Killers

by Howie Carr

So the governor gave him something where shakedowns were just part of the overhead and no one would ever complain—the Boston Licensing Board, which handled all the liquor licenses in the city. All these years later, Slip still had a few people up there. Before I met Katy at Meg’s, I’d asked him to pull the file on Santo’s/the Python for me.

  “Santo’s?” he said. “That dump on Bennington Street?”

  “I see you’ve been there.”

  “You know what I’m always looking for when I’m running for office?” Of course—a bullet. Slip ran at-large. Every voter got to cast ballots for up to four candidates, because there were four at-large city councilors. But a vote was worth a lot more if it was a “bullet,” a single vote. A second vote, for somebody else, meant that you just broke even with the other candidate. Anybody who voted for four candidates … well, there weren’t all that many voters in Boston that stupid.

  “East Boston’s one of those places,” Slip said, “where I always think twice about asking somebody for a bullet. Don’t want anybody to take me literally, you know. And let me tell you, I would never, ever ask anybody in Santo’s for a bullet. Not unless I’d made a good Act of Contrition first.”

  “They call it the Python now.”

  “A rose by any other name…”

  “What do you know about Santo’s?”

  “It’s been a bad place for forty years.”

  “East Boston’s changed a lot in forty years.”

  “The language, maybe, but Santo’s is still a magnet for assholes.”

  “Can you find out who owns it for me?”

  “I can find out who’s listed as the manager.”

  “Do the right thing, Slip.”

  21

  WHEN HENRY MET SPIKE

  I was holding court at my Allston outpost, Grogan’s Run. Believe it or not, some guys don’t like to go into either Somerville or Roxbury. So I was negotiating with a couple of tailgaters from Southie. They wanted to know how many cases of cigarettes I could take. I asked them how many could they get. Every time the legislature jacks up the tax another dollar an extra pack my bootlegging business goes up another thirty percent. Cigarette smuggling is a bigger racket now than it was in the sixties.

  It’s gotten ridiculous, how much smokes cost. After all the taxes, a carton of cigarettes now costs around $100 in Massachusetts. In New Hampshire, it’s “only” $56, and of course it’s even less in the tobacco-growing Southern states. The local taxes were so onerous that the five-mile zone just south of the New Hampshire border was starting to look like Syria, with nothing but abandoned convenience stores, gas stations and packys, none of whom could compete with nearby New Hampshire’s lower prices.

  Every time the legislature hiked the cigarette excise tax yet again, the DMZ would creep another mile or so south. The state economy was withering away, but for cigarette smugglers, it was boom times.

  I was haggling with the Southie crew over price before rather than after the “heist” because the drivers read the newspapers too, and they understand their loads are suddenly worth a lot more dough. The Southie hijacking crews know better than to ask me to front them anything, but they wanted a number on how much they could expect from the job.

  None of these were what you’d call real “hijackings,” of course. The driver just turns over the load to his friends, and they pay him off. That’s why they were asking about money. I’m positive the truck driver had other crews putting bids in too. Hell, he wouldn’t be much of a Local 25 Teamster if he couldn’t get at least a little auction going. The guys I was dealing with, I offered them top dollar because the profit margin now was too great to risk losing a load over a few hundred bucks. They were satisfied with the price and all I asked in return was that not all of the Marlboro Lights and Newports go missing before the truck got to my warehouse in Everett.

  I don’t mind a few random cases of Parliaments and Merits and Alpines thrown in with the popular brands, but please, don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.

  We’d about wrapped up our business when my cell phone rang. It was Hobart.

  “Spike Tierney’s on his way over to see you,” he said, and I groaned. Spike Tierney was a hothead, a loser, a drunk. I motioned to the Southie guys that we had a deal and that I’d catch up with them later. I kept the phone to my ear as we all stood up and shook hands and then I sat back down to talk to Hobart.

  “I thought he was still in on that weapons beef,” I said.

  “I guess he got out.”

  “He looking for work?”

