Darkness, Take My Hand (3 page)

As we left
Lewis Wharf and walked up Commercial, the schizophrenic New England autumn had turned an ugly morning into a glorious afternoon. When I woke up, a breeze so chilly and mean it seemed the exhalation of a Puritan god was hissing through the cracks under my windows. The sky was hard and pale as baseball leather, and people walking to their cars on the avenue were hunched into thick jackets and oversized sweaters, breath steaming around their faces.

By the time I left my apartment, the temperature had risen into the high forties, and the muted sun, trying to push through the sheet of hard sky, looked like an orange trapped just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.

Walking up Lewis Wharf toward Diandra Warren’s apartment, I’d removed my jacket as the sun finally broke through, and now as we drove back to the neighborhood, the mercury hovered in the high sixties.

We drove past Copp’s Hill, and the warm breeze sweeping off the harbor rustled the trees overlooking the hill and several handfuls of burnished red leaves crested the slate headstones and fluttered down onto the grass. On our right, the stretch of wharfs and docks glinted under the sun, and to our left the brown, red, and off-white brick of the North End hinted of tile floors and old open doorways and the smells of thick sauces and garlic and freshly baked bread.

“Can’t hate the city on a day like this,” Angie said.

“Impossible.”

She grasped the back of her thick hair with one hand
and twisted it into a makeshift ponytail, tilting her head toward the open window to catch the sun on her face and neck. Watching her with her eyes closed and a small grin on her face, I was almost prepared to believe that she was completely healthy.

But she wasn’t. After she left her husband, Phil, left him in a bloody heap retching off her front porch, payment for having tried to batter her body one time too many, Angie passed the winter in the mist of an increasingly short attention span and a dating ritual which left a succession of males scratching their heads as she abandoned them without notice and moved on to the next.

Since I’ve never been a paragon of moral virtue, I couldn’t say much to her without sounding like a hypocrite, and by early spring she seemed to have bottomed out. She quit bringing warm bodies home and started to participate fully in case work again, even fixed up her apartment a bit, which for Angie meant she cleaned the oven and bought a broom. But she wasn’t whole, not like she used to be.

She was quieter, less cocky. She’d call or drop by my apartment at the oddest hours to talk about the day we just shared. She also claimed she hadn’t seen Phil in months, but for some reason I couldn’t fully explain, I didn’t believe her.

This was all compounded by the fact that for only the second time in all the years we’ve known each other, I couldn’t always be there for her at a moment’s notice. Since July, when I met Grace Cole, I’d been spending whole days and nights, sometimes full weekends, with her whenever we could get time together. Occasionally I’m also enlisted into babysitting duty for Grace’s daughter, Mae, and so I’m often beyond the reach of my partner except in the case of an absolute emergency. It wasn’t something either of us ever really prepared for, since as Angie once put it: “There’s a better chance of seeing a black guy in a Woody Allen movie than seeing Patrick in a serious relationship.”

She caught me watching her at a light, opened her eyes
fully and looked at me with a tiny smile playing on her lips. “Worrying about me again, Kenzie?”

My partner the psychic.

“Just checking you out, Gennaro. Purely sexist, nothing more.”

“I know you, Patrick.” She leaned back from the window. “You’re still playing big brother.”

“And?”

“And,” she said, running the backs of her fingers along my cheek, “it’s time for you to stop.”

I lifted a strand of hair out of her eye, just before the light turned green. “No,” I said.

We stopped inside her house long enough for her to change into a pair of cut-off denim shorts and for me to take two bottles of Rolling Rock from her fridge. Then we sat out on her back porch listening to her neighbor’s over-starched shirts crack and snap in the breeze and enjoyed the day.

She leaned back on her elbows, stretched her legs out in front of her. “So, we have a case suddenly.”

“We do,” I said, glancing at her smooth olive legs and faded denim cut-offs. There might not be much good in this world, but show me anyone who has a bad thing to say about denim cut-offs and I’ll show you a lunatic.

“Any ideas how to play it?” she said. Then, “Stop looking at my legs, you pervert. You’re practically a married man now.”

I shrugged, leaned back myself, looked up at the bright marble sky. “Not sure. Know what bothers me?”

“Besides Muzac, infomercials, and New Jersey accents?”

“About this case.”

“Pray tell.”

“Why the name Moira Kenzie? I mean, if it’s a fake, which we can probably assume, why my last name?”

