Pleading guilty

XVII. I COULDN'‘I HAVE BEEN MORE SUPRISED IE THE HANDS HAD WON

A. Phantom of the Fieldhouse Among the many noble institutions that, years ago, had first sought Leotis Griswell's counsel was the U. For his partners, this connection was priceless, inasmuch as it allowed us to obtain prime seats for football and basketball games and private tours of important university facilities like the bevatron or the fieldhouse, where the Hands played their games. I'd been down on the lacquered playing floor, with the huge-knuckled hands drawn at the center line amid a collar of vermilion, had capered down the tunnels and visited the locker rooms. Most important now, I'd also been to the ugly little changing room, where the refs dressed before games and sat out halftime and, after the final buzzer, immediately showered and put on their street clothes and dark glasses and escaped by mixing into the throng, rather than waiting for any lurking villain who wanted to engage in his own instant replay of various calls.

Flying out of the house, I grabbed only a tweed sport jacket and drove recklessly over the river back into the city, wary of black-and-whites as I spun the dial to find the game on the radio. I had to lower the windows to clear the odor from yesterday morning and the Chevy was frigid. I blew on my fingers when I stopped at each light. It turned to halftime, the Hands down by only a bucket. I was desperate to get there while the refs were off the floor so that I'd have some chance to get hold of this Kam.

Approaching this guy, whatever his name was, was going to be dicey. As far as I was concerned, the bookies and he could fix what they liked, but I didn't expect him to be carefree about that, and almost everything I might mention was likely to spook him. I was curious, naturally, although it didn't take much imagination to see how having a ref in your pocket could be, as they say in the law, outcome-determinative: a foul here and there, an out-of-bounds, a jump ball, a goal tend, a travel, all called or not. You could probably swing twenty to thirty points a game without being too obvious, given the usual grousing about officiating and the fact that in a sport like basketball, where everybody's always pushing and moving, a ref can only be expected to see so much. Archie had a great thing with this Kam, no question, but I had retired as a policeman. All I needed was to know about Bert – alive or dead, and if the former, how to make contact. For my sake, aside from my usual snoopy impulses, I didn't even need to know where Bert fit in their scam.

The fieldhouse, 'The House of the Hands', as it was known, was the usual old university structure, a formidable mass of the same red-clay bricks from which most of the U's buildings were constructed. The House was relieved of utter grimness by roofline adornments of turrets and battlements and gunsight notches blocked out of stone. Someone will have to explain to me someday why the architectural plans for so many of the land-grant universities seem to have been borrowed from Clausewitz. What was the idea, that if the South rose again these buildings could be converted to armories?

At the moment I could have used my own militia, since without it I could not find any place to park. The attendant at the lot across the street stoutly refused the two twenties I tried to force on him to get the Chevy inside, and I tore off around the block, sweating, swearing, itchy and bitchy, running out of time. Outside the fieldhouse the hawkers with the pennants and cups, buttons and banners, were milling with nothing to do, putting up with the little black kids in hooded sweatshirts and tatty coats who hung out just to get a scent of the game and the players. A dribble of early departees emerged through the gates two or three at a time. There were no more than five minutes left of halftime by now. The teams would be out there warming up, trying to look loose and jovial while they strutted their stuff without opposition, jamming and blocking, doing drills; the refs would soon follow them back out. I finally left the car on the street in a red zone. With luck, if I found this guy, I could be back out in ten minutes.

I did not have a ticket. This didn't occur to me until I saw the gate attendant. They guarded the entrances throughout the game due to the little kids outside, who employed considerable craft figuring out how to get in. I ran back to the ticket windows in front, which were closed when I got there. I had to get a glum kid to go fetch some old biddy, who raised the shade halfway, eyed me serenely, and said, 'I'm sorry, we're totally sold out.' 'I'll take standing room.'

'Fire marshal doesn't allow that here in the House.' The shade dropped. I heard her walking away while I pounded on the glass.

