Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  He smiled and instead of answering my question he said, “You’re just like a blank sheet of paper, Orleen. Maybe a name and a date up top but that’s all and it’s in pencil. You could be my worst nightmare, Felix. But first we’ve got to get some words down on paper.” He smiled again and went out of his office. I followed.

  He threw the bolts open and kicked up the buttress. Then he pulled open the door. He made to go out and then thought of something, turned and pointed that teacher’s finger at me again.

  “Don’t open this door for anybody. Not for anyone but me. Don’t answer it. Don’t say anything through it. You can use this,” he tapped a small video monitor that was mounted on the wall to the right of the door, “to see, but that’s it.”

  “W-why?” I stammered.

  “The landlord and I have a little dispute going.”

  “What kind of dispute?”

  “I haven’t paid rent in seven years and he thinks that it’s about time that I did.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “The only truth in the bible is where it says that stuff about money and evil,” he said and then he hurried out. The door closed behind him, five seconds later the locks all flipped down and the buttress lowered. I noticed then that there was a network of wires that led from the door to a small black box sitting underneath the cushionless couch.

  The box was connected to an automobile battery. Even in a blackout Archibald Lawless would have secure doors.

  5

  I spent that morning inside the mind of a madman or a genius or maybe outside of what Lawless refers to as the hive mind, the spirit that guides millions of heedless citizens through the aimless acts of everyday life.

  The mess on my office table was a treasure trove of oddities and information. Xeroxed copies of wanted posters, guest lists to conservative political fund raisers, blueprints of corporate offices and police stations. Red Tuesday’s newsletter had detailed information about the movements of certain killkills using their animal code names (like Bear, Ringed Hornet, and Mink). She was less forthcoming about certain saboteurs fighting for anything from ecology to the liberation of so-called political prisoners. For these groups she merely lauded their actions and gave veiled warnings about how close they were to discovery in various cities.

  Lawless was right about her and the Catholic Church. She also had a box in each issue surrounded by a border of red and blue crosses in which she made tirades against Catholic crack houses paying for political campaigns and other such absurdities. Even the language was different. This article was the only one that had misspellings and bad grammar.

  At the back of every Red Tuesday newsletter, on page four, was an article signed only in the initials AAL. Everything else was written by Red Tuesday. This regular column had a title, REVOLUTIONARY NOTES. After flipping through about fifteen issues I found one column on Archie and the rent.

  Never give an inch to the letter of the law if it means submitting to a lie. Your word is your freedom not your bond. If you make a promise, or a promise is made to you, it is imperative that you make sure the word, regardless of what the law says, is upheld. Lies are the basis for all the many crimes that we commit every day. From petty theft to genocide it is a lie that makes it and the truth that settles the account.

  Think of it! If only we made every candidate for office responsible for every campaign promise she made. Then you’d see a democracy that hasn’t been around for a while. My own landlord promised me whitewashed walls and a red carpet when I agreed to pay his lousy rent. He thought the lie would go down easy, that he could evict me because I never signed a contract. But he had lied. When I took his rooms for month to month he needed the rent and told me that a contract wasn’t necessary. He told me that he’d paint and lay carpet, but all that was lies.

  It’s been years and I’m still here. He hasn’t painted or made a cent. I brought him to court and I won. And then, because a man who lies cannot recognize the truth, he sent men to run me out . . .

  Never lie and never lie down for a lie. Live according to your word and the world will find its own balance.

  I was amazed by the almost innocent and idealistic prattle of such an obviously intelligent man.

  The thought of a landlord sending up toughs to run me out of the rooms stopped my lazy reading and sent me out on the job I had been given.

  The first person on my list was Valerie Lox. She was a commercial real estate broker on Madison Avenue, just above an exclusive jewelry store. I got there at about eleven forty-five. The offices were small but well appointed. The building was only two floors and the roof had a skylight making it possible for all of the lush green plants to flourish between the three real estate agents’ desks.

  “Can I help you?” a young Asian man at the desk closest to the door asked.

  I suppressed the urge to correct him. May I, my mother inside me wanted to say. But I turned my head instead looking out of the window onto posh Madison. Across the street was a furrier, a fancy toy store, and a German pen shop.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to see Ms. Lox.”

  The young man looked me up and down. He didn’t like my blue jeans and ratty, secondhand Tibetan sweater—this college wear wasn’t designed for Madison Avenue consumption.

  “My father is thinking of opening a second office in Manhattan and he wanted me to see what was available,” I further explained.

  “And your father is?” Another bad sentence.

  “JP Orlean of Herman, Bledsoe, and Orlean in New Orleans.”

  “Wait here.” The young man uttered these words, rose from his chair, and walked away.

  The two young women agents, one white and the other honey brown, looked from me to the young man as he made his way past them and through a door at the back of the garden room.

  I was missing my seminar on the History of the West but that didn’t bother me much. I could always get the notes from my friend Claude. And working for Lawless promised to hone my investigative potentials.

