Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “I was with Con Cannon in the van,—Con was staking out Ev Rollins’s office down in Norton and the van’s got a secure radiophone, which the Lexus that I’ve got doesn’t—waiting for Brian to call from the courthouse where he was with the Bloviator, and tell us we had the warrants. Whereupon I’m gonna give Finn a call where he is, at Olivia’s kennel-farm, get Con started looting Ev’s office and then go help Finn toss and pillage hers. So Bob got Rosie at the desk when I didn’t pick up, and she told him I was out, as he of course already knew because I hadn’t answered.

  “ ‘Then,’ Rosie told me, ‘it was like the line went dead for a while. I told him you were out on assignment, but I didn’t know where, or when you’d be back, and he just didn’t say anything, and I said: “Hello? Hello? You still there, Bob, you okay?” Because he didn’t sound good, you know? Like he usually does, pretty upbeat and happy, when we talk on the phone—you know, like he’s pretending that we’re having an affair. Which is, yeah, kind of corny, silly, really, stupid, you know, that Bob plays that game with me. Like I’m supposed to think when he was young, he was, you know, he was getting lots of girls? Which no one would believe now he was, if that was how he hit on them. But he likes doing it, I guess, and he never gets, you know, real dirty, so I don’t really mind—I don’t think it’s funny, I mean, but it doesn’t bother me. I guess is what I mean.’ ”

  “Huh,” Gayle said, “has Bob, has he always been like that around the office?”

  “With the girls, you mean?” Harry said.

  “Well, the women,” she said.

  “Okay, the women,” he said. “With the dirty-old-man routine there, though? I dunno, not that I know of. Why?”

  “Because what you’d done since you took over the Mossi case must’ve put him under a lot of stress, and if he hadn’t been in the habit of harassing the women before, that would indicate he’s undergone a personality change, a shift. And that could be an indication that he might crack, and then do something. To himself, I mean, which I assume you don’t want to have happen. Which would mean that maybe you should have him watched, for his own protection,” Gayle said. “At least alert his family or something.”

  “Well, of course I don’t want him hurting himself,” he said, “but I don’t see who could tell me whether he’s always been like this, or this’s a new wrinkle for him. Rosie can’t help me with that one,” he said. “She wasn’t even there, in the office, I mean, when I went out to Northampton. Carol was there, she had been there a long time, but she retired while I was gone, somewhere in Florida, think I heard. Denise’s another one; she would’ve known, but she took maternity leave just around when I left, and then there was some terrible problem when the kid was born, and she still hasn’t come back. And Linda, of course, she was there. But Linda’s long-gone, as you know.”

  Gayle had removed the chicken from the oven and lifted it from the roasting-pan rack onto a platter. She was whisking flour into the chicken drippings in the pan to make a medium-brown thick gravy. She frowned but she did not say anything.

  “But you probably wouldn’t want me trying to track Linda down to ask her that, huh? About Bob, I mean? To talk to her about that?” he said.

  Gayle poured the gravy from the pan into a small green china pitcher. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind if you talked to her,” she said. “Talk wasn’t what bothered me.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “well it sure bothered me, the talking you did to your father, and then the talking he did to his buddies from college, that went into politics there. Appointive politics, that is. Had a hell of an effect on me.”

  She carried the platter of chicken to the table and set it in the middle, between their places. She pursed her lips. “Now stop being silly yourself, Harry,” she said. “I’ve told you, over and over again, Dad never did any such thing. So, once and for all, you really have to get that whole silly idea completely out of your head. He had nothing to do with what happened to you. He was just as surprised as we all were.”

  “And as I have told you, over and over,” he said, “every damned time you’ve told me that, I didn’t believe it the first time you said it, and I don’t believe it tonight.”

  She went to the stove counter and rubbed her hands with a dish towel. “Yes, I know you have,” she said. “Now let’s just have our dinner here now, all right? Before it all gets cold on us, I mean. You can finish telling me what this Rosie told you Bob said. Because I really do want to hear all there is about Bob, his new problems, that you’ve created for him. Not about problems we may’ve had, but managed to put behind us, or not had, if we didn’t, if we never had them, long ago, back in the past.”

