"It's a very common tendency," Sammy Paradise said earnestly over the submarine sandwiches from the Canterbury Village Sub Shop. "Many of them do it." Merrion had asked the court officer to get two Cokes, two Pepsis and two ginger ales as well. Paradisio when he saw the beverage selection said he 'should've asked for a can of canned iced tea, but it's probably too late for that now."
Merrion had predicted it. "Sammy's very serious about what he eats," he told Cavanaugh. "Whatever we get will have something slightly wrong with it. He will mention it. He wont want anything to be actually done about it; he just likes to keep the record straight. Sammy's very serious about everything, keeps close tabs on everything at all times.
He lives as though he's been warned that his life's being taken down and may be used in evidence against him at a trial in a court of law.
Basically a very nice guy, but for him everything in life is business.
So life becomes business for everyone else who gets involved with him, like it or not.
"He looks ten years older'n he is. At least. He's got a few years left now before he retires, three or four, I think. But he looks like he's seventy right now. I doubt he ever looked like a kid, even when he was one."
Cavanaugh did not react. "I do have to give Lennie that," Merrion often said. "He isn't one of those silly bastards who're sensitive about their age. Maybe he got so much shit for bein' young when he was appointed 'fore he's thirty, must be his Confirmation picture inna paper, he thinks he must still look young. He doesn't, but that may not be what he thinks. He looks as young as most people do when they aren't, anymore."
Paradisio was five-eight or five-nine; a soft, unassertive, hundred-fifty pounds or so. "His idea of a good strenuous workout's making sure it's all right with the wife if he takes the car Wednesday night. Sammy will not use "my OGV," Official Government Vehicle, on personal business. She wont mind; she's known for months he's going to want the car that night, ever since he got the tickets in December. He put the dates on this year's calendar before he hung it up in the kitchen.
"He picks up their son, Jeff, and takes the turnpike to Boston. The daughters aren't interested in baseball. He thinks it's probably because they think they weren't supposed to. "They never really tried to play baseball, gave it half a chance. Naturally now they don't like it."
"Sammy doesn't have that much to say about the girls. I get the impression he thinks how they're doing now is their husbands' business.
If they're doing okay, their husbands get the credit. If they're not doing okay then their husbands're to blame. Jeff is different.
Apparently sons, married or not, remain their fathers' responsibility.
Sam's very pleased with the way that Jeff turned out. I think this means he thinks he gets the credit. "Jeffs all right," Sam says,
"Jeffs doing very good. He's a hard-working kid and a good family man and I'm very proud of him. He started in fish and he did his job and worked hard and proved he was reliable, and so now he's in meat. That's a solid job to have and it's a good strong company he's got it with, too, the Big Y. In that business you're not gonna wake up some fine morning and find out you lost your job; people stopped buying what you sell. All a sudden what you were trained to do and've been doing all your life, for years and years, is now obsolete. You're outta work; there's nothing you can do. Terrifying, but it wont happen to Jeff; it can't. People'll always have to eat so they're always gonna need food.
What he's in is secure.
'"But Jeffs also got a growing family, four kids, and you know what that means: Gotta be thinking now about tuitions down the line, all that kind of thing. And I'm through that; I don't anymore. And I'm one of the few guys I know who when the time came, didn't get hit as hard as I expected we was gonna. I actually made out a little.
'"See, Jeff got outta Cathedral, he went the Navy. Now you did have tuition, Cathedral. It's a parochial school. But his mother wanted it, thought it was better, and so what the hell, I went along. This's something that she wants for the kid, might as well let him do it." But it wasn't very much, couple grand or so a year back then. Nothing compared to college, which'd been what I was getting ready for. But then he ended up not going. When he came out the service he said he was too old, go back to school, and besides, him and Carol wanted to get married. Start a family.
'"His mother was kind of disappointed, thought he should get his degree, but I supported him in that decision. Couldn't've done much else, said anything much against it not and been consistent, dropping out of AIC like I did. But also I agreed with him. I didn't think he needed it. I thought he could get along without it and if he didn't want to do it then he probably shouldn't he wouldn't get nothin' out of it. And on the basis of the way that things seem to've worked out, I think you'd have to say that both of us were right.
'"And then his two sisters. Well, Deb just did the two years to get her nurse's thing there; the associate degree. The bachelor's which was two more years, she didn't do 'til later and she paid for that herself. So it was just Marie Louise that actually went and stayed the whole entire four years. Not that that was not expensive, having her down New Rochelle there — Jesus, checks I used to write. But still, it wasn't that bad. Her being the only one of the three of them that really went, the whole four years. The way it worked out, me and Lois hadda pay for just the six years of college, not the twelve like wed been planning.
'"So okay, now I buy the tickets, Jeff and I go to the ballgame, and that's sort of my present to him. His coming to the games with me, that's his present to me."
"It's like it's some kind of a sacrament," Merrion said to Cavanaugh, 'going to the fucking ballgames. He exaggerates the meaning out of all proportion. Once he said to me that I must know what he was talking about, how much he gets out of it, because I probably did the same thing with my father, and I said Not really we only went once. Why, I couldn't tell you; it just wasn't a big deal for us. Sammy didn't know what to say. I hadda try to help him out.
'"Look," I said, "Pat was just never that much of a sports fan, is all.
He could talk sports with the customers and sound like he liked sports; he didn't mind them. He'd watch a game, TV. But going to the games, all that kind of thing? Didn't interest him. He was a nice guy and a good father and he took us fishing, me and Chris, the Connecticut shore, Long Island Sound. But only once or twice. I don't know what made him do it. He must've gotten the idea from someone at work, so when he got a day off, he took us and we rented the equipment and we fished. Caught something too, I remember. I forget exactly what. It was okay, but no regular thing. It was a pretty long drive.
'"We never had things that we did on a regular basis with him. But it was all right, you know? It really was. He worked hard, six days a week, and when he got a day off he worked around the house, cut the lawn, I dunno painted the hallway. He's been dead forty years. I don't recall now exactly what he did with his spare time. But I know he didn't collar me and Chris and tell us that we couldn't play baseball with our friends over Curtis School field, or go swimming up the pond, because he had a day off and we hadda spend it with him. Pat just wasn't like that, and I guess neither was I. So it was really okay."
