At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “I will say she did cross me up, though, little bitch—it turned out that she did have ’em. She did have the balls to leave.

  “But hey, okay, she made her mind up, that was how she wanted it—okay, that was still all right with me. Then that’s how it’s gonna be. But anyway, beside the point, John, far as you are now concerned. Point for you is if Kay now knows you’re fucking Ginny and as a result she’s not happy; or if the other one isn’t happy, Ginny, knowing that you still fuck Kay; any of that happy horseshit—just never mind it, all right?”

  Sweeney looked puzzled. McKeach sighed. “I’m making this too complicated,” he said.

  “The way you do it is, you fuck the one that you wake up with, and then you go out for the day and do your regular work. And then when that day’s over and it’s time now to relax, you then go fuck the other one. And then either go back to the first one, that you fucked in the morning, so you spend the night with her again anna next day’s the same as the one before, or you stay that night with the second one—anna next day it’s then the same thing, but reversed. And you never tell the one you’re leavin’ in the morning, don’t matter which one it is, if you’re coming back that night. She asks you, you say ‘Dunno.’ Period.

  “And that is how you do it, if you get it up enough so that you can do it—which I would think that most guys can, get their rocks off twice a day. They would think that was about right, specially with two different broads; you’d have some variety.

  “And that, incidentally, is one thing you’ve got goin’ for you, this’s what you’re doing here—fucking two women every day—they don’t think we can. All the stuff they read in all the fuckin’ magazines and see on television, gettin’ laid and so forth, fifty different ways to do it—it’s always about how of course they can come off six or seven times a night without even breathin’ hard. But all we can do it is once. Or maybe, when we’re still young studs, maybe twice in the same day, if we could sneak a nap in. So it will generally be quite a while that you can fuck two women before either one of them’ll really believe it. Even if the evidence is in front of her face. Because she doesn’t think you can. She thinks if you’re pullin’ down her bloomers, she must be your only one. But you still have to face it—sooner or later one of them’ll find out, and then if the other one don’t know, well, it’s just a matter of time—she’s gonna.

  “And then what? Well, if either one of them don’t like it, then, well, you make your decision and you let one of them go, tell her to just beat it. ‘I’m tiredah yah noise—take a hike.’ And you keep the other one—who then thinks she won. While you start keeping your eyes open for a new one for the place you now got open. The key’s not to let it get complicated.

  “Not that I care how you do it, just so you don’t get to thinking you’re comin’ in here an’ livin’ over my store. I’m not gonna have some half-crazy woman that you’re fuckin’ while you’re fuckin’ someone else come in here some night after dark, hollerin’ and screamin’, maybe wavin’ a gun around—gonna reduce competition, shootin’ up the joint and drawin’ cops. This’s where I have my business, and the kind of business I do, where I do my business matters. Anything else that goes on in here comes way second after that.”

  Shifting the duffel to his left hand in order to pull the door closed with his right, Rascob then used both hands to lug it in front of him down the passageway until he had passed the northeasterly corner of the big office. Then, steering the duffel around to his left and counting his steps on the wide planks he could not see underfoot, he carefully followed the bag into the gloom of the space between the studs supporting the interior wall of the big office and the bearing studs of the outside wall of the spa. The dirt accumulated on the inside of the narrow windows under the eaves made the thin remaining light of late afternoon in April into the pale twilight of evening.

  When he had counted six paces, he stopped and used his left hand to grope in the gloom at shoulder level, once more—again to his mild surprise and relief—finding the seventh stud in from the passageway, then locating by touch the rocker switch for the single-bulb shop light suspended overhead. He pressed the switch and the bulb came on.

  Up against the studs of the outside wall facing B Street there was a faded red steel floor-model Coca-Cola cooler. Three feet high, four feet deep and six feet long, with a top that was hinged at the middle and equipped with a handle at each end, it had been designed in the fifties for use by the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. to ice down as many as two dozen twenty-four-bottle cases of Coca-Cola—576 six-ounce bottles—for free good-will distribution at public gatherings at which Coke was the only beverage served. The front carried raised white block letters that read DRINK and larger white letters in flourished script reading COCA-COLA.

