Kindle County: Pleading Guilty Part 2

'That's how it struck me. Here's the thing, Brush. These birds around there seem to think Bert has gone off with some man. He ever mention anyone named Archie?'

'Nope.' She eyed me through the smoke. She already knew I was up to something.

'It made me think, you know. It's been years since I saw Bert with a woman.' When Bert got here more than a decade ago, he was still squiring Doreen, his high-school honey, to firm functions. He'd made vague promises to marry this woman, a sweet schoolteacher, and in the years she waited she turned into a kind of sports-bar bimbo, with a drinking problem like mine and skirts the size of handkerchiefs and blonde hair so ravaged by chemicals that it stuck out from her head like raffia. One day at lunch Bert announced she was marrying her princ.i.p.al. No further comment. Ever. And no replacement.

Always live to nuance, Brushy had perked up. 'Are you asking what I think?'

'You mean something dirty and indiscreet? Right. I'm not asking you to speculate. I just thought you might be able to contribute pertinent information.' I sort of scratched my ear lamely but it wasn't fooling her a bit. Pugnacious, you would call her look. She's not big - short, broad, and but for tireless health-club hours tending to the stout - but her jaw was set meanly.

'Who are you now? The Public Health Service?'

'Spare me the details. Yes or no will do to start.'

'No.'

I wasn't sure she was answering. Brushy is touchy about personal lives, since hers is always the subject of sn.i.g.g.e.ring. Every office deserves a Brushy, a stalwartly single, s.e.xually predatory female. She subscribes to a feminism of her own vision, which seems to be inspired by piracy on the high seas, regarding it as an achievement to board every pa.s.sing male ship. She does not recognize any common boundary: marital status, age, social cla.s.s. When she decides on a man, either for the position he occupies, the promise he radiates, or the good looks that stimulate other females to mere fancy, she is unambiguous in making her desires known. Over the years she has been seen in the company of judges and politicians, journalists, opponents, guys from the file room, a couple of former jurors - and many of her partners, including, should you be wondering, for one fitful afternoon, me. Big and good-looking, Bert had undoubtedly fallen within the circled sights of Brushy's up-periscope.

'It's not prurient interest, Brush. It's professional. Just give me a wink. I need your opinion: Is it he's or she's when Bert dances the hokey-pokey?'

'I don't believe you,' she said and looked off with a sour scowl. In her pursuits, Brushy, in her own way, is discreet. She generally wouldn't talk under torture, and her advances, while relentless, always recognize the proprieties of the workplace. But for her s.e.xual follies, Brushy still pays a heavy price. Her commitment to appet.i.tes that most of us are busy trying to suppress leads folks to regard her as odd, even dangerous; other females are often downright hostile. And among her peers, the younger partners, the men and women who started together as a.s.sociates and survived those years together - the giddy all-nighters in the library, the one thousand carry-in meals - Brushy is on the outs anyway. They envy her advancement in the firm, and when they gather privately for gossip, it's often about her.

She is, in her own way, alone here, a fact which I suppose has drawn us together. Our one misfiring encounter is never a topic. After Nora, my volcano seems more or less extinct, and we both know that afternoon belongs to my wackiest period - right after my sister, Elaine, had died and I had stopped drinking, just when the recognition that my wife was busy with other s.e.xual pursuits was beginning to a.s.sume the form of what we might call an idea, sort of the way all that swirling gas and dust in the remote regions of the cosmos starts to zero in on being a planet. For Brush and me our interlude served its purpose, nonetheless. In the aftermath, we became good pals, schmoozing, smoking, and playing racquetball once a week. On court, she is as vicious as a mink.

'How's the Loathsome Child?' Brushy asked. She eyed me in strict warning. We both knew she'd changed the subject.

'Living up to his name,' I a.s.sured her. Lyle was Nora's and my only kid, and his insular ways as a little boy had led me to refer to him with what I thought was tenderness as the Lonesome Child. When adolescence set in, however, the consonants migrated.

'What's the latest?'

