Sweetheart

by Andrew Coburn

  Blodgett heaved himself out of the chair and returned the cutting, which bore a damp spot from his thumb. Before he turned to leave, he murmured confidentially, “I suppose the less said to Blue the better.”

  “You suppose right.”

  Thurston dropped back deeply into his swivel chair and stared at two framed photographs on the side wall. One was of Ronald Reagan, and the other, which he peered at the longest, was of himself receiving an award from J. Edgar Hoover a year before the director’s death. He remembered priding himself on looking, a little at least, like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. He also remembered his awe of Hoover, as if the man were more powerful than God, with dossiers listing everybody’s peccadilloes.

  • • •

  Brother and sister traveled across the state in a chauffeured Cadillac Eldorado to Greenwood Regional Hospital, where they satisfied legal obligations by identifying the bodies of their mother and father. Anthony Gardella had not wanted his sister to make the trip, but she had insisted. In the gleaming basement of the morgue, near the almost soothing drone of a refrigeration unit, she viewed the still and brutalized faces and gagged. She did not cry. The medical examiner led her to a metal chair, which she would not stay in. She rose up and looked enormous. She had on a storm coat and knee boots that would not zip up all the way because of the heft of her calves. “I want to know every injury that was done to them,” she said in a tone that disconcerted the doctor.

  “I don’t know everything yet,” he said delicately.

  Anthony Gardella said, “We know enough.”

  Rita O’Dea raised a fist and clenched it. “You know what I want.” Her face, lacquered with a hard makeup, was, for the moment, fierce. Her brother gave a quick glance at the doctor.

  “Leave us alone,” he said, and the doctor did. The droning in the room seemed to intensify. Gardella, very quietly, said, “Get hold of yourself.”

  “I want to know what you’re doing about this,” Rita O’Dea said in a voice now unsteady. “Let’s discuss it.”

  “Wait till they’re buried.”

  “You should be on it now.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You don’t do something, I will.”

  “You’ll do nothing,” Gardella said evenly. “Everything’s being taken care of.”

  Rita O’Dea fixed her eyes upon him, her concentration intense and almost morbid. She stumbled in place, and her brother swiftly gripped the sleeve of her coat. The doctor returned. There were papers to sign in his office. On the way he said, “If I were you I wouldn’t delay the trip back. It’s starting to snow.”

  The mournful winter sky was already benighted, and the snow fell fast, sticking to the rural road. The headlights picked up a rabbit darting in a jagged direction before the left front wheel killed it in its tracks. In the opulence of the Cadillac, Rita O’Dea pushed her hair back. “I want to drive by the house.”

  “No,” said Gardella. “There’s nothing to see.”

  “There might be some things we want.”

  “There’s nothing we want.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “I speak for both of us,” he said, his voice dropping. A glass panel sealed their words from the driver, who doubled as a bodyguard. A sign showed the way to the highway, which was reached within minutes, a smooth ride. Rita O’Dea tugged at the collar of her coat. The car was warm, but she shivered. Gardella opened a compartment in the back of the front seat and removed a flask and a tumbler. He poured for her.

  She took a taste. “I remember a time you only bought wop wine.”

  “That’s an aperitif.”

  “I know what it is. I’d prefer a shot of gin.”

  “Show a little class, Rita.”

  “I got all that money can buy.”

  Anthony Gardella studied his hands. His wedding band was a half-inch wide. His nails were manicured. With deliberate cruelty he said, “Why’d you bring that spic up here?”

  For a heavy moment it seemed she would not respond. Her dark head sagged. She was tired. “Does it bother you?” she asked, her large face softened by shadow.

  “Yes, it bothers me.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “It’s an insult,” he said bitterly, and she sighed.

  “What should I do, Tony? Be lonely?”

  “You can do better than him.”

  She smiled with hard irony. “No, Tony. I can’t.”

