All Souls (24 page)

All types streamed in to pay their respects: young kids; local priests we'd never seen in the neighborhood before; all of Old Colony; Jimmy Kelly, who was now city councilor of South Boston; teenagers Frank had trained in the ring, like Joey Degrandis and “Little Red” Shea; and the gangsters. Then there were a few suspicious-looking characters, definitely outsiders, who Ma later said introduced themselves as detectives.

It was a good thing we had the breakthrough apartment, with the two joined living rooms, because after the wake the house turned into a full-on disco. It was our Old Colony version of a real Irish wake. “A good send-off” is what they called it that night. People danced in one living room, then went into the other living room where Frank's corner men had laid out mountains of free cocaine, then they went back to the other living room to dance some more. Then the trips back to the coke table got more frequent, and soon some of the neighbors weren't leaving the table at all, and were looking at that cocaine as if the mountain was going to disappear. The house was packed. Ma came out of the back room where she'd been hiding out for a while. She was all smiles but looked a little dizzy. Tommy Cronin said, “Try some—c'mon, Helen, it'll make you feel better.” Ma replied, “Well, I'm willing to try anything at this point.” Ma did a line and then she was dancing too. Kevin made sure I knew I was welcome to the coke. I'd tried it a few times before, but I didn't like the feeling it gave me of being out of control, desperate for more. And I especially couldn't imagine doing drugs with my family. Ma got me out of it saying, “Mike's never touched drugs, he's too quiet, he thinks too much. I never had to worry about that one,” she added. I didn't pass judgment on anyone else taking coke that night, though, and was even willing to let Ma try it if that might numb a pain I couldn't even begin to imagine. I chose to get shitfaced drunk for the heavy weight of sadness I was feeling, sneaking to my stash of whiskey in the back room.

Joe was doing a line and offered the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill to Mrs. O'Connor, Okie's mother. She looked at Joe, then right in front of the boys she said, “That's the shit that killed my son.” Mrs. O'Connor had had a couple of years to figure that one out; but we hadn't started to make the connection between Frank's death and the mountains of white powder that Whitey was bringing into the neighborhood from his Colombian connections in Florida.

I don't know how we made it to the funeral in the morning, after about an hour of sleep. My head was pounding as I sat in an aisle next to Frankie's casket. I thought we might have to catch Ma as she walked slowly up to the altar, holding onto any church fixtures she could grab. Ma had written a song that she wanted to read. I knew it was important to her to show she could still “hold her head high” in front of everyone:

You've broken down my prison walls,

You've melted the bars,

You've raised up my soul,

So that I could see your stars.

My honky-tonk ways are past

and now gone,

And my cold heart now has hope,

With each dawn.…

“That's a shameful poem altogether,” Grandpa muttered as Ma continued reading slowly, “some kind of country-and-western song about prison.” But we found out later that Grandpa actually kept the poem, scrawled onto wrinkled notebook paper, in his top drawer along with his precious novenas to saints, and letters to him from his own mother from when he'd left Ireland, never to see her again. Although it broke my heart to see our fun-loving hell-raising mother all dressed in black and reading about her dead son, I don't remember much about that funeral. But I do remember that Frankie's casket weighed an awful lot. Frankie was like a rock. My head was pounding, and I couldn't believe that he was really lying there inside the Irish flag-draped box, never again to play with Seamus and Stevie, never again to drive Ma to breakfast or to the cemetery, never again to be seen by any of us.

That night Ma was standing in the kitchen, looking out the back window. She usually looked out the front window, but I figured she probably didn't want to do that now, and see Frankie's empty-looking apartment across the street.
“Frick … ah … frack … n … pfft.”
Ma looked fine—she was smiling—but she was talking gibberish. She forced some real words out of her mouth slowly, but said she couldn't feel her left arm. I told her to lie on the couch and I called Mary, who said Ma was probably having a stroke. Ma insisted she was just tired and refused to go to the hospital that night, no matter how much I begged. I was relieved to see her awake later that night. She got up around midnight, flicked on the kitchen light, and started pummeling the ground with her bare hands, killing cockroaches with a vengeance.

