“You’re telling me Darryl and his crew robbed the Fargo truck? That’s a hell of a step up from running corners.”
“Darryl Jenkins has proven himself to be quite the entrepreneur, but no, he wasn’t involved in the robbery of the armored vehicle. Just the attempted laundering of the money.”
Two million dollars. Darryl’s missing stake only a million, meaning he is cleaning the cash for someone else, fifty cents on the dollar to have it come out pressed and dry. So who’s the partner? And where’s the other million if Gus or Britta are only responsible for one in Darryl’s eyes? Still on the street, as of yet unconverted from dope to cash?
“So what you’re telling me,” I say after thinking it through a moment, “is whoever hit the truck was smart enough to know the money was too hot to spend and brought it to Darryl to clean?”
“Yes.” Lee actually smiles. “The problem is not unique among bank thieves who manage such a large score, which might contain serialized bills, nor is it insurmountable. They pay their street debts with it, take road trips to Atlantic City or Foxwoods, gambling junkets to Vegas, purchase drugs or sex or throw it into local high-stakes poker games—I imagine you know quite a bit regarding that sort of endeavor. That is, assuming they’re patient and have time to piece it off a little at a time, avoid the big-ticket items that would catch the attention of law enforcement. What is highly unusual is for a group to bundle the stolen money and entrust it to another individual to launder it for them. They are, after all, every one of them, thieves. And who can trust a thief? Which leads me to conclude that whoever was behind the robbery was also in a hurry to have clean money to spend without attracting undue attention.”
“But you don’t know who robbed the armored truck and brought Darryl the money.”
“No.” Lee shakes his head. “I know that too.”
“Then why’re you wasting your time talking to me?”
“Because I am unable to talk to them.” Lee shrugs up his suit cuffs, reaches into his jacket, and produces three photographs, which he spreads onto the seat beside me. “Seeing how they are all thoroughly dead.”
FORTY-ONE
Will knows something’s wrong as soon as the spectral form of Richie Ritter slips empty-handed through the covered side entrance at ManRay to occupy the only vacant seat as he deals to a collection of out-of-town convention rubes whose Rotary Club hosts had fronted their initial buy-in action and who have since dipped, more than once, into their pockets again.
Will stacks a thousand dollars in chips, the burnt filaments of Ritter’s eyes flaring as he lights a warped cigarette smelling faintly of opiates and something that makes Will think of ground bones, the noxious smoke swirling around him as he drags the chips into his well without comment or counting.
The men don’t know Ritter—why would they?—but they’re attuned enough to feel a shift of ions in the room, something akin to a precipitous loss of oxygen. The man to Ritter’s left starts squeezing the cards so hard, his hands begin to shake. The man to his right accidentally turns over his down cards for all to see. After several more hands, none of which Ritter plays, Will is forced to prompt the action with words sharper than he’d intended, a prairie dog nipping at the heels of wayward steer, and thirty minutes later, the men have all gone, leaving Ritter tapping ashes into his well, ignoring the copper trays built into the table. Will’s never been comfortable with Ritter’s presence—in the physical sense, Ritter feels like a stain Will can’t rub off his skin—but he’s grown accustomed to his unannounced appearances, luggage in tow, the wordless exchange. Only he’s already noted Ritter is empty-handed.
Will deals a hand of Texas Hold’em, two down cards for each of them, three burn cards on the worn green felt. What is it Will wants from this game? Time, he tells himself. For the smoke around Ritter to dissipate. To read those dead eyes of his.
“He wants to see you.” Ritter leaves his hand untouched. “And if you didn’t fuckin’ notice already, I don’t play cards.”
“It’s the same game I was dealing before. Were you paying attention?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t know how to play.” Ritter parts his curtain of smoke.
“So one hand, then. What’ve you got to lose?”
“Nothing.” Ritter mucks his cards, a pair of jacks flipping up over the burn cards.
“That’s fitting,” Will says and waits, looking straight into the depth of Ritter’s vacancy, into eyes that have witnessed the murders of at least five men that Will knows of, would-be informers, rivals, wrong-place-wrong-timers. Come on, motherfucker, he screams inside his head. Come on!
