everything is frozen. We’re in limbo with the banks, the insurance, our suppliers. If we lose the store …” He sank back onto a stack of rice sacks and shook his head. “If I’m left alone here with Mum, my life is over. My sisters are older-they’re both married and starting families. If Dad stays missing, I’m going to have to take over here. This will be my life, this place Dad bought in fucking Somerville. You’ll call, right, if you find anything? You have the number?”
He wouldn’t let me leave without a business card with all his contact info, plus a few more copies of the flyer of his father, missing now for more than twenty days.
Sheldon Paull called me on the way back. I put him on speaker and asked if he knew anything about David playing poker.
“Funny you should ask,” he said. “I don’t think I was supposed to know about it. But one night, maybe a month ago, I got up to pee in the middle of the night and his door wasn’t all the way closed. The light was on. Nothing unusual, he often works through the night. I was walking past and I heard him go, “Yesss,” that way you do when you’ve done something great. I’m wondering, did he make a breakthrough or something? Something related to work or maybe Talmud? But no. Through the door I could see his arms in the air like he just scored a touchdown. And pocket aces on his screen.”
“How often does he play?”
“That was the only time I saw it.”
“He ever talk about it?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know if he ever played in live tournaments.”
“Seems unlikely to me.”
“No sudden trips to Vegas or Atlantic City?”
“David?”
“Nothing to suggest problem gambling?”
“Please,” Sheldon said. “What is all this, anyway?”
“We think David may have been making money playing poker.”
“If he was, he kept it from me.”
“You said he’s smart. Maybe he thought he could beat the odds. Get out of his financial hole. Maybe he got in over his head.”
“He was smart, is smart, and he could beat the odds if he wanted to. But he would have needed a stake.”
“He could have built one online.”
“But if he cashed any out, there’d be a record on his credit card statement.”
“Which there wasn’t,” I admitted.
“Anyway, it still doesn’t seem like David. He’s the opposite of the addictive personality. He gets his satisfaction from his work. That it for now?”
“Yes, thanks.” As soon as I hung up, the phone buzzed: it was Jenn, saying Dr. Stayner’s office had called to say he’d see me if I could be there in twenty minutes. I pulled over to the right, provoking only one middle finger and one hostile blast of a horn.
“That sounded warm and fuzzy,” she said.
“Can I get there in twenty from the Mass Avenue Bridge?” I said.
“Yes. Just stay on Commonwealth past the hotel till you get to Brookline and bear left. Park when you get to Francis.”
“Got it. Anything from the phone calls?”
“Drive now,” she said. “Talk later.”
CHAPTER 7
Sean Daggett had four properties in the Boston area, not counting the one down the Cape.
There was the garage in Somerville, the one his father had owned, and his father before that, passed down the dark generations for certain kinds of business. There were cars in there and parts of cars, but none of them ever got worked on. People did sometimes; some bled or got bruised. Others passed through. Goods moved in and out. Hangers-on hung. Flesh got pressed. That kind of place. Then there was his newest acquisition, a defunct funeral home in Mattapan that was proving to be sweetly lucrative.
His family lived out of the city, of course, to keep the kids away from its fucking schools. Michael and Virginia went to St. Bridget’s in Framingham for a good parochial education free of Boston’s loony ideas and racial engineering. He and Bev had built a sprawling ranch house between Farm Pond and the Bracket Reservoir. The kids had one wing east of the grand centre hall, with their own bathroom and entertainment room and study. The west wing held the master bedroom and monster bath where you could soak, shower, massage and otherwise pamper yourself. They had their own big-screen den too, him and Bev. He slept at home almost every night.
The fourth place, the three-bedroom condo on the top floor of Williams Wharf, was his sanctuary, the place he came to do his white-collar work, where no one got bloodied. Here he received guests of a certain stature, representing the many snaking arms of Boston’s public services. Here he could think and plan in quiet, or as quiet as his head ever got.
The views of the harbour were breathtaking in almost every room. Ask anyone who had been there. His office, kitchen and bedroom all faced east. And out on the balcony, where he stood now, it was fucking panoramic. He had his leather jacket on and an Irish whiskey rocks in his hand, easing the spring night chill. Facing north, hip against the balcony wall, he could see the Bunker Hill Monument, the soaring stone rose-coloured in the footlights. He had grown up a few blocks from there on Russell Street, but hadn’t lived there in years. After his dad died, his mother had sold the place to a yuppie couple with one kid, early gentrifiers, and she hosed them but good on the price. Got three times what she would have got a couple of years before. Charlestown, once a tough old neighbourhood. There were more dry cleaners than bars now-what did that tell you about a place? The old crowd in Charlestown never needed dry cleaners. They had wives for that.
One of his bedrooms at Williams Wharf had been set up as a workout room, which he used often. Sean was past thirty-five but not yet forty, and kept himself hard and quick. Five-ten and 175: all he’d ever needed with his anger, his speed.
The third bedroom was a guest room made up if he ever needed to sleep downtown. But not with other women. Sean had been faithful to Bev since the day he fell for her at fifteen, felt lucky that she returned his love the way she did, loved the kids they were bringing up. They had survived their one bad crisis with Michael, had come through it strong, and he still found her so beautiful he would never even think of cheating, couldn’t imagine tasting another woman’s mouth or body. The Italians he did business with-the local concern being the remnants of the Patriarca family-Jesus, they ran around like crabs on a beach. Cunt hounds every one of them, sleazing from one lay or blow job to the next, all while the wives cooked and banged out kids and combed their hair on Sundays and took them to church.
Not Sean. He didn’t need all that drama. This place was a man’s place, one big den, in the very north end of Boston, smack among the Italians; how do you like that for balls?
Sean’s father had been a Charlestown classic, Michael James Daggett, a.k.a. Mad Mickey or the Mad Mick. One of Whitey’s boys: Whitey Bulger, who ran the Boston Irish Mob for close to thirty years while his brother Billy ran the State House just as long. All through his climb and his long time at the top, Whitey instilled in his men the one, the only, absolute rule of the trade: Never rat. Never tell a cop a thing. Never look a fed in the eye, other than to spit in it. Never say a word. Do your time like a man, we’ll look after the missus. Above all, never rat.
All while singing like a diva to the FBI. For years.
An epic Wagnerian song cycle, performed by Whitey and his partner Steve Flemmi. They informed on rivals and friends alike to keep their own trade humming, killing prodigiously all the while. Stevie especially. Even killing killers who killed for them. Killing girls. The details on some of the girls, when that all came out, were sickening, even to Sean. But even as the warrants were being issued, Whitey’s pals in the FBI warned him off and he stayed free another fifteen years.
