Relief came over him. He shoved pizza into his mouth, chewed at it voraciously, and washed it down with the cold beer. He looked again at the pictures on the wall before him. He stared at the photo of Mario Rizzo on one knee, stroking the back of a dog. Another of a greyhound at full sprint and leaning into the bend of the track, looking as if it were levitating, lean muscles bulging from thin bone, and he imagined Sheila there, just to the right of the camera lens, leaning on the railing, watching the dogs racing past, and in a moment she would be captured within that frame herself, smiling beautifully forever.
“I know where to find you, Mario Rizzo,” he said. “I know where to fucking well find you.”
63
_________________________
Wonderland Dog Track, Revere
HE WATCHED THE two men appear on the horizon, two black figures against the snow-packed field and the sky above, colored like wet stone, its clouds breaking and rolling in slow liquid movements. One was tall and lean, bowed slightly, the other a little shorter, compact, and moving with a stiff determination even as he seemed to be limping. A tingling sense of déjà vu came over him, some future memory that seeped in from the spaces between dream and premonition, and he lowered his head wearily and sighed. It was time.
One of the dogs nuzzled against his leg. She sat beside him, and he dropped to one knee and pulled her to his chest. He felt her shivering, the sharpness of her ribs beneath her thinning coat. Her one good eye glistened wetly from the frigid air.
“Maxine, my old lady, I know it’s too damn cold. Go join the others and get those muscles worked up before the big storm.” He stroked her head and then said, “Go on now.”
The old greyhound gave him a worried look, as if she knew that the two figures approaching were carrying some bad news, but she obeyed his command and ambled off as well as her arthritic legs would allow, joining the other two dogs, Norman and Sierra, who moved through the snow quicker than she could, their heads bobbing as they rushed each other in play.
He stood and wiped the snow sticking to his knee. The two men were getting closer. It seemed they knew he wouldn’t make a run for it.
Norman and Sierra noticed the men approaching, and they hustled back and paced around him, craning their necks up as they circled, occasionally barking while their panting spurts of breath steamed the cold air. He wondered if they could feel what he was feeling: the fear and yet acceptance that everything would soon be at an end. The sound of the world felt contained, as if nature were holding its breath. He reached out to Sierra, and she nudged his hand before mewling a sad strange song. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he soothed.
With their hands stuffed inside their coat pockets, the two men were close enough now so that he could see their faces. They didn’t look like killers, nor did they look like police. The taller one seemed somewhat familiar, unshaven and gaunt and looking as if he’d been through the wash one too many times. It seemed as if he were barely on his feet and might fall any minute. The shorter guy was clean-shaven; his square face shone, reddened by the wind. As they came closer, he could see the shorter man’s eyes, bright and blue in bloodshot whites.
The shorter guy said, “Bobby Renza.”
“I don’t go by that name anymore.” His voice cracked as he spoke, as if something were catching painfully in his throat. The dogs moved toward the strangers. Steam fell from their open mouths, tongues hanging as they panted, brown mottled with pink.
He shrugged, scratched at his beard, cigarette smoldering between nicotine-stained fingers.
“We need to talk,” the shorter man said.
“What about? I don’t know nothing and I got nothing to say.”
“Maybe. It’s about Sheila Anderson.”
“Are you here to kill me?”
The shorter one paused at that.
“We just want to talk.”
Renza knelt by Norman, rubbed his hackles, as Sierra came and licked at his other hand. He looked at the two men, who eyed him flatly, the stone-faced blue-eyed one and the thin, sick one giving off such a buzz he could feel it. So many things he could do right now and perhaps make a getaway, but he felt so damn tired. He nodded toward a little wooden shack attached to a narrow extension where they kept the kennels. The shack’s stovepipe chimney funneled a gray smoke into the even grayer sky.
“All right then,” he said.
