Snitch Factory

by Peter Plate

  “Hassler? You got a second?”

  “Yeah, Rocky. Come in, please. Here’s a chair for you. Sit down.”

  A reflexive, self-protective voice in my head told me to gather my wits and my nerve because the man was festering. I plucked a fag from the pack on the desk, lit it and threw the match to the floor. It expired on the carpet like countless numbers of its predecessors.

  “How’re you doing, Rocky?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. How’s your wife taking it?”

  “Irene, she didn’t like it. We got into it, and she says I got to cut this stuff out.”

  The Pinkerton was wearing a new blazer, not a bad fit. Maybe he had a tailor do it for him. He had a plaster cast around his belly; the thing was riddled with get-well messages from his friends.

  “I think you should listen to Irene.”

  “Gosh, thanks for the advice.”

  His black face was frozen like an unplowed field in December in dire need of being thawed out. He hunched his still-considerable body in the seat, meaning to present a smaller target.

  “C’mon, Rocky, Let’s not be like this, okay?”

  His eyes coruscated in their pouch-like folds. Certain things that couldn’t remain hidden any longer, that didn’t have the ability to camouflage themselves and that couldn’t stay out of sight, were starting to show through in him.

  It used to be that people who had trouble with their lives were an invisible feature of this nation. You never saw them, or heard about them. Now they were everywhere.

  Like the man on the news who’d stolen a tank from the National Armory in San Diego. He’d driven the armored vehicle through a bunch of residential streets, plowing up lawns, tearing up trees, smashing cars parked in their driveways. He took it down the freeway, chased by nearly thirty police cars. The final segment of the clip showed the tank stalled on an embankment; dozens of helmeted cops were swarming on the turret.

  Rocky said, “The chick that shot me? She was so fucking close I could smell the lavender oil in her hair.”

  “Who was she?”

  “The police asked me that yesterday. I had to tell them I wasn’t certain. I’ve seen her somewhere before. Around, you know? But she could be some girl who looks like somebody else, if you catch my drift.”

  The Pinkerton had launched into the anecdote as though he’d begun the sentence in his head. His jaws were moving even before the words started coming out of his mouth.

  “You know, I really wanted to blame you for what happened to me. It would have been juvenile, but warranted, too. It would have been logical.”

  I was taken aback. “Why are you telling me about it?”

  “It felt like the right move.”

  “Do I have to hear it?”

  “Don’t fucking whine. They’re your clients.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “It was one of them that done me.”

  “How come I never have any problems with them?”

  “That’s because you brown nose everybody.”

  “Give me a break, and take responsibility for your own life, will you?”

  “Well, well, did they teach you that in group therapy?”

  “Hey, where do you get off with this? Go fuck yourself.”

  It was the wrong request to make. The Pinkerton rose to his feet and never taking his eyes from my face, he staggered over to my side of the desk. For one ludicrous moment, how his arms were extended toward me, I thought he was going to hug me. Instead, he put his hands on my shoulders.

  “You’re a chickenshit for saying that, Charlene.”

  I threw my cigarette at him; it bounced harmlessly off his cheeks. His face was close to mine. I got wind of his potent breath, a destroyer. I tried to catch his eye to mention something to him, something that might appease him. I forgot what it was in a blur of indigo. Inside my own skull I heard a sawing din that was getting louder.

  “You’ve been running the show long enough, Hassler. You and the other wimps.”

  He was pushing me back, inch by inch, against the dividing board wall, forcing me out of my chair. I tried to get up, but the wall behind me was giving way. Then the entire section collapsed, and I went crashing into a neighboring cubicle where a group of caseworkers were having a meeting around a conference table.

  Rocky fell on me, cracking me on the arm with his cast. His ankle got snagged on an aluminum shelf, and he whinnied with fright, releasing his grip on me. I got out from under him and rolled over to one side. The caseworkers were jumping like kangaroos from their chairs. Someone ran out the door to get help.

  “It’s Charlene!”

