Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (10 page)

CHAPTER 19

BLIND AMBITION

D
uddleman had been waiting for me outside my apartment building, sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette. Black boots, black tights, black leather jacket, looking like an existential dream, all pretty and pouty and fresh enough to make Sartre squint from the brightness. She was the kind of girl you drank wine with on La Rive Gauche and discussed with utter seriousness Céline and Nietzsche and the effervescent genius of Jerry Lewis, the kind of girl with whom you fought bitterly over obscure political parties in Argentina because the make-up sex was so sparkling, the kind of girl who let her hair grow ratty and developed the sexy paleness of a tubercular patient as she toiled on her dissertation and you ended up loving her all the more. She was an adolescent fantasy for shy intellectual boys with weak eyes and gangly limbs. If I were a different kind of guy and she were a different kind of girl, she would have made my heart skip in that getup. But we weren’t and it didn’t; her pose just made me feel weary.

“You couldn’t have called?” I said.

“If you saw it was me on caller ID, would you have answered?”

“No.”

“Can I come up, Kip?”

I thought about it for a moment. Crazy is crazy, but she wasn’t hard to look at. And there was a mark of sanity on her features, as if the craziness had passed through a piece of machinery and been pressed into something shiny and pure. With the carelessness of one too many drinks, I had nodded toward the door. Now she was sitting across from me, leaning forward, pleading for my help.

“I think you need more help than I can provide, Amanda,” I said. “I could recommend a therapist.”

“Be nice.”

“Then how about a beer?”

“Yes, please.”

I pulled a couple of Yuenglings out of the fridge, yanked off the caps, handed a bottle over. “So, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda. What are you here for, really? How can someone like me, with only two names, possibly help someone like you?”

“I’ve decided to take my career up a notch.”

“Set your sights on a senator, have you?”

“I’m a journalist, Victor.” She took a sip of the beer and then a gulp. “It’s just my personal life that’s a mess.”

“Don’t sell it short.”

“So you’re not going to be nice. Tell me something then—when the hell did neatness become such a virtue? Everyone is always going on and on about how my life is such a mess. Well, thanks for the tip, but I don’t need the bleating of the sheep in the chorus to know that. I can read my life like a text.”

“That’s right, you went to Bernard.”

“Barnard. It’s not a hair salon in Queens. And yes, I know the Congressman’s a creep and I’m debasing myself with him just to plug some sort of pathetic gap left over from my childhood. Daddy didn’t show me enough attention, so I sleep with a powerful man who fills me with his milky adoration. If it wasn’t so sad, it would be comical. Yet the emotions I feel are as real as if this wasn’t a pathetic stopgap solution to an immature childhood yearning. And so I go with it. You think I shouldn’t?”

“I don’t think.”

“Well done. How much better would the world be if all men followed your example? The time will come, Victor, when my life will be so well ordered that I’ll bore myself to sleep each night, but does it have to be when I’m twenty-three? Can’t I make a hash of things first?”

“I’m certain you can.”

“Thank you.”

“And that’s why you want my help, to further hash up your private life?”

“No, thank you, Kip. I can do that on my own. This is on the journalism side.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I’ve been at the
City Weekly
for eight months now. It’s time to move on, but to do that I need a story. Something big enough to shake the temple pillars. Something that will get me noticed by the higher powers.”

“God and country?”

“More like the
Times
or MSNBC.”

“So it’s rise-and-shine time for Amanda Duddleman, and you’ve come to me to help you find your story.”

“Oh, no, I’ve got a story. It has everything: sex and politics, money and murder.”

“Sounds like a slow afternoon in the nation’s capital.”

“The story’s not there, it’s here.”

“Please, no,” I said, awareness dawning. “Tell me you’re not talking about—”

“I’ve already lobbied my editor and gotten the assignment,” she said. “Full-time for as long as it takes. No expenses spared, which for the
City Weekly
means they’ll reimburse my subway tokens. For the time being I have a new beat: Shoeless Joan.”

I sat down and stared at her flushed and eager face. It had done something to her, the hunt and the excitement and the sense of possibility. It had calmed down the crazy and brought out her undergraduate earnestness. I liked this Amanda Duddleman; she had places to go and I had no doubt that she would get there. Too bad it wouldn’t be this way.

“You’re going to have to tell your editor to give it to someone else,” I said. “Isn’t there a convention you could cover, or a new brewpub to review?”

