The Weight (16 page)

Or maybe she turned the place into a moneymaker, subletting it out for ten times the rent
she
had to pay. A lot of people do that. It’s a risk, because the building owners are always watching for those kind of moves.

Maybe the building had gone co-op. Francine might still be there, but probably she would have sold the apartment a couple of years back—Solly had said something about real estate going way up then.

The real problem was the five years. More than that, actually. I’d never expected to be gone more than a few days, so what could I tell Francine that wouldn’t sound like complete bullshit? And it wasn’t like she was, you know,
crazy
about me or anything.

I balanced it out. Breaking into the place wouldn’t be a hard job—they didn’t have a doorman, at least when Francine lived there. But I’d have to do a lot of scoping it out first, and even then I’d
still
need a lot of luck.

And if I pulled it off, what would I have? Eighty grand … and maybe Francine telling the cops about an ex-boyfriend who had painted those same closets where there was a chunk missing now.

I made the decision before I fell asleep. I was going to take a pass. I remember thinking how Solly would have been proud of me, just before I went out.

It’s supposed to be tradition that the first thing a man does when he makes the gate is get himself some pussy. For sure, it’s what everyone who’s about to go
says
they’re going to do.

I think that’s probably more about what’s waiting for you than anything else. If you’ve got a wife, or a girlfriend—or even some woman you’ve been pen pals with, then probably it’s true. Or if you’re with a crew, they’re supposed to have that all lined up and waiting for you. Throw you a party.

There’s other ways. One old guy—hell, he was probably younger than I am now, but this was during my first bit—he told me the only difference between getting married and picking up a hooker is that, one you buy, the other you rent. But he was in there for killing his wife, so even I could figure out that he probably wasn’t wrapped too tight.

Finding a hooker used to be easy. Almost no-risk. At least not for me. Guys who worked the badger game, they’d tell their girls never to pick up anyone who looked like he could do damage. Plus, they’d want a guy in a suit if they could find one. A suit and one of those little briefcases.

There’s a different play on that game, but it only works if the john is looking for underage. The girl has to look real young, and they work it like a shakedown, not a rough-off. I wouldn’t be a good mark for that one, either.

But everything’s so … extreme now. Either you pick a girl up off a stroll, or you use one of the out-call services. A stroller could be underage. Carrying anything from a disease to a straight razor. And you’d have to get it on in the car, real quick. An escort could be an undercover. Or a psycho who kept souvenirs.

Most of the strip clubs, they had private rooms where you could get whatever you were willing to pay for. But there’s always some Law sniffing around those places. Not for the sex, for the skim. So the undercovers spent their time in the upscale places. The more the joints charged, the more likely there was Law around somewhere.

On top of all that, I knew the owner of that jewelry store we’d hit was still trying to collect on the insurance. He had to sue to get that, which is how I knew about it, from the papers.

All the insurance company had was suspicion. Nobody had ever been bagged for the crime, and real thieves
had
done the work—even the cops told the papers that it had been a professional job.

I admit, reading that made me feel good. Respected. I can translate cop-talk, so I knew what they were saying: “Either we find ourselves an informant, or this case is going to the North Pole.”

I knew something else: even if the cops quit trying to solve that one, it was a sure bet that the insurance company wouldn’t. And some of their guys were supposed to be
real
good. I don’t mean any ex-cop with a few pals still on the job. I mean one of those serious, fuck-the-rules spooks. The kind who get fired for going over the line once too often.

It had to be the cops who told this guy that they knew I’d been in on that jewelry-store job, but that they could never prove it in court. That’s why I got a visit, the only one I got all the time I was away.

Now, you can refuse a visit. Even if it’s the cops, you can still say no. Or at least you could have your lawyer there. I didn’t recognize the name the CO told me, but I … ah, I guess I was just bored. Or maybe curious.

My visitor didn’t look like an ex-cop to me. More like an accountant. He was maybe in his fifties, in good shape, but everything about him was a kind of gray. I don’t mean he looked blurry or anything. And it wasn’t his suit, or even his skin color. It was like he was part of a dark cloud.

Sure enough, he started raining. “We know you were one of several individuals involved in that jewelry-store robbery,” he said, flat out.

I almost told him it wasn’t a robbery, it was a burglary, but I didn’t. I still can’t figure out
why
I’d want to tell him that.

“We don’t care about the people who did the grunt work,” he went on. “What we want is the man who planned it. And we know who that was, too.”

Maybe he’d been a soldier once, because when he said “grunt work,” he was watching my eyes. I don’t know what he was looking for, but I know it wasn’t there.

“What are you telling
me
all this for?” I asked him.

“Mr. Caine, I’m telling you ‘all this’ because you’re doing a prison sentence. When you come out, you’ll be broke. And the owner of
that jewelry store will be rolling in money. That doesn’t seem quite fair to me. We thought it might not seem fair to you, either.”

“I’m not in here for no robbery.”

“Yes, you are,” he said. That’s when I knew for sure that the big cop had talked to him, face-to-face. Woods was too smart to put my real alibi on paper, or talk about it on the phone. So, even if this guy had connections strong enough so they’d open the whole file on that jewelry job for him, my name wouldn’t be in it.

