Killers
Page 31
I pushed her away, but not before I smelled her breath. Whiskey. Rotgut blended rye no doubt. Good Lord.
I grabbed Liz by the shoulders and shook her as hard as I could without attracting attention.
“Liz,” I said, “whatever you do tonight, don’t go near the Nite Lite. He told you again to come down wearing the hat, didn’t he?”
She frowned at me through rheumy eyes. But unlike Sally, she wasn’t drunk. She was stoned to the gills.
“You must think I’m stupid, Bench. I know he wants to get rid of me. If I’m wearing the hat, they’ll know who to shoot when they walk in.”
“You know that, Liz, and yet you still went in there looking for him, in front of all those witnesses?”
“Witnesses? Those are his friends in there, like you. He’s not gonna have me hit in front of his friends. The Nite Lite, that’s where he wants it to happen.”
Her voice was rising. She was angry. I glanced over at the people behind the counter. Thank goodness, I didn’t recognize any of them. Still, I put my finger to my lips and shook my head. I reached into my pocket and came out with about a grand in hundred-dollar bills.
“Do me a favor, Liz, get the fuck outta town or you’re gonna get killed tonight.”
“I know that, Bench,” she said, grabbing the bills. “I already bought my ticket. I’m going to see my sister in—”
“Don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know.”
She took off her hat and handed it to me. “Got any molls you wanna get rid of, Bench? Give ’em this hat and drop ’em off at the Nite Lite around midnight.” She laughed so hard she finally started coughing—a real smoker’s wheeze. “That’s what time Sally says he’s going to meet me there. He’s happy again, Bench. His son’s alive, he’s got you, the war’s over, and he figures he’ll never see me again.” She suddenly burst into tears.
I walked over to a table in the bakery where two young touristy couples were finishing their cannolis and cappuccinos. I held out the hat and asked if anyone wanted a $350 hand-tooled genuine leather headband chapeau. One of the women giggled and grabbed it and they all started laughing. The girl put it on and they all started taking pictures of her with their cell phones. She and the other woman posed and then the first woman put the hat on the second one’s head and they all started taking more selfies to tweet out.…
I walked back over to Liz and gave her a hug.
“I gotta get back to the time,” I said. “Please Liz, take that money, don’t put it up your nose or stick it in your arm. Get the fuck outta Boston. Catch a plane tonight. Go anywhere; just get out of town. I’m serious.”
She turned to walk away, but before she could get very far on Hanover Street, I called her back. I held out my right hand, palm up. I pointed at her with my left index finger, smiled and shook my head.
“Almost forgot something, didn’t you, Liz?”
She tried not to smile. “What do you mean, Bench?”
“Sally’s watch,” I said. “Let’s have it. I know you got it back from the Weeper. I called him and he told me you got it out of hock.”
“Ah, Bench,” she said, “that watch is my grubstake.”
“That watch is your death warrant,” I said. “Sally’ll send someone looking for you if he knows you have the watch. Guess who’ll get the contract.”
She sighed and reached into her purse. The watch had apparently been there all day; she had to take at least three full nip bottles out of the bag before she finally came up with the watch and handed it over. Then she smiled as sweetly as she could.
She went up on her tiptoes and kissed me on my lips as I did my best to hold my breath. “You’re a good man, Bench.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, “and you know it.”
She laughed again, and I pointed my finger at her once more.
“Be missing,” I said. She nodded and walked out of the bakery and I went back to the party. I never saw her again.
* * *
Within the week, the story had been thoroughly aired out in the newspapers, except now it had become a political scandal rather than a gang war. Once the heat died down, the casino bill rose from the dead, Beezo-like, and came out of committee. It passed both branches of the legislature overwhelmingly and was signed into law by the lame-duck governor. The Gaming Commission then officially designated the company Reilly had been working for as the licensee for the Boston casino, which was really in Everett.
I asked Reilly if he’d supplied the info that had so obviously been used to shake down the commission and the legislature. He just laughed and said, “Who wants to know?”
I guess I had that one coming.
A few days later, Sally invited me to dinner at the Café Ravenna—a real dinner, not a let’s-set-up-Liz supper. Just him and me, with Cheech on the door. Cheech seemed pleased with his promotion. I noticed he had even bought himself a new raincoat. I assumed he hadn’t changed sawed-off shotguns, because he still listed to the right.
This time I was happy to go, because I’d given the watch to Jason at the hospital and told him that when he got out he should leave it somewhere in the Dog House where Sally would be sure to find it, and would just think he’d had a senior moment and misplaced it.
After dinner, Sally took a fat envelope out of his breast pocket and pushed it across the table.
“I appreciate what you done,” he said. “I know we’re partners, but you had expenses. This here’s for your troubles—fifty large.”
I smiled in gratitude.
“Now,” he said. “I got a business proposition. You know I know some people in Everett.” I nodded; they call the pols over there “the Common Council,” as in, common thieves.
“I ain’t told you about this,” Sally said, “but when it looked like everything was goin’ south, I bought a liquor license on a joint one block from the casino. Got it cheap too. Under the table of course. We’re gonna have hookers, shylocks, bookies, you name it. You want in?”
Does a bear shit in the woods? Of course I wanted in.
“Good,” he said. “We’ll go halfsies. Now you owe me fifty grand.”
