George Higgins - A change of gravity

"Best I can figure, what Pooler said, it all goes back all the way to Chassy and Larry Lane, Fiddle Barrow and the Carneses; how those guys were doing business around here, thirty, forty years ago, you and me're just getting' started. I don't really see how they can do this, considering that every statute of limitations I ever heard of expires after five or six years. If they haven't bagged you by then, they can't. Except for murder and treason; and I don't think they got us on that.

"But according to what Pooler says, they got a way says they can get around it. I don't trust him but I guess I believe him. Still think the bastard'll bear watching, though. He's a shifty mother-fucker and I think he's twenty-to-forty-percent on the side of the enemy here. He told me he hates to lose. Said he goes into every case fully expecting to win. "When I can't expect that, I refuse it." But this time I think if his client loses, he'll be able to take it in his stride."

Pooler seemed dwarfed by his own lustrous brown leather desk chair. He sat far down in it so that hunched behind the desk he looked like a frog sitting on a rock, partially obscured behind a bigger rock in front that hid his body except for his shoulders and the part of his torso above the base of his sternum. Once he had Merrion seated in the barrel chair he studied him, working his mouth while he used his left index finger to rub his left nostril, hard. Then he picked up large black-framed eye-glasses with visible bifocal lines and used both hands to put them on, spreading the bows and fitting them over his ears as carefully as though he had been preparing to cut a diamond. When he looked up the upper and lower lenses enlarged Merrion's view of his brown irises differently, so that their upper and lower hemispheres did not quite seem to match. Pooler swallowed and said "Yes."

Merrion did not say anything. "I felt like some kind of specimen," he told Hilliard. "Something helpless in a lab that this guy was now going to cut up and see if he could learn something. Hard on me, maybe, but useful to him."

Pooler rested his chin on his left hand and extended his index finger up alongside the corner of his mouth. He licked his lips.

"The gist of it's the club memberships," he said. "From all we've been able to gather naturally not wanting to appear to be too interested but from what we can piece together that's essentially the direction they seem to be taking." His teeth were even and white.

"Grey Hills?" Merrion said. To Hilliard later he said: "I wasn't saying that to give the guy a hard time. Playing Mickey-the-dunce with him there. If we're really involved in something here, it isn't all just smoke and mirrors, how the hell could Grey Hills have anything to do with it? Almost twenny-five years after we joined it? It was a legitimate question.

"He thought I was jerkin' his chain. For Pooler that question was all it took. My asking that really creased it."

"Yeah," Pooler said, glowering at him, "Grey Hills. I know, it's a long time ago, but that's the way it is with over-reaching. You may get what you want at the time, but what you have to do to get it, well, those things have a way of coming back to haunt you.

"You probably never heard what I had to say at the time you and Hilliard applied for membership. I knew you by then from meeting you in Sixty-eight, and I didn't like you. And I said then to them, my father and grand ad I didn't like it and I thought it was a rotten idea for you and Dan to become members. Quite candidly said so. And not just to them, either; to the membership committee; totally open and aboveboard. I would've said it to you and Dan, if the opportunity'd occurred, said it right to your faces.

"I said it was a very bad idea. That no matter how nice and friendly it might look as though wed all become, dealing in party and legislative matters, the two of you did not belong at Grey Hills.

"My father and the Chief said their concerns were political. They were sorry circumstances had been such that the membership rolls had to be reopened, and very much regretted that had made it possible for people like you and Dan to aspire to membership and apply. They said when they voted to reopen, they assumed that the high price of initiation and membership would be enough to prevent your kind from even trying to get in. If they had ever dreamed that people like you might somehow find the money, they would've blocked the proposal at the outset.

It would've never made it out of the executive committee, much less been approved by the board of governors or voted on by the entire membership. In hindsight they fully agreed it would have been far better if they'd bitten the bullet and submitted to a hefty extraordinary one-time assessment on the membership to meet the club's financial needs.

"But now it was too late. They were afraid that if they kept you out, Dan might retaliate, prevail upon his pals on Beacon Hill to refuse to grant racing days for that damned racetrack the Chief was so obsessed about. They were obsessed by that damned track. They virtually ordered me not to use my blackball.

"I didn't, but I warned them. I told them no good would ever come out of letting the pair of you in. I said nothing but trouble would ever come out of it. I told my dad that, and I told the Chief, too, it was an awful idea.

"I couldn't know then exactly what form the trouble would take, what repercussions there'd be. I must confess it didn't cross my mind that somehow your joining some day might form the basis for a tax evasion case, which seems to be the way they're heading. But there was no doubt in my mind that some day, sooner or later, something bad was certain to happen. Now my ugly premonition seems to be coming true.

"I want to emphasize that none of this was personal. It was not that I had a thing against you. Even though wed had that confrontation over the Humphrey candidacy, that was irrelevant. Nor had I anything against Dan Hilliard, or anyone who'd gotten where he is today by means of his own good hard work. More power to him, I say. I just knew that trouble was bound to come out of it some day, if your applications went through. My father and the Chief knew it too. I suspect you both knew, regardless of whether you admitted it to yourselves, that the two of you did not belong at Grey Hills. You didn't have the stuff.

"By rights you didn't have the means, the resources, to be members. How you came by them, I don't know, and I don't want to. I do know some kind of shady business was involved. Had to be; you had no other way, no honest way, to have laid your hands on that amount of money that fast. Sixteen or seventeen thousand dollars? An assistant clerk of courts and a state rep on the lower rungs of power? I'll give you your due: you were cute. No one's ever found out what you did or how you did it. But cleverness purifies nothing: the dirty politician's still like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight: so brilliant, and yet so corrupt, he shines, and stinks."

Merrion glared at him. "You piece of yellow shit," he said, 'getting me in here to say that to me. The next time we meet where some of my friends're around, so I'll have witnesses, I'm gonna call you out, dare you to repeat that. If you don't I'm gonna call you a fuckin' coward, and spit on you. And if you do, you'd better have a friend with you to hold your fancy bridgework or you're gonna swallow it."

Pooler smiled. "Sorry, Amby, but there's no other way of putting it, wasn't then and isn't now, and your reaction to the statement of that fact just proves it: you're not Grey Hills material and you never were.

Neither of you ought to've been allowed to place yourselves in the position where you'd have to do whatever it is you've done to meet the obligations membership entailed. As the fix you're now in proves conclusively. But back then, no one would listen to me."