At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “That what you think I am, Todd?” Rascob said. “An ass-kissing apprentice hood? Never thought of myself in those terms.”

  “You don’t exactly fit, do you?” Naughton said. “I suppose Dad’d say you do, though—you work for McKeach; that’s enough.”

  “Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Rascob said. “Government puts me in jail, and then when I come out, takes away the only way I have to make an honest living. And then when I go to work for the only kind of guy who’ll hire me, cops say I’m now a hood. Talk about Catch Twenty-two.”

  “Oh, don’t take it so hard, Max,” Naughton said. “My old man wasn’t talking about you—he was just hugely pissed off. ‘Think you can kiss those doper friends of yours good-bye? And get by without the money you’re gettin’ from the hoodlums, doin’ things you don’t want me or any other cop to know about? Tall order, son, mighty tall order.’ ”

  “You use dope?” Rascob said. “You’re kiddin’ me. Heroin kills people. I thought only niggers’re dumb enough for that shit.”

  Naughton laughed incredulously. “Max,” he said, “you shittin’ me? No, I don’t do that shit. ‘Dope’ ’s what Dad calls anything that isn’t good old booze. Sure I do a little weed. What’s a little spliff with friends? Nothin’ heavy, none of that shit, but weed? Everybody does.”

  Rascob shook his head. “I’m gettin’ old,” he said.

  A man slightly bent at the waist backed out through the swinging doors behind him, dragging a large dark green plastic tub with black wheels over the steel threshold out onto the loading dock. He wore jeans, heavy black lug-soled work boots, a long white bloodstained lab coat and a dark grey scally cap. A large tan-and-white cat lithely extending and narrowing itself trotted swiftly though the doors alongside the tub, jumping on top as the man pulled it through and the doors slammed behind it. The cat sat down, fixing its gaze on the man in the cap, and balancing itself regally rode on the tub the rest of the way out to front of the dock at the dumpster. There it craned its neck and peered down over the edge of the tub at Rascob and Naughton.

  “Mouser,” Rascob said absently, ignoring the man in the scally cap and using the same respectful tone to greet the cat he would have used to acknowledge another person. The cat registered him and shifted its gaze back to the man in the grey cap and long white coat. It licked its chops.

  The man straightened up and put his fists on his waist. “Goddamn you, I told you No,” he said to the cat. The cat cocked its head to the right, raised its right paw and waggled it at the top of the tub, as though explaining something. The man laughed. He turned and faced Rascob. The front of the grey cap was bloodstained. “Max, can you beat that?” he said. “This fuckin’ cat. There’s meat in this—beef scraps, I been makin’ up roasts—and he wants them; he thinks they’re his. We keep him for the same thing we kept his mother, Rosie, sixteen years for, to keep the mice out of the place and catch the ones that come in, don’t know the policy here. And she did an excellent job. But he’s too fine for it. His taste runs more to steak, and fresh cod.

  “No,” he said, disgustedly, looking back at the cat. “ ‘Mouser’ my ass. We got mouse shit under the bakery shelves. We got mouse-shitty droppings inna backrooms. Anywhere you wanna go, anytime you wanna do it, make an effort, move some shelves and really take a look, you’ll find mouse shit inna store. From which I’d conclude at least that we’ve got some mice, probably quite a few of them. Board of Health’ll think so, too, next time they inspect us, and they’ll shut us down—unless first we get the rat-’n’-bug guy, cost us three-four hundred bucks, shut the place down for the day, keep everybody out, Stop and Shop gets all our business, so that he can gas the bastards. And then after he gets through, come back the middle of the night, tear the goddamned place apart, cleanin’ up the mouse shit. Which is a big pain in the ass, and why we keep a cat around—so that we won’t have to do it.

  “This would be you, Official Cat. But you don’t do your job. Far be it from you, go runnin’ after mice. ‘At’s beneath your dignity.”

  “You don’t hafta take this, Mouser,” Naughton said. “You can report him for upsettin’ you, insultin’ your feline gender diversity. You happen to be a cat that doesn’t like huntin’ and then eatin’ mice. Most boy cats don’t. And for this he’s threatenin’ to discriminate against you.”

