“Yeah,” Rascob said, “well, that’s pretty much what he was saying. ‘It’s all feasibility now.’ Can they do it here, workin’ with us—assumin’ that, of course, because that’s the only way, without us they know they can’t. But can they get enough hotel rooms at the time of year they want ’em? All the schools around here? Rooms already booked? For the graduations, see? If they are, then it don’t matter—kinda rates we get them—they can’t get the rooms.
“So, they’d rather do it here; makes much better sense. But first they hafta find out if they can. Or should they start lookin’ someplace else.”
“Well, but that’s what I’m saying,” McKeach said. “Like: what other place? What do they mean when they say ‘other place’? They got any idea whatsoever of this? What he’s talkin’ about when he says this?”
“I dunno,” Rascob said. “I didn’t ask him that, you know? All I did was, I basically listened. I told you all he told me.”
“Motherfuckers,” McKeach said.
“Yeah, I know,” Rascob said.
“Well, keep on top of him,” McKeach said. “Rusty’s a good guy and all, but every now and then he’s been known to get it in his head he might do some freelance stuff. Slightest hint he’s doin’ that—you know, not tellin’ us about—well, you lemme know right off. I’ll go over, see the bastard. Get his memory improved.”
“I’ll do that,” Rascob said.
“Yeah,” McKeach said. “Now, that brings us our boy Jackie, everybody’s favorite pinup. What is goin’ on with him?”
“He’s got three more trucks comin’ on line this week,” Rascob said. “These’d be the break-and-lunch trucks go around from plant to plant, job to job, you know? Ones with quilted caps you see outside the factories, selling sandwiches and coffee. In this case, job to job.”
“Where’s he gettin’ all these jobs?” McKeach said. “Every month or so, it seems like, puttin’ on more trucks.”
“Construction,” Rascob said. “We had this mild winter, right? Construction’s startin’ early. Last year they didn’t finish all the roadwork. Guess once the money gets there, carries over, year to year, ’til the job gets done. Plus which, got the naval air base closin’, down South Weymouth there, shopping center goin’ in. Means it’s just a matter ah time, demolition work gets started, and then as soon as that gets finished, they start puttin’ up the stores.
“Comin’ down or goin’ up—all the same to Jackie. You bring those crews in, get ’em workin’, gotta have their coffee, Coca-Cola, bottled water, usually three times a day. The two breaks, morning, afternoon, and then once a day they stop, let ’em have a meal. These guys make good money, want a solid meal for lunch? Lots of them don’t wanna bother, bringin’ it from home. They do, somebody’s got to make it, right? Most of them, wives also workin’, don’t want to get up early making sandwiches their lunch.”
“And they then buy our stuff too,” McKeach said.
“Jackie says his trucks didn’t have the stuff on paydays, be another fleet of trucks pullin’ in right behind him, ‘Pretty soon those guys’d be sellin’ coffee too. It’s a commodity now, like the Nabs and Drake’s Pound Cake. The way you get the stops is by bein’ reliable, on time, with good product. No excuses—truck broke down; the snow’s too deep; your route guy’s got the flu? You show up with ah coffee, Winstons and Marlboros. Fresh. Scratch tickets with the games they want. Bread inna sandwiches an’ stuff is fresh. Always. Never missin’ a beat. Every day, day in, day out, truck is there on time. Boss on the job won’t be makin’ calls day after day—“Where the fuck’s the guy the truck? My guys’re goin’ apeshit here. Where the hell’s your man?” If he’s my man, his truck’s there, and what those guys want is on it.’ ”
“Including the stuff,” McKeach said.
“So he says,” Rascob said. “He’s sellin’ benzos for two bucks a pill, his guys on the trucks. They sell three for eight to the guys on the job. Who then turn around and sell them to their friends that they work with for four bucks apiece. ‘And some of them then turn it around.’ This’s what he can’t get over. ‘They buy more than they know they’ll use so they can sell it onnah street for six, eight bucks a pop.” ’
“Jesus Christ,” McKeach said. “Many times I hear it, I’ll never get over it.”
