Pleading guilty

X.

A. Your Investigator Is Misled Glyndora lives in a triplex in one of these resurrected areas in the shadow of the projects. I swear to God, when I come back from the dead I want to be a real estate developer. Sell people a three-room apartment for two hundred grand and when they go out in the morning their car has no hubcaps. Two blocks away you could see the kids, in tattered coats in this season, playing basketball and looking through the chain-link with their devastated dead expressions. But here the construction was reminiscent of a Hollywood set, perfection in every visible detail, and the ^el that you could put your hand right through it. The effect was Williamsburg. Little wooden doodads at the roofline and wrought-iron rails; starving saplings, bare sticks in January, were planted in little squares removed from the pavement. One could not help thinking of a theme park.

'Glyndora, it's Mack.' I had found her address in the firm personnel directory, and I wasn't expected. I made my apologies for bothering her at home through the buzzer intercom. 'I need to talk to you and I don't have a lot of time.' 'Okay.' Silence. Talk, man.' 'Come on, Glyndora. You don't need to be so entertaining. Let me in.' Nothing. 'Glyndora, cut the crap.' 'Call you tomorrow.'

'Like you did today? Listen, I'm gonna stand down here freezing my chestnuts and pressing on this buzzer and shouting your name. I'm gonna make a big goddamn scene, so that your neighbors wonder about the company you keep. And in the morning, I'm going straight to the Committee to tell them how you've been horsing me around.' Something here might pass for a credible threat. Especially the Committee. I stomped around on the stoop another minute in the dark, breathing smoke beneath the brass colonial lamp, with my chin nuzzled into my muffler. Finally I heard the buzz.

She waited for me at the top of the stairs, backlit by her own home and barring the way to her door. She was wearing a simple housedress and no makeup, and her stiff hair had been released from barrettes and looked somewhat shapeless. I more or less moved her across her own threshold, waving my hands to show I wouldn't take no for an answer. Inside, I seated myself at once on her sofa and opened my overcoat. I did my best to look heavyset and immobile. 'Aren't you going to offer me coffee? It's cold out there.' Standing near the door, she showed no sign of moving.

'Look, Glyndora, there are a couple of things. One, maybe you can think again about whether you ever saw a little memo from Bert about the Litiplex checks. Two, the name Archie Koechell mean anything to you?'

She was going to stare me down, the way sideshow performers overcome certain fearsome creatures, cobras or bears. She put her hands to her waist and slowly shook her head.

'Glyndora, you answered Bert's phone for years and this guy Archie is a big pal of his. Think again. He's an actuary. And he's missing. Just like Bert. There was an article in the paper today. Maybe you saw it?'

Nothing. The same fiercely baleful expression. I blew on my fingertips to warm them and again asked for coffee.

She went this time, but not before she cussed me, tossing her head about in disbelief. I wandered around the apartment. Very nice. The sort of discreet middle-class taste I would have preferred in my own home. Light carpeting of a Berber weave and patterned fabrics with big flowers on the cushions of the rattansided furnishings. There was a kind of decorator painting, a lot of innocuous wave motion, over the sofa. Otherwise the walls were bare. Glyndora was not a person attached to images.

She was gone awhile. I looked into the kitchen, a little galley affair hinged to the cramped space the architect had probably called the 'eating area', but she was not in there. No coffee brewing either. I could hear her movements through another door or two and thought I detected her voice. Maybe in the John, or putting on her battle regalia. It would not be unlike Glyndora to be holding an animated conversation with herself, but I also had some thought of picking up the phone to see if she had reached out for somebody else. I held my breath, but I could not make out a word.

Across from me, in a corner of the dining room, was a little round etagere, a multilevel thing of chrome and glass. There were various glass animals – Steuben, if you asked Nora Goggins's ex-husband – and pictures of Glyndora's kid, a high-school graduation photo, complete with mortarboard, and a smaller snapshot, more recent, in a frame. An okay-looking guy, lean and muscular, the mother's strong build and good looks gender-translated, but with an impish unfocused expression that had never emanated from Glyndora since the day of her birth. 'You still here?' Over my shoulder, she looked remotely amused, probably with herself. 'Still warming up.'

She had combed her hair a little and reddened her lips, but her manner remained unyielding.

'Look, Glyndora,' I said, 'you're a smart guy and so am I, so let's skip the horseplay.'