“I need to make a splash, Victor, I need to light up Twitter. Puff pieces on the new trends in urban footwear aren’t going to do it.”

“Does your editor know you’re sleeping with Congressman DeMathis?”

“Why the hell should that matter?”

“Oh, don’t play naive, it doesn’t become you. Did you order a side of conflict with your interest? For example, why do you think politics is involved in her murder?”

“Because the paper said you were at the crime scene and that you’re a bagman.”

“A bagman for whom? For the Congressman. Who you’re sleeping with.”

“He didn’t do it, Victor. He’s ambitious and horny, but he’s not a killer. My God, he cries at movies.”

“So did Ted Bundy.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know, I never saw a chick flick with him. And what about sex? How do you know that’s involved?”

“Her shoes were missing.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oh, Victor, come on. Who do you think did it?”

“I don’t know who did it. I’m happily leaving the whole mess to McDeiss. But what I do know is that for you to take this assignment is a violation of every journalistic integrity thing.”

“It’s all been done before. Someone once said that every journalist knows deep in his heart that what he does is morally indefensible.”

“Who? Nixon?”

“Close enough. Kip, I need this.”

“You need to go home and forget about it.”

“There’s a guy at the
City Weekly
, he’s been there twenty years. He’s overweight, his teeth are rotting. Twenty years writing the same pseudocounterculture claptrap for a market that never grows older and never grows up. I can’t do that. This is my way up and out. Of everything.”

And I saw it, just then, the truth of it for her. This wasn’t just a story, this was a route out of all the insanity, a way to maybe grow up.

“What do you want from me?” I said. “Permission?”

“I don’t know where to start. I could just hang out at the Roundhouse and wait for Detective McDeiss to make his pronouncements, but that isn’t going to catch the attention of anyone. I need to do my own investigation. And for that I need leads.”

“What do you think I know?”

“More than you’re telling.”

She was right about that. I looked at her flatly, pretty Amanda Duddleman. Her life was a mess, absolutely, but she was trying to rise out of it, and who could admire that more than me? I am unaccountably drawn to troubled women. Some of them I want to screw, others I want to help. Amanda Duddleman, despite her youth and loveliness and, yes, innocence—or maybe because of them—was in the latter category. I thought about maybe helping her like she asked. But I stepped back a bit, pulled myself out of myself, and remembered I had felt the same way about Jessica Barnes.

“Here’s my advice, Amanda. Run away. This thing we’ve both fallen into is as foul as a sewer. I’m stuck here, in the middle of this. I have no choice. But you have nothing but choices. Say good-bye to this story, good-bye to your lover, good-bye to the whole damn city. Head back to New York and make a new start while you can.”

She looked at me, her face blank as she was absorbing it all, and then the corner of her lip turned up into a sneer. “Thanks, Dad. It was heartfelt and all, your little plea, but I’m a reporter and I have a job to do. Are you going to help me?”

“No.”

“Then fuck yourself.”

“Attagirl,” I said.

CHAPTER 20

SMEAR JOB

T
hey came for me a few nights later, hushed, in the dark. I woke to the sound of ripping, of slashing, of a horror movie being played with the volume low in the very next room, and I knew, right away and without doubt, they had come to slit my throat and steal my shoes.

As the realization hit me, I, quite sensibly, quailed and whimpered in my bed. But then I gathered my wits, what precious few were scattered about me, and rolled off the mattress until I thumped onto the floor as quietly as a bear falling out of a tree. On my stomach, facing the door, I considered my options.

Grab a weapon and attack like my hero, Ulysses S. Grant? It sounded right, except I had always avoided guns—yank one out and the next thing you know it might actually go off—so the closest thing I had to a weapon was my pillow. Grant could have taken Fort Donelson with less, but I wasn’t Grant.

Hide? I considered the bedroom closet, the space under my bed, behind a bureau. I had behaved with admirable stealth so far with my whimpering and rolling and thumping. What was the likelihood of actually making it to the closet without being detected? How do you say “nil” in Portuguese?

Flee? That was the ticket. My window was four flights up, a killer drop, but I could do it, without shoes and not knowing what was in the alley below me. I could leap. What was a compound fracture or two among friends?

But in the middle of all this flipping of options, I suddenly stood and, without weapon or plan, charged to the bedroom door and flung it open. It was a demented move born of righteous anger. What the hell were they doing in my apartment? What the hell were they doing to my stuff? I don’t have much in this world, sadly, and the stuff I had was mostly crap, but it was still my crap, dammit.

