At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “Really?” Stoat said. “Snooty rich folks around Boston?”

  “Absolutely,” Cistaro said, nodding but keeping his eyes fixed on Farrier. “Snooty, rich, and very well-known—‘prominent,’ I think you’d say, ‘prominent Boston physicians.’ ” He paused, smirking. “Suppose I could be mistaken, but isn’t that against the law?”

  “It certainly is, and very much so,” Stoat said. “We sent out several directives when I was in Washington, heads up to all field offices alerting them to this traffic. Administration’s told the State Deparment to emphasize to other heads of state we intend to take this outrageous conduct—‘looting’ and ‘smuggling’ were the terms we used—‘most seriously.’ ”

  “That’s what I thought,” Cistaro said. “Something like that, I imagine, you made an arrest here like that, that would get on CNN, I bet, no doubt at all of that.”

  “Oh yes, I would think so,” Stoat said.

  “And Washington would like that, right?” Cistaro said, now looking back at Stoat.

  Farrier cleared his throat. “Washington would love it,” he said evenly, regaining Cistaro’s attention. “And since the man who has the secret and his friend, the absent man, have strong reasons of their own to want their friends from Washington to speak highly of them there, and to seek cordial treatment for them, should they get their tails in cracks, the man who has the secret would act in his own best interest if he imparted it promptly.” He paused one beat. “He would not want to get them mad, any more than they would want him to get mad with them.”

  Cistaro stared. Farrier looked at Stoat and indicated Cistaro by moving his head.

  Stoat nodded and said, “You do know, of course, that I was only, you know, joking, when I said that. What I said about Italian cooking. Being easy.”

  Cistaro, still looking at Farrier, blinked and shook his head. He curled his lip but nodded. “Oh, sure,” he said, making a dismissive motion with his right hand. “No problem. I understand. Could say I asked for it, I guess. And what you were sayin’, Jack, you know how anxious me and Arthur always are, we can ever do you a small favor. All you got to do you know, is let us know, you know?” He snickered.

  “Well yes, of course, I do know that,” Farrier said. “As a matter of fact this evening, before you got here tonight, Darren and I were discussing how he has a small financial problem right now, and how it’s been on his mind. How it distracts him from his work. And I said he shouldn’t let it. I was sure that if he mentioned it to you and Arthur, that you’d immediately say to him, ‘Well, we can take care of that for you.’ ”

  “I see,” Cistaro said. His smile showing only his four upper front teeth, the tip of his tongue protruding for a moment, he talked to Farrier but studied Stoat. “And would this be a loan you’re talking? Or did you have in mind a gift?” Stoat squirmed.

  “Oh, a loan, of course,” Farrier said. “Just a short-term loan, sixty, ninety days.” He paused. “A gift, you know, under the circumstances we’d be uncomfortable with that. People might look at a gift the wrong way—interpret it as something else. So no, no gift, a loan.”

  “Well, a reasonable amount,” Cistaro said, “if this was a reasonable amount that you two’re asking here, we would have no problem with that. And I know that I can say that, even though for some reason, Arthur isn’t here tonight. But I know he would agree.

  “So, how much did you have in mind? Three grand or so, like we duked you a few years back, Jack, you and the bride could get some R an’ R, a little sun? Something in that neighborhood?”

  Stoat could not prevent his mouth from dropping open or his eyes from darting away from Cistaro to Farrier. Now Cistaro looked at Farrier too.

  Farrier smiled. “You know, Nick,” he said, “I’m glad you brought that up. Because Darren I think had some slight reservations, guess you’d call them, about asking you this favor as I’d recommended. And I was just going to remind you of that, how you and Arthur’d done me a somewhat similar though smaller kindness a couple or three years ago—though I wouldn’t say exactly, I don’t think I’d say you ‘duked’ me because to me that would connote a gift, you two made a gift to me—whereas I of course did pay you back. In full. And promptly.”

  Cistaro grinned at him with the gleeful malice of a man observing at the effect of his new evident wealth and confident satisfaction on an old and envious adversary. “But without any vig, wasn’t it?” he said pleasantly. “I recall it, we charged you no juice, no interest. An’ you kept the three large ’til your wife found a job—which was what, pretty close to a year?”

  He smirked. “So that part, I guess, you might call that a gift. Put it this way—we duked you the interest. Six hundred dollars a week. For, if I get this right, now, forty-six weeks, would it’ve been? What’s six hundred times forty-six? You’re good with numbers, Jack, what would that be? That one you can do in your head?”

  Farrier scowled at him. “Twenty-seven thousand, six hundred dollars,” Stoat said, his voice dull, his eyes dead on Farrier.

  Cistaro nodded and swung his gaze back to Stoat. “That’s what I figured it, too,” he said, his face calm, his voice pleasant. “Now how much did you have in mind? As a loan, of course—I don’t think you’d want to call it a gift either. Want to think of me and Arthur as giving you presents,” he nodded at Farrier, “any more’n your sidekick here would.”

  Stoat, despairing, said nothing.

