by Howie Carr
“Where? Out of a Crackerjacks box.”
“Just so happens I bought this off a cop, smart guy.”
“Now I know it came out of a Crackerjacks box.”
Sally’s upper lip curled. He slipped the device into his pocket.
“Do you think this is fucking funny?” The fact that he said “fucking” rather than “fuckin’” meant that he was really pissed. “Do you realize I gotta problem?” The slightest pause. “We gotta problem. If you’re driving a different car the other night there, one that don’t have that special hide, you’re downstairs right now in the parlor in a box next to Hole in the Head.”
“Sally, believe me, I never forget it when somebody shoots at me. By the way, and I’m not giving you the needle, but where is everybody?”
His nostrils flared, and I realized too late the mistake I’d made. He was going Sally on me again. Suddenly he was screaming.
“Listen, next time you see them motherfuckers, you tell them dirty rats, nobody runs out on Salvatore Matteo Curto. Fuckin’ every flight to Lauderdale and Fort Myers had to be jam-packed today with them yellow fucks.” He was tapping on my chest with his index finger, hard. “Yellow fucks—you tell ’em that’s what Sally Curto called ’em. I says, Youse guys, when I tell youse we are going to the mattresses, I don’t fuckin’ mean the mattresses in your condos in Deerfield Beach, or Palm Beach Lakes, you treacherous wannabe college-boy cocksuckers. Youse fucks, we used to shoot guys for dealin’ drugs, now youse are making more than the Jew bookmakers, a lot more, but most-a youse never even made your bones—”
He was breathing heavily now. Sally really needs to do two things. Number one, take off about seventy pounds, and number two, stop watching the Godfather movies over and over again. I was waiting for him to threaten to have the deserters “sleep with the fishes,” but suddenly it was over. He took a couple of steps backwards, then stumbled heavily into the swivel chair behind Rossetti’s desk. When he fell into it, the chair rolled back and tipped over, dumping Sally on the floor. He was embarrassed. He got up slowly, dusted himself off, and I could see tears in his eyes.
“I’m going nuts,” he said. “I can’t take it. I’m too old for this shit.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“The thing is, I … don’t … know … what … they … want.” He said it that slowly. “If we don’t know what they want, how can we figure out who they are? I understand musclin’ in, that’s how we all came up, right?” He regarded the swivel chair warily, then slowly, very carefully sat back down in it. “But now, we ain’t musclin’ nobody. Niggers, spics, gooks, motorcycle fucks with their meth labs, it’s live and let live. Even them whaddaya call ’em, hipsters, wearing pajamas and those fucking godawful wispy-ass goatees down there in the Seaport District, selling Mollys, whatever the fuck they are. But the point is, it’s an open city, every man for himself, am I right?”
“Absolutely,” I agreed.
“So what do they want, Bench? Can someone fucking please tell me that? When you get right down to it, what have we got that anybody would want? You got a garage, a barroom or two. I got the towing service, couple of contracts with the city, a few apartment buildings. It’s all legit. You know how the wiseguys in the movies always say that they’re ‘businessmen’? Well, that’s what we are. Mostly, anyway. So why do they want to kill us?” He paused for a moment. “You makin’ any progress?”
“Other than staying alive, you mean?”
He nodded thoughtfully but said nothing. He was stumped.
“I went down to Lewisburg over the weekend,” I said, and he snorted.
“You talkin’ to Bobby Bones again? That guy’s a junkie, you told me so yourself.”
“He’s clean now,” I said. “He told me some interesting stuff. You ever talk to that guy there, Peanuts, works for Blinky?”
Sally’s face curled into a snarl. “Peanuts? I told him I’d chop his balls off if he ever set foot on Hanover Street again. You know that.”
“Well, Peanuts has disappeared.”
“Good!” Now that the ice in his drink had melted a little, Sally took a long swig of his vodka. “I hope somebody clipped him.”
“Bobby Bones thinks he’s joined the program.”
“No fuckin’ way. Blinky would have told me. Besides, how the fuck would Bobby Bones know something like that?”
