Down Here

by Andrew Vachss

  “Why not?” Pepper said, a faint giggle under her voice. “It’s a nice, intimate little place. And you can decide where you want to go from there.”

  “Eleven,” I promised.

  “Okey-dokey,” she said.

  I admired Pepper’s professionalism. Even if there was a wiretap order—which was way past unlikely—and even if they somehow knew which phone Pepper was using that night, nothing in our conversation would tell a listener that my date for the night was named Molly.

  I started to make myself some soup, and sat down to think things through.

  A few years back, Max and I were sitting in my booth at Mama’s. It was late afternoon, and we had already spent hours handicapping the night’s races at Yonkers. Mama had finally lost her patience. If we had been playing cards, she would have been fine with it. Mama loves gambling, but betting on horses always struck her as downright degenerate.

  “No work today, right?” she demanded.

  “We’re waiting, Mama,” I explained, for the fourth time. “We can’t go to work until tonight.”

  “Work for making money. What you do, you lose money. Big circle, no end.”

  Max hotly defended our two-man gambling syndicate, pulling out his notebook, with our fully documented record for the year to date. We had wagered a total of six thousand four hundred and twenty dollars, and had a solid sixty-five hundred in the kitty.

  “So?” Mama sneered, profoundly unimpressed. “You not lose money, not lose money yet anyway. What is that? Just—how you say it?—big . . . hobby. Men always have hobby. Woman’s hobby is work.”

  “We are working, Mama. It’s just not time yet to—”

  “Sure, sure. Okay for you, Burke. You have no wife,” she said, adding a new accusation to her endless list. “And no baby. But you,” she said, pointing a gun-barrel finger at Max, “no excuse.”

  When Immaculata first came into Max’s life, Mama dismissed her as a “bar girl,” a wide-ranging insult that could mean just about anything. But a nanosecond after Max announced he was going to be a father, Immaculata went from no-status to goddess in Mama’s eyes. And ever since, Mama had been pounding Max’s blessed fortune in finding such a perfect woman into his head.

  Max spread his hands, put a “What the hell did I do?” expression on his face.

  “You know how cook? Make food?” Mama asked, miming the question as she spoke.

  Max made a stirring motion with his fist.

  “What you make?” Mama demanded.

  Max sipped from an imaginary spoon.

  “Soup? You make soup?”

  Max grinned, gesturing a man opening a can, pouring into a pot, turning on a stove, stirring.

  “That not make soup. In kitchen, here, make soup. Where you get soup?”

  Max gestured his way into a grocery store.

  “So! You not make soup, you buy soup, right?”

  Max nodded, glumly.

  “What you get soup with? Money. How you get money? Work. Not play games, work. Okay?”

  Max and I decided we’d start a little early that evening.

  Now I waited for the soup to warm up on my hotplate. It had come from a container I keep in the refrigerator. Mama’s soup, sure. But at least it wasn’t from a can.

  The “message center” is a basement poolroom, in a building no reputation could be low enough to live up to. Inside, it’s like the Fifties never went away. They’ve got a few top-shelf tables—all heavy, carved wood, with green felt and leather pockets. Lights suspended from the ceiling on long chains hang over the tables; overhead wires are strung with beads, for scorekeeping. It’s no Julian’s, but not even Julian’s is, anymore.

  The guy who runs the joint has been an old man since I was a kid. Rumor has it that he was a pro once, but nobody’s ever seen him pick up a stick. He keeps the tables beautifully maintained—tight, grippy cloth, fresh rails, and dead level. But that’s strictly a labor of love; people who come to his basement mostly don’t give a damn.

  The old man is a human telegraph machine. You drop your money in the slot, you send a message. Someone wants to reach out for you, they do the same.

  There are other services, too. I have my own cue, a custom job. It was built back before they used special breaking cues for nine-ball. Weighed in at a svelte thirty-two ounces even before I wrapped the butt end in several layers of friction tape. Like all of the good ones, it unscrews in the middle.

