At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “And so I therefore went to him and told him about you and Nunzio, and also about Rocco, and asked him what I should do. And he told me I should stay with him, and again when he was somewhat older that this operation, ‘and it is a good size for an operation because the man who runs it can do almost all of it himself—with one other person he can trust, which is about as many as one man in one lifetime can expect to find, and need not concern himself about betrayal as he would working with many.’ And so I saw that if I expected to become richer before I was as old as he was, I would have to make a change.”

  Hinchey paused the Ampex. “Now this’s where Carlo comes in and really puts it to him,” he said. “I give it to the guy—he’s good. Carlo’s been around a while and he runs an operation full of very hard guys. When he wants to know something, he wants a straight answer. He’s not used to having people bob and weave on him, and that’s just what the Frogman does. I think that’s what he does, at least. Maybe you listen, you tell me.” He touched the Play button again. “Carlo now,” he said.

  “You say that. But you didn’t come with us. And you didn’t go with Rocco. Instead you went with McKeach. Why did you do that? When I had spoken with you, you had said that Girolamo also wanted you to join him, and that what you thought you had to do was decide whether you’d be better off with him or us, or if you simply stayed with Hugo as the broker for a bunch of amateurs. Nothing about McKeach to me. Not a word of him.”

  “Cistaro,” Hinchey mouthed.

  “McKeach was not McKeach then, when you talked to me. McKeach then was Brian G.’s man. Very powerful, but still, one part of an organization—very dangerous, as we all knew, never to be insulted, but he did not have an organization that he ran and made decisions. He enforced Brian’s decisions.

  “When he came to me, this’d changed. It was right after Brian G. went down. I know some people—cops, I know, believed Bernie G. would take his place, but no one I respected did, and I didn’t either. I thought, ‘Now that Brian G. is gone and leaves his organizaton and the man who managed it for him, McKeach, the man who managed it for him will have it for himself.’ And when he asked to talk with me and said we should get together because if we did that then with what he had left from Brian G. and what I had with Hugo we could make it possible for business to continue, while Nunzio—you—and Rocco’s people fought with each other, and then when you had settled that, we would be the other organization in a city that is big enough for two.

  “That made sense to me, the best sense I had heard, and so I said that I woud join him. And that is what I did.”

  Hinchey mouthed, “Carlo.”

  “Again, you confuse me. You said that you remained with Hugo because he made you believe that if you stayed with him long enough that when the day came he retired you would have what he had made. But then after Brian G.’s death and our war with Rocco began and McKeach then came to see you, you said you would associate yourself with him to form an independent organization—when you could have come with us. Or joined with the Girolamos. And Hugo was still in place then, when you joined up with McKeach.”

  The tape ran and made no sound. Farrier raised his eyebrows. Hinchey said, “Here it comes, now. Cistaro here.”

  “Yeah. Well, tell you how that came about. What’d happened, see, was this. My wife Madelyn and I, I’m still livin’ with her then, hadn’t been married that long, and what can I tell you, huh? We’re still in love. So these two young guys that dealt with Hugo every now an’ then, freelancers—like most the people Hugo did his business with, you know? Hugo’s organization was basically a bunch of people who weren’t organized, didn’t have a gang that they knew they were a part of, so when they needed something, just did something or they’re getting ready tah do something, they came and they saw Hugo. And these were two of them, just a couple of young Irish guys worked on the docks, I guess, and I therefore also knew them. And my wife’s then just found out for sure she’s pregnant, with our first. This would’ve been our daughter, Suzanne, and the baby’s not for at least seven months but she wants a washing machine. Right off, she’s gotta have one. And a drier. Both of them. So, and you know how they are, they got one in the oven, they decide they rule the world. You don’t get for them what they want, when they want it, well good-bye, that’s all she wrote; go stick your dick in somewhere else.”

  There was knowing and appreciative laughter on the tape.

