The Weight (15 page)

She gave me a full smile at that, but she didn’t say anything.

“Would you be able to tell me when you expect the credit check to be completed?” I asked her. “I don’t want to be stuck—”

“Oh, you won’t be,” she said. “This is Monday. Thursday’s the fifteenth. If you moved in on Saturday, the rent would have to run
from the fifteenth to the fifteenth instead of from the first every month. Would that be all right?”

“Sure. But would you mind calling me as soon as you’re sure, either way, so I can make my plans?”

“I’m sure you’ll pass the credit check, Mr. Wilson. My name is McGrew, by the way. Mary Margaret McGrew, if you can believe
that
. My friends call me Margo.”

“I hope we can be friends, then.”

I wasn’t exactly knocked off my pins when she called my new cell early Wednesday morning and told me I had passed the credit check. I knew I’d done that the second she saw all that cash. She said I could move in Thursday if I wanted—the rent was going to start on the fifteenth, anyway.

There’s no way that apartment was legit; the city makes you get a Certificate of Occupancy for any rental unit, but a lot of folks convert a basement or put something up over their garage. They’re not going to report the income, so the last thing they need is a paper trail. If they get caught, it’s heavy fines. The tell is “utilities included”—they can’t have two different names on bills going to the same address.

The fines aren’t even the worst part of renting an illegal apartment. There’s no way to evict tenants, even if they don’t pay rent. You take a deadbeat to court, you’d just be pulling the covers off yourself.

I’d spent Tuesday buying things. Enough to fill two good-sized suitcases and the shoulder duffel.

I was the tenant from Heaven, she’d tell her husband. Paid cash, and I hadn’t even asked for a receipt, never mind a lease.

She was the only one around when I came Thursday morning. Told me about ten times that I must be very strong to carry all that stuff upstairs in one trip.

After she handed over the key, she gave me a little speech about not “changing” anything. Meaning the lock, I think she was saying.

I was patient while she gave me another little speech: how the
microwave worked, how it was better to leave the air-conditioning off when I wasn’t actually there, all this fussy stuff. She saved what I guess she thought was the big finish for last: the apartment not only had a flat-screen TV, it came with free cable.

The only way to get her out of the place was to check my watch, grab my cell phone, and punch in some numbers.

“I’ll let myself out,” she said.

Probably let yourself back in soon as you’re sure I’ll be gone for a while, too
, I thought, but I just gave her a little salute and went back to the conversation I was having with myself.

You’d think a man with as much prison behind him as me would be an ace at killing time. And I guess I am, in some ways.

As long as I know how to act, I can do it. In prison, it’s as clear as if they painted it on the walls. There’s only so many things you can do in there, make the time go by. So what you do is, you pick one, and get as deep as you can into it.

Some guys, it’s the weights. They do it in groups, spot for each other, talk about “reps” and “delts” and stuff like it’s a secret code. There’s steroids for sale Inside, and they were gold to the body-boys. Mostly pills, but there was even needle stuff around. The trick was getting clean needles.

Steroids aren’t much of a racket—you need tranqs to really bring the cash. You don’t have to risk a smuggle to do that. A lot of the loons on scrip, they’re happy to sell their meds. They don’t even want them in the first place … unless they’re saving them up until they get enough to check out. Some of them, you could see they’d already left. Locked up, sure, but not on
this
planet.

Some cons work on schemes. Letter-writing, that was always a good one. You just had to be careful. The real pros, they kept charts and everything, so they never got the women they were working mixed up. Once they got three, four of them on the string, just keeping up with the letters would take all day, every day. That’s why some cons have really fine handwriting, all that practice.

There’re guys who can play cards. Or dominoes. Chess guys,
they could even play by mail, have a couple of dozen games going on at the same time, all around the world.

But if you run a racket, there’s no such thing as part-time. You have something going for you, there’s always going to be people who want it going to them.

Gang guys, they always had business. Meetings, karate practice, praying, plotting … it all eats time.

For some guys, doing time was no different from hanging out on the corner. Same routine: play the dozens, tell lies, brag about what they had going for them. Prison’s perfect for that. It’s a lot easier to lie about what
was
than what
is
.

Only thing missing was the girls walking by. Nobody ever complained about that—you could be walking into a shark tank if the wrong guy took it the wrong way.

Religion, that’s always big. No matter where they lock you, there’ll always be some “fellowship” or “ministry” or whatever. If you’re Christian, I mean. The Muslims have their own thing. A few Indians, they would get together, too. I hadn’t seen that before, but I guess there’s more of them Upstate than in the city.

I remember asking Eddie how come there’s no Jews in there. “Oh, they got ’em,” Eddie had told me. “But not enough to form no crew. So they find their own ways to get by.”