  But mine has another feature, a little compartment in the fat end. If you know which cue is mine, you come in and ask the old man to rent number thirteen, and he hands it to you . . . after you put up a thousand-dollar deposit.

  When you’re done playing with my cue, you bring it back. The old man gives you nine hundred and fifty bucks, and removes your message. And whenever I drift down to the basement, I can read whatever you paid the half-century to write down for me . . . after I pay the old man the storage fee that’s always past due.

  The system is no good for emergencies, and everyone knows it. Even telling the old man direct is only going to work if I call in. He won’t make calls, not for any kind of money. Not to anybody, which is why he’s been in business so long.

  The poolroom may have regulars—I don’t go there enough to know—but it’s not Cheers. Greeting anyone coming in by name would be a mistake, one the old man never makes.

  I got there around ten, ransomed my cue, and pointed at one of the two tables that are set at opposite ends of the basement, each in a separate corner. I walked over, took the triangular RESERVED sign off the felt, and started knocking the balls around, getting the feel.

  If I’d taken any table but one of the two corner ones, sooner or later someone would have drifted over, asked me if I wanted to play something for something. But everyone knew what the corner tables were for. You rent those, too.

  It only took a few minutes for me to realize that it wasn’t just a case of me being rusty—I wasn’t the same, and I never would be. My eyes aren’t just two different colors now—they don’t work as a team anymore. When you lose binocular vision, you lose depth perception, too. Not such a big deal driving a car—which is why they’ll give a one-eyed man a license—but you’ll never get work threading needles.

  I tell myself that I’m a man who doesn’t mourn his losses, just cherishes his memories. Sometimes, that’s the truth. And sometimes, when I think of Pansy, or of Belle, it’s a lie.

  If you believe only a crazy man would miss a dog and a woman with equal pain, you don’t know what love-driven loyalty means to our tribe. Or what we’ll do for it. Do to you, if you get in its way.

  I couldn’t ever hope to find the cops who shot Belle. Anyway, that hadn’t been personal. She had drawn their fire on purpose, to keep them off me, out-driving the whole pack of them, heading for the junkyard. She won that race, but it was her last one. I found her, riddled, hanging on until I could get there and tell her I loved her. The only time I ever did.

  Belle’s mother was her sister. She had sent Belle running when her father put Belle next on his list. Belle was still running when I met her. A pro getaway driver, as good behind the wheel as any I had ever known. When she put her heart in my hands, she put her trust in me, too.

  After she left me, what I had to do was written as clear and clean as her love had been. I found her father, and I killed him.

  Years later, people who’d been paid to cancel my ticket set up an ambush. They sprung their trap on me, never expecting a hellhound to come charging out of the trunk of my car. By the time Pansy had ripped out the throat of one of them, they were shooting in self-defense.

  As soon as I escaped from the hospital, I went looking for them. That took a lot longer, because I didn’t know who they were. But I found them. When I did, the pain didn’t stop. But it changed.

  I’ll never truly know if I’d done all that for them, or for me. Not for sure. What I did know is, they wouldn’t have cared.

  You’re here now, I said in my mind. Get what yo
u came for.

  I didn’t concentrate on pocketing balls, only worked the white one, focusing on my stroke. I was just starting to feel okay about my draw when Molly Sands came downstairs.

  It only took a second for his cop’s eyes to pick me out. It took less than that for everyone else there to make him for what he was.

  “A little nine-ball?” I asked him.

  “Eight-ball’s my game,” he said. “And I’m used to smaller tables.”

  Bar tables, I thought, keeping it off my face. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll rack them, you break.”

  Sands was an appalling player. He managed to pocket a solid, then muffed an easy shot on the three ball.

  “What’s new?” I asked him, as I chalked up.

  “The techs got a good look at the slugs.”

  “And?”

  “They can’t tell for sure, without a barrel to match them to, but the guy they have in charge says he’d bet a year’s pay it didn’t come from any cheap piece. He says you can always tell the workmanship, and whatever the shooter was using was quality.”

