The Penny Ferry da-2

by Rick Boyer

  "Don't you want some Cutty, Brian?"

  "Yes I do, Kevin. But if I had some, then I'd have more and more and more. Then things would go blank and I'd disappear and you wouldn't see me for months, and I'd wake up in an ash can in Panama City. So I'm having a Sprite."

  "Oh. Had it bad eh?"

  Brian's big balding head swiveled like a gun turret and two streams of pungent smoke cascaded out of his nostrils.

  "How many people have you known who've had alcoholism good? Hmmm?"

  O'Hearn returned to his soap, and Brian to his Sprite and stolen cigar. Brian's story, replete with fled wife and kids, wasn't a happy one. This somewhat accounted for his rather acerbic wit and sarcastic humor. But a nicer guy never lived. Except Moe.

  "Okay Doc, we hand it to you. That makes two in a row. You're batting a thousand. So spill. How'd you know they'd burn Sam's safe?" Brian interrogated me.

  "Didn't. Like I told Sam, just a hunch."

  "Good hunch," returned Brian. "You got any more hunches?"

  "Yeah, like on the Sox game Sunday?" asked O'Hearn.

  "They just about done it to me," said Sam, tossing off the last of the amber fluid. "They just about broke me down now. Kill my partner, break open my place. S'all ruint now."

  He shook his handsome head slowly. He was dressed in a cream-yellow Windbreaker. His hands and forearms were veiny, his chin clean and taut. Tiny little white pinpricks of whisker showed on his nut-brown jowls where he hadn't shaved- the reverse image of my Calabrian brother-in-law, who patted him, softly on the back.

  "C'mon, guy," said Joe. "Remember, the damage done to the office and safe is all covered. Covered well. You'll/lose a coupla hundred, max. Thanks to Doc here you took the cash out and stashed it at Nissenbaum's. Good thing too. You had no proof of it at all. It was just a giant-sized hunk of petty cash, right? You wouldn't have gotten a dime on it, I'll bet. But it's safe, so don't worry."

  "What I gonna do for a partner?"

  We all stared at the table and sighed. There was a lull in the talk, which added further to the gloom. Mary asked Joe about Johnny Robinson's car.

  "They towed it four blocks away in the dead of night to a deserted garage, which is where the Lowell police found it. The rocker panels had been ripped off, seat upholstery torn open-"

  "And they also, what did they do, burned up Sam's safe? What do you mean, burned?" asked Mary.

  "They broke into Dependable's office- came in through the roofand burned the safe, honey. Burned it," I said, lighting a pipe.

  "See, Mare," said her brother, "there are several basic ways to open a safe without the combination. The famous one is by cracking it, or moving the lock dial delicately back and forth until the tumbler-pins fall into place. Then the safe can be opened. This is a great method, but it takes infinite skill and hours of time. Most crooks nowadays have neither. Also, the old pintumbler safe locks have been replaced by disc locks and other sophisticated stuff. It's almost impossible to crack a safe anymore. Now Sam's safe is- was- an old pin-tumbler Mosler. It could be cracked, but it would take a long time and it's in an exposed position. That leaves the other methods: peeling, blowing, punching, and burning."

  Brian erupted in a choking fit; he had tried to inhale my stogie.

  "That's a no-no, fella; you'll kill yourself," I warned.

  "Peeling a safe is strictly for amateurs," continued Joe. "When you peel a safe you don't have the knowledge, skill, or tools needed to do a professional job. What you're doing is, you're attacking the steel casing of the safe rather than the door. You're going after the body, and you start at an edge of the casing and peel away the layers of steel with cold chisels and sledges, wedges, pickaxes… anything. It takes about eight hours of sweaty work to peel even a small safe, and it's noisy as hell. You can only peel a safe that's isolated in some old warehouse where nobody will hear the noise."

  "Right," said Brian, whose eyes still watered. "Had a junkie tried to peel the safe in the lumberyard last year. Could hear him a mile away. Caught him before he'd even made a dent in it. Poor slob. But punching's different. Now that takes a little skill, and it's much quicker. Problem is, it's also noisy."

  "Yeah, noisy, but it is quick," said Joe. "Usually the guy who punches a safe will plan to skedaddle before the heat arrives. What you do is, you drill into the safe door with a low-speed, high-torque drill with a good Swedish bit. You put the hole just to the side of the dial in the door, angled in toward the center. Then you stick a heavy metal punch into that hole and whang it with a baby sledge. Ping! The back of the lock is knocked right off, and in you go. Noisy but quick."