  “Call security!”

  My breasts were mashed into a pile of papers; Rocky was crumpled in between the table and a chair. A lady from Medi-Cal yowled at the Pinkerton, pointing a horrified finger at him. In me, there wasn’t the strength to move. Social services personnel were crowding around the table; unfamiliar voices filled the room.

  One of my co-workers, I don’t know who, said with alarm, “Charlene’s injured! She needs a doctor!”

  Another voice, a tough woman’s voice snarled, “Not Hassler. She doesn’t need anything. Who’s in charge here, anyway?”

  I had to marvel: that was Lavoris. I heard her coming, high heels clicking authoritatively. She bent over to take a gander at me. Satisfied that I wasn’t dead, she turned around, blazing at the Pinkerton.

  “And what got into you?”

  Rocky rested his chin on his chest, mute.

  “She can have you arrested,” Lavoris said, looking at me. “Are you going to do that, Charlene? Have the police in on this?”

  It hurt me to talk. “I want an explanation from him.”

  The Pinkerton grunted, “You pushed my buttons.”

  “You let that fool get under your skin?” Lavoris asked. “Rocky, that’s it. You want to be a clown? Why don’t you leave while I try to get Charlene here not to call the cops on your butt.”

  The security chief sat up, swung his legs over the table’s edge, brushed off his blazer and hobbled off a tad worse for wear.

  “You,” Lav said to me. “Get off the table. These people were having a meeting. C’mon, there’s work to do around here.”

  I propped myself up with one elbow and watched everybody scuttling about picking up papers, straightening out the chairs. The force field of Lavoris’s instinctive belligerence was restoring harmony, putting everything back where it belonged.

  twenty-five

  Petard showed up while I was finishing a three-way telephone conference with a downtown paralegal and a client. I dropped the receiver and voila, there was my supervisor, my former mentor.

  There was a concrete, lasting presence around Gerald. He coaxed the gravity, mass, and volume out of every nearby object, and pulled it towards him. Call it personal magnetism; some people said he was a bloodsucker.

  He had a method of gazing at someone off-center in the face, so that you felt unsure of yourself. Whenever Petard was talking to someone he made sure the lighting in a room was at his back, giving him a halo and making him appear, by inference, larger than life.

  “You too busy to have a chat?”

  There wasn’t any expression on his florid, beefsteak face. His candid, guileless eyes had a steady, familiar I’llshow-you-nothing-until-you-show-me-yours glint.

  “No, Gerald, I can give you five minutes. Why don’t you come in.”

  “Thanks, don’t mind if I do.”

  Other than the instances when I’d intruded upon him and Lavoris, I hadn’t seen much of Petard in the last year. Our relationship had changed a great deal. At one time, we’d been mirrors of each other’s needs and ambitions. But the elements of our friendship, those things which had brought us closer, now moved at contrasting speeds, never overlapping.

  “Charlene, I must say, you’re rather svelte. Have you been dieting?”

  “Thanks. No, I haven’t. You
want a cigarette?”

  “Nah, I gave it up a few months ago. I started wheezing every morning. I didn’t like that, and my father, the pious shit, God rest his soul, he died from emphysema.”

  Watching Petard sit down, easing his hips into the folding chair across from me, I could see he’d gained approximately twenty-five pounds. Mostly around his waist and thighs. He was wearing a custom made suit that did an admirable job in hiding his girth. The drinking veins on his skin were darker, redder than ever, like they’d been nailed to his cheeks with a staple gun.

  “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Hassler?”

  His entire face crinkled into a fan of deep laugh lines that started in the corners of his eyes, working back into his hairline. He leaned forward in the chair; it creaked under him as he said, “The same business day after day, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure I see it that way, but yes, it is…the same old shit.”

  Surprising me, he stood up, hiked his slacks and parked his monstrous thighs on the far right hand corner of my desk.

  “You’re looking good, Charlene. No zits or anything. You exercising?”

  “Nope. No time nor inclination.”

