The Weight

by Andrew Vachss

  Some guys had a whole library of paperback books. They put them all on the juggle, rent them out. It doesn’t matter what you lend—in prison, you borrow two, you pay back three.

  The tattoo artists always have plenty of business. Even guys who come in covered in ink, they always want more. Like Eddie told me, the cops keep a record of all your tats. You can change your hair, grow a beard, stuff like that. But ink, especially just past the knuckles—like LOVE on one hand and HATE on the other—that’s forever. You can walk around in a long-sleeved shirt even in the summer, but you can’t wear a pair of gloves.

  A good thief would be hard to pick out of a lineup; the best thief would be invisible. I already had my size going against me, never mind the scar and the different-colored eyes. I sure didn’t need more.

  Doing time, there’s really a lot of choices. And even when all you can do is try and stay alive, that’s still something to do. As long as you don’t spend too much time thinking about it.

  But once you get out, there’s no rules—only laws. So you have to find something with rules. Like a job, maybe. It doesn’t matter if it’s working an assembly line or collecting debts, every job has its own rules. Always things you’re supposed to do and things you’re not.

  If your whole life is outside the law, the rules are much tighter. Say you’re a thief—you never want to take a muscle job. A loan shark pays you to break a guy’s arm; you do it even once, it’s like diving off a cliff. Once you break enough bones, they expect you to step up to doing hits. Or maybe one of the guys that owes, you end up totaling him, even when you didn’t mean to. I remember something Ken once said: I’m not a hired hand, pal. I’m what you call self-employed, get it?

  In prison, that’s the way you want it. It’s okay to be friendly to different guys, but you don’t ever want to be with them.

  See, if you’re with a prison crew, that’s got rules, too. You follow them too close, you’re never getting out.

  That’s why I always do the same things. I live good. Not for show, for real. I eat good, have decent clothes, a good car, that kind of thing. I keep case money, so I always have enough to get by even if there’s no good job coming for a while. That lets me pass up the shaky-looking stuff. A true pro, he never lets himself get desperate.

  So I still had about eighty grand stashed from before I went in, but I’d picked the wrong spot for it. I’d been staying with this girl for a while. You move in with a girl, you never know when you’ll be leaving, and you can’t be sure you’ll ever be back. So I never bring anything with me that I can’t walk away from, and I always keep a place I can walk back to.

  You have to expect a girl to go through your stuff. Every girl I ever moved in with did that.

  I hate handcuffs. Always dangling open, ready to snap closed. I’m not putting myself where I’d always be one dime-drop away from going back to prison.

  So, when I move in with a girl, I always bring enough stuff over so she thinks she’s got a hold on me. Stuff too big to just carry out, like a TV. Or even a lot of clothes I don’t care about. They’re always sure you’ll have to come back, even if it’s only to pick up your stuff.

  I heard stories about girls pouring bleach on a guy’s clothes when they got mad. That’s why I’d never let a girl buy me anything I’m not ready to throw away. Or lend me money. Or put me on her cell-phone plan.

  This last girl, she told me she was a student. I told her I hung drywall—what other kind of job could an ex-con expect to get if he was trying to go straight? Interior work; I was on the night shift. She lived on Central Park West, in the nineties. Three bedrooms. A huge place for just one person. It used to be her mother’s.

  I figured the girl would still be there—nobody gives up a rent-controlled apartment in this city. So my money would probably still be where I’d hid it, in a hole I made in the top of one of the closets. She was always saying the plaster was moldy, made her clothes smell. So, when she had to go someplace for a weekend, I emptied all the closets and rough-sanded the insides. Then I painted them, fresh, bright white.

  I mixed a little lemon juice in with the paint; that’s a trick I learned from an old guy who hired me to lift heavy stuff for him. I was supposed to be learning how to paint, but it never happened. This guy did tile, too, but he told me I didn’t have the hands for that.

  When she came back, I showed her my surprise. She loved it. I told her she couldn’t put her stuff back in the closets for another couple of days. I had laid it all out on the beds in two of the rooms. She didn’t care, she was so happy to see the closets looking so good.

  And they did, for real. With the plaster re-covered, the primer, and the three coats of paint, you couldn’t even see where I had planted the cash.

  I hadn’t planned on leaving it there long. But then I got popped for that rape I never did.

  When you have money, you don’t get all crazy about needing some more. Gives you time to think. Which is what I did, my first night in that over-the-garage apartment.

  Maybe Francine—that was the girl’s name—maybe she had a guy living there, like I had been. Or got married, even.

  Or maybe she turned the place into a moneymaker, subletting it out for ten times the rent she had to pay. A lot of people do that. It’s a risk, because the building owners are always watching for those kind of moves.

  Maybe the building had gone co-op. Francine might still be there, but probably she would have sold the apartment a couple of years back—Solly had said something about real estate going way up then.

  The real problem was the five years. More than that, actually. I’d never expected to be gone more than a few days, so what could I tell Francine that wouldn’t sound like complete bullshit? And it wasn’t like she was, you know, crazy about me or anything.

