Killers (12 page)

She smiled sweetly. “Okay, Bench. Just don't leave me here alone.”

I turned on the radio and put it on some smooth jazz station, then went around and checked to make sure all the shades were drawn. My kitchen opened onto a patio, and when I bought the condo, I'd had the sliding glass doors removed and replaced with steel plates, just in case. That way I could sit at the kitchen table in the mornings and make my phone calls. I missed the sunlight, but I didn't want to go out like Bugsy Siegel.

The first guy I called was Hobart. He was at the Alibi. He'd heard the sirens but sirens are nothing special in Somerville. We had a guy, one of our bookies, who was in tight with City Hall and the police department, kind of our own personal “vice president, governmental relations.” I told Hobart to call him and have him make discreet inquiries about who was in the hit car. That would give me more to work with tomorrow.

After that, I told him, get me a car—not a boiler, but a properly registered vehicle—and to have somebody follow him in another one. Also, he was to call me just before he got here, and I'd come out and get the keys and then he could get a ride back to the Alibi. We'd worry about the Escalade later.

I considered whether to call Sally Curto. He ought to know, but on the other hand, if he'd had a hand in it … Then I reconsidered. Having your nephew and your street boss clipped is a pretty tough way to establish an alibi. It was 10:30, which meant he was probably drunk in the North End somewhere, but I dialed his cell phone number anyway.

“Sally,” I said, as I heard loud, boozy talking behind him, “be sure to watch the late news tonight.”

“Don't play games,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

“Not on the phone,” I reminded him. “I'll see you tomorrow at six. The usual place.”

 

8

A BUST OUT SOLON

I can't say much good about this endless recession, but it has helped one part of my business—bankruptcy investigations. For turning up sold-gold dirt on somebody, the only thing that beats a bankruptcy filing is a federal pre-sentencing report, and once a pol has reached that stage in his career, when he's about to be packed off to prison, the only ones still making money off him are the lawyers handling his appeal.

Anyway, in the boom years, a rep's $60,000 salary wasn't that great, unless you were completely unemployable, which most of them are.

Nowadays, though, that sixty large is looking a lot better, especially when you factor in all the perks—the per diem for driving into Boston from the district, the federal income tax write-offs if you live more than fifty miles from the State House, the kickbacks from your one or two aides, the campaign account out of which you can pay most of your personal expenses …

All of a sudden, there were more contested legislative races, and a lot of the challengers, who often brag about their experiences in what we call the Dreaded Private Sector, just happen to have a recent bankruptcy filing on record in the Brooke Courthouse. Which of course is why they're running. They want to bury their snouts deep into the public trough.

I don't keep records, for obvious reasons, but I'd say I pull at least twice as many bankruptcy files as I did five years ago. Let me put it this way: I now give Christmas presents to the clerks up on the sixth floor of the courthouse. One Lottery season ticket per person.

I charge my clients a grand per bankruptcy file, but it's simple work, Xeroxing, and my clients don't have to dirty their hands by signing out the jackets. Actually, they could access the files easily enough themselves if they had PACER, but not many of them know that, and I'm not telling, although eventually I'm going to have to get PACER myself and save some money on downtown parking. Anyway, bankruptcy filings are a nice little side operation, and my clients always prefer to pay cash too, which is tidier for both parties.

I'd spent the afternoon pulling records for three of my incumbents. I was getting ready to leave when it suddenly occurred to me: as long as I was here, why not see if Denis Donahue had a jacket? Just a shot in the dark, but the lack of a second “n” in “Denis” made it very unlikely I'd run into a case of mistaken identity. And I didn't.

It appeared that three months ago, Donuts couldn't have afforded a box of a dozen assorted Honey Dew donuts. He owed child support, he was behind on his mortgage, his credit cards had been cut off, a couple of New Jersey and Connecticut casinos were chasing him and behind all of them came the usual local unsecured creditors—tradesmen, utilities, the cable company, the lawn service, even the
Worcester Telegram
newspaper …

This guy was a complete deadbeat. And it was a telling commentary on the collapse of the local newspapers that no reporters had yet picked up on this. Ten, even five years ago, the Boston papers would have routinely checked out court records to see if any of the legislative leadership had filed Chapter 7. Or somebody, probably me, if I had the right client, would have tipped them off, or sent them a Xeroxed package of the documents in an envelope with no return address.

