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“We should’ve practiced doing it this way back in the garage,” Dell’Appa said, contorting his upper body away from the seatback, releasing it forward and then crawling over it into the rear compartment, his buttocks and legs sliding awkwardly, painfully and noisily over the molded seatback and the transmission console, his booted feet hitting the underside of the dashboard.

  “Wouldn’t’ve made any difference, we did do that,” Brennan said calmly. “You would’ve been just as clumsy back there inna garage if we had, and then, you wouldn’t’ve been any less clumsy here. You’re too big for this mission. Practice wouldn’t’ve changed that. Practice wouldn’t’ve made you smaller, cab bigger. The only other way we could’ve done it would’ve been for you to ride out here in the back, and stay in there the whole time, like somebody’s cat in one of them big tan plastic hampers that they put them in to ship with the luggage on airplanes, they go on the family vacation. And I didn’t think you’d go for that.”

  “You were right,” Dell’Appa said, dragging his feet into the back and turning to draw the curtains closed to a narrow slit behind the seats.

  “Of course I was right,” Brennan said, looking at Dell’Appa in the inside rearview mirror. “I’m always right. But you’re all set now. As soon’s he gets a little closer to us you can take the whole show in.”

  Daniel Mossi had just reached the stairs leading to the railroad tracks and the platform and started down them when the crossing guard waddled officiously back to the sidewalk in front of the fire station, waving disdainfully to the motorists to proceed.

  “The gray Caddie?” Dell’Appa said, peering through the sepia film masking the glass of the window set into the rear door of the Blazer, “assuming it is gray, of course, seeing through this glass so darkly. The first car in the line there, comin’ up the hill? That the Caddie I’m s’posed to be watching?”

  “You know,” Brennan said, “it’s a funny thing. I was thinking, the other night, I got home, I got a beer, I just found out you’re coming on: This case’s been part of my life. Which is how come I know so much about Short Joe and his family, and how their lives’ve been: because I hadda. I had to learn all I could about them and how they lived their lives. Because their lives’re becoming part of mine, you know? It’s almost like I—we—grew up together, me and Joey and Dan, like we were the kids from two families that lived right next to each other while everybody was young. Except that we didn’t grow up next to each other, me and Joey and Dan, and we’ve been staying in touch with each other much better’n I did with the kids that I actually knew, when I was a kid myself, I was growing up next to, and much more I bet’n Joe and Dan did, with the kids that they used to know.

  “Except maybe not Joe. Kinda work that he does, those guys’re like each other’s family. A lot of them grew up with each other, you know? And lots of them really are cousins. Hell, ‘the Mob’s’ what we call it, or ‘the Mafia,’ and so do they—they do that. But sometimes they also, they call it: ‘the Family.’ And for lots of them, that’s what it is.

  “Well, that’s how it’s startin’ to be with me,” Brennan said. “I’m beginnin’ to feel like I joined it. This family that all these guys got, I’ve been on this case for so long that I’m now in their family with them. I think they will miss me now, when I’m gone. Things just won’t be the same. You’ll be onna job some day, tailin’ Short Joe, sittin’ outside some cheap diner, and he’ll come out, look around to make sure, you didn’t duck out on him there, while he was in havin’ a western-on-white, with some tea, and it’ll hit him. He’ll come over to the car, tell you roll the window down. He’ll lean on the door edge and he’ll say to you: ‘Harry,’ he will say to you, because of course he’ll know what your name is, fifteen minutes after you take the baton from me, that is if it even takes him that long, fifteen minutes, ‘you do a good job on this, Harry. Takin’ nothin’ from you here. Good solid professional job. But I got to tell you, Harry, it’s just not the same. The way it was, the good old days, when Bob was on my ass. Bob was like a guy I always knew, by the end of it. “My associate,” you know? I kinda miss the guy. You ever see him, tell him I said: you was to say hello for me.’ And then he’ll walk away, and you’ll roll the window up …”

  “And maybe wipe away a tear I couldn’t hide,” Dell’Appa said. “A furtive testament to an enduring furtive friendship that overcame all odds.”

