Pleading Guilty (43 page)

"But what happened?" I said. "You know. With you and her. Can I ask?"

"It didn't work out," he said. His hand skirted the air. "W
e w
ere kidding ourselves." The remark hung there, with all its potent sadness--the American predicament. Martin had these kids, this wife--and there was the Club Belvedere, clients who'd snigger that he'd taken up with a colored girl. But the result probably suited Glyndora. It would have been a lot to ask of her, to be herself in his world.

"I am very fond of Glyndora," he said then, impaled on whatever the remark conjured and concealed. He looked at me. -Do you believe in reincarnation?"

"No," I said.

"No," he said. "Neither do I." He was quiet then. Martin Gold, the most successful lawyer I knew, wanted to be somebody else too. It was touching, though. Loyalty always is.

We were silent some time. Eventually Martin started talking about what had happened in a depleted, reflective tone. He had not been fooling with me, he said. Not intentionally. I gave him far too much credit. Circumstances had mounted. Combined. His honesty as he spoke was beguiling. You so rarely got Martin to talk straight from the heart.

-Glyndora came to me with the memo and the checks as soon as they'd cleared. Early December, I think. Around then. It looked odd to both of us, of course, business checks negotiated offshore, but I didn't feel any great concern until I started doing the research--talking to Bert, Neucriss, the banker down there in Pico. No Litiplex registered anywhere. No records upstairs. I was shocked when I saw where it pointed. I never perceived this in Jake. He'd lie to the Pope for the sake of his vanity, but I was stunned to learn he was a thief. And it was gruesome, of course, imagining the consequences."

Martin, like any man with an empire, was accustomed to problems--big ones, situations that could bring him and everyone who depended upon him to doom. Like TN walking out as a client, or Pagnucci making a move. He got used to it, accustomed. He learned to walk the highwire, sailing along wit
h g
umption and a parasol. This thing with Eiger was a problem too. He left Glyndora on alert for more checks and took some time to ponder the common good.

"At which point," he said, "Glyndora's life began coming apart. "

"Bert and Orleans?"

He emitted a sound, the old wrestler's grunt, a little eruption of surprise, self-consciously controlled, when he was snatched for the takedown. He peered, his squat face immobile, engraved by shadow in the dwindling light.

"You know, Malloy, if you'd done half as good a job around here in the last few years as you did looking into this, you would have made my life a great deal easier."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"Please," Martin answered.

"What's he like?" I asked. "This son of hers?"

"Orleans? Complicated fellow."

"He's her heartbreak, I take it."

Martin made various ruminative gestures. It seemed he had tried to be good to Orleans as a boy.

"Very bright individual. Mother's son, that way. Very capable. But not steady. Temperamentally. Nothing you could do about that. She thought she was going to prohibit him from being the way he clearly was. And he wasn't willing to be prohibited." "She found Bert an upsetting development?"

"Not Bert as Bert. It's a situation she's never wanted to confront squarely." He made a sad face.

"Yeah," I offered. I got it. But I felt for Bert. In all likelihood, he'd been largely beside the point with Orleans from the start. "Did you warn Bert?"

"No one here has accepted my warnings. No one." He remained momentarily forlorn, even as his agitation visibly mounted. "Jesus, what a mess. What a mess! This one may have been the single stupidest thing--" Martin waved. "This ludicrous, insane novelty with these basketball games-- And worse
,
both of them, neither had given a moment's thought, not a bare instant, to the costs of this behavior-- Imprisonment, bodily harm, my God, the prospects, and the two of them are surprised by this, shocked, absolutely, positively disbelieving, like tiny children, the two most immature grown men I have ever known, neither with the remotest--" Martin stopped himself; he was losing the thread.

"You were explaining how you decided to cover for Jake." "This is part of it," he said. "I told you. It's happenstance. Circumstances conspire. This is part. This is what led Glyndora to it."

"Blaming Bert? You're saying that's Glyndora's idea? For what? To get even with him?"

