Merrion visited Lane the first time on Saturday, the day after Christmas, bringing a holiday fifth of Old Granddad. It was one of three Christmas bottles from lawyers allocated to each of the three assistants by Richie Hammond. He reserved both big baskets of fruit from abstemious attorneys balancing their strong beliefs in temperance against their disinclination to lose their ready access to continuances of cases for which clients had not paid and forgiveness for late filings and the other nine jugs for himself. Protesting the injustice to Hammond by reminding him that Lane had split the take evenly, Merrion had learned by chance that Larry was living alone. "Yeah,"
Hammond said with satisfaction, locking up the office at 2:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve and collecting the last of his gift parcels from the oak bench beside the door. "Thought being generous one day a year'd make people forget what a bastard he was all the rest of it. And what did it get him? Not much. Now he's up there by himself on the boulevard, all by his lonesome, gone and forgotten as well."
"What the hell're you talking about?" Merrion said. "Larry's got a big family, six or eight kids. He lives with his wife down in Indian Orchard in the same little house they raised all those kids in. "One bathroom and ten people trying to get in it."
"Well, his family got wise to him," Hammond said gaily. "Told him either he hadda lay off a the grog, or go live by himself somewhere else. Serves the prick right, you ask me."
Merrion had felt sharply embarrassed not to have found out earlier. He had not made any effort to contact Lane in the month that had passed since Larry, having no choice in the face of Carries family power, had turned the chief clerk's job over to Richie, going on what was called terminal leave the week after the four-day Thanksgiving break. He thought it strange that Larry had not telephoned him either, but knew guiltily that did not excuse his own omission. Initially suspicious, as he was of everyone, Larry after a year or two of daily scrutiny had accepted Merrion as 'a fairly decent guy, once you get to know the kid, make allowances for him," and made him his office protege, teaching him what the job really meant and entailed, grooming him someday to take it. To Hilliard Merrion admitted: "I owe Larry. I should've shown more respect."
When the court had opened with Larry as its first clerk, the title of magistrate was not included in the statutory definition of the office that he held. But that was in fact the job he had soon begun to do, years before the law was changed. He had started exercising magisterial powers when he and Charles Spring, the first judge to preside in Canterbury, soon after taking office deduced that Spring's job would become a lot simpler and less time-consuming if the judge informally ceded to his more-than-willing clerk and comp licit fellow-investor enough actual power to decide de facto Small Claims civil matters applications for summary process brought by landlords, tradesmen and public utilities against people who had failed to pay their bills. Lane began to hold what he and the judge called 'preliminary screening hearings," putatively to enable the judge to conduct 'official sessions' more expeditiously, 'saving everybody's time."
The bill-collectors immediately perceived that this procedure was by far the quickest, surest and most efficient way to get judgments against stubborn debtors. They learned to agree to allow "Judge Spring to decide the case and sign the judgment on the basis of the memo I'll write up of this session, and then after you've seen his ruling, if you have no objection, he will sign a judgment. If you do have an objection, all you'll have to do is state it and he'll hear the case."
If within three days neither party entered an objection to Lane's memo, a judgment tracking the content of the memo was entered on the docket, carrying the "Chas. Spring' signature Lane had expertly forged.
When there was an objection, experience soon demonstrated, the judge, after rather brusquely holding the full hearing requested by a disappointed litigant tended to decide the case against that party, disappointing him again. As that understanding gained currency, the formal debt-collection process became even speedier in the Canterbury District Court. The grateful lawyers thought it fitting to be openly generous at Christmas and eager to pick up bar-tabs when they saw Lane in The Tavern after a hard day on the job.
From the beginning Lane was publicly forthright about the civil powers he'd annexed as well the power to dispose of minor criminal matters; experience on the civil side revealed to the legally savvy the meritorious economies of time and expense of the Lane approach and led to its adaptation for quick and quiet resolution of minor criminal matters especially motor vehicle violations, but no one involved saw any need to publicize that. "Phone bills; oil bills; light bills; gas bills: most people've got no idea what a mountain of chickenshit we get every day in this building," Larry said. "Until he took the judgeship, Chassy was one of them."
