Put a Lid on It (17 page)

“Sure,” Meehan said, and went over to stand in front of the guy in the Yankees cap, who kept talking about NASCAR racing with his friends until Meehan said, “Bernie says, under that hat, you're probably bald.”

Bob Clarence gave Meehan an outraged look. “He does? Where's he come off with
that
shit?”

Meehan leaned in to peer at Clarence's hair around the edges of the cap. “I thought black guys never got bald,” he said.

“You can lay off lookin at my head,” Clarence said. “And you can tell me who the hell you're supposed to be.”

“Meehan,” Meehan said, and shrugged. “If there's a password, Bernie didn't tell me.”

“Bernie doesn't know everything,” Clarence said, still irritated. “Come on. Later,” he told his friends, and led Meehan back outside, where he pointed westward and said, “We'll grab some Chinese.”

“I already had Caribbean tonight,” Meehan told him, walking beside him, the oasis of light receding behind them. “Goat elbow, very good.”

Clarence looked interested. “Down in the West Village?”

“You know the place?”

“The goat is good,” Clarence agreed. As they walked he took off and pocketed his clip-on bow tie, unbuttoned his top shirt button, and folded his shirtsleeves back. “You're gonna like this Chinese,” he said. “They do stuff with shrimp you won't believe.”

There are worse things in this world, Meehan thought, than two dinners in one night. “Lead on,” he said.

The shrimp was very good, and so were the spring rolls, and so was the whole baked fish. They had Tsingtao Chinese beer, and Clarence wielded his chopsticks like samurai swords, wearing his hat while he ate, and through the meal Meehan told him his story. When he finished, Clarence said, “They'll never do that for a black guy. Never.”

“They don't do it for a lot of white guys,” Meehan assured him.

Clarence drank Tsingtao and brooded. “I'm not sure I
wanna
help this president,” he said.

“I figure I'm helping
me
,” Meehan told him. “The president's piggy-backing.”

“But if the law walks in on us,” Clarence said, “this president of yours isn't gonna know us.”

“That's why we gotta do it right,” Meehan told him, “with exactly the right people.”

“Tell me about this old guy we're gonna heist,” Clarence said. “I don't know if I like that, boostin from some old guy.”

“Well, you're gonna love him,” Meehan said. “He thinks everybody's scum except him. The great unwashed, he says.”

Clarence considered that. “Anti-black, you mean?”

“Clendon Burnstone IV doesn't fine-tune,” Meehan said.

“Well, maybe that's okay,” Clarence decided, “if that's the way he is.”

“He was on our side in the Revolution,” Meehan said, “but he's been against us ever since.”

“Okay, fine. You got a scheme for how to do this?”

Meehan told him the scheme. Clarence made an Olympic symbol on the shiny hard tabletop with his Tsingtao bottle while he listened, then finished the beer and said, “That's a mean thing to do to a guy that age.”

“It's the meanest thing I could think of.”

“I tell you what,” Clarence said. “I'll drive for you, I'll do this thing, but I'm gonne be in that limo with that old man a pretty long time, and if I decide that's too mean a thing to do, old guy like that, I'll just drive him right back home, right into the middle of your caper, let you people sort it out.”

“I'm not worried,” Meehan said.

“Okay,” Clarence said. “Just so you know how I feel.”

“I know how you feel.”

“Let's see what fate thinks about all this,” Clarence said, and reached for one of the fortune cookies in the middle of the table.

Meehan took the other, cracked it open, and read the slip of paper: “A silver tongue is more valuable than a golden sword.” And what was that supposed to mean?

Clarence said, “Listen,” and read: “Age must be honored, but youth must be served.”

Meehan said, “Okay, whose side are they on?”

“What does yours say?”

So Meehan read it to him. They both thought about this array of Oriental wisdom for a while, and then Clarence said, “Fuck it. We'll just do it and see what happens.”

33

O
KAY; JUST ONCE
, when he got back to 318 from meeting with Bob Clarence, the message light wasn't blinking on the bedside phone, but at nine the next morning, when he returned to the room after a breakfast in the neighborhood, there it was again,
red-red-red
, and turned out to be Goldfarb: “I'll pick you up in front of your place at nine-thirty.”

