“Don’t be a smartass with me.”
“I said it tongue in cheek—”
“And no brain in head. The fuck’s gotten into you?”
“It’s a bad time, Ollie.”
“Yeah, tell me about bad times.”
Ollie Schantz had not left this same small room for three years. Surgery and physiotherapy had restored his nerves and muscles enough to permit him to swing his head in a small arc from left to right and his right hand to move, like a seal’s flipper, across his bed to grip a remote control for his wall-mounted television set or slap a button to summon his wife for food, for drink, for the warmth of her company and devotion.
McGuire could tell Ollie nothing about bad times that Ollie Schantz failed to experience day by day, so he shrugged and avoided the other man’s eyes.
“Heather and I began dating last summer, but it was usually, uh, a sometime thing, you know?”
Marty Hotchnik leaned on the large, badly scarred pine table that served as his desk. Across from him Tim Fox sat hunched forward, watching the advertising man carefully while Donovan slouched in a restored Windsor chair with his legs crossed, pencil and notebook in his hands. One wall of Hotchnik’s office displayed reproductions of advertisements for beer, packaged snacks, fur coats and imported cars. Another wall, the one behind Hotchnik’s desk, bore framed certificates, advertising awards and several photographs of Hotchnik with groups of people, the women young and artificially attractive, the men older and intense, all of them with their arms about each other.
“How’d you meet her?” Fox asked.
“We’d known each other for years, through business.” Hotchnik stretched his arms above his head. “Then I was on a shoot up in the Berkshires and she dropped by and um . . .” He shrugged his shoulders.
“You married?” Fox asked.
“Three times. Divorced three times.”
Donovan held Hotchnik’s business card up and looked from it to the advertising executive. “You really a senior vice-president in this outfit?” Donovan asked.
Hotchnik nodded.
“Sure don’t dress like one. How big is this company anyway?”
“We billed a hundred million last year,” Hotchnik said. “Might do a hundred twenty this year.”
“And you can’t afford to wear a fucking suit?” Donovan said. He laughed and looked across at Fox.
“Why should I if I don’t have to?” Hotchnik said. He seemed amused.
“Why should you if you don’t have to,” Donovan echoed, and wrote something in his notebook.
“Where were you, night before last?” Fox asked.
“I was working here on a presentation until about ten o’clock. There were three other people with me, a writer and two art directors. We all went out for something to eat and a couple of drinks in a bar on Stuart Street and I left there sometime after eleven o’clock, caught a cab back to Cambridge.”
“What time’d you get to Cambridge?”
Hotchnik searched for the answer on the ceiling. “I’d say between eleven and midnight.”
“Anybody see you come in?”
Hotchnik closed his eyes and shook his head slowly.
“How about the next morning?”
“I was in here at seven o’clock. The presentation was at nine.”
“You got names of these people who were with you that night?” Donovan asked.
Hotchnik nodded. “I’ll write them out if you’d like.”
“I’d like,” Donovan said.
Tim Fox released a long breath, noisily.
Hotchnik began writing on a sheet of lined paper.
“She ever talk about a guy named McGuire?” Donovan said. “Joe McGuire?”
“Not that I recall.” Hotchnik flipped through a diary of names and addresses, copying them on the sheet of paper. “Although it sounds familiar.”
Fox scanned the advertisements mounted behind Hotchnik’s desk, and his eyes lighted on a photograph of three women modelling furs in a park setting. “Where was that picture taken?” he asked.
Hotchnik twisted his neck. “That one, with the trees? Down by the Esplanade.”
“Ziggy Posner take it?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact he did.” Hotchnik grinned up at Fox, impressed. “How’d you know that?”
“Were you there that day?”
“For a while.”
“With Heather?”
“I drove her over.”
“Do you remember her talking to some man sitting on a bench near the band shell . . .”
