Finders Keepers (7 page)

Andy clapped his hands to the sides of his head and clutched
it. “We planned
nothing
! And don't you try to lay this off on me! Don't you ever! I know you, Morrie. You didn't steal them to sell them, at least not until you've read them. Then I suppose you might be willing to give some of them to the world, if the price was right. Basically, though, you're just batshit-crazy on the subject of John Rothstein.”

“Don't call me that.” His temples were throbbing worse than ever.

“I will if it's the truth, and it is. You're batshit-crazy on the subject of Jimmy Gold, too. He's why you went to jail.”

“I went to jail because of my mother. She might as well have locked me up herself.”

“Whatever. It's water under the bridge. This is now. Unless you're lucky, the police are going to be paying you a visit very soon, and they'll probably arrive with a search warrant. If you have those notebooks when they knock on your door, your goose will be cooked.”

“Why would they come to me? Nobody saw us, and my partners . . .” He winked. “Let's just say that dead men tell no tales.”

“You . . . what?
Killed
them? Killed them,
too
?” Andy's face was a picture of dawning horror.

Morris knew he shouldn't have said that, but—funny how that
but
kept coming around—Andy was just being such an asshole.

“What's the name of the town that Rothstein lived in?” Andy's eyes were shifting around again, as if he expected the cops to be closing in even now, guns drawn. “Talbot Corners, right?”

“Yes, but it's mostly farms. What they call the Corners is nothing but a diner, a grocery store, and a gas station where two state roads cross.”

“How many times were you there?”

“Maybe five.” It had actually been closer to a dozen, between
1976 and 1978. Alone at first, then with either Freddy or Curtis or both.

“Ever ask questions about the town's most famous resident while you were there?”

“Sure, once or twice. So what? Probably everybody who ever stops at that diner asks about—”

“No, that's where you're wrong. Most out-of-towners don't give a shit about John Rothstein. If they've got questions, it's about when deer season starts or what kind of fish they could catch in the local lake. You don't think the locals will remember you when the police ask if there have been any strangers curious about the guy who wrote
The Runner
? Curious strangers who made repeat visits? Plus you have a
record
, Morrie!”

“Juvenile. It's sealed.”

“Something as big as this, the seal might not hold. And what about your partners? Did either of
them
have records?”

Morris said nothing.

“You don't know who saw you, and you don't know who your partners might have bragged to about the big robbery they were going to pull off. The police could nail you
today
, you idiot. If they do and you bring my name up, I'll deny we ever talked about this. But I'll give you some advice. Get rid of
that
.” He was pointing to the brown paper bag. “That and all the rest of the notebooks. Hide them somewhere. Bury them! If you do that, maybe you can talk your way out of it, if push comes to shove. Always supposing you didn't leave fingerprints, or something.”

We didn't, Morris thought. I wasn't stupid. And I'm not a cowardly big-talking homo, either.

“Maybe we can revisit this,” Andy said, “but it will be much later on, and only if they don't grab you.” He got up. “In the meantime, stay clear of me, or I'll call the police myself.”

He walked away fast with his head down, not looking back.

Morris sat there. The pretty waitress returned to ask if she could get him anything. Morris shook his head. When she left, he picked up the bag with the notebook inside it and walked away himself. In the opposite direction.

•••

He knew what the pathetic fallacy was, of course—nature echoing the feelings of human beings—and understood it to be the cheap, mood-creating trick of second-rate writers, but that day it seemed to be true. The morning's bright sunlight had both mirrored and amplified his feeling of exultation, but by noon the sun was only a dim circle behind a blear of clouds, and by three o'clock that afternoon, as his worries multiplied, the day grew dark and it began to drizzle.

He drove the Biscayne out to the mall near the airport, constantly watching for police cars. When one came roaring up behind him on Airline Boulevard with its blues flashing, his stomach froze and his heart seemed to climb all the way into his mouth. When it sped by without slowing, he felt no relief.

He found a news broadcast on BAM-100. The lead story was about a peace conference between Sadat and Begin at Camp David (Yeah, like
that'll
ever happen, Morris thought distractedly), but the second one concerned the murder of noted American writer John Rothstein. Police were saying it was the work of “a gang of thieves,” and that a number of leads were being followed. That was probably just PR bullshit.

Or maybe not.

