've known've been single like me. What we did was our business. I haven't had a lot of call for that particular specialty."
"Well, you'll want to get to work on it, then," she said. "For the boys' sake, I mean. Rachel I'm not concerned about. Rachel, if I don't do something silly and get her all stirred up, will happily stay right where she is, down there in Washington; contentedly doing just what she does, "working far too many hours" in the office of counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters; "and spending far too little time with her husband and her kids. Not that Terry's liable to notice, since he's as bad as she is and works far too hard himself," in the legal office of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
"The boys're a different matter." They were both still at Mount Hermon then. Phil, nine when his father died, had taken it hard and was still recovering, very slowly. Diane, when she and Merrion had become lovers, was not confident that the boy, 'so much like his father," had yet completely regained his equilibrium, and would not do so until Christmas, 1990, when he came home during his freshman year at Connecticut Wesleyan and announced he had joined the Army, signing up for a four-year program offering training in electronics, and wasn't going back to college, 'probably ever."
"Walter made no secret of it, how he'd hated college," Diane, much relieved, told Merrion then. "Many times he told me how unhappy he'd been when he was away at school, and how wrong his grandfather'd been to've sent him, made him go. "All I ever wanted to do when I grew up and came home from Mount Hermon was stay home from Mount Hermon and go to work in the agency and learn how to run the business, and then spend the rest of my life doing that."
Her second son, Ben, four years younger, had been at Deerfield only a year when Walter died. He was a strange and solemn kid who seemed puzzled by his father's death, as though feeling he had never known his father well enough to miss him too much when he went away. He had already somehow begun to assemble what amounted to a new life for himself, using what Deerfield had given him to work with, spending all but his shortest vacations with a roommate whose family had a cattle ranch in British Columbia, putting so much emotional as well as geographical distance between himself and the house with the yellow door in Canterbury that he had in effect resigned from the family before his father's death.
"But that doesn't mean I think he needs to know that his mother's having sexual relations with the guy from the courthouse his old man used to have too much to drink with. I don't mind if he does know, if either one of them, Phil or Ben, starts to think about it, figures it out, and draws the obvious conclusion. As I'm sure in time they will they're not stupid kids, after all. But I want them to have the option: either of thinking about it, and figuring out that their mother's having sex again, or of not thinking about it, if that suits them, drawing no conclusion at all. So that's why you have to be discreet."
What they had done was work out an arrangement that looked to Merrion as though it might last him, at least, for as many years as he had left 'maybe thirty or so," he said one winter Saturday at Grey Hills when he'd had a game of racquetball with Heck Sanderson and then done ten laps in the indoor pool, 'if I keep this up," as of course he had not.
The substance of it was what Hilliard had been looking to find out when he poked around, and what Merrion would not disclose. They had promised to take care of each other.
"You certainly look like hell this morning," she said affectionately after he had parked in her driveway and come into her house through the back door without knocking.
"Thank you very much," he said, getting a mug from the cupboard and filling it from the coffee pot on the counter next to the sink, 'so nice of you to notice. I suppose I probably do. I've fucking well come by it honest, up 'til all hours with a pack of criminals. What the hell else can you expect?" He drank some of the coffee. "Actually, though, I feel pretty good. And you look perfectly great."
The cat rubbed against her shins and she nudged it away with her foot, hard. "Oh no, you don't, you no-good bastard," she said. "Think you're getting back in my good graces that easy, you miserable son of a bitch."
"Peter been a bad boy?" Merrion said. In order to afflict the man he called his sometimes job-so-solemnly-religious, always-no-help uncle,"
Walter had named the cat Simon and called him Peter.
"Peter shat in the bathtub again last night," she said. "Peter's landlady damned near stepped in Peter's shit barefoot this morning when she went to take her shower, which would've made her good and mad at Peter if she had. Peter would've been lucky if he hadn't ended up in the pound. Not that Peter's landlady enjoyed having to wash the crap down the drain and then scrub the goddamned tub before she could wash her body."
"I told you when you did it," Merrion said. "I warned you when you had him fixed, you and Walter both: "You have that poor cat's nuts cut off, he's not gonna like it. He'll never forgive you, and he'll find some way to get even." And that's what he's been doin', ever since what is it? Fourteen years now? Gettin' even with you. Just like I would've and just like Walter would've, too, if you'd done it to either one of us."
"Finish your coffee," Diane said, picking up the cat and heading for the door. "Let me put this offender out and you can tell me all the way to the two fat sos all about the human desperadoes."
"So you had a long night at the lock-up?" Diane said. They were traveling south on Route 91 toward Holyoke.
"Yeah," Merrion said, moving out to pass a grey Ford Windstar minivan rocking erratically from side to side; the middle and rear seats were occupied by several sturdy children who seemed to be engaged in a tag-team wrestling match. "Fourteen of them I hadda process. Doesn't take that long, each one, maybe ten-twelve minutes. Unless it's a Two-oh-nine-A, guy's been whacking the bride around. Those take a little longer 'cause I don't let them out and they don't like hearing they're staying in. Stand there with the cuffs on and give me a lotta argument, cuts no ice at all. Last night's most popular offense was drivin'-under, Statics're roundin' 'em up left and right, very big night for the troopers. But last night they're not collaring them in bunches, like they usually do, 'round when the bars close down. Last night it was one at a time. Every time I think I'm free, call comes in the radio they're bringin' in another one so I hafta wait around.
"So for quite a while while I am there, I'm listening to Sergeant Whalen's ragtime. Everything that goes into Everett Whalen's ears comes out Ev Whalen's mouth. It's guaranteed. May not come out in the same order, or in the same condition. It may go in on Monday and then not come out 'til next Sunday, after all the stuff that went in Tuesday and Thursday. Everett ain't neat in his mind. But it'll come out; you can bet on it. So Everett's regaling me there, for what seemed like a long weekend. But finally Frankie Thompson big black guy that runs the lock-up, really handsome guy, looks like O.J. Simpson, only bigger an' meaner, started bringing out the guests.
"The first six or eight of them weren't anything you'd really call unusual. The first one was this little black guy. Looked like a jockey, so help me; same size and build. Like a jockey you'd see at the track."
"Or maybe on somebody's lawn," Diane said. "You know, one of those charming little iron lawn jockeys about three feet high that all the most elegant white folks used to have beside their driveways, holding out the hitching rings? They always had shiny black faces. Really, extremely attractive; lent such a festive note to the grounds."
"Nah, bigger'n that," Merrion said, purposefully ignoring her tone.
"Ottawa, he be small, but much bigger'n dat, and naturally not quite so well-dressed. He maybe would've qualified on size for a jockey job, but he looked really sloppy. Black sweatshirt with a hood, just the ticket for a seventy-six-degree night, seventy-percent humidity, after an eighty-four-degree day. That's the uniform shirt now. Teamed up with your truly-huge, baggy black sweatpants, and naturally your two-hundred-buck, National-Basketball-Association, stick-out-player-approved sneakers. Excuse me: shoes.
"These are his work-clothes; what the well-dressed young crack gourment with serious fashion jones wears to go out after dark breakin' and enterin' people's homes. The cops have suspicious minds. They see him scuttlin' 'round the back of the house, they're pretty confident the people who live there didn't invite him, tell him to drop by for a drink at any time, even if they didn't happen to be home. And when the cops find him actually inside the house, they believe he got into it this may shock you with intent to commit a felony therein. To wit, larceny of more than two hundred and fifty dollars, and he isn't picky; anything portable he can lift and carry by himself, and sell without too I much trouble to a fence for about a hundred bucks, maybe a third " what it's worth.
"Or maybe direct to upstanding, law-abiding folks like you and me, no more honest'n we should be. He runs into us in a bar where it's known you can often get a bargain and finds out wed like to have an eight-hundred-dollar video-cam, but don't have quite that much cash on hand. Slightly-used'd be okay, if it was cheaper. Just by coincidence an hour later he's back with one a friend asked him to sell; he can let go for much less. This way we get a twelve-hundred dollar video-cam for the low-low price of two hundred bucks, and Ottawa gets himself enough money to score some dope and feel real nice for a couple of days. Everybody's happy.
"Except there is some risk involved, and this time, as will happen, he got caught goin' in for the merchandise. So now he hasn't got any laces in these state-of-the-art sneaks. For wear in the lock-up, the dress code that cops enforce is the floppy look. Take their laces away from them when they're checkin' 'em in at the desk, so they can't get really nasty and vindictive, make a noose and hang themselves in the cell. Everyone gets all bent outta shape at the cops when prisoners do that. Next thing you know, you got one of those pain-in-the-ass civil-rights cases on your hands; poverty-pimp lawyers on television every couple nights for the next four years, beatin' their chests and hollering how this's typical; the cops so down on po' niggers that the first thing they do when they lock them up is torture their black asses. Made this poor boy feel so depressed, locked up in Whitey's jail with no crack to be had, he took the laces off his shoes and hanged himself, an' went home to be with Jesus."
Diane sighed and fidgeted ostentatiously in the passenger seat; Merrion elaborately failed to notice. "Uh uh," he said, 'cops want none of that shit at all. And they're heavy enough to make sure they don't get it they take the laces away. Of course you wont be surprised to learn that this humiliates the prisoners, and therefore also is a violation of their many civil rights, of which they have got hundreds, it seems like: another cruel and unusual punishment inflicted only on black guys, because of their race. By other black guys like Frank Thompson."
"Amby," she said, and then let her voice trail off.
"What?" he said.
"Oh," she said, exhaling loudly again, 'never mind, go ahead. I was going to say I wish you wouldn't talk like this, but it wouldn't do any good. Go ahead, get it out of your system."
"The reason I think the way I do," he said, 'is because I see the people up close that you're always feeling sorry for, but only see from a safe distance. So you assume they're the same kind of troubled kids you see up close every day, who're screwed up and have problems. But very few of the kids you see have criminal records, and there's a world of difference, Diane. The troubled kids the cops and therefore I have to deal with're not the same class of trade. Maybe they used to be once, and nobody helped them, and that's why they're the way they are now, but the reason doesn't matter. By the time I first see them, they've made the transition; they're criminal types. I know them better'n you, and it irritates me that even though we've been together a while, and you should know me pretty well, you still think on this point you know more than I do, and you don't."1 She frowned but said nothing.
"This fine young gentleman's print-out said his name was Ottawa Johnson. Now I didn't have any trouble with that; the name, I mean. I got over being surprised with the mo nickers these guys come up with a long time ago, back when I first found out one of them was actually the kid's real name, given to him by his momma "I um-no, how come she done it; guess she jcs' like the sound' of it." Alceedee Lincoln. I didn't believe him, but I was busy and didn't pursue it. Even though that was taking a chance, because if I don't get the kid's real name when they bring him in, and then he jumps bail, how the hell're we going to find him? We don't know who he is.
"Anyway, while after that I got another one. Adidas Busby. It was a slow night, or maybe I was just fed up with these people always giving me a lot of jive all the time, figure they can and why not. I went right to town on the little turd. "You listen to me, you little creep.
You cut that crap out here right now. You clear on that? I'm not down here on my night off to take shit from you, tellin' me you're named after a fuckin' sneaker. The way you behavin' ain't cool."
"But he had been; he finally convinced me his real name was Adidas.
Cops told me it wasn't even that unusual; I just hadn't happened to run into it before. Those people really do that. There're kids named "Reebok" and "Nike" around, too,
"Lawyer" "Colonel" and "Duke." Those're their actual names. I just wasn't aware of the style. Hell, I didn't know anna thing instead of ranting and raving at a kid named after a sneaker, I should've been getting ready for prisoners named after nothing I ever heard of:
Rajahlakah Muhammad and Buforce Elijah. I get a guy named after a city these days, and I recognize it, I can actually spell it, I tell you, I'm almost grateful.
"So I wrote it down on the form and gave Ottawa Johnson the once-over.
He didn't look dangerous to me. So that's one thing out of the way, before I decide on his bail. I held my usual chat with him while I was fillin' out the papers; I'm telling him as he doesn't know that he's charged with B and E in the night-time and he has to show up in court tomorrow morning early if not bright and tell the judge whether he plans to get his own attorney or wants one appointed for him.
'"One appointed," says Ottawa right off, very sure of himself. He knows the drill pretty good, as you would expect from glancing at his papers. Six-page print-out suggests to the casual eye he's not a newcomer to the criminal justice system. They get that rap-sheet now at the station the minute the guy comes in. If it's not waiting for him when he gets there, logged-in by the arresting cop in the prowl car at the crime-scene. Name, date of birth, Social Security; in six or eight minutes his whole history prints out nice and neat any time of day or night. Prior offenses; outstanding warrants; bingety-bangety-boom.
'"You still gotta come to court and tell the judge that," I say.
'"I know dat," Ottawa says, very matter-of-fact. I'm sure he does.
Ottawa turned eighteen on June fourth, and here we are now, less'n three months later, writing up his third adult encounter with the law.