'Mack, you' ain been no po-lice for twenty years, and I ain' never been no mope. So just take it somewhere else, man. I'm tired.' Glyndora is often at her blackest around white people, especially when she's on the offensive. In the office today, she'd spoken the same English as me.

'Come on, Glyndora. I already told you how it is. I'm the Question Man and you're the Answer Lady. Otherwise we can all sit down and discuss this tomorrow – you and me and the Committee.' I hoped the renewed threat, which had been enough to get me through the doorway, would make her relent. But the notion seemed to perk her up with a kind of tough amusement. 'I gotta do what you say, huh?' 'Sort of.' 'That figures, man. You like that, right?' I shrugged.

'Yeah, you like that. Just you and me and I ain't got no choice.' 'Come on, Glyndora.'

'Yeah, that's why you got to come round after dark to my house. Cause I ain't got no choice.'

Glyndora has what you might call issues. For her it always comes down to this, master and slave. She was moving in my direction now, sashaying slightly, a hip-rolling walk that was both deliberately provocative and defiant; I got back to my feet to greet her, but she still came a little bit closer than she was supposed to. She knew what she was up to and so did I, we'd both been to the movies. She was just going to back me down with her boldness. She'd cinched the waist on her dress and projected herself and her formidable anatomy at me, rocking a little on her toes, hands on her hips. She might as well have said, I dare you.

'So tell me, Mr Mack. What-all is it I gotta do for you?' Up close, her dark skin was a complex of colors, pointillis-tic. She was giving me a taunting smile, revealing a gap in her teeth which I'd never noticed over the fifteen years I've known her. I said again, quietly, 'Come on.'

She stayed right there, head high, eye mighty. As a grown-up I have believed that priests, schoolteachers, and criminal investigators should have no carnal knowledge of the people over whom they exert authority. Temptations, naturally, abound. What it is with some gals there's no telling, but it sometimes seems they'd stand in line to screw a copper. You can take a guy built like a Franklin stove, half bald and dirty looking, a fella who'd sit at the end of the bar all night and attract no company, and once you put a uniform on him and a pistol on his hip, the guy's a freakin ladykiller. It's just a thing. Some fellas on the Force, it was a dream come true, they'd work for free, and others, so what.

For me, this was one of the few areas in my life where I had actually exhibited self-control. Naturally I was not perfect. There was a party girl from Minnesota one time who made me dizzy, witness in a white-slavery case in which we were making our usual effort to catch some of The Boys by hiding behind a tree. Twenty or twenty-one years old, beautiful blonde thing who looked so innocent you'd have thought she'd sailed in off some fjord. Terrible life. Ran from home because her old man was cornholing her each night, fell in with the wrong crowd in the city, and Jesus, forgive me for sounding as if I had a Catholic education, but then did everything in the world to degrade herself. There was some big TV star, a comedian whose name you'd know, who paid her two g's each time he was in town for her to come to his hotel and let him take a dump on her and then – prepare yourself – watch her eat it. This I am not making up. Anyway, Big Bad Mack thinks she's pretty neat. And Christ, this is her life, she catches on like that, the way a plant will turn to face the sunbeams. And so one day it comes to pass, I'm supposed to take her from the stationhouse to her apartment, pick up some address book where she has the name or two of some big-time gumbas, and we both know what's cooking, nature is about to take its course, and she opens the door to this rummy place – I remember the door was like a pockmarked face; somebody had taken an ax or crowbar to it – and inside is this little Chihuahua, this pygmy animal, spotted with black sores from the mange or some similar doggy disease, charging our feet. She tells it once to scoot and then chases this poor mutt around, kicking and cursing it with a look of such fixed and intense hatred that it sort of let the air out of my heart. It woke me up, I admit it, seeing the ugly mark all that cruelty had made on her, beaten up, assailed, like her door.

And I was awake now with Glyndora. Chugging right up to fifty and potbellied, I was not, I knew, the image rousing Glyndora in a parched erotic heat at night. But something wild and screwy was turned on in me, especially to see how far this was going to go, and feeling the daring that is always leaping up in me, else I die of fear, I took each index finger and with a thrilling directness settled them one at a time on the point of each breast, then, gently as somebody reading Braille, let my fingertips come to rest on the thin fabric of her dress. I could feel underneath the lace pattern of her brassiere.