“That’s him,” Hotchnik said. “McGuire. That’s right. She came back laughing about it. Said he was a drunk or a doper, a big-time loser anyway. Said he was her . . . what? Ex-brother-in-law? Something like that. Anyway, I remember her saying she had something on him.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” Hotchnik resumed making notes. “It just seemed to please her that this guy, this McGuire fellow, was so down and out.” He shook his head. “Heather had quite a mean streak in her, I’m telling you.”
“How often did you see her?” Tim Fox asked.
“Couple of times a week,” Hotchnik said. “For dinners, usually. She might drop in here on business, maybe we’d go for lunch.”
“Were you in love with her?”
Hotchnik folded the paper once and handed it across the desk to Donovan. “Hardly.” He lowered himself into his chair. “It was mostly physical or business, one or the other. Heather was attractive and lively and we enjoyed each other’s company. But like I say, she could be tough and mean.”
“You know anything about a scam she was pulling?” Donovan said.
“Scam?” Hotchnik looked from Donovan to Fox and back again.
“She may have been blackmailing people,” Fox said. “There’s some evidence of that. Did you know anything about it?”
“No.” Hotchnik turned away to the window for a moment and lowered his eyes. “No, I knew nothing about a blackmail scheme, but . . .”
“But what?” Donovan demanded.
A sample of a smile. “But I wouldn’t be surprised. She wasn’t blackmailing me, but I wouldn’t be surprised by anything Heather was doing. Not a bit.”
“You know how I found out about you, where you were, what kinda shit you’d gotten yourself into?” Ollie Schantz rasped.
“Never thought about it,” McGuire said. Ronnie Schantz entered with coffee, fluffed Ollie’s pillow and departed, touching McGuire’s shoulder with affection as she passed.
“Don’t think about much anymore, do you?” Ollie said after his wife closed the door. “Well, it was Danny Scrignoli came by to see me, tell me about you.”
“He was at the jail too,” McGuire said. “Nashua Street. The guys on Berkeley elected him.”
“That right? Well, Danny’s concerned. Says a bunch of people down there are. He wants to talk to you, soon’s you’re ready.”
“Whenever that is,” McGuire said.
“How about tonight?”
“Aw, hell, Ollie . . .” McGuire said.
“I told him, come by about six o’clock, pick you up.”
McGuire stared back at the paralyzed older man, who returned his stare with a pale smile.
“’Course, you don’t have to be here, you don’t wanna be,” Ollie Schantz said. “But Ronnie’s sure as hell not gonna drive you back downtown and you don’t look ready to haul your ass that far on your own.”
“You mind staying out of my life?” McGuire said.
“Yeah, I mind.” Ollie’s good hand flapped twice in McGuire’s direction. “I mind a hell of a lot. Ronnie and me, we’ve got an investment in you. You wanta stick your ass in a meat grinder, you can go ahead and do it, I guess. But you think Ronnie and me are gonna sit around and watch you act dumber’n
a barrel of hair and not say anything, not try to keep you out of your own way, you’re nuts.”
McGuire’s hands began to shake and the hollows of his head filled with angry ghosts and rusting nails. The last of Django’s pills remained in his pocket and he feared they would be insufficient to hold back the flood of pain poised on the horizon.
“Danny’ll be here in an hour, take you down to North Boston and feed you some of that good pasta and Valpolicella he likes, introduce you to a bunch of his Italian buddies. Get you half alive again. Shit, your eyes’re so tight, they look like the assholes of two eagles in a power dive.”
“Okay,” McGuire said weakly, wondering how long he would be able to remain where he was without vomiting. “Okay.”
“Do a check on Hotchnik,” Tim Fox was saying. “Talk to those people who were with him that night and the next morning, see what they remember about him, how he acted.”
Donovan grinned coldly, like a smartass teenager ready to throw a line back at a teacher, daring the teacher to deal with him, watching Tim Fox manoeuvre the Plymouth down Boylston Street. “Me? You want me to do backgrounding? What for? The guy’s straighter’n a pimp’s peeker on Saturday night. Get some whistles to do it. We got other people to talk to, right?”
“Look, you do that, I’ll check some other stuff out.”