  "But you gotta have a good drill, and it takes an hour, and several bits, to get that hole," said Brian.

  "I wanna tell about blowing a safe," said Kevin, who'd spun around in his chair to face us. Cops. They'll talk your ear off. Everybody's seen the movies about this, where the guy packs in the vials of nitro, called soup, and then hides behind the mattresses while the building blows up. Well, it ain't like that. Now they don't use nitro, which is dangerous as hell. They use plastique. Black-market plastique, and they place it just right. Then they ramp it with a hemp-and-cable mat and detonate it electrically. Boom! Off comes your door and you're in."

  "Yeah," said Brian, "but not as easy as that. One: how and where do you get the funny putty? Not so easy, and a federal offense if you're even caught with the stuff. Two: you still gotta drill the holes and know how to place the charge. You gotta study the box before hand. Blowing a box is like cleaving a diamond, you get one shot… and you can wreck the box and everything that's inside. Also of course, you can kill yourself."

  "True, true," said O'Hearn philosophically. He returned to "The Young and the Restless."

  "Still," mused Brian, "blowing a box remains the quickest way in. If speed is all that counts, and you don't worry about the noise-"

  "- or the danger-"

  "- or the danger, then you can't beat it. But burning's the most popular method now."

  "Oh for sure," said Joe, lighting a Benson amp; Hedges with his Orsini lighter.

  "Where'd you get that fruity lighter, James0e?" asked Brian.

  Joe cuddled the instrument in his big hairy paw and glared back.

  "This is a class lighter, Hannon. Cost three hundred bucks. Made in Italy. In Florence. Only reason you think it's strange is because it's class."

  "I just said it looks a little fruity is all. I guess a lot of stuff made in Italy is fruity, like those chacha boots."

  "Izat so? How fruity is a nine-millimeter Beretta? I guess the Israeli army doesn't think it's so fruity. How about a Lamborghini, or a Ferrari? I notice there are no high-performance racing cars named O'Grady. Eh?"

  Brian squinted at him, like a leopard on a limb.

  "About the only thing they make in Ireland is Guinness… as if the Irish need any more of that- "

  Brian slammed his palms down on the table and rose to his feet. O'Hearn slammed down his shot glass and rose to his feet.

  "Shut up, Joe, or I'll paste you one," said Mary.

  "Everybody keep quiet, or I'll paste everybody," I said.

  "But you're just a doctor," said O'Hearn.

  "Kevin, you obviously haven't seen Doc Adams in the gym or on the pistol range," said Joe.

  Gee, he made me feel like Captain Marvel. I liked hearing that. Any guy who's almost fifty likes to hear that.

  "I want to hear about burning safes," I said.

  "Aren't they steel? Then how can you burn them?" asked Mary, getting another cappucino.

  "You use an oxyacetylene torch, Mary," said Brian. "It'll cut through anything. Burning is pretty slow, but it's dead quiet and safe. In the old days the only problem was lugging those big gas tanks to the box. How can you hike those big cylinders up to a roof and through a skylight? Can't. But recently they've come out with these little bottles, tanks you strap on your back just like scuba tanks. With hoses and gauges. Only instead of a mask on your face you're carrying the torch
. You climb into the joint and walk up to the box and start burning it. Right around the lock face. She falls away when you cut through the facing. It's kind of like punching, only slower.. . but dead quiet."

  Sam Bowman spoke up. We'd almost forgotten him, he'd been so polite and quiet.

  "Doc. What tipped you off was those guys come to look at my roof."

  "Yep. Seemed to me they came and inspected your place at a pretty convenient time. So I warned you. But it was only a really vague hunch. I wish I'd have caught on to this."

  I glared down at the crumpled brochure describing the highefficiency oil burner, which I was holding in my hand.

  "Mary says she let the guy into the basement for a quick look at our furnace. She stayed upstairs. He was down there for maybe ten minutes."

  "Enough time. Plenty," said Joe. "He was a real pro. He cut through your alarm wires in two lower windows, and so skillfully you can't detect the cuts on casual inspection. He slipped the snib on one. He left the bogus literature and split, knowing he could come back at his convenience and get in. Which he did."

  "Only question now," said O'Hearn, "is how many of them are there? Twenty? Keee-riste, seems like there's an army of 'em."

