for you, it will make me mad.”
He didn’t say anything. I turned and walked across the street to my car. It was very dark now, and in the snow I couldn’t even see the car till I was halfway across the street. I opened the door. The inside light went on. Frank Belson was sitting in the front seat. I got in and closed the door.
“For crissake turn the motor on and get the heater going,” he said. “I’m freezing my nuts off.”
“You want a beer?” I said. “There’s four left in the back seat.”
“I don’t drink on duty,” he said. He took two bottles of Beck’s out of the carton. “For crissake, what kind of beer is this? It doesn’t even have a twist-off cap.”
“There’s an opener in the glove compartment,” I said.
Belson opened the two beers, gave one to me and took a long pull on the other bottle.
“What you get from Mingo?”
“I thought I was ostracized,” I said.
“You know Marty,” Belson said. “He gets mad quick, he cools down quick. What you get from Mingo?”
“Haven’t you talked to him?”
“We figured you could talk with him harder than we could. We were right. But I thought he’d give you more trouble than he did.”
“I suckered him,” I said. “That got him off to a bad start.”
“Still,” Belson said, “he used to be goddamned good.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“I know that. What’d you get?”
“English set up the hit-and-run on the Lynnway.”
“Mingo do it through his cousin?”
“Yeah.”
“Cousin tell you that?”
“Yeah. Him and Cody did the work. Mingo gave them a deuce. He got the money from English. I braced Cousin Michael this morning.”
“I know,” Belson said.
“What the hell is this—practice teaching? You follow me around and observe?”
“I told you we had Cody and Mulready staked out,” Belson said. “When you showed up, the detail called in. I told them to let you go. I figured you’d get more than we would because you don’t have to sweat brutality charges. They lost you heading out of Sears, but I figured you’d end up here and I came over. Got here about one thirty and been sitting in the next block since. You get anything else?”
“No. But English is looking better and better. You look into those pie-throwers in Cambridge?”
Belson finished the beer and opened another bottle. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s nothing there. Just a couple of right-wing fruitcakes. They never been in jail. They don’t show any connection with English or Mingo Mulready or the Vigilance Committee or anybody else. They go to MIT, for crissake.”
“Okay. How about Julie Wells? You talk to her yet?”
Belson held the beer between his knees while he got a half-smoked cigar out of his shirt pocket and lit it and puffed at it. Then he took the cigar out of his mouth, sipped some beer, put the cigar back in, and said around it, “Can’t find her. She doesn’t seem to have moved or anything, but she’s not at her apartment whenever we show up. We’re sort of looking for her.”
“Good. You think you might sort of find her in a while?”
“If we’d known some things earlier, buddy, we’d have been more likely to have kept an eye on her.”
“Know anything about Mingo? You sound like you’ve known him before.”
“Oh, yeah, old Mingo. He’s got a good-sized file. Used to work for Joe Broz once. Used to be a bouncer, did some pro wrestling, some loansharking. Been busted for assault, for armed robbery, been picked up on suspicion of murder and released when we couldn’t turn a witness that would talk. English employs some sweetheart to drive the old babe around.”
I said, “You people going to keep English under surveillance?”
“Surveillance? Christ, you been watching
I said, “You gonna watch him?”
“Yeah. We’ll try to keep someone on him. We ain’t got all that many bodies, you know?”
“And he’s got money and maybe knows a couple city councilmen and a state senator.”
“Maybe. It happens. You know Marty. You know me. But you also know how it works. Pressure comes down, we gotta bend. Or get other work, you know?”
“Felt any pressure yet?”
