The Betrayers

by James Patrick Hunt

  “Because people like you don’t understand.”

  Hastings smiled. “Oh, please. You don’t know what I understand or don’t understand. Besides, it has nothing to do with me; it’s human nature.”

  “You know my first impression of you was right. You are far too sure of yourself.”

  “No, I’ve just seen things. That’s all.”

  “You work vice squad?”

  “Yeah, for a few months.”

  “Oh? Any prostitutes in here?”

  Hastings examined the surroundings, a slow pan. “No, not yet.”

  “So when you worked vice, did you roll your jacket sleeves up like Don Johnson?”

  “Yeah. When I dropped my car keys in the fish aquarium.”

  “Don fucking Johnson,” she said, slowly emphasizing each word. She’d been drinking. She said, “He always had that stubble on his face. You, you look like you shave every day. Did you ever wear a mustache?”

  “Never,” Hastings said. “But there were plenty of weekends I didn’t shave. There were times I’d go days without shaving.”

  “How bold of you. How existential.”

  “Do you want to hear about it?”

  “Hear about you not shaving?” She gave him another mock sigh. “Sure,” she said.

  “I used to go hunting. A lot. And I was very serious about it. Before the hunting trip began, I’d go two, sometimes three days without bathing. I’d brush my teeth, but that was about it.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “No, it was necessary. You have a dog?”

  “No. I have a cat though.”

  “Oh, a cat, that’s marvelous,” Hastings said. “Well, any dog owner usually has a story about his dog rolling over something that died. Sometimes it’s a dead snake. The smell is unholy. A mutt will do it, a show poodle will do it. Do you know why the dog does that?”

  “Tell me, o wise man of Nebraska.”

  “Because every dog is a descendant of a wolf. They’re all wolves deep down. And the wolf did that. Any predatory hunting animal will do that before he goes hunting, before he goes after the deer or the rabbit. So the prey doesn’t smell him coming.”

  “But you’re a man, not a wolf. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “The deer doesn’t care. The deer smells soap, he knows it’s a man and he’s going to run when he smells it.”

  “You really used to do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  She said, “You still do that?”

  “No,” Hastings said. “I quit a few years ago. After I got married, with the family, I didn’t have the time anymore.”

  “You miss it?”

  “No, not really.”

  She said, “I think I understand why.”

  Hastings smiled at that, but let it go.

  Carol smiled back at him and there was a moment between them. Which held, briefly among the music and smoke and the smell of whiskey.

  Carol said, “I don’t know …”

  He was reasonably sure he understood what she meant by that.

  He said, “What don’t you know?”

  “About this.” She said, “I’m not trying to speak out of turn, but … I think you’re still in love with your wife.”

  “She’s my ex-wife.”

  “I know,” Carol said. “But I’m not sure you’ve come to terms with that yet.”

  “Hey—”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get heavy all of a sudden. It’s just that—” She stopped herself. Smiled. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to have one of these relationship conversations. I hate those.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I want you to call me in a couple of days,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “If it’s what you want to do.”

  Hastings walked her to her car. Standing in the parking lot in the shadow of the massive Amoco sign off McCausland Avenue.

  “You okay to drive?” he said.

  “I’m good,” she said. “Besides, I know whose name to drop if I do get pulled over.”

  “Well,” Hastings said, “that’s a start.”

  She smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Like I said, far too sure,” she said. Then she was in the car and gone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dillon had bought a house in an alias’s name a few blocks south of Arsenal Street. It was a small, modest, brick house with a narrow yard and a separate garage in the alley, one of many such houses on many such blocks in the neighborhood. Dillon liked money, liked demanding it, getting it, keeping it, and gathering it. But he had never been tempted to buy anything resembling an estate. And he had never bought a foreign car.

  He sat at his kitchen table in his house and tipped a bottle of wine into Frank’s glass, then his own.

  Frank Cahalin started to lift the glass.

  Dillon raised his hand. “Hey,” he said, “you know better than that. Let it sit for a minute. Let it breathe.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Dillon regarded the younger man. Frank was only a few years younger than him, but he had always thought of him as sort of a son. He had once reminded Frank that they had met many years before Frankie became an FBI agent. Specifically, that Frank had come into an Irish pub in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood with his mom and dad when he was maybe ten years old and Dillon had been there meeting with the then-feared gangster Jerry Doyle. Dillon, then eighteen, already looking like he was about thirty; Dillon being one of those creatures that seems to jump over adolescence to manhood and is never, ever referred to as “kid.” Frank had said, yeah, he remembered, looking uncomfortable. And Dillon had known why. Frank’s dad had been a boozer and had never amounted to anything and he had probably been hammered that day. Even back then, everyone knew Dillon. He was a respected man. Frank was at the age where he starting to become aware that his old man was an embarrassment. His dad was older than Dillon then. But Frank remembered the way his dad had been around Mike Dillon: subdued, respectful, scared, his hands shaking. Dillon had seen young Frank, seen the mild anguish. Dillon nodded at young Frank then, almost smiled. A sympathetic gesture from Mike Dillon on that bleak day was not something Frank would forget.

