“What I’m saying,” Dell’Appa said softly, “all I’m trying to tell you here, is that I’d really like to do exactly what you say. As far as talking to Bomber, I mean, as far as that’s concerned, yeah. But in the first place, I wouldn’t be doing it again, like you suggest, because I’ve never done it before. And in the second …”
Mossi interrupted with another snort, rolling his eyes again and raising his hands. “Ahh,” he said, “no wonder then. Of course you’re an asshole, an asshole for good. You’re all of you assholes for good. And assholes’re all that you’ll ever be. Never talked to the Bomber at all.”
“Bomber retired before I came up,” Dell’Appa said. “I never worked under him, all right?”
“Well Jesus, for Christ sake,” Mossi said, “what difference does that make, I mean? He forgot how to talk once he retired? He move to the North Pole or somethin’ and didn’t get a phone line put in? He isn’t dead, is he? No, he’s not dead—I woulda heard if he was. One of the guys would’ve told me. Would’ve been a big party or something. Fireworks and drinks and a band. ‘Hey, Bomber Lawrence’s dead. I’m buyin’ drinks for the house.’ That’s what alla the guys’d be sayin’.” He chuckled. “But no, no, there wasn’t, wasn’t no party like that. So then he’s still alive, gotta be. And you can’t go and see him, or somethin’?”
“No,” Dell’Appa said, “nothing like that. He’s still right where he always was, summers at least, only now year around: with his wife down there on the Cape.”
“Well for Christ sake then, asshole,” Mossi said, “ask somebody who did work with him, give him a call, introduce you. Tell Bomber that you’re this new asshole kid and Short Joey said you should see him. Bomber’ll know who that is. He’ll recognize my name right off.” Mossi nodded, agreeing physically with himself. “We go back a long way, Bomber and me. Bomber’s one of my fans ’way back when. I was still gettin’ fights around here. He maybe don’t wanna see no more new cops now, now that he got retired—already seen all the assholes he ever wanted to meet, back when he hadda meet assholes. But he’ll see you, if you tell him that. Use my name, just like I said. Tell him I said to give you some pointers.”
Dell’Appa sighed. “Look,” he said, “just shut up for a minute and listen to me here now, okay? It isn’t because I didn’t want to meet Bomber when I came in, or that I really wouldn’t’ve liked to’ve talked to him since he retired. Just for the reasons you say. The guy’s a national legend, all right? From Boston to Honolulu, every cop in the whole great big street-clothes world knows who you mean, you say: ‘Bomber said once,’ they all listen. Maybe even bigger’n that, you think about it—the RCMPs and the Scotland Yard guys, the French Sureté know him too.
“So,” Dell’Appa said, “it’s not as though I’ve avoided the guy, or don’t think he could’ve taught me a lot. The point is, he can’t now, on most days at least. Can’t teach anyone now. The Bomber most days can’t talk anymore. He can’t remember, most of the time, either. The way I understand it, it’s gotten to the point now, it’s advanced so far, that most days he doesn’t even know he doesn’t know, anymore. Which I hope is true, because from everything I heard about the guy, it’d be absolute torture for him if he understood now what’s happened.”
Mossi stared at him. “You’re shittin’ me, aren’t you,” he said. “You’ve got to be shittin’ me here, tellin’ me that kind of shit.”
“No,” Dell’Appa said, “no, I’m not.”
“The Bomber’s gone goofy,” Mossi said, “right? That is what you’re tellin me, right? He lost all his marbles and stuff, got simple in his old age. He don’t know his ass from third base anymore. You expect I’ll believe shit like that?”
Dell’Appa shrugged again. “Doesn’t matter to me, pal,” he said, “what matters is whether his wife does. His wife and his family there. And they do believe it, I know. They won’t let anyone see him.”
Mossi nodded. “Okay then,” he said. “Yeah, that’s okay. That’d explain a whole bunch of stuff.” He laughed like a big dog barking once. “He oughta come outta retirement,” he said, “like Sinatra there’s always doin’. What is it they say? Oh, yeah, I remember: ‘That’s him all right, forgotten but not gone.’ That’s what the Bomber should do now. He’d fit right in with you young assholes here, if he really don’t know which end’s up.