THE ROOM WAS dimly lit but for the flickering light that came from the woodstove in a corner on which a blackened coffeepot sat, and from a small window above a cot piled with discolored sheets and wool army blankets. It smelled of warm dog hair, tobacco, old animal feed, stale sweat, and of bedsheets that hadn’t been changed in some time. The dogs followed them into the room, and Renza closed the door behind them. The older-looking dog pulled herself up onto the bunk but continued to stare at them.
Renza left them while he put the other two dogs in their cages, and from the kennel there came the sound of scratching and a chorus of excited barking. When he returned, he put two splintered logs into the fire, poked at the embers beneath them until flames shot up and licked, crackling, at the wood. “Sierra and Norman get a little wary around new people, but don’t worry about Maxine here, she’s a harmless old lady.” The dog looked toward him, nervously stole glances at the two strangers.
“All the other greyhounds are down in Florida for the winter. These here with me didn’t make it. They’re way past their prime, not one race left in the tank.” He walked to an industrial wooden trestle turned on its side to make a table, picked up a bottle of rum and a dirty glass.
“If you’re not here to finish me, you might as well pull up a chair, help me finish off this bottle.”
Bobby Renza was not what Dante had expected. His marquee good looks had long since faded. Bloodshot eyes burned from deep-set shadowed sockets. He had an unruly black beard. The pompadour was gone. Now his hair was long and swept over his ears, a black stocking cap tight on his head. He wore a tattered red and black flannel jacket, frayed at the collar and cuffs. The place around him was just as disheveled. Magazines and a stack of old newspapers and empty cans of beans and empty bottles of Coca-Cola strewn about, and above, exposed ceiling beams that seemed to bend, ready to snap and cave in from all the snow packed onto the flat tar roof.
Renza stared at Dante. “Now I know who you are. Sheila kept a picture of you and her sister on the dresser. She used to talk about you sometimes.”
Dante stepped closer to the fire, seeking some warmth to thaw the numbness in his bandaged shoulder. “We know all about pictures. We found some nice ones you took of her, the kind of smut they pass around at stag parties. Was she proud enough to put those on the dresser?”
“Those were just for the two of us,” he said and closed his eyes for a moment. “Most of them anyway.”
Cal pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “And the rest for Foley?”
“A few.”
“You’re a real piece of shit.”
A sad smile crept over Renza’s mouth. He coughed weakly and then cleared his throat as he sat down at the table. “I loved that girl like you wouldn’t believe.” He filled up the small glass with rum, took his lips to it, and drained it.
There was a moment of silence in the room, interrupted by wood popping in the fire. And as if the rum had already made him drunk, Renza continued. “You know, it was that faraway look in her eyes. First time I met her, back when I was singing still, I noticed it and immediately thought she was trouble. Not the kind like in the movies where she sticks a knife in your back when you’re not looking. No, it was never that way. Just like something damaged, something that you know you can’t fix but you damn well try your hardest anyway.”
“That damage attracted you,” Dante said.
“Yeah. And not just me.”
“She left you for Foley, didn’t she?” Cal asked.
“You’ve got it wrong, all wrong. She was always my girl. Even he knew that.”
“Then come clean.
” Dante sat down in the chair opposite him, took off his hat, and placed it on the table.
They watched him pour three fingers’ worth of rum, then drink it down.
“Day in, day out, stuck here hiding like some sick fucking dog. Somebody knows they can use you and they hand you a lot of money, you take it and feel this is it, the big payday. I thought I’d get what I finally deserved, take care of Sheila the right way by giving her everything she ever wanted.”
He paused as he filled his glass again. “Well over a million in bills and bonds. They wouldn’t notice the difference, right? A few thousand here and there out of a haul like that? Peanuts, right? But we all thought that way, you know, taking from the top and then some more.”
“The Brink’s job,” Cal said.
“Yeah.”
