No Lesser Plea (22 page)

The hospital was really his only choice, since he understood that his life span—had he been sent to Attica—would have been no more than a few weeks. Thugs have their standards, too. He was happy in the hospital, although, as the Millbrook Ripper, Fallon was on Dr. Ghope’s list of unreleasable inmates. He painted, he sold his paintings at premium prices to a small group of wealthy admirers, and saved his money in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. One day he planned to escape and live out his days in a less effete country, perhaps in South America, where they still appreciated extraordinary men, and where little girls could be purchased like bananas.

The light began to fade and Fallon got ready to put away his work. As he cleaned his brushes he fixed his companion with his huge and shining blue eyes, and said, “You’re the shotgun artist, right?”

“What’re you talking about, shotgun artist?” said Louis coldly.

Fallon chuckled. “Hey, it’s OK. I know everything that goes on here. No, really, just making conversation—why should I care if you slaughter a hundred shopkeepers? Let me just finish up here and we’ll go into the lounge and have a nice chat.”

Louis let himself be towed by the big man into the day room. He had little enough will in any case, and the painter seemed to be the only inmate he had met so far who was not a zombie. He thought maybe Fallon would be able to help him remember what he had to do.

“Friend,” said Fallon, “the first thing is, we’ve got to get you off the dope. You see, decadent societies always try to clip the wings of their superior men. Three centuries ago it was the stake and torture. Now it’s tranquilizers. You understand what I’m saying? The sheep can’t handle wolves like us and they haven’t got the balls to kill us any more. So they send us to so-called hospitals to ‘cure’ us. And what’s the cure? Slow poison. Hey, you can barely understand what I’m saying, you’re so doped up. Listen, next time that asshole with meds comes by, do what I do. Give him a dumb smile, take the drink, hold it in your mouth, and then spit it out into some toilet paper. Here, take some of mine.”

Louis did as he was told. By that evening, his head was clearer. The feeling of being wrapped in a warm blanket was fading. The next day he spat out all three doses. The day after that, he remembered what he was supposed to do.

Elvis almost fell out of bed when he heard the voice on the phone. What made it especially unnerving was that the bed he was in belonged to the voice on the phone, as did, in a manner of speaking, the woman who shared it with him.

“Elvis, my man! How you doin’, bro? You comfortable an’ all?”

“Man? Hey, that really you, huh? Where you at, Man?”

“Where I at? Where the fuck you think I at, asshole? I’m in the goddam nuthouse, where I got to be to keep from goin’ to the slams for about a thousand years, cause goddam Snowball Walker snitched on my ass, instead of bein’ dead in his grave, where you was supposed to put him. Now what the fuck happened?”

Elvis explained about leaving the package in Room 10.

“You
left
the shit! Goddam, Pres! If I wanted to leave the fuckin’ package I coulda hired a goddam
white
man from the Railway Express Company to
leave
the package. You suppose to watch the mutha-fucka take the stuff. An’ since Snowball wasn’t there you didn’t get the damn paper with my phone number on it, did you? No, you sure as shit didn’t.

“Now listen to me, little bro. You fuck up once, OK, you jus’ learnin’. You fuck up again, you dead. You dig what I’m sayin’?”

Elvis dug. And resented it. He had moved into Louis’s apartment, which apparently included, as an appliance, the occasional favors of the luscious DeVonne. He told himself he would keep an eye on things until Louis’s situation cleared up, which, he hoped, would not be for a long time. Meanwhile, he could live damn good on Louis’s stash, and after that was gone, he was pretty sure he could, with a solid base like Louis’s pad, figure out some ways of bringing in easy money. Elvis had big plans.

Which was why the voice on the phone had come as such a shock. Elvis tried to get his thoughts together. There was obviously no need for panic. Louis was behind bars, prison or crazy house didn’t make no never mind, and Elvis was outside. Shit, Louis needed
him,
right?

“Now wait a second, Man,” said Elvis, putting a little sass into his voice, “don’t go comin’ at me like that. I ain’t your nigger.”

“You ain’t?” said Louis after a long pause. “I think you wrong there, little bro. But I see how you could maybe think that, I do indeed. Now say if I go wrong now, but you thinkin’ ‘Shit, Louis in the can now, I get to play with his toys, play his fine stereo, an’ all, sleep on his soft bed, nothing can’t touch old Pres.’ That right? Yeah.

