Bob Wagner met the man who liked peanuts and beer in the Fairmont Hotel bar again. Pell said they had good peanuts. Pell said he was picking up the check anyway, even if Wagner called the meeting.
“I got to cover my ass,” Bob Wagner said. He was very pale and he had been drinking awhile even though it was only eleven in the morning. He had the abused look that men get when they know they don’t have a chance anymore but they still have to go through the motions.
“Have a drink,” Pell said in his thin voice. His eyes were narrow and he was staring through Wagner’s head at a point six feet behind.
“Karen. She’s gone crazy. She’s burrowing into files that are like six years old. I know she’s making all kinds of file checks. Like a busy beaver.”
“You got a problem, huh?”
“She’s on my case. She’s like an FBI guy. You can see she’s spying on me. That business down in Santa Barbara, it set her off, whatever it was.”
“Whatever it was,” Pell agreed.
“You got to get me out of this.”
“Or what?”
“Everything I know—” began the threat.
Pell waited, peanuts in hand. “The fuck you know? You know shit. You know me? You know my number? You know anything about anything? This is real stuff in the real world, Bobby, and you are just stumbling around like a second-grade kid finding out what urinals are for. The trouble with you guys is you like the action but you can’t take the heat. You wanta turn State’s? Turn State’s. Confess your bleeding heart out. You know what they do to you? Put you inside one of those max places where all you do all day is lift weights to make your muscles big so that the cons leave your ass alone. You wanta be a fish?”
“I don’t wanta be nothing. I don’t wanta be involved.”
“You sap. You never were. I told you. Let her look through her files. What’s she gonna find?”
“I don’t know.”
Pell made a face and said nothing.
“They’re after me,” Bob Wagner sputtered as the barman brought up a Stoli on the rocks. He was thinking now what he had thought before he called Pell. They were going to make him the patsy in this thing. Wagner had thought about it all the way to work. He had decided he was going to kill Karen O’Hare because he had to. He stopped in the Chinese bar on Powell Street at eight in the morning and drank until ten and then he called Pell. He was thinking about how they were all working in this thing to put Wagner in the bag and it wasn’t going to be that way. He really had to face up to it: He really just had to kill Karen O’Hare because he couldn’t talk Pell into doing it.
He thought about Karen dead and the thought didn’t frighten him as much as going to jail did.
Pell studied his peanuts as though they might foretell the future. Then he ate one. “You got anything more to tell me?” he said.
“No,” Wagner said. He knew it was hopeless with Pell, that he was going to have to stop Karen himself.
“Don’t forget to stop by the bathroom again.”
“I’m not wired,” Wagner said.
“Yeah, sure, I know. But I think my friend likes you.”