Put a Lid on It

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I bet,” Meehan said, “normally that would have been a turf fight, too.”

  “You know it. Anyway, this morning I applied for your release into my custody, since you were being improperly held in a federal facility with no federal charges pending against you, and in that paperwork you became a minor.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  She shrugged, as though to say she wasn't making a big deal out of it but it was a big deal, and said, “That's how I got custody. Out of the MCC because you're not a federal prisoner, into my custody because you were being improperly held, and all at once the reason it was improper to hold you in the MCC is because you're a minor.”

  “Three-card monte,” Meehan suggested.

  “Very similar. Now,” she said, “a lot of people at both the federal and state level had to squint real hard when they passed that paperwork along, but everybody had been given to understand there were good reasons known only on high, and that absolutely no backlash would ever occur. So now the last step is Juvenile Court Justice T. Joyce Foote, who will take one look at you and know you're not in the normal way of PINS under her jurisdiction.”

  “I'm not a PINS,” Meehan said, feeling blank.

  “Person In Need of Supervision. It's the custodial phrase when dealing with minors.”

  Meehan nodded. “Okay. So all she knows is the paperwork, she looks at me and says, ‘You're no Pin,’ and boots paperwork right back out of her court.”

  “Chambers,” Goldfarb said. “I wouldn't parade you in juvenile court, believe me. And no, she won't boot it back, because she will see that everybody else, including people with more sway and import than her or anybody else in juvenile court has already signed off on it. And that's when I explain there are other humanitarian reasons for this special treatment, or perhaps you're just a major turncoat about to testify against everybody in the world. We'll shade between superfink and a wasting disease, without getting specific about anything, because we don't have to get specific. Are you following me?”

  “No,” Meehan said.

  “All right, fine,” she said. “Your job, in front of Judge Foote, is to look hangdog but shifty, which I think you can do, and maybe toss in a little physical weakness as well. Answer questions briefly, volunteer nothing.”

  “I have volunteered nothing,” Meehan told her, “every day of my life.”

  “Hold the course,” she advised. “Tomorrow morning gets rid of your legal troubles.”

  “Hallelujah,” he said.

  “However,” she told him, “do remember that you are, or will be, on probation, and in my custody. There's still a leash on you. If you try to pull a fast one, run away, fail to deliver to Jeffords and Benjamin, everything that was done gets undone, and you're on your way back to the MCC.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Light bounced off her spectacles as she studied him. “You are going through with this, aren't you?” she asked. “All the way.”

  “All the way,” he agreed.

  “Good.” She peered ahead, where much brighter light gleamed at the next intersection. “That looks like Seventh Avenue.”

  He looked around to orient himself. “Yeah, I think it is.”

  “We can find a cab there,” she said, picking up the pace. “Come on, I'll drop you.”

  As they walked, Meehan looked back at the leafy darkness from which they were emerging. Too bad, really.

  32

  EVERY TIME, EVERY single time. Every time Meehan walked into room 318, there was that red light on the telephone, blinking like a reflex. Well, this time it couldn't be Goldfarb, whom he'd just left in the cab out front, so he went over to see what was what, and the nonvoice informed him he had two messages. Great to be popular.

  The first was from Bernie: “We could meet Bob at eleven in the morning, out here. Okay?” Bob would be the driver, Bob Clarence.

  And the second message was from Jeffords: “I understand you're getting your day in court tomorrow. Congratulations. I'll be coming up in the afternoon to get a progress report. Call me on my, uh, private line when you get out of court.”

  Progress report. Tomorrow was filling up, which Meehan could have done without.

  The clock radio bolted to the bedside table read 9:43. Bernie would be up, but would he be in or out? Meehan found the number in his memory bank, dialed it, and the missus answered. He said, “It's me, Meehan, again. Is Bernie around?”

  “He's watching one of his favorite shows.”

  “Oh. Does he want to call me back?”

  “Hold on, I'll ask,” she said, and clomp-clomped away, and the next voice he heard was Bernie: “You got my message.”

  “I don't want to take you away from your favorite show.”