  “So I talk to Hugo about this, and he says, ‘Here’s what you do. Get ahold the Ryan brothers, tell ’em what it is she wants, I said get ’em for you onna cuff. And then when it falls off of a truck I loan you my station wagon and you get a friend of yours to help you, pick them up and take them home, an’ hook ’em up? Guarantee it you’re a hero, finest husband ever lived, and when you get home at night she’ll have a cold beer in her hand for you an’ your dick out of your pants before you can get your coat off.’

  “So this sounds good to me and that is what I do, get a couple guys McKeach knows help me muscle the units around and I borrow Hugo’s car. This big green Olds Vista Cruiser, had this little windshield inna roof like the railroad cars with two decks in ’em. ‘Yeah, we got the washer. Got two very nice units for you. Go down the Navy Yard,’ they tell me, ‘sometime after nine o’clock. Building Seven. Maytags’ll be onna dock.’

  “So we do that, me and these two other guys McKeach knows. And maybe I should also mention this’s Friday, Memorial Day three-day weekend. So these guys’re all around, but places like the Navy Yard no one is around—because they’ve all gone away someplace for the long weekend. Anyway, this’s plus McKeach himself, he also comes, because the two guys he’s sending with me, they don’t have a car. I guess they cracked theirs up or something, means they’re gonna need a ride, and McKeach says he is free that night and what he’ll do, he’ll drive them.

  “We get them inna car, just barely, the two Maytags—hadda put the backseat down, filled up the whole back. And what I do, I then drive Hugo’s car with the machines in it, an’ have McKeach and his two guys follow me in his car—which they would’ve hadda anyway even if they had their own car—because they’re both pretty big and there’s no room for them inside of Hugo’s Olds. And anyway I dunno how much weight the springs in Hugo’s Olds can take before they break, in case I hit a pothole, something, with the Maytags inna back.

  “And so we do that. Take it our first house we’d just bought then in Tuttleville, me and Madelyn, this part of Hingham down there over by the dump that used to be there then with little houses and a sandpit there, now it’s all filled up with big ones, and we get the machines out of Hugo’s car and in the house, and hook ’em up—and it’s just like Hugo said. Madelyn’s as happy as a little pig in shit, ’cause she has got two new things she can tell her friends she’s got, I just got them for her. That always made her very happy—didn’t matter what it was, when I bought her things, ’cause that was all she cared about, having things were new. Especially if all her friends, they didn’t have one yet.

  “And then we mashed up the box the drier came in and put it in the washer box, and put that back in Hugo’s Olds. See, there’s all these markings onna carton that I don’t know what they mean; even where this washer came from. All I know is that I got it free, over at the Navy Yard, from two guys that I only seen once in my life, I’m not even sure their names, so I’m pretty sure it’s hot. For all I know there’s something on the box that if the people own the units get their hands on it again they may not then know who stole it, but if that box is at my house then they’ll be able, make a pretty good guess who’s got ’em. So I’m gonna take the box back into Inman Square over there in Cambridge, which’s where I’m meetin’ Hugo. He told me he hadda meet some guy he knew there, give his car back to him there. And also ask him he knows some place I can dump the box, so it don’t come back to haunt me.

  “So I go in this place where he was, leave his wagon parked outside, and he’s in there, like he said, with this guy that I don�
��t know. And I tell him my problem. And Hugo says when I meet him, ‘Yah, I know where you can take it. You just follow me in your car and I’ll show you exact place.’

  “So I do that and where he goes, we go this big construction site out by Fresh Pond there, they’re puttin’ up this huge motel. Apartment complex, something. Very dark, lots of equipment—huge bulldozers, crane. Wonder no one steals that stuff, they just leave it all around. Must be worth a lot of money. Put it onna flatbed, something, just haul it away. Must be no one does, I guess, but then I don’t know.

  “So anyway, I follow him in there, I’m expecting him to stop and show me, I’m supposed to dump the carton, I’ll then get out and help him do it. Pull it out the back his car and leave it there, ’til someone buries it ’long with all the other shit they got there just lyin’ around. And he does stop, but then the lights on his car don’t go off, so I don’t know if this’s it or if maybe this’s not the place, he’s just lost or something. Trynah get his bearings. So I wait. But nothing happens. Well, I’m not sitting there all night, so after a few minutes I get out of my car, go over to his, and he’s still in the driver’s seat, and I see that he is dead. Someone shot him inna head.”

