The Dorchester Five

by Peter Manus

  “I seen you here before, now I think about it, with a different wig on. You been around now and again past couple of weeks. I seen you talking to Pauly down the bar, just the other night. Don’t tell me it wasn’t you, neither.”

  “It was me, yeah. I’m supposed to be checking you out. Today was gonna to be the end of it. Last day I’m paid up to, anyways.”

  Now that he knows he is not about to be busted, Rocco is enjoying the bit of drama we are playing out. He grabs the forelock of my hair and pulls my head back hard so my neck is stretched taut. “I said I want to know what’s going on,” he says into my face.

  “And I just told you!” I spit back. “What are you, deaf or just plain dumb?”

  It’s the kind of answer he was hoping for. Letting go of my hair, he slaps me, a real stinger, then reasserts his grip in my hair.

  “Easy, boyfriend,” I pitch him. “Just trying to make a living here.”

  He slaps me again, hard enough that the side of my face goes numb and my ear rings for a long moment. “Ready to talk, Flo?” Rocco says in his even voice.

  “Yeah, here’s some talking: go fuck yourself,” I say. I see a tiny spray of saliva from my mouth land on his collar. A few of the bubbles are pink with blood.

  With a nasty smile, Rocco releases my hair, stands up straight, and punches me. It is an open-handed punch, admittedly, but still not much of a contest. I am propelled backwards and fall rather clumsily from desk to floor. With that, dear friends, I have reaffirmed everything I’d hoped for with the able assistance of Rocco Petrianni. It would not have saved his life if he had turned out differently, but it is far less troubling as it is. As if in response to my thought, I see my little pet, the Arak bottle, rolling around next to me on the carpet, toppled but intact. I tuck it behind me to protect it as Rocco walks around the desk. I put up an arm as if to ward him off.

  “You made your point,” I say. “You can hit a woman. Wow, ain’t you the one.”

  “I’m waiting, Flo,” he says from above me.

  I shake my head around a little, testing for damage, then roll my jaw, glance up at him. “I’m looking into the Dorchester Five, okay? All five, not just you. I’m just supposed to see what all of yous is up to. And that’s everything I know, so if you could keep your hands to yourself from this point forward, I’d greatly appreciate it.”

  “The Dorchester Five?” he interrupts. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I run a finger under my nose and check it for blood. Just snot. “What, you trying to tell me you don’t remember being one of the Dorchester Five?” I say, pushing myself back against the desk as if worried that he might aim one of his pointy black shoes at my gut. “Like eight years ago up in Boston, you bunch of winners tipped a car with a guy inside. Went on trial and walked. Any of this ring a bell, or has life been just so goddamn sweet since?”

  Rocco makes a cutting gesture to shut me off, then steps back and adjusts his shirt. I sit up and touch at my face with the back of my wrist. He offers a hand but I ignore it and get up on my own. I bring the Arak bottle back, setting it on the desk.

  Rocco rights a chair, and I sit in it while he hitches a thigh onto the desk. “Who the hell would be interested in the Dorchester Five? That shit’s ancient history.”

  I glance up at him like I am nervous that he is going to start using me as a punching bag again. “Guy whose car you rolled died. That bring it any closer for you?”

  He sneers. “Prick had it coming,” he says. “Some dick from the suburbs, thinks he can mosey on into the city to pick up his coke fix and then coast on out back to the mansion.”

  My turn to scoff. “They got a lot of mansions over in Southie? Myself, I never noticed. Anyway, it’s been a slice, Romeo, but I got a report to write. And it ain’t my finest piece of work, so…” I go to rise, but Rocco stills me with a raised finger.

  “You know better than that.”

  I shrug like I agree and slump back in the chair.

  “Who you working for, Flo?”

  I sigh. “So Terence D’Amante got released from Walpole late August, right? Very same night, he’s shot to death on his girlfriend’s front stoop. Close range—execution style. It’s got some attention, and that’s all I know because the guy who hired me ain’t my actual client.”

  Rocco ignores my false bravado. “So let me get this,” he muses. “Someone thinks that one of the other Dorchester Five was out to get D’Amante?”

