Prayers for Rain

by Dennis Lehane

  She turned down the music, let us in, and said, “Don’t step on the living room floor or it’s your ass.”

  We followed her into the kitchen and Bubba said, “Incident?”

  “It was nothing,” she said. “I was sick of working for them anyway. They use women for window dressing, think we look hot in our Ann Taylor suits, packing heat.”

  “Incident?” I said.

  She let out a half scream of frustration and opened the fridge.

  “The diamond merchant pinched my ass. Okay?”

  She tossed a can of Coke at me, then handed one to Bubba, took her own to the kitchen counter, and leaned against the dishwasher.

  “Hospital?” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows over the Coke, took a swig. “It’s not like he really needed it, little crybaby. I just backhanded him. A tap. With my fingers.” She held up the backs of her fingers. “How was I to know he was a bleeder?”

  “Nose?” Bubba asked.

  She nodded. “One tap.”

  “Lawsuit?”

  She snorted. “He can try. I went to my own doctor and she took a photo of the bruise.”

  “She photographed your ass?” Bubba said.

  “Yes, Ruprecht, she did.”

  “Damn, I woulda done it.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Oh, thanks, guys. Should I swoon now?”

  “We need you to call Grandpa Vincent,” Bubba said abruptly.

  Angie almost dropped her Coke. “Are you doped to the gills or something?”

  “No,” I said. “Unfortunately, we’re serious.”

  “Why?”

  We told her.

  “How’ve you two managed to stay alive this long?” she asked when we finished.

  “It’s a mystery,” I said.

  “Stevie Zambuca,” she said. “Little homicidal wack-job. He still have the Frankie Avalon ’do?”

  Bubba nodded.

  Angie swigged some Coke. “Wears lifts.”

  “What?” Bubba said.

  “Oh, yeah. Lifts. In his shoes. Has them done special by this old cobbler in Lynn.”

  Angie’s grandfather, Vincent Patriso, had one (and some said still did) run the mob north of Delaware. He’d always been one of the quiet guys, never mentioned in the papers, never labeled Don by anyone in the legitimate press. He’d owned a bakery and a few clothing stores in Staten Island, sold them a few years back, and divided his time between a new house in Enfield, New Jersey, and one in Florida. So Angie knew her way around the cast list of Boston wise guys pretty well—could, in fact, probably tell you more about most of them than their own capos.

  Angie hoisted herself up on the counter, drained her Coke, brought one leg up on the counter, placed her chin on her knee.

  “Call my grandfather,” she said eventually.

  “We wouldn’t ask,” Bubba said, “except, like, Patrick’s real scared.”

  “Oh, sure, blame me.”

  “Crying on the way over,” Bubba said. “Blubbering, really. ‘I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna die.’ It was embarrassing.”

  Angie tilted her chin so that her cheek rested on her knee and smiled at him. She closed her eyes for a moment.

  Bubba looked at me. I shrugged. He shrugged.

  Angie lifted her head and lowered her leg. She groaned. She ran her fingers back along her temples. She groaned again.

  “All the years I was married and Phil beat me, I never called my grandfather. All the scary shit,” she looked at me, “that you and I have gotten ourselves into, I’ve never called my grandfather. This”—she raised her tank top and exposed the puckered scar of a bullet that had torn through her small intestines—“and I never called.”

  “Sure,” Bubba said, “but this is important.”

  She hummed her empty Coke can off his forehead.

  She looked over at me. “How serious was Stevie?”

  “As the plague,” I said. “He’ll kill us both.” I jerked a thumb at Bubba. “Him first.”

  Bubba snorted.

  Angie stared at us both for a long time and her face gradually softened.

  “Well, I don’t have a job anymore. Which means I probably can’t afford this apartment much longer. Can’t hold on to a boyfriend, and I don’t like pets. So, I guess you two morons are all I got.”

  “Stop it,” Bubba said. “I’m getting all choked up and shit.”