  There was a brief period of soft laughter from several people on the tape.

  “Right. Well, I dunno who did this but there’s one thing I do know and that is someone has shot Hugo, and whoever this person is, he knows that I work with Hugo, so if he’s still somewhere around there and he sees me there with Hugo I am liable, get shot next. So I’m not hangin’ around there. I get the fuck out, and two or three days later, Tuesday, Wednesday, I guess, I find out that I was right. Because the people who’re working the construction site go back there after the weekend, they find Hugo in his car, but they don’t know it’s him. They don’t find out it’s him for another couple days, because apparently what happened after I got out of there, whoever shot him in the head also set the car on fire while he was still in it. Some kind of stuff burns very hot, like homemade napalm, maybe, and just totally destroyed the thing. Not only just the boxes, which after all’re only cardboard, few slats onna bottom, reinforcement, but everything ’Cept Hugo’s bones—just his bigger bones’re left. Anna paper said that even then they still weren’t sure, not completely anyway, if it was even him that died—just that they know he’s missing and the Olds’d been his car, so what they hadda do was they were only calling it ‘a tentative ID.’

  “And so then, after that, I decided I’d better get myself some backing there, because then with Hugo gone you could say I was alone. No one to protect me. And that’s when I joined McKeach.”

  “Now Carlo,” Hinchey mouthed.

  “McKeach was in the box.”

  “Cistaro.”

  “No, not when they found the car. See they didn’t find the box at all. Least the paper didn’t say it, that they’d found a box. Box wasn’t even mentioned. Box’d burned completely up.”

  “Now this’s Carlo again,” Hinchey said. “First you hear him, he’s laughing—but you can tell he’s impressed. What I can’t figure, is it the story he just heard, or Cistaro tellin’ it? I think it’s Cistaro telling. I think they all knew the story all along, ’m I right? Sort of Gangland’s Greatest Hits Night? That McKeach went and hid in the Maytag box while the Frogman went into the Inman Square Tavern for Hugo, knowing that when Hugo came out he’d take them to a safe place to shoot him. Where did Cistaro get the extra car he used to follow Hugo’s Olds? It had to be McKeach’s, ’cause McKeach was in the box.

  “Nick and McKeach had the guy set himself up—got him to pick his place to die. And that’s what these hoods here’re enjoying so much—hell’s bells, they’re lapping it up. This’s an old story to them, their version of Mother Goose Tales. They’ve heard it all told before.”

  “Sure,” Farrier said. “They like their war stories just as much as we like ours. It’s like the Church’s oral tradition, the deposit of faith—doesn’t matter if no one can prove it, if everyone knows that it’s so. What keeps the faithful faithful.”

  Hinchey frowned but said nothing and pushed Play again. The laughter came up.

  “Well, no, not when they found it, he wasn’t. McKeach’s never there when they find someone. That’s how he’s lived so long.”

  “Cistaro,” Hinchey said.

  “McKeach is a reliable man. You can depend on him because for him it isn’t work, he has to force himself to do. Or something to be feared. I’ve never seen him so juiced as when he’s done a guy. Never. I’ve often thought, ‘Tonight the woman who is with him is in for a very long hard ride.’ You must know this. You’ve used him yourself.”

  “Carlo.”

  There was a gruff chuckle on the tape. “Yes, I imagine she would be at that. A very reliable man.”

  Hinchey shut off the Ampex. Then he turned back to Farrier. “Okay,” he said, “what do we do?”

  Farrier showed surprise on his face. “ ‘Do’?” he said. “ ‘Do’ about what?”