'Oh, please. Let me count the ways. I find muddy footprints on the sofa. Dried soda pop on the kitchen floor. He comes home at 4:00 a.m. and rings the doorbell because he forgot the keys. The PDR doesn't list half the drugs he takes. Nineteen years old. And he doesn't flush the toilet.'

At that last item, Brushy made a face. 'Isn't it time for him to grow up? Doesn't that happen with children?'

'Not so as you'd notice with Lyle. I'll tell you, whatever you saved me on alimony, Brushy, she got even with that shrink. All that c.r.a.p about how an adolescent male was too vulnerable to be without his father in these circ.u.mstances.'

Brushy said what she always said: the first custody fight she'd seen where the dispute was over who had to take the child.

'Well, she got even,' I repeated. 'What did she have to get even for?' 'Jesus Christ,' I said, 'you really haven't been married, have you? The world went to h.e.l.l and I went with it. I don't know.'

'You stopped drinking.'

I shrugged. I am seldom as impressed by this feat as other people, who like to think it shows I have something, some element which if not unique is still special to the human condition. Courage. I don't know. But I was aware of the secret and it never left me. I'm still hooked. Now I depend on the pain of not drinking, on the craving, on the denial. Especially the denial. I get up in the morning and it strikes me that I'm not going to drink and I actually wonder why I have to do this to myself, same as I used to think waking from a bender. And inside there's the same little harpy telling me that I deserve it.

I had taken another cigarette and wandered to the big windows. The trail of headlamps and brake lights stippled the strip of highway, and an occasional building window was lit up by the isolated sparks of somebody else's life being squandered in evening toil. Stepping back, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection decaled over the night: the weary warrior, hair gone gray and so much ruddy flesh beneath my chin that I can never b.u.t.ton my collar.

'You know,' I said, 'you get divorced, it's like being hit by a truck. You walk around in a f.u.c.king fog. You're not even sure you're alive. Maybe the last year, I've realized when I stopped drinking was probably what pushed her out the door.'

Brushy had removed her pumps and crossed her feet on the desktop. With my remark she stopped wiggling her short toes against the orange mesh of her pantyhose and asked what I was talking about.

'Nora liked me better when I drank. She didn't like me much, but she liked me better. I left her alone. She could conduct her international experiment in living. The last thing she wanted was my attention. They have a word for this now. What is it?'

'"Co-dependent".'

'There you go.' I smiled, but we were both rendered silent. It hadn't taken Brushy many guesses. As usual, the mess in my life was its own dead end.

I sat down on her sofa, black leather trimmed with metal rails. It was twenty-first-century decorating in here, 'high-tech', so that the place had the warmth of a hospital operating room. Every partner furnishes as he or she likes, inasmuch as our offices are otherwise the same, three walls of union Sheetrock and a glamour view, all plate gla.s.s framed by piers of stressed concrete. We have been here in the TN Needle, a forty-four-story stiletto looming prominently against Center City and the prairie landscape, since it opened six years ago, keeping cozy with our biggest client. Our phones and electronic mail intersect with TN's; half our lawyers have stationery of the General Counsel, Jake Eiger, so they can dash off letters in his name. Visitors to the building often say they cannot tell where TN ends and Gage & Griswell starts, which is just how we like it.

'So you're really going to do this, look for Bert?'

'The Big Three didn't think I had a choice. We all know my story. I'm too old to learn to do something else, too greedy to give up the money I make, and too burnt out to deserve it. So I take on Mission Impossible and buy myself a job.'

'That sounds like the kind of deal somebody could forget about. Have you thought of that?'

I had, but it was humiliating as h.e.l.l to think it was so obvious. I just shrugged.

'Besides,' I said, 'the cops'll probably find Bert before me.'

She became rigid at the mention of the police. I took some time to tell her the rest of the story, about Jorge, the lightweight, and his three mean friends.

'Are you telling me the cops know about this? The money?'

'No chance. It's gone out of our escrow account and we haven't heard word one from them. It's not that.' 'Then what?'