Spring as a somewhat-affected teenager had formed the lifetime habit of abbreviating his given name as "Chas.," when he signed it in black ink with a gold-nib bed Waterman fountain pen, copying the steel-point signature reproduced as attestation of ironclad security on the cover of every policy issued by the company his namesake grandfather had founded in 1884, Pioneer Valley Insurance. His seventh-grade teacher, amused by the mannerism, had taken it at face-value, applying the durable nickname.
"Chassy'd always been a rich kid; what'd he know? Bills came into his house and went out the next day, paid. His daddy never had to go to court and have a judge yell at him, tell he'd better pay Ralph at the Gulf station down in Ingleside for the rebuilt engine in his car; fifteen bucks out of his paycheck every week until he paid the whole three hundred. Tell him if he didn't do it, Ralph was gonna get the car. If the engine in Chassy's father's car started burning oil, Chassy's daddy knew what to do. Nothing to it: he went down to DeSaulnier Chrysler-Plymouth, picked out a nice new Imperial hardtop and wrote out a company check. When Chassy finished law school and came home to practice law, he didn't have to run himself ragged, finding a job, get himself all tuckered out. He went to work where Dad worked, in the general counsel's office of the insurance company Dad'd inherited from Granddad.
"So, when Chassy became a district court judge he was shocked by what he discovered. Up 'til then he'd thought a civil matter was something that you did in superior or federal court. You hated to, but you had no choice. Major borrower'd begun defaulting on six-figure construction-bond payments. You had to protect your investors. It wasn't something that happened to you, because you'd gotten more than two months in arrears on your TV installment payments. "And anyway, what the hell are these things, these "installment payments"? Don't people have to pay for what they get in your store before you let 'em take it home?"
"Chassy just had no idea how many people there were who didn't pay their bills for the plain and simple reason that they couldn't. They didn't make enough money to buy all the things they thought they really oughta have, but they'd gone out and bought them anyway. The first month or so we're in business here he thought the reason that we had such a volume of Small Claims business was that Arthur and Roy Carnes'd been telling the truth when they talked their buddies in the legislature into setting up this court for their very own. It was true: the four towns had really needed it. But since he thought it was all backlog, pent-up demand, he assumed in time wed clear it up. Then when we didn't, because it wasn't, he didn't know which way was up.
"Instead of getting less, we got more. Once the plaintiffs and their lawyers finally found out we were here. It was like the tide coming in. Chassy finally realized something new hadda be done.
"It isn't easy to do something new in any courthouse, this one especially. A lot of the people in here: once they got to know Chassy a little, they decided they probably were never going to like him.
There were days when I was one of 'em. He could be a fussy bastard, really get on your nerves. And he treated Lennie Judge Cavanaugh, when he first came aboard, awful young but still and all, he was another judge like he was shit. Naturally Lennie didn't like him very much, and he had company. That was why when Chassy wanted to get something done in his courthouse, it could take a pretty long time. Even when everybody else could see it was a good idea, as his ideas generally were, they were in no hurry to see it get done.
"So we had to fix the problem with Small Claims by ourselves no help from anyone else. We decided that in the afternoons I'd become a junior judge. I'd hear all the petty civil cases. That'd free up about three or four hours every day for Chassy after lunch to do what he really liked to do, and was good at doing, too: watching the stock-ticker, following the market, picking out what stocks he thought we should be investing in with all this money we now had. Which me and Fiddle and Roy naturally wanted him to be doing with his time, just as much as he did. Much better having him out there making us richer'n to have him sittin' on his ass here in the court all afternoon, hollering at a buncha poor dead-beats whose chief money problem was they didn't make enough to pay their bills.
"So what we would do was have the normal sessions in the morning, until noon or as long's it took. Then unless we had a criminal matter go to trial, the afternoon and we all tried very hard around here to make sure we wouldn't; we had those police prosecutors and the defense lawyers beltin' out plea-bargains left and right as soon as we broke for lunch Chassy'd grab his coat-n'-hat and run out the door, jump in his Chrysler and high-tail it down to the brokers in Springfield. The rest of the day that's where he'd be, happy as a pig in shit at Tucker, Anthony and R. L. Day, down there on State Street; in his element. It was home to him there; he belonged. His daddy'd started taking him there when he was a little boy. And because he was happy, and also outta here, everybody in the courthouse who didn't like him was happy too. Me especially, of course, because he was making me money."