“Still, inna way,” Mossi said, “inna way it’s kinda too bad, he doesn’t know what’s going on. Because if he did, it’d be good for him, because now at least, he would know. He’d know what it’s like, to be someone like that, if he knew anything now, and knew that’s what he is himself. And needs someone to look out for him.”
11
“It’s an interesting approach,” Dennison said in his office the next morning. “We can do a paper on it for the next ‘Frontline’ show on the Mafia, huh? ‘Confrontational Aversion: Strategic Surveillance Techniques,’ something along that line.” He removed his Greek fisherman’s black wool cap and gray stormcoat and hung them on the hook behind the door. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly as he went to his desk and sat down. “ ‘Our theory is that the best initiative for surveillance of the standard-issue stone killer is to get him all riled up as fast as we can. Coddling these chaps just doesn’t work.’ I can’t say I ever heard of it before, and I’m not entirely sure I would’ve suggested it myself, approved it in advance if I’d been asked. But since I wasn’t …”
“Well, but I didn’t have that luxury,” Dell’Appa said. He sprawled in the chair facing Dennison’s desk. “Of consultation, I mean. Bob didn’t give me any inkling, any reason to expect, either when I talked to him or from reading his reports, that I was going to have the guy all of a sudden right there in my face, the first day I took the handoff. So it wasn’t like I could’ve seen it coming and asked you what you thought I should do when he did it. I hadda improvise, make it up as I went along.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Dennison said, leafing through his messages, grimacing as he discarded them and picked up the handset of his telephone console. He punched in a two-digit number. He listened for about a minute before he replaced the phone in its cradle. He shook his head, his face showing sadness. “You know,” he said, “in my next life I am definitely going to have to give more thought to the decision of what to be when I grow up. I called the Great Bloviator yesterday afternoon, we finally started getting tapes that look like at long last we can grab Buddy Royal. Which if we can’ll reduce the E. coli count of the human sea around us by at least, oh, say, six percent.”
“The guy that runs the chop-shop by the train station there?” Dell’Appa said. “Brennan says he’s just a little piece of shit. Gave me a whole big song-and-dance about him yesterday morning, how he beat up his first wife and his second’s the town’s community-snatch; his friends’re all laughin’ at him, shootin’ him birds all the time; and now, just to cap it off, sort of, his business’s gone in the dumper. Guy’s so hopeless he can’t even get himself indicted for something respectable.”
Dennison looked puzzled. “Bob told you that?” he said. “Where the hell’d he get that idea?”
“From the tapes we’ve been getting, he said,” Dell’Appa said. “That’s what he told me, at least. He said we finally got around to getting the bug in, after all these years he’s been buying hot cars, and now we’re gonna catch him red-handed in the act, put a stop to it once and for all. And what happens? Nothin’s what happens. Now nobody’s calling him up anymore, sell him Porsches so hot they’re still smokin’.”
“Bob’s not on that case,” Dennison said. “He’s not assigned anything anywhere near it, not even back-up on that lash-up. Buddy Royal’s Cannon’s case. Connie Cannon’s got his name, John Finn helping him. And the stuff you’re tellin’ me Bob’s tellin’ you there: that isn’t part of the case. That’s just fiddlin’ and diddlin’, the normal, usual bullshit you’d get off of any businessman’s phone line if you tapped into it in the lags between major transa
ctions. Got basically nothin’ to do with the stuff that we’re after, the real meat of the case. But even if it was connected, that still doesn’t tell me what the hell Bob doing’s with it. He’s got nothing to do with Buddy Royal. It’s none of his detail at all.”
“Oh,” Dell’Appa said. “Well, I dunno then. All I know’s what he said to me. Which at least sounded like he really knew a lot. Sounded very well-informed.”
“He shouldn’t even’ve been monitoring those tapes,” Dennison said. “Hell, he shouldn’t’ve even known they were coming in. You sure he said: ‘the tapes’? That he not only knew about the tapes and what was coming up on them, but he knew it from the tapes? It couldn’t’ve been just some scuttlebutt he happened to’ve picked up around here, heard at the coffee table or something?” He paused. “Not that that wouldn’t also disturb me, I thought Connie’d been being that careless, but it wouldn’t concern me as much.”