I shook my head sadly. I didn't have a clue. 'Actually,' I said, 'from the drift I got, I think they've been asking about Kam Roberts.' 'I'm lost,' she said. 'Me too.'

'Well, I don't understand why you're willing to do this,' Brushy told me. 'Didn't you say he'd shoot you?'

'I was negotiating. I'll fend him off. I'll tell him I didn't believe it, I took it on to defend his honor.'

'Do you believe it?'

I raised my hands: who knows? Who ever knows? I spent a moment with the wonder of it all. What is it really, this life? You're shoulder to shoulder with a guy eight hours a day, try cases with him, go to lunch, sit in the back row and make wisecracks at partners' meetings, stand beside him in the men's room and watch him shake his thing, and what the h.e.l.l do you know? Zippity-do. You haven't got a clue about the inner regions. You don't know what he regards as dirty thoughts or the place he dreams of as a haven. You don't know if he constantly feels close to the Great Spirit or if anxiety is always nibbling inside him like some famished rat. Really - what is this? You never know with people, I thought, another phrase I picked up on the street and have been repeating to myself for twenty years. I repeated it to Brushy now.

'I can't accept it,' she said. 'This is so calculating. And Bert's impulsive. If you told me he'd signed up to be an astronaut last week and was already halfway to the moon, that would sound more like him.'

'We'll see. I figure if I actually track him down, I'll always have a great alternative to turning him in or bringing him back.'

She stared, green eyes hopped up with all her wily curiosity. 'And what alternative is that?'

'Bert and I can split the money right down the middle.' I put out the cigarette and winked. I said to her again, 'Attorney-client.'

IV. BERT AT HOME.

A. His Apartment My partner Bert Kamin is not an everyday-type guy. Angular and swarthy, with a substantial athletic build and long dark hair, he looks good enough, but there is something wild in his eye. Until she pa.s.sed away, five or six years ago, Bert - former combat ace, trial shark, hotshot gambler and hoodlum hanger-on - lived with his mother, a demanding old witch by the name of Mabel. He didn't have a shortcoming she failed to mention. Slothful. Irresponsible. Ungrateful. Mean. She'd let him have it, and Bert, with his macho jaw set, tough talk, and chewing gum, just sat there.

The man left after this thirty-five-year mortar a.s.sault is a sort of heaping dark mystery, one of those vague paranoiacs who defends his odd habits in the name of individuality. Food's one of his specialties. He is sure America is out to poison him. He subscribes to a dozen obscure health newsletters - 'Vitamin B Update' and 'The Soluble Fiber Wellness Letter' - and he is regularly reading books by goofb.a.l.l.s just like him which convince him that something new should not be ingested. I have unwillingly absorbed his opinions over many meals. He lives in mortal fear of tap water, which he figures has everything deadly in it -fluoride, chlorine, and lead - and will drink nothing from the city pipes; over the protests of the Committee, he's even had one of those big green bottled water coolers installed in his office. He won't eat cheese ('junk food'), sausage ('nitrites'), chicken ('DES'), or milk (he still worries about strontium 90). On the other hand, he believes that cholesterol is an AMA-sponsored fiction and has no brief against red meat. And he never ate green vegetables. He will tell you they are overrated, but in fact, he just never got to like them as a kid.

I was feeling Bert's presence pretty strongly now, all his screwball intensity, as I stood outside his place. It was about eleven and I'd decided to check out his digs on my way home. Last time I looked, break and enter was still a crime and I figured I'd just keep this visit to myself.

Bert lives - or lived - in a little freestanding two-flat in a rehabbed area near Center City. As I recalled the story, he'd wanted to stay in his ma's house in the South End, but he got into one of those coffin-side spats with his sister and had to sell to make her happy. Here, he was pretty much at loose ends. I arrived with my briefcase, which had nothing in it but two coat hangers, a screwdriver which I'd borrowed from the maintenance closet on my way out of the office, and the Dictaphone, which I took on the bet that my dreams would wake me, as they have, and leave me grateful for something to do in these awful, still hours.

