Finders Keepers (9 page)

I can't, no matter what. I
won't
.

Andy Halliday might have been an English Leather–wearing homo, but he had been right about Morris's motivation. Curtis and Freddy had been in it for cash; when Morris assured them the old guy might have squirreled away as much as a hundred thousand, they had believed him. Rothstein's writings? To those two bumblefucks, the value of Rothstein's output since 1960 was just a misty maybe, like a lost goldmine. It was Morris who cared about the writing. If things had gone differently, he would have offered to trade Curtis and Freddy his share of the money for the written words, and he was sure they would have taken him up on it. If he gave that up now—especially when the notebooks contained the continuation of the Jimmy Gold saga—it would all have been for nothing.

Cafferty rapped his phone on the Plexi, then put it back to his ear. “Cafferty to Bellamy, Cafferty to Bellamy, come in, Bellamy.”

“Sorry. I was thinking.”

“A little late for that, wouldn't you say? Try to stick with me, if you please. You'll be arraigned on three counts. Your mission,
should you choose to accept it, is to plead not guilty to each in turn. Later, when you go to trial, you can change to guilty, should it prove to your advantage to do so. Don't even think about bail, because Bukowski doesn't laugh; she cackles like Witch Hazel.”

Morris thought, This is a case of worst fears realized. Rothstein, Dow, and Rogers. Three counts of Murder One.

“Mr. Bellamy? Our time is fleeting, and I'm losing patience.”

The phone sagged away from his ear and Morris brought it back with an effort. Nothing mattered now, and still the lawyer with the guileless Richie Cunningham face and the weird middle-aged baritone voice kept pouring words into his ear, and at some point they began to make sense.

“They'll work up the ladder, Mr. Bellamy, from first to worst. Count one, resisting arrest. For arraignment purposes, you plead not guilty. Count two, aggravated assault—not just the woman, you also got one good one in on the first-responding cop before he cuffed you. You plead not guilty. Count three, aggravated rape. They may add attempted murder later, but right now it's just rape . . . if rape can be called just anything, I suppose. You plead—”

“Wait a minute,” Morris said. He touched the scratches on his cheek, and what he felt was . . . hope. “I
raped
somebody?”

“Indeed you did,” Cafferty said, sounding pleased. Probably because his client finally seemed to be following him. “After Miss Cora Ann Hooper . . .” He took a sheet of paper from his briefcase and consulted it. “This was shortly after she left the diner where she works as a waitress. She was heading for a bus stop on Lower Marlborough. Says you tackled her and pulled her into an alley next to Shooter's Tavern, where you had spent several hours imbibing Jack Daniel's before kicking the jukebox and being asked to leave. Miss Hooper had a battery-powered Police Alert in her
purse and managed to trigger it. She also scratched your face. You broke her nose, held her down, choked her, and proceeded to insert your Johns Hopkins into her Sarah Lawrence. When Officer Philip Ellenton hauled you off, you were still matriculating.”

“Rape. Why would I . . .”

Stupid question. Why had he spent three long hours tearing up that home in Sugar Heights, just taking a short break to piss on the Aubusson carpet?

“I have no idea,” Cafferty said. “Rape is foreign to my way of life.”

And mine, Morris thought. Ordinarily. But I was drinking Jack and got up to hijinks.

“How long will they give me?”

“The prosecution will ask for life. If you plead guilty at trial and throw yourself on the mercy of the court, you might only get twenty-five years.”

•••

Morris pleaded guilty at trial. He said he regretted what he'd done. He blamed the booze. He threw himself on the mercy of the court.

And got life.

2013–2014

By the time he was a high school sophomore, Pete Saubers had already figured out the next step: a good college in New England where literature instead of cleanliness was next to godliness. He began investigating online and collecting brochures. Emerson or BC seemed the most likely candidates, but Brown might not be out of reach. His mother and father told him not to get his hopes up, but Pete didn't buy that. He felt that if you didn't have hopes and ambitions when you were a teenager, you'd be pretty much fucked later on.

About majoring in English there was no question. Some of this surety had to do with John Rothstein and the Jimmy Gold novels; so far as Pete knew, he was the only person in the world who had read the final two, and they had changed his life.

Howard Ricker, his sophomore English teacher, had also been life-changing, even though many kids made fun of him, calling him Ricky the Hippie because of the flower-power shirts and bellbottoms he favored. (Pete's girlfriend, Gloria Moore, called him Pastor Ricky, because he had a habit of waving his hands above his head when he got excited.) Hardly anyone cut Mr. Ricker's classes, though. He was entertaining, he was enthusiastic, and—unlike many of the teachers—he seemed to genuinely like the kids, whom he called “my young ladies and gentlemen.” They rolled their eyes at his retro clothes and his screechy laugh . . . but the clothes had a
certain funky cachet, and the screechy laugh was so amiably weird it made you want to laugh along.

On the first day of sophomore English, he blew in like a cool breeze, welcomed them, and then printed something on the board that Pete Saubers never forgot:

This is stupid!