  “No, he’s looking for his girl.”

  “His girl? What am I, fucking Craigslist?”

  “His girl is Dottie. She was over here drinking the other night, remember?”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “She looks like every other skank hanging out here.”

  In other words, twenty-five going on fifty-five.

  “So he just got out,” I said, “and now he’s trying to run her down because she sent him a ‘Dear Spike’ letter. Is that it?”

  “Something like that, I guess. I thought you might want a heads-up.”

  “You didn’t tell him where I was, did you?”

  “Fuck no, are you kidding? He just walked out. I told him she’d been in here, but I guess maybe he figures you know something I don’t. He’s working the circuit.”

  I hung up and considered the possibilities. Spike was a real red-ass, just what I didn’t need. But then it occurred to me that for once in his life, perhaps Spike could do something worthwhile for me.

  About five minutes later, Spike Tierney swaggered in. Gone five years, and he was acting like he’d never left. He sauntered over to my table, a big smile on my face. He thrust his hairy paw out and I stood up to shake it.

  “Bench, it’s been a while.” He sat down, uninvited. That was a bad habit he had picked up in the prison mess. “Listen, I need a favor.” Who didn’t?

  “Remember my girl Dottie? I been looking for her all over town since I got out. I can’t find her nowhere. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she’s giving me the swerve. But I hear she’s at the Alibi the other night, and I am wondering, do you talk to her?”

  “Dottie?” I said, furrowing my brow, pretending to give it some real thought. “Dottie Ballou, right?”

  “That’s it, Bench. Dottie Ballou. A real doll.”

  If he thought Dottie was a real doll, then she hadn’t been visiting him much down at MCI-Norfolk. She’d put a lot of miles on that chassis of hers during the five years he’d been away. Whatever Liz McDermott was guzzling, Dottie was drinking double.

  “Dottie?” I said, laying it on thick. “The night she was in my place, I think she was with Henry Sheldon.”

  “Henry who?”

  “Henry Sheldon. He’s a loan shark down Weymouth. Big fat fuck.” I grimaced. “I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad tidings here, Spike, but I thought they were an item, you know what I mean?”

  His lips curled into a frown, more than a frown, actually, more like rage.

  “Henry Sheldon, huh?” he said. “Where’s this motherfucker’s office?”

  I had to tell him. What are friends for? He stormed out of Grogan’s Run. I got up and watched him climb into an old, beat-up Dodge, of all things. It looked like about a fifty-fifty shot Spike could make it as far as Weymouth in that POS. I was also watching to make sure he hadn’t forgotten the quickest way to Weymouth. He turned right and headed north on Market Street, toward Storrow Drive to the Turnpike Extension. Poor Henry. I figured he had about forty minutes to live.

  22

  THE MOTHER’S MILK OF POLITICS

  God, I hate to park downtown. I don’t care if I’m running a cheat sheet or not, it still pisses me off to pay thirty dollars for a couple of hours. But I had a stop to make at City Hall. By the time I got to the seventh level of the Government Center garage, I was dizzy from going up all those flights in circles. The elevator smelled of urine, but that wa
s better than the only other thing it could have smelled like.

  City Councilor Slip Crowley was sitting in his fifth-floor office, feet on his desk, watching a rerun of Charlie’s Angels and smoking a Kool.

  “Take a load off, pal,” he said, motioning toward a chair. “I don’t know how much good this is going to do you, but I pulled everything in the file on Santo’s.”

  The folder was fairly light, but I didn’t have much time.

  “Gimme the CliffsNotes version,” I told Slip.

  “Last year, month of February sticks out,” he said.

  “And why would that be?”

  “They didn’t get closed down once that whole month.” He crushed out his cigarette. “You may remember, that was the month there were three blizzards. Or was it four?”

  “Owner of record?”

  “One Domenic Gargiulo. Does the name ring a bell?”

  “No, should it?”

  “He’s a probation officer, East Boston District Court.”