"When Chassy called the Canterbury District Court "my court," he meant it," Lane told Merrion. "He acted like he owned the place and could do anything he liked. When people said he was arrogant, they were right.
Whether he did it on purpose, to piss people off, or he never realized how people took it; that I really never knew. I didn't really mind it, myself. He was a smart son of a bitch and he treated me all right. He helped me make money. Naturally I'd think he was a pretty okay-type of guy.
"And anyway, the fact of the matter was that when he said "This is my courthouse," he had it about right." Spring had grown up in Holyoke.
He had gone to Deerfield Academy and then to Harvard ('46) and Harvard Law School ('49) with Roy Carnes. Carnes in 1952 had won the first of the five terms he would serve in the state House of Representatives, representing the easterly part of Holyoke along with the towns of Canterbury, Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland. In 1960, Holyoke voters approved his all-but-hereditary succession to the state Senate seat held by his uncle, Arthur, forced by failing health to retire.
Virtually by acclamation, Arthur had won what became known as 'the Carnes senate seat' when the death of the incumbent opened it in 1946.
That had been less than a year after he was invalided home from World War II army service in Europe. He had lost his left arm during the drive for the Rhine. When he died in May of 1966, a fellow WW II veteran and friend of many years, Holyoke Transcript Telegram city editor and weekly columnist Reg Gault collected and published a full page of tributes to him, ending with his own: "Arthur was entitled to wear the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. He seldom did.
"He figured in many eyewitness stories of combat heroism. I didn't hear them from him; I heard them from other soldiers, who had fought alongside him. Arthur was born in this city in 1913. He went away to school, and then he spent those war years in Europe. He took his legislative work seriously, as he took everything except himself, and so until his health forced his retirement, he kept an apartment in Boston, where he spent much of his time. "Far too much of it," he would tell you, voicing just about the only complaint I ever heard him utter, "too far from my home, from my friends, and much too far from Grey Hills," the club he'd been instrumental in creating on the abandoned estate of Jesse Grey, and the golf game he'd astonishingly somehow learned to play again with one arm "not quite as well, though," he would say after his war wound.
"His home, then, always was here. Wherever his life and work and service to his country took him, he never really left. His heart and spirit remained in Holyoke and this valley along the Connecticut River, with the people that he knew and served so very well. He never forgot where he came from.
"He always knew who he was. He never lost sight of the job he had to do. He was a devoted son, husband and father, an honest and far-sighted public servant, the kind of candidate who gives meaning to the term "public service," a hero and the best friend a man could have.
Raise a glass today to Arthur Carnes Ave atque vale."
The Carneses, Arthur in the Senate and Roy in the House, had first combined in 1954 to carve the Canterbury District Court jurisdiction out of the Holyoke, Chicopee, Palmer and Northampton Districts. There was merit to the rationale they publicized. The continuing escalation of the Cold War made it likely the civilian population around the US Air Force Strategic Air Command base at Westover Field would increase, as more and more Air Force dependents moved in. The Fisk Tire Company was working two shifts to meet the booming demand for real rubber tires to replace the synthetics rationed in wartime. The new Monsanto plant in Springfield was attracting young workers and their growing families.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst was expanding. And, as Larry Lane said, there didn't seem to be any reason to think business would be tailing off at the Tampax factory in Palmer.
"Like it or not," Arthur said in the Senate, 'more people means more work for our court system, just as surely as it means more work for our school systems and our hospitals, more demands upon our water systems and our highways. Either we expand our facilities and agencies or we overcrowd and overload them to the point at which they simply cannot get their jobs done, and break down. If we expect and want the prosperity of our cities and towns to continue, with the population growth that good times economically attract, we have to be prepared to pay the price in necessary services. We need another court."
The Carneses had intended that Arthur would become its first presiding justice, but by the time Chassy Spring's building committee Chicopee assistant clerk of court Larry Lane served it as consultant and Fiddle Barrows's construction people had the building ready for occupancy, early in 1957, Arthur's prostate cancer had been diagnosed. The prognosis was encouraging, Arthur's regular physician having digitally detected the growth early. But his cancer specialist said that in his view with radiation treatment and chemotherapy ahead of him, Arthur was probably going to find himself having to spend a lot of his time in a hospital Johnny at Mass. General in Boston, and would most likely be more comfortable and have a better chance of recovery if he stayed close by. "Particularly since you've already got your apartment in Charles River Park. Instead of getting yourself into a new situation where you have to travel a hundred miles every time you have to come in."