  “Making sense out of a seemingly incomprehensible jumble of facts.” That’s what Professor Ortega said at the first lecture I attended at Columbia. His class was called the Art in Article.

  I wasn’t sure what Lawless was looking for but that didn’t worry me. I knew enough from my father’s practice to feel safe from involvement in any crime. The test was that even if I went to the police there was nothing concrete I could tell them that they didn’t already know.

  I was beginning to wonder where the agent had gone when he and a small woman in a dark blue dress came out of the door in back. He veered off and the woman walked straight toward me.

  “Mr. Orlean?” she asked with no smile.

  “Ms. Lox?” I did smile.

  “May I see some form of identification?”

  This shocked. When did a real estate agent ask for anything but a deposit? But I took out my wallet and showed her my student ID and Louisiana driver’s license. She looked them over carefully and then invited me to follow her into the back.

  The head woman’s office was no larger than an alcove, there was no skylight or window. Her workstation was a one-piece, salmon pink high school desk next to which sat a short black filing cabinet. She sat and put on a telephone headset, just an earphone and a tiny microphone in front of her mouth.

  I stayed standing even though there was a visitor’s chair, because I had my manners to maintain.

  “Sit,” she said, not unkindly.

  I did so.

  Valerie Lox was a mild blend of contradictions. Her pale skin seemed hard, almost ceramic. Her tightly wound blond hair was in the final phase of turning to white. The hint of yellow was illusive. The face was small and sharp, and her features could have been lightly sculpted and then painted on. Her birdlike body was slender and probably as hard as the rest of her but the blue dress was rich in color and fabric. It was like a royal cloak wrapped around the shoulders of a white twig.

  “Why did you need to see my ID?”r />
  “This is an exclusive service, Mr. Orlean,” she said with no chink of humanity in her face. “And we like to know exactly who it is we’re dealing with.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So it wasn’t because of my clothes or my race?”

  “The lower races come in all colors, Mr. Orlean. And none of them get back here.”

  Her certainty sent a shiver down my spine. I smiled to hide the discomfort.

  She asked of what assistance she could be to my father. I told her some lies but I forget exactly what. Lying comes easily to me. My aunt Alberta had once told me that lying was a character trait of men on my father’s side of the family. That was why they all became lawyers.

  “Lawyer even sounds like liar,” she used to say. “That’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing. You got to go with the good, honey chile, no matter what you do.”

  I spent forty-five minutes looking over photographs and blueprints of offices all over the Madison Avenue area. Nothing cost less than three hundred and fifty thousand a year and Ms. Lox got a whole year’s rent as commission. I was thinking maybe I could marry a real estate agent while I worked the paper trade.

  Ms. Lox didn’t press me. She showed me one office after another asking strategic questions now and then.

  “What sort of law would he be practicing?” she asked at one point. “I mean would he need a large waiting room?”

  “If he did,” I answered, “I wouldn’t be here talking to you. Any lawyer with a waiting room is just two steps away from ambulance chasing.”

  That was the only time I saw her smile.

  “Is your father licensed to practice in New York?” she asked at another time.

  “You should know,” I said.

  “Come again?”

  “I gave your assistant my father’s name and he came back here for five minutes or more. If I were you I would have looked up JP Or-lean in the ABA Internet service. There I would have seen that he is not licensed in this state. But you must be aware that he has many clients who have investments and business in the city. A lawyer is mostly mind and a license is easy to rent.” These last words were my father’s. He used them all the time to out-of-state clients who didn’t understand the game.

  It struck me as odd that Ms. Lox was so suspicious of me. I was just looking at pictures of commercial spaces. There was nothing top secret that I could steal.

  The young Asian man, Brian, brought me an espresso with a coconut cookie while I considered. And when I was through he led me to the front door and said good-bye using my name. I told him, as I had told Valerie Lox, that I would be in touch in a few days after my father and I had a chance to talk.

  As I was leaving I saw Valerie Lox standing at the door in back looking after me with something like concern on her porcelain face.

  The next stop was a construction site on 23rd Street. Kenneth Cornell, the man I came to see, was some kind of supervisor there. The crew was excavating a deep hole getting ready for the roots of a skyscraper. There were three large cranes moving dirt and stone from the lower depths to awaiting trucks on a higher plane. There was a lot of clanging and whining motors, men, and a few women, shouting, and the impact of hammers, manual and automatic, beating upon the poor New York soil, trying once again to make her submit to their architectural dreams.

  I walked in, stated my business, was fitted with a hard hat, and shown into the pit.

  They led me to a tin shack half the way down the dirt slope. The man inside the shack was yelling something out of the paneless window at workers looking up from down below. I knew that he was yelling to be heard over the noise but it still gave me the impression that he was a man in a rage. And, being so small, I always stood back when there was rage going on.

  Cornell was tall but a bit lanky for construction I thought. His pink chin was partly gray from afternoon shadow and his gray eyes were unsettling because they seemed to look a bit too deeply into my intentions.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Cornell?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m Orlean,” I said pronouncing it or-leen as Lawless had done.

