Brothers and Bones (44 page)

I pretended to think about it for a moment. Frankly, since I didn’t have the tape anyway, I could have just told him what he wanted to hear, but that might have been suspicious. Only a fool would have given him the only copy of the tape, if that fool really had it, which I didn’t. “I’ll give you the original to prove we really have it and, once I’ve safely disappeared, I’ll destroy the copy and send you the pieces. And you have my word that I won’t make any more copies.” Siracuse stared at me in silence. “Look, Siracuse, I don’t want any more trouble with you. I want to start my new life with Jess and put all this behind me.”

He regarded me a moment longer, then said, “And Bonzetti? You’ll just leave him to us?”

“Who gives a shit about Bonzetti? He killed my brother. You can have him.”

Siracuse appeared to be thinking about the revised deal I’d offered him. I was praying he’d hand me a phone and so I could tell Bonz to bring the tape to us. While I was waiting for him to decide, Lippincott said relatively calmly, “We have no choice, Carmen. We need the tape.”

I turned to Lippincott. “You disgust me, Lippincott. You had your own son murdered. The kid was autistic, could barely function, from what I understand, and you had him disposed of like garbage.”

“You don’t know how it was, Charlie. You couldn’t understand.”

“And how was it? How can you justify your actions?”

“The results justify my actions.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Lippincott rubbed something from one of his manicured nails and said, “Thomas’s care was expensive. Insurance covered only so much. I had a wife to care for, a daughter—a normal daughter—to provide for. Thomas was a drain on our finances. He was bringing our family to ruin.”

“He was your son.”

“He was a potted plant,” Lippincott said coldly. “He wasn’t a son to me. Or to his mother. He wasn’t a brother to his little sister. He sat in his own little world, rocking back and forth, sucking up all our money. All my wife’s attention. He was a black hole, devoid of personality, incapable of affection, of interaction, of adding the least bit of value to this world. He was a negative force, at best, and the world is better off without him. And sitting there in silence, seeing and hearing nothing, he was better off without the world.” I sat in stunned silence. “Our family thrived after he was gone. Well, my wife may have died a year and a half later, but Jessica and I thrived. I could afford to give her what she needed, send her to private schools, to a good college and graduate program. I couldn’t have done those things if that—if Thomas—had lived.”

I couldn’t recognize the man speaking. I’d known him for eleven years, worked with him for eleven years, dined with him on occasion, watched him perform magic in court, learned my profession from him…yet, at that moment, I couldn’t for the life of me recognize him. How could a man so brilliant delude himself so completely? Convince himself of the rightness, the goodness, of his actions? He’d paid someone to snuff the life out of his autistic child, a child he claimed to believe was better off dead, but he couldn’t bring himself to put the child out of his “misery” himself, so he arranged it so the boy’s last seconds of life were spent with a soulless stranger, a punk who would kill for money. I thought about what Jessica had told me about how her father had been something of a wreck for nearly a year after Tommy died. Everyone assumed he was the loving father, grieving hard for his lost boy. In fact, I figured, he’d been laboring under the staggering weight of the guilt he carried, wrestling his demon conscience, until he’d finally closed the door on his son, walled off any remnant tenderness he may have had for the boy, if he ever had any, and constructed the fantasy he now told himself. With that fantasy in place, he could rejoin the world, throw himself back into his work with renewed vigor, which Jessica told me he had done.

I shook my head in disgust and turned to Siracuse, who was watching our exchange impassively. “And let me guess,” I said. “You informed the good DA of the tape you’d made and you’ve been blackmailing him ever since, even though a copy somehow slipped from your fingers.” I knew that Jake had gotten his copy from someone who had blackmailed Siracuse right up until the blackmailer, whose identity Siracuse never learned, died of throat cancer. But Siracuse probably found the trade to be an acceptable one. He gave money to a blackmailer, which may have galled him, but he, in turn, was blackmailing one of the most powerful figures in the Massachusetts justice machine.

Siracuse smiled. Yellow egg was stuck between some of his teeth. “Yeah, Lippincott here has been pretty fucking useful over the years. Tip-offs about searches, arrests, indictments, wiretaps, all sorts of good shit. I was a punk kid, just out of jail, when I made that tape. Now look at me. I run this town. And I can honestly say I don’t know where I’d be today without Andrew’s help.”