  “Doesn’t mean much,” I said, pocketing the ten in the corner, then deliberately blowing a shot on the fifteen.

  “Well, a gangbanger might use a cheap-ass twenty-five—in some neighborhoods, they sell them like hot dogs. But a baby caliber in a good gun, that’s something a pro might use.”

  “A twenty-two, sure,” I agreed. “They hit hard enough, if you place them perfect. But a twenty-five? Never heard of it.”

  “I did,” Sands said. “After I checked around, I heard of something even smaller, too. Beretta used to make a twenty-two short. Smaller than a twenty-five. The whole piece, I mean, not just the bullet. Fucking tiny. The gun guy I spoke with even said it was called an ‘assassin’s special.’ Mossad used to use it, all the time.”

  “Mossad? Yeah, I’m so fucking sure. Every gun nut around has got a Mossad story, but you’re grasping at straws with this one, pal.”

  “Is that right?” he demanded, face flushing in the overhead lights. “How can you be so positive? You take subsonic ammo, put a silencer on the piece, you could probably do someone in church, nobody’d even look up from praying. And, remember, the shooter picked up his brass; that’s a pro touch.”

  “You’re riding the wrong bus,” I said. “A pro wouldn’t use a bullet like that anywhere but a head shot. Never mind fucking Mossad, okay? Caliber like that, those guys would have gone for a triple-tap. Unless you’re saying the ammo was tipped?”

  “No, it was all hardball.”

  “No hollowpoints, no cyanide for a make-sure, and no head shots. Plus, whoever tried to do him didn’t stay around long enough to finish the job. Yeah, you’re right—a professional assassin would be my first guess, too.”

  “They could have heard someone coming,” he said, lamely.

  “Not from the way you laid it out the first time. Anyway, we both know, someone walks into the middle of a pro hit, there would have been one more body.”

  The waiter cleared away the remnants of our meal, asked us if we wanted dessert. Laura Reinhardt raised her eyebrows at me. “I could go for a little tórta,” I said.

  She held up two fingers.

  “Now, that may have been going too far,” she said, patting her lips with a white napkin when she was done. She leaned back in her chair, seemed to think better of it, and bent toward me. I lit another cigarette for her.

  “Tell me about the book,” she said.

  “You’ve been reading about the death-penalty cases—the ones where they find out, years later, that a man sentenced to death was innocent all along?”

  “I’ve seen things on TV, that’s all.”

  “It’s a national scandal,” I said, locking her eyes with my sincerity. “In Illinois, the last governor canceled every single pending execution before he left office. He said he just couldn’t be sure that people on death row are really guilty. In one case, this guy was accused of raping and murdering a little girl. Turned out it wasn’t him.”

  “How would they—?”

  “Sometimes, it’s DNA,” I told her. “Sometimes, believe it or not, the actual criminal confesses—usually when they’ve caught him on a whole bunch of other things. Sometimes, it’s as simple as an alibi they never checked out. But it always comes down to the same thing, which is what my book’s about.”

  “Innocence?”

  “No. I mean, innocence is a part of it, but that’s not the theme, not the . . . drive-force. I’m trying to go deeper. These things aren’t due to incompetence. Well, some of them are, sure. But the dark underbelly to all this is the kind of people who become prosecutors. I’m not talking about corruption, either—although that happens, too—I’m talking about people who have lost their way.”

  “Prosecutors?”

  “Prosecutors. Some of them lose sight of the difference between fighting crime and fighting criminals.”

  “I don’t see the difference myself,” she said. “If you fight criminals, you do fight crime, isn’t that true?”

  “In that order, yes,” I agreed. “But not when it’s reversed.”

  “How could it be—?”

  “A child is murdered. A woman is raped. A building is torched, and a fireman dies when the roof collapses. A . . . You know the type of crime I’m talking about. Public outrage. Lots of media attention. Demands for results. The pressure on prosecutors is tremendous. And, sometimes, they can be so hyper-focused on the crime that they ignore the criminal. It’s almost like, if they can put someone in prison, the crime is ‘solved.’ It just . . . consumes them. Like going snow-blind.