The next morning, with the funeral over, and Frankie buried, and the crowds gone, I opened my eyes and looked up from my mattress on the parlor floor to find Ma crying and clawing at the curtains, trying to tear them down to get a better view of Frankie's apartment. We'd always been able to see him in his kitchen window, cooking or shadow boxing, and Ma was looking for him once more. But he wasn't there. His kitchen light bulb was still on, shining dimly onto yellow cement walls and open cabinets. Ma saw that I was awake but just fell to her knees at the window, looking for Frankie, and saying over and over, “He was such a beautiful kid, he was such a beautiful fuckin' kid.” Her wailing went right through me. I cried inside, but Ma couldn't hold her pain in any longer. It all spilled out that morning, and I could hardly bear to see it.

Kevin started coming around the house with Laura and Katie, getting closer to Ma after Frankie died. That's when Ma began to get some of the answers she was desperately looking for about Frankie's death. Kevin blamed himself. “It should've been me,” he said. He'd been part of the planning for the job, and then when he went straight, just like Frankie had always wanted him to, he wanted nothing to do with it. But he didn't know how to get out of it. In the end, Kevin was replaced by Frankie, who wanted nothing more than to get the family out of the projects, and saw before him what was supposed to be a simple job. And the more coke Frankie was doing, the more simple the job must have looked, and the more invincible Frankie must have felt. Because Frankie had gotten heavy into coke in the last months of his life. After his death we heard about the all-night parties in his apartment with all the boys around and mountains of cocaine on the tables, and all kinds of plans being laid out for that simple job. Frankie went in on it with his friend Ricky, the former state trooper from the Rat, and some nineteen-year-old named Chico we'd never heard of, from the D Street Project.

The rest of the story Ma got from the detectives who'd started coming around, telling Ma everything while I listened from the back room. Frankie's job was to get the loot, to jump into the Wells Fargo truck while one of the guys put a gun to the back of a security guard, and the other guy sat in the car with shotgun aimed. Frankie got shot by the Wells Fargo driver when he jumped out of the back of the truck, taking a bullet in his upper back. Frankie ran and made it all the way to the getaway car, along with a bag of loot, in the middle of a wild shoot-out. The worst thing for us was that it was a minor wound. Frankie could have lived for hours, and likely survived, if there'd been any attempt to save his life. Even if they'd dumped him off on a highway where he might have been picked up, he could have lived. But of course if he had, there was a chance the bandits and the entire ring would have been caught. Frankie might have talked. So his friends had stuffed his head in trash bags and pushed him under the seat to keep him hidden and quiet, before fleeing with $100,000 to the second getaway car waiting for them. But the real story Ma found out from the coroner: Frankie had a veil of blood in his face and hand marks on his neck. Someone had strangled him.

That's when Ma went after the whole criminal ring. She may have been taking Valium for the pain she was feeling, and walking around in slow motion, but she was determined nonetheless. There was no time for tears. Ma never let me in on her investigations, but I overheard her conversations with Joe, who was driving Ma around in Frankie's Lincoln to track down some of the boys in the streets. But in Southie, it was hard to tell just how extensive any criminal ring was, and who exactly was involved in the various stages of planning and dividing the money. In Southie, for all the clean appearances of the boys who ran the town, nothing was ever what it seemed. Ma walked up to Whitey Bulger, who had nothing but kind words for her, politely calling her Mrs. MacDonald and saying Frankie was “a stand-up guy, God rest his soul.” Ma asked him to his face if he'd had anything to do with the Wells Fargo robbery, and he said he hadn't. Whitey's hands were always clean, though. Just like he had nothing to do with all the cocaine flooding the neighborhood, destroying kids like Frankie who had everything going for them except that they lived in the project next to his headquarters with its proud green shamrock painted outside.

