I said, “Your phone’s right here.”
“The other two were also mine. I’ve got their phones right here, but I didn’t get the chance to switch them back.” He took them out of his pocket and put them on the table.
“Anything interesting on them?”
“They’re locked.”
“Use your magic.”
Bay handed the phones to Flor along with a twenty-dollar bill and asked her to wait till we were gone and then return the phones to our friends. “Tell them they can also keep the substitutes. And tell the slender gentleman to check his e-mail.”
When we were out of sight, Bay showed me the JPEG he’d attached to his e-mail—a still photo of Pino taken from the murder video. He had been at the house, as his face reflected in a mirror at a confusing moment attested. I confessed I hadn’t noticed him in the video. Bay said he hadn’t, either, the first few times he’d seen it.
I said, “Should we be worried about those two?”
There was, it turned out, no longer any reason to fret about a fractious Clete Meatyard. The emphatically lifeless goon was found the following morning, naked, hung by his trussed ankles, and run twenty feet up the flagpole at the Melancholy Public Library. He’d been sloppily disemboweled, cut open from groin to gullet with the nine-inch stainless steel game shears found in the slop of organs at the base of the flagpole, some of which had been nibbled at by some razor-toothed nocturnal critter or other. Meatyard’s neck had been cleanly sliced and vehemently carved, his head was nearly severed, and he had pretty much bled out by the time Muriel Spence, reference librarian, arrived for work. Muriel was aghast, but unruffled. She took out her smartphone and snapped a picture of the eviscerated and exsanguinated union president and sent it off to her BFF, Perdita Curry, and then she called the police. Perdita posted the gruesome image—with a warning—on her blog, Curry On, along with a brief interview with Muriel. When Perdita asked Muriel what had gone through her mind when faced with that horrifying sight, Muriel said, “The Parrot Sketch.”
Perdita got her fifteen minutes of fame. Over the next few days she appeared on all of the local noon and six and eleven o’clock news reports talking about the shocking death of a public servant. Out at Betty’s Starlight Lounge, Aldore LaFlamme, gator poacher, may have nursed a Dark & Stormy and wondered what this unappealing gal talking to that beautiful Sofia Niente had that he did not. He, too, had a story to tell, a story to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and they wouldn’t let him tell it to the world. Sometimes his life just seemed to turn to shit while he was doing nothing but having a drink, minding his own beeswax.
So:
•Chafin Halliday was still in the area and was set on revenge.
•Pino Basilio was likely his next target. And he, Pino’s.
•Chafin had nothing to lose. Pino, everything.
•Bay had a hunch where Chafin might be staying, but did we want to find him, given the menacing circumstances?
•Chafin was something much more than a serial snitch. He was a certified badass malefactor.
In fact, and in time, and in installments, we would listen to and read the story of how Chafin Halliday found himself without friend or family, without a negotiable identity, and without protection.
Chafin Stuart Halliday was born Charles Anthony Houde in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Remy, was a butcher, his mother, Nina, née Cinelli, a seamstress. He selected the name Halliday when he entered the Witness Protection Program (WITSEC). Charles (aka Chuckie, Chick, Carlo, Chaz, and Charlie Machine) dropped out of high school and began working for Coin-O-Matic Distributors. His official duties included servicing vending machines and jukeboxes and seeing that there were ample Sinatra, Damone, and Bennett 45s in every bar from Central Falls to Cranston. His unofficial, but more crucial, duty was to collect payment on the fees levied on businesses by his boss, Mr. Ianotti. Tributes, you could call them.
An eager beaver, a self-starter, a team player, Charles worked his way up to bagman in the Ianotti crime family, transporting family cash between Providence and Boston, and eventually earned a promotion to enforcer. When he was arrested for the murder of Eamon Delaney in Dorchester, Charles expected Junior Ianotti, who had taken over the business operations while his father was in prison, to bail him out and take care of the legal defense. Junior did not. “I don’t know what I ever did to him. I must have been slandered,” Chafin told FBI investigators. “There’s a lot of backbiting that goes on in my line of work.” Charles admitted to three murders—jerkoffs from the Winter Hill Gang, no big loss—and was suspected to have carried out several others. He and his recently married wife, Temple Luxe Houde, were put in WITSEC along with Charles’s parents and a favorite aunt. The parents refused, saying they were not moving off Atwells Avenue after fifty years. “We have our infrastructure in place,” Remy told his son. “We can’t start over. You know how hard it is to find a mechanic you can trust?” One Sunday morning Remy started the Buick to drive to Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and the car exploded, killing him and his wife.
