by Howie Carr
But it was just dark enough, and I was just low enough to the ground. They didn’t even know where I was as they next raked the front of the Alibi, but nothing gets through those steel plates. I heard the squeal of tires again, and I raised my head just enough to see the taillights of an SUV, a big one, maybe an Escalade. Stolen, undoubtedly. It was headed east, toward the McGrath/O’Brien highway. I figured I had only a few seconds before the crash car pulled up and opened fire, so I jumped up and bolted for the Alibi. As soon as the boys had heard the shots, they’d locked the front door, and I had to bang on it for a few seconds before Hobart cracked it open, 9 mm Glock in hand. I pushed him back inside, then grabbed the gun from him and relocked the door. Finally I hit the deck, just in case. Outside, they opened fire again. This was car two. They couldn’t get to me now, and they knew it, which must have pissed them off, because they fired off a few more angry wasted rounds, which we could hear bouncing harmlessly off the steel plates outside. It only went on for a few seconds, but it seemed longer, much longer. Finally, it was over.
“Call the cops!” I yelled to Hobart. The few customers all started getting off the floor, dusting themselves off. Occasionally customers—civilians anyway—asked me why we’d boarded up the front window years earlier and put steel plating where the glass used to be. I always made some lame joke about being allergic to sunlight. I had a feeling no one would be asking me that question about steel plates again for a good long time.
The cops were there instantaneously, so quickly I barely had time to hand the Glock back to Hobart, who stashed it behind the bar. I knew the TV crews would be here soon too. I called Sam, the owner of the barbershop next door, and told him I’d pay for any deductibles on his insurance policy. He sighed and asked me if we had any plywood or two-by-fours at the Alibi that he could use to board up his place. He was driving in from his home in Arlington.
* * *
I get some respect in Somerville. God knows I should, I spread enough cash around. When they arrived, the uniforms left me alone and let the captain handle the perfunctory questions. His name was Paul Vitagliano, Paulie Vitt we called him. Two years ahead of me at Somerville High, or would have been, if I had stuck around long enough to graduate.
“What’s going on with you guys lately?” he asked me casually.
“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t know?” I said.
“Probably not,” he said. “I read the newspapers too, you know.”
“Well, don’t believe everything you read.”
After a while the reporters and TV crews arrived. I retreated upstairs to my club—I don’t feel like giving every wannabe in the city a good look at me. Rather than block the front door and look like an asshole on the eleven o’clock news, Hobart let the crews inside long enough to get a few wide shots of the bar, sans the few customers who hadn’t screwed out the back door when the shooting started. After they got their videotape, Hobart told them to beat it and they all took off for headquarters in Union Square and the official statement from Captain Vitagliano.
There were still a lot of cops around and I knew eventually I’d have to go downstairs and at least make an appearance. But first I wanted to call Sally on his cell phone. I’d stood him up on our date at the Café Ravenna. I was just hoping Liz had done the same.
“Where the fuck are you?” he said, his voice slightly slurred. “You were supposed to be here three hours ago.”
“I got ambushed outside the Alibi,” I said.
“What? Are you okay?” He sounded sincerely concerned, maybe because if I were gone, Cheech would be his top gun. Hell, maybe his only gun, if he couldn’t convince Salt and Peppa to come work for him.
“Yeah, I’m okay, watch the eleven o’clock news.”
“Get any of them?”
“Jesus Christ, Sally, I’m lucky to be alive. Remember when I put in those steel plates over the front windows, and you told me I was wasting my money? Those plates absorbed about a hundred rounds.”
“Whatever happened to revolvers?” Sally mused. He sounded like the old man, Tommy Callahan.
“If a guy’s got a machine gun,” I said, “a thirty-eight’s worth about as much as a knife at a gunfight.”
“But you’re okay, right?”
“I’d rather be lucky than good, Sally.”
Now that he knew I was all right, he suddenly seemed a lot more relaxed. Maybe it was the dago red he’d been swilling all night.
