I gave the receptionist my name and sat down to wait.
I’d waited all of forty-five seconds when Andy Ravenant stepped out of an inner office, came through the small wicket that fenced the receptionist off from clients, and stuck out his hand as I got to my feet. We shook hands.
“I remember you and your brother from my grandfather’s body shop,” he told me, smiling.
I had a vague recollection of his father, Stan Jr., but I didn’t remember Andy at all. Of course, if I’d been seven or eight, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to some four-year-old kid if I didn’t have to. I decided not to say that.
He took me into his office. It was small and lined with law books— Massachusetts General Statutes, extracts from federal rulings, bound trial transcripts. We sat down.
“Okay,” Andy said, leaning back and tenting his hands in front of his sternum. “What’s got Papá Stan’s bowels in such an uproar? He’s been evasive with me.”
“Did you know he was dying of cancer?” I asked him. I knew it was sudden, but I couldn’t afford to spare his feelings.
Andy sat up abruptly, his face frozen.
I made an apologetic gesture. “He’s told your grandmother about it, and he told me yesterday,” I said. “I guess he hasn’t gotten around to making it general knowledge.”
“Jesus,” Andy said softly. “I knew he was coming into town for treatments, but I didn’t realize how bad it was. He’s such a tough old bastard. You figure somebody like that’s going to die standing up. He won’t go for being an invalid.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I read it,” I said.
“Why did he come to see you, Jack?”
“Somebody threatened him,” I said. “In actual point of fact, they threatened you. Why they’d go after Stanley I don’t know. It seems sideways, or backwards.”
“What was it about?”
“The guy didn’t say, that’s the trouble.”
“Who was this guy?”
I shrugged. “Some cretin, according to your grandfather. Stanley didn’t give me much to go on, but it sounded like he was supposed to warn you off something.”
“My particular client base, that could mean damn near anything,” Andy said. He picked up the phone and punched one of the intercom buttons. “Hey,” he said, “you got a minute?” He paused and then nodded. “Bring him along,” he said to whoever was on the line, and hung up. “Let’s check it out,” he said.
There was a light tap on the door, and two people came into Andy’s office, a man and a woman.
I got up to shake hands as Andy made the introductions.
The woman was Catherine Dwyer, Andy’s law partner. Kitty was of medium height with thick, dark hair cut short and that luminous Irish complexion, like Spode porcelain. She was very trim in a silk pants suit, but she would have turned heads if she’d been wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. I felt awkward and foolish all of a sudden, as if we were on a first date.
The guy was Max Quinn, a big beefy job with a white sidewall haircut. He looked like an ex-cop, which is what he turned out to be, a private license who did legwork for Ravenant & Dwyer.
“Jack Thibault,” he said, grinning. “I hearda you. You’re the hockey player’s brother.”
“That’d be me,” I agreed.
“What’s the pitch?” he asked.
Andy gave them a quick outline, nothing about the cancer, just the fact that someone seemed to be using his grandfather to get at him.
Both of them picked up on it without needing more.
“Current caseload, what do you think?” Kitty asked, turning toward Max Quinn.
He pulled a face. “There’s that little squirrel Donnie Argent,” he told her. “He’s tight with those bums in Revere, or he’d like us to think.”
“Ring of chop shops,” Kitty explained to me. “Who else?”
“The dopers over in Charlestown,” Max said.
“That’s one of mine,” Andy told me. “Kids just getting into the heavy. Too scared to roll over on their wholesaler and plead out.”
“I don’t blame them,” Quinn said. “That’d be Chip McGill.”
“Something there?” Kitty asked him.
He shrugged. “You know that neighborhood, they’re like the freaking Sicilians — omérta — or, anyway, before the made guys started falling over their own feet, they were in a rush to rat each other out to the feds.”
“Everybody dummies up,” Kitty said to me. “Even these kids know better than to drop a dime on their connections.”
“Who’s Chip McGill?” I asked.
“Dealer,” Quinn said. “Methamphetamine, mostly. Roofies, angel dust, some psychedelics. Party animal. Runs with a bunch of Hell’s Angels wannabes, call themselves the Disciples.”
“I thought they were out of Springfield,” I said.
Quinn gave me a reappraising look. “Good call,” he said.
“You figure they might be looking to open up a new market?” I asked him.
He nodded. “McGill’s a local boy, grew up around Monument Square. Been in the rackets since God was a child. He cuts his overhead, he can get crystal direct from the source. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Symbiotic wasn’t the kind of five-dollar word I expected to be in Max Quinn’s vocabulary. It must have shown on my face.
He grinned. “It’s what you get, you hang around with these college kids,” he said.