No rest for the wicked; Ottawa keeps busy. But no surprise there;
Ottawa was precocious. Sixteen juvenile matters on his sheet. Some of them involved the unauthorized use of other people's motor vehicles.
Others the unauthorized removal of stereo-tape decks and custom nag-wheels from other people's motor vehicles; the removal of stereos, TVs, silverware and jewelry from other people's dwelling places; and just about everything you can do with controlled substances buying, selling, possessing.
'"Ottawa," I say to him, "I don't see no occupation, job, here on this printout. Whatchou do fo' a livin'?" '"Yeah there is, it say right there," Ottawa he say to me. Points it out to me with his ringer, there. "See? Says it right there: I'm Essesseye."
"Supplemental Security Income S, S, I. In their eyes that's a recognized trade or profession. Like licensed barber or plumbing inspector. Or at least the Ottawas of our world think it should be.
It's the occupation of choice among the majority of folks who visit the lockup and the courthouse. They be disabled, and can't work, so the Commonwealth gives them one-hundred-and-twelve dollars a month and the federal government kicks in four-hundred-seventy more. Meaning you and I and everybody else who's working for a living, and has taxes withheld from it, is making it possible for our governments to give every single shiftless bum who asks for it six-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-four American dollars each year. They don't have to do a fuckin' thing but cash their checks which is good 'cause they don't feel like doin' anything legal just now; what they want to do is hang out."
"Oh, Amby," Diane said, hopelessly.
He ignored her. '"Essesseye," I say to Ottawa, "now what inna world're you getting' that for? You look pretty healthy to me. Why is it that you can't work?" '"Well, 'cause I'm nervous." Ottawa says, and he grins. "I always been very nervous. So I never could hold a job down." '"Maybe it's always doin' things that get you arrested that's making you so nervous," I said. "Havin' cops after you most of the time.
"Cause you been arrested a lot." '"You know, that could be," Ottawa says to me. "I never did think of that."
"So," Merrion said, maneuvering around an old brown pick-up truck doing sixty-five, towing a wire-fenced trailer overloaded with power tools four lawn mowers a wheeled leaf-blower; a large rototiller and racks of untethered rakes and hoes and shovels banging around with each bump and curve, "Ottawa seemed pretty familiar with what can be done to him at a trial in a court of law, so that advice didn't take long. Of course he's never really had a trial yet; his cases all plea-bargained, but he knows the warnings by heart. Along with the rest of his several rights and responsibilities as an accused. I didn't see any reason to make Ottawa stay overnight make the taxpayers give him board and room, three hots anna cot, on top of everything else so us two old hands had him on his way in a New-York-minute or so."
"And now what'll happen to him, tomorrow?" Diane said. "Is it even possible that this time somebody might finally take a look at this kid, take an interest in him, maybe even try to find a way to help him?"
"Ottawa asked me something like that. I did not say to him, as I will to you now, that he oughta know that by now, all the experience he's had. In the past there've been complaints from some visitors that such comments suggest to them we're "prejudice"; because the cops've lugged 'em, we believe they're guilty. I said "the judge'll appoint Mass Defenders to represent you. Trial in a month unless you plead before that." '"M I gonna jail this time, you figure?" he says.
'"I'm not a lawyer, Ottawa," I tell him, as of course I'm not, "and if I were I couldn't give you any legal advice. You get that from your lawyer. You know all of this stuff."
"In other words," Diane said, 'the answer to the question I just asked you would be No. The answer's No." '"Yah," he says," Merrion said, disregarding her remark. "He agrees." '"Judge'll continue the same bail," I tell him. "You don't show up; you'll owe the court another hundred. Next time the cops run you, you'll stay in jail 'til you see the judge."
"Ottawa's already coughed up his twenty-five-buck bail fee, two tens and a five. Your seasoned old pros prepare for another night in the life of crime by setting their bail money aside. Fold it up and put it in their sock or in their shoe. So if they get to drinkin' or stoned on crack or something, they wont be tempted to invest their getting'-out dough in more happiness. Of course when they get well-wired, they pull off the shoe and spend the dough. But the principle is there. Anyway, Ottawa's money's still lying there on the desk. I haven't picked it up yet.
"That goes toward it," he says, meaning the hundred for bail if he scoots and then gets caught. His tone of voice gives me my choice. I can take it as a statement or a question. In all the times that Ottawa's made bail before, it happens that he's either never gotten grabbed in Canterbury or else he's come in on a night when someone else had the detail. So he doesn't know me. He's trying me out. "Nice try, pal," I say, and I pick up the cash. "This's my fee, not your bail." "Just asking'," he says, and he grins. Just a couple old hands, like I said.
"Then I have a couple more kids who aren't as personable as Ottawa and're facing different charges, but basically got nabbed at later stages of doing the same thing: Being someplace where they shouldn't be, using stolen money to buy illegal stuff, and not being able to give the cops who happened by and caught them a satisfying explanation of why they were there and what their plans'd been. And so they got arrested.
"One of them said he actually has a steady job at United Parcel in Wilbraham. He said he was afraid being busted for buyin' crack might make him lose it. He looked very worried, so he might actually've been telling me the truth.
"One of the other two was on Essesseye. He has a physical problem:
"Bad back. Chronic," he said to me. Put his right hand back on it right above his belt, so I'd know where it hurts. I didn't believe him, but I do believe his claim that a doctor and a caseworker believed him in the past doctors and caseworkers believe many things the average person would strongly doubt and the average cop would laugh at.
"The third one was kind of vague. He said he's on workman's comp. He had a bandage on his left hand. Said he sliced it twenty-stitches' worth cutting pipe on a construction job. Could be, but he looked shifty. He had almost four hundred bucks on him, though, so it's possible he was telling the truth. Also possible he isn't, and that he got the cash from selling something that he stole, or else from selling dope. Leave that one for Probation to sort out Monday.
"Then comes my next customer. She's a young-lady barkeep at Cannonball's on the road up by the pond. She sold she's alleged to have sold, excuse me a gram of coke to a State cop. He was in civvies and he looks like a Cub Scout. She's maybe about twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. Five-five, zaftig, very blonde, long pony-tail. Unusual for a defendant in that she is Jewish.
Rosenbaum. Leah Suzanne Rosenbaum. I suppose this's going to qualify me as an anti-Semite, go along with my well-documented racist tendencies, but the fact is we don't get much weekend trade from the Chosen People in my line of work."
"They're not doing their part?" Diane said.
"Not even close to it," Merrion said. "Oh, now and then we'll get a stray, some Jewish college kid who went out partyin' with the hard-drinkin' goyim, or a middle-aged businessman who knew but forgot that Jews aren't supposed to be big drinkers and there's a good reason for that. The kid gets bagged in an underaged-drinking round-up, he's out drinkin' with his pals, not as drunk but just as under-twenty-one as they are, and therefore just as illegal, so he gets busted with them. His older landsmen: it's so unusual for him to have more than a drink or two that he doesn't realize when he's had too much, not being that familiar with the symptoms, so he tries to drive himself home. If you or I're in that same condition, wed probably make it. We really shouldn't, we know, but because we've had some practice wed probably make it all right. The Jewish guy's all over the road and promptly gets busted."
"You can leave me out of that speculation, if you wouldn't mind," she said.
"Sorry," Merrion said. "You idealistic grass-and-magic-mushroom people don't know about intoxication like we evil drinkers do. Forgive me for suggesting it. I'd make it home all right. You should stay where you are and sleep it off.
"This young lady's got a lot bigger problem," he said.
"Selling a gram of coke?" Diane said. "How big a problem is that?"
"Not big at all," Merrion said, 'if that was the full extent of it.
First offense, as this is, suspended for sure, with stern lecture.
Cavanaugh yells at her for five or six minutes, "serious offense; mighty big risk you're taking, young lady; ruin your life," so on and so forth, "go forth and sin no more. Don't let me see you in here again." Her problem's not just what she sold to the cop after her boyfriend gave him the sales pitch that got him to the bar; it's what the cops found, under the bar, where she got the toot that she'd sold: thirty-four more grams, give or take."
"I can never remember…" Diane said.
"A little over an ounce," Merrion said. "Twenty-eight grams to the ounce. That tips you off something's wrong here. It's unusual to find someone in her position with that much stuff within her reach. That's the second tier of the statute. Anything between twenty-eight and a hundred grams wins you a full five years as a guest of the Commonwealth. Mandatory minimum: they prove you had that much, you go.
If she's the retailer, and the boyfriend's her floor-walker, then the dealer that they're working for's been kind of careless, exposin' his loyal employees like that. Leavin' the help to twist in the wind.
"That's dangerous. When employees start to shiver, they usually decide to clear their throats and see if the cops wanna patch the thing up and be friends. Case like this, the guy they have to talk about usually turns out to be the guy that owns the bar. If he isn't, he's the night manager and the guy who owns the joint's either stupid or partners with him. If the cops can prove the owner let that stuff go on, his liquor license is history. He may beat a criminal charge, if he can convince a judge he wasn't smart enough to know what was going on and get a piece of the action, but that wont save his license. He's supposed to know if there's something like that goin' on in his place, and get rid of anyone doin' it. Not do nothing and let it go on. The only hope he's got is that his people go through for him, swear he didn't have a clue.
"Over twenty-eight grams though, what Leah Suzanne's got this morning, that hope becomes kinda slim. That much makes her look like a kingpin herself. Very tough for a prosecutor to make more than an ounce of the stuff into less 'n fourteen grams, half an ounce, a mandatory three, and then shrink it even more so a judge can put her on the street. This child is in serious trouble.
"She's gotta know this," Merrion said. "She oughta be in tears, out of her mind. She's not, she's as calm as an angel. She's fixing her hair. Combing and primping, you know? I'm talkin' to her; I'm explaining the charges. She's nodding, not really listenin'. I guess it must be a lotta work, long hair like that, steady part-time job. Got this elastic ruffled thingie that she's gonna put around to hold it that is in her teeth. She needs both her hands, work on her hair. One to hold it; one to brush it, really hard, yankin it between strokes.
So, she's got it all pulled around in front of her, over her shoulder there, all nice and brushed out. Looks at it; it's okay. All right: takes the elastic thingie outta her mouth, spreads it open with her left hand, pulls it on over the hair, all the way up the back her head, and then tosses her head alia way back, an' flips the hair back over her shoulder.
"By now I've finished with what the offense is. She's heard me say she's facing five years inna can. She gives me this big lovely smile, like I'd just told her: "You won the lottery, Cupcake." And then what she starts doin' is countin' out twenty-five more bucks from her bra, which's got a whole lot more'n just money in it. My own guess is that all that this young lady does extremely well on tips, tending bar at Cannonball's by making sure she always leans 'way over the counter when she serves the drinks. And my guess would also be that whenever she's had a major purchase in mind, like a car or a high-priced vacation, she knows a reliable way to pick up a little extra money on the side.
Prolly has to take her gum out for that, though she took some out and started chewin' the instant I said she was free.
"I tell her about her right to an attorney and she says: "Get my own."
I start to warn her what'll happen if she doesn't show up eight-thirty tomorrow, report to Probation. She says, really bored: "Yeah yeah, I know, a hundred bucks." Like it's all she can do not to say: "Get real I spill more'n that."
"I begin to think I must've gotten the wrong lady's rap sheet Accordin' to the one the sergeant gives me, this's her first arrest. "This your real name I got here?" I say to her. '"Leah Suzanne Rosenbaum?" '"Yeah," she says, very nasal voice, "that's who I am don't I look it?"
She laughs. "Have tah tell my mother that. She's always after me.
"Leah, Leah, heaven's sake, whyncha get your nose fixed. They say there's nothin' to it no more; I'd do it myself, I was your age. You really should give it some thought." '"You ever go by any other names?" I say to her.
'"You serious1" she says to me. Thompson's bringing her boyfriend out.
"I do not believe this," she says to him. "Can you believe this, Felipe, what this guy is doing? He's asking me if my name is my real name. You tell him, Felipe, all right? Tell him who I am here."
"Felipe's ambition in this life's to be a comedian. He sees this as the chance he's been waiting for, goes right into his shtick. The lockup's on network TV. "He don't believe you're who you are? Of course you're who you are. I take care of this for you. This's the guy here I tell?" And Felipe points to me.
'"Yeah, him," she says. She thinks Felipe is hilarious. "He's the one, thinks I'm not me." '"Certainly," says Felipe. He clears his throat and stands up straight. "This young lady here I know most of my life to be Candida Rivera, right? Candida Rivera. She is Geraldo's top woman assistant, all right? That's probably where you seen her. Onna TV all the time.
Candida Rivera." He looks her up and down. "Nice lookin' woman, don't you think? Very shapely, nice and plump." "Hey" she says, sticks her elbow in his ribs, "I'm not plump. What is this, plump7." Meanwhile he's looking innocent. "That what you want me to tell him, Candy?
