At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “At least with a simple one like this, you got somethin’. Yeah, cops’d figure it out, but they’d hafta hit the joint just right, on a make-up day, and grab the work before you had a chance to add it up, and mix it up, and flash the bags and tape.

  “ ‘Doin’ that would take great timing,’ Brian said. ‘Which very few cops I ever heard of had.

  “ ‘Not to mention—half an hour’s quite a lot of time, you know what to do with it. Someone who wasn’t busted but who knew the raid’d happened could make one shitload of phone calls, half an hour, to other guys who’d like to know. Give them time to clean up their joints, ’fore cops came to visit them.’ ”

  Adams Canteen Catering in the Randolph Industrial Park had been Rascob’s fourth stop of the day. In the office at the back of the freight terminal that Jackie Adams leased for his garage and shop, Rascob had marked each of the five bags Jackie gave him with a W. In the office above the spa he had written the same letter next to each of the five sub-subtotals he had reached on the calculator, leading to the W subtotal for the Adams Canteen Catering location of $11,930, 430 twenty-dollar bills and 333 ten-dollar bills.

  As with the contents of the other bags, he had used wide beige rubber bands to collect four hundred of the twenties into eight stacks of fifty, putting the remaining thirty bills aside for combination with twenties from other locations. He had banded three hundred of the ten-dollar bills in three stacks and reserved the remaining thirty-three for banding with tens from other locations.

  When he had emptied and tallied all of the bags, there were four complete rows of fifty greyish-green thousand-dollar stacks and an incomplete row of nine stacks on the table in front of him. He had piled loose bills amounting to $375 to his right on the side. He folded those into a thick wad and put it into his left front pants pocket.

  He tore the tape along the serrated edge at the top of the calculator and folded it four times. Then he pushed his chair back from the table and bent over, rolling the dark blue silk sock on his left calf down below his shin bone, wrapping the tape tightly around his ankle and then rolling the sock back up over it. He humped the chair back up to the table and deleted all of the entries he had stored in the memory of the calculator. Then he reached down and unplugged it from the black extension cord leading to the wall outlet behind him, flipping the cord back to rest against the mopboard. He stood up, gathered the cord around the calculator and replaced it in the top right-hand drawer of the desk.

  Returning to the orange chair, he stooped and picked up the grey wastebasket and put it on the table. Then he reached down again, picking up the gaping duffel. He put it at the center of the table and went around to the other side. Using both hands and forearms he gathered the stacks of currency together and dumped them into the duffel bag. He zipped it closed.

  Picking the wastebasket up with his left hand, he carried it to the brown stove and set it down on the floor in front of the silent stove. A two-foot iron poker with a wooden handle lay on the floor under it. He went to the wall thermostat and turned the lower pointer on the dial clockwise to 90. As he turned back to the wastebasket, the stove grunted and ignited. He opened the door to the combustion chamber as the gas jet filled it with flames. He took three or four of the lettered paper bags from the wastebasket and drew the poker out from under the stove. He put the bags at the opening of the stove and used the poker to shove them into the flames. They burned brightly and quickly. He kept adding bags until the wastebasket was empty. Then with the stove door open he stood erect and went back to the thermostat, resetting it to 75. The stove subsided, sighing. In front of it again, he crouched and peered in, satisfying himself that no legible fragments remained. Then he replaced the poker beneath the stove and shut the door.

  He went back to the table and shrugged into his suit jacket. Then he nudged the orange chair that he had used back among the others along the southerly wall. He picked up the duffel bag with both hands. He stood holding it and looked around, nodding when he was satisfied that no one surmising what he had been doing in the big office would be able to confirm and prove it from anything that he would leave behind.

  “That’s the secret, Maxie,” McKeach had told him after he had met and sized him up in the old Pilothouse beside the Fort Point Channel. “You decide to work for me, for us, you got to forget your strongest instincts. You’re a certified public accountant, trained to keep neat and permanent records. Clear enough so people who had nothin’ to do with keepin’ ’em can take a look and know right off all they need to know about the business you worked for.

