Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “Well,” Dennison had said, “Virginia had the potential to become that kind of pest. She knew just as much, at least as much, about flowers as Billy’s father-in-law knew about the birds, and she could’ve done it, easy. But she didn’t. It was something that she did, that she’d always done, and that she’d always liked doing and knew how to do very well, so she did it. She belonged to three or four of the garden clubs around Taunton during the years that she lived there, and then when she moved down to Westport she found one or two down there, and she would go to them from time to time. When the winter started to run down every year so it was getting on toward spring, she would make arrangements to get herself to the Flower Show in Boston, one way or the other—couple years, Tory took her—and those were pretty much all the things she did about what she liked to do. With flowers. All of them. And that really was all of it, too. Because she liked growing flowers for that, for what it was to her. Not as something she could use to make a damned nuisance of herself, to bedevil other people with.

  “So when you saw her outdoors or in, working on her plants, something to do with her plants, you knew that Virginia was happy,” Dennison had said. “As happy as she ever got, anyway, up to her ass in dirt. And that day, the Sunday in June, when we turned in her drive and went up toward that goddamned house, and I saw her standing there beside the front door, just standing there and looking down at this flower bed she had there, these beds of beautiful tall, white and yellow, blue and red, flowers,—what they were I couldn’t possibly tell you to this day, and of course they’re all gone now, just as dead as she is, even after only one year of no one taking care of them; that’s all it took—on both sides of the door, I looked up that drive, and I saw her just standing there and looking down, and that was when I knew. That the time had come. Now it was all over. What we’d known was coming: It’d come, and now it was there.

  “Because that’s all she was doing, see?” Dennison had said. “She wasn’t working on them. It’d never struck me until then, that I’d never seen her just, well, doing what I guess I would’ve done, if flowers’d been my thing. Just standing back and looking at them, enjoying what my work, all my skill and care and hours, ’d made come from the earth. No, there was always something more, she was working on. But not now. Not that Sunday. Now there was some reason, what it was I didn’t know, and specifically, well, I never did find out exactly what it was, but something had been working on her down inside there, and now it’d finished what it’d set out to do to her. May’ve had a slight stroke; may’ve fallen and had a real hard time of it; getting up: any one of those things, it could’ve been. But something clearly had happened, and she was not going to put on her knee-pads and her cloth gloves and get down her hands and knees again and take care of her flowers any more. And she knew it. That was the end of it. She couldn’t do it, grow the flowers, anymore.

  “She had this look on her face that I’d never seen before, when she heard the car come up and turned around. The closest I’ve ever come to describing it to myself is surprise, and it wasn’t surprise to see us—we quite often dropped by, or at least Tory did. No, this was almost a look of … of astonishment, I guess. Wonderment, maybe? I don’t know. A kid-on-Christmas-morning look, only what was on her face was not delight—more like dismay. Virginia knew what I knew, too, and she’d found it out just like I had. It was like she’d just happened to stop by, ’d seen herself standing there by the flower-beds at the door, and quite unexpectedly found out. She hadn’t been prepared either. Even though she’d also known that it was coming, lots better’n I did.

  “Well that, my friend,” Dennison had said, “that is the sort of thing that I think must’ve happened to Bob Brennan while you were away, that none of us happened to notice because we were all around him every day. It was too gradual. I think what you’ve come up against is Bob Brennan still in the aftermath of suddenly discovering that something he’d never even dreamed could happen to anyone has happened to him, and he’s still trying to come to grips with it.”

  “Have you got any idea what it is?” Dell’Appa had said.

  “I haven’t yet,” Dennison had said. “I’m going to need more’n you’ve gotten so far, this feeling of uneasiness, or whatever the hell you want to call it, from reading his reports. You’re going to have to get a closer look at him’n you’ve had so far, in the flesh, and do more thinking, too. And then bring me some more data, more details.”