Everything fio-kay now, little one?"
"This cracks her up completely," Merrion said, taking the ramp south of Holyoke connecting Route 91 with the Massachusetts Turnpike, in West Springfield. "This is the most fun I have ever seen two people having who've just been arrested on a serious charge and aren't so drunk I can't let them out for fear they might fall inna river. They are perfectly sober, deep in the shit, and happy as larks.
"Well, nothing off mine. I give him the speech. Like her, although he's a spic and has a record, minor stuff, he's got what we call "ties to the area." Family lives here. Owns a house in East Longmeadow, with a mortgage. Wife and kids. He's also got a little something going with the barmaid; nothing says that means the wife an' kiddies're no longer local ties. And a bank account, as well, he says. I've got no reason not to grant him bail. She makes his bail fee. And that's where we stand, they're just leaving, when the woman trespasser comes out. The woman they arrested inna woods.
"The name she gave is Linda, Linda Shepard. She's in her early thirties, thirty-two, the sheet said, but she looks a lot older; maybe forty or so. She's got her three kids with her. Cops've got 'em back in the conference room the lawyers use, they come in to talk to their clients. Giving them tonic and something to eat, and they put a TV in there, too. Still, they got no place else to go so they're taking part in this "life experience," finding out what it's like to get arrested, put in jail. Great for "show-and-tell," their next foster parents ever get them back to school. One of them's eleven, other two're nine and six; Sylvester and Bruce and Demi.
"Mom's new boyfriend's also joining us tonight. Ronald Bennett, early twenties, looks like he had an IQ of maybe ninety, ninety-one, last time he was sober enough so that someone could sit him down and test him. His father most likely was his grandfather, and his mother's father too. The five of them, him and her and the kids, all of them living in a cabin up there in the State Forest.
"I'm getting all of this outta the report the Park Rangers leave off when they delivered this human trash. The Department of Natural Resources guys, the ones inna green four-wheel-drive pick-up trucks always bangin' around inna bushes, the State reservations, like they're chasin' rustlers or something.
"Their guess is these people've probably been living inna woods there since around the end of June. They are not really sure. One of them thinks that's the first time he recalls seeing them. But he didn't make out a report, not having any complaint to act on, any reason to do so. So there's really no way to find out, exactly. Probably don't know themselves, these people, how long they've actually been there.
All you can do is ask them, knowin' if they do know they're gonna lie to you. It's their reflex by now, tellin' lies. And for Christ sake, why shouldn't they? What've they got left to lose?
"And anyway, doesn't matter what they tell you. All it takes is two weeks. Technically they're trespassing once they're living there more'n two consecutive weeks, fourteen days the same cabin, not paying their six bucks a day.
"Rangers say this isn't unusual, homeless people living in there, not this time of year. Rangers know they're there, see them all the time.
They don't try to hide or stay out of sight. But generally they keep moving around. Cabin to cabin, three or four of them, pathetic dirty little groups, generally a woman and her kids.
Sometimes they'll have a rat-ass sorry excuse for a man along, like this one did, and after they've been there a while, they get so they know each other. They organize, set up a system. Rotate themselves around the camps. So none of them're ever staying more'n two weeks, the fourteen days, in any one of them. But all of 'em're always there, in one camp or the other. They're not paying, of course, but the way the Rangers look at it, if no one wants to rent the cabin, why not let someone who needs it but can't pay for it go ahead and use it? "Stead of having it sit vacant anna homeless people out inna rain? Makes sense, 'less you figure the bums bein' in there means the people who can pay wont wanna come and use it.
"Anyway, you almost have to give them credit. They may be the castaways of our society, but they know the rules, and they do do their best to keep them. It's not enough, but they do try. The Rangers told the cops they generally don't bother them unless the squatters practically force them to. Like if the legitimate people payin' rent onna cabins start making complaints about their stuff bein' missin', they come back from swimming or fishing, out inna woods for the day.
It's pretty hard to lock the cabins, no one can get in. Food gets stolen, which upsets them. Get even more pissed off if their cigarettes and beer disappear although I'm not all that sure you're even technically supposed to have any beer when you're camping State property like that. Or if you can smoke inna woods; Smokey the Bear might not like it. But people do, I guess; pretty hard to stop them.
Rangers probably do the same thing as with the squatters; only go in, enforce the rules, somebody gets drunk or something, makes an issue of it. Otherwise leave 'em alone.
"But anyway, stealing. If the squatters get to doing that, stuff starts being missing, then the Rangers wouldn't have any choice but to go in and throw 'em out and make 'em leave. But not unless they have to; that'd be what it amounts to. It's not something they like to do.
"Seven cabins out there. No heat, light or running water, anything; and people're s'posed to use the latrines. Never very far from one; four three-stall portable toilets and a trailer with four showers, two for men and two for women. But they don't go to all that trouble. They do it in the woods, wipe their asses off with leaves; it's easier.
Messier, too, of course, and very unsanitary; little of that old E. coli bacteria in the drinking water; make a lot of people sick. But it's easier easier rules.
"The only reason Rangers finally went in last night and arrested this group was because some legitimate workin' people who don't have any too much money of their own, spend onna two-week vacation that they earned by their hard work, they picked out one of those cabins back last spring, and reserved it. Now it's comin' up on their turn and they want it. They've been looking forward to it ever since they put their name on the list. So, they don't live that far away, and I guess they must've gotten wind of what was goin' on, homeless squattin' in the cabins. You're liable to get up here with all of your equipment and stuff, lookin' forward to your two weeks in the woods, and there's already someone sleepin' in your house. Never heard of Goldilocks but prolly wouldn't mind getting their paws on your porridge even better, some of your beer.
"So yesterday, the husband of this family that reserved the cabin back in April, he goes to the trouble of taking a ride up there into the woods to make sure him and his family're actually going to get what they signed up for back then and've been looking forward to ever since, he starts his two weeks off with pay tomorrow. And what he finds roostin' in it is that woman and her three kids and her dirtbag boyfriend. And I guess it was perfectly obvious to him that they'd been in it a good long time, not just a week or so, and they had absolutely no intention of clearing out on his say-so when he shows up there with his wife and kids tomorrow.
"He didn't like it. I don't blame him. He got back in his car and drove back out to the office that they've got there and he bitched to the Park Rangers. Put it that way and they didn't have much choice.
They saw the guy's point and arrested the squatters. Also hadda have someone go in and then clean the place up.
"Now, I feel sorry for everybody who's down on their luck, but feelin' sorry isn't my job. My job's to bail people charged with a crime. So I look at them, this woman and her scumbag of a man, charged with trespassin." But the poor bastards've got no place to go, really.
They're livin' on food stamps, bummin' cigarettes off each other.
They're not denning up out in the woods because they're relivin' "Davy Crockett."
"These people're destitute. Kids're in rags. Mother's to blame for the squalor, of course, usin' her welfare, most likely includin' the kids' clothes-allotment checks, to buy booze for herself an' her fuckin' boyfriend, this Ronald shit bird He's also on Essesseye. I didn't see much evidence he might be in danger of getting a job.
"This means I'm now in the same box as the Rangers were. I'm sittin' in the back room of the PD lockup around ten-thirty on a Saturday night and I'm a court clerk. What the hell am I supposed to do about this fuckin' mess? By that time I wasn't exactly myself anyway, either.
What you'd say was on top of my game; I wouldn't've told you I was."
"Why? What was the matter with you?" Diane said.
"Oh I don't want to bore you with all the details of it," Merrion said.
"The day I'd been having yesterday up until then was bad enough without reliving it again today. We seem to be pretty well on our way here to having a nice day for ourselves, and I'd just as soon have it and leave yesterday back where it belongs: behind me."
"Well, you will tell me, though, you know," she said. "I always tell you, when I've had a bad day. And you're the same way: You tell me. So you might as well just get started. And that way maybe by the time we get to Tanglewood and it's time to hear the Brahms, you'll have it off your chest and we can just enjoy ourselves."
There was a fair amount of Sunday traffic westbound on the turnpike where it begins the gradual ascent from the valley of the Connecticut River into the foothills of the Berkshires, enough to keep all but the most intractable lane-weavers respectably in line, peaceably exceeding the posted speed limit by ten miles an hour, just under seventy-five.
The heavy coupe was quiet and cool, going fast in a reasonably straight line, as it had been engineered and built to do, and Merrion had Diane's listening preference, WFCR-FM, Five College Public Radio, audible but just below normal conversational level the announcer, displaying his erudition, was voluptuously saying "Bayed-rish Schmet-nah' to identify Bedrich Smetana as 'the Czech composer' of the selection just concluded, the overture to The Bartered Bride. Merrion frowned, repressing an urge to say "Shaper."
Diane misinterpreted both his expression and the reason for his silence. "Come on, Amby," she said, coaxing, 'tell me what's on your mind. That's what we do for each other."
It was the kind of unpressured relationship she meant to have with him, one in which she intended that he would feel free to behave pretty much as he would have if he had been 'off-duty' with his friends and she had not been present. So far as she knew, he did, but she didn't have it quite right.
He believed he was making more of an effort to please her than he had made for any woman except Sunny Keller. When he was with her he was always on his better if not his best behavior; or intended to be, anyway. His effort was apparent to people who had known him a long time and seen them together. Dan Hilliard warned him he was 'getting somewhat pussy-whipped, you know." He shrugged it off by saying that he supposed he was, 'a little, but Jesus, a man's gotta calm down some time, hasn't he? I mean, I may say that I'm not getting old here, but I have to admit I've been getting a little winded. Not tuckered out, no; a little tired. It hadda happen, sooner, later, I suppose; I been out raising hell a long time. Takes it out of a man.
"Plus which, even though you wont wanna, I think you gotta admit I could've made a much worse choice to slow down with, you know? I realize she's not your favorite person, and I can't say I blame you.
But what happened between you and Mercy, and how much Diane had to do with it; well, that's something that Diane and I leave strictly out of what goes on between the two of us. I try not to talk much about you when I'm around her not that she would mind because she's told me she likes you okay; she's got nothing against you."
"Well, for Christ sake," Hilliard said, 'how the hell could she, have something against me? I never did anything to her; she did something to me. I'm not saying she set out to do it, ruin my marriage, or that Mercy all by herself d never've decided she'd had enough of me, but Diane had a lot to do with what finally happened and when it happened, too, worst possible timing for me. Regardless of whether she meant to or not, everything she did had the result of turning my wife against me. I don't thank her for it."
"Yeah, I know," Merrion said. "But I still do it, just the same, leave your name out of what we talk about. I just think it's better. And I never bring up Mercy's name and Diane doesn't either, much, although I know they're still very thick, very good friends themselves. And as a result, I think Diane and I get along pretty well. She's a real good woman. I like her. She's funny; she makes me laugh, and then she doesn't get mad when I do it. And she's not always trying all the time to reform me, or corner me, either, into getting married. Measuring me all the time.
"I had that happen to me once or twice, Mary Pat would get like that sometimes, and it made me nervous. I didn't like it. And've you got any idea how hard it is to find a woman our age who wont treat a man like that? Who'll just leave him alone and enjoy life, have fun? No, of course you don't. How could you? Your idea of a woman the right age is a thirty-six-C Wonderbra on a setta jugs that haven't even been inside a polling place yet; they don't turn eighteen until next year.
"I dunno, Danny; you, runnin' a college, all that firm young flesh bouncin' around all over the place? All that scary stuff we're always hearing all the time now, sex harassment cases? I worry, something might happen. Yeah, I realize you're an old hand, you could say, been doin' it quite a while now, and so far as we know, at least, you haven't been in trouble yet. But it worries me, Danny; I worry 'bout you all the time."
He was right in his perception that Diane did not have matrimony in mind. She consciously tolerated more from him than she would have from a man she had been inspecting as a prospective husband. "Gentleman friends are different from husbands," she told Sally Davidson, a friend since their freshman year at Wisconsin. "They don't have to meet the same requirements. The standards're nowhere near high. Be honest: the first thing to look for in husbands is whether they can make sure there'll be a roof over your head and you'll have enough to eat, be taken care of financially, if the day ever comes when they can't continue to provide those things. Walter was a very good husband. He left me very well-off, much better off than I ever dreamed of being.
Even if something should happen to my practice, if I got sick and could no longer work, I'd be quite comfortable. So there's no pressure on me, no reason why I need to find another husband. Furthermore, I don't think I want one. Two weddings ought to be enough for a respectable woman. More'n that and you start to run the risk of looking showy, don't you think?"
"Always wanting to be the center of attention all the time," Sally said. She laughed.
That delighted Diane; she deliberately tried to say things that would make Sally laugh because the sound she made reminded Diane of the noise made by agitated poultry. "Uh huh, there they are again. I just heard a bunch of turkeys." Sally laughed again. Diane said: "You're not kidding me, you know. You've closed the gallery and started farming turkeys. Don't the neighbors complain?"
