Pleading Guilty

toward his city and its life, and his tone suggested worlds, universes of emotion suppressed. God, I thought, to have been a fly on the wall for that romance, to have observed these two characters surmounting the many barriers to get into each other's pants. Glyndora must have stuck out all her prominent parts and dared him to touch them — a way to put him in his place. I'd seen that routine: You think you're tough? I'm tough. I'm the best-looking woman in four city blocks. I'd wear you out. I'd get you up four times a night, I'd screw you dry and tell you I needed more, I'd be so much you'd want to unhitch it and put it in my trophy case. You didn't have wet dreams as a puppy 10 percent as good as me. And you won't dare touch it. Cause I ain't gonna have it.

She probably laid it on thick. And he accepted the World Championship Challenge of treating her kindly. Glyndora'd stomp and sulk and he must have signaled in a hundred ways that he thought she was valuable and would never change his mind. He must have worn her down until she had to succumb to the fantasy that everything she rejected before it refused her might, instead, fold her in its embrace. And Martin visited that shadow zone where not much matters, where pretense and power, every one of his bets which was always on the future, had to surrender to the pure sensation of the present. I'll bet until ten minutes before they were screwing it was no more than daily titillation for each one of them, a dirty movie that was always shuttered in their minds.

'But what happened?' I said. 'You know. With you and her. Can I ask?'

'It didn't work out,' he said. His hand skirted the air. 'We were kidding ourselves.' The remark hung there, with all its potent sadness — the American predicament. Martin had these kids, this wife — and there was the Club Belvedere, clients who'd snigger that he'd taken up with a colored girl. But the result probably suited Glyndora. It would have been a lot to ask of her, to be herself in his world.

'I am very fond of Glyndora,' he said then, impaled on whatever the remark conjured and concealed. He looked at me. 'Do you believe in reincarnation?'

'No,' I said.

'No,' he said. 'Neither do I.' He was quiet then. Martin Gold, the most successful lawyer I knew, wanted to be somebody else too. It was touching, though. Loyalty always is.

We were silent some time. Eventually Martin started talking about what had happened in a depleted, reflective tone. He had not been fooling with me, he said. Not intentionally. I gave him far too much credit. Circumstances had mounted. Combined. His honesty as he spoke was beguiling. You so rarely got Martin to talk straight from the heart.

'Glyndora came to me with the memo and the checks as soon as they'd cleared. Early December, I think. Around then. It looked odd to both of us, of course, business checks negotiated offshore, but I didn't feel any great concern until I started doing the research — talking to Bert, Neucriss, the banker down there in Pico. No Litiplex registered anywhere. No records upstairs. I was shocked when I saw where it pointed. I never perceived this in Jake. He'd lie to the Pope for the sake of his vanity, but I was stunned to learn he was a thief. And it was gruesome, of course, imagining the consequences.'

Martin, like any man with an empire, was accustomed to problems — big ones, situations that could bring him and everyone who depended upon him to doom. Like TN walking out as a client, or Pagnucci making a move. He got used to it, accustomed. He learned to walk the highwire, sailing along with gumption and a parasol. This thing with Eiger was a problem too. He left Glyndora on alert for more checks and took some time to ponder the common good.

'At which point,' he said, 'Glyndora's life began coming apart.' 'Bert and Orleans?'

He emitted a sound, the old wrestler's grunt, a little eruption of surprise, self-consciously controlled, when he was snatched for the takedown. He peered, his squat face immobile, engraved by shadow in the dwindling light.

'You know, Malloy, if you'd done half as good a job around here in the last few years as you did looking into this, you would have made my life a great deal easier.'

'I'll take that as a compliment.'

'Please,' Martin answered.

'What's he like?' I asked. 'This son of hers?'

'Orleans? Complicated fellow.'

'He's her heartbreak, I take it.'

Martin made various ruminative gestures. It seemed he had tried to be good to Orleans as a boy.

'Very bright individual. Mother's son, that way. Very capable. But not steady. Temperamentally. Nothing you could do about that. She thought she was going to prohibit him from being the way he clearly was. And he wasn't willing to be prohibited.'

'She found Bert an upsetting development?'

'Not Bert as Bert. It's a situation she's never wanted to confront squarely.' He made a sad face.

'Yeah,' I offered. I got it. But I felt for Bert. In all likelihood, he'd been largely beside the point with Orleans from the start.

'Did you warn Bert?'

'No one here has accepted my warnings. No one.' He remained momentarily forlorn, even as his agitation visibly mounted. 'Jesus, what a mess. What a mess! This one may have been the single stupidest thing — ' Martin waved. 'This ludicrous, insane novelty with these basketball games — And worse, both of them, neither had given a moment's thought, not a bare instant, to the costs of this behavior — Imprisonment, bodily harm, my God, the prospects, and the two of them are surprised by this, shocked, absolutely, positively disbelieving, like tiny children, the two most immature grown men I have ever known, neither with the remotest — ' Martin stopped himself; he was losing the thread.

'You were explaining how you decided to cover for Jake.'

'This is part of it,' he said. 'I told you. It's happenstance. Circumstances conspire. This is part. This is what led Glyndora to it.'

'Blaming Bert? You're saying that's Glyndora's idea? For what? To get even with him?'

He waited. He smiled.

'What kind of mother do you imagine Glyndora is, Mack?'

You could take your choice of adjectives. Intense. Protective. She'd have sheltered Orleans through the ravages of war, scavenged food, or sold her body. For all I knew, that's what she was doing with me that night. But I still wasn't following. Martin saved his partners, his professional life, by covering Jake. I didn't see much gain to the chief clerk in Accounting.

'Look, Mack, Bert's decision to drop out of sight was well-intentioned as far as it went. He thought he was being heroic. But it was hardly a solution for Orleans. Not as far as Glyndora was concerned. She wasn't going to have him running for the rest of his life. She wanted him safe to stay here, and he wasn't.'

I still didn't get it.

'You're the one who asked the question, Mack. Last week. 'Where did Bert go?' Where do we say Bert went? This is a lawyer. With sixty-seven partners. And clients. Never mind his family. There's not much. His friends, so-called, were all implicated in the same thing and surely willing to keep their peace. But what the hell do we say around here? How do we keep somebody from notifying the police who, in investigating Bert's absence, will promptly discover that whole basketball mess? The only way to insulate Orleans — to completely protect him — was if there was another credible explanation for why Bert disappeared — even if that explanation was understood only by a few people who'd make excuses to everyone else.'

I rolled my head around, this way and that. I sort of liked it. Until I saw the next part.

'That's why you needed some hapless stumblebum to go look for him.' Someone, I realized, who wasn't supposed to really catch Bert or even figure out what he'd actually been up to — just state convincingly that he was gone. That was what Glyndora had meant in the one sincere moment we'd had. Absorbing my observation about their estimate of me, Martin, I noted, made no effort to differ.

'And that's why you hid the body,' I said. It came to me, just like that. 'Once I started looking for Bert.'

'We what? Martin's entire weight was suddenly planted on one hand fiercely gripping the arm of his chair. This aspect of alarm, of incomprehension, could have been posed, I realized. But Martin didn't look like he was fooling. Instead, I recalculated: Orleans and Bert, already shamed and scolded, yelled at, told they were irresponsible fools, hadn't confessed the worst. Martin and Glyndora thought Bert was running only from threats. Archie's disappearance, when it hit the papers, must have terrified them.

'Figure of speech,' I said. 'The memo. You hid the memo.'