  “Fuck you,” Brennan said. “You know how long I’ve been on it, how long I’ve been on this case? When I draw this assignment—not this time, no; this’s the first time, years ago, I mean, we first started tryin’ to make him; back then—I first pull the Joe Mossi file, it was a half an inch thick. That’s all it was at that time. Now Joe’s never been a virgin, at least not for very long. That’s not what I’m sayin’ to you. Ten minutes at the most, ’til he got the deal sized up and picked out which side to be on. He’s always been a player, the git-go, busy a very long time.

  “But when I pull Joe Mossi’s file, that first day I ever see it, little do I realize what it is I’m really doing. I’m starting a whole new career; that is what I am doing. Morning papers that day, I remember this, had a big-deal, front-page story. Some big-wheel, hot-stuff bankers, politicians, businessmen, they all got together and they had this great idea: they’re gonna bring the Tall Ships back. The Tall Ships back to Boston, that created such a big stir when they first come years ago? Well, they’re gonna come again. These big blow-hards’re gonna make ’em. Make a fortune for the city, tourists, TV, all that crap, throw a great big party, too, fireworks and everything? Every hotel’ll be jammed, all the restaurants, too. And pretty soon, like always—you know the first day this’ll happen, ’Cause it always does—there’s all these people yelling, all these other people, and they are pissed because they’re not the ones that thought of doing it. Bringin’ the Tall Ships back. And in Boston, we do this, this’s what we do. We didn’t think of it? It’s no fuckin’ good then. Can’t be just, no fuckin’ good. You can ask anyone that, and they will all say the same thing: ‘We didn’t think of it? It ain’t no good. It’s somebody rippin’ you off.’ So they were all sayin’, just exactly like they always do: It’s all bullshit. Never happen. You’re just blowin’ smoke up our ass. Just another phony scam, shake the money tree for you.’ And that goes on for a long time, back and forth and so forth, seems like it’s never gonna end, these bastards, you know? They enjoy it. They like doin’ this to each other. And if it does, well, it won’t matter: no one’ll remember what it was all about. Not by then anyway.

  “Yeah, but well, it didn’t. They did come back, the Tall Ships did, even more’n came the first time. And wall-to-wall people came too, from the Cape Cod Canal alla way the Canadian border there, seems like from TV at least, all stompin’ around, spendin’ their money, gawkin’ at all the old boats, and the whole wingding’s so big a success that no sooner’n all the Tall Ships leave town again, the second time, there’s talk starting up to bring ’em right back. ‘Ohh, this’s great. Canned beer ain’t even this good. We should do this every year. Or maybe every three years, you can’t get them every one.’

  “Okay, maybe they’re right. Maybe we should. And thanks to you, and thanks to me, and thanks to lots of guys, God knows how many guys, Short Joey’s file’s much smaller now. And you know why that is? Because now it’s all computerized, and that little disc is thin. But, if you had it all typed up, like I done for myself and I recommended you doing too, that file is now two folders, at least, and they’re about three inches thick. But Joey’s still out on the loose, same’s he was back then. We may know everything about him but if onions screw up his digestion and whether he farts at the movies, and spoils everyone else’s night out—and if we don’t know, it’s because we don’t wanna. But as much as we know, he’s still on the loose, and it’s us that’re still poundin’ sand.

  “Well, okay, we ain’t got him. We worked a long time, and we didn’t. But we’re not finished yet. We’re still gonna get him, if he doesn�
��t just fool us, and die. Okay, so we do it. I’ll grant you that the time bein’. Say we get Joe, and now Joe doesn’t talk. Which Joe won’t; I don’t care what the brass says. So Joe goes away for all day and all night, and he never gets out again. Is the operation that he worked for, is it outta business? Maybe, that day comes, it will be; I tend to doubt it, myself, but yeah, it is possible. But it won’t be because we nailed Joey. Or, take the opposite thing, if you want: he does talk. He still doesn’t go free. ‘What he’s done, in his lifetime,’ the head headhunter says, ‘he’s a vicious beast, he is. A very dangerous man. For that he’s got to do some time, at least, and by “some” I mean “a lot.’ ”

  “So Joe goes away anyway. Say he draws ten. That’s minimum three-to-five inside, they don’t hit him ‘habitual, organized criminal; racketeer-mobster; real heavy-duty bad actor. For that stuff you get something extra. Say: twenny to life, two or three times, each one on and after the others. Forget thoughts of parole—do it all. Say “Good night, boys and girls,” now, blow good-bye kisses to them. You won’t be at their wedding receptions.’ Well, what happens to Danny, ’f that happens to Joe? Either one of those things?

