At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  She straightened up and unrolled the poster, walking back to where she had been sitting, and leaned over the table so that she could hold the bottom down with her left hand in front of Dowd. He found that looking down her neckline he could see the tops of her nipples, dark brown circles among small freckles. Looking up at him she said, “No, at the poster,” and along with his gaze he shifted position to his right on the chair, placing his right hand on the edge of the poster precisely at the top of her black panty and looked down it.

  It was a harshly lighted three-quarter-angle frontal torso shot, with excellent sharpness. She stood with her arms akimbo, proudly. In addition to the panty she was wore a thin grey cropped tee shirt. She had been drenched, so that her hair streamed down around her gleaming face, shining grin and flashing eyes, and the tee shirt plastered to her showed the shape of her right breast and the fullness of both of them in detail, the nipples standing out in full arousal.

  “Mercy,” Dowd said admiringly. Without looking up, he said to Ferrigno, “You see this all right, Henry?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ferrigno said uncomfortably, attempting to sound listless, shifting his position at the door behind Sexton in his wheelchair, “I can see all right.”

  “Well, but upside down,” Dowd said practically, without looking up, shaking his head. “And you’re lookin’ over him there. What you have to do is come around this side the table. Look at ’em right side up. I mean—these’re really something. Gorgeous.”

  He looked up inquiringly, as though innocently meaning to seek Ferrigno’s gaze, but quite deliberately locked eyes with Sexton in his chair and held his gaze. There was savage helpless anger in Sexton’s eyes. “I take it, Mrs. Sexton,” Dowd said blandly, without looking at her, taunting her husband with his gaze and tone and the faint smirk at the corners of his mouth, “this was some kind of contest? Wet Tee Shirt Night or something? That they had at this place where you’d gone, with your husband and your friends, and you entered it, and won? And that’s what you’re celebrating tonight? When we interrupted?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “But I mean, is it okay now to roll it up now? I mean, you guys seen enough now?”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” Dowd said, smiling now on the left side of his face. “We’ve seen all we need to see. You can roll it back up now.” He lifted his hand off the poster and returned to his former position in his chair.

  Keeping his furious eyes on Dowd, Sexton lifted his hand immediately and fast off the top of the poster, holding it straight up, palm open and flat, fingers and thumb rigid, the fascist salute. Dowd widened his smile and flicked two fingers of his own right hand to receive it. The poster rolled up toward the center as she took away her left hand, so that the bottom and the top met in two rolls in the middle. She began rerolling it from the bottom to the top.

  “At first I didn’t want to,” she said. “You know, when we first got there to Rocky’s and we saw the sign and all—to expose myself like that. All those people there. But then we had a few beers, and Lou, you know, started saying, ‘Jesus Christ, ’re you guys nuts? What the hell’s the difference, huh? Everybody in here can already see what you got, best pair inna house—no woman here can beat ’em. You’re turning down a hundred bucks, you can have for the taking?’ And Joie, you know, said the same—‘It’s not like they can’t tell, you know, lookin’ at you, way you come in.’ And ‘All you’d be really doin’s givin’ them a little better look—it’s not like you exactly hide ’em.’ And like I say, we’d had some drinks, and then me and Tim, we sort of just looked at each other, like, you know—‘a hundred bucks?’ And so we said all right.

  “But I said they hadda use the hose, just hold it over my head and soak me down like that. I wasn’t gonna let ’em, you know, do like some girls let ’em do, and I did some other times myself, me and Tim first got together—come out with the tee shirt dry and an’ let them spray me onna stage like that they got there, with the seltzer bottles. Those things ’re strong, like powerful, and guys try to hurt you with ’em, aim ’em at your crotch and all, so that it stings. And they hadda let me change inna the tee shirt out in back. And the extra hundred bucks you get if you then take the tee shirt off and dry yourself off on the stage there, so you’re just there in your panties? In front of everybody? No way I was doing that.” She finished rerolling the poster, put it back on the refrigerator, and returned to her seat at the table.

  “Yeah,” Dowd said, having held her husband’s gaze while she told her story, “well, glad we got that straightened out.” He cleared his throat and looked around, meeting all eyes. “Now,” he said, “a report from our part of the forest.