  “And you can stay outta this,” the man in the grey cap said. “You don’t understand what’s involved here. A principle. This’s exactly how welfare families get started. Feed one shiftless breedin’ bastard, pretty soon none of ’em work. Lookit what his momma did—hooked up with some fly-by-nighter, hadda raise her kid by herself. ’s why we had this one gelded. Put a stop, this foolishness.”

  “Right,” Rascob said, “and that’s probably the reason Mouser isn’t following his family profession—you had his balls cut off. You expect him to do cat work for you, after you did that to him? Stopped him from acting like a self-respecting tomcat? Would you work for a man who had that done to you? He thinks you owe him a living now—I think the cat is right. Whadda you think, Todd?”

  “Absolutely,” Naughton said. “Give the cat some meat, Doran.”

  “Uh huh,” Doran said, nodding, but turning and bending to lift the lid on the tub, causing the cat to jump off at once, turning acrobatically in midair so that it landed next to Doran’s right foot, sitting down immediately and rising up on its haunches, fluttering its front paws at him. “Here we got the cop-to-be, promotin’ free loadin’—I’m surprised you’re not tellin’ me to get him a cruller an’ coffee.” He opened the tub and reached in, sorting through it for a moment before bringing out a handful of red-and-white flesh trimmings that he held up for a moment, tantalizing the cat into beseeching him further by meowing and rising off its haunches, climbing partway up his right leg.

  “And,” Doran said, glancing slyly at Rascob, “also the man who keeps the books, always very sensitive about the balls and what their purpose is, and even more so lately, huh?” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head as he dropped the scraps onto the platform and the cat pounced on them, using its front paws to gather them expertly into a neater pile, then settling down on its stomach to eat, growling huskily in its pleasure as it chewed the flesh.

  “Isn’t that so, Max?” Doran said. “New life in the old boy lately?” Rascob’s face reddened deeply. He did not say anything. “Or did I hear that wrong, Todd?” Doran said to Naughton, laughing. “I thought someone or other said best news Max had in years was Sweeney givin’ his poor lonesome sister a job here, she finely kicked her husband out—first she’d seen of him this year.”

  “You know, Doran,” Naughton said, “the big problem the department’s gonna have, day we find you inna harbor with a couple in your head, is where to find a place that’s big enough to round up all the suspects. Foxboro Stadium, I think, unless by then the Pats’ve finally built a new one.”

  “I don’t have time, this happy horseshit,” Rascob said, turning back toward the car. “I got to get the work in.”

  “Max,” Naughton said after him, causing him to turn around. “You do know who the friends were, who my father meant, don’t you?”

  Rascob frowned.

  “Those bad friends he said I’d have to give up, ’long with weed, if I got on the force,” Naughton said.

  Rascob grinned. “I could make a wild guess,” he said. “Look at the bright side—you probably won’t have that much trouble givin’ up the weed.”

  13

  NARROW BLOCKS OF PALE ORANGE setting sun remained near the front of the smoke-stained acoustic tile ceiling of the big office at the front of the second floor of Flynn’s Spa when Rascob in his red-striped shirt-sleeves, his narrow dark blue tie pulled down from his collar and his dark grey suit jacket draped over the back of the orange plastic chair, finished toting up the work. The big office was rectangular, about thirty by twenty; he sat at the center of the eight-foot plastic laminated banquet table that occupied the middle. Overhead, tran
slucent ceiling panels concealed tubular flourescent bulbs that hissed and crackled, flickering every so often.

  Over the years he had learned to ignore that distraction and all the others disturbing concentration in the big office. In the winter the room was always chilly, despite the excessive dry heat intermittently blown out by the two-burner Universal gas stove in the northeast corner, a squat four-foot brown steel cube on six-inch legs. It whooshed softly every five or six minutes; its thermostat, fastened too near it on the northerly wall six feet away, fired up the propane burner behind the heatproof glass door when the temperature in that corner had dropped below 75 degrees—the low 60s elsewhere in the room—sighing off again when the thermostat had risen back to 75. In the summer the 14,000-BTU Fedders air-conditioning unit mounted in the front wall under the windows groaned mightily to maintain the office temperature below 80. When summer came again Rascob would shift to short-sleeved shirts, leave his tie and coat at home and ignore the heat and noise as he ignored the terms of winter.

