At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “I mean, Marybeth didn’t marry me, for Christ sake—she married my brother, Peter. And as to what the hell I do, or did, no matter if it’s right or wrong, Peter never had a fuckin’ thing to say or do with it. Don’t believe me then ask him. So how do I figure into this, Emmett bein’ superintendent? Never really understood that.” He growled, abruptly, like a dog frustrated chained.

  “Anyway, like I say, I’m over there one night havin’ dinner, Peter-Marybeth’s house—which I did fuckin’ buy it for them, goddamnit, gave them the fuckin’ money for. Back when Peter’s makin’ chump change, workin’ an installer, back ’fore he started doin’ good. It’s not like I got no right there, don’t belong there.

  “Anyway, I’m there havin’ dinner, catchin’ up with my brother, talkin’ various things, and at one point I ask him what he’s been up to lately. Not that I expect much of an answer—that being the type of question he doesn’t ask me very often, either, or expect much of an answer the few times he does. But this time, I dunno, I did, and he says they just took on what to him’s a fairly interesting client, kind of a challenge, really—‘The old Wheelers Moving Company headquarters building, not that I guess it’s that old—built around nineteen-seventy or so.’ And do I know where that is, so forth.

  “Well as a matter of fact I do know. That’s the place me and Jimmy Locatelli got into the night after Jimmy heard the Collier family art collection was bein’ temporarily stored there, and the next day we took it. Right out the pike, just before the Charlton cutoff.”

  “Sure,” Cistaro said. “I forgot you guys did that. All the Rembrandts in this collection, biggest one in private hands——”

  “Cezannes, actually,” McKeach said. “Not quite as valuable as if they’d’ve been Rembrandts, but still, worth lot of money. All this crime-prevention equipment they had then, pressure plates and infrared rays, all that kind of fancy stuff every dog kennel’s got today but nobody had back then—no one could figure out how the hell we did it. And it was simple. We just got on our coveralls, got in the back of the truck while they’re loading it with the paintings the day before, up in Peabody. Guys from Wheelers thought we’re with the estate; guys from the estate thought we’re with Wheelers. Rode in with the paintings that night, in the back of the trailer.

  “That night while everybody’s focused onna warehouse and the yard, guards and dogs and lights all over the fuckin’ place, walkie-talkies all around, biggest worry I had was that Jimmy’s fuckin’ snorin’s gonna wake up one of those monster German shepherds Wheelers used to have around when they had real valuable cargo, and someone’ll search the truck. But they didn’t.

  “And then the next day onna turnpike, me and Jimmy get the gas masks on, light off smoke bombs inna back. Cops behind it in the unmarked cars see the smoke all comin’ out, think the load just caught on fire. Radio the fuckin’ driver, ‘Pull over! Load’s on fire.’ Guys’re drivin’ it and all the escorts, everybody stops their cars and then comes piling out, this great scene beside the road, everybody runnin’ round, shootin’ off fire extinguishers and screamin’, ‘Someone get a fuckin’ fire truck!’ Drivers from the company pop the doors the sides and back the trailer? An’ while all of them’re piling in, lookin’ to see where the fire is, hopin’ they can put it out ’fore it ruins all the art, me and Jimmy light a long fuse on a string of two-inch salutes. And then we come piling out, shooting off our own extinguishers. Nobody pays attention to us; nobody even sees us. Jump inna cab, keys in the lock, start ’er up and wait a couple minutes, seems like a couple days, hopin’ no one notices engine’s started up again—and also that we didn’t make the fuckin’ fuse too long so someone finds the damned salutes, or steps on it and puts it out before the things go off. It seems like a couple days.

  “But then, bang-bang-bang, start going off, and that sets off this huge stampede, people jumpin’ out the fuckin’ trailer, now they think it’s gonna blow, an’ we’re watchin’ in the rearview mirrors, watch ’em fallin’ onna ground, gettin’ back so they’ll have cover, and I say to Jimmy, ‘Hit it!’ and he sticks it into gear.