Morris didn't think he could be tracked down as a result of interviews with the half-deaf old codgers who hung out at the Yummy Diner in Talbot Corners, no matter what Andy thought, but there
was something else that troubled him far more. He, Freddy, and Curtis had all worked for Donahue Construction, which was building homes in both Danvers and North Beverly. There were two different work crews, and for most of Morris's sixteen months, spent carrying boards and nailing studs, he had been in Danvers while Curtis and Freddy toiled at the other site, five miles away. Yet for awhile they
had
worked on the same crew, and even after they were split up, they usually managed to eat lunch together.

Plenty of people knew this.

He parked the Biscayne with about a thousand others at the JC Penney end of the mall, wiped down every surface he had touched, and left the keys in the ignition. He walked away fast, turning up his collar and yanking down his Indians cap. At the mall's main entrance, he waited on a bench until a Northfield bus came, and dropped his fifty cents into the box. The rain grew heavier and the ride back was slow, but he didn't mind. It gave him time to think.

Andy was cowardly and full of himself, but he had been right about one thing. Morris had to hide the notebooks, and he had to do so immediately, no matter how much he wanted to read them, starting with that undiscovered Jimmy Gold novel. If the cops
did
come and he didn't have the notebooks, they could do nothing . . . right? All they'd have would be suspicion.

Right?

•••

There was no one peeking through the curtains next door, which saved him another conversation with Mrs. Muller, and perhaps having to explain that he had sold his car. The rain had become a downpour, and that was good. There would be no one rambling around in the undeveloped land between Sycamore and Birch. Especially after dark.

He pulled everything out of the secondhand trunk, resisting an almost overpowering urge to look into the notebooks. He couldn't do that, no matter how much he wanted to, because once he started, he wouldn't be able to stop. Later, he thought. Must postpone your gratifications, Morrie. Good advice, but spoken in his mother's voice, and that started his head throbbing again. At least he wouldn't have to postpone his gratifications for long; if three weeks went by with no visits from the police—a month at most—he would be able to relax and begin his researches.

He lined the trunk with plastic to make sure the contents would stay dry, and put the notebooks, including the one he'd taken to show Andy, back inside. He dumped the money envelopes on top. He closed the trunk, considered, and opened it again. He pawed the plastic aside and took a couple of hundred dollars from one of the bank envelopes. Surely no cop would think that an excessive amount, even if he were searched. He could tell them it was his severance pay, or something.

The sound of the rain on the garage roof was not soothing. To Morris it sounded like skeletal tapping fingers, and made his headache worse. He froze every time a car went by, waiting for headlights and pulsing blue strobes to splash up the driveway. Fuck Andy Halliday for putting all these pointless worries in my head, he thought. Fuck him and the homo horse he rode in on.

Only the worries might not be pointless. As afternoon wound down toward twilight, the idea that the cops could put Curtis and Freddy together with Morris Bellamy seemed more and more likely. That fucking rest area! Why hadn't he dragged the bodies into the woods, at least? Not that it would have slowed the cops down much once someone pulled in, saw all the blood, and called 911. The cops would have dogs . . .

“Besides,” he told the trunk, “I was in a hurry. Wasn't I?”

His father's hand dolly was still standing in the corner, along with a rusty pick and two rusty shovels. Morris tipped the trunk endwise onto the dolly, secured the straps, and peered out of the garage window. Still too much light. Now that he was so close to getting rid of the notebooks and the money—Temporarily, he soothed himself, this is just a temporary measure—he became more and more sure that the cops would be here soon. Suppose Mrs. Muller had reported him as acting suspicious? It didn't seem likely, she was thicker than an oak plank, but who really knew?

He forced himself to stuff down another frozen dinner, thinking it might soothe his head. It made the headache worse, instead. He looked in his mother's medicine cabinet for aspirin or Advil, and found . . . nothing. Fuck you, Mom, he thought. Really. Sincerely. Fuck . . .
you
.

He saw her smile. Thin as a hook, that smile.

It was still light at seven o'clock—goddam daylight saving time, what genius thought
that
up?—but the windows next door were still dark. That was good, but Morris knew the Mullers might be back at any time. Besides, he was too nervous to wait any longer. He rooted around in the front hall closet until he found a poncho.

He used the garage's rear door and yanked the dolly across the back lawn. The grass was wet, the ground underneath spongy, and it was hard going. The path he had used so many times as a kid—usually going to the Birch Street Rec—was sheltered by overhanging trees, and he was able to make better progress. By the time he got to the little stream that flowed diagonally across this block-sized square of waste ground, full dark had arrived.

