Killer (3 page)

The door opened and a guard came in. He nodded at Theo, then fixed his gaze past me, making sure to avoid eye contact. I stood up and thanked Theo for his decency.

Fortunately I didn’t embarrass myself any further by gushing about how it was the only decency I’d been treated to over the past fourteen years, because I could clearly see the thoughts that passed through his eyes – that he was just doing his job and it wasn’t his place to pass judgment on people, that he would leave that to God. He didn’t say any of that. Instead he must’ve decided that discretion was the better part of valor. “Good luck to you, Mr March,” he said. There was no hand offered, not that I expected one. I gathered up the paperwork he had given me, and left with the guard who was waiting to escort me out.

This guard was not the same one who had brought me to Theo’s office. At least twenty years older, short-cropped gray hair, thick folds creasing his bulldog-shaped face. He didn’t say a word to me while he led me to the front gate. I stepped outside, blinking, the sun big and bright overhead. The gate to the prison closed quietly behind me. There was no one out there waiting for me, no one in the prison had dropped a dime to the media about me being released today. I could understand that. I was an embarrassment to them. If they could’ve they would have thrown away the key and never let me out, but they didn’t have that option. Not that there hadn’t been guards trying to bait me over the years in the hope of extending my sentence, but it was always done half-heartedly, and always with some fear. They knew what I was capable of, and they had to be worried that I’d ignore the bait – which I always did – and get out someday. Now that they had to release me, they wanted it done as quietly as possible. I couldn’t much blame them.

It was the middle of October, and it was cold out, maybe in the low forties, and with the wind whipping about, it felt colder. Within seconds I was feeling a chill deep in my bones. These days I got cold so damn easily. I zipped up my jacket and grabbed the open collar, trying to hold it closed as much as I could around the neck area. Then, after looking around to see if there were any cars idling nearby and seeing that there weren’t, I set out on foot to catch a train.

chapter 3

1965

Word’s out about Ernie Arlosi hitting a Trifecta at Suffolk Downs the other day, and we figure he should be happy to spread the wealth and kick some of his winnings over to us to keep him and his store in one piece. The dumb bastard ends up trying to put up a fight and I have to rap him a few times in the mouth with a piece of pipe while Steve and Joey smash up one of his freezers before he pays up. It was so fucking unnecessary, but some guys are just stupid that way. So we leave him with his mouth a bloody mess, and his store not much better. It all could’ve just gone down so easily, but he made his choice. Not that I care one way or the other.

The next day I’m by myself walking down Centennial Avenue when a silver Caddy rolls up next to me. Even before the window slides down I have a good idea whose car it is, and who’s going to be sitting in the passenger seat. Sure enough it’s Vincent DiGrassi. I don’t recognize the muscle behind the wheel or the other wiseguy sitting in the backseat, but DiGrassi I recognize. Everyone knows he’s Salvatore Lombard’s right-hand man.

With his eyes DiGrassi motions for me to get in. I don’t have a choice in the matter, but even if I did, I still would’ve gotten in there. The wiseguy in back gives me a cold stare as I join him. Neither DiGrassi nor the driver bother looking at me. The car takes off, driving straight down Centennial Avenue until it reaches Revere Beach Boulevard, then takes a right, goes through the rotary and on to Winthrop Parkway. The car keeps driving until it reaches a small battered-looking Colonial a few blocks from the ocean. We’re on a dead-end street, no neighbors in sight, and close enough to one of the runways at Logan Airport where the noise of the planes taking off is deafening. We all get out of the car. As isolated as the place is, I doubt anybody sees us. The two wiseguys crowd me and hustle me into the house. DiGrassi tails behind.

They take me into the basement. Nobody’s talking. The house shakes for a half a minute with the rumbling of a plane taking off. One of the wiseguys picks up a sword – the type a samurai might use – and unsheathes it. While he runs his thumb over the blade, he grins at me. It’s a nasty grin, kind of like he’s telling me how much he hopes he gets to hack me up with that sword. I don’t pay him any attention. I don’t pay any of them any attention.

DiGrassi speaks to me for the first time. He has a tenor’s voice. Smooth, melodic, it makes me think of my pop’s old records, the ones he used to play every Sunday. The voice doesn’t fit DiGrassi’s thick body and craggy, badly scarred face. He calls me punk, asks me how old I am. I tell him my name’s Lenny March, not punk.

The wiseguy holding the sword hits me with its hilt in the stomach. I don’t show any reaction to it. I think I surprise DiGrassi by not doubling over. At least, his right eyebrow arches for a second.

