The Dogfather

by Conant, Susan

  Guarini’s manner changed when he addressed Carla. With a courtly tip of his hat, he said, “Carla, my dear.”

  “Me?” Carla said. “Me?” In my ears, but probably not in Guarini’s, she sounded startlingly like Miss Piggy: Mot?

  “You got a taste for the finer things,” Guarini said.

  From the lineup, his back still turned, Favuzza butted in. “Yeah, Carla, you’re doing okay for yourself. Better than you’d ever would’ve done with Joey.”

  “Shut up, you goddamned vampire!” she shrieked. “I didn’t know these dogs.”

  “You sure as shit knew they weren’t Joey’s, you cock-sucking little bitch,” Al replied.

  Guarini listened to the exchange with an air that I recognized from the canine world. It was the air of a dog with an agenda that eluded me, a dog who intended to steal a steak accidentally left on the counter, perhaps, but who was apparently paying attention to something else. Studying Guarini, I was hit by the sense that in staging this mini reenactment, this lineup, he had a purpose beyond the identification of Joey’s killer. Worse, I had a tip-of-the-brain experience of almost being able to remember something crucial, something I knew and could all but retrieve, something amiss, although I had no idea of what, where, or when.

  As Carla reluctantly took her place next to Al Favuzza, I wondered whether Guarini and his inseparable bodyguards would join her—or maybe should join her. How long had I been in Loaves and Fishes on the night of Joey’s killing? Kevin had pressed me for an answer. It seemed to me that I’d been inside long enough for Guarini or one of his escorts to have shot Joey and returned to the front of the store. But why would Guarini have surreptitiously killed one his own men and stolen his own money? I could think of a single reason: to lend credibility to his paranoia about Blackie Lanigan. If that were the case, though, why was he putting on tonight’s performance?

  Guarini did not take a place in the lineup. Instead, he told me to hitch my dogs to the front of the van exactly as they’d been hitched to my Bronco. I'd never before leashed a dog to an undercarriage, but I had no difficulty in getting Rowdy and Kimi to cooperate. In less than a minute, the dogs were just as I’d found them, with Kimi attached to the right front, Rowdy to the left. Without beef bones to occupy them, the dogs were now on their feet in front of the van, not lying on the blacktop as they’d been when Joey’s body had lain only a few feet away.

  Guarini nodded approval. “Just watch them. Move so you’re not that close to them. And then, like you always say, read them.”

  Guarini’s somewhat cryptic style of communication didn’t bother me; I was used to creatures who didn’t spell things out. His meaning was clear: Having positioned Rowdy and Kimi where they’d been when someone had given them beef bones, I was supposed to watch them for what might be subtle signs of expecting a repetition of that memorable act. Specifically, I was to look for any hint that my dogs’ expectations centered on one of the five people in the lineup: Zap, Tommy, Timmy, Favuzza, and Carla. All five still faced away from the van, hence away from Rowdy and Kimi.

  Guarini addressed his suspects: “What you’re going to do in a minute, when I tell you, is you’re going to turn around, and then you’re going to take one step toward the dogs. And you’re going to reach in your pockets, or make like you’re reaching in your pockets, and you’re going to bend a little and hold your hands out. And you’re going to walk toward the dogs.”

  This rear parking lot was unpopular and almost deserted. A few people passed by and glanced at the odd scene, the row of people and the two beautiful dogs. No one approached. Oddity is so typical of Cambridge that it’s practically the norm. The strangers probably thought that we were rehearsing an avant-garde play. I stopped looking around to concentrate on Rowdy and Kimi. Both dogs looked optimistic; they almost always did. As was usually the case, their ears were up, their eyes sparkled, their tails waved plumelike over their backs. The dogs’ minds were easy to read. In their malamute lexicon, optimism didn’t denote a globally sunny outlook; it meant the specific conviction that all human beings were here-and-now possessed of tremendous quantities of high-protein, high-fat delicacies destined for immediate delivery to the closest Alaskan malamutes. How do you read the happy expectation of food in dogs who perpetually expect it?

  Guarini gave the order. “Turn around and move. Pretend like you got—”

  Before he’d finished, Rowdy and Kimi hit the ends of their leads so hard that I was afraid they’d set the van in motion. Overjoyed, they hurled themselves toward Al Fa-vuzza, who didn’t bother to pretend that they’d picked out someone else.

