Killers (29 page)

“I can't remember that going to East Boston was ever a box of chocolates, Mr. Caulfield. But it looks pretty shady, the next president of the Senate, in that barroom.”

Against my better judgment, I mentioned the grand jury. There's always a grand jury sitting, somewhere. So if you act like you're passing on some inside information, you just sound stupid.

We used to make jokes at the State House about grand juries being empaneled “on spec,” but they really aren't. Whatever grand juries are currently in session just handle anything that comes along. I'm talking federal of course. The state attorney general doesn't do grand juries, unless he's going after a tree warden somewhere in Franklin County, or maybe a car dealer suspected of trying to turn back odometers, which is impossible now anyway. I think it's in the state constitution—the state A.G. never goes after anybody who can fight back—i.e., the legislators who control his budget.

Not that I cared—these days, the A.G. was my very good friend. He was my candidate for governor, at least until somebody else came along with more money.

“I'm not sure what this grand jury is doing, or even how many there are,” I said to Caulfield, already regretting my decision to mention it. “Maybe two—one going after the Mafia, the other going after the State House.”

Mr. Caulfield looked bored. The only thing in East Boston he cared about was the airport. “Do you have anything for me to report back to my clients?” he asked.

“Stall 'em,” I said. “I can't put it together yet.” I thought for a while. “You think I could get a bug in Donahue's office?”

“A bug?” he said with a smile. “In Denis Donahue's office? He has the place swept every weekend by the State Police. He's so paranoid he's installed motion detectors in his office. That's off the record, by the way. But the point is, forget about it.”

“Help me out here, Mr. Caulfield. I don't know this guy. He's gotta have some habits. There must be some places he likes to hang. How about the Twenty-First Amendment?”

“You mean the Golden Dome?” he said, using the Bowdoin Street bar's old name. “I'm sure he hasn't been in the Golden Dome since Keverian was speaker.” He paused. “Okay, I just thought of something. He has a table at B.B. Bennigan's, goes there every afternoon around five, meets people.”

B.B. Bennigan's was a lunch-trade pub on Tremont Street near where Dini's Sea Grill used to be, with food that was just about as forgettable. It also attracted a pretty good cocktail-hour crowd, but was closed by nine at the latest. Who the hell would want to be walking around that part of Tremont Street after dark, given the sort of riffraff that hangs out on the Common and in Downtown Crossing?

I asked Caulfield, “What kind of people does he meet there?”

“Bagman people. Connected people.”

“Have you been there with him, Mr. Caulfield?”

“Certainly,” he said. “If I hadn't, what sort of a ‘connected' person would I be? Do you really think you could drop a bug in there?”

“Have you got any better ideas?” I asked.

He said nothing but leaned across his one-acre mahogany desk and sighed, which I took as a nonverbal, deniable-if-need-be-later acknowledgement that he was in for a penny, in for a pound, sort of, at least as long as I didn't get caught.

He told me that as you walked in the front door of B.B. Bennigan's, there was a bar on the right, and on the left, maybe ten to twelve booths. In the middle were tables, foursomes. Denis Donahue had the last booth in the back, and they always kept the second-to-last booth vacant, to prevent eavesdropping. Donuts always sat facing out, toward the door and Tremont Street.

“Regular bartender?” I asked.

He nodded. “One anyway, two at the most. Suffolk Law students, the usual.”

I stood up.

“Are you going to make a run at him?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Be careful,” he said. “If you're caught—”

“I know, I know. The secretary will disavow any knowledge of my actions.”

 

29

SANTA'S LITTLE HELPER

There are places so down-and-out, or corrupt, or most often both, that even wiseguys can't make money out of them anymore. Chelsea is one such place—the old Winter Hill gang pulled out back in the eighties because so many people had their hands out that even Whitey and Stevie couldn't turn a profit. East Boston is getting to be almost as bad.

Now I was back in Eastie for the second time in two days. I'm used to people delivering money to me. In Eastie, I'm the one making the deliveries, this time to the family of another one of my guys who's doing a bit, in Allenwood. His name is Ricky, and he made the mistake of taking a machine gun on his last armored car robbery. I tried to warn him, I try to warn them all, but what do 213,091 inmates of the Bureau of Prisons have in common?