“What’s that?” Ritter says after an eternity.
“Jacks. Princes. Second bananas. Third, really, after the queens. Knaves. You know what a knave is, Ritter?” Will tosses the cards back in front of him.
“Fuck you, Meyers.”
“Yeah, when?” Will quickly waves him off. “Nah, screw it. We both know the answer’s whenever McKenna tells you.”
“Maybe that time’s now.” Ritter performs his own sleight of hand, a pearl-handled razor materializing from nowhere, the Sweeney Todd of D Street and Old Colony. Messy, Will thinks. And as slow as Ritter could manage it.
“I don’t think so.” Will forces his mouth to smile, his eyes to blot out the vision of the blade. “And if the time comes, I don’t think you’ll be the one doing it.”
“That right?” Ritter tilts back in his chair, but the cover of his smoke has lifted.
“So like I was saying, jacks. The only royal with two one-eyed cards, and you’re looking at them now. King has only one Cyclops; queens none at all, because the ladies, they see everything. And the kings, they’re armed to the teeth, with the exception of the one-eyed diamond, but even he’s got a blade within reach if he absolutely needs to get at it. But jacks got shit, hence the phrase. The diamond and the club look like a pair of bellhops at the Mirage. And the pair of one-eyed retards you’re holding, well … Knave means fool, by the way; don’t let anybody tell you the joker’s the only fuckup in the deck. On top of that, it’s got to be hard to sleep with one eye open all the time.”
“You should know.”
“Me? I sleep like a baby. Anyhow, I’m not saying jacks are a guaranteed loser; let’s see.” Will flops an ace and a pair of threes into the middle. Ritter shows not a glimmer of interest, but the razor’s evaporated. “Do you believe in luck, Richie?”
“What? Who gives a fuck?”
“So only games of repetition and skill, then? Chess? Checkers?”
“No. No fucking games.”
Will burns another card, turns over a nine of clubs. He hasn’t even peeped his down cards because he’s in the game now, whether he likes it or not, and anyhow, as any pro will tell you, the stakes get high enough, you play the man, not the cards. Only, Ritter’s eyes tell Will nothing.
“When’s he want me? Now?” Now would not be good. Will is not prepared for now.
“Tomorrow. I’ll let you know where right before. Make sure you stick around so’s I can reach you.”
“Shit,” Will says, arms open wide. “Where would I go?”
There it is.
Ritter’s mouth twitches, Will hitting the nerve he’d been probing for: Ritter is out of the loop on the interstate cash drop locations, McKenna’s moneyed exit route a one-lane highway. Which means McKenna’s killing machine is as expendable as he is, a loose end when the time comes to hit the road. It’s not information that can help right at this moment, but Will stores it away for a later hand, turns over his two down cards to show pocket sevens and burns the last card under the deck. “To the river we go. Luck be a—”
“And get yourself a sitter. The wife comes with.” Ritter grinds his smoldering cigarette into the felt, blows into his well, a cloud of ash exploding over the table and into Will’s face.
Will is still hacking as the door clicks shut, his hand hovering over the deck as if he could Uri Geller that last card by force of magnetis
m alone, by some special power that could change whatever it is into the only card in the deck that can bail him out of this shit. What are the odds? Actually, those numbers he can calculate in an instant, but why bother looking? The game is meaningless when played alone.
Will brushes at the misshapen ring of fire eating away at the table.
Think. No, don’t think. Feel. Find the angle. McKenna has already leveraged Diane’s identity, proven the length of his reach: Diane was untouched by the FBI even as her political contemporaries were swept up and jailed. Surrender was not an option when Diane was first pregnant, as she is again now.
Will flops the river card into the center of the burning hole; he hasn’t wiped out the flames, only fanned them. The card is a king of hearts, naturally.
Yes, Will has the feel now. And what he now knows, he knows for sure: Lady Luck is a cunt. And the king of hearts, both eyes wide open, has a sword stuck through his fucking head.
