Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel)

by William Lashner

  “Maybe seventy-five hundred, give or take.”

  “Which means more like nine thousand.”

  “Ten, actually. Which is why I’m here. Vic, you’re the bagman, right? You got clout with them downtown big boys—that’s what the papers said. You think you can fix them things for me?”

  “You want me to fix your parking tickets?”

  “Why else do you think I’m here?”

  “Okay, I see.” I put the parking slips carefully back in the bag, closed it up, leaned back in my chair, considered Guy Pelozzo for a moment.

  He thought I had clout with the downtown big boys, but I had no clout with the downtown big boys. He thought I could fix his parking tickets, but I couldn’t fix a loose screw with a screwdriver. The rules of professional responsibility and basic standards of ethics required that I disabuse him of his addled notions and send him on his way. And yet . . .

  What was a parking ticket, actually, but an opening demand in a negotiation between a car owner and the parking authority? And who better to handle such a negotiation than a card-carrying member of the bar association? And taking care of this bag of citations sooner rather than later could only adhere to Guy Pelozzo’s benefit.

  Where some in law school specialized in criminal law or copyright or environmental affairs, I specialized in raw opportunism. I had fallen into something, and, like a drunken tourist in Pamplona, I was going to run with that bull until it gored me through the liver.

  “I’ll need a thousand-dollar retainer,” I said without an ounce of waver in my voice.

  “Will cash be okay?” said Guy, pulling out a wad the size of a fist.

  “Cash is always okay, Guy. Leave the bag, get a receipt from my secretary, and I’ll be in touch.”

  “Vic, I appreciate this.”

  “It’s what I do, Guy, it’s what I do. But can I ask a question? With that wad, you could probably pay the whole thing off and still have enough left for new tires. Why go through me?”

  “I didn’t just fall off a boat here, Victor. I know the way the city works. You know someone, right?”

  “Yes, I know someone.”

  “Well, in this city, you got to know someone who knows someone to get anything done, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do, Guy. And I suppose, today, that someone is me. On your way out, please tell my secretary to send in the next on the list.”

  CHAPTER 16

  STONY MULRONEY

  There was a real-estate developer from Mayfair in a shaggy suit who had run into a zoning problem for the apartment building he was trying to renovate. There was a woman who wanted to cut her tax assessment by 50 percent. There was a strip-club owner who was getting hassled by the Department of Licenses and Inspections. There was a Pakistani restaurateur who wanted help getting her liquor license. There was a sea of folk who were anxious to throw their money at me so I could grease for them the grinding wheels of government, all because a slimy political reporter had written that I carried a bag filled with cash all about the town. And to each of them I gave a warm and comforting smile, and from each of them I received a retainer, and I told each of them I would do what I could to make the city bureaucracy work for and not against them.

  Is this a wonderful world or what?

  “Hello, friend. Do you by chance have a minute for a few words off the record?”

  The man in my doorway with the sharp, high-pitched voice, a voice like a grinding siren, was fat. I could use all kinds of politically correct terms to describe him, like stout or portly, but his very fatness precluded their utility. He was a series of circles—head, belly, thighs—a walking snowman in a black suit. His features were squashed flat by the fat in his face, his fingers were like overstuffed sausages. In one hand he held a soft-sided black satchel, in the other a gray fedora placed over his heart.

  Ellie came running up behind him, a yellow slip in her hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carl,” she said. “He got right by me before I could stop him. He refused to fill out an intake sheet.”

  “Now why in the wide world,” said the man, “would I want to fill out a silly piece of paper?”

  “Because it helps the process,” I said. “Go back to the reception area with my secretary and fill out a client intake form like everyone else. After that we can talk.”

  “You have the wrong impression, Victor. I’m not a client, and I hope never to be one.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I’m a colleague. Of sorts.”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “No, I’m not a lawyer, thank the heavens. I’m a professional man. I just want to have a word, you know, as a fellow member of the Guild.” He lifted his bag and rapped the doorframe with a fat knuckle. “You might find it worth your while.”

  I thought about it for a moment. This whole day was about unlikely opportunity. “It’s all right, Ellie,” I said. “I’ll take care of this.”

  “I also took a phone message for you, Mr. Carl,” she said, stepping past the man and placing the message slip on my desk.

  I took a quick look. Ossana DeMathis. “Wants to meet for drinks.” I felt my blood rise just a bit, even though I figured it was probably just that she had parking tickets of her own.

  “Thank you, Ellie,” I said. “Call her back and tell her anyplace after six will work.”

  On her way out, Ellie gave the man with the fedora a warning look that would have frightened a bear, but her stare just rolled off the man’s hide like so much drizzle. He smiled at her courteously as she passed, stepped inside my office, and gave me a quick wink before closing the door behind him.

