by Howie Carr
Drug kingpins. That’s what they would call me and Sally if they ever got the chance. Not to mention career criminals.
If we get a casino, maybe we can start weeding out the junkies. Maybe.
Just then we saw another car pulling up, a black Cadillac Escalade. It was Blinky Marzilli, another legend in his own mind. He fancied himself the East Boston captain. He jumped out of his car, ran up to Sally and first hugged him, then kissed him on both cheeks. Sally looked embarrassed. I was amused. I have a theory about these guinea greetings—the more emotive the hood is, the more likely he is to eventually end up in the Witness Security Program. It’s like they’re overcompensating, in advance.
I’d heard stories about Blinky, but nothing I could ever pin down. He’d been an “unindicted coconspirator” in a chop-shop indictment in Revere a couple of years back. One “unindicted coconspirator,” you get a mulligan on. A second one, they put out a contract on you. At least I do.
Blinky had brought along his muscle, such as it was, another nitwit named Benny Eggs. I think he got the nickname because he has the IQ of a soft-boiled egg. He was sniffling, another bad sign in my book. I don’t believe in colds anymore, not since cocaine came in.
As Benny Eggs looked on, Blinky shook my hand, then turned his attention back to Sally.
“From my lips to God’s ears,” he said, raising his left hand, “whatever I got is yours. I’ll help you get those dirty motherfucking spics.”
“Sally,” I said, “how sure are we that these were spics?”
“That’s what the dealer said. Charlie the Greek. He’s been with me for years.”
“I already got my spics out there beating the bushes.” Blinky still lived in East Boston, even though it had tipped years earlier. The old white neighborhood was receding at the rate of two or three blocks a year, north toward Orient Heights and Winthrop. The Eastie state rep, an Italian of course, now wore long-sleeve shirts year-round so no one would see his tattoos. Two years ago he’d only gotten fifty-two percent of the vote in the primary against a guy named Ramirez. Eastie was on the verge of slipping into the past tense.
“I’m putting Vinny and his partner Fat Vinny on it too,” Blinky said.
I know those guys. Let me tell you, if the killers were hiding in a meatball at Santarpio’s, Vinny and Fat Vinny would find them for sure.
“We’ll get ’em Sally,” Blinky said. “We gotta get ’em. This here is a, a…”
“A provocation?” I suggested.
“Yeah, that’s it, a provocation. You always come up with the right word, Bench.”
“I caught up on my reading at Lewisburg,” I said.
A couple of toothless tigers in scally caps were slowly hobbling towards us now. The only weapons they were carrying were canes, but I saw Cheech giving them the evil eye.
I looked at Sally. “We ought to get moving,” I said, and Sally and Blinky nodded, after which Benny Eggs nodded. I couldn’t see Cheech from where I was, but I had a feeling his trigger finger was getting itchy under the raincoat.
I watched them all leave, then sat down on a park bench and got out my cell phone. I called a detective I knew in Area A-1. I told him I’d meet him at Lupo’s, a bucket of blood on Harrison Avenue in Chinatown, after the shift change. I asked him to bring along whatever he had on the murder, including photos.
“Pictures?” he said. “I don’t know about that.”
“C’mon, I just want to look at them, I don’t want to keep them.” He’d bring them. He was on my pad.
I got to Lupo’s first and once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was sorry my eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Places like Lupo’s are why people get phobias about germs. I ordered a Bud—in a bottle, hold the glass.
The detective came in around fifteen minutes later, a bulky manila envelope under his arm. He slid into the booth across from me and ordered two double shots of Old Overholt rye with a Heineken chaser. Apparently I was buying. He opened the envelope, pulled out the reports and the photos, and pushed them across the table towards me, after first checking to make sure there was nothing wet on the tabletop, or even worse, sticky.
“We get these homicides almost every other night now, you know,” the cop said. “Only difference is, this dead guy is white.”
“Pretty big difference, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess it is, if it’s Sally Curto’s nephew.”
“Were they spics?”
“Who knows? They were wearing gloves, masks, somebody said they had accents, but what the hell does that mean nowadays? Could be Russians, could be Iranians, hell, they could even surprise us all and be citizens.”
“Why’d they shoot the kid?”
“He mouthed off to ’em, near as we can tell. Found three packets of coke in his coat pocket. And some Vicodin and Oxys. He was so high he thought he was bulletproof, that’s what the witnesses say. They’re not going to tell Sally that, of course. One more thing: I believe he may have also asked the eternal question.”
Do you know who I am? I shook my head. Working a door while you’re snorting coke was bad enough, but then to try to pull rank on guys who’ve got the drop on you …
“I got only one thing of interest for you,” he said. “One of the guns was a Walther PPK. We got the shell casings.”
I took a swig of my beer. “James Bond’s gun. I wonder where they stole it from.”
“Reason I mention it is, it ain’t like the old days, when guys got rid of a piece as soon as they used it, especially in a murder. Might keep your eyes open, I know we are. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it turn up again. These illegals get a nice semi-automatic like that, easy to get ammo for, a real one too, not some Hungarian knockoff, they’ll never get rid of it. They don’t give a shit about anything.”