  “As you may or may not’ve gathered,” he said, “the friend you expected to join you for dinner tonight, Mister Louis Sargent, has been unavoidably detained. By us. On a felony charge of conspiring and attempting to possess and distribute a Chapter Ninety-four-C, Section Thirty-two, Class A, controlled substance, an opium derivative, to wit—hydromorphine, to wit—Dilaudid, with intent to traffic therein. Which is punishable by a term of ten years in the state prison. To be served.”

  Theresa’s mouth kept opening and gaping, and each time she noticed it she closed it, working to receive and process what Dowd was saying and reminding him of a finning goldfish hanging in a glass bowl of warm standing water.

  “Having had a chance to think about his predicament and come to terms with what would certainly happen to him if he failed to make friends for himself with the mammon of righteousness, in this instance represented by our Trooper Jameson, Mister Sargent shrewdly elected, as we like to say, to come coco with us.

  “And I’m very pleased to report that when your pal Lou searches his soul and makes his decision to throw in his lot with the law, he don’t mess around. He barfs his guts up. He has given us the whole nine yards, a whole gang of information about the operation you two have got running here, and at this point I would like to say—and I can afford to do this, make these generous remarks, since we’ve got you two so cold we could use you to flash-freeze fish sticks—I am truly impressed with everything I know about it. The ingenuity, the sheer brilliance of it, using genuinely sick people to pyramid prescriptions of medications that they actually need?” He shook his head and raised his eyebrows. “Well, what can I say, huh? Genius, the work of a mastermind.

  “And the magnitude of it all—sixteen conscientious people”—Sexton swallowed hard, involuntarily; Dowd pretended not to notice—“out there laboring for you, out there beaverin’ diligently around this great commonwealth of ours, bringin’ in the pure? One hundred percent FDA pharmaceutical grade pure? Breathtaking’s what it is; that’s the only word for it—absolutely, breathtaking.

  “So,” Dowd said, “knowing as you now do how much, as an expert, so to speak, I have to admire your setup, you’ll understand how much it saddens me to say what I have to say now. It’s over. You’re finished. Toast. We’ve got Lou in the slammer, and we’ve got other cars out other places even as I speak, rounding up your other henchmen, rolling your ring up like a rug. We know from Dennis and the paper with the watermark, and before we leave tonight—taking you along, of course——” He paused a beat; Theresa blinked, and bit her lip. “Yes, if we hafta we’re gonna take you in—if you make it necessary.” He paused another beat. “We will’ve called in enough PC for a search crew to get a warrant for this place that’ll be bulletproof—if it’s ever tested.”

  Now Sexton blinked. Dowd saw him do it. “Right,” he said, “you just thought of it: ‘How come they didn’t get the warrant?’ Before we came to call?” He sighed. “Well, much as I do hate to speak unkindly of my fellow man,” he said, shaking his head, “the sad fact of the matter is sometimes he can’t be trusted. And even sadder to relate, some of those times have been when my fellow man or woman was the clerk of court. Read an affidavit to support a search warrant; and then, after the warrant issued, but before it could be executed, went and called the subject of it—so by the time the cops got the
re the drugs and cash and guns’n’ stuff were all gone. And quite often the suspects were, too.”

  He smiled. “So, we live and learn. While our colleagues are getting the warrants, if we decide that they’re needed, Trooper Ferrigno and I’ll be sitting right here with you. Helping you to curb what I’m sure’re your very strong natural urges right now to be running all over the place here, picking up and destroying what I’m even surer must be lots and lots of physical evidence—of this very considerable drug-dealing network Mister Sargent tells us you’ve been running out of this tidy little ranch house for almost three years now. Flushing it down the toilet. Burning it in the fireplace. Wishing to God that you’d bought yourselves one of those document shredders’ll chew up the world, they’re always sellin’ at Staples. Maybe two weeks ago.” He sighed and smiled, sympathetically. “But that’s human nature, isn’t it now? The fact of the matter’s—you didn’t.”