Lippincott winced almost imperceptibly beside me.

Siracuse said, “You look like you got gas, Lippincott. Don’t look at me like that, like you’re better than me, you fuck. It’s not like you didn’t profit from the deal.”

I looked at Lippincott, who started to drop his eyes but at the last second held my gaze. “I wouldn’t say I profited personally, Carmen. This city profited.”

“How so?” I couldn’t help but ask.

Siracuse shrugged. “Oh, I gave Lippincott a lot of help. I tipped him off, gave him info on activities of guys in the other families—the Russians, the micks—and he’d put the poor saps away. I even gave up a few of my own guys—nobody important, you understand—just so’s it wouldn’t look like he was ignoring us, you know? Sometimes my guys had to plant evidence, to make sure things went smoothly in court, and we’d tell Lippincott where to find it. We helped in other ways, too. Maybe he’d tell me about pain-in-the-ass witnesses and—hey, what did you call them?”

I answered for Lippincott. “Exculpatory witnesses.”

Siracuse snapped his sausage fingers. “Right. Exculpatory. Anyway, maybe we’d threaten ’em so their memories weren’t so good. Or maybe we’d have to do a little more. Maybe sometimes we’d even have to get rid of ’em. Whatever was necessary. We did what we could to help our favorite prosecutor.”

I looked at my former boss. “You let all this happen? You condoned it?”

“I didn’t have a choice, Charlie,” Lippincott said. “Carmen had the tape. I would have gone to jail. And if that happened, I wouldn’t have been able to continue my work in court. At least I negotiated for something in return.”

“Hey,” Siracuse said, pretending to sound hurt, “I could have told him to fuck himself. I could have been greedy. I could have just squeezed his balls, made him give me what I wanted, and left it at that. But I decided to help him out some, too.”

I said, “Knowing full well, of course, that the better Lippincott did professionally, the higher he rose, the better off you’d be, too. The more useful he’d be to you.”

Siracuse smiled. “That was an added benefit, sure.”

“They were guilty, Charlie,” Lippincott said. “Every one. That’s the important thing. They were all guilty. I just needed to be able to prove it. And I did. So you see, it really was all for the best. My arrangement with Carmen allowed me to send a lot of criminals to jail—first when I was DA and later when I became U.S. Attorney—criminals I might not otherwise have put away.”

I realized that I’d probably been right. Lippincott did indeed hate Carmen Siracuse. The acid in his voice when he spoke of him over the years, the hard look in his eyes at the mention of Siracuse’s name, they were real. But Lippincott hated Siracuse not because of what he was or what he stood for, but because the mob boss was blackmailing him. I doubted that Lippincott would have made his deal with the Devil if he’d felt he had a choice. But, having signed in blood on the dotted line, having been forced to commit criminal acts and unforgivable ethical violations, having betrayed the public trust to a staggering degree, he’d managed to convince himself that he’d done it all for the good of the people. Lippincott always was a persuasive man. It seemed that even he wasn’t immune to his own powers of persuasion.

“And Charlie,” he said, “you yourself benefited from this association, though you may not have known it. You unwittingly used information, evidence Carmen provided to me, in your own prosecutions. Those same prosecutions that made you a star with the District Attorney’s office and paved your way into the USA’s office.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

Siracuse just smiled.

“It’s true,” Lippincott said. “In fact, a lot of what we’ve put together on Vasily Redekov over the years we’ve gotten because of Carmen. Hell, half the tips that came into the task force were called in by members of the Siracuse family.”

I looked at Siracuse. He shrugged. “Like I said, whatever I can do to help…”

“And eliminate the competition,” I said.

Siracuse chuckled.

“And it didn’t bother you that your methods were illegal as hell,” I said to Lippincott.

“With Carmen’s help,” he said, “we’ve taken a lot of scum off the streets, made this city a safer, better place to be. You and I both have, Charlie.”

“Don’t drag me into your sewer, Lippincott,” I said. “The ends don’t necessarily justify the means, not in our line of work. You know that.” I shook my head in disbelief but decided not to deliver a primer on Constitutional rights. “And I think you said a minute ago that you didn’t profit personally from all this, is that right?” I heard Siracuse chuckle. “How about all your uncanny investments? The ones that made you rich? None came from illegal tips from Uncle Carmen here?”

