Finders Keepers (15 page)

I hope you rot in there.

The bitch appeared at his hearing the following year, legs now clad in support hose, ankles slopping over her sensible shoes. She was like some overweight, vengeful swallow returning to the prison version of Capistrano. She once more told her story, and parole was once more not granted. Morris had been a model prisoner, and now there was just a single reason given on the inmate green sheet:
Victim states she is still suffering.

Morris assured himself that shit did not mean shit and went back to his cell. Not exactly a penthouse apartment, just six by eight, but at least there were books. Books were escape. Books were freedom. He lay on his cot, imagining how pleasant it would be to have fifteen minutes alone with Cora Ann Hooper, and a power nailer.

Morris was by then working in the library, which was a won
derful change for the better. The guards didn't much care how he spent his paltry budget, so it was no problem to subscribe to
The American Bibliographer's Newsletter
. He also got a number of catalogues from rare book dealers around the country, which were free. Books by John Rothstein came up for sale frequently, offered at ever steeper prices. Morris found himself rooting for this the way some prisoners rooted for sports teams. The value of most writers went down after they died, but a fortunate few trended upward. Rothstein had become one of those. Once in awhile a signed Rothstein showed up in one of the catalogues. In the 2007 edition of Bauman's Christmas catalogue, a copy of
The Runner
signed to Harper Lee—a so-called association copy—went for $17,000.

Morris also kept an eye on the city newspaper during his years of incarceration, and then, as the twenty-first century wrought its technological changes, various city websites. The land between Sycamore Street and Birch Street was still mired in that unending legal suit, which was just the way Morris liked it. He would get out eventually, and his trunk would be there, with the roots of that overhanging tree wrapped firmly around it. That the worth of those notebooks must by now be astronomical mattered less and less to him.

Once he had been young, and he supposed he would have enjoyed all the things young men chased after when their legs were strong and their balls were tight: travel and women, cars and women, big homes like the ones in Sugar Heights and women. Now he rarely even dreamed of such things, and the last woman with whom he'd had sex remained largely instrumental in keeping him locked up. The irony wasn't lost on him. But that was okay. The things of the world fell by the wayside, you lost your speed and your eyesight and your fucking Electric Boogaloo, but literature was eternal, and that was what was waiting for him: a lost
geography as yet seen by no eye but its creator's. If he didn't get to see that geography himself until he was seventy, so be it. There was the money, too—all those cash envelopes. Not a fortune by any means, but a nice little nest egg.

I have something to live for, he told himself. How many men in here can say that, especially once their thighs go flabby and their cocks only stand up when they need to pee?

Morris wrote several times to Andy Halliday, who now
did
have his own shop—Morris knew that from
American
Bibliographer's Newsletter
. He also knew that his old pal had gotten into trouble at least once, for trying to sell a stolen copy of James Agee's most famous book, but had skated. Too bad. Morris would have dearly loved to welcome that cologne-wearing homo to Waynesville. There were plenty of bad boys here who would have been all too willing to put a hurt on him for Morrie Bellamy. Just a daydream, though. Even if Andy had been convicted, it probably would have been just a fine. At worst, he would have gotten sent to the country club at the west end of the state, where the white-collar thieves went.

None of Morris's letters to Andy were answered.

In 2010, his personal swallow once more returned to Capistrano, wearing a black suit again, as if dressed for her own funeral. Which will be soon if she doesn't lose some weight, Morris thought nastily. Cora Ann Hooper's jowls now hung down at the sides of her neck in fleshy flapjacks, her eyes were all but buried in pouches of fat, her skin was sallow. She had replaced the black purse with a blue one, but everything else was the same. Bad dreams! Endless therapy! Life ruined thanks to the horrible beast who sprang out of the alley that night! So on and so forth, blah-blah-blah.

Aren't you over that lousy rape yet? Morris thought. Aren't you
ever
going to move on?

Morris went back to his cell thinking Shit don't mean shit. It don't mean fucking
shit
.

That was the year he turned fifty-five.

•••

One day in March of 2014, a turnkey came to get Morris from the library, where he was sitting behind the main desk, reading
American Pastoral
for the third time. (It was by far Philip Roth's best book, in Morris's opinion.) The turnkey told him he was wanted in Admin.

“What for?” Morris asked, getting up. Trips to Admin were not ordinarily good news. Usually it was cops wanting you to roll on somebody, and threatening you with all kinds of dark shit if you refused to cooperate.

“PB hearing.”

“No,” Morris said. “It's a mistake. The board doesn't hear me again until next year.”

“I only do what they tell me,” the turnkey said. “If you don't want me to give you a mark, find somebody to take the desk and get the lead out of your ass.”