“What do you make of this, ladies and gentlemen?” he asked. “What on earth can it
mean
?”

The class was silent.

“I'll tell you, then. It happens to be the most common criticism made by young ladies and gentlemen such as yourselves, doomed to a course where we begin with excerpts from
Beowulf
and end with Raymond Carver. Among teachers, such survey courses are sometimes called GTTG: Gallop Through the Glories.”

He screeched cheerfully, also waggling his hands at shoulder height in a yowza-yowza gesture. Most of the kids laughed along, Pete among them.

“Class verdict on Jonathan Swift's ‘A Modest Proposal'? This is stupid! ‘Young Goodman Brown,' by Nathaniel Hawthorne? This is stupid! ‘Mending Wall,' by Robert Frost? This is moderately stupid! The required excerpt from
Moby-Dick
? This is
extremely
stupid!”

More laughter. None of them had read
Moby-Dick
, but they all knew it was hard and boring. Stupid, in other words.

“And sometimes!” Mr. Ricker exclaimed, raising one finger and pointing dramatically at the words on the blackboard. “Sometimes, my young ladies and gentlemen,
the criticism is spot-on
. I stand here with my bare face hanging out and admit it. I am required to teach certain antiquities I would rather not teach. I see the loss of enthu
siasm in your eyes, and my soul groans. Yes!
Groans!
But I soldier on, because I know that much of what I teach is
not
stupid. Even some of the antiquities to which you feel you cannot relate now or ever will, have deep resonance that will eventually reveal itself. Shall I tell you how you judge the
not-stupid
from the
is-stupid
? Shall I impart this great secret? Since we have forty minutes left in this class and as yet no grist to grind in the mill of our combined intellects, I believe I will.”

He leaned forward and propped his hands on the desk, his tie swinging like a pendulum. Pete felt that Mr. Ricker was looking directly at him, as if he knew—or at least intuited—the tremendous secret Pete was keeping under a pile of blankets in the attic of his house. Something far more important than money.

“At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be
this is stupid
. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless thing? My time with you is short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?”

Some of the kids—Gloria was one of them—now looked lost, but Pete understood exactly what Mr. Ricker, aka Ricky the Hippie, was talking about, because since starting the notebooks, he had read dozens of critical essays on John Rothstein. Many of them judged Rothstein to be one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, right up there with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Roth. There were others—a minority, but a vocal one—who asserted that his work was second-rate and hollow. Pete had read a piece in
Salon
where the writer had called Rothstein “king of the wisecrack and the patron saint of fools.”

“Time is the answer,” Mr. Ricker said on the first day of Pete's sophomore year. He strode back and forth, antique bellbottoms swishing, occasionally waving his arms. “Yes! Time mercilessly culls away the
is-stupid
from the
not-stupid
. It is a natural, Darwinian process. It is why the novels of Graham Greene are available in every good bookstore, and the novels of Somerset Maugham are not—those novels still exist, of course, but you must order them, and you would only do that if you knew about them. Most modern readers do not. Raise your hand if you have ever heard of Somerset Maugham. And I'll spell that for you.”

No hands went up.

Mr. Ricker nodded. Rather grimly, it seemed to Pete. “Time has decreed that Mr. Greene is
not-stupid
while Mr. Maugham is . . . well, not exactly stupid but forgettable. He wrote some very fine novels, in my opinion—
The Moon and Sixpence
is remarkable, my young ladies and gentlemen,
remarkable
—and he also wrote a great deal of excellent short fiction, but none is included in your textbook.

“Shall I weep over this? Shall I rage, and shake my fists, and proclaim injustice? No. I will not. Such culling is a natural process. It will occur for you, young ladies and gentlemen, although I will be in your rearview mirror by the time it happens. Shall I tell you
how
it happens? You will read something—perhaps ‘Dulce et Decorum Est,' by Wilfred Owen. Shall we use that as an example? Why not?”

Then, in a deeper voice that sent chills up Pete's back and tightened his throat, Mr. Ricker cried: “ ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge . . . ' And so on. Cetra-cetra. Some of you will say,
This is stupid
. Will I break my promise not to argue the point, even though I consider Mr. Owen's poems the greatest to come out of
World War I? No! It's just my opinion, you see, and opinions are like assholes: everybody has one.”

They all roared at that, young ladies and gentlemen alike.

Mr. Ricker drew himself up. “I may give some of you detentions if you disrupt my class, I have no problem with imposing discipline, but
never
will I disrespect your opinion. And yet! And yet!”

Up went the finger.

“Time will pass!
Tempus
will
fugit
! Owen's poem may fall away from your mind, in which case your verdict of
is-stupid
will have turned out to be correct. For you, at least. But for some of you it will recur. And recur. And recur. Each time it does, the steady march of your maturity will deepen its resonance. Each time that poem steals back into your mind, it will seem a little less stupid and a little more vital. A little more important. Until it
shines
, young ladies and gentlemen. Until it
shines
. Thus endeth my opening day peroration, and I ask you to turn to page sixteen in that most excellent tome
Language and Literature
.”

