The Pariot GAme (14 page)

“Used to be, as I remember it,” Riordan said, “man could actually get up on his hind legs in his room and walk his own butt out to the icebox and fetch his own beer. Take care of his own health and safety.”

“At night, Pete,” Doherty said, “only at night, when she’s supposed to be off duty. Hurts her pride if you do it during the day. She thinks you’re suggesting that she’s too infirm to
do her job anymore. So, I put the intercom in, and I told her it was orders from my doctor, while I was recuperating from the attack. You see, Mrs. Herlihy was put on the earth first to take of the late James Herlihy, and then to take care of me. It is perfectly all right in her estimation for me to be feeble. In fact, it is only right that I be feeble, because otherwise God would never have dispatched Mrs. Herlihy to see to my care and upkeep.”

“Complicated, isn’t it?” Riordan said.

Doherty shook his head as he sat down. “Complicated? Good Lord, I had no idea how complicated it would become as I got older.”

“So I’m discovering,” Riordan said. “All right, that’s Walker out of the way. I left him and I went in to the State House, where there is this fellow that may not know where Captain Kidd hid the gold, but when it comes to where the bodies are buried, he is supposed to know everything.”

“Seats Lobianco,” Doherty said immediately, laughing. “Salvatore Lobianco.”

“You know him, then,” Riordan said.

“I’m alive in the Commonwealth, am I not?” Doherty said. “If you’ve ever been at the intersection of Beacon and Park Streets on a sunny spring day, you know Seats Lobianco. He’s been around since the statue of George Washington on horseback in the Garden, but with one important difference: No pigeon in his right mind would ever dump on Seats Lobianco. Seats would ruin his career without ever raising his voice above a whisper.”

“Is he all right?” Riordan said. “My guy said he is all right. I went on that. I had to. I’ve been out of the state for a while, you know. Out of the States, for that matter. And since I’ve been back, I had very little to do with that place on the hill. I don’t know much about all that back-and-forth they’ve got going up there.”

“Nobody does,” Doherty said. “A great many people think they do, and even more say they do, but very few actually know. There’s too much of it. It’s like watching the Marathon. There’s more than twenty-six miles of it. Nobody’s ever seen the whole Marathon because there’s too much Marathon to see. What they see is a little bit of it, and they think they’ve seen the whole thing. Comforting, I suppose, but a myth. Talk about wheels within wheels. When Cushing was alive, I used to go up there now and then. Spent quite a lot of time up there for him, doing one thing and another and you’re not to ask me too many questions about that, either.”

“Bingo,” Riordan said.

“Damned WASPs,” Doherty said. “WASPs and mobsters. Pretty lethal alliance against the forces of light and truth and a solvent bourse in the parishes of the Archdiocese of Boston.”

“Is Lobianco straight?” Riordan said.

“Oh, sure,” Doherty said. Mrs. Herlihy hobbled in with the tray of beer. She looked suspiciously at Riordan and disapprovingly at Doherty. “You can look out for yourself, Peter,” she said, “I guess you’re old enough and young enough. But you, Father, you remember what the doctor told you about this sort of thing.” She set the Amstels on the table.

“Call him up, Mrs. Herlihy,” Doherty said, “and tell him that I’ll anoint myself on the way out if one beer carries me off. And if it does, I wasn’t long for this world anyway.”

“Well,” she said, “you just remember, that’s all.” She walked slowly out and shut the door.

Doherty began laughing. “Tyranny,” he said, “absolute tyranny. I hear all these complaints firsthand from the kids that their parents’re tyrants, and I get all the beefs secondhand from the parents that the clergy’s tyrannical, but not a one of them has the faintest notion of tyranny, real absolute rule, until he’s been subjugated to the will of a pedigreed rectory housekeeper.

“Yeah, Pete,” Doherty said, leaning forward to pour the beer. “Seats is all right. He plays the clown, and he puts on a good act about being a plotter and a conniver. Which in a way I suppose he must be, or he never would’ve survived as long as he has in that place. But he is absolutely dead honest.”

