Pleading Guilty Read Free Page A

batter, the people in the stands, somebody someplace has yelled your name. It's all co m ing to you, this dark circle m oving through the sky, changing size, just the way you've seen it at night when you're asleep. I had that feeling now, of having been betrayed by my dreams. Fear, as usual, was my only real excuse.
    "Listen, guys. This was carefully planned. By Mr. Litiplex or Kamin or whoever. Bert's three sheets to the wind with his sails nowhere in sight. And even if I do find him, by some miracle, what do you think happens when he opens the door and sees that he's been tracked down by one of his partners, who undoubtedly is going to speak to him about going to prison? What do you think he'll do?"
    "Hell talk to you, Mack."
    "Hell shoot me, Wash. If he's got any sense."
    Bereft of a response, Wash looked on with limpid blue eyes and a guttering soul--an aging white man. Martin, a step ahead as ever, smiled in his subtle way because he knew I'd agreed. Pagnucci as usual said nothing.

    Chapter II. MY REACTION
    Privately, my partners would tell you I'm a troubled individual. Wash and Martin are polite enough to murmur some fainthearted denial as they read this, but, guys, we all know the truth. I am, I admit, kind of a wreck from all directions--overweight even by the standards of big men who seem to get some latitude, gimpy on rainy days because I ruined my knee while I was a copper, jumping off a fence to chase some bum who never was worth catching. My skin, from two decades of drinking hard, has got that reddened look, as if someone took a Brillo pad to my forehead and my cheeks. Worse is what goes on inside. I have a sad heart, stomped on, fevered and corrupted, and a brain that boils at night in a ferment of awful dreams. I hear like far-off music the harsh voices of my mother and my former wife, both of them tough Irishwomen who knew that the tongue, for the right occasion, can be made an instrument of pain. But now I was excited. After the Committee broke, I lit out from the Needle for the Russian Bath, eager and actually somewhat jealous of Bert. Imagine! I thought as I bounced along in the taxi taking me west. Just imagine. A guy who worked down the hall. A foul ball. Now he was off roistering with a stolen fortune while I was still landlocked in my squalid little life.
    Reading this, my partners probably are squinting. What kind of jealous? they say. What envy? Fellas, let's not kid ourselves, especially at 4 :00 a . M . It is the hour of the wolf, quiet as doom, and I, the usual insomniac mess, am murmuring into my Di c taphone, whispering in fact, in case my nosy teenaged son actually returns from his night of reprobate activity. When I finish, I'll hide the tape in the strongbox beneath my bed. That way, in the event of second thoughts, I can drop the cassette into the trash.
    Before I began dictating the cover memo, I actually figured I would do it just as Wash requested. A report. Something anesthetized and lawyerly, prose in a straitjacket, and many footnotes. But you know me--as the song goes, I've done it my way. Say what you like, this is quite a role. I talk, you listen. I know. You don't. I tell you what I want--when I want. I discuss you like the furniture, or address you now and then by name. Martin, you are smiling in spite of yourself. Wash, you are wondering how Martin will react. Carl, you'd like it all in no more than three sentences and are bristling already.
    The bottom line, then: I didn't find Bert this afternoon. I tried. The cab got me to the right place and I stood outside the Bath, looking over the run-down commercial street, one of DuSable's many played-out neighborhoods, with the gritty restaurants and taverns, storefronts and tenements, windows dulled by dust. The brick buildings are permanently darkened from the years when this city burned coal. The masonry seemed to gather weight against the sky, which had been galvanized by winter, heavy-bellied clouds, gray and lusterless as zinc. I