Bosstown

by Adam Abramowitz

  So this is on him now, McKenna sitting in Will’s kitchen. Will didn’t think things through, didn’t practice the long game he always preached when the cards began to sour. If McKenna knows Diane’s true identity, then it goes without saying he knows far more, her TNT talents, her radical past. The Polaroids he produces of Leila Markovich, also still underground and unrepentant after the Harvard bombing, are just so much showing off, an unnecessary flourish that Will files away for future use.

  How McKenna knows these things is not important, Will tells himself. How is misspent energy, distraction. These are his cards. How will he play them?

  And to his credit as a reader of faces, as a manipulator of his own features, those dark lying eyes of his, he chooses to play the rube. That is, a feigned tic of his lids, a stiffness of body to mimic that genetically ingrained moment between flight or fight—not directed at McKenna, of course, that would amount to suicide, but toward the flowered Medusa who cuckolded him with a manufactured alias, grown thorns as sharp as razor wire. This, Will decides, is the only play he has, the ultimate bluff for their very lives.

  “You didn’t know, William?” Devlin McKenna laughs because this, it turns out, is far richer than what he had hoped to gain from this moment. Laughs because he has bought at least this part of his bluff and in doing so will extend the play. Because when you win, when the cards fall just right, you never want to stop playing the game.

  “Oh, this is rich!” McKenna is delighted, but playing it for mock regret. “The FBI, no less, would be quite happy to know where your young bride is hiding out. And here I am telling you what I assumed she’d told you herself? Maybe she doesn’t trust you, William? Not quite the ideal way to start a marriage. Now, is that a wee bump you’re showing, Diane, or have you just gained a little weight lately?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  I cruise up Harrison, crossing into Chinatown to the corner of Washington and LaGrange, where Gus has a loft a few doors past the Glass Slipper, one of the last strip joints operating within Boston city limits, the street dealers slouching out of the brickwork, warming to their hustle as I approach. I don’t figure Gus to be home, but I’d be remiss not to try, and anyhow the street is pleasant, lined with relics of the Combat Zone—faded nudie posters, aging glossies—posted on lamp poles, brick walls, construction plywood.

  I ring once, twice, three times a lady. No answer.

  I cut down Beach Street, order a bowl of tofu and ginger noodles from Xinh Xinh Vietnamese, and eat it sitting on the curb, Chinese pop music filtering down from the hanging black garden of fire escape balconies, the tune just lousy enough to make me appreciate the artistry of Britney Spears.

  A tangle of white lanterns is strung along the fire escapes on the corner of Beach and Knapp, giving Knapp—more cut-through alley than street—a serene glow, offsetting the dark and heavy permanence of sentinel Dumpsters lining the curb, and beside them, the up-down firefly glow of cigarettes, restaurant workers alternately standing and squatting, catching a smoke between shifts, between dishes, just between.

  What have I gotten myself into? It’s hard to tell, but it has a familiar feel to it: the first few times my father allowed me to risk my own money at the poker table when he was short a player in one of his games—a minnow at the table with sharks. What did I learn from those nights aside from my penchant for punishment? That sometimes it’s more important to catch the rhythm of the game than to catch cards, essentially to quit fighting the current and find a way to cut into the flow. In other words, follow the money.

  I lose fifty grand that I pick up from Black Hole Vinyl and instantly draw a couple of robbery homicide detectives working the Wells Fargo armored car robbery. How did Brill and Wells know to come see me at Beth Israel? Were they just stumbling around blind, hoping to get lucky, or were they playing me, already aware of the link between Sullivan and Zero? Or was it more about Black Hole, Darryl already on the police radar, which is the feeling I’m starting to get, the cash taking center stage, as always.

  But if Darryl’s to be believed, that he’s got nothing to do with the Wells Fargo robbery, how did that tainted money get into the coffers of Black Hole Vinyl? And did the few bills the detectives claimed to have recovered mean the whole stack was tainted? One more step back: I worked with Collin Sullivan, both of us moonlighting for Zero. Zen Movers is stocked with enough ex-cons to field a rugby team. Do the detectives already know this? Do they believe in coincidences? One shake of my illustrious family tree, there’s no telling what will fall out—my brother, mother, and father all dangling from the branches like overripe fruit, a worm in every bite.

