Serpents in the Cold (2 page)

_________________________

Scollay Square, Downtown

DANTE KNEW HOW
to play the rag doll. It was as though he'd turned boneless and shut off his nerves so every punch from Grabowski merely echoed in his flesh. He could feel what the damage would be, and the hurt would come later: the rupture of skin on his jaw, a swollen eye, the bruising of a rib, two teeth loosening from his blood-soaked gums. A debt a month old wasn't a ticket to the morgue, even with Sully and his Irish and Polish goons, the Catholic Pride of Dorchester Avenue, but lingering in the back of his head, there was the chance that they'd get carried away, make a mistake, and kill him.

“Dante, you're such a fuckin' waste. You know, back in the old days we all thought you'd make something of yourself. But now look at you with your pants down and your face all pretty. Jesus, a no-good waste, a true piece of shit.”

Grabowski held Dante's limp body up with his two scarred hands. He released his right hand, cocking his arm to the side, and sent another blow across Dante's chin. He pulled back again and lowered with a hard rip into the stomach. The thug had been a boxer once, but never much good. Without any discipline or strategy, he'd always been more at home fighting bare-knuckled in the back alleys and outside the social halls up and down the Avenue.

He grabbed a fistful of Dante's unkempt hair and pulled him back toward the stall. Dante made a choking sound and tried to raise an arm. Grabowski hauled his head back and then slammed it into the stall's oak door. Dante bounced, his head snapping back before he crumpled to the floor. Shaw stepped forward, leaned down over Dante, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette. The embers smoldered in the folds of Dante's shirt, singed through to his skin.

“Okay, Ski, hold up a bit. Go check his jacket there by the toilet and see if he has any cash.”

Shaw had grown up in Fields Corner with both Cal and Dante. He came from the Shaughnessy family, a ripe brood where the seven sons all wanted to be just like their father, a low-rent criminal who made a substantial mark in gin and whiskey running during Prohibition. Shaw was the youngest, and he was the runt of the litter. As a kid, he was all mouth. He'd always had someone do his dirty work for him. And he hadn't changed one bit since then, always talking like a tough guy, but with the trim, well-manicured hands of an accountant.

He had a habit of sucking his crooked teeth before he spoke. “Sully always liked you and Cal. Good boys, he says, could have really made it good with us if they just knew where their fuckin' bread was buttered. He feels for you, he really does. But it's been over, like, six months since your wife passed on. Sympathy has its limits, it wears thin after a while; even if it's small change, he goes on principle. A man has to work off of principle, right? Otherwise the whole world goes to shit.”

Dante looked up at the freckled, flabby, pale face, the curly orange hair escaping like a clown's wig from the sides of the tight hat, and the gray, heavy-lidded eyes. He tried to say something, but blood overflowed his mouth and spilled down his chin. The sharp metallic taste of it filled his nostrils, knotted with the growing pain in his gut as his adrenaline and his high dissolved into sickness.

He tried again. “I'll get it to you soon…just don't have it.”

Guttural laughter suddenly came from inside the stall. “The fucker got no money. But he's got these.”

Ski came and shoved a handful of morphine syrettes at Shaw, four of them capped except the one that Dante had used earlier.

Shaw wrapped them up in one of his leather gloves and then pocketed them inside his long wool coat. He shook his head, sucked his teeth again. “I guess those niggers at those jazz joints really give you a good deal, no? Five caps and they'll throw in some tubes of morphine just to take the edge off come morning.”

Ski caught his breath, rolled his shoulders, stood above Dante, and shook his head in an exasperated manner. He turned and looked over at Shaw, eyes crossed.

“Jesus Christ, how can somebody get this bad off? I feel kinda bad hurtin' somebody who can't even fight back.”

Shaw smirked. “If he wasn't such a fuckup, I'd feel kinda bad for him too. Sick bastard finds his wife dead of a junk overdose and then crawls into bed next to her. Three days later, the police get a complaint of something smelling foul, so they come and break down the doors and find him still in bed with her.”

“You kiddin' me?”

“Nope.”

“No, sleeping with your dead wife, that ain't right.”

“Nothing right about it at all.”