“Who with, your dope-head buddy McGuire? You think that hotshot’s ever gonna find anything heavier’n an old cigar butt in the bottom of a wine bottle?”
Fox looked away, out the passenger window, his hand gripping the top of the steering wheel. “Hotchnik’s an opening,” he said quietly. “Talk to him, run him down.”
“Opening? What opening? So he was banging her, so what?” Donovan began picking at his teeth with a matchbook cover. “So does that make him a number one perp or just another guy gotta start lookin’ around for some fresh pussy?”
Tim Fox’s face was a mask. “You want to clean up your language?” he said.
Donovan’s jaw dropped open. “What, you only work with choirboys? Huh? Is that what’s buggin’ your ass? Hey, I’m no choirboy, Timmy. I spent six years in South Boston wiping brains off car fenders before I was in Berkeley Street long enough to take a piss. So what do I owe that guy back there, makes probably two, three hundred grand a year and dresses like he’s going out to do yard work? I owe him maybe some college English, some Harvard horseshit language?” Donovan leaned forward, his arm on the dashboard, his head almost meeting the windshield, trying to catch Fox’s eye, stare at him as he talked. “Comes down to it, what the fuck do I owe you?”
Danny Scrignoli had come out of Boston’s North End twenty years ago ready to make his mark, get enough money to buy a house in Brookline or Cambridge and go back to the old neighbourhood, cruise Hanover Street in a black Caddy, the radio blasting some good doo-wop music and Danny waving to the old dagos standing outside the espresso bars, wearing their topcoats with the black velvet collars, talking the old country language.
All Danny had was high school, which was more than Danny’s old man, the florist, had, but it wasn’t enough to get Danny anything better than a messenger job downtown at a branch of the Bank of New England. Not a hell of a lot, and a long way from a Cadillac, but sometimes that happened to Italian kids in Boston, even street-smart ones like Danny and his older brother Gino, proving that having some talent and working your ass off doesn’t get you the American dream all the time.
All it got Gino was dead.
Gino Scrignoli was the best shortstop the Boston school system had ever produced, soft hands, speed on the bases and able to turn the double play at second, jumping like a garlic-eating kangaroo to avoid the slide coming in from first, the guy with his spikes up, trying to break the throw. Boston College picked Gino up like he was a diamond bracelet lying in the grass and he made varsity baseball as a sophomore, playing every day, going three-for-four some games, making maybe one, two errors all season. In his junior year Gino Scrignoli the baseball hero took courses in American History and Art Appreciation and dated blonde co-eds with blue eyes and tight sweaters and names like Buffy and Rebecca, showing them the North End, walking them down Hanover Street while his kid brother Danny jumped around them, slipping his hand into the girl’s or running behind to grip Gino’s bicep and say to anybody listening, “This’s my brother, Gino Scrignoli, the Indians are scouting him.”
And it was true. Cleveland offered him a contract, big bonus and all, and Gino was ready to go, ready to sign, but the old man said no, not until you get your education. Gino’s twenty years old, he can sign if he wants, but the old man’s word was law, had been all of Gino’s life. “Sign, for Christ’s sakes!” Danny begged his brother, five years older, soft hands, great speed on the bases, but Gino just smiled and said, “Lotsa time, Dinny.” That’s what Gino called him, Dinny.
“You could be down in Florida, sleeping with broads there, getting some double-A experience,” Danny begged him, but Gino shrugged and said, “Maybe the old man’s right. Get the education, have something to fall back on, keep the grades up.”
Then, middle of his senior year, Gino finally signs, just a couple of courses away from graduation. Cleveland management said he could finish his studies at spring training and through the first month of the season playing double-A ball in Davenport or Albany, some place like that. Then he could write his exams, graduate. They’d wait. Speed like that, hands like those, hit a curve ball the way Gino could, they’d wait.
And they gave him a signing bonus, twenty grand. Gino passes half of it on to the old man and spends some of the rest on a restored fire-breathing Norton 900, the last of the British motorcycles made back in the days when Limey bikes could still kick anybody’s ass, even a Harley’s, down a winding road.