Who has that kind of connections?
I thought. Not the feds; everyone knows they don’t get along with NYPD. This guy looked like a private contractor, but he had to be working for some … company. A big company. Sure! The insurance company. Their investigators kept on going long after the cops quit. I heard of them staying on death cases for twenty years, trying to get their money back. Sent a lot of people to prison doing that. Same with fires. Your business is going belly-up, so you move all your stock out, then hire a torch. Might get by the arson squad, but the insurance guys were like the pit bulls of detective work.

Insurance companies. Yeah. They had the edge over the cops—a pile of cash outweighs a badge, every time. You can buy more than info with cash, you can buy people. That’s why the DA’s Office spends most of its budget on white-collar crime—mugging victims don’t make campaign contributions.

What I said about a sex jones? A little while back, the Governor lost it all. He started out being the Attorney General—that’s where he made his rep. The guy was no Eliot Ness; he got his name from going after investment bankers, not for racket-busting.

But he was running the biggest racket of them all. Everybody loved it when he made those places cough up zillions. The papers made him out to be this big hero, fighting for the little guy. Most of that money went to the State … and nobody went to jail. Solly told me it was one of the sweetest scams he ever saw.

So this guy had all the momentum behind him when he ran for Governor. Nobody even wanted to run against him. He won in a landslide. Everyone said he’d be the next President.

Then he got caught up in one of those escort deals, and lost it all.
That’s why you stay away from a guy with a sex habit. If it’s only a matter of time for them, it’s a sure bet you’ll be doing some yourself.

The gray-cloud man leaned in a little closer. “You wouldn’t have to give up anyone who was in on it with you,” he said. “Nobody on
your
side at all. Just the owner. He’s the one we want. He’s
all
we want.”

I just looked at him.

“You pleaded guilty to a crime you didn’t commit. We know why you did that.”

I blank-faced him.

“How would you like to have that rape conviction vacated? Wiped off the books.
And
full immunity for the jewelry-store robbery.”

“I’d like that fine,” I told him. “The first part, I mean. The other part, I don’t need that.”

“Because you’re going to let the statute run, I know. But a
rape
charge? A man like you, he wouldn’t want something like that on his record.”

“That’s true, I don’t.”

“What’s the problem, then? You think the locals haven’t already done a KA on you?”

I knew they must have. Too bad for them—I didn’t
have
any “known associates.” I always wanted to be one of Ken’s, and I was getting pretty close, but I don’t think I ever really made the cut while he was still alive. Now, every fucking punk whose idea of a classy job was a smash-and-grab claimed they’d been with Ken. Me, I would never disrespect him like that.

So I answered the visitor’s question: “What’s the problem? The problem is that I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if the owner was in on the job? You just did it as piecework? Hired labor? Please don’t tell me you weren’t even in on the shares.”

Ex-FBI?
I asked myself. This guy knew his way around a pro thief’s mind. At least enough to know I’d take the idea of being hired to carry bags as an insult. Giving me the chance to say something stupid, that was a pro move from
his
side, I had to give him that.

But “I don’t even know what ‘job’ you’re talking about” is all I said.

“Sure. That’s what I expected. And, between us, I respect you for it. That’s your reputation, Mr. Caine.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. And even if it wasn’t, you’ve only got a couple more years to go, so I won’t waste your time telling you the men who pulled that drill-through left a lot of evidence behind.…”

He let his words just kind of hang there, watching my eyes again.

It was too weak to even count as a bluff, and he knew it. So he finished up with: “But you’re a pro, and a pro only plays for money.”

“I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“No? Then let me spell it out for you,
very
clearly: you tell us what we want to know, you walk right out of here. And if what you have to say stands up in court—we’re talking
civil
court now, none of this ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ stuff—two hundred and fifty thousand. Cold cash, in your hand.”

“The IRS would love that.”

“If we were to pay a witness a contingency fee for his testimony, that would be a very serious crime, Mr. Caine. One single conviction for that sort of activity would topple even the most reputable company. A huge backlog of cases the company had won could be reopened. Nobody wants that kind of disaster, rest assured.
Nobody
.”

“Fuck!”

“What?”

“Mr.… Johnson,” I said, reading it off the business card he’d handed to me, “this is the first time in my whole life that I wish I
had
done the crime.”

He looked at me for a long minute. Looked hard. The gray got deeper. Darker.

“We’re not paying off on that jeweler’s policy. He’s got to sue us to get paid, and
that
case will still be open long after you walk out of here. On the back of the card I gave you is a number. Call it and you’ll reach me. Me, personally. Anytime, day or night.”

Then he got up and walked away.

So I was right—that guy
was
an insurance investigator, with plenty of clout behind him. I didn’t know if he had enough to pull tax records. On me, I’m talking about. But one thing I was sure of: “Robert Johnson” might not be his real name, but him being the kind of man to take a job all the way,
that
was real. I was glad it wasn’t me he wanted.