  “Might be,” I say gruffly. “Like I said, I do not know because—”

  “Don’t add up,” he interrupts. “If the guy’s capable of pulling off an execution kill on a public street, why wouldn’t he just have had the asshole killed inside? A guy in the pen’s a sitting duck. Anyone like me wanted him dead over these years, he’d have been dead.”

  “Well, maybe the killer didn’t know how to make that happen,” I say as if uninterested. “It’s not like all the others are connected with the gang thing, like you obviously are.”

  He shrugs. “Proves I’m innocent, at any rate.”

  “Ironic little world, ain’t it, though?” I agree. “Got some ice, angel?”

  Rocco is puzzled momentarily, then sees the way I am handling my jaw. He tips his forehead at the little fridge against the wall. “Help yourself.”

  I rummage, then turn to him with a few cubes in my hand. “Look, I think I could use that drink we was talking about before you, uh, broke my cover,” I say. “You in?”

  Rocco looks at me, slightly surprised, then cracks a smile to indicate his answer.

  I fake smile back. “You break my snifters, tough stuff?”

  He fishes them out of my case, where they managed to survive our scuffle. I walk over, drop a cube into each, and pour. “So, long as I did my homework, let me show off a little. See how this stuff goes white? Called louching. It’s the ice. Purists drink it straight, but Americans like it foggy.” Taking my glass, I raise it and sniff. “Whoa! Ça déchire la tête, eh?”

  He cocks an eye at my French.

  “Stuff’ll rip you a new one,” I translate. “I better take a little water. I’m driving.” I head to the little bathroom. “Now, don’t drink without me,” I call out. “It’s bad luck.”

  “I don’t believe in luck,” he says in a terse, automatic way, as if he is thinking about something else. Ah, but he does not know how correct he is. He is, at this point, just about fuck out of luck.

  “No?” I empty my drink into the sink, retaining the ice cube, and add water from the tap. “Big fan of luck, myself,” I say around the door. “My line of work, I rely on it.”

  “Yeah, well, it didn’t come through for you today too good, did it?” he says.

  I emerge from the bathroom, swirling my glass. “Day ain’t over, handsome.”

  “Cigarette?” he says.

  I nod. “Yeah, actually.”

  He shakes one partway out and offers it. “Look, Flo, I don’t believe for a minute that you don’t know who your client is. PI’s don’t operate like that.”

  “They do when some guy drops a fat money order on their desk and they got bills to pay,” I offer. “What, you think we’re like those human hairdos on TV, tooling around in two-seat convertibles, hopping in and out without using the door?”

  I let him light me up. “I don’t buy it, and you’re not getting out of here without telling me,” he says pleasantly enough. “I mean you get that, right, Flo?”

  “I do,” I say flatly. I draw on the cigarette. “Fact is, I got my ideas.”

  “So I figured,” he says, lighting his own cigarette.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you, being as we’re getting along so nice now,” I say. “But only after you answer me something.” I smoke and lift my snifter.

  “Like what?” Rocco sips the liquor and bares his teeth to draw some air.

  “Little while ago, you acted like you having been one of the Dorchester Five wasn’t no big deal. But that was just bull, right? I mean, just between
us A-rabs?”

  He shrugs, uninterested. In spite of himself, however, he thinks it over. The fact is, he still remembers going after that douchebag in the VW, the rush of being part of a serious, spontaneous ass-kicking. And, for a moment, a full-sense memory floods his conscious mind.

  Rocco throws the gym door out of his way, noting how a couple of gays flinch as they skitter by. Behind him, Ella booms, “Watch me winder, white boy.” The heat hangs heavy, making folks woozy. His muscles thrum from his workout. He’s restless.

  He spots the car, then, bobbing round the slower cars, coming from a ways off, jagging in and out—some impatient prick. Somehow, Rocco knows. His eyes stick with the dull blue balloon of a car, and then an old lady darts out from the sidewalk. She’s tiny and comes out from between two parked cars—she’s going to get hit and it’s her own damn fault. Rocco watches the old bag pinwheel over the hood to land on her neck, orthopedic shoes still trying to walk upside down, slip billowing in the heat. In the moment it happens, it’s barely noticed. The dipshit behind the wheel never saw it coming—he doesn’t even brake enough to slide. For long seconds, no one even turns. Guy on the sidewalk right by where it happened is eyeing a chick’s ass and uttering a long, drawn-out statement of appreciation. A knot of church ladies, thinking the dead biddy’s still among them, continue to fan themselves as they gab. A dog takes a languid piss against a hydrant.

