Serpents in the Cold (31 page)

_________________________

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Mission Hill, Roxbury

A FLUSHED-CHEEKED ALTAR
boy swung the censer back and forth, its incense blurring the air in slants of gray smoke, drifting across the altar. Cal watched from the second pew behind the left transept. At the shrine to Saint Peter on his left, over which hung hundreds of canes and crutches dating back over a hundred years, the wood shining, a polished luster as if encased in amber, a half-dozen disabled parishioners were lighting candles and praying. Cal watched several of them bless themselves and rise, struggling from their kneelers, and totter to the center aisle, genuflect, and make the sign of the cross again before leaving. In the vestibule an old woman, stout-hipped and bow-backed, in a black shawl murmured the Stations of the Cross. A ragged run in her stocking cleaved the back of one thick calf as if it had been sliced by a blunt razor blade.

He watched the altar boy, who had paused in his swinging and then looked upward at the high domed and glittering ceiling as if an image of God might appear among the clouds and angels. The sound of footfalls, sharp and distinct on the tile, came to him only after he had registered the presence of bodies settling into the pew behind him.

He turned slightly, and Blackie's voice stopped him.

“Keep looking straight ahead, O'Brien. Just keep praying.”

Cal arched his neck, felt the muzzle of a gun there at the base of it.

“Did you think I wouldn't know it was you two fuckups that torched my places, my fucking bar?”

Despite Blackie's warning, he turned to the right, glanced at Joe Kinneally, and then to the left, Pat Mulrooney, and in the vestibule, the slender, stoop-shouldered figure of Shaw. He saw that Blackie's left arm was held in a sling, and he took some satisfaction in that. “Dante got you after all,” he said. “You prick.”

Blackie pressed the gun sharply into Cal's neck, prodding him to turn back to the front. Shaw moved up the aisle toward the altar, genuflected and blessed himself, put his hands together in mock prayer.

Blackie eyed him and scowled. “I told you to wait in the fucking car. What are you, a fucking idiot?”

Shaw shrugged, indifferent to Blackie's insults. “You want me to go back to the car?”

 “Nah, stay here now that you're fucking here. It's bad enough that Sully says I got to bring you with me wherever I go.”

Shaw laughed uneasily, his face burning red.

The gun barrel pushed harder against the back of Cal's neck. He should have been scared, but he wasn't. This is how it's going to end, he thought, and felt a strange calm. In his own church, no less.

“So,” he said, “what was it with you? The Brink's money or just the kicks?”

Blackie laughed, but it was harsh sounding, rueful, and filled with resentment. “That was the Butcher, not me, the sick fuck. I get no fun out of doing something like that, and I made an example out of him, didn't I? Found him even when the cops couldn't.”

Cal shook his head, felt Blackie jab the barrel into the base of his skull.

“He killed the other girls, all right, but you killed Sheila. You discovered the truck at the yards and found the perfect way to get rid of her, the perfect cover.”

“If I want to kill someone, I kill them plain and simple.”

“Like the old man out in Somerville. Like my wife.”

“Yeah, just like that.”

“So why did you kill her then? If you find her, you find the money. Unless she refused to talk? So you found her, but she never gave him up, never led you to the money and Bobby Renza.”

Cal could feel Blackie's anger, palpable as heat, surge at the back of his neck. The gun wasn't moving now, and he wondered if Blackie would wait to shoot him.

“I told you, I didn't kill the cunt.”

“How did you find out about Sheila and Renza anyway? How'd you know he was connected to the Brink's job?”

“You always talk too much, O'Brien. Shut up for once, why don't you.”

“I know you put her clothes in the trailer to make it look like the Butcher, and she wasn't killed on Tenean Beach. You killed her somewhere else—but where? And why dump her at Tenean?”

“I said, shut the fuck up.”

They waited as the church emptied. Soon the altar boy was gone and the old women doing the Stations. Shaw strolled toward the transept, feet echoing on the tile, looked around at the few parishioners who remained: a dark-suited man bent over the votive candles praying, a woman wearing a shawl dropping coins, clattering, into the empty poor box, and then glanced back to Cal.

He moved to the left and then to the right, pacing. When the man and woman were gone, he reached inside his wool coat and withdrew a silver-plated automatic. He checked the clip, opened and closed the chamber with a swift metallic click.

