The Penny Ferry - Rick Boyer (10 page)

"How much did your watch cost?" he asked.

"You mean the black one? Why do you ask?"

"How much?"

"Uh, about four hundred bucks. Don't tell Mary."

"
Hold on a sec."

He jumped out of the car and hoofed it back to the
tobacconist's, reappearing shortly with a little paper bag in his
hand. He got behind the wheel and opened it. He took out a small,
cardboard box, opened it, and held a jewelry case in his hand.

On the blue case, in stylized lower-case letters in
silver, was the word
Orsini.
He handed it to me and I snapped it open. Inside was a blue-and-gold
lighter.

"
Very handsome," I said. "How much?"

"Three twenty-five. It was their second~cheapest
one. But still nice. He just filled it for me."

"What does it run on, plutonium?"

"Butane. Nice, eh? See, the
nortes
aren't the only ones who can have these. I don't buy that much for
myself, you know."

We headed home. For his dues Joe bought a sack of
pears and some Brie in Fresh Pond, and we were home by four. But
after the car rolled to a stop and I gathered our purchases to carry
inside, I noticed Joe hadn't moved. He was still behind the wheel,
regarding the lighter that he flipped around in his big hands. I
thought he must really love it. Then he got out slowly, as if
burdened by a great weight. He sighed as he walked up the flagstones,
carrying the new lighter in front of him in both hands the way a
priest carries the host.

"Dammit, Doc. Why the
hell did I ever buy this thing?"

* * *

"Oh I don't know," mused Mary as she
fingered the lighter. "It looks really nice, Joey. And don't
worry so much what those
nortes
do or don't do. We all know they're not really Italians. They're
Austrians in drag."

We had asked Mary to pass judgment on Joe's big
purchase. We were sitting around the dinner table after a huge feast.

"The tortellini was a nice surprise," I
said, placing my hand under the table and on her thigh, which I
commenced to stroke.

"That's a ball, Charlie," she said with a
sigh.

"
Huh?"

"Low and outside," she said, patting my
hand.

"That's tawdry, dear. Must you always be so
tawdry?"

"Yep."

Joe took the lighter back. It had clearly become an
object of guilt, an albatross around his neck. Poor guy. Mary had the
solution. She went upstairs and got my fancy black watch and fastened
it onto Joe's wrist. Then she took the lighter from him and gave it
to me. Pretend you've given each other presents, she said.

"
Great," said Joe, regarding the fancy
timepiece. "Only trouble is I don't need a watch."

"
And I don't need a cigarette lighter."

"Well it's the thought that counts," said
Mary. "Now Charlie, make the cappucino."

After dessert we put on a Mahler symphony and sat in
the living room speculating on the
Robinson/Fabrianni/dead-guy-in-the-chimney connection. There still
didn't appear to be any, which made it all the more puzzling.

"Why are you guys so sure the poor man in the
chimney was working for the Fabriannis?" asked Mary, who was
busy flipping through a magazine.

"Well, the main thing is the fact that he looked
Italian— not Italian-American but real Italian, you know,"
said her brother, scowling and fingering his new watch, which seemed
to confuse and disgust him. "And also the fact that Johnny
Robinson was carrying a gold cup for the Fabriannis earlier. But
mainly, he wore a watch just like the one Lucia Fabrianni was
wearing. It's called a Bulgari, and it's made in Italy."

"
You guys are full of it," said Mary,
looking at her nails.

"
Now what makes you say that?" I asked.

"
The man's watch. Two reasons. One: here's a
Bulgari watch right here."

She flipped the magazine around and showed us a
full-page color ad with the name boldly spelled out. I noticed it was
spelled with a Roman style u that was shaped like a v. The magazine
washer favorite: Attenzione, the magazine for Italian-Americans, or
anybody who likes anything Italian. I liked the magazine a lot.

"Charlie and Joe, these Bulgari watches are the
new thing. No more Rolex or Patek Philippe. It's all Bulgari now; the
stores on Newbury Street are selling them like crazy. So reason
number one, again: everybody's getting Bulgari watches now; the guy
in the chimney could be an American."

"No way," said her brother.

"
Two: you're saying the guys killed Johnny to
get the gold cup, or something else valuable? Then why didn't they
take the watch? They could sell it easily for a couple hundred bucks.
So one, two: you guys are full of it."

She returned to her magazine and her nails. We didn't
exactly know what to say. Leave a woman to screw everything all up.
just before Joe left to return to his Beacon Hill bachelor apartment
he and I went over the whole thing again, just the two of us. We
decided Johnny Robinson's death was a Mob revenge killing after all.
So I said good-bye fully expecting to begin making a new bridge for
Tom Costello's mouth the next afternoon . . . and not expecting to
see Joe until next weekend. But something unexpected changed all of
that. It was a voice. A voice from beyond the grave.

Johnny Robinson's voice. Talking to me.
 
 

CHAPTER SIX

I regarded the bloody object that rested on the
sterile paper. Clumps of clotted tissue clung to its lower
extremities like limpets on a wave-washed rock. Although the patient
sitting in my chair would certainly enjoy newfound relief now that
the impacted third molar was removed from his lower jaw, I could not
help feeling a wee bit like Torquemada every time I clamped my
HuFriedy cowhorn forceps securely around an offending tooth and I
began to rock it loose from its socket. You do this after you
partially lift the tooth with a tool called an elevator; after the
forceps are in place you rock the tooth back and forth and then
extract it. Sometimes there is a muted crunch of bone or crackle as a
root fractures under the strain. But always there is the sickening
wet sucking sound of the gum tissue, a sound like that produced when
you sink up to your knee in a muddy bog and then pull your leg out.
To mute these noises I always have my patient wear earphones playing
classical music— on the loud side. My current patient was
listening to E. Power Biggs playing Bach's Toccata in E minor. He
felt nothing . . . yet.