The moment that then passed between us was what we used to call on the street PFS – pretty fucking strange. Nobody was supposed to mean it. I wasn't supposed to squeeze her tits and Glyndora wasn't supposed to like it. We were playing chicken or the Dozens. It was as if we were both on camera. I could see it in my mind's eye – the bodies here and the spirits hovering fifteen feet above, wrestling like angels over someone's soul. In theory, we were merely disputing power and terrain. But with all these faces, the secret self was set free and was frisking about. Those rich brown eyes of hers remained dead set on mine, thoroughly amused, determinedly defiant: I see you. So what? I see you. But, folks, we were both pretty goddamned excited.

This contact, encounter, call it what you like, lasted only seconds. Glyndora pushed her arms up and slowly parted my hands. Her eyes never left mine. She spoke distinctly.

'You couldn't handle it, man,' she said and turned for the kitchen. 'Are we taking bets?'

She didn't answer. I heard her say instead that she needed a drink.

I was ringing – the body after 4,000 volts. It was the whole idea of it, me playing with her playing with me. Mr Stiffy downstairs was definitely awake too. I heard her banging around in a cabinet and swearing.

'What?' I asked. She had no whiskey, and I offered to go out to get her a pint. I wanted her to relax. This could be a long conversation, a longer evening. 'You make coffee.' I pointed at her but didn't linger as I leaned into the little kitchen; I was afraid to see what showed. Something in me was already clinging to the weird intimacy of that instant between us. With any invitation, I might have kissed her goodbye.

So I went charging out toward the Brown Wall's, a local chain I'd seen on the way in, a grown man running down the street in the dead of winter, with his flag half unfurled. The store was in the neutral zone, between the projects and the upscale, its bricks spray-painted with gang signs, its windows holding gay displays but guarded by fold-back grates. I grabbed a bottle of Seagram's off the shelf, feeling I'd seen something pornographic when I looked at all those glass soldiers arrayed side by side. As an afterthought, I detoured to pharmaceuticals for a three-pack of Trojans, just in case, I told myself, because a Scout is always prepared. Then I barreled back down the block oblivious to the three gangbangers who stood on the corner in their colors checking me out. I took all the front steps in one bound and hit the buzzer, waiting to be restored to paradise.

I rang intermittently for I'd say maybe a minute and a half before I began to wonder why she was not answering. My first thought? That I'm a big dumbbell? That I'd let the little head think for the big one? No, I actually worried about her. Had she fallen ill? Had one of the neighborhood muggers come through the window and done her while I was gone? Then I recalled the little fatal click behind me that I'd made nothing of as I flew down the staircase. Suddenly, as I stood on the stoop, shriveled by the cold, I realized that was the sound of the dead bolt being set, of a lady locking up for the night.

I will say this for myself – I did not go gently. I punched that buzzer like it was her fucking nose. After about five minutes, her voice came up clearly, just once, and not long enough to allow any reply. 'Go way,' she said, alive and well and not waiting for me.

Let me be honest: it was not a good moment. I had beaten Lyle to the car tonight, my shitbox Chevy; Nora got the good car, a jade-green Beemer which I always drove with a pleasure that made me feel as if I had taken a pill. I retired to this wornout wreck, where I was always ill at ease with the stains Lyle and his friends left on the seats, and tried to assess the situation. Okay, I told myself, some gal won't let you in, then puts the make on you, then locks the door. The point is…? Fill in the blank. Pictures? Maybe some dope was in the closet with a camera.

I had to give her credit, though. Glyndora knew where the belly was on this porcupine. Let him strike out with the ladies once again, then put liquor in his hand. In my palm, the bottle had a strange magical heft. I always had drunk rye, same as my old man. God, I loved it. I felt a little thrill when my thumb passed across the tax labels on the bottle's neck. I was a civil drunk who did not get started until nightfall, but by two in the afternoon I could feel a certain dry pucker back in the salivary glands and the first shot was always enough to make me swoon. I used to think all the time about Dom Perignon, the monk who'd first distilled Champagne. He fell down a flight of stairs and announced to the brethren who rushed to his rescue, ‘I am drinking stars.'

It all seems so goddamned sad, I thought suddenly, looking out in the bleak night toward Glyndora's apartment. My breath was fogging the windows and I turned the engine over for heat. The whole appeal of this venture had been to take some sudden startling control over my existence. But I felt again some faraway master puppeteer whose strings were sewn into my sleeves. The fundamental facts were plain again: I was just a lowdown bum.

