Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “Flattering? You bet. It almost like to turn our poor fool heads. But it still didn’t, you know, make a lot of sense to us. At least not until we were sure we were where Virginia couldn’t possibly hear us, and then we just busted out laughing. Just goes to show you, I guess: if you’re gonna start slingin’ the shit, you should get started early in life. Not when you’re seventy-nine.

  “Well,” Dennison had said, “that wasn’t the way it actually was, of course. What Virginia was doing was scheming to buy the house by herself, for her and Lucy to live in. The real-estate taxes down in Westport on that monster were about the same each year as the tax bill on her house in Taunton, rates and assessments being lower down there, so that came to about two hundred bucks a month. On a fifteen-year mortgage, ten-and-a-half percent, fixed rate, that left Virginia about thirty-eight, thirty-nine hundred a month from her annual Lottery check, which meant the maximum she could finance, using every dime of it, would’ve been just under three-hundred-fifty grand. Total. Her place in Taunton was free and clear, in good shape in a nice location; even though the market was depressed at the time, she figured to clear somewhere between ninety-five and a hundred-fifteen if she could find a buyer who could find a bank. So that meant that as a matter of fact she wasn’t being completely unrealistic, not financially at least, when she proposed to buy a house that cost as much as the castle did. Actuarily? Common-sensibly? Sure, she was nuts. Bonkers, bananas, out of her everlasting tree, even to dream of such a thing. But mathematically, arithmetically, there was nothing wrong with the idea at all.

  “So, there being no logical way to argue her out of the idea, Tory got involved too. In the inspection tour and then the haggling, I mean. The sellers, the late owner’s grandnephews, put up a stiff struggle. It would’ve been a lot more convincing if they hadn’t been a couple of guys who had their own lives all set up in Syracuse and Washington, hadn’t already sold off the remains of the rug business to one of their late uncle’s competitors, and ’d had at least some interest in uprooting themselves and their families so they could live in Westport, Massachusetts, but they held out for a while before they finally came down to three-sixty-five. Which, after Virginia put most of what she got from selling her own house into the down payment, meant she and Lucy had a monthly payment of between thirty-one and thirty-two-hundred bucks a month. For her, an old lady with her Social Security, the pension Stan’d left her, not to mention their savings—old Stan’d been careful; Virginia’d been known to suggest, as a matter of fact, that he was rather ‘close with a buck’—that was a comfortable expense, if it happened to be how she wanted to spend her own money, and it was.

  “So she did,” Dennison had said. “That was six years ago, and everything went along just tickety-boo for a little more than three years, Virginia and her companion just as happy and contented as could be. And then, contrary to all expectations, Virginia’s included, Lucy up and died. Just keeled over in her chair one fine spring afternoon while they were watching Judge Wapner, mooning over how cute his court officer there, Rusty, was, and what a nice smile he had, and boom, that was the end of her. It was also when things started to get complicated. For us, I mean.

  “It would’ve been all right if Virginia when that happened’d still been living in the house in Taunton. Where she’d lived for over forty years. Friends all around who knew her, lived close by to her. The man down at the drugstore’d known her twenty years. The kid who’d used to mow her lawn, shovel out her walks and driveway; he was all grown up, of course, and now he owned the gas station and took care of her car. Police chief’d been with D Troop when I joined this outfit. Tory and I were less’n a half hour up the road, and if something’d happened to her, one of those people would’ve found out in a jiffy and called one of us right up. She’d been protected there.

