Killers

by Howie Carr

  “Is the Weeper going soft?” I asked.

  “I told him you were my collateral,” she said.

  She was lying. She knew better than to say something like that. And the Weeper knew better than to believe her.

  “Tell me what really happened, Liz?” I asked.

  “Okay, I had a watch.”

  “Did you steal it from those yuppies?”

  “No, I borrowed it.”

  The fog was lifting. There was only one person she could “borrow” a watch from expensive enough to hock to the Weeper for her bail.

  “You stole a watch from Sally?” I asked, incredulously.

  “I borrowed it,” she said. “And I wasn’t robbing that other place either, I was just taking a nap. I mean, why would I need to steal anything more if I already had Sally’s watch?”

  It was junkie logic.

  “Let’s get in the car,” I said. “We have to get the watch back. Who’s got it, the Weeper?”

  She nodded and wiped a tear from her eye. Then she went around and got in the passenger’s side.

  “I’m sorry, Bench,” she said.

  “I’m sorry too,” I said. “For you. Did you really tell Sally you were going to tell Rosa?”

  “Maybe, I can’t remember, but so what? She doesn’t know about me? Jason knows.” She waved at Jason as he came out of the station to a fill-up some hedge-fund manager’s Mercedes.

  “Liz,” I said, “you’re not supposed to flaunt it, don’t you understand? Sally’s going to want you…”

  “I know,” she said, as we headed south on Cambridge Street, toward the Common and the South End. “He wants to have dinner with me, and I’m afraid. I told him I wouldn’t come unless you were there.”

  Oh, now I understood my late invitation. I was the bait to lure Liz to the Café Ravenna, and from there …

  “How’d you know where I was?” I asked.

  “I called Cheech and asked if he’d seen you, and he said you’d just left with Jason. Are you going to have dinner with Sally tonight?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but don’t go inside until you see me.” Now I had another problem: how to avoid going to the dinner where Liz was supposed to get set up.

  “Is Sally going to miss the watch?” I asked, but before she could answer, I heard more banging in the trunk.

  “Let me out of here!” he was screaming. “I didn’t do nothing to you!”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  In spite of herself, Liz was smiling.

  “I can’t believe what you do sometimes,” she said.

  “Believe it,” I said. “Now, is he going to miss the watch or not?”

  “Never,” she said. “I know where he hides it. It’s in—”

  “I don’t want to know. Just fucking get it back from the Weeper. How much was your bail?”

  “Three thousand.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, reaching into my coat pocket. Henry Sheldon’s money was going fast. I handed her a wad of hundred-dollar bills and told her to get the watch back and we’d worry about putting it back later. I pulled over on Columbus Avenue and let her out.

  She came around to my side of the car and tried to kiss me but I brushed her off. No teeth and I could only imagine what her breath must smell like after a night in the lockup and then some cheap hootch to cut the D.T.’s after she made bail.

  “Thank you, Bench,” she said, looking down at the money in her hands.

  Odds were she’d use the money for more coke, or something, but that wasn’t my problem. If anything happened, I just wanted to be able to tell myself later that I’d tried to do something. I’d never say it to anyone—that would make me seem weak, sentimental. I just wanted to be able to rationalize it to myself. Maybe I do have a conscience after all.

  Nah, probably not.

  * * *

  I still had one problem, and he was in the trunk of my car. But as I drove south into Roxbury, I knew exactly what I was going to do with him. I drove into Franklin Park to the old Mattapan State Hospital and found a young tree, not too wide. I parked the car out of sight of the road, went around to the trunk and slammed the billy club down again.

  “Are you blindfolded?” I said.

  “Yea—yea, yes,” he said.

  “You better be.” I opened the trunk and sure enough, he was.

  I pulled him up by his collar and then dragged him to the tree. Then I opened the glove compartment, put on some fresh gloves and took out a pair of police handcuffs I’d picked up somewhere along the line. I used the cuffs to handcuff him around the tree. As fat as he was, it was a tight fit. Then I went through his pockets, found his wallet and extracted Ditto Foley’s $5,000 check. He had put me through a lot more than five grand’s worth of aggravation. Then I took the bottle of cheap gin from the Dog House and poured it all over his head. Finally, I pulled his underwear down around his ankles. I wanted him to be found seemingly drunk and the victim of some homo hijinks.

