بخش 02 - فصل 04

4

For almost a month he has been careful; has turned up for his day job on the dot every morning and gotten in early at Bugshit Manor every night. The only person from Waynesville he’s seen is Chuck Roberson, who got out on DNA with Morris’s help, and Chuck doesn’t rate as a known associate, because Chuck was innocent all along. At least of the crime he was sent up for.

Morris’s boss at the MAC is a fat, self-important asshole, barely computer literate but probably making sixty grand a year. Sixty at least. And Morris? Eleven bucks an hour. He’s on food stamps and living in a ninth-floor room not much bigger than the cell where he spent the so-called ‘best years of his life.’ Morris isn’t positive his office carrel is bugged, but he wouldn’t be surprised. It seems to him that everything in America is bugged these days.

It’s a crappy life, and whose fault is that? He told the Parole Board time after time, and with no hesitation, that it was his; he had learned how to play the blame game from his sessions with Curd the Turd. Copping to bad choices was a necessity. If you didn’t give them the old mea culpa you’d never get out, no matter what some cancer-ridden bitch hoping to curry favor with Jesus might put in a letter. Morris didn’t need Duck to tell him that. He might have been born at night, as the saying went, but it wasn’t last night.

But had it really been his fault?

Or the fault of that asshole right over yonder?

Across the street and about four doors down from the bench where Morris is sitting with the remains of his unwanted bagel, an obese baldy comes sailing out of Andrew Halliday Rare Editions, where he has just flipped the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED. It’s the third time Morris has observed this lunchtime ritual, because Tuesdays are his afternoon days at the MAC. He’ll go in at one and busy himself until four, working to bring the ancient filing system up-to-date. (Morris is sure the people who run the place know a lot about art and music and drama, but they know fuckall about Mac Office Manager.) At four, he’ll take the crosstown bus back to his crappy ninth-floor room.

In the meantime, he’s here.

Watching his old pal.

Assuming this is like the other two midday Tuesdays – Morris has no reason to think it won’t be, his old pal always was a creature of habit – Andy Halliday will walk (well, waddle) down Lacemaker Lane to a café called Jamais Toujours. Stupid fucking name, means absolutely nothing, but sounds pretentious. Oh, but that was Andy all over, wasn’t it?

Morris’s old pal, the one with whom he had discussed Camus and Ginsberg and John Rothstein during many coffee breaks and pickup lunches, has put on at least a hundred pounds, the hornrims have been replaced by pricey designer spectacles, his shoes look like they cost more than all the money Morris made in his thirty-five years of prison toil, but Morris feels quite sure his old pal hasn’t changed inside. As the twig is bent the bough is shaped, that was another old saying, and once a pretentious asshole, always a pretentious asshole.

The owner of Andrew Halliday Rare Editions is walking away from Morris rather than toward him, but Morris wouldn’t have been concerned if Andy had crossed the street and approached. After all, what would he see? An elderly gent with narrow shoulders and bags under his eyes and thinning gray hair, wearing an el cheapo sport jacket and even cheaper gray pants, both purchased at Chapter Eleven. His old pal would accompany his growing stomach past him without a first look, let alone a second.

I told the Parole Board what they wanted to hear, Morris thinks. I had to do that, but the loss of all those years is really your fault, you conceited homo cocksucker. If it had been Rothstein and my partners I’d been arrested for, that would be different. But it wasn’t. I was never even questioned about Mssrs Rothstein, Dow, and Rogers. I lost those years because of a forced and unpleasant act of sexual congress I can’t even remember. And why did that happen? Well, it’s sort of like the house that Jack built. I was in the alley instead of the tavern when the Hooper bitch came by. I got booted out of the tavern because I kicked the jukebox. I kicked the jukebox for the same reason I was in the tavern in the first place: because I was pissed at you.

Why don’t you try me on those notebooks around the turn of the twenty-first century, if you still have them?

Morris watches Andy waddle away from him and clenches his fists and thinks, You were like a girl that day. The hot little virgin you get in the backseat of your car and she’s all yes, honey, oh yes, oh yes, I love you so much. Until you get her skirt up to her waist, that is. Then she clamps her knees together almost hard enough to break your wrist and it’s all no, oh no, unhand me, what kind of girl do you think I am?

You could have been a little more diplomatic, at least, Morris thinks. A little diplomacy could have saved all those wasted years. But you couldn’t spare me any, could you? Not so much as an attaboy, that must have taken guts. All I got was don’t try to lay this off on me.

His old pal walks his expensive shoes into Jamais Toujours, where he will no doubt have his expanding ass kissed by the maitre d’. Morris looks at his bagel and thinks he should finish it – or at least use his teeth to scrape the cream cheese into his mouth – but his stomach is too knotted up to accept it. He will go to the MAC instead, and spend the afternoon trying to impose some order on their tits-up, bass-ackwards digital filing system. He knows he shouldn’t come back here to Lacemaker Lane – no longer even a street but a kind of pricey, open-air mall from which vehicles are banned – and knows he’ll probably be on the same bench next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. Unless he’s got the notebooks. That would break the spell. No need to bother with his old pal then.

He gets up and tosses the bagel into a nearby trash barrel. He looks down toward Jamais Toujours and whispers, ‘You suck, old pal. You really suck. And for two cents—’

But no.

No.

Only the notebooks matter, and if Chuck Roberson will help him out, he’s going after them tomorrow night. And Chuck will help him. He owes Morris a large favor, and Morris means to call it in. He knows he should wait longer, until Ellis McFarland is absolutely sure Morris is one of the good ones and turns his attention elsewhere, but the pull of the trunk and what’s inside it is just too strong. He’d love to get some payback from the fat son of a bitch now feeding his face with fancy food, but revenge isn’t as important as that fourth Jimmy Gold novel. There might even be a fifth! Morris knows that isn’t likely, but it’s possible. There was a lot of writing in those books, a mighty lot. He walks toward the bus stop, sparing one baleful glance back at Jamais Toujours and thinking, You’ll never know how lucky you were.

Old pal.