“I didn’t ask you for your name, asshole,” he says. “I know your fucking name. Ernie Arlosi knows your fucking name. How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“How the fuck d’you get so shitbrained dumb in only twenty years?” he asks.

I can’t help smiling. The words coming out of his mouth just don’t match his high tenor’s voice. The other wiseguy hits me in the mouth hard enough to loosen teeth. I taste blood, but I don’t show any reaction other than that little smile of mine.

DiGrassi moves his face so it’s inches from mine, so when he yells a spray of spit hits me. “You know who the fuck I am?”

“Yeah.”

“You know who I work for?”

I nod.

“So how come you’re so fucking stupid that you’re going to beat up and rob a childhood friend of Mr Lombard’s?”

I don’t bother saying anything. I had no idea about it. I just thought Arlosi was some fat fuck in the neighborhood who shot his mouth off too much. DiGrassi moves his face an inch or too closer and roars at me that he wants to know who the other two fucks were who were with me. I stare back at him, still with the quarter-inch grin on my lips. I’m not going to tell him shit.

He backs away and his two thugs go to work. Every time they knock me down, I get back up on my feet. I don’t show them shit. Nothing in my eyes, nothing in my expression. If this is the way it’s going to end, so be it. Fuck them is all I can think.

A loud booming noise echoes in the basement. DiGrassi has pulled out a bigass gun and has blown a hole in the wall. His two thugs back away from me, and he fires three more shots into the same wall, then comes forward pressing the red-hot gun muzzle against my cheek, burning me. “I’ve had it with your bullshit,” he yells, more spit flying into my face. “You give me those names now or I blow a fucking hole through your skull!”

I say nothing. I meet his stare, my own eyes dead. A snarl comes over his thick lips and he pulls the trigger.

Click.

The gun must’ve only had four bullets, and DiGrassi used them when he shot into the wall. He’s grinning at me now, his two wiseguys laughing softly.

“The fucking balls on this,” he tells his two wiseguys. “Not even a flinch.” He looks me over, his grin growing wider. “Didn’t piss his pants, and it don’t smell like he crapped them either.”

“A tough one,” one of the wiseguys says.

DiGrassi nods, then tells me that my two buddies gave me up. “Each of them, less than five minutes, I swear to God. Don’t worry, though, both those fuckers got worse beatings than you got.”

So I realize what this is all about. An initiation, to see what I’m made of. And I passed. Still, I ask him what the fuck he wants with me, my voice not quite right given how swollen my mouth and jaw is, and how pissed I am at Steve and Joey. DiGrassi puts a meaty arm around my shoulder, looks at me with something close to respect.

“Kid, you did good,” he says. “You showed real stones, and just as important, you ain’t a rat. We can use someone like you. I want you to call me in a week after you’ve gotten a chance to clean up and get those bumps and bruises healed up, and we’ll see if we can work something out.”

He digs into his pocket and gives me a piece of paper with a phone number on it. I nod, put the paper away. He’s appraising me, frowning slightly.

“March, what type of name is that?” he asks.

“My pop’s family name was Marcusi. He changed it to March.”

“Why the fuck’d he do that?”

I don’t know the answer so I don’t bother saying anything. DiGrassi’s giving me a harder look, his frown growing deeper.

“You ain’t full-blooded Italian, are you?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No, my mom’s family came over from Germany.”

“She at least Catholic?”

I again shake my head.

“Ah, fuck it,” he says. “I wish you were full-blooded, but we can still use someone like you. Give me a call.”

I tell him I will.

chapter 4

present

I took the commuter rail to South Station, and from there was going to have to catch a bus to Waltham. Nobody paid attention to me during the train ride, everyone locked into their own worlds. At least I could be thankful for that.

Once I got off at South Station I had an hour and a half to kill before my bus would be leaving, and I ended up walking down South Street to Beach Street, then on to Chinatown, figuring nobody would notice me there. First thing I did was buy some aspirin at a convenience store, hoping it would help with my headache. Next I found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant where for three dollars and fifty cents I had a plate of fried rice with pork and a pot of hot tea. Simply having ice in my water glass was a luxury that I’d forgotten about. I ate hunched over with my head bowed. There were only a handful of other people in the place. Anyone whose gaze wandered over to me would have only seen me as an old man wearing poorly fitting baggy clothes sitting alone at a cheap Chinatown restaurant.

“This genuine?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was given to me as a gift in 1980.”

More as a joke than anything else I asked if he could guarantee that that would be the highest price paid, and he seized up for a moment, making me think he was about to have a heart attack, before nodding fervently. I told him in that case to pay me the thousand bucks.

While he counted out the money for me, his stare remained frozen at his hands as if he were afraid of accidentally looking up and catching sight of me.