  “But now,” Dennison had said, “in this goddamned house that she’d bought for herself, all the way down in Westport, for God’s sake, she was out there all by herself. Out in the meadow alone, without another soul living close enough to her to even notice if her lights’d come on? Well, that wasn’t so good. They don’t have much crime down there, and the place’s so far off the beaten track it’s pretty unlikely any roving, thieving bastard looking for a rich old lady, living by herself, to break in on and steal from, ’d ever happen to see it. And sure, her health was good. She could look after herself, and we did know some people who’d look in on her every so often, let us know if she seemed to need us to do anything. But it was still awful lonesome for her, down there all by herself all day, with no one else to talk to, most days, after Lucy died. Real tough for her when the winter came that year, short days, got dark so early, and the wind just howlin’ through there, sounding colder’n it was. She stayed over with us at Thanksgiving, the Wednesday night before and then through the weekend, Tory went Christmas-shopping with her, and it was pretty clear, to me at least, she wasn’t in all that great a hurry to get back down there to Westport. Tory sort of revamped her schedule after the holidays, so she could get down there once or twice a week, take Virginia out to lunch or maybe meet her some place, make sure her car was all right, maybe get some shopping done, take her to get her hair done. But it was still a pretty makeshift arrangement. We didn’t talk about it to her, and she didn’t talk about it to us, but there wasn’t any use trying to kid ourselves: it was only going to last as long as it lasted, and that’d only be until something came along and happened, meant she couldn’t be alone all the time like that any longer.

  “She’d always said when her time came she’d go in a flash, ‘just like that’ ” —Dennison had snapped his fingers—“because that’s the way it’d been with everybody else in her family, all of them died of heart trouble. And that was the way she wanted it, too: ‘That’s the way to do it, you ask me’ was what she said, but when it finally happens, it doesn’t always happen like you want it to, or like it happened every single time one of your cousins died. And it didn’t, exactly, with Virginia, either, although she never really did get to the point where you’d have to say: ‘Well then, no use pretending any longer about this. This woman’s just laid up, can’t take care of herself anymore.’ It was more of a gradual thing, things just gradually getting harder and harder for her, until it was finally clear to everyone that either we were going to move in with her down there, which neither one of us of course wanted to do, or she was going to have to move in with us up in Canton—and she didn’t want to do that.”

  “So how’d everybody decide it was going to be you two moving down there?” Dell’Appa had said. “I mean, I know it sounds sort of cold-blooded and everything, but it’d more or less seem to me …”

  “… that it’d make more sense for the two people who’re probably going to be around longer to stay put where they are, and have the one person who probably isn’t going to be around for at least a whole lot longer move in with them, right?”

  “Right,” Dell’Appa had said.

  “Right,” Dennison had said, sighing. “Well, I’ll tell you the reason. Tory’s as good a daughter to her mother as she is a wife to me and a mother to the kids. Tory’s a good woman. And I’ll do anything for Tory that she ever asks me to, unless she’s lost her mind or something that she wants would kill her. Which I do not think will happen. But the reason we moved down there wasn’t because Tory saw that as part of her duty to her mother and asked me, and I agreed to do it because I’m in love with Tory. It wasn’t even because Tory’s mother put the heat on and commanded us to come, because to give the woman credit, she was almost as reluctant to have us make the move as we were to do it.

  “No, the reason was much simpler and a good deal less attractive than any of those other possibilities would’ve been. It was just what my good rabbi predecessor, the sainted Bomber Lawrence, told me when I first came on the job, what the simple explanation almost always is for so many of the lousy things that everybody, even good guys, nice guys like you and me, and good old Bobby Brennan—hell, even Bom
ber Lawrence—always seem to end up doing. We’ve always got good reasons for the things we did, but nobody wants to hear them when the things we did were good. It’s just the bad and stupid things we do that our friends want reasons for, and for that kind of thing the Bomber reason always is: ‘We did it for the money.’ There isn’t any decoration and there ain’t no colored lights. There isn’t any gravy and we’re out of salad-dressing and we got to face the facts and just take ’em as we are. We did it for the money.”

  4

  “Right there, now,” Brennan said, hunching forward in the driver’s seat so that he completely blocked any partial view Dell’Appa might have contorted himself into sharing in the mirror.

  “What’s he wearing?” Dell’Appa said.

  “Ah, the usual,” Brennan said offhandedly.

