Finders Keepers Read online

  Oh yes, undoubtedly, in spite of all he knew. Which was bad, but he couldn't remember the crazy things afterwards, and that was worse. After the third drink (sometimes only second), he fell down a dark hole and didn't climb back out until he woke up hungover but sober. Blackout drinking was what they called it. And in those blackouts, he almost always got up to . . . well, call it hijinks. Hijinks was how he'd ended up in Riverview Youth Detention, and doubtless how he'd ended up here. Wherever here was.

  Hijinks.

  Fucking hijinks.

  Morris hoped it had been a good old-fashioned bar fight and not more breaking and entering. Not a repeat of his Sugar Heights adventure, in other words. Because he was well past his teenage years now and it wouldn't be the reformatory this time, no sir. Still, he would do the time if he had done the crime. Just as long as the crime had nothing to do with the murder of a certain genius American writer, please God. If it did, he would not be breathing free air again for a long time. Maybe never. Because it wasn't just Rothstein, was it? And now a memory did arise: Curtis Rogers asking if New Hampshire had the death penalty.

  Morris lay on the bunk, shivering, thinking, That can't be why I'm here. It can't.

  Can it?

  He had to admit that it was possible, and not just because the police might have put him together with the dead men in the rest area. He could see himself in a bar or a stripjoint somewhere, Morris Bellamy, the college dropout and self-proclaimed American lit scholar, tossing back bourbon and having an out-of-body experience. Someone starts talking about the murder of John Rothstein, the great writer, the reclusive American genius, and Morris Bellamy--drunk off his tits and full of that huge anger he usually kept locked in a cage, that black beast with the yellow eyes--turning to the speaker and saying, He didn't look much like a genius when I blew his head off.

  "I would never," he whispered. His head was aching worse than ever, and there was something wrong on the left side of his face, too. It burned. "I would never."

  Only how did he know that? When he drank, any day was Anything Can Happen Day. The black beast came out. As a teenager the beast had rampaged through that house in Sugar Heights, tearing the motherfucker pretty much to shreds, and when the cops responded to the silent alarm he had fought them until one belted him unconscious with his nightstick, and when they searched him they found a shitload of jewelry in his pockets, much of it of the costume variety but some, carelessly left out of madame's safe, extraordinarily valuable, and howdy-do, off we go to Riverview, where we will get our tender young buttsky reamed and make exciting new friends.

  He thought, The person who put on a shit-show like that is perfectly capable of boasting while drunk about murdering Jimmy Gold's creator, and you know it.

  Although it could have been the cops, too. If they had ID'd him and put out an APB. That was just as likely.

  "I need a lover who won't drive me cray-zee!"

  "Shut up!" This time it was Morris himself, and he tried to yell it, but what came out was nothing but a puke-clotted croak. Oh, his head hurt. And his face, yow. He ran a hand up his left cheek and stared stupidly at the flakes of dried blood in his palm. He explored again and felt scratches there, at least three of them. Fingernail scratches, and deep. What does that tell us, class? Well, ordinarily--although there are exceptions to every rule--men punch and women scratch. The ladies do it with their nails because more often than not they have nice long ones to scratch with.

  Did I try to slap the make on some twist, and she refused me with her nails?

  Morris tried to remember and couldn't. He remembered the rain, the poncho, and the flashlight shining on the roots. He remembered the pick. He sort of remembered wanting to hear fast loud music and talking to the clerk at Zoney's Go-Mart. After that? Just darkness.

  He thought, Maybe it was the car. That damn Biscayne. Maybe somebody saw it coming out of the rest area on Route 92 with the front end all bloody on the right, and maybe I left something in the glove compartment. Something with my name on it.

  But that didn't seem likely. Freddy had purchased the Chevy from a half-drunk bar-bitch in a Lynn taproom, paying with money the three of them had pooled. She had signed over the pink to Harold Fineman, which happened to be the name of Jimmy Gold's best friend in The Runner. She had never seen Morris Bellamy, who knew enough to stay out of sight while that particular deal went down. Besides, Morris had done everything but soap PLEASE STEAL ME on the windshield when he left it at the mall. No, the Biscayne was now sitting in a vacant lot somewhere, either in Lowtown or down by the lake, stripped to the axles.