  “About one of our top-echelon informants confessing that he conspired, and was an accessory before and after, in the murder of Hugo Bottalico. And is therefore to be charged as a principal in the commission of murder in the first degree, committed in furtherance of an ongoing racketeer enterprise. Which you know and I know is murder, by the other prize pigeon, one of the few kinds of activity we’re not allowed to sanction. Or overlook when it’s done. Grounds for dismissal. And prosecution. Of us.”

  “Nothing,” Farrier said. “What you’ve got on that tape is an uncorroborated story Cistaro told last fall about an event that he alleges happened over thirty years ago. I will bet you a beer that if we go back now and review the evidence and the reports of the cops and the docs and forensics specialists who investigated that case, we would find that they did a good job. And that when they concluded—in pre-DNA days—they weren’t even sure who the victim was, much less who did it, they reached the right result.

  “Think we can do better now? Yup. We can dig up the big bones and establish conclusively that they’re what held Hugo upright and he was guest of honor at the roast. We can prove that the navy taught Nick the Frogman how to use everyday substances to make basic napalm at home, and that it burns at temperatures high enough to consume all but the biggest pieces of an individual carbon-based life form. We can prove that Nick and McKeach shared a motive for wanting Hugo to say good-bye. And that will be just about all we can prove to establish this murder case—all the rest would be, as sarcastic judges like to say, ‘nothing but mere speculation.’

  “Now,” Farrier said, tilting back in his chair and clasping his hands behind his head, “Brother Stoat and I’re dining this evening with our prime top-echelon informants. His career and future depend at least as much as mine on the success of this case against Carlo. Shall I ask him to set an extra place, so you can share your views on this sensitive matter with him, before our guests arrive? I can tell you your views on it won’t make him happy, but if you say so, I will do it.”

  Hinchey frowned. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m on a panel tonight up in Salem, regional Fathers for Justice. Agreed to it three months ago.”

  “Then you should do that,” Farrier said. “And let the past bury the past.”

  19

  THE AROMA OF DARREN STOAT’S signature chicken cacciatore filled the condominium at Number 7, 4 Gaslight Square in Framingham at 6:38 that evening when Farrier arrived, as usual, about forty-five minutes early for a dinner with Cistaro and McKeach. Cheri had suggested the policy to him when he first described to her his misgivings about Stoat’s fitness as an OC squad chief. “Honey,” she said, “if he looks to you like he’s just not up to it, and he’s not just plain stupid, think how scared he must be, for the very same reason. He has to know, and also know you feel that way. Have to face it, hon; you can stand and sling the shit with the best of them—you just became Soot Barillo—but even when you’re bein’ a completely different person, you’re no good at all
at hidin’ what you think. That’s why you were so good under cover—you got into the character, became the guy they asked you to pretend to be. And so people who met you as him, believed you were him—you were.

  “You think he’s not up to it, dealin’ man to man with your favorite gangsters? Then count on it, darlin’—he knows that’s what you think. And that’s makin’ him more nervous’n he was to begin with, which was plenty, when you first saw him and decided, ‘he’s too nervous for this job.’ ”

  “Oh, no,” Farrier said to her, “I’m not goin’ down that road. The only reason Darren Stoat’s uncomfortable around me is he knows I was a candidate for that job myself, and far more qualified. And he also knows I know the only reason that he got it, and I didn’t, was because one of the SOG brass hats he’d been playin’ footsie with for ten or fifteen years made him a present of it. Well, nothin’ I can do about that. If he knows I think that, he’s right. No way in the world I could ever convince him otherwise.”

  “No,” Cheri said, “of course you can’t. I wouldn’t want you, even try. You could never bring it off. But what you can do and you should do, because he’ll be so grateful for it, is make it as easy as you can for him to deal with these hoodlums. Then, when he gets the big promotion, he’ll thank you for your help and do something nice for you.”

  “He could do that,” Farrier said. “He could also resent me for seeing he was weak, and think my carrying him was a way of showing contempt. Not that he’d admit it—he’d just bury me, and then if someone asked him why, give some other reason. But I’d be buried just the same. No, he’ll always have power over me; what I need is something that’ll make him afraid to use it, except to do me good. I need something on the guy.”