Twenty-some years ago, before they shipped me off to Financial Crimes to give me time to finish law school, I worked in the tactical unit with a good street cop name of Gino Dimonte, who everybody called Pigeyes. Tac guys are plainclothes, the sort of roving linebackers of the Force who'll do further investigation on what the beat cop reports - stake out an arrest, round up a suspect. I learned a lot from Pigeyes, which is one of the things that ticked him off when I testified about him before a federal grand jury; these days he's backwatered in Financial Crimes and, as the legend goes, always looking for me, the same way Captain Hook had an eye out for the crocodile and Ahab for the whale. Anyway, Pigeyes taught me a million tricks.

How to sneak the cruiser down an alley, headlights out, using the emergency brake to stop so that your suspect doesn't even see the red glow of the rear lamps. I watched him get into apartments without a warrant by making calls, saying he was UPS and had left a package downstairs, or that he lived across the street and thought there was a fire on the roof, so that our man would come rushing out and leave his door wide open. I even heard him phone and say there were suspicious guys around, and have a high old time when the dip stuck his mug out with an unregistered pistol in his hand and got his a.s.s arrested and his front room tossed incident to arrest.

This was another of Gino's little bits, just a makeup mirror that a lady would carry in her purse or keep in the drawer in her office, as Brushy had. In most old buildings, the front door on an apartment has been trimmed at the foot to fit the carpeting, and with the mirror, if you get used to looking upside down, you can see a lot. I knelt there in the vestibule, putting my ear to the door to the upstairs apartment now and then to make sure the neighbor wasn't shaking around. As I remembered it, she was a flight attendant. I figured on trying her sometime, after I'd seen what was what in Bert's apartment.

It sure looked like Bert was gone. In the mirror I could see the mail piled up on the floor in heaps - Sports Ill.u.s.trated and health and muscle magazines and flyers, and of course a bunch of bills. I rumbled around a little bit against the door, enough noise so that if there was anyone inside I'd get them moving, then after a while I used the coat hangers. I straightened them out, all but the hook, and joined them at the crimps. Using the mirror, I could see the chain lock hanging open. I must have spent five minutes trying to get a decent purchase on the k.n.o.b of the dead bolt, and then it turned out the d.a.m.n thing wasn't set. The old skeleton-keyed door lock and k.n.o.b came off with the screwdriver in twenty seconds. I always told Nora: If they want to get in, they're coming in.

Maybe it was that thought of Nora, but as soon as the door swung open, I was attacked by the loneliness of it all, Bert's life. I felt like I'd gone hollow, unfilled s.p.a.ce aching with the absence. It scares me to see the way single guys live. When Nora bolted for the great outdoors, she left most everything behind. A lot of the furniture is broken and torn, what with the Loathsome Child, but it's there, it's still a house. Bert's living room didn't even have a rug on the floor. He had a sofa, a 30-inch TV, and a huge green plant that I bet somebody sent him as a gift. In one corner, housed on its packing box, was an entire computer setup - box, keyboard, monitor, printer - with a folding chair in front of it. I had a sudden vision of goofy old Bert lost inside the machine, spending the dead hours of the night with his mind tracing the circuits of a chip, whizzing from one bulletin board to the next or playing complex computer war games, wiping out little green people with a death ray from s.p.a.ce. Crazy guy.

I walked right through the mail as I came in, then thought better of it and plunked myself down on the hardwood floor among the gathered dustb.a.l.l.s. The oldest items were postmarked about ten days ago, which seemed to fit Bert's suspected date of departure. One envelope had a footprint on it, maybe mine, or someone else's, or Bert's when he took off. The last thought seemed to make the most sense, since I found another envelope which had been opened. Inside was a bank card - one only - tucked into the little two-sided cardboard holder used to send out new cards annually. Maybe Bert had taken the other card to travel? The one that was there was embossed with the name Kam Roberts.