  John Flynn had obtained it and three others for a Fourth of July celebration on Broadway in 1953, after Ike had stopped the fighting in Korea, and had so arranged matters that when the Coca-Cola people came to retrieve the coolers on the morning of the fifth one had disappeared. Thereafter each year on St. Patrick’s Day and other public celebrations he used it to chill beer served from the loading dock to loyal customers and friends who knew about the informal gathering behind the Spa, three blocks west of the parade route on Broadway.

  Rascob set the duffel down on the planking and used both hands to open the top of the machine and lift it off, resting it against the left end of the cooler. Then he lifted the duffel onto the left-hand corner of the cooler and rested it there.

  The cooler was about a quarter full of currency. The contents of the duffel would bring the total it contained to slightly over $631,000. He had finished stacking the currency from the duffel in the cooler and was replacing the cover when he heard the first footfall on the wooden staircase below. He sighed as he spun, reaching out and pressing the rocker switch that shut off the light overhead. He took a deep breath and held it.

  The person approaching began to hurry up the stairs, extending his left arm to hasten his ascent by pulling on the railing, making it shake audibly. Then a second person followed the first.

  “Max,” McKeach said, first in line, reaching the top of the stairs, “I assume it’s you in there, just had the light on with the money. If it’s not, you’ll wish you were Max, me and Nick get through with you.” Rascob exhaled and turned the light on.

  “Well,” McKeach said, extending his arms and putting his hands on the studs making the opening into the passageway as Cistaro sidled past behind him, “did my man Junius’s man, the Bishop, have the money at Wheelers today?”

  “No,” Rascob said. “Bishop, he say to me that Junius say for him to say to me, that the people at the hospital there, where they still be treatin’ him for all those burns he get that day he meet the man, McKeach? Before he realize who he is? Well, don’t they go and they change Junius’s day for therapy again, they just at him day and night, and he just purely hasn’t had the tahm to go and get together that large sum of money that he knows you been expectin’ fo’ this week an’ las’, countin’ on him there to have, but if I will come by tomorrow, he will have it fo’ me then. If I tell him I will do that, or that the man himself, McKeach, will do that, just come by tomorrow mornin’, then he will most definitely have that money there and waitin’ for me then.” He paused and snickered. “That be what the Bishop said.”

  McKeach displayed the small smile. “I see,” he said, “I see.”

  14

  “YOU’RE FROM DOWN AROUND THERE, RIGHT?” Dowd said on the way to Canton. He was the passenger in Trooper Henry Ferrigno’s unmarked cruiser, a white Chevrolet Impala. They were southbound in heavy traffic on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, the twilight darkening into evening at 6:20. Coming up on Morton Street, Ferrigno expertly avoided a white Cadillac Sedan DeVille double-parked with its engine running in the travel lane; as they passed he nodded toward it, saying, “One warm afternoon and summer’s here, I guess.” Dowd followed his gaze to the young black man in the right rear seat exchangi
ng currency for the small parcel held out by the older, very tall and long-armed black man with beaded dreadlocks in a red tee shirt crouching beside it. Dowd shook his head and said, “Nah, drugs’re a trade for all seasons. Kidding ourselves, we think we’re ever gonna stop it.”

  Ferrigno said, “Mmh.”

  “Nice if we could, but we can’t,” Dowd said. “It’s an evil way to make a royal living. Way better’n an honest job onna garbage truck. Well, do the best we can. You ever heard this radio guy? Heard him or heard of him?”

  “Actually, I have,” Ferrigno said. “Both. My mother used to tune him in on the kitchen radio every afternoon, she got home from the Town Clerk’s Office. Strange dude, very strange dude.”

  “Know his signal off hand?” Dowd said, reaching toward the standard broadcast radio in the dash.

  “Oh, never forget it,” Ferrigno said. “ ‘Ninety-eight-point-eight, FM—five thousand boomin’ watts.’ Guy’s a little warped but he does have a sense of humor. You’ll be wasting your time now, though, this side of Big Blue Hill. My mother could just barely get him where we lived, in Holbrook. Only Randolph ’tween him and us. His transmitter’s down in Sharon someplace, ‘on some dirt we sort of mounded up there—pretty big pile of dirt, though; biggest mound of dirt around.’ Wait ’til we get on the other side of Big Blue; then see if you can get him.

