A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  She excused such thoughts to the accuser in her mind with the mitigation that she never actually prayed for Keller's death. That would have been deliberate; she wasn't willing anything; she simply couldn't help thinking that it would have been much more convenient for her and better for Ambrose as well, if Sunny were to die young without any pain at all, peacefully, in her sleep.

  Mary Pat further understood without being told that Merrion could stand it if she should happen to run into someone else who would replace him as first in her love (although she hadn't wanted the assurance, and would have summarily rejected it if he'd offered it). So except for that first fucking week in fucking July every god-damned fucking year, and all the other fucking times fucking Sunny came home on fucking leave again, goddammit, always unexpectedly because unwanted by Mary Pat she and Amby did have their good times.

  It wasn't easy for her. Mary Pat said nothing to nobody about nothing, as she put it, but then she didn't have to; she turned up the volume on her desk radio whenever WHYN-AM played "Time Is on My Side," by the Rolling Stones, and everyone who knew and liked her including all the men, and she knew a lot of them, from her interest in politics also knew she played the waiting game. She was generally steadfast and obdurate, silent in receipt of truly well-meant good advice from friends including her boss, Carol, a peach, who was really good to her and mentioned it only once until they stopped giving it, content to eyebrow smart remarks. She did allow a rather dumpy woman in Agents Accounts named Priscilla, from Three Rivers, whom she didn't even like, to get away with saying one beautiful June day during lunch outside on the lawn that she was 'never sure if the reason Sweeney's cubicle's always filled with smoke's because of all those Winstons she smokes or if it's from that torch she carries."

  Knowing immediately from the laughter that self-restraint had been a mistake, Mary had rectified it early the next month — when Sunny's annual July visit, now two weeks at the place in Falmouth Heights that Amby rented had her in an ugly mood anyway. During a lull in a department briefing about the company's upcoming autumn media campaign of suggestions for avoiding life-endangering, artery-clogging, sedentary obesity, Mary Pat murmured rather loudly to the person sitting next to her that the ads should feature Priscilla as national poster girl. "Show Priscilla linin' up a chocolate-frosted jelly doughnut," Mary Pat proposed, well aware that her husky voice carried, 'drawin' a bead on a cruller. That'd put the point across: Henry the Eighth' amp; slim down."

  Then everything'd gone all wrong and come apart in May of 1973, when Sunny died in a hospital in Honolulu. The cause was severe head-trauma she had suffered when the rented Jeep CJ that she was driving rolled over and down a cliff in the aftermath of a three-car accident that killed another woman and injured four other people on a mountain road switchback during a blinding downpour. Merrion at first did not believe it. Stunned in his grief, he was badly surprised as well that Sunny had returned to Hawaii and he hadn't known about it. He had met her at the Royal Hawaiian she'd called it 'the big pink hotel on the beach, the one where everyone always goes once' for her previous energetic furlough four months before, and had assumed from its delights he'd be returning for the next one. The married major from Coronado, California, who'd flown from Tan Son Nhut to Hawaii with her for ten days of R amp;R, when he recovered consciousness gave police a statement proving conclusively the crash had not been Sunny's fault. Somehow that post mortem exoneration hadn't seemed to help Merrion feel better at all.

  That fact had not been lost on Mary Pat. Heedlessly leaving her desk at mid-morning as soon as she'd heard the news, putting off the explanation to another day no one in her office ever asked her for it later she had gone at once to his place to make stiff drinks and get in bed to give him a lover's help. She had arrived there knowing she thought: instinctively, without possibility of error he needed to have that done. It had always seemed to him afterwards that both of them had realized about ten seconds before she'd really begun trying to console him, it was never going to work.

  Neither one of them had ever gotten over it. After a few more perfunctory, good-buddy, make-believe tries at making him feel better she'd decided on her own to give it up. While in one corner of his mind he believed she'd never found it getting any easier to do, she'd started saying No without excuse or explanation every time he called, and she had stuck to it. After a while he'd given up too, and rather gratefully stopped making the calls.