  She dropped off the counter. “All right, who’s driving me to a safe phone?”

  She used one off the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel and I gave her plenty of room, wandered around the marble floors, admired the old elevators with their brass doors and the brass ashtrays standing to the left of the doors, wished it was still cool to wear fedoras and knock back scotch for lunch, light wooden matches with your thumbnail, and call people “mugs.”

  Where have you gone, Burt Lancaster, and why’d you take most of the cool shit with you?

  She hung up the phone, walked toward me, completely out of place among the brass fixtures and red Orientals, marble floors and people in silks and linens and Malaysian cotton, in her faded white tank top, gray shorts, and Nike thongs, no makeup, smelling like Murphy’s Oil Soap, and all she had to do was give me that loopy grin she was giving me now, and I was pretty certain I’d never seen anyone look half as tremendous.

  “Looks like you’ll live,” she said. “He said to give him the weekend, steer clear of Stevie till then.”

  “What’d it cost you?”

  She shrugged, started heading for the exit. “I got to make him a plate of chicken piccata next time he’s up this way and, oh yeah, make sure Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”

  “Every time you think you’re out,” I said.

  “They pull me back in.”

  24

  On Monday we went to work in earnest. Angie planned to spend the day trying to contact a friend at the IRS in Pittsburgh, see if she could get any hits on Wesley Dawe’s revenue info for the years before he disappeared, and Bubba promised he’d try the same with a guy he knew at the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, though he seemed to remember something shady happened concerning his friend but couldn’t recall what that was.

  I used the computer in the office to search the Net’s national phone books and any other databases I could think of. Typing in Wesley Dawe over and over and over and getting nothing, nothing, and nothing.

  Angie’s friend at the IRS kept her hanging all afternoon, and Bubba never called to report on his progress, and finally, sick of brick walls, I drove downtown to check out Naomi Dawe at the Hall of Records.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary in either her birth or death records, but I copied all the info down in a notepad anyway and stuck it in my back pocket as I left City Hall.

  I stepped out onto the rear of City Hall Plaza and two beefy guys, both balding, both wearing aviator glasses and thin Hawaiian shirts untucked over jeans, fell into step beside me.

  “We’re going to take a little walk,” the guy on my right said.

  “Cool,” I said. “If we go to the park, will you buy me an ice cream?”

  “Guy’s a comedian,” the one on my left said.

  “Sure,” the other guy said. “He’s fucking Jay Leno over here.”

  We crossed the plaza toward Cambridge Street and a small gang of pigeons took flight in front of us. I could hear both guys breathing a little heavy, a daily constitutional apparently not something they worked into their schedules.

  It was hot, but a colder than normal sweat broke out on my forehead as I noticed the dark pink Lincoln double-parked on Cambridge. I’d seen the same Lincoln parked in Stevie Zambuca’s driveway on Saturday.

  “Stevie felt like chatting,” I said. “How nice.”

  “You notice his delivery was a little shaky on that one?” the guy on my right side said.

  “Maybe this ain’t so funny no more,” the other guy said, and with an amazingly smooth and swift move for a guy his size, his hand slipp
ed under my own shirt and removed my gun.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me, “I’ll keep it in a safe place.”

  The back door of the Lincoln opened as we approached and a thin young guy got out of the car and held the door open for me.

  I could make a scene, and the two guys beside me would kneecap me and shove me in anyway, broad daylight or not.

  I decided to proceed with grace.

  I climbed in the car beside Stevie Zambuca and they shut the door behind me.

  The front seats were empty. Apparently my beefy handlers did the driving.

  Stevie Zambuca said, “Someday that old guy? He’s gonna die. He’s, what, eighty-four now, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So he dies someday, I’ll fly out to his funeral, pay my respects, and come back and take a pipe to your fucking elbows, Kenzie. You just be ready for that day, because I will be.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” He smiled. “Think you’re pretty fucking cool, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well, you ain’t. But for now, I’ll play ball.” He tossed a brown paper bag on my lap. “There’s eight thou in there. This guy, he paid me ten to back you off.”

