by Howie Carr
“People outside the building, you know what they say about us. They don’t understand the true meaning of public service.” A few uneasy chuckles followed. The commissioner didn’t appear drunk, so maybe it was some kind of inside joke, this gag about public service.
“Public service is about giving your word, and keeping your word.” Now he was back on track. God, how they loved to talk about giving their word, and keeping it. Almost as much as they loved to reminisce about who they’d stabbed in the back. “And that’s what our friend is all about—keeping his word. If the Leader tells you he’s going to do something for you, you can take it to the bank.” Preferably an offshore bank, where Donuts would be depositing your money.
“This is a watershed year in the history of our Commonwealth.” Aren’t they all?
“Powerful interests, out-of-state interests, are attempting to change the culture of our state.” God forbid that should happen.
“They want to turn our city into a gambling mecca, with all of the social pathologies that gaming will bring in its wake.” More chuckles, but fewer than before, because most of the crowd was in on this casino play. Surely Donuts couldn’t be going rogue on them at this late date, could he?
“But there is one man who stands athwart these nefarious forces.” Athwart? Nefarious? The commish was pushing it now. One of the bodyguards frowned slightly. Or maybe he was just confused by the big words.
“Denis Donahue knows that if casinos are the answer, then we must have asked the wrong question. He will do his best to halt this blight before its malignant tentacles begin strangling our state.” Somebody must have written this shit for the commissioner, I was sure of it now, even if I couldn’t see any notes on the podium. On casinos, Donuts was galloping off the reservation. Everything was starting to fall into place. “My friend, your friend, the man we have gathered together to pay tribute to tonight, knows the high price he may pay for his principled stand, but as we have all heard him say on more than one occasion, ‘I answer only to the people.’”
Eventually, it’ll be twelve people he’s answering to, along with a few alternate jurors thrown in for good measure. Was there a reporter here? Or perhaps the FBI had bugged the room. I hoped they were enjoying this as much as I was. Especially the part about paying tribute and high prices.
“But you don’t want to hear from me. You want to hear from the man himself, the majority leader of the Massachusetts State Senate. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our dear friend, the man whose word is his bond, Denis Donahue.”
Donahue approached the podium, and gave the commish a bear hug. He whispered something in Amato’s ear, and Amato nodded in the direction of his two plug-uglies, who peeled off to the side. If anyone was taking photos, especially newspaper pictures, Donuts didn’t want those two behind him. I wondered why.
The senator stepped to the podium, and bowed in mock appreciation of the applause, which I’d rate somewhere between tepid and average. Apparently the tickets bought access, not enthusiasm. This was incumbent money here tonight. The only thing they believed in was being with the winner. You wouldn’t call it a tough crowd exactly, but it was jaded.
Donuts looked like a majority leader straight out of Central Casting: average height, just the hint of a potbelly, expensive suit that somehow didn’t hang quite right on him. My guess was Shrewsbury, St. John’s Prep, Holy Cross, Suffolk Law. I wondered how many times it had taken him to pass the bar exam.
Donuts continued to hammer on the theme of Good Government and Reform. It was like listening to Ted Kennedy on temperance, or Bill Clinton on marital fidelity. Cognitive dissonance, I believe they call it.
“As always, my friends, I remain only a phone call away.” Preferably on a burner, an untraceable prepaid throw down. And don’t forget to use whatever code has been agreed to in advance. “But as important as I consider service to my constituents, and you are all my constituents, everyone who is here tonight, this year I find myself embroiled in what I can only describe as a crusade.” The Third Crusade of 1204, when they looted Constantinople. “I refer of course to the scourge of casinos which the commissioner has just described so eloquently.” A couple of the younger lobbyists standing a few feet away from me near the door took this opportunity to duck out. They’d paid their respects, and their cash, and if they wanted to hear this shit they could find themselves a First Communion breakfast in Wakefield on Sunday.
“What a fine capital city all of us here in the Commonwealth can be proud of. I can recall when this boulevard, Northern Avenue, was best known for its gangland killings.” Me too. I still remember the day Whitey Bulger shot two guys in broad daylight outside an upholstered sewer called the Pier. I was in the seventh grade.
“I ask you, my friends, why would we put all that we have accomplished in jeopardy? Why would we roll the dice?” A couple more lobbyists ducked out. Donuts was losing the crowd, fast. Did he think he was addressing the annual meeting of the Knights of Columbus at the American Legion Post in Clinton?
I know I wasn’t the only one in the room who was puzzled by the direction of this peroration. Wasn’t his boss, the Senate president, still officially in favor of the casino legislation? Hadn’t he introduced this bill Donuts was now calling a “scourge”? Dissent was no longer tolerated in either house, and yet Donuts was trashing his boss’ big payday.
I mean, I understood jumping ship, trying to line up the next big score, but the brazenness of this play, in front of hundreds of lobbyists at Anthony’s, was breathtaking. Donuts was revealing himself as one of those pols of whom it was said, they would steal a hot stove without gloves and then come back for the smoke.
Now he was saying, “Fortunately, those of us in this room tonight are not alone in our struggle against these malign forces. In the General Court, our allies are too numerous to mention.” Let’s just call them unindicted coconspirators.
