Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  Ehrlinger is at his desk pretending to write an opinion when the clerk admits us. The man has been a district judge for years, will never rise higher, but he is absolutely incorruptible, so inflexible that he is never more dangerous than now when, sitting in his capacity as the week’s special-duty magistrate—who hears in camera special pleadings that violate the court calendar—he is asked to alter the conventions.

  Like many humorless men, Ehrlinger loves to be entertained. I play the fool for him and he likes me for it.

  “Yes?” He looks toward us annoyed and glances at Morgan’s papers that the clerk has just placed on his desk. “Can’t this wait? This man’s just been arrested. The police can hold him for twenty-four hours. Why couldn’t he have his bail hearing tomorrow with everyone else?”

  “Influence,” I break in quickly. “You know these crooks, Your Honor. They have friends in low places.”

  “Oh, it’s you, Phoenician, is it?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Well, let’s get on with it, then.”

  “Wait just a moment, Your Honor. There’s something I’ve always wanted to do, sir.”

  “What? What’s that?”

  “No, no don’t pay any attention to me, sir. Just go on writing that precedent-making opinion.”

  “Here, what’s all this about then?”

  I rush to the hatrack where Ehrlinger’s robe is hanging. I lift its hem, draw it back and lean in under it, manipulating my right arm free of the robe and holding it up. Still bent down and hidden in the garment I pivot toward the judge. “Hold it.” I clench my exposed hand into a fist. “There! Got your picture, Your Honor!” I creep back out of the robe and stand up beaming.

  “Oh, Phoenician,” Ehrlinger says. “Tarnation, sir, a man your age. All right, now, all right,” he says like Ted Mack on The Amateur Hour, “that will do. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” He turns back to the file and I wink at Morgan. Ehrlinger studies the file for a moment and looks back up. “Well,” he says, “according to this there have been no previous arrests. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.” Morgan says.

  Ehrlinger grins. “Punched him, did you?”

  “I’m afraid I did, sir.”

  “Fetched him a good one?”

  “I guess so, Your Honor.”

  “Well, strictly speaking, you’re supposed to keep your hands to yourself, and since these students had a permit for their rally it was quite proper for the police to bind you over.”

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “Still—” Ehrlinger says.

  “When I heard him urging those kids to burn their draft cards—”

  “Couldn’t control yourself.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Well, when I was your age I’d like to think I’d have done the same.”

  “Hold on.”

  “He was a pimply, long-haired freak. To tell you the truth, Your Honor, it was more like slugging a girl.”

  “Well, you can’t say he didn’t have it coming.”

  “I’m even kind of ashamed.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Broke his jaw, did you?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir.”

  “Under the circumstances it would be hypocritical of me to congratulate you, Mr. Morgan, and the law’s the law. There were a lot of witnesses at that rally. I’m afraid you’ll have to appear.”

  “I know that, Your Honor.”

  “Still, I’ll try not to make it too hard on you. We’ll set a fifty-dollar bond.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. I didn’t anticipate any of this, so I don’t happen to have that much cash on me.”

  “I understand.”

  “Fifty dollars? Fifty?”

  “I’m glad you brought him by, Phoenician. You showed good judgment. There’s no sense in a man like this having to spend even an extra minute in jail.”

  “He broke his jaw!” I shout.

  “Yes,” the judge says.

  I turn to Morgan. “He was making a speech?”

  “Yeah,” Morgan says, “terrible things.”

  “A rabble-rouser?”

  “Until I clipped him.”

  “Judge, this man broke a boy’s jaw. No matter what you or I may think of the young man’s politics, it’s perfectly apparent that the kid was a student leader, a public speaker. Who can tell what disastrous effect Morgan’s punch might have on that young fellow’s future platform performances? Suppose he meant to go into radio? Or be a singer? To let Mr. Morgan off on a pledge of just fifty dollars—why it’s…it’s condoning, it’s tantamount to a dereliction of duty.”

  “Always having me on, Phoenician,” Ehrlinger says blandly. “That’s humor, so it’s all right, but blatantly to try to up the ante at a patriot’s expense just to line your pockets with a few paltry dollars, that’s something else. No. To be perfectly frank, Phoenician, I know as well as you do that the bail in these circumstances is five hundred dollars. It’s my little joke on you.”

  It’s useless. “Sure. That’s a good one, Your Honor.”

  “Just turn your documents over to the clerk on the way out. Your appearance is in three weeks, Mr. Morgan. Will that be all right?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. Thank you.”

  Outside I take out my checkbook. “Wait a minute,” Morgan says, “what are you doing?”

  “Writing a check.”

  “Hold on,” he says uncomfortably, “money doesn’t change hands unless I fail to appear.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Sign here, please. By my penciled x.” He’s glaring at me now, but he signs the forms and I give them to the clerk together with the check. We step into the elevator together.

  “Your fee’s what? Ten percent? Here’s your five bucks.” He holds the bill out stiffly to me but I make no motion to take it. I study him carefully. “What is it, the suit? It don’t cost five bucks to clean a suit. Give me two-fifty change.” I hand him two dollars and fifty cents and he tries to give me the five-dollar bill again. “Go on,” he says, “take it.”