"So there they were," Larry Lane said. "Arthur and Roy with their brand-new courthouse and nobody to put in it. Except me, of course, I was ready enough. Anything to get out of Chicopee and away from that bastard Popowski. Maurice was a son of a bitch. So they had a clerk.
But they also needed a judge.
"Roy thought about it and decided he didn't want it. Too early for him to put himself out to pasture. He was still in his thirties, waiting to take Arthur's seat in the Senate, still thinking maybe some day he might make a run for Congress." In 1962, when Roy moved up, Dan Hilliard, a Holyoke alderman because of strong though private Carnes support, won his first election to Roy's former seat in the House.
"It's hard for me to think now only fifteen years've gone by since we opened the place," Larry said to Merrion. "So much's happened since then. Take me for example, what's happened to me. You want the truth, I thought what happened to the Carneses was kind of funny. The two of them had it all planned out so neat, so firm, so fully packed, so quick and easy on the draw. Then the doctor sticks his finger up Arthur's ass, finds a little bulge up there that don't seem right to him, and "That's it. All bets're off. It's time to make new plans." Serves me right, I guess, that now it's happening to me. I'm on terminal leave."
Bureaucratically terminal meant 'using up vacation time before formally commencing retirement," but in Larry's case it carried another one of its meanings as well. He hadn't told anyone outside of his family.
Until his mind was changed by Merrion's visit, he hadn't planned to tell anyone else.
His eyes had instantly filled up when he saw who was at his door.
"Where the hell've you been?" he said, his voice clogging up, grabbing the Christmas whiskey with his left hand, using his right to pull Merrion into the apartment.
"I just found out, Thursday," Merrion said, shutting the door behind him. "I would've come over yesterday but I hadda stay with my mother.
My brother Chris didn't show up again, the shit, and she got all upset I couldn't leave her on Christmas. But I didn't know, you're here by yourself. I just assumed you're okay. I know now I should've asked.
But no one told me. I feel awful bad about this, Larry. Should've given you a call."
"Ahh," Lane said, shaking his head, clearing his throat, 'never mind the details, pal; stick to the important things. First thing is to get some ice here. Then we can figure out who's to blame, you for not calling or me. Not all your fault, you didn't know. Glad to see you's what's important. Kind of lonesome here. Not as tough as I thought."
He put the bottle on the red Formica counter dividing the kitchen from the dining area and opened the refrigerator freezer door. He put the tray on the counter and then rested his hands on the surface and gazed at Merrion. In a flat voice he said: "Doctor says I'm dying, Amby. He gives me a year to live and says it's not going to be fun. It's lung cancer, both of them. I'm too old for one of those new transplant-operations and it's too far along to stop. I'm numberin' out my days and as far's my family's concerned, I can do it by myself."
His wife and his kids had made his choice clear: he'd 'either quit drinking, get a second opinion, maybe have surgery, radiation and the chemotherapy, and at least do my best to get better," or else he would have to get out. "They said she couldn't take it, watching me die, without at least tryin' to get better."
He snorted. "Which is never gonna happen, me get better, matter what I do, or don't." Talking made him wheeze. "Everybody knows it; nobody ever does. Doesn't matter what the hell I do to myself or let someone else do to me better I'm not gonna get.
But that's the choice my family gives me. Get better or out of their lives."
He told Merrion that he'd asked for time. "I've seen what all that medical business does to a guy. It slows the dying down, I guess, lets him live a little longer. I don't argue with none of that. But what they do to you guarantees you're not gonna enjoy any life you get afterwards. If they'd drug you enough — morphine, maybe some of that heroin the cops've got in their evidence locker make you happy no matter how shitty you felt or how much of you's even left, well then, that'd be a whole different thing. Something like that I might go for.
But this other shit? I don't want it. When I go, what goes will be me. Me, pissin' and moanin' like always, not some dim bulb that finally burned out. That's all I was asking them for, time to die my own way."