  “That supposed to mean something to me?”

  “I called your office last week—about getting a job,” I said.

  His eyes tightened, it felt as though they were squeezing my lungs.

  “Who are you?” he asked me.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I was way out of my depth.

  Cornell’s hands folded up into fists as if to underscore the epiphany.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he said.

  I didn’t exactly run out of that hole but if I had been competing in a walking race I wouldn’t have come in last.

  6

  Lana Drexel, fashion model, was the last name on my list. She was the one I most wanted to see but I didn’t make it that day.

  Henry Lansman was my second to last stop. He was an easy one, a barber at Crenshaw’s, a popular place down in Greenwich Village. There was almost always a line at Crenshaw’s. They were an old time barbershop that catered to the conservative thirty-something crowd. They gave classic haircuts in twelve minutes and so could afford to undercut, so to speak, the competition.

  The shop, I knew from friends, had nine barber chairs that were all busy all of the time. But because this was a Tuesday at two-thirty there were only about ten or twelve customers waiting in line at the top of the stairwell of the shop. You had to go down a half flight of stairs to get into the establishment. I can’t say what the inside of the place looked like because I never made it there.

  “Hey,” someone said in tone that was opening to fear. “Hey, mister.”

  “Excuse me,” a man in a red parka said before he shouldered me aside hard enough to have thrown me down the stairwell if there hadn’t been a portly gentleman there to block my fall.

  “Hey, man! What the fuck!” the big man I fell against hollered. He was wearing some kind of blue uniform.

  I wanted to see who it was that pushed me. I did catch a glimpse of the top of the back of his head. It had partly gray close-cut hair. He was crouching down and the parka disguised his size, and, anyway, the big guy I slammed into needed an apology.

  “I’m sorry . . .” I said and then the shouting started.

  “Hey, mister. Mister! Hey I think this guy’s havin’ a heart attack!”

  The big man had put his hand on my shoulder but the terror in the crackling tone distracted him long enough for me to rush to the side of the young man who was screaming. I wish I could say that it was out of concern for life that moved me so quickly but I really just wanted to save myself from being hit.

  The screamer was a white man, tall and well built. He was tan and wore an unbuttoned black leather jacket and a coal colored loose-knit shirt that was open at the neck revealing a thick gold chain that hung around his throat. He had a frightened child’s eyes. His fear was enough to convince me to clear out before the danger he saw could spread. I would have run away if it wasn’t for the dying man at my feet.

  I crouched down on one knee to get a closer look at the heart attack victim. There was a fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth. The lips were dark, the panic in his wide eyes was fading into death. He wore a short-sleeved nylon shirt which was odd because this was late October and on the chilly side. His gray slacks rode a little high. He was almost completely bald.

  The struggle in his eyes was gone by the time I had noticed these things. I cradled the back of his head with my hand. A spasm went through his neck. His back arched and I thought he was trying to rise. But then he slumped back down. Blood seeped out of his left nostril.

  “He’s dead,” the someone whispered.

  Men and women all around were voicing their concern but I only made out one sentence, “Mr. Bartoli, it’s Henry, Henry Lansman!” a man’s voice shouted.

  I was watching the color drain from the dead man’s face thinking that I should clear out or tell somebody what I knew. But all I could do was kneel there
holding the heavy head, watching the drop of blood making its way down his jowl.

  “Out of the way! Let him go!” a man ordered.

  A round man, hard from muscle, pushed me aside. He was wearing a white smock. At first I thought it was a doctor. But then I realized it must be someone from the barbershop.

  I moved aside and kept on going. The screamer with the gold chain was leaning against the window of the shoe store next door. His tan had faded. I remember thinking that some poor woman would have to have sex with him all night long before the color came back.

  Henry Lansman was dead. People were shouting for someone to call an ambulance. I stayed watching until I heard the first far-off whine of the siren then I walked away from the scene feeling guilty though not knowing why.

  I went over to Saint Mark’s Place, a street filled with head shops, twelve-step programs, and wild youths with punk hair and multiple piercings. There was a comic book store that I frequented and a quasi-Asian restaurant that was priced for the college student pocketbook.

  I ordered soba noodles with sesame sauce and a triple espresso. I finished the coffee but only managed about half of the entree. I sat there thinking about the ceramic woman, the angry man, and the dead barber. That morning I was just a college student looking for a job. By afternoon I had witnessed a man dying.

  I considered my options. The first one was calling my father. He knew lawyers in New York. Good ones. If I told him what was wrong he’d be on the next plane. JP would be there. He’d body block anyone trying to hurt me. He’d do anything to save me from danger. But then he’d take me back down to Louisiana and tell me how stupid I was and which law school I was to attend. He might even tell me that I had to live at home for a while.

  And how could I say no if I begged him to save me?

  And anyway it looked like a heart attack that killed Lansman. I decided that I was just being oversensitive to the paranoia of Lawless and Red Tuesday.

  The man was just sick.