Pleading Guilty

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.

TAPE 2

Dictated January 24, 11:00 p.m.

Tuesday, January 24

V

A WORKING LIFE

A. The Mind of the Machine

Now and then everybody wants to be somebody else, Elaine. There are all these secret people rolling around inside — ma and pa, killers and cops and various prime-time heroes, and all of them at times reaching for the throttle. There's no way to stop it, and who's to say we should. What seemed sweeter yesterday than the thought of nabbing Bert and running with the money? It's just your brother, the old copper, explaining how it is that folks go wrong. Every guy I cracked said it: I didn't mean to, I didn't want to. As if it were somebody else who'd scored the smack or kicked the coins out of the vending machine. And it is in a way. That's what I'm saying.

I sat in my office this morning, venturing this two-bit commentary for the benefit of my dead sister, as I do a couple of times each day, and noodling over the statement that I'd pocketed from the Kam Roberts credit card. The