  “Okay,” Dell’Appa said, “but just so long’s we both understand it’s more than just a ‘feeling of uneasiness’ that I’m getting, from reading the reports, hardly talking to the man at all, I think there’s something seriously wrong. On what I’ve seen in those reports—actually, more like what I haven’t seen that I’d expect to see, and what I have seen that I never would expect to, not from this guy, not from him—something I never saw any sign of in this guy’s makeup before’s happened to him, and it must’ve been pretty dramatic, too. Traumatic, even. It’s changed the way he looks at things. The way he thinks.”

  “Well, this happens to people,” Dennison had said. “In all lines of work it can happen. And does. Not a bit unusual, either. Very common, in fact. For it, to have it happen, I mean, to someone who’s been in law enforcement all his adult life. Especially when his separation date’s coming up, and knowing that’s more or less’s gotten him started taking stock of how he’s spent what he’s got to see now’s been most of his useful life. Like it or not. He’s already receptive, he’s in a relatively-receptive state, a taking-inventory, stock-taking kind of thing, and then suddenly he sees something that he never saw before. Or else maybe it did, maybe many times, but it so happened every time that he just never noticed. Maybe just wasn’t paying attention. His mind was always, you know, off on something else. But now it isn’t, and he’s positively stunned. Something happens right in front of his eyes and this time, by God, he notices. It just staggers him, so much so that he starts to rethink all the basic underpinnings, the premises and principles, of the job that he’s been doing. This job that’s been most of his whole adult life, the way that he’s been doing it; what’s been that he’s been doing. What it all really means.”

  “Some kind of a midlife crisis there?” Dell’Appa had said. “Male menopause or something? That what you’re getting at here, Bry?”

  “Well, yeah,” Dennison had said. “Yeah, I guess that’d be, it could be, something like that. Maybe. One way of looking at it.”

  “Yah,” Dell’Appa had said. “Well, okay, I guess. Very touching and all that, and I’ll do my best. But I got big reservations about this, Brian, okay? Having him still staying on this case, working on it any more, now that it’s my baby. Big bad reservations, and they bother me already. I wanna be on record here about this from the gun: There’s something wrong already here, with the job that Brennan’s done to date with this whole Mossi case, and it bothers me. A lot. And what bothers me even more is that not only am I not sure just exactly what it is that smells wrong about this file, but I also don’t know how to pin it down without alerting Bob that what I’m doing is not only taking over the case from him but, in addition, trying at the same time to figure out how it got so mortally fucked-up. How come he either let it get that far sideways, or made it get that way. And if he did it on purpose,—which I’ve got to say right now, in case you didn’t guess, I think has to be the explanation here; it’s the only way that I can see that any project this important, in the hands of a man with his experience and brains, could get so monumentally fucked-up—then: How come? What’s the explanation here? What the hell is going on?

  “The man’s not stupid, Brian. I never said he was. No one’s ever heard me say I thought Bob wasn’t smart. I think he’s mean. I don’t like him. Those things I’ve said many times, but never that he’s stupid. He can’t fall back on that excuse and no one can use it for him. No one who knows him’d even try. When he broke me in here, back when I first came in, the time that I spent with him back then taught
me to hate his guts. I know,—hell, I even knew back then, because the old hands told me—it was nothing personal. ‘Bob Brennan’s always hazed the greenhorns. It’s just the way he is.’ And at the same time he was making my life miserable, I was seeing him do the same things to the other rooks. He made Cannon grovel, just doing everything he could to break another young guy’s spirit—and succeeding too, more than a little, I think, much as I hate to say it. Well, I hated him for that, too, hated him even more for what he tried to do to me, even though it didn’t work, because it really wasn’t personal, on his part, see? It was systematic, programmatic, individually institutionalized meanness. And on some other guys it did work.

  “Now I know, I hope, I must’ve calmed down some, all the time I’ve been away from here, away from him, but even having that in mind, I think that maybe I still do hate his guts, hate his fuckin’ guts. But: about his brains there’s still no doubt: I know that man’s not dumb, and he never has been, either.

  “So,” Dell’Appa had said, “that makes it kind of important, doesn’t it. To figure out as fast as we can what it is that’s got me so worried about him now, and do it fast enough to stop him from making my nightmare come true. Whatever that damned nightmare may be.”

