Serpents in the Cold (23 page)

Dante paused with the wheelchair, gave the two of them some distance just to be safe, and Owen stepped between them.

Giordano looked to Owen. “What are they doing here?”

“Lay off,” Owen said. “They're family.”

“Family my ass.”

Cal said, “It looks like someone did your job for you.”

“I don't think the press or the public will care about that. All they'll care about is that there's no longer a mass murderer on the streets. And in the end, they'll thank us for it.”

“And you don't care that someone almost killed him? You know it was Blackie who did this, and why? Because he doesn't want you to find out something. Why the hell would the Butcher, a truck driver, leave Sheila's body somewhere where everyone would know it had to have been dumped by a truck? It doesn't make any sense.”

Giordano looked down at Cal. “Want to know why you were kicked off the force?”

“Sure, go ahead, tell me.”

“Because you have no self-control. That's always the problem with you micks.”

He reached into his overcoat, pulled out a cigar, took his time unwrapping it. Cal noted that his fingernails were manicured. He chewed on the end of the cigar, spat into the trash bin by the door.

“He was good police,” Owen said, and held Giordano's gaze when he turned his way.

“Yeah, well,” Giordano muttered, staring at Owen and chewing on something stuck in his teeth. “He ain't no police now. Him and his buddy can look at the stiff if they want to, it doesn't mean shit to me. Then the room is off-limits to everyone.” He nodded to the uniform standing just outside the door. “You, what's your name, you got that?”

“Kokkinogenis, sir. Yes, sir.”

“Good. And you,” he said, gesturing to Owen, “come with me.”

He went to step past Cal's wheelchair and then paused. Cal turned his head painfully to look up at him. Giordano was smiling again, trying to antagonize him, and taking as much pleasure out of seeing him in a wheelchair as he could. Giordano's jowls trembled as if he were laughing silently to himself. He put the cigar in his mouth and turned away and Owen followed him.

THE MAN'S NOSE
was gone, the lips torn away, and his mouth an open leering cavity absent of teeth. From within a purple, pulpy mess a single eyeball gazed lifelessly up at them. An oxygen tube was taped to his throat, and through this he breathed in a wet, gurgling, clawing way that made Cal want to keep his distance. The man might as well have been dead. He should have been dead.

“Christ, how is he even alive?” he said. He stared at the man's arm and the deeply inked tattoo of an anchor, a dark serpent coiling around it, the only recognizable thing left on his body.

“I guess Blackie and his boys found him, all right,” Dante said. He moved from behind the wheelchair and stood beside Cal. “Owen said his tattoos were the only way they could identify him. They found the Peterbilt a little ways away from where they discovered the body. Shirley was in the truck, with her neck cut open.”

Cal leaned back in his chair, felt the chill of the room pass through his threadbare hospital robe. “Blackie made sure we could see those tattoos for a reason, but why did he leave him alive?”

“Maybe just to teach him a final lesson, spread the word not to fuck with him, I don't know.”

Cal continued to stare at the faceless man breathing through a pipe shoved down his throat, and the slow movement of his chest up and down, the shape of him growing more amorphous as sun reflected off snow and came into the room. The man's body seemed to dissolve into that stark and almost violent glow, and they squinted, focused on what was left of his face, the single blazing eye. The sound of his breathing intensified, a labored and thick, wet wheezing, like a broken sump pump attempting to suck water from a flooded basement. Both Cal and Dante thought that they were watching his final breath, but the machine returned to its even up-and-down grind, pushing air into a body that wouldn't last much longer. In the hallway beyond, a gurney passed along the tile on squeaking rubber wheels, momentarily startling both of them.

Dante rubbed at his jaw, exhaled. “So, it's all over now.”

Cal tongued his swollen mouth, rolled his shoulders. He was staring at the man again, and the whole room seemed to blur, leaving only the gruesome face in a sharp clarity, and for a moment he thought how the two of them shouldn't be here in a room with the near dead, that only family and loved ones should have this moment to say their final prayers. He clenched his jaw, and his mouth filled with fluid that might have been blood, and he wanted to spit on the floor.

He swallowed, coughed into his hand, his throat bitter and hoarse. He felt cold and weak and wanted to be back in his own bed. For the first time in a long while he had no desire for a drink, and that, despite everything else, seemed like a good thing, even if the danger of sobriety was being able to feel and see everything for exactly what it was—the whole shitty world and everything in between: the neighborhood within the neighborhood that was Boston.