Lippincott sniffed haughtily. “I’m a public servant. I perform a very valuable service to the commonwealth and I’m inadequately compensated in return. Any financial advice I received was well deserved and hurt no one.”

I wondered if the planet Lippincott inhabited had one moon or two. I realized that he felt forced into his bargain with Siracuse, but though the mob boss may have held the reins and the riding crop and Lippincott wore the saddle, they both climbed, together, to the pinnacles of their fields.

I said to Lippincott, “So you personally recruited me from law school to the DA’s office. Why?”

“It certainly wasn’t because of your slightly-above-average performance in law school,” Lippincott replied. “I did it to keep an eye on you. You know what they say about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. I got lucky when you turned out to be an excellent lawyer.”

“So you figured you could keep tabs on me, spy on me, direct my work away from Siracuse specifically, even though I insisted on working on organized crime cases in general.”

“That’s about right.”

“It was my idea, actually,” Siracuse said. “I told Lippincott to hire you.”

“It made sense to me,” Lippincott said, perhaps trying to save face.

“And what about Angel Medina?” I asked. “You hired him just to get close to me, too? To pretend to be my friend? To spy on me?”

Siracuse laughed. “Well, not really, no. He was your friend at first, I guess. But we offered him a good deal to use your friendship to poke around in your life, question you about your brother, stuff he might have left for you, shit like that. Now and then he’d search your place when you weren’t around, looking for the tape. The kid was pretty good, huh? I mean, he didn’t get us what we wanted, but you thought you guys were best buds, right, Beckham? And he served his purpose in the end, I guess, taking a bullet in the face for us.”

I shook my head, wondering how much he’d paid Angel to betray me, to drink my beer with one hand while jam-twisting a knife into my back with the other. I said, “Listen, I’m finding it a little tough to breathe in here with all the shit you guys are spewing, so why don’t you get Jessica ready to travel, put my half million bucks in a briefcase, and give me back my cell phone so I can call Bonz and tell him to bring the tape.”

Siracuse nodded and said, “Fine with me, Beckham. Let’s get this shit over with.”

My God. I was going to pull it off. I looked at Siracuse’s fat face and smiled inside with satisfaction. I looked at Lippincott and…didn’t like the look I saw in his shrewd gray eyes. He was studying me suddenly. I could almost feel his mind reaching into mine, mental fingers probing the folds of my brain, searching, searching…

He said, “Before you do what he says, Carmen, I have just one question for Charlie.”

I held my breath.

“How much did I pay Carmen?”

“Huh?”

“It’s on the tape, which you’ve clearly listened to. So…how much did I pay him to kill Thomas?”

And I was so close.
I’m sorry, Jessica.

FORTY-EIGHT

“Sounds like a pretty fucking simple question, Beckham,” Siracuse said. “How much did Lippincott pay me to kill his kid?”

I swallowed but said nothing.

“Beckham?” Siracuse said.

“I don’t remember,” I said finally. “It’s not the most intriguing part of the tape.”

Siracuse loosed a hearty laugh, like he’d just watched an old lady fall down some stairs and shatter her hip. His eyes were watering he was laughing so hard. His chins were rippling. Finally, he wiped his eyes and let out a satisfied sigh. “Jesus, I was wrong before, Beckham. You’re a pretty good bluffer. I said it last night and I’ll say it again. You got big, fucking balls, I’ll give you that. You had me there. Lippincott’s a pretty smart fuck and you almost had him, too.” He chuckled a final time.

“I have the tape, Siracuse.”

“Bullshit. If you had the tape, you’d know exactly what Lippincott paid me, and you wouldn’t even have to think about it. In fact, you’d have already mentioned it here, while you were prancing around the room on your high horse a few minutes ago, spouting about me killing the poor little brain-damaged kid, you’d definitely have voiced your disgust at how little I charged Lippincott to snuff the little shit, how I offed him for a mere fifty bucks. Yeah, I think you’d remember that, wouldn’t you, Counselor? How for just two Jacksons and a Hamilton I suffocated a six-year-old retard?”