Authors: George V. Higgins
“He’d sold out his family’s funeral business a long time before—he was the fifth generation run it? By the time he came along the family owned and ran eleven homes in Tennessee, one across the river, Mississippi, in West Memphis? People used to
say that if they didn’t lay you out at Weymuss’s, you couldn’t’ve been really serious ’bout bein’ dead. But then that Service Corporation British thingamabobby there that goes around all over the damn world buyin’ up the mortuaries fast as they can find them, they come into Memphis, and the way he sized it up, it was inev-able?
“Wallace is a fine man, but first and foremost—and he will tell you this himself—he’s a businessman. She mimicked him effortlessly, with delight entirely free of malice. “ ’Specially in the business of grief management? Cain’t let your ’motions rule your haid. The business’d been in my family, and a big part of our life, too, for a ver’ long time, ’most ninety years. But times change, and so do ways of doin’ things, and I had to change with them—that or just get left ahine.’
“So he didn’t let his sentiment get in the way of that, of doing what he felt simply had to
be
done. Single-family ownership just could not compete with this big international corporation. So sooner or later they’re goin’ to own
everybody
, ’cause the ones they couldn’t
buy
they’d just run out of business? And the way Wallace looked at it, the one who sold the first in any given town’d get the best price from ’em—simple as that. And that if that was how it was goin’ to be, then the one who got the best price in Memphis was goin’ to be
him.
“I learned a lot from Wallace.
“His first wife, her name was Rosalie, she told me that he made it sound like he was doin’ it purely for those business reasons. ‘All that talk he made—I admit he took me in. “This here’s shape of things to come, wave of the future. Training in bereavement psychology, therapy and counseling; the scientific approach to grief; latest techniques getting to closure. And logistics, economies of scale and so forth. In the very near future, during our own lifetimes, I promise you, this’s literally going to become the only way to go.” Oh, he could go on and on. But the
real reason that he did it was so he could spend more time rodeoin’. Wallace does like the ladies, but he may like rodeoin’ more.’
“He was married to Rosalie twen’-seven years. I have met her and we talked about it, what it was like being married to Wallace then, when she was, and when I was, seven years later, his fourth wife, and neither one of us could see much difference. I think she’s a nice lady—even if she did get most of his money so there wasn’t that much left for his later wives like me—’cept for the annual dividends. Which was a lot, I’ll grant you that, but nothin’ like what she got. I said somethin’ like that to her once, when we’re havin’ cocktails? And she said I was a real smart girl and I had that exactly right. ‘I did the same thing with Wallace that he did with the family business.’ That was what she said to me. ‘When I saw how things were goin’, well, I didn’t like it, but at least I was the first to cash him out, so I got the best price.’
“I got to know all this before I married him because just like I promised my daddy, I stayed in school during my year as Miss Memphis, traveled back and forth to Knoxville making my appearances during junior year, finished my BS in marketing, graduated with my class. And then my first job was executive assistant to the vice-president of private banking at the Memphis Safety Deposit—Mister Roland Dexter, he’s a good friend of my daddy’s. My daddy said that if I studied Mister Roland Dexter while I was workin’ for him, I would learn a lot about all smart businessmen. ‘And one thing you learn is that no businessman who’s really smart will mind it in the slightest if he happens to find out that a real good-lookin’ woman also’s a real sharp-
thinkin
’ woman. If he’s as smart’s he thinks he is, he’ll like her even better.’
“And my daddy was right about that, like he was about so many things. That’s how I met Wallace. Mister Dexter put me in charge of keepin’ track his portfolio, and also let it slip Wallace
was
single
? And so then when I first laid eyes on him I was so
impressed
? There he was in his western shirt and leather jacket, real tight jeans and these gorgeous handmade boots? And I said to him, ‘My goodness, sir, this’s how you look? Reviewin’ your portfolio, its extent and all, I don’t know, I guess I must’ve expected a much older man.’ He did seem to like that.”