"Sammy looked very confused. Flustered. Like he'd said something that he shouldn't've. He said: "And of course, you couldn't after that. You never had a son." And then he got even more upset and looked at me and said: "Amby, you know, I didn't mean to say that. I'm sorry. It came out."
"And I said to him: "Didn't mean to say what, Sam? That I never had any kids? Well, so far's I know, at least. But I knew that. And yeah, sure, now I sort of envy you, all my friends with grown-up kids.
Envy you now I didn't used to, when you've got the heartache of bringing them up. Naturally, you do that; you get to be my age and you think it must be nice to have the kids. After it's too late for it: that's when it crosses your mind, like lots of things, everything else you missed out on. "I should've gone to Rio. Would've been nice, to see Rio. Should've done that, I was younger." '"It's just cheap regret, tinsel. Fact is, I didn't. And it wasn't that the right girl never came along, so I never hadda chance. Even back when I was going around with this woman I thought I was probably gonna marry, kids were not on my mind. I don't think they were on hers, either. I don't think she ever mentioned the subject. I think I could've been a father; far's I know I wasn't shooting blanks. One time, kind ah scary, I was still in school, it looked as though I might gonna be one, but it turned out she was just late. After that I always took the precautions.
'"So I never made an actual decision, I wasn't gonna get married and have kids. I just never got around to it. But I knew it. You didn't hurt my feelings, saying it."
"I'm not sure he believed me," Merrion said to Cavanaugh. "He looked awful contrite. But anyway, that's what it is: to Sam what him and Jeff do with the Red Sox every summer is a holy thing.
"Six times a season," Merrion told Cavanaugh. "I used to think they must go at least once every week that the Red Sox were home. Every time the two of us met for lunch during the baseball season, it seemed like they'd gone to the game the night before. Not that we started meeting to talk about baseball; it was for business, a pleas anter way to discuss things we needed to talk about anyway, in the course of doing our jobs. So you and I know what we're doing here. Larry never did that, and Richie didn't, either. But I think they should've. A certain amount of regular, ongoing coordination between the state and the federal systems: I think it's essential these days. There's so much overlap now, especially with all the drug stuff. I know:
Probation. But the state probation guys don't do it enough, at least in my estimation. Maybe the ones in Superior do it, but on the District level, they don't.
"Anyway, we both just figured that since we gotta do this, and since, you know, you're both gonna have lunch anyway, well then, why not meet and have something to eat the same time? Made sense."
"And you're good at having lunch, aren't you, Amby?" Cavanaugh said.
"Hey," Merrion said, 'you're tellin' me I'm fat, is that it? Jesus, what I have to take in this job anna pay's not all that good either."
"But by judicious use of the expense account," Cavanaugh said, 'you're able to make the ends meet."
"Oh, what's this we got now?" Merrion said. "Now I got you also getting' on me, claimin' I cheat onna gyp sheet?" '1 don't know," Cavanaugh said, waving his hand. "I also don't care.
That's between you and your God. Or Theresa in the treasurer's office.
Whoever it is, it's not me."
"Well, okay, then," Merrion said. "Anyway, now you're gonna meet Sam and see for yourself. He's a little like his uncle, the chief: he's got enthusiasm. He's really into his work."
"As many times as I've seen them do it, your Honor," Paradisio said over the sandwiches, 'and it must be hundreds now, it never ceases to amaze me. They try to make me think they've become attached to me. And therefore I've become attached to them.
"It's ridiculous. It should be pretty clear, no matter how stupid you are, how much you wanna believe what you gotta know just isn't so, it isn't gonna matter if I like you; I think you caught a bad break or you're a nice guy, or if you make me laugh. I imagine you also run into this yourself, Judge, now and then, this same phenomenon: sometimes it just about drives me crazy. The law's put someone in your power, and he knows it, but he seems to have the idea that if he can ingratiate himself with you, you wont exercise it.
"Well as we all know, it isn't that way and it can't be that way. You can't allow it. Instead what the situation is is this: "If you give me a reason, so I have no choice, what I'm gonna do, my friend, is violate your sorry ass. Callin' me your buddy, or any of that shit, just wont do the job for you. Cryin' wont help either, do you any good at all.
Get your mind clear on this: If you violate the terms of your release, and I find out, as soon as we catch up with you you're goin' away again. And nothin's gonna change that."
He wore, as usual, a frayed and starched long-collared broadcloth shirt that had taken on a greyish cast, frayed at the cuffs and collar, and one of what must have been a large collection of flimsy neckties, modestly patterned and shy, that made tiny knots when tied.
Merrion found them embarrassing. To Hilliard: "I hate those neckties of his. They're offensive. It's so hard to remember what they even look like, five minutes after you've left him. Almost like he's daring you, you know? He's gonna call you up later and test you. "See? I knew it: You don't remember what color tie I've got on. That's how much attention you pay me." The only other time you see ties like his is when you're in a Filene's Basement or some charity thrift shop and they're hanging up in bunches, wooden pegs. They should stay there. He buys his pants out of catalogues and they come with Ban-roll waistbands I don't know that but I'd bet."
In cold weather Paradisio wore tweed sport coats that lacked heft, and in warm seasons he wore shapeless hop sack blazers. "His sports coats look like there's nobody in them, when he's got them on. He looks like he gets dressed inna morning hoping no one'll notice him all day. Even see him; like his ambition's to become transparent. His haircuts make him look like that's what he wants. Boys' regular, short back and sides. He's been going to Harding's ever since his father started going there in Nineteen-fifty-one. He may've never liked the way Russ Harding cuts his hair, but that wouldn't make any difference. He wouldn't have it in him to change barbers over such a little thing as not liking how the guy cut his hair.
"Not that I don't really like him or respect the guy at all; I do. He's the nicest guy the world. It's just that he's perfect. He looks like he is what he actually is and most likely always was, even before he officially became one a conscientious government worker. You look at him and you just know it. Everything about the guy screams Government at you."