Charles had met Temple in an airport bar in Newark. He was on his way to meet a girlfriend in Myrtle Beach, where he owned a condo on the Strand. He told Temple he was in industrial sales and was on his way to a trade show in Birmingham. He bought her a prickly pear margarita and one drink led to another and one thing to another. He changed his flight to hers, upgraded them both to first class, and they flew off to Rochester, where he wooed her for three weeks at the Americana Hotel before they drove to Niagara Falls and married, her second, his first. It was not until after the whirlwind courtship and elopement that Charles told Temple what he really did for a living, and she told him about Roger LeMoyne, to whom she was technically still married. At least in Canada and in the eyes of God.
When she was seventeen, Temple married LeMoyne, an eighteen-year-old dropout and drywaller from Port Perry, Ontario, who had black hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, and a strange and wonderful ass. He liked to fish and drink and screw, but he did not like to work or bathe or take his time. He’d come home from the Comet Pond with a lunch cooler full of gutted perch, open a Molson, and expect Temple to fry up the fish in cornmeal, but not before they did the dirty deed, as he called it, on the raunchy sofa in the den with the TV blasting away and all the lights on. Temple grew sick and tired of washing fish scales off her privates when he was finished with her, tired of his wheezing and snoring, his insults, his graceless manner, his rotting teeth, his loutish behavior in public, tired of his sloth and complacency, tired of his rank smell and his drunken rages. She hated the way he chewed his food with his mouth open, how his jaw cracked when he chewed, how he picked his teeth at the table. When he held her off the floor by her throat one evening and threatened to beat the shit out of her if she so much as talked to the faggot clerk at Testor’s Market again, she settled herself with a glass of wine, went to the closet, grabbed the claw hammer, and struck the sleeping LeMoyne three times in the forehead. His hands went to his face after the first blow, but then he didn’t move. She thought she should leave before she killed him, if she hadn’t, or he killed her. She packed a few clothes, cut the phone cord, broke his Shakespeare rod over her knee, took the keys, his wallet, and the F-150, and drove out of her old life and into her new.
The tale of Temple and LeMoyne was sent as an attachment in an e-mail to Geraldine Barry by Krysia when she knew she was about to vanish once again, but sent to Geraldine’s seldom-used AOL account, and Geraldine didn’t read it until weeks after Krysia sent it. When Geraldine read it, she forwarded it to me. Krysia’s subject line read, Somebody has to tell the truth sometime. This was the opening, and the only, chapter, perhaps, of Krysia’s memoir. Or her novel.
So Temple and Charles would get their names changed. The name changes would be legal, they were assured, but would be sealed. At first Temple told Charles this was fucked up and she would not be going. But when she was advised as to the possible fatal consequences of her dec
ision, she agreed and then actually threw herself into her new self. She had always wanted to be Polish (Chopin, Pope John Paul, kapusta), but she had to settle for Polish-American if she wanted a bona fide birth certificate. She could tell people she was from Gdańsk, but the certificate would read “Dudley, Massachusetts.”
Charles’s testimony had put some New England crime family bosses away on murder, fraud, and racketeering charges. He became Chafin Halliday in Everglades County, Florida. He would have preferred New York or Chicago or Philly, which was exactly why he wound up here. They got the house, a monthly stipend, and the documentation they needed to start over. Chafin had some discreet and effective facial plastic surgery. He was given a job as security guard for Wackenhut riding the Tri-Rail between Miami and West Palm. He had a healthy Swiss bank account the Feds knew nothing about and used the money to buy the restaurant and later the boats. It was a wonderful life for a while until the lucrative cash business attracted the attention of the mob. Two pastafed gentlemen in leather jackets showed up at his restaurant very late one night. He shot them both, put their bodies in his office on board the gambling boat, and dumped their weighted bodies overboard while the gamblers reveled on deck. Now he had himself a considerable problem. If the mob found out who he really was, he’d be iced. And the Feds could not protect him if he committed a crime. He called Pino. He was ready to flip again.
