Authors: Howie Carr
“Owner of record?”
“One Domenic Gargiulo. Does the name ring a bell?”
“No, should it?”
“He's a probation officer, East Boston District Court.”
“No shit,” I said, standing up and walking around Slip's desk. “Does that computer of yours work?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
It worked. Slip got up from his desk and went around to the couch and again put his feet up. It wasn't an election year. Things were slow. Correction: things are always slow at City Hall. They're just slower in the even-numbered years.
I quickly got on to the website of the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. Life is so much easier with the Internet. I clicked on “Candidates” and typed in the name Donahue. Then I clicked on “Contributors” and typed in the previous year and the name Gargiulo. I got just what I was looking for.
He lived in Revere with a woman named Donna, and a couple of kids, all of whom were deeply committed to fulfilling their civic responsibilities, namely, handing cash to politicians who could return the favor, in spades.
Their favorite statesman was none other than Donuts Donahue of Worcester.
“Find what you were looking for?” Slip asked.
“Tell me something, Slip,” I asked. “Why would a probation officer in East Boston and his whole family be giving money to Donuts Donahue? I mean, I know the connection to Donahue through his cousin, but why not one or two of the local guys too?”
Slip lit up another Kool. “You're lucky you're asking me these questions, and not one of your marks up in the State House. People might start saying you've lost your fastball.”
“C'mon, Slip, don't bust my balls.”
“It's simple, pal. There's too many guys in Boston, splitting up too few jobs. Unless he's in leadership, a rep in Boston gets one or two probation jobs, if he's lucky. Out west, less competition for the slots. More Republicans for one thing, and even they have to get a few. Eventually, one of them probation hacks out in the 413 area code picks off a deputy commissioner's job. That makes it a lot easier to get somebody in, if you don't have to call the commissioner in Boston, like everybody else does. Think of western Mass like baseball. They're not in Fenway, they're in Pawtucket, but when you're going after a P.O.'s job, what the hell does it matter who gets it for you?”
“So Donuts maybe got Domenic Gargiulo his job?”
“More'n likely.”
“And the introduction came in the usual way.”
“If you mean Benjamin Franklins, plural, the answer is yes.”
I asked Slip if he remembered Santo's from his old days on the Licensing Board.
“I do indeed. It was an In Town joint. Course, what wasn't over there, back then? I read over the police reports before you got here, they're celebrating diversity now, if you know what I mean.”
I knew what he meant. Knives, machetes even. Still, Slip didn't use the old slurs like “spic” anymore. Too many cell phones recording everything. One bad video on YouTube and your career could be over.
“Why would Donuts be going to the Python late at night?” I asked.
“I'd find that hard to believe.”
“Believe it.”
As long as I was at City Hall, running up my parking tab in the Government Center garage, I might as well save myself some time later and take care of another errand. I got back on Slip's computer and punched in the name of a pay site I'm a member of, where you can run DOBs and phone numbers and addresses. This time I was looking for DOBsâof Mr. and Mrs. Gargiulo. Odds were, they'd been born in Boston, and if they had been, their birth certificates would be on file in the city clerk's office on the mezzanine.
I got the dates I was looking for and headed downstairs. As I expected, the line was the usual new-Boston Tower of Babel, ninety percent illegal aliens queued up to pull their anchor babies' birth certificates. They were only taking the welfare Americans couldn't be bothered taking, as George W. Bush would say. The birth certificates they needed to prove that one of them was at least technically an American citizen, which entitled the entire family to the full Tsarnaev, as we now called the panoply of welfare bennies available to every Third World freeloader who could drop a baby here in the Live for Free or Die state.
I finally got to the window, and asked for the birth records books from 1965 and 1968, the years the Gargiulos had been born. Normally, that's a bit of a pain in the ass, because you may be there for a while, but the clerk was so happy to be waiting on a fellow Americano that there were none of the usual dirty looks. Plus, I had the birth dates.
