Killers
Page 17
Reilly didn’t say anything for a second or two, but he finally turned the key in the ignition, then put the Olds into gear and pulled out onto Bennington Street. He didn’t say anything for a couple of blocks before he spoke again.
“You guys really don’t know why they’re shooting at you?” he said.
“I have my theories,” I said.
“Me too. Let’s hear yours first.”
“Like I said, you’re the boss. You’re driving.” I scratched my head, trying to figure out how much I should tell Reilly. My general policy is, what you don’t say can’t hurt you, but I didn’t figure anything here was top secret. This was just theorizing.
“It seems pretty clear,” I said, “that somebody’s trying to make it look like there’s a gang war going on.”
“And there isn’t?”
“C’mon, Reilly, you’re smarter than that. There hasn’t been a hit around here for years.”
“What about in Somerville the other night?” Reilly asked.
“That? That was self-defense. Or so I’m told. I think that’s even what the cops said in the papers, didn’t they? They found guns in that car, rifles. Rifles that had just been fired.”
Reilly turned right towards the tunnel entrance. “So why would they start shooting people?”
“You tell me. I’m not even sure who ‘they’ are. You’re the political guy. Seems to me I heard there was a casino bill up at the State House. Maybe somebody’s trying to make it look like the element’s running out of control, and that it’ll only get worse if they start licensing casinos.”
“Who’d want to do that?”
I sighed. “Look, I’ve told you what I think. Now you tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” Reilly said. “All I know is, the pro-casino people had the votes to pass the legislation when the shooting started, and now they don’t.”
“Well, there you go.”
Maybe the shooting was over, if they’d gotten what they wanted. But we still had some scores to settle with them, me and Sally, whoever they were. Still, something told me there was more to this than Reilly was letting on, or maybe knew.
Reilly said, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—” which meant he was about to tell me whatever “this” was.
“You know Sally’s nephew who got shot the other night?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Now I was really paying attention.
“The BPD’s got the gun—it was a Walther PPK. Did you know that?”
“No, Jack, I didn’t.” Okay, I lied. The important thing was, his information was good. That fact hadn’t made the papers.
“Where’d it come from?” I asked. “Where’d they find it?”
“In some junkie’s car. He was trying to rob Blanchard’s down the Roxbury line, stoned out of his mind. The cops grabbed him and went outside to his car and they found it in the trunk.”
“No shit.” This was news I could use. “What color was this gentleman?”
“Spanish,” Reilly said. Being from the South End and having worked at City Hall and the State House, I guess he had to be politically correct.
“The most interesting thing of all,” he said, “was that when they let him make his one phone call, he called his probation officer, who is also his brother—”
I interrupted: “Who works for that front-running cocksucker who just walked into Santo’s with the senator.”
“Bingo,” Reilly said. “I just gave you a lot of stuff you didn’t have, didn’t I? I think we could turn up more, working together.”
“I’ll think about it, Jack.”
“Where’s your car, back at Anthony’s?” he asked, and I nodded. He doubled back around onto Northern Avenue and I pointed out the Chevy Blazer I’d driven over in. He pulled alongside it and we sat there in his warm Oldsmobile.
“I wonder who owns the Python,” he said.
“Somebody who’s in with the people who are trying to kill your casino bill, obviously.”
Reilly said, “Why would somebody with that kind of dough hang out at the Python?”
“C’mon, Reilly, these aren’t the guys with the money, these are the guys who are taking the orders from the guys with the money. Even the senator. Especially the senator. I mean, are you putting up the dough for the casino you’re trying to help get built, or are you working for some guys who are working for some guys that have the $500 million for the casino?”
Reilly shook his head. “Hard to track guys that hang out at the Python back to the big boys. Lotta buffers.”
“Of course,” I said. “That’s how the system works, you should know that, being a former buffer yourself. There’s always got to be a fall guy waiting in the wings. Or in this case, at the Python.”
Reilly still seemed to be trying to figure out his next move.
“Listen,” I said to him, “you do a little sleuthin’, and I’ll do a little sleuthin’, and maybe we’ll get together again and compare notes.”
“How will I know—”
“You’ll know,” I said, opening the door. “When I need to find you, I’ll find you.”
20
LUNCH WITH DINTY MOORE
I asked Katy Bemis to see what she could find out for me about Senator Denis “Donuts” Donahue. Even when I worked at the State House, back in the days when I was straightening things out for the old mayor, I never paid much attention to anybody who collected a per diem of more than $10 a day. The per diem is what the legislators get for the expense of commuting into Boston. Believe it or not, they get paid for coming to work. Or not coming, as the case may be. It’s run on the honor system, wink wink nudge nudge, and the reps can grab between $10 and $100 a day, depending on how far away they live from Beacon Hill.
Anyway, the more a guy collects in per diems, the more time he spends driving, which leaves less time for stealing. There’s an old saying at the State House: “When the boys from the suburbs go home, the boys from Boston go to work.”