  “Oh, for Chrissakes, Darren, say it,” Farrier said grimly. “No wonder you’re so pussy-whipped.” Stoat remained silent. Farrier looked at Cistaro. “Twenty thousand,” he said, savagely. “You keep that much in your jockstrap—which you wouldn’t have, a jockstrap, and nothin’ to put in one, if you didn’t have your ass insured with us.”

  “Twenty thousand,” Cistaro said, chuckling once, still looking at Stoat. Stoat, pale now, swallowed and licked his lips. “Almost seven times what you had, Jack. And yeah, I know, you say short term, but—and all of us know this, Darren, especially me and Arthur, the kind of business we’re in, but also, as now you and me both know, Jack knows this too—these small financial problems often take a little longer’n we expect them to, ’fore they work themselves out. Financial problems, I mean. ‘Check’s inna mail,’ but the check doesn’t come. ‘Have it for you Monday.’ ‘No, see me on Friday.’

  “So let’s say, we’re just talkin’ now like you’re one of our regular customers, ’stead of who you really are. If you were just like anybody else, you’d want to know our terms before you got yourself involved. And we’d want you to know them. Truth in lending. Although naturally I’m assumin’ here that what you got in mind is you want the Jack’s kind of loan, the special kind we made to Jack. Which is good because of course, be considering how close we are, the four of us, that’d be the kind of loan that me and Arthur would prefer to make to you. Like Jack says,” indicating Jack with his left hand, “since you got him vouching for you, Arthur and I both consider you as much a friend of ours as he is—too, in every respect.

  “But at the same time let’s be honest—if I loan you twenty on the terms we loaned to Jack, and you keep it”—now looking at Farrier—“how long was it, did we say, Jack? Forty-six weeks, right?” Farrier nodded. Cistaro looked back at Stoat. “If you keep it that long, let’s say, as we know of course you won’t, but since we’re all just talking here, that would be …”

  Stoat with his eyes wide and not realizing what he was doing started forming the syllables with his lips as Cistaro said, “That’s it, Darren, you have got it, and my God, I agree, because if we’ve both got it right now, that’d come to a hundred and eighty-four large. Are we all sure we’re up to this, all four of us can live with it afterward, if Arthur and I really do go ahead and do for you a hundred-and-eighty-four-grand favor? You’re sure that won’t, you know, change the way things are between us?”

  He turned to look at Farrier and then he put his head back and laughed. Then he reached his right hand over the dishes on the table and
patted Stoat on his left hand. He looked at him again with glee. “Well, don’t you worry, Darren, ’cause your friend Jack is almost right. I don’t have that much cash with me right here in my jockstrap, but I do have it where I can get it—right outside here in my car.” He got up. “No need to see me out,” he said. “I won’t even put my coat on. I’ll leave the door partly open and be right back in a flash.”

  “WHICH HE WAS,” FARRIER SAID to Cheri shortly after 1:30 A.M. when they had finished having sex. “Darren’d remembered Fifty-six has news at ten so he’d turned on the little TV again. And just as Nick came through the door the female anchor finished telling us about the two big black guys getting shot down, and then the male began to tell us how the Massachusetts State Police around six o’clock tonight began arresting all these poor bastards who’ve got cancer but they’re not gonna let that get them down—they’ve still been able to drag themselves out there and con many druggists out of all the happy pills and painkillers you could possibly imagine.

  “And not only have the Staties arrested all these crooked invalids, they have also bagged the filthy crooks who put them up to this vile trade and then sold the dangerous stuff to poor innocent construction workers and naive warehousemen along with their doughnuts and morning coffee.

  “The Staties said they suspect two of the people they grabbed ‘may be connected to organized crime,’ and since one of them is Rico Garza, who’s the Frogman’s legbreaker and the other one’s Max Rascob, who’s McKeach’s bookkeeper, my guess is the cops’re right.”

  Cheri sat up in bed hugging her knees and thought about that for a while. At last she said, “Did that mean Darren didn’t get his twenty grand?”

  “Are you kidding?” Farrier said. “Nick tossed it onto the coffee table while Darren was helping him on with his jacket. ‘You guys just remember now, don’t you forget the nice guys who gave you that nice little package. I sure hope you got lotsa friends inna State cops. I think me and Arthur may need them.’

  “Then he said, ‘I’ll be in touch.’ And he went off into the night.”

  “Will those two guys you mentioned, you think they will talk?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know them. Like I said I’m not sure I know now what anyone will do, or if I ever did, or I want to. Not, at least, anymore. Or if any of those guys ever knew what I’d do. None of us figured on this. I may have to go back being Soot.”

  “Could be worse,” she said, “you were good.”

  Epilogue

  WHEN DOWD ARRIVED AT THE YELLOW two-bedroom bungalow hidden in the woods south of Wareham Road, Route 6, on Marconi Lane in Marion on the evening of May 8, Ferrigno was in the kitchen making coffee and Rascob was in the living room watching the Channel 5 Evening News.

  “They have it on yet, the decision?” Dowd said.