“Hey,” he said, “I heard on the news tonight, somebody dusted Henry Sheldon.”
“Yeah, I heard that too. The police said they’re baffled.”
“They are, are they?” he said with a chuckle. “Tell you something else I heard. I heard somebody just borrowed some big dough off him.”
“Is that right? Got any names to go with that?”
Sally started to say something, then thought better of it. I had a feeling he was going to say something about karma, only karma wasn’t his kind of word. What he’d say was, “What goes around comes around.”
As if I didn’t know.
26
LOVE ON WINTER HILL
As I drove up Winter Hill, the first thing I noticed was the police cruisers in front of the Alibi. I thought about just heading up the hill, turning left on Medford Street in Magoun Square and then heading back into the city.
But my curiosity got the best of me. I parked across Broadway and then crossed over, just as one of the police cars was pulling away from the curb in front of the little barbershop. I saw a slight, older guy standing on the sidewalk. There were shards of glass everywhere, and he was nailing up boards over what was obviously a shot-out window.
I kept walking, and opened the front door of the Alibi.
“We’re closed,” somebody yelled. Then I saw Bench, sitting at the big circular table with a couple of what I took to be plainclothesmen. He saw me and nodded to the guy who’d yelled at me.
“He’s okay, Hobart.” He looked back at me and pointed to the bar. “Make yourself a drink, I’ll only be a couple more minutes.”
The cops didn’t ask who I was. That would have been impolite. I grabbed a stool and just sat there. The bartender was apparently taking the night off, and nobody had been called to fill in. Not that I was particularly thirsty. After another ten minutes or so, the cops stood up and shook hands with Bench—I was watching everything in the mirror behind the bar. They made their way out and shut the door, and Bench locked it behind them. Then he turned to me.
“Just another night in the All-American City,” he said.
“A drive-by?” I asked.
“What else?” He pointed toward a booth in the back. “Let’s sit down. You sure you don’t want something to drink?”
I shook my head and sat down. “I found out who owns the Python.”
His eyes narrowed. “Anybody I know?”
“You know a guy named Blinky, right? It’s some cousin or some other relative of his.”
“Be specific.”
“All I know is, the owner of record is a broad named Gargiulo, and her mother’s maiden name is Marzilli.”
He just sat there, staring at me. I took the folded birth certificate out of my coat pocket and handed it to him. He read it silently, shook his head, refolded it and pushed it back across the table to me.
“Anything else?” he finally said.
“Yeah. You know a guy named Mikey Tickets?”
He shook his head. “Tell me about him.”
“He used to be one of the mayor’s fixers at City Hall. He’s from East Boston.”
“So?”
“So he’s been in the can for a while, mail fraud, wire fraud, the usual shit, he was taking kickbacks to steer federal grants—”
Bench grimaced. “Let me guess, they’ve brought him back to testify before a grand jury?”
I waited for him to say something else, but he could hold his mud, as my father used to say. Bench McCarthy never said anything that might come back to haunt him
in, say, a grand jury proceeding. He never volunteered any information, not to me anyway. Suddenly I heard knocking on the front door of the Alibi and a woman demanding to be let in. Hobart, now sitting at the round table with an automatic in front of him, motioned one of the younger guys sitting at the bar to open the door.
A beautiful dark-haired young woman in a micro-miniskirt rushed in, looked quickly around the bar and made for our booth.
“Bench,” she said, throwing her arms around him. “Thank God you’re okay. I just heard.”
“It happened two hours ago,” he said coolly.
“I was getting my hair done,” she said. He looked over at me, then back at her. “Patty, this is—” I realized, he couldn’t remember my name.
“Jack,” I said.
“Bob,” he said. “Bob Smith.”
“Pleased to meetcha, Bob,” she said, then turned back to Bench, real anguish visible on her face. “Bench, why us? Who’s doing this?”