He had brought a flashlight and used it in brief winks to pick out a likely location on the embankment of the stream, a safe distance from the path. The dirt was soft, and it was easy digging until he got to the tangle of roots from an overhanging tree. He
thought about trying a different spot, but the hole was almost big enough for the trunk already, and he was damned if he was going to start all over again, especially when this was just a temporary precaution. He laid the flashlight in the hole, propping it on a rock so the beam shone on the roots, and chopped through them with the pick.

He slid the trunk into the hole and shoveled the dirt back around it and over it quickly. He finished by tamping it down with the flat of the shovel. He thought it would be okay. The bank wasn't particularly grassy, so the bald spot wouldn't stand out. The important thing was that it was out of the house, right?

Right?

He felt no relief as he dragged the dolly back along the path. Nothing was working out the way it was supposed to, nothing. It was as if malignant fate had come between him and the notebooks, just as fate had come between Romeo and Juliet. That comparison seemed both ludicrous and perfectly apt. He
was
a lover. Goddam Rothstein had jilted him with
The Runner Slows Down
, but that didn't change the fact.

His love was true.

•••

When he got back to the house, he went immediately to the shower, as a boy named Pete Saubers would do many years later in this very same bathroom, after visiting that very same embankment and overhanging tree. Morris stayed in until his fingers were pruney and the hot water was gone, then dried off and dressed in fresh clothes from his bedroom closet. They looked childish and out of fashion to him, but they still fit (more or less). He put his dirt-smeared jeans and sweatshirt in the washer, an act that would also be replicated by Pete Saubers years later.

Morris turned on the TV, sat in his father's old easy chair—his mother said she kept it as a reminder, should she ever be tempted into stupidity again—and saw the usual helping of ad-driven inanity. He thought that any of those ads (jumping laxative bottles, primping moms, singing hamburgers) could have been written by Jimmy Gold, and that made his headache worse than ever. He decided to go down to Zoney's and get some Anacin. Maybe even a beer or two. Beer wouldn't hurt. It was the hard stuff that caused trouble, and he'd learned his lesson on that score.

He did get the Anacin, but the idea of drinking beer in a house full of books he didn't want to read and TV he didn't want to watch made him feel worse than ever. Especially when the stuff he
did
want to read was so maddeningly close. Morris rarely drank in bars, but all at once he felt that if he didn't get out and find some company and hear some fast music, he would go completely insane. Somewhere out in this rainy night, he was sure there was a young lady who wanted to dance.

He paid for his aspirin and asked the young guy at the register, almost idly, if there was a bar with live music that he could get to on the bus.

The young guy said there was.

2010

When Linda Saubers got home that Friday afternoon at three thirty, Pete was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of cocoa. His hair was still damp from the shower. She hung her coat on one of the hooks by the back door, and placed the inside of her wrist against his forehead again. “Cool as a cucumber,” she pronounced. “Do you feel better?”

“Yeah,” he said. “When Tina came home, I made her peanut butter crackers.”

“You're a good brother. Where is she now?”

“Ellen's, where else?”

Linda rolled her eyes and Pete laughed.

“Mother of Mercy, is that the dryer I hear?”

“Yeah. There were a bunch of clothes in the basket, so I washed em. Don't worry, I followed the directions on the door, and they came out okay.”

She bent down and kissed his temple. “Aren't you the little do-bee?”

“I try,” Pete said. He closed his right hand to hide the blister on his palm.

•••

The first envelope came on a snow-showery Thursday not quite a week later. The address—Mr. Thomas Saubers, 23 Sycamore
Street—was typed. Stuck on the upper-right-hand corner was a forty-four-cent stamp featuring the Year of The Tiger. There was no return address on the upper left. Tom—the only member of Clan Saubers home at midday—tore it open in the hall, expecting either some sort of come-on or another past due notice. God knew there had been plenty of those lately. But it wasn't a come-on, and it wasn't a past due.

It was money.

The rest of the mail—catalogues for expensive stuff they couldn't afford and advertising circulars addressed to OCCUPANT—fell from his hand and fluttered around his feet, unnoticed. In a low voice, almost a growl, Tom Saubers said, “What the
fuck
is
this
?”

•••

When Linda came home, the money was sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. Tom was seated before the neat little pile with his chin resting on his folded hands. He looked like a general considering a battle plan.

“What's that?” Linda asked.

“Five hundred dollars.” He continued to look at the bills—eight fifties and five twenties. “It came in the mail.”

“From who?”

“I don't know.”

She dropped her briefcase, came to the table, and picked up the stack of currency. She counted it, then looked at him with wide eyes. “My God, Tommy! What did the letter say?”