He waited. He smiled.

"What kind of mother do you imagine Glyndora is, Mack?" You could take your choice of adjectives. Intense. Protective. She'd have sheltered Orleans through the ravages of war, scavenged food, or sold her body. For all I knew, that's what she was doing with me that night. But I still wasn't following. Martin saved his partners, his professional life, by covering Jake. I didn't see much gain to the chief clerk in Accounting.

"Look, Mack, Bert's decision to drop out of sight was well-intentioned as far as it went. He thought he was being heroic. But it was hardly a solution for Orleans. Not as far as Glyndora was concerned. She wasn't going to have him running for the rest of his life. She wanted him safe to stay here, and he wasn't." I still didn't get it.

"You're the one who asked the question, Mack. Last week. `Where did Bert go?' Where do we say Bert went? This is a lawyer. With sixty-seven partners. And clients. Never mind his family. There's not much. His friends, so-called, were all implicated in the same thing and surely willing to keep their peace. But what the hell do we say around here? How do we keep somebody from notifying the police who, in investigating Bert's absence, will promptly discover that whole basketball mess? Th
e o
nly way to insulate Orleans--to completely protect him--was if there was another credible explanation for why Bert disappeared--even if that explanation was understood only by a few people who'd make excuses to everyone else."

I rolled my head around, this way and that. I sort of liked it. Until I saw the next part.

"That's why you needed some hapless stumblebum to go look for him." Someone, I realized, who wasn't supposed to really catch Bert or even figure out what he'd actually been up to--just state convincingly that he was gone. That was what Glyndora had meant in the one sincere moment we'd had. Absorbing my observation about their estimate of me, Martin, I noted, made no effort to differ.

"And that's why you hid the body," I said. It came to me, just like that. "Once I started looking for Bert."

"We what?" Martin's entire weight was suddenly planted on one hand fiercely gripping the arm of his chair. This aspect of alarm, of incomprehension, could have been posed, I realized. But Martin didn't look like he was fooling. Instead, I recalculated: Orleans and Bert, already shamed and scolded, yelled at, told they were irresponsible fools, hadn't confessed the worst. Martin and Glyndora thought Bert was running only from threats. Archie's disappearance, when it hit the papers, must have terrified them.

"Figure of speech," I said. "The memo. You hid the memo." "Oh," said Martin. He relaxed. "Right. We hid the body." He made a brief effort to smile. For an instant, I wondered again about who'd moved the body. The only thing certain was that Archie couldn't have walked.

In the meantime, Martin had resumed his explanation, telling me how they had come to blame Bert for stealing the Litiplex money. The first few times Glyndora and he had discussed it, he said, the whole plan, it was in the vein of magnificent fantasy, a perfect future where all problems came to an end. He worke
d i
t out with her dozens of times, calculated how the dominoes would fall, saw at once how advantageous it would be to the firm not to have to sacrifice Jake. It was fun to discuss, lots of laughs, like a couple saying they'll rob a bank to pay the mortgage. Eventually he recognized that she was urging him to pursue what he'd regarded as jest.

"I told her this was lunacy. Worse than that, impermissible. A fraud. But you see. Really." He sat up. He faced me squarely. "It's me. It's mine. It's my precious values. My law. My rules. Take that out of the equation-- My right," he said, "my wrong. My precious abstractions." He halted in the midst of the litany he must have heard from her for years and lingered like some bug in the breeze, manifestly pained. Watching him, my heart spurted with sudden hope that Brushy and I might resolve what divided us the same way, until I recollected, as quickly, that we were both supposed to believe in the same thing.

"Here are these people," he said. "Glyndora and Orleans. My partners. Jake. Bert. Even you, Mack. Even you. This is an institution. It's the product of lives. Hundreds of lives. All right. I sound like Wash. Forgive the sanctimony. But do I lay that all on the altar? I've made worse compromises."

Both hands were thrown wide. He had a touch of priestly majesty. He thought he was revealed.