Mrs. Gargiulo's maiden name was Zenna, and her mother's maiden name was Palermo. Neither of them rang a bell. But when I got to Domenic, I saw that his mother was the former Carmela Marzilli.
Marzilliâas in Blinky Marzilli. I wrote down the particulars and then asked the clerk to make me a copy. Now that I was actually asking her to get up out of her chair and do something, her attitude took a turn for the worse. It improved when I handed her a twenty. I wanted to have something to show Bench McCarthy the next time I saw him.
Â
In the morning, the story about Henry Sheldon was all over the all-news radio station. The manager of a loan company in Weymouth had been gunned down in his office, but no cash was missing. Robbery did not appear to be a motive. The police were baffled. I love it when the police are baffled.
Poor Henry, I'm sure he never saw it coming. But then, how could he? I began to wonder, what other loan sharks might be willing to loan an upstanding character like me some dough? Next time, why not go for fifty, or even a hundred large?
It was about 7:30 in the morning, and the first thing I did as I walked into the bar on Hancock Street in Quincy was make eye contact with the bartender. I knew him vaguely, and he recognized me and nodded. Ditto Foley had told him to be expecting me. He motioned silently with his head toward the back of the bar. I'm sure he noticed the billy club I was carrying in my right hand. I'd left my car in the alley behind the bar, in case I had to leave in a hurry. Then I'd walked around and entered the bar through the front door.
There were already a couple of working men sitting at the bar, but they didn't look like cops. For one thing, they appeared sober, like they'd just gotten off the overnight shift at the nearby Stop & Shop warehouse. But everything about the guy sitting by himself in a booth in the back of the darkened, dirty room screamed copâbad cop. There were three empty highball glasses in front of him, and a half-full one. He was holding a smartphone. Twenty years ago, it would have been a
Racing Form
. He looked like the kind of guy you used to see at Suffolk Downs in the afternoons. Now he probably owed twenty large to some offshore gambling outfit run by a congressman's on-the-lam brothers-in-law.
I slid into the booth across from him, keeping the sap low so he couldn't see it as I laid it down next to me on the pockmarked, slashed plastic that covered the bench.
“Are you Tim Fitzpatrick?”
He looked up, somewhere between shit-faced and legless. I doubted he'd drawn a sober breath in at least five years. “Who wants to know?”
“That's not important,” I said. “What's important is your son.”
“My son?” You couldn't say he bristled exactly, because he was too far gone to bristle. Recoil was more like it.
“Listen carefully,” I said. “Your son is threatening to file a criminal complaint against the son of a friend of mine. This friend of mine gave you $5,000 yesterday, which seems more than fair under the circumstances, namely that your son came out on the short end of a barroom brawl.”
“Who are you?” he said blearily.
“Believe me, you don't want to know. Now listen, I can't stop your son from filing a complaint against my friend's son, but if he does, I've got a guy who's going to file a complaint against your son for starting another fucking fracas in a gin mill.”
“Bullshit.”
“This guy I know, he's going to swear that your son sucker-punched him, not in Quincy, but in Boston. Boston, you understand. Where you don't have any clout, but this friend of mine does. He knows the clerk/magistrate, and he knows the judge. And we have witnesses. And your son has a record, I've checked his CORI. He won't get much time, but he'll get thirty days in South Bay, and my friend's got friends of his own in South Bay, and some terrible things've been known to happen in South Bay, most of which don't even make the papers anymore. But guys inside there are getting shanked all the time. Or maybe they get a hot shot, you know what I mean?”
He squinted at me. “Do you know who you're talking to?”
“I'm talking to a motherfucker who oughta be very happy with his five grand that he can now proceed to blow on stupid fucking bets or give it to his son so he can stick it up his nose. I'm talking to a drunk-ass loser who ought to be giving a good talking to to his son about trying to shake down people who've already beat the shit out of him once.
Capisce?
”
His nostrils flared. “I don't have to take no shit off no guinea hood from Boston.”