Sally laughed again. "Not a bunch of turkeys," she said.
"Well, what then?" Diane said. "What are lots of turkeys? "Flocks," like lots of chickens? Crows? Doesn't seem as though they should be, being so much bigger and all." '"Gaggle," Sally said, clucking away as she said it. "My father said a fair number of turkeys was a gaggle. Or was that for geese, and a "gobble," that was his collective noun for turkeys I forget."
Sally had stayed on to finish her degree in fine arts, marrying one of their classmates and supporting him by teaching drawing at Laydon Art School while he went to law school. Both becoming disappointed by the complete departure of excitement from their marriage, they had divorced after two years without rancor, thankful they had not had any children.
With her lump-sum cash settlement, reimbursing her for his keep while in law school, she had purchased a small dark-green wooden building near the campus in Madison and opened a small art gallery: "Atelier Sally."
Four years later, while working toward her MFA, she had met and married an industrial designer older than she, also divorced, who'd returned to Madison for a doctorate. They had divorced after eight years; he had been unable to reject an offer of an executive vice presidency with an internationally known firm in San Francisco; she could not bear to sell her business, by then thriving.
Now she was 'semi-living with' an oral surgeon named Tony who was thirteen years younger than she was and did as he was told. She spent almost every night at his house except when he went to conventions, and during school vacations when his two daughters came to stay for visitation. During those periods she lived in her three-room apartment on the third floor of her gallery. "Yes, I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you're right. Tony's been after me again lately to get married. For the sake of his daughters, he says. He says even though I move out while they're here, they still know we're having sex.
"I'm sure they do. It doesn't seem to bother them. I don't really think it'd bother them if I didn't move out when they come here; it's his ex-wife who'd be bothered. Might haul him back into divorce court again it's what she does instead of jogging. Six years they've been divorced, and still she's got her hooks in him. "So why get married?"
I say. "What's the percentage?" '"Well, but on that same reasoning, why not?" he says. "Then you wouldn't have to move out, even if she still was disturbed by the idea of us screwing. Then how she felt about it wouldn't make any difference."
"Well of course what I've wanted to say to that is that how his ex' wife feels about our activities doesn't make any difference now, but that wouldn't be true. I don't care how she feels but it does matter to Tony. So I haven't known what to tell him, but now I think I do.
He's at a convention in Chicago this weekend. Wall-to-wall Porsches, I'm sure. You're the shrink; you explain it: what is it about dentists and Porsches? Suppose they feel safer and more comfortable driving if they're enclosed in small spaces, 'cause that's what they work in all day?"
"I don't know," Diane said. "Do we know what the gynecologists drive?
That might give us some help here."
She was rewarded with the gobbling sound again. Sally said: "When he gets back I'm going to tell him what you said. If he starts in on me again, I'll tell him we can't because Diane says it's showy to get married three times, and I agree with her. Diane isn't getting married a third time; until she changes her mind, I'm not going to either. So there."
"And if things should ever change," Diane said, 'if I ever did decide I was looking for another husband, I don't honestly think Amby'd be someone I'd consider. I'm not sure, though, which seems to be a hallmark of the way I am with this guy not being really sure. Now I know at first-hand what "ambivalence" is.
"I like him. I spend time with him. I don't mean we're always very sweet and kind, and loving, kitchy-koo. We disagree about things. We argue a lot. We quarrel. We're both adults. Sometimes you could say we even have fights. But they don't stop us from liking each other.
He's caring and I find him interesting. I think he finds me interesting too.
"I like the things he likes to do movies and going out to dinner. He takes me to Tanglewood in the summer, even though he'd probably rather go to a ballgame. He really does his best to be agreeable. I wouldn't think of asking him to take me dancing, but I'm sure he would if I did. He probably wouldn't be very good at it I doubt he had lessons when he was a kid. But he is good about doing things he isn't really all that keen about because they're things that I want to do. He's considerate of me when we're in bed, too, very gentle. He knows how to show a girl a good time, so that part's all taken care of. I tell myself I don't know how lucky I am; a lot of women'd kill for this guy.
"But he's oh, I don't know; he's still sort of a lout. I'm not sure how to describe him to you. He isn't like any of the boyfriends either of us had, when we saw each other all the time.
"He's a court clerk. Clerk magistrate. It sounds like less than it is. He's got three assistants under him, and there're over thirty people in the office where they work. It's really a medium-sized legal business. File clerks, bookkeepers; and about a dozen or so more who work out of it, constables, deputy sheriffs and so forth. So what it amounts to is that he's sort of a cross between the CEO and CFO of the Canterbury District Court, and he reports to the presiding judge, who's the chairman of the board of this little company.
"But what he really is, is a pol. That's how he thinks of himself and how he got his official title, when he was still in his twenties. He's never changed. I suppose that's to his credit. He doesn't pretend to be anything he isn't. Or not to be anything he is. Been a pol all his life and makes no bones about it. He's good at it. The proof is that he got this prize. He isn't a pol because he's the boss; he's the boss because he's a good politician. He's proud of it.
"If you met him he'd remind you of those men you used to tell me that your uncles hung out with all the time down in Chicago. Smoking cigars and drinking whiskey; telling dirty jokes and laughing all the time, except when they were snarling; talking about all the mean and nasty, awful things that they were going to do to people. Or'd just finished doing, croaked someone good. Probably not people that you'd want to spend all of your time with; every so often you'd hear that one of them'd gone to jail. But still and all, fun to be around them; they were raffish. You could tell yourself you didn't have much choice. It was your family duty. "Crude as they are, they're also entertaining."
That meant you could let yourself go and have a good time without feeling guilty about it. They made you laugh that made them pretty nice guys, all in all, if you could overlook their rougher edges.
"Rough but good-hearted." Amby's like that.
"He's certainly not someone you'd expect to find me consorting with now, at my age, and in my widow's weeds. Nor would I. When Walter was alive I thought he was rather vulgar. Poor dear Walter just adored him, so it seemed as though we had to have him every time we had a dinner party, and I used to have to remind myself I had some friends I always asked that Walter wasn't fond of, and he never complained. So if he wanted to have Amby, and the guy that Amby worked for, with, he would say, Dan Hilliard, well, grin and bear it.
"You would not believe this Hilliard. He's a college president now. It sounds like more than it is: just a dinky little community college. But that's what he does in retirement. He used to be chairman of Ways and Means in the state legislature. A very powerful man, and that's what he still looks like now. The way he moves, how he dresses and talks; he shows you he's used to power. He would've become Speaker one day, if he'd been able to control his sex drive. I'm best friends with his ex-wife, Marcy Hilliard. I'm as close to her now as I was to you. He thinks I'm the reason she's his ex-wife. All those chesty young bimbos that he ran around with had nothing to do with it. But the memory of power's still there; if you tried to imagine what the president of a tin-pot community college would look like; what he'd act like; what he'd be like; well, you would not imagine him.
"So anyway, there I would be, having the three of them over for dinner;
Amby and Danny and Marcy; being the dutiful wife. Plus one or two other couples we know. I really don't know how I did it. I'd tell Walter to invite them, and sometimes they'd show up and Amby'd have a date with him, some woman who they'd both met in politics either their husbands weren't interested in politics, or they didn't have husbands; they weren't really old enough yet. That was the explanation anyway; one didn't ask too many questions. And Marcy would be with Dan, and wed all act like of course this new woman was with Amby. When it looked to me at least a couple times as though she could've been with either of them and most likely had been, too, one time or another. We were never completely sure.
"I never knew what to expect from Dan or Amby, what either one of them would do or say, so I sort of just learned that the best thing to do where they were concerned was just go with the flow. Whatever they did was all right. And keep telling myself all the time they were there:
"This's for Walter, this's for him. Walter's my husband and Walter's okay, and Walter likes these two guys. Walter thinks these two guys're neat. My dear husband is probably nuts."
"Then Walter died. And both of them were so kind, and so good to me, so, well, sweet, to me, really. I couldn't get over it. The last people I would've expected. And then, Amby, he knew all about this complicated investment trust that Walter had, that I didn't really know anything about: he was a big help to me there. And so, well, what can I tell you? One thing just led to another, as it usually does. You know how it can be. Suddenly there you are in bed with some man and you're not really certain who he is, or if you were sure that you wanted to be naked in bed with him. But then figured: Oh, what the heck, kinda late now. Might as well see what he's like."
"That's how it was between David and me," Sally said. "That's just how I felt the first time I slept with him: "I'm very uncertain about this.
Not sure at all that I want to be with him, I even like him enough."
And then he turned out to be good in bed. Not that I had that much to compare him with, only two or three guys, but I certainly wasn't a virgin. He made my lights blink on and off. He said I was the best that he'd ever had I think he was telling the truth. But we were healthy young horny kids; what the hell did we know? We thought great sex was all it took. Trouble was that it isn't, and that was all we had."
"I think that's a good part of what I've got with Amby," Diane said.
"But at my age, that may be enough. It's sort of like finding this great big dog around, when all I've ever been used to is cats; never had any interest in dogs. Never asked for a big friendly, clumsy dog, but now suddenly I seem to have one. And he gets into things all the time."
She heard Sally laughing.
"Yes," she said, 'well, all right. But that's what I'm saying: that may be why I keep him around. Sometimes I get impatient with him.
Sometimes I'd like to kick him, give him a good swift kick in the pants and see if that might shape him up. But I don't, or I haven't so far, at least. And I must say most of the time I do like having him around.
Even though I'm never really sure, from one moment to the next, what he's going to do, and sometimes it turns out to be something I don't like."
"Amby," she said, in the car again, 'come on now, let it out. That's what friends're for."
"Okay," Merrion said, exhaling heavily, 'sorry that I brought it up and it's against my better judgment, but okay, here we go. Yesterday morning, my day off, I start off by going to the office. This's because the judge and I, as I think I may've already told you, we've got one of our projects going on, only it's not going on exactly the way we had in mind when we started it, all right? So we've been getting a little concerned about it lately, some of the reports we've been getting."
"This would be one of those jazz improvisations with the law you two enjoy so much?" Diane said. "With absolutely no authority to do them?"
"Yeah," Merrion said, 'a diversion. What we had in mind when we decide to do this one and having in mind like you just said: we don't have to do them was to see if maybe we can save this woman. She's basically retarded. Mildly, but retarded. If somebody doesn't at least try to do something for her, she's going to get so deeply involved in the criminal justice system where we're both convinced she does not belong that she's going to get hurt. And Lenny and I just decided we don't want that to happen."
"Yes," Diane said. "This would be the woman that got involved with the evil gypsy. And I told you at the time I didn't see how you had any power to do this, and I thought it was a rotten idea. The woman who worked at the pizza parlor and she got herself mixed up in the swindle with the shrewd old lady and the bank account."
"Well, the Burger Quik onna pike, but yeah," Merrion said, 'that's the one I mean. And the judge and I know very well, going into this, what people would think of what we're trying to do here. We're not under the impression that the vast majority of people would necessarily approve, wholly if they knew what we were doing, completely on our own.
If someone was to tell them what it is we're doing and then ask them what they thought of it, a lot of them would then say: No. We're under no illusions here. We know what we're doing goes totally against the grain, completely against the grain, of the attitude that the majority of people today have toward the criminal justice system. What it should be doing and what direction it should be taking. What it ought to be accomplishing; the kind of results it should be getting, what we've got a right to expect.
"That's what they think, and that's the end of it. No matter what you tell them, you're not gonna change their mind. Inna popular mind now, the purpose of the justice system is punishment. "No, no more talkin' here. Get 'em off a the streets; we're afraid of them. Lock'em up an' then get rid of the key."
"We know this. People who're involved inna system like Judge Cavanaugh and I, who actually know how it works and what it does to people, we're not supposed to say: "Well, yeah, we hear what you're saying. But we still think what may be called for here, in this particular case, involving this particular person, is something slightly different.
Instead of assuming that the best thing we can hope for is what you know you'll get, if we just let the system work the way it normally does, let's see if maybe we can adapt the system a little.
'"See, the system assumes that offenders're fungible; every one is the same. What works for one'll work for all the others. That's why the system doesn't always work very well. Offenders're people, and people aren't fungible. And Judge Cavanaugh and I think when you get a case like this one, what you oughta do is individualize the approach. See if something a little different might not work a little better."
"You mean you've aborted another prosecution," Diane said. "That's what it amounts to, isn't it? Just sort of noodged it off to one side where the two of you can play with it for a while. With no idea at all what the outcome of this little game will be. That's why you're so bothered; something's gone wrong: just like I told you it would when you were so excited telling me a year ago about it. I knew right off it was dangerous. I told you. You wouldn't listen. You reacted the way you always do when you've asked me what I think about something you propose to do and I tell you "Not much." You got hurry and said: "Well, I'm the expert. You don't know what you're talking about."
"You did it today, not fifteen minutes ago, when I asked you a harmless question about how much hope some young kid has of ever getting help. I can't imagine why you're telling me about this poor woman again, this case that you've been screwing up, when we're trying to have a nice day."
