Eddie's Boy

by Thomas Perry

  The boy said, “Yes. I’m new.”

  “I thought I recognized the hearse.” The guard looked in and saw the rolls of grass and chairs, then reached into the kiosk and handed him a printed map of the big cemetery. He took out a pen and put an X on a gravesite.

  “Thanks.” It took the boy a short time to find the section where the two men would be buried. He scanned the area and found a good spot to park the hearse, on a curve up a slight rise a few hundred feet away, near a freshly covered grave.

  He watched from a distance as the cemetery employees made preparations for the funeral. The two graves had been dug sometime before he’d arrived, a blue tent roof had been put up to shade the mourners, and about a hundred small white folding chairs had been opened and arranged in ranks.

  The boy got into the hearse and pulled it forward around a bend so that it was facing away from the site of the two-man funeral of the Tronzoni cousins. He left it idling and turned the air-conditioning up. Then he climbed over the seat into the back bay, where a coffin would normally be carried, and reassembled the AR-15 rifle he had used to kill the two men. He lay it flat beside him and set out the stack of loaded twenty-round magazines where he could reach them with his left hand.

  He watched four policemen on motorcycles pull up the gently rising road that led from the kiosk, followed by two black hearses. Next came six black limousines, and then a long procession snaking up the hill composed of at least a hundred cars full of mourners. The boy could tell that more people had come than the family had prepared for. That seemed good to him, because it would add to the confusion when the time came.

  He watched the cops dismount from their motorcycles to direct traffic on foot, getting the long line of cars pulled over along the shoulders of both sides of the road and waving the next ones on to the next hundred-yard stretch. When all the cars had parked and begun to empty men in suits, women in spike heels that would sink deep into the soft grass, and bored, cranky children onto the road, the cops remounted their motorcycles and puttered down the hill, out the gate, and into the regular traffic, probably to escort the next funeral procession to the cemetery.

  The pallbearers gathered near the backs of the two hearses. They stood around, most of them looking solemnly down at their shoes with their hands clasped behind their backs, or looking at each other side-eyed.

  The boy knew the sight to watch was the pair of hearses, and the man to watch wasn’t the priest. It was the funeral director. He made his way to the first hearse, opened the rear door, reached in, and slid the coffin back on rollers while the two sets of wheels swung down to the ground to lock.

  The eight pallbearers arranged themselves on both sides of the coffin.

  The boy slid the first magazine into the rifle until it clicked, pulled the charging handle of the rifle, set the safety lever to Semi, and aimed. He put his eye to the scope and settled the crosshairs on the pallbearer nearest to the front.

  The second team of pallbearers waited at the back of the second hearse. Apparently, they planned to carry both caskets to the graves in a procession. As he watched, he saw that female relatives were beginning to react to the sight of the caskets coming out of the hearses. Handkerchiefs appeared from purses and dabbed at eyes, a couple of women dressed in black hunched over and shook as they sobbed. The boy stared through the rifle scope at other faces.

  The two caskets were lifted off the gurneys onto the shoulders of the pallbearers, who began to move toward the grassy slope and the graves. The boy rested his rifle on the door of the hearse and placed the crosshairs on the head of the first man on the near side, blew the air out of his lungs to get rid of the carbon dioxide, and fired. The man collapsed, and the boy moved his aim back along the line of pallbearers, firing three more rapid shots.

  The pallbearers on the far side of the casket had no way to hold up the heavy object. The casket fell so quickly that it looked as though they’d thrown it down on the grass. They had seen the blood from their companions in the air, and the red mist had sprayed most of them. They all turned and ran toward the crowd near the graves, trying to slip in among them.

  The boy moved his aim to the second casket, but the second set of pallbearers dropped the casket on the ground and joined the others running into the crowd. Some of the mourners at the edges ran too, and others were knocked down. The priest dissolved into the immediate family and knelt to hide behind a large woman in a black dress.

  The boy knew he had little time, but he looked for one more target. An old man in a black suit stood still, and people were converging on him as if to ask him what to do. The boy aimed, fired, and watched the old man collapse, then scrambled forward over the driver’s seat, threw the hearse into drive, and headed up the hillside to merge onto the cemetery road.

  He drove fast, but not fast enough to risk losing control of the long vehicle. He drove straight to the next exit from the big cemetery, at Woodhaven Boulevard. He could see the gate was closed and chained, but he pulled up to it and parked the hearse beside it. He took the rifle apart and slipped the pieces into the backpack he’d brought, stowed the loaded magazines with them, climbed onto the hearse’s roof, went over the gate, and began to walk.

  When he came to a bus stop two hundred yards on, there were a half-dozen people waiting. He waited with them and took the bus a few miles into Brooklyn. Then he took a cab into Manhattan. By nightfall he was driving Eddie’s car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading for Pittsburgh.