_________________________

Black Jack's, South Boston

BLACKIE FOLEY SAT
at the end of the bar, slowly sipping a beer, and, squinting through the cigarette smoke, watched the door. It opened only occasionally, admitting a flash of brief, bright winter light through which the black shapes of men passed, their feet thumping loudly on the old wide-board floor toward a stool or table. The lights in the place flickered and dimmed each time wind gusted down the avenue, and the barman had begun to light candles—waxen stumps and butt ends—at the back of the bar as if anticipating a power outage. With the electric fluctuations, the lights of a jukebox in the room also flickered, a quivering glow cast through yellow marbleized Catalin, its once vibrant and translucent colors dulled by smoke and grime. The music droned, winding down and then starting up again, causing Lee Wiley's “Can't Get Out of This Mood” to vibrate back and forth between a strange baritone and a sweeping falsetto that filled the room with a strange, ghostly dissonance.

There was loud laughter in the corner, and a man with a green scally cap pulled low over his forehead joined Blackie at the bar. He had a stocky build, broad shouldered and narrow hipped, a thin crosshatching of scars just under his temple by the cheekbone. His blue and green flannel shirt was open to the waist. Still laughing, he gestured to the barman in a way that insinuated Blackie had his next round paid for.

“Do I know you?” Blackie said, his voice resounding in the long, narrow space. The man turned his head to look directly at Blackie, and noticing something, he started slightly. “I'm Jerry Hayes…” He looked confused. “I live over on D Street.”

“Do I know you?”

“I'm—”

“Do I fucking know you, Jerry Hayes?”

“We once were out—”

Blackie repeated himself, this time much louder so all the chatter in the bar stopped, allowing an uneasy silence to fill the smoke-laden air. “Do I fucking know you, Jerry Hayes?”

“No…no.” He took a step back, half raised his hands in apology. “You don't know me, Blackie.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing in my fucking space? Get the fuck out of my space.”

Casting his eyes downward, the man backed away, and when Blackie was sure he'd gone, he drank from his beer. A look overcame him, as if he were thinking back, trying his hardest to put two and two together and remember something.

“Petey,” he said, “get that fuck and his friends a round of drinks on me and a round of chasers. Tell them I don't mean anything by it.”

“You got it, Blackie.”

Blackie tipped back his glass and wiped at his upper lip. A copy of the
Herald
was spread out on the bar, its pages dampened by the wet rings of beer glasses. He grabbed it and turned to the front page, looked again at the photo of his brother, the chief of police, lead detective Giordano, and the mayor posing before the police headquarters entrance—
POLICE ARREST KILLER. THE BUTCHER'S REIGN ENDS.
A fucking joke, he thought.

The lights flickered and the song on the jukebox wavered in its strange tremolo of alternating speeds, fast then slow. When the congressman entered, the clock above the bar read a quarter past four, although Blackie knew it was fifteen minutes slow.

The congressman shook snowflakes from the collar of his leather coat, nodded at the bartender for a drink. He waited with his leg cocked on the tarnished bar rail as the bartender pulled on the tap and filled the glass, then grabbed a bottle of whiskey and poured a double. A semi rumbled past toward Old Colony and the building trembled.

Blackie continued to stare at him, until the congressman turned slowly toward him and grinned.

“C'mon,” Blackie said, and motioned with his head toward a back booth, and the congressman followed him from the bar. Blackie sat down in the booth, slapped the paper on the table, and sipped at his beer as if it were bitter. His jaw flexed; he watched as his brother drank casually from his whiskey. He gestured toward the newspaper. “Nice picture.”

“Think it'll serve me in my run?”

“That's all you've got to say?”

“Give it a rest.”

“No. You fucking owe me.”

“I worked hard to get here, Finn. I didn't come this far to get fucked by my little brother, the fucking gangster.”

“Don't talk to me like that, Mikey. You're not that big that you can talk to me like that, and not here. I'm always trying to do the right thing by you.”

A silence overcame the space between them. Blackie took a tug of beer and the congressman took a generous one off his double whiskey.

“I brought you up after Ma left because I promised her that I'd always look after you. I was there for you when you were in and out of juvie. I was there for you after you got out of Concord and Danbury. I've gotten you out of more scrapes than I can fucking count.”

“The Butcher is the least of what I did for you,” Blackie said.