But what was even more significant than the debts was the fact that they had all been discharged, less than a month ago. I did some rough calculations and the payments came to some $300,000, give or take a porn movie or two in the Presidential Suite at Trump Towers in Atlantic City.

Granted, Donuts was next in line to the Senate presidency, but that was still eight months off. And that kind of front-runner money generally trickles in slowly, finally gushing into a torrent as the moment of succession arrives.

I told the clerk I was going to have to copy this one last file. I was enough of a regular that he could groan that it was 4:15, fifteen minutes before closing time. And I was enough of a regular that I could slip him a double sawbuck and tell him to calm down.

He smiled and calmed down.

 

9

THE HR DEPARTMENT

Sally and I were sitting on a bench at Castle Island. It was another foggy morning. Fifty feet behind us, smoking a cigarette, was Blinky Marzilli's boy Benny Eggs. When I was starting out, all these guys were in their twenties. Now the youngest of them looked like they were in their late forties. The talent pool had dried up.

“Nice shooting last night, kid,” Sally said to me. He seemed in a better mood, now that I was no longer a suspect. “Lucky the cops don't have any witnesses.”

“There's no luck involved. That's what I pay 'em for. I don't care how many stones they look under, as long as they don't turn over the one I'm hiding under.”

“I assume you got the names they ain't releasing 'til they, whattayacallit, notify the next of kin.”

I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and read aloud to Sally.

“The driver was Emilio Cortez-Rodriguez, also known as—do I really have to read all these aliases? Illegal alien. East Boston, Chelsea and Revere addresses. Twenty-eight years old. Guy in the backseat—a white guy from Winthrop. Michael Cortese, former Probation Department employee. He's in critical condition, two slugs in the pancreas. Doubtful he makes it.”

“Cortese, you say. I know some Corteses in Winthrop, but this kid, I can't place him. How old you say he was?”

“He's thirty-four.”

Sally shook his head. “Probation Department. Makes no fucking sense. Former probation officer? Who the fuck quits a state job?”

“Maybe he got fired?” I said. Suddenly I had a question for my new friend Jack Reilly. This was hack shit, his kind of thing.

“Motherfucker,” Sally said. “I wish I knew somebody to ask about this kid.”

How about Blinky Marzilli, I thought to myself. Through Blinky, Sally still ran Eastie, at least nominally. After the last big heroin bust in Eastie, the feds had a press conference with an organizational chart of the Mafia crew, and at least a third of them were Hispanic.

“I still can't believe it,” Sally said, “the spics having the stones to come after us.”

Why wouldn't they, when they outnumbered In Town in East Boston maybe five to one? What bothered me about this job was the white shooter working with the illegal ex-con. I know I got Peppa on my crew, but we speak the same language. We're both Americans. I never heard of white guys working contracts with illegals. Drugs sure, but contract hits—never.

“What about the car?” Sally asked.

“The usual. Stolen license plates. It apparently belonged to another illegal in Everett. She has one of those ‘zero' registrations on it that the Registry gives out to accommodate the newcomers to our land. She'll get a fifty-dollar fine for court costs, and a continued without a finding.”

“You mean they don't deport her?”

“C'mon, Sally, where you been? We fuckin' celebrate diversity here in Massachusetts.” I paused. “What we gotta do is figure out who these two were working for. I assume you got some guys beating the bushes on that.”

“Assumptions are the mother of fuck-ups,” he said. “Who am I gonna send over there? I don't even have lunch in Maverick Square no more. I can't believe what they done to the place—”

“We're down to two scenarios now,” I said. “Number one, somebody hired them to whack me so it'd look like a war between us. Number two, they want to get rid of both crews so they can move in. Whoever ‘they' is. You got any ideas, Sally?”