  “Who you going to believe?” Favuzza protested. “They’re just dogs, for Christ’s sake. Who you going to believe? Me or some goddamned dogs?”

  World’s stupidest question. Guarini answered by pointing his walking stick at Tommy and Timmy Bel-lano, who understood the unspoken command and moved in on either side of Favuzza.

  Never a man to disappoint a dog, Guarini said, “Miss Winter, you got liver on you? Give ’em some.”

  I complied. Then 1 unhitched the dogs one by one and crated them in Steve’s van.

  “Get him in my car,” Guarini told the twins. To me, he said flatly, almost pleasantly, “Like you’re always writing, if loyalty’s what you want, get a dog.”

  Reaching into my pocket, I removed the puppy-chewed treasure that Sammy had found in the Suburban. I handed it to Enzio Guarini. “What started it,” I said, “was my article. That’s what gave him the idea. He read it, but I wrote it, so in a way, it’s my fault.”

  Sammy’s treasure: a glossy brochure from the mummification company I’d written about together with a letter to Alphonse Favuzza confirming the arrangements for his mummification. Al Favuzza’s visit to the Museum of Fine Arts? The Boston MFA has room after room of outstanding exhibits from ancient Egypt. Favuzza’s reaction when Joey’s coffin was lowered into the earth? Favuzza wasn’t grieved; he was sickened at the thought of bodily decay. He’d killed Joey and stolen Guarini’s money to make sure that decomposition never happened to him.

  CHAPTER 30

  I’d seen enough Mafia movies to know what to expect next: Enzio Guarini and his associates would take Al Favuzza for a ride that would end when the concrete-shod Count took a plunge into Boston Harbor. As to me, the Dogfather would repeat what he’d said on the night Favuzza had killed Joey: He’d inform me that nothing had happened, and he’d tell me take my dogs and go home. I intended to take my dogs and leave, but my destination this time was going to be Cambridge Police Headquarters.

  Anticipating Guarini’s orders, I started to open the van door, but Guarini stopped me. “Stick around,” he said. “I’ll be right back. Carla, you get over here with Miss Winter, and you stay here. No matter what, you hear? No matter what.” Dog person that he was, he smiled at me and said, “Yeah. Stand. Stay.” Then, accompanied by Zap and his bodyguards, he walked the short distance to the limo. Zap held the door for him, and he vanished behind the tinted windows. Zap got into the driver’s seat and closed the door. The headlights came on. The beams shone across the asphalt toward the cars parked near the front of the mall. If the engine started, I didn’t hear it, and the limo didn’t pull forward toward the front of Loaves and Fishes and the road beyond.

  “Enzio’s up to something,” Carla said. “You can always tell. He gets that funny smile. He’s cute, huh? Old. But cute. Don’t you think he’s kind of cute?”

  Abandoning my dog-person abhorrence of cattiness, I said, “Generous, too.”

  “Generous to a fault,” Carla agreed. “Enzio’s had a hard life, you know. His wife passed away, and then his daughter, breast cancer, and—Oh, Jesus! Holy Jesus, look at that!”

  From Enzio Guarini’s distinctive limousine emerged a man wearing Guarini’s trademark hat and carrying Guarini’s trademark walking stick.

  Carla repeated herself. “Jesus!”

  “I doubt it,” I said. Anyone less Christlike than Al Favuzza was hard to imagi
ne, and it had been Favuzza’s face I’d seen when the limo door had opened.

  “What’s he doing? Look what Al’s doing! That’s Al, you know. That’s not Enzio. He’s walking in the headlights. Where’s he going? Why’s he doing it? Enzio must’ve—”

  “We’re staying right here,” I said. “Remember? No matter what. This is the what."