  So how did I wind up here? Back to that, like a rat running on a wheel. If some woman marked my face with her nails, did I haul off on her? Maybe break her jaw?

  That rang a faint bell behind the blackout curtains. If it were so, then he was probably going to be charged with assault, and he might go up to Waynesville for it; a ride in the big green bus with the wire mesh on the windows. Waynesville would be bad, but he could do a few years for assault if he had to. Assault was not murder.

  Please don't let it be Rothstein, he thought. I've got a lot of reading to do, it's stashed away all safe and waiting. The beauty part is I've got money to support myself with while I do it, more than twenty thousand dollars in unmarked twenties and fifties. That will last quite awhile, if I live small. So please don't let it be murder.

  "I need a lover who won't drive me cray-zee!"

  "One more time, motherfucker!" someone shouted. "One more time and I'll pull your asshole right out through your mouth!"

  Morris closed his eyes.

  ***

  Although he was feeling better by noon, he refused the slop that passed for lunch: noodles floating in what appeared to be blood sauce. Then, around two o'clock, a quartet of guards came down the aisle between the cells. One had a clipboard and was shouting names.

  "Bellamy! Holloway! McGiver! Riley! Roosevelt! Titgarden! Step forward!"

  "That's Teagarden, sir," said the large black man in the box next to Morris's.

  "I don't give a shit if it's John Q. Motherfucker. If you want to talk to your court-appointed, step forward. If you don't, sit there and stack more time."

  The half dozen named prisoners stepped forward. They were the last ones left, at least in this corridor. The others brought in the previous night (mercifully including the fellow who had been butchering John Mellencamp) had either been released or taken to court for the morning arraignment. They were the small fry. Afternoon arraignments, Morris knew, were for more serious shit. He had been arraigned in the afternoon after his little adventure in Sugar Heights. Judge Bukowski, that cunt.

  Morris prayed to a God he did not believe in as the door of his holding cell snapped back. Assault, God, okay? Simple, not ag. Just not murder. God, let them know nothing about what went down in New Hampshire, or at a certain rest area in upstate New York, okay? That okay with you?

  "Step out, boys," the guard with the clipboard said. "Step out and face right. Arm's length from the upstanding American in front of you. No wedgies and no reach-arounds. Don't fuck with us and we will return the favor."

  ***

  They went down in an elevator big enough to hold a small herd of cattle, then along another corridor, and then--God knew why, they were wearing sandals and the jumpsuits had no pockets--through a metal detector. Beyond that was a visitor's room with eight walled booths like library carrels. The guard with the clipboard directed Morris to number 3. Morris sat down and faced his court-appointed through Plexiglas that had been smeared often and wiped seldom. The guy on the freedom side was a nerd with a bad haircut and a dandruff problem. He had a coldsore below one nostril and a scuffed briefcase sitting on his lap. He looked like he might be all of nineteen.

  This is what I get, Morris thought. Oh Jesus, this is what I get.

  The lawyer pointed to the phone on the wall of Morris's booth, and opened his briefcase. From it he removed a single sheet of paper and the inevitable yellow legal
pad. Once these were on the counter in front of him, he put his briefcase on the floor and picked up his own phone. He spoke not in the tentative tenor of your usual adolescent, but in a confident, husky baritone that seemed far too big for the chicken chest lurking behind the purple rag of his tie.

  "You're in deep shit, Mr."--he looked at the sheet lying on top of his legal pad--"Bellamy. You must prepare for a very long stay in the state penitentiary, I think. Unless you have something to trade, that is."

  Morris thought, He's talking about trading the notebooks.

  Coldness went marching up his arms like the feet of evil fairies. If they had him for Rothstein, they had him for Curtis and Freddy. That meant life with no possibility of parole. He would never be able to retrieve the trunk, never find out Jimmy Gold's ultimate fate.

  "Speak," the lawyer said, as if talking to a dog.

  "Then tell me who I'm speaking to."

  "Elmer Cafferty, temporarily at your service. You're going to be arraigned in . . ." He looked at his watch, a Timex even cheaper than his suit. "Thirty minutes. Judge Bukowski is very prompt."