  “Our business, that’s last thing we want anyone else to be able to do. What we want you to do is make the record right, but also make it temporary. So as soon’s we read it and we got it in our heads, where we keep the real records, the one you made disappears.” He studied Rascob as though appraising him as bodily collateral for a large loan. “And at the same time we do that, you have to make the record that you kept in your head while you made the written one also disappear.” He smiled. “Think you can do that?”

  “Hey,” Rascob said, three weeks out of jail, living in one seedy room, bath down the hall, in the old railroad Hotel Diplomat across the street from South Station. “I’m runnin’ outta money. Guy I met inside down at Plymouth, knew my situation, said he never met you but from what he heard about you I should get in touch with you. Tell you I really need a job.

  “There’s only one thing I can do. The law says I can’t do it. That means I got sentenced twice, once to do the fuckin’ time, and then to starve to death.

  “Well, I did the first one. I’m not gonna do the second. If it’s against the law for me to do honest work, I’ll do dishonest work, and if the law can hang me for that, well, they gotta catch me first.”

  “And if they do,” McKeach said softly, “are you sure you’ll be willin’ to hang? You already told me how you hated jail. You sure you can face goin’ back, most the rest your life? ’Cause that’d not be your only choice, you know, cops catch you workin’ for me. They’ll do that—they’re gonna ask you, just like I am askin’ now—‘You wanna hang? Do twenny years? Or wouldja rather go into the Program—help us hang McKeach, then we’ll disappear you, send you to New Zealand, someplace green.’ Still think you’d be willin’ to hang?”

  Rascob licked his lips and coughed, but his voice sounded strong to him. “Arthur,” he said, “how the hell do I know? Of course I am gonna say Yes—I need the damn job. But ’til I’m in the position that you just described, which I hope to God I never am, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  McKeach nodded. Then he reached across the table with his right hand and clapped Rascob on the left shoulder. “You’re an honest man, Max, I’ll say that for you. Nobody knows in advance what he’d do—stand-up guys have the guts to admit it. Myself, I would bet if they get you by the balls again you’d trade your mother to get loose. But like I said, no one knows.” He paused three beats. “You do understand, though, if you get caught, and fold on me, then no matter where they send you or how long it may take me, I will find you and I’ll kill you.”

  Rascob nodded. He moistened his lips again. “I thought that’s what you might say.”

  At the door Rascob took both handles of the duffel bag in his left hand and used his right to open it. To the left and right in front of him there was an unfinished passageway four boards wide created by the rear wall of the big office and the row of two-by-four studs on the other side. Sweeney in a Columbus Day weekend frenzy of unskilled carpentry years before had nailed them to the joists open on the other side beyond them. The space was chiefly lighted by two naked bulbs hanging in silver metal shop-light fixtures suspended from a cross rafter under the flat roof, wired in the same circuit as the fixture in the toilet operated from the single switch at the foot of the open staircase at the end of the passageway to Rascob’s left. Pink Fiberglas foam insulation lay between the joists. In the center of the rear wall, eighteen feet away, was a single twelve-pane window,
the glass filthy.

  The plan that had existed only in Sweeney’s head had called for the studio apartment in the space. In it the window was to have been replaced with a copper-clad bay window flanked by two casement windows, “which you could then crank them open in the spring and summer, for ventilation, see?”

  John Sweeney was a tall, heavy man whose brown hair had receded early, leaving him a sharp prow of it at the front that drew attention to his long sharp nose and bright dark eyes. For his fortieth birthday, in 1976, he had cultivated and then kept sharply groomed a Van Dyke beard that filled in dark red.

  “Looks like a crow, don’t he?” Cistaro would say at meetings in the big office, in the mood to get at someone. “Just like a fuckin’ two-hundred-an’-fifty-pound crow, lookin’ for some smaller bird’s nest, he can go an’ rob the eggs. Or some poor bastard’s little garden, trynah grow himself some plum tomatoes he can have fresh pasta sauce, Big Boys for his salad. Crow’ll go there and stab alla tomatoes with that big fuckin’ beak of his, suck out a little of the meat, leave ’em rottin’ onna vine. Ruin ’em for everybody else.