“Somebody who doesn’t like me would be my best guess.” He managed a slight smile, then stood up and hugged her tightly. She had an even better figure than I’d noticed at first glance. “Listen, baby, the good news is they’re not very good shots. And the better news is that this time you weren’t with me.” He kissed her on her forehead. “I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you. You know I love you, baby.”
Patty’s eyes grew wide. This had to be a very rare occasion, judging from her expression and Bench’s reputation as a hard guy. And I was a witness.
“Bench,” she said, tenderly, “this is the first time you’ve ever said you love me.”
He reached over and brushed a lock of her long black hair out of her face and around her ear. “I’m not a heart-on-my-sleeve kind of guy, am I, Patty?”
Boy, was that the understatement of the year.
He reached into his coat pocket and came up with a house key, which he handed to Patty. “Hobart’ll drive you to Brighton, and you wait for me there. I may not get back ’til late tonight.”
All this was right out in the open. I guess Bench didn’t keep a lot of secrets from the boys, at least if they didn’t involve something that could lead to something that would land his ass in a document that began, “The United States of America versus…” Patty stood up and they did another major lip-lock, like it was prom night at reform school. However, the timing didn’t seem right to tell them to get a room. So I held my own mud.
With Hobart behind her, Patty sashayed out of the Abili, every male eyeball in the house following her. Obviously Bench didn’t mind; she was yet another confirmation of his status as the alpha male in these here parts.
After Patty and Hobart were gone Bench told the just-arrived fill-in bartender to turn the outside lights back on, including the flashing beer light in the smaller, side front window that wasn’t covered by steel plates. It had somehow been spared in the fusillade; Central American armies have never been renowned for their marksmanship, or anything else for that matter.
“Never let ’em see you sweat” were apparently a few more of Bench’s words to live by. But Bench wasn’t taking too many chances. Just inside the door, out of sight from the sidewalk, he had one of his guys in a captain’s chair, a sawed-off shotgun on his lap, covered by a beach towel. Of course you may be thinking that possession of a sawed-off shotgun is a felony in America. But we weren’t in America, we were in Somerville. And Bench apparently hadn’t gotten the memo from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Explosives.
On the other side of the front door from the sawed-off shotgun, on the last bar stool in the corner, sat another guy. His stool was turned toward the door, and on the bar in front of him was what looked like a pregnant Herald. It bulged out because it was on top of a 9-mm Glock. The odds of the East Boston crew reappearing tonight were slim, but like the Boy Scout he’d never been, Bench preferred to Be Prepared.
He walked over to the booth and noticed where I was sitting, looking north, toward the door.
“Mind switching over to the other side of the booth with me?” he asked. “I like to be able to see the door—it’s just one of my little, uh, peccadilloes.”
I stood up and made the change. Bench slid into the other side and then slapped a .38 revolver on the table. “You understand?” he said and I nodded. I understood.
“Tell me more about this Mikey Tickets,” he said.
“I don’t know much, just that he’s on his way back.”
“Is he on the bus?”
“I’m not sure, but my understanding is, they’re not trying to bust his balls.”
“If you’re on the bus, they’re busting your balls.” He took a deep breath; he looked quite beat, which was understandable, considering. Watching him, I noticed something small and shiny reflecting in his hair. It took me a second to realize it was a tiny sliver of glass. I averted my eyes quickly before he spoke.
“You know there’s more than one grand jury,” he said. “What’s your interest in this hack?”
“He used to work at Santo’s.”
Bench nodded. “Seems like all roads lead to Santo’s. But what’s this got to do with me?”
“What’s this got to do with you?” I asked. “How about, you don’t get shot.”
“Too late for that. They’ve already been shooting at me.”
He wasn’t exactly a font of information, but there were certain steps that Bench could take to put an end to this that I couldn’t. So my job here was to provide him with enough information to get the ball rolling. How he got the mission accomplished, that really wasn’t my concern, or my clients’. So I didn’t think I had a lot to lose by leveling with him, at least up to a point.