“There was no letter. Just the money.”

“But who would—”

“I don't know, Lin. But I know one thing.”

“What?”

“We can sure use it.”

•••

“Holy shit,” Pete said when they told him. He had stayed late at school for intramural volleyball, and didn't come in until almost dinnertime.

“Don't be vulgar,” Linda said, sounding distracted. The money was still on the kitchen table.

“How much?” And when his father told him: “Who sent it?”

“That's a good question,” Tom said. “Now for Double Jeopardy, where the scores can really change.” It was the first joke Pete had heard him make in a very long time.

Tina came in. “Daddy's got a fairy godmother, that's what I think. Hey, Dad, Mom! Look at my fingernails! Ellen got sparkle polish, and she shared.”

“Excellent look for you, my little punkin,” Tom said.

First a joke, then a compliment. Those things were all it took to convince Pete that he had done the right thing.
Totally
the right thing. They couldn't exactly send it back, could they? Not without a return address, they couldn't. And by the way, when was the last time Dad had called Teens his little punkin?

Linda gave her son a piercing look. “
You
don't know anything about this, do you?”

“Uh-uh, but can I have some?”

“Dream on,” she said, and turned to her husband, hands on hips. “Tom, someone's obviously made a mistake.”

Tom considered this, and when he spoke, there was no arking and barking. His voice was calm. “That doesn't seem likely.” He pushed the envelope toward her, tapping his name and address.

“Yes, but—”

“But me no buts, Lin. We owe the oil company, and before we pay them, we have to pay down your MasterCard. Or you're going to lose it.”

“Yes, but—”

“Lose the credit card, lose your credit rating.” Still not arking and barking. Calm and reasonable. Persuasive. To Pete it was as if his father had been suffering from a high fever that had just broken. He even smiled. Smiled and touched her hand. “It so happens that for now, your credit rating is the only one we've got, so we have to protect it. Besides, Tina could be right. Maybe I've got a fairy godmother.”

No, Pete thought. A fairy god
son
is what you've got.

Tina said, “Oh, wait! I know where it
really
came from.”

They turned to her. Pete felt suddenly warm all over. She couldn't know, could she?
How
could she? Only he'd said that stupid thing about buried treasure, and—

“Where, hon?” Linda asked.

“The Emergency Fund thingy. It must have got some more money, and now they're spreading it out.”

Pete let out a soundless breath of air, only realizing as it passed his lips that he had been holding it.

Tom ruffled her hair. “They wouldn't send cash, punkin. They'd send a check. Also a bunch of forms to sign.”

Pete went to the stove. “I'm making more cocoa. Does anyone want some?”

Turned out they all did.

•••

The envelopes kept coming.

The price of postage went up, but the amount never changed. An extra six thousand dollars per annum, give or take. Not a huge sum, but tax-free and just enough to keep the Saubers family from drowning in debt.

The children were forbidden to tell anyone.

“Tina will never be able to keep it to herself,” Linda told Tom one night. “You know that, don't you? She'll tell her idiot friend, and Ellen Briggs will broadcast it to everyone she knows.”

But Tina kept the secret, partly because her brother, whom she idolized, told her she would never be allowed in his room again if she spilled the beans, and mostly because she remembered the arkie-barkies.

Pete stowed the cash envelopes in the cobweb-festooned hollow behind a loose baseboard in his closet. Once every four weeks or so, he took out five hundred dollars and put it in his backpack along with an addressed envelope, one of several dozen he had prepared at school on a computer in the school's Business Ed room. He did the envelopes after intramurals one late afternoon when the room was empty.

He used a variety of city mailboxes to send them on their way to Mr. Thomas Saubers of 23 Sycamore Street, going about this family-sustaining charity with the craft of a master criminal. He was always afraid that his mom would discover what he was up to, object (probably strenuously), and things would go back to the way they had been. Things weren't perfect now, there was still the occasional arkie-barkie, but he supposed things weren't perfect in any family outside those old TV sitcoms on Nick at Nite.

They could watch Nick at Nite, and Cartoon Network, and MTV, and everything else, because, ladies and gentlemen, the cable was
back
.

In May, another good thing happened: Dad got a part-time job with a new real estate company, as something called a “pre-sell investigator.” Pete didn't know what that was, and didn't give Shit One. Dad could do it on his phone and the home computer, it brought in a little money, and those were the things that mattered.