  The little bug rolls forward, shuddering as its engine stalls, then jerks backwards as it shifts into reverse—Rocco can see the sunlight reflecting off the windshield, but nothing of the driver. Doesn’t matter. He knows, now, where the afternoon is heading. The twit, dazed and frightened, intent on nothing but getting himself out of the trouble he’s suddenly found himself in, is going to bolt. The onlookers, waking up to the tragedy in their midst, will seize the opportunity to make the stranger a scapegoat. And, if someone takes charge, administers a little painful justice, the mob will respect that guy. Even as he’s arrested, convicted, does time, they will revere him.

  Rocco sees all this, but not as a spectator. He recognizes the moment on a personal level—it is his. This is how he makes his mark. He moves fast, pushing through the passersby, even as the little bit of the world surrounding that car begins to recognize the reality under their noses. Rocco hears a hoarse yelp as one of the old lady’s cronies figures out what she’s just seen. Rocco flexes, feels the blood in his shoulders and arms. The bug’s engine revs, and the car jerks clumsily to the right, then left, as if the driver is attempting to turn the thing. Rocco jumps into the street, spreads his arms and slams two fists down against the flimsy hood of the car, then points through the windshield. “Get the FUCK out of that vehicle, cocksucker!” he roars. And that’s when the guy really tries to rev and run. Rocco’s one step ahead. He’s so pumped full of adrenaline, he might actually stop the moving auto singlehandedly. But he doesn’t have to. There’s a rush into the street to join him—Rocco will never forget the thunder of that stampede. A man focuses when his defining gesture is upon him.

  “It was no big deal,” Rocco answers my question. “It happened. I moved on.”

  But I have skated along with him through this flash of memory, you see, and so I realize quite thoroughly that in spite of his affect, the Dorchester Five had been the profound moment in his life. All these years later, that memory and more—the arrest, the trial, even the sight of Jakey with his face and brains damaged beyond repair—all of this still gives him the huge rush. He is a man quite worthy of his life. And of his fate. Of this I am now certain.

  “You’re a cold man,” I comment. "No insult intended, but…”

  Rocco feels a pain in his stomach, a kick followed by a hot glow. Indigestion? He sips his drink to chase it away. “I am who I am. I don’t pretend otherwise,” he manages to respond.

  “Well, then.” I raise my glass. “Here’s to you being you.”

  Rocco raises his own glass, when the intercom buzzes. He leans back across the desk and punches a button. We can both hear the tinny return from downstairs.

  “Evening shift’s on, boss. You wantin’ anything?”

  Rocco depresses the talk switch. “I’ll be a minute.”

  He sits up. I am standing, my glass empty, looking for a place to staunch my cigarette.

  “Time’s up, huh?” I say. I go to where he tossed my stuff during our tussle and start puttering with it. “You gotta run, I can pull this crap back together and let myself out.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Rocco says. His gut is tied up in a knot made of white-hot wire. He feels beads of sweat break out on his upper lip. “Tell you something, lady. That fuck in the car had it coming. If it hadn’t been that day, that incident, it would have been something else. No luck. No fate. No such thing.”

  I stand up with my case. It could very well be that Rocco is quite right about Jakey, his destiny. Wise, even. But I do not care. “No regrets, then,” I say more than ask.

  “I have never regretted a minute of my life,” he growls, gripping his stomach.

  I pick up the bottle of Arak, the last thing I need to collect. At his words, I uncork it and pour myself another hit. “I’ll drink to that,” I say, raising it. “No regrets.”

  “Damn straight,” Rocco answers. He downs the rest of his, which tastes of aniseed but with a woody undertone. He has always prided himself on his palate. Makes him a cut above.

  I drop the Boston accent. “You like the Arak?”

  Rocco shakes his head. “Too much aftertaste. Too sweet. I wouldn’t have ordered it, if you’d really been selling.”

  I empty my glass onto the carpet. “The aftertaste is not its fault. It’s the cyanide that provided the syrupy tone. But do not worry. It will be quick.”