He had gotten his nickname in the course of his government work. His job had obliged him to start 'keeping exactly the kind of company,"
Merrion said, 'that you'd imagine a guy named "Sammy Paradise" getting' into on his own, water seekin' lower ground: Hangin' around with the gangsters. Only I would've thought they'd be other gangsters; his colleagues.
"I tell you, it's wonderful. Among hundreds of things that Sammy is not, Sammy isn't a gangster. He's in the world to do good, and nothing wrong with that notion. You and I, that's what we try to do. Don't always succeed, but we try. We're just not as ambitious. Sammy's faith in his fellow man's far greater'n ours: He tries to do good with the hoods.
"This is a very big difference. Knowin' what they are, knowin' that they'll never change, most of the time he can still manage to believe that they might reform. That's Sammy's natural mission. He knows his work is hopeless, but he also knows that if he ever lets himself think that, he wont be able to do it anymore. Somehow he convinces himself he doesn't know what he knows."
For Paradisio it was essential to persuade himself he didn't know what his clients meant when they told him that with his help they now understood where they had gone wrong. They told him they had come to see that the way that they'd been living before they had gotten caught was what had made them move so fast and make mistakes. "They hadn't taken time enough to think the whole thing out. Quickness's what's really counted in the acts that got them into trouble. It's surprising how big a part that plays in what they have to say to me, about the lives they've lived."
From listening to them for so many years he believed he had learned to think a little bit like they did. "Which can be very helpful,"
Paradisio told Cavanaugh. "I'm not knocking it. They often tell me if they'd only taken time enough to stop and think, about whatever got them into the shit, well, they never would've done it.
"They've just never had the time. It's the darnedest thing. It always seems to have been they had to act, right off, before every guy named Dave and Al, and everybody else as well, found out and started trying, pull the deal off before they could. So things never turned out quite the way that they hoped, and then look what'd happened. I hear those stories all the time, day in and day out. That's how I've spent my life at work, listening to desperate men convicted and then severely punished for very serious crimes tell me the reason was timing. They've had a lot of time to compose their stories. You'd expect that they'd be good, complete, with no loose ends. But they aren't. They always lack something: any admission or recognition that if Dave and Al had in fact managed to go for the loot first, they would've been just as guilty of committing serious crimes, and if caught then convicted and put in jail. The parolees I deal with in that one respect're a lot like the people I work for and with: they all seem to think that what matters is how good a job you do, not whether you should do the job.
Except of course that the people I work for don't usually do felonies.
The jobs they pull off may not always be good things to do, but most of the time they are legal."
He paused. "I no longer point out to my felons what is missing from their stories. I used to but I gave it up, many years ago. They claimed they didn't understand why the element I mentioned was important to fully understanding what was wrong with what they did. I could not convince them that it was. The smarter ones after a while saw that I wouldn't let them off the hook until I'd made them see the matter my way, so they claimed I'd convinced them. They were lying. I saw that they were never gonna stop lying. So I gave up creating the situations they dealt with by telling me lies I didn't believe. I guess we're partners now."
He was right. The strategy he'd devised to avoid disbelief of what they said amounted to comp licit surrender in their deceit. If he didn't raise the question of repentance, they wouldn't lie to him. "No one's on parole or probation forever. Sooner or later they either die or we have to release them. The agency can't get much bigger. Process them through, regardless of what they've become. Go along, get along, and go home."
He was resigned to the collaboration. "With a name like Paradisio, everybody thinks that anyway, you're in the bag with these guys. "Ah, this guy's probably mobbed-up. Fuckin' ghinnies; most of'em are."
He was not alleging prejudice. As far as he knew he had never been held back from advancement by suspicion that he might be connected, closer to the men that he was supposed to be supervising than he was letting on, concealing stronger loyalties to them than to the government and the department he was working for. He had found the job to be as it was supposed to be at the time he took it. His nickname was just an insignificant aspect of the acceptable prize that he had wanted, and gotten out of his life: a good steady job for himself and his family, Lois and the kids.
Civil Service: that was the kind of job that he'd wanted, the definition of steady. He went into Probation because Probation had openings when he dropped out of American International College in Springfield, for the usual three reasons: no money; no great interest in finishing; and lastly, no reason at all. "I could've dug up the money, I guess, I'd've put my mind to it. Really wanted to try. And the same with the grades. I didn't have to get Cs and Ds; I'm not stupid. But what the hell, I didn't want to, I guess was the main reason. I was young. What the hell do you know when you're young?
Nothin': that's the whole of it. Just that you're young, and you'll always be young so half of what you know is shit.
"I see it in my clients. That's how almost all of them got off to their start. Knowing two things for dead-certain sure, and at least one of those things was pure shit. Time they get to me, they've found out which one. Most of them probably were as strong and tough and smart as they knew they were; that part was true. But now they know that the rules did apply to them; the idea that they didn't was shit.
"The way that they found out was very hard. When it finally dawned on them they were locked up in the can, watching the years of their youth drain away. Like piss hissin' down onna white mint onna strainer, and all they can do now is just stand there holdin' their dick in their hand, watchin'. They've found out their lives've been like something they happened to be around for, like a big game and they got tickets, while the years were going by. Their whole youth and middle years; not lived, just gotten rid of, discarded by somebody else they don't even recognize, that guy standing next to them. By the time they get to me, all that most of them can do is just continue to stand there and watch, while the rest of their lives go away on them. Some day, they know, their life will finally disappear, like something that's never been here at all. All they have to hope for's that the instant when it runs out they'll feel a little better, because at least it'll be ending, whole process of watching it go.
"They look at me like I've got answers, some of them, when they've just gotten out and it's begun to register on them that the years they spent inside're really gone. Never get them back. They come in and see me, when they first report, sit there and look at me as though they're thinking maybe hoping might be more like it that maybe I can do something important for them. If they're nice to me, I could get their years back for them, all the years they spent inside. Maybe there's a secret way, and I know where it is.