  “By the time they see what the hell’s goin’ on, figure out what happened to them, we’ve gone off an exit about two miles away, got the trailer on a culvert, throwin’ paintings off the bridge, and down below there we’ve got Jimmy’s little brother Joey and this other guy we had, with a Ford deuce-anna-half on the two-lane underneath. Me and Jimmy, laughin’ so hard we can hardly grab the paintings—could just barely hear the sirens catchin’ up to us when we tossed some more smoke bombs inna trailer and went slidin’ down that slope on our asses, laughing like bastards all the way.”

  He laughed again with the pleasure of the memory. “That was one great fuckin’ day. Kind that makes you think you’ll live forever. Nothin’s ever gonna stop you now.” He snuffled.

  “Anyway,” he said, “me and Peter like I said, two of us’re havin’ dinner, and he tells me about the warehouse, how Watchguard just took it on. ‘And naturally, of course,’ he says, ‘as long as it’s still vacant we’re not gonna keep a man on duty in there day and night, guardin’ empty space. We’ll have a man swing a patrol car by there, two or three times every day, three or four times every night, regular door-shake detail, and we’re on good terms with all the cops, so that’s all that it should need. If the cops see there’s something wrong, doesn’t look quite right to them, they’ll of course give us a call before they go bustin’ in. And if we find there is something we think they should take a look at, well then, we’d call them.

  “ ‘But just the same, we don’t want to be bothering them every time kids start hangin’ around there weekends. Maybe use the parking lot to fly their model planes, drive their radio-controlled cars. Make ourselves look foolish.

  “ ‘So, you get around, you hear things. You get wind there might be someone doing something there that doesn’t sound quite right to you, appreciate it if you’d, you know, take a look around the place. See what you can find out. And call me, you know, if something’s wrong, something you can’t straighten out, and I’ll then call the cops.’

  “So I been doin’ that ever since,” McKeach said. “I go there and I see something, then I take a look around. And if the guys I find in there’re reasonable people, we can do a little business. ’til Walterboy, they all have been. Now and then I duke Peter a few bucks, help with the kids’ college fund, which he appreciates—fuckin’ kids can buy Harvard now, if they want. I mean, if a guy’s own brother asks him, what else would a guy do?”

  “Absolutely,” Cistaro said, “absolutely. I think it’s a beautiful thing.”

  9

  LILLIAN WEYMUSS STOAT—“DO CALL ME Lily,” she always said upon introduction; “Ducal Melilly,” Cheri Farrier christened her, snickering—lived with her second husband, Darren, in a grey white-trimmed two-story, seven-room, two-and-a-half-bath townhouse at 4 Gaslight Terrace, Number 7, in Framingham. Using about 2.8 percent of the million or so she’d accumulated in her investment portfolio by investing the quarter-million lump-sum settlement she’d received nine years before, pursuant to a prenuptial agreement, when her first husband, Wallace Weymuss, a former Memphis undertaker, divorced her (his fourth wife), she’d provided all of the 20 percent down payment of $27,000.

  “Wallace was much older’n I was of course when we married—he was sixty-one and I wasn’t even thirty? But the way he lived and all, he’d stayed all tanned and muscled, very nice flat belly and all his parts still worked real good—well, you never would’ve known it.

  “He’d sold out his family’s funeral business a long time before—he was the fifth generation run it? By the time he came along the family owned and ran eleven homes in Tennessee, one across the river, Mississippi, in West Memphis? People used to say that if they didn’t lay you out at Weymuss’s, you couldn’t’ve been really serious ’bout bein’ dead. But then that Service Corporation British thingamabobby there that goes around all over the damn world buyin’ up the mortuaries fa
st as they can find them, they come into Memphis, and the way he sized it up, it was inev-able?

  “Wallace is a fine man, but first and foremost—and he will tell you this himself—he’s a businessman. She mimicked him effortlessly, with delight entirely free of malice. “ ’Specially in the business of grief management? Cain’t let your ’motions rule your haid. The business’d been in my family, and a big part of our life, too, for a ver’ long time, ’most ninety years. But times change, and so do ways of doin’ things, and I had to change with them—that or just get left ahine.’

