At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  20

  “I HOPE YOU DIDN’T TELL HIM you’ve done it,” Cheri Farrier said. They were in the kitchen of their condo on Adams Street. She was at the refrigerator in her emerald green silk robe trimmed with white ostrich feathers. “At least once, that I know about.”

  Farrier sat at the table trying to make himself believe that the glass of milk in front of him would put him speedily to sleep. He had had a third mug of black coffee and waited for an hour and a half to pass before very carefully driving home from Framingham, so he was wide awake, but he still had enough Chianti in his system to be amused by anything she said or did that he could take as a sign of advancing age. “No,” he said, “I didn’t tell him about our small transaction with the Frogman.” Cistaro had, but he saw no need to mention that.

  “Your small transaction, you mean,” she said. She emerged from the refrigerator with a liter bottle of effervescent Evian water and, as she turned toward the counter next to it, kicked the door closed with the clear plastic gold-flecked spike heel of her mule, also ostrich trimmed. “I wouldn’t’ve gone on that trip, agreed to it in the first place, if I’d known where the money was coming from.” She poured the sparkling water into the twelve-ounce double-highball glass of ice and Martell Five-Star cognac she had prepared there.

  “Not much you wouldn’t’ve,” he said. “The minute, the minute, I got home that night with Andy’s fax to me from Santa Fe, how he’d run into Hammer on a detail, San Diego, they’d had a few drinks’n decided to try round up the old gang from Buffalo, reunite at that fabulous place Dennis found at Longboat Key, you started worrying what to pack. I hadn’t’ve come up with the necessary, you would’ve probably divorced me.”

  She sat down at the table opposite him, the robe blousing open on her breasts. “Well,” she said, making a halfhearted effort to cover herself and then giving up on it, “I would’ve at least said something, like there had to be some other way we could get three thousand dollars without asking them for it. Get a cash advance on the Visa card or something.”

  He chuckled. “Be serious,” he said. “Our highest limit then, any one of the four cards we had, was twenty-five hundred, and we maxed it every month. Never saw a zero balance. ’til we agreed you’d use Mastercard and I’d use Visa so we might not kill each other. It was routine, every month, one of us’d have a charge disallowed—the other one already used up all of the two-three hundred bucks that we’d paid the balance down the month before. Maybe we could’ve gotten fifty bucks—that wouldn’t quite’ve done it.”

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose we could say it wasn’t as much—only three thousand. Three thousand isn’t that much money—so there’s that difference, anyway; that’s a lot less money’n twenty thousand would be. And we did pay it back.”

  “Honey-chile,” he said, leaning toward her and lifting her chin with the first knuckle of his right forefinger, gazing into her brown eyes, “when you ain’t got it, an’ you cain’t git it, ’cause no damn bank on God’s green earth’ll lend you one thin dime more’n you already borrowed, ’n’ haven’t paid it back, ain’ no difference between three and twenny—any sum of money you got to have so much you borrow it from those guys, is, a lot of money.”

  “And it was a long time ago,” she said, pushing his hand away. He sat back, pouting a little, and tugged at his trousers. “My lord, how long ago was it? Two years, three years, that long? I know it was at least three—every time I go to get something in the dresser I have to look straight at that picture of us outside the shack where they filled the tanks, the one of you with a hard-on in it. I still even had blond hair then.”

  “Got one now, too,” he said. “The hell with this milk; not gonna make me sleep. Leave your drink here and let’s you and me go in the other room and fuck.”

  “It’s pretty late,” she said, thinking it over. “I hafta be at work early in the morning. That judge who passed away, you know him? He had a funny name, Dienstermacher, something like that, German, I suppose, Horace Dienstermacher.”

  “Never heard of him, my life,” Farrier said. “Come on, let’s go to bed. And do it.”