  “Ah, Harry,” Dennison had said, “now let’s not get, you know, too down-hearted here. Most of our worst fears, you know, never do come true.”

  “The ones that don’t come true aren’t the ones that worry me,” Dell’Appa had said. “It’s the goddamned ones that do, and were before you had them.”

  7

  Short Joe Mossi’s progress through the rest of that first day convinced Dell’Appa that Brennan’s reports were trustworthy, and therefore likely to be useful, in at least one major respect: if Brennan stated that on a given day what he had observed “the subject Mossi” doing had accorded “with the subject’s customary and usual Tuesday routine,” it almost certainly had. Dell’Appa by himself and doing sixty-seven miles an hour in the maroon Lexus SC300 coupe he had signed out of the seized-motor-vehicle pool, following Joe Mossi southbound in his old gray Cadillac on Route 24 in Brockton, so stated aloud. “There’s nothing wrong with old Bob’s vision. This guy may look like the chief assassin in a horde of minivan-size Mongols, which he certainly is, but he’s as reliable as disorder and early sorrow, by God.

  “The files say Brennan followed him every Tuesday the past year, except when Bob was on vacation, and then back there in July, when Short Joey went away, took Danny down to Swift’s Beach down in Wareham. And every Tuesday, Brennan reports, Short Joey did his Tuesday thing. Well, what he saw Short Joey doing all those Tuesdays is what I’m seeing done today. He saw Danny off safely on the Seven-forty-eight. Then he continued on up Dockett Street and turned right onto the parkway, heading for Marie’s. ‘So why Marie’s?’ I say to Brennan, ‘Why not the Dunkin’ in the Square, there? Was good enough for us.’ And Brennan says to me: ‘Because Short Joey likes Marie’s, on account he likes Marie. So if her doughnuts aren’t as good as Mister Dunkin’s there, well, to Joey that don’t matter: he’s not friends with Dunkin’.’ And sure enough, bet the ranch on it, Marie’s was where he went.

  “ ‘He’ll spend an hour, ninety minutes, havin’ coffee with the guys, seeing what might be in the papers, keepin’ up, what’s goin’ on. And also, of course, yesterday’s results and the card this afternoon, down at Coldstream there.’ And that’s exactly what he did.”

  Dell’Appa’s microcassette tape recorder kit from Radio Shack included an optional, unidirectional, lavalier microphone fitted with an alligator clip that he could attach to his lapel so “I can be Yuppiecop, and dictate while I drive.” He could also use it while he read through documents, studied texts or did surveillance.

  “I seldom take notes,” he had testified once, when asked to produce them at a hearing of a motion to suppress evidence he had obtained by means of electronic surveillance—defense counsel had pleaded insufficiency of probable cause for issuance of the bugging warrant—“any more than I overheard your client’s conversations by shinnying up the drainspout and listening-in under his eaves. I’m an investigator at the shag-end of the twentieth century, not some quill-and-inkpot court-steno out of Bleak House, and I work like what I am.”

  He had conditioned his acceptance of the Department’s combination job-promotion/permanent-transfer offer to the Detective Branch upon written assurances that he would have “access at all times to as much clerical assistance as is necessary for the efficient and satisfactory performance of assigned duties.” The civilian administrator, publicly- and showily-designated by the Secretary—also a civilian—to “beef up the Department’s investigative capability on a hurry-up, crash-basis, not only updating its operations in all technological respects, but making sure as well that they remain thereafter, at all times in the future, in an operationally top-notch, state-of-the-art condition” had fully understood neither the art nor its then-current state, and had therefore gravely underestimated the cost of the Department’s compliance with Dell’Appa’s condition. When the oversight became apparent, the administrator had first informed Dell’Appa by brusque memo that “unforeseen budgetary limitations will henceforth require advance divisional approval of all expenses of transcription, but in no event to exceed total cost per operative of $100 per week. Please allow minimum three working days for processing such requests.”

