Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “Yeah, wherever,” Ernie said, “I guess you must know him, Danny, huh? You know him, Danny, the retard; the brother?”

  “I’ve seen him,” Dell’Appa said. “Saw him taking the train one day, going to work, I suppose. His brother was shadowing him.”

  “Inna gray Cadillac, am I right?” Ernie said.

  “Inna gray Cadillac, yeah, yeah, you’re right,” Dell’Appa said.

  “Yeah,” Ernie said, “well, that’d be him, that’d be Danny all right. Danny’s a really nice kid. Well, a kid: he’s not that, I guess, older’n I am, but still he still acts like a kid, like he’s still about ten—twelve years old. And Joey still treats him like he is—which I would guess, far as Joey’s concerned, Danny still probably is, always has been ’n always will be: kid brother younger’n him.”

  “What kind of work does he do?” Dell’Appa said. “Cleanin’ up at McDonald’s or something?”

  “What’s that ’sposed to mean?” Ernie said. “I got a cousin does that, this pizza place over in Belmont, and she’s happy doin’ it, too. Geraldine’s a nice kid, she’s a very nice kid, and all of the people she works with, all of them really like her. Geraldine is a very nice kid and it’s a nice thing that those people do. Lettin’ her have a real job like that, that makes her really feel good, like she’s a real person and so forth. Their pizza’s still shitty, I never would eat it, but that doesn’t mean they’re not nice. They give Geraldine somethin’ to do. She’s still stupid but now she’s happy.”

  “Calm down, Ernie,” Dell’Appa said. “It’s not supposed to mean anything except to ask whether that happens to be what he does. I know at least one of the fast-food outfits’s got a program to hire people like that—that’s the only reason I said that.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. “Okay. No. Danny don’t work for no restaurant. Danny works for the federal government there. Down there in Government Center, I think. Somewhere down in there anyway.”

  For a moment Dell’Appa did not say anything. “Danny works for the federal government,” he said. “Okay, that could explain quite a few things, ’ve baffled the hell out of me.”

  Ernie furrowed his brows. “Like what,” he said, “explain what? Danny works for the GSA there. General Services, you know? Building maintenance, right? Danny’s a janitor, one of the buildings, one of the buildings they got. Sweeps the floors and empties wastebaskets; all of that stuff like that. They got one of those job-programs too, GSA does. Hire lots of people like him. Go around to the State schools and all of those places, they’ll hire anyone who can work. Danny told me, that time I stayed with him, the ones that come out of the church schools, like he did, or anyplace private like that, they’re much better workers, ‘because we’re smarter,’ than the ones that’re in public hospitals when they were kids.”

  Ernie paused. “I laughed when he told me that,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it or nothing—just sounded funny to me, this retard braggin’ he’s smarter, ’n the other retards he works with. I shouldn’t’ve done that, I guess. I guess doing it I hurt his feelings. He didn’t speak to me, rest of that mornin’, but he was okay the next day—he can’t remember most things the next day, I guess, the next day after they happen.”

  “Good thing for you, if he can’t,” Dell’Appa said. “If he’d been able to remember ’til Joey came back there, you probably would’ve wound up with a pool-cue up your ass.”

  “You heard about that then there too, I guess, huh?” Ernie said. “Yeah, I guess I was lucky in that there. But I would still guess just the same that no matter how much braggin’ Danny and his friends want to do, how they’re better, they all must be pretty good workers. They must all do a good job, I guess. Even though they do really stink there. They really smell bad, you’re next to them. I hadda go in there one day for a thing, one of the government buildings down there? I hadda go in and get something, an office on the eighth floor. And I went in the elevator just as they’re all goin’ back to their work from their lunch. Whole bunch of them got in with me. I guess that mustn’t matter to them, don’t bother them like it would me or you. But just the same, even if it don’t, they’re used to it so they don’t even notice it, they still should give them clean uniforms more there, so they wouldn’t smell so bad, I think. You get on the elevator with some of those guys, it’s like havin’ cat-piss in your bed. But, so, just the same, they give them real jobs they can do, and so what’s the matter with that? What’s the matter with them doin’ that?”

