Way Past Legal Read online

  The place I was living just then happened to be in a very nice building in Cobble Hill. I had been keeping my eye on this little old lady down the hall. She loved jewelry, she had like ten different watches she liked to wear, Cartier and Patek Philippe and Rolex, plus diamond earrings and bracelets, very old and very nice. Problem was, she was a sweet old bat. I carried groceries up for her a few times and she would always try to give me something to eat. She kept a pair of binoculars next to her patio, but the only birds she was interested in were the ones living in the building across the courtyard. She had this little dog, and she took him out for a walk every day. It was almost criminal not to, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, she was too nice. I thought I might hang around for a while, though, see if she croaked.

  So I’m walking back that morning, the morning after Leonid, and I’m feeling very jumpy. I’m thinking about Little Nicky, I’m worrying about the deal with Rosey, I want to get away with the kid and the money, both. Anyway, I notice some vans I hadn’t seen on the block before. Two big Ford cargo vans, the kind tradesmen use. They had the windows blacked out, both of them had the engines running and one of them was bouncing around a little bit, like there were guys inside, moving around. I turned back when I saw that, went off to think about it.

  I could have just walked away. That’s what I had been telling myself, that was one of the reasons I was doing the nomad thing to begin with, but I found out I was wrong. That paper bag with the hundred large was up there on the kitchen table, but it was not worth getting killed or busted for, I mean, there was plenty more where that came from. Aside from that, all I had up there was just, you know, personal stuff. But it was mine, you know what I mean? I didn’t like the idea of someone I didn’t know going through my shit, whether it was cops or the Russians or even the people I was subletting from. I got a flash then, how all those people I had ripped off must’ve felt, but I put it out of my mind. I knew I would have to deal with it sooner or later—once it comes up you’ve got to decide what you’re gonna do about it—but just then I was too worried about getting back into that apartment. See, there were two things up there that I wanted. I know it sounds stupid, but I really wanted that laptop. It was nobody’s business how much I spent on food or dry cleaning or women and it was all right there in Quicken, I hadn’t even bothered to put a password on the file. And the other thing was my life list, which I had folded up in the front page of my copy of the Sibley Guide to Birds.

  A life list is a record of every bird species you have personally seen and identified, and mine isn’t even official because you’re supposed to have someone with you to verify your sightings, is that a cedar waxwing, yes, by God, mark it down. That would have ruined it for me, this was a thing I had to do on my own, don’t ask me why. I had never spoken a single word about it to a soul. But it was up there, and I had a lot of birds on it, too, everything from house sparrows to a great big beautiful son of a bitch of a barn owl, what he was doing in Brooklyn I’ll never know, but I wanted that list. No way was I gonna start all over again.

  There were some kids shooting baskets in a schoolyard not far away, and I hung out and watched them for a while. I picked out two of them. They were both tall, looked like they could run, and I gave them twenty bucks each to go put a couple of bricks through the back windows of one of those Ford vans. It was pretty funny, the way it went down. The kids come walking down the sidewalk, boom, there go the windows, they take off, the doors of the van burst open, the guys inside are cops and they can’t help themselves, they come boiling out and go chasing after the kids, guy in the front seat hops out, he’s red-faced, yelling at his guys to come back, and right then a car that I hadn’t noticed which had been parked just up the block pulls out and goes screaming away, had to be Rosario waiting for me. The other Ford van jumps out and goes after him, and after a few minutes the cops all come back and get into the one with broken windows, and they take off, too.

  Makes you wonder. Maybe Rosey just wanted to talk, maybe the cops wouldn’t get him, maybe he wouldn’t roll over on me when they did, maybe the Russians were too busy running for the hills themselves to come chasing after anybody. Right?

  Sure. I was in and out in fifteen minutes. I grabbed an old Toyota out of the garage under the building. Hey, it was an emergency. I left it in front of some hotel in Queens, took my bags, and jumped into a cab. That way, I figure, dude gets his car back, the guys in the impound yard won’t mess with it too much because it’s an old crock, not even worth cracking the trunk open.

