Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Dell’Appa said.

  “What?” Ernie said, whining.

  “What you just said, about bein’ a young guy,” Dell’Appa said. “What the fuck was that for?”

  “Noth-in’, wasn’t for anythin’,” Ernie said. “I was just sayin’, is all, you would know. You been a young guy yourself, weren’t you there? Well that was all I was sayin’.”

  “Yeah,” Dell’Appa said. “Yeah. Well, go ahead. Watch your ass though.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. “Jesus, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” He coughed and shook his head, clearing his throat. “I wished they wouldn’t let the guys smoke in here. There’s too many of us in one place. I never had this, onna street.”

  “Yup, there it is, I just knew it’d come up,” Dell’Appa said, “only a matter of time here: ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ I think you should bring a civil rights suit. Same judges that put all of you guys in here could change what they say judgment day: ‘I’m sentencing you to the maximum term of two-and-a-half in the House, and also you gotta quit smokin’.’ That’d shape some of the real bad bastards up in a jiffy, make them see the light in a flash. ‘No, no,’ they would say, ‘don’t say that to me. Don’t tell me you’re gonna do that, make me quit smoking for just killing people. I’ll be good, I promise I will.’ Or you could get yourself convicted on what the feds’ve got you for, which could make you eligible to get sent to a genuine federal prison, ree-formed and improved all at once. No smoking in federal stir, no sirree; feds don’t want you missin’ out on any of the interesting programs and activities they got planned for all of their guests, not doin’ all of your rightful time, droppin’ dead ’fore you’ve done the full hitch. Good robust, healthy prisoners, that’s what they want, attractive, well-nourished inmates, suitable for all occasions both public and private. Mens malo sed corpore sano. Little Latin for you there, son, no extra charge whatsoever: ‘His mind’s pure unadulterated evil but his body’s Sanforized and won’t shrink from anything, foreign or domestic.’

  “Feds only want very pure people in their penitentiaries these days, only the best class of prisoners. It’s much harder gettin’ into the federal calabozo’n it is makin’ it into Harvard: if doin’ federal time is your cherished ambition, well, you’re gonna have to get a haircut and behave yourself, as well, and no fuckin’ backtalk either, like your parents and your prep-school teachers may’ve taken from you because they won’t stand for it. Practically got to file an application in writing, include three references, none of them members of your immediate family or addicted to any harmful substances, who’ve known you for at least ten years, have never seen you naked or expressed any strong desire to do so, and can testify persuasively with clear elocution to your good character, high moral standards, abstemious habits, and do it without mispronouncing any words. And then submit to an interview, neatly-dressed, jacket and tie for boys, girls with neatly-braided hair, no slacks, culottes or jeans, before they’ll even consider you. They’re very particular about who they let in these days, don’t want the wrong type of person gainin’ admission and then turnin’ out to be a bad influence on their other residents. And then, if you do get in—it’s provisional, of course; they think you might be a deserving person who will benefit their program; in the federal system, see, you do the probationary period first, and if you pass that, well, then you get to do the time—and you start look to them like you’re might be thinkin’ of maybe pullin’ your Johnson bar there, they give you a rubber glove right off, a clean towel to wipe up the mess. And God help the guy who fucks you up the ass: they take him downstairs and heave him headfirst into a vat of boiling Lysol. Teach him some fuckin’ manners. Shake their heads over his conduct. ‘Don’t this asshole know about AIDS?’ ”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. He looked worried.

  “Anyway, anyway,” Dell’Appa said, “you prolly knew all of that anyway. Like you were tellin’ me: Joey.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said, “tellin’ you about Joey. Anyway, like I was sayin’ there, it was right around then that Joey was lookin’, someone who could help him out. Nothin’ really permanent, anything like that—just a guy who could give him a hand for a while, ’til he got a few things straightened out.”

  “Have you got any real notion at all,” Dell’Appa said, “of just when this might’ve been? Try to leave Tyson out of it this time, you can.”