They didn't fucking listen.

I still called Ricky occasionally, for information, because he might be rubbing elbows with a different crowd down there than Bobby Bones. The problem was, if I didn't want to drive down there again, and I didn't, I always had to go to his mother's house to talk to him. She was on the BOP's approved list of callers, and I wasn't.

The drawback with using the relative of some jailbird to make the calls for you is that they expect something in return. I told you about Bobby Bones' sister in Charlestown. That's like going to the Cotillion at the Myopia Hunt Club compared to visiting Ricky's family.

Their hands were always out, they were lucky they weren't charged with impersonating the illegal aliens who'd taken over Ward 1. Not that I blame the cons' families—usually the guy in the can was the family earner, for better or for worse, and don't believe any of that bullshit about wiseguys' families being taken care of by the benevolent Godfather while they're away. If there are any flies on Sally, they're paying rent. I have to take care of some of the families of the In Town guys who ran with me out on the street, not because I particularly want to, but because somebody's got to do it, and it sure as hell ain't going to be Sally.

With these eighty-five percent federal sentences, sometimes I feel like I'm paying child support, or alimony. They lock guys up now and throw away the key. Career criminals, they call us at sentencing. Which we are, but nobody's perfect. Used to be, I'd be taking care of Ricky's family for maybe seven years. Now it's twenty.

Believe me, I didn't run for the job of Santa Claus. It's just one of my chores, a very expensive chore at that. I hadn't even been looking to talk to Ricky, but one of his cousins sent me word that he was desperate. What could I do? So now I was in East Boston, making a delivery.

I parked my car two spaces down from another low-rider with the hood open and two fresh-off-the-boat illegals peering into the motor. Drug lookouts, just like the ones outside the Python. This is what passes for Neighborhood Watch in Eastie. God, I felt like an asshole. I'd had to hook up with Peppa again to pick up methadone for Ricky's junkie brother so he'd have some for his trip to Florida, and here he was, living in a neighborhood where you would literally trip over drug dealers if you walked out your front door. I'm sure his excuse was, he didn't
comprende español.
Bet he'd learn to
habla
pretty fast if he didn't have me as his gringo mule.

And by the way, Ricky's brother ain't worked since the Johnson administration—Andrew Johnson. Where the hell does he get the money to fly off to Florida on “vacation”? Vacation from what?

Plus, I'd been buying so much shit off Peppa lately, I figured he was starting to wonder about me. I wouldn't be the first boss to start dipping into his own wares.

I walked up the steps and almost broke my ankle when one of the rotted wooden steps gave way under my left foot. The buzzer didn't work, so I rapped on the door. About a minute later, Ricky's mother limped to the door and let me in. It took about ten minutes for her to gimp her way back into the kitchen with me following behind her. She let out a long sigh as she collapsed into a chair covered in plastic, which someone seemed to have used for a little knife-stabbing practice.

I sat down on the other side of the ancient kitchen table and removed an envelope from my coat pocket. It contained $3,000 in $100 bills, what she claimed her junkie son had stolen from her. I know that's a lot of dough, but this wasn't strictly charity. Ricky and I had done a lot of work together—wet work, during the Charlestown thing—and in addition to being charitable, it was only prudent to try to keep him as happy as possible, and quiet.

Maybe the cops wouldn't have any witnesses, and it would be his word against mine, but why roll the dice? An indictment is always a disappointment.

“You a good boy, Bench,” Ricky's mother said in a thick Italian accent. “You always take-a care of Ricky. You didn't have-a to go In Town for this, did you?”

“Nah, Ma, I'm doing okay.” Better than Henry Sheldon, that's for sure. That was the silver lining. At least I wasn't parting with my own money. Easy come, easy go.

“Matty, he stole-a my jewelry, even my wedding ring from Santoro—you remember Santoro, don't you, Bench?”