“And Sheila knew too much about it. She knew what you were up to, but that’s not what got her in trouble. It was your uncle, the contractor, right? He forced you to give her up to Foley. She was there to grease the deal. Foley had his fun, and now your scumbag uncle is in charge of tearing down and rebuilding Scollay, and it’s on her fucking grave.”
Renza took three tugs off the bottle, pulled it roughly back from his chapped lips. “I loved that Sheila like nobody else ever did. And she did everything to protect me, kept her mouth shut…”
“What about the Emporium, room eight-oh-oh-one?”
“What about it? That’s Foley’s penthouse suite, where he and her used to meet. After I introduced the two of ’em, she went regularly by herself, whenever he called, the fucking shit.”
“Where’s the money, Bobby?” Dante asked.
“They killed her…you think it’ll make any difference if they get their money now?”
“I don’t think she died for the money, Bobby, but it might be the only thing that can save you.”
Dante pushed his chair in closer, the sound of wood scraping wood. “Who killed her?”
Bobby shook his head. “Honest to God, I don’t know.” He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.
“You knew she was pregnant?” Cal asked.
“Of course I did.”
Dante’s head was beginning to throb. “So you know what happened to the baby?”
Renza shook his head and took another hit off the bottle. “Dead and buried in a landfill for all I know. I have no fucking idea.” He slammed the bottle against the table, made a fist, and clenched his teeth.
“I don’t know shit. She could have been fucking half this city for all I know. A bunch of politicians at the State House, trading favors for favors, or at the jazz clubs she always went to, going down on some niggers just so they’d play her favorite song. And that makes me the sucker, don’t it?”
“You’re the one that sold her out, Bobby, pimped her like she was a whore.”
But Bobby no longer seemed to be listening. His bottle was almost empty. His head swayed and then drooped and stayed that way; his fingers lightly touched the bottle before him.
Dante clenched his jaws. “Hey,” he said, and kicked at Bobby’s feet. “Hey!” He wanted to hit him, but he knew that Bobby probably wouldn’t feel a thing; he was too far gone.
“Fucking wet-brain,” Cal said. They both knew he wouldn’t last much longer even if he did decide to run. The old greyhound on the cot eyed them sadly and groaned. Dante stood and made for the door, and Cal followed him.
Outside the cold air felt good on Cal’s neck and face, sharp in his nostrils, stinging his eyes so they watered. The snow-packed field was covered in shadow, and in the dusk-lit distance they could see the shell of the Wonderland racetrack, with its gleaming frozen track and empty stands, looking like something skeletal, just bones and the vast emptiness that seemed to hold it all together. It appeared as though it was much farther away, and that the walk back to the parking lot would take them nothing short of an eternity.
They began walking, and then paused when they heard the slight stirrings of a song. It was Renza’s voice coming to them, bending against and falling into the wind that whirled throughout the grandstands and onto the open field before them. It was a familiar ballad, strange and haunting, from which all the ravages and drunken slurring had lifted, and Renza’s voice was as golden in timbre and cadence as it had ever been on the radio all those years before.
Come take my hand, my love
Hold it tight and never let go
Under a night without stars, we’ll dance one more time
Come take my hand, and never let go
Forever and ever, the night sky we will climb
Dante shivered and pulled his coat more firmly about him. The dead still sing, he thought as he and Cal trudged back through the field, the sky above darkening with night and neither of them saying a word to the other but instead merely listening to the last ghostly echoes of Renza’s song fading throughout the old iron balustrades and tin roofing and then, almost at its end, broken by a dog’s howl.
64
_________________________
Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Mission Hill, Roxbury
A FLUSHED-CHEEKED ALTAR boy swung the censer back and forth, its incense blurring the air in slants of gray smoke, drifting across the altar. Cal watched from the second pew behind the left transept. At the shrine to Saint Peter on his left, over which hung hundreds of canes and crutches dating back over a hundred years, the wood shining, a polished luster as if encased in amber, a half-dozen disabled parishioners were lighting candles and praying. Cal watched several of them bless themselves and rise, struggling from their kneelers, and totter to the center aisle, genuflect, and make the sign of the cross again before leaving. In the vestibule an old woman, stout-hipped and bow-backed, in a black shawl murmured the Stations of the Cross. A ragged run in her stocking cleaved the back of one thick calf as if it had been sliced by a blunt razor blade.