  A bolt of pain that had nothing to do with his hangover went through Morris's head. "No! Not her! It can't be! That bitch came over on the Ark!"

  Cafferty smiled. "I deduce you've had doings with the Great Bukowski before."

  "Check your file," Morris said dully. Although it probably wasn't there. The Sugar Heights thing would be under seal, as he had told Andy.

  Fucking Andy Halliday. This is more his fault than mine.

  "Homo."

  Cafferty frowned. "What did you say?"

  "Nothing. Go on."

  "My file consists of last night's arrest report. The good news is that your fate will be in some other judge's hands when you come to trial. The better news, for me, at least, is that by that point, someone else will be representing you. My wife and I are moving to Denver and you, Mr. Bellamy, will be just a memory."

  Denver or hell, it made no difference to Morris. "Tell me what I'm charged with."

  "You don't remember?"

  "I was in a blackout."

  "Is that so."

  "It actually is," Morris said.

  Maybe he could trade the notebooks, although it hurt him to even consider it. But even if he made the offer--or if Cafferty made it--would a prosecutor grasp the importance of what was in them? It didn't seem likely. Lawyers weren't scholars. A prosecutor's idea of great literature would probably be Erle Stanley Gardner. Even if the notebooks--all those beautiful Moleskines--did matter to the state's legal rep, what would he, Morris, gain by turning them over? One life sentence instead of three? Whoopee-ding.

  I can't, no matter what. I won't.

  Andy Halliday might have been an English Leather-wearing homo, but he had been right about Morris's motivation. Curtis and Freddy had been in it for cash; when Morris assured them the old guy might have squirreled away as much as a hundred thousand, they had believed him. Rothstein's writings? To those two bumblefucks, the value of Rothstein's output since 1960 was just a misty maybe, like a lost goldmine. It was Morris who cared about the writing. If things had gone differently, he would have offered to trade Curtis and Freddy his share of the money for the written words, and he was sure they would have taken him up on it. If he gave that up now--especially when the notebooks contained the continuation of the Jimmy Gold saga--it would all have been for nothing.

  Cafferty rapped his phone on the Plexi, then put it back to his ear. "Cafferty to Bellamy, Cafferty to Bellamy, come in, Bellamy."

  "Sorry. I was thinking."

  "A little late for that, wouldn't you say? Try to stick with me, if you please. You'll be arraigned on three counts. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to plead not guilty to each in turn. Later, when you go to trial, you can change to guilty, should it prove to your advantage to do so. Don't even think about bail, because Bukowski doesn't laugh; she cackles like Witch Hazel."

  Morris thought, This is a case of worst fears realized. Rothstein, Dow, and Rogers. Three counts of Murder One.

  "Mr. Bellamy? Our time is fleeting, and I'm losing patience."

  The phone sagged away from his ear and Morris brought it back with an effort. Nothing mattered now, and still the lawyer with the guileless Richie Cunningham face and the weird middle-aged baritone voice kept pouring words into his ear, and at some point they began to make sense.

  "They'll work up the ladder, Mr. Bellamy, from first to worst. Count one, resisting arrest. For arraignment purposes, you plead not guilty. Count two, aggravated assault--not just the woman, you also got one good one in on the first-responding cop before he cuffed you. You plead not guilty. Count three, aggravated rape. They may add attempted murder later, but right now it's just rape . . . if rape can be called just anything, I suppose. You plead--"

  "Wait a minute," Morris said. He touched the scratches on his cheek, and what he felt was . . . hope. "I raped somebody?"

  "Indeed you did," Cafferty said, sounding pleased. Probably because his client finally seemed to be following him. "After Miss Cora Ann Hooper . . ." He took a sheet of paper from his briefcase and consulted it. "This was shortly after she left the diner where she works as a waitress. She was heading for a bus stop on Lower Marlborough. Says you tackled her and pulled her into an alley next to Shooter's Tavern, where you had spent several hours imbibing Jack Daniel's before kicking the jukebox and being asked to leave. Miss Hooper had a battery-powered Police Alert in her purse and managed to trigger it. She also scratched your face. You broke her nose, held her down, choked her, and proceeded to insert your Johns Hopkins into her Sarah Lawrence. When Officer Philip Ellenton hauled you off, you were still matriculating."