I asked him if he’d known who owned the Python, and he shook his head. He was tapping his fingers on the table, as if he were trying to recall something or somebody else.
“It’s interesting, that name Marzilli,” he said, “but sometimes one and one don’t add up to two, they add up to three, or four. I can’t take anything for granted. Could be instead of the way you’re laying it out, somebody’s out to knock off me and the other guy and the casino bill is the decoy, instead of the other way around. You follow me?” He rubbed his eyes, as if he’d been up for twenty-four hours, although I doubted very much he rolled out of bed before noon.
“What I can’t figure out,” Bench said, “is why wouldn’t all of these casino people want this bill to pass? Way I got it figured is, if you have to post a bond to build a $500 million casino, there has to be plenty of money to go around. More than enough for everybody. Am I right?”
I shook my head. “Not everybody gets a license. In fact, most of them don’t. The problem is, there’s only three casino licenses up for grabs, one of which is set aside for the Indians. They cut the state into three districts, and if the law’s passed then the new Gaming Commission decides which applicant in which district gets the license.”
He nodded. He still read the newspapers. “Seems like it’d be a lot cheaper, not to mention less trouble, just to bribe those guys for a license. How many are there?”
“Five, but they all answer to the politicians who appointed them.”
“In other words, they’re bagmen is what you’re telling me.”
“That’s one way to put it, I suppose.”
“Is there any other way to put it?”
“Not really,” I said, “now that I think about it.”
He smiled weakly. “This has to end, one way or the other, and as far as my friends and I are concerned, it only ends one way.”
“That’s the way we feel too.”
“Well, we feel it a little stronger, if you know what I mean. This thing is costing your people a lot of money. But you can always get more money. They’re trying to kill us.” He took a dog-eared business card out of his shirt pocket, turned it over and wrote a number on the back, then pushed it across the table at me.
“Memorize that number,” he said. “You need to reach me, that’s the num
ber to call.”
He let me watch it five or so seconds longer, then pulled it back and returned it to his pocket.
“Do you want mine?” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “I have a feeling you’ll be needing to call me before I need to call you.”
27
SALLY SINGS THE BLUES
I met Sally at Carson Beach the next morning. I came by myself. After last night, he was again accompanied by a driver/bodyguard, a guy I’d never seen before. I explained the situation to him, as it had been explained to me. He was not happy.
“So Blinky’s cousins or some such shit own Santo’s, and you think he should get hit over that?”
“I’m just putting the facts on the record, Sally. It’s your call.”
I didn’t mention my theory about how Blinky was going to blame me for killing Sally, which would set me up for my own Rossetti’s send-off. I wanted Sally to regard me as a disinterested observer.
“Are you telling me some fuckin’ assholes are usin’ me for target practice to kill a bill?” he said, his voice rising. “This ain’t even about the rackets?”
“Don’t take it personally, Sally. It’s just that people recognize our names. If they want to scare off the legislature, they need names that the public will recognize.”
“Fuck the public,” he said. “Two more killed last night in Maverick Square. Spics. Spics killing spics, not usually one of my big worries. It’s on the metro front of the Globe.” He yelled over to his driver, who brought over the paper, which I thought Sally had said he didn’t read. The guy passed it over to Sally, who handed it to me. I scanned it quickly—two guys in a parked car. No IDs, no licenses, no plates on the car. They weren’t any of our guys, that much was for sure.
“Coulda been anything, Sally,” I said. “Drugs, most likely.”
Sally shook his head. “Do you believe in Santa Claus too? Look, if what you’re saying is true, they need more bodies. I’m totally shut down. I finally told everybody, fuck it, go to Florida ’til this thing blows over. Of course, they’d already fuckin’ screwed anyway, so I might as well stay ahead of the curve. It ain’t as much of a problem for you. The spics look more conspicuous in your areas.”