I looked down at the table with my money bulging out of the envelope, then up at Sally. He smiled and swept up the envelope and put it back in his pocket. What the hell, though, it still seemed like a real steal, getting in on the ground floor of a gin mill around the corner from a “resort destination” casino, even if the resort was Everett. I was already considering names—for some reason, I always liked “the Horseshoe,” a very popular name in Nevada, just like you see a lot of joints named “the Paddock” around racetracks (or in the old days, in Somerville) …
Sally interrupted my daydreaming: “I just need one small favor of you, Bench.”
Obviously. Fifty large was too good to be true. My eyes narrowed.
“Kiss me, Sally,” I said. “I always like a kiss before I get fucked.”
He waved me off. “What’s wrong with you? Only you could look a gift horse like this here in the mouth.”
I puckered up my lips. “I’m waiting,” I said.
“Okay,” Sally said, “since you asked. You know, we—that’s you and me, partner—we’re gonna need some muscle in this new joint, to keep out the element, the element that ain’t us, that is. I was just wonderin’, I been watchin’ how some of these guys of yours handle themselves. I need guys that can straighten a thing out. So I’m comin’ to you, everything up front and on the record, partner—”
“Please, Sally, get to the point.”
“Okay, the point is, do you mind if I ask them guys you got with you at the garage, with the card game in Andrew Square—”
“Salt ’n’ Peppa?”
“Yeah, them two. You mind if I ask them if they’d like to come in on the joint? With us, I mean, because we’re—”
“Partners, yeah, I know, you told me once already. Partners.” I paused as he awaited my response. He was rubbing his hands together, a sure sign he was anxious.
“Sally, you do understand, Peppa is…” I paused.
“I know, I know, I regret all them things I said about him now, I truly do. Don’t tell him what I said, I mean, but I’m just telling you, I’m a fucking changed man. If I can just get this thing off the ground, I’m going so fuckin’ legit it’s ridiculous. Will you send ’em over the Dog House to sit down with me?”
What choice did I have? He’s my partner.
* * *
The final problem we had was when the lawyers for Donuts Donahue filed a motion in court demanding to know how many bugs had been under the table at B.B. Bennigan’s, and who had placed them there.
I asked Jack Reilly to handle it, since he’d had the same lawyer as Donuts. That way he could have a confidential chat with his old mouthpiece and if anything went wrong, both of them could claim attorney-client privilege. Jack sat down with him and the lawyer got all huffy, like he was rehearsing his lines for the trial. He said that if the feds had acted expeditiously, as he put it, and warned everybody about the plot, nobody would have gotten killed and his client would now be the president of the State Senate. He mentioned that back in the eighties when the FBI put the bug in Jerry Angiulo’s headquarters, the G-men had given a heads-up to at least two guys that Jerry and the boys had been planning to put to sleep.
Jack listened and then went to see some guy he knew who worked for the A.G., an old reporter who owed him a favor, and this guy put him in touch with someone high up in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I don’t know exactly how that conversation went down, but Jack pointed out to the fed that because the FBI hadn’t alerted certain parties to the threat, the way they used to do, it wasn’t just five people who ended up dead—it was three illegal aliens of color. Jack told him that if Eric Holder and Barack Obama ever found out that the DOJ office in Boston hadn’t warned these undocumented Democrats that evil white American gangsters would be using them for target practice, that would not bode well for the U.S. attorney, who was already under suspicion, on the grounds of being a white heterosexual Roman Catholic male.
After due consideration of about ten seconds, the consensus in the U.S. Attorney’s Office was, what can we do to make this go away, Mr. Reilly.
Jack told them he thought maybe he could make Donuts’ motion for disclosure disappear. But first he needed something to bring back to Donuts’s lawyer, and really, was it fair to tack another thirty years on and after his conspiracy sentence for those grenades in the shooters’ car at Mass General that he knew absolutely nothing about?
I guess that after all my complaining about it, that new statute came in handy for me, because once Jack put the deal together, that was the last either of us heard about the second bug, or Donuts’ thirty years on and after.
* * *
One final thing. In case you were wondering, after his spectacular return, Beezo Watson immediately vanished back into the mists of time. Every lead was a dead end, you might say, and his disappearance went back into the “cold case” file—get it? A month or two later, Jack Reilly’s girlfriend wrote a Sunday story in the Globe about how the cops no longer considered themselves baffled by Beezo’s fingerprints on the murder weapons, having concluded that it was all a cruel ruse by a cunning culprit.
“This was like something Whitey Bulger would have done,” one of the cops was quoted as saying.
Now that pissed me off. Being likened to Whitey Bulger, that’s a low blow. What have I ever done to deserve being compared to a sick treacherous fuck like Whitey?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Howie Carr is the author of Hard Knocks, as well as the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers The Brothers Bulger and Hitman. A native New Englander, he is a columnist for the Boston Herald, the host of a regionally syndicated radio talk show, and a member of the National Radio Hall of Fame. From his prison cell in Florida, Whitey Bulger tells visitors that he still regrets not murdering Carr when he had the chance back in South Boston. You can sign up for email updates here.
FORGE BOOKS BY HOWIE CARR
Hitman
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Killers
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
About the Author
Forge Books by Howie Carr
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
KILLERS
Copyright © 2015 by Howie Carr
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Michael Graziolo
Cover images © 2015 Shutterstock
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Carr, Howie.
Killers / Howie Carr.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7653-3374-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-0519-4 (e-book)
1. Gangsters—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. 2. Organized crime—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. 3. Political corruption—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.A77423K55 2015
813'.6—dc23
2015020939
e-ISBN 9781466805194
First Edition: September 2015