  Still smiling, he leaned toward Sexton again. “And when I say that network’s considerable, Mister Sexton,” he said, “as we both know very well, I understate the matter. Mister Sargent had five scrips in play when we grabbed him today. That’s ten years times five, in case you’re keeping score at home, since you get ten for each offense. And if that’s not impressive enough, just think what those scrips represented, as of course I’m sure you have. A thousand hits of Dilaudid, Lou was getting for you.”

  Dowd sat back, the smile gone. Sexton watched him as a bird watches a cat. “That was more than double what he had been doing, for the past year or so, but even so, that’d been pretty impressive. The four hundred hits a month he’d been bringing in before, combined with about the same amount of goodies you were gettin’ from each one of the other fifteen guys ’n’ gals you had out there goofin’ druggists for you? Of course it wasn’t all Dilaudid, so the number of hits varied; but still, roughly comparable amounts of the other kinds of stuff? Sixteen times four hundred? Sixty-four hundred caps ’n’ tabs ’n’ pills a month, before this recent escalation? Times twelve times a year? Must’ve left lots of evidence here. Have to be records of that kind of commerce.

  “And my God, where you were headed. You sure are ambitious critters. In the past year you’ve turned about seventy-seven thousand doses of legitimate painkillers, and mood elevators, and God only knows what all, into underground illegal pops, and … well now, we know you weren’t keeping the stuff for yourselves. You haven’t got dough enough, pay all your accomplices. You haven’t been taking the stuff yourselves—you had’ve you’d both be dead now. And you haven’t been dealin’ the stuff outta here, ’cause we would’ve known—your neighbors would’ve complained. So you hadda be sellin’ it, someone.

  “So now whoever you’re selling to wasn’t satisfied, anymore? He was so hungry double wouldn’t be enough; you were going to two-and-a-half? Aiming for two hundred thousand joy pills? Good Christ, Mister Sexton, Mrs. Sexton, who the hell were you two supplying? Have you ever thought about that? The Chinese CIA, for Chrissake? Someone who wants to take over the country? Without using bombs? By putting us all under first?” He paused two or three beats, then said softly and mockingly: “Do you start to suspect what we want from you?” Smiling again he said, almost whispering now: “We wanna know who it is.”

  He ran the tip of his tongue back and forth against the inside of his lower lip on the tops of his lower front teeth. He could keep his gaze on Sexton and still see Theresa to his right in his field of vision. She seemed to be suffering extreme cold. Her shoulders were shaking; her arms and hands were trembling; she was chewing on her lips and tremors washed across her face. Sexton’s face was immobile; his eyes stared, bulging slightly. The prosthesis in his left hand rested in his lap. He was breathing rapidly. Dowd could see his chest expanding and contracting, hear the air rushing in and out through the hole in his throat.

  “Mister Sexton,” Dowd said, leaning in again, “let me outline for you the fix that you’re in. You won’t find it a pretty sight. Even a moderately aggressive assistant district attorney at the very least will make each one of those sixteen deliveries your mules have been bringing to you each month into a separate overt act, when he gets you indicted for your conspiracy. And then he’ll have you indicted again on each one of them, as a separate substantive offense. A separate felony count. Seventeen times ten?

  “He will have as many of those counts as it turns out we can cast for him in cement. We don’t know yet how many we’ll have, but both of us know—a great many. Almost eight hundred just for the past year. Have you got any idea what a judge’s going to do to you—to both of you, Mister Sexton—when you get found guilty on that?

  “Eight hundred times ten. Eight thousand years? That’s ridiculous. No human being could do that. Let’s be reasonable here. Try ten on the first one and ten on the second and ten on the one after that. Each of those on and after, and then after those first three, the next seven-ninety-seven terms also on and after, but concurrently, with each other. Forty years. No parole. Does that sound like life to you yet? Does to me.”

  The speaker played softly “Take the A Train.” Sexton’s eyes roved. He said nothing. Theresa made whimpering sounds.