Chafin had been waiting for Meatyard in Meatyard’s darkened living room. He sat in an upholstered chair in a corner with a black leather doctor’s bag on his lap. In the bag, a Cash Special captive bolt stunner gun, a five-and-a-half-inch boning knife, and the game shears. The house smelled of stale cigars and citrus air freshener. Earlier, Meatyard’s unsuspecting and genial wife, Melody, had opened the front door for Halliday, who was standing on the doorstep in a brown uniform, balancing an awkwardly large, but empty, carton on his knee. He smiled, put down the carton, and smashed her head, just once, against the doorjamb. He then hog-tied Melody with butcher’s twine, duct-taped her mouth, dragged her upstairs to the attic, and dropped her onto a bed of pink fiberglass insulation. Maybe she would be found alive; maybe she wouldn’t. (She would be.)
Meatyard walked into the house, dropped his keys into a wooden bowl on a small marble-topped table in the foyer, unholstered his service revolver, and locked it in a desk drawer. He took off his jacket and holster and hung them on a clothes tree. He walked into the dining room, unbuttoning his shirt. He sorted through the mail on the table and called to his wife. He unbuckled his belt and undid the button on his trousers. He walked to the answering machine and listened to his message: a voice he didn’t at first recognize, Halliday’s voice, told him he was a dead man. He swore at the voice and shut off the machine. The voice said, “Don’t even turn around.” Meatyard may have felt the cattle gun as it touched his head just below the occipital protuberance the doctors had told him not to worry about, but that would have been the last thing he felt. The gun’s fired mushroom-shaped bolt may or may not have destroyed Meatyard’s entire brain, but it certainly killed him. Halliday stripped Meatyard’s body and set to work with the knife. He took Meatyard’s keys, started up Meatyard’s Cadillac, hefted the body into the trunk, and drove to the library.
26
And then for weeks all was strangely, welcomingly, quiet on the Halliday front. Halliday himself was in hiding, we assumed, or he had left the area, which Bay and I thought unlikely. Pino, we figured, was using his vacation time to furtively track down his former charge. Bay was back at the tables at the Silver Palace. I was seeing clients, seeing Patience, and not seeing, and not speaking with, Venise and Oliver. Django was learning to walk across the Florida room on the window screens. Vladimir and Cerise, mostly Cerise, were planning their seaside wedding and the subsequent tour of Melancholy’s historic sites (there are only two: the statue of Cristoffer Østergaard, the city’s founder, and the Tomato Monument in Festival Park, a relic of the time when Melancholy was the tomato capital of the world, before saltwater incursion rendered farming impossible) and the reception/brunch at Sputnik on the Intracoastal. The Halliday murder investigation and the coincident departmental housecleaning at EPD plodded along like an Ayn Rand novel. Our citizens were distracted by the influx of spring breakers and snowbirds and by some juicy new scandals in the news. The principal of Veronica Lake High, Gulley Seyforth, was busted for possession of cocaine; a Catholic priest at St. Sophia’s was photographed on the beach with his sweetheart, the mother, it turned out, of his two-year-old twin daughters; a school bus monitor and a cop were arrested in a child prostitution sting; and a city commissioner in Gulfstream was caught with child pornography on his City Hall computer.
Late one rainy night, Bay and I let ourselves into La Mélange, now boarded up and closed. We found evidence that Halliday had, indeed, been staying here—a cot, blankets, fast-food cartons, and dirty clothes—but had cleared out. The cops were after him—the good ones and the bad ones. The mob, the Russians, assorted bribable politicians, and unprincipled attorneys—all had a vested interest in seeing that he did not testify before any grand jury or any other investigation or inquiry. Halliday couldn’t trust anyone he knew. He would need to rely on the kindness of strangers. He would be easy to trace if he used his new identity, at least for Pino. He couldn’t be Halliday, or Houde, either. He’d need plenty of cash, which he might have already and was certainly resourceful enough to obtain. He knew, we knew, that he would never live to testify. How long, we wondered, until he surfaced? How long could he hold his breath?