Blackie looked up at him. “What the fuck are you doing now?”

“Nothing.”

“Well your nothing is bothering me. Stay still, will you?”

“Sure.”

Cal turned his neck so that it cracked, and Blackie clubbed his ear. Thoughts were rushing in his head now and he couldn't have stopped them had he wanted to. It was like telling someone a story you once knew but could no longer remember the ending. “You never found Renza, did you, Blackie?” he said quickly. “You never got your piece of the Brink's job, and your brother cut you out of everything else. Imagine the money he and McAllister are going to make on the Scollay deal, and all without you.”

“I told you, O'Brien, you're a dead man.”

“I bet Sully's getting his take, you can guarantee it. That's what the boss always does.”

Sucking on his teeth like a dimwit, Shaw raised the gun until it was level with Cal. Cal and he met each other's eyes.

Joe Kinneally rose from the pew. “What the fuck did Blackie tell—”

There was a gun blast, and Joe's face exploded in a black mist of blood and gore; part of the back and side of his head splattered down onto Cal's cheek. Blackie and Pat struggled to their feet, and the gunshots seemed to come to Cal in a delay. Instinctively, he half turned from the gunfire as Shaw fired another round and Pat fell into the transept. Blackie stepped into the aisle, gun raised and firing, and Shaw scampered toward the altar before Cal lunged and drove Blackie into the votive stand before Saint Peter's shrine. The tall brass candlesticks clattered to the floor. Votive candles sparked in the dark. Blackie tried to raise his gun, but Cal knocked it away, drove his fist into Blackie's cheekbone and then again into his mouth. He felt teeth and bone tearing the skin of his knuckles.

Blackie pushed him off and, crawling on all fours, went for his gun. Blood streaked his gums, stained his teeth. “You fuck, O'Brien,” he said, and snatched his gun off the tile. Cal scrabbled for a grip on the brass candlestick and swung it like a sledgehammer down onto Blackie's hand. Blackie howled, and the gun fell from his fingers. Cal struck him again in the head, and he fell onto his back. It took Cal's two hands to fully heft the candlestick, and he brought it down with all his force into Blackie's face. Blackie screamed and thrashed, but Cal had all of his weight upon him. When he lifted the brass, blood and skin were stuck to it. Bone poked out pink and viscous through Blackie's torn cheek. He sputtered, trying to talk; blood flowed down his gums, over his shattered teeth. “My brother,” he said, chokingly, “it was my brother,” and reached feebly to protect his face.

Cal brought the metal down again, crushing Blackie's nose and eye sockets. The body beneath him no longer struggled, but he raised the candlestick a third and then a fourth time.

“Cal!” Shaw shouted, but sound came only slowly, and then Cal was aware of his chest rising and falling, the thumping, heavy sense of his lungs working like a bellows. He let the candlestick go, and it clanged to the floor.

There wasn't anything left of Blackie's face below the hairline. Nothing to tell that he'd been a person, for even the skull beneath the skin was gone; no sockets or nose or teeth—all the bone within the pulpy mess had been shattered into hundreds of pieces.

“That's for my wife,” he said, and climbed shakily to his feet.

Shaw had been shot and was holding his arm. Blood seeped from between his fingers. The other hand held the gun still. He stared, pale-faced, at Blackie's body and sucked at his teeth.

“Jesus Christ, Cal.”

Shaw coughed, raised his hand weakly to his mouth. Cal stared at his long, arrogant face, but now Shaw seemed shaken and his voice didn't carry any authority. “Sully was sick of his shit. I guess that makes you one lucky son of a bitch, don't it?”

Cal nodded, and Shaw, clutching his arm, made his way to the vestibule. Cal listened to his heels padding on the tile. He waited, and then the door of the church opened, a thin stream of streetlight glanced down the center aisle of the nave, and then Cal was in gloom once more, illuminated by flickering votives and the meager sconces high on the wall. Blood from Blackie's head pooled darkly across the tile.