Describing the outrage to Merrion had made Lane indignant again, and therefore very emphatic. "Not more time to live, you understand. I wasn't asking for that. Not looking for miracles here. Not from that bunch, at least, fuckin' damned ingrates they are. Just some time to think. Seemed reasonable to me. After all, I've supported the whole fuckin' raft of 'em," Larry had eight children, 'all of these fuckin' years. Roof over their heads; warm dry place to sleep; pretty good food, by and large. Didn't cook it, no, but I paid for it oughta get some credit for that. Court's indulgence, as we say? Couple of days, over the weekend, decide which life I'd like better, little short one I've got left. I needed some time to think. "Sunday night be all right, say? After the Celtics game? I'll give you my answer then."
"They were pissed off. "In other words, Dad, you're gonna drink your way through another weekend, right? Just like you always've done. And then come Sunday night, when you're totally shit-faced, will've been for two whole days, that's when you make up your mind? Like your head'll be clearer then?"
"They actually had that much fucking nerve. "You bastards," I thought.
"You bastards," I said, "you fuckin' bastards. So this then is what it comes down to. Forty-two fuckin' years I've been working, counting the service and all, and now I finally retire, don't have to work anymore.
And what do I find out that makes me? Your prisoner. I gotta do what you say.
What an honor. Takes my breath away. Gimme the whiskey instead."
"Then I stomp out and go back down the courthouse. Gonna change my pension plan. None of them get any of it, all my years of damned hard work. Started six years before any of them came along. Eight of 'em didn't even exist. I created my own enemies. Am I feelin' sorry for myself, at this point? You bet cher your ass I am, Amby.
"Now this stuff in here," he'd gestured around, his one-bedroom apartment number 11 at the rear, on the second floor, with its dreary-brown, early-winter view of Ransom's Brook flowing down the cement trench 'this is what I've got left. But it's pretty grand, don't you think?"
Larry was beginning slyly to explain. The wind eddied groaning around the already-pitting aluminum sashes of the cheap double-glazed windows, ill-fitted into the brickwork, from the maker of the windows in the almost-new courthouse, the lower corners of the double glass already fogged in white crescent shapes with moisture condensed from vapor penetrating the thin rubber sealant. Merrion'd tried to look favorably impressed, but he wasn't. He thought it didn't look like much.
Larry hadn't been fooled. He'd grinned like a Doberman. "Yeah, right, I know. It isn't. It's cheap shit, built to a price, all right?
Building-to-price's the way you make money on an investment property like this. Cheap buildings bring in a real profit, even if they do look ten years old from the day when you first turn the key. It's a fat little pot fulla gold at the end of a rainbow; every month it gets fuller."
"They don't know," Larry said to Merrion. "Not one of my family's got a clue. Never told Richie either. Decided a long time ago I don't like the guy. Chassy appointed him, favor to Roy Carnes, but Chassy never made me think I oughta trust the guy, or that he did, either. And anyway, the fewer people that know what you're really up to, better off everyone is.
"You get a family yourself some day? This dame of yours ever gets her thinking straight, two of you settle down an' have kids? Beautiful, good for you. Good health and prosperity; may there be many days in their lives, and the sun shine on every damned one. I hope they treat you lots better'n mine treated me. But the same advice holds, either way. Tell 'em nothin' beyond what they need to know, case tomorrow you're hit by a bus. The rest let 'em find out after you're dead, you're still on speaking terms then.
"That's what I always did. They didn't know what the stakes really were, how much they had riding on me. What keeping me happy was actually worth. How much effort they oughta put in. That's why they thought they could get so high and mighty with me. They had no idea what it'd really cost 'em, what they'd be losing, if they went and got me pissed off. The pension was all they knew about, see? Well, all of my kids now, they've done pretty well thanks of course to the way that I brought them up, but you're not gonna hear that from them. They can take care of my wife, if they have to, without even breathing hard, right? So my pension for Ginny they're willing to risk, I guess, if they've even thought about that.
"So as a result, after what those pricks did to me, I'm on my way back down the office. The minute that I get there, the first thing I am gonna do is change that fuckin' pension. What they bet, they lost.
Gonna screw them right out of it. Just like they all screwed me out of the rest of my life, right to die in my own fuckin' house, when they put me out in the street.
