The Pariot GAme

by George V. Higgins

  “Hell, it’d been a big project, they wouldn’t’ve put Magro on it. He was a thief. If he ever did any contract business before that, nobody was sure enough to put it in his file. He stole furs, and they couldn’t prove that. He was just turning an extra dollar, doing a piece of work for a guy that might be able to bail him out in the future, getting a few points. Cripes, look at the mess he made of it. The guy came home in his own car at nine-thirty at night and drove it into his own garage. Magro’s car’s parked a hundred yards up the street, where of course none of the victim’s small-town neighbors’d ever notice a strange car parked on a dead-end street in the bushes. The town cops’d already come by once and taken down the license number, while Magro was hiding in the guy’s garage and the guy’s dogs’re raising hell in the yard. The cops ran that registration number through the computer and they had Magro’s name and home address before he ever pulled the trigger. There he is, waiting in the garage, the dogs yelling in the yard, the neighbors looking out from behind their curtains, the cops coming right back to where the car was, and the victim drives in the garage and Magro shoots him.

  “This is a professional hit man?” Walker said. “This is a guy that couldn’t spell cat unless you spotted him the c and the a. That victim wasn’t on the floor of the garage before Magro was practically running out and jumping into the cops’ arms. At least he showed a little sense then, four of them with their guns out. I’m surprised he didn’t try an O.K. Corral thing with them. What the hell bothers you about this guy? He takes out another cheap crook, he’ll probably get caught again, and even if he’s gotten a little experience, so he can do it with some finesse and get away with it, he’s still doing society a favor and making a dollar that’ll keep him off welfare. What’s got you so lathered up?”

  “I know some things that’re evidently not in that file of yours,” Riordan said.

  “You have my undivided attention,” Walker said.

  “This all goes back awhile,” Riordan said, “and I was occupied with winning the hearts and minds of certain peasants in the more remote villages of South Vietnam when it went down.”

  “And also involved, I believe you told me,” Walker said, “in picking up a few pieces of good old American shrapnel in your knee, courtesy of an artillery battery that was having a little trouble with its coordinates. Or its drug habits.”

  “What the hell,” Riordan said, “anybody can make a mistake. Short round? Happens all the time. Kind of gives a man a little twinge or two when it happens, but it’s better’n charging your ticket home on your own American Express card. That’s a long ride over there, back here. Expensive.”

  “Well,” Walker said, “like you said that night, I suppose when you get the DSC and about your fourth Silver Star, what the hell, huh? You roll with the punches.”

  “You ever tell anybody I told you that,” Riordan said, “and I will personally get out the tools of my old trade and jump out of a tree some night and teach you how to hold your breath a lot longer’n you think you can. I was drunk the night I told you that.”

  “More late-breaking news,” Walker said. “Tell me about Magro. I don’t care if it’s totem-pole hearsay. And don’t make any plans about jumping out of trees on anybody. You’re finished, with all that scrap iron. First move you make, the noise’ll give them time enough to get out of the way.”

  “The part about the furs is right,” Riordan said. “Magro was a thief before he took up shooting, or at least before he got caught at it. He was much better at stealing.”

  “Who’d he work with?” Walker said.

  “There is a fellow named Jerry Doherty,” Riordan said. “Runs a tavern down in Dorchester. Big fat guy.”

  “I know the gentleman,” Walker said. “We had him as a lodger here for a while, some years ago, if memory serves me correctly. Won the Mister Congeniality Award, or would’ve, if we gave one. A very beneficial influence among his peer group in the inmate population, as Mayes would say. He was always laughing and having a grand time for himself, never had a harsh word to say about anybody. Of course one or two of his fellow guests insulted him, but that soon stopped. Digger Doherty. I asked him how he managed to be so cheerful under these conditions, and why it was that even very tough guys who didn’t like him, liked him. He grinned at me and said, ‘Walker, I reason with them.’

