Shamrock Alley

by Ronald Damien Malfi

  “What happened?” His forehead was burning up with fever, his hands again throbbing beneath the table.

  “They kill him,” Sean said flatly. “Jimmy shoots him twice in the chest, they take his keys, dump him in the trunk of his own car. Drive to some warehouse and—get this shit—the motherfucker is still alive in the trunk when they get there.”

  “You serious?”

  “Swear to Christ, John, that’s how I heard it.”

  “So they kill him at the warehouse …”

  “Chopped him up,” Sean said. That vague smile was back on his face, his eyes aglow and teeming with bombast. He was like a parent bragging about his son’s home run in Little League. “Cut the bastard into pieces with an axe—his head, his legs, his arms. Diced him like a Chinatown fish. It’s how they make people disappear, is what I heard. They call it doin’ a Houdini.”

  “Where’d you hear this?”

  Sean waved away the question. It was unimportant. “I heard it. And you ain’t even heard the best part yet. They grab this guy Green’s loan-sharking book and start going around the city collecting the guy’s vigs! I heard that, thought it was the funniest damn thing in the world. Can you imagine?”

  “I think whoever told you this story’s full of shit,” he said.

  “I don’t think so, man. I mean, I know these guys. These ain’t just stories. This is the way it is down here.”

  John turned and glanced over at the bartender, watched him flirt with an attractive Asian woman in tan pants and a red sweater. Without looking at Sean, he asked him how many other people Mickey and Jimmy killed.

  Sean Sullivan rolled his shoulders. He suddenly looked very, very young beneath the glow of the restaurant’s lights.

  “Word on the street,” Sean said, “they worked a lot of guys.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  FOR A MOMENT, THE RECORDING OF SEAN Sullivan’s voice rendered the occupants of Brett Chominsky’s office speechless. Then, as Chominsky leaned over and turned the tape recorder off, there sounded a tremulous exhale from where Roger Biddleman stood before the large bank of office windows.

  Kersh, who had recorded the conversation via John’s transmitter last night, sat before Chominsky’s desk, his arms folded, his eyes unfocused and distant. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and his chin looked like a loaded pin cushion.

  John stood by the closed office door, his back against the wall, his hands stuffed into his pants pockets. Throughout the length of the recording, his eyes had volleyed from Kersh to Chominsky to Biddleman like someone watching a three-man handball game. Each had a different expression on his face: Kersh’s was one of perdition, Chominsky displayed an uncharacteristic incertitude, and Roger Biddleman looked like someone who’d just been dealt four aces in a poker game and was doing his best to keep a straight face.

  “Jesus,” Chominksy said, the first person to speak. “Who is this kid again?”

  “Sean Sullivan,” John said. “Maybe nineteen years old. Said he’s been doing jobs for Mickey and Jimmy for about five months now.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I believe that someone told him that story, yes,” he said.

  “But do you believe the story?” Chominksy elaborated.

  “I do, yes.”

  Chominksy frowned. “Are you sick? You look sick.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Chominksy turned to Kersh. “Bill?”

  “Green … Horace Green …” Kersh muttered to himself. He pushed back in his chair, frowning in consideration. “That name sounds so familiar. Horace Green …” He paused, then looked up at Chominsky. “I think,” Kersh said, “we need to first figure out what to do about this hit on the bartender.”

  “Ricky Laughlin,” John said.

  Chominsky asked John why he thought Mickey had offered him the hit.

  “To see who I really am,” he answered evenly. “And because he thinks he can own me.”

  Kersh shot him a look.

  “When is Mickey expecting an answer?” Chominsky asked.

  “Couple days.”

  “Any suggestions, Bill?”

  Sighing, Kersh unfolded his arms and set the palms of his hands flat against his knees. He looked like someone about to commence with prayer. “We have John take the hit,” he said. “Meanwhile, we’ll have the guys from NYPD approach this guy Laughlin, tell him that they got word someone’s looking to bump him. We’ll get him and stick him in a safe house in Queens until this thing is over.” He looked at John, and his eyes were dead. “Can’t do a hit on someone if they disappear.”