I wondered what I always do – how'd I end up this way? Was it just nature? In my neighborhood, if your old man was a copper or a fireman, you took it for granted he was a hero, these mystical men of courage donning their helmets and heavy coats to brave one of nature's most inscrutable events, how substance turns to heat and color, how the brilliant protean flames dance as they destroy. When I was three or four, I'd heard so much of this stuff, sliding down the pole and whatnot, that I was sure that when he wore his boots and fire slicker my old man could fly. He couldn't. I learned that over time. My father was no hero. He was a thief. "Teef,' as he used to pronounce the word, never in application to himself. But like Jason or Marco Polo, he brought back treasure from each adventure.

I often heard my father explain his logic when he engaged my mother in bouts of drunken self-defense. If a house is burning to the ground, woman, why not take the jewelry before it melts, for heaven's sake, you're there risking life and limb – you think you went outside and asked the residents, as they stood there with the flames shooting through their lives, that they'd say no? When I studied economics in college, I had no trouble understanding what they meant by a user's fee.

But I was not inclined to forgive him. I used to wonder as a kid if everybody knew the fireman stole. Everyone in my neighborhood seemed to understand – they'd come nosing around, looking to buy cheap the little items that were nicked and fit well in the rubber coats. 'Why'd you think they made them pockets in the coats so big?' my father used to say, never to me but to whoever had sidled by to examine the table silver, the clocks, the jewels, the tools, the thousand little things that entered our household. He'd laugh as he made these subverted displays. 'Where'd it come from?' the visitor would ask, and my father would chuckle and say that bit about the coat. Kind of dumb, of course, but he wanted people to think that he was bold all frightened people do, they want to be just like the people who scare them. I had a cousin, Marie Clare, who came by once and asked my father to keep an eye out for a christening dress for her baby and he got her a beauty -why'd you think they made them pockets in the coats so big?

For me, as a kid, the shame of it sometimes seemed to blister my heart. When I started confession, I confessed for him. 'My father steals.' The priests were never uninterested. 'Oh yes?' I wanted to leave my name and address in the hope they'd make him stop. A boy's father is his fate. But this kind of stealing was a matter of society, forgivable and common. They told me to respect my father and pray for his soul, and better mind my own conduct.

'So much of life is will.' I had spun the golden cap off the pint before I knew what I'd done, and repeated that old phrase to myself. I had heard it from Leotis Griswell, not long before he died. I looked into the open bottle as if it were a blind eye, and was reminded for whatever reason of looking down at something else, another seat of pleasure. The sharp perfume of the alcohol filled me with a pang, as acute and painful as the distant sighting of a lovely woman whose name I'll never know.

So much of life is will. Leotis was speaking to me about Toots, his old student. Leotis had the skill I'd noted in many of the best lawyers, ardent advocates who at the same time held their clients at a distance. When he talked about them he could often be cold-blooded and he did not want me to be beguiled by Toots. 'He'll make excuses to you about his harsh life, but I've never cared much for sociology. It's so negative. I don't need to know what holds down the masses. Any fellow with an eye in his head can see that: it's life. But where does that rare one come from, what is the difference? I still spend hours wondering. Where the strength comes from not to surrender. The will. So much of life is will.' A certain subtle incandescence refracted through the old man as he said this, the feeble body still enfolding his large spirit, and the memory of it and the standard he set as a person punished me now.

Still, Leotis had it right, about life and will. It's an appropriate belief for a man born in the last years of the nineteenth century, yet it's out of phase for anybody else. Now we believe that a nation is entitled to self-determination but a soul is a slave to material fate: I steal because I'm poor; I feel up my daughter cause my ma did that to me; I drink because my ma was sometimes cruel and called me names and because my father left that trait, like some unhappy lodestar, in my genes. On the whole, I still prefer Leotis's outlook, the same one they taught me in church. I'd rather believe in will than fate. I drink or don't drink. I'll try to find Bert or I won't. I'll take the money and run or else return it. Better to find options than that bondage of cause and effect. It all goes back to Augustine. We choose the Good. Or the Evil. And pay the price.

And this, this may be the serpent's sweetest apple. I did not even seem to swallow. I am drinking stars.

Thursday, January 26 B. Your Investigator Loses Something Besides His Self-respect I have awakened so many mornings vowing never to do this again that there was almost pleasure in the pain. I felt like something fished out of the trash. I held absolutely still. The sunlight was going to be like a bullet to the brain. Along the internal line from head to gut there was a bilious feeling, some regurgitive impulse already stirring. 'Slow,' I told myself, and when I did I sensed for the first time that I wasn't alone.