  I balanced it out. Breaking into the place wouldn’t be a hard job—they didn’t have a doorman, at least when Francine lived there. But I’d have to do a lot of scoping it out first, and even then I’d still need a lot of luck.

  And if I pulled it off, what would I have? Eighty grand … and maybe Francine telling the cops about an ex-boyfriend who had painted those same closets where there was a chunk missing now.

  I made the decision before I fell asleep. I was going to take a pass. I remember thinking how Solly would have been proud of me, just before I went out.

  It’s supposed to be tradition that the first thing a man does when he makes the gate is get himself some pussy. For sure, it’s what everyone who’s about to go says they’re going to do.

  I think that’s probably more about what’s waiting for you than anything else. If you’ve got a wife, or a girlfriend—or even some woman you’ve been pen pals with, then probably it’s true. Or if you’re with a crew, they’re supposed to have that all lined up and waiting for you. Throw you a party.

  There’s other ways. One old guy—hell, he was probably younger than I am now, but this was during my first bit—he told me the only difference between getting married and picking up a hooker is that, one you buy, the other you rent. But he was in there for killing his wife, so even I could figure out that he probably wasn’t wrapped too tight.

  Finding a hooker used to be easy. Almost no-risk. At least not for me. Guys who worked the badger game, they’d tell their girls never to pick up anyone who looked like he could do damage. Plus, they’d want a guy in a suit if they could find one. A suit and one of those little briefcases.

  There’s a different play on that game, but it only works if the john is looking for underage. The girl has to look real young, and they work it like a shakedown, not a rough-off. I wouldn’t be a good mark for that one, either.

  But everything’s so … extreme now. Either you pick a girl up off a stroll, or you use one of the out-call services. A stroller could be underage. Carrying anything from a disease to a straight razor. And you’d have to get it on in the car, real quick. An escort could be an undercover. Or a psycho who kept souvenirs.

  Most of the stri
p clubs, they had private rooms where you could get whatever you were willing to pay for. But there’s always some Law sniffing around those places. Not for the sex, for the skim. So the undercovers spent their time in the upscale places. The more the joints charged, the more likely there was Law around somewhere.

  On top of all that, I knew the owner of that jewelry store we’d hit was still trying to collect on the insurance. He had to sue to get that, which is how I knew about it, from the papers.

  All the insurance company had was suspicion. Nobody had ever been bagged for the crime, and real thieves had done the work—even the cops told the papers that it had been a professional job.

  I admit, reading that made me feel good. Respected. I can translate cop-talk, so I knew what they were saying: “Either we find ourselves an informant, or this case is going to the North Pole.”

  I knew something else: even if the cops quit trying to solve that one, it was a sure bet that the insurance company wouldn’t. And some of their guys were supposed to be real good. I don’t mean any ex-cop with a few pals still on the job. I mean one of those serious, fuck-the-rules spooks. The kind who get fired for going over the line once too often.

  It had to be the cops who told this guy that they knew I’d been in on that jewelry-store job, but that they could never prove it in court. That’s why I got a visit, the only one I got all the time I was away.

  Now, you can refuse a visit. Even if it’s the cops, you can still say no. Or at least you could have your lawyer there. I didn’t recognize the name the CO told me, but I … ah, I guess I was just bored. Or maybe curious.

  My visitor didn’t look like an ex-cop to me. More like an accountant. He was maybe in his fifties, in good shape, but everything about him was a kind of gray. I don’t mean he looked blurry or anything. And it wasn’t his suit, or even his skin color. It was like he was part of a dark cloud.

  Sure enough, he started raining. “We know you were one of several individuals involved in that jewelry-store robbery,” he said, flat out.

  I almost told him it wasn’t a robbery, it was a burglary, but I didn’t. I still can’t figure out why I’d want to tell him that.

  “We don’t care about the people who did the grunt work,” he went on. “What we want is the man who planned it. And we know who that was, too.”

  Maybe he’d been a soldier once, because when he said “grunt work,” he was watching my eyes. I don’t know what he was looking for, but I know it wasn’t there.

  “What are you telling me all this for?” I asked him.

  “Mr. Caine, I’m telling you ‘all this’ because you’re doing a prison sentence. When you come out, you’ll be broke. And the owner of that jewelry store will be rolling in money. That doesn’t seem quite fair to me. We thought it might not seem fair to you, either.”

  “I’m not in here for no robbery.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. That’s when I knew for sure that the big cop had talked to him, face-to-face. Woods was too smart to put my real alibi on paper, or talk about it on the phone. So, even if this guy had connections strong enough so they’d open the whole file on that jewelry job for him, my name wouldn’t be in it.

  Who has that kind of connections? I thought. Not the feds; everyone knows they don’t get along with NYPD. This guy looked like a private contractor, but he had to be working for some … company. A big company. Sure! The insurance company. Their investigators kept on going long after the cops quit. I heard of them staying on death cases for twenty years, trying to get their money back. Sent a lot of people to prison doing that. Same with fires. Your business is going belly-up, so you move all your stock out, then hire a torch. Might get by the arson squad, but the insurance guys were like the pit bulls of detective work.