McGill and the bikers sounded promising, and I said so.
“I see a downside to this,” Kitty Dwyer said.
Quinn and I looked at her.
“If it doesn’t have anything to do with McGill and Jack starts sniffing around him, it’s going to raise a red flag,” she said. ‘“We could regret it.”
“McGill’s got no reason to think our clients are about to testify against him,” Andy put in, “and we wouldn’t want to give him one, but that’s the lawyer in me talking.”
“Makes our situation a little ticklish,” Quinn observed.
He didn’t actually seem that bothered by it. I figured his way would be to jam McGill up and take whatever came next.
Kitty thought the same, apparently. “You know, Max, a full frontal assault might be counterproductive,” she commented.
“Shortest distance between two points,” he said. “You got your Polish grandfather on the one hand, and you got Chip McGill on the other. I’d sooner take McGill off the board.”
“So would I,” Andy said. “I know we’ve got an obligation to those kids, Kitty, they’re our clients, but if Chip McGill is trying to muscle Papá Stan, I vote we ask him about it.”
“Ask ?” Quinn didn’t sound too thrilled.
“Feel him out, I mean,” Andy said. “If he’s got legitimate concerns, we put his mind at rest.”
It sounded a little too much like a euphemism for me. Andy seemed to be giving Quinn the go-ahead to lean on McGill.
“Your grandfather went to Jack, remember. He didn’t come to you,” Kitty said. “Maybe he doesn’t want us involved.”
Quinn gave her a sleepy glance.
“Well?” Andy was looking at me. “What do you say to that, Jack? You want to fly solo?”
“Give me a day, maybe,” I said.
“Max?” Andy asked him.
“No problem,” Quinn said.
“Watch your step,” Kitty Dwyer said to me.
Did she mean with Max or McGill? I wondered.
“You’ll keep us in the loop?” Andy asked.
“Of course,” I said.
Kitty walked me out, leaving Quinn and Andy together. She could have wanted a minute alone with me, and she seemed to be making up her mind whether or not to tell me something. We were out on the landing at the top of the stairs when she spoke up.
“It might be personal,” she said.
“You mean, nothing to do with one of the law firm’s cases?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Andy have any skeletons in his closet?”
>
“I’m not the one to ask,” she said, which only suggested to me that she was.
“If you think of something, will you give me a call?”
“I was thinking I’d call you anyway,” she said, smiling.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but I was all too aware of her eyes on my back as I went down to the street.
~ * ~
I’d parked over by India Wharf. I was walking back along the waterfront toward my car when I passed an espresso bar with an outside deck and decided to get a cup of coffee. I went in and ordered a latte and took it out onto the deck, where I could sip it and look at the harbor.
It was Indian summer, late October, when the nights are crisp but during the day it can be almost balmy. The sky was nearly cloudless, and sunlight glanced off the oily water. Herring gulls swooped for floating trash and fought over it when they got something. A container ship moved down the channel, headed out toward the bay. It might be going up the coast to the Maritimes or south through the Cape Cod Canal to New York or the mouth of the Chesapeake.
There is a romance to ships, to cast off on a voyage and leave the land behind. The sea is a different place, with different rules, where the hopes and vanities of men have small effect. The kinds of problems I dealt with in my line of work usually boiled down to basic, base motivations. Envy. Lust. Greed. They might seem like primal forces of nature to the people they took possession of, but if you balanced them against the brute power of the North Atlantic, they stood for nothing.
It helped to put things in a healthier perspective. I thought about Stanley in the belly of a bomber, where life could be measured in moments, the flak and the German fighters, the odds against survival. I finished my coffee and turned away from the briny smell of the harbor, the moving water slopping at the pilings, and went inside to use the pay phone.
I called a cop I knew downtown. Frank Dugan owed me a favor, and I was lucky enough to catch him at his desk. There was an open case file on the Disciples, he told me, going back a few years.
“They’re a pretty strong presence, the Springfield-Hartford corridor, out in the Berkshires, too,” Dugan said. “A while back DEA and the state cops ran an operation against them, shut down a lot of their traffic, busted some cookers, but the gang bounced back. That’s the trouble with speed. Doesn’t take much to set up a lab once you figure a way to mask the odors.”
“What about the recipe?”
Ingredients weren’t that hard to come by, he explained.
“Basic pharmaceutical supplies, ephedrine, phenylacetone, hydrochloric acid. Thing to look out for, it’s dangerous, cooking meth. You’re working with volatile materials, you can blow yourself up. And then there’s the fumes. That’s a giveaway, the smell of acetone and ammonia, like nail polish or cat urine, plus you got your toxic slurry, four or five pounds of waste for each pound of product. Two ways to go. You stake out an industrial area with a lot of smudge and smut, or you go out in the boonies where the neighbors don’t complain.”
