Pleading guilty

IV. BERT AT HOME

A. His Apartment My partner Bert Kamin is not an everyday-type guy. Angular and swarthy, with a substantial athletic build and long dark hair, he looks good enough, but there is something wild in his eye. Until she passed away, five or six years ago, Bert – former combat ace, trial shark, hotshot gambler and hoodlum hanger-on – lived with his mother, a demanding old witch by the name of Mabel. He didn't have a shortcoming she failed to mention. Slothful. Irresponsible. Ungrateful. Mean. She'd let him have it, and Bert, with his macho jaw set, tough talk, and chewing gum, just sat there.

The man left after this thirty-five-year mortar assault is a sort of heaping dark mystery, one of those vague paranoiacs who defends his odd habits in the name of individuality. Food's one of his specialties. He is sure America is out to poison him. He subscribes to a dozen obscure health newsletters – 'Vitamin B Update' and 'The Soluble Fiber Wellness Letter' – and he is regularly reading books by goofballs just like him which convince him that something new should not be ingested. I have unwillingly absorbed his opinions over many meals. He lives in mortal fear of tap water, which he figures has everything deadly in it -fluoride, chlorine, and lead – and will drink nothing from the city pipes; over the protests of the Committee, he's even had one of those big green bottled water coolers installed in his office. He won't eat cheese ('junk food'), sausage ('nitrites'), chicken ('DES'), or milk (he still worries about strontium 90). On the other hand, he believes that cholesterol is an AMA-sponsored fiction and has no brief against red meat. And he never ate green vegetables. He will tell you they are overrated, but in fact, he just never got to like them as a kid.

I was feeling Bert's presence pretty strongly now, all his screwball intensity, as I stood outside his place. It was about eleven and I'd decided to check out his digs on my way home. Last time I looked, break and enter was still a crime and I figured I'd just keep this visit to myself.

Bert lives – or lived – in a little freestanding two-flat in a rehabbed area near Center City. As I recalled the story, he'd wanted to stay in his ma's house in the South End, but he got into one of those coffin-side spats with his sister and had to sell to make her happy. Here, he was pretty much at loose ends. I arrived with my briefcase, which had nothing in it but two coat hangers, a screwdriver which I'd borrowed from the maintenance closet on my way out of the office, and the Dictaphone, which I took on the bet that my dreams would wake me, as they have, and leave me grateful for something to do in these awful, still hours.

Twenty-some years ago, before they shipped me off to Financial Crimes to give me time to finish law school, I worked in the tactical unit with a good street cop name of Gino Dimonte, who everybody called Pigeyes. Tac guys are plainclothes, the sort of roving linebackers of the Force who'll do further investigation on what the beat cop reports – stake out an arrest, round up a suspect. I learned a lot from Pigeyes, which is one of the things that ticked him off when I testified about him before a federal grand jury; these days he's backwatered in Financial Crimes and, as the legend goes, always looking for me, the same way Captain Hook had an eye out for the crocodile and Ahab for the whale. Anyway, Pigeyes taught me a million tricks. How to sneak the cruiser down an alley, headlights out, using the emergency brake to stop so that your suspect doesn't even see the red glow of the rear lamps. I watched him get into apartments without a warrant by making calls, saying he was UPS and had left a package downstairs, or that he lived across the street and thought there was a fire on the roof, so that our man would come rushing out and leave his door wide open. I even heard him phone and say there were suspicious guys around, and have a high old time when the dip stuck his mug out with an unregistered pistol in his hand and got his ass arrested and his front room tossed incident to arrest.

This was another of Gino's little bits, just a makeup mirror that a lady would carry in her purse or keep in the drawer in her office, as Brushy had. In most old buildings, the front door on an apartment has been trimmed at the foot to fit the carpeting, and with the mirror, if you get used to looking upside down, you can see a lot. I knelt there in the vestibule, putting my ear to the door to the upstairs apartment now and then to make sure the neighbor wasn't shaking around. As I remembered it, she was a flight attendant. I figured on trying her sometime, after I'd seen what was what in Bert's apartment.