  Biddleman had been listening intently to the conversation. Safe houses, hits, and protective custody were catch phrases that defined a career-making case. Any more discussion and the attorney would no doubt begin salivating all over the rug. Yet he kept his countenance reserved, his hands pressed neatly together at his waist, his predatory eyes shielded behind a veil of modest concern.

  “Doing a Houdini,” Chominsky muttered to himself, pulling the cassette tape from the recorder. “What a bunch of animals. Here.” He handed the cassette over to Kersh. “Make some copies.”

  Kersh stood, the creases in his pants remaining. He walked out of the office, followed by Roger Biddleman, who took his time crossing the room. The attorney paused to smile at John.

  “Good job, John.”

  John simply nodded and watched the attorney slip out into the hallway.

  “What about you?” Chominsky said, reclining in his chair. “How do you feel about all this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you look like you’ve got malaria. And I’m aware of the hours you’ve been putting in with these guys. You sure you feel okay?”

  “I feel like shit, but I’ll be fine. Just a cold. Haven’t been sleeping too well.”

  “When’s the baby due?”

  “February.” Having Brett Chominsky mention his unborn child was tantamount to hearing Muhammad Ali discuss the fundamentals of nuclear physics. As much as he could remember, he hadn’t even mentioned his wife’s pregnancy to Chominsky.

  “You agree with Bill’s approach to this hit?”

  He nodded. “Sounds good.”

  “John,” Chominsky began, pushing forward in his chair, “if you feel you’re in over your head—”

  “No.” His tone was harsher than he would have liked. “I feel good about this. Some more time, we can bust this thing wide open.”

  Chominsky continued staring at him for several moments in silence before sitting up again and turning toward his desk. “Just know,” Chominsky said, not looking in his direction, “we can stop this thing whenever you feel it’s necessary.”

  “I know,” John said, turning toward the door. “I know.”

  Out in the hallway, John moved quickly toward the bathroom. There, he ran his hands beneath the faucet, working the feeling back into his fingers. He recalled an evening outside the candy store, standing on the curb in the freezing rain while Mickey and another guy talked in whispers by the pay telephone. In his mind, he could see the red-rimmed lids of Mickey’s eyes staring at him from over a table at the Cloverleaf, his face hard and unyielding, saying, What about guns? You think you can move some guns? And coupled with that, the ghostly articulation of Sean Sullivan saying, Diced him like a Chinatown fish. It’s how they make people disappear, is what I heard. They call it doin’ a Houdini.

  Behind him, the bathroom door swung open and Roger Biddleman entered. The attorney did a double-take in John’s direction, then smiled at his reflection in the mirror.

  “Come to take a load off my mind,” Biddleman said, still grinning.

  John shut off the water and grappled with a handful of paper towels.

  “Pretty impressive, getting that kid to open up like that,” Biddleman said. He saddled up to a urinal and relieved himself with great fervor.

  “It’s just talk.”

  “Well, I was impressed.” The attorney finished and tu
rned toward the sink, rested his hands on his hips. Instead of washing his hands, he leaned forward over the sink basin to examine his nostrils in the mirror. “You know what would be amazing? If we could get Mickey on tape talking about chopping that bookie up. I mean, can you imagine the impact that would have on a jury, just hearing this guy describe his own brutal crime?” Biddleman turned and faced him, his hands still on his hips. “I like to think we’re on the same page here. At least… on the same team …”

  “You want me to push Mickey for details on Green’s murder? Get him on tape?” Yet even as the words came from his own mouth, he knew Roger Biddleman was right. And it wasn’t just the notion of sending Mickey O’Shay away for a very long time that ignited something within him; it was the trepidation involved in pumping Mickey for that information. Another level; another condition to be bested. As he’d told Kersh, he was not doing anything for Roger Biddleman. It was all for himself, to see how far he could go, see how deeply he could submerge himself in Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn’s world.