  Insurance companies. Yeah. They had the edge over the cops—a pile of cash outweighs a badge, every time. You can buy more than info with cash, you can buy people. That’s why the DA’s Office spends most of its budget on white-collar crime—mugging victims don’t make campaign contributions.

  What I said about a sex jones? A little while back, the Governor lost it all. He started out being the Attorney General—that’s where he made his rep. The guy was no Eliot Ness; he got his name from going after investment bankers, not for racket-busting.

  But he was running the biggest racket of them all. Everybody loved it when he made those places cough up zillions. The papers made him out to be this big hero, fighting for the little guy. Most of that money went to the State … and nobody went to jail. Solly told me it was one of the sweetest scams he ever saw.

  So this guy had all the momentum behind him when he ran for Governor. Nobody even wanted to run against him. He won in a landslide. Everyone said he’d be the next President.

  Then he got caught up in one of those escort deals, and lost it all. That’s why you stay away from a guy with a sex habit. If it’s only a matter of time for them, it’s a sure bet you’ll be doing some yourself.

  The gray-cloud man leaned in a little closer. “You wouldn’t have to give up anyone who was in on it with you,” he said. “Nobody on your side at all. Just the owner. He’s the one we want. He’s all we want.”

  I just looked at him.

  “You pleaded guilty to a crime you didn’t commit. We know why you did that.”

  I blank-faced him.

  “How would you like to have that rape conviction vacated? Wiped off the books. And full immunity for the jewelry-store robbery.”

  “I’d like that fine,” I told him. “The first part, I mean. The other part, I don’t need that.”

  “Because you’re going to let the statute run, I know. But a rape charge? A man like you, he wouldn’t want something like that on his record.”

  “That’s true, I don’t.”

  “What’s the problem, then? You think the locals haven’t already done a KA on you?”

  I knew they must have. Too bad for them—I didn’t have any “known associates.” I always wanted to be one of Ken’s, and I was getting pretty close, but I don’t think I ever really made the cut while he was still alive. Now, every fucking punk whose idea of a classy job was a smash-and-grab claimed they’d been with Ken. Me, I would never disrespect him like that.

  So I answered the visitor’s question: “What’s the problem? The problem is that I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if the owner was in on the job? You just did it as piecework? Hired labor? Please don’t tell me you weren’t even in on the shares.”

  Ex-FBI? I asked myself. This guy knew his way around a pro thief’s mind. At least enough to know I’d take the idea of being hired to carry bags as an insult. Giving me the chance to say something stupid, that was a pro move from his side, I had to give him that.

  But “I don’t even know what ‘job’ you’re talking about” is all I said.

  “Sure. That’s what I expected. And, between us, I respect you for it. That’s your reputation, Mr. Caine.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. And even if it wasn’t, you’ve only got a couple more years to go, so I won’t waste your time telling you the men who pulled that drill-through left a lot of evidence behind.…”

  He let his words just kind of hang there, watching my eyes again.

  It was too weak to even count as a bluff, and he knew it. So he finished up with: “But you’re a pro, and a pro only plays for money.”

  “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  “No? Then let me spell it out for you, very clearly: you tell us what we want to know, you walk right out of here. And if what you have to say stands up in court—we’re talking civil court now, none of this ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ stuff—two hundred and fifty thousand. Cold cash, in your hand.”

  “The IRS would love that.”

  “If we were to pay a witness a contingency fee for his testimony, that would be a very serious crime, Mr. Caine. One single conviction for that sort of activity wo
uld topple even the most reputable company. A huge backlog of cases the company had won could be reopened. Nobody wants that kind of disaster, rest assured. Nobody.”

  “Fuck!”

  “What?”

  “Mr.… Johnson,” I said, reading it off the business card he’d handed to me, “this is the first time in my whole life that I wish I had done the crime.”

  He looked at me for a long minute. Looked hard. The gray got deeper. Darker.

  “We’re not paying off on that jeweler’s policy. He’s got to sue us to get paid, and that case will still be open long after you walk out of here. On the back of the card I gave you is a number. Call it and you’ll reach me. Me, personally. Anytime, day or night.”

  Then he got up and walked away.

  So I was right—that guy was an insurance investigator, with plenty of clout behind him. I didn’t know if he had enough to pull tax records. On me, I’m talking about. But one thing I was sure of: “Robert Johnson” might not be his real name, but him being the kind of man to take a job all the way, that was real. I was glad it wasn’t me he wanted.

  That jewelry-store owner, I wonder if he knew about the gray cloud yet. What I knew for sure was that he had nothing to trade. He wouldn’t have Solly’s name, much less me or Big Matt’s.

  Solly was a master storyteller. Like that wild card, Jessop. I didn’t even know if there was any Albie who’d vouched for him. But when I thought about that gray man, I could see a lot more reasons why Solly would want to be sure of this Jessop guy. Even dead sure.

  The best time to find what I wanted was mid-afternoon. The best place was outside Manhattan.

  The club’s parking lot was nearly empty. Inside, a single dancer phoned it in on the pole. Half a dozen guys were watching, none of them sitting together. The whole joint was about as sexy as a morgue.