I said, "It doesn't hurt you either, Martin. We all know who gets the biggest share." I was enjoying this--being the man of greater rectitude, even if we both knew it was situational and I knew it was an act. Fact is, I've enjoyed my acts, every one of them--copper, hard guy, smartass, lawyer. I can be a good anything, if it's only part time.

Martin had absorbed my remark with a lingering, rueful grin. "Not me," he said. He backhanded the little note card he'd had on his desk so it spiraled through space; I picked it up off the rug. Martin's handwriting is atrocious--slashes and squiggles indiscernible to me, even after all these years. But certain word
s w
ere clear enough. "Resigning." "Mayor." "Riverside Commission." "Long-held passion." In tonight's speech to the partnership assembled, Martin Gold was going to quit.

"Think the public sector can handle me?" he asked.

"You've got to be kidding." I couldn't believe it. The circus without Barnum.

He muled around. Stubborn. Set. It was time, he said. The deal was done. Martin Gold, head of the Riverside Commission. Starting April i. He talked about thirty years in private practice, giving things back, but I understood the imperatives. If he took a dive for Jake, if he didn't march stalwartly to Krzysinski's office and let his law firm pass into the great beyond, then Martin would punish himself instead. His people might survive, but he wouldn't get to the promised land. It was an old idea, and its mixture of shrewd practicality and highfalutin principles was quintessentially Gold. Lawyerly, you'd say. But still nuts.

"You should have been born a Catholic," I told him. "You really missed your chance. There are all these obscure fast days and penitential rites. We've been working for centuries on strategies for self-denial." He thought I was funny of course. He always did. He laughed out loud.

All these years I've figured that if I somehow eluded Martin's defenses and peered into his core it would be a vision of glory: I'd see a lionheart, beating at mach speed and enlarged by passion. Instead, what was within was some little gremlin that made him believe that his greatest nobility came from cutting himself off from what he liked best. Glyndora. Or the law firm. He was cheap with himself, with his own pleasure. It was crushing to recognize: he was more productive than me, but no happier. I didn't want his life either.

He was still disagreeing.

"As of today"-- And he nodded toward me--"I'm not giving up much. h Not once the dust settles upstairs. Whether Tad in- structs his new General Counsel to cut us off or just cut us back
,
this place won't hold together. A fellow like Carl--" Martin stopped himself; he never spoke ill of his partners. "Not everyone will settle for less. In the end, frankly, there will be those who paint me as an opportunist. First man to the lifeboat."

There was, of course, a subtle accusatory element to these observations. Martin had removed a limb or two for the team. I'd destroyed it. The Catholic boy, ever guilty as charged, still reared up to defend himself It was comic, of course. I'd stolen nearly six million bucks and wasn't beset by thoughts of giving it back. But in that goofy way we have of thinking we are what we're seen to be, I cared about Martin's impressions.

"Am I supposed to apologize?" I asked. "It's an ugly deal, Martin, the one you were trying to cut with Jake--five and a half mil of the client's money so he continues throwing slops to G &G."

Martin went still--just the way he had when I mentioned the body. He gave his head a distinct shake.

"Is that what you think?" He smiled suddenly. Luminously. He used the chair arms to boost himself What I'd said actually pleased him. I knew why too. I'd made some error that allowed him to resume his familiar supremacy.

"Oh, I see," he said, "I see. I was bartering with Jake. TN's business for the money. Is that it? That's it?" It was a contest now, a stalking. I just kept my mouth shut as he kept moving in. "I plead guilty, Mack. I was trying to preserve the firm. I was even trying to save Jake from himself. And God knows I was hoping to shelter Orleans. I trimmed some corners off my conscience in the process--I admit that too. Maybe more than corners. But do you honestly think the object of this was that --that crass?"

I didn't answer.

"I can't imagine how you viewed this. Why would I confront Jake with Wash and you last week? Why not just whisper in his ear that I knew he was a thief and demand he send all business now and hereafter?"