"Those're the most painful cases. These're hard men, very hard men, dangerous and violent and cruel; they've done terrible things. I know it sounds silly to say it, but this's the way I feel. I hate having to be the one who disappoints them. It's nothing personal. They happened to draw me, so I'm the guy who has to tell them what they hope for can't be done. Simply can't be done. Randomness's all it is; I'm the guy picked to do it. That's just the way it is. But sometimes I think: "If I could do that for him, maybe he would reform now." I often think that a guy with no hope may not see much reason to start behaving himself; he may decide he's got nothing much to lose now, if he doesn't what can he possibly lose? Fear, that's all, that we'll do it to him again, as indeed we will, because that's all we've got left now, to make him obey the law. That's not a good threat; I don't know anyone who'd mind losing fear.
"This I think is what accounts for the successes that the chaplains and lay preachers in the prisons and on the outside, too sometimes make of these thugs. No one can get their lives back for them. But the preachers can tell them that if they start playing their cards right for as long as this game continues, they'll get a great deal inna next one, in the afterlife. Not all those conversions that lots of us laugh at are the fakes we think they are, scams to con the parole board. Some of them are the real thing. Some of the born-agains may've met Jesus, or Muhammed, and some of them may just be too desperate to care if He was out when they called, but many of them really do believe. There's a terrible emptiness to knowing you've pissed your whole life away; you know it when you see how hard it hits these guys, meaner'n vipers themselves.
"There're days when I wish I'd done something else with my life, but on the absolute worst day I ever had I've been better off than my clients."
He had spent almost forty years on the job, ever since he'd seized the opening almost immediately offered to him after he won top grades on the Civil Service exam. "That, you see, I'm not really stupid, when I put my mind to something. College: I couldn't convince myself that what I was doing had any connection to any life I'd ever lead. The Civil Service exam was the only way I could get to live a life I wanted. So even though I was young, I could see it was important, worth preparing for."
Merrion knew this about him: he had spent all of his workdays earnestly talking with and about guys who had a sense of crippled-up irony that he'd never gotten, and therefore he had never really understood them.
It affected the way he thought about information that he got from Sammy, how he weighed, filtered and interpreted everything Paradise told him, complete with the irony and bitterness the people who had said it to him had come by the dishonest hard way, had had a lot of time to think about, in prison. They had refined it and worked it over in their minds, so that ever afterward it distorted everything they said through a sharpened, crooked smile. The mocking smile that never altogether went away told what they really thought when they saw men and women and their children, the conduct and possessions other people valued and took care of: they saw that they could turn those values into vulnerabilities. Weaknesses they could use to enrich themselves, and demonstrate that they could destroy anything they didn't want and would, to please themselves.
It was the dialect of real evil, a silent language that they spoke and Sammy didn't. The words were the same in each one but the connotations were different. Not opposite; trickier than that — off-center, skewed and distorted. When they thought a guy who had some power over them was nice enough so that they could be friendly with him which meant take liberties with him; 'you know, like fuck with his mind a little; don't mean the guy any real harm' without really risking anything, it had to mean that he was kind of an asshole, a jerk. Weak, if he wanted to be arms-length friends with them. The kind of guy you'd always have to be putting something over on, kind of laughing at, taking advantage of, to show that you knew he was weak. He'd never been one of the boys, and he'd never be one of them either.
They would always do it to him because they would always see it as a part of the duty to be cool. Merrion would be several miles and days away in Canterbury, when they saw Sammy down in Springfield, sat down and talked to him, just as earnestly and soberly as he talked to them, but later when Sammy talked about his clients and what they'd said to him, Merrion without ever seeing them would know exactly what had been going through their heads, like lethal gas, while they fucked with Sammy's mind real good for the Hell of it, for something to do in Hell, to pass away the time: contempt. And Sammy as he talked earnestly to Merrion would still not know what had happened to him. Reciting it to Merrion after the fact, completely unperturbed Merrion listening to him, hearing what the hard men had been thinking in the discordant music underneath the words that Sammy was repeating Sammy still didn't know, any more than he had known while the words were being uttered, what evil there was in them.
For Merrion it was like being compelled to attend a delayed broadcast of a sadistic procedure, knowing in advance what had already been done to the victim to degrade him, unable to do anything about it. It was as though he could communicate in his mind with evil men he had never seen and would not recognize on sight, but would know them for what they were, by instinct, if he ever saw them, and know beyond a reasonable doubt the nature, not the details, of what they had done. He understood them. You did it even though there was nobody else around to see what you were doing; you still had to do it. It was your moral obligation. So in case it did turn out that there had been someone looking, you wouldn't look like you'd been taking him seriously. And the perfect cruelty of it was that you hoped he hadn't gotten it, and wouldn't ever get it.
Because if Sam ever had allowed himself to catch on to what they were doing to him, meanly making fun of him, making a fool of him, that would triple or quadruple the pain they had inflicted on him just for fun. He still would've had to act as though he still didn't know it was going on, made himself act as though it never really happened.
Because after he got through talking with them and forming his impressions, it was going to be his job to write factual, unbiased reports about them. As he construed it that required never letting his personal feelings influence his judgement of a man, have any bearing, one way or the other, on what he recommended.
"That's my job, part of my job that I'm supposed to do. What I might think of some one particular guy personally; whether I like him or not: never letting that interfere or get in the way, in any way, of what I write down in my reports. What goes in there is what I think of him as a man who's on parole or on probation he's given his word, after all; he's on a trial; he's not free; he's just been let loose to see if he can, and will, behave, if and when he is fully released. What kind of use I think he's making of this second chance he's getting or this third or fourth or fifth chance, if that's what it is. If we're all gonna get another chance, after we die, to earn our way in Purgatory up into heaven, like it says in the Bible, then it seems to me that we oughta have something like that for down here. If there's gonna be redemption for us after we're dead, for what we may've done while we were down here, then by rights there oughta be some kind of redemption available on earth.
"And if there's going to be that, well then, getting it shouldn't depend on if I like you or not. What it should depend on is whether I think you've earned it, and deserve it, even if I do think you're not a guy I'd like to see a ballgame with: whether I like you's got nothing to do with whether I think you're doing OK. That's what I'm supposed to write down, whether you're doing OK And that's all that I therefore write down." Because he was a US Department of Justice Probation Services Officer, and that had to mean something, didn't it? Or else what did anything mean?