  "Don't like it," said Brian. "But as far as Doc and Mary are concerned- as far as the town of Concord is concerned think the worst has passed. Don't think I can say the same for you, Sam."

  "The worst ain't passed for them, I tell you that," Sam said.

  The phone rang. It was for Joe. While he nodded and grunted into the instrument, Mary began making a pizza. She had delegated tasks to everyone: Sam sliced the pepperoni, Kevin opened the anchovies, Brian sliced mushrooms and green peppers, and I grated mozzarella. Joe grunted and nodded. Then we all froze. in our tracks.

  'DeLucca!"

  Stunned silence on the part of all the cops. Mary and I stared at each other dumfounded, as if someone had just told a joke and we didn't get the punch line.

  'DeLucca!" echoed O'Hearn.

  "DeLucca shmalooka," said Brian contemptuously. "Carmen DeLucca is dead."

  Joe held the phone, frozen. He was wearing the Thousand-Yard Stare, like a G.I. who's been in combat for two days, or a football coach who's just lost the title game in the last thirty seconds because of an interception runback. He replaced the phone without saying good-bye, returning it to its cradle carefully, as if it were filled with "soup." I didn't like the look on his face.

  "Lab finally did a make- a twelve-point positive make- on the dog biscuit fingers we found at Johnny's," he said.

  "Not DeLucca's," said Kevin.

  "DeLucca's. Positively DeLucca's. Carmen Salvatore DeLucca, the East Coast buttonman and Wise Guy."

  "They found Carmen DeLucca in a lime pit," said Brian. "They found what was left of him in Elizabeth, New jersey, in a quarry lime pit. Don't tell me different?

  "I tell you different. Fingers in the doggie's mouth belong to Carmen DeLucca. Twelve-point positive make. The bag of smelly jelly they dragged out of that lime pit was some other poor bastard."

  "You mind?" said his sister, who was rolling out dough for the crust.

  O'Hearn glared at the other two cops.

  "Bull-fucking-shit, Joe," he yelled. "I say bull-fucking-shi-"

  He stopped, ashamed, as he realized Mary was there. She hadn't even turned her head.

  "Uh- sorry, Mrs. Adams, I didn't, uh-"

  " 'S okay, pal. I'll survive," she said, never taking her eyes off the rolling pin. "I've heard worse."

  "Worse? You've heard worse? Jee-sus Keee·riste!"

  "Lemme get that name," said Sam between clenched teeth.

  "DeLucca killed Johnny. This guy Carmen DeLucca killed my partner."

  While all this was going on, Joe's expression had not changed. Still the zombie look, the Thousand-Yard Stare. He announced he was going outside for a little walk. We watched him go, staring after him as the door shut. Joe does not take walks. Joe does not like the New England countryside; he likes crowded bars and sports events. Something was wrong.

  We finished our tasks as Mary trimmed the dough on the big pan and spread her homemade tomato sauce on it. We slid it into the hot oven, heaped with all the cheese and goodies, then looked out the kitchen windows at Joe, who was pacing back and forth through the grape arbor. His head was down and he was smoking furiously, lighting one cigarette off another. Kevin, who worked with him almost daily, was especially concerned. He told us he hadn't seen Joe so worked up since the Blue Hill Butcher case.

  "If it is DeLucca, then that means several things," he explained. "First, it's a giant-sized headache in general for all of us, since he's as brutal and bloodthirsty as they come. It's like Dracula coming out of his coffin. Second, as regards this case, it means it's big. It involves the Mob, the Wise Guys… and that alone makes it big."

  "But Kevin, it was the Outfit that wanted DeLucca dead in the first place. Two of their henchmen swore to this. They talked, then walked," said Brian.

  "Yeah I know. And that's another thing too: it doesn't figure. But even if he's not working for the Wise Guys, then he's gotta be working against them, or something like that. Any way you lay it out, Brian, the Mob's got to be involved. jeez, DeLucca was into the Outfit like Folger's into coffee. But to even show his face around… I just don't get it-"

  "You mean either he's off their shit list or else he's risking his neck," said Brian.

  "Exactly. And there appears to be quite a number of guys involved in this. How many to kill Johnny? The way we've got it figured, at least three: one to tag Johnny in town, the other two at Robinson's with the bomb. How many to pull these B and E's? At least two at Sam's for a burn job like that, plus the hole in the roof, right? Add to that one, maybe two guys here. Then there's Johnny's towed car. I figure two more. There are probably half-a-dozen men working the street side of this caper, which means two or three times that many upstairs. Now you see why he's upset."