The next day, Gino gave Danny a ride on the Norton, tear-assing over the Longfellow Bridge into Cambridge, Danny smiling all the way, thinking he’d get bugs in his teeth unless he closed his mouth but smiling anyway.
That was Saturday afternoon, a cold dry February day. Gino had a plane to catch for Daytona Beach on Monday.
Early Sunday morning, Danny woke to hear the Norton being fired up outside, the sound of its steel muscle cutting the quiet of the North End neighbourhood, Gino taking it out for one last ride along the river before storing the bike for the season. Danny smiled and rolled over, went back to sleep.
Danny had never heard his father scream before, never heard anybody scream like that again, and as soon as it woke him up, he knew.
“Cold weather like this, a bike’s tires don’t grip so well,” one of the cops at the door said, as if trying to explain the mechanics, the physics of it, trying to make sense of the death of a kid with soft hands, good speed on the bases.
Gino lost it tearing down Memorial Drive along the river in the gray dawn light. Nobody saw it happen. The cops found the body on the road near a gap in the fence where the Norton had torn through, sailing riderless into the water.
“Leave the son of a bitch in there!” the old man cried when the police said they were searching the river for the motorcycle.
Maybe they did. Danny never knew.
Danny was a decent athlete but he didn’t have Gino’s hands or speed and he wasn’t able to track a curve ball all the way in from the mound. Danny never had a lot of things his brother had except the craving to walk down Hanover Street and have the old dagos nod at him and recognize and respect him, as they had his brother, the Big League Kid.
So there he was a couple of years later, eighteen years old and a messenger boy for a bank, working on Congress Street for a lousy two hundred bucks a week, and he comes around a corner one night with his head down, scuffing his sneakers, pissed off because he had to stay late while the jerk accountant finished some stuff, and he looks up and right there on Franklin two guys are putting the boots to a cop. The cruiser door is wide open in the middle of the road and the cop’s on the sid
ewalk, one guy holding his gun on him and both of them kicking him, so much blood in the cop’s eyes he can’t see, he’s just trying to protect himself.
They spot Danny and Danny doesn’t think, he jumps into the cruiser, afraid to turn his back and give the guy with the gun a good target. He slips the Ford in gear and peels that sucker out of there, half expecting the rear window to be blown away, blasting the horn like hell as he drives, not knowing how to work the police radio. He gets around the corner, still leaning on the horn, and he clicks something on the radio until he hears the dispatcher’s voice and yells where he is, “Franklin south of Congress, there’s a cop down, get your asses here!” into the microphone, hitting every goddamn button in sight.
Then he turns the cruiser around, points it back up Franklin, and the cop is still there on his back, rolling from side to side, but the two guys have taken off, and by the time he reaches the cop he hears the sirens.
The city gave him a commendation and a press conference, Jack the Bear Kavander shaking his hand and smiling at the cameras. Right there on TV Kavander asked Danny if he’d ever thought of being a Boston cop. Danny said, “Not until now,” and Kavander told him to come by Berkeley Street some day, any day, Boston needed more brave young men like Danny Scrignoli.
Might just do it, Danny thought. Not too many cops drive BMWs. But they get respect. And Gino would’ve approved. Gino would’ve been impressed.
Danny showed up at Kavander’s office the next day and he was fast-tracked into the academy two weeks behind everybody else, they had to bump some turkey to make room in the first-year class for Scrignoli the hero, Gino’s kid brother. And Danny caught up with the others and graduated in the top ten in his class. Scrignoli the cop now.
The cop Danny saved, the one rolling around on Franklin Street who let two guys jump him and take his .38 Police Special, was Stu Cauley. A month later his gun was used in a fatal holdup on Columbus Avenue and Cauley never worked a beat again, never got anything more demanding than counter duty on Berkeley Street.
They said it was because of the damage to his eye but everybody knew about the holdup with Cauley’s gun.
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