Free Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow Page B

but finally got a fellow named Trilby who said he was the Associate Manager. He asked first thing for my name and number, which I gave him.
    "I'll check our records, Mr. Malloy, and ask Mr. Roberts to call you."
    Wrong idea. Bert didn't figure to stick around for an encounter with any of his partners.
    "I'm on vacation after today. I really need to reach him. Any chance of that?"
    "Just a moment." It was a good deal longer than that, but Trilby sounded quite pleased with himself when he returned. "Mr. Malloy, you must have ESP. He's a guest in the hotel." My heart stopped.
    "Kam Roberts is? You're sure?"
    He laughed. "Well, I wouldn't say that anybody here knows him, but there's a gentleman by that name checked in to Room 622. Should I have him call you? Or can we tell him when you'll be coming by?"
    I thought. "Can I talk to him?"
    He returned after I'd heard an extended symphonic version of "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head."
    "There's no answer there, Mr. Malloy. Why don't you stop by at the end of the day and we'll get him a message you'll be here."
    "Sure," I said. "Or I'll call."
    "Call or come by," said Trilby. He was writing a note.
    After I put down the phone, I sat a long time looking at the river. There was one building across the way, still wearing Yuletide festoonery, lights and a skirt of holly across the roof. It didn't make much sense. Bert had reason to be laying low--his partners, the police, and maybe even whoever had stuffed that bug-eyed businessman in his refrigerator were all after him. But why hide in Kindle, where sooner or later he'd run into somebody he knew? Whatever, I had to get down there fast, before
    Bert got this lame brained message in which I'd used my actual factual name, the sight of which undoubtedly would lead him to scoot once more.
    I took the elevator down and crossed the street to the health club where I play racquetball with Brushy. I jumped into my sweats and shoved my wallet in a pocket, then started jogging. It was 28 degrees so I hauled my broad Irish backside down the avenues with some dispatch, but I ran out of wind after about four blocks and went back and forth, running till my smoked-up lungs felt like I'd breathed in bleach, then stopping and letting sweat freeze up on my nose.
    I cruised out of Center City into the neighborhoods where the two-family houses roosted like hens behind the frozen lawns and the leafless trees, stark and black, loomed above the parkways. Lured by my mood, I jogged a few blocks out of my way into the edges of the ghetto, so I could pass St. Bridget's School. It is a stucco building split by long cracks the shape of lightning. There, for more than thirty-one years, Elaine was the school librarian--"feeding the starving," as she put it. This was a person of iron convictions. With our ma, I turned myself into a sort of human tetherball, always close enough to be pounded back in another direction when she'd go off her nut and rage about one thing or another, but Elaine was smarter and held her distance. She developed, through this exercise, I suppose, a strongly contrary temperament. When everyone was sitting, Elaine was standing; she wandered around the kitchen when the family dined. She preferred her solitary self to any company, and that never seemed to change.
    She ended up one of those Catholic spinsters, a spiritual type who never quite joined the secular world, at 5 :00 a . M . Mass every morning, always palling around with the nuns and identifying people, and even store locations, throughout the tri-cities by their parish. She had her worldly moments, some gentlemen friends with whom she sinned, and she was a terrific card too, one of these clever old Irish gals with a bracing wit. All Ma' s s harpness was still resident in her, but where Bess took to the cudgel of spiteful words and judgments, Elaine's humor was aimed principally at herself. These little muttered cracks as you left your seat, turned your back, and always an arrow to the