Killers (32 page)

I knew what I had to do, and I only had one question. Who was this guy who was coming after Sally? I was pretty sure I knew, but I had to be sure. Damn, if only they'd dropped his name. Stupid fucks, name-dropping left and right like the civilians they were, but on the most important one, the real turd in the punch bowl, the snake at the garden party, they dummy up.

I could feel the goose bumps on the back of my neck.

 

34

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

Patty had moved into the front seat and was listening to the conversation, which had descended even further into inanity and pseudo-machismo.

“Jack,” Patty said, “are these assholes as slimy as they seem, listening to them?”

“Slimier,” I said.

“They like to sound tough, don't they? But they really aren't, are they?”

“They're not going to be in that car driving to the Alibi tonight, if that's what you mean.”

“I wouldn't want to be in that car tonight, would you?”

“No, Patty, I wouldn't.”

The conversation dragged on for a few more minutes. I was afraid they were going to order another round, but I got lucky. About twenty minutes after Bench left, the commissioner dialed his phone and said, “
Dónde está Toro?
” The Bull indeed. In English he told Toro it was time to move, and Patty looked at me.

“You want I should call Bench?” she said.

I shook my head and dialed his number.

“They're in the air,” I said, and he replied, “Okay,” and then hung up.

“Wanna go somewhere and have dinner, Jack?” she said, and the temptation was great, very great. But I needed her kind of trouble like, well, like a hole in the head. Plus, I did have an appointment in Dedham, thank God. I told her no and she said, “Is that snotty bitch from the
Globe
really your girlfriend?”

“Used to be,” I said.

She regarded me closely. She was interested in me, not physically, thank God, but in a gossipy high school who's-dating-who kind of way.

She asked me, “You think you're going to make up with her?”

“I don't think the time is exactly right,” I said. If the time was ever right. Patty seemed calmer now, a different woman almost. But she was just a kid, no matter how Hollywood she looked, or how long she'd been running around with Bench.

“Are you pissed at me?” she said, touching an old-fashioned metallic cigarette lighter with her engraved initials to a Newport.

“Nah,” I said, truthfully. “What happened was bound to happen, sooner or later.”

“You getting anything on the side, Jack?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said evasively. The truthful answer would have been no, period. But no guy wants to look like a loser, especially when you're sitting next to someone who looks like Patty Lamonica.

I started the Oldsmobile and headed over to Ball Square. Normally I would have gone straight up Winter Hill on Broadway, but that meant passing the Alibi, and I didn't feel like getting caught in any cross fires, so I took Medford Street through Magoun Square—a name I've always considered particularly appropriate, given the high percentage of goons in the neighborhood. Then I turned left onto Broadway.

“Can I ask you another question, Jack?”

“Sure. I don't know if I can answer it, but I'll try.” Good Lord, I was sounding almost fatherly.

“I couldn't quite follow that conversation,” she said. “Why do these people want to kill Bench and Sally?”

“As best I can tell,” I said, “it appears that some big casino company with more money than brains got aced out on the action—there's only three licenses up for grabs, and one of 'em's for the Indians. So this company—I don't even know which one it is, just that it was one of the losers—decided to try to kill the bill until next year when everything would start over, on a level playing field. So they went to Donuts, and somehow he sold them on this insane idea of killing Bench and Sally. Maybe his cousin came up with the scheme, I don't know. Anyway, Donuts figured that if he could make it seem like the local element was already fighting over the spoils, the pols at the State House would get cold feet. His cousin, the commissioner, is about to get indicted, and he's already got a bunch of crooked guys he had to fire looking for work, so they had plenty of talent warming up in the bullpen, or so they thought.”

“But they really didn't?”

“No,” I said. “The guys they sent out, the cons and the crooked P.O.s, they could fuck up a wet dream, pardon my French.”

She laughed at that. They're not making Catholic schoolgirls like they used to, if she'd ever been one, which I doubted.

I said, “Whatever, they couldn't close the deal.”

“Because of Bench?”

“Because of Bench.”

“Why are the feds after the Probation Department?” she asked.

“Because the P.O.s—the probation officers—they all paid off pols to get their jobs, and now the feds want to know who they paid, and how much, so they're terrified of going to prison, the P.O.'s. And the commissioner there, he's talking tough, but usually, the tougher they talk, the faster they fold. He's got to be in the crosshairs. Did you hear Bench say there was another wire under their table? That's got to be feds. And from what I heard, it sounded like the commish was telling Donuts—the senator—that he expects to have Donuts taking care of him.”

“What do you mean, ‘taking care of him'?”

“That means he gets his end, even if he goes down.”

“And if he doesn't?”

“Then Donuts goes down too.”

“How'd they get hooked up, those two?” she asked.

“Cousins, and birds of a feather,” I said. “The senator had some walking-around money from the casino company. And he knew the commish was all jammed up with the feds and might have access to wiseguys—make that, wannabe wiseguys—who might be talked into trying to take out your boyfriend.”

She considered that for a moment. Then she asked me, “They really aren't good people, are they?”

“No, they're not,” I agreed.

I pulled the car up in front of Bench's condo in Ball Square.

Patty said, “Did you hear that guy saying that somebody was trying to set up Sally?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Who was the guy they were talking about?”

“I think Bench knows, but it's a big shot, a made guy probably, Mafia, and with guys like that, it's like proving something in court.”

“You mean, beyond a reasonable doubt?”

“Exactly,” I said. Maybe she wasn't as stupid as I'd thought she was. “But right now, Bench's gotta deal with these guys from the Python.”

“And then Bench will hit the other guy in the head.”

She said it, not me.

*   *   *

Before getting out of the car, Patty gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then I was back on the road, an hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to Dedham during rush hour.

