Authors: George V. Higgins
“Well,” McKeach said, extending his arms and putting his hands on the studs making the opening into the passageway as
Cistaro sidled past behind him, “did my man Junius’s man, the Bishop, have the money at Wheelers today?”
“No,” Rascob said. “Bishop, he say to me that
Junius
say for him to say to me, that the people at the
hospital
there, where they still be treatin’ him for all those
burns
he get that day he meet
the man, McKeach
? Before he realize who he
is
? Well, don’t they go and they change Junius’s day for therapy
again
, they just at him day and night, and he just purely hasn’t had the
tahm
to go and get together that large sum of
money
that he knows you been expectin’ fo’ this week an’ las’, countin’ on him there to have, but if I will come by tomorrow, he will have it fo’ me then. If I tell him I will do that, or that
the man himself, McKeach
, will do that, just come by tomorrow mornin’, then he will most definitely have that money there and waitin’ for me then.” He paused and snickered. “That be what the Bishop said.”
McKeach displayed the small smile. “I see,” he said, “I see.”
“Y
OU
’
RE
FROM
DOWN
AROUND
THERE
,
RIGHT
?” Dowd said on the way to Canton. He was the passenger in Trooper Henry Ferrigno’s unmarked cruiser, a white Chevrolet Impala. They were southbound in heavy traffic on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, the twilight darkening into evening at 6:20. Coming up on Morton Street, Ferrigno expertly avoided a white Cadillac Sedan DeVille double-parked with its engine running in the travel lane; as they passed he nodded toward it, saying, “One warm afternoon and summer’s here, I guess.” Dowd followed his gaze to the young black man in the right rear seat exchanging currency for the small parcel held out by the older, very tall and long-armed black man with beaded dreadlocks in a red tee shirt crouching beside it. Dowd shook his head and said, “Nah, drugs’re a trade for all seasons. Kidding ourselves, we think we’re ever gonna stop it.”
Ferrigno said, “Mmh.”
“Nice if we could, but we can’t,” Dowd said. “It’s an evil way to make a royal living. Way better’n an honest job onna garbage truck. Well, do the best we can. You ever
heard
this radio guy? Heard him or heard
of
him?”
“Actually, I have,” Ferrigno said. “Both. My mother used to tune him in on the kitchen radio every afternoon, she got home from the Town Clerk’s Office. Strange dude, very strange dude.”
“Know his signal off hand?” Dowd said, reaching toward the standard broadcast radio in the dash.
“Oh, never forget it,” Ferrigno said. “ ‘Ninety-eight-point-eight, FM—five
thousand
boomin’ watts.’ Guy’s a little warped but he does have a sense of humor. You’ll be wasting your time now, though, this side of Big Blue Hill. My mother could just barely get him where we lived, in Holbrook. Only Randolph ’tween him and us. His transmitter’s down in Sharon someplace, ‘on some dirt we sort of mounded up there—pretty
big
pile of dirt, though; biggest mound of dirt around.’ Wait ’til we get on the other side of Big Blue; then see if you can get him.
“Back then I didn’t understand it, the appeal he had for her. But hell, I was still a
kid.
Well, I was in college, eighty-six or seven; didn’t
think
I’m still a kid then, nineteen years old, twenty—I knew everything. Used to say to her, ‘For Gossake, Ma, this guy’s not to be believed.’
“Not that I was completely off—he’s a pretty lame excuse for a talk-show host. I mean
literally
—he’s a
talking machine.
Had his larynx out. Got this mechanical thing that he uses to talk, and the
sounds
he makes with it? Jesus. He gets in too close the mike, sounds like someone callin’
moose.
“He was right for her agenda,” he said. Bringing the Impala to a stop in the left lane at the traffic light at Morton Street, he took both hands off the wheel and looked at Dowd. “It wasn’t how good a talk-show host he was. It was him being in a wheelchair, and what put him there. Another victim of a careless, thankless country.”
“Vietnam,” Dowd said.
“You got it,” Ferrigno said. “To this day she believes that if we’d only gone in a little harder; stayed a little longer; gone all
out and
tried
a little more; not let the protestors make so much noise; stood behind our presidents the way we always did before that—right? She bought into the whole scenario of betrayal. Somebody, I dunno—was it Goldwater said it, when Jane Fonda went over there? ‘Hope and comfort to the enemy’—that’s what Hanoi Hannah meant to the Cong.