  “Just the headline,” Rascob said. “Said this judge wouldn’t let him out on bail either, but they’re going to appeal again. You were at the hearing?”

  “Yeah, wasted my whole day there,” Dowd said. “Never got put on the stand. Everything I could’ve said I already testified to, twice before. But the AAG said I hadda be there, in case Al Castle thought up some new reason why the Frogman should get bail, so I could knock it down.”

  The male anchor with grey hair said, “And security was again tight in the state Supreme Judicial Court today as well-known attorney Alfred Castle argued that his client, accused gangland leader Nicholas Cistaro, should be freed on bail.”

  “Here it comes,” Dowd said, “Henry, come in here—this’ll interest you.”

  The same sandy-haired reporter who’d been at Jamaica Pond, now wearing a blue blazer, stood holding a microphone on the brick plaza outside the New Courthouse at Pemberton Square. “Thanks, Chet,” he said. “Associate State Supreme Court Justice Francis Keating today, sitting as a single justice, upheld Superior and District Court rulings holding alleged organized crime kingpin Nicholas “the Frogman” Cistaro without bail. Noticeably angered by attorney Castle’s argument that since Cistaro, a Vietnam vet Navy Seal, has no prior record of convictions, he must be allowed bail, justice Keating said, ‘The fact that this guy’s amazing good luck ducking the police finally ran out is not sufficient reason to give him a fresh chance to join his pal and business partner, Arthur McKeon—the notorious McKeach—on the run. This gentleman’s charged with every major crime in the book except child molesting and treason. No way am I letting him out, so he can bolt for the border, too. He’s a menace to society. Decision affirmed—bail is denied.”

  “Well, maybe there’s some hope after all,” Ferrigno said. “Maybe now that gangbangers out on bail’ve killed four or five people would’ve testified against them, the courts’re catching on.”

  “Yeah,” Dowd said, “but the reason any of those judges held him was because we nailed him on the Walterboy murders. Without Murder One on the Frogman’s grocery list, guarantee you he’s on the street. Now you see, Max, why we grilled you on what happened at that midnight meeting at the Spa, night before those guys went down?” He paused. “And I still want his driver, you know,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten that little item—who chauffeured McKeach to his rifle party.”

  Rascob shook his head. “Nickie’s bad enough,” he said. “And I still say it wasn’t his idea—those two’re strictly McKeach’s project. All Nick did was say ‘Okay, fine by me.’ ” He paused; then staring directly at Dowd he said, “More’n enough lives’ll be ruined by this, like mine with Jessie—those at least McKeach don’t find me first. Some kid who’s still got a chance to shape up, have a good life and die happy? I won’t drag him into this. And if you knew—or you know—who it was, you wouldn’t want me to, either. So, I have forgotten who drove the car. Got no plans at all to remember.”

  Dowd thought about that for a while. Then he cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “the driver I’ll think about—you may have something there. And as to Nickie, yeah, I sort of know how you feel. But our law says if you say okay to a plan to knock off a few guys, your okay is enough to get you in the shit, along with the guy with the rifle. The law moves in mysterious ways.”

  “Yeah,” Rascob said morosely. “Too bad McKeach moves so much faster.”

  “Oh, we’ll track him down,” Dowd said at once, but without the confidence he wished he felt. “Canada, Ireland, Iceland? Doesn’t matter, we’ll get him. He’s gettin’ old now; don’t move so fast. Time’s on our side with this guy.”

  “Right, time,” Rascob said. “Same thing with me. About all I’ve got on my side. My only hope is that his time runs out, he dies before he gets me. If I could’ve chosen which guy you catch and which guy gets away, I would’ve said, ‘Leave Nick get the jump. He’ll understand why I hafta to do this. But McKeach?” He laughed. “Somehow I don’t think McKeach ever will.”

  ALSO BY GEORGE V. HIGGINS

  The Friends of Eddie Coyle

  Cogan’s Trade

  A City on a Hill

  The Friends of Richard Nixon

  The Judgment of Deke Hunter

  Dreamland

  A Year or So with Edgar

  Kennedy for the Defense

  The Rat on Fire

  The Patriot Game

  A Choice of Enemies

  Style Versus Substance

  Penance for Jerry Kennedy

  Imposters

  Outlaws

  The Sins of the Fathers

  Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years

  The Progress of the Seasons

  Trust

  On Writing

  Victories

  The Mandeville Talent

  Defending Billy Ryan

  Bomber’s Law

  Swan Boats at Four

  Sandra Nichols Found Dead

  A Change of Gravity

  The Agent

  At End of Day

  GEORGE V. HIGGINS

  George V. Higgins was the author of more than twenty novels, including the bestsellers
The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Cogan’s Trade, The Rat on Fire, and The Digger’s Game. He was a reporter for the Providence Journal and the Associated Press before obtaining a law degree from Boston College Law School in 1967. He was an Assistant Attorney General and then an Assistant United States Attorney in Boston from 1969 to 1973. He later taught Creative Writing at Boston University. He died in 1999.