  “Me neither. You eating out much these days?”

  “Hardly ever. Who can afford it?”

  “Are you drinking?”

  I said to him, aware of his eyes on my bosom, “Not at all.”

  “Right. Me neither. Look, I’ve been meaning to get around to seeing you. I’ve sent notes. Did you ever get them?”

  “Yeah, I got them, some of them.”

  It was because of him that I’d forfeited the previous twelve years of my life to the DSS. The cigarette girl of welfare. I knew the decade had gone somewhere; I don’t know where. That was untrue. All the time went into Petard’s bloated face. Every day and every month, with the promises that had cobbled those years together. Gerald had said I would go far, that I would rise high in the reich of social services. The bastard had manipulated me into a cul-de-sac.

  “Hassler, what’s going on here?”

  “Give me a break.”

  “What?”

  “I’m busy. You know how it is, chipping away at my caseload.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What else would I be doing?”

  “You don’t have to get churlish about it.”

  “I don’t know…maybe I feel let down.”

  “Yes? What about?”

  “It’s not worth going into.”

  More than anything I wanted Petard to know that I didn’t care. That after toiling like a slave for him, feeding myself on his measly assurances, believing that my career would improve—and now hearing the rumors that he was leaving just as everything got difficult—I wanted him to know I didn’t give a damn.

  He looked past my shoulder to the photographs on the wall. A snapshot of Frank, a framed diploma from the California licensing board stating that I was qualified to be a social worker. Petard observed these symbols of my life without any visible interest. He knew my history and had used it well.

  “Let’s not bullshit each other, Charlene. Yes, I know there’ve been problems. We could start with your career. How did you feel when you failed to get the promotion you wanted?”

  I didn’t want to answer that question.

  “You thought it was a raw deal, and it was. It wasn’t easy to turn you down,” he admitted. “But I didn’t come down here to rehash the past.”

  “That’s white of you.”

  “Please, you know as well as I do, there’s no call for disrespect. So here’s my advice.”

  “Advice? What makes you think I want it?”

  “Precisely. Here’s what I say. You ought to leave this place while you can, on your own terms. I can help.”

  “I’m sure you can. It’s amazing how helpful people are when they want you out of the picture.”

  He held out his hands to me. “Don’t interrupt me. It’s for your own good. You’ve heard rumors that I might be leaving?” Petard sneered, to demonstrate his ambivalence. “I don’t know…we’ll know shortly.”

  “What’s that?”

  “C’mere.”

  Gerald leaned over and touched my chin with his blunt fingers. Other than Frank, any man who did that, I’d have slapped him. But something in me desisted from doing it, something that was made from nostalgia for a time when Petard and I had been more together. He was trembling; his lupine mouth grazed my ear. His tinsel-red hair was in my eyes.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “To what?”

  Did he mean the waiting room, the Pinkertons, and the people in the corridor? Or the alcoholic temblor in his own head?

  “Can’t you hear them?”

  “Who?”

  “Every loser who wants to see you fail, that’s who.”

  He stroked my arm, and even after the damage he’d done to me, I let him. His paranoia was unaffected, safe for me to be around. It loosened the furrows and the creases on his face, and made him seem young again.

  “Are you okay, Gerald?”

  “Oh, yes, yes.”

  His voice was muffled in the unstarched folds of my blouse collar. I traced my index finger across his jaw; he was unshaven, but not unpleasantly. Petard quieted down, and I was relieved. Not only because I didn’t want him to have a breakdown, but Gerald had grown children who were older than me. Mothering the man, that was not what I was about.

  twenty-six

  In between bites of a spicy burrito, a gift to myself for having survived the morning, I heard a ruckus starting to escalate in the hallway. The voices involved were female and unrecognizable. I was wondering what was going on when Lavoris burst into my office followed by two women. She spat at me:

  “What’re you doing? Sleeping? Where’s there a computer in this building that works? These ladies are getting on my tits.”