  McKeach and four other unskilled workmen had built the room in two days after Brian G. acquired the spa from John Flynn as a favor, enabling Flynn to retire to Florida.

  McKeach resented disparaging remarks about his carpentry. “Brian G. bought this place, wasn’t ’cause he wanted it. John’d had a heart attack. Doctor said next one’d kill him. He needed to retire and this business was all he had, keep a roof over his head. All Brian said he was doing was ‘making it so John and Bridey could enjoy the fruits of their hard work.’ He had in mind to sell it.

  “I thought we should keep it. That’s why I did the work. We needed someplace private. Get something better? We move. The stove came from some rooming house on K Street, guy’s convertin’ to apartments. Saw it sittin’ on the sidewalk same night he put it out. Air conditioner fell off a truck one night, old Jordan Marsh warehouse over Squantum—thirty, forty fell off that night, Bobby Gleason and his brothers workin’ there, temporary loading-dock hands? They found ’em. Brought one here. ’fore that all we did was sweat our balls off up here, April ’til November. I tell you it was fuckin’ awful, underneath that flat black roof, bakin’ inna sun all day. All you could do to even come up here, got to be July and August. Hadda go right back downstairs, outside, sit down onna loadin’ dock, needed to talk about a thing. And this was not a good idea. Didn’t know who was around, staties tryin’ out their new toys, aimin’ parabolic mikes your way.

  “Of course it’s bargain basement—nothin’ I went out and shopped for, ’Cept the studs and that crap, Grossman’s.

  “And that’s the story of this place. Nobody ever planned it. It never was supposed to last, not long range anyway. Put that air conditioner through the wall there? That was damn hard work, but by then you could see it’s worth it, that much work; place was workin’ well for us.

  “People left us alone here—people meanin’ cops. Say you get inna habit—and Brian used to do this, even though I told him ‘No, this’s not a good idea,’ didn’t always listen to me—where you’re meetin’ with the guys at night in the back room of some guy’s bar. Isn’t somethin’ that you planned, just like this place wasn’t planned; you just sorta fell into it. Night after night you’re meetin’ with the guys, and it’s always inna same barroom. And I don’t care which one it is, Butchie Morgan’s like Brian G. did, or me when I’m first gettin’ started, goin’ over The Curragh.

  “You do this, night after night, always goin’ the same place, you are liable—hell, you’re gonna—you’re gonna run into a lotta cops. Cops enjoy a glass of beer—and this don’t mean, and I’m not sayin’, they’re a buncha drunks. Lot of them can handle it—they’re the ones you gotta watch. They’re off duty, goofin’ off, like to have a few with the boys. Just like everyone else. Not bad guys to hang around with.

  “So you go in and there they are, you both got a right to be there, and, well, that’s the way it is. What you are doin’ is, you’re hanging out with people who’re supposed to put your ass in jail.

  “ ‘Ah, calm down,’ Brian would say. ‘This’s Butchie Morgan’s. We own Butchie Morgan’s, anna cops come in there know it.’

  “ ‘It is, though, Brian,’ I would say—‘it really is a problem. Someday those cops’ll get us. An’ that is what it is. You go in, there they are—it’s all perfectly normal. You get used to each other. Stop even thinkin’ about it. Well, I don’t care, they are. Because off duty, on the clock—that doesn’t mean shit to the cops if that is how they get to know you, who you hang around with, what it looks like you’re up to, all right? They see you, get to know you, well, they also get so they know where they can not only find you, but also all the guys you run with, they might have a bug to spare, listen in your conversation. And for you this is not good. You gave them the PC.’ ” He sighed. “Brian wouldn’t listen.