  “Nothin’,” Dell’Appa said, “nothin’ at all. Nothin’ to do with Danny. But what was it that Joey wanted from you, if we can just move on to that here.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. He resettled himself in his chair, so that the base of his skull rested on the top of the back of the chair. “Joey hadda go outta town, see? Had some stuff to do outta town. And … I dunno where the hell he was goin’, some place out in the Midwest or somethin’, coulda been it was Chicago. Anyway, Joey don’t like to fly. This’s just somethin’ about him, he doesn’t like gettin’ on planes. So when he goes somewhere, has to go someplace, what Joey will do is, he’ll drive. I guess he would probably take a train if he hadda, if there was one where he wanted to go and it went when he wanted to go there, but what he likes better is drivin’ himself. That’s the kind of a guy that he is. Gets in his car and he goes where he goes, and when he’s through doin’ what he went to do, he gets in his car and comes back. Any time that he feels like it. So that makes him the one who decides when he leaves, when he goes, when he’s goin’ some other place, comin’ back. No one else can decide ’stead of him. I guess he likes doing that or something.”

  “A good many others do, too,” Dell’Appa said.

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. He nodded. “I guess lots of people like that.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “Jesus,” he said, “I never coughed so much in my life as I coughed since they put me in here.”

  “You probably haven’t been talkin’ enough,” Dell’Appa said. “Your throat’s gotten dry from not talkin’. You’d taken advantage of the opportunities, feds’ve been givin’ you here, talked more about Chico, they asked you, this problem might not’ve come up.”

  “Yeah, very funny,” Ernie said. “I said: I won’t talk about Chico. I don’t know nobody named Chico. Or if I did, what Chico is doin’.”

  “Joey’s the subject,” Dell’Appa said. “Chico is not our concern here. What did Joey want you to do?”

  “Well, like I said,” Ernie said, “Joe said he was goin’ away for a while, had somethin’ he hadda take care of, and he was lookin’ for someone to come and stay in his house with his brother. Because like I said, Danny’d just started his GSA job there, and he didn’t have no vacation saved up yet, or Joe would’ve taken him with him. Because that’s what they both always did. If Joey goes somewhere or takes a vacation, he always takes Danny along. ’Cause if Joey don’t go, who’s he go with? He hasn’t got no way to go. Only this time, with no vacation, Danny this time can’t go with him. So what Joey was worried was if he’s not there, would Danny still get to work all right? And that’s what he wanted from me. I get through in the morning to come from down from Reno’s and stay inna house there with Danny. Set the alarm-clock for seven o’clock and make sure Danny got up all right. Make his breakfast for him and then drive him to work, this’s before he starts takin’ the train there, and then at night Joe had somebody else, a woman who lived upstairs from them, to make sure he got home okay, made his dinner and that stuff. He had it all figured out, so Dan would be taken care of.”

  “And you said you’d do this for him,” Dell’Appa said.

  “Yeah, I did,” Ernie said. “I liked the guy then—like him now. I had no problem with that. It was kind of a pain in the ass for me, yeah, goin’ there when I got off from Reno’s; sleepin’ for maybe two or three hours, then gettin’ right up again, drivin’ Danny to work. But from there I went home to my ma’s in Revere and I went right back to bed there, so I ende
d up still gettin’ just as much sleep, so it really wasn’t that bad.”

  “Right,” Dell’Appa said. “And how much did you get paid for this?”

  “ ‘Paid,’ ” Ernie said. “You mean: how much money did Joey give me? For stayin’ with Danny like that?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean,” Dell’Appa said. “What’d Joey pay you for doin’ this?”

  “Well, Jesus,” Ernie said, “Joe didn’t pay me no money. This was just something he asked me to do, that I was doin’ for him. It wasn’t like, you know, I was doin’ somethin’, somethin’ that was makin’ him money, so I should’ve had a cut from it. All I did really, I wouldn’t’ve done, was more drivin’ I usually hadda. ’Stead of just goin’ home I got off from work, I went down to West Roxbury there. And then I hadda drive back. But that’s really all that it was. Just doin’ a favor, a guy that I knew. Didn’t call for no skill or like that.”

  “Oh,” Dell’Appa said, “I misunderstood then. I thought you said that the reason you did this was because you were looking for more work. Second odd-jobs, to make spending money.”

  “Well, I was, doing that,” Ernie said. “I needed to make some more money. But I didn’t look at stayin’ with Danny like something that would make me money. I looked at it more as a favor a guy, who needed a favor from me.”

  “And who, if you helped him on this occasion, might find some work for you in the future,” Dell’Appa said.