  “I told him he must be some reasoner. ‘I am,’ he said ‘Oh, you’ll get a guy now and then who doesn’t want to listen, you know? Doesn’t want to hear what the other guy’s got to say. But if you catch him down by the garbage dock, you can generally change his mind for him. There was one guy that I hadda reason with four times. Not even he thought he was a reasonable man. But I convinced him. I am very good at convincing people, and when I get a really hard case, I call in some of my reasonable friends and we all reason with him, all at once. He comes around. I always tell a man that what goes around, comes around, and I never yet run into a guy that went around and didn’t come around.’

  “So I said to Digger,” Walker said, “ ‘Digger, it sounds to me like maybe some of us in the administration could perhaps learn something about negotiating from you and your friends, and I wonder if maybe you’d be kind enough to invite us to your next meeting down by the garbage dock, so we could sort of look on and get some pointers about what we might be doing wrong.’ And he started laughing like hell, and he said, ‘Ah, actually, no, Mister Walker, I don’t think so. See, that kind of reasoning goes best when it’s completely private, just the guy that’s being unreasonable and the guys that think he should do the right thing and be reasonable. If there was somebody else there, everybody doing all the reasoning would just get nervous, and that would probably fuck it up.’ I told him that I understood.”

  “Boss con,” Riordan said.

  “They had their place,” Walker said. “They had their uses, too. We used a few tough guys to maintain order, by giving them privileges to use and distribute, and they kept the other guys in line. It wasn’t very different from what Mayes’s doing now, except that he’s eliminating the middleman. He’s become the broker.”

  “Which means that instead of keeping the residents in line by bribing a few of the hard guys,” Riordan said, “Mayes is offering to bribe everybody.”

  “It’s more democratic,” Walker said.

  “It’s less intelligent,” Riordan said. “I doubt very much that any of these boyos in here now are very much afraid of Mayes. If he offered to meet them down by the garbage dock, they would laugh themselves into convulsions.”

  “Yup,” Walker said. “You ever hear the phrase ‘enough rope’?”

  “Yup,” Riordan said. “Good point. Anyway, Magro worked with Doherty and a crook named Marty Jay, who had an unfortunate accident in his car one night just south of Nashua. Seems he came out of a joint where he’d been romancing a girl singer, and the girl singer had a boyfriend who had some horsepower. Marty got in his Coupe de Ville and there was a very loud noise when he turned the key in the ignition. The car was totaled and so was Marty.”

  “Sic transit gloria mundi,” Walker said.

  “Exactly,” Riordan said. “Anyway, Jay set up a little visit to a fur store at Newton Corner one fine night, and Digger and Magro ramrodded the operation. Cut through a Cyclone fence and made off with the merchandise, as the saying goes, no one the wiser. Jay sold it and for a while, everybody was fat and sassy. It was a very neat job.

  “The trouble was,” Riordan said, “Doherty used a new guy named Harrington, who was moonlighting from his regular job down at the Edison plant and was not experienced in the ways of Digger’s world. He was just hurting for money, which is a common complaint, and he took on a simple assignment without thinking that it would make his tummy upset.”

  “It did make his tummy upset,” Walker said.

  “I guess so,” Riordan said. “Now, keeping in mind that I don’t know this for sure, I gather Harrington got the jitters after he took his cut. There was a lot of heat on after t
hat little adventure. And the cops had a fairly reliable idea that Doherty was involved in it. Along with Magro. When they started out, they didn’t know much about Harrington. Shit, they knew nothing about Harrington. They didn’t know he was on the earth. But, like I said, he was a rookie. And he was an old rookie. And he was a good family man. But he didn’t know where to keep his mouth shut and where he could talk, and pretty soon the cops found out he had a habit of having a few pops down at Digger’s bar, and he was also a little richer’n he had been. So they started asking a few questions.

  “Harrington panicked,” Riordan said. “He got all scared and hysterical, and he went looking for reassurance. And who did he pick?”

  “Not the Digger, I hope,” Walker said.