"Well, if that's what you want to call it," he said, 'you could call it "screwing up," yeah. But if you're asking me for the term that I would use, I would say her case has been continued. Looks like just every other continuance we got, and there're dozens of 'em, literally, more'n you could shake a stick at. Technically that's what it is.
"But I would call it more of a suspension. We've continued the case, but we really don't expect… it isn't like we think there's going to come a day when this case's called for trial. No witnesses, for one thing; the old lady who's the victim was sharp but she wasn't in good health back when the incident occurred. And my understanding even then was that if much more'n another month went by before the matter came to trial, it'd be touch-and-go whether she could testify. And that was a year ago. So no, a trial in this case isn't out of the question; it's not very likely, is all. But we haven't screwed anything up."
"You're gambling," she said. "She doesn't know it, but this woman that you're trying to control… what was her name again? I can almost see it in my mind."
"LeClerc," he said. "Janet LeClerc' "Yes," Diane said, "Janet. Poor little Janet LeClerc, getting bossed around by you, who've got absolutely no authority to make her do anything, no case against her at all. But she doesn't know this, and wouldn't know what to do about it if she did she isn't bright enough.
The only reason that she's trying to do what you tell her is because you've tricked her, you and Cavanaugh. Lied to her, deceived her, conned her just like the gypsy who was conning her and the other woman to cheat the sick old lady. The sheer moral arrogance: breathtaking."
"Well, Jesus Christ, Diane," he said, 'this's for her own good. It isn't like we're doing this because we want to hurt the woman, here, you know. That's what I'm trying to tell you. That this's something that we decided we would try to do, thought it would be a good thing for us to try to do, and now it turns out, like I said, that there was a catch."
She overrode what he was saying before he could finish. "No," she said, shaking her head. "Don't make it what it isn't. You're taking an awful chance here, and a stupid one to boot. The papers get ahold of this, they'll ruin both of you, you and the judge both. And you'll deserve it. You have no authority to do what you're doing and you know it. You've told me that yourself. Place the case on file, as you put it, and then make the defendant accountable to you. Set yourself up over this unfortunate creature as though you were her keeper. Rule her life.
"It's okay. The two of you've decided in your wisdom that what's legally available, the agencies and so forth, aren't effective enough for you. They don't do things the way you'd like to see them done. So the hell with the legislature and the laws and all of that stuff. You and Danny Hilliard; that's where this got started. The two of you spent so much time thinking up ways to manipulate people to get him elected, and then when he was elected, using every bit of power he could get, any way that he could get it, to do what you two wanted done, you lost sight of everything else.
"Something happened to you. You've got this disdain for the whole process. For you it's become a charade. Everything official's a show you put on for the dummies out front, to distract them while you do what was best for them. What the law says is not important; what matters is who's got the fix in. The law's what you want the law to be, and never mind what it says; you'll decide what matters.
"Who the hell do you think you are? Barging into her life, like you own it? Who on earth gave you that right?
"No one did. You've got no right. And in the second place, just what are you going to do, to punish her, if she doesn't do what you tell her, or does what you tell her not to do? Have you given that any thought? What are you going to do to her if she decides to call your bluff, get into trouble knowing you will help her? You create a dependency when you inveigle a person into reposing her trust entirely in you, knowing she's not bright or strong-willed -that's what enabled you to do it. A low-affect personality you've compelled to abdicate responsibility that for all you know she might've been able to handle for what happens in her life. Instead you make all her decisions.
Amby, this is a dangerous game. Therapists who play it often find themselves wishing they hadn't."
"I know it," he said. "That's what I've been trying to tell you. I really wish now that the judge and I hadn't taken this thing on.
Basically what I had on my mind when I told her to come in and see me yesterday was what Sam Paradisio told me. I told you about him, my friend in federal Probation. He called me last week, said he's got information Janet's shacking up with this bank robber -most likely a stone killer, too, 'cept nobody's proved that yet. And his concern in my place would be that this vicious bastard'll decide it's time for Janet to disappear.
"Sammy thinks he's the type of guy who solves problems that way. When someone complicates his life, homicide is a thing he can do to simplify it. Sammy's afraid his guy'll kill this woman we've been trying to help."
"Marvelous," Diane said. "Perfectly wonderful. He kills her and then of course there's an investigation, and that's when it comes out that she shouldn't even've been in the situation where someone could get at her to kill her. When she got in trouble, a year ago, she should've been sent to an institution, a supervised, structured, protected environment. Either getting punished or else getting some help. And that's where she would've been, if the judge and his clerk had enforced the laws. But instead they decided to take the law into their own hands. "Cause they knew better."
"Well, naturally this worries me," Mernon said.
"I should think it would," she said. "It would certainly worry me.
"But I talk to her," Merrion said. "I have a heart-to-heart talk with her, and I tell her to stay away from this guy, have nothing more to do with him, and she assures me she will not. She'll stay away from him."
"Amby, you're a dear man," Diane said, 'but how is she going to do that? How on earth… if the reason you don't want her seeing this man is that someone who knows him thinks that he might kill her, how do you think your Sad Sack of a woman's going to make him leave her alone?
Isn't it more likely she'll set him off completely if she tries to do that? Provoke him into doing the very thing that you're afraid he'll do?"
"I don't think so," he said. "Or at least this morning, down at the station, I didn't think so. From what Sammy told me and you understand this's confidential stuff that he's only telling it to me because he has to, do his job and I need him to, to do mine, so I shouldn't really be telling it to you this's all very hush-hush and so forth."
"Right," she said. "At least 'til they find the body. But once that happens, I think you'll find it becoming general knowledge fairly quickly."
"Yeah," he said. "Well, I'm sorry I brought it up. But this squatter-lady last night, Linda Shepard, with her three kids named after movie stars and her dog-ass boyfriend, of course, to go with her and the kids: I had no idea at all what the hell to do with the five of them.
"So I say to Ev Whalen, I said: "Ev, 've you by any chance got any ideas here, what I can do with these folks? Assuming as I am of course that you don't want to keep 'em here, locked up in the jail overnight and tomorrow until Social Services opens up again Monday? I never run into anything like this before, where I couldn't release somebody when there wasn't any reason why they should be locked up, because they didn't have a place to go when they got out. Something you can do to just get these people under cover for a while, a day or two. You know?" And he just looks at me. Then he says: "No, not really, no.
They don't pay me here to have ideas." '"Well, you're a big help," I say to him. He gets kind of pissed off at me. "Hey," he says, "don't look at me. You've got these people here charged with a crime and you don't know what to do with them. I'm not in charge of homeless."
"Well, he's right, isn't he?" Diane said. "It isn't a crime to be homeless. The police aren't supposed to do anything except call the proper authorities when it looks like otherwise they might freeze to death, starve, or die without immediate medical care. Back when we were building the new station, I don't recall making any provision for that kind of problem, facilities for short-term family shelter."
"We didn't," Merrion said. "There aren't any."
"Well, doesn't that tell you something?" she said. "The sergeant was right."
"Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you, for Christ sake," Merrion said. "If you'd just… you know what it is about you people all the time, that gets on people's nerves? It's that it's always so important to you, matter what the situation is, to never get excited. Act like anything ever really mattered to you. You've always got to be completely in control. Always superior, cool, calm and collected, never upset about anything. That and the fact that you just will not listen. When somebody tries to tell you something that you may not understand, maybe don't know all the facts about even though you always think you do; always sure of that well, you got no time to hear it.
"You're always sort of lookin' down your nose all the time, at people like me who look to you as though we're getting' so riled up and everything, like I guess I am right now; doing things you look at, and then sit back and say: "Well, that's a stupid idea." The reason you can do that and the reason we can't, and that we do what we do, is because we're in the situation. We don't have your luxury, being able to stand back and shake our heads and say: "No, I don't like the looks of that one. I wont take that case. That problem don't appeal to me.
Not my specialty at all. Take it away. Find someone else. Don't leave it for me to get rid of."
"We're the people running the places where those people and problems you don't want get taken away to. We are the last fuckin' stop. After us there ain't nobody else. Every day we're in situations where it's pretty clear someone'd better do something, someone's got to do something, and fast, or something bad is gonna happen and we'll all be in the shit. The wheels'll come off a the world.
"To deal with this kind of problem day after day, we have to have passion. You can't do the hopeless work that we have to do every day without taking risks, and you can't take those risks without passion.
Without believing… not that you're better'n anybody else, or that someone else couldn't do it better… just believing that you can do something that will make things better, because you know that you are it: there is nobody else. Behind you is the edge; people who get past you fall off. There is nobody behind you. Better, worse, almost as good: doesn't matter, they're not there there is nobody else.
"I know I'm not saying this's right. I can't help it. I'm doing it like I always try to do everything else: the best way I can in the time that I got. That is the best I can do. Me and Danny're the kind of people who believe that people have to be taken care of; the work has to get done, any which way you can do it. And if this means you have to get excited, and take some risks, that's what you do: you get excited and you take them. So you can get something done. Because that is a damned sight more important than just making sure that you're not losing your cool all the time, and that's why we're doing what we are doing to poor little Janet LeClerc'
She did not reply but reached her left hand forward and turned up the volume of the music. The traffic remained heavy but well-behaved all the way to the Route 20 exit in Lee and he took that west to Route 7 north up to West Street in Lenox. They talked about a movie that had cost more than 100 million dollars to produce and was doing almost no business, and how long it had been since there had been any new movie that either of them or anyone they knew had been eager to see.
The seats that Rachel had given to Diane for the concert were in the center of the shed twenty-two rows back from the stage, close enough so that they could see that the musicians in their shirt-sleeves in the orchestra were sweating at their work, and that both the piano soloist and the guest conductor had put on even more weight than their newspaper pictures and preview stories had suggested. The conductor had evidently taken no pains to moderate the volume and the tone of the orchestra so that the pianist's work on Brahms's second concerto would be presented to best advantage, but the soloist's work was perfunctory so that no real harm was done when the orchestra submerged it by playing too loudly.
At dinner at the Red Lion they were seated next to a table of six hosted by a red-faced man in his seventies who provided the entertainment for everyone at their end of the dining room by indignantly relating how he had lost a great deal of money at Saratoga the preceding day, more than he cared to say, betting on horses he had carefully selected from records he had spent many winter-evening hours systematically compiling and analyzing on his computer.
He said he believed the horses had 'lost on purpose. I'm convinced of it. It wasn't the jockeys it was the goddamned horses. They were doing it deliberately. Stumbling, bearing out. All sorts of stupid mistakes. Any fool could've seen it. It was a conspiracy, a conspiracy of horses. They'd gotten together in the barns or in the paddock or someplace or other and cooked it up. Just to make me lose all my money and feel bad and look like a damned fool in front of my friends."
Then leaving the track, chagrined and downhearted, 'what did I do but run into Dorothy," one of his ex-wives, 'just what I needed." She had insulted him loudly in front of a great many strangers. "She disparaged my sexual prowess, can you believe it? Asked me if I could get it up "even once a year now." The nerve of the damned stupid cow.
When the reason she gave all the papers when she left me eighteen years ago was that I wouldn't leave her alone for a minute. I couldn't deny it, it was true. But I should've anyway. I must've been out of my mind." Diane and Merrion listened and then laughed along with all the other eavesdroppers, and the red-faced man beamed at all of them.
When they got back to the grey house with the yellow door on Pynchon Hill a little before 10:00, Diane invited him to come in for coffee, which in their code was her way of informing him that she would make love if he really wanted to, but he said he had a full day ahead of him and thought he better head home, and she was not displeased when they lightly kissed good-night.
On the job that Monday morning, Judge Leonard Cavanaugh at sixty-eight was the senior justice in terms of years of service in all the seventy-one district courts of Massachusetts, 'in my thirty-seventh year of presiding over routine arraignments and other foolishness."
Taking no pains to conceal the immensity of his accumulated weariness even on the morning of the first day of the week, sometime around 10:00 when he was 'good and ready," he would take his place in his tall black chair behind the bench in Canterbury Courtroom 1. There as usual he would regard Merrion, whatever news that he came bearing, and the world and his own place in it the same way he had gradually come to view nearly everything: disapprovingly, usually powerlessly, with what he intended to convey as quiet resignation bordering on noble endurance.
"If you saw him you'd have no trouble believing he's the judge who's been sitting the longest. He looks it," Merrion would say, when Cavanaugh's occasionally-puzzling, sometimes-intemperate behavior on the bench came up in conversation. "He looks like it's been damned hard work, too; like it hasn't been easy for him. He doesn't look as though what he's been doing all these years's been a job that involved the use of his brain which a lot of times, he'll tell you, it hasn't.
"That's just the way they write it up." He looks like it's been heavy lifting. Hods of brick. Or he had to wear a wooden yoke, like they put on oxen, throw his shoulders into it all day, move a lot of heavy weights from here to over there. And then come in tomorrow and drag 'em back again. But he says he wont retire until they make him."