He had told Merrion enough about the genesis of the nickname to enable him to deduce the rest himself. Soon after the beginning of his thirty-four years with the Service, his clients (Merrion seldom heard him refer to them as 'cases') had begun to call him "Sammy Paradise."
When they reported by phone or came to the office, they asked for him by that name.
"I assumed it must've seemed just as unsuitable for him as a younger man as it did when I ran into him and he was middle-aged," Merrion told Cavanaugh. "So naturally it therefore wasn't very long before the filing clerks and secretaries in the office where he worked, and then all other people that he worked with, his colleagues and superiors, began using it as well. It was a joke. When someone pins a nickname on a person that's so completely inappropriate for him you can't help but kind of laugh a little, snicker, every time you hear it laugh at him, I mean, not with him, just out of general high spirits it's guaranteed to stick. I think most of us must be cruel, enjoy hurting other people. Most human beings are generously cruel.
"Sammy being Sam, though, he doesn't seem to mind. I mean, as far as anyone could tell. I've never called him that myself, Sammy Paradise, when he was around, but the other guys I've met him with not his clients, now, his hoods; these're people in his office they use it around him all the time. Apparently he's never objected. They treat him like shit, do they? It's okay; he doesn't mind.
"One day when he didn't show for lunch I called there, find out where he was. That's when the whole thing first struck me, the way they treat the guy. He'd called in sick, the flu. But the asshole secretary that he talked to, someone that he works with, every day, he asked her specifically to call me? She never bothered.
"I was curious, you know? I asked her why. "Well then, if he asked you to do this, and you work for him, why didn't you do it then? Save me a useless trip to the place where he's supposed to be, like he wanted you to do, knowing he was sick and wasn't gonna make it." And she said: "I dunno. I had something else I hadda do, I guess. I must've forgot."
"I get this stupid broad any time I call up over there and ask for him by name, "Samuel Paradisic" She's the receptionist and she's also assigned to him, to type up his reports. She's the Sammy secretary.
When you ask for him she acts like she met him once a few months ago and he didn't impress her much. I say I want to talk to him and she always says to me: "Oh you must mean Sammy Paradise. I'm not sure he's in today." When I know he's in, because I just had to tell him I'd call him back after he called me and I had someone in my office.
"One day it got to me, this broad's attitude, and I asked to talk to Sammy's boss. Guy named Anglin, think his name was, seemed like a nice-enough guy. I told him how this typist of theirs acts when I call, and said if she treats me that way she's most likely rude to everybody else. How when I ask for Sam she refers to him as "Sammy Paradise," not "Mister Paradisio," which, I said, can't cause his clients to respect him a lot, much less the general public. And I asked Anglin did he think that was right. He told me Sam'd never objected which kind of surprised me; it seemed so completely out of keeping with everything else about him. Disrespectful of his dignity or something. And unless he complained about it, Anglin said he didn't see any need to do anything about it. I got the impression I'm the only one who ever griped about that lazy broad, who wont even look around for a guy she works for when someone calls and asks for him. In fact, from the reaction I got to the question over there, it was pretty obvious his boss thought maybe I was some kind of a nut. Either that or out of line."
"Well," Paradisio said, getting to know Cavanaugh by allowing Cavanaugh to learn what he was like, enabling the judge to evaluate him as though tacitly conceding that the judge outranked him and had a right to size him up, at the same time ate his Italian sub, talking while he chewed.
"Bad enough, when my clients try to do that, get on my good side, as though some day that might get them a break when they really don't deserve one. Wishful thinking but that I can understand.
"But every so often, just now and then, I get one that goes beyond that, acting like we're pals. I'm now his big brother, or sometimes maybe even his father. Finds out when my birthday is, sends me cards and shit.
"None of them've got any imagination. It's like they're followin' a cookbook. You can almost see 'em, movin' their lips. Here's this repeat-offender, career criminal, moanin' and groanin': he's all alone in the world. He was inside so long he hasn't got nobody left and no place to go. Nobody cares about him. The boo and the hoo and "poor me." So maybe this year you could ask your wife if she would make a little extra stuffing and set one more platen usual for Thanksgiving?
He'd like to spend the day with you, you're the closest thing to family he's got left, and he's not supposed to see his old friends any more, he used to hang around with, who got him in trouble. As you know; you're the boss now and you're the one who told him that. And you know he wants to do everything exactly how you say, 'cause he's reformed now and he's going to be good.
"He's working on you. Gradually it's all becoming your fault, you're to blame, that the holidays're comin' and he's all alone. He didn't have nothin' to do with it, or pretty soon he wont've, by the time that he gets through rewriting history around you. This's the pattern with almost all of them. All the bad things you thought he did were somebody else's doing. He'll get so he believes the shit while he's slingin' it; just give him some time and he will. It wont be anything he did that explains why his family disowned him, and he was inside for so long no one remembers his name or that he lost track of all of his respectable friends. Always what someone else did. That's his way of dealing with the emptiness: fill it up with lies.
"That's what all of that rigamarole is all about. When I wasn't looking, didn't know anything was going on, I adopted the guy. God or Fate brought us together. Instead of just having him assigned to me, because I was first in line to get the next bad actor, the day they let him out.
"Well, I can deal with that stuff. I know how to do it. You learn all that early; older guys teach you. What to do when the cons start working on you, trying to muscle in on your life. Let 'em go far enough and pretty soon they'll be in your spare bedroom. He'll take over your personal life on you, be everywhere you look and underfoot.
Hoggin' the bathroom, the morning, you're tryin' to shave and get dressed. Askin' you if you'd mind already asked her and she said it sounds fine to her if he slept with your wife now and then.
'"Just one night a week now, not asking' too much. Maybe, say, Tuesday, or Thursday night, when you're out bowlin' with the boys, give the old lady something to look forward to. Not like I wanna spoil any your weekend plans." Pretty soon he's fucking your wife and you're inna guest room. And these're bad guys that're pullin' this mealy-mouth shit, or you never would've even got to know them.