  With Guarini’s hat on his head and Guarini’s stick in his hand, Favuzza moved in the beams of the headlights across the wide, empty stretch of asphalt at the side of the mall toward the cars parked in the front lot. Just as he was about to pass beyond the range of the headlights, he broke into a gawky sprint. Simultaneously, I not only heard but counted six gunshots that came not from Guarini’s limo but from the opposite direction. In making a desperate, awkward attempt to run from death, Al Favuzza seemed to hurl himself head-on into the barrage of bullets, as if he were eagerly committing a grotesque form of suicide. His body spun, and before it had even hit the blacktop, I spotted a figure just beyond the distant row of parked cars, a familiar figure and, here in Cambridge, an ordinary one: a woman on a bicycle. Earlier this same evening when Guarini and I had sat in my kitchen discussing dogs and memory, I’d made the arrogant claim that we human beings enjoyed, or perhaps suffered from, a mental liberation from the constraints of space and time. Had I been right? If so, the sight of that very Cantabrigian woman here in the Loaves and Fishes parking lot proved that I was, indeed, half canine. The memory that had lingered on the tip of my brain was the memory of the woman who owned Kimi’s dust mop with teeth. Like so many other residents of my neighborhood, the woman rode her bicycle, quoted Robert Frost and e. e. cummings, shopped at Loaves and Fishes, and otherwise blended so unobtrusively into Cambridge that she might as well not have been here at all.

  Once a word moves from the tip of the tongue to the lips, it spits itself out in no time. That’s how long it took Enzio Guarini’s hidden army to emerge from fifteen or twenty apparently empty cars parked near the woman on the bicycle. Like wasps descending on a picnic, the men flew at the woman and swarmed over her. At a guess, twenty seconds had elapsed since the first gunshot. Carla was shrieking for Enzio, who now stepped out of his limo. To my surprise, he had Frey with him, and to my astonishment, he was not flanked by his bodyguards. Following Favuzza’s route, Guarini moved quickly to the scene of the dust mop woman’s capture. Carla started after him. So did I. If Guarini felt safe without the bodyguards, why should I hang back?

  By the time I reached Guarini, the wasplike swarm of men had disappeared back into the cars and driven away. The woman lay on her stomach at Guarini’s feet. Her ankles were bound with what I had no trouble in identifying as a leather dog leash. Behind her back, her arms were bound with a thin leather belt.

  “Carla, my dear, be a nice girl and go get Anthony,” Guarini said. When she’d tottered off on her high heels, he gave me one of those charming smiles of his. “Sit,” he told Frey. The pup obeyed. “Good boy,” Guarini told him. The praise was warm and genuine. Without a word to me, Guarini bent down, grabbed the prone, bound woman’s head, and with a swift upward movement, removed her short, straight, ever-so-Cantabrigian gray hair. The now-hairless woman twisted and squirmed. Holding Frey’s leash in one hand and the wig in the other, Guarini just stood there smiling at me.

  I started to say that I didn’t understand. But all of a sudden, I did understand. The small flashlight I’d taken with me when I’d set out to rescue Sammy was still in my pocket. By its light, I saw the face of Guarini’s captive. Everyone in Greater Boston knew that infamous face. Anyone else would’ve recognized it as easily as I did. We’d seen it in our newspapers and on our television screens. I’d seen it on the FBI website. I’d printed its image for Kevin Dennehy.

  Enzio Guarini had captured Blackie Lanigan.

  CHAPTER 31

  When the police arrived, as they soon did, Enzio Guarini explained everything. The police had no choice about accepting his story. After all, he had proof. Blackie Lanigan was indubitably lying there in the parking lot with Guarini’s belt around his wrists and Guarini’s leather leash around his ankles. There was no question about whether Guarini and his girlfriend, Carla Cortiniglia, had, in fact, come to the area for an innocent session of dog training. He had the dogs and the dog trainer right there to support his statement. Carla bubbled about my success with Anthony. Guarini went so far as to demonstrate Frey’s obedience for the cops, to whom he also offered a cogent explanation of clicker training. Frey behaved extremely well. I felt proud that he’d become the model puppy. With regard to Al Favuzza’s body, now minus the hat and walking stick, it was obvious that Blackie Lanigan had made an attempt on Guarini’s life and shot the wrong man by mistake. “I’m lucky to be alive,” Guarini told the cops. He pointed to the weapon, which was right there on the asphalt. It really was the murder weapon, of course, and Blackie Lanigan really had fired it.

  It still infuriates me to realize that I’d seen that quintessentially Cantabrigian woman lots of times. Her dog had attacked Kimi. I’d commented on her taste in novels. In retrospect, I see the books as a give-away I missed. The typical Cambridge type has already read Stephen McCauley, Elinor Lipman, and Mameve Medwed. She could’ve been rereading, of course, but if so, she should’ve stopped to share her enthusiasm with me instead of pedaling off. In my obliviousness to her, I was like Mary Wood with the heron that had killed her koi. Like the heron, Blackie Lanigan had been there all along. Like Mary, I just didn’t know it.