  That August Saturday waiting for Hilliard at Grey Hills the most recent time he'd seen her had been by chance at a dinner-dance at the Sheraton Hartford hotel in '92 or '93, benefit for the family of a high-spirited, hail-fellow lawyer they had known from Seventies-early-Eighties New England Democratic politics. Disbarred and disgraced after having lived very graciously for many years on money he had not, after all, earned from representing a few extremely wealthy and secretive clients, as he had always seemed to claim.

  Instead he had stolen systematically and routinely from a couple dozen estates left by fairly prosperous clients whose heirs had trusted him, taking what he'd wanted as boldly as if it had been his. Caught, he had avoided criminal prosecution, certain conviction and plenty of jail by stripping his own estate as ruthlessly as he'd plundered his late clients' accumulations. The sale of everything he owned at distress prices, beggaring his still-young family, combined with the proceeds of his malpractice insurance policy amounted to enough to constitute ostentatious restitution of eighty-four percent of what he had stolen. He was sentenced to five years in jail, two of them to be served, three suspended for ten years.

  Granted thirty days to finish putting his affairs in order before starting to serve his sentence, he had needed only two to complete his liquidation by shooting himself in the head.

  "Well, no one ever said Mickey wasn't thorough," Mary Pat said, encountering Merrion at the bar. She still smoked the Winstons and weighed around the same trim one-fifteen, but she was dressing and decorating it a lot better. Merrion told her she looked like a million bucks. "Yeah," she said, satisfaction in that smoky voice, 'and even nicer, now I've got it."

  "Hit the lottery?" he said. "Lucky you."

  She grinned and shook her head. "Can't count on luck," she said.

  "Luck's not dependable, and as you know, mine's never been all that good. Stock market's much more reliable. Skill and smarts still count there, which is good. Helps if you clank when you walk, but it's really not all that complicated. You quit spending all your time partying around; start staying home and paying attention to what the rich people say."

  "You have rich friends now?" Merrion said.

  "Well," she said, "I have a rich friend. He takes me where rich people go; I get close enough to listen."

  He hadn't asked her the next question because he'd known the answer.

  She'd delivered it anyway, shaking her head. He played dumb, smiled back and said: "I'm missing something here, am I?"

  She'd shaken her head once more. "Probably nothing that ever really interested you that much," she said. "Funny how things seem to change, after time's gone by."

  "What is it that seems to have changed on us here, all of a sudden and all?" Merrion said to Hilliard on the terrace at Grey Hills, that Saturday in August.

  Hilliard frowned and leaned forward in his chair. He rested his elbows on its arms and scraped it on the flagstones up against the table. "I think," he said slowly, frowning, '1 think… well, lemme put it this way: what I think is, anyway… I…"

  "Well, this is reassuring," Merrion said. "If you're doing that."

  "You had some doubt in your mind, maybe?" Hilliard said, looking up from under his eyebrows.

  "I was beginning to get a little concerned, yeah," Merrion said. "I was beginning to wonder if maybe instead of asking you to explain Julian to me, I should ask Julian about you. Or maybe get Janet back in and put a different question to her. "What's the meaning of life, huh Janet? You got a handle on this?"

  "Yeah," Hilliard said. "Well, look, whyn't we do this
now, then, all right? Let's you and me just go inside and get a bite to eat, cheeseburger, something, a bottle of beer, talk it over in there, and see what we do about this. Would that be all right with you? Then, after that, play a round. Or maybe just nine holes or something."

  "Fuck going inside," Merrion said. "Tell me here what you think's going on."

  "I don't know," Hilliard said. "I heard things I don't like, but I'm not sure… Look, you gotta remember Bob Pooler."

  "Remember and hate the fucker," Merrion said.

  "Yeah, well, still," Hilliard said. "I think you should go, you know, talk to the guy, and see what he thinks about this. See what he's got to say."