  The boy knew what he needed to do next. He put the house and Eddie’s butcher shop up for sale with a local realtor named Foster who used to buy meat from Eddie. Foster’s wife, Karen, had been one of Eddie’s special home-delivery customers. She had cried at his funeral in spite of the fact that her account had gone inactive when the boy was about twelve.

  Mr. Foster told the boy that the house was valuable and would sell quickly, but warned him that it would be hard to find a buyer for the butcher shop, with its huge refrigerator room, or its expensive equipment—Eddie’s industrial-level meat slicers, his bone saws, and the overhead track for hanging sides of beef.

  If the boy wanted a job in the trade Eddie had taught him, he would likely have to go to work as a meat cutter at the A&P. In spite of his skepticism, Mr. Foster arranged a sale at the shop, and was pleased and surprised when many of the expensive items did attract buyers, including the manager of the A&P.

  The boy was already feeling rich before the sales. He had followed Eddie’s instructions about thawing the freezers before he left for New York and had found about forty brick-shaped ice-covered packages at the bottoms of the two freezers. All of them were tightly wrapped packets of hundred-dollar bills.

  There were also another group of items he’d had to move quietly at night. Eddie had about twenty firearms of different calibers and configurations, all of them with supplies of ammunition. The boy kept only a few of the most practical ones. He also kept knives—a Ka-Bar marine fighting knife with a black blade, a six-inch switchblade, a high-quality lock-blade folding knife—and an artisan-made strangling cord with polished wood handles that were exceptionally comfortable to hold.

  The day the boy drove Eddie’s car away from the house, the Mafia War was over for him. After a few months came a peace that was not imposed or negotiated. The war died of fatigue. Later, some people identified the last, most convincing proof of its pointless cost as the killing of the Tronzoni cousins, done so that the rest of the family would be brought together in the open cemetery where they could be shot down too. During the 1980s, there was another set of killings that reporters called the “Second Mafia War.” But Schaeffer and many other people who had carried guns for a living in the 1960s knew that the name didn’t make sense. The second war had happened over ten years earlier.

  30

  Andrew Wain Herren had stayed at the dinner party later than he usually would have, given the array of friends and colleagues that he�
��d been glad to see. He had escorted Camilla Sealey, the widow of a former governor of Virginia. Austin Sealey had married Camilla because she was an heiress who held vast tracts of land in Tennessee and Kentucky, had gone to the right schools, and knew how to host and carry on fluent but unquotable conversation with anyone at any time. These qualifications were essential for a politician’s wife, which was what her mother and grandmother had been too. Governor Sealey had died young enough not to be a burden to his wife’s social ambitions.

  For events like tonight’s, Herren would occasionally invite her as his guest. She was still beautiful in exactly the right middle-age patrician way, enjoyed any event where she could wear her jewelry and fashionable clothes, and expected little actual attention from him during the evening. They both conversed with the people seated to their right and left at the table, and when they were moving around, she placed her hand on his arm but spoke to everyone but him.

  Camilla probably thought she was his beard, but she was wrong. She probably suspected he had realized he was gay late in life, but he had not. He was a straight older man whose sexual interest in women was unchanged. He loved the same kind of women he’d loved when he was twenty-five and they were too. The ones he loved were still twenty-five, only he wasn’t. These relationships had become increasingly difficult and complex, not only because the current young women had to be paid, but also because his clients, colleagues, and the world expected him to behave like the statue of a great lawyer and statesman.

  Tonight he’d had a few conversations that had required him to skirt topics and listen carefully to questions. Most of the questions had been about the Carlo Balacontano matter. His old law-school classmate Calvin Rialto, now a justice on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, came out and said it: “Why are you working on the Balacontano thing? You never took on that kind of client. Are you planning to buy a yacht or a country estate?”

  Herren shrugged. “It’s a case that somebody needs to take. It’s a murder conviction that people should have looked at more closely thirty years ago. The federal court took the lazy way. The defendant was bad, so they got careless about what they used to put him away.”

  “Is that any different from Al Capone’s case?”

  “Yes,” said Herren. “It was too hard to prove Capone had committed any of his violent crimes, but they could convict him of tax evasion. They gave him such a long sentence that time would execute him. We’ve heard a million times how clever that was. Maybe it was. At least he was guilty of the tax evasion.”

  “And Balacontano is innocent?”

  “Carlo Balacontano is a different story. He was a crime boss too—a racketeer, certainly a tax evader, and probably a murderer. But he wasn’t guilty of the particular murder he was charged with. The average person hears that and says, ‘So what?’”

  Rialto nodded. “And of course there’s plenty wrong with that.”

  “There is. We—our profession—have gotten too good at the machinery of the law without clinging tightly enough to the purpose of the law. Thirty years ago a federal court convicted Carlo Balacontano of being a bad man. He was certainly guilty of that. He just didn’t happen to kill Arthur Fieldston.”

  “And what are you doing? What’s your strategy? Are you trying to get him a new trial?”

  “He was convicted so long ago, he’s about to have a federal parole hearing. To start with, I’m going to help him at the hearing. After that, we’ll see.”