“He told me that he is,” Riordan said. “I wasn’t sure I believed him, though.”

“Ah, Peter,” Doherty said, after drinking beer through the head of foam, “the Holy Scriptures are right: ‘Wiser in the ways of the world are the children of Mammon, than are the children of the Light.’ Every one of those birds up there will tell you he’s as honest as the day is long, and then he will take you aside and whisper that you better watch them other guys, though. Lobianco is one of the lot that actually means it. He is straight. What’d he tell you, or is it another sin if I ask you that?”

“Nah,” Riordan said, “you have that one, free, gratis and for nothing. He said I was the third guy came at him yesterday on Mike Magro. Up till yesterday morning, Lobianco’d never heard of the guy. He was damned if he could figure it out.”

“Who were the first two?” Doherty said.

“The guy right before me,” Riordan said, “was one of the Councillors. Fellow by the name of Thomas Emmett. Democrat out of Worcester. He was the only guy on the Council that’d apparently ever heard of Magro before the meeting, and he wanted the pardon application rammed through all at once, executive session.”

Doherty furrowed his brows. “Emmett,” he said, “that’s odd. Tommy Emmett.”

“You know him?” Riordan said.

“Little,” Doherty said, “not a heck of a lot. Never draws much attention. Which of course’re often the most devilish kind, because nobody notices when they pull something off. Never heard anything much about him one way or the other,
though. Oh, the standard stuff—covers his district when there’s a judgeship, clerkship, something like that. Any judgeships coming up?”

“Lobianco said one filled yesterday, and the other ones locked up for delivery the next meeting.”

“Can’t be that, then,” Doherty said. “Besides, doesn’t make any sense. Where the hell would a thief and killer like Magro get the weight to pull a judgeship out for somebody? Unless Emmett also wants Jerry killed, which is equally hard to imagine. I doubt they even know each other, let alone one of them carrying that kind of a grudge.” He shook his head. “Nope, can’t do anything with it. There’s obviously something there, but I don’t know what it is. Who’s the other guy?”

“Rep name of Greenan,” Riordan said, “from Roslindale.”

“Ticker Greenan as I live and breathe,” Doherty said. “One of the grand characters out of vaudeville, now continuing an extended engagement in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.”

“He was in vaudeville?” Riordan said.

“I don’t think so,” Doherty said. “He’s funny as the devil, but he doesn’t mean to be and he doesn’t know he’s doing it when he does it. Where does he fit in?”

“Told Lobianco at lunch before the meeting,” Riordan said, “he was pushing Magro’s application as a favor for a priest.”

Doherty leaned forward and put the beer down. “Ahh,” he said, “now we are getting somewhere. The priest is a domestic prelate.”

“Right,” Riordan said.

“He’s got a parish in West Roxbury,” Doherty said.

“Right,” Riordan said.

“His name is Fahey,” Doherty said.

“Also right,” Riordan said.

“Right Reverend Monsignor Vincent J. Fahey, to be exact,” Doherty said. “Or, as we called him affectionately in the
seminary, Trimmer Fahey. Ah yes, my dear Watson, it all comes clear now. Clearer, at least. Trimmer Faheys at the root of this little adventure.”

“Care to fill me in?” Riordan said.

“Not now,” Doherty said. “The ball’s in my court now, and I believe I’ll take a little canter with it and see who chases me. When I get a reading, I will tell you.… Tell me, Peter, and be straight with me because we are old pals, are you telling Warden Walker everything you know, such as that you know me?”

“No,” Riordan said.

“Are you telling Lobianco all you know?” Doherty said.

“No,” Riordan said, “like I said. I didn’t see any reason to drag your name into it.”

“I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” Doherty said. “Now for the hard part. Keeping in mind that what you’ve told me is quite bad enough, have you told me everything you know about Jerry? And why he interests you?”

“Tell you the truth,” Riordan said, “no.”