Cavanaugh had been appointed an associate justice of the Canterbury District Court in 1958 at the age of twenty-nine. Like many lawyers he had in his student days begun to harbor an ambition to become a judge, seeing the judicial selection as official validation of professional distinction. But in 1958 his career history although bright was rather short. His student days were not yet six years behind him. His resume recorded two years in the army's Judge Advocate General's corps discharging the ROTC obligation he had undertaken both to avoid the draft during his years at the College of the Holy Cross and then at Fordham Law School and for the Army Reserve pay that helped to subsidize the education and four years teaching commercial law at Northeastern Law School. He had also begun to lay the foundation of a money-making outside practice; he was Of Counsel to a seven-lawyer Boston firm specializing in corporate law. He had published two ponderous scholarly articles in the Hastings Law Journal on provisions proposed for inclusion in Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code:
Secured Transactions. They had been cited favorably by two obscure commissions established by state legislatures considering the UCC; the Maryland commission had invited him to contribute two days of expert testimony, paying his expenses and a consulting fee of $1,200.
He had thus positioned himself nicely to make a lot of money when the day at last arrived as it did, a decade later when the UCC governed almost all business transacted in the United States; all he had to do was persist in the same fashion and his measured opinions about what the new law really meant and actually allowed 'would carry considerable weight," a euphemism lawyers use for 'worth big money."
In those days when he now and then allowed his mind to stray from productive thought and muse about his career, he usually thought ruefully about the time, energy and passion that his work was taking from his days and many nights, and wondered guiltily whether what was left for his wife, Julia, and their three young children was truly adequate. They were building a good life for themselves in their new Royal Barry Wills-designed colonial-reproduction home in Sudbury the Maryland consulting fee had really boosted their hopes that soon they'd actually be able to afford it and he was quite content with the progress he had made, reasonably sure that he had made full use of his time, intelligence, education and good fortune. His only real uneasiness came from his awareness that he was selfish, neglecting his family by working too hard, too many hours, as much because he revelled in it, knowing that he did it well, as because it was a dead-certain lock to lead to his advancement and the enrichment they would share. He soothed his conscience by telling himself that a young matron who insisted on a custom home in a wealthy suburb and started making Ivy League plans for her children before delivering them assumed the risk of spousal inattention.
So, unlike most prospective judges inwardly rejoicing but striving mightily to blush when their appointments are at last announced, Leonard Cavanaugh when singled out had not considered, wanted, sought or anticipated nomination to the bench in Canterbury, a town that he had never visited or any other judicial nomination for that matter, that soon. Consequently he was not prepared to evaluate the development carefully, in order to decide calmly what he ought to do.
His surprise designation had been an exaction made upon a Republican governor by Cavanaugh's doting bachelor uncle, Andrew Finn, June Finn Cavanaugh's elder brother. He lived in West Boylston and owned and operated a Pontiac dealership in Worcester. He was short, five-six or so, barrel-chested and bow-legged; he had a seaman's rolling gait.
"People think that I look funny. My own dear sister says that, so I guess it must be true. I think it gives me an advantage when I deal with people. While they laugh at me, I take their money."
In the late 1940s, like many other dealers in the car-starved, newly prosperous postwar United States, Finn without making any significant changes in the way that he'd been doing business since 1937 had suddenly started making lots of money, selling every new Pontiac and second-hand car he could get his hands on. He was delighted with the new prosperity, but he was not deluded by it into thinking that the Pontiac Division of GM had stumbled upon a secret formula that forever would sell cars to people who didn't need them.
Privately he believed that the product he was selling 'costs too much.
It's nice to have, but isn't necessary. You can get along without what I have to sell. Your life wont be as easy or convenient, or anywhere near as much fun but it'll be a helluva lot cheaper. The chief reason that most people have for buying cars, Pontiacs or any other kind, is because they want them and they're not thinking straight. Their ego's gotten the better of 'em. Otherwise they'd never take on the debt like most of 'em have to, buying something they don't actually need. Like they do milk and bread, a place to live, electric light and so forth."
He believed further that the only way to sell more of his particular brand of the product than other dealers sold of theirs was by selling himself. He did that first by making himself well-known in the community where he had his place of business, and secondly by doing everything he could to ensure that its most prominent and respected leaders were seen smugly driving his product. "So the other people seeing them get the fool idea that the way to get prestige which I guess means looking like you've got a lot of power and money is by giving me most of your money to get yourself a Pontiac'
He had therefore commenced to use his new riches partly to support substantial and successful-looking candidates for national and statewide elective public office who shared at least some of his political views. They appreciated his generosity and happily agreed to be transported and thus seen and photographed -during their campaigns and subsequent official duties arriving and departing from widely publicized events and riding in parades in highly polished red-and-white Bonneville convertibles, glossy ivory-on-russet Star Chief hardtop coupes and shiny dark blue Catalina sedans from Finn Pontiac in Worcester, "The Friendliest Pontiac Dealer in Central Massachusetts At Finn Pontiac, Everyone Wins."
All of Uncle Andy's choices were Republicans. Except for his three congressmen, from the 1st, 10th and 12th districts, his state senator and his district attorney, most of his winners three mayors, a governor's councillor, a secretary of state, one attorney general, and his biggest prize, this governor had been electral long-shots coat-tailed into office during the Eisenhower years, doomed on arrival by overwhelmingly Democratic voter-registration figures to be losers the first time they sought re-election without Ike at the top of the ticket, meaning: after 1956.
When he wanted something from them that he thought his proven friendship entitled him to ask, Uncle Andy frankly and mercilessly reminded them that he had not become well-fixed in the automobile business 'by believing in the fuckin' Easter Bunny."
Finn's governor he called him that: "My governor' was no exception. He had told the candidate before he was elected that he would most likely win, but that his prospects for re-election would not be promising.
After the election Finn did not shilly shally He made it clear to his governor early in his term that what he wanted in exchange for his support was 'a little present for my kid sister, June. She's married to a jerk, a failure, never liked the guy. But her son, my nephew Leonard, Lennie's a good kid. Worked his way through college, Holy Cross. Good school, everything I hear, at least, nothin' wrong with that; and then Fordham Law School. He's teaching law now, at Northeastern. And not only that, he's got some sense. Unlike most of the assholes you're gonna find you hafta appoint alia time. So I want you to make Lennie a judge. This'll make June happy, and she's a good kid herself, even if she does say that I'm funny-lookin'. It's the least I can do, my kid sister."
The governor at first resisted, saying that although Leonard was obviously smart and able, he was too young. His nomination would become a cudgel that the governor's next opponent would use to 'beat me over the head with," denouncing him for cronyism. Finn said that unless the governor somehow changed "Boston Harbor into beer with a good creamy head, and make sure you get the credit, you know just as well as I do you're not going to have a chance against any Democrat two years from now. All he'll have to do to win is stay alive 'til the votes're cast and counted."
Therefore, Finn told the governor, what was important was not whether the appointment of Finn's nephew to the bench would bring resounding cheers from the public. "It's whether you remember who your friends've been, and do the right thing here, nominate my sister's fuckin' kid while you still got the power to do it, 'fore you get booted out on your ass. I don't ask for much from anybody, Eddie, even when I've got every right to ask. But this one I am asking; this one I want from you. So don't go making it hard for me here, all right now? He'll be an excellent judge, and his mother'll be proud of him. I'll even be happy I'll be the one who's grateful to you, 'stead of you being grateful to me. All you got to do here is just get him appointed, while the appointing's good. It's simple; even you can do it without breaking a sweat. And it's not only something I want from you here; it's also the right thing to do. God'll reward you in heaven."
When the governor came back and said his legal counsel told him that the Canterbury District Court judgeship was the best that he could do 'without having them get up a mob to tar and feather me," Finn believed him and told his favorite nephew that if he knew what was good for him he'd 'grab it while I still got it within reach. I dunno how many other sponsors you've got that hang around with guys who want to be governor, or what their chances are, but Eddie is the very first one I've ever had, in my life and I been tryin' a long time, at no small expense to me. Which is why I'm as sorry for my own sake as I am for you to tell you it don't look to me as though he's gonna last, you know? Looks like a one-termer, I'm sorry to say, once Ike retires and plays golf full-time. And I can't promise you I'm gonna have a replacement for him real soon. It doesn't look good at all."
Leonard was filled with consternation. Until then a registered but politically inactive Democrat, he had in his four years of teaching acquired three close friends among the faculty. Two of them were slightly older; the third was nearly twice his age. He asked them for advice. They told him unanimously, earnestly and truly, that they were prescinding from their pronounced Democratic loyalties as they advised him not to accept the nomination. They said that while they fully understood that the temptation to embark upon a judicial career at such an early age was very strong, if he was as smart as they knew him to be he would resist it. They said that while his considerable intellectual powers, maturity of judgment and evenness of disposition satisfied them that his youthfulness was irrelevant to the issue of fitness and judicial temperament, his possession of those qualities at so early an age established him as 'a bright and rising star."
They said it would be only a matter of time, and not very much of that, either, before someone tapped him 'as a non-political prestige appointment. Every politician needs one now and then, to take the stink off the cat and dogs he has to appoint so the public doesn't gag on the payoffs." They predicted confidently that patience would be rewarded within ten years 'at the outside' with a nomination either to an appellate court, 'where by rights you ought to be, with your writing ability and all," or, failing that, 'an important position in Washington.
"What you've got to do is wait," they said. "Don't be in a hurry. Then when you die, you'll be famous, which's really the only way to be dead.
Everyone says so. You wont have all that good a view of it yourself, but everyone who's still alive and knew you will sincerely wish you were also still alive, so you could be around to see it. "What a turnout, my God. What a shame Lennie's dead. Can't you just see him, if he could be here and see this, am I right? What a kick he'd get out of it."
"And these people wont be just saying they're sorry; they'll really mean it. Even if they did think sometimes while you were still alive you seemed pretty full of yourself. Once you're safely dead, they'll stop thinking like that. They'll be in awe, you were so famous. How many people get that kind of tribute, huh? How many people can actually say that, that people were actually sorry when they died.
"Except your family, maybe. When they see the big turn-out and hear all the fine speeches, they'll be so proud of what you were when you were alive they'll almost be glad you're finally dead. Now without having your big ego around, your grieving heirs'll finally get some real enjoyment out of your career. Even if they do find out later you weren't carrying quite as much insurance as they would've thought you might've, man of your prominence."
Leonard demurred. He said it seemed to him that judicial service while still fairly young would enhance his resume and therefore as his hair began to turn grey, as theirs had, and he had to start buying pants in larger sizes and pills to treat various ailments, as they had told him they had been obliged to mandate regular promotions to higher and higher courts, 'like they had to do with Ben Cardozo, until you finally get to the level where the only higher court is the one where Moses sits."
His colleagues said that would probably be so if the appointment were at least to the superior court, extended as a prophylactic early coronation preferably by a Democratic governor compelled to make and thus to disinfect a couple other highly unsanitary nominations, 'maybe a whole string of out-and-out stinkers. Then your precocity would count, and in your favor. Then you'd be getting the nod because you're a legal Mozart, you're so bright, and just like it didn't matter he was only four when he was writing symphonies and stuff because the music was so good, it wouldn't matter with you that you're such a young lawyer, because you're such a brilliant young lawyer.
"But," they said, 'since it's to the district court and it's being offered by a practicing Republican, it'll be the kiss of death. If you take this thing, you'll regret it the rest of your life." They said it would be deemed, correctly, a patronage bonbon, paying off his uncle.
"So although your precocity still counts, now it counts against you.
Now you're not getting the job even though you're young, because you're so bright; you're getting this job because of uncle's pull, even though you're still wet behind the ears."
They said acceptance of the Canterbury nomination would forever nullify Leonard's potential usefulness as a high-class nominee. "Doesn't matter, he's your uncle; that he's family and he loves you very much.
It's a hard world. You let somebody pimp you, fact he's kinfolk doesn't matter; still makes you a common whore."
Leonard agonized. He said: "But look, it's not that easy. If my uncle hadn't gone ahead and done this so I got this nomination, that'd be a different thing. Then of course I'd wait; I'd have to. I'd have no choice. I'd be just another meek and blushing virgin, hoping to be kissed some day if not by an ugly governor looking for an appellate judge or a senator with warts but a prime federal vacancy, then at least by a handsome prince dangling a powerhouse deanship. But now that Andy's gone and done this, other people know, how shameless I am.
No more playing hard to get: "Oh gee, I don't know. I'm not really sure." They know Andy didn't do this because what I really wanted was a Raleigh ten-speed bike; I really do want a judgeship. Trouble is the Canterbury slot was all the governor had in stock the day that Andy went shopping.
"Well, too bad for me, that's how it turned out, but it is the way it turned out. I want to be a judge, and I've got this bird in hand. Not the best judgeship in the world, no, not one I ever wanted. But still, an honest-to-God judgeship. One more than most guys who want a robe 're ever going to see or have, mine to accept or reject.