  • • •

  Twice Silas Rogers avoided them, the first time by pretending that he wasn’t home, though it was obvious he was, and the next time by shouting that he was too sick to talk, which in a faint way was true. One of his mongrels was ailing, and he suffered for it. He had five dogs, and during the winter he kept them inside because their bodies breathed heat for the house and life into his solitude. He was a widower. Now, for the third time, the dogs alerted him that the two men were back. He let them knock several times before opening the door just enough to show his crag of a face. “You don’t need to talk to me,” he said with false bravado. “I told everything to Hunkins.”

  Trooper Denton stuck his foot in the door. Lieutenant Wade said, “You’ve been ducking us. What are you afraid of?”

  “Nothing.” The dogs pressed against him from behind, their paws scratching the floor. The dogs were odd sizes and colors, nervous, anxious for air. “You’re upsetting my animals.”

  Lieutenant Wade said, “Do you want to talk here or take a ride to the barracks? We can do that.”

  “You threatening me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw what I saw and nothing more.”

  “Let us in, we’ll talk about it.”

  “You think I know more than I do. I don’t!”

  “We’ll see.”

  They got nothing from him. They sat at his bare table, the dogs milling beneath, and interrogated him, the trooper rephrasing questions the lieutenant had already posed. It was a ploy to trip him up, but he was too smart for that. He kept his hands in his lap and his head high and gave out flat answers either negative or neutral. Once he got up to wipe piddle from one of the dogs off the floor. Lieutenant Wade shifted the substance of the questions to the Gardellas themselves.

  “What did you think of them?”

  “They didn’t mean nothing to me.”

  “They lived in the town twenty-five years, I’m told.”

  “We didn’t mix.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t mix with nobody.”

  “Especially Italians?”

  “You said that. I didn’t.”

  “You don’t say much of anything, Mr. Rogers. Two good people were sadistically murdered, and you sit there blowing smoke up my ass.”

  Silas Rogers reddened. “And you come in here threatening a man. It ain’t right!”

  The lieutenant got to his feet. So did Trooper Denton, a young giant of a man who had played football for UMass. Together they stared down at Silas Rogers, who nervously patted a dog. In a stage whisper the lieutenant said, “He’s only making it worse for himself.”

  The trooper agreed. “He doesn’t give us a choice.”

  “There’s only one way out of this, Mr. Rogers. Put you to a lie detector.”

  For a second Silas Rogers went sick inside, and his face wrinkled up like a baby’s. When he rose out of the chair, he did not seem entirely lucid. Then he stiffened himself. “I know my rights,” he said and stood on them.

  • • •

  “You scared?”

  “Shit, no. You?”

  “I keep thinkin’. S’pose he saw?”

  “We’d’ve been arrested.”

  “Fifty-three fuckin’ dollars.”

  They spoke in the dark, their faces pinched from the cold, and passed a Seagram’s bottle back and forth. One was hiccuping. The Seagram’s and the nearness of the cows inside the barn kept them from freezing. Outside it was snowing.

  “Be a blizzard by the time it’s through.�
��

  “Who cares?”

  They huddled in hay, their knees drawn up. The cows were restless, and some were ailing, mostly from neglect. “Hate it here,” the younger brother said, though he was used to the smells and sounds of the barn and never noticed them.

  “Quit hiccuping.”

  “Can’t. Christ, it’s cold. Let’s go in the house.”

  “No way. The old man knows something’s up, and we ain’t gonna let ‘im guess what.”

  “We’ll give ‘im the bottle. That’ll put ‘im to sleep.”

  “Shake it, you damn fool. There ain’t none left.”

  One of the ailing cows let out a low moan of discomfort and then a screech of pain that sounded more human than animal. Snow blew in under the double doors.

  “Leroy.”

  “What?”

  “We had the chance to go back there and do it again, would you still do it?”

  “I’d do it better.”

  A wind shot through the doors and cut into their mackinaws. They squirmed deeper into the sour hay. “Still and all,” the younger brother said, “we oughta make sure.”