He looked around over his shoulder at his so-called bodyguard, who was lighting a new cigarette off the old one. Chain-smoking was back in a big way with In Town. Sally turned back around to me and lowered his voice.

“I told you, I'm short on good help. I'm counting on you, kid, nobody else can do it.”

He was right about that, but what he didn't say was, nobody else would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Overhead, a jet taking off from Logan practically drowned out our conversation. Probably a couple more of Sally's “soldiers” were on it, heading south to Florida until the heat died down. After last night, Patty had more experience being under fire than anybody in any of Sally's crews.

“Sally,” I said once the plane's noise died down, “I can't take care of nothing until I know who's coming after me. Are you absolutely positive this ain't a guinea thing, you'll pardon the expression.”

“Hey,” he said, “we don't use spics.”

“You sure about that?”

He slumped down. “Okay, correction. I don't use spics. I can't speak for nobody else. I grant you, that other guy there, that friend of mine in Worcester, he did. That's why he's doing two hundred years. The spics ratted him out. I tell Blinky a million times, watch yourself, they're no fuckin' good, but he says, who else am I gonna use? Any Americans over there have kids, first thing they do is get the fuck out, move to Saugus, Revere, Winthrop, anywhere except maybe Chelsea, which is even worse, if that's possible.”

He shook his head slowly, sadly, and shook another cigarette out of his pack.

“Who the fuck is gonna send a white kid to a public school in Boston? Which is why there ain't no white kids hanging out on the corners no more, or maybe you ain't noticed?”

“I've noticed.”

See, our way of life is over. It was never what it was made out to be in the movies, but now it's nothing. I see young guys, not many but a few, they want to be the next Dutch Schultz or Al Capone. Idiots is what they are. I don't care, I'm just passing through. I don't blame Sally's guys getting the fuck out of Dodge before the shooting starts. There's nothing left here worth getting capped over. I have to stay, just like Sally. It's the old rule about captains going down with the ship.

As much as I possibly can, I now avoid the day-to-day wiseguy stuff. You just never know who's a rat anymore. Drugs are the worst, of course, but these snitches are reporting back to the cops about every goddamn thing. I still go to wakes and funerals, because I'm expected to. But any social events, forget about it. As hard as I try to avoid everybody, I still run into wiseguys who want to talk. They try to tell me something, they got something going, do I know anybody needs some work? Later, when something goes wrong, because it always goes wrong, Sally or the guy's uncle will start asking questions, wanting to know who knew about this score? If I don't know nothing, nobody can suspect me of ratting them out.

So whenever somebody leans over and whispers in my ear, like he's gonna pass on some good gossip or a hot tip, I put my hands up. ‘Please,' I say, ‘I don't want to know.' There's only one thing I'm interested in anymore: if somebody gets hit, I want to know who did it. Because I absolutely have to know who's capable of doing that kind of wet work.

Myself, I'm capable. Very capable. I know, it's supposed to be up to other people to say how tough you are, but I'm just quoting everybody else, trust me on that. See, what my job boils down to is basically human relations. In corporations, HR handles the job searches, hires the headhunter firms, figures out which health insurance to buy and so on. But let's face it—there are two major reasons why companies have HR departments. The first is so they'll have some place to dump all the incompetent affirmative-action hires where they can't get into too much trouble. The second, and more important reason for HR, is to have a group of people who know how to fire bad employees while making sure the company doesn't get sued.

In the rackets, nobody gets fired. Sometimes they get run off, but that can be risky too, because if they fucked up here, chances are they're going to fuck up in the next place they end up. And then they get to thinking about what they know from back in Boston that they could trade up, and how they might be able to snitch themselves into the Witness Protection Program if they can point the finger at somebody else high enough up in the rackets.

So we frown on people leaving town. Like Don Corleone, we like to keep our friends close and our enemies closer, until someone from HR—that would be me—can work out a severance plan, if you know what I mean.