  “Where am I?” he said, his eyes still covered by his pants.

  “Welcome to the jungle, baby.”

  24

  NOT JUST ANOTHER PRETTY FACE

  I knew getting the lieutenant governor’s cell phone records was going to be a bitch of a job, and I’ll tell you why.

  The problem was, the State Police had custody of the phone records. The staties are like a different world. I’m a Boston guy, out of City Hall, ex-BPD, heavy connections to the State House through my years as Mr. Fix-it, or Mr. Fixer, for the old mayor.

  The State Police cover all of Massachusetts, including even a few parts of Boston, like the airport. I would never think of calling them hicks, but that’s exactly how a lot of city guys see them. Whenever they try to expand their footprint in the city, like right now in the Seaport District, there’s a major-league turf war. Which is a long way of saying, the BPD and the staties are wary of each other at best, and I’m still a Boston cop as far as the staties are concerned. That makes it much more difficult for me to extract usable amounts of excrement from my erstwhile rivals, especially at reasonable prices.

  Typo Rivard, my liaison in the attorney general’s office, understood the bureaucratic morass I found myself in. Fortunately, the A.G. has his own cadre of State Police investigators. These are usually very well-connected guys. After introductions from Typo, I had started working with one, a Lieutenant Paulino, who had explained that this case was even thornier, because being from Worcester, the lieutenant governor was very tight with C Troop, who were the first responders to his, ahem, accident. Everybody in C Troop was with the lieutenant governor, at least in the Office of Campaign and Political Finance reports. Well, almost all of them. Which was why we figured that, given enough time, we could find the weak link.

  “There’s always a bad apple,” I told Lieutenant Paulino at our first meeting at the Red Hat, on the bottom of Beacon Hill, just down the street from his twenty-first-floor office in the McCormack Building. “Even Jesus had a—”

  “I found Judas,” he said with a smile. “It’s all lined up.”

  At this point I wouldn’t have been surprised if Typo had told me my services were no longer required, and sent me on my way with a grand for my troubles. But these guys didn’t want any fingerprints—always a good policy, but especially when you’re dealing with sodomite dynamite here in the Gay State, Sodom and Begorrah.

  “I don’t have to meet him in Worcester, do I?” I asked.

  “Good Christ no, that would be asking for trouble,” he said. “It’s all lined up for tonight. Eight o’clock. Brian Boru’s in Lowell.”

  These Irish names crack me up, like any of the local harps know who Brian Boru was, any more than they’ve ever read Flann O’Brien, or Brendan Behan, both of whom also have pubs named after them. There’s only one Hibernian name that means anything to American turks—Guinness on Draft.

  * * *

  The pick-up went off without a hitch. At 8:00 p.m. I was sitting in a booth in the back of the Brian Boru u
nder an ancient framed portrait of Eamon de Valera, another Irishman nobody in the bar could pick out of a lineup. With me in a plain business envelope were twenty-five of my closest friends, all of whom were named Benjamin Franklin. The off-duty statie, wearing a Harley jacket, sidled in across from me and pushed a folded-up edition of that evening’s Lowell Sun across the table. I reciprocated with a copy of the morning’s Boston Herald. He got up and left without saying a word. I did the same five minutes later.

  I consider myself a professional shit excavator. No need for a written contract, I work on a handshake. I follow my clients’ instructions, obtain the political feces that they require, and after thoroughly washing my hands, move on to the next assignment. But this time my curiosity got the better of me. This might be a real game changer. There was a very good chance that the governorship was on the line right here. Like everybody else in the state, I wanted to know who Crash had been calling that morning at 5:20 when he was driving at 108 mph on I-190 in his footy pajamas.