  “It stinks, actually,” Bernie said. “We on for tomorrow?”

  “I can't,” Meehan told him. “I gotta go to juvenile court.” When Bernie responded with nothing but silence, Meehan added, “It's okay, it's part of the process.”

  Bernie said, “Do I wanna know what process?”

  “The process we discussed, that has me here instead of downtown.”

  “Okay, fine, skip it. Afterward?”

  “Well, no, I got another thing then.”

  “Meehan, we're talking about doing this thing day after tomorrow.”

  “I know that.”

  “Bob needs a meet, he needs the story from you.”

  “But he's free, he can do it.”

  “Maybe. He'll decide after he hears the story from you.”

  Meehan frowned at the clock radio. “How about tonight?”

  “Tonight? He's in the city, he won't want to come out here tonight.”

  “Bernie,” Meehan said gently, “I'm in the city, too.”

  There was another little silence from Bernie, but this time Meehan waited him out, and finally Bernie said, “You mean, I should drive into the city tonight.”

  “After your favorite program.”

  “No, screw that, I hate that show, it's just habit. Let me see can I reach Bob, and I'll call you back.”

  “Fine,” Meehan said, and spent the interval with the television set, trying to figure out which of these dogs on view was Bernie's favorite program.

  All the dogs were ending, to be replaced by the ten o'clock dogs, when the phone rang and it was Bernie, sounding very troubled: “He could meet at midnight.”

  “Good,” Meehan said.

  “Jeez, Meehan,” Bernie said. “To tell you the truth, I don't wanna drive into the city at midnight.”

  “You've become suburban, Bernie,” Meehan told him.

  “It's the real me, coming to the surface,” Bernie said. “Whyn't you meet him without me?”

  “How would I recognize him?”

  “I'll describe him to you, and you to him.”

  Meehan wasn't sure about this. The way it worked, since you were in the process of something illegal, the way the ten thousand rules laid it out, you do not meet with a stranger. You meet with somebody you know who knows the stranger and can introduce you.

  But Bernie had, as Meehan had pointed out, turned suburban in his middle years. There was no getting him into Manhattan at midnight, not even on a Monday. So Meehan sighed and said, “Okay, describe him.”

  “He's black.”

  Meehan waited. Then he said, “I knew that part. So where are we meeting, a Klan convention, he's the only black guy there?”

  “No, he wants to meet at a garage on a Hundred Twenty-fifth Street and Amsterdam Avenue.”

  “That's Harlem,” Meehan said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Bernie said. “It's an all-night gas station garage, I guess he hangs out there or something.”

  “He's not gonna be the only black guy at a Hundred Twenty-fifth Street and Amsterdam Avenue,” Meehan said. “Give me more description.”

  “He's maybe forty, wiry, not too tall, always wears a hat, maybe a cap. I think he's bald under there.”

  “Well, I'll try it,” Meehan said.

>   “A Hundred Twenty-fifth and Amsterdam,” Meehan said.

  The cabby, a recent immigrant from Latvia, turned to look at Meehan through the bullet-proof Plexiglas. “You sure?”

  “Positive,” Meehan said. “There's a garage there that—”

  “Oh,” the Latvian said, “you're gonna drive a hack. Sure. I still gotta charge you.”

  “That's okay,” Meehan said, and sat back. If he said he wasn't gonna drive a hack, what would that do? Prolong the conversation.

  The Latvian's conclusion, it turned out, had not been that improbable a jump. Just off the intersection was an oasis of bright light amid the surrounding semidarkness, and this bright light gleamed all around a gas station and parking building that called itself, according to the big metal sign out by the street, UPTOWN 24/7. Meehan got out of the cab and looked at the taxis parked all around the place, the gas station cashier behind his Plexiglas window in the face of the brick building, the parking entrance next to the cashier, and the sign on the wall saying you could also rent a car here, if you wanted. Everything automotive, under one roof.