  “So he didn’t let his sentiment get in the way of that, of doing what he felt simply had to be done. Single-family ownership just could not compete with this big international corporation. So sooner or later they’re goin’ to own everybody, ’cause the ones they couldn’t buy they’d just run out of business? And the way Wallace looked at it, the one who sold the first in any given town’d get the best price from ’em—simple as that. And that if that was how it was goin’ to be, then the one who got the best price in Memphis was goin’ to be him.

  “I learned a lot from Wallace.

  “His first wife, her name was Rosalie, she told me that he made it sound like he was doin’ it purely for those business reasons. ‘All that talk he made—I admit he took me in. “This here’s shape of things to come, wave of the future. Training in bereavement psychology, therapy and counseling; the scientific approach to grief; latest techniques getting to closure. And logistics, economies of scale and so forth. In the very near future, during our own lifetimes, I promise you, this’s literally going to become the only way to go.” Oh, he could go on and on. But the real reason that he did it was so he could spend more time rodeoin’. Wallace does like the ladies, but he may like rodeoin’ more.’

  “He was married to Rosalie twen’-seven years. I have met her and we talked about it, what it was like being married to Wallace then, when she was, and when I was, seven years later, his fourth wife, and neither one of us could see much difference. I think she’s a nice lady—even if she did get most of his money so there wasn’t that much left for his later wives like me—’cept for the annual dividends. Which was a lot, I’ll grant you that, but nothin’ like what she got. I said somethin’ like that to her once, when we’re havin’ cocktails? And she said I was a real smart girl and I had that exactly right. ‘I did the same thing with Wallace that he did with the family business.’ That was what she said to me. ‘When I saw how things were goin’, well, I didn’t like it, but at least I was the first to cash him out, so I got the best price.’

  “I got to know all this before I married him because just like I promised my daddy, I stayed in school during my year as Miss Memphis, traveled back and forth to Knoxville making my appearances during junior year, finished my BS in marketing, graduated with my class. And then my first job was executive assistant to the vice-president of private banking at the Memphis Safety Deposit—Mister Roland Dexter, he’s a good friend of my daddy’s. My daddy said that if I studied Mister Roland Dexter while I was workin’ for him, I would learn a lot about all smart businessmen. ‘And one thing you learn is that no businessman who’s really smart will mind it in the slightest if he happens to find out that a real good-lookin’ woman also’s a real sharp-thinkin’ woman. If he’s as smart’s he thinks he is, he’ll like her even better.’

  “And my daddy was right about that, like he was about so many things. That’s how I met Wallace. Mister Dexter put me in charge of keepin’ track his portfolio, and also let it slip Wallace was single? And so then when I first laid eyes on him I was so impressed? There he was in his western shirt and leather jacket, real tight jeans and these gorgeous handmade boots? And I said to him, ‘My goodness, sir, this’s how you look? Reviewin’ your portfolio, its extent and all, I don’t know, I guess I must’ve expected a much older man.’ He did seem to like that.”

  At the time of purchasing the townhouse she had wholeheartedly agreed with Darren that the wisest financial course for them was indeed as he suggested—to leave his government pension fund and his IRA undisturbed in the admirable mid-six figures they had reached during his twenty-two years of bachelor frugality and maximum allowable deductions from his FBI pay. That way they would not only avoid severe IRS penalties for early withdrawal but prepare for his late and her early fifties a bountiful thirty-year federal retirement, to cushion nicely their transition into a doubly rewarding second career for him in state law enforcement or the private security sector and for her, as well, continuing her midlife blossoming as a freelance certified private investment counselor.

  “Back in Tennessee, most likely, but somewhere in the middle South, for sure—we both still got family there.” That down-payment contribution—“as long’s the place goes in my name, of course” (as it did), “you’re still young and in good shape, but one thing you learn bein’ married to a mortician; take the cash and leave the promises for someone else, ’cause anybody’s light can go out any time, and often does, they least expect it”—enabled her to think happily of his savings as theirs and of their residence as a desirable small parcel of northeast residential real estate and thus one of her shrewdly diversified investments. She did not conceal that view of things from others.