  “The name is Stony,” he said, after he managed to squeeze himself down into one of the client chairs. The armrests creaked as he settled in. “Stony Mulroney. Yeah, yeah, I know, like a double Dutch rhyme, but trust me, it’s better than the real thing. My father was Briggs Mulroney—maybe you’ve heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “’Tis sad the way all the legends are fading. But they still whisper my father’s name with reverence in the stairwells of city hall. Briggs Mulroney: he made strong men weep.” The man put his hat back over his heart and raised his gaze to the ceiling. “May the son of a bitch rest in peace. My father, when he passed on to greener pastures, he passed on his responsibilities to me, including this one. So here I am. And what I came to say, Victor—I can call you Victor?”

  “Sure, you can call me Victor.”

  “What I’m here to say, Victor, is welcome.”

  “Welcome to what?”

  “The Gang, the Guild, the Order of the Sazerac, the Club of Kings, the Brotherhood. You’re one of us now.”

  “Is that good?”

  “My father used to say we are the princes of the street.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “Yes, sure it is, but give my father a half a bottle of Scotch and he’d sing ‘Danny Boy’ so loudly even the walls would weep. Now, as a friend and as a colleague, I want to give to you a gift of some advice that my father gifted on to me. It kept him in good stead, so long as he listened, and it’s been doing all right by me over the years.”

  “And you came by my office just to give me some advice.”

  “As a colleague, you know, friendly like. My father, he told me over and again, he said, ‘Stony, always use a rubber.’ ”

  I looked at the man and blinked twice.

  “Good advice, don’t you think? I mean my father, he knew something of what he was talking about, though if he followed his own advice, I wouldn’t be here, since my mom was just something he had on the side. And beyond that, if he followed his own advice, he’d still be carrying the bag, he would.”

  “What did he die of, syphilis?”

  “He was too hard a man for that. Syphilis was afraid of catching Briggs Mulroney. He no longer walks among us bec
ause he violated a second piece of advice that I’m giving you here and now—and all for free.”

  “You’re like a cornucopia of wisdom there, Stony.”

  “Scottish, actually, on my father’s side. But see, this is what he told me, this is the specific advice I wanted to pass on. As a colleague. And if my dad had followed his own advice, he’d be the one sitting here, welcoming you to the club, and shooting the breeze. Are you ready for this, Victor? Are you ready for a bracing piece of truth?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Keep your fucking face out of the papers.”

  Stony Mulroney said this with just the right amount of humor to cut the harshness, and just the right amount of harshness to make sure I knew it was less an avuncular piece of advice and more an admonition that I had better take seriously.

  “My father,” he continued, “thirty years he made his rounds and no one outside of the business knew his name. He used to tell me that half the job was keeping your fucking face out of the papers. Then he made the front page of the Inquirer and two weeks later he was gone. And the thing was, he was shocked as hell. I’ll always remember the expression on his face as we bid him adieu. Briggs Mulroney, looking as if a broad with tits like great mounds of taffy had just jumped out of his cake. You see, he forgot himself. Don’t you be forgetting yourself. It’s not just bad for you, Victor, it’s bad for all of us.”

  “Us?”

  “There aren’t many of us left, so we need to take care of each other. That’s why I’m here, giving you my father’s good and sound advice.”

  “It sounded a little like a threat, Stony.”

  “Yes, well, he was that kind of guy, my dad. Listen, we meet up every Thursday, five o’clock, over at Rosen’s. You know the place?”

  “On Twenty-Third?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “The Club, the Guild, the Order of the Sazerac, because that’s what we drink, the Brotherhood.”

  “The Brotherhood?”

  “The Brotherhood of the Bag.”

  “Ahh, yes,” I said, as understanding suddenly dawned, like the sun rising on the rocky outcrop of some dim lunar landscape. “How come I’ve never heard of your . . . your organization?”

  “We work hard not to be heard of, something you need to learn. Stop on by at Rosen’s, pal, and I’ll introduce you around. It’ll do you good. And if you need any help with anything, you just let me know. Anything. Except I can’t get you a taxi medallion—that’s Maud’s turf—and I don’t work north of Ogontz Avenue, ’cause Hump would have my liver. And criminal courts are too corrupt even for me; it’s like the judges each have six hands. But anything else, you let me know.”

  I stared a bit and processed it all and rubbed my jaw before saying, simply, “Anything?”

  “That’s the word.”

  I opened a desk drawer, took out Guy Pelozzo’s soiled brown paper bag, and tossed it to Stony.

  He opened the bag, took a whiff, and smiled, as if instead of stacks of creased and soiled parking tickets, it was filled with freshly baked bread. “Now we’re talking.”

  CHAPTER 17

  THE POLITICS OF HATE

  Do they know who she is?” said Ossana DeMathis, wide green eyes shining in the dim light as she rubbed the tip of her finger along the rim of her cosmo.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then why don’t they give out her name? Calling her Shoeless Joan is abominable.”

  “Abominable is the way the press likes it. The more they splash the nickname of a corpse on the cover, the more papers they sell.”

  “That’s filthy.”

  “News is a filthy business,” I said before downing a slug of my drink. It would have been more impressively hard-boiled, the whole act, if the drink weren’t a Sea Breeze. But, as I like to say, I’m man enough to drink a prissy drink. At least there wasn’t an umbrella in it.