  “So you’ve done business with him?”

  “No. It was a straight job. Ten grand to keep you off his back. Never met the guy until Friday night. He approached one of my people, made his pitch.”

  “Did he tell you to threaten Bubba to get to me?”

  Stevie stroked his chin. “Matter of fact, yeah. He knows a lot about you, Kenzie. A lot. And he don’t like you. At all, motherfucker. At all.”

  “You know anything about where he lives, works, that sort of thing?”

  Stevie shook his head. “No. Guy I know in K.C. vouched for him. Heard he was stand-up.”

  “K.C.?”

  Stevie’s eyes met my own. “K.C. Why’s that bother you?”

  I shrugged. “It just doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. When you see him, give him the eight Gs, tell him the other two Gs are for my aggravation.”

  “How do you know I’ll see him?”

  “He’s got a real hard-on for you, Kenzie. Like diamond-cutter hard. He kept saying you ‘interfered.’ And Vincent Patriso might be able to back me off, but he can’t back this guy off. He wants you dead.”

  “No. He wants me to wish I were.”

  Stevie chuckled. “Maybe you got something there. This guy? He’s smart, speaks real well, but in there with all that brain power, there’s disease, Kenzie. Personally, I think he’s got rocks in his head, and the rocks got little birds flying around in ’em.” He laughed, brought his hand down on my knee. “And you pissed him off. Ain’t that great?” He pressed a button on his door console and the locks popped up. “See you later, Kenzie.”

  “See you, Stevie.”

  I opened the door, blinked in the sun.

  “Yeah, you’ll see me,” Stevie said as I stepped out of the car. “After the old guy’s funeral. Up close. In Technicolor.”

  One of the beefy guys handed me my gun. “Take it easy, comedian. Try not to shoot off your own foot.”

  My cell phone rang as I walked back across City Hall Plaza toward the parking garage where I’d left my car.

  I knew it was him before I even said, “Hello.”

  “Pat, buddy. How are you?”

  “Not bad, Wes. Yourself?”

  “Hanging to the left, my friend. Say, Pat?”

  “Yeah, Wes?”

  “When you get to the parking garage, go up to the roof, will you?”

  “We going to meet, Wes?”

  “Bring the envelope Don Guido gave you.”

  “But of course.”

  “Don’t waste our time contacting the police, okay, Pat? There’s nothing to hold me on.”

  He hung up.

  I waited until I was in the shadows of the garage itself, unseeable to anyone inside or on the roof, before I called Angie.

  “How fast can you get down by Haymarket?”

  “The way I drive?”

  “So about five minutes,” I said. “I’ll be on the roof of the garage at the base of New Sudbury. You know the one?”

  “Yup.”

  I looked around me. “I need a picture of the guy, Ange.”

  “That garage roof? How’m I gonna shoot down on that? All the buildings around it are shorter.”

  I found one. “The antiques co-op at the end of Friend Street. Get on the roof.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Outside of the friggin’ expressway, I don’t see any other place you could shoot from.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m on my way.”

  She hung up and I took the stairs eight stories to the roof, the stairwell dark and dank and reeking of urine.

  He was leaning with his arms up on the wall, looking down at City Hall Plaza, Faneuil Hall, the sudden towering eruption of the financial district where Congress met State. For a moment, I considered rushing him, giving his legs a quick lift and chuck, seeing what sounds he’d make as he tumbled end over end and splattered all over the street. With any luck, it’d be ruled a suicide, and if he had a soul, it would choke on the irony all the way down to hell.

  He turned to me when I was a good fifteen yards away. He smiled.

  “Tempting, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thought of throwing me off the roof.”

  “A bit.”

