Killers

by Howie Carr

  I had her. She couldn’t put me in the story, and she knew it. I was of no further use this evening.

  “Good night, Jack,” she said. “And say good night to Patty—I mean, Donnaangela.”

  37

  ON THE LAM

  I keep a room on the third floor of an old one-family house just outside Medford Square. I rent it from an old Italian lady, and keep a change of clothes there. It’s strictly a hideout, and most years I don’t use it at all. No TV, no Internet, just an old AM tube radio that the old lady found in the basement and brought upstairs for me a couple of years back.

  Nowadays, though, I have an iPad, and my cellphone has a WiFi hot spot, so I was able to read the early editions of the newspapers shortly after midnight, while sitting on the lumpy old mattress of my bed. I wasn’t exactly gripped with remorse—after all, they had been trying to kill me. Still, I admit that to the squeamish must have seemed over the top, five people shot to death, another on his way out. It was like a Blackfriars, or Sammy White’s Brighton Bowl, one of those massacres from thirty-five years ago that I’d always heard about.

  But what exactly are you supposed to do if somebody sends six or eight guys after you? You can’t take any prisoners, that’s for sure. Not in this line of work. Nobody gets read his Miranda rights, let’s put it that way. If the situations had been reversed, they wouldn’t have read me mine.

  It was hard to see how they’d be bothering either me or Sally again, but on the other hand, it looked like this guy Donuts and his hack pals had gotten what they wanted. Nobody in the legislature was going to vote for a casino now.

  The next morning, right at 6:00 a.m., my cell phone rang in Medford.

  “You hot shit you! That was fucking awesome!” It was Sally. “I’m almost afraid to meet up with you after last night.”

  “Sally, ix-nay,” I said. “See you in Winthrop?”

  I hoped Sally remembered the code. Winthrop meant Winchester. The cops would never figure us meeting in Winchester. Even though it was in the same Senate district as Somerville and Medford, it seems suburban—safe.

  Which was probably why Sally’s driver was George Graft. I hadn’t seen him since the troubles started. He was more Sally’s friend than anything else, a wiseguy, but with an asterisk. Sally must have figured the war, such as it was, was over.

  In Winchester, we meet outside Piantedosi Bread Shoppe downtown. I got there first and was leaning up against a mailbox when Sally pulled in behind my car. He jumped out and ran up and hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks and then grabbed me by the arm. I waited until George Graft got out and then I went over and gave him a hug and said “Welcome back.” Then Sally grasped my arm again and started walking us both toward the train station, so we could talk alone.

  “I was expectin’ you again last night at the Café Ravenna,” he whispered. “You don’t show up, it ain’t that big a deal, except that Liz stopped by, and she likes to see you, but then I’m home, waiting for a call, only it’s not you, it’s George Graft, telling me turn on the late news, there’s been a shoot-out in Somerville—”

  From the way he was telling the story, I could see that he’d thought I’d been hit. Maybe he would have been broken up about me sleeping with the fishes, but that was something he would have gotten over. After all, he didn’t seem to miss Hole in the Head. What he would have missed about me was my muscle. One thing about Sally—he played all his cards face up. He wasn’t devious about anything. Damn right he was glad I was still alive. He still had somebody to protect him, and through me he had avenged his nephew, and his street boss.

  He had gotten it done, that’s what he’d tell everybody down in Fort Lauderdale next winter. I’ve got this kid, this Irish guy—and his goombah pals would say, we heard you cut the kid in on everything, fifty-fifty, he’s your partner now, he’s practically a made guy. And Sally would answer sure, he thinks he’s my partner, I let him have all that shit in his own neighborhoods, but that’s all it is anyway, shit. And the goombahs will say, I thought all the new shit he split with you, fifty-fifty, and Sally will say, sure, sure, that’s the deal, but there ain’t no new shit, you know that, everything that’s out there now, low-hanging fruit, just begging to be picked, it’s always feds pretending to be wiseguys.

