Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [81]
Nobody knew. There was no record anywhere of my having been released or transferred elsewhere. My lawyer knew I hadn’t gone home, because he had already asked after me there. Mary Kathleen had told Arpad Leen and Leen had told the lawyer that I lived at the Arapahoe.
They could not even find out what I had been arrested for.
So all the cells were checked. I wasn’t in any of them, of course. The people who had brought me in and the man who had locked me up had all gone off-duty. None of them could be reached at home.
But then the detective who was trying to placate my lawyer remembered the cell downstairs and decided to have a look inside it, just in case.
When the key turned in the lock, I was lying on my stomach like a dog in a kennel, facing the door. My stocking feet extended in the direction of the bowling trophy and the crap. I had removed my shoes for some reason.
When the detective opened the door, he was appalled to see me, realizing how long I must have been in there. The City of New York had accidentally committed a very serious crime against me.
“Mr. Starbuck—?” he asked anxiously.
I said nothing. I did sit up. I no longer cared where I was or what might happen next. I was like a hooked fish that had done all the fighting it could. Whatever was on the other end of the line was welcome to reel me in.
When the detective said, “Your lawyer is here,” I did not protest even inwardly that nobody knew I was in jail, that I had no lawyer, no friends, no anything. So be it: My lawyer was there.
Now the lawyer showed himself. It would not have surprised me if he had been a unicorn. He was, in fact, almost that fantastic—a man who, when only twenty-six years old, had been chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Investigating Committee, whose chairman was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the most spectacular hunter of disloyal Americans since World War Two.
He was in his late forties now—but still unsmiling and nervously shrewd. During the McCarthy Era, which came after Leland Clewes and I had made such fools of ourselves, I had hated and feared this man. He was on my side now.
“Mr. Starbuck,” he said, “I am here to represent you, if you want me to. I have been retained on your behalf by The RAMJAC Corporation. Roy M. Cohn is my name.”
What a miracle-worker he was!
I was out of the police station and into a waiting limousine before you could say, “Habeas corpus!”
Cohn, having delivered me to the limousine, did not himself get in. He wished me well without shaking my hand, and was gone. He never touched me, never gave any indication that he knew that I, too, had played a very public part in American history in olden times.
So there I was in a limousine again. Why not? Anything was possible in a dream. Hadn’t Roy M. Cohn just gotten me out of jail, and hadn’t I left my shoes behind? So why shouldn’t the dream go on—and have Leland Clewes and Israel Edel, the night clerk at the Arapahoe, already sitting in the back of the limousine, with a space between them for me? This it did.
They nodded to me uneasily. They, too, felt that life wasn’t making good sense just now.
What was going on, of course, was that the limousine was cruising around Manhattan like a schoolbus, picking up people Mary Kathleen O’Looney had told Arpad Leen to hire as RAMJAC vice-presidents. This was Leen’s personal limousine. It was what I have since learned is called a “stretch” limousine. The American Harp Company could have used the backseat for a showroom.
Clewes and Edel and the next person we were going to pick up had all been telephoned personally by Leen—after some of his assistants had found out more about who they were and where they were. Leland Clewes had been found in the phonebook. Edel had been found behind the desk at the Arapahoe. One of the assistants had gone to the Coffee Shop of