Cal looked at Blackie's body and then toward the crucifix beyond the altar, and resisted the urge to genuflect and bless himself. He cocked his head as if listening for something—distant sirens, a screech of tires, the rest of Blackie's goons come to finish him off—and then when only silence came, he exhaled long and hard. He glanced at the body sprawled in the transept, at Joe Kinneally bunched between the pews, and then wiped some more at the blood spotting his neck, the angle of his jaw, his cheek. He stared bleary-eyed at the crucified Christ. The lights of the altar flickered on his blind eyes. Cal ran his hand over the side of his face again, stared at the gore he'd wiped onto his skin, then, hand shaking, reached for his hat and followed Shaw out into the light.

_________________________

Plum Cove, Gloucester

FOR MOST OF
the ride north Cal and Dante said very little. They watched the strange morning mist blending with the snow clouds that darkened the horizon. Cal eased the car along Route 1A as it curved back and forth along its snakelike trail north of Boston, through the coastal towns of Swampscott and Salem. The heater ticked and hummed, and snow, heavy and thick and driven by the wind, fell out of the sky. The big car began to slip and slide, its engine revving, its tires losing traction. Cursing, Cal finally stopped at a corner store that seemed to come at them from out of the squalls with its dimly lit signs advertising Ipswich Beer, Wonder Bread, and Happy Time soft-serve ice cream, up against an inlet where small dories lay upon their bellies, scattered here and there along the ice, broken wind-bleached backs humped with snow.

Cal asked for directions in the store while Dante eased the car into the attached single-bay gas station and paid two dollars to have chains put on the tires by a boy in a denim burlap jacket with a ribbed collar. He had large parboiled eyes and terrible acne, and smelled of booze.

As they waited, they stood in the shelter of the garage bay.

“You don't look so hot,” Cal said, eyeing Dante. “Will you make it?”

“Yeah, I'll make it okay.”

Dante's pallor was ashen. He coughed into his hand, and he raised his other hand in an apologetic way as he stepped out from the garage into the snow. He turned his back to Cal and began to heave, his shoulders bowed and shuddering. When he was done, he wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, breathed deeply, took off his hat, and let the snow come down onto his face.

“Me and Sheila,” Dante said, and Cal looked up, wondering if Dante was talking to himself. “We had a thing, Cal. I fucked up. I didn't mean for it to happen, but it did. It started months before Margo died, and she knew about it but never said a word.”

“Were you two together after Margo died?”

Dante nodded. “I should have told you.”

Cal squinted at him through the snow. “I don't think it matters much now, do you?”

And then the boy was done and staring at them, wisps of cigarette smoke drifting from his vacant mouth. Cal pulled the car out, and Dante opened the door and moved stiffly into the front seat. Cal rolled down the window, his bloodshot eyes glancing in the rearview mirror, and steered them back to the road.

When they came into Beverly, the temperature dropped, and moved into the car's interior through the dashboard, doors, and windows. Strakes of snow appeared suddenly, flung in from the sea miles distant yet, drifting across the road, and as they came to Cape Ann, heavy winds buffeted the car.

They crossed a drawbridge and looked out at houses squatting against the coastline, the cranes and the fish and ice storage warehouses of Gloucester Harbor. Washington Street curled and spiraled inward around Flats Pond and Grays Harbor. They looked about them, at houses pressed in against one another, smaller, uniform clapboard turn-of-the-century cottages of quarrymen and once upon a time the Irish, now the province of the Italians, Portuguese, and Swedish, the homes of lobstermen, cod men, and swordfish men, those who sailed out toward the Grand Banks and were gone for a week at a time. But fishing was over for the season, and the economy had blighted the area. Everything seemed meager and tamped down. Here and there a light burned within a window. Small lobster pot buoys, strung up as decoration along the tops of fences, banged hollowly against wood.

Cal drove farther inland and by abandoned quarries, and the houses parted on their left, revealing a small stone jetty and the sea crashing against the rocks. A tall abandoned church tower leaned capriciously in a snow-covered clearing, and then they were descending another rise and a small bay opened up on their left. At the southern promontory a ledge of granite rocks jutted out into Ipswich Bay, and upon it sat the large colonial house from the photograph on McAllister's desk, and at the same address as the check he mailed to Foley.

Cal slowed the car and, as the engine quieted, they listened to the wind whistling in the wheel wells, the door runners, the sound of waves battering the rocks in white spumes.

“The Foley homestead,” he muttered.