“But the problem with that, see, is if it turns out I gotta do time in Attica, well then it’d be my duty to stand up in court and tell them all ’bout you, boy, how you help me plan the crime, how you stood right by me when I blew those two dudes away. That make you guilty, same as me, the law funny that way. So we both be in Attica at the same time. You gonna love that, Pres, I promise you that. Shit, Pres, there’s dudes in there, they’d shove goddam broken glass up your asshole for ’bout fifty dollars apiece.”

“Ah, Man, I din mean …”

“No, lemme go on, Pres,” said the soft voice on the line. “It hurt me you not doin’ all you can to help me out, especially since it was your own self got me into this. Anyway, let’s say I don’t go to Attica, let’s say I stay here in Matteawan. Shit, Pres, this place—a fuckin’ blind man could walk outa here. So you see, Pres, I figure we friends, you gonna help me outa the fine affection you feel for your main man, but if not, you know I’m gonna come after you, one way or the other. I’m up on murder one already, so I don’t have shit to lose, you dig? An’ when I catch you, an’ I
will
catch you, cause you a dumb muthafucka, I will cut your black ass into tiny little pieces. Now, you dig how you might of been wrong about you not bein’ my nigger anymore?”

Elvis was bathed in sweat, both from fear and from the effort of having ventured to suggest an independent course of action for himself. Elvis did not fear the law; there were thousands of ways of avoiding it, and even if it caught you it was no big deal. But he was pretty sure there was no way on earth of avoiding Mandeville Louis, and he was absolutely sure that if Louis caught him, it would be a big deal.

“Hey, Man, hey be cool. Jus bullshittin’, that’s all. Shit.”

“Good. I like your attitude, Pres. Now, listen, here’s what I want you to do.”

“The problem,” Karp was saying to V.T. Newbury, “is that he only has two weeks to get certified as a candidate. Vierick’s been campaigning for months. Every time somebody gets mugged, the mayor puts Vierick on TV, with the implication that the city needs a war on crime under a new general, which is him.

“Meanwhile, Conlin is going batshit. He can’t come out publicly as long as Garrahy is hanging fire, but short of that he sure as shit is acting like a candidate. Hogging press? Fucking guy is now inviting
reporters
from the
Times
and the
News
to sit in on Homicide Bureau meetings. It’s unbelievable. Morale is in the toilet.”

The two men were sitting on a bench in Foley Square. It was spring again. The Marchiones had been in their graves for over a year. Karp was carrying a full load in Homicide, as was Ciampi. Hrcany was in Felony Trial. Newbury was in Frauds, conducting interminable and arcane investigations of the financial markets, most of which involved, according to him, jailing his relatives and their friends. He loved it. Guma was in the new Narcotics Bureau, also, presumably, jailing his relatives. Conrad Wharton had been named chief administrative officer of the District Attorney’s Office.

“Something’s wacky there, Butch,” said Newbury. “Why doesn’t Conlin get together with the other bureau chiefs and tell Garrahy he’s either got to run or to declare for a successor, you know, for the sake of the glorious DA’s Office? I mean, the thought of Vierick in there ought to shake him up. Or, dare I say it, a Republican.”

Karp laughed. “Bite your tongue. Yeah, I can’t figure it out either. I’ve heard some weird rumors, but Conlin assures me that he’s been pushing Garrahy to run for a year.”

“What does he say Garrahy says?”

“That he’ll see how he feels when the time comes. Anyway, the time has come. I’ll tell you though: I wish I was a fly on the wall at the next bureau chiefs’ meeting.”

They were silent for a while. Then V.T. said, “We couldn’t bug his conference room, could we? I mean, that would be wrong.”

“Oh, very wrong, and besides there isn’t time. The meeting’s today at four-thirty. However, talking about ‘flies on the wall’ and ‘bugs’ has got me thinking. You know that big wooden wardrobe at one end of Garrahy’s conference room? If somebody was standing in it, he could hear everything that was going on at the meeting.”

“Yes, he could. But surely you’re not suggesting that you or I …”

“Of course not, V.T. I’m way too big and you’re way too couth. No, for this venture we need somebody small, slimy, utterly devoid of moral discrimination, yet possessed of a kind of animal cunning, and most of all, somebody who has absolutely nothing to lose as far as career goes.”

“I believe you’re right, Butch. But where are we to find a colleague so utterly devoid of professional ethics, so desperate a villain that he would stoop to spying on our esteemed leaders? I mean, where in the New York District Attorney’s Office would we find a creature so vile?”

“Where indeed?” said Karp.

“No fucking way!” said Guma. “You guys are crazy.”