I'd set up the meeting a week earlier, before I'd even stumbled into this mess. At the time I was just doing a favor for a friend of a friend, talking to an amateur who wanted to run for an obscure county office. Short money at best, assuming he even decided to run. Now I knew I'd have trouble keeping my mind on my end of the conversation. I would have canceled it but this was the kind of guy who'd keep calling and calling and calling until I finally sat down with him. Besides, what else was I going to do tonight? My services were not required for the kind of task at hand. Even if I'd wanted to get involved, Bench McCarthy would have told me again to screw.

So I was sitting down with a guy named Robert O'Mara, one of those perennial candidates who keep running for the same office over and over, in his case county register of deeds. I guess somebody has to be the register of deeds, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out why, unless it was the pension. Come to think of it, that was reason enough for most guys, and then some.

I walked into the 99 in Dedham and he was immediately waving at me, trying to get my attention. About fifty-five, wearing a loud sport coat, a wide tie and double-knit pants. His gut hung over his belt; if ever a man was meant to wear suspenders, it was Robert O'Mara. He was wearing a large campaign button, green lettering on white background: “O'Mara Register of Deeds.”

I wondered what Bench McCarthy was doing at this moment. I suddenly realized that I was now providing myself with an alibi, in a different county, a long, long way from Somerville. In other words, this meeting was not going to be a total loss.

After the customary small talk, O'Mara told me why he was running for register of deeds—for the third time.

“I can't believe we still have county government,” he said.

And I can't believe anyone still cares.

“I need some work done on the campaign, but I don't have a lot of money.”

Somehow they always go hand in hand, needing some work done on the campaign and not having a lot of money.

He told me a long, involved story about how the Registry had had a bindery for deeds since at least the eighteenth century, but that now it was much cheaper to just subcontract the printing, not to mention even simpler just to scan the deeds and put them online. So, with excitement in his voice, as if he had stumbled onto a major scandal, O'Mara told me how the county commissioners had done away with the bindery department and moved the single remaining hack employee out to the parking lot out in back of the courthouse, which had always been free, and now he sat outside in a little booth, charging five bucks per car.

“Isn't that outrageous?” he said.

I nodded, trying to feign interest. His next story was about how if you wanted a copy of a deed, you had to go to a room where another ancient hack would get it for you, unless of course he wasn't there, which was most of the time, in which case you could just wander back into the stacks and grab the book yourself.

“In other words, they don't need this guy,” he said. “Why is he drawing a salary?”

“Maybe,” I guessed, “he lives on a corner in Quincy and puts up a yard sign for the Register every election.”

“And if you want to make a copy,” he continued breathlessly, oblivious to my little dig, “they don't have copying machines. Well they do, see, but what you have to do is, you have to pay a buck—a buck, instead of fifty cents, like in Middlesex! And then they make out a receipt, and you have to take the receipt down the hall, and there's three or four of these hacks just standing there, unless it's lunch hour of course, when the entire office is closed, and you have to give them the receipt, and that's when they make the copy for you. If they feel like it.”

I wanted to get back outside to the car and turn on the radio to find out if the shooting had started yet.

“Can I ask you something, Bob?” I said.

“Shoot,” he said, and my mind was immediately back in Somerville.

“How much does the register of deeds' job pay?” I said.

“One hundred ten,” he said.

“How much were you planning to spend on the fight this year?” I said.

“I'm hoping to raise thirty thousand,” he said. “But to be honest, most of that will be my own money. I came into an inheritance this year. My mother passed away. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to raise money for a county race, unless you're selling jobs of course.”

I sighed. “Can I make a suggestion?”

“Of course,” he said. “They say you're the best at what you do.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I don't like to see anyone throw his money away, so I'm going to make a recommendation to you, Bob, a free recommendation—can I call you Bob? If you take your thirty grand and get it out in cash, I'll personally introduce you to the register of deeds—what'd you say his name was?”

“O'Connor, Kevin O'Connor. He's from Quincy.”

“Of course he is,” I said. “I guarantee you, Bob, that for thirty large I can get you a job at the Registry that pays eighty grand. You want to be assistant register? Associate register? I'll bet I can even line up a job for you as deputy register. And everything on the level, so fucking legit I'm not even checking to see if you're wearing a wire.”

I smiled; I wanted him to think he was one of the boys. “This O'Connell—”

“O'Connor.”

“This O'Connor, he's got a business on the side, right. Lawyer?”

“No, insurance agency.” Of course it was an insurance agency. It was Quincy. Lawyers starved in Quincy, unless they were public defenders.

“How's that sound, eighty grand?” He seemed puzzled. It was just now occurring to him that I was more like O'Connor than I was like him.

“Once you're inside, on the payroll,” I said, “you can start working on reform from the inside. It's always better to be on the inside, believe me.”

Six months at the courthouse, and he'd be a union steward. And he wouldn't be bothering me—or anybody else, except maybe O'Connell, er O'Connor. But if O'Connor wanted to pocket O'Mara's thirty large cash, and I knew he would, then that was the price he'd have to pay.

“Let me think about it,” O'Mara said, running his hand through his greasy, thinning brown hair.

“You do that,” I said, “and get back to me. Right now, though, I gotta run. Give me a call when you make up your mind.”

“Deputy register,” he muttered, more to himself than to me, a faraway smile in his eyes. “Deputy register of deeds…”

 

35

BEEZO BAFFLES 'EM

I suppose I could have called the Somerville P.D. and had them make the stop. Their guns obviously wouldn't be registered, and probably most, if not all, of the shooters were illegals. But this was my problem. I had had it with these people. Trying to kill me was bad enough, but trying to kill me not for any particular reason other than to stop a casino bill that Sally and I had absolutely nothing to do with …