  Rocco shrugs, then immediately grimaces in pain. “That supposed to be funny?”

  “Pas de tout,” I say plainly, dropping my Boston accent. “Most of the time, I am a regular riot. But right now I would advise you to take me very seriously.”

  Rocco looks up at me sharply. Before he can think about it, he feels another explosion in his gut. This one erupts from his stomach into his chest, then courses like fire up into his throat. It is enough for him to decide that I have, in fact, poisoned him. Always the man of action, he lunges even as a surge of lava rises in his mouth. “You fucking…” he manages.

  His legs fail him. His pitches forward to land with his forehead almost touching the toe of my boot. Then comes the vomit. He cannot roll himself or even raise his head an inch, and so the mass of molten acid foams up against his face. He vomits again, drags air painfully into his lungs, and shrieks, very feebly, in pain. Or perhaps rage. I cannot say.

  Rocco loses his bowels. The stench is feral, as if he has expelled half his ravaged guts. And perhaps he has—I do not know, as my study of cyanide ceased when I decided it would do the job. He raises his eyes and sees me, swimming, losing color fast. I am adjusting the auburn wig, a pin in my mouth as I secure the French twist into place. He cannot think, but if he could, he would nevertheless not have recognized me. It occurs to him that I may be a stripper he canned, back for revenge.

  I crouch down near his ear. “You wanted to know the identity of my client?” I say. “Well I will tell you. I work for myself. I am Nightingale.”

  “You…fucking…cunt,” he manages to croak.

  And with that appeal to my feminine instinct to aid a dying man, he loses consciousness.

  Two dead, three to go. The slices of cake, my friends, yes?

  Très sincèrement,

  Nightingale

  SEVEN

  Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal

  Well, Zoey, it may be me who has some sort of spastic psychic ability, but it’s H.P. who made a major connection today. Gang-rushes me to his car on my arrival at the precinct, and then we’re on our way to Rhode Island, my latte moustache still bubbling on my lip. Interspersed with the regular patter of mutterings about other drivers—hey, I finally figured out that “
it’s the long, skinny one on the right, lady,” is a reference to the accelerator and not, as I’d imagined, some sort of phallic thing—he lets me in on our plan. Last night, he’s doing his usual “three-way” over dinner, he tells me. This, turns out, is also non-sexual—just means he’s conversing with the wife and also watching TV, all with his laptop open on the table so he can “hit up” stuff that piques his interest from anywhere. So in the midst of this homey mosh pit of info-overload, on the TV appears this face. It’s one of those over-the-anchor’s-shoulder flashes, on screen for maybe five seconds, and Harry entirely misses the accompanying headline, but it tugs on his nose—his expression, not mine—like he ought to know more about what’s going on with that face. So he beads in on the crawl, and when he sees something about a Rhode Island strip club owner, there’s that tug on his nose again. Hits up his favorite search engine and pretty quickly gets the story of Rocco Petrianni’s murder. Couple more clicks and he’s got the answer to his twitchy proboscis: Rocco’s the second of the Dorchester Five to get whacked within a month. First Terence D’Amante and now Rocco. And so Harry and Pop go road tripping southward.

  Now, strictly speaking, neither D’Amante nor Petrianni are any of our business, so, strictly speaking, we should have just thrown a heads up at the cops working on both cases. But it’s no good going through channels when something curls its tentacles round your curiosity, and by the time H.P. finishes his tale, I’m in. As we do the freeway crawl out of Boston, I go to dial up Rhode Island’s finest, but Harry shuts me down—makes his own call to a buddy in Providence and, with no detail and no trouble, gets us a promise of a guided tour of the death scene. Methinks I need me a buddy network. After that, we don’t talk much in the car, as we have this more or less unspoken pact never to theorize about a crime until we walk the scene. Actually, this is Harry’s pact with himself. I just get to live with it, a proposition that’s not all that natural for me. I’m big into letting my imagination lead me to the truth, and I happen to imagine best with my mouth running. Bottom line, though, is that H.P. indulges my rather prodigious quirks, so I’m bound to indulge his. So silent we are, aside from the occasional grouse from Harry about the driving antics on display.