  “No shit,” I said, standing up and walking around Slip’s desk. “Does that computer of yours work?”

  “How the fuck would I know?”

  It worked. Slip got up from his desk and went around to the couch and again put his feet up. It wasn’t an election year. Things were slow. Correction: things are always slow at City Hall. They’re just slower in the even-numbered years.

  I quickly got on to the website of the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. Life is so much easier with the Internet. I clicked on “Candidates” and typed in the name Donahue. Then I clicked on “Contributors” and typed in the previous year and the name Gargiulo. I got just what I was looking for.

  He lived in Revere with a woman named Donna, and a couple of kids, all of whom were deeply committed to fulfilling their civic responsibilities, namely, handing cash to politicians who could return the favor, in spades.

  Their favorite statesman was none other than Donuts Donahue of Worcester.

  “Find what you were looking for?” Slip asked.

  “Tell me something, Slip,” I asked. “Why would a probation officer in East Boston and his whole family be giving money to Donuts Donahue? I mean, I know the connection to Donahue through his cousin, but why not one or two of the local guys too?”

  Slip lit up another Kool. “You’re lucky you’re asking me these questions, and not one of your marks up in the State House. People might start saying you’ve lost your fastball.”

  “C’mon, Slip, don’t bust my balls.”

  “It’s simple, pal. There’s too many guys in Boston, splitting up too few jobs. Unless he’s in leadership, a rep in Boston gets one or two probation jobs, if he’s lucky. Out west, less competition for the slots. More Republicans for one thing, and even they have to get a few. Eventually, one of them probation hacks out in the 413 area code picks off a deputy commissioner’s job. That makes it a lot easier to get somebody in, if you don’t have to call the commissioner in Boston, like everybody else does. Think of western Mass like baseball. They’re not in Fenway, they’re in Pawtucket, but when you’re going after a P.O.’s job, what the hell does it matter who gets it for you?”

  “So Donuts maybe got Domenic Gargiulo his job?”

  “More’n likely.”

  “And the introduction came in the usual way.”

  “If you mean Benjamin Franklins, plural, the answer is yes.”

  I asked Slip if he remembered Santo’s from his old days on the Licensing Board.

  “I do indeed. It was an In Town joint. Course, what wasn’t over there, back then? I read over the police reports before you got here, they’re celebrating diversity now, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew what he meant. Knives, machetes even. Still, Slip didn’t use the old slurs like “spic” anymore. Too many cell phones recording everything. One bad video on YouTube and your career could be over.

  “Why would Donuts be going to the Python late at night?” I asked.

  “I’d find that hard to believe.”

  “Believe it.”

  As long as I was at City Hall, running up my parking tab in the Government Center garage, I might as well save myself some time later and take care of another errand. I got back on Slip’s computer and punched in the name of a pay site I’m a member of, where you can run DOBs and phone numbers and addresses. This time I was looking for DOBs—of Mr. and Mrs. Gargiulo. Odds were, they’d been born in Boston, and if they had been, their birth certificates would be on file in the city clerk’s office on the mezzanine.

  I got the dates I was looking for and headed downstairs. As I expected, the line was the usual new-Boston Tower of Babel, ninety percent illegal aliens queued up to pull their anchor babies’ birth certificates. They were only taking the welfare Americans couldn’t be bothered taking, as George W. Bush would say. The birth certificates they needed to prove that one of them was at least technically an American citizen, which entitled the entire family to the full Tsarnaev, as we now called the panoply of welfare bennies available to every Third World freeloader who could drop a baby here in the Live for Free or Die state.

  I finally got to the window, and asked for the birth records books from 1965 and 1968, the years the Gargiulos had been born. Normally, that’s a bit of a pain in the ass, because you may be there for a while, but the clerk was so happy to be waiting on a fellow Americano that there were none of the usual dirty looks. Plus, I had the birth dates.

  Mrs. Gargiulo’s maiden name was Zenna, and her mother’s maiden name was Palermo. Neither of them rang a bell. But when I got to Domenic, I saw that his mother was the former Carmela Marzilli.