  When you have to run, the toughest thing in the world is to think about it first. I kept going over it on that ride to Manhattan, Rosey sitting there waiting on me, not noticing the cops waiting on him. That’s what he was like sometimes, so focused on what he was doing that he couldn’t see what was going on, and I began to wonder if I might not be guilty of the same sort of blindness, so busy running away that I didn’t look for the trap. Rosario had to be on fire, man, he’d had all that money right there in his lap, and now it was gone. He wouldn’t even consider that he’d been ready to screw me out of my cut, and put me in the ground when I found out. He was the offended party now. He could take me up to the roof and throw me off, and who would blame him? Maybe he’d feel sorry for it afterward, add my death to his list of regrets, but that wouldn’t do me much good.

  I made a few calls on my cell phone while the cab was stuck in traffic. They had a vacancy at the Halloran House on Lexington, so that’s where I wound up. That’s not the name of the hotel anymore, but Halloran House sounds much cooler than the Sheraton or whatever the hell it is now, so that’s how I always think of it. That must be what it’s like to get old, you keep seeing things the way they used to be instead of how they are now.

  I sat in my hotel room eating room service and watching television while I tried to figure out what to do. The movie The Fugitive was on. Tommy Lee Jones knew that Harrison Ford was going to be running downhill, knew how fast he could run and how far. I had to think about that. My first impulse had been to head for Miami—Miami is like Brooklyn with palm trees, and there are a lot of guys there that look like me, I could fit right in. If someone was looking for me, though, if they knew me and wanted me bad enough, Miami would be a good place to start. I liked the place and had been there a few times. That’s how they get you. They watch how you move, they keep track of what you’ve done before, assuming that’s something like what you’ll do next time. So what would Tommy Lee Jones expect from me? He’d expect me to head south in someone else’s car.

  It took me a few days to put it together. I went back out to Jersey, there’s one place about ten minutes from the George Washington Bridge, has to be the center of the used-car universe. There’s even a place that specializes in exotics, Maserati, Lotus, Vette, Ferrari. I was sorely tempted, I got the money, right? But I wound up buying a Ford minivan from the guy across the street. It’s the last thing anyone would ever expect me to drive, but I’m running away from Tommy Lee, right, and I’m going uphill. I paid the guy cash, told him what I wanted, and he was more than happy to take care of the whole transaction, tags, insurance, and all.

  The next day I had an appointment to see a guy named Michael Timothy Buchanan. Dude is supposed to be a lawyer, that’s what it says on his office door. You wouldn’t want him making out a will for you, though, or closing a real estate deal, or much of anything else. He was a crook, and a good one. The cops have never bagged him. I don’t think he’s ever even shown up on their radar screen. I had dealt with the guy twice before, and both times I worried if this deal was gonna be the one that put us all away. What Buchanan did was solve problems. You take a guy like me, my problem is that I got cash, and I need to get it into the system. Cash is just one kind of money, but it can be inconvenient. The other kind of money is the kind that doesn’t really exist except for a row of numbers on a piece of paper, a check or a statement of some kind. Changing cash to the other kind of money is a common problem. Uncle Sam keeps a sha
rp eye out for guys trying to do that. They watch banks and casinos and brokerage houses, and if you start moving large amounts of cash through a place like that you will be visited by a couple of guys who will ask you a lot of questions about where you got it. I worked for it, motherfucker, but any time Uncle Sam’s minions catch you with a fat wad of green they automatically assume you got it from some nefarious activity, and they take it. You want it back, you got to demonstrate to their satisfaction that you earned it in some socially acceptable fashion. How is that fair?