  “Okay,” he said, tautly, “we’ll just have it your way again. Like we did with Roy, and with the Abbey School; like we do with everything, seems like.” She scowled but she didn’t reply.

  “Rosie said when he tried to start talking again, ‘he sounded, you know, kind of funny? Like he wasn’t really sure where he was? He wasn’t really saying words, just sort of mumbling, kind of. And then I heard him clear his throat and say “Yeah, yeah, I’m still here.” And then he asked me to switch him over to Lieutenant Dennison, and I said he wasn’t in the office either. So Bob goes: “Oh, is he with Harry, or do you know if he is?” And I said I didn’t know, but I thought he was, you and the lieutenant’d been going to meet someplace today before you both came in, but I wasn’t really sure and I really didn’t know. And then Bob cleared his throat again and said, well, did I know if you were out on the Mossi case, if that was where you were, and I said I didn’t even know there was, we even had, a Mossi case, in the office.’ Which in fact Rosie doesn’t. Except for Brian and the Bloviator, no one in the office, in the field or totally inside, knows what cases we have got except the ones they’re working on. ‘And he goes “No, no, I guess you probably wouldn’t, at that. It’s one of those things: you hadda be there.” Like I made him feel bad or something.

  “ ‘And I asked him if I should have either you or the lieutenant call him when you came in, or you called in, like whether this was some kind of an emergency he had or something, and he said: “No, no, no need of that. Just tell Brian for me, honey, or if anyone else asks, I won’t be coming in today. I came down with that damned Rumanian flu Friday night, or whatever the name is that they’ve got for it this year, and I really don’t feel good. So if anyone’s looking for me, well, I might be able to come in tomorrow, and I will if I can, got some stuff I want to get cleaned up in there, but if I’m still running a temperature … well, just say I’m home, sick in bed, and I’ll come in as soon as I can, without taking a chance of giving this damned misery to everyone else in the place.’ ” ”

  “He was just afraid to face everybody, you think?” she said. “Face anybody he knew in there, I mean? Not necessarily you.”

  “I don’t think he’d quite reached that point yet,” he said. “Maybe he was, staying home, playing sick, to get more time to steel himself for the ordeal of what he must’ve known by then was coming, in his guts, but I tend to doubt it. As much as I’ve disliked Bob, ever since I met him—really hated him, in fact, at one point—I’ve never said I thought he was stupid or afraid. If he had medicine that he was going to have to take—and by then he had to know he did—Bob is not the kind of guy who’d run and hide from it. No, he’d pride himself on showing up on time when he had to get it, full-pack, too: clean uniform, boots freshly-shined and all brass polished, for the firing-squad. My guess is it was more likely by then, sometime on Monday, that Dougie and Olivia and the other chirping members of his swarming-beeping nerd-herd’d tapped into some computer somewhere that’d given up some data that we still don’t know exist. Which they’d used to make a model of what we were likely getting out of holding hands with Ernie.”

  “So by then they knew what you were doing,” she said. “Where you were headed, I mean.”

  “Pretty much, yeah,” he said. “They had nothing specific to go on from Ev Rollins’s copy of the warrant Co
n’d executed at his office or the one Finn’d slapped on her lesbian nibs there. Bry and I’d had the Bloviator draw ’em just as loose’s law allows, but just the fact that we’d picked those particular two places to hit, that alone told them quite a lot. Basically what the paper said was that Ernie was a reliable witness, with a reputation for truth and veracity—which of course everybody’s got until he’s formally convicted of perjury or major fraud, at least for search-warrant purposes—who’d told us Reno and Chico, and Franco and Joey, and Ev and Livia, were all in cahoots, to do all kinds of mischievious deeds. And that based on surveillances we had conducted, confirming what Ernie had said, we therefore did swear and affirm that there was probable cause to believe that those six people had been, and were indeed still, cahooting, wilfully and maliciously, in the buildings occupied by them and more specifically described as two structures in Norton and Mansfield, in the Commonwealth aforesaid and like that, and that there was therefore probable cause to believe that physical and electronic evidence of the means, equipment and methods employed in and for the commission of the said felonious cahooting, to wit: evasion of taxes due and owing to the Department of Revenue of the Office of the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was to be found, practically begging to be found, right there in those very buildings.”