“You’re the guy,” he said.

I ignored him. So far he had counted out four hundred dollars in fifty-dollar bills, painstakingly making sure none of the bills were stuck together. When he reached seven hundred dollars he asked again about me being the guy, the one they’ve been talking about in the news who used to be a hit man.

“Just pay me what you owe me.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, his tone hurt. “No reason to take that attitude.” He hesitated for a few seconds, added, “But I know you’re the guy.”

“What the fuck difference does it make to you?”

He seemed stuck trying to come up with an answer to that. Once he had the stack of fifties laid out on the countertop in front of me, I picked it up, counted it myself and fattened up my wallet with it. A thousand bucks wasn’t going to last long, but then again, I didn’t expect to last long myself either. I was halfway out the shop when the jeweler finally thought of something to say and asked me how it felt. I gave him a puzzled look and he added, “You know what I’m asking. After killing all those people, and then cutting a deal by ratting Salvatore Lombard. So how does it feel? You have any remorse?”

Several of his chins had jutted out in a kind of forced bravado, but I could see the tentativeness in his liquid eyes. I wasn’t even sure which he was asking me; whether I had remorse over being a rat or my murders. In any case, I didn’t bother answering him. I walked out the store and let the wind slam the glass door shut.

By the time I returned back to South Station, a small line of tired-looking people were waiting to board the bus to Waltham. I got behind them, fitting right in. As far as I could tell nobody bothered to look at me, at least no more than casual, bored glances. If anybody recognized me, I couldn’t tell. I took a seat in the last row. A discarded newspaper had been left on the floor. I picked it up and found a story about me starting on page five. It was a long article covering two pages. Fortunately it didn’t include a picture of me, just one of the DA who had made the deal with me, and on the following page of the article, another picture showing several family members of one of the guys I had taken out.

Up until then I’d been avoiding as best I could all the stories about me, but I read this article carefully. My eyes had trouble focusing on the small print and the effort made my headache worse, but I did learn a few things. The DA had long since moved on to private practice, and he told the paper how making the deal he did with me still haunted him but that he had no way of knowing at that time about my involvement with Lombard. I had had no arrest record – not even as a juvenile – and was off the grid as far as the mob was concerned, and that up until my arrest for the business at the docks he had never heard of me, nor had anyone else in law enforcement. All that was probably true. It always amazed me with the shit I pulled as a kid that I was never arrested, and not only that, never even had any cops harassing me. Once I started working for Lombard, I was kept on the fringes, at least at first. Later when I started doing contracts for him we were careful to keep our association together quiet. For twenty-three years I was on the books at Jack’s Discount Liquor Store on Lansing Street, and sometimes I actually spent my free hours uncrating boxes and stocking merchandise, although more often than not when I was there I would sit in the back room drinking scotch and studying the day’s racing forms. Still, as invisible as I might have kept myself, it was carelessness on their part. The violence I committed at the docks should’ve alerted them to what I was, and then there was the inscription on the back of my Rolex. There was no excuse on their part for missing that, just as there was none on mine for wearing that Rolex out in public. Christ, I had gotten sloppy by then.

Of course, you can’t always believe what you read in the papers. When I was first arrested, the papers and TV stations got half the shit wrong about what went down at the docks. Given that, I wasn’t sure what to make of a claim the article made that the state had kept the details of my confession secret until six months ago. Maybe it was true. Quotes given in the article from several of the victims’ families supported that. The other inmates at Cedar Junction, as well as the guards, knew what I’d done, but maybe that was just the word getting out from Lombard’s organization. Maybe that knowledge was kept inside.

The explanation the state gave in that article for keeping the details of my confession secret was an outright lie – that it was part of the deal I made, and that it was only following a recent Superior Court decision that they were allowed to divulge my sealed confession. It was all bullshit. If my confession was sealed, that was done by them, not me. I guess they’d been hoping I’d never leave prison alive, and once they realized that I was going to they came up with this fairy tale to cover their asses. Thinking about it, I was amazed that these state officials were willing to keep the victims’ families in the dark the way they did for so many years, but I guess it showed how afraid they were of the political fallout of having the public find out they cut a deal with a hit man with twenty-eight scalps tied to his belt.

The paper had talked to families of four of the guys I had taken out, and each of them were made to look like saints. I remembered these guys, and they were all dirty. I’m not saying they deserved to be killed, but they were far from the innocent choirboys they were made out to be. As I said before, you have to take what you read in the papers with a grain of salt. They get so much of the shit wrong.