  “Yeah,” Ernie said, “that was what I had in mind. Sure. I knew why he was askin’, could I help him out. There wasn’t no doubt in my mind. Always before, when somethin’ came up, after his dad went in the rest home, and he hadda go outta town, if Dan couldn’t go with him, one reason or other, he would have Chuckie come over. And Chuckie would do what I did. Well, like I said, by the time he asked me, I knew about Chuckie, and he sure was not coming over. And I also knew that in the past there, him and Chuckie’d done business. Not partners exactly, but you get the idea. Him and Chuckie’d done things together.”

  “What does Danny carry in the briefcase?” Dell’Appa said.

  “That attaché case he has got, you mean?” Ernie said. “That little red attaché case he’s got?”

  “Yeah,” Dell’Appa said. “What’s in it? He’s like the Queen of fuckin’ England with her goddamned fuckin’ handbag that she’s always got with her, and I don’t know what’s in that, either, and I’d like to know. What the fuck that Danny Mossi’s got inside the briefcase that he carries every day.”

  “I don’t know,” Ernie said, frowning. “I never seen inside it and I never asked him that. Why? Why you want to know?”

  “Because I’m the type of guy that likes to know things,” Dell’Appa said. “I just like to know.”

  “Well, I can’t help you there,” Ernie said, “because I don’t know myself. I was just over there that one time, over there that once, after Chuckie disappeared, when they thought he went away. You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Dell’Appa said. “Let me see if I do get it here. What you’re telling me, if I’m getting it right, is that Chuckie and Joe were a Frick-and-Frack combo. Partners in mayhem. A team. An underworld enforcement SWAT team. They worked for the bosses, principally Franco, during the wars of the Irish. When the dumb Micks forgot what the game was about—making money, not havin’ gunfights—and got to dukin’ it out with each other, instead, usin’ sidearms instead of their fists.”

  “What,” Ernie said. “I didn’t say nothin’ ’bout that. I don’t know nothing ’bout that.”

  “Half-true,” Dell’Appa said. “You didn’t say anything about it, no, but you do know all about it. Everyone who’s been around since the turnip-truck rolled through last Wednesday knows all about what went on. The role Franco carved out for himself during the wars was the same as Switzerland’s is in world wars: he was the neutral banker for both sides. ‘Whyn’t you and him fight, I’ll hold the coats, and then when you get through, heal the winner and bury the loser, all for a reasonable price. Namely: every last piece of the business you fools’re fighting over, instead of running right and making lots of money.’ ”

  “I never heard nothin’ like that,” Ernie said, shaking his head positively.

  “Oh, sure you did,” Dell’Appa said, reassuringly, “and you also heard, just like everybody else did, why Santa’s elves’d gone to work out of season, the late winter of that year you stayed with Danny in the summer, and’d gift-wrapped Chuckie’s head for PD Boston. Because informed and usually highly-reliable sources had it Chuckie’d been gettin’ far too chummy and chatty with the homicide division. That he’d been whispering to a cop who was a cousin of his about some of the Irish lads that Chuckie didn’t like himself—hated actually, competitors of his loan-sharking business—but Franco wouldn’t let him put them out of business—and also out of life, as well, while he was at it. So Chuckie’s idea was to have his cousin the cop do the dirty work for him, getting rid of his rivals for him without getting Franco mad at him at the same time. I suppose when Franco found out what skulduggery Chuckie was up to he must’ve been annoyed. Probably thought it wouldn’t be too good for his own business, word got out that one of Franco’s bone-breakers was collaboratin’ with the cops about some of Franco’s own payin’ clients. Trading with the enemy, they would’ve seen it as; a clear breach of neutrality there. So Franco told Joey to scrag his friend Chuckie, and present his head, but no longer talkin’, to all Chuckie’s friends at the cop-house. And Joey, reliable like always, did as he was told and knocked his pal off.”

  “I still don’t believe that,” Ernie said. “You can say it as much as you want to, all right? I still don’t believe he would do that.”

  “Okay,” Dell’Appa said, “still perfectly fine by me. You can believe whatever you want, no matter how silly it is. How long did Joey stay gone when he went, while you stayed with Danny ten years back?”

  “Little over a week or so, I guess,” Ernie said. “I’m not really sure now, it’s so long ago, but a week or ten days or so, in there. I got used to it pretty fast, goin’ there when I got through work, gettin’ up with Danny, the mornin’, makin’ sure he made work on time, and then goin’ home, back to bed. It wasn’t like I’d like to be doin’ it alla the time, but still, I didn’t mind doin’ it there.”

