George Higgins - A change of gravity

"I was asleep," Hilliard said.

"Figured you would be," Merrion said. "Most people are at this hour."

The big car went through the night like a luxury liner on the surface of a calm sea, the moon blinking on and off among the branches of the trees like the dot-dash of a signalman's light.

"So why're you bothering me like this then?" Hilliard said, whining,

"I never did nothing to you."

"I'm lonesome," Merrion said. "I've been working all night like a very good boy. Now I'm tired; I want to relax. Want to be with a friend, talk about the old days, when I sang in my chains like the sea."

"Huh?" Hilliard said. "What the hell does that mean?"

"I dunno," Merrion said. "I heard you say it a long time ago. I'm not sure but I think you said it to a woman. I meant to ask you what the hell you meant, besides wantin' to get her pants off. But then I decided you probably didn't know either. It just sounded good at the time."

"Look, Amby," Hilliard said, "I'm waking up. You can't come up here right now. It's the middle the night and I got sleep to get and I'm going to go back to bed."

"Don't hang up on me, Dan," Merrion said. "You'll just be wasting your time. I need to talk to you, and I need to talk to you tonight, and so that's what I'm going to do. I'll put you on auto re-dial if you hang up, which'll mean that you'll have to leave your phone off the hook, and it'll hum at you all night. So you still wont be able to get any sleep, or emergency calls from anyone else, and I know how you hate both those things. Now throw some clothes on and go out inna kitchen and put coffee on, and make me a Jack Daniel's and water, some ice.

I'll be there in eight minutes and you'll let me in or I'll sit on the stoop and I'll cry. And when all the neighbors wake up and say what's the matter, I'll say I'm an orphan got left on your doorstep and you're too mean to take me in, and can someone take me to the rectory."

"Tell me onna phone, Amby," Hilliard said. "Turn around and go back to your own house and bed, and tell me on the phone on the way. It's almost two in the morning for Christ sake. There's nothing that can't wait 'til morning."

"Yes there is," Merrion said, 'me."

Hilliard groaned. "Amby," he said, "I can't let you come up here tonight. I got someone here with me and, well, I just can't. I can't let you in if you come here. Tell me what it is on the phone."

"Danny," Merrion said, 'listen up now, friend of my youth: You have got to let me come in. Tell her to stay in the bedroom and sleep. Or him, if you now go both ways. You can say I insist if you want, 'cause I do. I don't want him or her to hear what I'm saying to you. This is strictly between you and me. That's why I've got to come up. This isn't something I'd say on a phone, anyway, but especially not on a car-phone. They don't need a wireman to sit in on car-phones; they don't even have to be cops anyone with an eighty-buck scanner can pick up what you say, just by purest accident. That give you any inkling of why I am coming?"

There was an extended silence. The Cadillac rushed quietly up the boulevard under the bright moon and dark trees. "I'll wake her up and send her home and make the coffee," Hilliard said. "Jack Daniel's, you said you wanted?"

"You got it, pal," Merrion said. "And don't bother sending her home.

Just tell her to stay inna bedroom and sleep. This's not something we want to share."

In a tee-shirt and grey drawstring sweatpants, clumps of his hair standing up and a look of deep concern on his face, Hilliard with a cup of tea in his hand met Merrion at the door and said: "Will you tell me what the…?"

Merrion shook his head and put his right forefinger to his lips. Then he pointed at the kitchen softly lit by one ceiling fixture over the sliding glass door leading outdoors and nodded. "That my drink I see on the counter there? That's what I need. Let's you and me go and get it." With his drink in hand Merrion took Hilliard's right elbow, steering him toward the door opening onto the townhouse patio. "Mawn now," he said, 'nice out tonight. Let's you and me go outside and chat." He slid the glass door open.

"I think you're getting' paranoid," Hilliard said, hanging back.

"That could be," Merrion said, "I got every reason to be. Anyway, there's no question I'm spooked. I prefer to talk out of doors."

Hilliard grabbed a dish-towel from the rack over the sink and led the way, Merrion sliding the glass door shut quietly behind them, Hilliard mopping the dew off the puffy green and yellow cushions of the lawn chairs. Seated so that he faced Hilliard and the glass door, Merrion said: "The first thing to keep in mind when you deal with fuckin' cops is that you want to keep them friendly if you can at almost any cost.

So that when you have to tell them No, you can't do what they want like on a warrant application, when they just don't have enough PC to let you let them go in and make a search some place they understand you really can't give them one. They don't think you're a prick who's just giving them a hard time, just to be a prick, because they think of you as a friend of theirs, and they know you would give them the paper if you could. And that way they don't get mad at you so they all start giving you all kinds of fuckin' grief alia time. Which as you know, that group can do."

Hilliard was still shaking off the dullness of sleep. "Absolutely," he said, 'because the last thing you want to have on your mind, and especially in a job like the one you've got, dealing with cops every day, you don't want to get them pissed off. But in any job, really, that'll always hold true: you don't want to get a cop mad at you. You get one cop mad at you, before you even know it, all the cops're mad at you. Because all the cops talk to each other, and they can make life miserable for you."

"Right," Merrion said. "Now the reason why I woke you up to talk is Sergeant Whalen. Where Ev Whalen is concerned, and he is the one concerns me, the stakes're even higher. The guy's a human vacuum cleaner, a rug-beatin', shampooin', Hooverin' machine with a bright white light onna front when it comes to diggin' up dirt. He knows stuff nobody knows. Half the time he doesn't know himself he knows it, the dirt that nobody else knows. But that changes nothing; it's still vintage dirt, and all you've got to do to get it out of him is two basic things.

"The first thing's to make sure you stay friends with him. This isn't hard because he wants to be friends with you, even more than you do with him. He's very insecure, I think. He's always afraid that nobody will like him. So he's got enough motivation for both of you. He thinks you're the one who's being nice. By talking to him now and then, sure, but even more by listening to him, spillin' his guts out to you.

"So that's the second thing you do: You make it very clear to him that not only are you always glad to see him but you really appreciate the things he has to tell you. You aren't just humoring him; you're interested.

"That's the only two things you hafta do. He likes you; he'll talk.

You say: "Hey Ev, how's it goin', huh, kid? What's goin' on; whaddaya hear?" And woof-woof; here it comes, you got it. Immediately the guy is telling you every damned thing he knows. Without even knowing, most of the time, what the hell most of it means, the significance of what he's sayin'. It's like you struck up a friendship at the track with a talking horse who tells you which one of his friends is gonna win that day because he likes you. And when you mention one day you're startin' to feel guilty, you've been getting' rich on him and you feel like you oughta share your winnings, he just shrugs it off and says: "Hey, great; I'm happy for you. But what good is money to me? I'm a horse.

Bring me an apple sometime."

"Ev Whalen's info is that good and he's got no idea how valuable it can be to you. He would've made a hell of a newspaperman. He works a lot harder'n most of them do, and he finds out a whole lot more stuff. But he doesn't know what news is. He thinks if he recognizes the subject everyone else must already know it. He thinks he's always the last kid onna block to find something out. Oh, and he doesn't question anything. He assumes whatever he knows must be the Gospel truth.