Killers

by Howie Carr

  The car was closing fast. Patty was saying something about liking the TVs on Jet Blue when I told her, as calmly as possible, to get down on the floor. She immediately dropped to the floorboards. I saw another car headed east on Broadway, and I drifted over toward the double yellow line, so the hit car couldn’t get beside me on the driver’s side. That didn’t stop them, though. They closed on me from the right side, a dangerous stunt if somebody suddenly pulled out of a parking space on the north side of Broadway.

  “Stay down, Patty!” I said, as I sped up to about forty and opened the hide to get my PDW. I knew it was loaded and the lock was off—otherwise it was no good, because I wasn’t going to have time to do anything but fire. In the rearview mirror I could see an automatic rifle barrel pointing out of the other car’s back window. I wasn’t going to have much time. I heard a shot and suddenly all the lights on the dashboard were flashing like a pinball machine.

  “Hang on, Patty,” I said, and then I slammed on the brakes. Surprised, the driver of the car behind me kept coming. I put the gun on automatic, and as the car passed us on the right I fired right through the Escalade’s front passenger window, raining glass down onto Patty. If I’m lucky, I get the driver. If I miss, the car keeps coming, and the automatic rifle takes me out.

  The guy who shoots first almost always wins, or at least that used to be the rule of thumb. But nowadays, if you’re using an automatic weapon, it really doesn’t matter if the other guy fires first if you’re the better shot. The bad guys’ car, an old Ford Taurus, undoubtedly stolen, lurched to a halt. The driver was slumped against the steering wheel, blood pouring out of a gaping wound just above his left ear. The guy in the backseat with the rifle seemed frozen, so before he thawed, I fired another burst at him through the back passenger window of my Cadillac. The bullets made a neat line of holes in the Ford’s rear door, the rifle dropped onto the pavement and the gunman slid out of sight.

  I floored the Escalade, but it was sputtering, and smoke was coming from under the hood. The guy with the rifle in the backseat had done a much better job ventilating the Escalade than he had ventilating me. I was less than four blocks from my condo in Ball Square but I wasn’t sure I could make it. I put the pedal to the metal and I still couldn’t top fifteen miles an hour. Patty was sobbing, still curled up on the floorboards, her hands covering her head.

  I’d have preferred to turn around and get the Escalade into one of our garages at the top of the hill, where the glass could be replaced very quickly and Rocco could come out from Roxbury to try to put the Escalade back in working order, if possible, which I doubted.

  But the important thing now was to get away. I momentarily wished I had a throw down to drop at the scene, but quickly thought better of it. Sometimes it’s better to play it straight, or at least as straight as you can.

  * * *

  Once I got the Escalade into my own garage, I tried to calm Patty down. She was crying hysterically. Her face and arms were covered with spots of blood where the flying glass had nicked her. Until now she’d only seen the upside of being with a wiseguy—the occasional fur coat from a hijacked load, the best tables with no waiting at the best restaurants, the new cars with dealer plates every six months. She’d never been around during a war.

  Inside, I stripped off her clothes and pushed her into the shower. Then I looked through my medicine cabinet and found some Oxys. I turned off the water and picked her up and carried her to the living room—there was no lust, believe me. I just didn’t want her to cut her feet on any random shards of glass that had dropped off my clothes. She was still sobbing as I toweled her off and bundled her into one of my bathrobes. Finally I got her settled down on the couch with a glass of gin over ice. I was going for the quick knockout, but she was too excited.

  “Why were they trying to kill us, Bench?” she asked.

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “It’d make it easier to find them.”

  “Did anybody see us?”

  “I hope not.”

  “I’m scared, Bench. What if they’re still coming after us?”

  “No need to worry about that,” I said. I came over to the couch, leaned over her and kissed her on the forehead. “Try to get some sleep.”

  “I wanna go home, Bench.”

  Home was maybe three blocks away, on the other side of Broadway and Powderhouse Square. But the Escalade was wrecked, and besides, all of Broadway would be crawling with cops for hours to come.