  “And it’s our—the public’s—fault, too. How do we judge prosecutors? On their conviction rates, right? So, if a DA has any sort of political ambitions, he’d better clear his cases. That’s where plea bargaining came from, originally. It is a bargain. The criminal gets a much lighter sentence, and the prosecutor doesn’t take a chance on losing a trial.”

  “But why would an innocent person agree to a plea bargain?”

  “They don’t,” I said, lighting another cigarette. I left it in the ashtray next to the candle-in-Chianti-bottle that had been burning since before I sat down. “And that’s where the gate to hell opens. That’s when the pressure builds to get a result. Any result. That’s when an innocent man goes to prison.”

  “A man like—?”

  “John Anson Wychek. You understand what they did to him, don’t you? I don’t mean the wrongful conviction,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her from speaking, “I mean the rest of it.”

  “I know it ruined his—”

  “Ms. Reinhardt . . .”

  “Laura.”

  “Laura, the fact that you couldn’t be closer to the situation and even you don’t understand the scope of the tragedy, well, that proves why my book has to be written. Look, your brother was convicted of a single crime, right?”

  “Yes. They said he—”

  “In fact,” I interrupted, “he was convicted of more than a dozen.”

  “What? How can you—?”

  “Laura, these cases don’t have to be solved. They just have to be cleared. Do you understand the difference?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “When your brother was convicted of that one crime, the police ‘cleared’ a whole bunch of other crimes, naming him as the perpetrator. I don’t mean they charged him with the crimes. I don’t mean he was ever tried for them. But, as far as the police are concerned, those crimes are closed cases now.

  “They never could have proved those cases against your brother. He was innocent, and I think they must have known that. So they never brought him to trial. But with that one single conviction they announce that all the crimes—all the similar crimes that were committed throughout the entire metropolitan area!—are solved. And John Anson Wychek, well, he’s the guilty man.”

  “They never said—”

  “They don’t have to say anything to you. All that counts is the
press. And for the press, it’s an instant no-story. They can’t print that your brother is guilty—he’d sue them for millions. But they can’t pressure the DA to ‘solve’ the cases, either. See how it happens?”

  “My God,” she said, eyes widening.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know just what you’re thinking. Somewhere in this city, maybe somewhere close by, a vicious serial rapist is walking around loose. That’s the hidden penalty society pays every time we stand by and allow an obsessed prosecutor to railroad an innocent man.”

  “And you think John’s story could change all that?”

  “For what I want, I think he’s perfect,” I said, pure truth beaming out of me, like I was radioactive with it.

  The check came inside a small leather folder. The waiter dropped it off and vanished. I opened it up. Much less than I’d expected. I put a fifty inside the folder, closed it back up.

  “Wouldn’t credit cards make a better record for your accountant?” she asked.

  “The only accountant who’ll ever see this bill is the publisher’s. And they’re not going to care.”

  “You’re not one of those guys who pays cash for everything, are you?”

  “Me? No. I use credit cards when I have to, I guess. Probably more of that old-fashioned thing. I’m a long way from paying bills over the Internet.”

  “Because you’re worried about the security?”

  “The security?”

  “You know,” she said, raising her eyebrows just a touch. “Identity theft, stuff like that.”

  “Oh. Well, you can’t work where I do without hearing about it. But . . . no. I guess I just don’t see what’s so great about doing it any new way.”

  “Sometimes, to make things better, you have to try new ways,” she said.

  The waiter came back, picked up the leather folder, and walked off without a word.

  “What’s the next step?” Laura Reinhardt asked me.

  “That depends on you,” I said.

  “But you’re going ahead, doing a story on my brother, even if I don’t . . . cooperate, I guess is the word I was looking for.”

  “I . . . I can’t say that. Not for sure. My contract is for a book on the consequences of false—or, I should say, ‘wrongful’—imprisonment. I thought your brother would be the ideal way to present the material, but he’s not the only candidate. Let’s face it, if he was, I wouldn’t have much of a book.”