The Parole Board—now three men and three women—was convened in the conference room. Philip Downs, the Board's legal counsel, made lucky seven. He read a letter from Cora Ann Hooper. It was an amazing letter. The bitch had cancer. That was good news, but what followed was even better. She was dropping all objections to Morris Bellamy's parole. She said she was sorry she had waited so long. Downs then read a letter from the Midwest Culture and Arts Center, locally known as the MAC. They had hired many Waynesville parolees over the years, and were willing to take Morris Bellamy on as a part-time file clerk and computer operator starting in May, should parole be granted.

“In light of your clean record over the past thirty-five years, and in light of Ms. Hooper's letter,” Downs said, “I felt that putting the subject of your parole before the board a year early was the right thing to do. Ms. Hooper informs us that she doesn't have much time, and I'm sure she'd like to get closure on this matter.” He turned to them. “How say you, ladies and gentlemen?”

Morris already knew how the ladies and gentlemen would say; otherwise he never would have been brought here. The vote was 6–0 in favor of granting him parole.

“How do you feel about that, Morris?” Downs asked.

Morris, ordinarily good with words, was too stunned to say anything, but he didn't have to. He burst into tears.

Two months later, after the obligatory pre-release counseling and shortly before his job at the MAC was scheduled to begin, he walked through Gate A and back into the free world. In his pocket were his earnings from thirty-five years in the dyehouse, the ­furniture workshop, and the library. It amounted to twenty-seven hundred dollars and change.

The Rothstein notebooks were finally within reach.

PART 2: OLD PALS

1

Kermit William Hodges—plain old Bill, to his friends—drives along Airport Road with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up, singing along with Dylan's “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” He's sixty-six, no spring chicken, but he looks pretty good for a heart attack survivor. He's lost forty pounds since the vapor-lock, and has quit eating the junk food that was killing him a little with each mouthful.

Do you want to live to see seventy-five? the cardiologist asked him. This was at his first full checkup, a couple of weeks after the pacemaker went in. If you do, give up the pork rinds and doughnuts. Make friends with salads.

As advice goes, it's not up there with love thy neighbor as thyself, but Hodges has taken it to heart. There's a salad in a white paper bag on the seat beside him. He'll have plenty of time to eat it, with Dasani to wash it down, if Oliver Madden's plane is on time. And if Madden comes at all. Holly Gibney has assured him that Madden is already on the way—she got his flight plan from a computer site called AirTracker—but it's always possible that Madden will smell something downwind and head in another direction. He has been out there doing dirt for quite some time now, and guys like that have very educated sniffers.

Hodges passes the feeder road to the main terminals and short-
term parking and continues on, following the signs that read AIR FREIGHT and SIGNATURE AIR and THOMAS ZANE AVIATION. He turns in at this last. It's an independent fixed-based operator, huddled—almost literally—in the shadow of the much bigger Signature Air FBO next door. There are weeds sprouting from the cracked asphalt of the little parking lot, which is empty except for the front row. That has been reserved for a dozen or so rental cars. In the middle of the economies and mid-sizes, and hulking above them, is a black Lincoln Navigator with smoked glass windows. Hodges takes this as a good sign. His man
does
like to go in style, a common trait among dirtbags. And although his man may wear thousand-dollar suits, he is still very much a dirtbag.

Hodges bypasses the parking lot and pulls into the turnaround out front, stopping in front of a sign reading LOADING AND UNLOADING ONLY.

Hodges hopes to be loading.

He checks his watch. Quarter to eleven. He thinks of his mother saying You must always arrive early on important occasions, Billy, and the memory makes him smile. He takes his iPhone off his belt and calls the office. It rings just once.

“Finders Keepers,” Holly says. She always says the name of the company, no matter who's calling; it's one of her little tics. She has many little tics. “Are you there, Bill? Are you at the airport? Are you?”

Little tics aside, this Holly Gibney is very different from the one he first met four years ago, when she came to town for her aunt's funeral, and the changes are all for the better. Although she's sneaking the occasional cigarette again; he has smelled them on her breath.

“I'm here,” he says. “Tell me I'm gonna get lucky.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” she says. “AirTracker is a very good website. You might like to know that there are currently six thousand, four hundred and twelve flights in U.S. airspace. Isn't that interesting?”

“Totally fascinating. Is Madden's ETA still eleven thirty?”

“Eleven thirty-seven, to be exact. You left your skim milk on your desk. I put it back in the fridge. Skim milk goes over very rapidly on hot days, you know. Even in an air-conditioned environment, which this is. Now.” She nagged Hodges into the air-conditioning. Holly is a very good nagger, when she puts her mind to it.