“And in the media, some courageous tribunes of the people have stepped up.” Now he had my attention again.
“One of them, I’d like to recognize here tonight. Ted McGee, the columnist for the Globe, a man who will someday be described as a Pulitzer Prize winner.” Only if they start giving out Pulitzers for plagiarism.
“Ted has almost singlehandedly made the state aware of what lies ahead if we allow these unscrupulous merchants of vice to operate unimpeded.” You know, like the State Lottery Commission already does.
“Ted, raise your hand—let’s have a round of applause for our good pal in the Fourth Estate.”
I saw a hand go up. It was clasping a highball glass. So McGee was a brown-water man, and something told me he had been even before the bourbon renaissance. The applause was even more restrained. One of the two thugs now standing off to Donuts’ side started working his way along the wall toward the door. Obviously, the speech was drawing to a merciful close. I made an instantaneous decision to tail Donuts’ car when he left.
Chances were, he’d just duck down to one of those new upscale bars like the Whiskey Priest. Good name, but I’d never been there. Even from the outside, it looked pricey. Either that, or he’d jump onto the Turnpike Extension west in Chinatown, headed home to Worcester, in which case, I’d just turn around at the Allston tollbooths. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I ducked out of the room and watched the thug head down the stairs. I followed at a respectable distance, nodding to each picture on the wall as I went by. Spiro Agnew, Ted Kennedy, Frank Sinatra and a whole host of other local celebs you’ve never heard of, guys with charming nicknames like Nicky Pockets, the Corrupt Midget and I’ll Take a Buck.
No valet parking for Donuts. His car was in a handicapped space, right up in front. A Crown Vic. No legislative license plate for Donuts either, he was too cute for that. People throw shit at you if you have one of those. He might have a three- or four-digit plate, but that was probably on his wife’s car, or the one at his summer place in New Seabury, around the corner from Bob Kraft.
My guess was he had
an untraceable, like the deputy fire chief I’d bagged a few days earlier with Ron Burgundy. That was the true status plate, although of course you could never brag about it. They say you can be either a successful poisoner or a famous poisoner, but not both. Same with untraceable plates. If people know you have one, they can trace it back, can’t they, and give you tickets for parking in all those handicapped spaces and fire lanes. I used to have one of those plates myself, back when I was a contender.
Anthony’s weeknight dining-room crowd had thinned out considerably, so I could move my late father’s old Oldsmobile into a space closer to Donuts, where I could watch him as he left. I hadn’t done a tail in a while, but traffic was light and I was pretty sure his driver wouldn’t be paying attention.
I got into my Olds and turned the key in the ignition to get some heat circulating. That was when I saw a shadow pop up in the rear-view mirror. Then I heard the voice from the backseat.
“I thought you’d never get here.”
It was Bench McCarthy.
19
DONUTS’ DETOUR
The way he jumped, you’d have thought Jack Reilly thought I was going to cap him.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he yelled. “What the fuck are you doing, hiding like that?”
“You oughta lock up your car, Jack. This is the city. Lotta criminals lurking around here, from what I hear on the news. Didn’t they teach you that in the academy?”
Reilly was still breathing heavily. I think he was more embarrassed than anything else. For not locking the car, maybe, or for freaking out, which was only natural, considering how I’d surprised him, in the dark.
“What do you want?” he finally said. There was exasperation in his voice. “Last time I saw you, you told me to fuck off.”
“That was then, this is now. Listen, can we go somewhere and talk? You’re a Foley’s guy, right?”
“How come you didn’t just call me?”
“I don’t like phones, Jack.”
“We could have just met somewhere.”
I shook my head. “I’m not a big meetings guy. Especially lately.” I paused. “Mind if I come around and sit in the front seat?”
Reilly was looking intently out the windshield, towards the front door of Anthony’s.
“Jack, are you waiting for somebody to come out?”
“Yeah, I am.” He looked up into the rearview mirror. “Come on around, I think we’re going for a ride here in a minute or two.”
“A ride, huh? I like taking rides. Who we gonna go see?”
I opened the back door and came around the back of the car and jumped in the front seat. I extended my hand and Jack Reilly took it. He seemed a lot calmer now.
“You know a senator named Donuts Donahue?” he asked me. “I wanna see where he’s going from here.”
I’d been in the backseat for about forty-five minutes, inhaling the musty old-car smell, cheap cigars and mothballs and stale beer. That afternoon I’d had one of my younger guys stake out Reilly’s house in the South End, and he’d tailed him over here to Anthony’s and sat on him until I could drive over myself.
It’s good to run into people, if you know what I mean. If you catch somebody off guard, you may find out whether or not he can stand up under pressure. If I’m going to be running with a guy, I like to know how he deals with a wild card turning up, especially a faceup wild card like me. Some guys, you can’t peel them off the ceiling for hours. Others get pissed, I mean really pissed. Jack Reilly, though, was taking it pretty good. My guess was he’d been surprised more than a few times and it didn’t take him long to figure out that on a scale of one to ten, this was about a minus-three in the danger department.
I said, “This guy Donuts, does he have something to do with what we were talking about the other day?”