  “Not now, baby. I have to get another car. I gotta call Hobart and have him bring over a new one, and then I’ll drive you home. How’s that, hon?”

  She smiled sweetly. “Okay, Bench. Just don’t leave me here alone.”

  I turned on the radio and put it on some smooth jazz station, then went around and checked to make sure all the shades were drawn. My kitchen opened onto a patio, and when I bought the condo, I’d had the sliding glass doors removed and replaced with steel plates, just in case. That way I could sit at the kitchen table in the mornings and make my phone calls. I missed the sunlight, but I didn’t want to go out like Bugsy Siegel.

  The first guy I called was Hobart. He was at the Alibi. He’d heard the sirens but sirens are nothing special in Somerville. We had a guy, one of our bookies, who was in tight with City Hall and the police department, kind of our own personal “vice president, governmental relations.” I told Hobart to call him and have him make discreet inquiries about who was in the hit car. That would give me more to work with tomorrow.

  After that, I told him, get me a car—not a boiler, but a properly registered vehicle—and to have somebody follow him in another one. Also, he was to call me just before he got here, and I’d come out and get the keys and then he could get a ride back to the Alibi. We’d worry about the Escalade later.

  I considered whether to call Sally Curto. He ought to know, but on the other hand, if he’d had a hand in it … Then I reconsidered. Having your nephew and your street boss clipped is a pretty tough way to establish an alibi. It was 10:30, which meant he was probably drunk in the North End somewhere, but I dialed his cell phone number anyway.

  “Sally,” I said, as I heard loud, boozy talking behind him, “be sure to watch the late news tonight.”

  “Don’t play games,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Not on the phone,” I reminded him. “I’ll see you tomorrow at six. The usual place.”

  8

  A BUST OUT SOLON

  I can’t say much good about this endless recession, but it has helped one part of my business—bankruptcy investigations. For turning up sold-gold dirt on somebody, the only thing that beats a bankruptcy filing is a federal pre-sentencing report, and once a pol has reached that stage in his career, when he’s about to be packed off to prison, the only ones still making money off him are the lawyers handling his appeal.

  Anyway, in the boom years, a rep’s $60,000 salary wasn’t that great, unless you were completely unemployable, which most of them are.

  Nowadays, though, that sixty large is looking a lot better, especially when you factor in all the perks—the per diem for driving into Boston from the district, the federal income tax write-offs if you live more than fifty miles from the State House, the kickbacks from your one or two aides, the campaign account out of which you can pay most of your personal expenses …

  All of a sudden, there were more contested legislative races, and a lot of the challengers, who often brag about their experiences in what we call the Dreaded Private Sector, just happen to have a recent bankruptcy filing on record in the Brooke Courthouse. Which of course is why they’re running. They want to bury their snouts deep into the public trough.

  I don’t keep records, for obvious reasons, but I’d say I pull at least twice as many bankruptcy files as I did five years ago. Let me put it this way: I now give Christmas presents to the clerks up on the sixth floor of the courthouse. One Lottery season ticket per person.

  I charge my clients a grand per bankruptcy f
ile, but it’s simple work, Xeroxing, and my clients don’t have to dirty their hands by signing out the jackets. Actually, they could access the files easily enough themselves if they had PACER, but not many of them know that, and I’m not telling, although eventually I’m going to have to get PACER myself and save some money on downtown parking. Anyway, bankruptcy filings are a nice little side operation, and my clients always prefer to pay cash too, which is tidier for both parties.

  I’d spent the afternoon pulling records for three of my incumbents. I was getting ready to leave when it suddenly occurred to me: as long as I was here, why not see if Denis Donahue had a jacket? Just a shot in the dark, but the lack of a second “n” in “Denis” made it very unlikely I’d run into a case of mistaken identity. And I didn’t.