I explained about Peanuts’ nephew, the chop-shop story that didn’t add up and his transfer to WITSEC, and how Peanuts had missed a meeting with a dealer who owed him fifty large. Now I had Sally’s attention.
“You think Blinky’s flipped too?”
“All I know is what I’m telling you,” I said. “What you do next, that’s between you and Blinky.”
I don’t get involved in intramural Mafia squabbles. If Sally says he wants something done, that’s different. But until he tells me otherwise, I’m staying out of it. One thing I learned a long time ago: don’t go around asking a lot of questions because somebody might get the idea that you’re looking to find out some answers.
But now Sally was interested.
“What does Bobby Bones think?” he asked.
“I thought Bobby Bones was a junkie.”
“Don’t be a wise guy. What’s the scuttlebutt inside?”
“Well, they’re pretty sure they’ve flipped Peanuts’ nephew—the Fonz—he doesn’t have any juice with anybody. So they had to be moving him out of general population for some reason, and there’s only one anyone can think of.”
Sally’s brow was furrowed. “Why didn’t Blinky tell me this?”
“You tell me, Sally.”
“Well, I tell you one thing—Peanuts and Blinky couldn’t both be wearing wires. Don’t make no sense.”
“Did it make sense to have both Whitey and Stevie as Top Echelon rats?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Okay, don’t believe it. But somebody who knows us pretty good has gotta be tipping these guys that’re shooting at us.”
Sally stared down into his empty drink. Normally, I’d have gotten him another one by now, but I wanted to finish this conversation. I wanted it all on the record, in no uncertain terms, about what I knew, and what I had told him just in case everything went south later on.
Sally looked up at me. I was waiting for him to say something. Finally he did.
“I’m not hitting Blinky.”
“I didn’t say you should. All I’m saying is, watch yourself around him.”
What I didn’t say to Sally was, if you do get hit, for sure Blinky runs to Providence or New York and puts the finger on me. And the feds’ll figure out some way to back him up—leaks to the papers, most likely, lining me up for a head shot. That way, the two guys who aren’t rats—me and Sally—get taken off the board, and Blinky slides in, all the while snitchin’ out everybody else on the commission.
“Look,” Sally said, shaking the ice cubes in his empty glass, “once we get this other thing straightened out, we’ll worry about Blinky.”
“What makes you think the two aren’t related?”
Sally put his glass down and took a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket. He looked about a hundred years old. He politely asked me to go get him another drink. I was just standing up when suddenly we both heard a light tapping on the door. Sally and I both snapped to attention. He pulled a .38 out of a shoulder holster inside his coat that I hadn’t noticed. The safety was off and he pointed it at the door.
“It’s me, Sally. Liz.”
Liz McDermott was Sally’s girlfriend. Or had been, until she turned thirty and started putting on weight and her teeth started falling out from all the meth and every other damn drug she was doing. Five years ago, she looked like my younger sister. Then she looked like my mother. Now she resembled my grandmother, who’s been dead for fifteen years. She used to be a hot mess. Now she was just a mess.
You’ve heard of someone who looks like ten miles of bad road? Liz McDermott looked ten counties of bad road.
<
br /> “Fuck,” Sally muttered. “Just when you think things can’t get any worse…”
“Let me in, Sally, I have to talk to you.”
He sighed deeply. Sally got a girlfriend because he couldn’t stand his wife, and now he couldn’t stand his girlfriend, but he couldn’t get rid of her anymore than he could get rid of his wife, because if he tried, she’d rat him out to Mrs. Curto. Not that Mrs. Curto didn’t know what was going on, but the rule was, you didn’t rub your wife’s face in it. Liz understood the rules very well.
Sally nodded at me and I walked over to the door and opened it.
“Bench,” she said. “I was hoping you’d be here.”
Her breath reeked of booze. Sometimes she was sober, but less and less often. Not much more than thirty-five years old, her black hair was now shot through with gray. She didn’t care. Any money she spent keeping her hair touched up was money she couldn’t spend on getting high. Her eyes were glassy, unfocused. She was stoned out of her mind. She was wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat.