“ ‘Strictly supply, demand,’ he says,” Rascob said. “ ‘Think about this, if you want, what the hell is goin’ on. The market’s not for anything. Nothing owns the market. It’s not for crack, not pot, not heroin; not hash, not coke, not ecstasy; Darvon, Demerol, or Dilaudid; knockouts or Special K. Whatever’s around—that’s what the market’s for, and I mean anything. You had a fuckin’ smorgasbord, all right? As much of any kind of drugs anyone could want? Choice’d be the benzos. But if capsules aren’t around, then the Darvon and Dilaudid, and the bags of marching powder. You got guys that look like they could tangle assholes with a buncha paratroopers, come out on the winning side? There they are takin’ Halcion like housewives with the screamin’-meemies. Buspar and Xanax—made for people with anxiety, and here’re these muscle builders fightin’ jackhammers all day, got arms on them like trees, and they’re woofin’ ’em down, fifty and a hundred times the normal dose. Wash ’em down with a ball and a beer. CC and a Coors Light on a fistful of Valium. You don’t have to fly to Florida see the magic kingdom.’ ”
“So, we need more stuff,” McKeach said.
“From what Jackie tells me,” Rascob said, “we will always need more stuff. No matter how much we get.”
“So then this after,” McKeach said, “you leave here, you hafta go and see the Box.”
“You mean I got to go tah the office, count the money,” Rascob said.
“Right,” McKeach said, “you got to go the fuckin’ office, an’ you count ah fuckin’ money. Don’t need me to tell you that, you count ah fuckin’ money. You need me for is to tell you—after you count the fuckin’ money, then you go and see the Box.”
Rascob sighed. “Mack,” he said, “I hate doin’ that. I hate goin’ to the Box.”
“So do I,” McKeach said grimly, “but I’m the boss, and that’s why you hafta go.”
“Maybe he won’t be home,” Rascob said.
“He’ll be home,” McKeach said. “He works at home. He’s in demand. You’ll be lucky all he does is make you wait.”
4
EMMETT NAUGHTON FOR THE FOURTH or fifth time wearing “one of my fancy new outfits”—well-cut dark grey Donegal tweed jacket, a soft wool grey shirt open at the collar and dark grey flannel pants, all purchased by his wife, Caroline, on Nassau Street in Dublin; and tasseled black Bally loafers; she bought those on Grafton Street—knew that even in good clothes that fitted, he still looked like a man out of uniform and uncomfortable that way.
Caroline had thought that the first time he wore any of the new clothes—“Oh, dear, still not quite ready to think about making the change.” But she kept it to herself. The next time she talked to her sister, Marybeth, she said she realized lots of men love their jobs “just as much as Em does—they are what they do. So of course they find it hard, transitioning retirement. But he’s going to be a handful. Ever since the mandatory age was knocked out, he thinks if he keeps putting it off in his own mind, the day’ll never come.
“Seventy’s what he’s saying now, but he won’t be ready when he’s ninety, if he lives that long. He’s never going to be ready. You know how often you’ve heard him say he was ‘born to be a cop.’ I think he’s determined to be one the day he dies—and not a retired cop, either.”
To him she said that maybe he could somehow persuade Matty at the barbershop to leave his hair “a little fuller, that might help a little.”
“You mean ‘a little longer,” ’ Naughton said. “Fuller’d be better, and Matty’s a hell of a barber, but fuller’s not within his powers. And if he did leave it longer, then when I’m in uniform I’d look uncomfortable, and for the selfsame reason—then the uniform wouldn’t look right
. So I wouldn’t feel right. No, day comes when I decide, let them retire me, ten-eleven years from now, more important for me to feel right in the uniform than to feel right out of it.”
With Jim Dowd, some years his junior, feeling the elder’s obligation to transmit wisdom he’d acquired on his own, he allowed himself to be more forthright. “Seen it happen, time and again—men I started working for. They moved up? I moved up too—no coincidence. Their time came to hang it up, they’d get this hangdog expression—tricked into havin’ their balls cut off. ‘Someday,’ they’d always said; thinkin’ they’d get to decide later, ‘someday’ ever came. Didn’t mean that; meant someone else’d make that decision for them, and had, and now someday’d come.
“Probably true in any line of work, it’s sure true in law enforcement. The more a man loves it, better he gets at it. Better he gets at it, harder it is, put it aside. For anything—two weeks’ vacation, or a weekend with the family. Much less think about walking away from it forever; staying away? Sees himself getting older; pretty soon he’s gonna die.