“There’s something known as coincidence. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s when the—”

“Okay. Something else.”

“Yes?”

“Kevin Hurlihy seem like the type of guy who’d have a girlfriend to you?”

“Well, no. But it’s been years, really, since we’ve known him.”

“Still…”

“Who knows?” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of weird, ugly guys with beautiful women and vice versa.”

“Kevin’s not just weird, though. He’s a sadist.”

“So are a lot of professional boxers. You always see them with women.”

I shrugged. “I guess. Okay. So how do we deal with Kevin?”

“And Jack Rouse,” she said.

“Dangerous guys,” I said.

“Very,” she said.

“And who deals with dangerous people on a daily basis?”

“Certainly not us,” she said.

“No,” I said, “we’re wusses.”

“And proud of it,” she said. “Which leaves…” She turned her head, squinted into the sun to look at me. “You don’t mean—” she said.

“I do.”

“Oh, Patrick.”

“We must visit Bubba,” I said.

“Really?”

I sighed, not real happy about it myself. “Really.”

“Damn,” Angie said.

“Left,” Bubba said.
Then, “About eight inches to your right. Good. Almost there.”

He was walking backward a few feet ahead of us, his hands held up near his chest, his fingers wiggling like he was backing in a truck. “Okay,” he said. “Left foot about nine inches to your left. That’s it.”

Visiting Bubba in the old warehouse where he lives is a lot like playing Twister on the edge of a cliff. Bubba’s got the first forty feet of the second floor wired with enough explosives to vaporize the eastern seaboard, so you have to follow his directions to the letter if you want to breathe without artificial assistance for the rest of your life. Both Angie and I have been through the process countless times before, but we’ve never trusted our memories enough to cross those forty feet without Bubba’s help. Call us overly cautious.

“Patrick,” he said, looking at me gravely as my right foot hovered a quarter inch off the ground, “I said six inches to the right. Not five.”

I took a deep breath and moved my foot another inch.

He smiled and nodded.

I set my foot down. I didn’t blow up. I was glad.

Behind me, Angie said, “Bubba, why don’t you just invest in a security system?”

Bubba frowned. “This is my security system.”

“This is a minefield, Bubba.”

“You say tomato,” Bubba said. “Four inches left, Patrick.”

Angie exhaled loudly behind me.

“You’re clear, Patrick,” he said as I stepped onto a patch of floor about ten feet away from him. He narrowed his eyes at Angie. “Don’t be such a sissy, Ange.”

Angie was standing with one knee raised looking a lot like a stork. A very put-out stork, actually. She said, “When I get there, I’m shooting you, Bubba Rogowski.”

“Oooh,” Bubba said. “She used my full name. Just like my mom used to.”

“You never knew your mother,” I reminded him.

“Psychically, Patrick,” he said and touched his protruding frontal lobe. “Psychically.”

Booby traps aside, sometimes I worry about him.

Angie stepped onto the patch of floor I’d just vacated.

“You’re clear,” Bubba said and she punched his shoulder.

“Anything else we should worry about?” I said. “Spears falling from the ceiling, razor blades in the chairs?”

“Not unless I activate them.” He walked back toward an old fridge which sat beside two worn brown sofas, an orange office chair, and a stereo system so old it had an eight-track deck. In front of the office chair was a wooden crate, and its several cousins were stacked on the other side of a mattress thrown down just beyond the couches. A couple of the crates were open and I could see the ugly butts of oiled black firearms sticking up through yellow straw. Bubba’s daily bread.

He opened the fridge, pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. He produced three shot glasses from the trench coat I’ve never seen him without. Dead of summer or heart of winter, it doesn’t matter. Bubba and his trench coat do not part. Like Harpo Marx with a really bad attitude and homicidal tendencies. He poured the vodka and handed us each a glass. “I hear it steadies the nerves.” He tossed his back.

It steadied mine. By the way Angie closed her eyes for a moment, I think it steadied hers. Bubba showed no reaction, but then Bubba doesn’t have nerves or, as far as I know, most other things humans need to function.

He plopped his two hundred and thirty-plus pounds down into one of the sofas. “So, why you need a meet with Jack Rouse?”

We told him.

“Doesn’t sound like him. That picture shit, I mean, maybe it’s effective, but it’s far too subtle for Jack.”

“What about Kevin Hurlihy?” Angie said.

