Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  "Is this the piano mover?"

  Her surprised look said that she had forgotten telling him about that.

  "The guy you met in a Laundromat." Frawley smiled. "I thought you stood him up."

  "What's so funny?"

  "Nothing."

  "You don't want to hear this, but he's helping me."

  "Good. That's good."

  "He's not a piano mover."

  "What's wrong with piano movers?" Their coffees came, and the check. Frawley wasn't worried. "Competition's good. Raises the bar."

  She smiled at him, uncertain. "So there aren't any FBI rules about this?"

  "Against dating the vic? No. Just a personal rule I abide by."

  "Which is?"

  "Never, ever do it," he said, laying down his credit card and a smile.

  * * *

  DINO DROVE A COP'D-OUT 1993 Ford Taurus, the police blues under the grille only noticeable if you were looking for them or if the sun hit them just right. It wasn't an undercover car like Frawley's staid Bureau Cavalier, but other than the whip antenna curling off the trunk, it was good enough for cruising the Town incognito.

  The police radio squawked an "odor of gas" call-- the attending patrolman acknowledging the 911 dispatcher not with Affirmative or Roger or the military Over, but rather with the distinctly Boston I have it-- as Dino and Frawley rolled out from under the Tobin Bridge, passing two Housing Authority sedans idling driver-to-driver at the end of Bunker Hill Street.

  "I've told them," said Frawley. "I've said, you know, just get me an apartment here, set it up. Nothing fancy-- just let me work this square mile exclusively, give me the time, give me the space. Let me play the part. I'd be a yuppie Serpico, you know? A yuppie Donnie Brasco. This town, the way it is-- the streets are so narrow, so tight. Any change is noticed, any deviation from the norm. You can't surv a house here, even if you have the manpower-- even if there's a vacant apartment right across the street and your target's religion forbids window shades-- because the people here, they're too involved. Crack open a beer and a guy three doors down gets thirsty. You gotta be part of the landscape."

  "But they won't do it."

  "Boston would okay it. The SAC could be persuaded, but not D.C. People not from around here have a hard time understanding what a fountain of banditry this zip code is."

  "Fountain of banditry," chuckled Dino. "You got a way."

  The markets on lower Bunker Hill Street advertised their welfare-friendliness with window signs stating EBT Accepted, WIC Accepted. Above and to the left, the tapered spike of the monument rotated as they passed, the Town slow-roasting on an enormous granite spit.

  "So what do you got on this phone company guy?" said Dino.

  "Elden. Desmond Elden. What have I got? I've got nothing, that's what I've got. Guy lives with his mother, holds down a steady job, pays his taxes in full and on time, and has never spent a minute of his life in a jail cell. Goes to mass three, four times a week."

  "And yet you're convinced-- "

  "Oh, I'm absolutely fucking positive."

  "No record," said Dino. "No time in double-A ball. Jumps right into the majors."

  "I don't know the backstory, but it is what it is. As for getting into it later in life, I'd offer this guy's father as Exhibit A."

  "Okay, go."

  "He was clean too, no record, nothing, when they found him on one of those streets we just passed, early 1980, two bullet holes in the chest. Don't have the full read, but it looks like he was a bagman, not an enforcer, more like a buffer between the street and the guys he was collecting for. Arrest bait, this guy with a clean record. Fourteen years with Edison before that."

  "Gotcha."

  "This guy, Elden, he'd be their tech. Spotless work record, including attendance, except for a few important dates. Such as the sick day he took the Tuesday after the marathon. Your next right."

  Dino flipped on the blinker. "Okay, so it's starting to come into focus."

  "Thus far, I've only made him with one other guy, ID'd from the Lakeville mugs. One Douglas MacRay."

  "MacRay?" said Dino.

  "Yeah, ringing a bell?"

  "My age, more like plinking a triangle. Bear with me. Mac MacRay's son?"

  "Bingo."

  Dino licked his lips, smelling something cooking. "Okay. Big Mac's gotta be a good ten or fifteen in. Walpole, I think."

  "MacRay junior last saw twenty months for ag assault. Jumped a guy in a bar, no provocation, nearly killed him. Would have killed him if they hadn't pulled him off. Shod foot was the deadly weapon, public intox, resisting arrest. Got out about three years ago. Note that this string we're looking at now started up about six months later."

  "Hockey star, wasn't he?"

  "Something like that."

  "Yeah, yeah, high school hockey star, Charlestown. MacRay. Drafted, I think. Christ-- was it the Bruins?"

  "This is Pearl Street, where he lives now."

  It was a one-way street, the one way being straight down. Frawley pointed out the worst-looking house halfway down the suicide slope. With the cars parked along the right, there was barely enough room for the midsized Taurus to squeeze through.

  "See what I mean about surveillance?"