  “Well, maybe you never did,” she said, “but a boatload of other people sure did. Yesterday afternoon—I guess it was on the noon news. He’d dropped dead in court. A lot of people must watch that—we had a flock of orders come in, and a good many of them were for the big display pieces, too. Law firms, mostly; whenever it’s in the news that someone died that was widely known in the legal profession, anywhere on the South Shore, Randy says he always knows he’s gonna have a banner week. They all seem to really go for the showy stuff. Lots of football mums, and stock. Snapdragons, glads. And roses, very big blankets of roses. Randy says sometimes the flower car for one of those dead legal guy’s funerals, all those big rose blankets, looks he won the Kentucky Derby, collapsed in the winner’s circle.

  “But he just eats it all up, Randy does, and you can’t blame him for that. He was on the phone taking the orders almost the whole afternoon. And when he wasn’t doing that, he’s almost rubbin’ his hands, is how good he felt. So he’s gettin’ up at five-fifteen, take the truck in to the wholesale market. Pick up all the stuff he’s ordered to make the sprays and bouquets, and he’ll be back out at the shop by six-thirty.

  “So that we can then get to work, gettin’ them all put together if we’re going to deliver them the funeral home, twelve thirty. Means I’ll have to leave here by six-fifteen, which means get up five-forty-five.” She paused. “What time is it anyway? Lemme see your watch. We’ve just got to get ourselves a clock, put in this kitchen. This must be the only kitchen in the whole damned world, in the whole damn universe, doesn’t have a clock in it.”

  “It’s a little after one-fifteen,” he said, rolling his left forearm over so that she could see the Tag Heuer, “and if you’d just forget about Randy’s dead judge now and put your mind instead to thinking about my sergeant major, by one-twenty-five I’ll have you ’bout as close to paradise’s any goddamned judge I ever met is liable to get.” He stood up.

  “Well, I suppose,” she said, standing up and gathering the robe about her, taking a long swallow of her drink. She grinned at him and took his hand. “After all, it has been almost eighteen hours since we last did it. Wouldn’t want to lose the knack.”

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  “You’ll just have to tell me all about your dinner with your pet gangsters, you get home tomorrow night.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll see. I may only have one tame gangster left now. Other seems to’ve gotten loose and run away.”

  CISTARO CAME THROUGH STOAT’S FRONT DOOR a plainly worried man. “He isn’t here?” he said to Farrier standing by the couch as Stoat shut the door behind him. Farrier shook his head. “Course I didn’t think he would be, since his car’s not out in front.” He let Stoat take his black leather coat. “And he hasn’t called, either? You haven’t heard from him?”

  Farrier said “Nope. Phone hasn’t rung since you called. And we’ve been here all the time.”

  Cistaro shook his head and started toward the leather chair to the right of Stoat’s. “I tell you guys, this bothers me. This bothers me a lot.” He sat down.

  Stoat, closing the door to the closet in the hall, said, “Can I get you a drink?”

  “You better believe you can,” Cistaro said. “What I’d like to have right now is a tall glass with about three ice cubes in it and then the rest filled up with vodka.” Then he snuffled and smiled as Stoat went toward the kitchen. “Well, maybe not filled all the way up, that might not be such a hot idea, but you know what I mean—what I want is ice and vodka and no decorations, little something for the nerves.”

  “You got no idea where he is?” Farrier said.

  “Nope,” Cistaro said. “Like I told you onna phone, I see him today, this after, I was over at the spa there, Rico’s droppin’ me off so I can get my car. He’s gonna shadow Maxie onna a piece of work that he’s got, where h
e has to go to Canton and then go over Randolph, and this’s gonna take them all the rest the afternoon. But since there’s no reason me to be there, I am pickin’ up my car. That way I can then go home and do some stuff before it’s time for Arthur come and pick me up, and then we both come out here. So we can have dinner, you guys.”

  “And everything seemed to be all right with him?” Stoat said, handing Cistaro’s drink to him. To Farrier he said: “Cacciatore’d cooled off more’n I expected, so I just turned the heat back on underneath the pot there. Wasn’t quite as hot as I like it to be, I serve it. It should be ready in fifteen minutes; then I figure we should eat—whatever you think, huh?” Then he sat down and drank some beer.

