to talk to you tonight, and so that's what I'm going to do. I'll put you on auto re-dial if you hang up, which'll mean that you'll have to leave your phone off the hook, and it'll hum at you all night. So you still wont be able to get any sleep, or emergency calls from anyone else, and I know how you hate both those things. Now throw some clothes on and go out inna kitchen and put coffee on, and make me a Jack Daniel's and water, some ice.
I'll be there in eight minutes and you'll let me in or I'll sit on the stoop and I'll cry. And when all the neighbors wake up and say what's the matter, I'll say I'm an orphan got left on your doorstep and you're too mean to take me in, and can someone take me to the rectory.'
'Tell me onna phone, Amby,' Hilliard said. 'Turn around and go back to your own house and bed, and tell me on the phone on the way. It's almost two in the morning for Christ sake. There's nothing that can't wait 'til morning.'
'Yes there is,' Merrion said, 'me.'
Hilliard groaned. 'Amby,' he said, 'I can't let you come up here tonight. I got someone here with me and, well, I just can't. I can't let you in if you come here. Tell me what it is on the phone.'
'Danny,' Merrion said, 'listen up now, friend of my youth: You have got to let me come in. Tell her to stay in the bedroom and sleep. Or him, if you now go both ways. You can say I insist if you want, 'cause I do. I don't want him or her to hear what I'm saying to you. This is strictly between you and me. That's why I've got to come up. This isn't something I'd say on a phone, anyway, but especially not on a car-phone. They don't need a wireman to sit in on car-phones; they don't even have to be cops anyone with an eighty-buck scanner can pick up what you say, just by purest accident. That give you any inkling of why I am coming?'
There was an extended silence. The Cadillac rushed quietly up the boulevard under the bright moon and dark trees. 'I'll wake her up and send her home and make the coffee,' Hilliard said. 'Jack Daniel's, you said you wanted?'
'You got it, pal,' Merrion said. 'And don't bother sending her home.
Just tell her to stay inna bedroom and sleep. This's not something we want to share.'
In a tee-shirt and grey drawstring sweatpants, clumps of his hair standing up and a look of deep concern on his face, Hilliard with a cup of tea in his hand met Merrion at the door and said: 'Will you tell me what the…?'
Merrion shook his head and put his right forefinger to his lips. Then he pointed at the kitchen softly lit by one ceiling fixture over the sliding glass door leading outdoors and nodded. 'That my drink I see on the counter there? That's what I need. Let's you and me go and get it.' With his drink in hand Merrion took Hilliard's right elbow, steering him toward the door opening onto the townhouse patio. 'Mawn now,' he said, 'nice out tonight. Let's you and me go outside and chat.' He slid the glass door open.
'I think you're getting' paranoid,' Hilliard said, hanging back.
'That could be,' Merrion said, 'I got every reason to be. Anyway, there's no question I'm spooked. I prefer to talk out of doors.'
Hilliard grabbed a dish-towel from the rack over the sink and led the way, Merrion sliding the glass door shut quietly behind them, Hilliard mopping the dew off the puffy green and yellow cushions of the lawn chairs. Seated so that he faced Hilliard and the glass door, Merrion said: 'The first thing to keep in mind when you deal with fuckin' cops is that you want to keep them friendly if you can at almost any cost.
So that when you have to tell them No, you can't do what they want like on a warrant application, when they just don't have enough PC to let you let them go in and make a search some place they understand you really can't give them one. They don't think you're a prick who's just giving them a hard time, just to be a prick, because they think of you as a friend of theirs, and they know you would give them the paper if you could. And that way they don't get mad at you so they all start giving you all kinds of fuckin' grief alia time. Which as you know, that group can do.'
Hilliard was still shaking off the dullness of sleep. 'Absolutely,' he said, 'because the last thing you want to have on your mind, and especially in a job like the one you've got, dealing with cops every day, you don't want to get them pissed off. But in any job, really, that'll always hold true: you don't want to get a cop mad at you. You get one cop mad at you, before you even know it, all the cops're mad at you. Because all the cops talk to each other, and they can make life miserable for you.'
