At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “Well, at least give nice a try,” Cheri said. “Why you think I never did my imitation of his wife—high-hat phony bitch, can’t stand her—when we’re at someone’s house who also knows her? That ever occur to you? Well, if it didn’t, now you know why. Don’t need to always be a wise guy—now and then it pays to give someone a break.”

  “YOU KNOW, DARREN,” FARRIER SAID, heading for his usual before-dinner place on the black leather couch, “if the liberal crazies ever get control of Congress and abolish the FBI, I dunno what guys like me’d do, make a living for myself, but you would have it made. Way that you can cook Italian, all you’d ever have to do’s get yourself an SBA loan, open yourself up a restaurant—in no time you’d be a rich man.”

  “All my years a bachelor,” Stoat said, closing the door behind Farrier. He was clearly distracted. “Either you learn to cook or you starve. Get you a beer?”

  “Yeah,” Farrier said, sitting down. “Beer’d be fine.” Then he got up again at once and with no apparent purpose wandered after Stoat, but heading for the dining room instead of following into the kitchen. For his destinaton Farrier idly chose the Hitachi TV on the pass-through counter with the video image of Margie Reedy reading New England Cable News.

  “… Jamaica Pond in Boston early today, two men in their forties, one of them a former well-known college basketball star, were gunned down in what police say appeared to be still another brutal drug-related shooting.”

  A view of the walk at the northerly end of the pond replaced Reedy’s face on the screen. Fluttering yellow plastic tape black-lettered “POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS” placed about three feet off the ground linked the clump of trees where McKeach had hidden in ambush to the cement bench upright of the bench beside the place on the sidewalk where Walters and his bodyguard had gone down.

  Farrier snickered. “ ‘Another brutal drug-related shooting.’ Don’t you just love it? ‘Brutal shooting’—ever hear of ‘a nice dainty little shooting’?”

  “Can’t say’s I ever have, no,” Stoat said, turning away from the refrigerator with two bottles of Harpoon lager and setting them down on the kitchen counter behind the television. Then he frowned. Farrier expected him to say something, but he didn’t.

  On the screen a sandy-haired compactly built man wearing glasses, a tweed jacket and a blue shirt with a blue knitted tie began speaking into a handheld microphone. “ ‘Walterboy’ Junius Walters, sixties stickout point guard for the University of Kansas Jayhawks”—the screen flashed a black-and-white photo of Walters releasing a one-handed jump shot —“and his associate and friend, Aladdin Stephenson, jogged into a hail of bullets at peaceful Jamaica Pond just after sunup today, thus …”

  As he continued talking, three brown ducks, one mallard and a Canada goose swam into the frame on the pond behind his left shoulder and the four trees. Quacking furiously, one of the brown ducks reared up on the water, spreading its wings and prompting the cameraman to edit the reporter out of the picture and zoom in on the fowls. “While his Bronx teenage pal Stephenson never made it to college, Aladdin too was something of a b-ball legend, making his name in the slam-dunk world of New York playground hoops.”

  Stoat opened the beers and put one of them on the pass-through counter. “Guys who got shot—they any concern of ours?” He opened a cabinet to his right and brought out two pilsner glasses, setting one next to the beer on the pass-through.

  The cameraman remembered his mission and the reporter’s face was on the screen again. “ … Ron Gollobin, for the New England Cable News. Back to you, Margie.”

  Farrier picked up the beer with his left hand and poured it slowly into the glass. “Names never surfaced on my watch,” he said. “Which doesn’t mean if they’d’ve lived a while longer, they wouldn’t’ve. My guess’d be the reporter’s probably right—New York out-of-towners hornin’ in on the drug trade. That’s black gangbangin’ stuff, not OC, way I look at our bailiwick at least. Not OC yet anyway; may be headed that way—boundaries’re nowhere near as clear-cut’s they used to be. State Police Special Investigations Bureau—drew that assistant DA shooting back a year or so?” He shuddered. “Horror-show case that one is—Jim Dowd, the SP boys, probably had a fat file on these guys. Good, let ’em have it. Our practice’s always been, leave ’at shit to them and DEA. Stay as far’s we can away from it.” He tasted the beer. “Or the locals.”

  Stoat emerged from the kitchen, heading for the chair closest to the door. Farrier following his lead had reached the living-room area when Stoat said, “You can shut that thing off, you want. ’less you want it on.”