  “Right,” Riordan said, “the Digger. Who reassured him and then went out of town in time to enjoy some sun with his lovely wife and family in the Caribbean, or someplace like that. But Harrington wasn’t reassured, or else the Digger started getting the vapors, because about two days before Doherty got back, Harrington bought the ranch.”

  “Figures,” Walker said.

  “ ’Course,” Riordan said, “Doherty reasons with people, and they always see his point of view. They may be in no condition to talk about it, but for at least an instant, they see it. Even if it’s only a muzzle flash.

  “You know how we cops are,” Riordan said. “We’re a little dense, a lot of the time, but if you put a couple angry owls in the shower with us, we will soon figure out that something a little out of the ordinary is under way. The cops’d been investigating Harrington, and they could see that Harrington was becoming very nervous. Then the cops get a call one fine night that maybe they would like to have a look inside the trunk of this tan Chevy Caprice that’d been parked a few days down at the bus-commuter lot at the HoJo’s in the Blue Hills. So they went down there and they took the pry-bar and opened up the trunk, and there was Brother Harrington inside the trunk of his own car, all cuddled up in his blankie, looking for all the world like he was having a nice nap. Except he was pretty ripe. And besides, how did he get himself locked inside his own trunk? They decided he was dead. The medical examiner thought he knew what brought this on. Had something to do with firearms.

  “So now the cops’re really interested in Digger, on account of they thought maybe he might’ve had some interest in this. Or at least he would want to know promptly about the untimely passing of his regular customer, Brother Harrington. Pay his respects to the family, you know? So they hustled a couple cars right over to the Bright Red in Dorchester and they got there just as Digger was inviting the bitter-enders to leave. They went inside and all of a sudden the Digger wasn’t having a bit of trouble persuading his loyal patrons to pay up and get out—they were practically jumping out the windows, they were in such a hurry. And Digger thanks the cops very much for coming by and helping him remain a law-abiding saloonkeeper that faithfully observes the closing hours, and says if it is all right with them, he will turn off the lights and lock up and be on his way home to bed.

  “They told him that could probably wait a minute or two,” Riordan said. “They said they would like to have a little conversation. So he locked up all the booze and offers the cops a Coke, which they took, and they all sat down at one of the tables. The cops asked the Digger if he knew Harrington. ‘Harrington?’ Digger said, or words to that effect. ‘I run a bar in Dorchester and you’re asking me if I know Harrington? Of course I know Harrington. There is Harrington, the fish market. There is Harrington, the tire store. There is Harrington that drives the bus. There is that beezer Harrington that works the electric plant, and there is …’ And the cops said, ‘It is Harrington the beezer at the light plant that we came to see you about. He is dead.’

  “Now,” Riordan said, “the cops expected Digger to be surprised. From what I understand, there is a very high mortality rate among middle-aged men that the Digger knows. Back when he was having a little trouble with some of the gentlemen down at Neponset Circle, the Digger’s friends and the gentlemen from Neponset were dropping like flies. It was getting so you couldn’t take a nice evening stroll down by the beach at Wollaston without meeting up with one of those guys floating face down in a tidal creek. Digger has spent a lot of time in mourning, but he is still always very surprised to hear that somebody else has gone to meet Jesus face to face.

  “The thing of it is,” Riordan said, “the cop who was telling me this, guy named Petrucelli, was there that night, and he said Digger looked as though he really was surprised. ‘Now this guy,’ Petrucelli said, ‘he is better’n Barrymore, and I’ve seen several of his performances, but I really think when we told him about Harrington, he really was surprised. Usually when you brought him the sad news, he would look all sad and discouraged and ask you if it was a heart attack. But this time, he didn’t go through that routine. He just sat there staring at us, and finally he said, “Son of a bitch.” No jazz about a shock or was the guy sick a long time, or any of that razzle-dazzle ball-handling bullshit. “No shit,” he said. And he was shaking his head.’