"But by the time I get down there, I've changed my mind. "Fuck 'em 's what I've now decided. What'll I care, my wife gets the pension? I'll be dead and buried, six feet under 'fore they find out what I did to her, got even. And then they'll go out and start bad-mouthin' me. Make me look like shit, all over town: my poor widow, she ain't got a dime.
What a bastard I was; I left her destitute, all the rest of that crap.
Right here, in my very own town, which I've lived in all my life. And I wont be around to fight back. Tell all the people what they did to me, treatin' me like a sack-ah brown shit, I had the nerve to get sick.
What good is that gonna do me? '"No, better like this." That was what I decided. Better if they never know, the rotten bastards, about all the other stuff there was, they never dreamed of. The big boodle. That's where the real revenge is. Not takin' it with me, no, still can't do that, but I can keep it away from them. That's as good as you can do, at least. Almost as good in the end, Slick, wouldn't you say? Almost as good in the end."
It'd taken Larry longer than his doctors and he had expected, dying at the pace set by the cancer, but doing it his way. He hadn't finished up until just before Columbus Day in 1972, twenty-one slow, hard months later. Merrion had visited him at least once during each of eighty-two of those eighty-seven weeks that Larry Lane lived at 1692 Ike.
During the first week of March in '72 Merrion had been pretty much recovered from the flu that had sent him to bed during four days of the last week of February, but still feared he might infect Larry. Each year he had taken the same nine days of vacation that he'd started taking in 1962, the first year he'd been on actual salary with Danny the last week of June and the first week of July, combining vacation days with the holiday for the Fourth. Beginning in '66 he attended the annual clerks' conventions during his time away each June. The first week in July was his one-quarter share of the month's rental of the two-bedroom cottage he rented with Dan and Marcia Hilliard at Swift's Beach in Wareham, and he spent it there fucking Sunny Keller, when she came home on leave from the Air Force to him as the summer herself, even the July it rained.
Over twenty years later he still missed Sunny Keller, and every so often late at night in the card room at Grey Hills when he had had enough to drink, he would shake his head and say it again, right out hud but softly, that he still didn't see why she felt she had to volunteer to go and take a chance on getting herself killed, and then actually get killed, and then he would say 'fucking war," even though it hadn't really been the war that killed her just a heavy rain in Hawaii that could've fallen anywhere. But without the war it wouldn't've fallen onto her. One night Dan Hilliard'd had a few drinks too, and he'd begun to feel sad himself. "You think, you silly bastard," Danny had said, 'you think you were the only one."
"You son of a bitch, I do not," Merrion had said. '1 know very much better'n that, god damn it. I know she fucked other guys. Sunny always fucked other guys. But I couldn't help that, you know. There was nothin' I could do about that."
"Not fucking, goddammit," Hilliard had said. "Not fucking I'm talking about. I meant it was you thinking you were the one, that you were the one that was crazy about Sunny. And you were jus' wrong about that. It was everyone, all of us, ever' damn body, always liked Sunny, right off. And more'n a few of us even got so we loved her. Not that we fucked her, I didn't mean that, but we also loved her. We did. So you shouldn't think that, that it was just you, that it was just you that loved Sunny. "Cause it wasn't just you that loved Sunny. That was the way that she was."
All the other weeks except for flu and his vacations, Merrion had gone to see Larry. Every time he'd gone there, he'd said the same thing.
"Just dropped by, see how you're do in'."
"Checkin' up on me," you mean," Larry had replied every time, wheezing it out and then coughing deeply, moaning as he dredged another shallow air-passage through the viscous tide collecting in his lungs. "See what progress I'm makin'." Igniting another Lucky Strike; gradually devouring and dissolving himself from the inside out, the brown whiskey yellowing his skin; even using two reagents, the process still took its luxurious time.
"You got to be patient," Larry had said. "After all, it stands to reason, am I right? Takes seven years to make the stuff, age it — isn't that what they claim it takes? Bound to take it a while to work. But I don't mind. I'm in no real hurry here to clear out. But I got no desire to hang around, either. Either way, perfectly all right with me."