Two other things mattered in the months after the money
started coming in. Dad's legs were getting better, that was one thing. In June of 2010 (when the perpetrator of the so-called City Center Massacre was finally caught), Tom began walking without his crutches some of the time, and he also began stepping down on the pink pills. The other thing was more difficult to explain, but Pete knew it was there. So did Tina. Dad and Mom felt . . . well . . .
blessed
, and now when they argued they looked guilty as well as mad, as if they were shitting on the mysterious good fortune that had befallen them. Often they would stop and talk about other things before the shit got deep. Often it was the money they talked about, and who could be sending it. These discussions came to nothing, and that was good.

I will not be caught, Pete told himself. I must not, and I will not.

•••

One day in August of that year, Dad and Mom took Tina and Ellen to a petting zoo called Happydale Farm. This was the opportunity Pete had been patiently waiting for, and as soon as they were gone, he went back to the stream with two suitcases.

After making sure the coast was clear, he dug the trunk out of the embankment again and loaded the notebooks into the suitcases. He reburied the trunk and then went back to the house with his booty. In the upstairs hall, he pulled down the ladder and carried the suitcases up to the attic. This was a small, low space, chilly in winter and stifling in summer. The family rarely used it; their extra stuff was still stored in the garage. The few relics up here were probably left over from one of the previous families that had owned 23 Sycamore. There was a dirty baby carriage listing on one wheel, a standing lamp with tropical birds on the shade, old issues of
Redbook
and
Good Housekeeping
tied up with twine, a pile of moldy blankets that smelled like yuck.

Pete piled the notebooks in the farthest corner and covered them with the blankets, but first he grabbed one at random, sat under one of the attic's two hanging lightbulbs, and opened it. The writing was cursive and quite small, but carefully made and easy to read. There were no cross-outs, which Pete thought remarkable. Although he was looking at the first page of the notebook, the small circled number at the top was 482, making him think that this was continued not just from one of the other notebooks, but from half a dozen. Half a dozen, at least.

Chapter 27

The back room of the Drover was the same as it had been five years before; the same smell of ancient beer mingled with the stink of the stockyards and the tang of diesel from the trucking depots that fronted this half of Nebraska's great emptiness. Stew Logan looked the same, too. Here was the same white apron, the same suspiciously black hair, even the same parrots-and-macaws necktie strangling his rosy neck.

“Why, it's Jimmy Gold, as I live and breathe,” he said, and smiled in his old dislikeable way that said we don't care for each other, but let's pretend. “Have you come to pay me what you owe, then?”

“I have,” Jimmy said, and touched his back pocket where the pistol rested. It felt small and final, a thing capable—if used correctly, and with courage—of paying all debts.

“Then step in,” Logan said. “Have a drink. You look dusty.”

“I am,” Jimmy said, “and along with a drink I could use

A horn honked on the street. Pete jumped and looked around guiltily, as if he had been whacking off instead of reading. What
if they'd come home early because that doofus Ellen had gotten carsick, or something? What if they found him up here with the notebooks? Everything could fall apart.

He shoved the one he had been reading under the old blankets (phew, they stank) and crawled back to the trapdoor, sparing a glance for the suitcases. No time for them. Going down the ladder, the change in temperature from boiling hot to August-normal made him shiver. Pete folded the ladder and shoved it up, wincing at the screek and bang the trapdoor made when it snapped shut on its rusty spring.

He went into his bedroom and peered out at the driveway.

Nobody there. False alarm.

Thank God.

He returned to the attic and retrieved the suitcases. He put them back in the downstairs closet, took a shower (once more remembering to clean up the tub afterwards), then dressed in clean clothes and lay down on his bed.

He thought, It's a novel. With that many pages, it's pretty much got to be. And there might be more than one, because no single novel's long enough to fill all those books. Not even the Bible would fill all those books.

Also . . . it was interesting. He wouldn't mind hunting through the notebooks and finding the one where it started. Seeing if it really was good. Because you couldn't tell if a novel was good from just a single page, could you?

Pete closed his eyes and began to drift napward. Ordinarily he wasn't much of a day-sleeper, but it had been a busy morning, the house was empty and quiet, and he decided to let himself go. Why not? Everything was right, at least right now, and that was his doing. He deserved a nap.

That name, though—Jimmy Gold.

Pete could swear he'd heard it before. In class, maybe? Mrs. Swidrowski giving them background on one of the authors they were reading? Maybe. She liked to do that.

Maybe I'll google it later on, Pete thought. I could do that. I could . . .

He slept.