Ski looked down at Dante on the floor. A look of sympathy briefly flickered in his gray face, hard with thickly knit scars, but then a scowl of disgust pulled at his mouth and he grunted loudly, drew back his leg, and brought another heavy boot to Dante's chest.

_________________________

CAL PULLED HIS
battered Chevy Fleetline into a plowed space opposite Epstein's Drug and sat for a moment watching the bundled shapes of pedestrians passing along the sidewalk. The radio was tuned to the news and the news reporter was asking Richard Nixon, congressman and investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, about his thoughts on the upcoming trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage and on charges that they passed information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

Cal turned off the engine and glanced at himself in the rearview. His face, still youthful and quick to flush, was lined around startling blue eyes. Black hair shining as if oiled, close back and sides, high and flat on top. He looked better than he felt, and smiled without humor. A wind was howling down the avenue and it whistled in the wheel wells, shook the car, so that Cal had to put his shoulder into the door to open it as he climbed out. His joints ached and the tendons in his legs seemed to be talking to one another, sending sharp pains through him with each step, and he wished he'd taken another slug of whiskey.

He looked down the crooked alleyways stretching toward the cobblestone and crowded tenements of the West End, where tavern signs glowed in bright red and green neon, and farther, where vagrants shifted beneath makeshift shelters—cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and ragged, hole-worn army blankets they'd thawed over subway grates from which tendrils of steam twined. The sun was somewhere above the rooftops, but he'd be damned if he knew where.

He hadn't been to the office in over a week. Their last customer looking for bonded security watchmen had been G. J. Fergusson on Washington Street. Cal had done the walk-through of the six-floor garment factory himself: sixty thousand square feet of overheated, poorly vented space that looked out on the elevated tracks where trolley cars rumbled, groaned, and squealed from dawn to night and where, at rows upon rows of ancient sewing machines, hundreds of Chinese women labored away.

The building was a footsore if ever he'd seen one, but an easy job for a night watchman. Three key stations on each floor; you could pass the night doing whatever the hell you liked as long as you kept an ear out for the property owners making an impromptu drop-by. All property owners did it now and again to check in on their investments, to make sure the guards were where they were supposed to be, that the number of guards they'd requested and paid for were actually on the premises. He liked to hire retired cops, ex-soldiers, and, now and again, cons who he knew had been sent down for misdemeanors, judge bias, or crooked police work and who he knew could, at times, provide him with valuable information the others could not. But the Fergusson Company was out of business now, and others like the Anvil Building had been gutted after the city designated it for the wrecking ball and urban renewal. Pilgrim Security had had contracts with Sears in the Fenway, Woolworth's, Gillette, Necco, the Custom House Tower, the Copley Hotel, and the Eliot, but those days were gone, and now he could count their clients on the fingers of one hand: a tool and die factory on Old Colony Ave in Southie, three package stores in Mattapan, and a bank in Uphams Corner by the Strand Theatre, a couple of warehouses down on Atlantic Ave along the waterfront, some office space downtown and in Post Office Square. Every so often something would come up—a week or two worth of work with the potential for something long-term—and he'd call in the numbers of those who he knew needed the work the most.

Of course, the business was more than just a security company, despite his attempts to make it only that. But when Boston's economy went south, he'd had to take whatever he could, and there were always people looking for someone like him to get things done. And the people in the neighborhood, who needed things done, who didn't trust the police or couldn't call them, reached out to him for help. There were wives whose absentee husbands refused to pay child support; families with loved ones in Suffolk or Charlestown jail and no way to post bond or hire a lawyer; employers who suspected their workers of pilfering goods or stealing from the till; debt collectors and loan sharks who needed to be squeezed back just a little bit; the husband or wife who believed their spouse was cheating on them; the sister who didn't believe the story of how her brother died.

He liked to think that he'd found a way to make a living and pay the bills from what he knew how to do and what he was good at, and that once the economy got better and everyone was back on their feet, he'd get back to running his security company and to hell with everything else, but he also found it hard to leave behind what he'd done as a cop, doing what he thought mattered, which in the end, he'd discovered, had little to do with the law. Perhaps more than that, he often wondered if he was trying to make right all his wrongs from the war.