“Chug-a-lug, Holly,” he says. “I have a Dasani.”

“No, thank you, I'm drinking my Diet Coke. Barbara Robinson called. She wanted to talk to you. She was all serious. I told her she could call you later this afternoon. Or you'd call her.” Uncertainty creeps into her voice. “Was that all right? I thought you'd want your phone available for the time being.”

“That's fine, Holly. Did she say what she was all serious about?”

“No.”

“Call her back and tell her I'll be in touch as soon as this is wrapped up.”

“You'll be careful, won't you?”

“I always am.” Although Holly knows that's not exactly true; he damned near got himself, Barbara's brother, Jerome, and Holly herself blown to kingdom come four years ago . . . and Holly's cousin
was
blown up, although that came earlier. Hodges, who had been more than halfway to in love with Janey Patterson, still mourns her. And still blames himself. These days he takes care of himself
for
himself, but he also does it because he believes it's what Janey would have wanted.

He tells Holly to hold the fort and returns his iPhone to the place on his belt where he used to carry his Glock before he became
a Det-Ret. In retirement he always used to forget his cell, but those days are gone. What he's doing these days isn't quite the same as carrying a badge, but it's not bad. In fact, it's pretty good. Most of the fish Finders Keepers nets are minnows, but today's is a bluefin tuna, and Hodges is stoked. He's looking at a big payday, but that's not the main thing. He's
engaged
, that's the main thing. Nailing bad boys like Oliver Madden is what he was made to do, and he intends to keep on doing it until he no longer can. With luck, that might be eight or nine years, and he intends to treasure every day. He believes Janey would have wanted that for him, too.

Yeah
, he can hear her say, wrinkling her nose at him in that funny way she had.

Barbara Robinson was also nearly killed four years ago; she was at the fateful concert with her mother and a bunch of friends. Barbs was a cheerful, happy kid then and is a cheerful, happy teenager now—he sees her when he takes the occasional meal at the Robinson home, but he does that less often now that Jerome is away at school. Or maybe Jerome's back for the summer. He'll ask Barbara when he talks to her. Hodges hopes she's not in some kind of jam. It seems unlikely. She's your basic good kid, the kind who helps old ladies across the street.

Hodges unwraps his salad, douses it with lo-cal French, and begins to snark it up. He's hungry. It's good to be hungry. Hunger is a sign of health.

2

Morris Bellamy isn't hungry at all. A bagel with cream cheese is the most he can manage for lunch, and not much of that. He ate like a pig when he first got out—Big Macs, funnel cakes, pizza
by the slice, all the stuff he had longed for while in prison—but that was before a night of puking after an ill-advised visit to Senor Taco in Lowtown. He never had a problem with Mexican when he was young, and youth seems like just hours ago, but a night spent on his knees praying to the porcelain altar was all it took to drive home the truth: Morris Bellamy is fifty-nine, on the doorstep of old age. The best years of his life were spent dying bluejeans, varnishing tables and chairs to be sold in the Waynesville Outlet Shop, and writing letters for an unending stream of dead-end Charlies in prison overalls.

Now he's in a world he hardly recognizes, one where movies show on bloated screens called IMAX and everyone on the street is either wearing phones in their ears or staring at tiny screens. There are television cameras watching inside every shop, it seems, and the prices of the most ordinary items—bread, for instance, fifty cents a loaf when he went up—are so high they seem surreal. Everything has changed; he feels glare-blind. He is way behind the curve, and he knows his prison-oriented brain will never catch up. Nor his body. It's stiff when he gets out of bed in the morning, achy when he goes to bed at night; a touch of arthritis, he supposes. After that night of vomiting (and when he wasn't doing that, he was shitting brown water), his appetite just died.

For food, at least. He has thought of women—how could he not, when they're everywhere, the young ones barely dressed in the early summer heat?—but at his age, he'd have to buy one younger than thirty, and if he went to one of the places where such transactions are made, he would be violating his parole. If he were caught, he'd find himself back in Waynesville with the Rothstein notebooks still buried in that patch of waste ground, unread by anyone except the author himself.

He knows they're still there, and that makes it worse. The urge to
dig them up and have them at last has been a maddening constant, like a snatch of music (
I need a lover that won't drive me cray-zee
) that gets into your head and simply won't leave, but so far he has done almost everything by the book, waiting for his PO to relax and let up a little. This was the gospel according to Warren “Duck” Duckworth, handed down when Morris first became eligible for parole.

