Close to the Bone

by William G. Tapply

  “He thinks pretty highly of you.”

  “It’s hardly mutual. It was defending guys like Eddie Vaccaro that made me fall out of my boat.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Vaccaro went to you, huh?”

  “Yes. He showed up in my office last week.”

  “Fuck him,” said Paul softly. “You absolutely must not tell him anything.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “But I want to tell you, Eddie Vaccaro is a very scary guy. He made me take a fee so he’d be a legitimate client and I’d have to protect his confidentiality. I think he would’ve shot me in the eye if I’d refused.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul. “He probably would’ve.”

  21

  CHARLIE WAS WAITING AT our regular table at Marie’s when I got there a little after noon on Friday. He was sipping coffee and peering through his reading glasses at some legal-looking papers, and when I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down, he looked up and said, “Where’ve you been?”

  I looked at my watch. “I’m five minutes late.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. You’re late.”

  “Shit, Charlie.”

  “Do the math, Coyne. Five minutes is a measurable percentage of your lifetime. You shouldn’t waste it.”

  Charlie McDevitt is the chief prosecutor for the Boston office of the Department of Justice. He’s also my old Yale law school roommate, fishing and golfing partner, and best friend. We help each other out from time to time in exchange for a lunch at Marie’s. Usually it’s Charlie who helps me and I’m the one who pays for the best non-North End Italian food in Boston.

  But this time he’d invited me to lunch. I assumed he wanted something.

  “Sorry I kept you waiting,” I said. “But you’re usually not so damned crabby about it. What’s up?”

  He took off his glasses, folded them, and tucked them into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He slid the papers into his briefcase, which sat on the floor beside his chair. Then he put his elbows onto the table, rested his chin on his clasped hands, and looked at me. “Eddie Vaccaro,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “Exactly. What about him?”

  “Is that what this is about?” I said. “Here I am, thinking my old pal wants to buy me lunch, talk fishing, reminisce about our days in New Haven, tell a few jokes, and what it really is, he wants to play quiz games with me.”

  “A week ago Wednesday,” said Charlie, “at one-thirty-seven P.M., Edward R. Vaccaro, a killer in the employ of Vincent Russo, who, as you probably know, the Feebs have been trying to nail for years, entered a certain one-man law office in Copley Square. He emerged at four-forty-two. As you undoubtedly also know, a couple years ago this Vaccaro, who makes a pretty decent living by shooting people in the eye with a twenty-two-caliber automatic pistol, refused to testify against Russo, even when given the opportunity to exchange an almost certain life term in a federal penitentiary for immunity from prosecution and life membership in the witness protection program. He went to trial and, mirabile dictu, a clever Boston defense attorney managed to outmaneuver a contingent of federal prosecuting attorneys. Vaccaro went free. No testimony. No Vincent Russo.”

  “Charlie—”

  “Very embarrassing,” he said. “It looked like a lock. We assumed somewhere in the course of the trial, Vaccaro and his smart lawyer would see the light and come across for us.”

  “Paul Cizek,” I said, “being the smart lawyer.”

  “And your client, right?”

  I shrugged. “You know better, Charlie.”

  “Sure, okay. Client privilege.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about Vaccaro,” I said. “I know who he is.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Charlie. “You probably also know why he spent over three hours in your office nine days ago.”

  “I do,” I said. “How’d you know he was there?”

  “How do you think?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “He’s being followed.”

  “Yes. And the reports come to me. And when I read that he appears to be lining up a new attorney, I figure something’s afoot. And I want to know what it is. So when this new attorney happens to be the one guy who—”

  “Charlie,” I said. “Please don’t.”

  “Vaccaro’s a cold-blooded killer,” said Charlie. “And Vinny Russo’s not exactly your Mr. Rogers, either. He gets kids hooked on drugs. He pays money to have people murdered. He lures young girls into prostitution. He—”

  “You don’t have to tell me this,” I said.

  “How do you think it looks?” he said. “Vaccaro hires Cizek, refuses our deal, and Cizek gets him off. Then Cizek, who’s your client, turns up missing, probably dead. And then Vaccaro shows up in your office? And it just happens that you are my best friend?”

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I said, “but whatever it is, it’s wrong.”

  Charlie sat back and shook his head slowly. “I’m sure it is, Brady. I don’t like what I’m thinking. I want you to straighten me out.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I met with Vaccaro for about twenty minutes. I will not meet with him again. But for reasons that you should be able to infer, I can’t tell you what we talked about.”

  “You accepted a fee from Eddie Vaccaro?” Charlie shook his head.

  “Charlie, shit—”

  He held up his hand. “I can imagine how it was, Brady. He’s a frightening man. I don’t blame you.”

  “Believe me, Charlie—”

  “Forget it,” he said. He cocked his head and peered at me. “This has something to do with Paul Cizek’s death, doesn’t it?”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s order lunch. Then I’ll tell you something. How’s that?”

  “You’ll actually tell me something? Wow.”

  “Don’t, Charlie. You know you can trust me.”

  He nodded. “I always thought I could.” He looked around, lifted his hand, and a moment later one of the BU undergraduates who Marie hires to wait tables came over.

