Give or take ten years.
40
I DIDN’T WANT TO GET into that kind of scene again, but I didn’t know what else to do. So finally I went to see if Herbie was still up and about, and I found him wide-eyed and stoned out of his mind but ready to rip.
“I thought you’d show,” Herbie said as I came into the room. “Want to get some breakfast?”
I was surprised. “It’s that late?”
“Yeah.” He checked his watch. “Seven-thirty.” He stepped out the door, and came back in holding the morning paper. “Your old lady ought to have gotten a big write-up,” he said. “Big splash.” He sighed. “Wish I could help,” he said, “but…”
I nodded. There was nothing he could do. Obviously, there was nothing that any of us could do. “A forty-brick bust,” I said. “That’s a hell of a big bust.”
“She got anything else going for her?” Herbie said.
“No prior offenses, no record,” I said. “That’s something.”
He nodded. “College student?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Work history? Can she prove she doesn’t do this for a living?”
“She hasn’t worked at some job for five years, if that’s what you mean.”
“Psychiatric history?”
“Nothing,” I said. That was the last resort, so far as defense went, but for young defendants it often helped.
Herbie sighed again, and shook his head. Then he looked up suddenly. “How many bricks did you say?”
“What?”
“How many bricks was she busted for holding?”
“Forty,” I said.
“Forty kilos?”
“That’s what I said.”
“That’s odd,” Herbie said. As I’d been talking he’d been leafing through the paper. “Because it says here… wait a minute… dadadadedah… umm… Here. It says ‘Susan Blake, busted for forty pounds in twenty kilos.’”
“Well, they made a mistake,” I said. “Fucking newspapers can’t even get the facts on a goddamn local bust down right. Anyway,” I shrugged, “it was forty keys.”
Herbie stared at the paper some more. “No,” he said.
“No, what?”
“No, they did not make a mistake. The sentence is internally consistent. Forty pounds would be just under twenty kilograms. That’s accurate.”
“Yeah, well, she had forty keys, forty bricks—”
“What did they say on the news last night?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“Well,” Herbie said, “it’s important, because if it’s only twenty keys, her bail might be lower.”
“Far out,” I said, and felt momentarily encouraged. Until I began to think of some other things that I had never thought of. Things I should have considered right off, especially with Murphy involved.
“Herbie,” I said, “this is far out. This is very far out.” Herbie looked interested. “Dig it: I know that there were forty keys in that shipment. Sukie was holding down two suitcases, twenty keys to a suitcase. Total value, ten thousand dollars. I mailed the check to her myself.”
“That is far out,” Herbie said. “The boys in blue seem to have gotten pretty arrogant.” He smiled, and buried his nose in the newspaper. “’Cause it says here ‘one suitcase,’ and that means that… Where do you think it’s being dumped?”
“Roxbury,” I said, “or Somerville. That’s a beginning, anyway.”
“Okay,” Herbie said, getting off on the whole idea of fucking up the pigs. “Now we need a car, and binoculars. I have both. Also, we have to stop off at the drugstore…”
“What?”
“I’ll meet you in the courtyard in ten minutes,” Herbie said on his way out the door.
41
AN HOUR LATER WE FOUND ourselves in Herbie’s VW, parked across the street from District Station House Number Four. It was still raining slightly, and on a Sunday afternoon this part of town, on the east edge of Roxbury, was quiet. Herbie gave me the binoculars. “Here,” he said. “You’re the one who knows what he looks like.”
I took the binoculars and tried to look through them. Herbie had focused them for his own eyes, and they were completely blurred for me. While I changed the focus, Herbie took off his glasses and wiped them on his tie. “You know,” he said conversationally, “Boston has the lowest pay scales for police of any place in the country.”
“That right?” I said. I was now focused on the front steps.
“Yes,” Herbie said. “That’s what’s behind it all. That and the mail.”
“The mail?” I repeated, still looking through the binoculars. A man came out of the station, talking to a cop in uniform. The man wasn’t Murphy.
“Yes,” Herbie said. “Cops get mail just like everybody else. Last year’s murder rate in Boston went up sixty percent over the year before. But the mail doesn’t say ‘Stop the murders.’ The mail says ‘Get those nasty kids with their nasty drugs.’”
“Oh,” I said.
Another man came out of the station. He wasn’t Murphy, either. I sighed.
“Better relax,” Herbie said, lighting a joint and passing it to me. “It could be a long time. You know, you can’t really blame them.”
“Who?”
“Whom. The police,” Herbie said. “Dope is money, you know. Why not make a little extra?”
“Yeah,” I said. And I added, “I hope Murphy’s broke.”
“That probably isn’t the motivating factor,” Herbie said. He said it in a cryptic, dry way and I suddenly flashed on what Herbie was doing here: weak, nearsighted, brilliant little Herbie, who was still working up to his first Big Date at the age of seventeen. Herbie was here because it was a manipulation trip, action at a distance, control from afar, guess and second-guess, with cops-and-robbers overtones. He was playing it hot and heavy, and loving every minute of it.
“I’m going to work on the gun,” he said, and leaned into the back seat to get it.
One hour passed, then two, then three. I began to get depressed. It seemed that things like this were always coming down on me, waiting things, dependent things, things where I wasn’t in control and had to bide my time, see what developed. It happened to everybody, of course, but that didn’t make it any better. Waiting to get out of high school so you could get away from Main Street. Waiting to get your degree so you could go out and wait for a job. Waiting for the bank loan. Waiting for the kids to grow up. Waiting for the draft to blow your neck. Waiting for the record to end—the same dismal, crummy record that played the same dismal, crummy song over and over, the song that went “When does it end, and who is it that’s won, and will I die, too, before it’s begun?”
Three and a half hours later the VW seemed very cramped, the air very stale. Herbie said he’d go across the street to a sandwich shop and get a couple of subs, while I stayed with the binoculars. He asked me what I wanted and I said a meatball sandwich. He came back with it for me, and it was terrible, a true crapball concoction, to be washed down by an artificially flavored, artificially colored beverage of some sort. I frowned when I bit into it and he asked me if it was what I had wanted. It wasn’t, of course. I thought about how I could never seem to get what I wanted. Nobody in America could, for that matter, unless of course you happened to want something that you could purchase, in which case you had an immense variety of guaranteed satisfactions. But even that had been going on too long. Too many people had been getting all the new cars and the new tubes and the new refrigerators that they’d wanted for so long. And now they wanted something else. But they didn’t know what.