  Meehan walked over to the parking entrance, and inside was an open concrete-floored space with DRIVE UP and STOP HERE signs, and more taxis parked in the area in the back, and a concrete ramp leading upward, and off to the side a set of little offices behind big windows. Half a dozen black guys in white shirts, black pants and black bow ties stood around in clumps, talking; the staff. One of them wore a New York Yankees cap, frontward. He was about forty, wiry, not too tall.

  It was a different one who came toward Meehan, hand out for a claim check, saying, “Evening.”

  “Hi,” Meehan said. “I'm here to see Bob Clarence.”

  The air very subtly shifted all around him. People kept talking, but they weren't listening to each other any more, they were listening to Meehan. People kept facing one another, but out of the sides of their heads they were looking at Meehan. The guy who'd wanted his claim check dropped that hand to his side, frowned, looked thoughtful, then shook his head. “I don't think I know him,” he said. “Bob what?”

  “Sure,” Meehan said, and went over to stand in front of the guy in the Yankees cap, who kept talking about NASCAR racing with his friends until Meehan said, “Bernie says, under that hat, you're probably bald.”

  Bob Clarence gave Meehan an outraged look. “He does? Where's he come off with that shit?”

  Meehan leaned in to peer at Clarence's hair around the edges of the cap. “I thought black guys never got bald,” he said.

  “You can lay off lookin at my head,” Clarence said. “And you can tell me who the hell you're supposed to be.”

  “Meehan,” Meehan said, and shrugged. “If there's a password, Bernie didn't tell me.”

  “Bernie doesn't know everything,” Clarence said, still irritated. “Come on. Later,” he told his friends, and led Meehan back outside, where he pointed westward and said, “We'll grab some Chinese.”

  “I already had Caribbean tonight,” Meehan told him, walking beside him, the oasis of light receding behind them. “Goat elbow, very good.”

  Clarence looked interested. “Down in the West Village?”

  “You know the place?”

  “The goat is good,” Clarence agreed. As they walked he took off and pocketed his clip-on bow tie, unbuttoned his top shirt button, and folded his shirtsleeves back. “You're gonna like this Chinese,” he said. “They do stuff with shrimp you won't believe.”

  There are worse things in this world, Meehan thought, than two dinners in one night. “Lead on,” he said.

  The shrimp was very good, and so were the spring rolls, and so was the whole baked fish. They had Tsingtao Chinese beer, and Clarence wielded his chopsticks like samurai swords, wearing his hat while he ate, and through the meal Meehan told him his story. When he finished, Clarence said, “They'll never do that for a black guy. Never.”

  “They don't do it for a lot of white guys,” Meehan assured him.

  Clarence drank Tsingtao and brooded. “I'm not sure I wanna help this president,” he said.

  “I figure I'm helping me,” Meehan told him. “The president's piggy-backing.”

  “But if the law walks in on us,” Clarence said, “this president of yours isn't gonna know us.”

  “That's why we gotta do it right,” Meehan told him, “with exactly the right people.”

  “Tell me about this old guy we're gonna heist,” Clarence said. “I don't know if I like that, boostin from some old guy.”

  “Well, you're gonna love him,” Meehan said. “He thinks everybody's scum except him. The great unwashed, he says.”

  Clarence considered that. “Anti-black, you mean?”

  “Clendon Burnstone IV doesn't fine-tune,” Meehan said.

  “Well, maybe that's okay,” Clarence decided, “if that's the way he is.”

  “He was on our side in the Revolution,” Meehan said, “but he's been against us ever since.”

  “Okay, fine. You got a scheme for how to do this?”

  Meehan told him the scheme. Clarence made an Olympic symbol on the shiny hard tabletop with his Tsingtao bottle while he listened, then finished the beer and said, “That's a mean thing to do to a guy that age.”

  “It's the meanest thing I could think of.”

  “I tell you what,” Clarence said. “I'll drive for you, I'll do this thing, but I'm gonne be in that limo with that old man a pretty long time, and if I decide that's too mean a thing to do, old guy like that, I'll just drive him right back home, right into the middle of your caper, let you people sort it out.”

  “I'm not worried,” Meehan said.