At the time of purchasing the townhouse she had wholeheartedly agreed with Darren that the wisest financial course for them was indeed as he suggested—to leave his government pension fund and his IRA undisturbed in the admirable mid-six figures they had reached during his twenty-two years of bachelor frugality and maximum allowable deductions from his FBI pay. That way they would not only avoid severe IRS penalties for early withdrawal but prepare for his late and her early fifties a bountiful thirty-year federal retirement, to cushion nicely their transition into a doubly rewarding second career for him in state law enforcement or the private security sector and for her, as well, continuing her midlife blossoming as a freelance certified private investment counselor.
“Back in Tennessee, most likely, but somewhere in the middle South, for sure—we both still got family there.” That down-payment contribution—“as long’s the place goes in my name, of course” (as it did), “you’re still young and in good shape, but one thing you learn bein’ married to a mortician; take the cash and leave the promises for someone else, ’cause anybody’s light can go out any time, and often does, they least expect it”—enabled her to think happily of his savings as theirs and of their residence as a desirable small parcel of northeast residential real estate and thus one of her shrewdly diversified investments. She did not conceal that view of things from others.
The first evening when Darren came home from the office and told her he had agreed with Jack, without consulting her, that it was Darren’s turn to host a dinner with Nick and Arthur,
she said that meant that they’d be six for dinner. She said that that was good because it meant she could make a nice leg of lamb or a beef Wellington, either one of which was just too much for less than six people, and no matter what anybody said, no one really liked to eat leftovers, and no matter how comfortable they might be in life, by which she meant well fixed, she did “just
abominate
waste, like my daddy always taught me, ‘never throw good food away.’ ”
Darren explained to her that in fact Cheri Farrier had not been invited and would not be coming, just as Lily had not been invited to the first two such dinners he’d attended with Nick and Arthur at Jack Farrier’s brick townhouse on Adams Street in Quincy. Lily said at once she didn’t see what that had to do with it, since she hadn’t been able to move north to join him until almost eight months after he was transferred to the Boston office and this organized-crime-squad cloak-and-dagger business that he’d never been mixed up with anything like before, by which time he’d already been to a couple of those funny dinners.
“Of course I hated being separated from Darren, all that distance, but I’d just barely started my MBA program at GW and I didn’t want to lose the first-year credits. I knew if I got them I could transfer them up here, so I finished out the year.” She confided that to new suburban Boston clients attracted to her in part by her MBA from Babson. To Darren she said, how could she have been invited the two times he’d already gone to Farrier’s “for those hush-hush dinners of yours” if they had happened before she’d even come up or gotten settled in, or so much as met Cheri Farrier, and she said she therefore couldn’t understand what that had to do with whether Cheri should come to
their
house when
she’d
be cooking one of them there. Or why Cheri wasn’t even going to be
invited
, if that was what he was telling her, as apparently it was.
“Dearest,” Stoat said, “the reason is because apparently a long time ago when some agent named DeMarco, and Nick and Arthur, started this … oh, I don’t know, this
custom
, longstanding
practice
, where they’d get together and have dinner every now and then, to talk about, you know, what’s going on in the circles that they move in, have their business interests in, so forth—no one but the handling agent and the Strike Force group supervisor were included.
“It wasn’t a custom of excluding
women
; it was a matter of confidentiality; excluding
everyone
, of
either
sex, who wasn’t directly involved. So Nick and Arthur could talk freely about their competition, LCN, which’s primarily what we’re interested in and they hate as much as we do—where our interests coincide. What the local LCN, the La Cosa Nostra people, they seem to’ve been up to, and it looks like they’re probably going to be
doing
during the next two or three months. What they’ve picked up on the street. What the local hoods’re saying.”
“But these men, they’re real criminals, aren’t they?” Lily said. “And you and Jack’re FBI, and you’re supposed to be
catching
them, and putting them in
jail
—aren’t you?”
“Well, of course,” Stoat said, “that is and remains our stated mission. And that’s basically what we’re doing, all the time we’re doing this, every time we do it. Finding out what the criminals’re doing, what it is that they’ve been up to, and making plans, arrangements, so that we can either stop them from doing it, catch them in the act, or if they’ve already done it, the crime has been committed, then how we can set things up to get the evidence that will then enable us to go into a grand jury and charge them—and then bring them into court, and try them and convict them.