  “Absolutely,” Cistaro said, before Farrier could reply. He drank some vodka. “Ahh, that’s good. That hits the spot. Much better. I was thinkin’ comin’ over, see, I’m afraid I might get lost—never drove here by myself. Way we always did it since we started comin’ here—as opposed the guy before you, him livin’ up in Salem there, would’ve been way out his way, Arthur came to pick me up, so it made sense then we both drove—but with you now, livin’ out here, well, made more sense Arthur’d stop and pick me up. ’Cause then it’s not out of his way—it’s right on his way, in fact. See, where I live where I’ve been livin’, inna Towers, Chestnut Hill, since I move there, eighty-eight. But it turns out I did know the way, remembered it all right. But while I’m doin’ this I’m thinkin’, ‘I could use a drink right now.’ So this one here, it sure tastes good.”

  He looked at Farrier. “But no, I didn’t see a thing. Or didn’t notice anything, I guess, is what I’m trying, say. As far as I could see. Of course this now’s just from lookin’ at the guy, but I’ve known him a long time, over thirty years or so, that we’ve been doing things together, so I think that I would know, I’d be able to tell, if he had somethin’ on his mind that was botherin’ him. An’ there just wasn’t, I could see, anything like that at all.

  “Nothing on his mind,” Farrier said, reaching for his own glass.

  “Well, business, naturally—he was always thinkin’ about that. But nothin’ else,” Cistaro said. “And Arthur never, all the time I’ve known him, kept a thing that was botherin’ him to himself. Never. The first thing he does is talk about it, work out in his mind what to do about it—and the second thing, he does what he has worked out. And if he decided you were the cause of it, boom, right off, he’d be in your face about it. Who it was didn’t matter—he would go right into action. No holdin’ the guy. ’Cause that’s just the way he is. It is not his style to wait.”

  “Well, you’re right about that, all right,” Farrier said.

  “And like I say,” Cistaro said, “I knew he was particularly lookin’ forward comin’ over here tonight, because, well, we aren’t sure about the date yet so you can’t move on this right now, but him and me, we kind of think we’ve got a case you’re gonna like. And the reason that I say this, and I’ll tell you what it is, is that this’s so far off the beaten track for you guys—and way off the beaten track for us, too—that you’re not gonna … well, I don’t know, you might have trouble believin’ it.”

  He paused for their reaction. Both Farrier and Stoat frowned. Farrier shrugged. The Hitachi replayed the taped report from the young woman with the short dark hair wearing a blue suit and standing with the microphone outside the Blue Hills Division barracks of the Massachusetts State Police. All three of them ignored it.

  “Right,” Cistaro said, “okay, let’s try it this way. You remember when Steve Martin, the comedian who I guess he now thinks he’s an actor, in the movies? I mean, like I guess Robin Williams? Every now and then he used to be on television, ‘Saturday Night Live.’ May still be on, for all I know—almost never tune it in now.

  “Anyway, he’d be one of these two real blazing assholes that’re always, you know, going out to places seeing if they can find dates, and pick up girls. And although of course they couldn’t actually say it on TV, at least back then, of course what they’re doing is they’re trying to get laid. Which of course is when any man who’s ever gonna act like a total asshole does it—when he’s horny and he doesn’t have a woman and he doesn’t wanna pay for it, so he’s out trying to get laid.

  “And one thing that I really remember about this is that they would both, both of them would wear berets. Like they thought this was really cool—as soon as women saw those hats, they would just go wild. And then what they would do, these two guys playing assholes, one of them was Martin—Steve Martin like I said, not that in his real life he is an asshole but he would be acting like one—one of them would always say, ’cause this’s what the act’s about—‘We are such wild and crazy guys.’ All right?” He looked brightly at them, first at Stoat and then at Farrier.

  Farrier shrugged. “All right by me,” he said.

  “Well, okay then,” Cistaro said. “These two guys we heard about that I’m telling you about—only you’ve now got to promise me, and I mean both of you, that nobody’s gonna act on this until we give you the go-ahead, probably next month, but I’m not sure about that and it could be that it goes two. Now do I have that?”

  “Oh, positively,” Stoat said. “You got a problem with that, Jack?”