“If it’s too subtle for Jack,” he said, “then it’s completely beyond Kevin.” He drank from the bottle. “Come to think of it, most things are beyond Kev. Addition and subtraction, the alphabet, shit like that. Hell, you guys must remember that from the old days.”

“We’d wondered if he’d changed.”

Bubba laughed. “Nope. Gotten worse.”

“So he’s dangerous,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Bubba said. “Like a junkyard dog. Knows how to rape and fight and scare hell out of people and that’s about it, but he does those things well.” He handed me the bottle and I poured another shot.

I said, “So two people who knowingly took a case that pitted them against him and his boss…”

“Would be morons, yeah.” He took the bottle back.

I glared at Angie and she stuck her tongue out at me.

Bubba said, “Want me to kill him for you?” and stretched out on the couch.

I blinked. “Ahm…”

Bubba yawned. “It’s not a problem.”

Angie touched his knee. “Not at the moment.”

“Really,” he said, sitting up, “no sweat. I built this new thing, and what you do is clamp it around the guy’s skull, right here, and—”

“We’ll let you know,” I said.

“Cool.” He lay back on the couch, looked at us for a moment. “I didn’t figure a freak like Kevin for having a girlfriend, though. He seems like a guy either pays for it or takes it by force.”

“That bothered me too,” I said.

“Anyway,” Bubba said, “you don’t want to meet Jack Rouse and Kevin alone.”

“We don’t?”

He shook his head. “You go up to them, and say, ‘Back off our client,’ they’ll kill you. They’d have to. They ain’t real stable.”

A guy who used a minefield for home protection was telling us Jack and Kevin weren’t stable. This was good news. Now that I knew just how dangerous they really were, I considered walking back into that minefield, doing a jig, getting it over with quick.

“We’ll go through Fat Freddy,” Bubba said.

“Are you serious?” Angie said.

Fat Freddy Constantine was the godfather of the Boston Mafia, the man who’d wrested control from the once preeminent Providence outfit and consolidated his power. Jack Rouse, Kevin Hurlihy, anyone who so much as sold a nickel bag in this city answered to Fat Freddy.

“It’s the only way,” Bubba said. “You go through Fat Freddy, you’re showing him respect, and if I set up the meet, they know you’re friends, they won’t whack you.”

“Bonus,” I said.

“When you want the meet?”

“Soon as possible,” Angie said.

He shrugged and picked up a cordless phone off the floor. He dialed and took another swig from the bottle as he waited. “Lou,” he said, “tell the man I called.” He hung up.

“’The man?’” I said.

He held out his hands. “They all watch Scorsese movies and cop shows, think it’s the way they’re supposed to talk. I humor them.” He reached across his whale’s-hump chest and poured another shot into Angie’s glass. “You officially divorced yet, Gennaro?”

She smiled and downed the shot. “Not officially.”

“When?” He raised his eyebrows.

She propped her feet up on an open crate of AK-47s and leaned back in her chair. “The wheels of justice turn slowly, Bubba, and divorce is complicated.”

Bubba grimaced. “Smuggling surface-to-air missiles from Libya is complicated. But divorce?”

Angie ran both hands through the hair along her temples, looked up at the peeling heating pipes stretched
across Bubba’s ceiling. “A relationship in your hands, Bubba, lasts about as long as a six-pack. So what do you know about divorce? Really?”

He sighed. “I know people seem to go out of their way to fuck up things usually should be snapped off clean.” He swiveled his legs off the couch, dropped the soles of his combat boots to the floor. “How about you, home-boy?”

“
Moi
?” I said.

“
Si
,” he said. “How was your divorce experience?”

“Piece of cake,” I said. “Like ordering Chinese—one phone call, and everything’s taken care of.”

He looked at Angie. “See?”

She waved a dismissive hand in my general direction. “You’d take his word for it? Mr. Introspection?”

“I doth protest,” I said.

“You doth full of shit,” Angie said.

Bubba rolled his eyes. “Would you guys just bang each other and get it over with?”

There was one of those awkward pauses that comes up every time someone suggests there’s a lot more than friendship between me and my partner. Bubba smiled, getting a charge out of it, and then, thankfully, his phone rang.

“Yeah.” He nodded at us. “Mr. Constantine, how you doing?” He rolled his eyes as Mr. Constantine elaborated on just how he was. “Glad to hear it,” Bubba said. “Listen, Mr. C., I got a couple friends need to speak with you. Take a couple minutes.”