The congressman raised a finger, pointed it across the table, silencing his younger brother. Blackie waited a moment, watched the congressman sipping his double. Color had risen up his neck to his cheeks.

“You helped me out of a jam, Finn, and I appreciate it. For Christ's sake, I had nowhere else to turn.”

The congressman put his glass on the table. When he spoke he was slow and deliberate.

“Look, if I didn't show appreciation for what you did, if I didn't thank you enough, then I'm sorry.”

“You and that silly little twat. You sent me on a wild goose chase, Mikey. You said she was connected to Renza, and now they're both gone, and I'm still out my share.”

“I don't care about the Brink's job and I don't care about your fucking share. You know I don't give a damn about any of that. I told you where she lived, I told you what she had going with Renza. What more do you want from me?”

“I want a cut of what that McAllister and that fat guinea Rizzo have. I want Scollay Square, between Cambridge and Broad.”

“You don't think Sully or half the other racketeers in the city want a part of it too? You're nuts. What would Sully say if he knew?”

“Fuck Sully. You give me a part of what you and McAllister have going on and it puts me in a position to take over.”

The congressman raised a hand in exasperation and surrender. “Okay, okay, but there's still too many loose ends. McAllister is getting worried. No one gets anything for nothing here.”

“I've already taken care of the Butcher, already made everything nice and easy for you.”

“Jesus, you want me to ask Sully to take care of this because my own brother can't?”

“No. I'll take care of it.”

“There's a reason why Sully is boss. He finishes things off.”

“I said I'll take care of it.”

The congressman nodded. “We're brothers. We stick together.” Spit glistened on his lower lip. “But this needs to get done, so just do it.” He pushed out of the booth and rose, adjusted his shirt and coat with an odd grace. He looked down at the picture on the front page of the paper. “Not bad, is it? I think they got my good side.”

At the bar he pulled a five-dollar bill from his pocket, placed it on the scarred countertop, nodded at the bartender, and strode toward the door, coat fanning out behind him. Blackie watched him exit the bar, his hulking figure momentarily transfixed in the doorway surrounded by a corona of light, and he saw the two of them as small boys of some summer long ago, when they still had their mother and before their father had remarried. They were in a small cove where waves crashed and the sand was hot beneath his feet, and once he'd made it into the water, his brother's grip strong and reassuring, pulling him through the water, drawing him farther and farther out where the water swirled gray and cold and mysterious, his brother telling him to look into his face, at his eyes staring intently back into his own, forcing him to trust him, convincing him that no matter what, he would not let him go—he would never let him go.

_________________________

Carney Hospital, Boston

CAL SAT UPRIGHT
in bed, looking out at the snow-topped evergreens swaying against the glass and the sounds of the hospital in the hallway beyond: the shuffling of soft-heeled shoes, the whirring of gurneys and trolleys, of nurses and doctors and the double
bing
of the intercom and a page for a doctor or family member. A young nurse's aide named Maggie had managed to get him some bennies to calm his nerves and he'd asked her not to mention it to Lynne, but when Scarletti's face came to him—or what was left of his face—he could die for a drink. Scarletti was barely alive, sucking air through a tube; in a matter of days he'd probably be dead, but it wasn't death that scared Cal, it was the way one died.

He'd first seen death as a boy on the streets of Dorchester, a man stumbling from a bar, bloodied from being cut with a smashed beer bottle. It had been in the summertime and near dusk, although true night seemed very far off, for the streets were still busy with the noise of workmen on their stoops talking and smoking, sharing a beer after work, women calling children in, and radios blaring from open windows.

He was walking the sidewalk when the door to the Adams Street Tap slammed open and the man stumbled out before him. The man reeled, his legs crumpling beneath him before he'd even made the curb. Blood flowed brightly down his face and from his neck. The chest of his blue work shirt turned black. He clutched at his throat, oblivious to the blood flowing from the gash at his hairline, and then fell onto his back. He turned in Cal's direction and stared at him and gasped something, and it was then that Cal realized the man before him was Mr. Welch—Julie Welch's father, who worked at Necco confectioners over the bridge in Cambridge. On Dorchester Day he'd bring bags of candy and pass it out to the kids. He even rode a float in the annual parade. Cal had never seen him inside a bar, and he'd been inside most of them on the Avenue, at one time or another, searching for his father. Mr. Welch gasped some more, blood frothing from the wide, ragged slit in his neck. His eyes searched Cal's and held them for a moment as if he had something very important to tell him, and then he closed his eyes and lay very still and Cal knew that he was dead.