  "Rape. Why would I . . ."

  Stupid question. Why had he spent three long hours tearing up that home in Sugar Heights, just taking a short break to piss on the Aubusson carpet?

  "I have no idea," Cafferty said. "Rape is foreign to my way of life."

  And mine, Morris thought. Ordinarily. But I was drinking Jack and got up to hijinks.

  "How long will they give me?"

  "The prosecution will ask for life. If you plead guilty at trial and throw yourself on the mercy of the court, you might only get twenty-five years."

  ***

  Morris pleaded guilty at trial. He said he regretted what he'd done. He blamed the booze. He threw himself on the mercy of the court.

  And got life.

  2013-2014

  By the time he was a high school sophomore, Pete Saubers had already figured out the next step: a good college in New England where literature instead of cleanliness was next to godliness. He began investigating online and collecting brochures. Emerson or BC seemed the most likely candidates, but Brown might not be out of reach. His mother and father told him not to get his hopes up, but Pete didn't buy that. He felt that if you didn't have hopes and ambitions when you were a teenager, you'd be pretty much fucked later on.

  About majoring in English there was no question. Some of this surety had to do with John Rothstein and the Jimmy Gold novels; so far as Pete knew, he was the only person in the world who had read the final two, and they had changed his life.

  Howard Ricker, his sophomore English teacher, had also been life-changing, even though many kids made fun of him, calling him Ricky the Hippie because of the flower-power shirts and bellbottoms he favored. (Pete's girlfriend, Gloria Moore, called him Pastor Ricky, because he had a habit of waving his hands above his head when he got excited.) Hardly anyone cut Mr. Ricker's classes, though. He was entertaining, he was enthusiastic, and--unlike many of the teachers--he seemed to genuinely like the kids, whom he called "my young ladies and gentlemen." They rolled their eyes at his retro clothes and his screechy laugh . . . but the clothes had a certain funky cachet, and the screechy laugh was so amiably weird it made you want to laugh along.

  On the first day of sophomore English, he blew in like a cool breeze, welcomed them, and then printed something on the boar
d that Pete Saubers never forgot:

  This is stupid!

  "What do you make of this, ladies and gentlemen?" he asked. "What on earth can it mean?"

  The class was silent.

  "I'll tell you, then. It happens to be the most common criticism made by young ladies and gentlemen such as yourselves, doomed to a course where we begin with excerpts from Beowulf and end with Raymond Carver. Among teachers, such survey courses are sometimes called GTTG: Gallop Through the Glories."

  He screeched cheerfully, also waggling his hands at shoulder height in a yowza-yowza gesture. Most of the kids laughed along, Pete among them.

  "Class verdict on Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'? This is stupid! 'Young Goodman Brown,' by Nathaniel Hawthorne? This is stupid! 'Mending Wall,' by Robert Frost? This is moderately stupid! The required excerpt from Moby-Dick? This is extremely stupid!"

  More laughter. None of them had read Moby-Dick, but they all knew it was hard and boring. Stupid, in other words.

  "And sometimes!" Mr. Ricker exclaimed, raising one finger and pointing dramatically at the words on the blackboard. "Sometimes, my young ladies and gentlemen, the criticism is spot-on. I stand here with my bare face hanging out and admit it. I am required to teach certain antiquities I would rather not teach. I see the loss of enthusiasm in your eyes, and my soul groans. Yes! Groans! But I soldier on, because I know that much of what I teach is not stupid. Even some of the antiquities to which you feel you cannot relate now or ever will, have deep resonance that will eventually reveal itself. Shall I tell you how you judge the not-stupid from the is-stupid? Shall I impart this great secret? Since we have forty minutes left in this class and as yet no grist to grind in the mill of our combined intellects, I believe I will."

  He leaned forward and propped his hands on the desk, his tie swinging like a pendulum. Pete felt that Mr. Ricker was looking directly at him, as if he knew--or at least intuited--the tremendous secret Pete was keeping under a pile of blankets in the attic of his house. Something far more important than money.

  "At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless thing? My time with you is short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?"