  “Back then I didn’t understand it, the appeal he had for her. But hell, I was still a kid. Well, I was in college, eighty-six or seven; didn’t think I’m still a kid then, nineteen years old, twenty—I knew everything. Used to say to her, ‘For Gossake, Ma, this guy’s not to be believed.’

  “Not that I was completely off—he’s a pretty lame excuse for a talk-show host. I mean literally—he’s a talking machine. Had his larynx out. Got this mechanical thing that he uses to talk, and the sounds he makes with it? Jesus. He gets in too close the mike, sounds like someone callin’ moose.

  “He was right for her agenda,” he said. Bringing the Impala to a stop in the left lane at the traffic light at Morton Street, he took both hands off the wheel and looked at Dowd. “It wasn’t how good a talk-show host he was. It was him being in a wheelchair, and what put him there. Another victim of a careless, thankless country.”

  “Vietnam,” Dowd said.

  “You got it,” Ferrigno said. “To this day she believes that if we’d only gone in a little harder; stayed a little longer; gone all out and tried a little more; not let the protestors make so much noise; stood behind our presidents the way we always did before that—right? She bought into the whole scenario of betrayal. Somebody, I dunno—was it Goldwater said it, when Jane Fonda went over there? ‘Hope and comfort to the enemy’—that’s what Hanoi Hannah meant to the Cong.

  “Everyone’s to blame. ‘Both parties,’ she’ll say, when she really gets going. ‘Republicans and Democrats, got us so involved there. His Highness JFK—in a very big way. He thought it was a grand idea. Adventure. They all did. Sure this was what we should do. They all lied.’

  “That is what she thought, and that is what she thinks, to this very day, and no matter what anybody says to her, she will not be talked out of it. She believes this, and she always will believe it. Because my father got killed there, ‘and nobody cares, the way they do about the ones who died in World War Two, and World War One. Even in the Civil War, people still care about them—the Revolution. But not the men who died in Vietnam.’ ”

  “Such a loss has to mean something,” Dowd said.

  “Well, exactly,” Ferrigno said. The light changed and he put his hands back on the wheel, moving the Impala forward. “This guy Sexton was in Vietnam, First Cav, just like my father was, only not at the same time. He was there long after Dad ‘got sent home to me in a bag’—actually a metal box but she always says ‘a bag.’ ”

  “Well, she obviously loved him,” Dowd said. “We got him killed, his country did, and while some of us were doing that to him, a good many of the rest of us’re acting like we’re ashamed of guys like him. Or, ‘they were suckers.’ Understandable, she’s bitter.”

  “Oh, I know,” Ferrigno said. “All I’m saying is, she’s not a stupid woman, but she listens every day to this stupid show, this loud-mouth small-town blowhard. It’s not what he says, about abortion, or drunk drivers, gun control or prayer in the schools—it’s the Vietnam connection.

  “The way she heard about him, the Ledger did a story when he came home, he wasn’t quitting even though he couldn’t walk. ‘Look at him, the sacrifice he made for his country. And he won’t let it get him down. Say what you like about him—I admire him.’

  “My grandfather,” Ferrigno said. “Always bought his tires from John Natale. He didn’t even like Natale. Said he was a lyin’ ratta-bass. Sullivan’s in Rockland always had a better price. So why’d he buy from the lying rat bastard? Surprised you hadda ask. ‘He’s an Italo, is why. Keep the money in the neighbohood, the fam’ly. Always buy from your own.’

  “Sexton and my father’s neighborhood was Vietnam. What was Dad’s is hers. I don’t think she knows how Sexton lost the use of his legs—neither do I. I assume she thinks combat. As you naturally would. But she doesn’t know if he ever saw combat. And I doubt she thinks having to spend your life in a wheelchair’s quite as big a sacrifice as giving it up, completely, stepping on a mine and getting blown to kingdom come. Doesn’t matter—he was an American soldier and it happened in Vietnam.

  “Therefore she may not necessarily believe what he says, but she will listen to it, give it a fair hearing. As far as I know, every day.” He laughed. “They’re old friends. Been together over twenty years.”

  “So this’s going to come as a big shock to her,” Dowd said. “We arrest this guy and charge him with dealing drugs.”