  Farrier hesitated, then continued toward the living room. “Nah, leave it on, I guess. Case they give the scores and weather. Jeez, Sox’ve been amazing, haven’t they? Swore, I got assigned here, ‘Okay, so I’ll go to Boston. Guys give their left nut to go there, I can handle it. Eat the lobster, take up skiing? Maybe dive the Andrea Doria. But one thing I’m not gonna do’s become a Red Sox fan.’

  “I was a kid, I’m a Cardinals fan. All I know ’bout Boston’s we beat ’em in sixty-seven. Orlando Cepeda, the Baby Bull. Lou Brock. And the greatest clutch pitcher ever—Bob Gibson, mowin’ ’em down. But this year’s Red Sox? I dunno. Bunch of castoffs, rejects, but give the bastards credit: they don’t seem to realize when they’re licked. Cheap hit, steal a base, take advantage of an error, other pitcher hangs a slider and be damn if they don’t win. Exciting club here, for change.”

  Stoat collapsed heavily into the chair. He sat with the bottle of beer in his right hand and the empty glass in his left on the arms of the black leather chair, staring toward some point on the wall above the couch. Farrier went back to his initial place and sat down again, just to the right of where Stoat’s gaze seemed to be focused.

  “Darren,” Farrier said, “ ’re you okay?”

  Stoat clearly heard him but seemed reluctant to shift his gaze. Then he shook himself out of his deep concentration; frowning, he began to pour the beer into the glass.

  “ ’re you okay?” Farrier said. “ ’Cause if you aren’t, you know, I can always find some way, get in touch with Nick and Arthur, tell them not to come—you don’t feel right.”

  Stoat, shaking his head, filled the glass. “It isn’t …” he said, filling the glass and setting the bottle on the coffee table between them. “It’s personal, really. Isn’t how I feel so much as I don’t know what’s going on in my life.

  “Lily’s back in Memphis. Her first husband, Wally Weymuss, finally died. Last Sunday. Hardly unexpected, man his age—he’s eighty-four. Not that he’d been sick, either—he was at a yearling quarter-horse show somewhere outside of Fort Worth, had a heart attack and died. He’d arranged to have his lawyer call all of his ex-wives when it happened, he died. Lily was his fourth and then he had himself another one after that. And divorced her too, I guess. Number Five, I mean.

  “So,” he said, morose, “she got this call, like I said, and she told me she was going back down there to Memphis. For the funeral. And I just said to her, ‘My lord, Lillian, what in God’s name you want to do that for? You and Wallace’re divorced, years and years ago. Hell, you were only married to him less’n four years, you divorced him. We’ve been married almost nine years, and you’re single three or four years before we even met. Must be close to eighteen years, maybe nineteen, since the last time you’ve seen him; what the hell makes you think now you have to go his funeral?’ ”

  He shook his head again, his eyebrows high and eyes wide, and he drank some of his beer. He softened his voice and exaggerated a drawl. “ ‘Well, but he was my husband, Darren. For a while he was my husband and I was his wedded wife. We were one flesh, like in the Bible, an’ the Bible tells us that when two people cleave together, a man and a woman, that they then become as one flesh—and that is what, the eyes of God, no man can put asunder, and I guess the Bible’s right.

  “ ‘I just feel like I belong there, ought to be there. Wallace was my husband, and we cared for each othe
r; and that even though he did make me so crazy we did have to get divorced, and it was quite a while ago, in some ways he’s always remained a part of me, inside me, in that respect, and now he’s dead, I just feel like I should go. And be there. It’s the proper thing to do.

  “ ‘And all Wallace’s other wives—Rosalie, you recall she was his first, his wife, she came first, she went and had this conference call set up the other day when she first heard the sad news down there, that Wallace had passed away, so we all could talk. And take counsel with one another. And we talked and, well, the more we shared our feelin’s with each other, the more we saw that way down deep we all felt the same. Wallace finally left this world? We were all part of his life, and we should be there to see him off and say farewell. To Wallace. They all feel the same as I do, and they’re going to be there too. All of us, one pew of all of Wallace’s wives together, to say good-bye to him.’ ”

  He paused and studied Farrier. “Now does that sound right to you, Jack?” he said, his face and voice both mournful. “Does that make any sense to you, that stuff she said to me?” He drank some beer.

