Again. Slow it down.
Turn.
Little four-shot derringer.
Pan up to the shooter’s face-Brendan Conroy’s face. Flushed, maybe a little grimace at having to perform this necessary, distasteful task. Did he say anything first? “Sorry, Joe, hope you understand”?
Dad’s tongue flattens itself against the roof of his mouth, readying to say No!
Bang.
32
Joe hated working details, but there was no way around it. He needed the money. Of course, what he earned on a detail was peanuts. At $3.50 an hour, he would be lucky to walk away with twenty-five bucks. His bookie debt, by contrast, was now an outlandish twenty thousand dollars or so-twice what Joe made in a year. He was not quite sure of the total debt. It was divvied up among a half dozen bookies, mostly in the South End, all charging different rates, rolling the vig back into the Big Number, pulling figures out of a hat, moving their lips and rolling their eyes toward the ceiling as they did the math, then writing it all down in Chinese in their little notebooks. By the time they’d finished figuring, Joe had no idea what the true number was. So what could you do but take their word for it? If they said you owed, you owed.
His luck was bound to turn, and soon enough he would have plenty of cash to pay the whole thing off, whatever The Number was. He would make everyone happy, even Kat. All he had to do was keep playing, stay in the game long enough for things to even out. It had to happen: bad luck must be balanced by good, ten coin-flips that come up tails must be followed by ten that come up heads. One man simply could not keep losing forever. In fact the longer he kept losing, the more he felt he could not walk away. All the money he had lost was an investment in future good luck. With every lost bet, he figured, the odds shifted a little further in his favor-“flip a coin a hundred times…” The trick was to keep the wolves at bay long enough to ride out the cold streak and reap the reward.
For a long time Joe believed he could do just that. He was able to keep the faith. Oh, it would take a little belt- tightening, he would have to deny himself a few things-not his strong point-and he would have to work a lot of details. But with the hundred bucks a week he got on the sleeve, he could make his nut every week, just about. He needed about six hundred a week to keep up with the vig. Some weeks he had found a way to get it, or to get close enough for a cop. Of course he saw the futility in using his pad-money to pay the bookies. Those dollars came from the North End and, like homing pigeons, they circled right back to the North End. One of Capobianco’s lieutenants paid off a sergeant at Station One; the sergeant paid Joe; Joe then made his rounds through the South End paying off the bookies; and a few days later those same bills were back where they started, all sorted and banded in one of Capobianco’s counting rooms. Charlie Capobianco had set up a vast bucket brigade to move cash, spilling just enough dollars along the away to keep everyone at it. Of course many weeks-most weeks-Joe had been short, sometimes a lot short, and he’d had to bluster and bargain his way through. But it had never been a problem. Cop privilege, Joe figured-his shield was just that, a shield. With it, he’d pull through, somehow.
But now he knew: He wasn’t going to get out of it, ever. He’d been fooling himself. The hole he was standing in was the hole he’d be buried in. Maybe it had been Amy’s dying. Or the fact that he’d turned to a shylock for the first time, to borrow cash to patch the hole-a fatal mistake, one that inevitably brought out the wolves to surround the wounded limping animal. Maybe it was the new ferocity in the city’s crimeworld. Maybe it was all these things. A gloomy paranoia infected the city after so many murders, high and low.
Charlie Capobianco’s campaign to take over the bookmaking rackets had unleashed a frenzy of killing as surrounding gangs felt the squeeze. The period would later come to be known as the Irish Gang War, but it was nothing as noble or purposeful as war. The Winter Hill crew was systematically exterminating the rival McLaughlin gang, in Charlestown, but most of the violence was just small-timers sharking each other. A gang war, it turned out, was an opportune moment to settle any old score. So the bodies started to turn up. They slumped in abandoned cars…three suitcases were left in an alley beside a hotel downtown, emitting an eggy stench…a headless corpse lay in an unlocked apartment, its windpipe gaping in the neckhole…a mysterious dark syrup leaked from the trunk of a car parked in the hot sun, and people complained of the stink… By now there were nearly twenty dead, most of them shot, two strangled, one throat slit, one beheaded, one drowned. The preferred method was the double-cross-the bullet usually entered the back of the head. Beware the smiling pal who invites you on a job, or stands back to let you walk through a door first, or offers you the front passenger seat while he sits behind.
Meanwhile Capobianco was tightening the screws not just on the books and shylocks who put his money on the street, but on the suckers who took it. A new policy was now in force: The clock never stopped. A deadbeat was never allowed to pay only principal, even if he’d been bled dry. It was a senseless policy unknown in New York or Chicago, for the obvious reason that the Mob could no longer extract money from a deadbeat once it killed him. But that sort of nuance was lost on Charlie Capobianco. He wanted his money, all of it, right now. In Boston the clock ran until you made your final payment, one way or the other.
So here was Joe, in his too-tight uniform pants and too-small policeman’s cap, standing in the Greyhound bus terminal at one in the morning, wondering whether he could afford the price of new uniform pants, having long ago spent the two-hundred-dollar clothing allowance the department gave out each year. The bus station was, to Joe, the absolute worst detail there was. Some guys got the details at Symphony Hall-Joe got the bus station. It figured. But the bus station was the only detail that hired seven days a week, it was indoors, and it fit Joe’s schedule. He could work a “first half” till midnight, then the detail from midnight till six or seven the next morning. So he took it. Interminable nights of waking up bums with his nightstick and breaking up blowjobs in the men’s room and, mostly, doing nothing at all, and for what? So he could hand over what little he earned to the greaseballs. He had at least figured out that he could park his car nearby and go sleep in it. If he wandered through the bus station once an hour to make it look good, that was enough.
Around one, the place was completely abandoned and Joe was dazed with boredom when the fin of a black Cadillac glided into frame in one of the big windows. Not the sort of car that belonged here at this hour, or any hour. Joe went to the window and watched Vinnie Gargano get out of the car. Gargano stood there, looking around. He shrugged his shoulders and waggled his head like a boxer getting loose before a fight. It was remarkable how these guys appeared at your most vulnerable moment. Joe-who had been turning over in his mind thoughts of Kat and twenty thousand dollars-quickly tried to work up a little of the old confidence. He sucked in his gut and buttoned his pants, which he had opened so he could breathe easier, and tried to find his old chesty GI posture. But his body had lost its memory. When Gargano wandered in through the steel-and-glass doors, Joe was still trying to arrange his shoulders and chest properly.
“Hey,” Gargano said. “When’s the next bus to Poughkeepsie?”
Joe forced the corners of his mouth into a weak smile.
Gargano strolled around the waiting room. The banks of molded-plastic seats were empty, the ticket windows closed. No buses left at this time of night. The station stayed open overnight just to receive the occasional arrival from God-knew-where-a handful of exhausted, bedraggled passengers would shuffle through, like immigrants from some faraway country, then silence again.
“The fuck you doin’ here?” Gargano asked.
“My job.”
“I thought you were some detective. Big shot.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I got a right to know how my taxes are gettin’ spent.”
“You pay your taxes?”
“No.”
“Alright, then.” In Joe’s head, the sentence ran on with its natural momentum: Alright, then, go fuck yourself.
Gargano strolled around the circumference of the waiting room with the distracted manner of one lost in thought. From the side-which was Joe’s angle of view as he turned slowly on his heels to keep Gargano from moving behind him-Gargano had an unmistakable simian look. His arms hung to his mid-thighs, a beard of fat rounded his face into a snout. The rumor was that Vinnie Gargano had packed that man into three suitcases, even