  “But not mentioning Bob or his brother,” she said.

  “Correct, naming neither of them,” he said, slicing more chicken, “and leaving out therefore our total assurance that when we have sifted all the stuff we seized, and’ve wrung Ernie utterly dry, we’ll have lethal proof that those six people had made up an ensemble arranged and conducted, if not cahooted, by Dougie. Franco and Joey and Ev, and Chico and Reno’d all been racketeering along at a rollicking good pace, with no help from modern technology, long before Dougie and Livia’d teamed up together, to kick Franco’s operation into hyper-space, warp-speed. But after those two cherubs made their way into the mix, it was digital crime in a different dimension. I mean, Don Vito thought he knew from organized crime, but he never knew nothin’ like this. The reason he didn’t want nobody, no time, askin’ him ’bout his business, was that compared to this generation of vipers, he didn’t know what his business was. Bob’s brother may look like Saint Anthony of Padua or something, but behind that clear-conscience gaze of those sparkling brown eyes is the mind of a criminal genius.”

  “Well,” she said, “I realize you’ve cracked a major case and all, a monster case, yeah, but’re you sure? A criminal genius? You think he’s Rasputin or something? You’re saying he’s a Professor Moriarty, Sergeant Bob Brennan’s kid brother from Quincy?”

  “He isn’t yet,” he said, “but that’s purely because he’s only been at it a while, no more’n three or four years. If he’d made better use of his time, he would be, but he didn’t find his métier right off, right out of college. First he futzed around five or six years, trying various kinds of careers, like a casual shopper who doesn’t need anything browsing the suits down in Filene’s Basement, seeing if any one of them yells: ‘Hey, asshole, buy me.’ Little of this, a little of that. The Franco-loop he got into by purest accident, but it was the same kind of accident for him that Saint Paul had on the road to Tarsus, or wherever the hell he was on the way to, when he got knocked off of his horse there. This man’d then found his life’s work, found his life’s work in that instant. What God’d put him here for.

  “Dougie’s wife Laura grew up in Wellesley. She’d known Olivia at Wellesley High School, both on the girls’ varsity swim-team. They stayed in touch after they graduated. Laura went to Emmanuel, and Olivia went to Bentley. Laura met Dougie at some college-hangout bar during his last year at BU, he was in computer science and she was in Ann Taylor clothes, so it was obvious at once that they’d been fashionably designed to complement each other perfectly. He complimented her and she complimented him, and one thing led smoothly to another, as things are supposed to, for two such perfect, young people.

  “When they got married, Laura and Dougie, Livia was maid of honor. They stayed in touch after that, too. So then when Olivia quit her first job—she’d been working for five or six years for Ballard, Weaver and Sales, out of their Minneapolis office, and wanted to come back to New England—and backpacked her career in accounting into her dad and Joe’s racing kennels, she naturally went to Doug for microchips and high-speed modems, scanners, everything in sight. Where else, after all, could she get a better price, than from her old friend Laura’s Dougie?

  “Well, he put it all—and I mean all—together for her in that backroom office there. All her stuff’d been, when it came out, absolute state-of-the-art. And it still isn’t that old, even now; few new programs and upgrades’ll kick that system right back up to top-grade again, Brian can cadge a few bucks from the budget, after we forfeit the stuff to ourselves. I felt like I was raiding the command-bridge of an Aegis missile cruiser. But for the happy fact that I’d suspected she’d have it, and’d dropped that little word ‘equipment’ into the warrant application and the warrant the judge signed, the gear I saw when I went in there would’ve made me moan and slobber. But I did have the word in there, so now the evidence includes all the goodies Dougie got her, to do what she’d been doing, and she has instead of them her very own copy of the warrant, plus a lot of newly-vacant desk- and counter-space. That was one very good warrant.