Sally didn’t even bother to try to hide his contempt.
“Who’d you steal that from?” he said, gesturing at the hat.
“I bought this down Newbury Street,” she snapped defensively.
“The last time you were on Newbury Street, I had to send somebody down to District Four to bail you out.”
She daintily touched dirty hair that was spilling out from under the hat, as if she were preparing for her close-up.
“You shouldn’t be here, Liz,” Sally said. “This is family.”
“And I’m not family?” she said, putting down her purse, opening it and removing a tiny nip bottle of something clear, maybe schnapps. The smaller the bottle, the bigger the problem. She emptied it in one gulp, smacked her lips and underhanded the bottle into the trash can.
“You’re not family,” Sally said. “Get that straight. I can’t believe JoJo even let you in here.”
“I just want to help.”
“You want to help? Then go kill yourself. Capisce?” Sally shook his head. “You was raised on Commercial Street, I’m gonna say something to you in Italian: Fatte a cazzo e me. You know what that means, Liz?”
“‘Mind your own business’?”
“Wrong! It means, ‘Mind your own fuckin’ business.’”
Well, close enough, I guess. Besides, it wasn’t my place to correct Sally on his Italian.
Sally looked at Liz with pure disdain and took a wad of bills out of his pocket. “How much?” he said. “Just tell me how much you want? If I give you what you want, will you get the fuck out of here?”
“I got a problem, Sally.”
“So do I,” he said. “How much?”
“The lawyer wants another thousand.” A couple of days earlier, she’d been arrested in one of the new high-rises in the Back Bay. She’d been emptying out one of those $3 million condos when the owners returned. Liz had told them she was the new maid. Then she lay down on their couch and passed out. She’d spent enough time in Framingham to know she didn’t want to go back to the women’s prison.
“A grand?” Sally was peeling off bills. “Like I really believe you, Liz. How much shit can you buy with a grand?”
“Sally, that’s a rotten thing to say,” Liz said. “You never appreciated me.” She glanced over at me. “Ain’t that right, Bench?”
Sally didn’t look up as he continued counting the bills. “Leave him out of this, he’s got nothing to do with this here problem.”
“So now I’m a problem?” she said, looking at her boyfriend. “You used to tell me I looked like Ava Gardner.”
“You still do,” Sally said, managing a little smile. At first Liz did too, until she realized the dig.
“Oh, I get it. Ava Gardner’s dead. That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.”
I stepped between them. “Look, Liz, you got what you wanted, we got business to discuss here.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “You think I don’t watch the news? I know what’s going on. Somebody’s trying to kill you guys.” She looked at me. “I still like you, Bench, you’re a gentleman, but him—”
That was it. Sally’s nostrils flared and he was having a Sally, the second one in less than ten minutes. I’d never seen them come so close together. He threw his cigarette at Liz and she stepped clumsily aside to avoid it.
“You tell that fuckin’ whore,” he said, pointing his finger right in her face, “that I’ve about had it up to here with her bullshit. I’m through bailing her out, I’m through paying for her abortions, I’m through putting her in them sober half-way houses in East Boston as part of the plea deals in the BM-fuckin’-C. Fuck that! You tell her that—fuck her and the horse she rode in, and for the sake of the fuckin’ horse I hope to fuck it’s a fuckin’ Clydesdale she rode in on, she’s gotten so fuckin’ fat.”
She just stared at him, her mouth open.
“You tell that no-good cunt, if you want to be somebody’s girlfriend, you gotta stay in shape, and nobody ever stayed in shape doing every fuckin’ drug in the world, and what’s even worse, when she fucks now, it’s like fuckin’ a dead body, ’cause she’s usually nodding off when I hop on top of her. You tell her she ain’t the only slut in the North End.”
Now Liz was scared. She made a sudden move toward him, but I pulled her back. Interrupting Sally in the middle of a Sally would be the worst possible thing to do. It was like he was possessed; if he was interrupted maybe he’d never come out of it, like in some made-for-TV horror movie, I forget the name of it.