So he went down to the street at nine-thirty, and she wasn't there on the sidewalk, but a minute later she was there, in a limo. Waving at him from the back seat of a limo, with a black chauffeur in uniform at the wheel. Feeling a weird moment of paranoia or surrealism or something, Meehan bent to check, but the chauffeur wasn't Bob Clarence. Still, to have a life suddenly full of limos was kind of unsettling.

Meehan slid into the back seat next to Goldfarb, who grinned at him, said, “Good morning,” and before he could answer leaned forward to call to the chauffeur, “Okay.”

They pulled into traffic, the chauffeur trying to get over to the left lane, and Goldfarb grinned at Meehan again, saying, “Not bad, huh?”

“No, not bad,” Meehan agreed. “I thought we were gonna do the subway, so this is not bad.”

“Jeffords called me last night,” she said.

“Yeah, he left a message in my room. He's gonna be up here, he wants me to call him and give him a report after court.”

“I know about that,” Goldfarb said, as the chauffeur managed the slow and tricky left onto Forty-second Street. “What he called
me
about was to authorize me to hire this car this morning, to take you out to your court date. That's the word he used, authorized.”

“Meaning he'll pay you back.”

“Exactly.”

“How come?” Meehan asked. “This doesn't seem like the Jeffords I know.”

“He finally believes,” she said, “that you're actually going to do it, and what he said to me was, he wants to keep you happy.”

“Well, that's nice,” Meehan said. “We're seeing eye to eye there. I want to keep me happy, too.”

“Chambers” was a little room about the size of the box a grand piano might come in, with a low ceiling crisscrossed by cables and pipes, and two tall narrow dirty windows with a view, beyond an air shaft, into a larger brightly fluorescented room lined with rows of gray metal filing cabinets, among which people appeared and disappeared, moving slowly and bearing handfuls of paper and facefuls of distraction, like laboratory animals kept in the maze just a little too long.

Chambers itself was very crowded, with a stubby metal desk facing away from the windows, two tall filing cabinets on the left, two wooden armchairs facing the desk, and a library table on the right piled with children's books and magazines and soft toys. The dark wood entrance door was in the wall opposite the air shaft, flanked by bookshelves floor to ceiling, crammed with law books and more kid lit.

Judge T. Joyce Foote, whose office this was, deep in the bowels of this massive old stone government building far in the outer boroughs, rose to greet them when they entered, and Meehan thought immediately that she looked like Mrs. Muskrat in some of those kiddy books over there, who would live in a tree trunk, with curtains on the windows, and make pies. She was black, very stout, short, dressed fussily in purple and ribbons. On her face were eyeglasses the exact rebuttal of Goldfarb's black-rimmed monsters, being delicate glass ovals suspended in the slightest possible lines of golden wire. She smiled a greeting, but there was something sharp and calculating in the eyes behind the granny specs. She was a Mrs. Muskrat who knew very well how to live deep in these woods.

She smiled at Goldfarb and then at Meehan, and then at something in between them, or behind them, at waist level. As the smile became confused, Meehan realized she was looking for the child. Should he raise his hand?

No. Goldfarb had brought paperwork with her, in a manila folder that she now extended toward the judge, saying, “Here you are, Your Honor, the documents.”

Taking them, frowning, the judge said, “Francis Xavier Meehan?”

“Me, Your Honor,” Meehan said, and actually did raise his hand partway.

Before the judge could react, Goldfarb said, “Your Honor, I'm Elaine Goldfarb, the attorney in the case.”

The judge hefted the manila folder in her hand, while she gave Meehan the skeptical look he deserved. “With the explanation, I presume.”

“It's all in the documents, Your Honor,” Goldfarb told her, with a little hospitable gesture inviting the judge to open the folder and wade right on in.

“Well, sit down,” the judge said, welcoming and dubious at the same time, and sat down herself as they did. “Let's see if we can sort this out,” she said, and opened the folder.

The next little period of time in that room was very quiet. It was so quiet that after a while Meehan realized he was listening to a clock tick in some other room.