  I’d known I couldn’t resist the temptation, so I had bought a throw-down cell phone earlier, in the Acre, at a store that had hand-lettered signs in six languages saying “WE ACCEPT EBT CARDS.” Outside Brian Boru’s, in my Oldsmobile, I ran my finger down the list of phone numbers until I got to 5:22, just after the crash. It was a 508 area code. I picked up the burner phone and dialed. It rang three times before someone picked it up.

  “This is State Senator Lisa Mulcahy, how may I help you?”

  I hung up the phone. Lisa Mulcahy, oh my God.

  The ugliest woman at the State House, maybe in the state. What did the Herald always say about her—a whale of a candidate? Not just another pretty face. Tons of fun.

  Then I went up the phone bill’s list of numbers. He’d started calling the same number at 10:56, probably about the time his wife turned in for the evening. He’d been lining up a session of bury-the-brisket at the local hot sheet no-tell motel.

  He wasn’t queer after all, just blind. Who knew? This was even better news for the A.G. His foe the lieutenant governor couldn’t trump the exposé by coming out of the closet and saying, “I am a gay American.”

  I immediately called Typo with the good news.

  “Turns out he was playing doctor with the shades drawn with the senator from the Third Worcester,” I said.

  “That sow?” he said with a laugh. Glasses were clinking. As usual Typo was in a bar. “He must have been so horny he’d have fucked the crack of dawn.”

  The lieutenant governor’s career was over.

  “I didn’t know they were still running Pig Nights at the State House,” I said.

  Typo Rivard laughed. “Good work, my boy. I’ll see you at Foley’s in an hour.”

  * * *

  My brother Marty has seven months to go on his latest bit, or so it says on the Bureau of Prisons website. He’s up at Devens, a federal medical center, a nice place to do time, if you have to do time, which my brother does, because somebody traded him up. He was driving another load of stolen cigarettes, and the cops got a “tip.” That makes twice now he’s gone away on a load of stolen cigarettes.

  It’s not easy to get to the phone up there, or so Marty tells me. Not as bad as in some of the higher-security pens, like Otisville. Weekends are the worst, of course, because the cons can call their girlfriends who have jobs, even though in my experience most of them are on the dole, at least lately. Marty tells me Saturdays are quite a show, guys stroking themselves off in front of the payphone. I’ll spare you the rest of the X-rated details.

  This was a Tuesday. He had the phone reserved for ten. I’d handed over the cell-phone records to Typo Rivard, had a quick hihowahya with him, pocketed my own bulging envelope and then excused myself. I only live two blocks from J.J.’s. The call from my brother came through right on time.

  “Commissary account’s starting to run a little low, bro,” he began. I guess I don’t blame him. Gotta be quick, we never talked much longer than four or five minutes. He’d gotten into the Internet, and now he was complaining that the BOP was robbing him blind, a dime per e-mail, everything censored on top of it all. It had to be the only part of the federal government running in the black.

  “Can you get up here?” he said. It was the money he wanted to see, not me.

  “As soon as I can,” I said. “Listen, you hear anything?”

  “It’s easier to talk in the visitors’ room.” Pause. “Safer.”

  “I understand, but I’m in kind of a rush. Anybody taking the bus?”

  “Funny you should mention the bus. Remember a guy named Mikey Tickets?”

  “Mikey Tickets from East Boston?” I said. “Mikey Tickets from City Hall?”

  “Yeah, him. He always talks about how when he worked in Transportation, you used to send over the reps’ parking tickets from the State House and it was his job to fix ’em.”

  Yeah, Mikey Tickets, after the old mayor left office in a photo finish with the grand jury, the same grand jury I was running neck and neck with, Mikey Tickets backed the right guy in the next mayor’s fight. He got a promotion, handing out urban redevelopment grants, only he started handing them out to himself, which was why he was riding the bus now.

  “Shouldn’t he be out by now?” I said.

  “Contempt of the grand jury,” Marty said. “Another eighteen months, on and after.”

  “What?” I said. “He was working solo. What’s he got to give them?”

  “He’s from East Boston.”

  “He was never in the rackets that I know of.”

  “You sure about that? I repeat, he’s from Eastie.”