  And you know what, if Sally was saying that, and he probably was, he’d be right. But still, being his “partner” was better than always having to worry about getting whacked, or snatched, because most of the time it’s the same thing. They grab you off the street, they hold you for ransom, and when they get the dough, they cap you.

  For me, being with Sally means not having to replace all the plate-glass doors at my next apartment with steel plates, so I don’t get picked off when I’m eating breakfast with Patty at the kitchen table.

  Don’t get me wrong; I know I could get clipped at any moment. It’s almost happened three times in the past week alone. Sally might even decide to take me off the board, or try to. Believe me, I have no illusions about Sally. But I’ve got a skill set none of his guys have anymore, which cuts down the odds of getting hit in the head more than somewhat.

  “Do you know how this’ll look to New York?” Sally was saying, gesturing with his cigar as we walked past a bus stop with parents standing with their kids, to protect them from any random killers who might be out for morning constitutionals. “After last night, nobody’s gonna fuck with us for a very long fucking time.”

  “Sally, watch your language,” I said, lowering my voice. “They’re not used to guys like us in Winchester.”

  Sally shrugged, but didn’t speak again until we’d put thirty or forty yards between ourselves and the school-bus contingent. I spoke first.

  “Sally, remember a couple of months back, you told me our problem was we hadn’t been shooting enough guys? Discipline’s all shot to shit and everything. Remember when you said that?”

  “My poor nephew,” he said, nodding. “Them dirty motherfuckers—I can’t tell ya how great I felt last night when I seen it on the late news. That nice neat row of machine-gun bullet holes in their fucking car in Somerville. It was just like the old days. Larry Baione would have been proud. I seen him once, down Shawmut Ave, he was firing a machine gun while he was hanging off the running board of a Packard. He left rows of bullet holes all up and down the street.”

  He was telling me the same story old Tommy Callahan had told at Hole in the Head’s wake. Only then he’d said Tommy was going senile.

  Sally was still waving his cigar around. “You don’t see shit like that no more!”

  “That’s the effect I was going for, Sal. The retro look.”

  “The beautiful thing here is all them weapons in their cars. They were fuckin’”—he caught himself this time, even though there were no matrons on either side of the street—“they were trying to kill us, no question about it. These here weren’t no innocent bystanders, these motherfuckers had it coming, and they got it, in spades.”

  Man, he loved taking credit for something he had nothing to do with. Then something occurred to me.

  “You were waiting for a call?” I said. “Since when do you wait for a call, especially late at night? And since when does George Graft or Cheech or anybody ever call you after they go off duty?”

  Sally stopped and then threw his arms around me and gave me another bear hug.

  “Man, I trained you good. I just say one thing I shouldn’t, make one simple mistake, and you pick right up on it.”

  “I get it now,” I said. “You were still planning to use me to set up Liz, even after I told you to knock it off. She wouldn’t have come to the Café Ravenna if she didn’t figure I was going to be there. Did you do something to her—you better tell me now, Sally, I’ll find out.”

  He waved me off. “Nothing happened to Liz.”

  “But something was supposed to, wasn’t it?”

  “What are ya talkin’ about? I’m crazy about Liz. You know that.”

  “What was the play?”r />
  He stopped walking and turned around to face me directly.

  “Look,” he said, “this Liz problem is personal business, you understand, and I’m only gonna tell ya ’cause you’re a beautiful fuckin’ guy after what you done last night?”

  “Save the Vaseline,” I said. “Tell me what you were gonna do.”

  “You know that fucking cowboy hat? She was wearing it again last night. I knew she would be. I told her, I had some guys I had to meet, but I’d see her later at the Nite Lite on Commercial Street. I told her, wait for me there. I was gonna send in two guys. You know ’em. Spucky and Jimmy Lynnway. They never come In Town, nobody knows ’em.”

  “You bastard. I’m out taking care of business for both of us and you’re sneaking around trying to cap a friend of mine.”