  It appeared that three months ago, Donuts couldn’t have afforded a box of a dozen assorted Honey Dew donuts. He owed child support, he was behind on his mortgage, his credit cards had been cut off, a couple of New Jersey and Connecticut casinos were chasing him and behind all of them came the usual local unsecured creditors—tradesmen, utilities, the cable company, the lawn service, even the Worcester Telegram newspaper …

  This guy was a complete deadbeat. And it was a telling commentary on the collapse of the local newspapers that no reporters had yet picked up on this. Ten, even five years ago, the Boston papers would have routinely checked out court records to see if any of the legislative leadership had filed Chapter 7. Or somebody, probably me, if I had the right client, would have tipped them off, or sent them a Xeroxed package of the documents in an envelope with no return address.

  But what was even more significant than the debts was the fact that they had all been discharged, less than a month ago. I did some rough calculations and the payments came to some $300,000, give or take a porn movie or two in the Presidential Suite at Trump Towers in Atlantic City.

  Granted, Donuts was next in line to the Senate presidency, but that was still eight months off. And that kind of front-runner money generally trickles in slowly, finally gushing into a torrent as the moment of succession arrives.

  I told the clerk I was going to have to copy this one last file. I was enough of a regular that he could groan that it was 4:15, fifteen minutes before closing time. And I was enough of a regular that I could slip him a double sawbuck and tell him to calm down.

  He smiled and calmed down.

  9

  THE HR DEPARTMENT

  Sally and I were sitting on a bench at Castle Island. It was another foggy morning. Fifty feet behind us, smoking a cigarette, was Blinky Marzilli’s boy Benny Eggs. When I was starting out, all these guys were in their twenties. Now the youngest of them looked like they were in their late forties. The talent pool had dried up.

  “Nice shooting last night, kid,” Sally said to me. He seemed in a better mood, now that I was no longer a suspect. “Lucky the cops don’t have any witnesses.”

  “There’s no luck involved. That’s what I pay ’em for. I don’t care how many stones they look under, as long as they don’t turn over the one I’m hiding under.”

  “I assume you got the names they ain’t releasing ’til they, whattayacallit, notify the next of kin.”

  I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and read aloud to Sally.

  “The driver was Emilio Cortez-Rodriguez, also known as—do I really have to read all these aliases? Illegal alien. East Boston, Chelsea and Revere addresses. Twenty-eight years old. Guy in the backseat—a white guy from Winthrop. Michael Cortese, former Probation Department employee. He’s in critical condition, two slugs in the pancreas. Doubtful he makes it.”

  “Cortese, you say. I know some Corteses in Winthrop, but this kid, I can’t place him. How old you say he was?”

  “He’s thirty-four.”

  Sally shook his head. “Probation Department. Makes no fucking sense. Former probation officer? Who the fuck quits a state job?”

  “Maybe he got fired?” I said. Suddenly I had a question for my new friend Jack Reilly. This was hack shit, his kind of thing.

  “Motherfucker,” Sally said. “I wish I knew somebody to ask about this kid.”

  How about Blinky Marzilli, I thought to myself. Through Blinky, Sally still ran Eastie, at least nominally. After the last big heroin bust in Eastie, the feds had a press conference with an organizational chart of the Mafia crew, and at least a third of them were Hispanic.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Sally said, “the spics having the stones to come after us.”

  Why wouldn’t they, when they outnumbered In Town in East Boston maybe five to one? What bothered me about this job was the white shooter working with the illegal ex-con. I know I got Peppa on my crew, but we speak the same language. We’re both Americans. I never heard of white guys working contracts with illegals. Drugs sure, but contract hits—never.

  “What about the car?” Sally asked.

  “The usual. Stolen license plates. It apparently belonged to another illegal in Everett. She has one of those ‘zero’ registrations on it that the Registry gives out to accommodate the newcomers to our land. She’ll get a fifty-dollar fine for court costs, and a continued without a finding.”

  “You mean they don’t deport her?”

  “C’mon, Sally, where you been? We fuckin’ celebrate diversity here in Massachusetts.” I paused. “What we gotta do is figure out who these two were working for. I assume you got some guys beating the bushes on that.”