When I opened my eyes, a kid was looking square at me, Latin he seemed to be, crouched about an arm's length away on the driver's side beneath the dash. He had one hand on the car's tape player, which he'd lifted half out, revealing the bleak innards of the auto, colored cables and dark spaces. Cutting the wires would be the next step. The door was cracked behind him and the dome light was on. There was a little sniffle of cold air riffling across my nose. 'Just cool,' he told me.

I didn't see a gun, a knife. A kid, too. Thirteen, fourteen. Still with pimples all over the side of his face. One of your sweet little urban vampires, out in the early-morning hours rolling drunks. Fifty coming, I could still pound this little fuck. Hurt him anyway. We both knew it. I checked his eyes again. It would have been such a frigging triumph if there was just a dash, a comma, an apostrophe of fear, some minute sign of hesitation.

'Get out,' I said. I hadn't moved. I was sort of folded up like a discarded shopping bag, piled sideways onto the passenger's seat. With the adrenaline I was waking fast and turning dizzy, whirly city. My tummy was on the move.

'Don't fuck around, men.' He turned the screwdriver to face me.

'I'll fuck with you, shorty-pants. I'll fuck with you plenty. And after I do, you won't be fuckin anybody.' I gave my head a sort of decisive nod. Which was a bad mistake. It was like tipping back in a chair too far. I rolled my eyes a bit. I picked myself up on my elbow. With that, it happened. I puked all over him.

I mean everywhere. It was dripping from his eyelashes. His nappy head had got little bits of awful stuff all over. His clothes were soaked. He was drowning in it, spluttering and shaking, cursing me, an incoherent rap. 'Oh men,' he said. 'Oh men.' His hands danced around and I knew he was afraid to touch himself. And he was out of there fast. I was so busy waiting for him to kill me I actually didn't see him go until he was running down the street.

Well, Malloy, I thought, you are going to like this one. I patted my back all over a few times, before I straightened myself up, then realized that this story, like the tale of what really happened between Pigeyes and me, was going to go untold. After all, I had been bad. Weak. I'd had a drink. A bottle. I had fucked around with fate.

My guy at AA, my angel, guardian, hand in the dark, was a fella named Giandomenico, LNU, as we said on the Force, last name unknown, none used. Even though I haven't shown at a meeting in sixteen months, I knew he would talk to me and tell me that I still had what it took to do it. Today was no different than the day before yesterday. It was a day I wasn't gonna drink. I was going to get through today and work on tomorrow then. I knew the rap. I'd memorized all twelve steps. Somehow over the long haul I found A A sadder than being a drunk, listening to these folks, 'My name is Sheila and I'm an alcoholic' Then would come the story, how she stole and whored and beat her kids. Jesus, sometimes I wondered if people were making things up just so the rest of us wouldn't feel so bad about our own lives. It was a little too much of a cult for me, the Church of Self-denunciation, I used to call it, this business of saying I'm a shit and I turn myself over to a higher power, LNU, who'll keep me safe from John Barleycorn, the divil. I welcomed the support and got all warm and runny about a number of the people who showed up each week and held my hand, and I hope that they're still going and still safe. But I'm too goddamned eccentric, and reluctant to contemplate the mystery of why, with my sister's death, I no longer felt the uncontrollable need to drink. Had I finally filled even my own bottomless cup of pain? Or was this, as I often feared in my grimmest moments, some form of celebration?

Glyndora's little complex was across the street, gray on gray, the colors almost indecipherable in the subdued elements of winter, still looking like a stage set except for the sign in front, announcing that units were available, from 179 grand. What was her point last night? Was that whole thing, that interlude, just for laughs? I didn't think Glyndora enjoyed that kind of subtlety. She told you off face-to-face. But for some reason she had wanted me out of there. Was she afraid I would catch on to something? A boyfriend, maybe? Somebody's clothes were in the closet, shoes by the door. Archie's? Or Bert's?

I straightened myself up. I had a pretty good yuk thinking about Lyle getting in here with his buddies south of midnight and taking a whiff. I'd bet a lot of money he wouldn't know who to blame. He'd sit here trying to recall who'd hurled night before last. The little bastard had left worse for me. Still, I opened all the windows and threw the floor mat on the street. I shoved the radio back into the fragile plastic membrane of the dashboard. I thought about that little thief running all over the North End in the cold, searching for a hose. He'd smell like something when he got to school. Yep, I was feeling mean and humorous. I gathered myself together and slid across the seat behind the wheel, and only then noticed the absence against my hip. I began to swear. The goddamn kid had got my wallet.