  He nodded. “Friend, huh? Ya know, I been meaning to ask you about that. What’s up with you and Liz? I know it ain’t her magnetic sex appeal.”

  “I feel sorry for her.”

  “What the fuck, I know you all these years, I never hear you say you feel sorry for nobody. How about Henry Sheldon, you feel sorry for him? Or them five guys last night, you feel sorry for them too?”

  “Liz ain’t trying to kill you, Sally.”

  “The fuck she ain’t. She says she’s gonna call Rosa, I call that trying to kill me.”

  I stopped on the sidewalk. I had my hands on my hips and was shaking my head. This guy really bugs me sometimes.

  “Sally, that’s nothing but the drugs talking, and you know it.”

  “Then I gotta kill them drugs.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m serious here. Let me handle Liz. I’m gonna make her disappear.”

  “Now you’re talking!” He clapped his hands together. “The old Bench is back! If you say you’re gonna make her disappear, I’ll pull Spucky and Jimmy Lynnway off.”

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it. She’s not gonna bother you anymore, okay?”

  “She’s out on bail, you know that, right?”

  “I’ll settle up with the Weeper. It’s only a couple grand. I’ll get her out of town. It won’t be a problem. This ain’t like you and me going on the lam.”

  The deal with wiseguys is, you have to move fast once you get that target letter from the grand jury. If you’re not going to stick around, you take it on the lam before the indictment, not after. Then later on when you come back after you see what everybody else in the so-called conspiracy got for time, you can claim you didn’t know there was a warrant out. That way, they can’t charge anybody close to you—say, in my case, Patty or Hobart—with aiding and abetting a fugitive.

  God forbid they actually lug you, because then you have to post bail. If you jump after you post bail, then you’re out fifty or a hundred grand, probably more now for me and Sally being career criminals and drug kingpins and all that shit. They throw everything but the kitchen sink at guys like us. It’s all boilerplate; down in Lewisburg, we used to pass around the indictments against ourselves for everybody to read, and the plagiarizing cocksuckers used the exact same language in every one of them. “On or about,” “racketeering enterprise,” “parties known and unknown to the grand jury.” At this point I think I could write an indictment in my sleep.

  But these days I don’t think they’d even give me and Sally bail. They’d call us “flight risks.”

  Damn right we would be.

  I finally said, “Please Sally, leave Liz alone, okay?”

  “You say you’re gonna handle it, you’re gonna handle it. Calm down. I know you had a busy night but this here is my business. I didn’t say nothing to you about Henry Sheldon, did I?”

  “What do you mean by that?

  “What do you think I mean? You think I don’t know what happened?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Sally smiled. “Please, Bench, you think I fell off a turnip truck? I know what you done. So don’t give me this holier-than-thou routine with Liz.”

  “Well, you don’t have to kill her.”

  “Did you have to kill Sheldon?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  He looked at me. “I’m through talking about this. Look, I didn’t come here to get in a beef with you, I just wanted to tell you, good job last night wrapping it up.”

  We were approaching a convenience store. “Sally, the problem is, it ain’t over. Let’s go in here and get a Globe and I’ll show you.”

  “Fuck the Globe. I wipe my ass with the Globe.”

  I walked in, grabbed a Globe and gave the Indian behind the counter a buck and a quarter. It breaks my heart, every time I have to buy a Globe. It only encourages them. I read the main story quickly and saw mention of a “person of interest” that police in Somerville and Boston wanted to question but could not find early this morning. That was to be expected. What I was really looking for was on the front page, right underneath the main story, which was headlined, “Five shot to death, 1 wounded in Somerville, Roxbury/Indicted probation officers included in toll.”

  I was looking for Ted McGee’s column. The headline read, “The Scourge of Casinos.” It began:

  “The simmering underworld war for control of the state’s new casinos last night flared into a fiery crescendo of mobster mayhem not seen anywhere north of the Rio Grande since the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.”

  North of the Rio Grande? Who knew that Ted McGee was a foreign correspondent on top of everything else?