“No, ‘from the bug’ is what he told me,” Dell’Appa said. “He told me for a long time, good many years, everybody knew what this Buddy Royal guy was doin’, takin’ in hot cars for parts. But it was just that nobody seemed to have time to get a bead on him and croak him. Until finally Buddy’s turn came, his number’d come up, and we got the mike in, and then, apparently just as we got it in, all his suppliers went out of business, all his buyers went broke. So as a result all we’re listenin’-in on’s Buddy’s friends callin’ him up and yankin’ his chain—how his new wife’s fuckin’ every guy in Boston, and six or eight other towns too, all the way the New Hampshire state line.”
Dennison raised his eyebrows. “Okay, if you say so,” he said, drumming the fingertips of his right hand on the desk and glancing at the phone as he spoke, “but it beats the hell out of me where Bob got his information. Which is fortunately wrong, irrelevant, actually, but that still doesn’t change a lot about the basic … Goddamn you, Terry, call back.”
“Why you need the Bloviator?” Dell’Appa said. “If you’re getting what you went in for.”
“Because we haven’t got enough yet,” Dennison said. “The quality’s all right, really first-rate, nasty stuff, nothing wrong with it at all. But the warrant ends tomorrow night. So we need another one, right? An extension, I mean. Whatever the hell they call it. So, yesterday afternoon, when I find out what we’re getting, which is what we went in for in the first place, the whole reason for this thing, I check back on the paper and find out it’s dead at midnight Friday. Ergo, we need another one, and I call Terry on the phone.” He shook his head.
“Terry isn’t there,” he said, “and this’s not that late in the day. Three-thirty, quarter-four. Terry’s secretary doesn’t really know where Terry is. I can tell because when Terry’s gone out to do something that he should’ve come back from doing at least two hours ago, she always says: ‘Terry isn’t back from court yet.’ Which is what she always also says when that’s really where he is, and she knew he’d get back late. But when she thinks he isn’t still in court, that he’s wandered off someplace, she says it in a different tone of voice. She says it like she isn’t telling you something; what she’s doing’s asking you a question. What she’s really saying is: ‘I’m almost sure that Terry’s having coffee someplace, goofing off this afternoon. But if I tell people that, even though they already knew it, and Terry finds out, he’ll get mad. So if I say he’s in court, will you pretend you believe that for me, please?’ ”
“Jeez, Brian,” Dell’Appa said, “you’re a hard man on a guy, aren’t you, here. Aren’t you the guy who practically made it a tradition in this place, that when the thing you’re working on’s started making you completely nuts, you tell whoever else’s around to say that you’re out doing fieldwork, and then you go down to the aquarium? Aren’t you the guy who invented that?”
“Only the aquarium variation was mine,” Dennison said. “The original theme was by Bomber, back in the days of afternoon baseball when ballgames were feasible workdays. But I think the aquarium’s better. It’s climate-controlled and open all year, two definite advantages for the harried Boston executive, and I for one find it soothing. No man should go through life without porpoise. And anyway, when you’ve reached stymie on a thing, it helps to visit something, any animal, that looks sillier’n you’ve made yourself feel. The Red Sox don’t, anymore; all that bunch does now is look stupid. Penguins and harbor seals fill the bill, if an innocent free-play period’s called for.”
“Well,” Dell’Appa said, “how do you know Terry hadn’t come to stymie too, just like you have, so he either had to go fuck off or else check in for observation?”
“I don’t,” Dennison said, “and it wouldn’t matter if I did. Because even if he did have a good reason, he should’ve timed it better, for a day when I wasn’t going to be the one who had to talk to him.”
“Oh,” Dell’Appa said, “now I get it. Yeah. Well, I can see where that would make a difference, now you’ve explained it and all, all of the ramifications. If your elevator’s stuck three floors from the top, it’s okay to go out and play—unless Lieutenant Dennison might decide to come looking for you. In which case, postpone it ’til you’re sure.”
“Right,” Dennison said, “the whole secret here—” His phone rang and he seized it.