  What Buchanan does is broker a deal with two other crooks who have different problems. You take a guy that owns a used-car lot or a candy store, say it’s worth a half a million bucks, and the guy is looking to sell. He sells it straight up, the IRS is gonna want about a hundred and fifty grand from him in taxes after the deal is done. So the guy goes to someone like Buchanan, says, “I want a hundred and fifty regular and three and a half in cash.” Okay? But it costs me a hundred and fifty thousand in legitimate dollars and four hundred thousand dirty ones. Plus, what the hell do I want with a candy store? Buchanan goes out and finds some guy who really does want it, maybe he offers it to the guy for something less than market value, say, four and a half. So, on paper, I bought something for a hundred and fifty grand, turned around and sold it to some other guy for four and a half. What I actually did was launder my money. I get my original hundred and fifty back, plus three hundred thousand more that I can put into the system in any fashion I choose, transforming myself in the process from a crook to a man of substance and independent means. I gotta pay some tax on the capital gain, but hey, I’m a citizen now, right? Buchanan gets a percentage, plus, you can be relatively sure he is screwing everyone involved, but that’s not my business, and it beats the hell out of going to jail. It doesn’t have to be a candy store, either, it can be anything from Liberian freighters to office buildings, and sometimes the deal can be ferociously complex. The only safe way through something like that is to be totally clear on your own end of it. Here’s how much I give you in this form, here’s how much I better get back from you in that form. You yield to temptation and get drawn in any further, especially if it has anything to do with real estate, you will get gutted like a fish.

  Buchanan had an office in a suite with a bunch of other lawyers in a building right off Union Square. I don’t know if he was partnered in with those other guys or if he was just a carbuncle on their ass. I don’t know what any of the other lawyers did. He was in when I called, though, and he agreed to meet me at a coffee shop around the corner from his building. I got there ahead of time, sat in with a bunch of Jamaicans who were hanging on the corner across the street from the place. Buchanan showed up about five minutes late, looking like he always did. He was a pale white guy, always wore a three-piece suit, always, white shirt with French cuffs, tie, shiny shoes. His hands always shook, he sweated like a coolie even in the dead of winter, so much so that the collar of his shirt was always wet. He was deep into the process of drinking himself to death. Too bad. Smart bastard like him, you gotta wonder what he could have been, he didn’t have that monkey on his back. I didn’t see anybody following him, so after a few more minutes I crossed over.

  I sat down across from him. He didn’t offer to shake hands, and neither did I. “Hello, Michael.”

  “Mohammed. I heard you were dead.”

  “Did you really?”

  “No. I did hear that there is a contract out on you. You and that Puerto Rican gorilla you run with.”

  “Wow.” That was fast. “No kidding. How much?”

  Buchanan laughed, shook his head. “You want me to find out?”

  “No. I want to do a transaction, just like last time, only bigger. Two million, this time.” The number did not impress Buchanan at all.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not staying in town, I’m only in for the day. How much time you think you’re going to need?”

  He shrugged. “At least a couple of weeks, maybe more. I might be able to give you details in a few days. Is there someplace I can reach you?”

  “No. I’ll call you.”

  “All right,” he said. He stood to go. No small talk for him. “Try me in about a week. Call me at the office, around ten. Call too early and I won’t be there. I’m not always available after noon.” He smiled once, a quick mechanical grimace, and he turned and walked out. He must have been getting worse. Last time I dealt with him he didn’t start drinking until after five in the afternoon. That’s the way alcohol addiction gets you, though, like a beaver working on the base of a tree, it keeps chewing off pieces of you until it takes you down.

  Two days later I’m sitting in the minivan, parked on Flushing Avenue outside the Bushwick Houses—that’s the housing project where the Bitch lived. Nicky didn’t come outside that day, but I wasn’t worried—you can’t keep a kid like Little Nicky inside for long, he’ll drive you out of your mind. Sure enough, the next day he came outside, he was chasing leaves around the dogshit-speckled patch of grass between the buildings. I slid back the side door of the van and sat in the opening watching him. When he finally noticed me he came tearing over, screaming, “Poppy!” Nobody noticed, nobody was watching, nobody gave a fuck. After a few minutes he detached himself from my leg and looked up. “Poppy,” he said. “You got a haircut.”

  I had been wearing dreads for a while, but after the job with Rosey I’d gotten them chopped off, and now my hair was not much more than a painted shadow on my skull. “Yeah, I did. How you feeling? You doing okay?”

  He looked down at the sidewalk and shrugged. Didn’t want to talk about it.