"So I think by now, well, I'm pretty well seasoned. I been around quite a while. I must've seen, or at least heard about, most of the flavors of bullshit there are. But now this new guy comes onto my list. Never had one like this one before, Mister Lowell Chappelle. He makes all the others look tame, and I've hadda buncha lulus in my time, believe me. This is one very bad guy, and he not only thinks that he's my adopted son; he thinks I've adopted his whole family. So he tells me anyway.
"I'm not sure this is the honor that Lowell seems to think it is, or that I want it, if it is. Lowell's family doesn't seem to've exactly flourished, deprived as they've been of his affection and fatherly direction while he was unavoidably detained elsewhere, in one prison or another, doing time for all the exciting things he did.
"He believes he has two sons. He believes they both may still be alive, but he's not sure. He hasn't always tried to keep close tabs on the children he's begotten, but if I could locate them he'd like to make amends. Because I have access to sources of information that are closed to him. As usual when it's some nice thing that Lowell would like to see occur, it will require quite a lot of work from someone else, not him. He's helpless. Lowell's careful to be helpless puts a lot of effort into it; make sure he stays that way. He'd like me to use "that computer that you're always using there that can do anything, and see if you can find out something about my kids, on it. See where they are these days, what they're doing. That'd be good to know."
"Using information that he's volunteered and that I've obtained by questioning him, like a fool I've tried without success to do this. I have been unable to check or verify any family history that he's given me that's not in his own personal record. He of course is not the sole source of the information in that jacket about him; that came from law enforcement officers and public records. That's why it's pretty reliable. And there's a lot of it; he's had a long and eventful career. But that data's only about his military and criminal career; it isn't a complete picture of his background. It doesn't enable us to say with any sort of assurance who his family includes, much less list their current addresses, because he was the source of the entries about them and he's a habitual liar.
"So what I am saying is that the information he's given me about his family members may be true. But I haven't been able to substantiate or verify it. I'm not sure whether he deliberately falsified the data that he's given me; or the information that he's given me's the best he has, but simply wrong; or because both his sons, and his wife and the woman who bore his second son, have somehow managed, deliberately or otherwise, to disappear from all the data banks that we have access to.
It wouldn't be unusual if they did, just decided that Lowell's never going to make their lives better; may in fact cause them more trouble and pain, so they've decided that the safest thing to do is to disappear. The dependents of repeat offenders often do that; the very best they can to divorce themselves from ever having anything to do with their bad boys again. It often works, and I have to say it often seems to me that they're right: it's by far the smartest thing for them to do.
"My guess is some of each factor's probably at work here, not that it matters. Tracking all these people down and making sense out of Lowell Chappelle's family tree would cost a lot more time and money than it could possibly be worth. So, going on the data that Lowell furnished:
"One of his sons, the eldest, is named September. "His mother liked that for a name. She had him in the wintertime but she didn't like February." Lowell always called him "Shadow" but he's not sure whether anybody else ever did. He last saw the boy, then two or three, before he went into the service in Nineteen-flfty-nine. That would make "this kid" thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Lowell forgets but he thinks that would be about right. From something he heard on the grapevine before he was released the time before this, Lowell believes that he was in maximum security somewhere in the sovereign state of Texas. He isn't sure exactly where, or what for. He thinks the sentence might have been the outgrowth of something to do with a riot that happened at another correctional institution in Texas where he was previously doing time. "For drugs or something, something to do with drugs. Or maybe it was a border thing." He hasn't seen him for many years.
"Lowell lost track of his wife, Norma this would be September's mother "years and years ago." He says he didn't go looking for her when he came out of the service and "I guess if she ever went lookin' for me she couldn't've looked too hard, because if she did I never heard nothin' about it and she never found me." He righteously assumes that she and the boy received the allotment checks that he knows were deducted from his army pay, but he doesn't know that.
"The VA computer records consist of entries manually copied onto magnetic tape from card-files during the changeover from the keypunch system that took place years and years ago. They indicate that allotment checks made out to forty-four military dependents named Chappelle went to a total of seventy-one addresses in the US, Canada and the Dominican Republic during the years that our boy was in the army fighting for his country and the democratic way of life. The only one that seems to have any connection with him at all was a Gloria Chappelle at an address in Atlantic Beach, Florida. "Gloria" was his mother's name, but he has no recollection either of her ever having lived in Atlantic Beach or of himself ever having directed that she be sent any allotment from his pay at that address. Or any other one. He said he hadn't seen her since he was about six years old, and that was in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands. So: our first dead end in the pursuit of the history of Lowell Chappelle.
"The last he heard of his wife, Norma, she was living somewhere in Illinois and she was working in a factory "that made things." What things he doesn't know. "Could've been pumps." He believes that was about "twenty, thirty years ago," but he's not sure. He thinks she may be dead. He says she had asthma, or maybe it was TB, and it gave her a lot of trouble, so it was hard for her to keep a job.
"The other son's named Rutherford. He'd be about sixteen or seventeen by now. He lived with his mother in the Santurce section of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Lowell's information about him's very old and comes entirely from letters he received some time ago, while he was in prison, first from a social worker and then from a parish priest in Puerto Rico. They seemed to be under the impression Lowell was a wealthy man who owned several restaurants and clubs in New York, and hoped he would see fit to contribute financially to the support of his son and his son's mother.
"This was before the States all started enacting those long-arm Dead-beat-Dad statutes that've become so popular in recent years and just about drive us nuts in the federal system, trying to keep track of all the warrants that're issued under them that we're supposed to enforce. Not that I don't think they're a good idea, but that's a different matter. It seems to me as though the States ought have their own people to do all the work it entails. We're already understaffed and overworked, before they started this.
"Anyway, Lowell concedes the possibility that the social worker may've gotten this impression, that he was a wealthy fella, from the boy's mother, who may very well have gotten it from him, during his only visit to the island shortly after the four-hundred' thirty-thousand-dollar bank job back in Seventy-eight that was alleged to have been his most recent effort at least so far as anyone's proven so far. The one that landed him in jail out at FCI McNeil Island before he got out and came here, destined for my attention.
"Lowell of course continues to maintain his innocence of that charge.
He does admit that during his visit to Puerto Rico when he knocked up the lady in Santurce he had quite a lot of currency with him, much of which he lost playing blackjack in the casino at the El San Juan Hotel.