  Dino watched his spacing and tried to take in the house at the same time. "Least he keeps it nice."

  "Oh, it's not even his. He rents, or shares, I can't tell. The house is in two names, a sister and a brother, Kristina Coughlin and James Coughlin."

  "Coughlin."

  "Heard the bells that time?"

  "Like Christmas morning at the Vatican. Fathers and sons, huh? What a piece of work Jackie Coughlin Sr. was. I think-- I think-- he bought it falling out of a fourth-floor window or something, a B and E. Wouldn't surprise me if he was pushed by his own partners."

  Frawley remembered the bumping he had received in the cellar bar of the Tap, having matched Coughlin's foggy, more-white-than-blue eyes to his card in the Lakeville mugs. "Young Coughlin started with DUIs and race crimes in his teens and got more adventurous from there. By some miracle he's stayed clean for the past thirty months. No arrests, even served out his parole. He and MacRay went down on a bank job together in 1983, still juvees. Amateur hour, Coughlin vaulting the counter, MacRay brandishing a nail gun."

  "Oh, that's nice."

  "A .22-caliber construction gun loaded with staples. Guy's got a temper. Couple of months before that, he'd gotten himself drummed out of the AHL for putting another player in the hospital."

  "In hockey you usually earn a bonus for that."

  "Guy he fought was on his own team."

  Dino snickered. "The happy-go-lucky type. What about Coughlin's sister?"

  "Sister? I don't know. Haven't even looked at her."

  They bottomed out on Medford and turned left. Dino said, "That makes three."

  "The fourth I'm doing a little conjecture on. We know-- or almost know-- at least we think that they don't farm out their car jobs, because if they did, it's a good bet we'd have had a snitch by now, or at least some whispering on the wind. Coughlin was picked up on a joyriding bid in '90 or '91 with an Alfred Magloan. On his own, Magloan is a convicted car thief and a member of Local 25, does some film-crew work as a driver."

  "That's pretty comprehensive work for file-checking and part-time eyeballing there, Frawl."

  "I'm on them. My sense here is, they smell something. That's why they're staying clear of Elden. But I'm having enough trouble watching one, never mind all four. That's why we're in your car today."

  "You think you got made?"

  Frawley was reluctant to admit it. "Just being real careful. I put in for a new Bureau vehicle, but that's going to take some time."

  "You want me for some weekend duty."

  "Elden is the only one we've got the subpoena for, so I'm all for sticking with him. Build up some paperwork, make a case, grow it out from there."

  "What about this bank Elden's been cruising? In Chestnut Hill."

  "
I don't know."

  "Come on. Speak."

  The Schrafft's building came around the corner, the firehouse, Local 25's headquarters. "Small neighborhood branch. Two exits-- a busy parking lot and narrow Route 9. A small-time bank, ATM. I don't see it."

  Dino signaled and turned back onto Bunker Hill Street, the opposite end, starting up toward the Heights. "So what's he doing there then?"

  "I hope not distracting us."

  19

  Sandman

  "MY GOD!" SHE SAID, spinning around from the purple flowers she was planting in the ground.

  "Hey," said Doug.

  "You scared me! Where did you come from?" She looked around like he might have brought a surprise party with him. "What are you doing here?"

  Her smile made Doug forget who and what he was, made him forget everything. "I was in the area, thought I'd take a chance."

  She brushed at the browned knees of her jeans, as though he cared that they were dirty. "You spying on me?"

  "Maybe just a little."

  "Well, stop it and come on in here."

  The gate catch was a simple wire loop. Inside, he stuck to the neat, S-shaped path of small, crunchy stones. A hello kiss would have come off too forced and awkward, too formal even. She stayed close to him as he looked around. A weathered wooden chest was open behind the bench, stocked with hand tools, fertilizer, Miracle Grow. "This is nice," he said.

  "Yeah, well...." She surveyed it with the backs of her wrists curled against her hips. "My perennials are perennially frustrating, and my annuals are a semi-annual disappointment. Oh, and the spearmint is strangling my phlox."

  "I thought I smelled gum."

  "Other than that-- welcome to my little patch of heaven. I was just putting in some impatiens for color. If you want to wait, I'm almost done."

  "I'll sit."

  His shoulders rustled some weeping-willow tendrils-- and just like that he was sitting on her stone garden bench. He was in. He tried to see across to where he used to watch her from, but couldn't make it out now.

  She knelt on a foam pad, facing away from him, planting and patting the rest of the flowers in a bed of overturned dirt. The lilac band of her panties showed over the stressed belt of her jeans, panties he had once picked up off the Laundromat floor.

  "This is a surprise," she said.

  "Time on my hands. I was in the area, and I remembered you raving about this place at dinner."

  "Right. Now-- were you really in the area? Or did you sort of put yourself in the area?"