  "Hear what the little prick's got to say about what?" Merrion said.

  "What could that little shit possibly have to say that could possibly interest me?"

  "Well," Hilliard said slowly, "I'm not exactly sure myself yet what the broad outlines of this might be, but what it seems to be is this: he thinks they may be thinking, the federal boys in Boston, about maybe starting up grand jury hearings out this way, down in Springfield, I mean, and if they decide to do that then they might be… well, you know what I'm saying, right? Might be coming after me."

  "Which of course would have to mean, then," Merrion said thoughtfully, 'also after me."

  Hilliard frowned and cleared his throat, "Yeah," he said. "Well, after us. That would be the gist of it. After you and me."

  THIRTEEN

  The police station in Canterbury was the second-largest structure to be built in the new municipal complex, four buildings clustered on Holyoke Street a block north of the green. The town offices opened in 1981.

  The police station was completed in February of 1982. The largest building, the new fire station, and the public library were finished in April of 1983, during Hilliard's eleventh and last term in the House.

  Because he had been instrumental in the enactment of 1980 legislation granting $6.7 million in state aid to the town for the construction, the selectmen felt they had no choice but to invite him to be the keynote speaker at the dedication of the buildings as the Veterans'

  Memorial Municipal Center on the afternoon of Memorial Day of 1983.

  It was not a popular decision. Many who had voted for him several times now severely disapproved of him and said they would never support him again, generating considerable and vehement negative advance comment. He thought he heard someone boo when he took the lectern, but he soon made his audience feel better, using the occasion to announce to the audience of sixty-three seated on metal folding chairs before him on the broad front walk that he would not be a candidate for re-election in 1984Several women applauded vigorously, nodding for emphasis, saying "Good," and "Well, you shouldn't," giving their husbands meaningful looks; one or two even cried "Yea," in ladylike fashion.

  He declined to divulge his plans. "You do," Merrion said, 'and all you do is egg them on, whet their appetites. All they want is to see you humiliated, punished for the way you treated Mercy.

  Okay, let 'em have what they want. Put your tail between your legs and look sheepish; tell 'em you're not gonna run. Cringe like a dog that's been beaten a lot. Try to cower a little I realize you're outta practice, but do the best you can. That'll make 'em all feel superior and virtuous; like they've upheld the sanctity of marriage and the family, driving you out of office. You do some public penance, it wont be as much as you deserve, but it'll be enough. They'll be satisfied, forget about you and go on; find some other poor bastard to make life miserable for.

  "They start thinkin' you're getting' away with something, pretendin' to be humble but sneakin' away to something even better this soft job that you invented they're liable say: "Oh no you don't; none of that shit, there. Givin' up the rep seat, pays fifty grand a year, 'cause he's been a naughty boy, and that gets him a better job, he pulls down eighty grand? Uh uh, we're not lettin' him do that."

  "They'll find out if I don't announce it," Hilliard said. "Someone will've leaked it, time I make the speech. If they want to raise a stink and try to block it, they will. It'll all amount to the same thing."

  "No, it wont," Merrion said. "If someone else tells 'em, that's all it'll be: something that someone else said. But if you announce it, they'll think you're laughing at them, gloating. To them it'll sound like this: "Okay, you hypocrites, I am convinced. If I run again you'll kick my ass. Well, up yours; I'm not giving you the chance. I'm not gonna let you dump me. And, I got something much better cooked up.

  Pays even more and you'll never be able to vote me out of it, no matter how much I get laid. Doesn't that frost your balls, folks?"

  "You know what they'll do then?" Merrion said. "They will lynch you.

  If they decide you're not repenting; that you're giving them the finger, they will hang you by your fuckin' neck. They'll come to your condo and they'll drag you out the cellar where you hid and they'll march you down to Holyoke they'll have a band and everything, put on a torch-light parade. And when they get to Hampden Park they'll tie your hands behind you and rope your feet together and loop a noose around your neck. They'll make you stand on the roof of your Murr-say-deez-Benz and they'll throw the other end of the rope over the branch of a tree and tie it down good and tight to the tree trunk. And then before someone backs the car out from under you, they'll have a butcher climb up on the hood, yank your dick out of your pants and chop it off with his cleaver, and hold it up for all to see, while the bishop gives his blessing and leads the crowd singing "God Bless America."