  “Oh,” Dell’Appa said, “so he’s wearin’ ‘the usual.’ Well, that certainly clears it right up for me, doesn’t it? Case I might’ve any doubt in my mind, some lingerin’ confusion about what the guy is wearin’. Since, you know, I’ve never seen him before today, and I still haven’t seen him today yet, either—thanks to you sittin’ there, like Buddha or Jabba the Hutt there, hoggin’ the whole view like you’re doin’. But now at least I know: all I got to do, I get back the office tonight and I sit down to write my report of the day’s adventures with you and Uncle Wiggily, Squirrel Nutkin, all the guys—Peter fuckin’ Rabbit—is put down that even though I never did get a good look at any of them, any of the usual suspects, I’d still know them anyplace now. In the dark in a coalbin at midnight. Because I had your guidance in this. Right.”

  Brennan did not turn his head or say anything and Dell’Appa saw no reddening at the back of his neck; Brennan was ignoring him again, just as he had deliberately nonexisted him during Dell’Appa’s rookie year in street clothes, when he had managed to make himself the senior non-com whose hazing Dell’Appa most despised. But now there were at least two differences: Dell’Appa, sitting with Sergeant Brennan in the Blazer three years after that first year in plain clothes, had a sergeant’s badge of his own in his pocket; he had thus long since outgrown any motive, without acquiring any new inclination, to grovel for Brennan. “Any Brennan,” as he put it that night to Gayle, “or any other bastard under the rank of Detective Lieutenant Inspector. Let the word go forth from this time and this place, to all the Brennans in all the world, no matter what their names are: ‘Party-time was yesterday. Now is payback time. Fuck all you guys. Fuck all your horses. Strong letter follows. Harry.’ Should’ve just called him an asshole right off the bat, ’stead’ve wastin’ valuable time.”

  Dell’Appa cleared his throat and selected his testimonial voice, a bit heavy on the self-important-timbre pedal but nonetheless very serviceable, not only for giving evidence to jurors assembled in poorly miked, acoustically dead courtrooms but also for goading an overbearing former tormentor in the privacy of a truck cab, when he chose to overlook whimsical changes in status made in the passage of time. “For the Uncle I’ll write: ‘of the usual height, the usual weight and all that stuff. The usual hair and the usual eyes; in the usual colors, I think. Wears the usual clothes in the usual way; the usual feet, in the usual shoes, stickin’ out of the plural end of the pants, the end at the bottom, you know? And the usual belt through the usual loops up at the singular end, of this very usual garment.’ Dupe verbatim the same brilliant rundown for Squirrel, and then all I got left to do is rerun it just once more, for Peter. I’ll be on my way home like a blue streak tonight, boy—no greased lightnin’ was ever this fast.”

  That did the job. It made Brennan’s neck good and red. He sat back suddenly and hard in the driver’s seat, turning his head to focus on Dell’Appa the baited-bear scowl and career-threatening glare that had intimidated so many tenderfoot detectives in so many years gone by. Brennan had done more than merely overlook the years and the changes they had worked; he had nullified them by his own act of will, just as a fat man enables himself to graze comfortably out of the refrigerator by first gearing up the confidence that calories consumed while standing don’t count in the day’s total tally. He said:

  “Just what the fuck is the matter with you, kid? The fuck is the matter with you? Your third week back inna real world with us, no more king of your own little hill, no one knows what you’re doin’ out there inna woods, or maybe you’re just doin’ nothin’, and now here you come back where you’ll hafta work, and you know it, and you’re acting like the job’s a zipper with the sharp teeth there, that we yanked up real fast and caught your cock in it. What was it, old buddy, that what it was? You can tell Bob. Bob’s your old pal. Cry your heart out right here on my brotherly shoulder. You leave somethin’ sweet ’n precious out there in those woods? Or maybe some sweet behind’s what it was, a Little Red Ridin’ Hood, maybe? Your own little Goldilocks-sweathog, all sorry and sad, all alone inna weeds, when she heard her hero was leavin’.”