“Then all of a sudden, day arrives—he’s gone. Comes as a jolt.
“Early part of his career, it’s all right. Home with the wife and family. His wife’s a good girl and she wants him to be happy, and he is. She sees his dedication, and it does have its rewards. Rank means more money. Seniority? A desk job. Less hazardous duty; better chance when he goes out the door in the morning, next time she sees him is, he comes back in that night. Not onna slab with a sheet over him—some young punk put a bullet in him. Or caught a breadknife in the belly from a husband and a wife perfectly happy fighting with each other, until he showed up and got between them. Plus the better hours—and, let’s not forget, more pay.
“Policemen’s wives—and husbands, too, and domestic partners as well, mustn’t leave them out—fine and dedicated lot, salt of the earth. Taking nothing away from them when I say I’ve yet to meet a policeman’s wife who didn’t like to see him bringing home a bigger paycheck.
“But still, the more successful the man is in his job, because he loves it, more his wife comes to see it as her rival. Gradually, over the years, she begins to compete with it, to fight it. She tolerates the fact that it takes him away from her—she says ‘all that time it takes from his family,’ but she really means ‘from me.’ So if you see him fairly regularly doing something else that doesn’t involve her—every day you see him doing it and he’s as happy as can be—you still have to understand it’s only because she’s lettin’ him. And also understand that somewhere down the line when she thinks he’s had about enough fun, going off by himself, doing things that don’t involve her, she’s gonna put her foot down and that’ll be the end of it.
“Control’s what it’s about. When she decides there’s been enough of his horsin’ around—stamping out crime and making the world safe for democracy, whatever the hell he’s been doing—then forever and after he’s going to do what she wants. And that’s all, and that is it.
“Which, naturally … most men who’ve gotten used to command, exercising power over other people, been doing it for years, the idea of someone else who’s not even a cop, a superior officer, telling them what to do all the time, when and where they’re gonna do it—their own wife? Does not appeal to them.
“Maybe especially their own wife. Mere idea’s embarrassing.
“Husbands don’t like it, kind of supervision shit—and so they fight back. That’s why you’ll see old doctors, old dentists, old lawyers—all kinds of old men who got that way running their own businesses, forty, fifty years, still going to work every day. Money’s not the issue; they’ve got all of that they need. They’re still at their desks because they hadda close look at their older friends, retired; saw how miserable they were; figured out in their jobs, nobody could kick them out or drag ’em out. So they didn’t leave.
“And those wives who were so keen on their husbands getting through—they don’t like their men retiring either, once they’ve tried it for a while. That’s why you see so many stories in the paper all the time, letters, all these women writing in—husbands, sick, retired, always underfoot. In the way all the time, giving orders; trying to run everything around the house—which the women always ran before any way they liked because the boys were off at work. And then the other women writing in, tell them to stop complaining—least their husbands’re alive, get in their way and take them ballroom dancing and give them a little cuddle now and then—don’t hear much about that nasty sex stuff, though, except now and then there will be one, speaks for all the rest of them—‘Thank God that’s over with,’ and the day the old goat comes home with any of that Viagra stuff’s the day she’s out the door—because the women who’re now writing in to tell them to shut up, their husbands’re dead, and if they knew then? They’d be lightin’ the big candles in the sanctuary every single blessed day.
“Caroline’s the light of my life and the mother of my childen and I’ll always love her dearly, but I’m putting retirement off as long as I possibly can. I know what it’s gonna be like—I am not lookin’ forward to it. Even now, still years away, every so often I catch her warming up the engine when she thinks I’m not lookin’, payin’ attention, gettin’ ready, run my life soon’s I turn in the badge. Suppose it hasta come someday, but I’m not lookin’ forward to it. Could also be the day I start to see the end of my marriage comin’.”
Except on ceremonial occasions, Detective Lieutenant Inspector James Dowd of the Special Investigations Bureau, Massachusetts State Police had been wearing plain clothes on the job for nineteen years. Arriving a few minutes late meeting Naughton for one of their very occasional lunches at the Terrace, on Soldier Field Road between Harvard Stadium on the Boston side of the Charles River, he thanked Eileen, the hostess, for showing him to Naughton’s table. “Never would’ve recognized him, all decked out like this.”