Over the course of the twenty-one months the building had become etched in clear detail in Merrion's mind, the three-story, eighteen-unit rectangle squatting cramped on a mingy acre-and-an-eighth shelf of land ('being approximately 49,005 square feet, more or less," the deed to the trust recited) filled and levelled with the wreckage of buildings demolished in Urban Renewal projects in Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee, putting a questionably buildable site in place of the nine-percent grade of the natural ravine cut by Ransom's Brook. The fill pulverized brick, thick greyish clay, mulched fibreboard, chunks of cement glittered with shards of window-glass and china; bent steel spikes and rough zinced rods stuck up between dead blades of grass browned and
flattened by the early frosts. Larry Lane and the other four men in the Fourmen's Realty Trust had gotten the fill free for their investment. "Must've been damned near two hundred loads," Larry said, confirming what Merrion's eyes told him. The place had been built on debris.
"Crap built on crap," Larry said, laughing. "Just like the people who live in it now more stuff that nobody wanted. We got it for the cartage, for taking it away. Fiddle Barrow gave his drivers all the hours they could stand. When they finished his contract work for the day, had them go and get it, bring it over here. Eight, ten tons at a time, dumped it right down the slope of that ravine there, right to the edge of the cement trench. Lot of it didn't stop at the edge, went right along into the brook. But what the hell did we care, huh? Wasn't costing us anything. No one saw it go in. There was always plenty more."
Number 14, Janet's unit, was at the front, on the third floor of the six-unit stack to the left of the entrance on the westerly end of the building. The other twelve, Numbers 2 through 19, skipping 13, were stacked on the easterly side of the door, four units on each of the floors. Janet knew the habits of others in the building, people whose names she didn't know; she'd deduced their business by watching them.
"From my fucking picture window," she'd said once, matter-of-factly, mildly startling Merrion. "Some fucking dumb pictures I get from it.
Better stuff on stupid TV. OJ: I was watching that. More innaresting stuff n people in my building've got going, onna TV there." She attended the lives of the other tenants as though they had been staged for her, like the athletic events and movies she watched avidly. She preferred professional hockey, she told Merrion, "specially when they have the fights," seldom missing any game broadcast, no matter which teams were playing. Like the other people in her building they were features of the video in her life, silent players passing through it, their purposes unstated, their function as far as she was concerned being to entertain her. She thought that few of them tried hard enough, no matter what resentments she expressed by grumbling at them.
She did that a lot. She had plenty of time. Far too much of it, in Merrion's estimation; it allowed her the leisure to overheat her imagination, already running on more mood elevators than Merrion believed could possibly be good for her. Xanax, he thought it was, that Sammy Paradise'd said, assuming his own source was telling the truth. But that was not a safe assumption; Lowell Chappelle was the source, the probationer snooping around in his girlfriend's apartment for damaging information about her, who had heedlessly taken him in.
Chappelle was assuming Janet hadn't substituted something else for what'd come in the Xanax-labelled bottle that he'd seen when he browsed her bathroom medicine cabinet. She'd mentioned Elavil at least once to Merrion. Janet knew her drugs.
Louella Daggett was no help. She wouldn't tell Merrion what elixirs Janet was on, beyond confirming she'd been given something that would make the world spin nice and slow and even, no bumps. Louella cited rules of confidentiality Merrion did not believe existed, or should not if they did.
Janet had nothing in her life but raw time. When she sat in her best chair to watch her shows all day on TV, and her hockey games at night Boston and Providence Bruins; Hartford Whalers; Springfield Indians, Kings, Falcons; New York Islanders; Rangers; or New Jersey Devils; God only knows which teams or how many after she got back from Dineen's convenience store each morning, that was all she had: time, nothing but time. She was waiting to die.
Sam Paradisio thought Chapelle could make it happen for her. He thought Chappelle had done it to others, committed murder. "Just because nobody ever caught him at it, that doesn't mean the bastard hasn't done it. There was this one bank that got robbed, 'way the hell out in western New York State, Olean, during the time that he was out before he went in this last time that he got caught. All the earmarks of a Big Sid Charpinsky job that was his neck of the woods, out that way, part of the world he come from. He was in the Rockingham County Jail up in New Hampshire, there, Exeter, same time Chappelle was in for an armored car thing he did. The two of them became asshole buddies.