The lower portion of Ronald Belknap's tooth was bent
at a thirty-degree angle. This dogleg had developed over the years as
the tooth tried to push its way up through the gum— in the manner
God and nature intended all good teeth to do— and join its fellow
teeth in the job of grinding up food. But the tooth could not push
its way to the surface because the jawbone was too small and there
wasn't room. Our tiny mandible, like our appendix, is a curse of
human evolution, So the tooth pushed against the twelve-year molar in
front not it at an angle. And as it pushed against the molar, it
began to bend. Finally all this pushing and bending leads to
inflammation, pressure, and infection. Sometimes you need to section
impacted teeth before you remove them, but in Belknap's case I
didn't.

"Ohhhhh Jameseeeez," he moaned, looking at
the huge tooth that lay soaking the white paper with blood. "No
wonder that sucker hurt!"

"Yes," I said, "and unfortunately,
when the local wears off you're going to get some more pain. Notice,
Ron, I'm not calling it discomfort, as so many of my colleagues do.
I'm calling it pain because that's what it will be. Do you drink?"

"Sure."

So I gave him a blue card with instructions. For
minors, or people who don't drink, I give a white card with a
different set of instructions and a prescription for Tylox. But never
do I mix instructions, or cards, because booze on top of a
pain-killing drug can make some people drop where they stand after
one snort. It's very dangerous.

"Hey Doc. This just says to go home and get
bombed."

"
Uh-huh. There's a good drink recipe on the
back. Stay home tomorrow and watch the tube. You'll be in some pain
for the next twenty hours because I had to remove a wee bit of
infected jawbone. That's going to smart. Next day return to work and
a take aspirin. Keep the packing in your mouth until dinnertime and
don't rinse. Good-bye."

"What about payment?"

"One pain at a time. Susan will bill you."

He regarded the devastatingly gorgeous Susan Petri,
the one who could turn men into stone. Susan Petri should be a
controlled substance. He addressed me
sotto
voce
.

"Wow, Doc. If you'll pardon a personal
observation, you've got some really nice scenery around here. Must
make coming to work uh, less of an ordeal."

"If you're referring to Ms. Petri's physical
attributes"— I sniffed— "then let me assure you they
had next to nothing to do with my hiring her. And, speaking as one
twentieth-century man to another, I regret your judging her solely on
her physical appearance. It is sexist and archaic. Isn't she
dynamite?"

"Yeah, I-OOOO I think I just got the first
twinge!"

"You ain't felt nothin' yet, Ron. There's more
where that came from. Go home and guzzle; I'll see you Friday."

I saw him out the door just as the phone rang. It was
Joe, returning my call to Ten-Ten Comm. Ave.

"Where the hell have you been? I called you
before work."

"Oh. You mean it was important?"

"
Joe, listen: I've got a taped phone message
from Johnny. He called me late Friday afternoon and left a message on
my machine."

"Well what's it say?"

"
I'll play it over the phone. Hold on."

I pressed the playback button on my phone answering
machine and held the receiver right over the tiny speaker:

Hello, Doc? This is Johnny. Johnny Robinson,
Dependable. Listen, I got your work from the dental lab but I'll be a
little bit late with it. Can you hold on until just before
suppertime? Sorry, but I'm totin' somethin' hot for my buddy Andy and
I've got a— uh [squeak, flap, squeak] complication, dontcha know .
. . [bark, bark]. Sorry for the delay . . . I'll stay in touch.
[bark, click]

There was a pause on the other end after it was over.
Then , Joe asked me to play it again. I did. Then he asked me to play
it a third time.

"Okay, I'll be out in an hour. I might bring
O'Hearn with me. You hear that squeaking in the background?
Phone-booth door. . . the old type. And the barking? Johnny's dogs.
Somebody was tailing him."

"Who's Andy?"

"
That's what we're gonna find out. Stay put."

Joe and I listened to the tape three more times. We
played the end of it over and over again to try and determine what
the background noises meant. The problem was that the answering
device was a crude recorder, and the speaker was a tiny arrangement
barely an inch and a half across. Hardly concert-hall realism.
Frustrated, Joe said he needed a big tape deck with three heads so he
could make more copies. I had such a deck, but the one at the Concord
police station was closer and Joe said he'd like Chief Brian Hannon's
opinion of the message.

"You would? Really and truly?"

"Well why not?" asked Joe.

"Well why?"

We nestled ourselves in front of the police
department's big Akai tape deck after we'd made four copies of the
message, which ran 25.4 seconds, and listened again to the original
tape. Brian Hannon sat between us, running his fat fingers through
his thinning sand-colored hair as he cocked his ear at the-voice. The
details in the background were clearer with the better equipment. The
squeak of a door hinge, the faint sounds of traffic and pedestrians
and a bell.

The three of us hunkered down there like sparrows on
a wire, listening. I was at one end, a bit lean and graying at the
temples. Brian, short, stocky, and almost bald, was in the middle.
Bringing up the far side was good old Joe, with his paunch and his
hound-dog eyes. Then I knew who it was we must've looked like: Larry,
Curley, and Moe. The Three Stooges.

"Phone booth," growled Brian at the squeak,
flap, squeak. "He's opening and closing the door of a phone
booth, probably to get a good look at somebody who's tailing him."

"We agree," said Joe. "And the barking
we're hearing is Tommy and Susie, who are on their leads right
outside the booth. They usually didn't bark. It took a lot to make
them squawk. All these things add up to the message: I'll be late, I
got a complication . . ."

"Uh-huh," I agreed. "Like somebody
tailing me, trying to get what l'm carrying."

"
What?" asked Brian.

"We're narrowing it down. But what about the
chiming bells in the background? Which church is it?"