But that type of death, as shocking as it had been, had never touched Cal physically. He had no fear of his neighborhood or its streets; he knew he could never be hurt here, not like that. And then, a year before the war, sitting at the Blarney Stone in Fields Corner having a beer, and Blackie and some of his buddies from Charlestown started a fight with him. There had been a mick, a small weasel of a man but tough, with a boxer's nose and fast hands, whom Blackie had goaded into fighting by telling him he couldn't take Cal, and the mick had come up to the bar and slapped the beer out of his hands and followed with a cheap right, grazing the side of his head. When it looked like he was going to handle the mick one-on-one, Blackie set the others on him. Outnumbered, he'd smashed a beer bottle and stuck it first into the mick's eye and then one of his buddies' throats. He'd acted out of desperation and fear, but with this came an anger that provided its own momentum and energy, a conviction that he wouldn't stop until he had hurt as many of them as he could.

In thinking about it now, Cal clenched his fists. His shoulders and neck became rigid and his breathing deepened. It felt as if his lungs were being pierced by his ribs, his heart a heavy, swollen thing working hard in his chest. Air whistled through his broken nose and it began to throb painfully, forcing him to breathe through his mouth.

In the end, when Blackie's boys had driven him to the floor with their fists and boots, Jackie Doyle, the bartender and an old friend of his father's, had saved him. He took a bat to the back of one of Blackie's punks, held three of them off, and as Cal rose to go at them again, slipping in a pool of blood on the wooden floor, they fled, bleeding and cursing their way out the door and fucked off up the Avenue. For months Cal had waited for retribution from Blackie in the typical manner of the neighborhood—a tire iron to his skull one night as he stepped drunkenly out of a bar, a shiv to the eye—but none ever came. Jackie Doyle wasn't so lucky. Blackie came through a crowd on the street during the Saint Patrick's Day parade and gutted him, left him to bleed out on the street while parents with their children milled about.

He had survived because of that desperation, because he didn't cede an inch, but if he'd stayed and never left Boston for Europe, that desperation would probably have also gotten him killed. And he realized this in the same way that he realized he was lucky to be alive now. He had pushed Blackie too far, and he was lucky to be seeing and thinking and breathing, and not like the sad bastard down the hall who'd had his face torn inside out.

When he'd first come back from the war—a six-month-late transport home thanks to stops at French hospitals in Bar Le Duc, Clichy, and Verdun—Lynne had tried to comfort him, soothe him, and be sympathetic. But even after the injuries to his body had healed, all he'd felt was a numbness, a black nothing that gradually gave way to fear and then to incredible waves of anger and resentment—anger at nothing he could name, and yet the source was everywhere around him: it was Lynne with her calm tenderness and sad, pitying eyes; it was the neighborhood with its people and reminders of the life he'd left behind and could never return to; it was those people with their talk and memories of his parents, of his mother, silenced into submission by his father's fists, hiding in their small kitchenette in her housecoat and apron, staring blankly out at the Ave, waiting for the phone to ring, for a neighbor to call and visit, smoking one cigarette after the other, the gray haze of it always swirling in threads against the stamped tin of the ceiling in the small room; the shift horns from the docks, the shipyards, and the Edison plant, the clock chiming five thirty; and the downstairs door opening and his father's footsteps sounding on the narrow, crooked back stairwell as he made his way up to their second-floor apartment, with no bathtub or hot water and only a coal stove in the middle of the kitchen to heat water and an icebox to keep the food cold. It was this neighborhood, with its boundaries and petty grievances and vendettas and its long, never-ever forgetting.

There was still something wrong about the whole Butcher thing. Cal knew this. It all seemed too easy to have a suspect in custody who would soon die without ever giving voice to all the terrible things he'd done. But perhaps Lynne was right, perhaps it was time to get out, now while he was in this state of mind, now while the rage for retribution and payback did not burn within him or the deep-rooted fear that the not-acting, the not-doing-anything-at-all might mark him as a coward, as someone who'd hidden beneath dead bodies in order to stay alive and then slunk away like a rat to safety beneath the cover of night. He knew that sooner or later he'd die—everyone died—and the only thing that frightened him was that he didn't want to die like Mr. Welch, Jackie Doyle, or even Scarletti, the Butcher.