  “Tyson wasn’t around then,” Ernie said. “I don’t get it. This had nothin’ to do with Mike Tyson. I never heard of him then.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Dell’Appa said. “Mike Tyson seems to bother your brain. Mike Tyson confuses you. Timor Tyson conturbat … vos? Ah the hell with it: just try to leave him out all the time. Just stick to: when did all stuff this happen with Mossi, that’s all—do the best you can with just that. When you did this work for Joe Mossi.”

  “Well, I can tell you ‘about,’ ” Ernie said. “It was right around when … it was pretty soon after my father, like I told you, he’d just died doin’ time up in Concord. And I was eighteen, like I said. So that would’ve made it ten years or so ago, right around ten years—or in there. And another way I know, another way I can tell, was that it was right around the time there, pretty soon in there, when they just’d found Chuckie’s head. It was after that. Not right after that, but pretty soon, you know?” He fluttered the fingers of his left hand. “Right about in there, I’d say, three–four months or so. Guys were still talkin’ about Chuckie’s head then, when Joe asked me to do some stuff for him, so I would say it would have to’ve been well, about, less’n six months after that.”

  “This would’ve been Chuckie Damon’s head, am I right?” Dell’Appa said. “The head in the box, the Hitachi TV box, in the car in the alley offa Stanhope Street, up behind PD Headquarters there?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” Ernie said. “The head in the box in the red Oldsmobile, turned out to be Chuckie Damon’s. Both of them belonged to Chuckie. First the car, and then after, the head. All the guys were really surprised. They all knew that Chuckie wasn’t around, and like that, that wasn’t what was surprising them there, that they didn’t see him for a while—I guess it was six or eight months.”

  “More like six or eight weeks, if I’ve got it right,” Dell’Appa said.

  “Yeah?” Ernie said, looking thoughtful. “Yeah, well, I suppose, it could’ve been that, coulda been six or eight weeks. I thought it more’n that, though. Could’ve sworn it was more’n that. Because, you know, there was that about him. Chuckie was like that; he was always like that, and everyone all knew it, too: go away for a while, then come back. Tell all the guys he had somethin’ come up, hadda go outta town for a while and take care of it. Took him longer’n he thought it would. If he would’ve known, how long it would take, well, then naturally he would’ve said somethin’. But the time he finds out, that he realized it, well, by then he was already gone, right? By then he was already gone. Because that’s why he went inna first place: he hadda go and find out. So when he wasn’t around and nobody seen him, well, what they all thought was that that’s where he was, doin’ somethin’, doin’ that all over again. So, when he didn’t show up again then for a while, that was of course what alla guys thought: he had somethin’ else that come up unexpected, hadda drop everything and go handle it.”

  “Any of the guys ever say what kind of thing it was that was always taking Chuckie by surprise like that, so he hadda leave town and go deal with it?” Dell’Appa said.

  “Well, they could’ve,” Ernie said. “I didn’t pay too much attention, who Chuckie Damon even was back around then. See, I didn’t know too many guys then, like I do now, most of them. I only knew some of them, see what I’m sayin’? And Chuckie didn’t happen to be one. He wasn’t one of those guys that I felt like I knew there, so: what he was doin’ or where he went, any of that stuff like that? I honest-to-God didn’t know. I didn’t pay no attention, was basically what I did then, to anything
he might’ve been doin’. I didn’t know the guy, hardly, anything like that or something, I don’t think I even met him. Might’ve seen him someplace or something like that, but I didn’t really know Chuckie. Before they found his head and like that, I mean, because after that, of course, then everyone did, me included. We all knew who Chuckie was then. But so: Where he was, what he might’ve been doin’? Just didn’t mean anythin’ to me. He was just a name that I heard, and in those days you heard lots of names. There was lots of stuff goin’ on, those days. Much more’n there’s goin’ on now. This guy here’s doin’ this; that guy there’s doin’ that; some other guys—who knows where they come from? Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, they got somethin’ else goin’, no one else even thought of it yet. Nowadays, Jesus Christ, the whole town’s dead. Not a fuckin’ thing goin’ on now. Except with the coons, naturally—niggers always got stuff goin’ on. They got more stuff’n we ever had, any of us ever had, goin’ on, and it seems like there’s more of them, too.”