"What if I turn it down and never see another one? It could happen.
Say No, and bide my time, wait for a better one. People aren't stupid; they'll know what I'm up to. They'll say: "This young man does not suffer from lack of self-esteem."
"Suppose they then decide: "Okay, so that's how he feels, little prick: wants to start off at the top. Holdin' out for First Circuit Court of Appeals. Fine. Best of luck to him." And then I never get another one. What do I do then? I'll regret it all my life."
His friends said that was the sort of anguish that generally made it much easier to give sound advice than to take it. Julia said his friends were right and he should heed what they told him, even if it did mean that Uncle Andy, who'd been known to be vindictive, would be very angry at him.
"Forget about him, Len," she said. "You can't make your decisions on the basis of how you think Andy Finn's going to react. It's your life, not his; you're the one who has to live it -even though he'd like to run it. There's a way to tell him nicely. You don't have to come right out and say it, that it's a third-rate judgeship and it isn't good enough for you even though that is the reason. And if Andy still gets mad, so he never tries to get you another nomination, well, that's the way it goes."
Julia also said that she was prepared to face the probability -Leonard had seen no reason to mention it to his friends that if he turned down Canterbury Andy would probably cut him out of his will. "My mother and I're the only kinfolk he's got. This isn't small change that we're talking here; this's serious money. Outside of what he spends on politicians, Andy's very frugal; he's really got no vices. He could pay off our mortgage tomorrow out of petty cash.
"Well, that'd also be too bad, if he disinherited you," Julia said, 'although I doubt he would. Because as you say, who else's he got? And if he leaves it all to your mother, you'll get it anyway just have to wait a little longer."
"Unless my father spends it first," Cavanaugh had said.
"She wont let him," Julia said. "She's got him well in hand. Look, this's being silly. Even if you never get another offer, you'll be better off. We'll have each other, our life together; you'll be happy, knowing what you did was right."
Leonard had reluctantly rejected everybody's counsel and called his Uncle Andy. Choking back his misgivings, he expressed deep gratitude for the appointment, and with much fanfare became Associate Justice Leonard B. Cavanaugh. In the Transcript Freddie Dillinger called him 'the Boy Judge of Canterbury," reapplying the label every time Cavanaugh was in the news until his own retirement, thirty-two years later.
The faculty colleague twice Cavanaugh's age in 1961 took a leave of absence to become special counsel to the US Senate Commerce Committee investigating price-fixing in the sugar industry. Not wanting to leave Boston and her friends, his wife opposed the move but went along when he made it, becoming sad and bitter. Three years later when his leave was about to expire, he notified the law school that with his wife terminally ill in Georgetown Hospital he could not return to Boston. A year and a half after that, widowed and then newly remarried to Sen.
Harriet Fathergood, D." Ore." he resigned at seventy-two as chief counsel to become 'rich in my old age; now that I've found out what they mean by "better late than never." He became chief of legislative liaison for Coldhammer Industries, an international conglomerate concentrating on the manufacture of packaged foods the fourth-largest consumer of raw sugar in the world.
The second of Leonard's colleagues went on to become general counsel to the New England Council, serving eight years until appointment as Under Secretary of Commerce and later his selection as head of the Latin American Affairs desk of the World Bank.
The third became an associate justice of the superior court. Later he gracefully declined a federal district court judgeship, confident that he would be elevated as he was, six years later to associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. In that capacity he wrote a majority opinion breaking new ground in the resolution of conflicts between the laws of privacy and those of creditor's rights. Soon after the SJC decision, his book-length treatise on effective legal protection of privacy in the computer age was published, immediately becoming the bible of the telecommunications industry. Relinquishing his SJC seat at sixty-five, five years before mandatory retirement age, he became Of Counsel to Magruder, Magrid and Locksley, P.C." at 1334 Connecticut Ave." N.W." Washington counsel to Mar Sat Corp." a leading manufacturer of satellite communications equipment.
From time to time Leonard found their names in the newspaper, or inadvertently saw them interviewed on television. He mentioned those sightings when he encountered the SJC judge at Massachusetts bench and bar events. He supposed his efforts not to sound wistful were not entirely successful, but even though his old friend was invariably warm and cordial, and tried hard to pretend that one judgeship was much like any other, they found as the years went by that they had less and less to talk about. Many times in the course of many evenings, in conversations that seemed to him, in the comfort of good food and wine, to merit some reflection on his long career in Canterbury; each time what he said, after shaking his head once, was: "Well, it's simple, isn't it? I made a big mistake."
"Then everybody's supposed to feel sorry for him," Merrion perceived, and reported to Hilliard, back when Cavanaugh at fifty-four was dourly observing his 25th anniversary on the bench, Reagan was approaching the end of his first term as president, and the old dancing school on the second floor above High Street in Holyoke was still available for private conversations late in the evening. "And I did, I used to feel sorry for him, I first went in there, heard him say something like that. One of his old pals'd gotten some great new job and his name in the paper, and Lennie was all depressed."
Merrion snuffled, thickening his voice into the On the Water' front pug's clot: '"I tell yuh, Charlie, I could ah been a contend ah Well maybe but then again, maybe not. What if that's all nothin' but the good old stuff? Maybe if he'd turned it down, never become the Boy Judge, famous from border to border border of Holyoke, border of Ludlow maybe he never would've gotten another bite of the apple.
"Maybe… ah yes, that sad word maybe. He wants is you to tell him you think if he hadn't taken Canterbury, that instead of everybody saying now that some guy he used to teach with has a mortal lock on the next Supreme Court vacancy, it'd be him; it'd be Lenny. He waits for you to do that, say that, grease up his ego for him like a dog waits for you to finish doing whatever you're doing to that prime-rib bone with those pathetic little teeth of yours, and give it to him, who needs it; can handle it; knows what to do with the thing. Well, boo-fuckin'-hoo; you don't feel sorry for him and so you don't say it.
And then when you don't suck it up and lie to him, tell him what he wants to hear, he sulks for the rest of the day.
"He's got no idea how he tempts me when he does that. He's got a question? I got a question as well. Does he know why his job was created? Arthur and young Roy Carnes did it for their pal, Judge Spring. Lennie was the jay vee team. The reason for his job was to free up Chassy's afternoons. This was years before I got my job, but according to Larry Lane courthouse people used to feel sorry for Lennie then. Chass treated him like a servant. Made it very clear to him and everybody else the only use that he had for him was to do the scut-work, clean up all the messy cases he left behind when he snuck out at lunchtime to play the market.
"Havin' heard what the guy hadda take, now and then I used to feel sorry for him. But now I don't, anymore. It's not a bad job that he's got. It's taken good care of him, all of these years. He didn't come from big money although until a few years ago he expected to have a lot some day; he thought he was gonna come into a bundle, this uncle of his went to Jesus. Then Unk died and someone else got it. Too bad for Lennie. But just the same, since before he turned thirty he's never had to worry once about a paycheck. No one's gonna lay him off. If he gets hurt on the job, or him and the beautiful Julia get sick, the doctor bills're paid. And when the day finally comes, he decides he'll retire, state pays him a pension and covers her, too, long as they're still alive.
"You know what? He's got a real beef about that, lifetime-security deal. He hasta contribute to his pension fund, deductions from his paycheck. "Federal judges don't have to do that," is what he says.
"While they're still sitting they get all they earn, after the taxes, of course, and then they retire on full pay."
"Okay, juicy deal, but so what? He isn't a federal judge. Most of the rest of us aren't either, and we have to contribute don't we? I said that to him once, he's pissin' and moanin', there isn't much left of his check by the time he gets it: "Hey," I say, like I just thought of it, "I have to contribute to my pension plan. What're you gripin' about?"
"I almost had him. He almost said what he would've regretted; had it right onna tip of his tongue. "You're not a judge; you're a clerk."
"He could see me thinkin': "Come on, come on, say it." He caught himself just barely in time. If he says it then I'm gonna say it: "And I'm not a federal judge, either, your Honor. No one in this courthouse is." He din't say anna thing "So okay, maybe he's right: His job's not the best deal inna world. But still, you come right down to it, it isn't a bad deal at all.
Twenny-five years ago, he knew, didn't he, what it was he could expect?
Sure he did. It was all laid out plain for anyone to see, even way back then. He wasn't stupid, was he? He didn't first learn to read after he took the job; he isn't saying that, now. So he knew what the deal was, and he accepted it. Hell is he bitchin' 'bout now?"
On Monday morning at 10:10 Cavanaugh buzzed Merrion in his office and Merrion without needing to answer the phone picked up his portfolio and his brown-enameled metal box of files, the paint worn away from the lower back corners by his thumbs over the years, and headed up the private east corridor to the door to the hallway that led from Cavanaugh's chambers directly onto the bench in Courtroom 1.
The eight rows of benches behind the bar enclosure were overcrowded, usual on Monday mornings, filled with the weekend yield of State and local police activities in the Four Towns and on the turnpike. Most of the people had been in the courthouse since it opened at 8:30. They were restless. There was a lot of traffic back and forth through the brass-studded, coarse grained green-leather-padded swinging doors that opened into the main corridor and foyer outside the rear of the courtroom.
Those who were defendants had reported to the probation office in the basement of the courthouse for intake processing. Many had accompanied defendants, in order to provide moral support, additional bail money or legal advice or because they were small children of defendants who had no one to babysit and would have risked additional charges of child neglect if the kids had been left alone and a DSS caseworker dropped by to make one of the periodic unannounced supervisory visits required by regulations. The children cried and squirmed and fidgeted and dropped their plastic nursing bottles on the floor, so that their mothers had to grope around under the benches and pick up the bottles and wipe the non-spill mouthpieces on their sleeves. They slapped the children and hissed at them angrily, several of them in Spanish. Then they looked around anxiously in case someone official might have seen and recognized them as they hit their children, and had taken out a spiral notebook to write down details of their unfitness as parents.
There were thirty-four matters on the criminal list. Judge Cavanaugh was seated behind his desk. He cupped his hand over the microphone on the bench that fed the tape machines recording all public utterances at every session, and leaned forward so that his face and Merrion's were barely a foot apart. "Hate to tell you this, Judge," Merrion said in a low voice as soon as he had reached the clerk's desk, one step down in front of the judge's, and turned his back on the crowd, 'but as soon's you get through arraignments today, we got four domestic violence cases onna list I gotta ask you to hear. We got these two women comin' in, new, but the usual thing say they want restraining orders, husbands battin' them around. And there's a guy today, too, little change of pace Ellsworth Ryan's his name wants one. I told him he hadda come in front ah you.
"I dunno what to make of this bird. He looks like he should be able to take care of himself all right, but he says she's always telling him he's got to sleep sometime. That's all she says, nothin' else, but that's enough for him: he thinks that means that when he sleeps she's gonna get him. So, what do I know, huh? Ellsworth says he hasn't been able to get any rest. He's afraid to go to sleep. Says he's afraid if he does, his devoted wife Sheila, she gets a few too many drinks in her, she'll come and stick a bread knife in him while he's got his eyes closed and he can't defend himself.
"And then we got the Federico matter comin' up again, for your listening pleasure. Johnny Federico. His wife's name is Tishie, you recall. You oughta be pretty close to being on a first-name basis now.
You put the paper on him, week ago, and far as we know, until yesterday he's okay, left her alone. Now she says she wants him violated. Had him picked up on the restraining order early last night. Cops held him overnight in the lock-up up the Pond, meditate upon his sins.
"She says he come home Sunday evening; he'd been to the ballgame, Sons of Italy from Holyoke hired a bus, took it down to Fenway Park, an' he had too much beer to drink. Must've got it onna bus. That horse-piss they sell at the ball-park now hasn't got enough kick in it give a young nun half a charge. Got back to Holyoke all fulla beer, and he decided: "Well, this'd be an awful good time, go back home and violate the order." Which he knows perfectly well he's not supposed to do, since you told him to stay the hell away from her and leave her alone.
But he went there and started whalin' the shit outta her again.
Neighbors called the cops but he either heard 'em comin' or else he got tired and left when they got there he was gone. She makes out a complaint though, so they're onna lookout for him, and they grab him six this morning, someone spots him sleepin' it off inna park. So that's what he did last night. And if he tries to tell you that it wasn't him, ask him who it was; we gotta find him, 'cause he's mean.
Her face's all bruised. He kicked her a couple times too, for good measure. Good thing for her he's not a soccer fan, he does this after a baseball game.
"Says she wants him put away this time. Ludlow, Lancaster; anywhere they got a bed anna lock onna door he can't open from the inside. Not changin' her mind this time, backin' down from this man any more."
"Uh huh," the judge said, 'well, we'll see about that, wont we? She has before, I recall."
