‘A woman. The guy’s wife.’
There was silence on the other end of the line, and Ryan knew that the man was connecting the dots. He had always been good at figuring people out, or so it had seemed. He’d just lost that gift when it came to his enemies.
‘Get him out of there. This is important.’
He hung up. Ryan now had the gun in one hand and the cell phone in the other. He slipped the gun back in its ankle holster, the cell phone into his pocket, then made his way quickly across the street. A man passed, a newspaper under his arm and a beer can in one hand, concealed in a brown paper bag. The man nodded at him, and Ryan nodded back. He kept his eye on the guy all the way to the Napier house, but the man didn’t look back. Ryan had left the front door unlocked when he stepped outside. It banged against the wall when he opened it too quickly, and he called out from the hallway just in case Dempsey panicked and came out waving a gun or a knife.
‘It’s me! We have to go.’
He knocked on the living-room door before entering. He saw Dempsey buckling his jeans. Helen Napier was kneeling on the couch. Stockings and panties were lying coiled together on the floor. She was adjusting her dress, pulling it down to cover her thighs while keeping her back to the door. Her shoulders were shaking. She did not turn to look at him.
‘Is she okay?’ asked Ryan.
‘What do you think? If it’s any consolation to you, I was gentle with her. Your timing is good, though, I’ll give you that. A few minutes earlier, and I might have been annoyed at the intrusion.’
Dempsey checked the room to make sure he hadn’t dropped anything, then spoke to Mrs. Napier.
‘Helen,’ he said.
She stiffened but still did not turn her head.
‘You have a choice,’ he continued. ‘You can tell your husband what happened tonight. From what I hear, he’s the kind who could get all hot under the collar about a thing like this, and it might lead him to come looking for me. If he does, I’ll kill him. He brought this on you by his own actions, but he won’t see it that way. And, you know, it won’t help you anyway. I knew a man once whose girlfriend was raped. He could never look at her the same way again. Could be he thought that she was soiled goods. Whatever the reason, they broke up. End of story. Think about that before you go shooting your mouth off to your husband. I was you, I’d just tell him that we called, that we put the fear of God into you, and he should sort out his affairs before we come calling again.’ Dempsey picked up the shoebox of cash. ‘In the meantime, I’ll take the money as an interim payment on what was lost. We’ll be on our way now. Go fix yourself up. You don’t want him seeing you like that when he gets home.’
He brushed past Ryan on his way out the door.
‘You coming?’
Ryan was still staring at Mrs. Napier.
‘You want to apologize to her again?’ asked Dempsey. ‘You can, if you think it will help.’
But Ryan just shook his head. There was something wrong about what he was seeing: not just the act that had been committed, but the aftermath. He tried to put his finger on it but couldn’t, and then Dempsey was pulling him away, and they were walking to the car, and the assault was forced from his mind for a time as he told Dempsey about the call.
‘Regular nine-one-one,’ said Dempsey. He was counting the money in the shoebox, flipping his finger through the bound bills. Dempsey separated four hundred in twenties, split the stack evenly in two, then stuffed two hundred into his wallet and two hundred into Ryan’s coat pocket.
‘Walking-around money. If he gives you more, just take it and keep your mouth shut.’
‘How much was in there?’ asked Ryan.
‘Two-five now, plus change.’
Ryan laughed. It was that or pull over by the side of the road and beat his fists against the sidewalk in frustration.
‘All that for a lousy three grand?’
‘Hey, I had a good time.’
Now Ryan did pull over, causing the driver behind them to honk his disapproval. He turned in his seat, ready to release his belt and tear Dempsey’s throat out, but Dempsey already had his hand on the butt of the gun. His left hand was raised, one finger extended in warning.
‘What? You going to kill me?’ asked Ryan. ‘You going to pull the trigger this time?’
‘No, but I’ll break your nose with it, and I’ll go further if you make me. You want to make me do that to you?’
‘You raped a woman, just for three grand.’
‘No, I didn’t. I had the three grand anyway.’
Ryan almost lost it again, but the sight of the gun revealing itself to him brought him back to his senses. His shoulders collapsed, and he laid his forehead against the steering wheel. He felt ill. His face was bathed in warm, clammy sweat.
‘Three grand,’ he whispered. ‘Three grand and change.’
‘Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with developments, Frankie, but Mr. Morris is hurting. Two grand here, a grand there, a couple of hundred from the junkies – it all adds up. It keeps him in business, and keeps us in a job. More to the point, it’s keeping us alive. Our credit isn’t so good right now, and the bank of goodwill has closed its doors.’
‘He’s drowning,’ said Ryan. ‘He’s going down.’
‘That’s not what I said, and if I was you I wouldn’t be saying things like that out loud either. It might get taken as disloyalty. It’s swings and roundabouts. Everybody’s hurting in this economy. He’ll come good again. He just needs time.’
Ryan raised his head. Dempsey’s face was expressionless. It gave no clue to whether he believed a word that he was saying.
‘You’re going to start driving now, Frankie, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘We good?’
Ryan nodded.
‘Let me hear you say it.’
‘We’re good.’
‘Right. Now let’s go see what he wants.’
They drove in silence toward Cambridge. Eventually Dempsey let his head rest against the window, his eyes fixed on distant lights. Ryan smoked a cigarette, and thought about a boy he once knew, Josh Tyler, who died in a lake at some summer camp in New Hampshire when his canoe capsized. Josh could swim, but the kid in the canoe with him couldn’t, or not well enough. He panicked, and dragged Josh under the water. The kid was kicking, and one of the kicks caught Josh in the side of the head and knocked him unconscious. Somehow the kid made it to the canoe and managed to hold on to it, but by then Josh Tyler was dead. Drowning men will drag you down if you let them, thought Ryan. Sometimes, to survive, you have to let them sink.
