I raised my hands: who knows? Who ever knows? I spent a moment with the wonder of it all. What is it really, this life? You're shoulder to shoulder with a guy eight hours a day, try cases with him, go to lunch, sit in the back row and make wisecracks at partners' meetings, stand beside him in the men's room and watch him shake his thing, and what the hell do you know? Zippity-do. You haven't got a clue about the inner regions. You don't know what he regards as dirty thoughts or the place he dreams of as a haven. You don't know if he constantly feels close to the Great Spirit or if anxiety is always nibbling inside him like some famished rat. Really — what is this? You never know with people, I thought, another phrase I picked up on the street and have been repeating to myself for twenty years. I repeated it to Brushy now.
'I can't accept it,' she said. 'This is so calculating. And Bert's impulsive. If you told me he'd signed up to be an astronaut last week and was already halfway to the moon, that would sound more like him.'
'We'll see. I figure if I actually track him down, I'll always have a great alternative to turning him in or bringing him back.'
She stared, green eyes hopped up with all her wily curiosity. 'And what alternative is that?'
'Bert and I can split the money right down the middle.' I put out the cigarette and winked. I said to her again, 'Attorney-client.'
IV
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 —
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