He watched the altar boy, who had paused in his swinging and then looked upward at the high domed and glittering ceiling as if an image of God might appear among the clouds and angels. The sound of footfalls, sharp and distinct on the tile, came to him only after he had registered the presence of bodies settling into the pew behind him.
He turned slightly, and Blackie’s voice stopped him.
“Keep looking straight ahead, O’Brien. Just keep praying.”
Cal arched his neck, felt the muzzle of a gun there at the base of it.
“Did you think I wouldn’t know it was you two fuckups that torched my places, my fucking bar?”
Despite Blackie’s warning, he turned to the right, glanced at Joe Kinneally, and then to the left, Pat Mulrooney, and in the vestibule, the slender, stoop-shouldered figure of Shaw. He saw that Blackie’s left arm was held in a sling, and he took some satisfaction in that. “Dante got you after all,” he said. “You prick.”
Blackie pressed the gun sharply into Cal’s neck, prodding him to turn back to the front. Shaw moved up the aisle toward the altar, genuflected and blessed himself, put his hands together in mock prayer.
Blackie eyed him and scowled. “I told you to wait in the fucking car. What are you, a fucking idiot?”
Shaw shrugged, indifferent to Blackie’s insults. “You want me to go back to the car?”
“Nah, stay here now that you’re fucking here. It’s bad enough that Sully says I got to bring you with me wherever I go.”
Shaw laughed uneasily, his face burning red.
The gun barrel pushed harder against the back of Cal’s neck. He should have been scared, but he wasn’t. This is how it’s going to end, he thought, and felt a strange calm. In his own church, no less.
“So,” he said, “what was it with you? The Brink’s money or just the kicks?”
Blackie laughed, but it was harsh sounding, rueful, and filled with resentment. “That was the Butcher, not me, the sick fuck. I get no fun out of doing something like that, and I made an example out of him, didn’t I? Found him even when the cops couldn’t.”
Cal shook his head, felt
Blackie jab the barrel into the base of his skull.
“He killed the other girls, all right, but you killed Sheila. You discovered the truck at the yards and found the perfect way to get rid of her, the perfect cover.”
“If I want to kill someone, I kill them plain and simple.”
“Like the old man out in Somerville. Like my wife.”
“Yeah, just like that.”
“So why did you kill her then? If you find her, you find the money. Unless she refused to talk? So you found her, but she never gave him up, never led you to the money and Bobby Renza.”
Cal could feel Blackie’s anger, palpable as heat, surge at the back of his neck. The gun wasn’t moving now, and he wondered if Blackie would wait to shoot him.
“I told you, I didn’t kill the cunt.”
“How did you find out about Sheila and Renza anyway? How’d you know he was connected to the Brink’s job?”
“You always talk too much, O’Brien. Shut up for once, why don’t you.”
“I know you put her clothes in the trailer to make it look like the Butcher, and she wasn’t killed on Tenean Beach. You killed her somewhere else—but where? And why dump her at Tenean?”
“I said, shut the fuck up.”
They waited as the church emptied. Soon the altar boy was gone and the old women doing the Stations. Shaw strolled toward the transept, feet echoing on the tile, looked around at the few parishioners who remained: a dark-suited man bent over the votive candles praying, a woman wearing a shawl dropping coins, clattering, into the empty poor box, and then glanced back to Cal.
He moved to the left and then to the right, pacing. When the man and woman were gone, he reached inside his wool coat and withdrew a silver-plated automatic. He checked the clip, opened and closed the chamber with a swift metallic click.
Blackie looked up at him. “What the fuck are you doing now?”
Serpents in the Cold Page 33