He looked over at me and smiled. “Who wants to know?”
“C’mon, Jack, you can trust me. I’m not like the others.”
He ignored that. “Look, they’re going to be coming out soon. You wanna ride along or not?”
“I’m game,” I said. “You want me to drive? I’ve probably done more of this kind of thing than you.”
“I was a cop, remember.”
“But not that kind of cop, or so I hear.”
He shook his head. “This kind of tail I can handle. Look, he’s coming out. Shit, that’s Amato with him.”
I didn’t know who Amato was. But I recognized Donuts from television. He was a regular at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at Halitosis Hall in Southie, which I still watch out of habit. A bad habit. Donuts especially—he was about as funny as a crutch. He was wearing a Chesterfield topcoat. He was accompanied by a middle-aged guy without a coat—was that Amato? With them was a younger guy who handled himself like a wannabe. Hair combed straight back into a ponytail, kept his right hand in his pocket, like he was carrying, which I very much doubted. Like Sally, he probably watched way too many gangster movies.
We watched them get in their Crown Vic, Donahue and the other guy in the back, and the ponytail kid in front, driving. When they reached the end of Anthony’s long parking lot, the Ford turned right, towards downtown. It cruised past the Whiskey Priest, which was when Jack spoke again.
“Good,” he said. “I was afraid he was going to stop in there to count his cash.”
The Crown Vic turned right again, onto Atlantic Avenue, and wound its way around to the Callahan tunnel.
“East Boston?” said Jack Reilly. “I didn’t expect this.”
“Airport maybe?” I said, just to keep up my end of the conversation.
“I have no idea.”
At the end of the tunnel, instead of heading for the airport, the Crown Vic turned toward Maverick Square, cut past Santarpio’s, and then headed left on Bennington Street.
“I bet I know where they’re headed,” I said.
“Where?” He looked over in curiosity.
“A place called the Python.”
“Mafia?”
“Once upon a time, maybe. It used to be called Santo’s. It’s Spanish now, everything over here is, until you get to Orient Heights.”
Reilly was keeping a steady five or six car lengths behind the Crown Vic. It was a leisurely tail. He turned to me and said:
“What makes you think they’re going to Santo’s—I mean, the Python?”
“A couple of guys I ran into in Somerville, I heard that’s where they hung.”
Jack Reilly thought for a second. He was pondering the past tense of hang—“hung.”
“Are you talking about those two guys that got shot in the car on Broadway a couple of nights ago?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’d be a helluva thing,” Reilly said, “if the next president of the state Senate walked into a bucket of blood like that.”
Up ahead I could see the neon sign for the Python. There were a couple more beer signs in the glass windows. When they burned out they’d be replaced with ones that said “CERVEZA.” The fact that the glass wasn’t boarded over meant that the neighborhood was no longer in play. No need to worry about getting machine gunned by a passing car full of guineas pissed about getting pushed out of their own neighborhood.
The Crown Vic pulled into a bus stop directly in front of Santo’s and Reilly drove past. I watched everyone get out, including the driver. Reilly made his first left turn and then backed out onto Bennington and took the first space he could find. He was right behind a low-rider with the hood up, and a couple of tattooed illegals staring into the engine. As soon as they saw us, they shut the hood and walked off down a side street.
“Drug sentries,” Reilly said needlessly. “Maybe they thought we were cops.”
I laughed. “In this piece of shit? I mean, no offense, but what junkyard did you steal this out of? They don’t even make Oldsmobiles anymore, do they?”
“They don’t make Crown Vics either.”
I let it go. “What do you want to do now?”
Reil
ly gave me a puzzled look. “We go in and check it out, of course.” He opened his door and had one foot out onto the pavement before I grabbed his right arm.
“Hold on,” I said, grasping his arm tightly. “Are you crazy? Walking in there alone doesn’t make any sense.”
“I didn’t know I was alone,” he said. But he pulled his left leg back inside the car and closed the door. The roof light went out and we sat in darkness. He looked at me quizzically.
“C’mon,” I pleaded. “You don’t want to tip your hand.”
“I don’t mind walking into strange bars. I do it all the time.”
“So I’ve noticed,” I said. “But let’s think about this. You’re not even carrying, are you?”
“Aren’t you?” he asked.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m a convicted felon.”
He snorted. “Please.”
“Please, nothing. If I were carrying there’d be another guy here with me. A guy with no record.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a law-abiding citizen.” Now he was starting to get fresh. I think I liked him better when he was scared of me.
“Look, it’s your car so it’s your call, but why do you want to stick around here? I mean, we kinda stick out. We’re Americans.”
“Yeah, but it’s dark, and we’re in an illegal-alien car.”
“You got a point there, but the bigger question is, why bother to let them make us, now that we’ve confirmed our suspicions.”
“We?”
“Yeah, we. You came to see me, remember? I think we share a mutual interest in this … this matter. I’m assuming you’re working for somebody, so you want to turn up some information for your client. My interest is, me and my friends, we don’t like getting shot at, especially when we don’t know why they’re shooting at us. Speaking of which, that’s another good reason for moving along. It’s harder to hit a moving target.”