“Everyone’s to blame. ‘Both parties,’ she’ll say, when she really gets going. ‘Republicans and Democrats, got us so involved there. His Highness JFK—in a very big way. He thought it was a grand idea. Adventure. They
all
did.
Sure
this was what we should do. They all lied.’
“That is what she
thought
, and that is what she
thinks
, to this very day, and no matter what anybody says to her, she will
not be
talked out of it. She
believes
this, and she always
will
believe it. Because my father got killed there, ‘and nobody cares, the way they do about the ones who died in World War Two, and World War One. Even in the Civil War, people still care about them—the Revolution. But not the men who died in Vietnam.’ ”
“Such a loss has to mean something,” Dowd said.
“Well, exactly,” Ferrigno said. The light changed and he put his hands back on the wheel, moving the Impala forward. “This guy Sexton was in Vietnam, First Cav, just like my father was, only not at the same time. He was there long after Dad ‘got sent home to me in a bag’—actually a metal box but she always says ‘a bag.’ ”
“Well, she obviously loved him,” Dowd said. “We got him killed, his country did, and while some of us were doing that to him, a good many of the rest of us’re acting like we’re ashamed of guys like him. Or, ‘they were suckers.’ Understandable, she’s bitter.”
“Oh, I know,” Ferrigno said. “All I’m saying is, she’s not a stupid woman, but she listens every day to this stupid show, this loud-mouth small-town blowhard. It’s not what he
says
, about
abortion, or drunk drivers, gun control or prayer in the schools—it’s the Vietnam connection.
“The way she heard about him, the
Ledger
did a story when he came home, he wasn’t quitting even though he couldn’t walk. ‘Look at him, the sacrifice he made for his country. And he won’t let it get him down. Say what you like about him—I admire him.’
“My grandfather,” Ferrigno said. “Always bought his tires from John Natale. He didn’t even
like
Natale. Said he was a lyin’ ratta-bass. Sullivan’s in Rockland always had a better price. So why’d he buy from the lying rat bastard? Surprised you hadda ask. ‘He’s an Italo, is why. Keep the money in the neighbohood, the fam’ly. Always buy from your own.’
“Sexton and my father’s neighborhood was Vietnam. What was Dad’s is hers. I don’t think she knows how Sexton lost the use of his legs—neither do I. I assume she thinks combat. As you naturally would. But she doesn’t know if he ever saw combat. And I doubt she thinks having to spend your life in a wheelchair’s
quite
as big a sacrifice as giving it
up
, completely, stepping on a mine and getting blown to kingdom come. Doesn’t matter—he was an American soldier and it happened in Vietnam.
“Therefore she may not
necessarily
believe what he says, but she will listen to it, give it a fair hearing. As far as I know, every day.” He laughed. “They’re old friends. Been together over twenty years.”
“So this’s going to come as a big shock to her,” Dowd said. “We arrest this guy and charge him with dealing drugs.”
“Absolutely,” Ferrigno said. “Gonna take me at least a week or two to live it down. But from what Jameson says this cancer patient told him, we’re not gonna have much choice.”
“Well, no, but we don’t want to be too hasty here,” Dowd said as the Impala approached River Street at the intersection with the Cummins Highway, the traffic barely moving now. “The way
I understand it, we’ve got the cancer patient all nice and secluded, right?”
“On ice,”
Ferrigno said. “On ice. Did just like you told me. He told Jameson, the drugstore, he can’t afford a lawyer, and——”
“But this’s
after
he signed the waiver, and talked to us, right?” Dowd said. “We don’t want him doing any soul-searching, hiring some shyster and giving Sexton the heads up on the phone ’fore we get to Canton.”
“Not gonna happen,” Ferrigno said. “Jameson’s with the cancer patient. Bobby says he
owns
him. ‘Looks like he’s ironclad—caves in like meringue.’ The thing he sent up to you, what’d he tell you about him?”
“Not a hell of a lot,” Dowd said. “His call came in, full ah bells and whistles, I’m in one of those
delightful
meetings with the colonel. About the Mullahy case and are we makin’ any progress on it yet.”
“I’ll bite—are we?” Ferrigno said.
“No,” Dowd said. “Jody Aragon keeps thinkin’ he might be gettin’ someplace with some kid he used to know from the Dominican, apparently now up here with the Latin Kings. In Lawrence. And since they’re of course competin’ in the drug business with the black posse guys who did Mullahy, Jody’s tellin’ the
Latino
thug he should give us the
black
thugs. But so far he’s not buying.