  “What Petrucelli thinks,” Riordan said to Walker in the warden’s office, “was that Digger had every intention of knocking Harrington off. Do it himself, get somebody else to do it, but he was going to get it done. Digger knows everything that’s going on, and if he doesn’t know about it, it isn’t usually going on. And here was obviously something that he didn’t know’d been going on, and the most humiliating part of it was that he had to find it out from the cops, of all people. ‘I think he was not only surprised,’ Petrucelli said, ‘I think he was embarrassed. And he was also worried. Digger Doherty likes to have things under control, and here was somebody taking out one of his guys without asking him. That’s not neat. Means trouble. You could almost hear the gears changing in his head. But for once, just that once, I really don’t think he knew who beat him to the punch and saved him the trouble with Harrington.’

  “Well,” Riordan said, “the cops packed up and left, and Digger was still sitting there at his table, big fat guy in a white shirt, sitting there in his own saloon at three in the morning with one light on, shaking his head. And for the next couple of weeks that neighborhood had more buzzing goin’ on’n you’ll generally get in a beehive. And nothing came out of it. Nothing. As far as anybody knew, Digger’d been Harrington’s only moonlight employer. Digger couldn’t find out who the hell’d knocked him off, and it was driving him nuts. The cops couldn’t find out who knocked him off, but it really wasn’t bothering them—they were having too much fun watching Digger go snuffling around like some big fat hog in a pen, trying to find some fresh swill, and getting more and more frustrated.

  “Then after a while,” Riordan said, “Digger began to lose interest, and he pretty much gave up the investigation he was conducting on his own. The cops didn’t like that a bit—destroyed their entertainment. ‘So,’ Petrucelli said, ‘we kind of let it be known on the street that we were pretty close to cracking the Harrington thing. Got everybody all stirred up again, and after they stewed in their own juice for about a week, it was picture-taking time again. Run all the boys in, new mug shots front and side, case they changed their hairdressers or grew mustaches or something. Didn’t even question them or anything. Even let a couple guys go that had some small stuff in their cars when we stopped them. They’d ask us what we wanted, must’ve been about thirty of them, and all we’d tell them was we thought we might have a witness to something fairly big but the witness wasn’t sure about the pictures in the books so we thought we’d take some new ones.’

  “ ‘And we did something else,’ Petrucelli said, ‘that was really mean. I must say, even I was impressed. We grabbed Digger and brought him in, and Magro was standing right next to Doherty when we picked him up. But we didn’t pick up Magro. He was practically begging us to take him in, and we wouldn’t do it. So now all the boys know that we’ve got a witness who doesn’t recognize any of the boys on sight, which means that somebody who does r
ecognize the boys must’ve tipped us to the witness, and who is the one guy that we don’t haul in? Magro.’ ”

  “Ahh,” Walker said to Riordan, “that is cute. Old, but cute. Done it myself now and then, but you can’t pull it too often, they catch on.”

  “Digger and his boys didn’t,” Riordan said. “So all of a sudden Magro is in the shit up to his earlobes and thinking seriously about dialing nine-eleven and asking for emergency police protection. And that is when the call came through to Magro from down south of the line there, that a fellow who was maybe in a little trouble with his buddies might think about doing a favor for the boss. Show his heart was in the right place, you know? So that’s why Magro knocked off Holby in a hurry and made a mess of it. He had to do it then, or somebody was going to do something to him. Guy was desperate.”

  “Which leaves Harrington,” Walker said. “Who did that?”

  “Ahh,” Riordan said, “we’ll never know. Some volunteer, probably. Goes out to do Digger a favor, come back and brag about it later, be a big man with a bigger man. Probably some tough young kid we never heard of, yet. Looking to make his bones. Then the shit hit the fan, and he was smart enough to keep quiet. Thing of it is, Magro’s in here doing a long bit, and he thinks it’s Digger’s fault. So I think I know what he’s going to do when he gets out, only this time he’ll plan a little better.”