It sure looked like Bert was gone. In the mirror I could see the mail piled up on the floor in heaps – Sports Illustrated and health and muscle magazines and flyers, and of course a bunch of bills. I rumbled around a little bit against the door, enough noise so that if there was anyone inside I'd get them moving, then after a while I used the coat hangers. I straightened them out, all but the hook, and joined them at the crimps. Using the mirror, I could see the chain lock hanging open. I must have spent five minutes trying to get a decent purchase on the knob of the dead bolt, and then it turned out the damn thing wasn't set. The old skeleton-keyed door lock and knob came off with the screwdriver in twenty seconds. I always told Nora: If they want to get in, they're coming in.

Maybe it was that thought of Nora, but as soon as the door swung open, I was attacked by the loneliness of it all, Bert's life. I felt like I'd gone hollow, unfilled space aching with the absence. It scares me to see the way single guys live. When Nora bolted for the great outdoors, she left most everything behind. A lot of the furniture is broken and torn, what with the Loathsome Child, but it's there, it's still a house. Bert's living room didn't even have a rug on the floor. He had a sofa, a 30-inch TV, and a huge green plant that I bet somebody sent him as a gift. In one corner, housed on its packing box, was an entire computer setup – box, keyboard, monitor, printer – with a folding chair in front of it. I had a sudden vision of goofy old Bert lost inside the machine, spending the dead hours of the night with his mind tracing the circuits of a chip, whizzing from one bulletin board to the next or playing complex computer war games, wiping out little green people with a death ray from space. Crazy guy.

I walked right through the mail as I came in, then thought better of it and plunked myself down on the hardwood floor among the gathered dustballs. The oldest items were postmarked about ten days ago, which seemed to fit Bert's suspected date of departure. One envelope had a footprint on it, maybe mine, or someone else's, or Bert's when he took off. The last thought seemed to make the most sense, since I found another envelope which had been opened. Inside was a bank card – one only – tucked into the little two-sided cardboard holder used to send out new cards annually. Maybe Bert had taken the other card to travel? The one that was there was embossed with the name Kam Roberts.

In the scattered mail I found another envelope addressed to Kam Roberts. I held it up to the light, then just ripped it open. A monthly statement for the bank card. It was pretty much what you'd expect with Bert during basketball season, charges run up in every town in the Mid-Ten. Bert thought nothing of flashing to the airport at five and getting in one of those flying buckets so he could arrive in some Midwestern college town in time to witness the walloping of the Us team, the Bargehands, known for generations as the Hands. There were a number of local charges, too, but I stashed all of it, the card and the bill, in my inside suit pocket, figuring I'd study the details later.

The only other item in Bert's mail that struck me was The Advisor, Kindle County's gay newspaper, with its sizzling personals section and some pretty embarrassing ads for underwear. Was he or wasn't he? Bert might tell me that he subscribed for the classifieds or film criticism, but to me it figured that Bert was in the closet. He's of my place in history, when sex was dirty and desire a hidden misery that each of us kept steeled within our own Pandora's Box and released only in clandestine darkness where we were promptly enslaved. Bert's inclinations are a deep-dark secret. He isn't telling anybody, maybe even himself. That's where Kam Roberts comes in; it's his drag. If he's meeting boys in the men's room of the Kindle County Public Library or visiting leather bars in another city where he's supposedly gone to watch the Hands, Kam is his name. All of this is surely what the TN engineers refer to as a WAG – a wildassed guess. Yet standing in the apartment, I thought it made sense. No, he never put his hand on my knee or cast lascivious glances at the Loathsome Child either. But I'd bet the farm anyway that all Bert's twitches and costumes and lonely moods came out of which way his pecker was pointing. Which is his business, not mine. I really mean it. Frankly, I've always admired people with secrets worth keeping, having, of course, one or two of my own.

Which is not to pretend on the other hand that scoping all this out did not give me a combo of the creeps and some little thrill of kinky curiosity. So talk to me about my tendencies. But don't you wonder sometimes, really, what these guys are up to? I mean, who does what to whom. You know, tab A, slot B. They've got this weird secret thing, like the Masons or the Mormons.

I wondered if it was problems in his life as Kam that had the coppers looking for Bert. When I was on the street, there were always the sorriest scams with these fellows – a prisoner in the Rudyard penitentiary who somehow got a bunch of guys he'd found through the personals to pay him fifty bucks apiece with a letter promising he was 'going to put a liplock on your love-muscle' as soon as he was released. There was one restaurant owner who installed a hidden camera behind one of the urinals and had a private photo gallery of Kindle County's most prominent penises. And you'd hear of plenty of outright extortion, boy-toys who threatened to tell the wife or the employer. There were a billion ways Bert could have gotten himself in trouble, and tossing all this around, big bluff old Mack felt pretty sorry for Bert, who wasn't trying to hurt a soul.