It’s true, if you include the adjoining cities as Boston—especially Somerville, Chelsea, Revere and Cambridge. Donahue, though, was from Worcester, a $35 per diem. But he had to be pretty good, if he had the votes lined up to become the next president of the Senate.
Katy must have been intrigued by my request that she pull the files on Donuts, because after a little cajoling, she agreed to join me for lunch at Meg’s on West Broadway in Southie. It used to be a good place to meet her because it attracted a strictly lunch-pail blue-collar crowd, unlike Amrhein’s across the street, where the more upscale hacks and hoodlums hung out.
Now, with the gentrification going on, the Meg’s breakfast crowd was a bit more chi-chi, or so I’d heard. I never ate breakfast in Southie; I hate being the one who finds the body in the alley and has to call 911. But by noon the yuppies are all at work in the skyscrapers, and it’s the old crowd, very few of whom would recognize me or, more importantly, Katy. The Globe loves the hoi polloi, but only in the abstract, on the editorial page. Actually consorting with the riffraff—that was as unthinkable as the married lesbian Globies sending their gaybies to Boston public schools.
I got to Meg’s first and grabbed a table in the window, so I could keep an eye on the Amrhein’s crowd across the street, mainly for shits and giggles. Then I went up and ordered the blue-plate special, corned beef hash. Katy sauntered in about five minutes later, saw me, slung her Gucci bag over the facing chair, and went up to order her food. Another reason I like Meg’s—it’s refreshing to see Katy Bemis with a tray in her hands. A couple of minutes later she sat down across from me.
“I hope you don’t mind I didn’t wait for you,” I said.
She eyed my clean plate with distaste. “I see you went with the Special Du Jour too,” she said.
“Corned beef hash,” I said. “Dinty Moore’s finest.”
“They told me it was homemade,” she said.
“They tell that to all the girls from Wenham.”
She t
ook a few bites without saying anything, then pushed the plate aside and dug into her bag. She took out a file folder full of printouts and put it on the table. I felt somewhat embarrassed, having to ask Katy to fill me in on anything at the State House, but if you’re not around somewhere every day, you can lose touch quickly. I still knew everybody from the city, and everybody who’d been around when I was working on Beacon Hill, but Donahue had been a backbencher when I was the mayor’s fixer. He’d moved up fast, after the feds wiped out the Senate leadership a few years back in a scandal involving racetrack dates, or maybe it was no-bid state computer-software contracts, or perjury in a gerrymandering case … the scandals all run together after a while.
The key here was, it was an election year, and the governor wasn’t running for reelection. An old-time governor’s councilor used to say, “Lame duck is my favorite dish,” and it still is, for everybody. There was a going-out-of-business sale sign on the front lawn of the State House, just like at Reilly Associates, except that underneath their “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” sign, there was another one that said, “EVERYTHING MUST GO!”
The outgoing governor was peddling judgeships. Instead of reasonable doubt at a reasonable price, in a lame-duck year the lawyers themselves were seeking reasonable retirements at a reasonable price.
Construction contracts were big too. This governor was trying to “straighten out” the so-called curve at the Allston tolls on what was no longer officially called the Turnpike. No one had ever noticed there even was a bend in the road until the governor’s rubber-stamp Pike board decided to fix it, which would triple or quadruple the value of the land underneath it, which had been sold to Harvard University eight years earlier, during the prior administration’s lame-duck session. That former governor was now a vice president of Harvard, for $350,000 a year.
I had told Katy about Donuts’ time at Anthony’s, and how he had basically thrown the casino bill under the bus, after his boss the Senate president had been pushing it for years.
“I called around this morning,” she said. “The word is they all think the bill is dead for the year, so the president cut Donuts and everybody else loose. They’re all free agents, they can tell anybody they’re going to vote whichever way they want, unless it comes to the floor, in which case, they still have to vote with the leadership. But that’s moot, because they don’t have the votes. Don’t be surprised if the Senate president calls a press conference today to announce he’s withdrawing his support.”
“And here I thought a man’s word was his bond at the State House.”
Katy smiled in spite of herself. “The polls have flipped since the shooting started; he knows which way the wind is blowing. Besides, he’s been paid off already. He gave it his best shot. It’s not his fault what happened. Now he’s got to worry about himself. It’s up or out. The pro-casino money’s not going to do him any good if he’s out of office and there sure won’t be any more money coming in if he’s gone.”
“What about Donuts?” I asked.
“I guess,” she said, “he was just testing out his new stump speech in front of a friendly audience.”
Katy was explaining this quite clearly, no BS, her green eyes flashing occasionally as she used to good effect one of the simple phrases she’d picked up from me, like “up or out.” I’d been a good teacher, perhaps too good. She didn’t seem to need me anymore, for political tutoring or anything else. But as they say in Hollywood, self-pity is not good box office, and I’d have plenty of time for feeling sorry for myself later.
“Tell me about Donuts,” I said.
She took a legal pad out of her file folder and glanced at her handwritten notes.