  "Could be more than that. Don't forget the guy in the mill and our hot-rod friend on Route Three."

  Mary slid the hot pizza out and onto a rack. It smelled great.

  "It's more than that," she said. "I know Joey better than all of you put together. It's something else he's not telling us."

  She watched her brother pacing and smoking outside, then went out to call him in. We saw him turn and shake his head.

  "Not hungry?" said Kevin as he leaned on the countertop and stared out the window. "Joe Brindelli not hungry?"

  They came in and Joe sat and smoked in the corner while we ate. He had a Laphroaig on the rocks with a splash and fiddled with the television. He said nothing, and we left him alone. When we all finished he rose first and went to the door. He turned and faced all of us.

  "The way I figure it," he said, "this thing has taken an unexpected turn. All I've got to say is- and Kev, I'm not trying to speak for you, so disagree if you want- all I'm saying is that it now appears to be a Mob action. Therefore I'm turning any business I may have had with this thing, or any I might have in, the future, over to the O.C. unit. As far as I'm concerned, it's a local killing- as much as I loved Johnny, Sam, and I mean that. I'm out of it and the state is out. Let O.C. handle it if they want. Good-bye."

  He turned and left and got into his cruiser. We all stared after him.

  "What the hell was that all about?" asked Brian.

  "I have no idea," said Kevin, "except I don't believe it."

  We walked the rest of them out to their cars. Kevin got in the shotgun seat next to Joe. Mary stuck her head in and kissed her brother; her long black hair hung down and cascaded all over the door. Most women over forty say they can't wear their hair long. But Mary can. She looks under thirty. She leaned back and brushed her hair aside and Joe motioned me over with his finger.

  "Doc, stay away from this business. Stay away from it!"

  He and the others drove off, and Mary and I went back into the house. She sat down and put her chin on her lists.

  "What's the O.C.?" />
  "Organized-crime unit. But I can't understand the sudden turnaround. Nobody liked Johnny better than Joe. And he was keen on this case too, especially since it involved us. Can't understand it."

  "I can."

  "What?"

  She narrowed her eyes and glared at me. 'Not telling!"

  "Why not?"

  "You know why. Remember, I said I'd get even with you. Well here's round one: Joe told me why he's dropping the whole thing, and why he's upset. But I'm not telling you and neither will he. Then maybe next time you and Janice- "

  "How'd you know that- uh- what makes you think I-"

  She waved her hand through the air impatiently.

  "I just know, Charlie. And the next time you get even a pinky finger near her it's going to be all she wrote!"

  She jumped up and stomped out, leaving me to clean up the luncheon mess. I opened another Bass and regarded the task before me, contemplating recent vicissitudes.

  The needle wasn't moving up out of the Dead Zone. Sumbitch appeared to be stuck.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I finished cleaning up, relighted my pipe, and went to find Mary. It was time for a Long Talk, in which I would tell her that I really hadn't meant to grab Janice like that. I would explain that it was all her fault, not mine. That's all.

  Swell, Adams.

  To hell with it, I decided as I passed the door of her workroom. Besides, Long Talks are like summit meetings; when they're over things are more screwed up than they were before. I went for a medium-long run, did a hundred sit-ups on the inclined board, and took a sauna. I dressed and left the house as the first of the insurance claim officers arrived, and I left a warm note for Mary which explained that I would be at the residence of Morris Abramson, M.D. I thought it best to communicate by diplomatic note until the crisis d la frottage au derriere blew over.

  There was a darkening cloud cover, with a chilly blowing drizzle, as I turned into Walden Breezes trailer park. It's right across from Walden Pond, where Thoreau wrote the famous tract. But old Henry David would get the fantods if he glimpsed the horrendous assemblage of mobile homes permanently parked across Route 126 from the pond. Most are vintage fifties and sixties, with a few more recent additions. Moe's dwelling was at the end of the circle, right by the deep pine woods. This was a good thing because he keeps two Nubian goats in a miniature corral and they can be noisy. I got out of the car and felt better immediately. Although I have no firsthand knowledge of how good a therapist he is, I can say that being with him is good therapy for me. After being in his company even briefly, you begin to sort out what's important and what isn't. And it's amazing how many things in twentieth-century middle-class American life aren't at all. I sauntered down the tiny gravel path lined with myrtle and climbed the two narrow wooden steps to the side door of the old Airstream trailer.