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.”