  “Absolutely,” Ferrigno said. “Gonna take me at least a week or two to live it down. But from what Jameson says this cancer patient told him, we’re not gonna have much choice.”

  “Well, no, but we don’t want to be too hasty here,” Dowd said as the Impala approached River Street at the intersection with the Cummins Highway, the traffic barely moving now. “The way I understand it, we’ve got the cancer patient all nice and secluded, right?”

  “On ice,” Ferrigno said. “On ice. Did just like you told me. He told Jameson, the drugstore, he can’t afford a lawyer, and——”

  “But this’s after he signed the waiver, and talked to us, right?” Dowd said. “We don’t want him doing any soul-searching, hiring some shyster and giving Sexton the heads up on the phone ’fore we get to Canton.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Ferrigno said. “Jameson’s with the cancer patient. Bobby says he owns him. ‘Looks like he’s ironclad—caves in like meringue.’ The thing he sent up to you, what’d he tell you about him?”

  “Not a hell of a lot,” Dowd said. “His call came in, full ah bells and whistles, I’m in one of those delightful meetings with the colonel. About the Mullahy case and are we makin’ any progress on it yet.”

  “I’ll bite—are we?” Ferrigno said.

  “No,” Dowd said. “Jody Aragon keeps thinkin’ he might be gettin’ someplace with some kid he used to know from the Dominican, apparently now up here with the Latin Kings. In Lawrence. And since they’re of course competin’ in the drug business with the black posse guys who did Mullahy, Jody’s tellin’ the Latino thug he should give us the black thugs. But so far he’s not buying.

  “Colonel was displeased. Does not like bein’ interrupted when he’s cuttin’ you a new asshole—he assumes you had the call set up ’fore you came in for the procedure. So I told Jameson to take it all down, what he’s gotten from the guy on the details of the business, and fax it to me, so I can read it at my leisure like a proper Christian gent. So that when I talk to Sexton I’ll sound like I was hiding in his closet every time he had a meeting for the past six months. And leave the personal background on this cancer-ridden monkey ’til we both’ve got more time.

  “And that is what he
did. Dictated me a four-page fax on the Sexton operation which I read before you came, and I dunno if I now know everything that Sexton ever did, but I can sure sound like I do. Bobby may talk like his first language’s Polish, but he knows how to debrief a subject, and when he’s got the wind up him he can make that voice-recognition gadget of his sing.” He sniffled. “But nothing personal about the subject, no. I told him there was no time.”

  “He gave it to me,” Ferrigno said. “Guy’s name is Louis Sargent. Lives in South Dartmouth. Name onna scrip he gives the druggist at the CVS in Mansfield’s Andrew Chamberlain. Says he lives at Forty-seven Lincoln Street, just over the line in Norton. There is such an address. Street directory says people who live there’re named Harriman, but he’s ready with the casual chitchat, an explanation for his showing up at this CVS with this paper—Harriman’s his married daughter, Joan. He’s staying with her and her husband up here for a while, seeing specialists in Boston. Finding out if they’ve got some miracle cure the folks down in New Jersey haven’t heard about yet. Maybe can do something for him Trenton doctors overlooked. Also resting, trying to regain his strength. Says he’s got bone cancer. Needs the Dilaudid for the pain.

  “Dose’s on the money. As a matter of fact it’s the dose he’s actually taking, and getting, under his own name, in South Dartmouth—his own legit prescription. This second helping that he’s after—Wheelchair Timmy’s gonna sell it and they’re both gonna make some dough—is also for sixteen milligrams a day, four-eighty for thirty days, right in the mid-range of acceptable and therefore normal dosages. In street terms? Two-hundred-and-forty-two-mig caps, sell ’em for anywhere from two bucks apiece to six, eight—depending on availability of other shit, how desperate people are.

  “But the pharmacist don’t know this, that Lou is gonna resell it, turn his twenty-buck investment into that kind of profit. Or that he’s got three other druggists in three other towns working on prescriptions for the same stuff, under three other names, just as well historied, so that he stands to scam this week close to a thousand pills, and gross about a thousand bucks, for blowin’ smoke at druggists. He may be sick but he can do this; isn’t heavy liftin’.