  Brennan shifted his tone into a whining simper. “Poor baby-Harry. Those big meanies called him up, and they said: ‘Okay, back to work. We need you back home-base, chop-chop. Wrap up that whipped-cream assignment you promoted for yourself, shouldn’t’ve existed in the first place, not for a Boston-based trench-grunt, at least. A Springfield accountant, yeah, maybe, the eyeshade and pocket-protector, but no job for a genuine cop. One with all those yew-neek skills that you’ve got, that you bring to the same job we’ve been doing without them, pretty damned good, too, all of those years before you came. Cost the taxpayers arms and legs, too, of course, all of those special unique skills. But: hey, doesn’t matter, not anymore, now it’s all over and done with. Just get your candy ass back in here Monday morning, fit for normal duty. You’ve screwed around all that you’re gonna now, out there inna bushes, the milkmaids.’

  “And so as a result now you’re gonna sulk, workin’ under men senior to you. Who can see if you’re doin’ things right, and’ll say something to you, you’re not. That what it really is, Percy? Well, tough fuckin’ shit, you fresh little prick, ’f you don’t like takin’ orders again. Suck it up, candy ass, then suck it in, and then if you still don’t like how it actually works, go on sick days. Claim ‘nervous exhaustion.’ ”

  Dell’Appa did not say anything for what seemed to him like several minutes, if not several hours, being absolutely certain that if he allowed himself to reply at once to Brennan’s sneering he would surely incite himself further, beyond the limits of his ability to control himself. His voice would rise into a roar to the point at which the rush of hearing himself saying what he’d wanted to do for more than a year, and wanted again to do now, would be more than enough to impel him do it. He really would haul off and break the man’s jaw. He knew that, but he also knew, even more surely, that that was far more than he would want, in calmness regained later, to have to know that he had done.

  So there was some relief, to find that out. Somewhere along the time-line he had passed along with birthdays a milestone of increasing genuine maturity, without even noticing it. He really did not want to emerge now from his anger to find that he had acted on it while it lasted, and had broken Bob Brennan’s jaw. It was a year or three over fifty, and with the rest of Brennan it would have been pensioned off some time back, in the days before the retirement age went up to fifty-five. Most likely that jaw was dry shingle brittle, furnished with dental appliances—Dr. Morse called all dental plates and bridges “appliances,” including those he had fashioned for Harry to replace the three right upper and two lower teeth knocked loose by a sixteen-year-old Wellesley rich kid in the Mowglieh Tigers Rap Concert riot in his second year on the force (no more than two or three seconds before he had backhanded the kid with his long baton and hospitalized him with a fractured skull; the kid had recovered, after nine weeks in bed, his parents muttering about lawsuits until they heard about Dell’Appa’s firm intention to reciprocate and as his lawyer put it to them: “Take your fucking house for what your druggy little bastard did.”), thus causing Harry and Gay
le ever after to call them his “maytags”—that a single solid shot would easily shatter and jolt off the shrunken lower gums, ramming sharp pieces of flesh-colored tough plastic at strange angles into the soft palate, making deep, jagged entry wounds. It was good to discover that causing grave bodily harm to Bob Brennan or even somebody like him, however delicious anger made the prospect, was no longer the sort of thing likely to be done by the kind of man Dell’Appa had always intended to be, some day; had worked hard to become, and now apparently had some reason to believe himself to be—even though it was the first thing that had come into his mind. He had already made a good start on beating Brennan senseless with his mind. There was no need to do anything more, especially if it involved risk.

  During Dell’Appa’s silence, Brennan breathed heavily across from him, plainly meaning to convey by means of labored, noisy inhalations and exhalations the falsehood that he too was in the mood for a fistfight. But his pale-blue eyes would not meet Dell’Appa’s gaze and stay locked in, despite his efforts to steady them; their shiftiness gave him away. That was also good; it meant there was no danger Brennan would stupidly throw a sucker punch if he somehow got the erroneous idea that Dell’Appa had been distracted by something or someone outside the truck. So for Dell’Appa the appropriate tactic was therefore to find a way to occupy his mind and his time until the appearance of a subject of sufficient common interest to warrant (and also explain) total disregard of what had just happened, and open a fresh conversation.