In the scattered mail I found another envelope addressed to Kam Roberts. I held it up to the light, then just ripped it open. A monthly statement for the bank card. It was pretty much what you'd expect with Bert during basketball season, charges run up in every town in the Mid-Ten. Bert thought nothing of flashing to the airport at five and getting in one of those flying buckets so he could arrive in some Midwestern college town in time to witness the walloping of the Us team, the Bargehands, known for generations as the Hands. There were a number of local charges, too, but I stashed all of it, the card and the bill, in my inside suit pocket, figuring I'd study the details later.

The only other item in Bert's mail that struck me was The Advisor, Kindle County's gay newspaper, with its sizzling personals section and some pretty embarra.s.sing ads for underwear. Was he or wasn't he? Bert might tell me that he subscribed for the cla.s.sifieds or film criticism, but to me it figured that Bert was in the closet. He's of my place in history, when s.e.x was dirty and desire a hidden misery that each of us kept steeled within our own Pandora's Box and released only in clandestine darkness where we were promptly enslaved. Bert's inclinations are a deep-dark secret. He isn't telling anybody, maybe even himself. That's where Kam Roberts comes in; it's his drag. If he's meeting boys in the men's room of the Kindle County Public Library or visiting leather bars in another city where he's supposedly gone to watch the Hands, Kam is his name. All of this is surely what the TN engineers refer to as a WAG - a wilda.s.sed guess. Yet standing in the apartment, I thought it made sense. No, he never put his hand on my knee or cast lascivious glances at the Loathsome Child either. But I'd bet the farm anyway that all Bert's twitches and costumes and lonely moods came out of which way his p.e.c.k.e.r was pointing. Which is his business, not mine. I really mean it. Frankly, I've always admired people with secrets worth keeping, having, of course, one or two of my own.

Which is not to pretend on the other hand that scoping all this out did not give me a combo of the creeps and some little thrill of kinky curiosity. So talk to me about my tendencies. But don't you wonder sometimes, really, what these guys are up to? I mean, who does what to whom. You know, tab A, slot B. They've got this weird secret thing, like the Masons or the Mormons.

I wondered if it was problems in his life as Kam that had the coppers looking for Bert. When I was on the street, there were always the sorriest scams with these fellows - a prisoner in the Rudyard penitentiary who somehow got a bunch of guys he'd found through the personals to pay him fifty bucks apiece with a letter promising he was 'going to put a liplock on your love-muscle' as soon as he was released. There was one restaurant owner who installed a hidden camera behind one of the urinals and had a private photo gallery of Kindle County's most prominent p.e.n.i.ses. And you'd hear of plenty of outright extortion, boy-toys who threatened to tell the wife or the employer. There were a billion ways Bert could have gotten himself in trouble, and tossing all this around, big bluff old Mack felt pretty sorry for Bert, who wasn't trying to hurt a soul.

I made a tour of the apartment. Bert's bedroom wasn't much better than the living room - a cheap dresser set, his bed unmade. There wasn't a picture in the entire place. His suits hung neatly in his closet but his other stuff was thrown around the room in the familiar fashion of Lyle.

I went to the kitchen to check out the fridge, still trying to see how long our hero had been gone, another old cop move, smell the milk, check the pull date. When I opened the fridge, there was a dead guy staring back.

B. His Refrigerator The dead, like the rich, are different from you and me. I was racing with that crazy bursting feeling as if I was going to pop out of my own skin. Not that I couldn't acknowledge a macabre interest. I actually pulled one of the kitchen chairs around and was sitting, say, three feet away, staring at him. In my time on the street I'd seen my share of corpses, suicides hanging from the bas.e.m.e.nt pipes or in a bathtub full of blood, a couple of murder victims, and lots of folks who just plain expired, and I'm at the age now where every couple of weeks it seems like I'm going to a wake. However it is, I'm always impressed by the way a human being looks stripped of that fundamental vitality, like a tree without its leaves. Death always takes something away, nothing you could really name, but life somehow is a visible thing.