  "I put myself here, definitely."

  She looked back at him over her shoulder with a smile. "Good."

  "Plus I'm a big fan of flowers."

  "I could tell." She returned to them. "What's your favorite kind?"

  "Oh, lilac."

  She reached forward, patting the soil around a short stem in the manner of one tucking in a blanket around a baby. "You can see my underwear from there, can't you."

  "It's all right. I don't mind."

  She didn't straighten, didn't cover up, a very simple, sexy thing, just letting it be. She finished and splashed some hose water on the beds and her own dirty hands, then packed away her tools, smoothed her hair back into a scrunchy, and took him for a stroll through the gardens.

  "I have to tell you," she said, twirling a green leaf by the stem as they walked, "I did a terrible thing yesterday."

  "What was that?"

  "I watched a soap opera. Used to schedule my college classes around them. Anyway, there was this typically ridiculous scene where two people stand across the room from each other and talk, talk, talk, until the woman turns to the window, gazing off for her big close-up, sighing, 'Why am I falling for you?' It was so crazy and overblown, I was smiling when I turned it off. But then I got to thinking." She glanced at him. "Why am I falling for you?"

  "Wow," he said, the words hitting him like booze.

  "You're not at all my type. My girlfriends, I've told them about you, and they think it's just, like, big rebound. And I'm like-- rebound from what? The robbery? I mean-- are we that different? Really? I think we have more in common than we have differences."

  "Agreed."

  "We both love flowers."

  He laughed. "Right."

  "Anyway, my friends." She shook her hands like she couldn't express herself clearly. "I feel sort of estranged from them, I think maybe that's what they're picking up on. I have changed. I can feel it. They still have this, like, carelessness about them-- which I sort of envy, but at the same time, I don't really understand anymore. It's scary to think that I might be, you know, leaving them behind."

  "Yeah," Doug said, following this closely. "I think I know exactly what you mean."

  They turned the corner at a double-wide plot with pebble paths and a big bonsai tree. A barefoot Asian woman was practicing slow-motion, invisible-wall-pushing tai chi.

  "But this, you and me-- it's happening too fast," said Claire. "I don't trust it. I think about you and I feel like... I can picture you in my mind for a second, but then you're gone. It's like I know you really well, but almost not at all. Like you're not real-- like I invented you, or you invented me, some Zen thing like that. Are you real, Doug?"

  "I think so."

  "Because I can't root you in anything. Charlestown, I guess, but that's too vague. I don't even have your phone number. I can't call you. Or your address-- no house to drive by and torment myself and wonder, 'Is he home? Is he thinking about me?' "

  "You mean you want references?"

  "Yes! And a look at your driver's license and another valid form of ID. I want to stand in your bathroom. I want five minutes alone in your closet. I want to know that you're not just going to turn to smoke on me someday."

  "I'm not."

  "And fine, I know this is stupid, it's only been two dates. I know that I'm crazy, okay? But I can't help this feeling that there's something..." She shook her head, throwing the leaf to the dirt path. "Are you married?"

  Doug sputtered. "You said married?"

  "Can't you see-- you're making me ask! Making me embarrass myself here."

  "Married?" he said, wanting to scoff and laugh at the same time.

  "I need to know that there's water in the pool. Even if-- okay, fine, even if I've already jumped, I still want to know whether or not there's water in the pool."

  "There's-- there's water in the pool," he said, confused.

  "We could go to your apartment. You could show me where you live."

  He started to say no.

  "Five minutes." She showed him that many fingers, growing frantic. "So I can plant you somewhere in my mind, so you're not this, this sandman. I met you in a Laundromat, Doug MacRay. It is Doug MacRay-- right?"

  He couldn't give in here, and she slowed along the path, hands falling to her sides. "See, this is-- now my mind is filling with possibilities."

  "Whoa, what? Like centerfolds all over the walls or something? Dirty laundry hanging from the ceiling fan?"

  "That's... minimum."

  "I am not married." That time he did laugh, angering her.

  "Neither am I," she said. "So far as you know."

  "My place-- " He stopped himself. "I was going to blame it on my neighbors, but that's not true, it's me, all me. See, I'm making some changes in my life"-- Doug was hearing this himself for the first time-- "and my place-- that's the old me. Something I'm trying to fix."

  She jumped on that. "But I want to see-- "

  "The old me? No, you don't. Would you want me poking around your college dorm room to find out about you now?"

  "But, wait-- "

  "Listen. I just grew up. Just a little while ago. The day I met you, maybe. Already, I've turned over so many bad cards for you."

  "And I'm still here."

  "And you're still here. So what I'm asking for now is, please-- let me work on trying to impress you for a change. Please."

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  Doug made a pretend move fo
r his wallet. "I have a license and a Blockbuster card."