Back in front, I found some guy with three young kids, leaving to put them to sleep; he did not mind parting with his ticket stub for ten bucks, and I ran back to a different gate. The two student ushers, a boy and a girl in their red sport coats, were both overweight and obviously amorous, still overcome by that first thrill of love, the amazing news that in the flight of life, solo thus far, there might be a copilot. Watching them, I had an abrupt thought of Brushy, pleasing and then somehow muddled and pained. I bulled through the stiles between them, shaking my head and smiling and telling anyone who could hear how glad I was that I'd remembered the car lights. As I rushed on, I heard the boom of the horn and the crowd suddenly rousing itself: the second half was starting. I was in the dark rampway by then and I stood beneath the enormous welling crowd noise muttering, 'Fuck.' I could be one of those jerks who run out on the court, but the best that would come of that would be a trip to District 19, maybe even a clubbing.

Instead, I slowly paced through the warren of brick corridors, trying to remember where the refs' changing room was. The old interior bricks of the place were all painted in a heavy enamel, a garish Hands' vermilion that refracted the spectral light. The air had a sort of salty smell, not so much sweat as excitement, the way lightning leaves the pungency of ozone in its wake. Already there was a lull in the clamor, which meant that the Hands were fading. Passing by a ramp up, I caught a look at the big four-sided scoreboard suspended on taut cables between the rafters and the blue ribbons of smoke floated in from the hallways. Milwaukee had put up six points in the first forty seconds out of the locker room. Maybe the Hands weren't even on the court.

Finally I found what I was looking for, a simple wooden door painted the same red as the bricks and labeled 'Authorized Personnel Only'. I caught my only break of the night. The security guard in his ill-fitting red jacket was down the concrete corridor a good fifty yards, his radio clutched to his ear as he meandered, probably on his way for a leak now that halftime was over. I grabbed the knob and went through like I knew what I was doing. There were steel stairs, then a long low passage lit by bare incandescent bulbs, a janitor's gangway running downward beside the boiler pipes and plumbing into the fieldhouse basement, where the refs changed.

To be under there while the game roared above was strange. Overhead there was glamour. The ash floor gleamed under the phenomenal brightness of the stadium lights. The cheerleaders, heartbreaking emblems of youth, simple in their grace, like flowers, flounced their skirts and jumped up and down. In the stands that timeless thing that goes back to when we ran in packs was strumming like the current in a high voltage wire in 18,000 sober citizens who were now nothing but one mass of screaming freaks. People with troubles, with a disabled kid or a mortgage they couldn't meet, were shouting so loud that tomorrow they wouldn't be able to speak at work, but now they were thinking of nothing but whether some long-bodied kid in shorts could throw a leather ball through a hole.

And the refs would be out there, dressed in black and white amid the colors and brightness, the very figures of reason, the law, the rules, the arbiters, the force that kept it a game, not a fistfight. Down here was where they got ready, where they steadied themselves and came to grips with reality, and believe me, it stank. Literally. I remembered from visiting before. The changing room would be gamy with sweat, a little closet with a seven-foot ceiling, an architectural afterthought carved out of the service channel that runs for the sewer pipes. The walls were wood, painted some miserable yellowish eggshell lacquer that glimmered cheaply under the unshaded bulbs. There were two little partitioned changing cubicles and a shower and a crapper, each behind a blue canvas drape, a setup that offered about the same level of privacy that inmates get in a holding cell. At the bottom, the gangway joined a tunnel that ran up at an angle, leading to the court. Noise and light were funneled down, and as I got close to the door of the changing room, looking up the concrete channel to court-side, I could see the legs and red coat hems of two security guys stationed there to guard this area. The crowd above and the fury of the game, the pounding sounds of the court, the whistles, the yells, reached down here like exotic music.