  “ ‘Bout what?”

  “ ‘Bout Rogers.”

  • • •

  A foot of snow fell through the night and much of the morning. It was midafternoon when Lieutenant Wade turned in his chair and peered out the window. His office inside the state police barracks was small, his desk occupying most of it. The building was just off the highway and surrounded by birch and pine. Snow cuddled branches of the pine and clung to the birch. Chickadees made twitchy and brief appearances. Wade saw nothing but the stark snow and blades of ice flashing in the cold sunlight, which increased his dissatisfaction with the remoteness of the area. He disliked country winters, which billowed with the fiercest of winds and the deepest of drifts, as if the other seasons there had misspent themselves, as he seemed to have done with the years of his marriage. His sense of aloneness, dull during the day, worsened at night when the only sound might be a dog’s barking in the dark.

  A noise made him swivel around. A man he had never seen before stood unannounced at his desk. The man’s outer coat was draped over his arm. His suit was dark and tailored to accommodate the small burden of a revolver. The man said, “You don’t know me.”

  “Sure I do,” Wade said. “You’ve got government written all over you. Let me guess. FBI.”

  “You’re quick.”

  “Show me something.”

  Russell Thurston produced identification. Wade read it and returned it. A metal chair was available, but Thurston remained erect. “I understand you went through Quantico.”

  “Hasn’t everybody?”

  “Nice to know you, brother,” Thurston said and extended a hand. The handshake was neither warm nor cold. It was professional and bone dry, like the man himself. Each studied the other and hid his judgment. Wade had little liking for the FBI, which had never broken its habit of aiding local police and then taking full credit if the results were favorable. Thurston said, “You can guess why I’m here.”

  “More or less.”

  Thurston draped his coat over the back of the chair. “For me it’s a break. Can you understand why?” There was no comment from Wade, no admission of any sort, and Thurston took another tack. “I wasn’t always Bureau, you know. For a short time I was with the CIA. Good years, let me tell you, but I was a budget casualty. Saddest day of my life.”

  “You seem to have landed on your feet.”

  “I have that facility. I used to fight Communists, and now I fight scum of another kind.”

  “Sounds like an obsession.”

  “Everybody moves to his own music, Lieutenant. I imagine you move very nicely to yours — given the chance, that is. Out here, I suspect you march to a bored drummer.”

  Wade placed his hands on his desk, one covering the other, no wedding band, only an emerald, his birthstone. In a low and knowing voice, he said, “You want Tony Gardella.”

  “I’ve got his picture in my wallet. You want to see it?”

  “I know what he looks like.”

  “I know you do.”

  “He’s in Boston, but you come all the way here to get him.”

  “This is where the action’s going to be, wouldn’t you say?”

  Wade preferred not to say. “Why don’t you sit down, Thurston? You make me nervous. You’re working on some kind of scam, aren’t you? You want to squeeze Gardella.”

  “Wouldn’t you if you were in my shoes?”

  “I’m not in your shoes. Mine have been reheeled three times.”

  “Are you afraid to get involved?” Thurston’s stance was the stillest, and his voice gave Wade an image of a spider climbing its silk.

  “I wouldn’t want a fed calling my shots.”

  “Get your coat.”

  “What?”

  Thurston bared his teeth in what did not in the least look like a smile but was meant to be one. “I’m going to buy you a drink.”

  • • •

  They went to a place called the Hunter’s Cove, drank dark beer, and stayed for dinner. The huge stone fireplace blazed, igniting faces. The waitresses wore buckskin vests and skirts, and the music was country. Wade, who was known there, had steak. Thurston had soup, annoying Wade by the deliberate and almost mannered way in which he ate. They discussed the lack of immediate evidence in the double homicide — no workable fingerprints, merely a long list of area toughs thought capable of such violence and an uncooperative witness surrounded by dogs. Thurston said, “The witness intrigues me. What did you say his name is?”