"Bastards do not stay put any more. They refuse to just stay in one place nowadays, where a man can keep an eye on them. They're all over the place now like horse shit. Well, I saw the surveillance photos on that one, the New York job. The US Attorney showed them to me, and they showed this one poor bastard getting' mowed down. Just getting' fuckin' riddled he was. And the guy that was doin' it looked an awful lot to me like my friend Lowell, guy who's usin' the Mac Ten. Wearin' a mask, but even so, more than a passin' resemblance. The same build, and the same way he's got of movin', way he carries himself. We know what Chappelle is capable of.
Army trained him too good. He could be anyone's killer. Available, formal occasions. Weddings and funerals, bar mitzvahs. Bastard'd have to get his own eight-hundred number, there'd be so much demand for his work."
Merrion rejected that notion at once. It alarmed him. He didn't like being alarmed. Larry'd said one day to him when he was still feeling really good, which usually meant savage and mean: "I've reached that magic age where I only have to do the fuckin' things I want to do, and only think about the things I fuckin' like to think about. So, if I don't like to do it, it's a thing that I don't like, or I don't like to think it, well then, my friend, then I don't." Merrion had agreed with Larry at the time, and now, approaching the same age, agreed with Larry even more, even though he was dead and had been dead for more than twenty years. Another legacy from Larry: words to be dead by.
Still the thought lingered, skulking around in the back of his head, bothering him with its shadow. "I'm never gonna leave this place,"
Larry Lane'd said to him. "Well, I go out now and then, time to time, right now. And I'm gonna leave, of course some day I'm gonna have to.
But the only way I'm gonna do it is when the six guys bring the long black car around. Then, well, I'll have to leave."
Somehow or other about a year or so into Larry's last mission Richie Hammond'd found out that Merrion had been going to visit him. "Every week, is it?" Richie'd said to him. "Every week you go up there, and stay about two hours! What the hell you do up there with him, up there in that place with that shrivelled-up old bastard he is, all that time alone with him? Guy's fuckin' dyin' isn't he? That's what I hear, every place I go. Everyone says it, all over town. "Larry Lane isn't long for this world," 's what I hear. "Larry Lane's on his way out, this time." That's what everyone's sayin'." Then he had paused and looked hopeful, waiting for confirmation.
Merrion had not said anything. He had shrugged, throwing in the eyebrow-raising. He did that whenever Richie started irritating him, which was fairly often. It wasn't insubordinate not that Richie as a practical matter could harm him in any way at all. Even if he did start keeping a log and writing it up whenever Merrion yanked his chain; as long as Danny Hilliard had access to a telephone that worked and a friend alive on Beacon Hill, it would take St. Michael the Archangel to lay a bad hand on Ambrose Merrion.
His silence pissed Richie off. That was another thing Richie didn't know how to do right, get pissed off properly. And usefully, so's to set a precedent, one that people would shudder to remember and try not to do again whatever it was that had set him off. He just got plaintive and made himself look ridiculous. "Well answer me, for Christ sake, Amby. I asked you a fuckin' question." That was why Merrion did it. "What the hell do you do up there with him, for Christ sake? The man's a dyin, fuckin', man."
Merrion had shrugged again, but this time as Riche'd begun to work up another pisspot eruption, he'd given him words to go with it. "We tell each other stories," he'd said blandly. "Well, Larry tells me the stories, how things used to be. What went on, and what it all meant.
History lessons of this place. I mostly just listen, nod now and then.
Sometimes I ask him a question. But you know, there're days, when we had something' happen. Something's gone wrong down here. And as he knows and you know and I know myself, most days something generally has. And those weeks I have something to say. Stories to tell him, put some fun in his life."
That had enraged Richie. He'd come out of his chair. He slammed both his fists knuckles-down on the top of the very desk Merrion now occupied, so hard that it had to've hurt, and then braced himself on his stiffened, locked arms. His face had gone crimson immediately, right up to the roots of his brown greying hair. His voice'd gone up along with the blood pressure. "You son of a bitch you; you son of a bitch; you son of a goddamn-damned bitch. You're tellin' Larry Lane what we're doin' in here? You getting' his input on stuff? You're getting' his clearance on stuff? He hasn't got no more power in here.
That bastard is retired, even if he isn't dyin' like everyone else knows he is and they are glad. Once you are retired from here, that is the end of your power. Then you have got no more power in here and you might as well be dead, like you are gonna be. You cut that stuff out now, right now."