Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel)

by William Lashner

  “Do you want to know a truth about me, Ossana?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a slight smile. “Can I handle the truth?”

  I had thought she was a bit stiff, a bit proper, Ossana, the Congressman’s sister, but there was a streak in her that was catching me off guard. Okay, it was time to see how the rawest of my truths worked with green eyes.

  “You know all those people at that little masquerade party we attended last night?” I said.

  “The Governor’s Ball wasn’t a . . . Yes, okay. All the people in their glittery costumes.”

  “The rich and powerful and their wives and their husbands and their lovers and their beards and their lackeys? The truth of the matter is I hate them, all of them, and they can sense it on me like a stink. It’s nothing personal. I happen to hate everyone more successful than I am, which is pretty much everyone. You know what Gandhi said, ‘If you don’t hate something, you end up hating nothing.’ ”

  “Did he say that?”

  “If he didn’t, he should have. Well, I hate them all, the posers and the flunkies, the players and the pawns, the baldly self-serving puffed up with their self-righteous senses of entitlement. I want to be them, too, I want all their perks and powers—their cars, their houses, their illicit lovers—I want to be them so badly that sometimes I piss blood at night from all the wanting. I want to join their clubs and laugh at their jokes and play golf on their courses and have sex with their daughters and broil like a lobster on the lounge chair right next to their lounge chairs at their swim clubs on the Vineyard. But all of that doesn’t mean I don’t hate them, too. So to have them look at me like I’m a danger to everything they hold most dear, like I’m a leper, well, that’s fine. That’s more than fine. It feeds the soul.”

  She took in a breath, as if I had just touched some intimate part of her. “All that hate, my God. It must be poisonous.”

  “Not really. It’s a cheerful hate.”

  “Does it include my brother?”

  “You bet.”

  “And me?”

  “Were you there with diamonds dripping from your ears?”

  “Why do I find all of this thrilling? Why do I suddenly want you to ravish me with your hate?”

  “Because you understand the power of it, the way it nourishes the will and fires the spirit and engorges the flesh. My hate is hard and relentless, stiff and thick and unyielding, charging like a stallion across a fertile green meadow. And do you want to know a secret, Ossana?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  I leaned forward and she did too. Our faces were close and our lips were closer. “It lasts a damn sight longer than four hours.”

  CHAPTER 18

  UNEXPECTED GUEST

  This is a complete disaster,” said Melanie Brooks to me on the phone after I returned to my apartment, still tipped from the waves of alcohol and lust that had flooded through me at the Bellevue. I sat down casually on my battered red couch, crossed my legs, loosened my tie, winked. I wasn’t alone.

  “Can we talk about this later?” I said.

  “No, we can’t, dearheart. Colin worked for us for years and never had so much as a mention in the press, and here you are, with us for just days, and already you’re on the front page of the Daily News. Don’t you know the first rule of this business?”

  I looked up at my guest and said, “Always use a rubber?”

  “Victor, I’m serious.”

  “Then it must be: Keep your fucking face out of the papers.”

  “Yes, exactly, and put so succinctly, too.”

  “I received this selfsame advice just this afternoon, so you’re not telling me anything new. But I didn’t ask to end up looking guilty as sin on the front page of the paper. It just sort of happened.”

  “It is unacceptable.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if Sloane hadn’t been in court that day, and he was only in court that day because of Colin, so it’s not all on me. And, I must say, it has paid some dividends. My waiting room was full this morning and I have a boatload of new clients.”

  “Because you’re connected to a murder?”

  “No, because they think I’m connected, period.”

  “Victor, Victor, what are we going to do with you?”

  “Pay me, that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to pay me.”

  “Well, at least you’re learning. Tell me the truth now: Are you involved in the murder? Have you gotten in that deep with these snakes?”

  “No.”

  “But you knew her.”

  “I met her once.”

  “Because of the Congressman?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? Did you give her something?”

  “I gave her what you’d expect me to give her.”

  “And what did she give you?”

  “I can’t say anything more.”

  “Don’t give me that privilege dance. I invented that privilege dance. Remember who you work for.”

  “And pray tell, Melanie, exactly who is that?”

  “It sure as hell is not DeMathis. He’s a politician, for God’s sake. We don’t work for politicians. You might as well be hauling mounds of manure for a dung beetle.”

  “Then maybe it’s time for you to tell me who we really report to.”

  “There are levels to everything, and all you need to know is your own level. You’re working for me. Now Sloane will be looking for every opportunity to link you with the Congressman and we can’t have that. But there is still work to be done that will require your special talents. Mrs. Devereaux has more donations to make, there are places those donations must go, and there is still the matter of digging the dirt on Thomas J. Bettenhauser.”

  “You know about that?”

  “I know my business, and you, dearheart, have become my business. From now on you’ll receive your instructions regarding the Congressman from another source.”

  “You?”

  “God, no, I have standards. Patience. But once you get your instructions, no freelancing. Follow your instructions to the letter unless I tell you otherwise.”

  “You sound sexy when you’re in charge. What are you wearing?”

  “Stop it.”

  “There used to be a heart beating in there.”

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Are you ever?”

  “Not anymore. And what a relief that is. You should try it, Victor. I could get you a dose of Depo-Provera, it would do wonders for your disposition. We have a supply on hand to give to candidates who can’t stop their peckers from sabotaging their electoral chances. But I want you to be clear on one thing more. Under no circumstances are you in any way to get in the middle of that murder investigation. You steer clear of the papers, you steer clear of Detective McDeiss, you steer clear of the entire mess.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Remember where I found you, desperately clutching the courthouse wall, hoping to stop your spiral into financial ruin.”

  “I remember.”

  “Make sure you do. Now be a good boy, Victor, and do as you’re told.”

  When I hung up, I took a moment to straighten the pleat that should have been in my pants. That last line of Melanie’s had stuck in my throat like a bone. Telling me to do as I was told was one of my mother’s favorite admonitions. The disappointment on her face when I failed her was as close as I would get to a declaration of her love. Since then, not doing what I was told has become as much a habit as a matter of principle. Yet I surely did enjoy the money train I was on since hooking up with Melanie. I took a moment to try to reconcile my dual inclinations.

  “Trouble?” said my guest.

  “There’s always trouble.”

  “I suppose next you’ll be telling me Trouble’s your middle name
,” she said.

  “More like Shelby.”

  “Really?”

  “No. My parents didn’t love me enough to give me three names, I’ve only got the two. How many do you have?”

  “Five.”

  “That figures. Now what again are you doing here?”

  Amanda Duddleman leaned forward and clasped her hands together as if she were praying to me, or trying to sell me insurance, one or the other. “I came here tonight, Kip, because I desperately need your help.”

  CHAPTER 19

  BLIND AMBITION

  Duddleman 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 De
tective 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

  They 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.