“Shhhhhh,” I said to her. “Let him come out of it by himself.”
She put her arms around me and cooed, “Oh, Bench,” but I pushed her away. Sally was right about her; her days as the siren of Salem Street were way behind her. Sally was breathing heavily now. That meant he was coming around. Finally he blinked and shook his head. Then he saw Liz and he grimaced.
“You got your money,” he told her. “Now get the fuck outta here.”
Her head down, she slinked out of the room without a word and closed the door softly behind her.
“If she ever goes to Rosa,” he said, “I swear to God, I’ll, I’ll…”
By which he meant I’d get the contract.
“Don’t sweat it,” I lied. “The cops got her cold on this last beef. She’ll be gone soon enough. She ain’t gonna be bothering nobody from Framingham.”
Sally shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit up.
“Christ,” he said. “I wish to fuck it was 1973 again.”
Poor Sally. He was going to have his wish come true about the time I got Tommy Callahan’s burp gun back.
* * *
This time when the cell phone rang at three in the morning I was sleeping at my condo just outside Ball Square. Patty turned on her side fitfully, so I grabbed the phone and tiptoed quickly into the living room. I didn’t even have to look at the number to know who was calling.
“They hit the check-cashing place on the Lynnway—killed my guy Vito, shot him in cold blood, no fucking reason,” Sally Curto was yelling so loudly that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “You tell that Irish prick I gotta see him right away.”
I glanced out the window into the parking lot. There were a couple of light poles—it was, after all, a “luxury condominium”—and I could see that a steady rain was coming down. No Carson Beach meetings this morning.
“How about the garage?” I said.
“The garage?” he said, in surprise. He doesn’t like talking inside. Neither do I, for obvious reasons.
“It’s okay, Sally. I got the guy coming in today with the equipment, first thing in the morning.” Sometimes the trooper wasn’t too punctual about getting over, but I knew he would be there today. While he was there, he wanted us to total his car for him. It was a professional courtesy for our friends in law enforcement.
“He’ll be there right at eight,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Two guys walked in, just b
efore closing. Americans. Wearing ski masks. Don’t make no sense, in the first place, it’s a check-cashing place, not a bookie joint or a bar. At the end of the day they got less money then in the morning.”
“And less security.”
“Yeah, that too.”
“So your guys called the cops?”
“Of course they called the cops.”
“Which means it’ll be on the news this morning.”
“Yeah, so what are you getting at?
“I don’t want to talk on the phone. Drive into the third bay, it’ll be open at eight. I got a couple of ideas.”
* * *
Sally came by himself, another sign of how agitated he was. Or maybe what I’d told him about Blinky had sunk in. No Blinky, no Benny Eggs—maybe Sally was coming to his senses. When he drove inside, I shook his hand and guided him past where one of my tow trucks was smashing into the cop’s Lexus sedan. The cops used to burn their old cars in the Allston rail yards, but the feds had run a sting out there a few years back, and then Harvard bought the land and put some real security on the gates. It had been a big break for my business, and for my relationship with the local constabulary. My garage had no windows. It was the perfect place to commit insurance fraud.
I’d told the statie to sweep my office first, so Sally and I could speak in there. Once we got in I flipped on the all-news radio station and turned it up high, just in case. I took Sally’s overcoat, got him seated in a chair across from the desk with an ashtray for his smokes, and then sat down in my office chair.
“Sally,” I said, “I been thinking about this a lot. I don’t think we’re dealing with wiseguys here.”
He looked confused. “Who the fuck else would it be?”
“Hear me out,” I said. “You used to do stickups, right?” He nodded, a little warily. He enjoyed “do you remember” conversations about as much as I do. “What’s the best way to do a stickup?”
“One guy, of course.”
“Of course. That way, no one to whack up the pot with, no one to rat you out.”
Sally frowned. “Some guys, they do their first one with another guy. That way, they can’t back out if they get cold feet.”