"Now, this woman that your Park Rangers surfaced in the woods back on Saturday night, this Linda Shepard: as I understand it, she claims to be Chappelle's daughter. It's possible she is but that detail slipped his mind. Details have a way of slipping where Lowell's mind's concerned. Or perhaps he just kept that fact from me, chose not to tell me for some reason of his own or for no reason at all. I couldn't find Lowell today after you called so I could ask him that. Got no idea where the hell he is, and neither does anybody else I know who knows him. Janet LeClerc's was one of the numbers I called, that you give to me there, Amby. Got no answer from her."
"She's probably down at the convenience store there," Merrion said, 'stocking up on butts and scratch tickets."
"Dunno," Paradisio said. "All's I know is that I couldn't get ahold of her, either, to even ask, so I don't know if they're still shacked up.
Even though you told her she hadda make him leave. But still, pending when we find Lowell and get a chance to ask him a few things about this woman claims to be his daughter: I can't find either from our files or from what Daggett'd tell me Louella over DSS. You know, there are times when I think I really hate that woman.
"Seriously," he said, when Merrion laughed. "I don't know if you'd be familiar with her, with this woman, Judge. But I do know my friend Amby here is, and that's why he's laughing now. He knows how much fun it is when you've got a question that you need an answer to, right away. It'll take you about two or three days to get it through channels, maybe even back and forth with Washington, much more tim en you've got. Louella could answer it for you in about fifteen seconds if she would, but she wont. She says she can't, but the real reason is she wont. She just hates giving out information. I don't know what it is, protecting her clients against us? Doesn't make any sense; we're trying to help them. But if you can get the time of day out of that one, you're doing better'n I am."
"Sam always speaks very lowly of Louella, Judge," Merrion said to Cavanaugh. "I've told him many times he shouldn't do it, but he just wont seem to stop."
"For the record, Sam," Cavanaugh said, 'she wont tell me anything either. If instead of dumping the chore on Amby, I pick up the phone and make the call myself, the result is the same. I get the same answer both of you get. The woman was born saying: "No." No wonder she's never been married. She's probably still a virgin."
"Yeah, well, I guess I'm glad to hear that," Paradisio said. "At least now I know it's not just me, not just Feds and all, some grudge she's got against us. Makes me feel a little better, know at least I'm not alone.
"But anyway, Lowell gave us the Shepard woman's address as the place where he'd be living before he got out of jail last March and ended up here, lucky us. He told us she's a niece of his. He definitely did not say she's his daughter. But according to him she'd be thirty-four not thirty-two, as she told the Park Rangers. She's a ninth-grade dropout from a school in Lockport, New York. Those three kids she had with her all named after movie stars are by three different fathers.
'"His niece," now?" Cavanaugh said.
"Yeah, "niece," Paradisio said. "Look, I know I don't look too good on this. I didn't do that great a job here. But my guess is she isn't his niece. My guess's that there's some connection between where he was, right before he robbed that last bank with the machine gun after he got out from McNeil Island. He's got some connection out there in New York State that we really don't know all that much about yet. We're not that far along. And then when he got out last spring he came back here and moved in with this Linda Shepard and her three kids, down in Springfield. This Ronald Bennett that you tell me was with her: we don't know where he came from.
"She had a place on State Street way the hell out up beyond the Armory there, up near Winchester Square. Not a bad place at all, pretty roomy; should've been enough for her. Three bedrooms, small dining room, big living room, reasonably good-sized kitchen, not that you'd wanna try and cook a banquet in it, anything; but still, you know, for nothin'? Should've been okay for her. Plus it had a bath-a-half. It's a mostly minority section, African-American and Puerto Rican. That does make it sort of surprising she'd seek that out, want to locate herself up there with them. Lookin' for the trouble, the first place, or else she wouldn't've gone there. But in her circumstances? She's got three kids and she's on welfare: how much choice'd she have? And besides, Lowell's mixed blood himself, half black and white, half Hispanic. He knew he was getting' out, maybe he wanted to live there.
"Anyway, that's where she was when Lowell showed up and moved in. Eight or nine weeks after that, it's June, and now Bennett joins the party here, and then not too long after that, they all hadda move out. Which brings us up to the events of this weekend. And that's where you come in here, I guess, Amby."
"Okay," Merrion said. "Putting together what the Rangers and then the cops were able to get out of this woman last Saddy night, plus what I was able on my own before court this morning, managed to pry outta Daggett, everything was hunky-dory with Shepard and the kids until Chappelle showed up. Everyone was doin' fine. Wasn't workin', of course, nothin' quite as dramatic as getting' a job, maybe doing something now and then to earn her keep, but with the Essesseye and the Food Stamps and the AFDC and the rent subsidy, well, they're getting' along. They're warm and they're eatin' and they've got clothes to wear and the kids seem to've been going to school.
"Bennett may've already been there, against the welfare rules, when Chappelle showed up and made him get out. Then Bennett wasn't there for a while. For about six weeks after Chappelle got there, things were quiet. But that changed. The neighbors start complaining about noise in the Shepard apartment, and then the cops get called. And then Shepard decides one night, fuck the neighbors, and throws a party that turns into a round-robin fistfight, everybody goin' at it, fightin' everybody else. Naturally the night wont be complete until the cops're called. So she gets on the telephone herself and invites them to come up.
"Cops arrive and what they find is that there are about a dozen people in the place, and all of them seem to be either drunk or stoned. Some of them're also bleedin'. Except for Mister Chappelle. He's as sober as a judge, begging your Honor's pardon here, and he takes it upon himself to inform the cops that he's been visiting his niece, Miss Shepard, since he got released from jail, and frankly he don't like the way she lives. Doesn't approve of her life-style. Tells the cops confidentially he's got reason to believe she's been supplementing her income by entertaining gentlemen callers and taking money from them.
Which is another activity not allowed welfare recipients.