  Her name was Ellie, and she wore a gold stud in her nose and a gold cross around her neck. She told us she was a physics major with a minor in music and an ambition to go to law school. Charlie told her the law was a fine profession, and I didn’t contradict him.

  Charlie ordered the cannelloni, and I settled on the antipasto for one.

  After Ellie left, I said, “I can tell you that Vaccaro wanted me to deliver a message to Paul Cizek. I can’t tell you what that message was.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Charlie. “Didn’t Vaccaro know that Cizek had died?”

  “He didn’t seem to believe that Paul was dead.”

  “And that’s why he went to you? Because he thought Cizek was still alive?”

  “Seemed peculiar to me,” I said. “At the time.”

  Charlie sat back and stared at me for a moment. Then he nodded. “At the time,” he repeated. “You’ve learned something since then.”

  “I wish I could talk about it.”

  Charlie began nodding. “Cizek isn’t dead, is he?”

  “If I’d known what was on your mind today,” I said, “I’d have refused to meet with you.”

  “Paul Cizek is alive, and that’s another secret you can’t share.”

  “Let’s talk about fishing.”

  “He’s your client,” said Charlie. “So you can’t tell his wife, and you can’t tell his law firm, and you can’t tell me.”

  “We should try to get to the Farmington this weekend,” I said. “Or maybe head out to the Deerfield. We haven’t been trout fishing all spring.”

  Charlie smiled and nodded. “Sunday. Let’s do it.”

  “We’ll talk baseball and mayflies. I’ve got some woman problems I’d like to tell you about. We’ll play blues tapes in the car. All professional subjects strictly verboten.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “On Sunday we’ll avoid sensitive le
gal topics. But—”

  He looked up as Ellie delivered our lunches. After she left, he took a bite of his cannelloni, smiled, and mumbled, “Mmm.”

  I speared an anchovy from my antipasto. “Can we change the subject?”

  “I’d sure love to know why Eddie Vaccaro wants to see Paul Cizek,” he said.

  “I think it’s a moot question.”

  “Why? If Cizek’s alive—”

  “I didn’t say he was alive.”

  Charlie took another mouthful of cannelloni. “A week or so ago,” he mumbled, “we arrested a guy at Logan Airport because he had a homemade bomb in his carry-on luggage. Crude thing. Couple sticks of dynamite, wires, battery. Probably wouldn’t have even worked. Still, a terrorist is a terrorist. Big federal offense, of course, taking bombs onto airplanes. We read him his rights, and he refused counsel. Turns out he works in a bookstore in Salem. Bachelor. Lifelong Republican. A deacon in the Episcopal church.”

  “Classic terrorist profile,” I said.

  He smiled. “I talked to him. He didn’t seem to understand that he’d done anything wrong. Claimed he had no intention of detonating it, or using it as a threat to hijack the plane, or anything like that. Said he just felt better having it with him. I said, ‘How could having a bomb on an airplane make you feel better?’ He said he hated to fly. He had this terrible phobia that a terrorist would blow up the plane. I said, ‘If you’re so afraid of bombs, how come you tried to bring one aboard?’ And this guy looks at me with these innocent, puppy-dog eyes and tells me, he says, ‘I called up the airlines and I asked them what were the odds of there being a bomb on the plane. About a million to one, they said. So I thought about that,’ he says, ‘and then I asked what the odds were of there being two bombs on the same plane. Infinite, was the answer. There’d simply never be two separate bombs on the same plane. It wouldn’t happen.’ ”

  “Charlie, wait a minute,” I said.

  He lifted his hand. “Listen. The guy is looking at me. ‘Now do you see?’ he says. And I admit that I don’t. So he says, ‘It’s simple. If I bring a bomb aboard, I’m safe.’ ” He spread his palms and grinned.

  “That’s a pretty funny story,” I said. “What’s your point?”

  “Does there have to be a point?”

  “There usually is,” I said. “So what’re you trying to tell me?”

  Charlie shrugged.

  “If you think too much, you twist simple things around until they seem complicated. Is that it?”

  “That would work,” he said.

  “I’m not going to tell you what Eddie Vaccaro and I talked about.”

  “I know. You already said that.”

  “Justice may be simple to you,” I said.

  “Basically, it is simple. It’s making sure that people who commit crimes are punished.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s much more complicated than that.”

  “Lawyers are the ones who make it complicated. The law is simple.”

  “So why don’t you just talk to Vaccaro?” I said. “Ask him what we talked about? It seems to me that would be the simple thing to do.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “We’d like to.”

  “So…?”

  “But last night our guys lost him.”

  “He gave them the slip?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Well,” I said, “here’s something I can tell you. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Yeah, but Paul Cizek might know.”

  “I can’t help you there,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “Me, too.”

  22

  CHARLIE AND I AGREED to meet in the parking lot of the Papa-Razzi restaurant on Route 2 in Concord at seven on Sunday morning. We still called it “the place where the Howard Johnson’s used to be,” although the old Hojo’s with the orange tile roof had been gone for several years. We’d leave my car there and take Charlie’s four-wheel-drive van, and we’d be on the banks of the Deerfield River by nine. In June there are insects on the water, and trout feeding on them, all day long. Sulfur-colored mayflies, tan caddisflies, a few stoneflies. We’d fish till dark. We’d make a day of it.