  “Same thing, some high-roller tries to stiff him. Jawn doan hafta tellah guy he’ll send McKeach around to see him—just gives him that killer-crow look; stiff’ll turn the little wife out onna street by sundown, suckin’ cocks for double sawbucks to pay off Jawn.” Then Cistaro would laugh. “Jawn’s own wife’s got him scared to death—poor fierce old crow is pussy-whipped, but he’s hell on guys don’t pay.”

  Straddling the two joists in front of the window and illustrating with his hands, Sweeney had enthused about his plan. “Anna big window in the middle here’d give you all the light you’d need in the main room here, where you’d have your dinette, and your couch and your TV, of course, see? And then up there next to where the john is now, all you’d have to do is put your sink in, and disposal, and just tap inna main plumbing tree, already there—got your water and your waste pipe and your drain right there; wouldn’t hafta put a new one in. And you would use the same toilet where it already is, cut a new door in this side of it, or if that bothered people, going to the john in what would then be this apartment, well, then just put in another one on this side of the cubicle that’s already there, and a Y-joint in the waste pipe, take care of that. And then install one of those Fiberglas stall showers that they’ve got all ready made now, and then you would be all set, ready for whatever happened. And this’s not a big project—’nother week or so, you’ll see, it’ll all be finished. Nice. Always have a place to stay.”

  To this McKeach had said, “No.”

  “Whaddaya mean, ‘No’?” Sweeney had said. “I know this’s zoned commercial but I already checked the city and they say there’s no reason at all the owner of a business like a spa or say, a drugstore, can’t put a bed in if he wants, and a place to take a shower and so he can cook a meal. Hell, we’ve already got the microwave an’ little fridge anna coffee urn on downstairs inna backroom there, day and night, Chrissakes, gets more attention from the help ’n the whole rest the store does—what the hell’s problem?”

  “The problem is you ain’t the owner and I am and I don’t want you livin’ here,” McKeach said.

  “It’s my name’s on the deed,” Sweeney said.

  “Yes, it is,” McKeach said, “and it’s also on the liquor license, and that’s why it went on the deed instead of mine and Brian G.’s. So the name on the deed and therefore the license application wouldn’t spit out a criminal record when the License Board plugged it in. And that’s the only reason—and you should keep that in mind, unless you maybe now decided what you now want is your name comin’ off the deed, which I can do, just as fast I put it on—in which case it might get chiseled on a headstone.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be livin’ here,” Sweeney said. “I’d just be stayin’ here a while—just until I can get things straightened out again with Kay.”

  “Which’ll be never, and you know it,” McKeach said, grinning. “Just like it was with Annie, and just like it’ll be when you finally figure out you can’t stay married to Kay if you’re gonna keep fuckin’ Ginny, any more’n you could stay married to Annie, you first started fuckin’ Kay. You’re worse’n Elizabeth Taylor—you think anything you had your dick in more’n twice, it then hasta marry you and you hafta marry it, or God’ll punish you. It’s a wonder you didn’t hafta divorce your right hand when you started fuckin’ Annie and decided, marry her.

  “You know what your problem is? I’ll tell you what it is. Your problem is your dream’s to be fucking two women the same time, but be damned if you can figure out how the hell to do it. When I told you and I told you but you just don’t seem to get it, that the only way to do it is the first thing that you do is, you completely stop worrying about what either one of them thinks. Never mind what they are thinking. You remember how it was, way back when I was with Traci, and then I started seein’ Dorothy and Traci just went bullshit?”

  He paused. Wonder and then amusement passed across his face. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I just said that and it hit me—that was thirty years ago. Nineteen sixty-six I think it was, that we broke up. So it’s over thirty years now, since I was with Traci? Shit. I really must be gettin’ old.” He shook his head.

  “Traci died, didn’t she?” Sweeney said.