  My mother: a Bosstown legend, who, prior to the Harvard bombing and Bank of Boston, was known for little more than her steady presence protesting US Central American policy and cofounding Boston’s first food co-op. How long has my mother been gone? Long enough that I rely on photographs to know her face. So what am I missing, too close to see the money for the trees?

  Zero is sketchy, there’s no denying it. His pirate band of movers covers just about every form of felonious misconduct on the books. Only I have a hard time picturing him orchestrating this mess, even as the detectives inevitably follow that line; aside from me and the money, it’s the only solid reel they’ve got to tug on.

  So tally time: I’ve got half the Boston force looking for me, a gun I need to ditch, a promise made that I have no idea how to deliver on, and Zero, to whom I neglected to give a heads-up as the day picked up speed. Leaving me where?

  Craving weed. Marijuana’s not addictive—it’s the Doritos that steer you to rehab—but the introspection I get from smoking might be. I like being a messenger just fine, but there’s nothing quite like being a stoned messenger. And I’ve noticed nobody runs over the stoned messenger. He’s like the court jester on loan—two-minute bits and out the door before the crowd sours.

  Barring that, a drink will have to do. So after I deposit the gun in a mailbox at the corner of Tremont and Harrison, I’m leaning my new bike in the alley behind J. J. Foley’s, the neighborhood’s last standing bucket of blood and a longtime cop bar and filling station for the Herald staff who toil a block up Harrison. There’s a second Foley’s on Stanhope Street downtown, but that watering hole caters to an entirely different clientele, suit and tie during daylight hours before shifting to the tattooed and pierced crowd as the evening drops in. It also happens to be Messenger Central; on busy nights there’s not a free signpost or parking meter on which to lock a bike for blocks.

  Not the case here. And depending on how you feel about the combination of cops, guns, and alcohol, it is, at any given time, either the safest or most dangerous place in the city and quite possibly, I figure, the last place they’ll be looking for me once they connect the Britta Ingalls break-in to Black Hole Vinyl and then to the money I papered Boylston with.

  I take my chances at the long L-shaped cigarette-scarred bar. There’s fresh sawdust on the green and white checkerboard floor, plenty of open tables and chairs, but they’re too close to five burly men in blue jeans and loosely zipped BPD Windbreakers whose conversation stalls briefly as I enter, resuming to full volume only as I slide into an empty seat. Shot glasses and beer bottles cover the two tables they’ve pulled together; except for a couple of hard hats probably off from working the Big Dig, I have the bar and bartender to myself.

  “Be right there,” Jerry the barkeep and owner says, separating bills in the register, his back to me. Jerry works mostly nights, usually with one of his three sons, but he looks to be winging it solo for the time being.

  “Jameson and a Guinness when you get the chance,” I tell him.

  “Feelin’ Irish tonight are ye, pal?” Jerry says in his soft Irish lilt, glancing at me in the bar mirror, noting my new lock-cutter haircut before resuming his counting.

  Pal. Nothing beats that. I’ve been in here two hundred times, been served by Jerry a hundred times before. Welcome to Foley’s. Cheers is for losers.

  “Just
trying to fit in, Jerry.”

  “Yeah? How’s that working out for you, Zesty?”

  I make a show of looking around the bar: street signs nailed above the front door pointing toward Dublin and other Irish towns I can’t pronounce unless properly drunk. On the walls, a photo gallery of Boston politicos, ballplayers, and cops through the ages. Cops and servicemen. Cops and celebrities. Cops and Ireland. You get the picture.

  “I think I’m in the wrong Foley’s,” I say.

  “Ah, well, long as your money’s green.” Jerry, master of subliminal advertising, sets the drinks before me on a pair of Guinness coasters.