I mouthed, “Mr.
C
.?” and he shot me the bird.

“Yes, sir, they’re good folks. Civilians, but they may have stumbled onto something could maybe interest you. Has to do with Jack and Kevin.” Fat Freddy began talking again and Bubba made the universal masturbatory gesture with his fist. “Yes, sir,” he said eventually. “Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.” He listened, then blinked and looked at Angie. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “You related to the Patriso Family?”

She lit a cigarette. “’Fraid so.”

“Yes, sir,” Bubba said into the phone. “The very same Angela Gennaro.” He raised his left eyebrow at her. “Ten
tonight. Thanks, Mr. Constantine.” He paused, looked at the wooden crate Angie was using as a footstool. “What? Oh, yeah, Lou knows where. Six cases. Tomorrow night. You bet. As a whistle, Mr. Constantine. Yes, sir. Take care.” He hung up and sighed loudly, shoved the antenna back into the phone with the heel of his hand. “Fucking wops,” he said. “Everything’s ‘Yes, sir. No, sir. How’s the wife?’ Least the Harp mobs, they’re too mean to give a fuck how the wife is.”

Coming from Bubba, this was high praise for my ethnicity. I said, “Where do we meet him?”

He was looking at Angie with something akin to awe on his rubbery face. “At his coffee shop on Prince Street. Ten tonight. How come you never told me you were connected?”

She flicked her cigarette ash on his floor. It wasn’t disrespectful; it was Bubba’s ashtray. “I’m not connected.”

“According to Freddy, you are.”

“Well,” she said, “he’s mistaken. An accident of blood, that’s all.”

He looked at me. “You know she was related to the Patriso mob?”

“Yup.”

“And?”

“And she never seemed like she cared, so I didn’t either.”

“Bubba,” she said, “it’s not something I’m proud of.”

He whistled. “All these years, all the scrapes you two been in, and you never called on them for backup?”

Angie looked at him through the long bangs that had fallen in her face. “Never even considered it.”

“Why?” He was genuinely confused.

“’Cause you’re all the Mafia we need, handsome.”

He blushed, something only Angie can get him to do, something that’s always worth the effort. His huge face swelled like an overripe grape and for a moment he looked almost harmless. Almost.

“Stop,” he said, “you’re embarrassing me.”

Back at the office, I brewed some coffee to counteract the vodka buzz and Angie played back the messages on our answering machine.

The first was from a recent client, Bobo Gedmenson, owner of Bobo’s Yo-Yo chain of under-twenty-one dance clubs and a few strip joints out in Saugus and Peabody with names like Dripping Vanilla and The Honey Dip. Now that we’d located Bobo’s ex-partner and returned most of the money he’d embezzled from Bobo, Bobo was suddenly questioning our rates and crying poormouth.

“People,” I said, shaking my head.

“Suck,” Angie agreed as Bobo beeped off.

I made a mental reminder to toss the collection job to Bubba, and then the second message played:

“Hallo. Just thought I’d wish you jolly good luck on your new case and all that rubbish. I gather it’s a splendid one. Yes? Well, I’ll be in touch. Cheerio.”

I looked at Angie. “Who the hell was that?”

“I thought you knew. I don’t know anyone British.”

“Me either.” I shrugged. “Wrong number?”

“’Good luck on your new case’? Sounds like he knew what he was talking about.”

“Accent sound fake to you?”

She nodded. “Like someone who’s watched a lot of
Python
.”

“Who do we know who does accents?”

“Beats me.”

The next voice was Grace Cole’s. In the background I could hear the assaultive human noise and babble of the emergency room where she worked.

“I actually got ten minutes for a coffee break so I tried to catch you. I’m here till at least early tomorrow morning, but call me at my place tomorrow night. Miss you.”

She beeped off and Angie said, “So, when’s the wedding?”

“Tomorrow. Didn’t you know?”

She smiled. “You’re whipped, Patrick. You do know that, don’t you?”

“According to who?”

“According to me and all your friends.” Her smile
faded a bit. “I’ve never seen you look at a woman the way you look at Grace.”

“And if I am?”

She looked out her window at the avenue. “Then I say more power to you,” she said softly. She tried to get the smile back but it cracked weakly and disappeared. “I wish you both all the best.”