  “Rogers.”

  “You think he’s holding back?”

  “It’s a feeling, nothing substantial to base it on.”

  “Law enforcement people have special feelings. Insights. I’ve always maintained that.”

  The waitress, pale and petite, made an unnecessary trip to the table and fussed over Wade, who had a solid, half-handsome face and usually a gentle voice. He had once taken the waitress to a movie and later would have brought her back to his place had she not mentioned she was married. Thurston watched with amusement and afterward asked, “Are you a ladies’ man?”

  Wade did not trouble himself to answer.

  “I didn’t think so,” Thurston said and for a number of moments gazed at other diners, sizing up men by the women with them. The light of the fire flattered many of the faces. Gradually he returned his gaze to Wade. “I’m curious. How the hell did you manage to get yourself assigned way out here?”

  “I go where I’m told.”

  “Translated, that means you don’t have the right people in your corner. Too bad. Your family’s back in the Boston area, I understand. Wellesley, is it?”

  “My wife and I have separated.”

  “I know that. You have two daughters going to BU. The tuition must be killing you.”

  “While you’re at it, why don’t you tell me my bank balance?”

  “Two hundred and three dollars in your checking and not a dime in your savings. Account closed. How about an after-dinner drink? I like Bailey’s Irish.” Thurston beckoned, and the waitress came immediately.

  A bit later Wade said, “You’re smooth.”

  “No,” said Thurston. “Just smooth enough.”

  “This all going on your expense account?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m an item.”

  “I’d like you to be an even bigger item,” Thurston said in a tone meant to convey opportunity and promise. The waitress served their drinks, giving all her attention now to Thurston, who ignored her.

  Wade bided his time. “Go ahead,” he said restively. “I’m waiting for your pitch.”

  “First, let’s put something down for the record. Tony Gardella is garbage, no better than the goons who killed his folks. Sixteen years old, he bit a kid’s ear off in a street fight. That’s a savage, not a civilized member of society. Eighteen, he made his first hit working for a loan sh
ark. Used an ice pick. Boston police picked him up right away, beat the crap out of him, but he never said a word. Impressed the hell out of the Providence people.”

  “I’m relatively familiar with his file,” Wade said. “Plenty of arrests in those days, but no convictions.”

  “You’re wrong, there was one. He was fined for peddling pornography a couple of weeks after he came out of the army. He moved up fast in the organization. A smart boy. He knew who to crush and who to suck up to. At the same time he was developing a taste for custom shirts and clean fingernails.”

  Wade gave an ironic shrug. “Nothing wrong with a little polish.”

  “He’s got polish like a snake’s got glitter. Over the years he’s mellowed a little, but that doesn’t make him any less a killer.”

  “I still don’t know what you want from me,” Wade said tightly.

  “I want you to do Gardella a favor he can’t forget.”

  Wade laughed. “That has a nice ring to it, like ‘an offer you can’t refuse.’ What does it mean?”

  Thurston paused. A small group was leaving. He viewed the women and then, cynically, the men, as if censuring them. “It means as soon as Gardella gets done burying his parents he’ll approach you. Either him or one of his people. You can count on it. For him, this goes to the gut. He can’t eat or sleep right till it’s settled. His brain’s on hold because he’s all emotion. You help him, you become special. You do it right, you become his brother. Am I getting through to you?”

  “I can brief him on the investigation,” Wade said with distaste. “What more can I do?”

  “You can give him the witness.”

  Wade looked blank, then upset. “What the hell are you getting at?”

  “You’ve heard the expression you can’t get blood from a stone. Gardella can.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  But they did. For a good half hour, with much argument and no agreement. Twice Wade placed a hand to his brow as though his thoughts were slipping away. Frequently Thurston’s voice dipped dramatically, which suggested theater had been his first love. “This guy’s got friends at City Hall, the State House, the Union Bank of Boston. Imagine how sweet it’d be to strip him bare.”