  “Would you settle for greenish?” I plunk down the bloodstained hundred, make a show of smoothing it out. Jerry blinks at the bill and takes a long look at my face. If it’s my stitches he’s counting, he’ll need a third hand for the job. But to Jerry’s credit, he doesn’t say anything and doesn’t ask any questions—it’s the new millennium, pal, and the bartenders don’t want to hear any of your troubles; they’ve got enough of their own. My father always claimed Jerry would make one heck of a poker player.

  I take a long pull from the beer and throw down the shot behind it, studying my new reflection in the shadowy bar mirror. The T-shirt Darryl gave me is light red, bordering on pink that matches the color of the swelling above my right eye. It’s a fine outfit for the South End proper, but a little out of place here, and if Jerry didn’t know me, I wouldn’t hold it against him if he made me for an unhappy victim of a recent gay bashing. Too much of that going around lately, tempers flaring as new money rubs up against empty pockets.

  I salute my gay reflection with a raised pinkie toast and settle in to watch the corner TV tuned to a West Coast ball game, my beloved Red Sox battling the Seattle Mariners, Ichiro gliding around the bases after slapping the ball into the corner.

  “Now, there’s a fucking ballplayer!” one of the Crown Vic cops exclaims. “Feetfirst like you’re supposed to.”

  “Pete Rose used to slide headfirst,” one of his drinking partners imparts.

  “It’s wrong.”

  “Charlie Hustle’s wrong?”

  I watch Ichiro get stranded at third and hardly think about Black Hole Vinyl and all the money I lost. Ortiz leads off the Sox half with a homer to left, and I give nary a thought to Collin Sullivan, the murdered Wells Fargo guard I only knew from working for Zero’s moving company. Sullivan was likely moonlighting for some extra cash, like I often do.

  Varitek drills a double to left-center, and I practically forget the mismatched detectives, Brill and Wells, to whom I lied due to my inherent mistrust of institutional authority and to cover for Zero until I knew how thick he was with Sullivan, the booze blending nicely now with the residual knockout punch of whatever Sam had concocted in his home lab.

  During a commercial break, my crash-triggered antennae pick up static again, the frequency making me wince. Only this time the noise fades before delivering a song; maybe my gift is losing wattage as I recover.

  We are experiencing technical difficulties.

  I watch another inning of listless baseball and notice the hands on the Miller Beer clock above the rear doorway sitting squarely on midnight.

  “Is that right?” I wake Jerry from his standing nap.

  “On the money,” Jerry assures me.

  I order another Guinness, and before I know it, Ichiro is up again, apparently taking on the Sox single-handedly. The bar fills up as shifts change on the Big Dig and nearby Shawmut Avenue police station. Men in loose construction clothing, jeans and sweatshirts or cheap suits with noticeable bulges under their left arms; a few women peppered in among them, pistol- and mace-loaded handbags slung over shoulders within easy reach. Two ladies take their seats near me, and we all watch as Ichiro bloops a double just over Youkilis’s reach at first.

  “Halfway to the cycle!” shouts the same cop who admired Ichiro’s slide a couple innings before.

  “Remember Pearl Harbor,” grumbles the man sitting across from him.

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  “This is just like being at Fenway.” The woman beside me blatantly looks me up and down before swiveling to her friend. “The seats are lousy, the beer guy’s never around when you want him, everybody’s soused off their ass or on their way, and every other word you hear’s either ‘fuck’ or ‘shit.’”

  “No fucking shit,” her friend responds, without a hint of sarcasm. “If I ever tell you I’m getting hitched to anyone in this room, shoot me before the rock gets on my finger.”

  I get up after Ichiro’s stranded again and head for the bathroom in back. When I return, I point toward the clock, which hasn’t moved at all. “Fuckin’ A, Jerry.”

  “Hey, you just asked me if it’s right. Not if it’s working.” Jerry folds his arms, the bar rag draped over his shoulder. “What’s that they say about a broken clock, Detective?” He grins sideways at Wells who, with a Rolling Rock in hand, sits in the seat I’d vacated.

  “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen?” Wells says.

  “That’s the one.”