“Yeah, Terry,” he said, before the caller could possibly have greeted him or identified himself, “where the hell’ve you been?” He listened. “Never mind ‘the traffic this morning,’ ” he said. “In the first place I don’t believe you—I know very well what held you up was you overslept or you were getting laid or something. And in the second place, it was yesterday when I had to talk to you anyway, so where the hell were you then?” He listened again. “Okay then,” he said, “I forgive you. Not that I believe any of that cock-and-bull story you just told me there, but leaving that aside, what we need here’s either an extension of the paper that we’ve got on Buddy Royal, or a new piece of paper entirely. The one we got now dies twelve-oh-one Friday, and we haven’t got as much shit in our bucket to plaster all over the motherfucker’s I’d like to have, you take it in before the grand jury.”
He paused. “No,” he said, “I don’t care. Doesn’t matter a rat’s ass to me. If you think a whole new one’d most likely be safer, by all means let’s get a new one. I’ll send Cannon up to see you instanter, chop-chop. Make a new affidavit up pronto. Judge’ll give you another closed session? This morning?” He nodded. “Okay then, good,” he said. “That’s very good there. Yeah, I’ll send Cannon right up.”
He depressed a different button on the console, lighting a new line. He listened. He said: “Connie. Yeah. I got him. Just now. No, I don’t know where he was. He told me he was at the Social Law Library, but of course we both know that’s a lie. You ask him, you have to know. See what kind of answer you get.” He listened, grinning. “Connie, Connie,” he said, “you don’t ever listen to me. I keep tellin’ you, you aren’t listening. You’ve got to stop, you’ve just got to stop, lettin’ guys intimidate you just because they got law degrees. You got too much respect for attorneys. It’s not healthful.” He began to laugh. “Corporal,” he said, “that is not language appropriate for use by a professional person for description of other professional persons, of either gender, is that clear? Correct. So, when you see Terry … yes, right now of course, go on up … correct, you are not to call him a cocksucker, ’kay?” He nodded. “Correct,” he said, “you can’t call him that bad name either.”
He replaced the handset in the cradle and smirked. “I love this shit,” he said, “every bit of it. I live for this part of it, that’s what I do. This’s the part that I live for. Takin’ down some guy like him. You get a guy like Buddy Royal, a no-good, scheming-little, dirty-pants, snotty-nosed bastard, thinks he’s so goddamned smart and we’re such fuckin’ stupid dummies, we not only cannot catch him doin’ what he’s really doin’, we’re not even smart enough to know what it is? I looove takin’ those assholes down. It’s like havin’ ice cream and cake.
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“All these goddamned years he’s been sittin’ out there in that clapped-out, fly-blown shop of his down next by the railroad tracks there, laughin’ with his good-for-nothin’ rat-ass buddies at what jerks we are, and how he’s of course immortal—that kindah stuff pisses me off. Especially since, as a matter of fact, in Buddy’s case here, he was right—we couldn’t do steam-shit about it.”
He nodded. He crooned. “Yeah? Well now we can. Okay now, Buddy, laugh your ass off, gloat all you want, but make sure you’re finished in a couple weeks or so, the outside, ’Cause when the grand jury gets through hearing those recordings, you’ll be on your way to the penitentiary, my friend, and what’ll happen to you in that place you aren’t gonna like a bit, not, at a fuckin’ bit, at all.”
“What?” Dell’Appa said. “What’s gonna happen to him?”
“Well, the usual thing, I assume,” Dennison said. “The usual bridal reception and shower, daisy-chain and the conga-line the boss cons always put on, when the new baby fuckers come in.”
“ ‘Baby-fuckers’?” Dell’Appa said. “I thought Royal’s a car-thief, a high-grade, superfly car-thief. Midnight Auto Supply. One of the best ones around.”
“That’s what everyone thought,” Dennison said, now just smiling. “That’s exactly what everyone thought. They thought it because while Buddy’s a born-to-run sleaze-bag, Buddy Royal’s clever, and that’s what he wanted them thinking. Well, clever he may be, but he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, or he’s managed to make people think. Put him down for just standard-bred cute.”
“At doing what?” Dell’Appa said. “If everybody thought he was dealin’ in hot cars …”
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