“Why should they?” The former state attorney general had once said, “Technically, it is not illegal to be illegal in Massachusetts.” She wasn’t kidding. Anything goes wrong, some bleeding heart judge gives them bail and they’re on the next plane out of Logan back to whatever Third World hellhole they came from until the heat dies down.
I caught the bartender’s eye and motioned for another round.
“So is it spics?” I asked.
“In the Boston Police Department, we are only interested in apprehending criminals, not in the race, national origin or immigration status of said perpetrators.”
“How much they get?” I asked.
“A guess? Not much over five thousand. The guys we talked to, the players, the dealers, all of ’em, the youngest one had to be seventy-five. Every degenerate gambler under seventy-five is on the Internet. The web ain’t just for porn anymore.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. I’m a “brick-and-mortar” wiseguy, or used to be. Like every other businessman, I’m still trying to figure out how to “monetize” the Internet. The dirty bookstores and the Combat Zone are long gone, my best gambling customers bet offshore, and if you try to shake down your average shady run-of-the-mill hustler, they go running straight to the feds and quit the grinnin’ and drop the linen, except the microphones are so tiny now they don’t even have to take off their shirts to get wired, besides which there aren’t any more wires anyway, just transmitters.
I studied the crime scene photos. The overturned tables didn’t interest me. I wanted to see the corpse. He was wearing a tight-fitting jacket, another rookie mistake. If you’re working the door, you wear a loose coat, at least two sizes too big, so you can keep at least one piece or even better two in your pockets so that no civilians even notice, only the bad guys. Sally hadn’t imparted any of the tricks of the trade to his nephew, probably because he hadn’t figured he needed to.
The kid had been shot in the head. His eyes were wide open, and so was his mouth. Maybe his last thought was, I can’t believe they don’t know who I am.
“Kid have a record?” I asked.
“Usual dipshit suburban stuff, continued without a finding, OUIs reduced to reckless—
nothing like yours at that age, Bench.”
“Yeah, the social workers always said I was precocious.”
“I thought the word they used was ‘incorrigible,’ and I thought it was parole officers, not social workers.”
“Same thing,” I said, taking a sealed envelope out of my breast pocket and sliding it across the table to him. You never give cops cash; it makes them feel dirty, like you bought them. Somehow putting the cash in the envelope makes it okay.
“Sometimes,” I said, “it pays to grow up in the city instead of the suburbs.”
The cop nodded as he palmed the envelope. “Especially if you’re planning on being a gangster.”
2
A DIRTY JOB
It was shaping up as another banner year for Reilly Associates. And the banner said, “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.”
I was so broke that I was even considering scheduling an appointment with a crooked new Indian psychiatrist I’d heard about who was clearing ex-cops like me to go back on the job, years or even decades after we’d gone out on “mental disabilities.” I had it all figured out: after I got the okay to go back on the job, I’d take a three-week refresher course at the academy, then go out to the range, fire one of the new weapons, take a fall from the recoil and refile for my seventy-two-percent tax-free disability, calculated at the new, higher, post-twenty-five-percent pay raise rate.
Of course I was going to have to move fast, because a scam like this goes around the world at the speed of sound while a new cure for cancer is still putting its pants on in the morning.
First things first though. I had some duties to attend to in the oppo-research end of my racket, I mean “business.” I’d set the alarm clock for 6:30, because I had to meet the TV crew in Brighton at 8:30. I’d already given them the golf-course video of the mark we had lined up—the first deputy superintendent chief of the fire department, along with his car. The camera crew knew which golf course he was headed for—Woodland, in Newton. But I didn’t want to take any chances on a screwup. This was a $3,000 job, maybe even more—a good score by my standards, which had been slipping lately.
I’m a private detective, so-called. Another description for my line of work is confidential investigator, and confidentially, business sucks. People say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but you can’t prove it by me. I’ve got the kind of reputation money can’t buy, and you wouldn’t want to even if it could. I don’t give out business cards anymore. If somebody’s caught with one of mine on him, it just gives the cops probable cause to suspect … just about anything they want to suspect.
I know what they say in Hollywood: self-pity is not good box office. But after a while, the suck of it all just wears you down.
Today I was working for a guy in the Boston Fire Department who wanted to take out his boss, which would enable him to move up to first deputy. He could have just dropped a tip in an envelope with no return address, and sent it via snail mail to the “investigative” reporters in town. But that would be like putting a note in a bottle, throwing it into the ocean and hoping for the best. My client wanted results, guaranteed. He wanted a guy who could go directly to some reporter, in this case a TV guy, and make the pitch directly. He also wanted no fingerprints.
It’s a dirty job, and somebody dirty has to do it.
So this morning I was a finger man. I had to point out the deputy chief. Today there was a new camera crew working, and God forbid they should videotape the wrong guy, and then confront some poor schmuck on his day off from a real job. They’d lose the mark and I’d be out three grand.
I drove my Oldsmobile out to Soldiers Field Road and parked at the edge of the parking lot on the Charles River across from Channel 4. Heard something on the radio about a murder in the North End, but I didn’t pay much attention. Figured it was another Yuppie walking alone at 2:30 in the morning like he was in Wellesley or someplace.