  Suddenly, the prospect of pumping Mickey about Horace Green’s death appealed to him.

  He turned and looked at Biddleman, standing with his back toward the mirror, his hands still on his hips.

  “You want it,” he said, “you got it.”

  Katie was studying at the kitchen table of John’s father’s house when he arrived. She heard him approach but did not turn and look up from her textbook immediately. Finally, as he lingered in the kitchen doorway, making noise with the zipper on his leather jacket, she spoke.

  “There’s Tylenol in the upstairs bathroom under the sink,” she said. “Take something before you get pneumonia.”

  He came up behind her and placed one hand on the top of her head. Like a curious bird perched on a branch, he peered over her head and ran his eyes over the spread of textbooks.

  “Exams?” he said.

  She closed the book. Turned in her seat. Looked at him. “You don’t look well.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “Are you going back out tonight?”

  “No,” he said, pulling off his jacket, “I’m here tonight. Or home. Wherever you want to be.”

  “Are you hungry? I just made tuna fish sandwiches, but I can make you something hot…”

  Draping his jacket over the back of one of the chairs, he shook his head. “How’s Dad?”

  Her eyes held him, unmoving. For a second, she appeared to him like a stranger. She no longer looked young and full of energy. Over the past couple weeks, something had changed inside her—in her face, in her eyes, in the lines around her mouth. Had it really been just recently he’d thought of her as a young schoolgirl? Imagined her at Coney Island, losing a shoe on the Tilt-A-Whirl? What had happened to that red-eyed panda bear she’d won for him, anyway?

  “You’re mad,” he said, smoothing back her hair.

  “He’s real sick, John,” she said. Tears filled her eyes. “I mean … you know … it’s coming down to the end here and …” But her voice trailed off.

  “And?” he said, but she just shook her head. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m gonna check up on him,” he said, not knowing what else to tell her. And even as he turned down the hallway and moved toward the stairs, he could feel his wife’s eyes on him.

  Upstairs, only the dim yellow light from the hallway bathroom was on. The door itself was half-closed, casting a thin sliver of light along the otherwise dark carpet.

  His father was in his childhood bed; the old man turned his head in his direction when he entered the room.

  “Hey, Pop, how you feeling?”

  “John …” His father’s voice was paper-thin. John felt his own body tremble at the sound. “I need … help me … up …”

  “Pop … what?”

  “Bathroom,” his father managed, pulling back the bedsheets from his withered body.

  “Wait,” he said, “I’ll help you.”

  It was like lifting an empty husk. The old man couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds. He closed one hand around his father’s wrist, felt bone, shuddered. A second hand went to the old man’s back, and it was like caressing some exotic desert plant. He felt helpless, powerless, impossibly small. He hated himself for his weakness, hated himself for his inability to fix things, mend things.

  “You’ve been taking your medication?”

  But his father was too weak to respond.

  Though the bathroom was only a few feet away, it seemed an eternity. Together, they walked like children, like two generations of an incapable breed. And halfway to the bathroom he found himself wishing for the journey to be over, for them to reach the light, because his mind was reeling now, speeding like a runaway locomotive …

  “Help,” the old man said, trying to inch open the bathroom door.

  “Relax, Pop, I got it…”

  The bathroom was overly bright. He winced and tightened his grip on his father’s wrist, his father’s frail back. He could feel the shift of the old man’s shoulder blades through his cotton pajamas.

  Here, in the light, they were both exposed.

  “Do you … Pop, do you need …”

  He was trying to pull the man’s drawstring on his pajamas while maintaining balance at the same time. In his arms, his father felt nonexistent, like a prop, like the faint memory of the person he’d once been.

  “Shit, Dad—”

  His father was not cooperating. One of the old man’s hands flailed out, knocking his son’s hand away. One of his bare feet lifted an inch or two off the tile floor, toes rigid … then the heel stamped down.

  “Pop—”

  A foamy string of vomit dribbled down the front of his father’s pajamas. Shocked, frightened, John snapped his head up and saw his father’s eyes had rolled back into his head. The flailing hand continued to flail at his side, the fingers working in meaningless semaphore.