"Naturally the cops are shocked. But feeling that it's only fair to give this woman a chance to defend her good name and reputation, they take her aside and ask her if she'd care to comment on reports that she may be doin' a little light hookin'. She's understandably upset to hear that someone's been saying such things about her, and after telling them that she's a good girl and wouldn't think of doing such things, worms the name of the stoolie out of them. Then, while they are still there, the cops're still in the apartment, she flies into a fucking rage and goes berserk, grabs ahold of a rum jug, and goes after Brother Chappelle, screaming like a fuckin' banshee. Before the cops can grab her she bangs him on the head with the jug, and breaks it.
It's not empty. The booze goes all over the place, all over him an' the gas stove. He falls against it. That turns on the stove, which sets the rum on fire. So you've got flames leaping up from the stove and his clothes; cops're beating them out with dishtowels or something.
And while that's going on, she's still got the handle and the jagged neck of the jug left, so she goes after him with that and opens up his face before the cops can separate them again.
"This throws a damper on the party, so the cops decide to have some of them arrest Miss Shepard and take her down to the station. And never mind the EMTs, just have some of the other cops who after all're right there on the scene transport Chappelle to the ER and get him repaired.
The next day after the judge has heard all about this in Springfield District Court, the upshot of it is that Miss Shepard gets a stern lecture and a year's probation — because she has no money to pay a fine and nobody to stay with the kids if she goes to the cooler, and it seems like that's about the only thing anybody can do to her without going to a hell of a lot of trouble finding foster homes for the kids.
"Mister Chappelle, on the other hand, all stitched and bandaged up like he is, is ordered to stay away from her, or the first thing that he knows he'll be back in the federal lockup for violating probation by making a nuisance of himself under State law. Mister Chappelle states his opinion this is a gross miscarriage of justice, him being threatened with going back to jail. He points out that after all, she's the one who did all the damage, cut his face up with a broken bottle, so she's the one should go to jail. The judge is unmoved and tells Mister Chappelle that if he doesn't like getting his face all cut up and Miss Shepard is the one who last did it to him, all he has to do's obey the order, stay away from Miss Shepard, and he should be fine. Oh, and also inna future maybe think twice before he starts going around telling cops any hostess of his is also selling her ass.
That isn't exactly what the judge said just pretty much what he meant."
"Except that nobody in Springfield then ever gets around to telling me about this," Paradisio said.
"Or else they did call but you were out, and they got that bitch of a secretary of yours, and she had something else to do, like pick her nose, so she didn't bother telling you," Merrion said. "As we know's been known to happen."
"That could be," Paradisio said.
"As a further result of all of this brouhaha," Merrion said, 'at least according to Louella, a week or two later when Miss Shepard's landlord he lives over in Agawam; owns a number of apartments, all of which are slums finally gets wind of what went on in the one up in Winchester Square that night, he decides it's his turn to get upset.
So he orders her to quit and vacate the premises. Says he's trying to run a classy joint there and she's not helping him to do this, so therefore out she goes. This gets the social workers started digging into the whole mess, trying to resettle Miss Shepard.
"They find no sign of Chappelle. He seems to be gone from the scene probably because he's now taken up with our Janet in apartment fourteen at Sixteen-ninety-two Ike, but this fact hasn't yet reached either Sam's attention or ours. What the social workers do find is that Bennett is now keeping Miss Shepard company. Miss Shepard is informed that she can't expect to get another subsidized place for herself as long as Bennett's with her. At least under the statute, he's an able-bodied male. He's supposed to work. She takes offense at this and says what they're planning to do is get married. The case worker says weddings're nice, but that the money she's been getting isn't for supporting unemployed fiances or husbands, either, as far as that goes.
They put her and the three kids up in a motel temporarily, 'til they can find an apartment for her, but with strict orders to Bennett to stay out, and to her not to let him come in. He ignores his orders and she ignores hers and the case-worker catches them and boots the whole bunch of them out. That's the last that anyone at DSS hears of any of them until the Ranger posse rounds them up on Saturday and dumps them here in our lap."
"Okay," Cavanaugh said to Merrion, 'so, where does that leave us all now with Janet? Is the ball in your court here, this afternoon? Or can you kick it back into Sam's?"
Merrion stared at Cavanaugh. He did not say anything. "I didn't say anything," he told Hilliard that night, 'because I didn't know what to say. Sam said that Well, as far as he was concerned, he's already looking for Chappelle. Now that the guy is officially missing, or whatever you call it when his probation officer who's supposed to know at all times where he's living, and Sam doesn't, it's his job to find him. As far as I'm concerned, I thought once I'd spoken to Louella, gotten her onto the case with the woman and the three kids, that then until the dame comes into court, as she's now going to do tomorrow, the only thing I have to do is sit tight and see what the hell happens. And anyway, where's the judge fit in all this? This's the part I don't like. It seems like Lennie's saying he's got nothing to do; he's just a spectator here. Janet's now completely my responsibility, like the whole thing was my idea. So I didn't answer him.
"And then after that, Sammy's gone, I'm still there in his chambers, I dunno, picking up, something, throwing the sandwich wrappers away, and the bastard does it again. "What plans've you got to handle this damned problem with Janet? Think you can find her today?"
"I looked at him. "Len," I said when we're by ourselves, we're on a first-name basis "you're making me nervous, talking like that. Like Janet's now my foster child. I've told her what we want done. Had her in Saturday for that. If she doesn't do what I said; keeps on entertaining the guy, then the only thing I can see that we can do is call up her case and get rid of it. It wont cause any stir. It's only attempted larceny and she's been outta trouble almost a year. It'll look okay if we broom it. And there's no way we can try the fuckin' thing now, as both of us very well know. The cops haven't got any witnesses left. So the way that I look at it, that's our only choice."
"So that was when he said to me could I get on that and track her down right this afternoon after work there, mark it up for tomorrow and bring her in right after lunch, "when no one's around. Call it up, blow it out and get rid of it here. Or maybe just lose it, like Chassy and Larry used to do, when they were playing their games."
"Well, I wasn't gonna argue with him. So I just said I couldn't do that or anything else today. I said I hadda see Pooler. And that's when he said to me, outta the blue: "Bob Pooler? Why've you gotta see Pooler? Are you in that too? That federal mess I've been hearing about? I assumed he'd be Hilliard's lawyer."