I’d been sitting there about ten minutes when a guy in a trench coat and a scally cap came over and tapped on the window. He was the investigative reporter—that’s why he was wearing a trench coat. Basically, he was Ron Burgundy. And now he was about to sternly expose an abuse of the taxpayers’ funds—a deputy fire chief who took out an undercover car with “untraceable” plates to play golf every morning. Untraceable means that if anyone like a hood ever gets suspicious enough to run the plates with the Registry of Motor Vehicles, they come back untraceable.
It’s very convenient to have unregistered plates if you’re trying to, say, tail an arsonist.
They come in equally handy if you want to play a round of golf on business hours, “on the city.” The crack gumshoes of the “I team” had been on this one for three days. On Monday the “hero jake,” because jakes are all heroes, at least in the media, had driven the car with the untraceable plates to a mall in Nashua, New Hampshire. On Tuesday, the jake—the fireman, or should I use their preferred term, “firefighter?”—took it to his girlfriend’s apartment in Arlington. Wednesday he drove his twenty-one-year-old daughter back to college at Westfield State. Today, Thursday, he was back in the 617 area code. Tee time at Woodland was 9:30. I’d checked.
“You got the other camera crew over there already?” I asked Ron Burgundy.
“Just where you told us, Jack,” he said.
They had more than enough video now. This was the day Ron would confront the hero jake. Which was why the reporter was wearing his trench coat. It was his trademark. It’s every TV investigative reporter’s trademark. The scally cap—his personal statement, like Geraldo’s mustache. The viewers were supposed to draw the conclusion that he was Irish, from Boston. He was neither.
Some jobs I work on for weeks, and in the end, they don’t pan out. But this one had been like shooting fish in a barrel. The untraceable plate had been issued to the arson squad, but of course they never saw it, if there even was an arson squad. The deputy chief pulled into the Woodland parking lot in Newton right on schedule. The first camera crew got him getting out of the car, then unlocking his trunk and taking out his golf bag. I took some video myself with my cell phone, just in case there turned out to be a crease in the tape or some other baleful act of God.
He was headed for the clubhouse with his bag of clubs over his shoulder when Ron stepped out from behind a tree with his second camera crew to ask the deputy chief why he was parked at a golf course outside the city during business hours with an untraceable license plate on his unmarked City of Boston car.
Back at fire headquarters, the guy who’d paid me $3,000 cash had already pulled the deputy chief’s punched-in time card and made a copy of it, so he couldn’t later claim he was taking a vacation day. I’d provided them with copies of the time card from the other three days too. I’m a “source,” although more often I’m called “sources,” plural. The story sounds more authoritative that way.
I must say, Ron Burgundy did a fine job with the ambush interview. He began with, “Excuse me, chief—” and the guy said, “You must have the wrong guy, I’m not a chief.” Burgundy asked, “Who are you then?” And the jake gave the name of a Boston city councilor. It went downhill from there. Before he took off running for the clubhouse, the deputy chief’s last words were, “I’ll sue you! Do you know who I am?”
I think that may be the most-asked question in Boston, if not the United States. Do you know who I am? I know who I am. I’m somebody who would never ask that question, lest the person I’m addressing respond in the affirmative.
When I was working for the mayor and in the crosshairs of a federal grand jury, the media called me an “embattled cop.” Then my case was nolle prossed, and I became “rogue ex-cop.” If I don’t drum up some more business soon, the next adjective they use to describe me is going to be “washed up.”
I caught a ride back to Brighton with the TV crew. They were laughing, high-fiving each other all the way back. Once the job is done, it’s like I’m not there, never was there. Reporters never like to admit that the only reason they get mos
t “investigative” stories is because A is trying to take B off the board. In that way, reporters are no different from cops. Like I always say, there’s a lot more snitchin’ than sleuthin’ goin’ on.
When we got back to the TV station, I told Ron I’d send him a scan of the deputy chief’s Thursday time card by noon, after which we shook hands. There was a bounce in his step as he walked into the station. This would take the heat off him for at least six months. Maybe a year if the Globe could be persuaded to pick up the story.
I drove back to my house in the South End and got on the phone to Katy Bemis. How’s that old song go? We used to kiss good night but now it’s all over. Double entendre—get it? There’d been a time when we’d been seeing a lot of each other, another double entendre, but somehow things had never been the same since she’d moved over to the Globe from the Herald.
“Hello, Jack,” she said. “If you’re asking, I’ve already got plans for the evening.”
Have I been that persistent?
“Katy, I was just calling about a story. I got some pictures you might be able to use.”
“What kind of pictures?”
I told her about the deputy chief I’d gift-wrapped for the TV station, how they’d be running with it tonight at six, and then I mentioned that I had some photos of the $100,000-a-year hero jake getting his golf bag out of the fire department car with the untraceable plates.
“You want me to do a follow-up to a TV story?” she said. “Are you sure you’re doing this for me, or is it for the guy who hired you to blow up his boss? And who exactly am I supposed to say took this mysterious picture?”
“How about you caption it, ‘Special to the Globe.’”