  I thought hard. To me he was just another hack from Ward 1, a guy who started every other sentence with “Not for nothing…” I think he used to tend bar at Junior’s Trolley. Maybe sold a few pills, but …

  “No, it ain’t pills, at least I don’t think so. He told me these were DOJ guys came to see him, prosecutors, with DEA and the State Police.”

  “DEA?”

  “They handle organized crime in Boston now, don’t you know anything? FBI’s been cut out of the loop since Whitey.” He chuckled. “Are you back peepin’ through keyholes again? You have to call me to find out what’s going on?”

  He loves to do this to me. He’s inside and I’m out. The one time I got in a real jackpot, I was nolle prossed, and yet he’s the smart guy, Mr. Three-time Loser.

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “This was about three weeks ago. First they run him through the wringer up here, they drag him out of population and make him sit there in some closet for three hours, you know what I mean? I’ve told you how it works.”

  What the feds do is, if you’re not cooperating, they throw you in a holding pen for hours at a time. Then they bring you in and you say, I’m not saying nothing until I see my attorney, and they say okay and drive back to Boston. After which you are returned to population, and everybody’s giving you the fish-eye look ’cause they think you’ve been ratting them all out these last three or four hours.

  If you’re lucky you might not get shanked that same night in the shower.

  Next morning, you’re calling your lawyer, and the feds are coming back, and this time you are answering their questions, you are ratting, and next thing you know, you’re in WITSEC—

  “Are you listening?” my brother Marty said. “Mikey fucking Tickets could talk a dog off a meat wagon, so he’s okay, he explains to everybody what happened. Once the feds realize he ain’t cracking, they put him on the bus.”

  Diesel therapy, they call it. They drive you around the country, you and a bunch of other cons they’re trying to crack. The windows are covered over, so you don’t even know what time of day it is. The only thing they feed you is sandwiches with cold cuts, and I don’t mean Boars Head Black Forest ham either. So you get constipated. Every night, the bus stops at a different lockup and you file off, but you can’t buy anything at the commissary or make phon
e calls outside, because you don’t have an account there.

  This can go on for months, or so Marty tells me.

  “Is he back yet?” I asked.

  “Fuck no he ain’t back. There ain’t no round-trip tickets on that bus. They either crack you or you end up in some state pen in the south that’s ninety percent jig. And that’s when you flip. Most guys figure, who needs that? They crack quick once they get on the bus.”

  “So you haven’t talked to him?”

  “I just told you, he’s on the bus. Or was. Next time I see Mikey Tickets it’ll be at Santo’s.”

  “What did you say?”

  “He used to tend bar at Santo’s before he got hired at City Hall.”

  I was suddenly anxious to end the conversation. “Thank you very much, Marty. Anything else?”

  “Just don’t forget me,” he said. “You told Ma you’d look after me. The way I interpret that, it means you never let me get under a hundred bucks and, brother, I’m getting close.”

  I told him I’d see him Saturday. Maybe.

  25

  I’D RATHER BE LUCKY THAN GOOD

  Sooner or later, you get caught flat-footed. To quote somebody, there comes a night when the best get tight—and when it happened to me, I wasn’t even tight. I just wasn’t paying enough attention as I pulled up into a parking space a few doors up the hill from the Alibi. It was dusk, and there was nobody on Broadway—Somerville has gone from working class to non-working class. It wasn’t like the old days, when people at this hour would be getting off the bus and shopping for a few groceries or a six-pack before walking home. Now it might as well as have been midnight.

  Suddenly I heard the squeal of tires. That was what saved me. If they’d just driven up at a normal speed they’d have had me cold. Instead, I had time to hit the sidewalk rolling, toward a dented-up minivan with a roof rack for ladders, something that belonged to a tradesman, probably a painter.

  As I rolled I could see the front plate-glass window of the Winter Hill Barber Shop explode. They were using an automatic rifle. And I was unarmed. If they knew that, my reputation might still precede me, but it sure wouldn’t save me. I’d be the next guy laid out in the front parlor at Rossetti’s.