  “Yes ma’am, Dougie really did that lady proud. And she knew it, and was grateful, and they remained on the friendliest terms. We know this because if you look at the list of Coldstream Track Records, they print them in the front of the program, the dog that holds them at five-sixteenths of a mile—just over thirty seconds—and also at three-eighths—just under thirty-seven—is Error Kennel’s ‘Laura’s Dougie,’ set a year ago. Olivia named one of her very best animals, big blue male sprinter, over seventy pounds, for her friend Laura’s sweet young hubby, Douglas Brennan. And a very good doggie Laura’s Dougie still is, at least a second better at his best distances most outings than the average animal.”

  Gayle laughed sourly. “I’m not sure I’d like it, if someone named a racing-dog after me,” she said. “With my luck, it’d be a loser. And a bitch, too, of course—throw that in there before you do. ‘Came in last again, you bitch, ha ha?’ ” She shook her head. “ ‘Worse’n average animal.’ Uh-uh, nope, wouldn’t like that at all.”

  He had been cutting a large slice of chicken-breast on his plate, making the division neatly across the striations of the meat after first having scraped the concealing gravy off. He stopped for a moment and looked up at her. Her eyes were dull, and her head waggled slightly. He furrowed his forehead and then shook his head. He looked down at his plate again, and resumed cutting the meat. “Aw right, whaaat,” she said, drawing it out.

  He shook his head again. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He kept his gaze on the plate and lifted the chicken to his mouth.

  “Yeah,” she said, “right. You don’t think so. Well, I do, you got that? I think so.” She put her fork down and picked up her wine. She stared at him over the glass, and then nodded twice. “Well,” she said, “yeah, I got to hand it, you. By sweet Jesus, I do, I hand it to you. I got to hand it to you. Or else nobody does, nobody has to, hand it to you’s what I mean. Because by Jesus, they can’t, hand it to you, because you’ve already got it. If it’s something you want, if it’s something you wanted, well then, by Jesus, it’s not gonna last very long. Because you will just take it, if it’s what you want. You don’t stand on no ceremony. A little taste-a Harry in the night. Harry was here and he wrecked me.

  “And by Jesus, you never change,” she said, slapping the table with the palm of her right hand. “You’re as constant the moon’n the tides. You decide you know something, no one else knows, and nobody else agrees with you? Everyone else thinks you’re nuts? Well, hell, that’s all right, that doesn’t matter, you don’t give a good flyin’ fuck. Nothin’ matters to you, ’cept what matters to you. What you think
is what rules the world. Nothin’ else makes no difference at all. Ahh Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar c’n tumble, but old Harry, he’s made-ah stone, an’ old Harry, he stays jus’ the same. I knew, yes, I knew, you went out there, you, you bassar, I knew if you ever came back, did make it back here, I knew you would manage to do this. Him. Something to him. I knew you would do this to Bob. Zackly what? I dinn’ know that, an’ I dinn’ know how, an’ I dinn’ know when, but by Jesus, I knew you would do it.

  “I said it to Dad, I said it him then, I said: ‘Mark my words, he’ll come back. He won’t stay out there and he won’t send for me; he won’t do anything like that. He will come back, like Godzilla, he will, like ah fuckin’ Assyrian, ’syrian there, inna purple an’ gold, you know who I mean, down likeah wolf onna fold, his cohort … that it, it’s his cohort ’at’s gleamin’, in purple an’ gold, uh-huh, you wait an’ see. He will know, and he’ll pay us all, back.’

  “And he wooln’t listen to me. None of them’d listen to me. Stupid dumb woman, I guess. What possible fuck could she know? Well, that’s all right, I still knew. And I was still right, wasn’t I, matter how long it took. And that’s another thing ’at there is with you: no time. Time’s got no meanin’ for you, doesn’ mean anythin’, you. With you when you get an idea in your head, a year could be an hour, ’n hour could be a year, jus’ dunn’ matter at all, you. Because I knew what I knew about you, and I still know, what I know, an’ I know to this very day: I knew you never forget. Fuckin’ elephant, that’s what you are: Harry never forgets. In your former life you’re an elephant, or else in your next one, you’ll be. One. So … anyway, anyway,” she shook her head, “I knew jus’ what you’d do. An’ I was … fuckin’ right, too.” She stared at him, blinking; her eyes were filling up fast enough so that pretty soon it would be not only reasonable but necessary to cry.