  Of all the surprises that came my way the day after the Governor’s Ball, getting the message from Ossana DeMathis asking me out for a drink was the most surprising. And why, when I was still shaken by all I had seen in that alley the night before, had I agreed to have a drink with a woman I barely knew and wasn’t sure I even liked?

  Why the hell do you think?

  “How did they find out her real name?” she asked.

  “I told them.”

  “You knew her?”

  “A little.”

  She leaned forward, lowered her voice, locked her eyes on my own. “How?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not? Is it some rule or something?”

  “Yes, it is some rule or something.”

  “Was it . . . ? Did it . . . ?” She lowered her eyes and ran her finger up and down the stem of her cocktail glass. “Did it have something to do with . . . ?”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t say anything, Ossana, one way or the other.”

  “Fine,” she said, leaning back now, tilting her head with calculation. “You’re being quite admirable, I suppose. Most people are not so discreet when it comes to gossip.”

  “This is not gossip, this is a murder.”

  I took another swig of my drink. We were in a large dark lounge on the nineteenth floor of the Bellevue. Yes, that’s right, the very same hotel where I had been shanghaied by three cops the night before. Even with its lofty dimensions, it was an intimate place, with high trappings and soft lighting, a bar designed for seduction. The question was: Whose? Well, maybe that wasn’t the question. Maybe the question was: Did it matter?

  “Why did you call me this afternoon?” I said.

  “I wanted to see you.”

  “So you could pump me for information about a dead girl?”

  “Of course. Why did you agree to come?”

  “I like your eyes.”

  She smiled, looked down for a moment, lifted her cosmo and took a demure sip, licked her red lips with her pale tongue. “I’ve been told that green eyes are a mark of incipient insanity.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My psychiatrist. So what are you going to do about her?”

  “About your psychiatrist?”

  “About our Joan.”

  “That’s not her name. And what do you mean ‘do’? The cops are looking into the murder. They think it’s a robbery. Whatever they think, I’m going to stay out of their way.”

  “You’re sure that’s wise?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Because they called you to the crime scene and labeled you a person of interest.”

  “That’s just Detective McDeiss’s way of wishing me a good morning.”

  “And now they’re probably doing what they can to link you to what happened to her. We all know how easy it is for the police to influence statements, to create false identifications, to manufacture evidence. Do you think it’s wise to sit back and let them build a frame around you without your trying to figure out things on your own?”

  “I think it’s wise to stay out of McDeiss’s way. Always. Especially when there’s a buffet involved. I’m going to sit back and hope for the best.”

  “How has that worked out for you in the past?”

  “What’s that on your wrist?”

  “My watch?”

  “No,” I said. I gently took her right hand and turned it over. On the sweet flat of her wrist was the tattoo of a flock of birds in flight, tiny v’s diving and swirling. I rubbed my thumb across the swarm. Her skin was cool and dry.

  “Do you like it?” she said.

  “I have the urge to kiss it.”

  “I was young when I got it. I thought it was an expression of my startling individuality. But have you been to the beach lately? A tattoo is now as individual as
a seagull. Do you have one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “On my chest.”

  “Let me see.”

  I tossed my tie over my shoulder, opened the middle buttons of my shirt, pulled down my white T-shirt. She smiled when she saw it and rubbed her fingers gently over the heart.

  “Who is Chantal Adair?” she said.

  “She was just a girl, another girl who was murdered.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you get it?”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  She looked puzzled.

  “Somebody gave it to me when I was drugged and passed out,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t get it removed?”

  “I’ve grown to like it.”

  “You keep a tattoo you didn’t ask for to remember a dead girl you never met.” She pressed her full palm against my flesh; my whole chest froze for a moment from her touch. “You’ve turned your body into a memorial. Deep down, Victor, you’re actually one of the noble ones.”

  “Whatever I am deep down,” I said as I buttoned my shirt, “it is not noble. Did you see the way all the politicians looked at me when the police pulled me out of the ball last night?”

  “Like you had suddenly developed leprosy.” She examined the pink of her drink for a moment. “What is it like to be stared at like that, as if you’ve suddenly crossed some unforgivable line?”

  “I sort of liked it.”

  Her green eyes lit up at that. “I don’t understand how.”

  There is always the question of how to play it with someone new. Do you act the part they want you to play, the good-guy part or the bad-boy part, the intellectual part, the awkward-as-they-are part? It’s easy enough; the movies have given us all the right lines. Or do you do something radical and tell them one of the truths at the root of your soul, not because you only want to be loved for what you truly are—I don’t want to be loved for what I truly am, my whole life is a sprint from what I truly am—but because telling a foul truth is just a perverse enough strategy in this world of mendacity to spark an interest. And if you go with the truth gambit, which is just as manipulative as the play-a-part gambit, there remains the question of which truth to tell, since there are so many. We are, all of us, like Whitman in containing multitudes. We are, each of us, sad and angry and optimistic and hapless and sweet and sour and innocent and depraved. Which of these truths to expose?