  I’m definitely in the wrong Foley’s, I think to myself.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Boston’s a small city, but not so small I’d just run into Wells out of the blue, notwithstanding Foley’s status as a longtime cop bar and Wells being a homicide detective. That he’s got my purple and black messenger bag on the bar in front of him only confirms it, which in turn means he’s been following me. But for how long and from where?

  “Your friend Albert told me you might be here.” Wells clarifies that mystery, sliding the bag toward me. The plastic snaps at the front have been scraped into jagged prongs dangling uselessly from nylon straps. I peel back the flap and find my metal clipboard sporting the mother of all dents on the front cover, my tin of weed, and one of Zero’s Zen Moving Company T-shirts I don’t remember being there this morning. With my hands inside the pack, I flip open the tin and peek at the joints still inside.

  “Brother”—Wells peers at me over his bottle—“if you’ve got the brain cells to spare, all the power to you.”

  Wells’s enlightened view prompts me to look at him with new eyes, and what I notice first off is the detective’s still wearing the same suit from this morning, only now, on closer inspection, I see his sculpted beard beginning to creep like weeds escaping their cultivated lines, a slight gap at the neck where his tie’s knotted, missing too many meals as he chases down leads. He’s still tan, but his skin is dry, matching bags forming under increasingly puffy eyes.

  “You know how much room we’d have in prisons for people who belong there if we legalized that shit?” The detective tilts his chin toward my bag as Jerry brings him a vodka with ice and limes, sets it down in front of him.

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” I tell him.

  “No kidding, except the choir conveniently forgot to sing about that stash when we asked what went missing this morning.”

  “I plead short-term memory loss.”

  “From the smoke or the Buick?”

  “Now I plead the Fifth.”

  “I bet. Everything else is gone, though, right?”

  I pry open the clipboard. “Including the paperwork and the check they cut me at Black Hole. Where’d the bag turn up?”

  “Under a car towed off Commonwealth, which qualifies as a small miracle in my book.” Wells drinks off half the vodka, mashes ice in his back teeth.

  “What do you want, Detective?”

  “Collin Sullivan.” Fatigue settles into Wells’s voice for the first time. Or maybe it was there from the start and I’m just noticing it now.

  “What makes you think I know anything about him?”

  “The badge reads detective. You need me to show you again?”

  “No.” I finish my Guinness, decide against another; I’ll be sore enough in the morning without adding a hangover. His drink also finis
hed, Wells just sits and glowers at me.

  “You know Charlestown, Zesty?”

  “What about it?”

  “Population Irish? Least before all the yuppies who look like me moved in.”

  “So?” I ghost sip my empty drink. When did I finish it?

  “Not even a couple square miles, the place produces more bank robbers, armored car hitters than anywhere else in the world.”

  “Fascinating,” I say.

  “You’d figure somebody in this town would’ve banged out a dissertation on it by now, right? Tight community. Nobody talks to cops, even though everybody’s related to one. Like it’s the first thing they learn growing up. We root for the B’s, the C’s, depending on how many coons they got on the team, the BoSox. Here’s the Code: Don’t talk to cops. Or else.”

  “You?” I say.

  “Me what?”

  “You didn’t grow up around here?”

  “Do I sound like I grew up around here? I actually like the letter r. It’s worth pronouncing once in a while. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you make it sound like Charlestown’s so different from every other place, but it’s just like any neighborhood in any city big or small. As for the Irish and banks? They’re a smart people, and that’s where the money is. There’s no mystery to it.”

  “Short thesis.” Wells points at my empty glass.

  I shake my head.

  “Anyhow, like I was saying … Jesus, what was I saying? I need a nap.”

  “I’m assuming you were talking about Sullivan,” I say.

  “Right. Our man Sully. Grows up in the bank robbery capital of the world and lands a job working for Wells Fargo. It doesn’t add up.”

  “A job’s a job,” I say, without really meaning it. I do what I do because it’s what I’m cut out for. I’m built for speed the same way Wells is uniquely suited to his job; not everyone can speak for the dead. “What’s your point, Detective?”