Bill Aubuchon labored to stop his sobbing. His head was back against my office couch, his forearm thrown over his swollen eyes. He was a man seemingly at the end of his rope, and he was boring me to death. I know that bad decisions make for good stories, and I should have perked right up when he told me that he’d confessed his love for Ellen Hillistrom to his wife, Dottie, and told Dottie she should hire an attorney, or use his, and commence with the divorce proceedings, but his blubbering sentimentality and self-pity were infuriating. Dottie called her pharmacist instead and then swallowed a handful of Xanax. Bill found her unconscious in the bathtub and called 911. He was sure this “suicidal gesture” was a manipulative attempt to keep him from leaving, and, of course, he did care “enormously” for Dottie, and he did feel “monstrously” guilty, but if he failed to assert himself, then he would lose Ellen, too. He shook his head and looked at the ceiling and then at the lady in the Automat in the Hopper painting lifting her coffee cup from its saucer, and there he saw, I’m sure, Ellen, near tears, waiting for him to arrive. I took notes for my own upcoming session with Thalassa. I’d wanted to talk about Myles and Red and Carlos, my anger and my grief and my guilt and my general unease and anxiety, a hangover from the crazed business in Alaska. Bill said, “Why? Why? Why?”
“Why what?” I said.
Bill blew his nose, made a fist, and bit his bottom lip. He then took a deep breath, held it, and put his face in his hands.
I began a to-do list: plastic storage boxes, ink cartridges, vodka … I wanted to say, Yes, Bill, life is a lose-lose situation. I did say, “What do you want now?” No answer. “What do you want to happen?” And I waited.
He folded his hands and brought them to his mouth. He leaned back and looked me in the eyes. “I want it to be a year from now. I want this to be over. I want us all to be in a better space.”
“And how will you get to that better space, Bill?”
And that’s when my office door opened and Pino Basilio, looking somewhat blunted and louche in his wrinkled Mr. Anonymous suit and with his unshaven whiskers, walked in, pointed at Bill and then at the door.
I said, “What the fuck!”
Bill said, “Who’s this asshole?”
Pino took a step toward Bill. I stood, but Pino shoved me back into my chair. I said, “We’re in a session right now.”
“The session’s over.” He looked at Bill. “Get off your whiny ass and get the fuck out right now.”
>
Bill looked at me. I shrugged. He got up and said he didn’t expect to be billed for the hour.
Pino moved my Sigmund Freud bobble-head doll and sat on my desk. He swung his feet and wanted to know what happened to Carlos. I said as far as I knew Carlos was scuba diving in the Keys. Pino rubbed his stubbled face, then gripped the desk with both hands and sat up straight. He said, “Don’t. Fuck. With. Me. We both know that you and Carlos were in Alaska together.”
I feigned bewilderment. “I went to Alaska with my father.”
“You came back without him.”
“He died.”
“He did?”
“My father.”
“The airline says you haven’t used your return ticket.”
“That’s strange.”
Pino hopped off the desk, grabbed my shirt in his fist, and leaned in to my face. I told him to get his fucking hands off me, and I was both startled and alarmed by my courage or by whatever it was that provoked my imprudent, if righteous, outburst. Pino twisted the shirt and pushed me back into the chair. I asked him why he had thrown away a decent life. He grabbed me by the throat, and that’s when Bay said, “Smile for the camera, douche bag.” He was standing by the door in a mantis-green suit and school-bus-yellow shirt, aiming his iPhone at us and making a movie.
Pino let go of my throat and said to Bay, “Hand me that phone.”
Bay put the phone in his coat pocket. “I don’t think so.” He took an open deck of cards out of his pocket and fanned the cards. “I’ll cut you for it.”
“No, I’ll take it from you.” Pino stepped toward Bay, who took a single card from the deck in his right hand, lifted it over his head, and threw it at Pino. The card pierced Pino’s throat just below the chin. He didn’t know what had happened. He choked, grabbed for his neck, and dropped to his knees. The second card impaled his cheek and must have cut his tongue as it passed into his mouth—he began spitting up blood.
No Regrets, Coyote Page 28