  “But the police would quickly ascertain that the last call I made from my cell phone was to your cell phone, and they’d triangulate the source of the signals and place you at City Hall, six or seven minutes before I died.”

  “That’d be a bummer,” I said. “Sure.” I pulled my gun from my waistband. “On your knees, Wes.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Hands behind your head and lace the fingers.”

  He laughed. “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

  I was ten feet away now. “No. But I’ll pistol-whip your nose beyond recognition. Would you like that?”

  He grimaced, looked at his linen trousers and the dirty ground at his feet.

  “How about I just hold up my hands, you frisk me, and I remain standing?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I kicked him in the back of the left knee and he dropped to the ground.

  “This is not what you want to do!” He looked back at me, his face scarlet.

  “Oooh,” I said. “Wesley gets angry.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Hey, psycho, put your fucking hands behind your head. Okay?”

  He did.

  “Lace the fingers.”

  He did.

  I ran my hands along his chest, under the flaps of his untucked black silk shirt, along his waistband, crotch, and ankles. He wore black golf gloves in the dead of summer, but they were too tight and too small to conceal even a razor, so I let them be.

  “The irony is,” he said as I searched him, “that even as your hand is running all over my body, you can’t touch me, Pat.”

  “Miles Lovell,” I said. “David Wetterau.”

  “You can place me at the sites of either of their accidents?”

  Nope. Son of a bitch.

  I said, “Your stepsister, Wesley.”

  “Committed suicide, last I heard.”

  “I can place you at the Holly Martens Inn.”

  “Where I provided aid and sustenance to my clinically depressed sister? Is that what you’re talking about?”

  I finished frisking him and stepped back. He was right. I had nothing on him.

  He looked back over his shoulder at me. “Oh,” he said, “you’re done?”

  He unlaced his fingers and stood, brushed at the dark ovals on each knee, the oily, sunbaked tar permanently imprinted in the linen.

  “I’ll send you the bill,” he said.

  “Do that.”

  He leaned back against the wall, stu
died me, and I again felt the irrational urge to push him over. Just to hear his scream.

  Up close for the first time, I could feel the casual combination of power and cruelty that he wore like a cloak draped over his shoulders. His face was a strange mix of hard angles and ripeness—hard jawline under fleshy red lips, a doughy, pudding softness to his ivory skin interrupted by jutting cheekbones and eyebrows. His hair was blond again, and combined with those fleshy lips and eyes so blue and vibrant and mean, the total effect of his face was defiantly Aryan.

  As I studied him, he studied me, cocking his head ever so slightly to the right, his blue eyes narrowing, the hint of a knowing grin curling the corners of his ample mouth.

  “That partner of yours,” he said, “is a real babe. You fuck her, too?”

  It was as if he wanted me to throw him off the roof.

  “I bet you have,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder at the city below. “You bang Vanessa Moore—who by the way I caught in court the other day, quite good—and you’re banging your hot little partner and God knows who else. You’re quite the swordsman, Pat.”

  He turned his head back to me and I placed my gun in its holster at the small of my back for fear I’d use it.

  “Wes.”

  “Yeah, Pat?”

  “Don’t call me Pat.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “Found a sore spot. Always interesting. People, you know, you can never be sure where their weaknesses lie until you prod a bit.”

  “It’s not a weakness, it’s a preference.”

  “Sure.” His eyes glittered. “You keep telling yourself that, Pat, er, rick.”

  I chuckled in spite of myself. The guy didn’t quit.

  A traffic helicopter from one of the news stations flew over us and then made an arc over the expressway as the crush of rush hour began to swell on the elevated girders to my left.

  “I really hate women,” Wesley said evenly, his eyes following the path of the helicopter. “As a species, intellectually, I find them…” He shrugged “…silly. But physically”—he smiled, rolled his eyes—“Christ, it’s all I can do to keep from genuflecting when a really gorgeous one walks by. Interesting paradox, don’t you think?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re a misogynist, Wesley.”