  I shrugged my shoulders to signal that I didn’t know. Lavoris, stressed out, shouted an indecipherable gibe at the two women trailing after her. The younger one of the pair, a sepia-colored woman in a jeans jacket kept arguing with my colleague. I felt sorry for the wee girl; anyone who crossed Lavoris was risking a calamity.

  For a social worker, Lav had a talent for bullying her clients, particularly the pregnant women. She was inflamed from the negative fallout of womb envy.

  “Hey, baby,” she said. “I don’t have all day for this. You’ve got to give me the information I requested. Why can’t you do that?”

  The three women were at the door facing each other, quibbling. It didn’t look too dangerous. Lavoris got the last word in, as she always did. She was turning around to walk out when the girl had the gumption to backhand her, giving it to my co-worker in the mouth.

  The other woman jumped into the fray, clambering on Lavoris’s back, driving a fist into the social worker’s collar-bone. My cohort got sandwiched in the middle and fell to the floor after knocking over a chair.

  By the time I got the burrito out of my mouth, Simmons was at the door. It was only a matter of seconds before the Pinkertons would arrive. You could hear them in the corridor, scampering in our direction. Lavoris seemed to understand that; she threw a punch, taking care to protect her face.

  Her suit jacket got a rent in it and the heel of one shoe snapped off, laying there on the floor like a golfing tee. But Lav, to her credit, displayed no emotion. She turned over on her back, flailing her legs, raising her knees up to guard her breasts, because that’s what the bigger woman was aiming for.

  Lavoris wouldn’t give up. That wouldn’t have been the caseworker who incited conflict with her coworkers. That wasn’t the temptress who seduced her boss, nor was it the lass who’d kissed me years ago in an unstaffed administrative office. She said to me when we broke our clinch, “You taste like abalone, you know that, Charlene?”

  I had contemplated Lavoris in a variety of poses over the years, some of them pseudo-sexual. Seeing her in battle, I was imbued with an understanding that
we were at a turning point, she and I.

  Rocky and a quintet of Pinkertons stalked into the cubicle and without wasting a second, the security chief efficiently knocked the larger woman off Lavoris. With his foot, he kicked the girl, yelling, “Cool it with the shit!”

  When the two clients heard the order, they got to their feet, dreadfully glum. The fight these women had in them, it died as quickly as it had ignited. Rocky handcuffed them without any resistance.

  Pulling herself together, Lavoris held onto a chair and adjusted her stockings, then fiddled with a barrette in her hair. After the two women were taken outside, manacled to each other, Rocky came over to her. Trying to be helpful, he asked, “You need a hand, hon?”

  Her near-purple eyes were puffed up and haughty. The cups of a black silk bra were visible through a rip in her Armani blouse. Lav had held her own during one hell of a cat fight and she knew it. “For Pete’s sake, leave me alone. Don’t come near me,” she said.

  There was a look of canceled amazement on Rocky’s corrugated face. A sadness and reckoning that couldn’t be put into words. I could see how much the Pinkerton cared for Lavoris. How much he admired her, and how he wanted her.

  He would put up with any amount of rejection to get next to the woman. It was extraordinary to see the sacrifices a man would make to get near some nookie. To be close to a female who didn’t want him, not in this lifetime.

  “Don’t you touch me,” she said, eyes slit, mascara spoiled. “I can take care of myself, thank you.”

  After rebuking Rocky, Lavoris picked up the broken heel from the floor, and with a hitch in her stride, she reeled out of the cubicle into the corridor. She wobbled by the clients and the Pinkertons, bearing toward the exit doors in the waiting room.

  twenty-seven

  With the computer software malfunctioning, we’d temporarily misplaced Mrs. Dominguez’s file. Simmons, being her original caseworker, said it might’ve been shipped out to the annex downtown in a box of disks because her papers weren’t at Iron Mountain. We didn’t have documentation about Frances and her income. Since she didn’t have any legal identification, I thought I’d expedite the process by getting her prints.