  “Katie! Katie!” In an instant, his father’s body collapsed in his arms. Holding him tight, he could feel the seizures wrack the old man’s body. “Katie! Call an ambulance!”

  There was pounding on the stairwell—footsteps?—and the lights in the bathroom suddenly seemed too bright, too comic. The lid of the toilet seat cracked down against the porcelain with deafening abruptness.

  And standing there in the throes of fever, his father convulsing in his arms, John saw the world sway and bend before his eyes.

  The rest of the evening was spent in a blinding delusion of sharp hospital light fixtures and the stink of latex and antiseptic.

  John remained staring straight ahead at the blank hospital wall, Katie asleep with her head on his shoulder. His face held no expression; his eyes had softened to a dull gray. The steady course of Katie’s breathing beside his ear did little to soothe him.

  A young female doctor stepped out into the hallway clicking a pen. “Mr. Mavio?”

  Secluded behind a green plastic curtain in the ICU, his father lay unconscious in a bed that looked ridiculously large for him. He had become, in just a couple months, a shadow of the man he’d once been.

  “Your father’s suffered a severe stroke caused by a buildup of pressure in the location surrounding the tumor. He’s currently unconscious, though if he should ever regain consciousness, it will not be without complete dysfunction of all motor skills, including speech and, according to his papillary response, vision loss … hearing … paralysis …”

  The words faded around him, broken like clouds of smoke in the air.

  “Thank you,” he said to the doctor and slipped out into the hallway.

  Katie was still asleep in the waiting room, her head against the back of her chair. He paused just outside the ICU and watched her for some time before heading down the hall toward the bathroom.

  There, in his own soundless way, he cried.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CORKY MCKEAN, ONE OF THE TWO BROTHERS who owned the Cloverleaf, had a face like a whipped pit bull and a spine a
s crooked as the contours of a woodpile. His hands were big—lumberjack’s hands—with curled, blackened nails at the tips of his fingers. Scarred by adolescent acne, Corky’s cheeks resembled two tic-tac-toe boards, separated by a nose as flat as a bottle cap.

  As the day manager, Corky rarely remained at the Cloverleaf after dark, but the sudden snowstorm that had accosted the city just prior to his routine departure caused him to loiter behind the bar, smoking a Macanudo while seated on a keg of beer. He was notorious for his hatred of snow—feared it, some said—ever since he spun off an icy road and slammed into a tree somewhere upstate. Now he continued to peek through the Cloverleaf’s narrow window while he smoked to watch the storm’s progression. He silently hoped it would let up soon: he had a can of baked beans and a couple of skin flicks at home that he was anxious to abuse.

  John entered in a gust of wind and snow, and hurried straight for the bathroom. The Cloverleaf had become familiar to him over the passage of weeks. As he walked the length of the room, he offhandedly took notice of the faces at the tables and around the bar. Some he recognized—Boxie, the old boozer, was seated at the end of the bar; likewise, the kid in the knitted Islanders cap hugged a table toward the back of the room—and some he did not.

  The bathroom was empty. John pushed open the stall door, slipped inside, and attempted to work the busted lock to no avail. The stall was tiny, hardly large enough for someone to stand upright, let alone sit down on the toilet. The back of the stall door was decorated with crude graffiti and at least twenty different phone numbers. Behind him, the flecked rim of the toilet bowl prodded the backs of his knees.

  John unzipped his jacket and lifted his fleece pullover above his waist. There was a pocket sewn to the inside lining of the fleece, in which a reel-to-reel recorder the size of an audiocassette was secured. A wire from the recorder was taped to his chest and ran the length of his upper body, capped by a minuscule microphone just below the neckline of his shirt. He adjusted the reel-to-reel against his stomach and straightened the fleece, then his jacket. He hated to wear the wire, but knew it was better than using a portable transmitter; it was more reliable for recording and, blessedly, did not require the surveillance team to crowd too close around the Cloverleaf.