  “It’s been taken care of.”

  “What do you mean it’s been taken care of?”

  “It’s been taken care of. There’s a gentleman waiting for you outside. A professional golfer I think he said.”

  Morgan’s face drains. “What for?” he asks hoarsely.

  “How should I know? Maybe he needs you to fill out a foursome.”

  “You son of a bitch,” he screams, “you sold me out!”

  “That’s right. I pick up a cool twelve fifty on the deal.”

  “Cocksucker!”

  He comes for me and I draw my gun and press the emergency button. The elevator jerks to a stop. “You’re Mafia and you don’t carry cash and you don’t pack a gun. Me, I’m an honest man and am lumbered with both. All right, I figure we’ve both been screwed. That’s why I’m doing you this favor.”

  “Some favor.”

  “You bet some favor. I was supposed to get fifteen hundred bucks for you. How the hell could I know all the cops wanted you for was for smacking some goddamn hippie? Painstaking attention to detail, we try harder. Bygones are bygones. The favor is I warned you.”

  “The guy’s outside, you said. What am I supposed to do?”

  “It’s a courthouse here. Confess a crime. Expose yourself to a meter maid. Up to you. I’m getting out on three. You’re not.” I press three. We stop and the door opens. “Vaya con Dios, Uncle Sam.” As I step out I bang a button, but before it can shut I lean my weight against the door. “One more thing. If you should happen to get away from that palooka, just remember your appearance is in three weeks. I’ve got fifty bucks tied up in you. If you don’t show up, I’ll come get you.” I release the door, it closes behind me and we’re quits.

  2.

  The bailbondsmen of Cincinnati, Ohio, eat their lunch across the Ohio River in what is now an enormous restaurant a mile south of Covington, Kentucky. Called The Grace and
Favor, its name sounds like an English pub, but it bears no resemblance to one. Built in the early twenties, it has had several avatars: speak-easy, night club, gambling casino; briefly a dance hall during the big-band era and then a roadhouse when that style went out after the war; a night club again in the fifties until the public had learned by heart on television the songs and routines of the stars who appeared there, then a sort of caterer’s hall where the Jews of Cincinnati bar mitzvah’d their sons and sprang for the enormous weddings of their daughters; a place where the Republican Party sponsored $1,000-a-plate dinners and the Democrats $25- and $50-a-ticket closed-circuit viewings of rallies staged in Hollywood and New York, with a cash bar available—until, in the mid-sixties, it finally became a restaurant, though it had always had a kitchen, food being a necessary concomitant of such places, prepared to serve at a moment’s notice the high roller’s steak and the gunman’s lobster.

  Probably because of its various incarnations, The Grace and Favor enjoyed a certain geisha ambiguity: no matter what its function at any given moment, there were always people around who remembered when it had had another; who saw a dance floor where the tables and banquettes now stood, or remembered the crap tables and chemin de fer and roulette where the dance floor used to be; who could still see the queer metallic aisles and pews formed by the rows of slot machines; who could conjure up through the altered walls and windows and raised platform (which was once space sunk feet beneath the ordinary sea level of the surrounding room) prior configurations, where coppers’ bullets, shattering mirrors, might have brought seven years bad luck had not the management seen to it that no such continuity was likely in the place’s chameleon transitions. But no one, save the émigré English gangster who built it and who was now an old man, had witnessed all of it, though some, even some here at the long table reserved for the bondsmen, had been there at the beginning. There had been lacunae. They’d had to leave town, perhaps, or been called to war, or suffered strokes; one thing or another had taken them away at a time when the establishment was undergoing one of its many transformations. Now, in perhaps its most effete phase, as a restaurant for Cincinnati businessmen and clubwomen, it did its biggest business at lunch. (It was genuinely immense. Its main room alone could handle 500 diners without giving the appearance of crowding them.) The new Interstate Federal Highway that led across the new bridge that spanned the Ohio River and actually provided it (since advertising is banned along federal highways) with its own broad grass-green reflecting sign (“Grace and Favor ½ Mi.”) and exit ramp (no one, not even the most cynical of the bondsmen, knew how this had been finagled, though the speculation was that perhaps one of those $1,000-a-plate dinners had made it possible) made it as accessible as any restaurant in Cincinnati.

  The bondsmen came in taxis, five or six to a cab, and rubbed their loud, heavily padded, sports-jacketed shoulders—they dressed in a sort of mid-fifties style, like customers in delicatessens on Sunday mornings—with the furred shoulders of the clubwomen and sober-suited buyers from the downtown stores. The London broil for $1.50 was a specialty. It was what they all ate, the distinction in their appetites if not their characters apparent only in the way they wanted it prepared and what they chose to gulp it down with.

  The Phoenician was not with them today, and since word of Ehrlinger’s joke had already been leaked, some of the bondsmen were disappointed that he was not there to take their ragging. None made any comment, however. This was not their usual social gathering. It was a new departure, more or less a formal business meeting, scheduled weeks ago. They had never had a business meeting and were a little uncertain how to begin. In the trade all their adult lives, these were men who had never tired of the infinite eccentricity that came their way, who by the simple process of constant witness had become expert raconteurs, sheer access to “material” democratizing any differences in imagination and delivery chat might once have existed between them. They looked around the table at each other, their glance finally settling on Lester Adams, a tall, speckled, taciturn bondsman in his seventies.