  “Okay,” Clarence said. “Just so you know how I feel.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  “Let's see what fate thinks about all this,” Clarence said, and reached for one of the fortune cookies in the middle of the table.

  Meehan took the other, cracked it open, and read the slip of paper: “A silver tongue is more valuable than a golden sword.” And what was that supposed to mean?

  Clarence said, “Listen,” and read: “Age must be honored, but youth must be served.”

  Meehan said, “Okay, whose side are they on?”

  “What does yours say?”

  So Meehan read it to him. They both thought about this array of Oriental wisdom for a while, and then Clarence said, “Fuck it. We'll just do it and see what happens.”

  33

  OKAY; JUST ONCE, when he got back to 318 from meeting with Bob Clarence, the message light wasn't blinking on the bedside phone, but at nine the next morning, when he returned to the room after a breakfast in the neighborhood, there it was again, red-red-red, and turned out to be Goldfarb: “I'll pick you up in front of your place at nine-thirty.”

  So he went down to the street at nine-thirty, and she wasn't there on the sidewalk, but a minute later she was there, in a limo. Waving at him from the back seat of a limo, with a black chauffeur in uniform at the wheel. Feeling a weird moment of paranoia or surrealism or something, Meehan bent to check, but the chauffeur wasn't Bob Clarence. Still, to have a life suddenly full of limos was kind of unsettling.

  Meehan slid into the back seat next to Goldfarb, who grinned at him, said, “Good morning,” and before he could answer leaned forward to call to the chauffeur, “Okay.”

  They pulled into traffic, the chauffeur trying to get over to the left lane, and Goldfarb grinned at Meehan again, saying, “Not bad, huh?”

  “No, not bad,” Meehan agreed. “I thought we were gonna do the subway, so this is not bad.”

  “Jeffords called me last night,” she said.

  “Yeah, he left a message in my room. He's gonna be up here, he wants me to call him and give him a report after court.”

  “I know about that,” Goldfarb said, as the chauffeur managed the slow and tricky left onto Forty-second Street. “What he called me about was to authorize me to hire this car this morning, to take you out to your court date. That's
the word he used, authorized.”

  “Meaning he'll pay you back.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How come?” Meehan asked. “This doesn't seem like the Jeffords I know.”

  “He finally believes,” she said, “that you're actually going to do it, and what he said to me was, he wants to keep you happy.”

  “Well, that's nice,” Meehan said. “We're seeing eye to eye there. I want to keep me happy, too.”

  “Chambers” was a little room about the size of the box a grand piano might come in, with a low ceiling crisscrossed by cables and pipes, and two tall narrow dirty windows with a view, beyond an air shaft, into a larger brightly fluorescented room lined with rows of gray metal filing cabinets, among which people appeared and disappeared, moving slowly and bearing handfuls of paper and facefuls of distraction, like laboratory animals kept in the maze just a little too long.

  Chambers itself was very crowded, with a stubby metal desk facing away from the windows, two tall filing cabinets on the left, two wooden armchairs facing the desk, and a library table on the right piled with children's books and magazines and soft toys. The dark wood entrance door was in the wall opposite the air shaft, flanked by bookshelves floor to ceiling, crammed with law books and more kid lit.

  Judge T. Joyce Foote, whose office this was, deep in the bowels of this massive old stone government building far in the outer boroughs, rose to greet them when they entered, and Meehan thought immediately that she looked like Mrs. Muskrat in some of those kiddy books over there, who would live in a tree trunk, with curtains on the windows, and make pies. She was black, very stout, short, dressed fussily in purple and ribbons. On her face were eyeglasses the exact rebuttal of Goldfarb's black-rimmed monsters, being delicate glass ovals suspended in the slightest possible lines of golden wire. She smiled a greeting, but there was something sharp and calculating in the eyes behind the granny specs. She was a Mrs. Muskrat who knew very well how to live deep in these woods.

  She smiled at Goldfarb and then at Meehan, and then at something in between them, or behind them, at waist level. As the smile became confused, Meehan realized she was looking for the child. Should he raise his hand?