  In his early thirties, Frank Cahalin was an ambitious special agent who had already formed a mind-set not unusual to FBI agents assigned to organized crime. That is, a belief that the Bureau was less a law enforcement agency than it was a sort of government spy ring. To gather intelligence against Mafia figures, alliances were formed with other gangsters, often members of the Mafia themselves. People like Agent Cahalin persuaded themselves that their informants were small-timers, not the menaces to society that John Zanatelli was. Some in the FBI worried that Cahalin had not left his south Chicago admiration for Irish mobsters behind, but they had been in the minority. In any event, Cahalin was encouraged by his superiors to contact Dillon and try to persuade him to start helping his friends in law enforcement.

  So Cahalin had.

  That had been twelve years ago.

  In that time, a sort of bond had formed between the two men. At least, from Frank’s perspective it had. Dillon and Jimmy Rizza, who was half Irish, would have Frank over for dinner. They talked and laughed and knocked back a lot of wine. They shared stories of what tough, stubborn people the Irish were; joked about the obstinacy of their people. What proud, hard-shelled motherfuckers they were. Frank became enamored. To him, Mike Dillon was an affable rascal. A man who had done hard time and had learned his lessons and was good to his mother. Dillon took to telling Frank, “You ever need anything, you let me know. Anytime, okay?”

  Six years ago, Frank got involved with a girl in his office. She was younger than him. Her name was Darlene and she had been a pom-pom girl for Ohio State University. She was a good fifty pounds lighter than Frank’s wife. They would get together at hotel rooms twice a week. This along with gifts and frequent dinners took its toll on the agent’s salary. Frank was sent to Miami by t
he Bureau for a five-day conference. He missed Darlene and he wanted her to come down and spend the weekend with him. But a last-minute flight was about eleven hundred dollars, and he would need another grand for gifts and entertainment once she got there.

  Frank called Mike.

  Mike said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  That afternoon, Jimmy Rizza brought Darlene an envelope with three thousand dollars in it. That evening, she was on a flight.

  Looking at it realistically, there was no going back after that. A few months later, Frank’s wife filed for divorce. There was a celebratory dinner at Mike’s. As Frank was leaving, Mike said, “Wait a minute,” and handed Frank a case of what had become his favorite wine. When Frank got home, he found an envelope under the bottles. There was eight thousand dollars in it. Frank kept it, though he never said anything about it to anyone.

  Now, Dillon said, “You worry too much.”

  Frank said, “You blame me?”

  “Look, you just told me they don’t know anything. They’re looking into some guy who’s in Marion, for Christ’s sake. Me, I don’t even live here.”

  “You’ve been living here for two years.”

  “Yeah, but underground. Who knows I’m here besides you?”

  “Jimmy knows. The woman knows.”

  “So what?”

  Frank said, “I still think it’d be better if the both of you left town.”

  “Leave town? How long should I leave town?”

  “Until this situation cools down.”

  “Frank, it has cooled down. Forty-eight hours have come and gone and they got nothing. Besides, I don’t want to leave.”

  “Come on, Mike.”

  “No, you come on. I spent a year driving around this country. Going to small towns and hotels. Country music … Jesus. I want to eat good food in nice restaurants. I live on the road, it’s like I’m doing time.”

  “It’s better than doing time, Mike.”

  “Well, I’m not doing that either. Frank, two things I told myself when I came out of prison: one, I was never, ever going back and, two, I was going to live my life the way I want to live it. I’ve kept that promise. I wouldn’t have had to leave Chicago if you’d kept yours.”

  Frank Cahalin frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know goddamn well what I’m talking about.”

  “Aw come on, Mike. The feds didn’t issue a warrant for your arrest. That was state police.”

  “You said you’d protect me. You gave me your word.”

  “And I kept it. I can’t control what some other law enforcement agency does.”

  “You could have stayed on top of it. Whatever information they had, it was available to you. It was available.”

  “Mike, I don’t know what you want from me. Don’t you think I did the best I could?”

  Dillon sighed. “Yeah, I suppose you did.” He poured more wine into Frank’s glass. “Just don’t ask me to leave town, okay? I’m through doing that shit.”

  “Okay, Mike.”

  Dillon looked at him again.

  Frank Cahalin, Catholic boy in his forties, all tangled up in sin. Frank was getting heavy now and it was showing in his face. Jimmy had once said that Frank looked a little like that statue in front of the restaurant, yeah, Kip’s Big Boy, but Dillon got fierce with Jimmy and told him not to show disrespect because Frank was all right.

  He remembered the day after they whacked the asshole cop and his partner. Frank had come charging down to Jimmy’s garage, almost weeping with rage. Stomping his feet and shouting, but at the end of the day powerless to do anything about it.

  Frank had said, “What did I say to you in Chicago? Years ago, what did I tell you?”

  Dillon had said, “Ah, come on, Frank.”

  “What did I say to you?”

  “I remember what you said.”

  “I said you can do what you want, so long as you don’t clip anyone. You remember that?”