“Peter,” Doherty said, swatting Riordan mildly on the knee, “and I mean this: I really appreciate that, both your candor and your reticence. Yes, when I have scouted around Fahey a little, I will fill you in. But I will not tell you everything. Fair?”

“Fair enough,” Riordan said. “Wish all my sources were this candid.”

The bulldog, which had sat, listened and watched attentively during the conversation, yawned loudly, and slid slowly to the floor into position for a nap. He was snoring when Riordan reached the door.

“Pete,” Doherty said.

“Yeah,” Riordan said.

“You maybe put Spike to sleep there, but you sure woke me up. Thanks.” He was grinning.

T
HE
R
IGHT
R
EVEREND
Monsignor Vincent Fahey, wearing black trunks he had adopted under protest when the University Club admitted women to the use of its athletic facilities, swam length after length in the indoor pool at the red brick building on Stuart Street in Boston. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (he arrived around 11 a.m.), he did sixty laps in the pool. He was a trained swimmer, and had competed occasionally in informal meets with other clubs in his younger days, but upon turning fifty had started to beg off.

“Getting too old to help the club, Tommy,” he would reply when Thomas Emmett approached him. Emmett arranged all the meets. He resided in Worcester but he lived in an apartment on Somerset Street, next to the State House. “Still got the moves, like you on the Executive Council, but I don’t have the speed anymore.” Monsignor Fahey prided himself on his ability to appraise realistically any matter of earthly or heavenly concern referred to his attention. “The best I can do now, Tommy, is endurance, and keep myself in shape. Cant let yourself get into the sad condition of the fellows on the track up there.”

Monsignor Fahey left very little wake as he moved through the water, doing a steady Australian crawl with great economy of motion. He wore ear plugs on a black rubber head-gear.
He put his left side down and dug powerfully with his right hand at the slightly steaming surface of the pool. His legs and feet kicked just below the surface; he took air through his mouth, rolled onto his right side, submerged that ear, dug the water with his left hand, reached the end of the pool, submerged, did a kick turn off the wall and broke the surface once again, working like a diesel engine. On the track suspended above around the pool, the runners labored along, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, panting. Men half Faheys age wore headbands, wristbands, sodden tee-shirts, shorts, sneakers and socks. Their faces became red and their feet sore thudding on the wooden surface.

“Running,” Monsignor Fahey would scoff in the men’s locker room, toweling off his flat belly and his muscular chest and legs, refusing both offers of beer and invitations to join the runners. “Cant do it. Haven’t got the equipment for it. I don’t like beer so I don’t have the belly that it looks as though a man needs for the first lap. My face wouldn’t get red fast enough. You guys’d all be sweating like horses and I’d still be comfortable. The only thing that’d get me is shin splits, and I don’t want those.”

Completing his laps, Monsignor Fahey climbed out of the pool and took his white towel from the hook. He removed his headgear with the ear plugs and dried his bald head and the fringe of gray hair at the base of his skull before he mopped his face and neck. From the bench beneath the hook, he took the glasses with the black frames and fitted the bows over his large ears, reddened by the water. He put his feet into slippers made of coarse brown paper and walked toward the door and the stairs to the locker room. Above him the early lunchtime joggers thumped earnestly around the wooden track. He shut the door on their noise behind him.

On the carpet before his gray-green locker, Monsignor Fahey scuffed off the disposable slippers. He removed the
black nylon bathing suit and the white supporter he wore under it. Entering the same row of lockers, Daniel Minihan of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority paused in the act of taking off his green-and-blue-striped silk tie when he saw Fahey undressing. Minihan wore a gray linen suit, with a vest, and a white broadcloth shirt. His face was well tanned. “Father Fahey, as I live and breathe,” Minihan said. “And not wearin’ the trunks so’s you’re lookin’ down on the unemployed.”

Fahey turned toward him. “
Monsignor
Fahey to the likes of you, Minihan,” he said. “No, as a matter of fact, I try to keep it out of sight in case you might forget sometime when I’m around you which one belongs to whom, should your hand start twitching. Still shaving your palms are you, to dispose of the evidence?”