  “Works just fine for me,” Farrier said. “I’m the soul of flexible. Got to get myself a haircut ’fore too much more time goes by. Maybe get my good winter suit cleaned and pressed, and put away. But otherwise on most days I can always make room on my busy schedule, almost anything worthwhile. Mostly lately, all I’ve been doing’s listening to my tape collection, Evenings at Carlo’s?

  “Funny …” he said as though musing, “funny how when you get something that you thought you always wanted, and then when you finally get it—and you’d know this, Nick, ’cause you are on it, heard a tape of you today, tellin’ Carlo all about the night Hugo got you your first washer and drier, and then you picked him up in Cambridge …” He hesitated one beat.

  Cistaro was impassive.

  “Well, anyway,” Farrier said, “then you start to think, ‘My God, what have I got here? These guys’re vicious animals. Did I really want this thing?’ But anyway, that’s what I do most days. So, for anything worthwhile.”

  Stoat got up. “We should eat,” he said.

  “Amen to that, brother,” Farrier said. “That okay with you, Nick, we don’t wait any longer, see if Arthur’s showing up?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cistaro said. “I am personally hungry. No, all I say ’s I am worried about the guy; and where he is; and how come he isn’t here, and so forth; but we’ve all still got to eat.

  “And anyway, Jack, I was saying, there’s also another thing on my mind when I am thinking about Arthur, and you’ll know what I mean by this, Jack, is that Arthur now and then … well, put it this way—from time to time he has been known to go and do a thing that he has been thinking about, thinking maybe about doing it for quite a while, you know? But he did not see any need, any reason or whatever, he just never got around to telling me about it. Or anybody else, either, as far as that goes.

  “And then one day he would have just decided that, okay, the time has come, the time has come to go and do it. And then he would go where he had to go to do it. Just, you know, disappear on you, he’d vanish, and you wouldn’t see him for a while, or hear from him, either. But you didn’t dare touch anything that was his, any operation, because you didn’t know when he’d show up again, just as unexpected, take it back and most likely shoot you for trying to take it over.

  “One day there he’d be again, right where he’d been before, doing the same thing that he always’d been doing, and you would say hello to him and he would say hello to you, just like he’d never been away. Maybe some time later he’d tell you something about it, drop some hint or something, that would at least give you some rough idea of where he’d been and what he did. And maybe he wouldn’t. In fact usually he would not. And you’d just never know where he’d been or what he did, and t
he reason would be because he didn’t want you to.”

  “I’m going out in the kitchen,” Stoat said. “Open the wine and dish out the food. Keep talking—place isn’t that big. I’ll be able to hear you.”

  “Right,” Farrier said. “And this’s also something that I think that you’d know, Nick. The worst thing you could do, the absolute worst thing that you could do, was to react, when he’d disappeared like that and’ve been gone a while, and then he had come back, was ask him where he’d been and what he’d done.”

  Cistaro nodded vigorously. “Absolutely,” he said, “that is absolutely right.”

  “Well, I know it is,” Farrier said. “Fogarty told me that when he was first getting me ready to take over from him as, what, as liaison to you guys, and he said he got it from DeMarco. Al DeMarco’d had to learn it for himself, find it out the hard way, but when he did, he remembered it; he never forgot it. And when the time came for him to leave, when he retired, he’d handed it down to Fogarty. Passed it down to him. Which was that you never did that, ask McKeach, or even not exactly ask him, but just indirectly say something to him, tell him that he’d had you worried, or that he’d even pissed you off, when he pulled that shit of his.

  “Because if you did that, one thing it told him was that what you’d thought when it happened, he was missing, not around, you didn’t see him and nobody else had, either, was that maybe he’d pissed someone else off that you didn’t know about, and as a result he was now in the trunk of a stolen car someplace, with a couple in the head. You know—dead.”

  “Oh, Jesus, no,” Cistaro said. “You got that right—never, ever ask him. Because to him that means you’d actually been thinking—worried—that maybe he couldn’t take care of himself. That if anyone came after him they might actually get him. That it would be him that then got clipped and not the other guy. No, he prides himself on that. That if anyone came after him he would always know about it, before the guy could make a move, and take care of it himself—the other guy would always be the one who said good-bye.