FORTY-TWO
Lee punches the car’s interior light so I can get a better look. One picture I’m already familiar with: Sullivan leaning into oblivion against the armored car. The other photos are new, except I’d already had a front-row seat for the slim black man with diamond studs in his ears laid out in the lane under a basketball hoop. The third body I don’t recognize, but maybe that’s because he’s bent facedown into a plate of food, the back of his head a dark indented mess, a fine spray of blood reaching a hand-sized Jesus icon nailed halfway up the wall.
“Okay, I recognize the baller, on account of Wells dragging me to the scene, but before that I’d never seen him in my life. Same goes for that mess in the kitchen, and you know my Sullivan connect. What’re you trying to tell me, Darryl killed these guys?”
“No,” Lee says. “In fact, I know he didn’t kill them. In no small measure because we have been following Darryl Jenkins and his subordinates for some time now.”
“Come again?”
“Are you familiar with SIS, Zesty? It stands for special investigations section. Depending somewhat upon the city in which they serve, they are tasked with running long-term surveillance on criminals whom they suspect of committing or planning violent or serial crimes. Often they work with fugitive section detectives, whom I’m sure you are much more familiar with.”
Fugitive section detectives specialize in tracking down and apprehending wanted felons considered armed and dangerous. Like my mother. Except at this point, if she’s still alive, she’d be considered armed and rusty.
“So you’re telling me these guys saw Darryl’s men grab me?”
“Off the record? That is correct.”
“And they didn’t do anything.”
“It was not foreseen. But yes, we allowed it to play out. To intervene would have jeopardized an ongoing investigation. But we were close by, if that makes you feel any better.” Something akin to amusement twinkles in Lee’s eyes. “You are upset?”
“Whatever. Get on with it. No, wait. Has SIS been tailing me too?”
That actually causes Lee to laugh.
“Originally, that was the plan, only it proved to be a difficult task, much to the consternation of the SIS men, who pride themselves on covert ops, the art of the tail. I’m told you bike with no regard for the rules of traffic, which made tracking you problematic, even for SIS. Cars were of no use. Placing a bug on your bicycle wasn’t deemed viable, and anyhow, you ride them as if they are disposable. Eventually, they put a man on a bicycle, only he was not quite as adept as you are on two wheels or as eager to take some of the risks you do,” Lee continues. “You’re not color-blind, are you?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering if you see red lights.”
“I see them. I just forget what they mean.”
“Perhaps if you had adhered to traffic rules, you wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.”
“That’s cold,” I say.
“Yes, perhaps. These three men.” Lee points at the photos on the seat. “Sullivan, the inside man, Derrick Coney on the basketball court, and Shaun Stavros were contracted to rob the armored truck by an individual who provided them with the weapons, the planning, and the change of vehicles after the robbery. As far as the bureau has been able to piece together with the invaluable aid of Detectives Brill and Wells, none of these men knew each other prior to the robbery, and if there was contact, it was most likely under aliases. Both Stavros and Coney had New York driver’s licenses on their persons when they were killed, but under different names and Social Security numbers. Not the easiest thing to acquire these days, with all the computerization and paperwork required.”
“They were criminal geniuses?” I say.
“Hardly. But they were organized and effective. Though not very loyal, as Sullivan discovered in the worst possible way.”
“Less people, larger cut.” Math was never my strong suit, but put anything into pizza or pie form, and I’m a genius. “Until there’s only one left.”
“So it appears. Sullivan was a Charlestown native, though the Town’s not quite what it used to be. Coney was from Roxbury, and Stavros, East Boston. Arrests for assault, auto theft, witness intimidation. In and out of Walpole and MCI. Quite a diverse crew.”
“Welcome to the new world order. You left out the part about the Asian FBI agent.”
“Chinese. Yes. New world, only same as the old. Three men with no local gang affiliations and no ties to organized crime. Coney and Stavros with extensive records, but nothing in their makeup to suggest they were capable of taking down an armored car in broad daylight.”