  “You wanna come with me?”

  He looked up, eyes wide. “To stay?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked around. “Mrs. Hicks is gonna get mad.”

  “She’ll get over it. Come on, let’s go.”

  We made it as far as Haverhill, Massachusetts, that night. I still don’t know anything about Haverhill, it was just one of those places on the way to where I was going. We got out on that wide, flat, endless American interstate, it got dark and I got tired, I saw the sign that said Haverhill, and I got off. Nicky and I slept in the same motel bed that night. He was scared and he cried, I comforted him the best I could. It was tough for me to understand his tears. They couldn’t have been for his mother, he didn’t really remember her, nor could they have been for Mrs. Hicks, God forbid. Me, I had plenty to cry about, and I did it, too. New York City was lost to me now. She had cast me out, left me in these strange backwoods, I thought she was closed to me forever, this beautiful hideous bitch goddess whore mother of a city had turned her back on me and left me out here with Opie and Dorothy, River City before Harold Hill, Jesus, who wouldn’t cry?

  Little Nicky got over it and fell asleep tucked up next to me, his arm stretched out onto my stomach. Every time I moved he would grab and hang on, and that really said it all.

  That sense of urgency left me sometime during the night, and in the morning we lay in bed while Nicky watched Barney on the motel television. I wondered, for a while, what Barney was doing to my son’s head, but it was something he knew. He watched, rapt, sang along with the idiotic songs in his little boy’s voice. He even tried to explain to me, distractedly, what the hell they were singing about. I should have done this long ago, I thought, I should have come for him as soon as I got out. We shut the television off when Barney was over, and Nicky stood on a chair in the bathroom, brushed his teeth with my toothbrush, washed his face. I watched him, wondering how in the world I was going to do this. What could I teach him? I didn’t know anything myself. Nothing good, anyway.

  There was a huge shopping mall on the other side of the highway from the motel, and there was a pancake house in one corner of the parking lot. I’ve never been a breakfast guy myself, I always thought the only civilized time for breakfast was about two in the afternoon, preferably with a few Bloody Marys up front. Nicky was bouncing in the
front seat beside me. He didn’t say anything, but little kids gotta eat, even I knew that. I pulled into the parking lot next to the pancake house and shut the car off. He got nervous when I opened my car door.

  “Where you going, Poppy?”

  I pointed at the pancake house. “Me and you are gonna go have breakfast in there.”

  “Breakfast?” He looked out his window with his mouth open, wonderment plain on his face.

  “Yeah, breakfast. Lock your door, push that button down. Okay, come with me.”

  I probably should have put him next to me in the booth so that I could help him out, but I was new at this. He climbed up and got onto his knees on the bench so that he could lean his elbows on the table the way I did. When the waitress came, she handed me a menu, but she spoke to Nicky.

  “You want a booster seat, honey?”

  “No, I’m okay,” he said. “Do you work here?”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” she said, smiling. She glanced over at me. “Coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nicky recaptured her attention effortlessly. “Are they good to you here? They treat you nice?”

  She smiled again, wider this time, looked over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. “Well, you know,” she said, “sometimes they do, and then sometimes they don’t. You want something to drink, honey?”

  The two of them turned and looked over at me like I knew something. It took me a couple of seconds. “You want a glass of milk?”

  “Milk?”

  “It’s that white stuff goes on your Cheerios.”

  He gave me a look, like, Okay, buddy, and turned back to her. “You got chocolate milk?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said. “I’ll go check.” She walked off chuckling, shaking her head. I’ve got to learn how he does it, I thought. I knew that part of it was his looks, but still, he had a way of connecting, of opening people up and making them want to talk to him. He’d been able to do it ever since he’d learned how to talk, and I had no idea how it worked. Put me in a room full of strangers and I will be guarded and defensive until I figure out who’s who and how much compensating I have to do to make up for what I am, you know, no education, jail, and the rest of it. Put Nicky in the same room and he’ll walk out a half hour later friends with everybody in there, he’ll remember their names and everything they talked about. Jesus. He should be helping me eat my breakfast, not the other way around.