“You gotta be super-careful to start with,” Duck had said. This was before Morris's first board hearing and the first vengeful appearance of Cora Ann Hooper. “Like you're walking on eggs. 'Cause, see, the bastard will show up when you least expect it. You can take that to the bank. If you get the idea to do something that might get you marked up on Doubtful Behavior—that's a category they have—wait until
after
your PO makes a surprise visit. Then you prob'ly be all right. Get me?”

Morris did.

And Duck had been right.

3

After not even one hundred hours as a free man (well,
semi
-free), Morris came back to the old apartment building where he now lived to find his PO sitting on the stoop and smoking a cigarette. The graffiti-decorated cement-and-breezeblock pile, called Bugshit Manor by the people who lived there, was a state-subsidized fish tank stocked with recovering druggies, alcoholics, and parolees like himself. Morris had seen his PO just that noon, and been sent on his way after a few routine questions and a
Seeya next week
. This was not next week, this was not even the next
day
, but here he was.

Ellis McFarland was a large black gentleman with a vast sloping
gut and a shining bald head. Tonight he was dressed in an acre of bluejeans and a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt, size XXL. Beside him was a battered old knapsack. “Yo, Morrie,” he said, and patted the cement next to one humongous haunch. “Take a pew.”

“Hello, Mr. McFarland.”

Morris sat, heart beating so hard it was painful. Please just a Doubtful Behavior, he thought, even though he couldn't think what he'd done that was doubtful. Please don't send me back, not when I'm so close.

“Where you been, homie? You finish work at four. It's now after six.”

“I . . . I stopped and had a sandwich. I got it at the Happy Cup. I couldn't believe the Cup was still there, but it is.” Babbling. Not able to stop himself, even though he knew babbling was what people did when they were high on something.

“Took you two hours to eat a sandwich? Fucker must have been three feet long.”

“No, it was just regular. Ham and cheese. I ate it on one of the benches in Government Square, and fed some of the crusts to the pigeons. I used to do that with a friend of mine, back in the day. And I just . . . you know, lost track of the time.”

All perfectly true, but how lame it sounded!

“Enjoying the air,” McFarland suggested. “Digging the freedom. That about the size of it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know what? I think we ought to go upstairs and then I think you ought to drop a urine. Make sure you haven't been digging the wrong kind of freedom.” He patted the knapsack. “Got my little kit right here. If the pee don't turn blue, I'll get out of your hair and let you get on with your evening. You don't have any objection to that plan, do you?”

“No.” Morris was almost giddy with relief.

“And I'll watch while you make wee-wee in the little plastic cup. Any objection to that?”

“No.” Morris had spent over thirty-five years pissing in front of other people. He was used to it. “No, that's fine, Mr. McFarland.”

McFarland flipped his cigarette into the gutter, grabbed his knapsack, and stood up. “In that case, I believe we'll forgo the test.”

Morris gaped.

McFarland smiled. “You're okay, Morrie. For now, at least. So what do you say?”

For a moment Morris couldn't think what he should say. Then it came to him. “Thank you, Mr. McFarland.”

McFarland ruffled the hair of his charge, a man twenty years older than himself, and said, “Good boy. Seeya next week.”

Later, in his room, Morris replayed that indulgent, patronizing
good boy
over and over, looking at the few cheap furnishings and the few books he was allowed to bring with him out of purgatory, listening to the animal-house yells and gawps and thumps of his fellow housemates. He wondered if McFarland had any idea how much Morris hated him, and supposed McFarland did.

Good boy. I'll be sixty soon, but I'm Ellis McFarland's good boy.

He lay on his bed for awhile, then got up and paced, thinking of the rest of the advice Duck had given him:
If you get the idea to do something that might get you marked up on Doubtful Behavior, wait until
after
your PO makes a surprise visit. Then you prob'ly be all right
.

Morris came to a decision and yanked his jeans jacket on. He rode down to the lobby in the piss-smelling elevator, walked two blocks to the nearest bus stop, and waited for one with NORTHFIELD in the destination window. His heart was beating double-time again, and he couldn't help imagining Mr. McFarland
somewhere near. McFarland thinking,
Ah, now that I've lulled him, I'll double back. See what that bad boy's
really
up to
. Unlikely, of course; McFarland was probably home by now, eating dinner with his wife and three kids as humongous as he was. Still, Morris couldn't help imagining it.

And if he
should
double back and ask where I went? I'd tell him I wanted to look at my old house, that's all. No taverns or titty bars in that neighborhood, just a couple of convenience stores, a few hundred houses built after the Korean War, and a bunch of streets named after trees. Nothing but over-the-hill suburbia in that part of Northfield. Plus one block-sized patch of overgrown land caught in an endless, Dickensian lawsuit.