The door to the changing room was like the one I'd come through above, an old wood thing painted red, with three raised panels. If the security guys up there were smart, they'd have locked it. If not, I'd hide inside, waiting. When I rattled the knob, it didn't give; I shook it twice and swore. I'd have no choice but to lurk about ten feet down the gangway, hoping for a chance as the refs came rushing down the tunnel right after the game. I was likely to get grabbed by security guys. They'd drag me away as I was screaming something dumb like 'Kam! Kam Roberts!'

I was still holding the doorknob when I felt it move. The bolt shot back inside, and as my heart seized up, the door opened toward me. Bert Kamin looked me up and down.

'Hey, Mack,' he said. 'Jesus, am I glad to see you.' He waved me inside and threw the bolt at once when I was beside him. Then he told me something I already knew. He said, 'I'm in a lot of trouble.'

B. Troubled Heart Bert has never really mastered the gestures of amiability. In my unworthy suspicions about him, I imagined he was reluctant to put a hand on your shoulder for fear of what he might reveal. But the fact is that Bert is just strange. His usual manner is of some hey-man hipster. He chews his gum and gives forth with cynical carping from the side of his mouth. I'm never sure exactly who he thinks he is – he comes on like somebody who didn't quite get the sixties, who wanted to be in on what was happening but was too tough or unsentimental to take part. He reminds me at times of the first guy I ever busted, an engaging little rat named Stewie Spivak who was a student at the U and seemed to enjoy peddling dope much more than taking it.

Bert stood there now bucking his head, telling me I looked good, man, I looked good, while I appraised him too. His dense black hair had grown to an unbarbered length and his hands kept moving to shove it in place; he was unshaved and that weird out-of-kilter light in his eye was brighter than ever. Otherwise, he was neatly turned out in a black leather jacket and a fashionable casual ensemble: Italian sweater with a snazzy pattern, pleated trousers, fancy shoes and socks. Was this the attire of a man on the run? He didn't look quite right, but then he never did. 'So who sent you?' he asked me.

'Who sent me?’ I reeled around on that line. 'Come on, Bert. Who the hell are you kidding? Where've you been? What are you doing here?'

He hung back, squinting a bit, trying to comprehend my agitation in the forgiving way of a child. He remained happy for familiar company. 'I'm waiting for Orleans,' he finally said.

'Orleans? Who in God's name is Orleans?' At that Bert's eyes glazed – an aura of galactic mystery took hold. I might as well have asked the secret of the universe, of life. The level of misunderstanding between us was immense -different dimensions. In the silence I noticed that a radio was on. Locked away here in this dungeon, he was still listening to the game. The ceiling was low enough that he was hunched over a bit out of caution, which furthered the impression of something more yielding in his character. He hadn't replied yet when I figured out the answer to my own question. The referee,' I said.

'Right.' He nodded, quite pleased. 'Yeah. I'm not supposed to be in here. You either.'

Kam Roberts was Orleans. I was piecing it out in my head. Archie owned Orleans, and Orleans, the referee, was Bert's friend. Archie was dead and was once in Bert's refrigerator and Bert was alive and hiding from somebody, maybe just the conference officials of the Mid-Ten. It was not adding. I tried it again, hoping to settle him down and get better information.

'Bert, what's going on here? The cops are looking high and low for you and, especially, for Orleans.'

He jumped then. There was an old teacher's desk, probably requisitioned from a classroom, on which the radio sat. Bert had rested against it until I mentioned the police.

'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' he said. 'For Orleans? The police are looking for Orleans? Why? You know why?' I realized then what was different about him – his emotions were unmasked. Grim and adolescent before, he now seemed almost childish. He was jumpier than I recalled, but also pleasingly sincere. I felt like I was dealing with a younger brother.

'Bert, it's not like the traffic reports, they don't explain. I've been putting little bits together here and there. My guess is that they think your buddy Orleans there has been shading games. For bookies.'