The windows to the second-floor offices of Pilgrim Security were dark and shuttered, and when he climbed the stairs, snow melting from his shoes onto the worn green carpeting, he found the door locked. The rippled glass painted with the company name was in need of cleaning. Cal stared at the door. One of the children whose parents worked on the floor had been peering into the dark room; a small greasy handprint was smeared on the glass. The white cardboard sign announcing
PASSPORT PHOTOS TAKEN HERE
and
NOTARY PUBLIC
hung crookedly at the center of the window. The hallway smelled of boiling cabbage—a wet and ripe, sweaty smell—and of something burnt—eggs perhaps. Voices came muted through other doors: a radio, a telex, and farther down the hall from Franklin Professional Services came the clickety-clack of secretaries at work, of typewriters and the thump and hum of Dictaphones and mimeographs, the sudden short bark of a woman's laugh.

Later, Cal stood just inside the building's entranceway, smoking a cigarette and trying to avoid the wind. Dante might be at Mike Piloti's garage on Summer Street or even out at Uphams Corner Auto doing a bit of spot-welding, as he sometimes did to put cash in his pocket, but then he remembered Dante had put in some hours at his cousin's garage last week right before the latest storm, and as long as Dante could make enough to get by, he wouldn't be looking to make more. And if he had cash in his pockets, he'd give himself over to something else. Cal just hoped he was on the bottle rather than the junk.

THE DOOR TO
Dante's apartment was unlocked. Cal knocked, and when there came no reply, he entered. Dante's younger sister, Claudia, sat at the small Formica-topped table in the kitchen. She wore a blue housecoat, bare feet in oversized worn slippers. Pale varicose flesh nestled in thick tufts of fake fur around the ankle. She was sitting sideways in the chair and staring out the window. Her hands lay in her lap, unmoving. Her hair looked damp and hung in lank strings on either side of her ashen face. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and her lips appeared white, bloodless. A cigarette smoldered in a World's Fair ashtray on the vinyl tablecloth.

“Claudia,” Cal said and resisted the impulse to touch her before he sensed she was aware of him standing there. Still she gave no response. Melting snow from the rooftop thumped the glass and slid down the window, making everything blurred and indistinct. Claudia stirred and blinked, turned her head at last and looked at him. “Oh,” she said, but showed no surprise or curiosity.

Cal came and stood beside her, squeezed her shoulder before pulling out a chair from the table and settling into it. Looking at her, he knew he wouldn't tell her about Sheila; she was in no condition to hear about murder.

“I tried calling,” he said and nodded toward the black phone resting in its cradle on the wall, “but they've shut your phone off.”

Claudia took a last drag from the cigarette and pressed it down into the tin ashtray. A breeze from somewhere turned the smoke and pushed ash across the table. Claudia looked at the phone on the wall.

“I'm waiting for Dante to call. He said he'd call.”

Cal nodded. “He'll probably call soon, Claudia. Any time now. If I see him, is there anything you want me to tell him?”

“We need coffee. Bread, too. And toilet paper. Milk and eggs would be nice.”

“I'll take care of it, Claudia. Don't worry about it.” He touched her shoulder, so cold it made him shiver, and went to the foldout couch in the living room and returned with a throw blanket, placing it around her shoulders. He considered putting on water to make her some tea, but as he watched her turn back toward the window, he decided against it. At the door he turned up the thermostat to sixty-five, waited until he heard the furnace kick in and water flowing through the radiators. At least they hadn't turned that off yet.

On the street, Charlie, the newspaper hawker, was counting change in his newsstand beside the Rialto. Above them, on the second floor of the theater, the neon cross of the Calvary Rescue Mission glowed, a blue nimbus in the frozen air. Outside the newsstand, pinned to plywood, the covers of
Sports Daily, Bettor's Weekly, Men's Club,
and various local and national papers fluttered and flapped against their pins. The
Globe
was revisiting the Brink's robbery of a year before, what the
New York Times
had called the Crime of the Century, and showed the Superman masks the robbers had used and that now every kid from Charlestown to Quincy wore on Halloween.