“Well,” she said, “he’s from Worcester, and I seem to recall you teaching me something about pols from Worcester.”
“It took him three tries to pass the bar exam?”
“Actually, four.” She smiled in triumph.
“What’s his tie-in to the probation commissioner?” I asked. “Other than kin.”
The tie-in was this: the judges and the legislature had always battled for control of the hack jobs in the judicial system—court officers, assistant clerks, probation officers, chief probation officers, etc.
The legislators always figured that they should have the upper hand, since they had to run for their jobs every two years, whereas the judges made close to $100,000 more a year than legislators, and they had lifetime appointments. The judges were immune from those rare Republican landslide years. So the legislature decided to effect a hostile takeover of the Probation Department. The shiftless judges could still get plenty of P.O. jobs for their equally shiftless friends and relatives, but to get them the judges had to go hat in hand to the legislature, just like the reps had to clear their court-officer job lists through the judges. One hand washes the other, you scratch my back …
Thinking about the courthouse hackerama reminded me of an old State House joke.
Q: What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of forty?
A: Your Honor.
To control Probation Department patronage, the legislative leadership needed a commissioner they could control, a front man. A guy from Boston would raise eyebrows in the press; he would automatically be assumed to be at best a hack, at worst a white-collar wiseguy.
At this point Donuts stepped forward and nominated as commissioner Drew Amato—a chief probation officer who had the added advantage of being … Donuts’ cousin. Katy beamed as she told me that; she was proud of her little tidbit and far be it from me to say “I already knew that.” Being from Worcester, she continued, Amato, like his cousin, was presumed to be too lame to represent a serious threat to anyone. Donuts and his cousin might be hot stuff in Worcester, but anybody from east of 128 could roll them, no problem, or so the leadership figured.
This legislative takeover of probation had occurred about four years ago, and since then the hacks had been running amok. The judges, greedy pricks that they are, wanted more, and not only did the legislature tell them no, they cut the budgets of a couple of the more vocal judges to put an exclamation point on their refusal to share the wealth.
None of this was exactly a state secret—almost every new connected probation hire was snidely reported in the Herald, although the Globe didn’t deign to even mention such low-rent effluvia. Presumably the Globe editors didn’t want to embarrass their fellow travelers in the judiciary. It was all so incestuous among the Beautiful People, and Katy wanted so desperately to pass muster with the PC Police. She’d even taken to calling sex-change operations “gender reassignments.”
“Let me guess,” I finally said. “Finally, a delegation of distinguished jurists, most of whom drifted into Massachusetts from New York, went to see the capos di tutti bow-tied bum-kissers of Morrissey Boulevard, all of whom blew in from the Hamptons and Park Avenue.”
“It’s always 1953 to you, isn’t it, Jack?”
“More like 1853. You’re familiar with the Know Nothings, I presume?”
Her great-great-great-great-grandfather had been the governor back then. Oh, how her ancestors had despised Roman Catholics. The Yankee mobs burned convents back in those days. I still have the sign above my mantel that I bought years ago at the JFK Library—“No Irish Need Apply.” God, how Katy had hated that sign.
“Now I’m starting to remember,” I said. “Globe runs a big Sunday story putting together all the little Herald stories about the probation hackapalooza, and the judiciary is shocked—shocked. And the very next day a blue-ribbon commission—a Pabst Blue Ribbon commission—is set up, and now the feds have a grand jury investigating how Amato’s wife and daughter got jobs at the state Lottery after he ran a time for the state treasurer with about a hundred of his P.O.s there.”
She nodded. “And of course the Lottery jobs are the ones everybody wants because they’re union and you can’t be fired if the treasurer runs for governor, which they always do, including this one. And he’s going to lose like all the other ones.”
If, however, this year’s casino bill suddenly imploded, which it now had, then it would be up to Donuts to pick up the pieces next year. The King is dead, long live King Donuts.
The guy who had been arrested with the gun that killed Sally Curto’s nephew—he’d been on probation. He was from Worcester. He’d used his one phone call to reach out to a probation officer who happened to be his brother, who was duking a grand a year to Donuts. It’s a small world, isn’t it? Plus, one of the two guys who’d opened fire on Bench on Broadway in Somerville—he’d just gotten out of the can too. And the guy in the back seat was a fired probation officer.
Everything was falling into place. But I still couldn’t figure out how they knew which places to hit, although I had a feeling Bench McCarthy might be one step ahead of me on that piece of the puzzle.
I hurriedly got up from the table.
“Hey,” said Katy, “where are you going? What is this, the old dine ’n’ dash?”
Yet another line she’d picked up from me. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a double sawbuck and threw it on the table.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, heading out onto West Broadway.
* * *
Slip Crowley, my old pal on the Boston City Council, got his start on the Boston Licensing Board. He’d been the driver for a winning candidate for governor, and he’d begged for the job of chief secretary, the guy in charge of patronage in the Corner Office. But Slip had turned out to be a little rough around the edges for that position—he was always demanding cash from strangers who wanted jobs, even Republicans.