•••

One of the stories Mr. Ricker assigned that year was “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” by D. H. Lawrence, and sure enough, many of Mr. Ricker's young ladies and gentlemen (including Gloria Moore, of whom Pete was growing tired, in spite of her really excellent breasts) considered it stupid. Pete did not, in large part because events in his life had already caused him to mature beyond his years. As 2013 gave way to 2014—the year of the famed Polar Vortex, when furnaces all over the upper Midwest went into maximum overdrive, burning money by the bale—that story recurred to him often, and its resonance continued to deepen. And recur.

The family in it seemed to have everything, but they didn't; there was never quite enough, and the hero of the story, a young
boy named Paul, always heard the house whispering, “There must be more money! There must be more money!” Pete Sau­bers guessed that there were kids who considered that stupid. They were the lucky ones who had never been forced to listen to nightly arkie-barkies about which bills to pay. Or the price of cigarettes.

The young protagonist in the Lawrence story discovered a supernatural way to make money. By riding his toy rocking-horse to the make-believe land of luck, Paul could pick horse-race winners in the real world. He made thousands of dollars, and still the house whispered, “There must be more money!”

After one final epic ride on the rocking-horse—and one final big-money pick—Paul dropped dead of a brain hemorrhage or something. Pete didn't have so much as a headache after finding the buried trunk, but it was still his rocking-horse, wasn't it? Yes. His very own rocking-horse. But by 2013, the year he met Mr. Ricker, the rocking-horse was slowing down. The trunk-money had almost run out.

It had gotten his parents through a rough and scary patch when their marriage might otherwise have crashed and burned; this Pete knew, and he never once regretted playing guardian angel. In the words of that old song, the trunk-money had formed a bridge over troubled waters, and things were better—
much
—on the other side. The worst of the recession was over. Mom was teaching full-time again, her salary three thousand a year better than before. Dad now ran his own small business, not real estate, exactly, but something called real estate search. He had several agencies in the city as clients. Pete didn't completely understand how it worked, but he knew it was actually making some money, and might make more in the years ahead, if the housing market continued to trend upward. He was agenting a few properties of his own, too. Best of all, he was drug-free and walking well. The crutches had been in the closet for
over a year, and he only used his cane on rainy or snowy days when his bones and joints ached. All good. Great, in fact.

And yet, as Mr. Ricker said at least once in every class. And yet!

There was Tina to think about, that was one very large
and yet
. Many of her friends from the old neighborhood on the West Side, including Barbara Robinson, whom Tina had idolized, were going to Chapel Ridge, a private school that had an excellent record when it came to sending kids on to good colleges. Mom had told Tina that she and Dad didn't see how they could afford to send her there directly from middle school. Maybe she could attend as a sophomore, if their finances continued to improve.

“But I won't know
anybody
by then,” Tina had said, starting to cry.

“You'll know Barbara Robinson,” Mom said, and Pete (listening from the next room) could tell from the sound of her voice that Mom was on the verge of tears herself. “Hilda and Betsy, too.”

But Teens had been a little younger than those girls, and Pete knew only Barbs had been a real friend to his sister back in the West Side days. Hilda Carver and Betsy DeWitt probably didn't even remember her. Neither would Barbara, in another year or two. Their mother didn't seem to remember what a big deal high school was, and how quickly you forgot your little-kid friends once you got there.

Tina's response summed up these thoughts with admirable succinctness. “Yeah, but they won't know
me
.”

“Tina—”

“You have that
money
!” Tina cried. “That mystery money that comes every month! Why can't I have some for Chapel Ridge?”

“Because we're still catching up from the bad time, honey.”

To this Tina could say nothing, because it was true.

His own college plans were another
and yet
. Pete knew that to
some of his friends, maybe most of them, college seemed as far away as the outer planets of the solar system. But if he wanted a good one (
Brown
, his mind whispered,
English Lit at Brown
), that meant making early applications when he was a first-semester senior. The applications themselves cost money, as did the summer class he needed to pick up if he wanted to score at least a 670 on the math part of the SATs. He had a part-time job at the Garner Street Library, but thirty-five bucks a week didn't go far.

Dad's business had grown enough to make a downtown office desirable, that was
and yet
number three. Just a low-rent place on an upper floor, and being close to the action would pay dividends, but it would mean laying out more money, and Pete knew—even though no one said it out loud—that Dad was counting on the mystery cash to carry him through the critical period. They had all come to depend on the mystery cash, and only Pete knew it would be gone before the end of '14.

And yeah, okay, he had spent some on himself. Not a huge amount—that would have raised questions—but a hundred here and a hundred there. A blazer and a pair of loafers for the class trip to Washington. A few CDs. And books. He had become a fool for books since reading the notebooks and falling in love with John Rothstein. He began with Rothstein's Jewish contemporaries, like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Irwin Shaw (he thought
The Young Lions
was fucking awesome, and couldn't understand why it wasn't a classic), and spread out from there. He always bought paperbacks, but even those were twelve or fifteen dollars apiece these days, unless you could find them used.