  “I wish you luck, Andrew. It’s always right to correct the system when it gets sloppy. Even if nobody else ever thanks you, I will.”

  Herren and Camilla Sealey left the party almost two hours after that conversation. His driver took Camillla home, and then Herren. The doorman opened the big glass door with a remote control before Herren could reach it, and then closed it as soon as he was in. Then he pressed the button to summon the private elevator that went to the upper floors, where Herren’s New York apartment was. “Thanks, Ray,” Herren said. The elevator doors closed and the elevator rose, moving faster until it had nearly reached the twenty-third floor, decelerated, and stopped at Herren’s private hallway.

  He stepped out of the elevator into his foyer, walked to his door, and opened it with a key. Much of the time he left the apartment door unlocked. But a few weeks ago the maid and the cook asked him not to. They had read an article in the New York Times that mentioned he was representing the boss of one of the five New York crime families, and once a lawyer dealt with clients like that, he just might get a visit from other people from that world.

  He locked his door again and pressed a button on the console by the door to turn on the pattern of lights for late evening. It was lighting his decorator had designed for romantic encounters, but it was also good for times like these, when it was late and he was simply going to go to sleep.

  He went to the kitchen to get a chilled bottle of water from the refrigerator and then entered his master suite.

  He stood paralyzed in the doorway with a glass in one hand and the bottle of water in the other. The man sitting on the couch in his suite didn’t look like a burglar or anything like that. He looked like the sort of man he might have seen in the locker room of his club after a round of golf—late middle age, well dressed. “Hello?” Herren said.

  The man said, “Relax, Mr. Herren. If you don’t do anything suicidal, we can talk, and then I’ll leave. I’ve read that you’re Carlo Balacontano’s lawyer. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” said Herren. He set the glass and the bottle on the bureau beside him and then instantly regretted it. If this man was another gangster or a madman, he could have thrown them at him and made a dash for the elevator or stairwell. Not now.

  “How much is Balacontano paying you?” the man asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Most of the time in a parole hearing, the prisoner isn’t represented by a lawyer. His guilt isn’t in doubt, legally. I’m only advising him, so I’m doing it pro bono.” He took a breath. “I think I’ve said enough. Your turn. Are you going to tell me your name?”

  “No.”

  “Are you here to intimidate me?”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “Then what?” asked Herren. “What is your profession?”

  “I’m retired.”

  “From what?”

  “Killing people.”

  “For money?”

  “Yes. Usually because the customers were afraid of somebody.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of them too?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not a duel, challenging somebody to a fight to the death. It’s more like a hunt. I’m the wolf. They were all deer. No matter how things go, the deer doesn’t get to eat the wolf.”

  “Why should I believe you about any of this?”

  “You can or not. If you don’t, just don’t make me prove it.”

  The man opened his coat and took out the loaded pistol that Herren kept in the built-in compartment of his bed’s headboard. He held it up and then put it back.

  Herren’s knees felt weak. He tried to look casual as he raised his left arm to rest his elbow on the bureau and keep himself from toppling over. He said, “How did you get into my apartment?”

  “It doesn’t matter. There are tricks and bits of knowledge about how things work that people like me rely on. But mostly I observe other people coming and going.”

  Herren’s hands were shaking, so he put them in his pockets and concentrated on controlling his voice. “Before we get any further, I think it’s important that you know something. Killing me will make no difference. Whatever is going to happen will happen whether I’m advising him or one of twenty other attorneys from my firm is. He should get out because he’s served the minimum sentence he was given in 1982, and is now, under the statute in effect at t
he time, entitled to parole because he hasn’t gotten any other infractions on his record during his time in prison and meets the other criteria.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “No. In public I’ve been bluffing, acting as though he will, but he won’t.”

  “If you can’t win, why are you involved?”

  “For one thing, I’m making it clear to the authorities that someone is watching them to be sure they follow the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “No misplaced paperwork. No charging him with mysterious new capital crimes on evidence that they’ve had forever but didn’t notice until now. That kind of thing.”

  “You know he’s a really bad man, right?”

  “Yes. But the integrity of the system is more important than he is. If we preserve that, including correcting the system when it fails, it will protect people after we’re long gone. I’m playing the long game. I’m building public discussion about the fact that he was wrongfully convicted. I want him to get a new trial. For the system to work, he needs to be either convicted of something he actually did or be set free.”

  “All right,” said the man. “I’m going to tell you some things that may help you, and I’m going to let you record my voice. One warning though. If a picture of me ever surfaces after this conversation, it won’t matter what high-minded motives you had. You’ll be dead within a week. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then get your recorder ready.”

  An hour and a half later, the man who had been waiting for Andrew Wain Herren in his twenty-third-floor apartment appeared at the reception desk in the foyer. “Hey, Ray,” he said. “Miss Zoellner said to give you this.” He handed the man at the desk a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me. It’s from her for making sure she didn’t miss her old uncle’s visit. Have a good night.”

  “You too, sir.”