Karp, Newbury, and Marlene Ciampi were ranged around Guma’s desk, like detectives around the suspect in an old-time movie. Karp had been inspired to drag Ciampi along on the theory that the presence of a woman would turn Guma’s brain to mush, a necessary preamble to the plot. She came, but was not amused.

“Come on, Goom,” said Karp. “There’s nothing to it. We got to find out what Conlin’s been feeding Garrahy about the election, and this is the only way. There won’t be another chiefs’ meeting until it’s too late.”

“You do it, then!”

V.T. said, “Raymond, where’s your spirit of adventure? What happened to the Mad Dog we used to know? You lost your nerve?”

Guma scowled like a sulky Pekinese. “Up yours, V.T.! Look folks, I’m a busy man—got places to go, people to see. Let’s have lunch sometime …”

“Guma, we got to have you in on this. Name your price.”

“Fuck you too, Karp. What d’you think, I’m some kinda sleaze bag? ‘Name your price,’ my ass! It’s unprincipled, that’s why I’m not gonna do it, and nothing you can say is gonna make me change my mind.”

At this, Ciampi leaned forward from where she was perched on the corner of Guma’s desk and looped her finger through one of Guma’s curly locks.

“Guma,” she said, “this is the final offer. Do the job and I promise that when we ride up on the elevator when it’s crowded and you accidentally-on-purpose brush my bazoom with your arm, I won’t kick you in the ankle anymore.”

“Yeah? And you won’t yell out, ‘Guma, stop mashing my tits!’ anymore?”

“You got it. I’ll pretend it was an accident and back away.”

Guma looked at his wristwatch. “When’s the goddam meeting?” he said.

Outside Guma’s office Ciampi spoke to Karp with some heat, “OK, I owed you one, and I consider us even, with interest.” She began to walk off.

Karp said, “Hey Champ, it’s all for the cause. Where you going? Aren’t you going to wait around for the payoff?”

“Sorry fellas, I got to get into my hot pants and get down to Times Square. Leroy gonna whup my ass if I be late.”

At 5:30 that afternoon, Karp and Newbury entered Guma’s office to get the dirt. They found him seated at his desk, smoking a White Owl and reading the
Post.
The office coat rack was propped up against the sill of the wide-open window. A pair of navy-blue trousers and a pair of jockey shorts fluttered in the breeze like ignoble flags over Foley Square.

“Guma, what’s going on?” asked V.T. “You know, you don’t really have to undress in order to jerk off, but let me say I admire your delicacy.”

Guma dropped his paper and gave the two other men a sour look. “Shut the fuck up, Newbury. I swear I’ll never forgive you guys for this. I was in that goddam closet for two and a half hours. It was like a fucking bad dream.”

“What happened,” said Karp, “what did you hear?”

“I should’ve gone before I went in there, but who knew the meeting was gonna take so long?”

“What are you talking about, Goom?”

“I peed in my pants, for Chrissake, a fucking drop at a time. It was murder. Then I had to wash my stuff out in the men’s room and come back here buck naked. Hey, V.T., feel that stuff and see if it’s dry, will ya? Jesus, talk about embarrassment …”

V.T. said, “Anything, Guma. I will be your personal laundress, but for God’s sake tell us what happened!”

“What happened was that Conlin did a big bullshit number about how while he, Conlin, supported the old man to the limit, the support just wasn’t there in the office. He said the younger attorneys respected Garrahy, but wanted new leadership. Oh, he was rare, made you want to cry.”

Karp was astounded. “And nobody else said anything?”

“Nope. It was Conlin’s show. Oh yeah, he brought out a poll he said he had done, that showed Garrahy splitting the Democratic vote with Vierick thirty points apiece. If Vierick runs as an independent, which he says he’s going to do, that means a turnover in the general election. He had all the figures.”

“What a piece of crap, that bastard!” cried Karp. “How the hell can Garrahy believe that?”

“Maybe he wants to believe it, Butch,” said V.T. “Maybe he’s tired and looking for an excuse to quit.”

“He can’t quit. I need, I mean the office needs him.”

“Then what do you intend to do about it?”

“I’ll think of something,” said Karp.

That weekend the Bullets clinched the city-wide Lawyer’s League title for the fifth straight year. Which meant a party for the team in Garrahy’s office, which meant that Karp could sneak in for five minutes with Garrahy alone, when the DA was likely to be in as good a mood as he would attain at any time—and without having to get on his official calendar, of which Conrad Wharton had become the virtual master.