  “Assumptions are the mother of fuck-ups,” he said. “Who am I gonna send over there? I don’t even have lunch in Maverick Square no more. I can’t believe what they done to the place—”

  “We’re down to two scenarios now,” I said. “Number one, somebody hired them to whack me so it’d look like a war between us. Number two, they want to get rid of both crews so they can move in. Whoever ‘they’ is. You got any ideas, Sally?”

  He looked around over his shoulder at his so-called bodyguard, who was lighting a new cigarette off the old one. Chain-smoking was back in a big way with In Town. Sally turned back around to me and lowered his voice.

  “I told you, I’m short on good help. I’m counting on you, kid, nobody else can do it.”

  He was right about that, but what he didn’t say was, nobody else would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Overhead, a jet taking off from Logan practically drowned out our conversation. Probably a couple more of Sally’s “soldiers” were on it, heading south to Florida until the heat died down. After last night, Patty had more experience being under fire than anybody in any of Sally’s crews.

  “Sally,” I said once the plane’s noise died down, “I can’t take care of nothing until I know who’s coming after me. Are you absolutely positive this ain’t a guinea thing, you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “Hey,” he said, “we don’t use spics.”

  “You sure about that?”

  He slumped down. “Okay, correction. I don’t use spics. I can’t speak for nobody else. I grant you, that other guy there, that friend of mine in Worcester, he did. That’s why he’s doing two hundred years. The spics ratted him out. I tell Blinky a million times, watch yourself, they’re no fuckin’ good, but he says, who else am I gonna use? Any Americans over there have kids, first thing they do is get the fuck out, move to Saugus, Revere, Winthrop, anywhere except maybe Chelsea, which is even worse, if that’s possible.”

  He shook his head slowly, sadly, and shook another cigarette out of his pack.

  “Who the fuck is gonna send a white kid to a public school in Boston? Which is why there ain’t no white kids hanging out on the corners no more, or maybe you ain’t noticed?”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  See, our way of life is over. It was never what it was made out to be in the movies, but now it’s nothing. I see young guys, not many but a few, they want to be the next Dutch Schultz or Al Capone. Idiots is what they are. I don’t care, I’m just passing through. I don’t blame Sally’s guys getting the fuck out of Dodge befor
e the shooting starts. There’s nothing left here worth getting capped over. I have to stay, just like Sally. It’s the old rule about captains going down with the ship.

  As much as I possibly can, I now avoid the day-to-day wiseguy stuff. You just never know who’s a rat anymore. Drugs are the worst, of course, but these snitches are reporting back to the cops about every goddamn thing. I still go to wakes and funerals, because I’m expected to. But any social events, forget about it. As hard as I try to avoid everybody, I still run into wiseguys who want to talk. They try to tell me something, they got something going, do I know anybody needs some work? Later, when something goes wrong, because it always goes wrong, Sally or the guy’s uncle will start asking questions, wanting to know who knew about this score? If I don’t know nothing, nobody can suspect me of ratting them out.

  So whenever somebody leans over and whispers in my ear, like he’s gonna pass on some good gossip or a hot tip, I put my hands up. ‘Please,’ I say, ‘I don’t want to know.’ There’s only one thing I’m interested in anymore: if somebody gets hit, I want to know who did it. Because I absolutely have to know who’s capable of doing that kind of wet work.

  Myself, I’m capable. Very capable. I know, it’s supposed to be up to other people to say how tough you are, but I’m just quoting everybody else, trust me on that. See, what my job boils down to is basically human relations. In corporations, HR handles the job searches, hires the headhunter firms, figures out which health insurance to buy and so on. But let’s face it—there are two major reasons why companies have HR departments. The first is so they’ll have some place to dump all the incompetent affirmative-action hires where they can’t get into too much trouble. The second, and more important reason for HR, is to have a group of people who know how to fire bad employees while making sure the company doesn’t get sued.