In this room, the only sound was the occasional
shrush
when Judge Foote turned over one of the documents to give an equal fish-eye to the next. She was giving a lot of fish-eye. From time to time, she would look up and give Meehan the fish-eye, and he would blink slowly at her, trying for no expression at all, trying in Stanislavski style to recall how he'd done it, at the age of ten, when he was Kneeling Shepherd in that Adoration of the Magi tableau in parochial school. Then Judge Foote would look down again, turn another page, and this time give Goldfarb the fish-eye. Meehan didn't dare turn his head to see how Goldfarb was dealing with it, but he assumed attorneys got the fish-eye all the time and had worked out coping mechanisms.

At last, the final document had been studied and digested—or maybe not digested—and Judge Foote gave them both the fish-eye at once, leaving the folder open on her desk. “Interesting,” she said.

Neither of them said anything, while Judge Foote nodded, agreeing with herself. “A lot of signatures here,” she commented.

“Everybody's signed off, Your Honor,” Goldfarb said, as though she were merely agreeing, but Meehan understood (and so would Your Honor) that a little pressure had just been brought to bear.

Which Judge Foote didn't like; Meehan could see her nose wrinkle, as she smelled something less pleasant than a cooling pie here in her tree-trunk parlor in the woods. “Not quite everybody,” she said.

“Well, not you, no, Your Honor,” Goldfarb said, and Meehan decided this was why she wasn't off with some big firm, with her brains, making the big bucks; she didn't know how to tread lightly.

“Oh, more than that,” Judge Foote said, with a little disdainful wave at the folder. “For instance, I don't have the psychiatric evaluation.”

“Oh, I think you do, Your Honor,” Goldfarb said, half rising, as though to help the judge paw through the papers, then settling again. “From Dr. Steingutt at the MCC.”

“
That's
the psychiatric evaluation?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I saw that,” Judge Foote said. “Dr. Steingutt writes that he never actually saw the prisoner Meehan.”

“No, Your Honor,” Goldfarb said, “Dr. Steingutt explains he's based his judgment on the record of Mr. Meehan's behavior while in detention.”

“In eleven days of detention,” Judge Foote said. “We're giving new meaning to the term ‘rush to judgment’ here.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Goldfarb said, apparently having finally realized her job at the moment was to back off.

The judge's look toward Meehan this time was almost kindly, as though he actually were the wayward twelve-year-old she'd been anticipating. “What is
your
psychiatric evaluation, Mr. Meehan?” she asked him.

He blinked. “I'm sorry? Evaluation, of what?”

“Of you,” she told him. “Tell me your psychiatric evaluation of yourself.”

Meehan was just on the verge of describing a self based largely on Tom Sawyer when he suddenly recalled one of the most important of the ten thousand rules, which is: Always Tell the Truth. (The codicils to that one are (1) If you can't think of anything else, (2) If it's unexpected, and (3) If it can't hurt you, all of which is because (4) It's easier to remember.)

So he said, “I get along with other people pretty good, but basically I'm the type that's a loner. I'm not a crazy or a child molester. I'm not political or violent. I do whatever I gotta do to keep myself in nuts and berries, but I don't think I'm greedy.”

She nodded through this, and kept on nodding when he was finished, then stopped nodding to say, “But you're a criminal.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Wouldn't you describe yourself as antisocial?”

“Anti?” He was surprised, but not offended; she just didn't understand yet. “I'm not against society,” he said. “I need it. Just like you do, or anybody else. I got no objection to society at all. I do try to keep out of its way.”

“And what,” she asked him, “do you see as your position in society?”

He couldn't resist. Hoping to achieve a boyish grin and a shrug, he said, “Usually, on a fire escape.”

She laughed, so it had been a good gamble to take. But then she cocked an eye at him and said, “But not to peek.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “There wouldn't be time. Besides, leave other people alone, that's my idea.”

Goldfarb said, “Your Honor, that's very close to Dr. Steingutt's findings.”

“Mmm,” the judge said, and said to Meehan, “Francis, did you read Dr. Steingutt's report?”

“Your Honor,” he said, “I haven't read or looked at one piece of paper in there. Ms. Goldfarb here, she just takes me from place to place, and I do what she says.”

“I see.” She leafed through documents briefly, clearly thinking it over, then gave Goldfarb a brand-new fish-eye and said, “There's no home visit here.”

Goldfarb began, “Your Honor—”

Judge Foote overrode her: “I cannot complete this hearing without the results of the home visit. A qualified social worker must visit the home and submit a report on the child's—Well. On the child's home environment. Without that, I don't see how I can proceed.”