  “What you have got to do if you want things to stay good is start thinkin’ like the cops do. When the cops are off duty, after dinner they don’t say to their dear wife, ‘Hon, I think I might swing ’round Flynn’s Spa a couple hours, see how the cabbages’re doin’, izza watercress all right.’ That isn’t how they think. No normal person does. So, when we started comin’ here to get together, talk about some things, we didn’t always find a bunch of cops standin’ around. Didn’t drop around Flynn’s Spa, they got off work, lookin’, have some beers. And even after they knew this’s where we come to talk, well, what good did that then do them, huh? Nothin’. They wanna overhear us here, first they’ve gotta getta warrant, get an order from a judge, and this’s not, I’m glad to say, an all-that-easy thing to do. In America.”

  Here he would pause. “And if some cop should get a warrant, and install a bug this place, the very most he’d have it would be one week, the outside. I’d find it, pull it right out by the roots—that is guarafuckinteed.”

  McKeach would not explain the basis for his assurance. “That don’t matter,” he would say. “The point is after that much time’d gone by, after we first came here, and we’d felt no cryin’ need to find another place, and Brian G. was dead, the chances then were we weren’t going to, and so then we settled in.” Then McKeach would pause again.

  “And when you think about it, you know, there are some advantages to havin’ walls that you can hear through, when you’re on the second floor and conductin’ private business. Gives a man a little warning, someone comes into his building, got no proper business there.”

  At the southeasterly end of the passageway outside the office there was a chain-flushed toilet with an overhead tank, also enclosed by thin paneling. Now it flushed loudly and a man belched nearby noisily enough to be heard over it. Rascob shook his head and snorted. There were eight other molded orange chairs grouped haphazardly around the office and he grimaced every time as coming in he grabbed the handiest to the door and pulled it to the table to commence the work. Each time he reminded himself that the chair provided no support, so that he must sit up straight with shoulders back, and it did not matter; once engaged he gradually bent forward over the table, hunching his shoulders, so that when he finished his back was once more killing him. He heard the toilet door close down the passageway. The deep affronted tone of a diesel tractor’s horn bawled on the boulevard outside, drawing sharp cries of objection from two or three automobile horns. He put his hands on his lumbar region and arched it, taking a deep breath and moaning.

  He heard someone passing in the corridor hesitate near the office door and place a hand on the knob, perhaps considering violation of the iron rule that although after Sweeney unlocked the door in the morning it remained so all day until relocked by the last person leaving at night, each person entering or leaving the big office during the day closed the door behind him, and except by invitation it was only to be opened by a person with a key—Rascob, Sweeney, the Frogman or McKeach. So Rascob at once laughed and said, loudly enough to carry through the hollow wooden door: “Nothing serious, I’ll live.” The man outside—perhaps Doran; he had no business
in the office—said, “Had me worried for a minute.” Rascob heard him walk away. He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

  The paper bags from the trunk now lay crumpled in the grey metal wastebasket next to his left leg. There had been twenty-two of them, for the fourth time one less than McKeach had told him to expect. Taking them one by one from the black duffel bag, now empty under the table next to his right leg, he had emptied the contents onto the table and tallied them on the printing calculator he kept in the top right-hand drawer of the grey steel desk under the windows. The desktop was taken up with a black telephone, a pop-up phone-number indexer, a five-inch Gran Prix black-and-white personal TV, and Sweeney’s account book, a large black looseleaf notebook open on column-ruled pages captioned APRIL PRODUCE, APRIL BAKED. Rascob had tried the armless wooden castered chair behind it; it was more uncomfortable than the orange plastic chairs.

  He had coded the entries as usual by location, using letter designations based upon an alphabet beginning that month with the letter T. McKeach, initiating Rascob: “Brian G. said, all any code can do’s delay the cops. No code, even a tough one, is ever gonna stop them from figurin’ out what you’re doin’, from your records of it, if you give ’em enough time. Our code isn’t very tough. Cops ever get their hands on it, they’ll crack it—half an hour.

  “But it can’t be very tough if you’re gonna use it and also be able change it. Your people’ve gotta know it, and use it—without thinkin’ more about it than they are about the business that they’re doin’ in it. You make it too tough, an’ what happens then, they don’t use it—so then what the hell good’s it to you? Might as well not have it at all.