McAllister's family had once lived in that home and rented a cottage to the Foleys. Cal could see the young Foley, entranced and awed by the wealth such a house implied, imagining a life in which he was one of them, not merely poor Irish from Boston but one of the Brahmins, the elite. How, even as a young boy, he had envisioned something other, something greater, a way out of the squalor of the Southie and Dorchester tenements. How could one not be impressed and awed by it?

Foley had risen up the political ranks and bought the house from the man his family used to rent from. Was that when he and McAllister began their business relationship, one in which Foley the politician ensured the success of McAllister's developments, of his proposals getting city and state approval, and of local contractors working on the cheap, and all of them pocketing federal monies? Or perhaps the house had been a part of that deal also.

Beyond the debris-strewn sand of the deserted cove lay ragged rows of wrack and straw, pushed up like drifts, and farther still, raw-looking whitecaps on the waves, and Cal could imagine the younger Foley brothers playing on that sand with their father of a summer, he grasping them in turn beneath their arms, scooping them up in his large longshoreman's hands, probably callused and bent in the way of his own father's, and throwing them out into the spray and spume of high tide, and a warm sun beating down upon them, the houses on the coastline of Ipswich glittering in the sun from across the bay.

Out on the rocks of the compound an American flag whipped to and fro and snapped against a tall metal stanchion. Most of the surrounding houses were closed and shuttered for the season. Snow-covered gravel crunched beneath the car's tires as they made their way up the winding driveway toward Congressman Foley's summer retreat. Bare trees loomed on either side of the car. Bushes came into view, evergreens trimmed in all manner of shapes, a topiary of strange, obscene animals, turned fantastical now, overgrown and misshapen.

The doorway was unlocked and the hallways were silent. It seemed the hired help were gone for the weekend. From somewhere upstairs came the strains of an opera playing softly. Wind chimes sounded from the eaves of the house, echoing the louder warning bells from the buoys tossing out upon the whitecaps, marking the treacherous coastline.

They followed the sounds of the music, listened as the stylus lifted off the record and then slid, crackling, back into the groove again. The room, a pastel blue, was warm and seemed impervious to the storm outside. At the center of the room a fire burned low in the grate, its coals glowing. With eyes closed, Congressman Foley reclined in a rattan chair covered with thick quilts to the left of the fireplace. A sleeping infant lay stretched, face turned sideways, upon his chest, its cheeks flushed a bright and healthy pink. It wore a red-striped cotton one-piece. Small sheepskin boots covered its feet. A half-empty nursing bottle stood on a side table with a glass tumbler of scotch or bourbon. The congressman's eyes were closed and his breathing was as soft as the baby's. Watching the congressman and the baby, Dante was aware of the cold, like a block of ice that surrounded him and Cal, as if they had brought the storm in with them. From the phonograph a soprano's voice pleaded to her love or to God or to some other torment of the heart and soul. The congressman's eyelashes flickered and then opened. He took them in slowly, and then his eyes widened.

“Cal,” he managed. “Dante.” His voice was hoarse and thick with sleep. He hacked to clear his throat and blinked. His hand reached protectively around the sleeping baby.

Cal stepped into the room and Dante followed, settled himself on the arm of a sofa just inside the door, plucked at the top buttons of his coat until the coat dangled open at the front and he seemed to sink down inside it. His eyes looked more sunken than ever, his cheeks hollowed out by a hunger and exhaustion.

“Hello, Michael,” Cal said.

“What are you two doing here?”

“We're here to bring you news. Your brother was killed late yesterday.” Cal waited for a response. The congressman opened his mouth and then closed it again. It seemed as if he was thinking of the correct thing to say.

“My brother? How?”

“I killed him, though it wasn't supposed to happen that way. But then you already know that. You knew that Sully was going to kill him.”

The congressman looked at Cal and then nodded. “Yes.”

“You put the call in to Sully, and Sully went along with it.”

“I did it because I had to, because of what he'd done, because of all the infighting and mob factions he'd created in the city. He was tearing the city apart. I did it for the good of the city. You know that better than anyone, Cal.”

Phlegm rattled in Dante's throat, and Cal glanced over at him. He was leaning forward. He hadn't taken his eyes off Foley and seemed purposefully not to be looking at the child.