Soon after talking to Whitey, Ma was invited by the detectives into a back room of a restaurant in Medford to meet with the FBI. They asked Ma what she knew about this one and that one. Most of them, Ma had never heard of. But when they asked over and over about John Doherty, Ma knew what direction to take her own investigation. She'd been going to hairdressing school, and she carried her sharpest pair of scissors with her into Doherty's house. I'd never heard of John Doherty, but as it turned out, he was the brother of “Lorraine the Lesbian,” a neighbor from Jamaica Plain who'd tried to recruit me into the Ku Klux Klan when I was six. Everyone told Ma that no bank robbery happened from Southie that John Doherty didn't stake out ahead of time, and supply the guns for. “What a strange bastard he is,” Ma said to Nellie on the phone. Ma said she thought he might be a pedophile, with all the half-naked teenage boxers running around his house. She said she walked into his den, which was dark except for candles all around and big red velvet couches. Ma pulled out her scissors and politely asked the gangster in his silk smoking jacket if he needed a little trim. Then she motioned across her throat with the scissors, to tell him what she really had in mind. Ma said that in the end Doherty convinced her that he'd had no part in the robbery. He said he'd been cut out of the deal after he'd done all the staking out. “If I was involved, Frankie would've been wearing a bulletproof vest,” he said.

Then one night I came out of the back room and found Ma and some detectives peeking out the front window onto Patterson Way from behind the curtains. Ma was pointing out a neighbor who lived across the street with his wife and two children, and who Ma said had another seven kids in Jamaica Plain. Ma said she had information that he was involved in the bank job, supplying the guns after Doherty had been cut out. I never would've suspected the likes of him. He was one of the few fathers in the neighborhood and weighed about three hundred pounds. I'd never seen him get up off the front stoop to go to a job and had always wondered what his scam was. Now I knew. But nothing ever came of Ma's tip-off, and within weeks the whole neighborhood was excited about the new “Clam Shack” the guy opened up on Dorchester Street, purchased with Frankie's blood.

Everyone knew Ma was on a mission. That was why, when the gangsters finally came forward with some money for Frankie's funeral expenses, they avoided dealing with her directly at all. One night Red Shea came by looking for Johnnie, still home on leave from the Seals. I told him Johnnie was at Grandpa's in City Point. Red went there, rang Grandpa's doorbell, and waited for Johnnie out on Kelly's Landing. Grandpa saw what was happening from his window and came downstairs in his long underwear ready to save Johnnie from trouble. Red handed Johnnie ten thousand in cash from the boys, and Johnnie screamed at Grandpa to get the fuck inside. Red took off, and left Johnnie crying at Kelly's Landing with the bundle of blood money in his hand. Johnnie could throw, and he hurled the wad of bills off the landing about twenty-five yards, where it sank into the ocean. The FBI told Ma they'd watched the whole transaction, but that they weren't going to take Johnnie in because he didn't keep the money. The story got around town, and the next day Red and some kids from Old Colony were at Kelly's Landing scouring the ocean floor for all that loot.

After a few weeks Ma had started to look less determined, and her mouth was settling into a permanent downturn. Kathy was able to live independently now, and she'd gotten a subsidized apartment in Manchester, New Hampshire. On the day we took Kathy up to her new home, Ma, Joe, and I sat in Frank's Lincoln in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot on the way back to Southie. Joe talked about Frankie and told funny stories about the two of them cruising for girls in the pimpin' Lincoln Continental whenever Joe was on leave from the service. Ma just listened with downturned mouth and stared straight ahead at the rain on the windshield. It was a blow to see someone the likes of Ma look at us and say, “I don't think I'll ever be able to smile again.”

“I miss that kid so fuckin' much,” Kevin told Ma, looking out our front window at Frankie's old apartment. Kevin didn't have Laura and Katie with him. He was starting to come back to the neighborhood to hang out with all the people he and Frank had in common, sharing stories about Frankie in the ring, while drinking and doing lines. Kevin said Whitey wanted to open a bar and have him run the place. Ma told him to get out of Southie. But Kevin kept coming around, and whenever he came up the house he'd start crying about Frankie, especially when he was high.