"Twice," Merrion said. "Twice she's done it to us. Come in and said "This time he's got to go." And then when you tell him he's gonna do six months, she's starts to scream and holler, "No, no, you can't do that. How'm I gonna pay the rent, you put my Johnny in jail? Never see my man again."
"Ain't love grand," Cavanaugh said.
Four of the matters on the docket that Monday were bail revocations; the defendants had attracted attention to themselves by doing something sufficiently annoying to interest cops. The cops instead of immediately arresting them had detained them long enough to type their names into the computer. There without surprise they had found there was no need to make a new arrest of the annoying person, necessitating another paperwork-hassle to take him out of circulation; he'd already failed to show up to answer charges lodged against him by other cops on one or more previous occasions. Therefore he could be rousted on the basis of the existing paperwork and taken off the street.
Three were hearings on probation-office motions for orders to commit probationers who had exceeded the considerable patience of their supervising officers, usually first by not bothering to show up for their appointments and then making it worse by disappearing when the probation officers went looking for them.
One case was a State Police turnpike speeding ticket charging the defendant with operating his motor vehicle in excess of 90 miles an hour, but not with operating so that the lives and safety of the public might have been endangered. This meant that after an exhilarating pursuit with whooping siren and flashing multi-colored strobe-lights through early-morning thin or non-existent other traffic the cop had arrested him for doing triple digits but otherwise driving competently, and that the driver once pulled-over had been sober and polite, with all his papers in good order, and had not insulted the cop's intelligence by trying to lie his way out of it. The cop had given him a break, so now the guy was going to see whether being sober and polite maybe even contrite in the courtroom would get him found Not Guilty, thus rescuing him from a fine, surfine and costs that would set him back just under $400, and guarantee a surcharge on his car insurance every year for the next five that would make him feel like he was bleeding from the ears each time he paid it. If the cop showed up to give evidence, the gambit wouldn't work, but neither Merrion nor Cavanaugh ever blamed a guy for trying.
There were four drunk-and-disorder lies two of them combined with charges of making an affray, the arrests having been made in bars in Hampton Pond and Cumberland after the managers carried out threats to call the cops if noisily quarrelsome patrons refused to quiet down.
There were two cases of driving under the influence of alcohol. There were three narcotics cases, two of them the people Merrion had met in the Canterbury lock-up Saturday night.
"On the Rosenbaum matter," Merrion whispered to Cavanaugh, 'the Rosenbaum and also the Fernandez matter, Leah Rosenbaum and Felipe Fernandez, his goes with hers. She's the barmaid up at Cannonball's.
You can see her sittin' back there in the third row, over to the left beside the wall, young broad with big tits and a long blondish ponytail, see her over there?"
"Sleeveless red blouse, tight white jeans?" Cavanaugh whispered. "She the one that just stood up there?"
Merrion turned enough so that he could sneak a glance over his right shoulder. Leah Rosenbaum had inflated her chest and was tucking her shirt in, looking toward the bench; she saw him peeking. She smirked.
He felt his neck getting red. "That's her," he said, turning back.
Cavanaugh concealed a smile from everyone in the courtroom but Merrion.
Merrion tried to ignore him. "Fernandez's the movie-star dude with the black hairdo sittin' next to her there. He's her foot-soldier, gofer delivery boy.
"Cocaine charge. Fairly heavy one, about thirty-five grams, time you get through. State Police matter. We've had a call from Mister Cohen's office this morning, and they say he'll be representing Miss Rosenbaum, and maybe well, make that "probably" -Fernandez as well. But he's engaged before Judge Segal in the probate court up in Northampton this morning, will be all day, and so he asks at least that both these matters be held for second call, so they can get somebody here to enter pleas for them. But preferably just go off the calendar, put over for a week, if that would be okay with you here, until he's had a chance to have a talk with the DA. Let it go off the list 'til a week from Tuesday. See whether they can work something out, maybe avoid a trial here."
"Geoffrey Cohen's handling drug cases now?" Cavanaugh murmured, raising his right eyebrow. "My my. Music of the Renaissance and crack cocaine. "Tonight my friends, for you we have: con certi by Corelli and Scarlatti, and a gram or two." Quite a combination. Branching out a bit, is he?"
"Looks like," Merrion said. "Hard even for him, I guess, as much as he must be makin," all of those domestic cases, resist the kind of retainers dopers offer these days."
"Continuance look all right to you on it?" Cavanaugh whispered. "Look, I know if Geoffrey's on it, oughta be okay, his word's usually good.
But you hadda close look at these two birds: think there's any chance they'll flee?"
"Aww, I'd doubt it," Merrion said. "You always got that chance, of course, maybe the bastards bolt. But they had since Saddy-night to run and here they are today. I'd say "No, I don't think so." They look all right to me."
Cavanaugh nodded. "Off the list then," he said. "Give Geoff his week, which as usual with him's gonna come to about nine days. Like they say about his divorces: when he represents the wife, he thinks her half a hundred grand oughta work out to about seventy-five thousand bucks. But what the hell; like you say: anything to avoid a trial here."
Other cases were: one larceny by check; one grand larceny, motor vehicle; one petty larceny, shoplifting; one failure to heed a Stop sign, Canterbury; four attaching plates, uninsured and unregistered motor vehicle; and eleven cruelty to animals. "Guy had fourteen dogs penned up in his garage, Judge," Merrion said. "Hadda car in there with them too. Old Packard, hadn't driven it for years. Nobody knows why he had them, the dogs. They weren't pedigreed, reported stolen or anything. Seemed all right, they talked to him; perfectly-normal old guy. Told the cops all it was was he liked dogs. But he hadn't been feeding them, giving them any water, which seemed kind of strange, guy who liked dogs as much as he did. Or letting them go out, either. Dog officer said the garage was filthy, stunk like hell overpowering. That was why the neighbors finally complained. But then it took her over a week to get out there. By then three dogs were dead. Those animal officers: male or female, doesn't make any difference. They all scream and holler how they want the job, and then when they get it none of 'em give a good shit about doin' it. Don't care about the animals at all.
All they want's to get off the clock and have no one over them, no one they gotta report to. Then they can goof off the whole live-long day, and no one even misses them. They're always saying how overworked they are, and the towns don't give them enough money. But why should we?
They do such a lousy job. But so anyway, we got the old guy. Dunno what the hell you do with him. He's too old to put him in jail. Fine him? Just come out of his Social Security; that's all he's got to live on. He doesn't have any dough."
"Oh shit, I dunno," Cavanaugh said. "Put it down at the end of the list. Maybe by then I'll think of something. Or he'll do the right thing and die."
There were three breaking and entering charges, one of them Ottawa Johnson's. There were the two trespassing cases brought against the woman and the man arrested by the Rangers in the Canterbury State Forest. "That'd be the Shepard and the Bennett matters, Judge,"
Merrion whispered.
"Trespassing," Cavanaugh murmured, even though he still had his hand over the mouthpiece of the microphone. "How the hell can somebody trespass in a State Forest? Thought that was the whole idea the damned thing: Nobody owns it; we all do. Supposed to be open to the public' "Yeah, but with some limitations, your honor," Merrion whispered. "Two weeks, six bucks a night. Your time limit's up, you go home. This woman, she's the Shepard, here, and her three kids and her shit-bum boyfriend, he's the Bennett, Robert," checking papers, 'no, sorry, Ronald, Ronald Bennett: all of them, the five of them, what they've been doin's they've been been livin' there since June. Best anyone can tell. They all look like it's been at least since June, they hadda bath. Mean to tell you, these folks stink. Rangers go up there, gonna bring 'em all in? Before they could do it, take 'em out the cabin, they hadda go and get a buncha cardboard boxes, liquor cases, you know?
Down at Wheeler's package store out on Route Five there. And then go back and help her pack up all her household goods and all their clothes and stuff. Pots and pans, everything. Blankets, and these thick quilts and pillows, filthy dirty, all of them all kinds of shit. Whalen told me Rangers said they hadda put the rubber gloves on; God knows what was livin' in that shit. Campin' wasn't what you had these people doin' there; what they were up to was settling-in the place. Gettin' themselves all dug in to stay a while, ready for winter, looked like.
Like they're woodchucks diggin' a hole for themselves in your lawn.
See 'em doing that, they're not plannin' on leavin' right off- anytime soon anyway."
"Holy shit," the judge said. "It's hard to believe, you know, Amby? As long as I been here, hearing this stuff, day after day after day, I get so I think: "I heard all of it, now. I must've heard all of it now."
And then something else comes along. It gets so you just can't believe half of it, your mind just rejects it, it boggles, the things people dream up to do."
"Yeah," Merrion said, 'and I got to tell you, where this one's concerned, the camping's not all of it either. This Shepard matter, it's more complicated'n you might think. From what little I could get outta her there, other night up at the station, she may be tied up with our little friend Janet LeClerc'
The defendants and their families and the witnesses and cops stood and sat and talked and sighed and shrugged. Some of them made faces of disgust. They asked each other questions and ignored those who asked them, and when they were jabbed or poked and asked again, looked annoyed and said that they did not know either. Information about what time it was was popularly sought and repeatedly given. The people moved around with their shoulders hunched as though there might be snipers watching the room. They went from row to row and bench to bench and crowded in, getting angry looks from those they displaced to sit beside people they wanted to talk to; they talked urgently in low voices, glancing furtively every so often up toward the judge's bench, as though plotting against him and Merrion and making sure they would recognize them when the time came to harm them. They took careful note of everyone inside the bar enclosure. People came and went constantly outside the rail. They got up abruptly as though they had just remembered something that they should have done before they entered the courtroom and went out hurriedly through the swinging doors into the main foyer. Right away, as though they had been waiting for the chance, people came from the main foyer through the swinging doors into the courtroom and looked around at the seats vacated by the people who had just gone out. Finding none they liked, the new arrivals leaned against the wall and put their hands in their pockets and sighed.
Inside the bar enclosure were the prosecutors, cops and lawyers both, and probation officers, two of them plus a third one who came and went with papers. Two lawyers from the Mass. Defenders huddled together, riffling absently through their files. They talked about the Red Sox and how erratically they'd been playing, considering what a bunch of overpaid rich bums they were.
"For Christ sake, how?" Cavanaugh said. "How the hell can that all be connected with her? Didn't you have her in? Tell her to stay away from undesirable companions? Didn't you talk to her like we agreed and you were going to there?"
"I had her in," Merrion whispered urgently. "I had her in Saturday morning. I gave her a good talking-to. I told her she hadda, well, you know what I told her. I told her what we said I hadda tell her and make sure she understood. I told her to stop doing what she was doing.
I told her to cut it the hell out."
"Well, what did she tell you she'd do then?" Cavanaugh whispered.
"Tell me what she said to you. Did she tell you she'd do it or not?"
"I'm trying to," Merrion said. "That's what I'm trying to do here, for Christ sake. If you'd just let me, here, damnit, let me get the words out of my mouth."
"Well then, do it," Cavanaugh said. "Tell me what she said to you."
"Look," Merrion said, 'what I did here, I think the best way that we go about this's just let this case of trespassing here that we've got, let it come forward, it's eleventh on the list, and appoint the Mass.
Defenders on this, and continue it a week. Because this Shepard woman doesn't know and neither does her boyfriend, this Bennett character either; neither one of them has any inkling about the connection that I think we've got here with Janet. Because I don't think Janet's talked to them since I had her in here Saturday. They wouldn't've had any way of knowin' what I said to her then, unless she did. They didn't have no phone or anything, livin' up at the campground. In the State Forest's what I'm saying.
"And then, what I already did this morning was, I called Sammy Paradise and I asked him, is he free for lunch today. And he said yes, he is, he could do that if we wanted, and so what I thought the best thing we all could do here is if we just get together here, you know, and see if we can get something worked out. Have some sandwiches sent in and we just have them in your office after we recess at One today. Put our heads together here and think about this thing, talk the whole thing over and see what we have got here. What we ought to do. That sound good to you?"
"If I tell you there are times when I wish I had never been born,"
Cavanaugh said, 'and you believe that I'm sincere, I really truly mean it, is there any way you know of they can make it retroactive? Anyway you ever heard of it?"
"Well," Merrion said, becoming more offended, 'all I was just trying to do here was…" when there was a sound almost like someone with a chest-cold coughing during a lull in conversation and then someone with a deep baritone voice who was outside in the main corridor made a loud noise combining a scream of pain with a roar of outrage that stopped all the conversations in mouths-open progress in the courtroom.
Everyone turned to look at the green-padded swinging doors. Both of them swung open very slowly, tumbling a short, stocky woman with swarthy skin and short black hair, wearing a red, white and green flowered blouse and a short red skirt and red high-heeled shoes off-balance backwards perhaps two feet in the air into the room and then hard onto the floor, so that she landed crashing seated on her large buttocks with her arms outstretched and her feet in the red shoes sticking up in the air. She wore eyeglasses with red frames and her face was contorted, and she had a small silver automatic pistol in her right hand, pointed at the ceiling.