He took this badly. He brought his long fingers to his mouth to ponder. The refs' room, as I'd remembered it, was strictly low-rent. On the other side of the court, where the Hands changed, the boosters had provided carpet and whirlpools, weight rooms, a country-club air. But there was nothing similar here. In the center of the room, there was an old backless bench of vanished oak splintered at a corner, and against the wall facing the door three crummy-looking lockers listed. They were rusted in places and one of them was pretty much staved in from a foot or fist hurled by some ref who'd heard those remarks from the crowd about his mother, his eyesight, the size of his penis a little more clearly than he'd allowed out on the floor.

'Bert, there's a lot of screwy stuff going on. There's a body in the refrigerator in your apartment. At least, there was. I think it's another pal of yours. Did you know that?'

He glanced up barely, grimly preoccupied, and nodded a bit. 'That's jail, right?' he asked. He couldn't have meant murder.

'Fixing basketball games? I'd say that one's pen time, yeah.' He swore. He took a step to the door and then stopped. 'I gotta get him out of here.'

'Bert, wait a minute. Why was this guy in your refrigerator?'

'How'd they find out, you think? The cops? About Orleans?'

Talking to Bert is always the same thing, his subject is more important than yours. You have to follow him around like a puppy or a three-year-old child.

‘I have no idea, Bert. Frankly, they seemed to have known about Orleans before they knew about you. Actually, they're looking for somebody named Kam Roberts. Is that him?'

He answered me this time. 'It's complicated.' Then he pounded a fist on his thigh. 'Shit,' he said. 'I don't understand. How'd they find Archie? Nobody knew he was in there.'

Nobody knew Archie was in there and Bert liked it that way. A brief qualm of something, a feathery spooky feeling like being touched by a moth, passed over me. I scrutinized Bert's vacant manner for signs as I explained to him how it was, that I, not the cops, had seen the body.

'By the time they got there, somebody'd adiosed the corpse. Maybe you know who.'

He had the nerve to draw back and look at me as if I'd lost it, then he reverted to his calculations. If the cops hadn't seen Archie, he asked, what brought them to Orleans?

'Bert, how am I supposed to know? They were down at the Russian Bath asking questions. Would they have heard about Kam Roberts there?'

'Oh right,' said Bert. 'Right, right, right.' He snapped his fingers a number of times and did a few paces. 'God, me and my mouth, man. My fucking mouth.' He held still, in considerable pain. When he opened his eyes, he looked right at me.

'If anything happens to me, Mack, can you make sure he gets a lawyer? Will you promise me, man?'

‘I promise you, Bert, but give me a hint here. What's gonna happen to you? What are you afraid of?'

With that, there was the first sign of the old Bert, the sometime madman, always on the brink of falling into his own volcano. Red fury mobilized his expression.

'Come on, Mack! You said you saw what they did to Archie.' 'Who we talking here? Outfit?' I got that much from him, a nod.

'And they want what? Money?' That was my first thought, that they were demanding to be made whole for the losses Archie had palmed off on them. He looked at me. 'Orleans,' Bert said. 'Come again.' 'They want Orleans. You know, man. How to find him. Who he is. I mean, that's what they wanted from Archie.' 'Did he tell them?'

'How could he? He didn't have any idea where I was getting this stuff. I had a guy I called Kam. That's all he knew.' Bert was bouncing around pretty good now, twitchy, scrambling all over the little refs' room like a hamster in a cage. But I thought I was following him. Bert was giving Archie advance word on game outcomes. 'Kam's Special.' Archie knew only that. 'Did Archie tell them about you?'

'He said he wouldn't. At first. And then the last time I talked to him, he told me – You know, he was pretty emotional. He said they'd kill him if he didn't let them know where it was coming from. They wanted Kam. They gave him like twenty-four hours to bring them Kam. You know, he was beggin'.' Bert dared a little look my way, just to see how I handled that thought, some guy pleading with you for a secret to save his life. Which Bert didn't reveal. That's why he was only peeking at me.