  As we walked back out onto the sidewalk, I handed the paper to Sally and pointed at McGee’s column. He read it quickly and handed it back.

  “Total bullshit,” he said. “And by the way, if this was the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, that makes you Al Capone.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. We were walking back toward our cars now.

  “When I see a headline like that,” Sally said, “I know it’s time to fly to Florida for a month. You oughta get outta town too. And I don’t mean Medford.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “There’s still loose ends. They’re still trying to deep-six the casino bill by saying we’re killing each other. We’re just lucky they can’t shoot their way out of a paper bag, or they would have.”

  “So what? That’s better for us, if they don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “I’m just saying, there’s been plenty of money spread around to get this casino bill passed, and now not passed. A couple of weeks from now, this blows over, the votes are back. The people shooting at us may make another run, just to close the deal.”

  “That reminds me of something,” Sally said, “who is behind this whole thing? I ask you again, who are these people? We gotta get them next.”

  “Too dangerous,” I said. “It’s pols—I’m not even going to tell you who.”

  “You don’t have to tell me who. Just put a rocket in their pocket.”

  “Sally, it ain’t 1963 anymore.”

  “You’re talking too much to this private dick, is what I think. You’re starting to sound like him, like some State House fuck that goes to law school nights and thinks he’s a half-a-wiseguy.”

  “Listen, Sally, I don’t need Reilly or nobody else to figure this out. They have to make it quote-unquote underworld. The cops like me for these jobs but there’s none of our guys dead. Maybe it was Beezo Watson.”

  Sally snorted at that one.

  “Don’t laugh,” I said. “That’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, maybe on TV tonight. Beezo’s fingerprints are all over those guns.”

  Sally put up his hands. “I ain’t even askin’…”

  “I’m just telling you, Sally, these hacks may have one more run in them.”

  Sally stopped again. “So how come we’re standing here?”

  “You’re standing,” I said. “I’m walking.”

  He picked up the pace. When he tried to walk fast, Sally waddled like The Penguin in Batman. He couldn’t keep up the pace—any pace—for long. Lucky for him, our cars weren’
t far away.

  “What’s their next play?” he asked, breathing heavily.

  “All I know is, we were listening in on them yesterday—don’t ask me how. And they said they had somebody ‘inside.’”

  “You mean, like Hobart?”

  “C’mon, Sally. Have they been hitting my places? Not until the other night, and even then they went after places everybody knows I own. They’ve been going after your rackets, the barbooth game, the check-cashing front, things only someone inside would know you had a piece of.”

  He pulled to a full stop right there on the sidewalk and grabbed me by the arm. His nostrils flared, his mouth contorted with rage. I knew what was coming next. He was going Sally.

  “Listen up!” he bellowed. “When you see that kid of mine”—this was me he was talking about, not his own son—“you tell him he better find that no-good yellow rat, and then I want him dropped, right where he stands, I don’t care if it’s on the corner of Hanover and Commercial Streets in front of eight million fuckin’ tourists. Ba-boop-ba-bing-ba-boo. Hit him in the head! You understand American? Too many fuckin’ rats, we gotta Orkin-ize the whole outfit. You tell him I said that.”

  Yes, Sally, I will. He closed his eyes and started breathing even more heavily. He was coming out of it. Thank God it was a short one, or one of the Mommy brigade here in Winchester would be calling 911 for sure. Finally, when he was calmed down, I tried to resume our conversation. Nothing I could do now anyway. I knew what my plans for the day were—lay low in my Medford pad until the senator arrived at B.B. Bennigan’s to wet his whistle.

  “I was you,” I said to Sally, “I’d keep under cover today. Have somebody with you. I should know something by evening.”

  He nodded at George Graft. He was standing beside the Cadillac. George Graft clicked the key to unlock the door and they both climbed back into the car. I walked over to the passenger’s side and tapped on the window. Sally hit the button and it went down.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Don’t hit Liz without telling me.”