“Wouldn’t recognize myself,” Naughton said, trying to smile and not managing very well.
“You get used to it,” Dowd said, sliding into the other bench in the booth. “Only time I’m in full pack now’s when I have to go into a building where they’ve got someone freshly dead who was real important. Usually don’t mind it—disliked him enough alive, verifying that he’s dead makes it all worthwhile.
“Eileen, since at least in theory I’m on a day off from a case driving me nuts, I do believe I’ll have a Guinness. You’re not on the clock ’til eight, right, Emmett? Interest you in one?”
“Oh, might as well,” Naughton said, pushing his iced tea aside. Eileen nodded, smiled and said, “Ettie’ll be right with you,” and put two menus on the table as she went away. Dowd took one for himself and slid the other one in front of Naughton. Soon a dark-haired waitress in her early forties, her good looks in her mind seriously marred by an overbite that could have been corrected easily thirty years or so before, brought their pints of dark-brown Guinness with the café-aulait-colored heads of foam and set them on the table. “Hullo, Ettie,” Dowd said, picking his glass up at once. “How’re all belongin’ to yah?”
“Fine, thank you, James,” she said, working a smile around the teeth and making a small curtsey. “And those in your own household—well too?”
“No complaints, except with me,” Dowd said. “And those no more’n the usual, I’m very glad to say.”
She nodded. “And you, Superintendent Naughton,” she said, inclining her head. “I trust you’ve been keepin’ well.” Three years before, the first time he and Dowd had met for lunch after his promotion, she had as usual called him “Emmett” instead of “Lieutenant,” as he had requested several years previously, and Dowd had told her facetiously she mustn’t do that any more. “He’s no longer one of us ordinary mortals—he’s a superintendent now.”
Naughton feigned an expression of disapproval. “Still givin’ a convincing impression, I’m happy to say,” he said. “They haven’t caught up with me yet.”
“I’ll be back in a moment or two fo
r your orders,” she said.
“How long has that kid been working in here?” Dowd said, after the waitress had gone away. Long ago in the aftermath of a state police captain’s discharge in disgrace—“after twenty-one spotless years in the uniform,” the commander’s angry-grieving statement said—for being the third party in a lovers’ triangle concluded by the husband’s shotgun murder of the wife, Dowd had decided that only a woman who was absolutely perfect could ever bring him to risk both his marriage and career. Two or three years later he had joined Naughton for lunch and met Ettie Hanifin. It had taken him three or four more encounters to register that overbite and realize with great relief that she was “not quite perfect,” so he was safe after all. He remembered that each time he saw her, silently toasting a narrow escape once again as he raised his pint and drank some of the stout through the foamy head.
“Cripes,” Naughton said, having known that Dowd was tempted since shortly after Dowd had, but never having said anything about it because Dowd never had, “ever since her First Communion, I guess. When was it Danas bought the place, The Ground Round then, wasn’t it? Not that I came in then.”
“Danas bought it, turned it around, but then two-three years ago Harry Dana got the cancer, and seeing what was coming he sold out to Marvin Scotti, well-known Boston restaurateur and realtor with no money of his own who fronts for Nick Cistaro—who’s here today, I might add.”
Naughton’s displeasure showed on his face. “Eileen told me he’s in the back. With his rat-faced little sidekick.”
“Figured,” Dowd said. “Saw his ride in the parking lot, I came in. Maroon Expedition. Who’s he meeting?”
“Eileen didn’t know,” Naughton said. “Only notable’s gone through since I sat down’s Al Bryson—runs that ‘Stars in the Summer Sky’ thing out on Route Nine there, gets all the washed-up, drugged-out rock stars to do weekend concerts by the lake. Pleasant enough, I suppose, you don’t ever wanna grow up, and the night you’ve got tickets it doesn’t rain too hard. I recall, Al was in his fifties, he went down that delinquency-of-minors charge—feeding smack to that fourteen-year-old boy-toy singer, OD’ed in Detroit after that. All slack in the belly, but here he is, mincin’ through here in the gold silk shirt and tight pants, hair standing up and dyed green; like he’s a rock star himself.”
At End of Day Page 4