Ricky's father. Yes indeed I remembered him. He gave me my first pinky ring as a bonus after I hijacked a truck carrying TVs for him. He was a miserable fucking human being, pinky ring notwithstanding. The way Ricky told the story, Santoro had been a prizefighter as a kid, the cham-peen of East Boston. But apparently the only times he ever successfully defended his crown were outside the ring, against Ma. I wondered how much Ma remembered of the real Santoro. She'd been as soft as a grape for a while now, which I'm sure was why her junkie son Matty figured he could steal her valuables.

Anyway, she was babbling on about her wedding ring. Knowing Santoro, I figured she was lucky the ring didn't leave third-degree burns on her finger when he slipped it on.

“It was bee-you-ti-full, four carats. Oh sure, he heisted it, he never told me, but I always knew. You know how you can always tell things like that, Bench.”

“I certainly do, Ma.”

“But you know, what's it matter? I always say, it'sa the thought that counts.”

“It certainly is.”

“Matty, he stole-a all my Hummels too, and my Lladros. Santoro give me them too. Most of 'em he gotta from a house he knocka over in Concord. I had a couple hundred of them. First I noticed a few of them missing, then I went to my sistah's in Providence two weeks ago, and when I come back, they was all gone. Them and my jewelry.”

“Ricky told me,” I said, looking across the table at the envelope full of hundreds. “If I were you, Ma, I wouldn't keep the cash here. Not as long as Matty's around.”

She quickly reached across the table, grabbed the cash and shoved it into her apron.

“You a good boy, Bench,” she said again. “I always told Ricky, stick with Bench, he knows how to handle himself, he can straighten a thing out.”

“He'll be out soon enough,” I lied.

“Bench,” she said, “about that other thing, for Matty.”

I nodded and pulled out the ten packs of methadone I'd gotten from Peppa at $25 apiece. I don't like putting myself in needless jeopardy, and yet here I'd been driving around all morning with a Class A controlled substance, a narcotic. It was insanity. We don't even sell this shit, as a matter of policy, so Peppa had to get some as a favor to me. I'm his boss, but it was still a favor, a favor for an asshole named Matty, and I hate to waste favors, especially on ungrateful assholes. I pushed the packets across the table, but these she didn't immediately pocket.

Instead, she reached for her cane. “I wana Matty should thank you.” She slowly stood up, gripped the table with one hand for support and tapped on the ceiling with the cane. “Matty,” she yelled. “Come down here, Matty. I want-a you should say thanks to a friend-a your brother's what done you a favor.”

I shook my head. “No need for that, Ma.” I leaned across the table and took the cane and tapped on the ceiling again. “You can stay up there, Matty.” There was no response. He'd probably nodded off. I didn't want to see him, because if I did, I'd most likely slap him around. And that was Ricky's job, not mine.

I stood up and walked around the table to kiss Ma on the cheek. Her breath smelled of garlic and cheap wine. God, what a madhouse.

“Remember, Ma, get that cash outta here, or he'll grab it for sure.”

“I know, Bench,” she said, nodding her head. “Nona this would have happened if Ricky was still around. I don't know how many times I tell him, Ricky, no more stickups. Cops now, they got too many cameras, radios, red-dye packs. Stick to the drugs, I says. Find some spics-a sell it for you. God knows we got enough of 'em around here now.” She waved her arm in dismissal. “You was always smarter than him, Bench.”

I said my good-byes and made for the door. I was out on the sidewalk when my cell phone rang.

 

30

 … AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

Bench had given me the number of one of those cell phones with an area code you never heard of. He probably changed phones every couple of days. That way by the time any cops could get a warrant to listen in, the phone would be gone. So I called the cell phone du jour.

“Yeah?” he said.

“You know that party we saw over in Ward One last night?”

“Ward One?” he said, obviously puzzled. Sometimes I forget, not everyone is into city politics the way I am.

“Eastie,” I said, and he said “Yeah” again. Bench McCarthy, I had come to understand, was a man of few words.

“I got a plan, but I'm going to need some help.”

“So why you callin' me?”

“I mean, we're after the same thing here, aren't we?”