“I couldn't care less that your scumbag brother is dead, but you put a hit out on him for more than that,” said Cal.

“I had to, because of what he'd done to Sheila.”

“Because you loved her,” Dante said acidly.

“Yes, that's right. I loved her and she loved me and he fucking murdered her.” The congressman's voice rose, and he lowered it almost immediately. Color had risen to his cheeks. The baby moaned, kicked out with a foot, and then was still again.

Dante felt a pressure pulsing in his forehead. Dark spots seemed to be spiraling down before his eyes, blurring everything. He tried to measure his breathing. He felt the cold again, encasing the space in which he stood.

“But she didn't love you, did she?” Cal said. “She never really loved you, and when you found out about her leaving you for Renza, you wanted to teach her a lesson, teach her that no one says no to a Foley. Kind of like what your father did to your mother, isn't it?”

“You don't know what you're talking about. What the hell have my mother and father got to do with anything?”

“Your mother had an affair—I remember it was the talk of the neighborhood—but it got hushed up, and over time the story changed. All that we remembered was how your father had her sent up to Danvers, had her institutionalized, saying that she was unfit, mad, how he had to drag her home from the bars every night, telling everyone about her various infidelities, how she'd fuck anyone in the back of McGann's for the price of a drink. Everyone felt so bad for him, that poor man and those poor boys with the crazy mother. Except she wasn't crazy, was she? And she wasn't no whore. Just a woman who ended up on the wrong side of the Foley men.”

“My father was a good man, a proud man who served the city his entire life. She brought him down. She ruined him.”

“Like Sheila could have ruined you—ruined you and the deal you and McAllister had going.”

“I loved Sheila. I'm telling you the truth.”

“But when you found out about her and Renza, how they still had a thing together, you had to teach her a lesson.”

“I knew who she was with. I knew where she got her money. I didn't care about any of that.”

He looked over at Dante now, pleading. “Dante, I loved her. I truly did. I never wanted this to happen. I only wanted her to realize what she had in me, what we had together, and not to throw it away on some piece of shit like Renza.

“Blackie was like a caged animal about the Brink's job. He kept going on about how they'd taken the food right out of his mouth, how they'd come onto his turf and he needed his cut. I told him about Sheila's connection, how she was close with someone on the inside. She used to brag to me about it to get me jealous. I never thought that he would hurt her. I never thought he'd kill her. I just thought that he'd scare her, make her see things right, and that she'd come back to me.”

“Look at me, Foley,” Cal said. “Dammit, look at me.”

The congressman turned back to Cal.

“You're lying. Blackie didn't kill her, not like that—it wasn't his style. He was covering for someone else. And there's only one person I know who Blackie would cover for.”

Cal sighed, wanting Foley to explain, wanting him to say something that might make all of this right. The baby stirred in its sleep, mouthing as if it were at its mother's nipple; the small arms and legs flailed and then became restful again.

“You were the one that killed Sheila. You killed her at the Emporium, killed her because you were angry over her relationship with Renza, angry because she was going to spill the beans about your affair, about your crooked dealings with McAllister, and splatter it all over the front page. Blackie had already discovered the Butcher's trailer out at the salvage yards and knew he had the perfect out for you.”

The congressman shook his head, raised a hand in protest.

“I—I didn't mean to, Cal. We argued—she said she was going to tell Celia, that she was going to tell everyone about our affair, about her child—she was going to ruin everything—and I hit her, it wasn't even that hard—dear God, I've never hit a woman in my life—”

The congressman nodded. “I'd been drinking, God, I'd been drinking all day. I didn't think I'd ever see her again, and then suddenly she shows up at my suite…” He stopped for a moment and then added, “She fell and hit her head. I thought she was fooling around, but she didn't get up again. I didn't know what to do, so I called Blackie. He said he'd take care of it.”

“And he did. He made her death look like the work of the Butcher. He took her body from the Emporium, slit her throat from ear to ear, and left her naked body at Tenean, and you carried on with your run for Senate. That was why he had to get to the Butcher before the cops, so that they could never prove otherwise. And that was why you had to call in the hit on your own brother, because, in the end, you didn't feel you could trust him, did you? You were worried that eventually he'd talk and your career would be over.”