'I knew he'd give me up. I already figured I'd have to run. I was edge-city, I kind of snuck home, and I like open the fridge, and I'm so fucking freaked out, I'm like out of my mind, for Godsake what they did to him – ' His voice cracked, it broke, big bad Bert Kamin. He squeezed his hands to his eyes. The sight was so strangely out of keeping with what I knew and expected of Bert that a little inky blot of suspicion again darkened my heart. This might all be showtime. Bert after all was a trial lawyer, which meant he was part hambone. But Bert's long dark face appeared earnestly tortured and weak. 'What they fucking did to him. And I'm next. I knew that. They're not kidding around, these guys.'

My days as a copper sort of deprived me of any respect for the mob. Mind you, there are policemen who fall in with them, who gamble, particularly, and end up on the vig, with their asses owned in a city minute. And there is even an Italian son or two who I always was told had come on the Force because the uncle was some big something who wanted a toehold in the department. But as guys, who are they? Just a bunch of dark Mediterraneans who didn't finish high school really. If you've seen a guy selling fruit down at the market you've seen your basic mobster – some dese dems and dosers with a lot of jewelry who couldn't find something better to do. Accepting the fact that human beings are pretty mean, who but some guy who feels like a pygmy gets his jollies out of making everybody crap in their boots? And they are also the most overpublicized group in history. A city this size has maybe fifty, seventy-five guys max who are really inside, and a bunch of little rats running beside them hoping to gobble up crumbs. That's the mob. They live out in these bungalows on the South End because they don't want the IRS asking where they got the dollars for anything else; they drink coffee and Amaretto and tell each other that they're tough and worry over which of them's wearing electronic underwear, FBI issue. Bad dudes, no doubt about that, not folks you want to get crosswise of or even have to dinner, but their business these days is shrinking. The gangs control drugs. Hooking, that's mostly for oddball stuff now, golden showers, Greek, not straight sex; pornography's the same. The only place they can really still turn a buck is gambling. 'And what do they want to do with Orleans? Kill him?'

'Maybe. I mean, who knows. Do you know? They say not. That's what Archie said, they won't hurt him.' 'So what do they want?' I asked, but I caught up at that moment. Orleans was a golden goose and golden geese are not slain. They would want him to give them what he'd given Archie. Points. Fixes. Games. I said that to Bert. 'They want him to perform, right?'

'He'll never do it. It's not him. Even if he wanted to, he'd mess it up somehow. They'll kill him. Sooner or later.'

'And that's why you're running? Here's what I don't get, Bert. What's that to you? In the end.'

He didn't answer, but it was there for a second, just a sudden stricken look, his dark face riven by feeling. And I'm slow, Elaine, lumbering, like the coach said in high school, but I get there eventually. Bert was in love with him. With Orleans. There's no real etiquette for this. It's still not the thing to do, to tell your gay friend that you knew all along. So we said nothing. 'Anyway,' I said eventually. 'You're protecting him.' 'Right. I've got to.' 'Sure,' I said.

He was back by the desk, haunted, caught up in the vastness of all these troubles. He said it aloud a couple of times – 'God, what am I going to do?' – and then without any real warning or connection he focused on me.

'And what's with you?' he asked. 'I don't get why you're here, man. Who sent you?' 'Our partners, basically, Bert.' He drew back again. He closed one eye. 'For what?' 'They want the money back, Bert. No questions asked.'

I'd caught him, surprised him. He hung there, mouth vaguely parted as he sought the right words. Taking a step closer to him, I was startled by my own impulse. I was actually halfway to some sly remark, some ingenious quip about splitting the dough. It was as if I'd stuck a hand inside myself, trying to find out what was there. But it was just the same awful mess and I said nothing.

There was a tremendous commotion outside about then. Footsteps, pounding, lots of voices. My first thought was that the ball had rolled down the tunnel and they were playing the game right there. Someone began hammering on the door so that it seemed ready to jump out of the frame. But that happened only after Bert had looked me square in the eye, blinked, and swallowed so his large Adam's apple wobbled in his long throat where the hair grew coarse and unshaven. His face was utterly empty of guile. He asked me, 'What money?'