  Dell’Appa had dictated a memorandum of reply to the administrator: “New regulation and procedures inapplicable to this operative,” it said. “Read my contract. No typing, old or new.” Five weeks thereafter, to the day, he had received an administrative memorandum by which he had been “hereby advised” that he had been “temporarily-separated, forthwith, from Boston central office, for detachment to western field office, for exigent assignment on case-by-case basis, detached duty period not to exceed 12 consecutive calendar months, inclusive of such periods of earned vacation or sick leave as may fall within said 12-month period.”

  He had consulted Dennison about the memorandum.

  “I’ve seen it,” Dennison had said, scaling it back to him across the desk. “I’m copied in on all administrative decisions that affect the operation of my branch. Not necessarily consulted before they’re made, but fairly-faithfully informed about them after they’ve been made, before they’re to take effect. Just before, usually. Just barely before.”

  “So I take it then, this isn’t unique?” Dell’Appa had said.

  “What makes you ask that?” Dennison had said.

  “A suspicious nature, I guess,” Dell’Appa had said. “Not that I’m subject to frequent fits of domination by post-hoc, propter-hoc frenzy, least so far as I’m aware, and I don’t think I’m any vainer than the next man, but—”

  “Oh, but you are,” Dennison had said, interrupting. “A good deal vainer than the next man, as a matter of fact. Not necessarily ‘the next man here,’ because after my sixteen months so far in the Bomber seat my own guess is he was right when he claimed he’d bossed more divas’n the Met’s ever seen, but still, certainly a good deal vainer than the next, ordinary, guy. Oh yes, old chap, quite so.”

  “Well,” Dell’Appa had said.

  “Good heavens, man,” Dennison had said, “you’re not taking offense here now, are you? There’s nothing wrong with it, with being vain, if you’ve got something to be proud of and you use it. Just don’t make yourself ridiculous, pretending that you aren’t. That’s all I was suggesting.”

  “Yeah,” Dell’Appa had said. “Well anyway, without some reason to think otherwise, what I started out to say was that it’s pretty hard for me to look at that memo without seeing just a hint of retribution in it, you know? A little whiff of the old grapeshot, a bit of a taste of the lash? Oh, nothing coarse, mind you, nothing like the bad old days, when I understand a man with a fresh mouth on him could come back to his desk on Thursday night and find out he’d been reassigned to the North Adams barracks, full-pack, back onna road again, him and ol
d Willie Nelson, effective Saturday. Collective bargaining hasn’t been a total loss. But it still looks to me quite a lot like what it used to be. Like a banishment, I mean. Though maybe only to me. Mom always said I was too sensitive sometimes.”

  “Of course,” Dennison had said.

  “ ‘Of course,’ ” Dell’Appa had said.

  “Sure,” Dennison had said. “You think he’s given you one good swift boot in the croagies. Well, you’re exactly right. He did. You laid some hard attitude on him a while ago. That ‘fuck-you,’ wise-ass steno-memo. Right off he didn’t like it. He was thoroughly pissed-off. The guy spends all day fighting budget battles with the other agencies—thinking he’s protecting us guys, who then turn around and laugh at him behind his back for calling us ‘my troops,’ ungrateful wretches that we are—and then when he puts in a cost-cutback plan that’s purely for show-and-tell, a ‘leaner-meaner’ pufferoo that nobody expects will have any more real-world effect than if he’d merely cleared his throat and said he might actually have to do something, some day, that would really cut costs in this place, one of his own people rises up and gives him the speedy finger. You can bet he was annoyed.

  “But he’s the new variety,” Dennison had said. “When his breed gets pissed off, it gets just as pissed off just as fast as the old wardogs we were used to. But then it doesn’t do anything. Not right off, like they used to—explode—and that’s where the difference is. It’s on a delayed fuse or something. Sneaky’s more its style. It wouldn’t choose that word, though; that would not be sneaky. It calls what it does ‘just taking some time to think this whole thing over, turn it over once or twice in my mind. Look at all the angles.’