It wasn't Bert. This guy was about Bert's size, but he was older, maybe sixty. He had been folded into the refrigerator like a garment bag. His feet went one way, his legs were squashed down under him, his head was forced to about ninety degrees to make him fit. His eyes were bugged out unbelievably; they were that very light green you might as well call gray. He was wearing a suit and a tie, and around the collar of his shirt, the blood had soaked in and dried like a kind of batik. Eventually I noticed the black line dug into his neck and tied to a shelf hook to hold him up. Fishing tackle. Deep-sea stuff. One-hundred-pound test. The refrigerator light glowed like a bald head and threw a little orange into his gray face. Alive, he must have been a respectable-looking fellow.

I sat there trying to figure out what to do. I had to be good and careful, I knew that much. Still, I kept wondering what had happened. Bert's motives for disappearing seemed clearer. The most obvious reason to chill the remains would be to get some time to run. But there was no blood anywhere in the apartment. Unless there'd been a rug or a little more furniture before. Did wonky old Bert have murder in him? The Jesuits in high school told me n.o.body did, then the police force gave me a gun and told me to shoot and I was in enough bas.e.m.e.nts looking for some slug who'd vanished down a gangway, ready to p.i.s.s my trousers every time I heard the furnace creak, so that I knew I would have. Bert, in his own way, was pretty tightly wound. So maybe.

Option 2 was that this was somebody else's handiwork. Before Bert left or after? Before appeared unlikely. Not too many people are going to break into your apartment with a stiff and leave him in your refrigerator without your permission. After was possible. If somebody knew Bert was gone.

I really didn't want to call the cops. If I did, everything was going to come out. Missing Bert. Missing money. So long, client. So long, Mack and G & G. Worse yet, the way things work, murder suspect number one for a while would be me. That could be a real pain, given the number of coppers, pals of Pigeyes, who are laying for me, one of whom in time would realize he could charge me for the break-in. Sooner or later the police would have to hear about this. This poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d, after all, probably had a family. But the best way to tip them was anonymously, after I'd had some time to think things through.

I went about putting the place back together as best I could, wiped the refrigerator handle down, swept the kitchen floor to clear my footprints. I couldn't get the lock in the front door without opening it, since the outer plate screwed in from the other side. So I stood there on the threshold,, upright, in plain view, fumbling for five minutes, fixing up the apartment I'd just broken into. I tried to imagine what the h.e.l.l I'd say if the stew came home or if I raised the curiosity of somebody pa.s.sing on the street, how I'd get myself out of trouble. Still, as I fooled around with the last screw, I liked it, my minute dangling over the cliff. Sometimes in life, things just happen. No planning. Out of control. That's one of those things guys like about being cops. I'd liked it too, just not the way I woke up in the night, with my heart galloping and my mouth like glue and the fears, the fears, licking me all over like some cat getting ready to do it to a mouse. It drove me to drink, was one of the things, and off the Force, though it has never stopped.

But nothing happened, not now. The stew never showed, n.o.body on the street even looked my way. I went through the outer door with my scarf pulled up to my nose, and down the city walk, safe and happy, just like I am with daybreak coming now, knowing I can stop talking into this thing, having slipped away for one more night.

TAPE 2.

Dictated January 24, 11:00 p.m.

Tuesday, January 24 V.

A WORKING LIFE.

A. The Mind of the Machine Now and then everybody wants to be somebody else, Elaine. There are all these secret people rolling around inside - ma and pa, killers and cops and various prime-time heroes, and all of them at times reaching for the throttle. There's no way to stop it, and who's to say we should. What seemed sweeter yesterday than the thought of nabbing Bert and running with the money? It's just your brother, the old copper, explaining how it is that folks go wrong. Every guy I cracked said it: I didn't mean to, I didn't want to. As if it were somebody else who'd scored the smack or kicked the coins out of the vending machine. And it is in a way. That's what I'm saying.