  “You got one way, avoid that,” Dowd said, holding his position, keeping his voice low and soothing. “You got one way you can save your wife and yourself from spending the rest of your lives in jail. And I don’t want to hear about how they’ll kill you if you give them up—we both know that that doesn’t count. You’ve been where people got killed for nothing. You saw it every day. You know there’re worse things’n just getting killed, and you’ve got something that if you lose her’ll be far worse’n getting yourself killed.” He made his voice hard, and louder. “Haven’t you, Tim? Who were you selling the stuff to?”

  Sexton shook his head, blinking, coughing strangely, silently. “One way, Tim,” Dowd said, his voice low. “Otherwise you go, my friend—and your lady also goes.”

  Still shaking his head, the ponytail bobbing, his face now decomposing to cry, Sexton with his eyes now down raised the prosthesis to his stoma and urged words out through it. “I can’t,” he said.

  “You have to,” Dowd said.

  “No,” Sexton said, his eyes still down, the tears coming now down his cheeks, “I would. I know what you want. And if I could, I would. For her. I can’t. I can’t wear no wire. With this. She’ll have to be here. No one else can be, but she has to be. She’s always here when he comes. If she isn’t, he will know. Will know something’s wrong. And if she is and I’m wired, then they’ll know. Right off. And then they’ll kill us both.”

  “God damn you,” Dowd roared, coming out of the chair. “Quit your goddamned faking. We’ll take care of the acoustics, shithead. We know what we can do and we know what you can do and you’d better do it, you lying piece of shit. You give me the name, you bastard. Who’s your pick-up-pay-off guy, and when does he come?”

  Sexton was licking his lips, sobbing gusts of air and raising the prosthesis, his eyes wild and rolling, when Theresa moaned, “Thursdays. Used to be on Tuesdays. Now he comes here on Thursdays. Rascob. We sell it to Max Rascob.” In the right corner of his vision Dowd could see her put her head down and cover her face with her hands, her gilded nails in her reddish-blond hair, and begin to sob wrackingly.

  Keeping his gaze on Sexton, now slumped and motionless, Dowd sat back in the chair. Nodding, he first curled his lips and shook his head at Sexton. Then he looked up to Ferrigno. “Maxie,” he said, gently, “Maxie,” and when he smiled again, Ferrigno bowed to him.

  16

  WHEN MCKEACH IN THE SHINY OLD blue Bonneville Brougham came down West Broadway soon after midnight, the white curtains in windows of the second- and third-floor apartments above the storefronts to the left were still, lighted from the street, the rooms behind them dark. He saw only one man walking on the sidewalk, big and thick in the body, his face red and weathered under a grey scally cap, wearing a bulky olive-drab field jacket and blue jeans; he proceeded slow
ly and carefully, his hands in his jacket pockets and his shoulders hunched, intent on his balance and the placement of his booted feet. Farther down the lights were still golden in the windows of Armhein’s Restaurant on the easterly corner of the intersection of West Broadway and A Street. Two men stood talking in the sheltered doorway cut into the corner of the building, their faces shadowed by the bills of their dark-blue Red Sox B-logo baseball caps; the one on the right took his right hand from his jacket pocket and saluted McKeach’s Pontiac with a couple of fingers, and the one on the left used three fingers of his left hand. McKeach lifted his left hand from the wheel, languidly returning a two-fingered wave, and turned right off Broadway onto B Street, disobeying the one-way arrow on the corner.

  He drove down B in the middle—Cistaro’s maroon Expedition was parked at the left curb next to a NO PARKING sign—to the driveway behind Flynn’s Spa facing Old Colony and turned left into it. His headlights caught the silvered reflectors in the headlights of Rascob’s old grey Town Car—the Naughton kid was impassive but alert behind the wheel; he nodded recognition—and the red reflector lenses in the taillights of Cistaro’s black BMW. McKeach backed out again and parked the Pontiac at the curb behind Cistaro’s Expedition.

  He got out into the clear darkness that seemed colder after the warm day and as always took a moment to scan the area. Cistaro made fun of his habit. “Arthur—I bet when Arthur gets the soap all rinsed off inna morning, you know, inna shower? Gets through playin’ with himself and makin’ sure that he’s still got at least as many fingers as he had the night before, he came home and went to bed; that before he slides the glass door open first he takes a look around. What is it that you call it, Arthur? ‘Just doin’ a little recon’?