George Higgins - A change of gravity

BuM shit Merrion said, 'that was a gift. All those dues and things were gifts. Danny and me'd been friends over ten years by the time we joined. He was my best friend inna world. If I hadn't gone to work for Danny I'd probably still be behind the Parts and Service desk up at Valley Ford. No reflection on John Casey; he was a good guy, and he treated the Merrions well, but that was not the kind of life I had in mind. I asked Danny to get me the clerk's job 'cause by then I'd decided I didn't wanna go into teaching and I thought it would be a good job to have. He talked to the Carneses and Judge Spring, and I talked to Larry Lane myself. Nobody had any objections, so I got the job, third assistant clerk.

"It's a good job and I've been very happy with it, but at no time has it ever been what you'd call a major plum. Sure it turned out to be one, after Larry Lane died, but that wasn't the job, it was Larry. By the time he retired, four years after I came in, wed become pretty good friends. Then I find out he's very sick, in addition to drinking too much, and in case he might still feel cheerful while he's dying, his own family threw him out. What can I tell you? He's sick and alone; I did what I could to take care of the guy, not that it was very much.

Two years or so later he's dead.

"Until he got sick I assumed all he had was his pension and when he died that'd go to his widow. I never knew he had any other money, much less that he'd leave it to me. And neither did Danny, of course. So I couldn't've done it for that. I was just trying to be a nice guy. So then, what am I supposed to do when I find out about the money? Give it away to strangers? I don't think so. I gave me and my best friend a present, something we both always wanted to have, and never expected to get. Those memberships at Grey Hills you resent us so much for having.

"I always paid taxes on the money, every year, before I spent any of it. You can go ask my accountant. I didn't mind doin' that — well, I minded, but no more'n everyone else who pays taxes. But then couldn't I use some of what I had left to give Danny a present? I wouldn't've had it without him."

"They're not saying you couldn't give it to him, Amby," Pooler said.

"Quite the opposite: they don't dispute that at all. They're saying that you did give it to him, eighty-five hundred or so the first year, and thousands more after that ever since, year after year after year.

They don't even really care now that Lane got the money from corruption death takes the taint off dirty money; they don't see any way to take Lane's loot away from you. But they'll be sure to put the fact in evidence just the same. "See? Graft's a tradition in Massachusetts.

Graft over the years if it's wisely invested can go on yielding graft to the next generation. It's like planting a poisonous tree; the booty never stops giving."

"What they do dispute, though, is that it was a gift. They say it was payment to him under the corrupt bargain you made: a piece of whatever action you got as a result of him getting you that job. So to him it was income, illegal income, like Capone's bootleg millions, but still taxable, and he's never paid taxes on it."

Pooler lowered his head and leaned across the desk, staring at Merrion.

He moistened his lips with his tongue; his eyes glittered. "He didn't pay taxes on that money last year, Amby. He didn't pay them the year before that, or the year before that one, either, didn't pay in any year they still can reach under the five-year statute limiting criminal prosecutions. And once they prove something within the statute, they can go back to the dawn of creation, allege it was all a continuing scheme of corruption that persists to this very day. All they have to do is grant you immunity and you'll have to testify to what everybody knows you've been doing all these years. That will prove both the source and the income, and Danny's benefit from it.

"They'll try to give you what's called use immunity, meaning that they wont be able to use anything you say to prosecute you, except for perjury. But that'd leave them still able to come after you for some crime you committed jointly with Danny they can prove another way, and you do not want that. If you do as I'm suggesting and go to Geoff Cohen, he'll say that's not good enough, make them ante up transactional immunity. That would mean nothing that they make you testify about can ever be charged against you.

"They'll do it. They don't want you, they want Danny, and I think they're going to get him good. Unless I can cut a deal for him, the likes of which I've never seen, Dan Hilliard is going to jail."

"Ahhhhh," Merrion said, closing his eyes, emptying his lungs, and sagging in the chair. "I do not want to hear this."

"What I'm getting from them is just preliminary," Pooler said relentlessly, 'but it's bad enough. They figure by the time they get through adding interest and penalties on that club membership item alone, they'll be able to say he's evaded taxes on over two hundred thousand dollars. And more importantly to them, as I say, once they prove that he hasn't paid taxes on those dues and fees for the last three years as of course they can, very easily, then they can allege that that was just one aspect of an elegant scheme. One going all the way back to Seventy-two when he first accepted the payoff from you for the membership, when you got into Grey Hills.

"And that then will mean they'll be able to prove all the other crooked things he was doing after that, all the kickbacks and bribes they think he started accepting when he really rose to power as the head of Ways and Means Seventy-three or four, was it? All of those kickbacks on state contracts, calling them "campaign contributions" but treating them as income for his personal use and luxurious enjoyment. Illegal income, to be sure, ill-gotten gains aren't exempt.

"They'll have him in a steamer-trunk, ready to ship. It wont be to maximum security, no, but it'll probably have bars on the windows, and he wont be able to leave. They reckon that with all their multipliers of interest and penalty charges, they'll have him twisting in the wind for taking money and evading federal income taxes on it totalling about two million dollars. And after they've forfeited to the government everything that they can lay their hands on, the state will take what's left.

"So, that's their scenario. First they're going to put the cuffs on him and cart him off to jail, and then they're going pick him clean, take everything he's got. He'll be in all the papers, maybe national TV. "Another crooked Bay State politician went to federal prison today; details at eleven."

"He's got this look he gives you when he says stuff like that," Merrion said to Hilliard. '"Local politicians," and "crooked state and local politicians," like he's talking about some lower form of life starfish or something.

"I sat there looking at him," Merrion said to Hilliard, and what I want to say is: "The what? Run that one by me again?" But I don't. I don't think it matters how many times I make him say it, it's not gonna change."

Hilliard looked grey and stricken. Merrion had not seen him look like that since his first term in the House when he came home from Boston on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963, after JFK was shot in Dallas. "I called Mercy 'fore I left, and she already knew," he said to Merrion that day. "She was crying. So was I. I said "What will happen to us now, what will happen to us now? All I can seem to do is cry." She said: "It's what you should be doing. Eleven John, thirty-five." I looked it up. "Jesus wept."

"I can't believe what they're saying," Merrion said. "AH these years I've been paying you kickbacks for getting me the clerk's job, like Fiddle Barrow paid to Chassy and Larry and Roy Carnes for the courthouse contract, for them lettin' him cheap jack the job, when I thought I was giving you presents. I always paid taxes on the money I used for that when Fourmen's Trust made the annual distribution. So therefore I am okay. But they think you didn't pay income taxes on the money I paid to Grey Hills for you.