“Colonel was displeased. Does not like bein’ interrupted when he’s cuttin’ you a new asshole—he assumes you had the call set up ’fore you came in for the procedure. So I told Jameson to take it all down, what he’s gotten from the guy on the details of the business, and fax it to me, so I can read it at my leisure like a proper Christian gent. So that when I talk to Sexton I’ll sound like I was hiding in his closet every time he had a meeting for the past six months. And leave the personal background on this cancer-ridden monkey ’til we both’ve got more time.
“And that is what he did. Dictated me a four-page fax on the Sexton operation which I read before you came, and I dunno if I now know
everything
that Sexton ever did, but I can sure
sound
like I do. Bobby may talk like his first language’s Polish, but he knows how to debrief a subject, and when he’s got the wind up him he can make that voice-recognition gadget of his
sing.
” He sniffled. “But nothing personal about the subject, no. I told him there was no time.”
“He gave it to me,” Ferrigno said. “Guy’s name is Louis Sargent. Lives in South Dartmouth. Name onna scrip he gives the druggist at the CVS in Mansfield’s Andrew Chamberlain. Says he lives at Forty-seven Lincoln Street, just over the line in Norton. There is such an address. Street directory says people who live there’re named Harriman, but he’s ready with the casual chitchat, an explanation for his showing up at this CVS with this paper—Harriman’s his married daughter, Joan. He’s staying with her and her husband up here for a while, seeing specialists in Boston. Finding out if they’ve got some miracle cure the folks down in New Jersey haven’t heard about yet. Maybe can do something for him Trenton doctors overlooked. Also resting, trying to regain his strength. Says he’s got bone cancer. Needs the Dilaudid for the pain.
“Dose’s
on the money.
As a matter of fact it’s the dose he’s actually taking, and getting, under his own name, in South Dartmouth—his own legit prescription. This second helping that he’s after—Wheelchair Timmy’s gonna sell it and they’re both gonna make some dough—is also for sixteen milligrams a day, four-eighty for thirty days, right in the mid-range of acceptable and therefore normal dosages. In street terms? Two-hundred-and-forty-two-mig caps, sell ’em for anywhere from two bucks apiece to six, eight—depending on availability of other shit, how desperate people are.
“But the pharmacist don’t
know
this, that Lou is gonna resell it, turn his twenty-buck investment into that kind of profit. Or that he’s got three other druggists in three other towns working on prescriptions for the same stuff, under three other names, just as well historied, so that he stands to scam this week close to a thousand pills, and gross about a thousand bucks, for blowin’ smoke at druggists. He may be sick but he can do this; isn’t heavy liftin’.
“It should’ve worked. Everything this druggist sees, and the other druggists see, says this guy is okay. You had some experience with people on painkillers, this’s about where you’d expect a guy to be who’s got what he’s says he’s got, still getting around. He’s documented. Complete ID as Chamberlain, driver’s license from New Jersey, address there in Ewing Township, just outside of Trenton, credit cards—whole schmear. Same for the other three guys he says he is.
“All fake. No such person, no such address; the accounts exist but not under that name. But very
good
fake. To begin with, not only does the scrip look all right,
he
looks all right—meaning he looks very
sick.
To any pharmacist, assistant, used to dealing with sick people, his appearance’s normal—meaning, he looks awful.
“He should’ve
sailed
through. Why doesn’t this Mister Chamberlain’s?
“Simple—bad luck.”
“Criminals also have bad days,” Dowd said. He chuckled. “Funny, but they never think of that possibility. Almost never occurs to a street thug that the next well-dressed chap he picks to mug may not only have a fancy watch but also a nasty disposition and a thirty-eight. Or to the stickup artist that the guy in the line beside him at the bank may not only be a regular customer but an armed off-duty cop.”
Ferrigno laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “It so happens that this druggist’d filled four prescriptions for that stuff in the previous thirty-six hours. Exhausted his supply. He’d already called the distributor and ordered up another batch, but it’s going to be a couple hours, before it comes in. So he has his assistant ask Mister Chamberlain to come back, four-fifteen, four-thirty. Chamberlain says fine, he’ll do that. But there’s a lull around three. Our pharmacist’s maybe bored. He thinks, ‘What the hell’—he’s had quite a demand for this stuff; it
is
a controlled substance; they’re
always
getting the nagging newsletters. ‘There’s an illegal market out there; people’re always dreamin’ up new scams to get it’; he’s got the time—so why not? He makes the call.”