“But you know who hired them,” I say, trying to draw Lee to a close, my arms numb from the shoulders down now, the smell of the patchouli mingling with my sweat and making me nauseous.
“Yes, I’m reasonably sure of who organized and recruited them.”
“So case closed. Or almost, right?” A couple of arrests away, Darryl sounding good as gone on money-laundering or corner-dope-slinging charges, a triple killer in SIS and FBI sights, Gus reduced to collateral damage, in over his head and paying for it with his life; Black Hole Vinyl destined to be a no-hit wonder unless Gus’s posthumous album goes platinum. As for Britta Ingalls, if she has a brain inside that bleached blond head of hers, she’ll cut her losses, ditch the traceable cash, and never be seen in this city again.
“No, not quite.” Lee returns to frowning. “We still need to locate whoever hired these men and make an arrest, which has in the past proven quite difficult. See, that’s where you come into play. I have one more photograph to show you.”
Lee drops another picture on top of the three dead bodies, a card my father would have referred to as the turn or Fourth Street.
“Get fucking serious,” I say, looking at the equivalent of a black king.
“So you know who Devlin McKenna is.”
“Agent Lee, if you know anything about me, then you probably know I like to get stoned sometimes. Only that doesn’t mean I live under a rock. Anybody who’s grown up in Boston knows who Devlin McKenna is.”
Even a decade after ducking an indictment that dismantled his crew, McKenna’s name is still spoken in hushed tones, at least by the men in Zero’s employ who’ve done time behind federal bars, close enough to rub tattooed elbows with those in McKenna’s sphere. That McKenna avoided arrest on the indictment was not surprising in itself. His political connections ran deep, and he was a resourceful man who’d obviously planned an exit strategy. The more shocking revelations came later, when it was revealed that McKenna, in addition to his duties as crime boss, had also been a longtime FBI informant given an extraordinarily long leash by the bureau, which allowed him to wreak havoc and murder unabated and unpunished for decades while ratting out friends and enemies alike.
When McKenna’s double life was exposed, his killing crew beat a path toward the prosecutor’s office, Richie Ritter cutting the sweetest deal of all; leading investigators to cemented corpses under building foundations in Southie an
d bullet-ridden victims excavated from community gardens in the South End, the Big Dig shovels made their own unwitting contributions, turning over unmarked graves by the handful—the aftershocks of McKenna’s disappearance reverberated through the New England FBI field offices all the way to Washington.
When McKenna’s former handlers were sentenced to lengthy jail terms on corruption and murder charges, the Boston offices of the FBI were restocked with out-of-town agents, who had to navigate steep learning curves as they acclimated themselves to the local scenery. My father heard about it from the unaffiliated players having a hard time adjusting to the lockstep bureaucracy, the cold Midwestern faces and flattened accents of the new G-men working by the book.
My father suffered his first conviction on gambling charges in this transitional period, and though he still had enough political juice to keep him out of prison, his card games were sharply curtailed, his former network of bars and clubs no longer willing to risk his presence. This, in turn, meant admittance to his games became highly restricted, amounting to fewer fish for the sharks at the table and a tightening of the cash flow. Call it trickle-down crime fighting at its best.
“What do you want me to say, Agent Lee?” I use my leg to push the pictures aside. “You think Devlin McKenna’s back in town?”
“I don’t think. I know he is back.”
“And what, he hired these three amateurs to take off an armored truck? You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“Why are you so certain he has not returned, Zesty?”
“Because it’s a death sentence is why. He’s got no friends here. Probably every hood from Charlestown to Southie wants to see his head on a pole on account of all the people he’s fucked over, let alone collect whatever reward’s still out there on him. Why risk it?”
“Why, money of course. Money in a city he knows like the back of his hand.”
“Knew,” I clarify. “Like the back of his liver-spotted hand. Nothing’s the same anymore. They don’t keep you guys up to date once you graduate Quantico? Money? He’s been on the run for, like, thirteen years; money hasn’t been an issue yet.”
Bosstown Page 21