They found a spot not far from the entrance to the Brattle Street Theater, and sat back to wait.
‘What’s on there?’ asked Ryan.
‘
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
,’ said Dempsey. ‘I read about it in the paper.’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know it?’
‘I said I don’t know it. I’ve never seen it, never even heard of it. It must be new.’
‘No, it’s not new. It’s old. Nineteen seventy-three. Robert Mitchum and that guy, the one from
Everybody Loves Raymond
. Boyle, Peter Boyle. He’s dead now. Real good in that movie. I can’t believe you never heard of it, you growing up in Boston and all.’
‘I didn’t go to movies much as a kid.’
‘Still, you should know it.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘A snitch.’
Dempsey didn’t say anything else. Ryan felt him looking at him, but didn’t say anything, just waited for him to continue. Eventually, Dempsey did.
‘Eddie – that’s Mitchum – decides to rat out his buddies to avoid doing time. He’s old. He doesn’t want to go back in the can.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘How does it end?’
‘I’m not going to tell you how it ends. Go rent it sometime.’
‘I’m not going to rent it.’
‘Well, I’m not going to tell you how it ends.’
‘Fine.’
‘Yeah, fine. You’re some asshole, you know that?’
‘You’re the asshole, not telling me how it ends.’
‘You want to know how it ends?’
‘No, I don’t care now.’
‘You want to know?’
‘No.’
‘You want to know. I know you want to know.’
‘Right, tell me.’
‘It ends with a guy being tied to a chair while another guy forces him to watch the fucking movie, that’s how it ends.’
Ryan let a beat go by.
‘I don’t think that’s how it ends.’
For the first time that evening, Dempsey smiled at something that didn’t involve another person’s misery.
‘Asshole.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ryan, and he was reminded of why sometimes he didn’t mind being in Dempsey’s company. It wouldn’t stop him from killing him if the time came, but he might make it quick. ‘All of this is so important, what’s he doing at a movie?’
‘He likes movies. He says they help him think more clearly. He always goes to a movie when he’s struggling with a problem. Then it ends and he has a solution. I guess it’s something to do with sitting in the dark and letting the pictures wash over you. And even if he doesn’t come up with an answer he’s got to spend some time hiding in the dark. It’s easier than hiding in the daylight.’
‘Amen to that.’
‘Yeah. Some good-looking women around here.’
‘College girls.’
‘They got no time for men like us, not unless you catch ’em drunk.’
His words brought back to Ryan the look of fear on the girl’s face, and the way Dempsey had set out to humiliate the man with her, leaving him with a choice that was no choice: He could throw a punch, and Dempsey would beat him, and beat him bad, or he could suck up Dempsey’s poison and walk away with his body intact but his pride in tatters. His girlfriend had been forced to beg Dempsey to leave them in peace. Ryan had seen that happen before, and had often watched something die in the eyes of the woman involved when it did. Her boyfriend was weak, and his weakness had been publicly exposed. Somewhere deep inside, the woman always wanted the guy to fight back, to win or to take his beating. There was a strength in winning a fight like that, but there was a strength, too, in being unwilling to become another man’s bitch, win or lose, in not allowing him to break you down or paw your girlfriend without consequences.
And what Dempsey had done in the bar had set him up for what he’d done later to Helen Napier. His blood had been up, and she’d suffered for it.
‘He’s coming out,’ said Dempsey, and Ryan followed his gaze to where Tommy Morris was slinking out of the movie theater, his head low, his hair hidden by a wool cap. Tommy Morris, carrying the stink of failure on him, the stink of death.
Tommy Morris, the drowning man.
Tommy Morris’s family had always been two-toilet Boston Irish. They had aspired to better things, which led them to leave behind the West Broadway projects of D Street in Southie for what they considered to be the more salubrious surroundings of a Somerville three-decker, even as their neighbors sneered at their aspirations. In Boston the working-class Irish distrusted success, political success aside, as that was just criminality by another name as practiced by the Boston School. General success, though, only made others feel bad about their own situation, their ambitions for betterment that stretched no further than winning the nigger-pool lottery.
So it was that the Morris family was spoken of in disparaging terms just for not wanting to stay mired in the mud at the bottom of the pond. When Tommy’s father, who owned a florist’s, bought a new delivery van, black paint was poured over it before it was even a week old. Tommy never forgot that, and years later he would visit his own kind of vengeance on South Boston, helping Whitey Bulger flood it and the rest of the city with cocaine. It was said of Tommy that he hated his own, which is always the sign of a man who secretly hates himself. It made him vulnerable, although he chose not to recognize that vulnerability, believing instead that by consolidating his position and acting cleverly he could somehow overcome the fault line that ran beneath the foundations of his life.
Tommy had started out with stealing, and hijacking truckloads, the way most of his peers did, then briefly graduated to bank jobs before realizing that shakedowns were easier to plan, harder to trace, and carried less chance of serious jail time or having his head blown off. Tommy Morris, they used to say, was always smart like that. He wasn’t like the other project rats. The real wolves, the ones like Whitey and his sidekick Stevie Flemmi, used to scoff at Tommy. They called him ‘Two-Bit’ Tommy, and sometimes ‘Mary’ Morris because of his preference for avoiding violence. It made him appear less of a threat to them, and so he survived Whitey’s relentless purging of his rivals, the bullets to the head and the slow strangulations that left Whitey as top dog, aided by a nickel stretch in Cedar Junction that spanned the worst of the killing, during which he kept his head down and his mouth closed.