  We would discuss no business. When Charlie and I played golf we sometimes discussed cases or clients or judges or legal theory. But we had agreed a long time ago that trout fishing is too important, and requires too much concentration, to corrupt with business conversation.

  When I got back to my apartment that Friday evening, I heated a can of beans and ate them directly from the pot at the kitchen table while I flipped through the current issue of American Angler. Then I wandered around the place, assembling my trout-fishing gear. We weren’t going until Sunday, but I wanted to have it all ready. It took me a couple of hours to find everything and to decide what to bring with me and to pile it all neatly beside the door.

  Then I sprawled on the sofa and turned on the television. My old black-and-white Hitachi gets only five channels, two with considerable fuzziness, and on this Friday evening in the middle of June I found three sitcoms, an old John Wayne movie, and, on Channel 2, a show on home repair. I left it on Channel 2. A man in a beard was demonstrating the art of laying hardwood floors.

  Even when I lived in a suburban house with Gloria and my two young sons, I had never contemplated laying a hardwood floor.

  I was, of course, trying very hard not to think about Alex, and the fact that she wasn’t with me, and that this was the first Friday evening in almost a year that we hadn’t been together, and that I was facing the first weekend in that amount of time without her.

  Trying not to think about her, of course, didn’t work. I might as well have hung a big sign on the wall that said: DON’T THINK ABOUT ALEX.

  I held out until a little past ten. Then I switched off the TV, poured two fingers of Rebel Yell over some ice cubes, lit a cigarette, took a deep breath, and called her.

  She answered on the first ring with a cautious “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Oh, geez,” she said. “I was going to call you.”

  “You were?”

  “It’s Friday. You’re there and I’m here. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

  “I was screwing up my courage,” she said.

  “If I’d known that, I’d have waited. I was very nervous, calling you.”

  “Nervous?”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t want to talk to me,” I said.

  “Oh, Brady…”

  “You know what I think?” I said after a moment.

  “I wish I did,” she said softly.

  “I think that not seeing you is confusing me. It’s not helping me to clarify things. Not seeing you makes me feel as if the only important thing is being with you, that nothing in my life matters except that. It makes me want to just chuck it all and go to Maine with you. It makes me want to ignore all the other variables. Not seeing you makes this big hole in me where you belong, and it hurts, and it needs filling, and the simplest thing would be just to go with you. Except it’s not simple.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I could think more clearly if that hole weren’t there.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do want you with me, you know.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know that.”

  “You have talked a lot about changing your life. You know, the Montana dream. Simplifying. Focusing on important things.”

  “I have talked about those things, I know.”

  “I think you’ve been serious about it.”

  “I think I have, too. But I’m not sure. I’ve got to figure it out.”

  “My moving is forcing you to do that.”

  “If you weren’t moving,” I said, “I might never do anything. I might just glide along the same way, year after year, until I was too old to do anything. It’s good that you’re moving. It’s forcing me to think.” />
  “Well,” she said, “do you think you’d like to have company?”

  “Now?”

  “Is it too late?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Her cheek rested on my shoulder and her fingers played on my chest. Her bare leg pressed against mine. I stroked her hair in the dark.

  “If I kissed you ever so gently,” she whispered, “you wouldn’t think I was trying to manipulate you or influence any decisions you had to make, would you?”

  “No. That would be small-minded and foolish of me.”

  I felt her mouth move on me.

  “Or,” she murmured, “if I touched you—there, like that—you wouldn’t misconstrue my motives?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “Or—mmm—if I did this…?”

  “Jesus, no, Alex. Of course not.”

  When I woke up, Alex was gone, and the hole in my stomach had returned. She had brewed a pot of coffee, and a note was propped against it. It read: “Call me. A. XXOO.”

  Alex worked on Saturdays. She got up at seven, while I was still asleep, showered, and slipped out without waking me up. She spent all day Saturday in her little cubicle at the Globe, hunched over her word processor, polishing her Sunday feature. Every Saturday.

  Come September, she wouldn’t be doing that anymore.

  Eight or nine more Saturdays. Then things would change.

  Around noon I called the Falconer house in Lincoln and found Roger at home. Glen’s condition had deteriorated. He’d been unconscious for nearly a week. There had been some encouraging signs on Thursday. He’d moved one hand and mumbled. Then his coma had deepened. Now there were indications of kidney distress. I asked if there was anything I could do. No, Roger said. There didn’t appear to be anything anyone could do. Brenda was there. She was a comfort, he said.

  As far as he knew, the Concord police had made no progress in finding the hit-and-run driver, Roger said. They’d promised to tell him if and when they did.

  I called Alex at one, when, I knew, she generally took a break. Her recording invited me to deposit a message in her voice mailbox.

  “It is I,” I said. “If you’re—”

  “Mmm,” her unrecorded voice mumbled. “H’lo.”