I sat in my office this morning, venturing this two-bit commentary for the benefit of my dead sister, as I do a couple of times each day, and noodling over the statement that I'd pocketed from the Kam Roberts credit card. The thought of Bert being someone else impromptu still drilled me with that little secret jolt, but the particulars of his hidden life remained elusive. Besides the charges for air tickets and restaurants and motels in little Mid-Ten towns, there were items, five to fifteen dollars each, posted almost daily for some something called Infomode', and there was also a series of cash advances totaling about three grand. Bert made more dough than me, maybe 275K, and I'd have figured he'd write a check to cash in Accounting if he needed folding money, rather than pay interest. Then we got really strange: a single credit item, over nine thousand bucks for something called Arch Enterprises. Maybe this was pal Archie, the wayward actuary, but what-for nine thousand dollars credit? I was writing comedy making up the explanations. E.g., Bert returned a big insurance policy? And then we had the small-time peculiar, two nights' charges last month at U Inn, a kind of run-down hotel/ motel right across from the university's main quadrangle, an odd spot for Bert to be checking in since his apartment was only a mile away.

I was pushing around these puzzle pieces when my phone rang.

'We have a serious problem.' It was Wash.

'We do?'

'Very serious.' He sounded undone, but Wash is not the fellow we turn to in crisis. There are people, like Martin, who talk about Wash as a legend, but I suspect he was one of those young men who was admired for his bright future and now is forgiven his lapses due to the supposed achievements of his past. Aged sixty-seven, Wash by my reckoning lost interest in the practice of law at least a decade ago. You could say the same of me, but I'm not an icon. This life can make you soft. There are always younger lawyers, agile-minded and bristling with ambition, to think for you, to write the opinion letters and draft the contracts. Wash has capitulated to that. He is, for the most part, a ceremonial lawyer, a soothing presence to old clients to whom he is connected by club affiliations and schooling.

I just spoke with Martin,' Wash said. 'He ran into Jake Eiger in the elevator.'

'So?'

'Jake was asking about Bert.'

'Uh-oh.' Ticklish inquiries from the client. I felt the usual moment of private grat.i.tude that I wasn't in charge. 'We have to figure out what to tell Jake. Martin had to jump onto a conference call - we only spoke for a second. But he should be through soon. He suggested we all get together.' I told Wash I'd stand by.

In the interval I resumed my routine endeavor these days at G & G - trying to find something to do. When I came here eighteen years ago, it was with the promise that Jake Eiger would have lots of work for me, and for a number of years his word held true. I rewrote TN's Employees' Code of Conduct, I conducted a number of internal investigations - flight attendants selling drinks out of their own bottles, a hotel manager whose hiring standard for chambermaids was whether they swallowed after fellating him. Eventually that stuff tapered off, and in the last two years has stopped cold. I'm left doing odds and ends for Bert and Brushy and some of my other partners who remain on Jake's main menu, trying cases they are too busy for, doing firm committee work, still hoping, after eighteen years in private practice, that somehow, somewhere there's some million-dollar client who wants an ex-drunk former copper for its princ.i.p.al outside counsel. Between slouching work habits and a lack of clientele, my economic value to this enterprise is dwindling toward zero. True, I cash a hefty draw check every quarter, notwithstanding three straight years of reductions; and there are folks, like Martin, who seem inclined to support me as an act of enduring sentiment. But I have to worry about when someone like Pagnucci will call time's up - and then there's the matter of my pride, a.s.suming I have any left.