  Yeah, Dillon remembered. He had said a lot of things to a lot of people. But the cop had gotten too close. He was on the verge of discovering wanted fugitive Mike Dillon. And if Mike Dillon was caught, it would be the end of Frank Cahalin.

  And that was the thing about Frank. He understood all of it. Frank knew as well as anybody that the cop had to be clipped. But as Dillon told Jimmy after Frank left, “He knows it had to be done. Deep down, he’s relieved it’s done. And he feels ashamed that he’s relieved. So he needed to come here and yell at us for being bad little boys so he can feel better about it. It doesn’t change anything.”

  Now Dillon said, “Frank, let’s not talk about it anymore. Bygones.” Dillon’s voice was gentler now. “Have some more wine.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  They only used half of the gymnasium for the second grade girls’ basketball games because it would be too much for the kids to run the entire length of the court. Little girls running chaotically up and down the width of one-half of the court, shooting baskets without aiming. Lee Dunphy was shorter than most of the other girls and not much of a shooter herself, but she hustled and blocked and passed and was valuable to her team.

  Sharon sat with the other parents on one of the unfolded chairs they had provided. Mothers yelling as loud as the dads who were there, shouting out directions to their children who couldn’t hear them.

  There were two coaches for Lee’s team. One was a heavyset man who seemed to forget that he was coaching seven-year-old girls. Not a bad guy, but too serious. The second coach was Terry Ross. “Mr. Ross,” as Lee called him, was a natural with children. Gentle and kind, yet strong enough and wise enough to know when to tell a girl she was more scared than she was hurt. He had a daughter on the team too—Katie Ross.

  It was around the second or third game of the season that Sharon found herself watching Mr. Ross almost as much as she did Lee. He was a good-looking man. She had overheard one of the mothers say he was a widower and an engineer and half the basketball moms were in love with him. Sharon would remind herself that she was plain and even if most of the others weren’t married, Terry Ross would surely pick any of them over her. And when Terry began talking to her after games and then before games, she reminded herself that he wasn’t really interested in her, but was a decent person who was nice to everyone. It didn’t mean anything, she thought, in spite of the juvenile knowing glances the other moms gave her.

  Halfway through the season, Terry asked Sharon if she and Lee would join him and his daughter for some ice cream. Sharon said yes and then was genuinely surprised to find that it had been an exclusive invite. No other moms, no other children. A pleasant hour quickly passed by as they talked about basketball and kids. They did it a couple more times after that. And it got so that Sharon Dunphy became angry with herself. She wanted to tell this man that she was not normal. That a normal, happy family life was not something she deserved or was meant for. That she felt like a liar and a fraud even as she enjoyed the time she spent with him. That they could not be husband and wife and raise his daughter and her two children together.

  Tonight, when the game ended, Terry came over with Lee walking alongside him. God, Sharon thought, he doesn’t make it easy. The two of them looking natural together. The first possible decent father figure in Lee’s life, and it was not meant to be.

  “Hey,” Terry said.

  “Hey.” To Lee, Sharon said, “You did great, honey.”

  Sharon said other encouraging words to her daughter before the little girl ran off to talk with her friends, and then Sharon was left alone with the man she had fallen in love with.

  Terry Ross said, “Can I sit?”

  “Sure.”

  Sharon was aware of the other moms watching him. They think we’re dating now, she thought. Courting. The body language, the smiles. People could think they were married.

  Terry Ross said, “I thought maybe we could have some dinner.”

  Sharon said, “Tonight?”

  “No,” he said.
“I meant, this weekend. I mean, just the two of us.”

  She looked at him, a slight pain on her face.

  She said, “Let’s talk about it outside.”

  Terry Ross looked away. “Well … perhaps some other time.” Being gracious now; he was the sort of man that would not bother her if she did not want to be bothered.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Sharon said. “Walk with me.”

  In the school parking lot, they put their children in their respective cars and spoke on the lot in lowered voices.

  Sharon said, “I can’t get involved with you.”

  He said, “Okay. Well, I understand.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You really don’t understand.” Sharon said, “I like you very much. I’d like to see you and get to know you better. But it’s not going to work. There are things you don’t know about me.”

  “I know what I need to know. I know you’re a good mother and that you’re a very nice person.” He said, “I think you know how I feel about you.”

  “Please don’t say things like that.”

  “Why not? It’s the truth.”

  “It can’t work. I’m not meant to—do you know about my ex-husband?”

  “I’ve been told.”

  Sharon was not surprised. One of the other mothers had found some way of letting him know. Women were often the worst enemies of women. Sharon smiled with some bitterness. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose you have.”

  “I know he’s in prison,” Terry Ross said. “I don’t care. You’re the one I like.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  “No,” she said, “you don’t. Terry, it’s … too late for me to have—this. I need you to understand that.”

  “Listen, if you’re not interested—”

  “No, that’s not it at all.” She took his hand. “Not at all.”

  “Then what?”

  “I can’t explain it to you. Just trust me, okay.” She released his hand.

  “You deserve something better. Find another girl. A nice girl who can be your wife and a good mother to Katie. Forget about me.”