  The first evening when Darren came home from the office and told her he had agreed with Jack, without consulting her, that it was Darren’s turn to host a dinner with Nick and Arthur, she said that meant that they’d be six for dinner. She said that that was good because it meant she could make a nice leg of lamb or a beef Wellington, either one of which was just too much for less than six people, and no matter what anybody said, no one really liked to eat leftovers, and no matter how comfortable they might be in life, by which she meant well fixed, she did “just abominate waste, like my daddy always taught me, ‘never throw good food away.’ ”

  Darren explained to her that in fact Cheri Farrier had not been invited and would not be coming, just as Lily had not been invited to the first two such dinners he’d attended with Nick and Arthur at Jack Farrier’s brick townhouse on Adams Street in Quincy. Lily said at once she didn’t see what that had to do with it, since she hadn’t been able to move north to join him until almost eight months after he was transferred to the Boston office and this organized-crime-squad cloak-and-dagger business that he’d never been mixed up with anything like before, by which time he’d already been to a couple of those funny dinners.

  “Of course I hated being separated from Darren, all that distance, but I’d just barely started my MBA program at GW and I didn’t want to lose the first-year credits. I knew if I got them I could transfer them up here, so I finished out the year.” She confided that to new suburban Boston clients attracted to her in part by her MBA from Babson. To Darren she said, how could she have been invited the two times he’d already gone to Farrier’s “for those hush-hush dinners of yours” if they had happened before she’d even come up or gotten settled in, or so much as met Cheri Farrier, and she said she therefore couldn’t understand what that had to do with whether Cheri should come to their house when she’d be cooking one of them there. Or why Cheri wasn’t even going to be invited, if that was what he was telling her, as apparently it was.

  “Dearest,” Stoat said, “the reason is because apparently a long time ago when some agent named DeMarco, and Nick and Arthur, started this … oh, I don’t know, this custom, longstanding practice, where they’d get together and have dinner every now and then, to talk about, you know, what’s going on in the circles that they move in, have their business interests in, so forth—no one but the handling agent and the Strike Force group supervisor were included.

  “It wasn’t a custom of excluding women; it was a matter of confidentiality; excluding everyone, of either sex, who wasn’t directly involved. So Nick and Arthur could talk freely about their competition, LCN, which’s primarily what we’re interested in and they hate as much as we do—where our interests coincide. What the local LCN, the La Cosa Nostra p
eople, they seem to’ve been up to, and it looks like they’re probably going to be doing during the next two or three months. What they’ve picked up on the street. What the local hoods’re saying.”

  “But these men, they’re real criminals, aren’t they?” Lily said. “And you and Jack’re FBI, and you’re supposed to be catching them, and putting them in jail—aren’t you?”

  “Well, of course,” Stoat said, “that is and remains our stated mission. And that’s basically what we’re doing, all the time we’re doing this, every time we do it. Finding out what the criminals’re doing, what it is that they’ve been up to, and making plans, arrangements, so that we can either stop them from doing it, catch them in the act, or if they’ve already done it, the crime has been committed, then how we can set things up to get the evidence that will then enable us to go into a grand jury and charge them—and then bring them into court, and try them and convict them.

  “That’s what the whole purpose is of these dinner meetings. Jack and I get together, meet with them, a given place, we all think it will be safe, we won’t be inadvertently giving more away to the enemy than we’re getting out of it ourselves. Now, do we enjoy ourselves when we sit down and have this kind of dinner? Well, I can’t speak for the others—although I suspect that Jack does—but I personally do not. They’re not my kind of people, Nick and Arthur—they make me nervous. But it’s part of my job, and I have to do it.

  “And fortunately for me, the way it’s evolved over the years has been so that there isn’t any set interval—so that you could go to your desk calendar and say, ‘Well, let’s see now, next week have we got a meeting scheduled?’ And then find it and say, ‘Yes, and this time it’s at Jack’s house. Seven-thirty Wednesday.’ It’s all very clandestine. We don’t keep records. Jack’ll say to me, he runs into me in the hall, he’ll say to me he thinks it’s time again we got together. ‘With the lads, you know. Next Tuesday be okay?’ Without using their names.