Not happy thoughts as I looked over the Blue Sheet, our daily bulletin, and the remainder of the lost forest of memos and mail that are generated within G & G each day. I had some desultory work to do on 397, the air crash disaster that has provided nearly full-time employment for Bert and more than occasional toil for me in the last three years. There were letters to sign and a draft of payout doc.u.ments which were due over with Peter Neucriss, the lead plaintiff's lawyer, an exacting p.r.i.c.k who'd force me to rewrite them four times. Today's letters purported to be from TN, written on TN stationery - various proclamations regarding the settlement fund that we were supposed to safeguard and which TN controlled - and I applied my flawless imitation of Jake Eiger's signature, then went back to the Blue Sheet, shifting for interesting news. Only the usual. A corporate department luncheon to discuss interest rate swaps; time sheets due by 5:00 or we'd get fined; and, my favorite, mystery mail, a photocopy of a check payable to the firm for $275 with a note from Glyndora in Accounting asking if anybody knew who sent it and why. There was once a check for about 750 grand that ran for three days straight which I very nearly claimed. Carl and various subalterns had also sent four separate memos to the partners, hard copy and E-mail, telling us to giddy up and get our clients to pay their fees before the fiscal year ended next week on January 31.

This thought of bills coming due reminded me of the Kam Roberts credit card. I told Lucinda where I'd be when Wash called and rambled through the halls to the law library, a floor above on 38. Three a.s.sociates, all in their initial year of practice, were yakking around a table. At the rare sight of a partner in these surroundings, they embarked on a silent, quailed departure from each other's company to resume making profit of their time.

'Not so fast,' I said. I had recruited each of them. A large law firm is basically organized on the same principles as a Ponzi scheme. The only sure ingredients of growth are new clients, bigger bills, and - especially - more people at the bottom, each a little profit center, toiling into the wee hours and earning more for the partnership than they take home. Thus we have a lecher's interest in new talent and are always wooing. In the summers we give fifteen law students a tryout on terms that make overnight camp look like hard labor. Twelve hundred a week to go to baseball games and concerts and fancy lunches, an experience that is a better introduction to life as royalty than the practice of law. And who's in charge of sucking up to these children this way? Yours truly.

When I was a.s.signed to the recruiting subcommittee, Martin tried to explain it as a tribute to my raffish charm. Young people would relate to my offhand ways, he suggested, my casual eccentricities. I knew that with his native bureaucratic dexterity he'd struck on some last-hope way to demonstrate my usefulness to our partners. The fact is I do not particularly care for younger people. Ask my son. I resent their youth - their opportunities, the zillion ways they are inherently better off than I am. Nor, frankly, are they particularly taken with me. But nineteen times each fall I sit in some desolate hotel room near a premier law school and watch them, in their lawyer costumes, strut their stuff, twenty-five-year-olds, a few so self-impressed you want to stick a pin in and watch them blow around the room. Jesus.

'I got this guy's bank card statement in discovery,' I said, 'and I'm trying to figure what he was spending money on. What's Infomode?' Amid the library's lavish surroundings, the three listened to me with the studied solemnity reserved to the young and ambitious. This was a comfortable, old-fashioned place with club chairs and oak bookcases and tables, and a second-floor balcony rimmed with gold-trimmed volumes that ran the circ.u.mference of the room. Leotis Griswell, the firm's late founder, had spent generously here, sort of on the same theory by which Catholics like to glorify their churches.

It was Lena Holtz who knew about Infomode.

'It's a modem information service. You know. You dial up and can go shopping or get stock-market quotes, the wire services. Anything.'

'You dial up what?'

'Here.' She walked me over to a laptop computer in one of the carrels. Lena was my touchdown for the year, law review at the U, from a rich family out in the West Bank suburbs. She'd had some rough times prior to law school and they left her with an appealing determination to use herself well. Five feet tall, with those teensy thin limbs so there always seems to be extra room in her clothes, she's not much to look at, not when you looked closely, but the pieces fit well. Hair, cosmetics, clothes - Lena has what is generally called style.

I had given her Kam Roberts's bill and she was already punching at the computer. A phone was ringing inside.

'See?' she said as the screen brightened with color proclaiming infomode!

'And what kind of information can you get?' I asked.

'You name it - flight schedules, the prices of antiques, weather reports. They have two thousand different libraries.'

'So how do I figure out what he was doing?' 'You could look at his billing information. It would come right up on the screen.' 'Great!'

'But you'd need his pa.s.sword,' she told me. Naturally I was blank.