  “Right,” Dell’Appa said. “That’s what all of us guys also think: The spearchuckers’re the ones that’re doin’ all the stuff. Those bastards just don’t ever sleep. They’re more fun’n four otters in your bathtub in the mornin’, when you’ve got a long day ’headah you, no matter how much they cost. We completely agree with you on that point: nothin’ goes down anymore. Not with the white boys, at least. Only problems we got now’re dark meat. Wasn’t for them you disband the police force. But there is one thing that kind of puzzles us, you know? It’s what it was that made all you wile-an’-crazy guys clean up your acts all at once. You all did it the very same time. What was the cue for you all to get born-again? How did the word of the rapture get passed, to every last one of you, without any of us gettin’ wind of it? How did all of you know precisely the instant to rid yourselves of the soiled and tattered garments of this tearstained world and put on the shining raiments of Light?”

  “Huh?” Ernie said.

  “Sorry,” Dell’Appa said, “lemme rephrase that: What is this shit that you’re handin’ me, huh? That nobody’s got nothin’ goin’ on. That’s a bunch of crap and you know it. And it’s unnecessary crap, too, completely unnecessary. The decapitation of Chuckie may’ve caused a lot of consternation in better circles at the time, especially for the Boston cops who’d been coming up that alleyway and using the back doorway off it for ten days or two weeks so before it occurred to any one of those crack sleuths there to ask what the hell that red Olds was doing there, illegally-parked and all, right under their fuckin’ red noses. And then to find out that the guy who owns it’s a rather well-known figgah in your higher-rollin’ circles who hasn’t been seen around very much, and who’s been rumored deceased, and then, as a pièce de résistance, crack it open and see what is in it—the oh-my-fuckin’-word, honest-to-God, missing-high-roller’s, personal-favorite, very-own, singular, head. That he never went noplace without. Well, yes indeed, it sure did; that did raise a considerable ruckus. But since then much sand’s gone over the dam and much water’s pissed out of the hour-glass, and now we all know that the rest of Chuckie Damon almost certainly’d been served as the plat du jour dinner to the lobsters off of Castle Island, at least a week before his gift-wrapped head turned up at PD Boston. And, furthermore, we know why.”

  “Why?” Ernie said.

  “No-no and uh-uh,” Dell’Appa said, wagging his left forefinger. “That is another part of the forest, and not why we’re meeting here today. We’re not gathered here for me to tell you the mysterious ‘whys’ of things, Ernest, how zebras got stripes and all that shit; no, we’re here so that you can tell me.” He paused and shook his head. “I will tell you this, though, my friend: I would bet a modest sum that not a day or evening went by, when Chuckie once again didn’t show up for his mail, when Short Joe Mossi missed a single edition of the morning papers, drove a mile without listening to all-news radio, or went to bed without watching the late news, and that as those days mounted up, all those quiet summer days, that noise most ignored in the background being only the nice lobsters munching, Chuckie still unsighted and unofficially still missing, MIA in more sophisticated knowledgeable circles, Short Joe must’ve been appalled at the shoddy law enforcement his tax-dollars were buying. Here he’d gone to all the trouble and inconvenience of leaving the gendarmes a door-prize right under their beer-blossomed noses, and they don’t even know enough to unwrap their present and say ‘thank you all out there, very much’? Goodness and gracious, what louts.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ernie said.

