Bloody River Blues

to volunteer, to be witnesses. You don’t have to be worried. We can protect you.”
    “I didn’t see anybody get shot. All I saw was some guy who nearly knocked me on my ass.”
    “We’re more concerned with the person in the car. We think he’s the one who ordered the hit.”
    “Sorry. Now, if there’s nothing else . . .” Pellam lifted his hands like a TV preacher confronted with more sin than he can absolve.
    “Will you at least help us do a sketch of the man you saw?”
    “Yes. Sure. But not now.”
    The WASP cop shifted his weight like an impatient college boy. He was no longer reasonable. “He’s not going to cooperate.”
    “Cooperate?”
    The WASP said to his grimacing partner, “Let’s go. He’s a GFY.” The cops put their notebooks away.
    “What’s a GFY?” Pellam demanded.
    “An official term we use about reluctant witnesses.”
    “I’m not reluctant. I didn’t see anything.”
    When they got to the perimeter of the set, the Italian cop turned suddenly and said, “Look, mister, a lot of local people cooperated with you so you could shoot this damn movie here. They aren’t going to be too happy to hear you’re not so cooperative in return.”
    The WASP cop waved his arm. “Aw, he’s a GFY. Why bother?” They walked off the set.
    In Sloan’s trailer, the curtain fell closed.
    THE INDICTMENTS AGAINST him read:
    Counts 1–2: Conspiracy to sell controlled substances.
    Counts 3–32: Criminal federal income tax fraud.
    Count 33: Conspiracy to interfere with civil rights.
    Counts 34–35: Perjury.
    Count 36: Extortion.
    Counts 37–44: Criminal violations of the Racketeering-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.
    Peter Crimmins did not exactly have the words memorized but this—the paraphrase—he knew, the essence of the government’s case against him.
    Crimmins (the name was his father’s impulsive recasting of Crzniolak) was fifty-four. He had a body like a pear, a face like a potato. His hair was combed forward in bangs, Frank Sinatra style, over his high forehead, on which a single dark mole rested above his left eyebrow like a misplaced third eye. He was presently sitting in his office, which overlooked the parking lot of his trucking company and, through windows in the opposite wall, a large room filled with gray desks, filing cabinets, overhead fluorescent fixtures and a dozen office workers who appeared simultaneously bored and anxious.
    Peter Crimmins had a thousand business decisions he should be making but it was the words of the indictment that kept running through his mind.
    And they made him furious.
    Oh, several counts were nonsense and had beenthrown in by an eager runt of an assistant U.S. Attorney. The civil rights thing, ridiculous. Conspiracy, ridiculous. The drug counts were absurd. He had never sold an atom of any controlled substance. The extortion, well, that was somewhat true but only a little. But what infuriated him were the counts that were accurate—the RICO charges.
    Peter Crimmins thought of himself as a blue-collar philosopher and had decided that there were simple rules in life you could figure out without anyone’s help. Not the Ten Commandments, which were a little too simple-minded even for a good Russian Orthodox like him to buy. But rules like: A man’s dignity should be respected, take care of those who cannot take care of themselves, do your duty, support your family, don’t hurt anyone innocent . . .
    You live your life by those rules and you will do just fine. So here he was, doing his duty, supporting his family, not hurting anyone (anybody innocent, at any rate), making a living, going to church occasionally—and what happens? He runs smack into another set of rules. And these rules made no sense to him at all.
    They were pure idiocy.
    The problem was that they were collected in Title 18 of the United States Code. And if you happened to break these rules, people would come after you and try to put you in jail.
    But what was the most frustrating of all was that he was wrestling with these forty-four indictments solely because of a single mistake, which was that he had hired a maniac, Vincent Gaudia, now deceased, gunned down the day before.
    The two men were contrasts. Crimmins had noticed this immediately, at their first meeting, in a German restaurant in Webster Groves, Missouri. Crimmins was unflashy. He had years of experience as a labor negotiator before he left the union and opened his own business. He drank vodka in