'Right,' Merrion said. 'Now the reason why I woke you up to talk is Sergeant Whalen. Where Ev Whalen is concerned, and he is the one concerns me, the stakes're even higher. The guy's a human vacuum cleaner, a rug- beatin', shampooin', Hooverin' machine with a bright white light onna front when it comes to diggin' up dirt. He knows stuff nobody knows. Half the time he doesn't know himself he knows it, the dirt that nobody else knows. But that changes nothing; it's still vintage dirt, and all you've got to do to get it out of him is two basic things.
'The first thing's to make sure you stay friends with him. This isn't hard because he wants to be friends with you, even more than you do with him. He's very insecure, I think. He's always afraid that nobody will like him. So he's got enough motivation for both of you. He thinks you're the one who's being nice. By talking to him now and then, sure, but even more by listening to him, spillin' his guts out to you.
'So that's the second thing you do: You make it very clear to him that not only are you always glad to see him but you really appreciate the things he has to tell you. You aren't just humoring him; you're interested.
'That's the only two things you hafta do. He likes you; he'll talk.
You say: 'Hey Ev, how's it goin', huh, kid? What's goin' on; whaddaya hear?' And woof-woof; here it comes, you got it. Immediately the guy is telling you every damned thing he knows. Without even knowing, most of the time, what the hell most of it means, the significance of what he's sayin'. It's like you struck up a friendship at the track with a talking horse who tells you which one of his friends is gonna win that day because he likes you. And when you mention one day you're startin' to feel guilty, you've been getting' rich on him and you feel like you oughta share your winnings, he just shrugs it off and says: 'Hey, great; I'm happy for you. But what good is money to me? I'm a horse.
Bring me an apple sometime.'
'Ev Whalen's info is that good and he's got no idea how valuable it can be to you. He would've made a hell of a newspaperman. He works a lot harder'n most of them do, and he finds out a whole lot more stuff. But he doesn't know what news is. He thinks if he recognizes the subject everyone else must already know it. He thinks he's always the last kid onna block to find something out. Oh, and he doesn't question anything. He assumes whatever he knows must be the Gospel truth.
'He doesn't interpret anything, either, tell you what to think about it. He tells you what he thinks but he's not real confident about it, so you can overlook it. And so those're the things I'm trying to remember all the time tonight when he comes outta left field and absolutely stuns me, we're out there inna back waitin' for the prisoners to come out.
'I forget how it came up, but it seemed like before I knew it we're talking how he's sort of vaguely heard you're in some sort of trouble, and do I have any idea what it is. At first I figured maybe he was just fishing around, but every time I tried to change the subject, which I must've, three or four times, he came right back to it. The gist of it seemed to be the Grey Hills memberships. He suspects they were fairly expensive, and he knows it costs a lot to play golf on the public courses so it must take one shitload of money at Grey Hills. He knows we've been playing there a long time, so we must've paid a lot of money, and he's really curious about where we got it. And also where you got the money for the Bell Woods house and the summer house, as well, which for all he knows is onna Cape but he did throw in that it might be onna Vineyard. He didn't mention under-the-table campaign funds or kickbacks, or maybe bribes, but I felt pretty sure if I asked him how it was he thought you got it, that is what he would've said.
'He had me close to panic. He kept pushing me on how much it cost to join Grey Hills and of course I didn't wanna tell him, so I keep saying I forget and trynah get him interested in something else, almost anything. I start tellin' him, what golfs about, and how you're always beatin' me and he wouldn't buy it. It was like he had a bone in his teeth: he kept comin' back to how much it costs for Grey Hills. So finally I just gave up and fell back on the standard strategy of what to do when you're trapped: I made something up.'
'In other words, you lied,' Hilliard said, 'and hoped that he'd believe it.'
'You could put it that way, yeah,' Merrion said. 'I didn't actually come right out and say it cost between two and three grand. I said I remembered when we were doing it saying to you that if I put the price of the membership with what my car was worth, I could've had a brand-new Oldsmobile, which was true. And that as I recall it now, the amount of money that it would've taken me to make a deal trading my car on a new Eighty-eight then would've been two or three grand. Which is also the truth, or very close to it, but not close to the truth he was after.'
