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“Because,” Leo said, “you know what them cops’re gonna do with somebody that’s got a record like I got, that he ends up inna swamp at three inna mornin’ and there’s a body of a dead guy inna car with him, or maybe inna swamp and there doesn’t happen to be no other way that body could’ve gotten there, huh? They’re gonna blame me for it, and then they’re gonna charge me manslaughter.

“This,” Leo said, “I do not need. He is a little shit and the whole goddamned world will be better off for all of us if he is dead, and that includes the cops, but I was glad he was alive. Because if he is dead, I certainly cannot afford to take the credit.”

“So what’d you do?” Malatesta said.

“Well,” Leo said, “like I said, what I did was sober up. Which maybe would’ve been a good idea earlier, when I wasn’t so tired and then maybe I never would’ve gotten myself in this mess where I drowned my own car like a cat. What am I, a United States Senator or something, I drown my own car? But it was not such a hot idea, because I decide I can charm a dog off a meat wagon and I am gonna think up this story that’ll explain the whole thing. When I am finished, the cop is probably gonna be cryin’ his eyes out and put me in for an award, I was such a quick-witted citizen when this emergency hits and I probably even saved the guy’s life. The worthless little piece of shit he is that started the whole thing inna first place.”

“What’d you tell them?” Malatesta said.

“I told them,” Proctor said, “I told them I was, I was standing there inna water up over my ankles, I sort of waded over to where I saw the headlights, and I would’ve been freezing my balls off except it was summer and anyway I was so shitfaced I was probably good for about twenty below, and honest to God, Billy, I must’ve thought I was Winston Churchill or something. Here is this cop. I saw something once that was also alive and was just as big, but it was grey and it couldn’t talk and it had a very long nose and I saw it in the circus when I took the kids the Garden and it cost me about seventy bucks and there was this guy that had on a silver suit and made a tiger jump on the back of this thing with a long nose and then the guy jumped on the tiger’s back and rode the two of them around the room and that big grey thing was an elephant. That’s how big this cop was.

“But he could talk,” Leo said. “He could talk and he did talk. What he said was impressive, but he did not say as much as I did, which was my mistake. My ninth and tenth mistakes for the night, a little over my usual quota, maybe, but not that much over, and I told him that the tire blew and I steered it in the pond so I wouldn’t hit nobody that was alive.

“And he says,” Leo said, “he says, ‘Bullshit. Those tires’re all fine. They’re all that’s keeping that thing afloat.’ Which is when it occurs to me, maybe I better look at the tires, I’m gonna tell stories like that. I did. They were all fine. I wished I thought of doing that a little earlier, maybe before the cop showed up, so I didn’t try something dumb as that.”

“What’d he do?” Malatesta said.

“The fuck you think he did?” Leo said. “For Christ sake, you’re a cop. The fuck’d you do? You’d write me up. You oughta know.”

“Yeah,” Malatesta said, “I guess I would’ve. I don’t think the same I used to.”

“He ran me in,” Leo said. “Driving Under, Driving So As To Endanger. Drunk. The usual stuff.”

“What about the passenger?” Billy said.

“Locked him up to sleep it off,” Leo said. “Let him go the next day. Which was when, of course, I hadda call Fein.”

“Well,” Billy said, “you are a sorry son of a bitch if you had to call Fein, and I don’t rate your chances none too good if that jamoke’s going to defend you at a trial in a court of law and all that stuff.”

“Billy,” Leo said, “I admit to being stupid. You yourself can ask me, and I will personally admit it. I only got an eighth-grade education and the stuff was gettin’ a little hard for me the year before that. The nuns down Our Lady of Victory practically made a public announcement and printed it in the newspaper that Leo Proctor was thick as shit and would never get anywhere except in jail, and they should’ve known they were right in the first place when they let him in even though his father was English but they hoped his Irish mother maybe gave him some sense and she didn’t.

“Well,” Leo said, “they were right about the jail, but they were wrong about the other part, because I have gone and I have transcended what the nuns give me to the point at which I probably owe various people close to half a million dollars if I was to sit down and take the time to add them up, which I am not about to do, on account of how I do not need that shit. This is a great country and it is a land of opportunity, so that even a dumb shit like me, who cannot get rid of a few noisy niggers, can wind up owing various people half a million dollars or so with just about no hope to God that he will ever pay them back. If this was not a great country, I would be out someplace with a shovel and some guy’d be whipping me on the naked back for not diggin’ fast enough, but it is and so I’m not.

“Still,” Leo said, “I am not so stupid that even I do not know that Four-flusher Fein is not your very best legal-type counselor and could on his best day probably not get Jack Kennedy off on a charge that he murdered Lee Harvey Oswald.

“The trouble is, Billy,” Leo said, “the trouble is that when you owe various people about half a million dollars or so which you are not in a position to pay back right away, they start looking around all the time and gettin’ jittery, you know? And they say, ‘Gee, uh, Mister Proctor, we loaned you all that money and stuff and you bought these here buildings with it and everything that’ve got apartments in them and you’re supposed to have people living there. But we took a look at the buildings and there don’t seem to be a large number of people floatin’ around. Oh, there’s a few of the minority groups shuckin’ and jivin’ on your stoops and stuff like that, and we’re certainly glad to see you’re doing your bit for low-cost housing for the underprivileged. We mean it. You’re a prince of a guy, and we got to compliment you for it. But then again on the other hand, we’ve been lookin’ at your statements here for the past few months, and you haven’t been payin’ us.’

“Billy,” Leo said, “you ever see one of them metal-framed bankers, with the grey hair and the three-piece suits and their black shoes and the glasses with the metal frames? You ever talk to one of them guys? They don’t live in the real world, I’m tellin’ you. What they do is live in the banks. They got their desks out in front of everybody and that is where they live. They can’t fuck, fight, frown, wash, shit or change their underwear. The hell, everybody goin’ by on the street could see them and so could everybody at all the other desks on the red rug, and I finally figured it out, how they do it: they hire people that don’t do none of those things, so they don’t need to.

“Now those guys, Billy,” Leo said, “those guys’re all in favour of helping everybody inna whole wide world as long as it don’t involve none of their money. Which is another thing about bankers – they may be all vice-presidents or something, and they’re making nine grand a year and they all eat lunch at Slagle’s and have the vegetable special and the iced tea that goes with it and it costs a buck twenny-five and they leave a fifteen-cent tip, but there’s millions in those vaults and it all belongs to them. Other people maybe put it there, and someday they’re gonna come and take it out again, but in the meantime it all belongs to the bankers.

“What they are all for,” Leo said, “they are all for helping the fuckin’ niggers. They think helpin’ niggers is the greatest thing since people started coming in and depositing their money, and the reason they think this is because if they don’t ship that money out to help the niggers, on the understanding that they’re gonna get it all back on time with plenty of interest, of course, pretty soon some hairy Jew kid with about ten degrees from Harvard’s gonna get a poverty law grant and start dragging them out of the bank and into court, they’re not doin’ enough for civil rights and they should lose their charters. They are all for loanin’ money to guys like me that’re gonna rehab old joints and rent ‘em out to low-income people, until we do it and they find out them low-income people is fuckin’ niggers, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they don’t pay their fuckin’ rent, neither. Which means you’re not makin” payments on your fuckin’ loans, and I bet you could dump a fuckin’ rattler down a banker’s back without makin’ him as nervous as he gets when you’re not payin’ off those goddamned loans.