By the time I finished with the article, my head was feeling like it was going to split apart. That wasn’t that unusual for me. The last fourteen years I’d had headaches almost constantly, and had learned for the most part to ignore them. Sometimes they were worse than other times, and this time it was worse. Much worse. I fished out of my pocket the bottle of aspirin I’d bought earlier and chewed on a few tablets. When I looked up, a teenage boy sitting three rows up was twisted in his seat and staring fixated at me. His eyes slits, his face a hard plastic mask. There was no question that he recognized me. I stared back, and realized that it didn’t make any fucking difference. I did what I did. People were going to know who I was, and sooner or later they were going to know where I was living. There was nothing I could do to change the past, and it was pointless thinking I could hide from it.

We kept up this staring contest, me and this boy, until a middle-aged woman who must’ve been this boy’s mother realized that he was staring at me. She smiled apologetically at me, while at the same time reprimanding him. He shrugged her off and said something to her that I couldn’t hear, but I knew from the panic in her face what it must’ve been. She grabbed him and forcibly moved him so that he was no longer looking at me. After that I stared out the window and watched while other cars rolled past us on the Mass Pike. If people inside the bus were staring at me, so be it. I had more important things to worry about. And more mundane things also.

Some of these more mundane things were necessities, like clothing. When Jenny was alive, I knew she was holding on to my old clothes for me, but once she died my kids probably threw it all out. Not that I knew for sure since Michael and Allison wouldn’t take my calls and I had no idea how to reach Paul, but that’s most likely what happened. So all the clothes I had were what I was wearing. In retrospect, I should’ve packed up my prison jeans and tee shirts and underwear, but the thought of smelling that prison detergent a second longer seemed unbearable. Even more so, the prison stench I had grown to imagine soaked into that clothing. As it was I was going to have to spend a good deal of time scrubbing myself before I’d be able to get that stench off my skin. Of course, I had far more than the mundane to worry about, but at least for a little while that’s what mercifully occupied my thoughts.

It didn’t seem to take long before the bus came to a stop at a congested street corner and the driver announced that we were at the Moody Street stop. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled off the bus, more tired than I would’ve thought. Bone weary could’ve described how I was feeling. While my work details kept me on my feet all day, I wasn’t used to walking as much as I had today. I stood for a moment blinking as I looked around me. My first impression was that the area was a mix of yuppie and blue collar, with ethnic grocery stores and low-rent shops side by side with trendy-looking restaurants. I might’ve driven through Waltham once, I couldn’t remember. I never had much to do with this area. Even though it was maybe ten miles west of Boston, this city could’ve been on the opposite side of the world as far as Revere and my old life were concerned.

I stood on the street corner thumbing through the papers Theo had given me, the cold from the wind numbing my face. When I found the apartment rental form, I squinted at it until my eyes adjusted enough for me to be able to read the address on it. Then I set off on foot.

The apartment Theo arranged for me was in the basement of a five-story brick tenement building which looked like it had been built in the sixties. When I first showed up there, the woman working in the office gave me an empty stare as if I were any other low-income elderly renter, and it was clear to me that she had no idea who I was. She was in her forties, heavy, with badly thinning red hair, and this dull look about her like she was someone who had little interest in anything, at least not enough to bother paying attention to what was in the news and in the papers. If she was the person Theo had dealt with, it explained why my application was accepted. Or maybe even if she knew that I was a confessed hit man, it still wouldn’t have mattered to her.

Theo had set it up for the state to pay my security deposit and first month’s rent as part of the DOC’s prisoner reintegration program. After that I’d be responsible for all future payments, although I’d be getting additional state assistance checks for my first six months.

After I signed the required paperwork, the woman gave me a key and warned me that in a week I’d have to make my apartment available to their pest maintenance person; which meant clearing the countertops and storing any plates, glasses and silverware in boxes so the kitchen could be sprayed. I didn’t bother telling her that that wasn’t going to be a problem.

The apartment was a one-room studio with the kitchen and the living area all in the same space. It was supposed to be furnished, but there wasn’t much in it. A small cot, about the same as what I’d slept on in prison, and a badly chipped dresser from the seventies whose three drawers all stuck. The kitchen area had a sink and enough counter space to maybe hold a few canisters and a toaster. Three cheaply built and falling apart cabinets were placed above a stove that was from the same era as the dresser, and an even older refrigerator sat wedged in the corner. The floor around the stove felt greasy, and the small amount of countertop also had a thin layer of grease and other dirt covering it. When I moved closer, I noticed the small pellets scattered about. Mouse droppings. A quick look showed the bathroom was in worse shape, and even dirtier. Not much more than a tiny cubbyhole that barely fit the toilet, sink and shower stall crammed into it.