  “And did Joey give you some more jobs?” Dell’Appa said.

  Ernie became uneasy. He frowned again, shifted in the chair, straightened up and folded his hands in his lap. He nodded. “Well, yeah, I guess you could say that. It wasn’t as though he got me new jobs, but when he had somethin’ that might be worth money, a way to make money, he’d let me in on it there.”

  “Sure,” Dell’Appa said, “because now he trusted you now, now that you took care of Danny. He did trust you, too, didn’t he?”

  “Well, jeez, I mean, sure, ‘trusted me,’ ” Ernie said. “But not just because I stayed with Danny. He wouldn’t’ve asked me to stay with Danny, he didn’t, like, know me, and trust me some first.”

  “Sure,” Dell’Appa said, “and the reason he trusted you first like that, right off, was because you’d come to him recommended. He knew you were workin’ for Reno. And Reno was Chico’s own personal laundry-man, Chico’s own currency-washer. Chico washed off his dough in the cab-fare deposits that Reno made at his bank there.”

  “I dunno that,” Ernie said. “I never knew nothin’ like that.”

  “Yes you did,” Dell’Appa said. “You knew it just as well then and you know it just as well today as you know that I’m sittin’ here, this very minute right now. That was why Joey trusted you, right from the start, and why you did what Joe wanted done. Because your boss was Reno, and his boss was Chico, and Franco was Chico’s boss, right? And Franco directly, no middleman, Franco was Joey’s boss, too. So when Chico’d vouched for you, when your dad went to jail—for not squealin’ on Chico, among other things, just like you’ve been refusing to do for all of these past fifty-thre
e days, carryin’ on the honored family tradition here in upstanding praiseworthy fashion—well then, Reno hired you on the spot. Which in turn meant that when Franco’s guy, Joey, needed a trustworthy kid, to stay with his brother a while, while Joe went on loan out to Gary, Indiana, to kill a nice fellow there. Guy by the name of Walter Biowker who presented some serious logistical problems to the local hierarchy desiring him to be dead. Walter knew all the local stone-killers on sight, also by habit and method, having done some of that type of work his own self, so setting him up to be get slain, as they say, was no simple task for house-bound. That was why Outta-town Joe hadda go, or someone like Joe in that line of work that Walter’d never worked with, so his face and his work wouldn’t be so familiar to Walter that he’d head for the high timber as soon as he spotted the guy coming towards him. Joey said fine, but he’d need a kid who could keep an eye on his brother. Franco told Joey that Chico had someone, a kid that he’d put in with Reno, and Reno’d said he’s all right, he’d done good. And Chico’s kid Reno’d said that about, well, that had to’ve been you, didn’t it? Sure it did, no one else even came close: faithful Ernie, none other than you, you were that trustworthy lad, unlaid hack of the woebegone countenance. So now, all right? Tell me, quit horsin’ around here, what business did Joe send your way, after you’d served him well too?”

  “Nothin’, I told you,” Ernie said, “I already told you that: nothin’. I never went on jobs with Joe. If Joey was even, doin’ jobs there, if he was goin’ on jobs when I knew him. I never knew nothin’ ’bout that. You got to believe me on that.”

  “I don’t got to believe you,” Dell’Appa said, “and I don’t believe you, either. You’re fuckin lyin’ to me. Think you’re blowin’ smoke right up my ass. Somehow you managed to get the idea you can do that, you can fuckin’ lie to me, and so somehow I got to convince you right here and right now, you got your head right up your ass. So let me try this out on you here, and see if it changes your mind: tomorrow morning I’m gonna show up in Ev Rollins’s law office, all right? I’m gonna have with me a piece of paper that says subpoena on it. Meaning: ‘get your buns in before the grand jury in Boston; they wanna hear what you’ve got to say.’ And also says: duces tecum. Little more of that Latin for you there; what it means, it means ‘and bring all your papers in with you; they wanna look those over as well.’ And lastly it will say: forthwith. Meaning: ‘right now, so haul ass, babycakes; we’re not waitin’ for you to “lose” any your things, our truck’s backed up outside, your door. I talked to Ernie yesterday, we had a lovely chat, and he told me some things that made me stop and think. If what this young man says is true, about you and Joe Mossi—and it sure sounds to me like it is, at this point—you should not be permitted to course dogs at licensed pari-mutuel meetings, much less hold a license to practice law in Massachusetts. And that’s just for openers. You could very well be facing jail.’