  Marzilli—as in Blinky Marzilli. I wrote down the particulars and then asked the clerk to make me a copy. Now that I was actually asking her to get up out of her chair and do something, her attitude took a turn for the worse. It improved when I handed her a twenty. I wanted to have something to show Bench McCarthy the next time I saw him.

  23

  JUNK IN THE TRUNK

  In the morning, the story about Henry Sheldon was all over the all-news radio station. The manager of a loan company in Weymouth had been gunned down in his office, but no cash was missing. Robbery did not appear to be a motive. The police were baffled. I love it when the police are baffled.

  Poor Henry, I’m sure he never saw it coming. But then, how could he? I began to wonder, what other loan sharks might be willing to loan an upstanding character like me some dough? Next time, why not go for fifty, or even a hundred large?

  It was about 7:30 in the morning, and the first thing I did as I walked into the bar on Hancock Street in Quincy was make eye contact with the bartender. I knew him vaguely, and he recognized me and nodded. Ditto Foley had told him to be expecting me. He motioned silently with his head toward the back of the bar. I’m sure he noticed the billy club I was carrying in my right hand. I’d left my car in the alley behind the bar, in case I had to leave in a hurry. Then I’d walked around and entered the bar through the front door.

  There were already a couple of working men sitting at the bar, but they didn’t look like cops. For one thing, they appeared sober, like they’d just gotten off the overnight shift at the nearby Stop & Shop warehouse. But everything about the guy sitting by himself in a booth in the back of the darkened, dirty room screamed cop—bad cop. There were three empty highball glasses in front of him, and a half-full one. He was holding a smartphone. Twenty years ago, it would have been a Racing Form. He looked like the kind of guy you used to see at Suffolk Downs in the afternoons. Now he probably owed twenty large to some offshore gambling outfit run by a congressman’s on-the-lam brothers-in-law.

  I slid into the booth across from him, keeping the sap low so he couldn’t see it as I laid it down next to me on the pockmarked, slashed plastic that covered the bench.

  “Are you Tim Fitzpatrick?”

  He looked up, somewhere between shit-faced and legless. I doubted he’d drawn a sober breath in at least five years. “Who wants to kn
ow?”

  “That’s not important,” I said. “What’s important is your son.”

  “My son?” You couldn’t say he bristled exactly, because he was too far gone to bristle. Recoil was more like it.

  “Listen carefully,” I said. “Your son is threatening to file a criminal complaint against the son of a friend of mine. This friend of mine gave you $5,000 yesterday, which seems more than fair under the circumstances, namely that your son came out on the short end of a barroom brawl.”

  “Who are you?” he said blearily.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know. Now listen, I can’t stop your son from filing a complaint against my friend’s son, but if he does, I’ve got a guy who’s going to file a complaint against your son for starting another fucking fracas in a gin mill.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “This guy I know, he’s going to swear that your son sucker-punched him, not in Quincy, but in Boston. Boston, you understand. Where you don’t have any clout, but this friend of mine does. He knows the clerk/magistrate, and he knows the judge. And we have witnesses. And your son has a record, I’ve checked his CORI. He won’t get much time, but he’ll get thirty days in South Bay, and my friend’s got friends of his own in South Bay, and some terrible things’ve been known to happen in South Bay, most of which don’t even make the papers anymore. But guys inside there are getting shanked all the time. Or maybe they get a hot shot, you know what I mean?”

  He squinted at me. “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “I’m talking to a motherfucker who oughta be very happy with his five grand that he can now proceed to blow on stupid fucking bets or give it to his son so he can stick it up his nose. I’m talking to a drunk-ass loser who ought to be giving a good talking to to his son about trying to shake down people who’ve already beat the shit out of him once. Capisce?”

  His nostrils flared. “I don’t have to take no shit off no guinea hood from Boston.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “But I do know you do have to take shit off me. This is your one and only warning.”