  FARRIER LATER AT HIS OWN HOME that night, before he had fully sorted out the meaning of McKeach’s call and Cistaro’s late arrival at Stoat’s by himself, was struck again by the intensity of Stoat’s gaze. “Never saw him like that before,” he said to Cheri. “Didn’t know he had it in him, this total focus that he had, like he’s counting my pores or something and this is the most important thing, most vital and, well, significant, thing, maybe, he’s ever done in his whole life. Seeing how I’m now going to react to this information he just gave me. And he says to me, the voice of doom—‘Do you think that’s right? Tell me, do you think what she said’s right?’

  “Thing of it is,” Farrier said, “well, I know he’s testing me, but I don’t know what passing is. What it is I’m s’posed to do. One part of me thinks what he just told me’s true, and he really is just as devastated as he certainly looks to be, but he thinks maybe I’m laughing at him. Maybe I think he’s a fool. In which case his life is probably over, but if there’s even a little bit of it left he’s going to use it to destroy me, revenge for my destroying him. Don’t ask me how I got this power over him, if I did, but apparently I did, and now how I use it’s truly life-and-death to him.

  “And at the same time the other part of me is saying he’s making all this up, that Lily’s at one of her suburban ladies’ stock-and-bond seances, doping out the markets, and she’ll be home by eleven. And if I’m not sharp enough to see how ridiculous this all is, the idea that she’d actually fly back to Memphis for the funeral of this old goat she and at least four other women married for his money, so they can now all cry together ’cause they now think they should’ve gotten more; if I don’t laugh my ass off, then he’ll know that either I’m a perfect asshole, or else that I’m convinced that he is—and the very first thing that he’s going do tomorrow, when he gets back to his office, is get in touch with SOG and torpedo my career.

  “So now, how do I call it? Because one way or the other I have got to make a choice here, I’m juggling live grenades—drop it, make the wrong choice and I’m going to be paying for it the rest of my life.

  “And I am literally saved by the bell. So I think, for a while, anyway.”

  THE YELLOW PHONE MOUNTED on the wall next to the refrigerator rang in the kitchen. “Unnnh,” Stoat said, exhaling heavily and leaning forward to put his glass on the coffee table. “This’s probably Lily.” He heaved himself up out of the chair and started toward the kitchen. “She’s been down there four nights now and called me every one of them. ‘Just to see how you’re doing, don’t want you to get too lonesome.’ Making sure I’m at home, not off somewhere enjoying myself, even though I told her last night not to call because I’d have you and the lads here so I wouldn’t really be able, talk.” In the kitchen he grabbed the phone off the mount and said shortly, “Stoat.” Then he said “yeah,” and then “sure,” and put the phone down on the counter.

  “For you, Jack,” he said to Farrier, coming back into the living area, saying as he stood up with an inquiring look on his face, “Didn’t give me a name. Think it may be Nick—never heard him before on the phone.”

  Farrier took the phone cautiously. “Yeah?” he said.

  “Jackie,” Cistaro said, “is Arthur there?”

  “No,” Farrier said, “of course he isn’t here. You guys always come together.”

  “That’s why I’m calling, from the lobby, my apartment.” Cistaro said. “Didn’t pick me up yet. See him this after, over the Spa. Rico’s droppin’ me off, get my car there—he’s gotta do somethin’ with Max. Arthur says he’s gonna do a few things, then go home. Grab a nap if he can. Said he’s up fairly early today, couldn’t sleep for some reason. And I know he’s lookin’ forward this evenin’ with you guys. Says, ‘I can’t fall asleep over dinner.’ But it’s now after seven; he still isn’t here. Called where he’s been living—him an’ Dorothy—didn’t get no answer there. Thought maybe he went directly there.”

  “If he did he’s not here yet,” Farrier said. “I haven’t heard from him either. You know how he gets—somethin’ happen to spook him, he’s halfway to Canada now?”

  “Come on, Jack,” Cistaro said, “don’t kid around about that stuff. That’s your department, knowin’ if anything’s happened to spook us. You’re the one’s s’posed to be Paul Revere, make the call, let us know if we oughta take off. You didn’t do that. So then, why would he split? You ain’t heard of nothin’ goin’ down?”