  Three days after Blackie Lanigan killed Al Favuzza, I was finally allowed to visit Kevin Dennehy. The bullets removed from Kevin’s chest matched a gun found in Fa-vuzza’s apartment. “I knew it was that goddamned vampire, pardon my French,” Kevin croaked. “I told you I was nosing around. The stink was coming from Favuzza’s direction. They just wouldn’t take the tubes out of my throat so’s I could talk.”

  Kevin was out of Intensive Care, but IVs and monitors were strung around him like weird bird feeders around a pale, sickly nestling. On his bedside table was a framed photo of Blackie Lanigan. It was early evening, and we were watching a local TV special called “Here’s Blackie.”

  “In a way,” I told Kevin during a commercial, “Blackie succeeded in doing what Deitz tried and failed to do. Deitz’s mistake was that he tried to enlist me as an informant. Also, he threatened my dogs. Blackie was smarter than that. He knew all about Guarini and dogs, he knew about Frey, and he kept an eye on Guarini. Once I was in the picture, Blackie planted himself in my vicinity. Kevin, you really have to admit that he picked the perfect disguise. And Guarini, for his part, set the whole thing up. He knew Blackie was out to get him. That wasn’t just media hype. Guarini knew that Blackie was around somewhere, somewhere right nearby. He planted that whole army of his men in those parked cars. If my dogs had picked out Zap, or Timmy or Tommy Bellano, Guarini would’ve sent one of them across that parking lot instead. Guarini used Blackie to kill Joey’s killer, and at the same time, he set things up so that when Blackie killed Joey’s killer, Guarini would get Blackie.”

  “And Blackie fell for it.”

  “He’d been waiting for an opportunity. Guarini gave it to him. Guarini counted on Blackie to seize it. Blackie did.”

  The show resumed with footage of Enzio Guarini, who said that his true satisfaction came from bringing a notorious criminal to justice. The interviewer asked Guarini how he planned to spend the FBI’s million-dollar reward for the capture of Blackie Lanigan. Guarini said that he was going to buy a second Norwegian elkhound. He also announced, right there on television, his engagement to Carla Cortiniglia. I didn’t hear any more because Kevin’s monitors went berserk, and a nurse rushed in and made me leave. Kevin’s heart rate and blood pressure had abruptly risen. They dropped as soon as the nurse took my parting advice and turned off the television. I should never have let Kevin watch that special about Blackie in the first place. His body was still too weak to manage the stress.

  Less than a week aft
er my first hospital visit to Kevin, Steve returned from his mother’s funeral. I explained why I’d thrown out the flowers. Then I went on to tell him everything.

  “And this guy Favuzza’s really gotten himself turned into a mummy?” Steve asked.

  “He won’t be a completed mummy for a while yet,” I said. “It’s long, complicated process. But yes. He paid to be mummified, so mummified he’ll be. The mummification company must be delighted. They’ve done dogs and cats before, but Favuzza is their first human being. It’s fitting, really, that he’s the first. He honestly did have a horror of decomposition. Kevin told me that Favuzza’s specialty was dirty work, but he didn’t say exactly what kind. It turns out that it was moving buried bodies.”

  A few last things.

  Guarini and I have never discussed Sammy’s kidnapping, but I am sure that the boss found out about it because Rowdy got his chewman back, and it was returned not by Zap, but by Guarini himself.

  I thought I’d never find out who blew up my car, and it’s true that I’ll never be absolutely certain, but a short segment on the local evening news told me all I needed to know. It showed a pretty white colonial house in the suburb of Lexington. In the driveway sat the wreckage of a Ford station wagon that had been blown up. It belonged to a woman named Ellen Deitz. Her husband, Victor, worked for the FBI. It was a good bet that Deitz hadn’t destroyed his wife’s car. The television announcer suggested that the explosion might have been an act of revenge perpetrated by someone with a grudge against Victor Deitz in his capacity as an FBI agent. I agreed.

  Speaking of cars, I still haven’t replaced my Bronco, but I have a lead on a new car. A puppy-training client of mine says he can get me a great deal. Indeed, in the spirit of full openness about my association with the Mob, I have to confess that I have not yet entirely freed myself from Enzio Guarini. In fact, he called me only a few days ago. He remains grateful to me for everything. “I owe you one,” said the Dogfather. “I owe you a big favor.”