“That’s what the whole
purpose
is of these dinner meetings. Jack and I get together, meet with them, a given place, we all
think it will be safe, we won’t be inadvertently giving more away to the enemy than we’re getting out of it ourselves. Now, do we
enjoy
ourselves when we sit down and have this kind of dinner? Well, I can’t speak for the others—although I suspect that Jack does—but I personally do not. They’re not my kind of people, Nick and Arthur—they make me nervous. But it’s part of my job, and I have to do it.
“And fortunately for me, the way it’s evolved over the years has been so that there isn’t any set interval—so that you could go to your desk calendar and say, ‘Well, let’s see now, next week have we got a meeting scheduled?’ And then find it and say, ‘Yes, and this time it’s at Jack’s house. Seven-thirty Wednesday.’ It’s all very clandestine. We don’t keep records. Jack’ll say to me, he runs into me in the hall, he’ll say to me he thinks it’s time again we got together. ‘With the lads, you know. Next Tuesday be okay?’
Without
using their names.
“What I’m saying is that this’s all on a strictly need-to-know basis, that we even
have
this confidential relationship with them. If someone from the outside asks us if we have it—could be another law-enforcement agency, state police, IRS, DEA, or ATF, doesn’t matter who, U.S. Attorney’s office—what we do is deny it. ‘Nope,’ we say, ‘it isn’t true.’ No matter who is asking.”
“You lie to them,” she said. “To the other cops, and prosecutors.”
“Well, they almost never ask,” he said. “Law-enforcement people as a breed’re quite closed-mouthed. Fact is, I shouldn’t even be telling you, but I know you know how to keep secrets, so
you
can get the stock
before
it shoots up, not after. But if someone does ask, you
have
to lie. This’s
not
something we want to have everyone—meaning even other agents, in our own field office—
knowing
, all over the place. There’d be a leak. Someone might get killed. And even if they didn’t, that’d be the end of it,
all the good that it’s accomplished. And I
can
tell you this much—it’s been a
lot.
“This case Jack’s working on right now, will be for next several weeks—he’s got eleven men working under him processing the raw surveillance tapes that’re
so
darned important to this all-out anti-LCN effort that we’re making here. It’ll put the New England Mafia pretty much out of business. This is a major, major case, and it’s one Nick and Arthur helped us make. Helped
Jack
make; it started long before I got here. We simply would not’ve ever been able to’ve made it without this relationship that Jack inherited some years back from this agent named Fogarty. Who trained Jack before he retired. As
he’d
been trained by DeMarco.
“Jack tells me DeMarco originally developed it twenty-five or thirty years ago purely as his own idea. This sort of association wasn’t an established specialty within the bureau, that agents were trained to carry out. But since DeMarco, every agent who’s followed him in here has used his formula, developed and nurtured the association over the years, this relationship ‘with the lads.’ Jack’s in the process of training Bob Hinchey, so that when, as and if Jack moves on, say up to SOG, Hinchey’ll be ready to step into line.
“These informal dinners have been very significant in the cultivation of the relationship. For years and years the agents’ve been setting up these occasions to meet and have a meal, the agent in charge of running ‘the lads’ and whoever the squad leader is; maybe some wine, a few drinks—although I’ve noticed Arthur never really has that much to drink, no more’n one or two; ’fraid of losing control, I suppose. And, well, just
talk
, man to man, in a calm and relaxed kind of atmosphere, a quiet setting free of pressure.
“Secure. Where you don’t have to be wondering all the time
who might just happen to walk in, you know, as they might very well do in a restaurant or a bar—as anyone could; public places, after all. Then you’d never know. Who’d come in, not recognize
you
but recognize
them
, sitting with
you
, and as Jack says, ‘Whoosh, all your covers’re blown.’
“Because they’d then go and buttonhole someone else and say, ‘Who’s that with Nick and Arthur?’ And the other guy’d recognize
you
, and the two of them’d think, ‘Hey, that’s kind of funny—what’re
they
doing together?’ Find it a little strange—FBI guys’d be having dinner with these particular two guys, talking like old pals, like they’ve known each other a while, and have something in common—as of course we do, but we don’t want to
publicize
it.