“So it’s messy, and it stinks, and it’s an explosive mix,” I said. “Which makes it sound perfect for a crew of sociopathic losers like these outlaw bikers.”
I could hear Dugan sucking on his teeth. “Far be it from me to step on your toes, Jack, but the Disciples are a seriously mean outfit. How’d you fasten onto this?”
“Guy name of Chip McGill, over in Charlestown,” I told him. “I heard they were his new source for product.”
There was an even longer silence this time around.
I waited him out.
“You sure know how to pick ‘em,” he said at last. “You’re headed for a long walk off a short pier, you fish that water.”
“Care to give me a little more detail?”
“Okay. Chip McGill’s the type, he’s burning the candle at both ends. He’s a loose cannon, and sooner or later the Bunker Hill boys are going to take him out. I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t already turned up in the trunk of a parked car out in the long-term lot at Logan.”
Long-term parking at the airport was a favored method of putting a dead body on ice. It did double duty. First, the crime scene was stale by the time Homicide got to it, but there was a secondary benefit. A corpse left unattended swells with fluids and eventually bursts and putrefies. Nobody wants his family to see him like that. So it was an object lesson.
“Anyway, your little pal there, this McGill, he’s a bad apple, take my word for it,” Dugan went on. “He’s got a sheet going back to juvie, he’s done time for distribution, he’s been pulled in on assault, conspiracy, murder. Whether it stuck to him or not, we’re talking mainline hood here. He’s been on the radar a while. Major Crimes wants him bad “
“I don’t know as that’s really my lookout, Frank,” I said. “I just don’t want to accidentally stumble into a rat’s nest.”
“You will be, you try to put the arm on this chump.”
“Far as I know, McGill is in the background,” I said, “part of the scenery.”
“I think you’re horsing me around, but I guess it’s not for me to say,” he remarked. “My advice would be to walk away”
“I’m not out to bust the guy’s chops. All I want is a quiet word.”
“Chip McGill is a nut job, and a speed freak on top of it,” Dugan said. “Give him an excuse, he’ll whack you out.”
“Well, that’s not very encouraging,” I said.
“It’s not supposed to be. The point is, all you have to do is wait about six months, and he won’t be a problem.”
“Yeah, I understood you the first time. Somebody with a bone to pick is likely to put the guy in the ground. Trouble is that I don’t have six months to wait.”
“Do what you gotta do,” Dugan said.
“What about habits and habitat?” I asked him.
“He holds court at a joint called the Blue Mirror, by the Navy Yard. You know it?”
I was afraid I did.
“Most every afternoon between four and six. Happy hour.”
“That’s pretty deep in Indian Country,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” Dugan said cheerfully and hung up.
~ * ~
Boston is a town known for its tough, parochial neighborhoods, Southie, Charlestown, the North End, Fields Corner and Savin Hill in Dorchester, and the neighborhood bars that cater to the locals are often like ethnic social clubs, friendly and familiar to initiates but suspicious of outsiders.
The Blue Mirror was in Charlestown, right outside the main gates of the Navy Yard, where the USS Constitution is berthed.
The yard’s fallen on hard times since the seventies, deactivated with defense cutbacks, new keels being laid at Bath Iron Works in Maine and down at Norfolk and out on the West Coast in Puget Sound. Developers have had their eye on it over the years and now it’s a National Historic Site, but as a shipbuilding facility and a port of call for bluewater sailors, it’s been mothballed. Even when the yard was an active military installation, though, the Blue Mirror was off-limits to enlisted personnel.
There were rougher places, I’m sure, but you probably had to go to Belfast or Kingston, Jamaica, to find them. All the same, at four-thirty in the afternoon it looked pretty tame. A couple dozen vehicles were parked outside, vans, pickups, muscle cars, along with some choppers, low-slung panhead Harleys sporting ape-hangers and chromed valve covers. I went on in.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The room was long and low, opening up like a keyhole at the far end, where there was a small hardwood dance floor and a band was doing a sound check, testing levels. The bar itself ran along the near wall, probably thirty-five or forty feet, with two guys working behind the stick. The only lighting was a set of pinpoint spots down the back bar, the narrow focus putting the bottles on the shelves in high relief and making the liquor seem lit from within, like coals. Having the light behind them, the bartenders were in silhouette, so their faces were unreadable. The effect was a little sini
ster, but I guessed it might even be intentional, giving them the edge on a rowdy crowd when the clock edged last call.
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