  “Same thing that’d happen if Joe should die of the natural causes there, right? He could have a heart attack, too, you know, just like a judge or a priest. He’s still on the butts, the serious butts; he’s smoked Camels for most of his life. That isn’t good for him, from what I hear. So Joey could get sick from that. And then what happens to Danny? Who takes care of Danny when Joe’s in the can, or Joe’s in the ground? We got him or Saint Peter did? I’m telling you, and you can quote me: If we get Joey and put him in jail, take him out of the play, we’re also taking his brother, Danny, and we might’s well face up to that. If Joe goes to jail, Dan goes to the home. The hood and the dummy run as an entry: lock one up, you lock’em both up.”

  “Well,” Dell’Appa said from the back, “but that isn’t so anymore. We don’t lock up the functioning ones anymore. The ones that at least get around.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Brennan said, “and that’s sorta what’s worrying me. They’ve got their freedom now, but lots of times that seems to mean they’re free to die on the street, and so that’s what they tend to do. I’m not really sure I want to be one of the nice helpful guys that finally helps Danny do that. By putting his brother away.”

  The faded-gray Cadillac Sedan de Ville creeping up to and alongside the Blazer now showed by the tattered condition of its phaeton vinyl roof and the chalky oxidation of its painted finish more years and less upkeep than had been apparent when it stood motionless 200 yards away. “Yeah,” Dell’Appa said, “well, if you can sorta park the weight of the world somewhere else off of your shoulders now for a few minutes and give me the play-by-play on this Brillo-padded, bullet-head that’s coming up behind us now, well, that would not go bad at all.”

  “Yeah, Harry, yeah, I know,” Brennan said. “Make all the fun you want, the cheap cynicism of youth there, buncha tough guys that never earned toughness, think it’s just issued to you with the badge, but I’m tellin’ you, when you’re my age and you’ve been at it this long, you’re gonna start to wonder if all the things that you did, while you were carryin’ that badge and all that hard-boiled attitude, whether they were right.”

  “Up yours, all right?” Dell’Appa said. “Let’s just try to do the job.”

  “Well, then,” Gayle said, sharing the last of the wine into their glasses as he returned to the table from racking the dinnerware in the washer, “that makes it even plainer, doesn’t it? Seems to me it does. What Bob’s going through—and as much as you dislike him, he’s still not immune to time’s passages and so forth—’s a very familiar syndrome not only to but among clinicians themselves. I suppose it’s sort of a variation on the Heisenberg Principle, about disrupting the system that you simply have to measure by the very act of measuring it. What you told me about him suggests to me that as he approaches the end of his career, his police career at least, which is often very hard for people, especially men, in the kinds of occupations that in the minds of most of the community define the individuals engaged in them—as the jobs of policemen and firemen do—he’s collided with the reality that when he’s done as he thought he was supposed to, ‘changed the community’ in some way, ‘made it better,’ it’s now apparent to him that he’s also ‘changed the community’ as well, quite involuntarily, even inadvertently, in a way that ‘made it worse.’ So, when he now wonders whether it would really be appropriate—‘ethical,’ or ‘moral,’ as he’d most likely see it—to incarcerate the older, vicious brother. If by so doing he, or you, or anyone acting in either of your places, would thereby unavoidably diminish the life of the younger, retarded brother. So what in effect he’s doing is not compensating in advance for the loss that he expects, and the loss that will indeed come, as he would probably think he is, if he’s at all self-referential, but questioning the basic validity of his entire career to date. And this is very hard for him.”

  She paused. “I know you don’t like him, Harry,” she said, “and I think you’ve got very good reasons not to. But that doesn’t alter the fact that Bob Brennan right now is an extremely troubled man. A deeply-troubled man.”