Cal held up the paper, looked at the headline:
POLICE ASK PUBLIC'S HELP IN BOSTON BUTCHER CASE. NO LEADS IN MURDER OF FOUR WOMEN.
At the bottom of the page he read
STILL NO SIGN OF $2.5 MILLION SEIZED IN BRINK'S ROBBERY
and then turned to the back of the paper and the sports section.

Charlie watched him and chewed on his frayed cigar. There was always cigar pulp around the old man's mouth, and with his deep-set eyes he looked like some manner of mole poking its head out into the sun.

“They think that guy they're calling the Butcher might be a foreigner off the boats coming in,” he said. “Maybe a sailor docked over in Charlestown. That's what I'm thinking too. Only a foreigner could do something like that. You know, a Russian or one of those Slavic types. Are Polacks Slavic? You don't think it was a Polack, do you? My mother was Polish.”

Cal shook his head. “No, not a Polack off a boat anyway.”

“Four girls cut up like that. It's a crying fucking shame. I don't know what the world's coming to.”

He glanced over the top of the sports page in Cal's hands.

“Bruins lost again,” he said.

And before Cal could ask, Charlie said, “The Canadiens won.”

Cal scanned the results himself, sighed. “Still, we face Montreal tomorrow night. We can make up some ground.”

“Like hell. I'm just waiting for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training.”

“Baseball?” Cal shook his head. “Too early for baseball. I still have faith in the Bruins.”

“This year? Are you shitting me? We've got no offense and our defense stinks. Better chance of Mulrooney winning the Senate seat.”

“So, all bets are on Foley?”

“Well,” Charlie paused as a fit of coughing took him, “I wouldn't bet against him. He's way too connected in this town. And who else would want the mess Cosgrove left behind.” He took out a soiled handkerchief, and blew into it. “You know, they say he died on the shitter.”

Cal grinned, pulled a crumpled dollar from his pocket, placed it on the counter, made as if he were tipping back a drink, and pointed to the betting slips stacked against the back of the booth. His hands were shaking. “Any chance you saw Dante this morning?”

“Nah, haven't seen that mess in days.” Charlie reached behind the betting slips and, after a moment, pushed a fifth of whiskey into Cal's hands. “Is he in trouble again?”

Cal screwed off the top and knocked back a quarter of the bottle, coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He breathed deeply and felt the shaking in his hands subside.

“Not with me he's not.”

By the time he'd made it to the end of the street, the fifth of whiskey was almost empty. Cal's mind felt sharp, and the aching in his limbs was gone. He felt his heart beating strong in his chest, and when the biting cold pressed through to his skin, his gun was a pocket of warmth just below his ribs.

THERE WERE ONLY
two people at the bar, bowed over their half-empty glasses in a dull, drunken silence. When the door opened, one of them looked up. Before an empty stool at the other end of the U-shaped bar, a lone drink sat untouched. It was a whiskey sour and it had a depressed air to it, as if some poor sap had bought it for the girl he admired, thinking she would walk in at any minute.

Next to the drink, an ashtray held a cigarette that had burned through. Cal knew that Dante was here. A whiskey sour wasn't his drink of choice, it was Margo's.

Cal lurched forward, called out to the bartender, a tall balding man with a mustache that hung over his lip. “Have you seen him?”

“I see lots of people, all kinds of people.”

“Just do me a favor and at least let me know if he has company in there.”

“Aaaah, O'Brien, I just cleaned the toilets. Not a soul in there.”

Cal turned and glanced toward the hallway leading to the bathroom.

“You know we don't welcome that kind of stuff here.”

“I'll check myself.”

Cal reached in under his coat, felt the reassuring weight of his M1911 in the holster. He passed several empty booths along the wall, soiled red-and-white-checked oilcloth on the tables, glasses of unfinished beer from the night before, past a nickel jukebox with its stained yellow panels, and farther into the hallway toward the bathrooms. The acrid smell of piss gathered in his nostrils. At the door, he heard a heavy grunt followed by a cough thick with phlegm, the squeaking of rubber soles moving on the tiled floor, and then a rip of laughter.