  "So I gather you don't think it would be a good idea for me to say what my plans are," Hilliard said.

  "That would be the gist of it," Merrion said.

  Reports of the address at the dedication said "Hilliard appeared subdued." An editorial paragraph in the Springfield Union reported that 'to many there, the personable and forceful chairman seemed chastened, no doubt by the strong public reaction to recent disclosures of his untidy personal life, almost certainly the principal reason behind his prudent decision to leave elective office." As Hilliard had predicted, the reports did include informed speculation that he expected to be 'appointed president of the community college in Hampton Pond, scheduled to formally open next year, although at first offering only night courses at the Pioneer Regional School during hours when it would normally be unused," but Merrion had also been right: no public outcry followed.

  Freddie Dillinger in his Transcript column seemed a bit subdued himself. He was content to sneer, writing that the scheduled summer '84 completion of construction of the first of three new buildings planned for the HPCC campus 'will make the Hilliard Hilton the most modern shamelessly lavish, many have said — layout in the Commonwealth's entire community college system. The throne room, palmed-off in main-building blueprints as the presidential office suite, will be spacious enough for Dapper Dan to host a full-blown consistory, should the College of Cardinals ever stop by Hampton Pond and need a meeting-place. Assuming the prelates are on speaking terms with him after his pending divorce, seen by many as the catalyst for his career move." But Dillinger also seemed saddened by the prospect of Hilliard's departure from active politics. "I have no trouble saying that I've always liked Dan Hilliard. He's given us a lot of laughs, although not always intentionally, and in this often-gloomy world it's hard not to like a man who's so often brought you laughter."

  "Praise from Caesar is praise indeed," Hilliard said to Merrion.

  "Imagine the cocksucker getting emotional? Probably had to wipe away a tear. How insensitive I've been: All these years I've been reading the guy without ever guessing he liked me." He snorted. "Freddie must think the old saying's a commandment: Each man kills the thing he loves. Does his best to, anyway."

  "I think we should give him a present," Merrion said. "How about we make a blivit, nice big bag full of fresh, soft dogshit, with a brick in it, throw it through his window on his desk."

  The run-up to the withdrawal began in the spring of 1980. When Hilliard figured in n
ewsworthy events, the identifier in the papers gradually changed; "Powerful Ways and Means Chairman' became "Embattled Chairman."

  "I used to love it when they did that," he mourned to his friends, 'called me "powerful." He had begun to depend on them heavily for companionship. Weekends bothered him badly; drinks and dinner among 'my pals' Sunday nights at Grey Hills took on extreme importance.

  What he called: 'my well-known downfall' began semi-privately. Mercy, on her way home from drinks with Diane Fox at Gino's Hearthside one fine evening in the spring abruptly decided that she'd had enough and determined to kick him out of their lovely new home in Bell Woods. By noon on Tuesday word of what she'd done had reached Beacon Hill. "Dja hear what happened Friday night, Danny Hilliard? His wife got home this class she's takin' up at UMass.? Threw him out. He wasn't even doin' nothing. Didn't have a fight with her or anna thing like that.

  Just sittin' there, havin' a beer, watchin' the TV or something'. Had no idea anna thing goin' on; just waitin' her to come home. Make him some dinner, you know? How'd he know what she's got on her mind? But she comes inna door, says: "Okay, I've had it. Get your ass out. I'm sick of lookin' at you. We're finished." Hear he begged and pleaded her, too; prackly got down on his knees, she'd give him just one more chance. Didn't do him no good. "Nothin' doin'," she says, "I said out, I mean out. Now leave or I calla cops." He couldn't budge her.