  “No,” Dell’Appa said, “well, no, most likely not. I do go on sometimes. Only that it’s now common knowledge and’s been for several years that Chuckie gave what head he gave—the only one that he had on him, good head or not good, regardless—not because he was real eager to make such a contribution, but because somebody—someone that he knew and trusted, by the name of Joey—shot him in it with a pistol ’fore removing it off him. His head, I mean: removing his head off of him. But even though we’ve known it, and we can guess why Joseph did this, knowing almost certainly that we’re absolutely right, well, all the same it isn’t quite what we’ve had in mind, and have in mind, to prosecute him for. And also, well … also because it doesn’t quite suit our peculiar needs. We live to have at least one witness, indisputably alive, at a minimum, and ideally also a decedent for whose passing a reasonable jury can muster up at least a twinge of real regret, not one whose assassin they might be tempted to honor at a testimonial dinner. Chuckie didn’t qualify on either count. Not as a witness, being dead, of course, but he didn’t make it as a victim, either, having been a real bad boy before he got somebody mad enough to make him a real dead one. But pardon the digression. What’d Joey want from you?”

  “You think Joe clipped Chuckie?” Ernie said. “You guys think Joe did that, shot Chuckie Damon inna head and then cut his head right off?”

  “Well,” Dell’Appa said, “not exactly. That’s not exactly what we think. What we actually think is that Joey shot him in the head, yes, making him terminally dead and much easier to manage, but not that he then cut Chuckie’s head off—we think that he then sawed the head off Chuckie. With a small electric chainsaw—not as noisy’s the big heavy gas ones—also found off Castle Island, hitched to what remained of Chuckie’s left thigh with the same length of stout rope formerly connecting his much-meatier corpse to the cinder block tied to it, when it first went into the drink.”

  “But him and Chuckie was friends,” Ernie said.

  “Ah yes, my little chickadee,” Dell’Appa said, “but then, wasn’t it all for the best, that way? If you were scouting around for somebody to shoot you right in your very-own, Sunday-best, head, and then cut off that head with a chainsaw, well, my dear fellow, whom would you prefer for such sensitive, delicate work? The next stranger you meet on the street, someone whose qualifications—his training, experience, neatness, originality, taste: my God: simply all of those things, so important on such an occasion when only the very best will do, and that only just barely—someone whom you know absolutely nothing about? Or: a close, trusted, personal friend, someone whose work you know well, whose work you’ve always admired, and who always takes infinite pains? Well, the friend, obviously, I should think. This’s certainly not the sort of casual chore you’d want to entrust to some short-tempered, slovenly, ill-mannered, fly-by-nighter who’d be content to do a slapdash, slipshod job that would embarrass everyone. Besides, touch-hole, do you think Chuckie Damon would’ve let anybody but a friend sit behind him in his car on any night when Chuckie knew, at least suspected, there might be a contract on him? Chuckie wasn’t your garden-variety-asshole, you know, even though he trusted his pal and that was a big fatal mistake—he wouldn’t’ve thought it was, at the time that he made it. But would he’ve trusted a stranger? I personally do not think so; I think that’s why Joey got picked for the job.”

  Ernie licked his lips and stared at Dell’Appa. A gust of shifting wind drove th
e gray rain harder and more noisily against the window. Ernie shook his head once. “Nope,” he said, “I don’t believe it. Him and Chuckie was friends. Joey would never do that.”

  Dell’Appa shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “You wanna believe Joey didn’t shoot Chuckie, and then clothesline him with the chainsaw? Certainly your prerogative. Fine by me, absolutely. What’d Joey want you to do for him, right after they found Chuckie’s head?”

  “It wasn’t right after,” Ernie said, “I didn’t say it was that. I said it was right around, after, after they found Chuckie’s head.”

  Dell’Appa shrugged again. “Okay again: fine by me. We’ll agree it was right around, after. Just tell me what Joe wanted done.”

  “It was pretty easy, really,” Ernie said. “His brother Danny, the retard, he’d just gotten his job, inna financial district downtown. A month or six weeks before that. They were livin’ in Roslindale, was it?”

  “West Roxbury, actually,” Dell’Appa said. “Seventy-three Pittman Street, in West Roxbury.”