I made a tour of the apartment. Bert's bedroom wasn't much better than the living room – a cheap dresser set, his bed unmade. There wasn't a picture in the entire place. His suits hung neatly in his closet but his other stuff was thrown around the room in the familiar fashion of Lyle.

I went to the kitchen to check out the fridge, still trying to see how long our hero had been gone, another old cop move, smell the milk, check the pull date. When I opened the fridge, there was a dead guy staring back. B. His Refrigerator The dead, like the rich, are different from you and me. I was racing with that crazy bursting feeling as if I was going to pop out of my own skin. Not that I couldn't acknowledge a macabre interest. I actually pulled one of the kitchen chairs around and was sitting, say, three feet away, staring at him. In my time on the street I'd seen my share of corpses, suicides hanging from the basement pipes or in a bathtub full of blood, a couple of murder victims, and lots of folks who just plain expired, and I'm at the age now where every couple of weeks it seems like I'm going to a wake. However it is, I'm always impressed by the way a human being looks stripped of that fundamental vitality, like a tree without its leaves. Death always takes something away, nothing you could really name, but life somehow is a visible thing.

It wasn't Bert. This guy was about Bert's size, but he was older, maybe sixty. He had been folded into the refrigerator like a garment bag. His feet went one way, his legs were squashed down under him, his head was forced to about ninety degrees to make him fit. His eyes were bugged out unbelievably; they were that very light green you might as well call gray. He was wearing a suit and a tie, and around the collar of his shirt, the blood had soaked in and dried like a kind of batik. Eventually I noticed the black line dug into his neck and tied to a shelf hook to hold him up. Fishing tackle. Deep-sea stuff. One-hundred-pound test. The refrigerator light glowed like a bald head and threw a little orange into his gray face. Alive, he must have been a respectable-looking fellow.

I sat there trying to figure out what to do. I had to be good and careful, I knew that much. Still, I kept wondering what had happened. Bert's motives for disappearing seemed clearer. The most obvious reason to chill the remains would be to get some time to run. But there was no blood anywhere in the apartment. Unless there'd been a rug or a little more furniture before. Did wonky old Bert have murder in him? The Jesuits in high school told me nobody did, then the police force gave me a gun and told me to shoot and I was in enough basements looking for some slug who'd vanished down a gangway, ready to piss my trousers every time I heard the furnace creak, so that I knew I would have. Bert, in his own way, was pretty tightly wound. So maybe.

Option 2 was that this was somebody else's handiwork. Before Bert left or after? Before appeared unlikely. Not too many people are going to break into your apartment with a stiff and leave him in your refrigerator without your permission. After was possible. If somebody knew Bert was gone.

I really didn't want to call the cops. If I did, everything was going to come out. Missing Bert. Missing money. So long, client. So long, Mack and G amp; G. Worse yet, the way things work, murder suspect number one for a while would be me. That could be a real pain, given the number of coppers, pals of Pigeyes, who are laying for me, one of whom in time would realize he could charge me for the break-in. Sooner or later the police would have to hear about this. This poor bastard, after all, probably had a family. But the best way to tip them was anonymously, after I'd had some time to think things through.

I went about putting the place back together as best I could, wiped the refrigerator handle down, swept the kitchen floor to clear my footprints. I couldn't get the lock in the front door without opening it, since the outer plate screwed in from the other side. So I stood there on the threshold,, upright, in plain view, fumbling for five minutes, fixing up the apartment I'd just broken into. I tried to imagine what the hell I'd say if the stew came home or if I raised the curiosity of somebody passing on the street, how I'd get myself out of trouble. Still, as I fooled around with the last screw, I liked it, my minute dangling over the cliff. Sometimes in life, things just happen. No planning. Out of control. That's one of those things guys like about being cops. I'd liked it too, just not the way I woke up in the night, with my heart galloping and my mouth like glue and the fears, the fears, licking me all over like some cat getting ready to do it to a mouse. It drove me to drink, was one of the things, and off the Force, though it has never stopped.

But nothing happened, not now. The stew never showed, nobody on the street even looked my way. I went through the outer door with my scarf pulled up to my nose, and down the city walk, safe and happy, just like I am with daybreak coming now, knowing I can stop talking into this thing, having slipped away for one more night.