That’s also when Eddie told me about Reno, that Nazi guy. He was one of them. A Jew, I mean. I don’t know how Eddie found out, but when he told me, I got the joke. That’s what Eddie called it when you understood something—that you got the joke. See, when Eddie told Reno about me working undercover, he was telling him something else at the same time.

Some guys had a whole library of paperback books. They put them all on the juggle, rent them out. It doesn’t matter what you lend—in prison, you borrow two, you pay back three.

The tattoo artists always have plenty of business. Even guys who come in covered in ink, they always want more. Like Eddie told me, the cops keep a record of all your tats. You can change your hair, grow a beard, stuff like that. But ink, especially just past the knuckles—like
LOVE
on one hand and
HATE
on the other—that’s
forever. You can walk around in a long-sleeved shirt even in the summer, but you can’t wear a pair of gloves.

A good thief would be hard to pick out of a lineup; the
best
thief would be invisible. I already had my size going against me, never mind the scar and the different-colored eyes. I sure didn’t need more.

Doing time, there’s really a lot of choices. And even when all you can do is try and stay alive, that’s still something to do. As long as you don’t spend too much time thinking about it.

But once you get out, there’s no rules—only laws. So you have to find something with rules. Like a job, maybe. It doesn’t matter if it’s working an assembly line or collecting debts, every job has its own rules. Always things you’re supposed to do and things you’re not.

If your whole life is outside the law, the rules are much tighter. Say you’re a thief—you never want to take a muscle job. A loan shark pays you to break a guy’s arm; you do it even once, it’s like diving off a cliff. Once you break enough bones, they expect you to step up to doing hits. Or maybe one of the guys that owes, you end up totaling him, even when you didn’t mean to. I remember something Ken once said:
I’m not a hired hand, pal. I’m what you call self-employed, get it?

In prison, that’s the way you want it. It’s okay to be friendly to different guys, but you don’t ever want to be
with
them.

See, if you’re with a prison crew, that’s got rules, too. You follow them too close, you’re never getting out.

That’s why I always do the same things. I live good. Not for show, for real. I eat good, have decent clothes, a good car, that kind of thing. I keep case money, so I always have enough to get by even if there’s no good job coming for a while. That lets me pass up the shaky-looking stuff. A true pro, he never lets himself get desperate.

So I still had about eighty grand stashed from before I went in, but I’d picked the wrong spot for it. I’d been staying with this girl for a while. You move in with a girl, you never know when you’ll be leaving, and you can’t be sure you’ll ever be back. So I never bring anything with me that I can’t walk away from, and I always keep a place I can walk back to.

You have to expect a girl to go through your stuff. Every girl I ever moved in with did that.

I hate handcuffs. Always dangling open, ready to snap closed. I’m not putting myself where I’d always be one dime-drop away from going back to prison.

So, when I move in with a girl, I always bring enough stuff over so she thinks she’s got a hold on me. Stuff too big to just carry out, like a TV. Or even a lot of clothes I don’t care about. They’re always sure you’ll
have
to come back, even if it’s only to pick up your stuff.

I heard stories about girls pouring bleach on a guy’s clothes when they got mad. That’s why I’d never let a girl buy me anything I’m not ready to throw away. Or lend me money. Or put me on her cell-phone plan.

This last girl, she told me she was a student. I told her I hung drywall—what other kind of job could an ex-con expect to get if he was trying to go straight? Interior work; I was on the night shift. She lived on Central Park West, in the nineties. Three bedrooms. A huge place for just one person. It used to be her mother’s.

I figured the girl would still be there—nobody gives up a rent-controlled apartment in this city. So my money would probably still be where I’d hid it, in a hole I made in the top of one of the closets. She was always saying the plaster was moldy, made her clothes smell. So, when she had to go someplace for a weekend, I emptied all the closets and rough-sanded the insides. Then I painted them, fresh, bright white.

I mixed a little lemon juice in with the paint; that’s a trick I learned from an old guy who hired me to lift heavy stuff for him. I was supposed to be learning how to paint, but it never happened. This guy did tile, too, but he told me I didn’t have the hands for that.

When she came back, I showed her my surprise. She loved it. I told her she couldn’t put her stuff back in the closets for another couple of days. I had laid it all out on the beds in two of the rooms. She didn’t care, she was so happy to see the closets looking so good.

And they did, for real. With the plaster re-covered, the primer, and the three coats of paint, you couldn’t even see where I had planted the cash.

I hadn’t planned on leaving it there long. But then I got popped for that rape I never did.

When you have money, you don’t get all crazy about needing some more. Gives you time to think. Which is what I did, my first night in that over-the-garage apartment.

Maybe Francine—that was the girl’s name—maybe she had a guy living there, like I had been. Or got married, even.