“I wouldn't know about that,” I said. “But I do know you do have to take shit off me. This is your one and only warning.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bartender glancing over at me. He was shaking his head. Perhaps I'd spoken too loudly. Like me, he didn't want any trouble. I nodded, to silently indicate to him I'd keep my voice down so that the two guys from Stop & Shop wouldn't notice anything amiss. I'd have bought them a drink except I didn't want them looking over this way to thank me. Then I turned back to the cop.
“I'm going to tell you just one more time: you've been paid five grand, now you better quit while you're ahead. You won't be hearing from me again. Neither will your son. But if my friend or his son hears from you, you're going to be in a world of hurt, and I don't mean maybe. Some guys can fix things in Quincy, and some guys can fix things in Boston, and the ones who can fix things in Boston, those are the guys you have to watch out for.”
His mouth was half-open. He'd be pissed when he sobered up, as much as he ever sobered up, that is.
“So you're Ditto Foley's muscle?”
“I'm just a friend of hisâand yours,” I said. “Let's keep it that way.”
“Fuck you,” he said, and that's when I realized he was one of those guys who just wouldn't listen to reason. Sometimes you get more with kind words and a billy club than you get with kind words. So I grabbed my sap, gripped it tightly, rose from the booth and reached across to slug him squarely across the side of his face. Luckily, he was so drunk he didn't cry out, just slumped out of the booth and thudded loudly onto the floor, unconscious. The two guys at the bar heard that and turned around, as did the bartender.
“Guy can't handle his booze anymore,” I yelled. “Wet brain, like Ted Kennedy there at the end. It's a tough way to go.”
The bartender had come back to check on things. He wanted to do something, but I told him, “Just give them a round on me, Sully, and put it on my tab. I'll get him out of here.”
Free drinks! That's usually all it takes to make a concerned citizen lose interest. I leaned over and grabbed Fitzpatrick by the collar of his jacket. For the first time I noticed the gut on him. He was a real load. I dragged him out to the back door, then out into the alley. I was out of breath by the time I dropped his dead weight onto the pavement. I fumbled for my car keys and then unlocked the trunk. I gathered him up again and grunted as I pushed him against the open trunk. He fell back heavily, still unconscious, so I grabbed him by the legs and lifted him up and into the trunk. I slammed it down and went around, got into the car, started it and drove off.
A drunk ex-cop passed out in the trunk of my car, and it wasn't even eight in the morning. This day had nowhere to go but up.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
My next stop was Sally's headquarters In Town. It was on Prince Street, and everyone called it the Dog House because Sally's mother used to sell hot dogs out of it. I pulled my car up in front of the sign “ReservedâValet Parking.” The valet had taken the day off so I just got out of the car and walked up the steps that led to the front door.
There were two guards posted outside the door. One of them was Cheech, in his usual overcoat. His brother Hole in the Head wouldn't even be buried for a couple of hours, but for Cheech the mourning period was over. On the other side of the steps was one of the younger guys in his crew, a kid named Blur, wearing a Bruins jacket over a large handgun, maybe a .44.
I saluted them and bolted up the steps. There were two more guys just inside the door, and I walked past them and headed into Sally's back office. His son Jason was sitting there, his legs crossed. Usually this time of day, Jason would be pumping gas himself at the gas station Sally had bought him on Cambridge Street, at the bottom of Beacon Hill. That station was Jason's pride and joy, maybe because his father left him alone there. This morning Jason was looking sheepishly at his father, who was screaming at somebody on his cell phone.
“No no no no,” he was yelling. “Don't you even think about it!”
He slammed down the cell phone and looked up at me.
“That fucking broad Liz. She gets arrested again last night, and now she wants me to send a lawyer up to the first session and bail her out.”
“Drugs?” I asked.
“Not directly,” he said. “Common nightwalking. Turning tricks on Marginal Road. She claims she was set up, but I've heard that before. I give her at least a grand at the wakeâyou saw meâand now she's locked up again.”
“Poor kid,” I said.
“âPoor kid'?” Sally said, incredulously. “Whose side are you on? I got people shooting at me, and now I got this here to worry about.”