  “Oh, yeah, years ago,” McKeach said. “Kids hadda move back in with their father, poor little bastards they were, everyone was sayin’ then, havin’ to go back and live with him, their no-good father, and the only reason they could even do that was it so happened when she got it, Dennis’d just gotten out from whichever place that he’d been in, dryin’ out that time, and ‘How long’s that gonna last, you think?’ That’s what people’re sayin’. And he then surprised the world, got those kids and said ‘Aw right, you’ll live with me, then,’ and he went and got his job back, working for Gillette. Raised those kids, took care of them? So far’s I ever heard at least no one ever saw him take a drink again. Really an amazing thing.”

  “Yeah,” Sweeney said, “but Traci there, didn’t she get shot?”

  “Oh, yeah,” McKeach said, “she got shot. But that wasn’t anything, you know, had anything to do with her—she was just there, with Richie Dugan, when his turn came to get it. Which most people were surprised it hadn’t happened to him sooner, fuckin’ renegade he was, sell his mother for a buck. It was him that they were after, whoever it was that shot Traci. Naturally when they got him, since she was there, it hadda be two-for-one day—shoot ’em both. Richie, he’d been gettin’ to the point where he was makin’ people nervous. Very friendly with DeMarco, Al DeMarco, FBI. Very friendly guy, DeMarco. They say he didn’t hafta take the candy from the baby—he could talk the kid into givin’ it to him. And you know how Richie was—didn’t take a DeMarco, talk him into doin’ somethin’. Word was he was gonna tell DeMarco who did the Kingston armored car—made some fairly hard guys nervous.

  “Traci had to’ve heard it, he had people lookin’ for him. Should’ve known what’s gonna happen, she happens to be standin’ next to him, they find him. Didn’t take ’em long. Hampton Beach. Which anyone, I mean, I could’ve told you, that’s where he’d go if someone told him, ‘Now just go lie low someplace, all right? Not long, a week or two, while we work it out with Washington.’ So what if it was wintertime, the merry-go-round was shut down and everything was boarded up except a couple clam stands? Wouldn’t make no difference, Richie—Richie just loved Hampton Beach. It was his favorite place to be. And so that was where he went, an’ Traci-little-bitch went with him.

  “Those were hard guys, involved in that, that armored-car thing. They did something, like clip a guy, they weren’t the type of guys who leave loose ends around you know? Fix one problem, make another one? Leave an eyewitness? Uh-uh. You’re there they find the guy they want? You must’ve wanted to come with him; you’re goin’ with him, too. Those guys were serious.”

  He sighed. “But that was Traci, all the way. Liked the brig
ht lights, and the danger—I think she got off on it. She was that way I first knew her, she’s still livin’ then with Danny and there’s nothin’ wrong with him, but you knew, she kept it up, there was probably gonna be. I even told her that myself—and this’s when she was with me—that it was really killin’ Danny; an’ she oughta cut it out. But there was no holdin’ Traci. She’s stayin’ out at night on him, bein’ seen with guys like me and Brian? Well, what’m I supposed to do? Leave her standin’ in the street, place shuts down at two A.M.? Or take her home and fuck her brains out like she’s clearly got in mind? So I did it, I admit it. And loved every minute of it. But you just knew something’d happen, and then sure enough, it did.”

  He paused and smiled. “She was one good-lookin’ babe, though, big blue eyes and all that hair? You did have to give her that. Not the brightest bulb in town, no, but lookin’ like that, you tell me, how bright did she needah be? As long as she’s still young. Why she ever married Danny and then had those two kids with him, that’s one thing I never knew.

  “But anyway,” he said, “that was before, long before we got together. And then I started goin’ out with Dorothy, a few times, and Traci heard about it somewhere, by then she’s livin’ with me, and did she ever get pissed off. She said I hadda cut it out. Well, I just told her, I said, ‘Traci, this’s something you decide now, what it is you wanna do here. If you want to stay with me, then that is what you should do. And when I’m here with you, I’m with you. And when I’m not, I’m not. And you leave me the fuck alone. An’ if you don’t want to do that, well then, I don’t think you should.’

  “And I was takin’ a chance there, and it’s not like I don’t know this—although the time if you’d asked me what I thought was gonna happen, I would’ve said, ‘Well, my thought is she won’t do it. She ain’t got the balls to go.’ But either way I couldn’t let it happen, let no woman run my life. That’s one thing you cannot do.