  Adams had got into bailbonds in the thirties when his farm was taken from him by the banks. He had come to Cincinnati to look for work and found $100 in the street on his first day in the big city. He was on his way to the courthouse (his small village of Bend, Ohio, had no jail, though it had a J.P. who functioned also as a law enforcement officer and Lost and Found service) to return it, carrying it openly in his hand because he had never seen such traffic before and was a little afraid he might be run over by a truck and the money found concealed on his person and people would wonder what a simple, destitute farmer like himself was doing with a hundred dollars cash in his pockets. He was looking for the Lost and Found, which was, he reasoned by analogy, in the immense courthouse. He waved the bill in front of him as he came down the corridors, snapping it like a flag of safe passage, the ostentation of the gesture only slightly less painful to him than his fear that people might think he came by it wrongfully, until he was stopped by a lawyer who was looking for a bondsman to put up $75 bail for his client.

  The lawyer, who had seen Adams waving his money, touched his sleeve to get his attention. “Bondsman,” the lawyer said, and Adams, thinking the man had said “Bendsman” and that it was a question, immediately answered “Yes.” The lawyer explained his client’s circumstances and Adams, who hadn’t followed a word of what the man was saying but who was chagrined not to have recognized a fellow townsman, thought: In the big city not a whole day and whole night and so shook that I not only don’t remember this feller though we come from the same village but don’t even recognize that he looks familiar to me, and nodded in agreement to everything the lawyer said, figuring out only as the lawyer went on and it was too late, and that it was his own pleasant nodding that had made it too late, that his old friend seemed to want to borrow seventy-five dollars of the farmer’s found hundred to help out a friend of his own—possibly, Adams imagined, another fellow Bendsman. When the lawyer’s client was produced, he thought: Yep. I’m in worse trouble than I thought, for this feller don’t look no more familiar to me than the first. Not in the big city a whole day and whole night and already I can’t remember nobody. Spoiled, he thought, cursing himself, spoiled rotten, bigger headed ’n a sow’s belly.

  So he was already prepared to turn over the hundred dollars to the lawyer and the twenty-five dollars change to the Lost and Found as soon as he could get away from him and find it when the lawyer said, “What about the form?”

  Adams shook his head sadly. “Ain’t got no farm. Lost the farm.”

  “Never mind,” the lawyer said, “I’ll be right back.” He was as good as his word. In a few moments he was back with a piece of paper. “This’ll do,” he said. “I got it from the clerk. Here. Sign.”

  And though Adams couldn’t read very well he could write his name all right—wasn’t that how he’d lost the farm in the first place?—and he imagined that this was something to do with the loan, it not seeming at all strange to him that in the big city, where everything else was turned around, it was the lender who should fix his name to an IOU rather than the borrower. Then he saw that it was going to be all right when the lawyer’s client signed too. “When do I give the seventy-five dollars?” he asked.

  “What?” said the lawyer. “Don’t worry, he isn’t going anywhere. Hey,” said the lawyer, “Baxter, pay the man.” And Baxter, the lawyer’s friend and fellow townsman, handed Lester Adams $7.50 for which Lester didn’t even thank him, so concerned was he that not only could he not place the lawyer and the lawyer’s friend, but couldn’t even remember Baxter now that he knew his name.

  It was all over in a few minutes; Baxter and the lawyer left the building and Adams was standing there with one hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. He was so confused by now that he couldn’t move, and others approached him—all asking, it seemed, to borrow money. Under no obligation to these new borrowers since none claimed kinship with him, he was still too good-natured
and too timid to have to tell them that he himself had no money and so he refused no one, and when he left the courthouse that day he had not only the hundred found dollars but eighty-four additional dollars that the new borrowers had pressed on him!

  Now Lester Adams was no dope. He knew a good thing when he saw one, and though he did not understand what had happened he understood that there had been a misunderstanding. When the corridors finally cleared, he approached one of the policemen and told him the story from the beginning and asked him if he could make anything out of it. The policeman couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes, but when he finally did he explained it all to Adams, careful to omit nothing, not the most trivial detail, since the cop felt that only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, could drive home to the farmer what an outrageous hick he was, and this, meant as cruelty, was the best lesson anyone could ever have had about the ins and outs of bailbondery.

  “I’ll be damned,” Adams said to all the policeman had told him, “I’ll be goddamned. That’s some business! Why, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that in a wicked city like Cincinnati there’s always some feller or other in trouble.” With some of his one hundred eighty-four dollars he hired a private tutor, and inside two months he had not only improved his reading skills but could read and understand the most complicated legal documents, and inside three he was licensed by the State of Ohio to set himself up in the bailbond business, and by the fourth he had already had to go out after Baxter, the original borrower, shoot him in the leg, and bring him back by force to the courthouse to stand trial as best he could on one leg. In the years since he had killed eleven men, was no longer a hick and could tell stories of depravity that curled hair.