The less we have, the more bitterly we fight for it.

The living room I saw through the flung-open door was an utter shambles: books scattered, the cushions of my red couch slashed, the whole floor littered with my things. And in the middle of the room, a thin, weaselly, sparsely bearded kid in jeans and a loose-hanging flannel shirt, more junkie than mob flunky, was rustling inside my fancy-assed bagman bag. No more than twenty, the kid turned his head to stare at me in fear and surprise, like my appearance in my apartment in the middle of the night was some sort of astounding occurrence.

I stepped forward and said, “What the crap are you doing with my—”

I stopped in the middle of my exclamation when his eyes darted from my face to something behind me. I didn’t have time to turn around before the something behind slammed me in the shoulder blades, driving me to my knees. I can just remember kneeling in pain and inexplicably reaching out, as if to some divinity, when I got slammed again, this time in the head.

Then the reception got fuzzy and the television blinked into a test pattern with an Indian’s head in the middle. Everything didn’t so much go dark as disappear, and the world and my presence in it ceased to exist.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

When I came to, I was alone.

I sat up with difficulty, my head a bowling ball rolling fiercely down a waxed alley. I tried to stand but, halfway up, the rolling ball rammed into a triangle of pins and I sprawled back down onto my hip. I took a moment to hold my head in my hands before I looked around.

My apartment was a fouled mess, like some revival meeting had ripped through it. And in the center of the disarray my brown bag was flopped on its side, its mouth open like the jaw of a dead fish.

I crawled to it and looked inside. It was scrubbed empty, of course it was. There had been a couple thousand dollars of the Devereaux money, and that was now gone, along with everything else I had stashed there. Maybe I had been targeted because of the newspaper headline, maybe a clever thief would have correctly assumed that a bagman would surely have cash in his bag, maybe this was a simple robbery.

And maybe frogs speak Hungarian.

No, my initial impulse had been correct; they had not come for the money, they had come for me. But not to murder, as I originally suspected, instead to deliver a message, the same message Melanie had given me, but this time with all the subtlety of a forearm shiver. And they had come not only to deliver a message. They must have known Jessica Barnes would have brought some proof backing her blackmail threat to her meeting with me. They must have searched her after they killed her, and not finding it on her they assumed correctly that she had given it to me. And they had come to me to find it.

I hadn’t looked in the envelope when Jessica Barnes gave it to me, discretion being a crucial part of my new job, and I hadn’t looked in it after I was shown Jessica Barnes’s corpse, because I assumed it to be just another piece of porn and to look on it then, I somehow thought, would be to dishonor a dead woman. But the time for hiding my head in the sand was over.

I hadn’t looked inside the envelope, sure, but I hadn’t left it in the bag either—I’m cleverer than that. It was in a square brown envelope, like a greeting card, and so I had taken it out of the briefcase and put it in a kitchen drawer with all my other greeting cards: from aunts and cousins, from a few married lawyer-types with bright-eyed children, and from my mother. You may accuse me of being a sentimentalist for keeping such things, but my mother sent me a yearly holiday card and that was pretty much it; putting them in a drawer when they came saved me the burden of reading the damn things.

The kitchen lights were like cocktail forks jabbed into my eyes. The drawers had been left open, the floor was littered with cutlery and towels, spare batteries, loose pens, screwdrivers. And greeting cards, scads of greeting cards, still in their envelopes. I crawled over to the scatter of cards and pulled them into a pile.

Mom. Mom. Aunt Gladys. Mom. The law firm of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, those stuck-up bastards, wishing me a prosperous New Year. My former partner, Beth, all the way from India. Mom. Mom. (Notice, none from Dad: we don’t communicate with greeting cards; we communicate by not communicating.) Mom. Aunt Gladys again. And then a blank brown envelope, no name, no address.

I leaned against the kitchen counter, closed my eyes for a moment to stop the cocktail forks, and then took a knife from off the floor and slit open the envelope, readying myself for a sordid slice of someone else’s sex life.

But it wasn’t porn. It wasn’t even a photograph.

Inside was a card, but not a greeting card, nothing with sweet sentiments and timeless virtues. It was just a blank card, white, with a broad, thick swath of something painted onto the paper. Something dried and dark maroon, something very much like . . .

I was out of my league, I needed help, I needed backup. And I was thinking I knew where to get it when I heard a banging on my door.

Knock knock.

“Open up. It’s the police.”