"The first thing's to make sure you stay friends with him. This isn't hard because he wants to be friends with you, even more than you do with him. He's very insecure, I think. He's always afraid that nobody will like him. So he's got enough motivation for both of you. He thinks you're the one who's being nice. By talking to him now and then, sure, but even more by listening to him, spillin' his guts out to you.
"So that's the second thing you do: You make it very clear to him that not only are you always glad to see him but you really appreciate the things he has to tell you. You aren't just humoring him; you're interested.
"That's the only two things you hafta do. He likes you; he'll talk.
You say: "Hey Ev, how's it goin', huh, kid? What's goin' on; whaddaya hear?" And woof-woof; here it comes, you got it. Immediately the guy is telling you every damned thing he knows. Without even knowing, most of the time, what the hell most of it means, the significance of what he's sayin'. It's like you struck up a friendship at the track with a talking horse who tells you which one of his friends is gonna win that day because he likes you. And when you mention one day you're startin' to feel guilty, you've been getting' rich on him and you feel like you oughta share your winnings, he just shrugs it off and says: "Hey, great; I'm happy for you. But what good is money to me? I'm a horse.
Bring me an apple sometime."
"Ev Whalen's info is that good and he's got no idea how valuable it can be to you. He would've made a hell of a newspaperman. He works a lot harder'n most of them do, and he finds out a whole lot more stuff. But he doesn't know what news is. He thinks if he recognizes the subject everyone else must already know it. He thinks he's always the last kid onna block to find something out. Oh, and he doesn't question anything. He assumes whatever he knows must be the Gospel truth.
"He doesn't interpret anything, either, tell you what to think about it. He tells you what he thinks but he's not real confident about it, so you can overlook it. And so those're the things I'm trying to remember all the time tonight when he comes outta left field and absolutely stuns me, we're out there inna back waitin' for the prisoners to come out.
"I forget how it came up, but it seemed like before I knew it we're talking how he's sort of vaguely heard you're in some sort of trouble, and do I have any idea what it is. At first I figured maybe he was just fishing around, but every time I tried to change the subject, which I must've, three or four times, he came right back to it. The gist of it seemed to be the Grey Hills memberships. He suspects they were fairly expensive, and he knows it costs a lot to play golf on the public courses so it must take one shitload of money at Grey Hills. He knows we've been playing there a long time, so we must've paid a lot of money, and he's really curious about where we got it. And also where you got the money for the Bell Woods house and the summer house, as well, which for all he knows is onna Cape but he did throw in that it might be onna Vineyard. He didn't mention under-the-table campaign funds or kickbacks, or maybe bribes, but I felt pretty sure if I asked him how it was he thought you got it, that is what he would've said.
"He had me close to panic. He kept pushing me on how much it cost to join Grey Hills and of course I didn't wanna tell him, so I keep saying I forget and trynah get him interested in something else, almost anything. I start tellin' him, what golfs about, and how you're always beatin' me and he wouldn't buy it. It was like he had a bone in his teeth: he kept comin' back to how much it costs for Grey Hills. So finally I just gave up and fell back on the standard strategy of what to do when you're trapped: I made something up."
"In other words, you lied," Hilliard said, 'and hoped that he'd believe it."
"You could put it that way, yeah," Merrion said. "I didn't actually come right out and say it cost between two and three grand. I said I remembered when we were doing it saying to you that if I put the price of the membership with what my car was worth, I could've had a brand-new Oldsmobile, which was true. And that as I recall it now, the amount of money that it would've taken me to make a deal trading my car on a new Eighty-eight then would've been two or three grand. Which is also the truth, or very close to it, but not close to the truth he was after."
"Did he buy it?" Hilliard said. "First, though, you tell me now, because now I don't remember. What was it, about double that? Six grand or so, apiece?"
"It was eighty-four hundred," Merrion said, 'which I was not about to tell Whalen. I could ah had three Oldsmobiles, six if I'd spent your piece of the action. Four thousand for the equity share, three thousand initiation. Fourteen hundred down-payment on the annual dues.
You're the math genius but I could do that one: times two, sixteen-thousand-eight-hundred American dollars. Not cheap.
"Did he buy what I tried to make him think it was? Probably. Two or three grand's still big money to Ev Whalen today. In fact I think if I'd told him the truth, and said sixteen-eight, he probably would not have believed me. That price to play golf would've boggled his mind, would've made him faint dead away. I doubt Whalen's house cost him that if he owns one now, after his kid. One of his kids, I think he's got two, had something terrible happen. So as a result the kid's helpless. Ev has not had a good time in this world; I try to cut him some slack."
"Sixteen-thousand, eight-hundred dollars," Hilliard said musingly.
"Jesus, that was expensive. Seven percent compound interest, more than twenty years: fifty grand, about, by now, if you'd left it in the bank."
"Yeah, right," Merrion said, 'if you don't deduct the taxes that you hadda pay every April on the interest that it earned from year to year.
Which you would've, of course, so that you'd now have a lot less. With inflation, you'd have nothin'. Less'n nothing, actually. Plus which the last time they talked about maybe re-opening membership, so they could put a dome over the pool and people could swim inna winter? They ended up not dotn' it, of course, but before that the talk was they'd be asking thirty-five K for the equity ante alone. Which I think was most likely what killed it: not the prospect of the course getting' too crowded, but the fact that the only people who would've had that kind of loose change to spend on playin' golf d be pro athletes and major drug-dealers, and havin' them as members scared the power elite.
"So you could say that we got a bargain. I think it's been a damned good investment. It's hard to play golf and have drinks inna bank, and anyway, over the years I've dropped a lot of dollars doing stuff and buying things that weren't worth what I paid, and I've had my regrets.
But I never regretted Grey Hills. That was a damned smart investment.
I've been having a wonderful time for over twenty years now with my high-priced toy, and I'm not even close to bein' through havin' fun with it yet.
"But tonight I was not havin' fun. Tonight I am a worried man. Whalen has heard something about you and me, and that means it's out on the street. What it is specifically I could not get out of him. I suspect he doesn't know either, exactly what the feds're doing. But they're doing something, he knows, and that means this will not go away. So that's why I hadda see you tonight. I was hoping that maybe you could make me feel better. At least tell me what's going on, which you did not this afternoon; what they're after you for, and therefore why they're after me."
Hilliard's face was grey in the moonlight. He licked his lips. He shook his head. "I want to say I know, and of course I'll tell you, but I can't because I don't," he said miserably, looking down and studying his hands. He stopped and shook his head. "Pooler isn't sure either. Or he wasn't when he called me, late Friday afternoon." His voice trailed away and stopped. He coughed a couple of times and changed his position, as though that would help to dislodge some foreign substance that had accumulated in his throat. He covered his mouth and coughed several times.