  “Not a whisper,” Farrier said. “And since anything federal’d clear through me first, and the staties’re supposed coordinate with us when they got a party planned, if there was something I definitely would’ve heard. Look, there’s nothing, all right? Either he’s havin’ car trouble and he isn’t near a payphone or else one of you got screwed up. Calm yourself down. Get in your Beemer and come over here; we’ll have a drink, wait for him. He goes to your place? He’ll find out you’re not there. He’ll stop, make a call, find out that you’re here; he’ll come here and then we’ll all eat.”

  “Okay,” Cistaro said, “I will do that. But I will tell you, I’m worried. This isn’t like Arthur at all.”

  “WHICH IT WASN’T,” FARRIER SAID to Cheri. “But tell you the truth, when I hung up the phone I wasn’t really too worried. Well, I was concerned, I was very concerned, but not about Nick and McKeach—I was concerned about me and my boss. What’m I gonna say to him, his crazy wife’s antics? How the hell do I know what they mean?

  “But then I decide, ‘Hey, maybe now, thanks to the Frogman, I could be off the immediate hook—I can play for a little time here. First see try to find out he wants me to say’—see, I’m havin’ in mind what you said—‘and then when I do find out, well then, say it.’ ”

  “YOU WERE RIGHT,” FARRIER SAID to Stoat, hanging up the phone, “that was Nick. He doesn’t know where McKeach is.” He started toward the living room.

  “Well, why’d he call here?” Stoat said dully. He had his left hand pressed to his forehead. He lifted the hand away. “Arthur’s not here. They come here together, one car—so it draws less attention from the neighbors. Arthur said that: ’less cars in front, fullah shady characters, looks like a Mafia sitdown.’ Nick should know that; he isn’t here.” He coughed. “Whyncha bring in a couple more beers, while you’re at it?”

  Farrier returned to the refrigerator and took out two more bottles of Harpoon. He opened them on the counter and headed toward the living room. “Probably just the first thing that came into his head,” he said. “You know how it is, you get frustrated. He called Arthur at home and no one answered there, so then what’s the next thing he can do, he wants to find out where McKeach is?”

  He put the bottles on the coffee table. Stoat immediately picked one up and poured it into his glass. “No McKeach cell phone,” Farrier said, sitting down on the couch, “call him up in his car or his own jacket pocket. �
��Too easy to eavesdrop,’ is what he says. ‘Any kid with a scanner could do it.’ Guy’s paranoid on the whole subject. He’ll have nothing to do with the things. He won’t even let Nick, or any their people, have one of those things in their car.”

  “I should probably turn off the heat under that stewpot,” Stoat said, putting his glass and the bottle on the coffee table as he got up. He headed for the kitchen. “Had it on simmer since before you got here, but enough’s enough. Stay hot for a while anyway. It gets cold, they’re really late, I’ll just heat it up again. Won’t take long.”

  “Good idea,” Farrier said. “Better’n having the sauce turn to red library paste.”

  “It’s still surprising, though,” Stoat said from the kitchen, “that Arthur won’t use them at all. Think as conscious as he is of security, he’d want people be able to reach him. Tip him off, something went wrong.”

  “Oh, but that’s exactly what he’s afraid of,” Farrier said. “If they had it for that they’d use it for other things and then they’d get him in trouble. ‘Might use the damned thing to call me, I dunno I’m on it; I listen. Then I talk and he listens to me. Cops tapin’ him? Cops’re tapin’ me too. They get him, he is stupid? Can’t help that. They get me, even though I’m smart’n careful, ’cause he’s stupid? I don’t like that. And I can help it. Catch anybody usin’ one of those things to call me, I’ll find out where he is and go and shove his fuckin’ cell phone up his fuckin’ ass.

  “ ‘Yeah, they’re convenient—that’s why they’re so dangerous. You get so you’re always thinkin’, “Ah, whatsa risk, there’re thousands of calls every minute. What’re the odds they get me? They’re not gonna catch me, I use this thing once—they don’t even know where I am. And if they did, they did tap onna mine, what possible good could it do them? It’s not like I’m sayin’, ‘Let’s talk about business,’ when McKeach picks up the phone. And even if they did luck out, wouldn’t do them any good—they wouldn’t know what we’re talkin’. Nah, know what you do? You worry too much. It could only happen, a fluke.” ’ ”