  “Look,” Dell’Appa said, “if he is then I’m sorry. Not very sorry, just: sorry. But that’s not what’s on my mind now. What worries me’s not how he feels, but what he may’ve done to feel better, that he shouldn’t’ve done. Or, equally scary, far’s I’m concerned: what he might not’ve done, that he should’ve. Mistakes and misjudgments: everyone makes them—we all deal the best we can with them. But what if his conscience’s told him to do something the law says he can’t? Or excused him from doing something he should’ve, so then I wind up in the shit—tell me: then what do I do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can always describe what I see in the data. I can’t always prescribe how to change it.”

  He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, “so much for that then, I guess. I just wish I felt like I had Brian with me, though. Beyond here, I think there be dragons.” He paused and swirled the last of his wine once. “I know you think that I’m after Bob,” he said, frowning, “even though I never said that. But even assuming that you’re right, I do not want him to’ve done this. As much as I hate him, really despise him, I do not want to come around an ordinary corner on an ordinary day and trip right over unavoidable evidence, fuckin’ proof, that Bob Brennan has done or is doing something that is gonna fuckin’ ruin him, if anyone finds out—and he knows that it will, and I’ve been looking. I do not want that, Gayle. I want him to go in peace, and I will tell you honestly that I am scared to fuckin’ death it doesn’t matter, what I want. At all.”

  6

  “I’ve got to admit,” Dennison had said, “that sort of shook me up, when it first dawned on me one night while I was paying the damned mortgage, writing out the monthly check for the payment that we can’t afford to make, on this house that we don’t want, that the reason I am doing it proves the Bomber Rule is right. Or put it this way, at least: As many times as I’ve applied it to somebody’s behavior that I just couldn’t understand, my own or someone else’s, it’s never failed me yet. Time and time again, when there’s just no explanation for why someone did something, you’ll find if you look far enough, dig deep enough, wait long enough, that, yes, there is an explanation after all, and it’s: money. The Frogs’ve got ‘cherchez d’argent’; Bomber’s got his Reason; and both of them are right. Right there, on the money.

  “Virginia mostly did all right by herself for the first couple years after Lucy died on her. The two of them’d had time enough to locate most of the emergency services—oil-burner repairman, snow-plow man, stuff like that—that a person dumb enough to buy a house’ll usually need in the normal course of things, so when something went wrong that had to be fixed right off, and needed a genuine repairman or a guy with the right equipment—like a truck with a plow on it—to do it, not jus
t some handy-dandy, all-purpose, rechargeable adult daughter or a clumsy son-in-law but someone who actually knew something about fixing a busted sump-pump or getting a garbage disposal unit running again, she had one she could call.

  “Like I say, her health was good. Plus she’d had a certain amount of practice, living by herself, in the years after Stan’d died but before she’d had the operation on her hip and Lucy’d come in. She didn’t like being by herself again, not by any means, but it wasn’t new to her. We gave her a season ticket to Megabucks for Christmas—because quite naturally after she’d won it the once there was going to be no way ever afterward of talking her out of faithfully betting it twice every week until doom finally cracked—so that cut down considerable on her need to get out to the store. Tory got down to see her at least one afternoon a week, not all that easy to do, even though it sounds like it would be, not if you’re trying to start up your own small business at the same time and you’ve still got your family responsibilities, too. As Tory did and does. And they talked every day on the phone. She was functioning. She could handle it.

  “She could handle it,” Dennison had said, “but she could only handle it as long as she could handle it, you know? She was not the type of person who ever would’ve faked it, laid a guilt-trip on somebody to get something that she really didn’t need, just because she craved attention or something. But she also wasn’t stupid. When she got to the point where she really did need help, or else she was going to end up in some truly serious gravy, she knew it, and she wasn’t too proud to admit it.

  “And that’s where the money came in,” he had said. “That cock-and-bull story she’d told us about how she and Lucy were buying the house together? Well, it hadn’t been one-hundred-percent-pure, total bullshit. There was considerable truth to it. The deal they’d worked out really did protect what was Tory’s rightful share of her father’s estate that Virginia’d sunk into the house. If what the two of them’d figured was what’d likely happen, if things’d really turned out that way, with Lucy the survivor, she would’ve had enough money to pay rent to the bank every month that would’ve come to her half the mortgage payment. For as many years as there were left to run on the mortgage—and, on top of that, since Lucy’d never shown any signs of wanting to live like the queen of England, more’n enough to take care of her for as many more years as she turned out to have on this earth.